Thursday 1 June 2023
Wednesday 31 May 2023
Sunday 20 September 2015
Saturday 19 September 2015
NYT - Crazy Talk at the Republican Debate
Eleven presidential candidates had three prime-time hours on the national stage on Wednesday to tell the American people why they should lead the country.
Nobody forced them to be there. They were there freely, armed with the best arguments they and their policy advisers had come up with, to make their cases as seasoned politicians, business leaders and medical professionals — the Republican Party’s “A-Team,” as one of them, Mike Huckabee, said at the outset.
And that, America, is frightening. Peel back the boasting and insults, the lies and exaggerations common to any presidential campaign. What remains is a collection of assertions so untrue, so bizarre, that they form a vision as surreal as the Ronald Reagan jet looming behind the candidates’ lecterns.
It felt at times as if the speakers were no longer living in a fact-based world where actions have consequences, programs take money and money has to come from somewhere. Where basic laws — like physics and the Constitution — constrain wishes. Where Congress and the public, allies and enemies, markets and militaries don’t just do what you want them to, just because you say they will.
Start with immigration, and the idea that any president could or should engineer the mass expulsion of 11 million unauthorized immigrants. Not one candidate said that a 21st-century trail of tears, deploying railroad cars, federal troops and police dogs on a continental scale, cannot happen and would be morally obscene. Ben Carson said, “If anybody knows how to do that, that I would be willing to listen.” They accepted the need to “control our borders” with a 2,000-mile fence. Even Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, once an immigration moderate, endorsed the fence. Mr. Carson actually suggested two fences, for double security, with a road in between. Do these people have to be sent to the Rio Grande Valley to see how ludicrous a border fence — over mountains, vast deserts, remote valleys and private property — would be? And it won’t solve the problem they are railing against, which doesn’t exist anyway. Illegal immigration has fallen essentially to zero.
On foreign affairs, there was a lot of talk about not talking with bad people. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas said his first act would be to tear up the Iran deal, throwing the nuclear race back to the ayatollahs and rupturing global alliances — but making a point! Carly Fiorina said: “What I would do, immediately, is begin rebuilding the Sixth Fleet, I would begin rebuilding the missile defense program in Poland, I would conduct regular, aggressive military exercises in the Baltic States. I’d probably send a few thousand more troops into Germany. Vladimir Putin would get the message.”
We get the message, and it’s scary.
Jeb Bush spun a particularly repellent fantasy. Speaking reverently of his brother the president, he said, “He kept us safe,” and invoked the carnage of 9/11. Wait, what? Did he mean George W. Bush, who was warned about the threat that Al Qaeda would attack? Who then invaded a non sequitur country, Iraq, over a nonexistent threat?
When the A-Team got around to science and health, many of them promised to help Americans by killing the program that gives millions of them medical insurance. One candidate said he felt sure that vaccines had caused an autism “epidemic.” The two doctors on the dais did not seriously challenge that persistent, dangerous myth.
Let loose by the CNN moderators, the candidates spun their visions freely. Despite an abundance of serious issues to talk about, nobody offered solutions to problems like child poverty, police and gun violence, racial segregation, educational gaps, competition in a global economy and crumbling infrastructure. On looming disasters (the changing climate) and more immediate ones (a possible government shutdown over, of all things, Planned Parenthood), the debate offered no reassurance that grown-ups were at the table, or even in the neighborhood.
But we did hear an idea to put Mother Teresa — Mother Teresa, a penniless nun — on our money. Think about that.
“We were discussing disease, we were discussing all sorts of things tonight, many of which will just be words. It will just pass on,” one candidate said, wrapping up. “I don’t want to say politicians, all talk, no action. But a lot of what we talked about is words and it will be forgotten very quickly.”
Which was the smartest thing Donald Trump has said all year, and an outcome America should dearly hope for.
This tech blogger completely missed the point of the Ahmed Mohamed story
The story of 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed, whose home made science project ended in his arrest, has absorbed the media in recent days.
Even President Obama invited Ahmed Mohamed to the White House.
Photos of his clock have been released online, and some have chosen to comment upon its appearance.
An article on ArtVoice reverse-engineered Ahmed’s clock. Fair enough, that’s interesting.
What’s less interesting, and frankly astounding, is the way the piece concludes that because the clock wasn’t strictly invented his arrest was justified.
The author writes:
Now, before I go on and get accused of attacking a 14 year old kid who’s already been through enough, let me explain my purpose. I don’t want to just dissect the clock. I want to dissect our reaction as a society to the situation.
