This analysis is one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies of the local immigrant-crime relationship. It spans decades of metropolitan area data, incorporating places with widely differing social, cultural and economic backgrounds, and a broad range of types of violent crime.
Areas were chosen to reflect a range of immigrant composition, from Wheeling, W.Va., where one in 100 people was born outside the United States, to Miami, where every second person was. Some areas were home to newly formed immigrant communities; other immigrant pockets went back generations. Controlling for population characteristics, unemployment rates and other socioeconomic conditions, the researchers still found that, on average, as immigration increases in American metropolises, crime decreases.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/30/upshot/crime-immigration-myth.html?emc=edit_th_180331&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=119040680331
Saturday 31 March 2018
The future of food
But the challenge in developing any new food is in making something that consumers are comfortable with. There's little that people are more cautious about that what they eat, says Max Elder, a researcher at the Institute for the Future. "People don't want to eat science, they want to eat natural foods," he believes.
Yeah but they're idiots. Chemistry is chemistry wherever it comes from. Make it tasty and/or cheap and they'll eat it. The natural food craze is one that dominates a certain brand of underprivileged morons. However :
But that said, he believes future food designers may have success if they can develop foodstuffs that are what he calls "hyper-individualised" - crafted to give a specific person the exact nutritional content they need. No more, no less.
Now that would be more interesting.
Dutch company ByFlow has come up with a 3D printer that prints food replicator. Their model starts at 3,300 euros (£2,940) and the firm has already sold more than 100 of them, including many to professional restaurant kitchens.
Awesome !
The printer is loaded with cartridges full of edible pastes than can be designed to set when extruded, says ByFlow's Milena Adamczewska. It will print a carrot by using beetroot paste, for example.
Just guessing here, but couldn't it use, say, carrot instead ?
But taking the concept forward a step or two, imagine people in the near future using a 3D printer to produce meals with exactly the right calorie, fat, protein and vitamin content right for them. The role for a food designer here would be to create ways of tailoring consumables to each and every user - and finding ways of making extruded foodstuffs appetising once arranged together.
"Imagine that the cartridge is loaded with, let's say, all the nutritional elements that a single person needs," says Ms Adamczewska. It could even lead to a drop in food waste, she suggests, if people find it easier to purchase only the food they need to eat.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43259905
Yeah but they're idiots. Chemistry is chemistry wherever it comes from. Make it tasty and/or cheap and they'll eat it. The natural food craze is one that dominates a certain brand of underprivileged morons. However :
But that said, he believes future food designers may have success if they can develop foodstuffs that are what he calls "hyper-individualised" - crafted to give a specific person the exact nutritional content they need. No more, no less.
Now that would be more interesting.
Dutch company ByFlow has come up with a 3D printer that prints food replicator. Their model starts at 3,300 euros (£2,940) and the firm has already sold more than 100 of them, including many to professional restaurant kitchens.
Awesome !
The printer is loaded with cartridges full of edible pastes than can be designed to set when extruded, says ByFlow's Milena Adamczewska. It will print a carrot by using beetroot paste, for example.
Just guessing here, but couldn't it use, say, carrot instead ?
But taking the concept forward a step or two, imagine people in the near future using a 3D printer to produce meals with exactly the right calorie, fat, protein and vitamin content right for them. The role for a food designer here would be to create ways of tailoring consumables to each and every user - and finding ways of making extruded foodstuffs appetising once arranged together.
"Imagine that the cartridge is loaded with, let's say, all the nutritional elements that a single person needs," says Ms Adamczewska. It could even lead to a drop in food waste, she suggests, if people find it easier to purchase only the food they need to eat.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43259905
Optimising VR
When I tested the prototype - looking round the virtual cockpit of a passenger plane - the level of detail in the small central area of vision was certainly impressive - as close to the real thing as I've come across. Image quality outside this area, simulating standard VR headsets, was noticeably fuzzier.
Founder and chief executive Urho Konttori says the firm has managed to achieve this by mimicking how the eye sees. "The human eye only focuses on a thumbnail-sized area of vision - the brain fills in the rest," he says. "Our peripheral vision is less detailed, at a much lower resolution." So Varjo's headset provides very high definition images only of the objects our eyes are focusing on at any particular moment, the rest of the scene is at lower resolution. It uses eye-tracking technology to tell which parts of the image it needs to render in high definition.
Another obvious drawback with VR is the inconvenience of having to put on a clunky headset that can become uncomfortable after prolonged use. VR headset makers are beginning to address all these issues. For example, HTC is releasing its Vive Pro headset in April, which features a much higher-resolution screen, high-performance headphones with noise cancellation facility, and a more comfortable strap. It will cost £799. Users will also be able to unplug the headset from the computer and move freely thanks to a wireless dongle accessory.
Pimax has even produced a headset with ultra high-definition 8K image resolution and a 200 degree field of view (humans can see 220 degrees without having to move our heads).Cheaper headsets - think Samsung's Gear - use your smartphone as the screen, but new products such as Facebook's Oculus Go and Lenovo's Mirage Solo will "eliminate the need for a phone or PC altogether," says Mr Mainelli. "These products will drive a much different experience and will ship in notable volumes this year."
I dunno, I would have thought the better solution would be to have a fancy PC doing the bulk of the processing with the headset itself providing only the realtime sensors and a display. Keep the heavy stuff off the user's head. People who want a VR headset are going to tend to be the kind who have a beefy PC anyway (or so I'd guess, but then, people are weird and confusing things).
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-42963408
Founder and chief executive Urho Konttori says the firm has managed to achieve this by mimicking how the eye sees. "The human eye only focuses on a thumbnail-sized area of vision - the brain fills in the rest," he says. "Our peripheral vision is less detailed, at a much lower resolution." So Varjo's headset provides very high definition images only of the objects our eyes are focusing on at any particular moment, the rest of the scene is at lower resolution. It uses eye-tracking technology to tell which parts of the image it needs to render in high definition.
Another obvious drawback with VR is the inconvenience of having to put on a clunky headset that can become uncomfortable after prolonged use. VR headset makers are beginning to address all these issues. For example, HTC is releasing its Vive Pro headset in April, which features a much higher-resolution screen, high-performance headphones with noise cancellation facility, and a more comfortable strap. It will cost £799. Users will also be able to unplug the headset from the computer and move freely thanks to a wireless dongle accessory.
Pimax has even produced a headset with ultra high-definition 8K image resolution and a 200 degree field of view (humans can see 220 degrees without having to move our heads).Cheaper headsets - think Samsung's Gear - use your smartphone as the screen, but new products such as Facebook's Oculus Go and Lenovo's Mirage Solo will "eliminate the need for a phone or PC altogether," says Mr Mainelli. "These products will drive a much different experience and will ship in notable volumes this year."
I dunno, I would have thought the better solution would be to have a fancy PC doing the bulk of the processing with the headset itself providing only the realtime sensors and a display. Keep the heavy stuff off the user's head. People who want a VR headset are going to tend to be the kind who have a beefy PC anyway (or so I'd guess, but then, people are weird and confusing things).
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-42963408
The problems of incentivising research
I don't think I can disagree with any of these.
https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/edwardsroy2017-table1-perverse-incentives.pdf
https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/edwardsroy2017-table1-perverse-incentives.pdf
An octopus reportedly using projectile weapons
I can't actually see the shells being thrown in the video.
Those ornery octopuses have also taken to hurling objects at each other, like shells and bits of seaweed, blasting them through the water with high pressure. And while Godfrey-Smith says there may be other explanations for this behavior, the number of direct hits has him suspecting that the octopuses are using projectile weapons.
"It would be quite significant if it's happening," says Godfrey-Smith, who has been collaborating on this research with David Scheel of Alaska Pacific University. "In general, projectile use is pretty rare among animals."
He says they've got a lot more observing to do before coming to firm conclusions about the shell-chuckers. In the meantime, he refuses to be baited by sensationalizing reporters. "The prospects for octopus takeover are still fairly remote at present," he says.
https://www.npr.org/2015/08/30/436085657/watch-octopuses-appear-to-take-up-arms-as-submarine-warfare-escalates
Those ornery octopuses have also taken to hurling objects at each other, like shells and bits of seaweed, blasting them through the water with high pressure. And while Godfrey-Smith says there may be other explanations for this behavior, the number of direct hits has him suspecting that the octopuses are using projectile weapons.
"It would be quite significant if it's happening," says Godfrey-Smith, who has been collaborating on this research with David Scheel of Alaska Pacific University. "In general, projectile use is pretty rare among animals."
He says they've got a lot more observing to do before coming to firm conclusions about the shell-chuckers. In the meantime, he refuses to be baited by sensationalizing reporters. "The prospects for octopus takeover are still fairly remote at present," he says.
https://www.npr.org/2015/08/30/436085657/watch-octopuses-appear-to-take-up-arms-as-submarine-warfare-escalates
Friday 30 March 2018
Facebook doesn't care if it kills people
Facebook believes murder is justified for its own growth. Lovely. But obviously this was just to 'be provocative', because that's definitely a normal thing to propose.
A Facebook executive's memo that claimed the "ugly truth" was that anything it did to grow was justified has been made public, embarrassing the company. The 2016 post said that this applied even if it meant people might die as a result of bullying or terrorism. Both the author and the company's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, have denied they actually believe the sentiment.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43594959
A Facebook executive's memo that claimed the "ugly truth" was that anything it did to grow was justified has been made public, embarrassing the company. The 2016 post said that this applied even if it meant people might die as a result of bullying or terrorism. Both the author and the company's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, have denied they actually believe the sentiment.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43594959
More on the government's involvement with Cambridge Analytica
Further allegations of the government's involvement. I'm surprised this aspect isn't getting more attention.
Documents shared by Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie spell out how parent company SCL Group tried to influence elections worldwide. One letter also refers to its support of 15 psychological operations involving the UK's Ministry of Defence as of January 2012. The Foreign Office is quoted as saying another part of SCL was "a joy to work with" on a counter-terror operation.
The files spell out how SCL helped the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office "in strategic planning to counter violent jihadism" in Pakistan. "I wouldn't only recommend them, I'd work with them again in an instant," wrote an official, whose name has been redacted.
The files also refer to work done for Ambassador Bolton on US votes. This appears to be a reference to John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the UN. He was recently appointed as President Drumpf's National Security Adviser.
Describing its work in a Nigerian election, SCL Global said it had advised that "rather than trying to motivate swing voters to vote for our clients, a more effective strategy might be to persuade opposition voters not to vote at all".
It boasted of devising a political graffiti campaign to create a youth "movement" in Trinidad and Tobago and of disseminating "campaign messages that, whilst ostensibly coming from the youth, were unattributable to any specific party". It said as a result "a united youth movement was created".
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43581892
Documents shared by Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie spell out how parent company SCL Group tried to influence elections worldwide. One letter also refers to its support of 15 psychological operations involving the UK's Ministry of Defence as of January 2012. The Foreign Office is quoted as saying another part of SCL was "a joy to work with" on a counter-terror operation.
The files spell out how SCL helped the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office "in strategic planning to counter violent jihadism" in Pakistan. "I wouldn't only recommend them, I'd work with them again in an instant," wrote an official, whose name has been redacted.
The files also refer to work done for Ambassador Bolton on US votes. This appears to be a reference to John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the UN. He was recently appointed as President Drumpf's National Security Adviser.
Describing its work in a Nigerian election, SCL Global said it had advised that "rather than trying to motivate swing voters to vote for our clients, a more effective strategy might be to persuade opposition voters not to vote at all".
It boasted of devising a political graffiti campaign to create a youth "movement" in Trinidad and Tobago and of disseminating "campaign messages that, whilst ostensibly coming from the youth, were unattributable to any specific party". It said as a result "a united youth movement was created".
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43581892
Can targeted ads really change your behaviour ?
Since it's possible to persuade an ordinary person (inasmuch as there is such a thing) to murder an innocent in the space of one hour, the answer to the headline must violate Betteridge's Law.
At the start of the year, Prof Carroll requested that Cambridge Analytica provide details on the personal information it had collected on him. What he received was both worrying and intriguing. It included rankings on 10 issues - giving him a three out of 10 on gun rights, and seven out of 10 on national security importance, alongside the suggestion that he was unlikely to vote Republican.
"It seemed so invasive. This was about predicting my behaviour without my knowledge or consent," he told the BBC. But it was also confusing. The data was unclear - was the three out of 10 a good or bad thing? Did gun rights mean more or less gun control? And it also seemed rather brief.
"The chief executive of Cambridge Analytica had boasted that the firm had 4,000 to 5,000 data points on most US voters but what they gave me was a dozen at most," he said. He felt that the company was withholding information, which gave him grounds to mount a legal challenge in London's High Court. Cambridge Analytica has until April 5 to respond.
