General CE Chat

Amazon’s Face Recognition Falsely Matched 28 Members of Congress With Mugshots
By Jacob Snow, Technology & Civil Liberties Attorney, ACLU of Northern California

In a test the ACLU recently conducted of the facial recognition tool, called “Rekognition,” the software incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress, identifying them as other people who have been arrested for a crime.

The members of Congress who were falsely matched with the mugshot database we used in the test include Republicans and Democrats, men and women, and legislators of all ages, from all across the country.
...
The false matches were disproportionately of people of color, including six members of the Congressional Black Caucus, among them civil rights legend Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.). These results demonstrate why Congress should join the ACLU in calling for a moratorium on law enforcement use of face surveillance.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-t...s/amazons-face-recognition-falsely-matched-28
 
Irish Online Economy Report 2018 (Source: Wolfgang Digital) PDF

Key findings quoted below.

Wolfgang Digital said:
  • Desktop remains the number one buying device at 58% but is slowly losing ground to smartphones, which accounted for 30% of revenues, up from 26% in 2016
  • Smartphones dominated when it came to traffic accounting for 51% of visits to e-commerce websites versus 38% for desktop and 11% for tablet
  • Travel continues to boom with revenues for this vertical up an impressive 114% year-on-year, after a 65% increase in transactions
  • Retailers saw their online revenues climb 19% as traffic rose 14%
  • Black Friday sales experienced a 56% uplift compared to 2016, with 7% of Q4 revenues generated on this one day alone
  • Despite traffic to e-commerce websites growing 16% in Q4, dubbed the ‘Golden Quarter’, revenues only increased 11%
  • 24% of Irish retailers’ revenues came from international visitors
 
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https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/gsb-cmis/gsb-cmis-download-auth/442076

Its a (meta) study about the efficency of campaigning. It comes to very counterintuitive and thought provocing conclusions that refute many common assumptions. I am not entirely sure what to think.

This meta-analysis estimates that campaign contact and advertising can have persuasive effects in primaries and in ballot measure elections. However, their effects one lection day in general elections are essentially zero. These results are robust across elections at every level of government and in both competitive and uncompetitive elections
 


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I am stunned, shocked, that s site on race and IQ has a link to Nazi-era anti-Semitism.
So I decided to google James Thompson.

University College London has launched an urgent investigation into how a senior academic was able to secretly host conferences on eugenics and intelligence with notorious speakers including white supremacists.

The London Conference on Intelligence was said to have been run secretly for at least three years by James Thompson, an honorary senior lecturer at the university, including contributions from a researcher who has previously advocated child rape.

He is a member of the Ulster Institute for Social Research, an organization founded by Richard Lynn, a British author and white nationalist


And I'll let the man speak for himself:


 
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I am stunned, shocked, that s site on race and IQ has a link to Nazi-era anti-Semitism.
So I decided to google James Thompson.






And I'll let the man speak for himself:




I genuinly didn't know any of that. So thanks for putting it out there. I am still interested to know where he misinterprets the science in regards to this specific aspect of intelligence research. Whats the current consensus on this?
I came to this tweet via this tweet:
Someone in the comments posted this: , which would contradict it. Haier answered this:



tl,dr: Your opinion on Haier?
 
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We are so incredibly fecked

Increasing tolerance of hospital Enterococcus faecium to handwash alcohols

Alcohol loses its luster
Alcohol-based disinfectants are a key way to control hospital infections worldwide. Pidot et al.now show that the multidrug-resistant bacterium Enterococcus faecium has become increasingly tolerant to the alcohols in widely used hospital disinfectants such as hand rub solutions. These findings may help explain the recent increase in this pathogen in hospital settings. A global response to E. faecium will need to include consideration of its adaptive responses not only to antibiotics but also to alcohols and the other active agents in disinfectant solutions that have become so critical for effective infection control.

http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/10/452/eaar6115
 
Saw some posts on Reddit. One about a student protester having his eyes gouged out and apparently it's all about wanting safer road laws?

I struggle to bridge the gap between protesting for safer roads and the response being gouging eyes out. What's the whole story?
 
