Here’s a short thread on the history and significance of the pith helmet (as worn by Melania Trump in Kenya today). Media correctly describes the pith helmet as a symbol of colonial rule. But why did colonizers start wearing them in the first place? 1/

White Europeans have long obsessed over the supposed relationship between race, culture & climate. 19th century colonists (supported by scientific & medical opinion) believed “tropical” solar radiation attacked white people’s nervous systems & rendered them infertile. 2/
Pith helmets were often worn by colonizers alongside other protective paraphernalia such as red vests & “spine pads” worn under the shirt to protect the nervous system from the feared “actinic ray.” Spine pads were standard issue in British Army kit in early 20th century. 3/
Other convenient medical recommendations included no manual labour outdoors for whites, holidays to cooler climates & no white children in the colonies beyond age 5. The pith helmet was part of a pseudo-scientific discourse that enforced class as well as racial domination. 4/
The pith helmet is sometimes used to denote a “frontier” spirit of adventure & exploration. This is wrong. Their historical social role was to emblematize white fragility and anxieties, as well as blurring the distinction between white civilians & colonial police/army. 5/
Personally, I think the US First Lady's decision to wear a pith helmet is appropriate. The regime she's representing in Kenya is a white supremacist one whose policies & ideological grounding are a continuation of earlier forms of imperialism, represented by the pith helmet. 6/
I found out more about the social history of the pith helmet and white settler "climatic theories" in Dane Kennedy's book "Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1939" (1987). Other recommendations welcome. 7/
This is the kind of thing I used to cover when I edited the "White History Month" series on Africa is a Country. I'm all for White History Month, because there's so much about the concrete history of white supremacism that is poorly remembered or conveniently forgotten. 8/

More from All

How can we use language supervision to learn better visual representations for robotics?

Introducing Voltron: Language-Driven Representation Learning for Robotics!

Paper: https://t.co/gIsRPtSjKz
Models: https://t.co/NOB3cpATYG
Evaluation: https://t.co/aOzQu95J8z

🧵👇(1 / 12)


Videos of humans performing everyday tasks (Something-Something-v2, Ego4D) offer a rich and diverse resource for learning representations for robotic manipulation.

Yet, an underused part of these datasets are the rich, natural language annotations accompanying each video. (2/12)

The Voltron framework offers a simple way to use language supervision to shape representation learning, building off of prior work in representations for robotics like MVP (
https://t.co/Pb0mk9hb4i) and R3M (https://t.co/o2Fkc3fP0e).

The secret is *balance* (3/12)

Starting with a masked autoencoder over frames from these video clips, make a choice:

1) Condition on language and improve our ability to reconstruct the scene.

2) Generate language given the visual representation and improve our ability to describe what's happening. (4/12)

By trading off *conditioning* and *generation* we show that we can learn 1) better representations than prior methods, and 2) explicitly shape the balance of low and high-level features captured.

Why is the ability to shape this balance important? (5/12)

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I think a plausible explanation is that whatever Corbyn says or does, his critics will denounce - no matter how much hypocrisy it necessitates.


Corbyn opposes the exploitation of foreign sweatshop-workers - Labour MPs complain he's like Nigel

He speaks up in defence of migrants - Labour MPs whinge that he's not listening to the public's very real concerns about immigration:

He's wrong to prioritise Labour Party members over the public:

He's wrong to prioritise the public over Labour Party