Tag: Sunday Paper

Sunday Paper - Restorative Justice, Social Distance, USA Border Patrol

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I’m curious. I have questions that I have been unable to answer via Google search. For example, how does the process address acts where the victim has been permanently harmed? Examples that come to mind:

  • The victim has suffered financial loss too significant for the person committing the act to provide restoration
  • The victim has been disabled and is unable to work
  • There are multiple victims and some of the victims prefer traditional justice

What are your filters, human and algorithmic, not letting you see?

Who you are as a person is an essential piece of context in how to judge information. If you’re walking on the street and a random stranger asks to have a coffee, you interpret it very differently from when your partner walking next to you asks you the same thing. We are all walking information filters, our brains are very well used to doing that. So what I know socially about you helps me interpret what you share, as it will be coloured by who you are. Let’s call this social filtering.Feed Reading By Social Distance by Ton Zijlstra

The USA border patrol is using soviet era tactics in foreigners and Americans.

I had my doubts as to whether they could actually crack my iPhone and MacBook, but I didn’t doubt that they would be happy to confiscate them. So I decided to take another tack: I told the officers I had nothing to hide, but I felt I had a professional obligation to call an attorney for further advice. Pomeroy said I could not because I wasn’t under arrest; I just wasn’t allowed to enter the United States. I wasn’t allowed to leave the Homeland Security zone, either. I know because I tried to sort of wander out a couple of times and got yelled at. When I actually tried to call a lawyer friend of mine in Austin, Pomeroy stopped me. They held onto my phone from then out.I’M A JOURNALIST BUT I DIDN’T FULLY REALIZE THE TERRIBLE POWER OF U.S. BORDER OFFICIALS UNTIL THEY VIOLATED MY RIGHTS AND PRIVACY

Sunday Paper - Facial Recognition and Civil Liberties, Dream Colleges and the Democratic Communist Party, Geeks and Nerds, 5G, Mental Fatigue

Facial Recognition Tech Straight Out of 'Robocop' Could Be a Real Threat to Civil Liberties

Civil-liberties concerns have driven California lawmakers to consider Assembly Bill 1215, which would ban police agencies from using facial and biometric tracking devices as part of their body cameras.

"Having every patrol officer constantly scanning faces of everyone that walks into their field of view to identify people, run their records, and record their location and activities is positively Orwellian," said ACLU attorney Peter Bibring.

This technology is creepy, especially when one considers the next step that's under active development: Tying facial-recognition software into security cameras that are practically everywhere. The bill's author, Assemblyman Phil Ting (D–San Francisco), points to an incident in China where the authorities used recognition software to grab someone from a crowd of 20,000 people during a concert.

Opponents of the ban naively insist that there's no difference between using such software and looking at a mugshot—and that police are still required to follow the Constitution's Fourth Amendment restraints on unreasonable searches. That's nonsensical. Police admit that they want to use these cameras as part of wholesale dragnets, by scanning everyone at public events and not only those that they suspect of having committed a crime.

In its official opposition to the bill, the Riverside Sheriffs' Association argues that, "Huge events…and scores of popular tourist attractions should have access to the best available security—including the use of body cameras and facial-recognition technology." There you have it. The goal of police is to scan our faces at every event.

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According to the Assembly analysis, the ACLU used such software to compare photos of all federal legislators and "incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress with people who had been arrested. The test disproportionately misidentified African-American and Latino members of Congress as the people in mug shots." The company that produced the software disputed the ACLU's approach, but this is disturbing, especially in terms of racial bias.

Some of the presidential hopefuls in the Democratic Party sound like front runners for the Communist Party. At what point will they start advocating to bring back slavery and indentured servitude?

The world doesn't owe you a dream college or a dream house or a dream job. You have no right to someone else's labor and time. If you want to attend free college, ask professors to offer you their lectures gratis or ask school administrators who run massive endowments to open their doors to everyone.Bernie Sanders' #CancelStudentDebt Is a Dangerous Scam

Are you a geek or a nerd? Both? It's ok to be both but know which one you are at any given moment.

I had an LOL moment last night watching Jimmy Fallon [a late-night talk show, for y'all in different countries]. Ex-gangsta-rapper and "Law and Order" detective Ice-T was on TV (it was broadcast here, anyway—I don't watch often enough to know whether it was a rerun or not) with his extravagant wife Coco, and he pointed out that there's a big difference between a nerd and a geek. Given any little area of enthusiasm, a nerd is a guy who knows all about it—and likes to talk about it and argue about it—and a geek is a guy who likes to do it. Whatever "it" is.

So I'm a darkroom geek but a Miata nerd. (Makin' me laugh again*.)
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I remember back when I occasionally participated in the often contentious forums of a certain high profile British digital camera review site. I got into it once with a guy who was evangelical about a certain brand of high-end professional DSLR and outspokenly critical of the competing brand's flagship model. (I forget whether he loved C and hated N, or loved N and hated C...not that it really matters.) When I dug into it, it turned out that the fellow was a teenager who didn't own a nice DSLR at all.

A goal for him to aspire to: geekhood!Geeks vs. Nerds by Mike at The Online Photographer

5G networks may be faster but less ubiquitous and more costly to build out.

Thousands of engineers and planners like Mr. Hubbard, along with diggers of trenches and installers of antennas, must coordinate to link more fiber-optic cable, in more places in the U.S. than ever before. All so we can do more stuff on mobile devices.