Building psychographic profiles of individual voters based on their lifestyles and preferences could be hugely powerful, thinks Chris Sumner, research director at the Online Privacy Foundation. "It is a huge problem," he told the BBC. The power of emotional advertising is well-known and drives a lot of decisions but right now there is less regulation on online political campaigns than on a marketing campaign for toothpaste."
His group replicated the methods of psychographic profiling over two years, firstly examining differences in personality traits, thinking styles and cognitive biases between voters in the UK's 2016 EU referendum and then devising their own campaign to test whether it might be possible to identify, target and influence voters.
"We found that people behaved as we predicted they would. If you get the messages right they can be very powerful indeed. Messaging works and is really effective - and can nudge people one way or the other."
Task for later : look up more details on this. Numbers as to how effective targeted messages can be would be extremely interesting.
Seth Alexander Thevoz, a political historian from Oxford University, is not convinced that the UK's political parties are currently using such sophisticated methods.
"We found that political ads aren't that accurate," he told the BBC. He explained that ads intended to target people in specific geographical areas were sent to people living in a completely different part of the country. "The things that Cambridge Analytica claims to be able to do, we haven't seen that slick an operation in the UK. At least not yet." he said.
The Conservative Party reportedly spent £1.2m on digital advertising during the 2015 general election, according to the Electoral Commission. Labour spent £160,000 and the Liberal Democrats £22,245. Virtually all of this money went into advertising on Facebook.
Major caveat : this doesn't preclude CA from involvement in the referendum or from the overspending scandal. But it points to an interesting inconsistency as to when the government use such systems.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43489408
At the start of the year, Prof Carroll requested that Cambridge Analytica provide details on the personal information it had collected on him. What he received was both worrying and intriguing. It included rankings on 10 issues - giving him a three out of 10 on gun rights, and seven out of 10 on national security importance, alongside the suggestion that he was unlikely to vote Republican.
"It seemed so invasive. This was about predicting my behaviour without my knowledge or consent," he told the BBC. But it was also confusing. The data was unclear - was the three out of 10 a good or bad thing? Did gun rights mean more or less gun control? And it also seemed rather brief.
"The chief executive of Cambridge Analytica had boasted that the firm had 4,000 to 5,000 data points on most US voters but what they gave me was a dozen at most," he said. He felt that the company was withholding information, which gave him grounds to mount a legal challenge in London's High Court. Cambridge Analytica has until April 5 to respond.
Building psychographic profiles of individual voters based on their lifestyles and preferences could be hugely powerful, thinks Chris Sumner, research director at the Online Privacy Foundation. "It is a huge problem," he told the BBC. The power of emotional advertising is well-known and drives a lot of decisions but right now there is less regulation on online political campaigns than on a marketing campaign for toothpaste."
His group replicated the methods of psychographic profiling over two years, firstly examining differences in personality traits, thinking styles and cognitive biases between voters in the UK's 2016 EU referendum and then devising their own campaign to test whether it might be possible to identify, target and influence voters.
"We found that people behaved as we predicted they would. If you get the messages right they can be very powerful indeed. Messaging works and is really effective - and can nudge people one way or the other."
Task for later : look up more details on this. Numbers as to how effective targeted messages can be would be extremely interesting.
Seth Alexander Thevoz, a political historian from Oxford University, is not convinced that the UK's political parties are currently using such sophisticated methods.
"We found that political ads aren't that accurate," he told the BBC. He explained that ads intended to target people in specific geographical areas were sent to people living in a completely different part of the country. "The things that Cambridge Analytica claims to be able to do, we haven't seen that slick an operation in the UK. At least not yet." he said.
The Conservative Party reportedly spent £1.2m on digital advertising during the 2015 general election, according to the Electoral Commission. Labour spent £160,000 and the Liberal Democrats £22,245. Virtually all of this money went into advertising on Facebook.
Major caveat : this doesn't preclude CA from involvement in the referendum or from the overspending scandal. But it points to an interesting inconsistency as to when the government use such systems.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43489408
How to write a pseudoscience email
Found on the internet.
[AUTHOR] is [BASICALLY, ENTIRELY, PRECISELY] [WRONG / RIGHT].
To be fair, [CONCESSION]. But [UNCHARITABLE RETRACTION OF THAT CONCESSION]. In this case, [SPECIAL PLEADING].
Presuming [THING WHICH IT IS INSANE TO PRESUME], then [OVERSTATED CONCLUSION.] But if [INSANE MISSTATEMENT OF OPPOSING ARGUMENT], then [UNCONDITIONAL RETRACTION OF MY BASIC POINT].
When [THING WHICH WILL NEVER HAPPEN] happens, then I will be proven conclusively right. But until that time, no one can criticize me for having made unfalsifiable conclusions, because they were merely conditional at the time I made them.
[SHORT STATEMENT WHICH IS LESS PITHY THAN I INTENDED]
[AUTHOR] is [BASICALLY, ENTIRELY, PRECISELY] [WRONG / RIGHT].
To be fair, [CONCESSION]. But [UNCHARITABLE RETRACTION OF THAT CONCESSION]. In this case, [SPECIAL PLEADING].
Presuming [THING WHICH IT IS INSANE TO PRESUME], then [OVERSTATED CONCLUSION.] But if [INSANE MISSTATEMENT OF OPPOSING ARGUMENT], then [UNCONDITIONAL RETRACTION OF MY BASIC POINT].
When [THING WHICH WILL NEVER HAPPEN] happens, then I will be proven conclusively right. But until that time, no one can criticize me for having made unfalsifiable conclusions, because they were merely conditional at the time I made them.
[SHORT STATEMENT WHICH IS LESS PITHY THAN I INTENDED]
Thursday 29 March 2018
A more realistic way to stop Trump ?
This is probably one of the least offensive things he's done, but still, a lawsuit's a lawsuit.
Donald Drumpf's attempt to dismiss a lawsuit alleging ownership of his business empire while president is a violation of the US constitution has been rejected by a federal judge. He is accused of breaching the constitution's emoluments clause, which prohibits the receipt of gifts without congressional approval.
The lawsuit includes allegations that Mr Drumpf's position puts other hotel and entertainment properties nearby at a competitive disadvantage, and that the Drumpf hotel has received special tax concessions. Shortly before he became president, Mr Drumpf stepped down from running the company. He transferred the business into a revocable trust, one he can receive money from at his request.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43577444
Donald Drumpf's attempt to dismiss a lawsuit alleging ownership of his business empire while president is a violation of the US constitution has been rejected by a federal judge. He is accused of breaching the constitution's emoluments clause, which prohibits the receipt of gifts without congressional approval.
The lawsuit includes allegations that Mr Drumpf's position puts other hotel and entertainment properties nearby at a competitive disadvantage, and that the Drumpf hotel has received special tax concessions. Shortly before he became president, Mr Drumpf stepped down from running the company. He transferred the business into a revocable trust, one he can receive money from at his request.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43577444
Ecuador has told Julian Assange to stop being naughty
That's magnificent.
Ecuador has cut Julian Assange's internet connection at its embassy in London, preventing him from communicating with the outside world. The move is to prevent the WikiLeaks founder from interfering in other countries' affairs, Ecuador said. It comes after Mr Assange questioned accusations that Moscow was responsible for the poisoning of a Russian ex-spy and his daughter in the UK on 4 March.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43573694
Ecuador has cut Julian Assange's internet connection at its embassy in London, preventing him from communicating with the outside world. The move is to prevent the WikiLeaks founder from interfering in other countries' affairs, Ecuador said. It comes after Mr Assange questioned accusations that Moscow was responsible for the poisoning of a Russian ex-spy and his daughter in the UK on 4 March.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43573694
Wednesday 28 March 2018
Blair continues saying sensible things on Brexit
This was apparently a "Speaker's Lecture" in Parliament. I can't find a video of it anywhere.
In no other dimension of life let alone politics, in no personal decision that any of us take in the myriad of different situations which require decision in our lives, would we take such an all defining direction to a new future in this manner. We wouldn’t move jobs on that basis, move home, marry or divorce with such a ‘whatever the terms’ abandon as we apparently have chosen to do in this case of the most momentous decision for the direction of our country in modern times.
By a combination of a pitiful lack of leadership and the bludgeoning of that part of the media dedicated to Brexit at any cost, we have taken the British people to the point where we consider it a betrayal to allow them to re-visit the most important political decision of their lifetime once they are in possession of the full facts which will determine the nation’s destiny for generations to come.
If the people are to be trusted with the decision to leave before we know the terms of exit, why, once we have that knowledge, are they now disqualified and seemingly incapable of making the decision on whether the terms of exit meet their approval?
In all areas – from pharma to cars to financial services, what I call ‘the Dilemma’ will become manifest. Either we keep to Europe’s rules – however we call it, equivalence or alignment – in which case we have not fulfilled the central Brexit promise of absolute control over our laws; or alternatively we are free to diverge from those laws in which case the disruption to trade and consequent economic damage will be large.
As time goes on, the Government will recognise fully that if they put a proposition to Parliament which clearly resolves the Dilemma, and before March 2019, the risk is it will not pass. Either it will mean divergence from Europe in which case, the business community will protest the damage and MPs will take notice of that. Or it will mean alignment with Europe in which case the diehard Brexiteers will cry foul and the British people will wonder why we are leaving.
We are utterly and wrongly complacent about the damage to financial services if we lose access to Europe’s Single Market. Short term, the losses will be limited because of course it is hard for Europe to re-adjust from London as a financial centre for European finance. Short term.
Long term, the City should be under no illusion: European regulators and even more so, European politicians, will not find it acceptable to have the centre for European finance outside the purview of European regulation. Frankfurt, Paris, Dublin are setting out their stall. Over time, we are going to haemorrhage jobs and business.
The most alarming characteristic of the Brexiteers is their confusion of delusion and patriotism. To recognise Britain’s position in the global hierarchy of nations and how it is changed over the past 70 years is not to be unpatriotic.
In alliance, we gain strength. That is the modern case for the European Union. To say this is not to diminish British pride in what we have achieved or confidence in what we can achieve. It is just to say that reality, not fantasy, is a better guide to statecraft. It is not to dishonour our past, it is simply to understand that the future will be different.
http://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/blair-brexit-speech-in-full-1-5451824
In no other dimension of life let alone politics, in no personal decision that any of us take in the myriad of different situations which require decision in our lives, would we take such an all defining direction to a new future in this manner. We wouldn’t move jobs on that basis, move home, marry or divorce with such a ‘whatever the terms’ abandon as we apparently have chosen to do in this case of the most momentous decision for the direction of our country in modern times.
By a combination of a pitiful lack of leadership and the bludgeoning of that part of the media dedicated to Brexit at any cost, we have taken the British people to the point where we consider it a betrayal to allow them to re-visit the most important political decision of their lifetime once they are in possession of the full facts which will determine the nation’s destiny for generations to come.
If the people are to be trusted with the decision to leave before we know the terms of exit, why, once we have that knowledge, are they now disqualified and seemingly incapable of making the decision on whether the terms of exit meet their approval?
In all areas – from pharma to cars to financial services, what I call ‘the Dilemma’ will become manifest. Either we keep to Europe’s rules – however we call it, equivalence or alignment – in which case we have not fulfilled the central Brexit promise of absolute control over our laws; or alternatively we are free to diverge from those laws in which case the disruption to trade and consequent economic damage will be large.
As time goes on, the Government will recognise fully that if they put a proposition to Parliament which clearly resolves the Dilemma, and before March 2019, the risk is it will not pass. Either it will mean divergence from Europe in which case, the business community will protest the damage and MPs will take notice of that. Or it will mean alignment with Europe in which case the diehard Brexiteers will cry foul and the British people will wonder why we are leaving.
We are utterly and wrongly complacent about the damage to financial services if we lose access to Europe’s Single Market. Short term, the losses will be limited because of course it is hard for Europe to re-adjust from London as a financial centre for European finance. Short term.
Long term, the City should be under no illusion: European regulators and even more so, European politicians, will not find it acceptable to have the centre for European finance outside the purview of European regulation. Frankfurt, Paris, Dublin are setting out their stall. Over time, we are going to haemorrhage jobs and business.
The most alarming characteristic of the Brexiteers is their confusion of delusion and patriotism. To recognise Britain’s position in the global hierarchy of nations and how it is changed over the past 70 years is not to be unpatriotic.
