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Along with three others, Tou Thao murdered George Floyd. For 8 minutes and 46 seconds, Thao watched and guarded Chauvin as he asphyxiated a pinned, choking, and finally non-responsive man, uncaring about the human life they were all grinding into dust.

In the midst of a global pandemic, time has contracted. In social isolation, no longer do everyday events mark out temporal passage: the perhaps perfunctory hello and how are you?, the friendly smile at a bus stop, the off-hand thoughts of my friends, the touch of different surfaces, all departed, perhaps for the long-term.

It’s no big secret that machine learning suffers from a science problem. The issue, sometimes funny, always sad, is that it is difficult to rely upon many published results, despite monikers like “state-of-the-art” and “competitive”.

I was born and raised in Edmonton, Alberta. My parents are immigrants from Vietnam, but are ethnically Chinese as well as Vietnamese. I have lived in Canada my entire life, which has contributed both to my love of the diverse cultural mosaics of Canada and of the world, and to a sense of disjoint identities and cultural dislocation.