Saw some posts on Reddit. One about a student protester having his eyes gouged out and apparently it's all about wanting safer road laws?

I struggle to bridge the gap between protesting for safer roads and the response being gouging eyes out. What's the whole story?
The government is accusing the protesters (school children) of being part of an organised effort by the opposition party to undermine rule of law. It's basically a play by the authorities to come down hard on opposition parties in the run up to elections.
 
The government is accusing the protesters (school children) of being part of an organised effort by the opposition party to undermine rule of law. It's basically a play by the authorities to come down hard on opposition parties in the run up to elections.

Same happened before the 2014 election. History will repeat itself. Question is if this will lead to something more.
 
That seems a bit, eh, extreme.

Still, authorities have been trying to keep track of Hajis at least since Mughal times.
This is a little different though. Have you been following the news coming out of Xinjiang and the Ningxia Hui autonomous region? It's all part of a broader plan in my opinion, originally the rhetoric and hands on approach was about the Uygyer but the Communist Party has now started on the Hui community.
 
This is a little different though. Have you been following the news coming out of Xinjiang and the Ningxia Hui autonomous region? It's all part of a broader plan in my opinion, originally the rhetoric and hands on approach was about the Uygyer but the Communist Party has now started on the Hui community.

Only really seen it mentioned in passing in one or two posts on here. Authorities seem to have Xinjiang on lock-down, seems like very little news gets out.
 
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tl,dr: Your opinion on Haier?


This is honestly not my field. My research is exclusively dealing with microbes, I have only dealt with human data in classes.
I didn't have any opinion on Thompson till I started reading his blog and saw the link for that Henry Ford book, that's when I started googling him. I had no idea who he was and I have no idea about Haier.

About his conclusion about studying and IQ - googling leads to very different results. But again, not my field.

I will add my (unqualified) opinion - in the past century, average IQ, across race, gender, nationality, has skyrocketed (Flynn effect). My first instinct is to attribute this to schooling, since that is obviously something that has spread rapidly in the same time. Another explanation I've heard for this effect is that IQ measures "exposure to modernity" rather than raw intelligence. I cannot imagine any genetic cause for this that acts in <100 years, especially since there doesn't seem to be much intelligence selection in human reproduction.
 
First of all, its not just the Clinton's who you can blame for America's prison system but calling them beneficiaries of slave labor is a bit ridiculous. Also, this is Arkansas, probably the one place in this country where I would be afraid to break the law.

You can make of this what you will but I find it inexcusable myself.

Current Affairs' Nathan J Robinson said:
The prison labor system in the United States has long been an unacknowledged scandal. It’s quite plainly a form of slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment even admits as much: it doesn’t say that when you’re forced to work for being convicted of a crime, that isn’t slavery. It says that slavery is legal if it is imposed as part of a conviction for a crime. All manner of people benefit from the system; as Mother Joneshas reported, Congress actually incentivized private companies to use inmate labor, and the incarcerated now produce everything from bedding to eyeglasses. They even staff call centers, with a company called UNICOR encouraging companies to “smart-source” their call-center work to prisoners rather than sending it overseas.

But two possibly unexpected beneficiaries of the contemporary prison slavery system were none other than Bill and Hillary Clinton, who during their time at the Arkansas governor’s mansion in the 1980’s used inmates to perform various household tasks in order to “keep costs down.” Hillary Clinton wrote of the practice openly and without any apparent sense of moral conflict.

The Clintons’ practice has gotten some renewed attention over the last day, with the rediscovery of the relevant passage from It Takes a Village. Last year I wrote a bit about Hillary’s admission in my book Superpredator: Bill Clinton’s Use and Abuse of Black America:

Clinton was, however, generous enough to allow inmates from Arkansas prisons to work as unpaid servants in the Governor’s Mansion. In It Takes a Village, Hillary Clinton writes that the residence was staffed with “African-American men in their thirties,” since “using prison labor at the governor’s mansion was a longstanding tradition, which kept down costs.” It is unclear just how longstanding the tradition of having chained black laborers brought to work as maids and gardeners had been. But one has no doubt that as the white residents of a mansion staffed with unpaid blacks, the Clintons were continuing a certain historic Southern practice. (Hillary Clinton did note, however, that she and Bill were sure not to show undue lenience to the sla…servants, writing that “[w]e enforced rules strictly and sent back to prison any inmate who broke a rule.”