In alliance, we gain strength. That is the modern case for the European Union. To say this is not to diminish British pride in what we have achieved or confidence in what we can achieve. It is just to say that reality, not fantasy, is a better guide to statecraft. It is not to dishonour our past, it is simply to understand that the future will be different.
http://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/blair-brexit-speech-in-full-1-5451824
Improving memories by zapping your brain
Using the team's electronic prosthetic system based on a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) nonlinear mathematical model, the researchers influenced the firing patterns of multiple neurons in the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in making new memories in eight of those patients.
First, they recorded the neural patterns or 'codes' while the study participants were performing a computerized memory task... The USC team led by biomedical engineers Theodore Berger, Ph.D., and Dong Song, Ph.D., analyzed the recordings from the correct responses and synthesized a MIMO-based code for correct memory performance. The Wake Forest Baptist team played back that code to the patients while they performed the image recall task. In this test, the patients' episodic memory performance showed a 37 percent improvement over baseline.
"We showed that we could tap into a patient's own memory content, reinforce it and feed it back to the patient," Hampson said. "Even when a person's memory is impaired, it is possible to identify the neural firing patterns that indicate correct memory formation and separate them from the patterns that are incorrect. We can then feed in the correct patterns to assist the patient's brain in accurately forming new memories, not as a replacement for innate memory function, but as a boost to it.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180327194350.htm
First, they recorded the neural patterns or 'codes' while the study participants were performing a computerized memory task... The USC team led by biomedical engineers Theodore Berger, Ph.D., and Dong Song, Ph.D., analyzed the recordings from the correct responses and synthesized a MIMO-based code for correct memory performance. The Wake Forest Baptist team played back that code to the patients while they performed the image recall task. In this test, the patients' episodic memory performance showed a 37 percent improvement over baseline.
"We showed that we could tap into a patient's own memory content, reinforce it and feed it back to the patient," Hampson said. "Even when a person's memory is impaired, it is possible to identify the neural firing patterns that indicate correct memory formation and separate them from the patterns that are incorrect. We can then feed in the correct patterns to assist the patient's brain in accurately forming new memories, not as a replacement for innate memory function, but as a boost to it.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180327194350.htm
11 broken Brexit promises
Originally shared by Jenny Winder
11 #Brexit promises the government quietly dropped
Leaving aside the £350m for the NHS, Brexit has promised quick and easy trade deals with the EU and the rest of the world, an end to ECJ jurisdiction and free movement, and British control of North Sea fishing. None of this has come to pass. Here are 11 key abandoned claims
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2018/mar/28/11-brexit-promises-leavers-quietly-dropped
11 #Brexit promises the government quietly dropped
Leaving aside the £350m for the NHS, Brexit has promised quick and easy trade deals with the EU and the rest of the world, an end to ECJ jurisdiction and free movement, and British control of North Sea fishing. None of this has come to pass. Here are 11 key abandoned claims
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2018/mar/28/11-brexit-promises-leavers-quietly-dropped
A galaxy without dark matter ?
This looks extremely interesting. Annoyingly, the link to the paper is broken (and my institute doesn't have a subscription to Nature anyway). I guess it'll be on arXiv soon.
DF2 is known as an “ultra-diffuse” or “ghost” galaxy, an extremely low-density variety, recognisable due to its large size and faint appearance. However, this one is “an oddity, even among this unusual class of galaxy”, according to Shany Danieli, a Yale University graduate student who contributed to its discovery.
The astronomers realised something about DF2 was amiss when telescope observations revealed that 10 clusters of stars within it were moving far slower than would normally be expected. The velocities of stars and other objects in faraway galaxies can be used to measure their individual masses.
By performing these calculations, the research team found that all the mass in the galaxy could be attributed to the visible stars, gas and dust. There was essentially no remaining room in this galaxy for dark matter.
Just as we should be cautious about claiming some other UDGs are extremely dark matter rich based on observations of only a handful of globular clusters, so we should be equally cautious about finding galaxies with no dark matter by the same method.
Counterintuitively, Professor Van Dokkum and his colleagues suggest the lack of dark matter in DF2 is actually good evidence for its existence. While this substance plays a central role in our understanding of the universe, its intangible nature means alternate theories have been suggested to account for the gap in scientific understanding of what is currently known as dark matter.
These theories consider the dark matter signature that astronomers measure to be an unavoidable consequence of ordinary matter. Therefore, the existence of a galaxy that has lots of matter, but no dark matter, suggests dark matter does indeed exist elsewhere as a substance in its own right.
I've long suggested that if we find a galaxy with a Keplerian rotation curve (as standard Newtonian gravity predicts), both modified gravity theories and dark matter would be screwed. However, with 10 data points we won't get a nice rotation curve, just a total mass value. And there are a whole bunch of caveats to this anyway, so I'm reserving judgement and further commentary until I've read the paper.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/distant-galaxy-dark-matter-universe-understanding-theories-wrong-space-yale-a8277951.html
DF2 is known as an “ultra-diffuse” or “ghost” galaxy, an extremely low-density variety, recognisable due to its large size and faint appearance. However, this one is “an oddity, even among this unusual class of galaxy”, according to Shany Danieli, a Yale University graduate student who contributed to its discovery.
The astronomers realised something about DF2 was amiss when telescope observations revealed that 10 clusters of stars within it were moving far slower than would normally be expected. The velocities of stars and other objects in faraway galaxies can be used to measure their individual masses.
By performing these calculations, the research team found that all the mass in the galaxy could be attributed to the visible stars, gas and dust. There was essentially no remaining room in this galaxy for dark matter.
Just as we should be cautious about claiming some other UDGs are extremely dark matter rich based on observations of only a handful of globular clusters, so we should be equally cautious about finding galaxies with no dark matter by the same method.
Counterintuitively, Professor Van Dokkum and his colleagues suggest the lack of dark matter in DF2 is actually good evidence for its existence. While this substance plays a central role in our understanding of the universe, its intangible nature means alternate theories have been suggested to account for the gap in scientific understanding of what is currently known as dark matter.
These theories consider the dark matter signature that astronomers measure to be an unavoidable consequence of ordinary matter. Therefore, the existence of a galaxy that has lots of matter, but no dark matter, suggests dark matter does indeed exist elsewhere as a substance in its own right.
I've long suggested that if we find a galaxy with a Keplerian rotation curve (as standard Newtonian gravity predicts), both modified gravity theories and dark matter would be screwed. However, with 10 data points we won't get a nice rotation curve, just a total mass value. And there are a whole bunch of caveats to this anyway, so I'm reserving judgement and further commentary until I've read the paper.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/distant-galaxy-dark-matter-universe-understanding-theories-wrong-space-yale-a8277951.html
The biggest Scottish wildcat
One of the largest wildcats ever recorded in the world has been discovered by field workers in Aberdeenshire's Clashindarroch Forest. Nicknamed the Clashindarroch Beast, it was captured on camera and is estimated to be 4ft (1.2m) from nose to tail.
The footage was gathered as part of a Scottish wildcat conservation project operating across the Highlands. Remote traps are baited with food or scent, and anytime something passes in front of it the camera shoots video. Kev Bell, field worker at Wildcat Haven, said: "I've been fortunate to get footage of quite a few of these ghost cats; there's about 10 to 15 of them here in the Clashindarroch. I couldn't believe my eyes when I first saw this cat, he is enormous, a magnificent animal."
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-43555314
The footage was gathered as part of a Scottish wildcat conservation project operating across the Highlands. Remote traps are baited with food or scent, and anytime something passes in front of it the camera shoots video. Kev Bell, field worker at Wildcat Haven, said: "I've been fortunate to get footage of quite a few of these ghost cats; there's about 10 to 15 of them here in the Clashindarroch. I couldn't believe my eyes when I first saw this cat, he is enormous, a magnificent animal."
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-43555314
Tuesday 27 March 2018
A message from UNESCO
...We live in a time when it is hard to see clearly. We are surrounded by more fiction than at any other time in history or prehistory. (Although paradoxically we are watched continually; it is said that on a normal outing when I travel from my home to central London I will be filmed at least 300 times on CCTV.) Any ‘fact’ can be challenged, any anecdote can have claim on our attention as ‘truth’. One fiction in particular surrounds us continually. The one that seeks to divide us. From the truth. And from one another. That we are separate. People from people. Women from men. Human beings from nature.
But just as we live in a time of division, and fragmentation, we also live in a time of immense movement. More than at any other time in history, people are on the move; frequently fleeing; walking, swimming if need be, migrating; all over the world. And this is only just beginning. The response, as we know, has been to close borders. Build walls. Shut out. Isolate. We live in a world order that is tyrannical, where indifference is the currency and hope a contraband cargo. And part of this tyranny is the way control is asserted and enforced: not only over space, but also time. The time we live in eschews the present. It concentrates on the recent past and near future. I do not have that. I will buy this. Now I have bought it, I need to have the next… thing. The result of this endless insatiable gratification? The deep past is obliterated. The future of no consequence...
https://www.opendemocracy.net/simon-mcburney/message-for-unesco-on-world-theatre-day
But just as we live in a time of division, and fragmentation, we also live in a time of immense movement. More than at any other time in history, people are on the move; frequently fleeing; walking, swimming if need be, migrating; all over the world. And this is only just beginning. The response, as we know, has been to close borders. Build walls. Shut out. Isolate. We live in a world order that is tyrannical, where indifference is the currency and hope a contraband cargo. And part of this tyranny is the way control is asserted and enforced: not only over space, but also time. The time we live in eschews the present. It concentrates on the recent past and near future. I do not have that. I will buy this. Now I have bought it, I need to have the next… thing. The result of this endless insatiable gratification? The deep past is obliterated. The future of no consequence...
https://www.opendemocracy.net/simon-mcburney/message-for-unesco-on-world-theatre-day
The heroic efforts of Victorian meteorologists
Keen to gather similar data for Britain, the Scottish Meteorological Society decided to build a weather station at the top of Ben Nevis. For a trial run, one particularly intrepid member scaled the mountain every day for four months – through blizzards, gales, and heavy storms – to record measurements at the summit. Funding to build the station and obtain the instruments was raised through a kind of 19th-Century crowdfunding initiative. Even Queen Victoria donated.
And so began a remarkable experiment in Victorian stoicism and scientific endeavour. From 1883 to 1904, a few hardy individuals lived year-round in a small stone hut, surviving on tinned food and making hourly recordings of everything from atmospheric temperature to humidity, wind speed to rainfall. In total they made almost 1.5 million observations – often going to extraordinary lengths and risking their lives to record data in the most hostile of conditions.
“They were living in very severe weather conditions: 100mph winds were not uncommon, the temperature would drop to -15C (5F) at times, and they lived inside a cloud for most of the year. But on the rare occasions the cloud was below them, they got the most amazing views. So I suspect they lived for those days where they could see for miles and miles around.”
Blizzards and precarious mountain paths were far from the only scares the weathermen faced. On a couple of occasions the observatory was struck by lightning. The first time, the lightning came down the chimney and set the wooden lining of the building on fire. (The blaze was extinguished.)
Feeding the original Ben Nevis weather data into a computer model requires all the observations to be digitised. And so thousands of volunteers across Europe have helped digitise the observations over a period of just 10 weeks in autumn 2017.
As a result, Hawkins’ team is now looking at how the amount of moisture in today’s storms compares to those in the late 19th Century. “A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, and so when it rains in a storm today, we expect the amount of rain to be much greater compared to a storm a century ago, of the same severity,” he says. “It’s a fingerprint of how things are changing in a warmer world.”
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180320-what-scotlands-ben-nevis-can-teach-us-about-climate-change
And so began a remarkable experiment in Victorian stoicism and scientific endeavour. From 1883 to 1904, a few hardy individuals lived year-round in a small stone hut, surviving on tinned food and making hourly recordings of everything from atmospheric temperature to humidity, wind speed to rainfall. In total they made almost 1.5 million observations – often going to extraordinary lengths and risking their lives to record data in the most hostile of conditions.
“They were living in very severe weather conditions: 100mph winds were not uncommon, the temperature would drop to -15C (5F) at times, and they lived inside a cloud for most of the year. But on the rare occasions the cloud was below them, they got the most amazing views. So I suspect they lived for those days where they could see for miles and miles around.”
Blizzards and precarious mountain paths were far from the only scares the weathermen faced. On a couple of occasions the observatory was struck by lightning. The first time, the lightning came down the chimney and set the wooden lining of the building on fire. (The blaze was extinguished.)
Feeding the original Ben Nevis weather data into a computer model requires all the observations to be digitised. And so thousands of volunteers across Europe have helped digitise the observations over a period of just 10 weeks in autumn 2017.