This is the paradox of 5G, the collection of technologies behind next-generation wireless networks: They require a gargantuan quantity of wires. This is because 5G requires many more small towers, all of which must be wired to the internet. The consequences of this unavoidable reality are myriad. The 5G build-out, which could take more than a decade, could disrupt our commutes, festoon nearly every city block with antennas, limit what cities can charge for renting spots on their infrastructure to carriers on which to place their antennas, and result in an unequal distribution of access to high-speed wireless, at least at first.
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The driving force behind this enormous build-out is that 5G networks don’t work like previous wireless cellular networks. Where 2G, 3G and even 4G rely on large towers with powerful antennas that can cover many square miles, the shorter-range, higher-frequency radio waves used by 5G networks—essential to their ability to deliver the 10- to 100-times faster speeds they promise—mean that 5G networks must have small cells placed much closer together.The Downside of 5G: Overwhelmed Cities, Torn-Up Streets, a Decade Until Completion by Christopher Mims in the Wall Street Journal

What exactly does it mean to be mentally tired? What’s actually happening in your brain? Proposing an answer to these riddles is the challenge that a new paper in Sports Medicine, from a team at the University of Canberra led by Kristy Martin, takes on.

The basic hypothesis that Martin and her colleagues present (drawing on a suggestion from 2014) is that mental fatigue results from the accumulation of a brain chemical called adenosine. In this picture, sustained cognitive activity burns up glucose, particularly in certain regions of the brain associated with “effortful mental processes,” such as the anterior cingulate cortex. This temporary and localized fuel shortage triggers a rise in adenosine levels, which in turn blocks the release of neurotransmitters like dopamine. The result is a rise in perception of effort and a decrease in motivation—in other words, a feeling of mental fatigue.Here’s What We Know About Mental Fatigue by Alex Hutchinson

Sunday Paper - EU R&D Fuels Silicon Valley, Busyness, Kyle Kashuv and Shame and Moral Bullies, The Young and the Ignorant and Inexperienced

Have you heard about Silicon Valley’s unpaid research and development department? It’s called the EU. by Aral Balkan

You… yes you.
Who should you thank for Facebook’s Libra?
“One of the UK’s leading privacy researchers” University College London The DECODE project And, if you’re an EU citizen who pays their taxes,
You. Surprised? Don’t be.
None of this was unforeseen Today, the EU acts like an unpaid research and development department for Silicon Valley. We fund startups, which, if they’re successful, get sold to companies in Silicon Valley.

via Tom Zylstra

I have used the phare, "I'm busy", in the past. It's not part of West Indian culture so I must have learned this way of signalling one's worth from living in the USA. I'm not sure when I stopped trying to be busy.

Imagine if we were to temporarily step outside of our busyness and examine it from the outside. Why are we so damn obsessed with doing stuff all the time? Busy — is this the way we want to live and define our lives? Given the objectively absolute fact that we are only here for a limited time, is busyness even a rational benchmark for quantifying the value of our existence? To what extent do we ‘choose’ to be busy — or to what extent are we caught up in a toxic cultural motif or script?Why are we busy? by James Shelly

The Internet Judgment Machine is a forever machine, not unlike, the Terminator. Mistakes are forever punishable. Forgiveness is becoming a word with no meaning. The Intenet never forgets is a problem.

Kashuv had planned to attend Harvard in fall 2020 after completing a gap year, but shortly after his past racist comments became public, administrators advised him that his acceptance could be withdrawn "if you engage or have engaged in behavior that brings into question your honesty, maturity, or moral character." He was asked to provide a full explanation for his behavior, which he did. He also emailed Harvard's Office of Diversity Education and Support, vowing to make amends. This office told him "we appreciate your thoughtful reflections and look forward to connecting with you upon your matriculation in the fall of 2020."

Alas, it was not to be: The dean of admissions decided to rescind Kashuv's admissionHarvard University Cancels Kyle Kashuv by Robby Soave on Reason

These are the same cohort who routinely fall off cliffs and building and get mauled by wild animals while attempting to capture the best selfie.

In a post written last year, I explained why it's a mistake to give special credence to the policy views of victims of horrible tragedies. Surviving a school shooting, or some other awful event, doesn't give you any special insight into the moral and policy questions at stake. Survivors deserve empathy and respect—but not deference to their policy views, except in rare instances where they have genuine expertise on the subject. Why We Shouldn't Treat Survivors and Victims as Authorities on Policy Issues by Ilya Somin on Reason

Western society is headed toward a place where we are trading real freedoms in exchange for perceived freedoms.

The ban was implemented following an ASA review which concluded that stereotypical depictions pave the way for "real-world psychological, physical, economic, social and political harm for individuals and groups."
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Gender stereotypes "constrict people's choices," says the ASA review. Yet the ban itself does precisely that, as it limits companies from advertising their products as they see fit and shields consumers from ideas associated with wrongthink.The U.K. Has Banned 'Harmful Gender Stereotypes' in Advertisements by Billy Binnion on Reason

I'm starting to see a pattern to these articles. The theme seems to be "judgment"; judging others against one's moral standard and trying to "force" them to live by that standard. It's a dangerous trend.

In addition to bans, fees, and moral preening, anti-plastic bag advocates have a new trick up their sleeve for inspiring you to bring a reusable tote on your next trip to the grocery store: shame.

Two weeks ago, East West Market, a grocery store in Vancouver, Canada, rolled out a new line of single-use plastic bags for customers who don't bring bags to the store. The bags feature less than flattering business names, including "The Colon Care Co-Op," "Into the Weird Adult Video Emporium," and "Dr. Toew's Wart Ointment Wholesale."Anti-Plastic Bag Activists Have a New Weapon: Shame by Christian Britschgi.