And after reverse-engineering the clock, says:
So there you have it folks, Ahmed Mohamad did not invent, nor build a clock. He took apart an existing clock, and transplanted the guts into a pencil box, and claimed it was his own creation. It all seems really fishy to me.If we accept the story about “inventing” an alarm clock is made up, as I think I’ve made a pretty good case for, it’s fair to wonder what other parts of the story might be made up, not reported factually by the media, or at least, exaggerated.
The author stipulates that because Ahmed Mohamed didn’t actually invent electronic timekeeping, the police were right to lead a child out of school in handcuffs.
He went on to say, that because they are trained to suspect terrorism in schools the media's discussion of the issue of racial profiling is ridiculous.
When the teachers asked what it was, Ahmed said it was a clock. It was a clock. It didn't count down to zero, like in the 80s movies.
But, by the time it was deduced that the thing which looked an awful lot like a modified digital clock was a digital clock, this had already happened:
Not Even the People Who Write Algorithms Really Know How They Work
You might deduce, for example, that the tracking software that watches you browse has figured out you’re shopping for a Halloween costume. Lo and behold, ads for gorilla suits and fairy wings start popping up in the margins of every other website you visit. Or maybe you just rewatched a bunch of Twilight Zone episodes on Netflix. It makes sense that the site then recommends Black Mirror andQuantum Leap.
But much of the time, there’s no way to tell why information is filtered the way it is online. Why is one person’s status update on Facebook prioritized in your News Feed over another’s? Why does Google return a different order of search results for you than for the person sitting next to you, googling the same thing?
These are the mysteries of the algorithms that rule the web. And the weird thing is, they aren’t just inscrutable to the people clicking and scrolling around the Internet. Even the engineers who develop algorithms can’t tell you exactly how they work.
Which means, Moore told me, we are “moving away from, not toward the world where you can immediately give a clear diagnosis” for what a data-fed algorithm is doing with a person’s web behaviors. I once explored the idea that we might eventually be able to subscribe to one algorithm over another on Facebook as a way to know exactly how the information filter was working. A nice thought experiment, perhaps, but one that assumes the people who write algorithms know with any level of precision or individuality how they work.
“You might be overestimating how much the content-providers understand how their own systems work,” said Moore, who is also a former vice president at Google. He didn’t want to talk about Google in particular, but he did present another hypothetical: Imagine a company showing movie recommendations.
“You might want to say, ‘Why did you recommend this movie?’ When you're using machine-learning models, the model trains itself by using huge amounts of information from previous people,” he said. “Everything from the color of the pixels on the movie poster through to maybe the physical proximity to other people who enjoyed this movie. It’s the averaging effect of all these things.”
Which means the systems that determine what you see on the web are becoming more complex than ever. Factor in questions about how those algorithms might hurt people and the picture is murkier still. Consider, for example, Facebook's patent for technology that could trace a person’s social network—a tool that lenders could use to consider the credit ratings of a person’s Facebook friends in deciding whether to approve a loan application. “If the average credit rating of these members is at least a minimum credit score, the lender continues to process the loan application,” Facebook wrote in the patent filing. “Otherwise, the loan application is rejected.”
“That is a really difficult problem,” Moore said. "You’re asking a computer that’s obviously not that smart in the first place to predict whether this person is a risk based on what we know about them—but [you’re telling it], ‘Please exclude these features that, as a society, we think would be illegal.’ But it’s very hard or impossible for the engineers to know for sure that the computer hasn’t inadvertently used some piece of evidence which it shouldn’t.”
All this means that as algorithms become more complex, they become more dangerous. The assumptions these filters make end up having real impact on the individual level, but they’re based on oceans of data that no one person, not even the person who designed them, can ever fully interpret.
Man brilliantly trolls homophobe commenters who slammed Doritos rainbow chips
In a classic tale from the world wide web, Doritos found itself hounded by anti-gay trolls this week as it teamed up with the It Gets Better Project to launch its new rainbow crisps.
For a limited time only, people who donate $10 (£6) or more to the organisation - which aims to raise awareness around the staggering rate of suicides in the LGBT community and offer support to those in need - will receive a bag of rainbow Doritos.
Turns out some people on the internet were not happy about this. So took to the brand's Facebook page to air their opinions. Great.
That's where Facebook user Mike Melgaard came to humanity's rescue, setting up a fake help page to troll the trolls.
Here's a selection of his best efforts:
He later took to his own Facebook page to address why he took action.
Did it ever occur to you that this actually has very little to do with gay pride? But rather, it is to address the fact that suicide is one of the leading causes of death amongst the LGBT community for ages 15 to 24?The 'It Gets Better' charity is where this money (all of it, mind you) is going and they just so happen to specialize in LGBT suicide prevention.Anyone being "upset" over this issue is really just slowing down the collective progress for all of humanity. And you're doing it for no reason other than your personal bias.
Read his post in full here:
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