As a result, Hawkins’ team is now looking at how the amount of moisture in today’s storms compares to those in the late 19th Century. “A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, and so when it rains in a storm today, we expect the amount of rain to be much greater compared to a storm a century ago, of the same severity,” he says. “It’s a fingerprint of how things are changing in a warmer world.”
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180320-what-scotlands-ben-nevis-can-teach-us-about-climate-change
The fire-breathing elephant
This elephant is trying to become a dragon.
Is this elephant blowing … smoke? Scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society found the female elephant while checking their camera traps in Nagaharole National Park in India. They say the elephant is blowing ashes off of wood charcoal to snack on it. Charcoal from forest fires can work as a laxative for animals and may help them get rid of any unwanted toxins.
https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/news/180322-wild-elephant-blows-smoke-mouth-vin-spd
Is this elephant blowing … smoke? Scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society found the female elephant while checking their camera traps in Nagaharole National Park in India. They say the elephant is blowing ashes off of wood charcoal to snack on it. Charcoal from forest fires can work as a laxative for animals and may help them get rid of any unwanted toxins.
https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/news/180322-wild-elephant-blows-smoke-mouth-vin-spd
Monday 26 March 2018
Do you feel lucky, punk ?
This paper examines the role of luck in determining success in society. The claim is that this is under-appreciated, and that luck is more important than we like to give credit for. Genuine merit goes unrewarded, while the really big-shots are actually just ordinary people who get a lucky break. There's a lot of press releases going round about this, mostly decent enough, but I shall cast a more critical eye over it.
First, I need to say that I like this paper and really hope the authors take this further. It's a nice, accessible work with important implications. But as it stands it's got some gross oversimplifications and the conclusions, in my opinion, are too strongly stated. They don't need to be changed, but I think they should be toned down and the limitations of the study emphasised very much more strongly.
1) The Observations
There are some quite intriguing observations indicating that luck is underestimated. In particular, while abilities seem to follow a Gaussian distribution, wealth seems to follow a power law : that is, if everyone was rewarded according to their skills, the wealth distribution would look different to how it actually does. This does not mean it would be more equal, just different. I do wish they'd stop using wealth as a proxy for success though - there's no benefit to this and it creates many ethical and social issues. Just say wealth !
But there's immediately a bigger problem. While they present many citations for wealth following a power law (including that recent dubious Oxfam study saying the distribution is insanely extreme*), they don't give any demonstrating that abilities follow a Gaussian. Well, not strictly true, they do give one, but it's worse than zero : it's not actually a paper, it's a research proposal !
https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1035&context=mzwp
Aarrgggh.
* I'm not saying this result is necessarily wrong, just that from what I've read it was unconvincing.
They then give numerous examples of how luck has been shown to be important (including the one about successful scientific papers occurring at random throughout academic careers with no correlation with age, which makes an interesting mockery of requiring the death of the Old Guard before new ideas are accepted). They also note how individuals can construct a false narrative to downplay the role of luck in their own success. That's all more convincing stuff, but the Gaussian distribution of talent needs much, much more discussion. Which abilities do this ? Are those the same abilities as the skills that allow exploitation of opportunity ? Because I can well imagine mathematical ability being absolutely uncorrelated with opportunism.
2) Simulations
The simulations are, reasonably enough, very simple affairs. A population of individuals go around for 40 years (their working lives), each starting with some money (equal for everyone) and talent (in a Gaussian distribution). Every six months they experience a chance event, which can be either lucky or unlucky. If they're lucky, then there's a chance (proportional to their talent, which never varies) that they can double their money; if they're unlucky, it halves. Or nothing can happen at all. The end result is that gives a power-law distribution of wealth and a Gaussian distribution of talent. Hurrah !
Except... this is just consistency. It isn't evidence that the world really works like this. Showing that one model works in no way precludes the success of others. Moreover, that this model works with its gross oversimplifcations in no way whatsoever implies that a more realistic version would be a mere refinement and guaranteed to do any better. It could very well make things very much worse !
The problem is that the role of talent is almost completely neglected from the model, except in exploiting opportunities. Individuals never receive any rewards except through luck, and I doubt anyone believes the situation is quite that extreme in the real world except for lottery winners and aristocrats. While they say later that the wealthiest individuals have at least the average talent (i.e. enough to exploit opportunities), rather than being mediocre, since talent by itself is never rewarded a huge factor is missing from their model. Moreover, rewards are only bestowed every six months, rather than continuously as in reality. Because people generally have these things called salaries. I think it's fair to describe the model as setup to succeed - there's no possibility this one could fail.
And talent is assumed to be proportional to the chance of exploiting opportunities. That's not so much a simplifying assumption as it is a huge leap in the dark. It could well be that a small increase in ability reaps disproportionately higher rewards, which could easily lead to a purely talent-based model giving a power law of wealth. Furthermore some individuals probably deal with success and failure assymetically; events which halve or double your capital are bizarre things to suggest; and talent probably doesn't remain constant throughout your life. Learning new skills by definition makes those skills easier to exploit.
Again, being good at something doesn't mean you're good at using it to acquire wealth, and this notion (perhaps not intended) of using wealth as a proxy for success is problematic. They take it for granted that the most talented individuals should get the most money - I suppose in a research grant context that's fair, but not necessarily in broader areas. They assume social benefits would result, but they don't say how. Quite a lot of people are probably content with moderate salaries - not everyone is in a rat race to earn as much money as possible. If they were, the world would be unbearable. They may not want to earn more money. Money is only success if that's your goal and you use it properly. Using a fortune to exploit other people isn't success, it's villainy.
While they do produce the wonderfully rhetorical line...
"...if your life is as unlucky and poor of opportunities as that of the other agent, even a great talent becomes useless against the fury of misfortune."
... they also go on to simulate changing the average level and variance of the talent distribution (they use these, without justification, to model the effects of education). These additional simulations show that both of these increase the chance of more talented individuals earning more, but they appear to be pointless : both of these are simply going to increase the number of talented individuals, hence it's guaranteed that there will be more successful talented individuals.
This might sound harsh, and perhaps it is. But I really do like this paper, I think it's quite important to demonstrate that a pure luck-based model can reproduce the observational results. I just wish the thing was turned down a few notches : there's no evidence here that luck has the strong influence the authors seem to think it does. It's an interesting consistency, but without comparable rival models, it doesn't really say very much.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068
First, I need to say that I like this paper and really hope the authors take this further. It's a nice, accessible work with important implications. But as it stands it's got some gross oversimplifications and the conclusions, in my opinion, are too strongly stated. They don't need to be changed, but I think they should be toned down and the limitations of the study emphasised very much more strongly.
1) The Observations
There are some quite intriguing observations indicating that luck is underestimated. In particular, while abilities seem to follow a Gaussian distribution, wealth seems to follow a power law : that is, if everyone was rewarded according to their skills, the wealth distribution would look different to how it actually does. This does not mean it would be more equal, just different. I do wish they'd stop using wealth as a proxy for success though - there's no benefit to this and it creates many ethical and social issues. Just say wealth !
But there's immediately a bigger problem. While they present many citations for wealth following a power law (including that recent dubious Oxfam study saying the distribution is insanely extreme*), they don't give any demonstrating that abilities follow a Gaussian. Well, not strictly true, they do give one, but it's worse than zero : it's not actually a paper, it's a research proposal !
https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1035&context=mzwp
Aarrgggh.
* I'm not saying this result is necessarily wrong, just that from what I've read it was unconvincing.
They then give numerous examples of how luck has been shown to be important (including the one about successful scientific papers occurring at random throughout academic careers with no correlation with age, which makes an interesting mockery of requiring the death of the Old Guard before new ideas are accepted). They also note how individuals can construct a false narrative to downplay the role of luck in their own success. That's all more convincing stuff, but the Gaussian distribution of talent needs much, much more discussion. Which abilities do this ? Are those the same abilities as the skills that allow exploitation of opportunity ? Because I can well imagine mathematical ability being absolutely uncorrelated with opportunism.
2) Simulations
The simulations are, reasonably enough, very simple affairs. A population of individuals go around for 40 years (their working lives), each starting with some money (equal for everyone) and talent (in a Gaussian distribution). Every six months they experience a chance event, which can be either lucky or unlucky. If they're lucky, then there's a chance (proportional to their talent, which never varies) that they can double their money; if they're unlucky, it halves. Or nothing can happen at all. The end result is that gives a power-law distribution of wealth and a Gaussian distribution of talent. Hurrah !
Except... this is just consistency. It isn't evidence that the world really works like this. Showing that one model works in no way precludes the success of others. Moreover, that this model works with its gross oversimplifcations in no way whatsoever implies that a more realistic version would be a mere refinement and guaranteed to do any better. It could very well make things very much worse !
The problem is that the role of talent is almost completely neglected from the model, except in exploiting opportunities. Individuals never receive any rewards except through luck, and I doubt anyone believes the situation is quite that extreme in the real world except for lottery winners and aristocrats. While they say later that the wealthiest individuals have at least the average talent (i.e. enough to exploit opportunities), rather than being mediocre, since talent by itself is never rewarded a huge factor is missing from their model. Moreover, rewards are only bestowed every six months, rather than continuously as in reality. Because people generally have these things called salaries. I think it's fair to describe the model as setup to succeed - there's no possibility this one could fail.
And talent is assumed to be proportional to the chance of exploiting opportunities. That's not so much a simplifying assumption as it is a huge leap in the dark. It could well be that a small increase in ability reaps disproportionately higher rewards, which could easily lead to a purely talent-based model giving a power law of wealth. Furthermore some individuals probably deal with success and failure assymetically; events which halve or double your capital are bizarre things to suggest; and talent probably doesn't remain constant throughout your life. Learning new skills by definition makes those skills easier to exploit.
Again, being good at something doesn't mean you're good at using it to acquire wealth, and this notion (perhaps not intended) of using wealth as a proxy for success is problematic. They take it for granted that the most talented individuals should get the most money - I suppose in a research grant context that's fair, but not necessarily in broader areas. They assume social benefits would result, but they don't say how. Quite a lot of people are probably content with moderate salaries - not everyone is in a rat race to earn as much money as possible. If they were, the world would be unbearable. They may not want to earn more money. Money is only success if that's your goal and you use it properly. Using a fortune to exploit other people isn't success, it's villainy.
While they do produce the wonderfully rhetorical line...
"...if your life is as unlucky and poor of opportunities as that of the other agent, even a great talent becomes useless against the fury of misfortune."
... they also go on to simulate changing the average level and variance of the talent distribution (they use these, without justification, to model the effects of education). These additional simulations show that both of these increase the chance of more talented individuals earning more, but they appear to be pointless : both of these are simply going to increase the number of talented individuals, hence it's guaranteed that there will be more successful talented individuals.
This might sound harsh, and perhaps it is. But I really do like this paper, I think it's quite important to demonstrate that a pure luck-based model can reproduce the observational results. I just wish the thing was turned down a few notches : there's no evidence here that luck has the strong influence the authors seem to think it does. It's an interesting consistency, but without comparable rival models, it doesn't really say very much.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068
When America tried to punish its workers for irrelevant behaviour
So, the Chinese model of punishing people based on irrelevant misdemeanours was not based on Black Mirror, or at least might not have been. Ford got there much earlier.
If you worked for Ford in 1914, chances are at some stage in your career a private investigator was hired to follow you home. If you stopped for a drink, or squabbled with your spouse, or did something that might make you less of a competent worker the following day, your boss would soon know about it. This sleuthing was partly because Ford’s workers earned a better salary than the competition. The car manufacturer raised pay from $2.39 a day to $5 a day, the equivalent of $124 (£88) today. But you had to be a model citizen to qualify.
Your house needed to be clean, your children attending school, your savings account had to be in good shape. If someone at the factory believed you were on the wrong path, you might not only miss out on a promotion, your job was on the line... The programme lasted eight years. It was expensive, and many workers resented its paternalism and intrusion. Today, most of us would find it unacceptable – what does my work have to do with my laundry, bank account or relationships?
Data collection is “changing employment relationships, the way people work and what the expectations can be”, says Moore. One problem with this approach is that it’s blind to some of the non-quantifiable aspects of work. Some of the subtler things I do in order to be a better writer, for instance, are not quantifiable: having a drink with someone who tells me a great story, or imagining a piece on my commute. None of these things would show up in my ‘job score’. “A lot of the qualitative aspects of work are being written out,” says Moore, “because if you can’t measure them, they don’t exist."
But, if used wisely, there are advantages :
Employees value these health initiatives not only because their bosses might allow them time off to participate but also because if they track exercise via their phone, smartwatch or fitness wristband they can earn rewards... There are several good business reasons to collect data on employees – from doing better risk management to examining if social behaviours in the workplace can lead to gender discrimination.