Indeed it’s really difficult, given the facts, to conclude that this practice was anything other than slavery. The Clintons were perfectly content to be waited on by black people who received no compensation and would have been pursued and dragged back in chains if they had tried to leave. There is only one word for such an arrangement.

It's as also not surprising that a woman holds a certain dislike to women her husband fecks.

That is a massively disingenuous way to describe her actions over a decade of demonizing, vilifying and trying to destroy women that were either victims of womanizer or victims of sheer sexual harassment (and potentially worse). Here is Anthony Bourdain whose girlfriend was one of Harvey Weinstein's victims

Anthony Bourdain said:
Bill Clinton, look, the bimbo eruptions—it was fecking monstrous. That would not have flown today. A piece of shit. Entitled, rapey, gropey, grabby, disgusting, and the way that he—and [Hillary Clinton]—destroyed these women and the way that everyone went along, and, and are blind to this! Screamingly apparent hypocrisy and venality. How you can on the one hand howl at the moon about all these other predators. And not at least look back.

OK, let’s say, well, it was all consensual: powerful men, starstruck women, okay fine, let’s accept it at its most charitable interpretation. Fine. He is a very charming man, I met him, he’s fecking magnetic. … As is [Hillary]. When you’re in the room, you think wow, she’s really warm and nice and funny. But the way they efficiently dismantled, destroyed, and shamelessly discredited these women for speaking their truth … is unforgivable.


GiddyUp said:
The Iraq vote is a monumental feck up for this country, not just one Senate vote. You also quote Hitchins but he was all in on the Iraq war.

I didn't quote Hitchens on the Iraq war.

The point is that Rodham-Clinton presented herself as a Democrat leader. She was a famous Senator in the opposition party with a duty to the public to provide a check and balance on the executive branch. Yet she completely failed in her duty to provide due diligence.

Here was a NY Times article from Oct. 3, 2004 that documents how a Bush Admin lied, with the help of Rodham-Clinton and others like Judith Miller of the NY Times. If reporters were able to verify this information in Sept-Oct of 2004, this is what the Democrat senators completely failed in doing their due diligence. With HRC though it falls into a pattern of her doing whatever the most politically expedient short term stance on an issue is, irrespective of what the truth is.

It is typical for Hillary Clinton’s supporters to point out that holding Hillary accountable for her husband’s actions is unfair at best and sexist at worst. Hillary Clinton was, of course, a major power in Bill’s administration and his equal partner in a joint political venture. But more importantly, Bill’s recent comments have been made as part of the campaign. Bill was defending this record on behalf of Hillary Clinton, to thousands of her supporters. If Hillary Clinton didn’t have Bill Clinton out front speaking about the Clinton Administration, it might be fair to ask people not to associate them. But since she has chosen him to be an ambassador for her message, we must at least assume that she does not think him as heinous as the record proves he is.

Christopher Hitchens said:
One also hears a great deal about how this awful joint tenure of the executive mansion was a good thing in that it conferred "experience" on the despised and much-deceived wife. Well, the main "experience" involved the comprehensive fouling-up of the nation's health-care arrangements, so as to make them considerably worse than they had been before and to create an opening for the worst-of-all-worlds option of the so-called HMO, combining as it did the maximum of capitalist gouging with the maximum of socialistic bureaucracy. This abysmal outcome, forgiven for no reason that I can perceive, was the individual responsibility of the woman who now seems to think it entitles her to the presidency. But there was another "experience," this time a collaborative one, that is even more significant.

During the Senate debate on the intervention in Iraq, Sen. Clinton made considerable use of her background and "experience" to argue that, yes, Saddam Hussein was indeed a threat.

So no, she doesn't get a pass here. She can't use that "experience" to her benefit for 16 years then suddenly disassociate herself when the truth about all the dark sides come out.