And of course if it's misused, it can do more harm than good :
But this kind of data could be used in more controversial ways, and the goodwill of the companies involved doesn’t eliminate all the risks. Data could be stolen in a cyberattack, for instance, or it could be used in ways that are not transparent for users. It “could be sold to basically anyone, for whatever purpose, and recirculated in other ways,” says Ifeoma Awunja, a sociologist at Cornell University who researches the use of health data in the workplace.
There is also the question of return on investment for the employers. Do they actually save businesses money? These programmes are meant to lower health insurance premiums both for companies and employees, since they are supposed to decrease health risk, sick days, and hospital costs. But it is not clear if this actually happens. A 2013 study by the Rand Corporation claims that, while these programmes save companies enough money to pay for themselves, they “are having little if any immediate effects on the amount employers spend on health care.”
In the EU, a new General Data Protection Regulation (GDRP) will come into force thisMay, which will outlaw any use of personal data to which the user didn’t explicitly consent.
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180323-how-much-should-your-boss-know-about-you
If you worked for Ford in 1914, chances are at some stage in your career a private investigator was hired to follow you home. If you stopped for a drink, or squabbled with your spouse, or did something that might make you less of a competent worker the following day, your boss would soon know about it. This sleuthing was partly because Ford’s workers earned a better salary than the competition. The car manufacturer raised pay from $2.39 a day to $5 a day, the equivalent of $124 (£88) today. But you had to be a model citizen to qualify.
Your house needed to be clean, your children attending school, your savings account had to be in good shape. If someone at the factory believed you were on the wrong path, you might not only miss out on a promotion, your job was on the line... The programme lasted eight years. It was expensive, and many workers resented its paternalism and intrusion. Today, most of us would find it unacceptable – what does my work have to do with my laundry, bank account or relationships?
Data collection is “changing employment relationships, the way people work and what the expectations can be”, says Moore. One problem with this approach is that it’s blind to some of the non-quantifiable aspects of work. Some of the subtler things I do in order to be a better writer, for instance, are not quantifiable: having a drink with someone who tells me a great story, or imagining a piece on my commute. None of these things would show up in my ‘job score’. “A lot of the qualitative aspects of work are being written out,” says Moore, “because if you can’t measure them, they don’t exist."
But, if used wisely, there are advantages :
Employees value these health initiatives not only because their bosses might allow them time off to participate but also because if they track exercise via their phone, smartwatch or fitness wristband they can earn rewards... There are several good business reasons to collect data on employees – from doing better risk management to examining if social behaviours in the workplace can lead to gender discrimination.
And of course if it's misused, it can do more harm than good :
But this kind of data could be used in more controversial ways, and the goodwill of the companies involved doesn’t eliminate all the risks. Data could be stolen in a cyberattack, for instance, or it could be used in ways that are not transparent for users. It “could be sold to basically anyone, for whatever purpose, and recirculated in other ways,” says Ifeoma Awunja, a sociologist at Cornell University who researches the use of health data in the workplace.
There is also the question of return on investment for the employers. Do they actually save businesses money? These programmes are meant to lower health insurance premiums both for companies and employees, since they are supposed to decrease health risk, sick days, and hospital costs. But it is not clear if this actually happens. A 2013 study by the Rand Corporation claims that, while these programmes save companies enough money to pay for themselves, they “are having little if any immediate effects on the amount employers spend on health care.”
In the EU, a new General Data Protection Regulation (GDRP) will come into force thisMay, which will outlaw any use of personal data to which the user didn’t explicitly consent.
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180323-how-much-should-your-boss-know-about-you
How Derren Brown manipulated someone into murder (spoilers)
On balance, I've decided to reshare this with additional commentary. If you don't want spoilers, don't read the rest of this post. If you don't have time to watch the documentary, read on. It's a long one, but it has to be.
This is an attempt to convince otherwise ordinary people into committing murder in the space of (essentially) one hour. Derren Brown begins by asking people to come for an interview to see if they'd be suitable for a show. This is correct, but deceptive : they're not told what the real show is; their answers to the questions are immaterial. Actually they're being psychologically assessed for compliance. For instance, the waiting room begins with three actors filling in forms. At the sound of a bell, they all stand up, then sit down again. Genuine recruits then enter one at a time. Those who follow the crowd proceed to the next stage, those who do not are rejected. Interestingly, none of them ask why they're standing when a bell goes off : they either do or do not comply.
Everyone is then told that they've been rejected. In reality, only some of them have, but unfortunately we're not told what the fraction is (there might be a bias in who applies for show anyway, so it might not tell us much). For nearly the rest of the show we concentrate on one single participant, Chris.
We next meet up with our unlucky subject some time (weeks, I think) later. Brown has created an entirely fictitious charity (PUSH) for helping disadvantaged youths (or whatever). A manager of PUSH meets with Chris to discuss whether Chris' (very real) IT company can help PUSH to design websites or whatnot. He arranges for Chris to come to a charity auction a week or so later so he can meet the rest of the team. Every single thing that follows is a set-up : everyone is in on the act except for Chris. Derren Brown is watching on hidden cameras to coordinate activities, such that nothing happens at the wrong moment and that actors say the crucial things.
The auction itself forms the bulk of the show, subjecting Chris to an hour of intense psychological manipulation. It begins very gently with thin-end-of-the-wedge stuff, with the main manager asking him to help in very simple, easy little tasks you couldn't possibly refuse : holding doors open, that sort of thing. The other managers, importantly, form little bonds with Chris, but we won't meet them again until the climax. Chris also hasn't been told the event is black tie, putting him at an instant, small but constant social disadvantage compared to everyone else present. The realism of this is basically perfect, with a video showing celebrities (David Tennant, Martin Freeman, Stephen Fry... pretty big, seemingly trustworthy names) talking very earnestly and convincingly about the importance of "making that final PUSH", or something very similar.
Our main manager (I forget his name, let's call him Tim to make things easier) introduces Chris to Bernie, a wealthy, elderly (I'd guess ~70) patron who's absolutely vital to PUSH. In fact he's donating £5 million, so it's vitally important to keep him on side. Chris gets a behind the scenes tour with Bernie, during which Bernie sits on a wall on the edge of the roof having a cigarette.
A little later, Chris is very briefly introduced to the auctioneer, who mistakes him for Bernie (apparently the auctioneer is just hired for the event and isn't otherwise involved with PUSH). There's no time for Chris to correct him and it's seemingly unimportant.
At this point the guests haven't yet arrived. The auctioneer goes off and Bernie practises a short speech. Tim disappears, and Bernie, having taken quite a shine to young Chris, takes him aside to check over some final details. He discovers the auction items are being hugely undervalued, and gets very angry that he's already provided corrections but they were ignored. Tim hears Bernie shouting and returns, wherein Bernie collapses and apparently has a heart attack. Tim instructs Chris to go back to the office and find his medication. He takes maybe 2 minutes before he gives up, grabs all of Bernie's stuff and returns. But by that point, Bernie is dead. In fact the actor has been replaced with a staggeringly deathlike (lifelike is hardly accurate) prosthetic.
Tim then claims he's already given him CPR. He says there's no point calling an ambulance because Bernie's dead (this is of course bollocks). Anyway Chris is persuaded that though yes of course they will call someone, they first and urgently need to get Bernie out of the way. They can't have the guests finding the patron dead on the floor.
So Chris goes from the small steps of helping Tim in ordinary ways to the rather bigger step of moving a dead body out of sight. And then, not without reluctance, to the considerably larger step of hiding the body in a crate. Tim uses a mixture of gentle persuasion and more forceful emotional rhetoric to do this, but eventually succeeds. Finally Chris takes perhaps the most critical step of all : he agrees to pretend everything's all right until the auction's over.
The auction proceeds. The auctioneer says a few words, then invites "Bernie", who he says is extremely shy, to come and say a few words. Chris reluctantly does so at Tim's insistence. He reads Bernie's speech notes and then recalls the joke he heard Bernie give in his earlier practise.
After a few normal rounds of the auction, the auctioneer announces a mystery item which comes... in a box. He enthusiastically encourages the audience to bid because it's something "really special", and so on. Tim gets Chris to bid, promising to pay him back later, because they can't take the chance of revealing Bernie's body like that. So Chris wins. And then they box is wheeled out, and the auctioneer whips up the crowd to chant, "OPEN THE BOX !". Chris refuses, but another mystery item is promised for later.
Tim and Chris retreat to the office, where they discover that there was a second box under the table the whole time, and that's the one that was brought out. Still, they need to get Bernie out of the office, which only connects to the auction room. They do so by dressing him in dark glasses and putting him in a wheelchair, pretending he's a random old man who's had too much to drink. The stress level on Chris at his point must be phenomenally high, constantly veering between intense pressure and massive relief.
They get Bernie downstairs, not without incident. While Tim goes to look for Bernie's car (something about making it look like he had a heart attack there and never made it inside), Chris has an unfortunate encounter with a couple of "drunk" guests who try to take a picture with Bernie. Chris persuades them not to; it's a totally unconvincing argument but it maintains the pressure-relief cycle.
Tim returns without Bernie's car and the drunks go off; Tim himself is acting at turns angry and distressed. The only safe place left is, apparently, the bottom of the stairwell, so that's where they go. But they can't leave him their in his wheelchair because there's no reason for him to be there. So instead they place him on the ground as though he's fallen... but hang on, if he'd fallen, he'd be bruised, wouldn't he ? Tim wants Chris to kick Bernie, but this is a red line for Chris. He will neither kick Bernie's body nor allow Tim to do it instead. Tim complies. They now find the other managers and Chris explains the whole thing to them. Returning to the stairwell. they find that Bernie is gone.
After a few minutes of panic, Tim gets a phone call from Bernie's wife, worrying that he's not taking his medication. Without it he has a tendency towards paralysing attacks that render him unable to move but aren't fatal. So they rush back to the stairwell, hearing an angry Bernie shouting from the roof.
Thus we enter the dramatic endgame. A furious Bernie has been aware of everything that's going on and his dictaphone has recorded the whole thing. He's threatening to kill the charity and send them all to prison. And just like he did the first time, he goes and sits on the edge of the wall and has a cigarette.
At which point someone makes the suggestion that if Bernie were actually dead there'd be no problem. If he just fell off the roof they'd all be innocent and everything would be fine. They just need Chris to make that final push.
Chris doesn't do it; he doesn't even seem to consider it. He walks away, at which Derren Brown reveals the act.
And then, just as Chris has been subjected to pressure, relief, pressure, relief... Brown reveals that Chris wasn't the only subject. Four other people went through exactly the same experience, and they did push Bernie off the edge. Of course Bernie had a concealed harness and was absolutely fine, but they were genuinely convinced they'd committed murder.
So in the space of an hour, a single hour for God's sake, it's possible to convince ordinary people to commit atrocities. Yes, it requires extreme effort to do this. And yes, only some fraction of the populace will comply. But whatever that fraction is, I can't help but think "it's enough". No doubt different techniques would be more or less effective with different people, but I shall never again doubt the importance of Fake News or the importance of media in manipulating people. This an extreme example, of course. In everyday life we get different, subtler, but more prolonged tactics.
In Brown's view, showing and understanding how vulnerable we can be to this is what allows us to fight back. Certainly the methods used are very clever :
- Find the most naturally compliant people to begin with.
- Thin end of the wedge, getting people to do small things so they'll be more inclined to do larger things. Constantly but quite slowly increase the drama.
- Make people feel choiceless. At no stage does this experiment seem to make people into enthusiastic killers; they are all reluctant. Making people believe that this is not merely the least bad option, but also a genuinely, absolutely good result, is a very different prospect. The final act is shocking, but it's hardly the most violent method possible.
- Misinformation : lying is absolutely critical to the experiment.
- Trustworthy sources - more subtle. Except for the celebrities in the demo video, none of the actors are convincing. But if you were there at the time, would you really think someone was experimenting on you ?
- Similarly, having someone in charge. Tim acts as a vital lifeline for Chris, providing him with instructions when he'd otherwise be lost. Tim has established himself as a helpful authority figure; Chris probably sees him both as taking control and rendering assistance at the same time.
- Emotional manipulation is vital. There are a whole number of events at which one might say, "but hang on..." but wouldn't necessarily have the wit to actually question, if one had been turned into an emotional wreck by the different mechanisms. You literally can't think straight if pressurised correctly.
- A mixture of rhetoric, from the forceful to the compassionate, coupled not with maintaining pressure but by constantly varying the stress, giving false hope only to take it away again.
- You do not need to demonize people. Bernie is a bit aggressive, but he's seen as essential to the charity, not a villain.
Of course this has huge ethical problems. It's a fascinating result, but I'm not at all comfortable with deliberately manipulating people into thinking (even for a few seconds) that they've murdered someone. Brown's claim that it helps fight manipulation may be honest and sincere, but I'm still not OK with this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doFpACkiZ2Q
This is an attempt to convince otherwise ordinary people into committing murder in the space of (essentially) one hour. Derren Brown begins by asking people to come for an interview to see if they'd be suitable for a show. This is correct, but deceptive : they're not told what the real show is; their answers to the questions are immaterial. Actually they're being psychologically assessed for compliance. For instance, the waiting room begins with three actors filling in forms. At the sound of a bell, they all stand up, then sit down again. Genuine recruits then enter one at a time. Those who follow the crowd proceed to the next stage, those who do not are rejected. Interestingly, none of them ask why they're standing when a bell goes off : they either do or do not comply.
Everyone is then told that they've been rejected. In reality, only some of them have, but unfortunately we're not told what the fraction is (there might be a bias in who applies for show anyway, so it might not tell us much). For nearly the rest of the show we concentrate on one single participant, Chris.
We next meet up with our unlucky subject some time (weeks, I think) later. Brown has created an entirely fictitious charity (PUSH) for helping disadvantaged youths (or whatever). A manager of PUSH meets with Chris to discuss whether Chris' (very real) IT company can help PUSH to design websites or whatnot. He arranges for Chris to come to a charity auction a week or so later so he can meet the rest of the team. Every single thing that follows is a set-up : everyone is in on the act except for Chris. Derren Brown is watching on hidden cameras to coordinate activities, such that nothing happens at the wrong moment and that actors say the crucial things.
The auction itself forms the bulk of the show, subjecting Chris to an hour of intense psychological manipulation. It begins very gently with thin-end-of-the-wedge stuff, with the main manager asking him to help in very simple, easy little tasks you couldn't possibly refuse : holding doors open, that sort of thing. The other managers, importantly, form little bonds with Chris, but we won't meet them again until the climax. Chris also hasn't been told the event is black tie, putting him at an instant, small but constant social disadvantage compared to everyone else present. The realism of this is basically perfect, with a video showing celebrities (David Tennant, Martin Freeman, Stephen Fry... pretty big, seemingly trustworthy names) talking very earnestly and convincingly about the importance of "making that final PUSH", or something very similar.
Our main manager (I forget his name, let's call him Tim to make things easier) introduces Chris to Bernie, a wealthy, elderly (I'd guess ~70) patron who's absolutely vital to PUSH. In fact he's donating £5 million, so it's vitally important to keep him on side. Chris gets a behind the scenes tour with Bernie, during which Bernie sits on a wall on the edge of the roof having a cigarette.
A little later, Chris is very briefly introduced to the auctioneer, who mistakes him for Bernie (apparently the auctioneer is just hired for the event and isn't otherwise involved with PUSH). There's no time for Chris to correct him and it's seemingly unimportant.
At this point the guests haven't yet arrived. The auctioneer goes off and Bernie practises a short speech. Tim disappears, and Bernie, having taken quite a shine to young Chris, takes him aside to check over some final details. He discovers the auction items are being hugely undervalued, and gets very angry that he's already provided corrections but they were ignored. Tim hears Bernie shouting and returns, wherein Bernie collapses and apparently has a heart attack. Tim instructs Chris to go back to the office and find his medication. He takes maybe 2 minutes before he gives up, grabs all of Bernie's stuff and returns. But by that point, Bernie is dead. In fact the actor has been replaced with a staggeringly deathlike (lifelike is hardly accurate) prosthetic.
Tim then claims he's already given him CPR. He says there's no point calling an ambulance because Bernie's dead (this is of course bollocks). Anyway Chris is persuaded that though yes of course they will call someone, they first and urgently need to get Bernie out of the way. They can't have the guests finding the patron dead on the floor.
So Chris goes from the small steps of helping Tim in ordinary ways to the rather bigger step of moving a dead body out of sight. And then, not without reluctance, to the considerably larger step of hiding the body in a crate. Tim uses a mixture of gentle persuasion and more forceful emotional rhetoric to do this, but eventually succeeds. Finally Chris takes perhaps the most critical step of all : he agrees to pretend everything's all right until the auction's over.
The auction proceeds. The auctioneer says a few words, then invites "Bernie", who he says is extremely shy, to come and say a few words. Chris reluctantly does so at Tim's insistence. He reads Bernie's speech notes and then recalls the joke he heard Bernie give in his earlier practise.
After a few normal rounds of the auction, the auctioneer announces a mystery item which comes... in a box. He enthusiastically encourages the audience to bid because it's something "really special", and so on. Tim gets Chris to bid, promising to pay him back later, because they can't take the chance of revealing Bernie's body like that. So Chris wins. And then they box is wheeled out, and the auctioneer whips up the crowd to chant, "OPEN THE BOX !". Chris refuses, but another mystery item is promised for later.
Tim and Chris retreat to the office, where they discover that there was a second box under the table the whole time, and that's the one that was brought out. Still, they need to get Bernie out of the office, which only connects to the auction room. They do so by dressing him in dark glasses and putting him in a wheelchair, pretending he's a random old man who's had too much to drink. The stress level on Chris at his point must be phenomenally high, constantly veering between intense pressure and massive relief.
They get Bernie downstairs, not without incident. While Tim goes to look for Bernie's car (something about making it look like he had a heart attack there and never made it inside), Chris has an unfortunate encounter with a couple of "drunk" guests who try to take a picture with Bernie. Chris persuades them not to; it's a totally unconvincing argument but it maintains the pressure-relief cycle.
Tim returns without Bernie's car and the drunks go off; Tim himself is acting at turns angry and distressed. The only safe place left is, apparently, the bottom of the stairwell, so that's where they go. But they can't leave him their in his wheelchair because there's no reason for him to be there. So instead they place him on the ground as though he's fallen... but hang on, if he'd fallen, he'd be bruised, wouldn't he ? Tim wants Chris to kick Bernie, but this is a red line for Chris. He will neither kick Bernie's body nor allow Tim to do it instead. Tim complies. They now find the other managers and Chris explains the whole thing to them. Returning to the stairwell. they find that Bernie is gone.
After a few minutes of panic, Tim gets a phone call from Bernie's wife, worrying that he's not taking his medication. Without it he has a tendency towards paralysing attacks that render him unable to move but aren't fatal. So they rush back to the stairwell, hearing an angry Bernie shouting from the roof.
Thus we enter the dramatic endgame. A furious Bernie has been aware of everything that's going on and his dictaphone has recorded the whole thing. He's threatening to kill the charity and send them all to prison. And just like he did the first time, he goes and sits on the edge of the wall and has a cigarette.
At which point someone makes the suggestion that if Bernie were actually dead there'd be no problem. If he just fell off the roof they'd all be innocent and everything would be fine. They just need Chris to make that final push.
Chris doesn't do it; he doesn't even seem to consider it. He walks away, at which Derren Brown reveals the act.
And then, just as Chris has been subjected to pressure, relief, pressure, relief... Brown reveals that Chris wasn't the only subject. Four other people went through exactly the same experience, and they did push Bernie off the edge. Of course Bernie had a concealed harness and was absolutely fine, but they were genuinely convinced they'd committed murder.
So in the space of an hour, a single hour for God's sake, it's possible to convince ordinary people to commit atrocities. Yes, it requires extreme effort to do this. And yes, only some fraction of the populace will comply. But whatever that fraction is, I can't help but think "it's enough". No doubt different techniques would be more or less effective with different people, but I shall never again doubt the importance of Fake News or the importance of media in manipulating people. This an extreme example, of course. In everyday life we get different, subtler, but more prolonged tactics.
In Brown's view, showing and understanding how vulnerable we can be to this is what allows us to fight back. Certainly the methods used are very clever :
- Find the most naturally compliant people to begin with.
- Thin end of the wedge, getting people to do small things so they'll be more inclined to do larger things. Constantly but quite slowly increase the drama.
- Make people feel choiceless. At no stage does this experiment seem to make people into enthusiastic killers; they are all reluctant. Making people believe that this is not merely the least bad option, but also a genuinely, absolutely good result, is a very different prospect. The final act is shocking, but it's hardly the most violent method possible.
- Misinformation : lying is absolutely critical to the experiment.
- Trustworthy sources - more subtle. Except for the celebrities in the demo video, none of the actors are convincing. But if you were there at the time, would you really think someone was experimenting on you ?
- Similarly, having someone in charge. Tim acts as a vital lifeline for Chris, providing him with instructions when he'd otherwise be lost. Tim has established himself as a helpful authority figure; Chris probably sees him both as taking control and rendering assistance at the same time.
- Emotional manipulation is vital. There are a whole number of events at which one might say, "but hang on..." but wouldn't necessarily have the wit to actually question, if one had been turned into an emotional wreck by the different mechanisms. You literally can't think straight if pressurised correctly.
- A mixture of rhetoric, from the forceful to the compassionate, coupled not with maintaining pressure but by constantly varying the stress, giving false hope only to take it away again.
- You do not need to demonize people. Bernie is a bit aggressive, but he's seen as essential to the charity, not a villain.
Of course this has huge ethical problems. It's a fascinating result, but I'm not at all comfortable with deliberately manipulating people into thinking (even for a few seconds) that they've murdered someone. Brown's claim that it helps fight manipulation may be honest and sincere, but I'm still not OK with this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doFpACkiZ2Q
Making lasers talk to you
Whoop-dee-doo. Because if there's one thing the world needs more of, its directed energy psychological warfare weapons. Yes. Great. Mwwwwaaaaarrghhh.
This specific project, called Non-Lethal Laser Induced Plasma Effects (NL LIPE), aims to have a perfected a beam that can produce audible instructions and commands to an individual or a small group of people within three years and maybe have a practical prototype system ready in five years.
“I’m trying to get a little plasma ball to speak to you,” David Law, head of the JNLWD’s technology division, told Military Times earlier in March 2018 at an exhibition focused on directed energy systems in Washington, D.C. “We’re this close to getting it to speak to us,” he added to Defense One on the sidelines of the same event.
But it’s not actually transmitting a recording or relaying an actual person talking at all. What’s actually happening is an interaction between two lasers. The first is what’s known as a femtosecond laser, which shoots out pulses of amplified light at an extremely high speed. This creates a ball of plasma, a field of highly electrified gas with unique properties distinct from other states of matter – gasses, liquids, and solids.
Those properties mean that U.S. military scientists can hit the field with a second small nanolaser to create different effects, such as light, sounds, and even the release of thermal energy. They say they’re working on developing ways to tune the system to produce specific audio wavelengths, which in turn will allow them to effectively artificially generate a human voice. It can also generate loud sounds – more than 140 decibels in some cases, the same as hearing a typical gunshot from 100 feet away – that could be distracting or painfully disorienting.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/19568/us-military-scientists-are-building-a-laser-cannon-that-shoots-disembodied-voices
This specific project, called Non-Lethal Laser Induced Plasma Effects (NL LIPE), aims to have a perfected a beam that can produce audible instructions and commands to an individual or a small group of people within three years and maybe have a practical prototype system ready in five years.
“I’m trying to get a little plasma ball to speak to you,” David Law, head of the JNLWD’s technology division, told Military Times earlier in March 2018 at an exhibition focused on directed energy systems in Washington, D.C. “We’re this close to getting it to speak to us,” he added to Defense One on the sidelines of the same event.
But it’s not actually transmitting a recording or relaying an actual person talking at all. What’s actually happening is an interaction between two lasers. The first is what’s known as a femtosecond laser, which shoots out pulses of amplified light at an extremely high speed. This creates a ball of plasma, a field of highly electrified gas with unique properties distinct from other states of matter – gasses, liquids, and solids.
Those properties mean that U.S. military scientists can hit the field with a second small nanolaser to create different effects, such as light, sounds, and even the release of thermal energy. They say they’re working on developing ways to tune the system to produce specific audio wavelengths, which in turn will allow them to effectively artificially generate a human voice. It can also generate loud sounds – more than 140 decibels in some cases, the same as hearing a typical gunshot from 100 feet away – that could be distracting or painfully disorienting.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/19568/us-military-scientists-are-building-a-laser-cannon-that-shoots-disembodied-voices
Sunday 25 March 2018
China attempts to quantify the unquantifiable
It's not 'like' a plot from Black Mirror, it literally is a plot from Black Mirror.
Nine million Chinese have been banned from buying domestic flights, and three million more from buying business class tickets in early trials of the scheme, under which citizens are rated on their compliance with social norms and rules. Behaviour that triggered the bans varied from obstructing footpaths with electric bikes to failing to pay fines.
Smoking cigarettes in no smoking areas of trains, riding a train without a correct ticket and selling counterfeit tickets were among the offences listed, that could result in 180 day bans from buying train tickets.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/24/chinas-social-credit-system-bans-millions-travelling/
Nine million Chinese have been banned from buying domestic flights, and three million more from buying business class tickets in early trials of the scheme, under which citizens are rated on their compliance with social norms and rules. Behaviour that triggered the bans varied from obstructing footpaths with electric bikes to failing to pay fines.
Smoking cigarettes in no smoking areas of trains, riding a train without a correct ticket and selling counterfeit tickets were among the offences listed, that could result in 180 day bans from buying train tickets.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/24/chinas-social-credit-system-bans-millions-travelling/
The British government may have worked with Cambridge Analytica
Prolonged election meddling on a grand scale with British government involvement. Oh, yay.
It claims, for instance, that it organised rallies in Nigeria to weaken support for the opposition in 2007. The UK Foreign Office says it was unaware of this alleged activity before SCL was awarded British government contracts in 2008. Cambridge Analytica says it is looking into the allegations about SCL.
In the document, SCL Elections claimed potential clients could contact the company through "any British High Commission or Embassy". It also claims SCL received "List X" accreditation from the UK's Ministry of Defence which provided "Government endorsed clearance to handle information protectively marked as 'confidential' and above".
The brochure outlines how SCL Elections had apparently organised "anti-election rallies" to dissuade opposition supporters from voting in the Nigerian presidential election in 2007. The election was described by EU monitors as one of the least credible they had observed. The document claims SCL Elections deliberately exploited ethnic tensions in Latvia in the 2006 national elections in order to help their client.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43528219
It claims, for instance, that it organised rallies in Nigeria to weaken support for the opposition in 2007. The UK Foreign Office says it was unaware of this alleged activity before SCL was awarded British government contracts in 2008. Cambridge Analytica says it is looking into the allegations about SCL.
In the document, SCL Elections claimed potential clients could contact the company through "any British High Commission or Embassy". It also claims SCL received "List X" accreditation from the UK's Ministry of Defence which provided "Government endorsed clearance to handle information protectively marked as 'confidential' and above".
The brochure outlines how SCL Elections had apparently organised "anti-election rallies" to dissuade opposition supporters from voting in the Nigerian presidential election in 2007. The election was described by EU monitors as one of the least credible they had observed. The document claims SCL Elections deliberately exploited ethnic tensions in Latvia in the 2006 national elections in order to help their client.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43528219
Saturday 24 March 2018
Uber's self-driving car crash
The firm that designed the sensors on the Uber self-driving car that killed a woman this week has said its technology was not to blame. San Jose-based Velodyne told the BBC it was "baffled" by the incident, adding its equipment was capable of seeing in the dark. Video of the incident was published by investigators earlier on Wednesday. It showed Ms Herzberg walking with her bicycle, away from a pedestrian crossing. Neither the car - nor its human driver - reacted.
Velodyne Lidar president Marta Hall told the BBC it would not be advising its customers to halt tests in the wake of the Arizona death because "we do not believe the accident was due to Lidar". Instead, the company is pointing to Uber's on-board computer as potentially being to blame, Ms Hall said.
"Our Lidar can see perfectly well in the dark, as well as it sees in daylight, producing millions of points of information. However, it is up to the rest of the system to interpret and use the data to make decisions. We do not know how the Uber system of decision-making works."
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43523286
Velodyne Lidar president Marta Hall told the BBC it would not be advising its customers to halt tests in the wake of the Arizona death because "we do not believe the accident was due to Lidar". Instead, the company is pointing to Uber's on-board computer as potentially being to blame, Ms Hall said.
"Our Lidar can see perfectly well in the dark, as well as it sees in daylight, producing millions of points of information. However, it is up to the rest of the system to interpret and use the data to make decisions. We do not know how the Uber system of decision-making works."
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43523286
Here we see a far more significant cause of Brexit than Facebookmanipulation : a Communist in charge of the Labour...
Here we see a far more significant cause of Brexit than Facebook manipulation : a Communist in charge of the Labour party building up a power base, who's fine with working with Russia for some reason. He really is the other side of the same coin as Donald Trump.
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2017/05/a-brief-thought-experiement.html
Owen Smith says he "stood by his principles" in calling for another EU referendum - a move which resulted in his sacking from Labour's shadow cabinet. The former shadow Northern Ireland secretary said Jeremy Corbyn had made a "mistake" in firing him. He also said the party should "shift its position" on Brexit.
Referring to Mr Corbyn's views on Brexit as "a more Eurosceptic position", he added: "It's the first instance that I can think of in living memory of a government pursuing a policy that they know is going to make our economy smaller and reduce people's livelihoods and life chances and I cannot understand why we in Labour would support that."
Party figures have criticised Mr Corbyn's decision to sack Mr Smith, with Labour peer Peter Hain describing the dismissal as a "Stalinist purge".
Smith was lovely and boring and exactly the sort of level-headed person we needed in politics right now. Instead we're stuck with a hotheaded clown.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-43524945
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2017/05/a-brief-thought-experiement.html
Owen Smith says he "stood by his principles" in calling for another EU referendum - a move which resulted in his sacking from Labour's shadow cabinet. The former shadow Northern Ireland secretary said Jeremy Corbyn had made a "mistake" in firing him. He also said the party should "shift its position" on Brexit.
Referring to Mr Corbyn's views on Brexit as "a more Eurosceptic position", he added: "It's the first instance that I can think of in living memory of a government pursuing a policy that they know is going to make our economy smaller and reduce people's livelihoods and life chances and I cannot understand why we in Labour would support that."
Party figures have criticised Mr Corbyn's decision to sack Mr Smith, with Labour peer Peter Hain describing the dismissal as a "Stalinist purge".
Smith was lovely and boring and exactly the sort of level-headed person we needed in politics right now. Instead we're stuck with a hotheaded clown.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-43524945
Mt Etna is heading for the sea
But very, very slowly.
On the human scale, a movement of 14mm/yr - that is 1.4m over a hundred years - will seem very small, and it is. But geological investigations elsewhere in the world have shown that extinct volcanoes that display this kind of trend can suffer catastrophic failures on their leading flank as they drift downslope. Stresses can build up that lead eventually to devastating landslides.
Dr Murray and colleagues stress such behaviour is very rare and can take many centuries, even thousands of years, to develop to a critical stage. Certainly, there is absolutely no evidence that this is about to happen at Etna. Local residents should not be alarmed, the Open University scientist said.
"The 14mm/yr is an average; it varies from year to year," he explained. "The thing to watch I guess is if in 10 years' time the rate of movement has doubled - that would be a warning. If it's halved, I'd say there really is nothing to worry about."
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43522169
On the human scale, a movement of 14mm/yr - that is 1.4m over a hundred years - will seem very small, and it is. But geological investigations elsewhere in the world have shown that extinct volcanoes that display this kind of trend can suffer catastrophic failures on their leading flank as they drift downslope. Stresses can build up that lead eventually to devastating landslides.
Dr Murray and colleagues stress such behaviour is very rare and can take many centuries, even thousands of years, to develop to a critical stage. Certainly, there is absolutely no evidence that this is about to happen at Etna. Local residents should not be alarmed, the Open University scientist said.
"The 14mm/yr is an average; it varies from year to year," he explained. "The thing to watch I guess is if in 10 years' time the rate of movement has doubled - that would be a warning. If it's halved, I'd say there really is nothing to worry about."
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43522169
"Just use your imagination", says Nancy Pelosi
Under the bill, just 33 miles of new barriers can be built and only using "bollard" fencing or levees, not the concrete prototypes Mr Drumpf has viewed in photo ops, reports the newspaper.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi appeared to taunt Republicans over funding for a wall, which her party firmly opposes. "If you want to think you're getting a wall, just think it and sign the bill," she said to Mr Drumpf's congressional supporters.
Given the Trump supporters apparently limitless capacity for self-delusion, that will probably actually work.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43505059
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi appeared to taunt Republicans over funding for a wall, which her party firmly opposes. "If you want to think you're getting a wall, just think it and sign the bill," she said to Mr Drumpf's congressional supporters.
Given the Trump supporters apparently limitless capacity for self-delusion, that will probably actually work.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43505059
Fake news in the Brexit referendum
The director of Vote Leave has denied allegations of links between his campaign and Cambridge Analytica. Dominic Cummings said claims by the Observer newspaper are "factually wrong, hopelessly confused, or nonsensical".
Pretty sure that's a description of the Leave campaign.
Mr Cummings claimed stories alleging links with Vote Leave were being promoted because a "powerful set of people will do anything to try to shift public opinion in order that they can overturn the referendum".
If only that were true ! But I'd be highly skeptical of CA being a major influence in the referendum. Elderly Daily Fail readers living in the countryside don't tend to have Facebook accounts. On the other hand, the vote was so close, they could perhaps be blamed in some sense for the marginal Leave victory, but this wouldn't tackle the root cause of the problem.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-43518628
Pretty sure that's a description of the Leave campaign.
Mr Cummings claimed stories alleging links with Vote Leave were being promoted because a "powerful set of people will do anything to try to shift public opinion in order that they can overturn the referendum".
If only that were true ! But I'd be highly skeptical of CA being a major influence in the referendum. Elderly Daily Fail readers living in the countryside don't tend to have Facebook accounts. On the other hand, the vote was so close, they could perhaps be blamed in some sense for the marginal Leave victory, but this wouldn't tackle the root cause of the problem.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-43518628
Someone trying to shoot you ? Bring back stoning, says teacher
"Every classroom has been equipped with a five-gallon bucket of river stone," Mr Helsel said at the state's House Education Committee on 15 March. "If an armed intruder attempts to gain entrance into any of our classrooms, they will face a classroom full students armed with rocks and they will be stoned. We have some people who have some pretty good arms. They can chuck some rocks pretty fast."
People like this make me think that there are worse things than eugenics.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43523797
People like this make me think that there are worse things than eugenics.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43523797
Friday 23 March 2018
3D rocket printing for fun and profit
Even in an era during which the aerospace industry faces significant disruption from myriad new competitors, Relativity Space stands out. The company, led by a pair of twenty-somethings who used to work for Blue Origin and SpaceX, seeks to 3D print rocket engines and the boosters themselves, reducing the number of parts in an orbital rocket from 100,000 down to fewer than 1,000.
Founded in late 2015, Relativity remained in stealth mode until last year, but now it is starting to come out of the shadows. And in doing so, the California-based company is revealing some pretty outsized ambitions. One day, in fact, the company intends to 3D print a rocket on Mars for a return trip to Earth. "We have a pretty broad long-term vision," Tim Ellis, a co-founder of Relativity, admitted in an interview with Ars.
Before it reaches Mars, of course, Relativity must first successfully 3D print a rocket on Earth. Ellis said Relativity is making good progress toward that goal, having already printed engine components for test firings.
So far, Ellis said, the gamble is paying off. Building and 3D printing an engine has been, he says, "a little bit easier than expected." The metals they are using for engine chamber parts, based on their strength and grain structure, are actually 20-percent stronger and have higher ductility than similar alloys not printed using the 3D process.
Automation has allowed Relativity to remain a very lean company—it still has just 17 full-time employees at a time when it is beginning to perform full-scale and flight-weight engine tests. Turbopumps will be added to the engine tests this year for a much more flight-like configuration. Ellis said Relativity will probably expand to about 45 people by the end of this year, as it scales up production.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/relativity-space-reveals-its-ambitions-with-big-nasa-deal/
Founded in late 2015, Relativity remained in stealth mode until last year, but now it is starting to come out of the shadows. And in doing so, the California-based company is revealing some pretty outsized ambitions. One day, in fact, the company intends to 3D print a rocket on Mars for a return trip to Earth. "We have a pretty broad long-term vision," Tim Ellis, a co-founder of Relativity, admitted in an interview with Ars.
Before it reaches Mars, of course, Relativity must first successfully 3D print a rocket on Earth. Ellis said Relativity is making good progress toward that goal, having already printed engine components for test firings.
So far, Ellis said, the gamble is paying off. Building and 3D printing an engine has been, he says, "a little bit easier than expected." The metals they are using for engine chamber parts, based on their strength and grain structure, are actually 20-percent stronger and have higher ductility than similar alloys not printed using the 3D process.
Automation has allowed Relativity to remain a very lean company—it still has just 17 full-time employees at a time when it is beginning to perform full-scale and flight-weight engine tests. Turbopumps will be added to the engine tests this year for a much more flight-like configuration. Ellis said Relativity will probably expand to about 45 people by the end of this year, as it scales up production.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/relativity-space-reveals-its-ambitions-with-big-nasa-deal/
Changing America's gun paradigm
Plato, lightly edited :
Thanks to some providential necessity, Sparta and Crete have a splendid and—as I was saying—astonishing institution : communal meals. But at present, unhappily, the rest of the human race has not progressed as far as that, and if you’re wise you won’t breathe a word about such a practice in other parts of the world where states do not recognize communal meals as a public institution at all... the very mention of the correct policy will be met with howls of protest. But perhaps this state will be different.
Exotic is a relative state. What seems normal and unavoidable to some seems impossible to others.
http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-43504307/why-this-mass-shooting-is-different-the-evidence
Thanks to some providential necessity, Sparta and Crete have a splendid and—as I was saying—astonishing institution : communal meals. But at present, unhappily, the rest of the human race has not progressed as far as that, and if you’re wise you won’t breathe a word about such a practice in other parts of the world where states do not recognize communal meals as a public institution at all... the very mention of the correct policy will be met with howls of protest. But perhaps this state will be different.
Exotic is a relative state. What seems normal and unavoidable to some seems impossible to others.
http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-43504307/why-this-mass-shooting-is-different-the-evidence
Thursday 22 March 2018
Blue passports... from France !
Farce beyond farce.
Ironically, I've always viewed the red ones as more imperial...
The new UK passport to be issued after Brexit will be made in France, the current British manufacturer has said. The burgundy passport, in use since 1988, will revert to its original blue and gold colour from October 2019.
The boss of UK supplier De La Rue said it would appeal against the decision to award the £490m contract to Franco-Dutch firm Gemalto. The Home Office said a winning bid had been chosen but it was up to the supplier to announce the news. De la Rue's shares closed nearly 6% lower on Thursday.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-43489462
Ironically, I've always viewed the red ones as more imperial...
The new UK passport to be issued after Brexit will be made in France, the current British manufacturer has said. The burgundy passport, in use since 1988, will revert to its original blue and gold colour from October 2019.
The boss of UK supplier De La Rue said it would appeal against the decision to award the £490m contract to Franco-Dutch firm Gemalto. The Home Office said a winning bid had been chosen but it was up to the supplier to announce the news. De la Rue's shares closed nearly 6% lower on Thursday.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-43489462
Wednesday 21 March 2018
You too may experience synaesthesia with this amusing gif
I don't really "hear" it, exactly, but I do get an unmistakable and involuntary mental sensation every time the pylon lands.
"I suspect the noisy gif phenomenon is closely related to what we call the Visually-Evoked Auditory Response, or vEAR for short," explained Fassnidge.
"This is the ability of some people to hear moving objects even though they don't make a sound, which may be a subtle form of synaesthesia - the triggering of one sense by another. We are constantly surrounded by movements that make a sound, whether they are footsteps as people walk, lip movements while they talk, a ball bouncing in the playground, or the crash as we drop a glass. There is some evidence to suggest that synaesthetic pairings are, to some extent, learnt during infancy."
"I might assume I am hearing the footsteps of a person walking on the other side of the street, when really the sound exists only in my mind. So this may be a common phenomenon because the sound makes sense, but for that exact reason we may not even know we have this unusual ability until the noisy gif suddenly came along in the last few years. What determines who experiences vEAR and how intensely is probably individual differences in how our brain is wired."
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42237092
"I suspect the noisy gif phenomenon is closely related to what we call the Visually-Evoked Auditory Response, or vEAR for short," explained Fassnidge.
"This is the ability of some people to hear moving objects even though they don't make a sound, which may be a subtle form of synaesthesia - the triggering of one sense by another. We are constantly surrounded by movements that make a sound, whether they are footsteps as people walk, lip movements while they talk, a ball bouncing in the playground, or the crash as we drop a glass. There is some evidence to suggest that synaesthetic pairings are, to some extent, learnt during infancy."
"I might assume I am hearing the footsteps of a person walking on the other side of the street, when really the sound exists only in my mind. So this may be a common phenomenon because the sound makes sense, but for that exact reason we may not even know we have this unusual ability until the noisy gif suddenly came along in the last few years. What determines who experiences vEAR and how intensely is probably individual differences in how our brain is wired."
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42237092
If you can't beat 'em, catch 'em with a big net
In one sense, ULA is playing the tortoise to SpaceX’s hare. Musk was first out of the blocks with development of reusable rocket boosters, but Bruno believes ULA’s Vulcan, with reusable first stage engines, makes the most sense financially given current market projections. He said the Vulcan’s engines represent two-thirds of the cost of the stage. Under ULA’s approach, the engines will be recovered and reused after every flight. SpaceX’s design calls for recovery of the entire rocket stage. Depending on the weight of the payload and the requirements of its orbit, that cannot be done on every flight.
“It boils down to as simple as this: is it better to recover 100 percent of the value of the booster some of the time or only two thirds of the value of the booster all of the time?” Bruno said reporters during a roundtable discussion earlier this week. “Well, that depends on how often you get a big, heavy payload. We’ve each made market forecasts, and if we’re right, our solution will be economically advantageous. If I’m wrong and they’re right, then theirs will".
To recover the Vulcan engines, a small pod housing an inflatable heat shield and a gas generator will be mounted on the bottom of the first stage. After boosting the rocket out of the lower atmosphere, the engines will shut down and the propulsion section will be disconnected, allowing it to fall free. The heat shield, based on NASA technology, then will inflate using the gas generator, protecting the engines from the heat and stress of atmospheric entry. Once clear of the plasma heating region, a parafoil will deploy to fly the engines to their planned pickup point.
All sounds rosy so far...
A large helicopter then will swoop overhead...
Wait, what ?
...snagging a cable to capture the engine package, which will be lowered to the deck of a nearby salvage ship. A similar technique was used to capture film canisters ejected from Corona spy satellites in the 1960s.
Well, err, OK, but that I would very much like to see.
Recovering the engines non-propulsively will allow the Vulcan to use virtually all of its propellant to put the payload into the best possible orbit “for a pretty modest weight penalty, you know, the weight of a parachute, the weight of the subsystem,” Bruno said... the entry environment behind the heat shield is much more benign than what a Falcon 9 experiences with its tail-first propulsive descent and ULA engineers expect engine refurbishment to be a relatively straightforward affair.
https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/03/20/ula-touts-new-vulcan-rocket-in-competition-with-spacex/
“It boils down to as simple as this: is it better to recover 100 percent of the value of the booster some of the time or only two thirds of the value of the booster all of the time?” Bruno said reporters during a roundtable discussion earlier this week. “Well, that depends on how often you get a big, heavy payload. We’ve each made market forecasts, and if we’re right, our solution will be economically advantageous. If I’m wrong and they’re right, then theirs will".
To recover the Vulcan engines, a small pod housing an inflatable heat shield and a gas generator will be mounted on the bottom of the first stage. After boosting the rocket out of the lower atmosphere, the engines will shut down and the propulsion section will be disconnected, allowing it to fall free. The heat shield, based on NASA technology, then will inflate using the gas generator, protecting the engines from the heat and stress of atmospheric entry. Once clear of the plasma heating region, a parafoil will deploy to fly the engines to their planned pickup point.
All sounds rosy so far...
A large helicopter then will swoop overhead...
Wait, what ?
...snagging a cable to capture the engine package, which will be lowered to the deck of a nearby salvage ship. A similar technique was used to capture film canisters ejected from Corona spy satellites in the 1960s.
Well, err, OK, but that I would very much like to see.
Recovering the engines non-propulsively will allow the Vulcan to use virtually all of its propellant to put the payload into the best possible orbit “for a pretty modest weight penalty, you know, the weight of a parachute, the weight of the subsystem,” Bruno said... the entry environment behind the heat shield is much more benign than what a Falcon 9 experiences with its tail-first propulsive descent and ULA engineers expect engine refurbishment to be a relatively straightforward affair.
https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/03/20/ula-touts-new-vulcan-rocket-in-competition-with-spacex/
Women of SpaceX
Two things from this picture : 1) The Falcon 9 is terrifyingly large; 2) SpaceX actually have quite a lot of female employees, you just never normally see them for some reason.
https://twitter.com/SpaceXJobs/status/971802961000087552/photo/1
https://twitter.com/SpaceXJobs/status/971802961000087552/photo/1
Training the brain directly
Another issue she faced was that she was morbidly obese, weighing 183kg with a BMI of 63 at her heaviest. This resulted in severely limited mobility which, naturally, exacerbated her depression, putting in place a vicious circle of poor health. As a last resort treatment, psychiatrists took a drastic decision to implant an electrical device in her brain, an invasive therapy known as deep brain stimulation. Not only did this treatment significantly help her depression, it had another astonishing outcome – she lost more weight than she had with any previous treatment, losing almost 50% more weight (2.8kg or 6.1lbs) per month than she had done after the gastric bypass surgery.
In 2002, deep brain stimulation was approved to treat Parkinson’s disease. It has been extremely effective and more than 40,000 patients have now been treated. Though it’s largely used for tremor disorders, this heralded its use in the treatment of other conditions, such a severe depression in the case of patients like Anna. To perform deep brain stimulation, first scientists use a drill to put a burr hole in a patient’s skull. After that, they place electrodes onto the brain itself. The patient is often awake, enabling researchers to test the specific area while the brain is stimulated.
That brain stimulation inhibits an area of the brain from performing its function is still a theory, but one that is strengthened by research in animals. For instance, a study using rats found that brain simulation resulted in an increase of the brain’s inhibitory chemical, gaba, which is released when certain areas need to be constrained. Another study showed that individuals which are better at controlling unwanted thoughts, had more of this chemical.
Yokum and her team are developing training tasks that are intended to help obese individuals reset the way their brain responds to food. They do this by showing digital images of health food on a patient and asking them to click ‘like’ towards it, doing the opposite with unhealthy food. “We are trying to train the brain this way,” says Yokum.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180312-how-electronic-brain-stimulation-silenced-food-cravings
In 2002, deep brain stimulation was approved to treat Parkinson’s disease. It has been extremely effective and more than 40,000 patients have now been treated. Though it’s largely used for tremor disorders, this heralded its use in the treatment of other conditions, such a severe depression in the case of patients like Anna. To perform deep brain stimulation, first scientists use a drill to put a burr hole in a patient’s skull. After that, they place electrodes onto the brain itself. The patient is often awake, enabling researchers to test the specific area while the brain is stimulated.
That brain stimulation inhibits an area of the brain from performing its function is still a theory, but one that is strengthened by research in animals. For instance, a study using rats found that brain simulation resulted in an increase of the brain’s inhibitory chemical, gaba, which is released when certain areas need to be constrained. Another study showed that individuals which are better at controlling unwanted thoughts, had more of this chemical.
Yokum and her team are developing training tasks that are intended to help obese individuals reset the way their brain responds to food. They do this by showing digital images of health food on a patient and asking them to click ‘like’ towards it, doing the opposite with unhealthy food. “We are trying to train the brain this way,” says Yokum.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180312-how-electronic-brain-stimulation-silenced-food-cravings
Tuesday 20 March 2018
Turning energy into matter
Personally, I'd have marketed this to appeal more to nerds. Recreating the early conditions of the Universe ? Pffft, naaaah.
THEY'RE BUILDING A REPLICATOR, PEOPLE !
(no, not literally, but that's obvious)
The theory of the Breit-Wheeler process says it should be possible to turn light into matter by smashing two particles of light (photons) together to create an electron and a positron. However, past attempts to do this have required the addition of other high-energy particles.
Physicists from Imperial College London, led by Professor Steven Rose, came up with a way of testing the theory that did not rely on these added extras in 2014, and today an experiment is running in the hope of turning light directly into matter for the first time.
Professor Rose said: "This would be a pure demonstration of Einstein's famous equation that relates energy and mass: E=mc2, which tells us how much energy is produced when matter is turned to energy. What we are doing is the same but backwards: turning photon energy into mass, i.e. m=E/c2."
https://phys.org/news/2018-03-underway.html
THEY'RE BUILDING A REPLICATOR, PEOPLE !
(no, not literally, but that's obvious)
The theory of the Breit-Wheeler process says it should be possible to turn light into matter by smashing two particles of light (photons) together to create an electron and a positron. However, past attempts to do this have required the addition of other high-energy particles.
Physicists from Imperial College London, led by Professor Steven Rose, came up with a way of testing the theory that did not rely on these added extras in 2014, and today an experiment is running in the hope of turning light directly into matter for the first time.
Professor Rose said: "This would be a pure demonstration of Einstein's famous equation that relates energy and mass: E=mc2, which tells us how much energy is produced when matter is turned to energy. What we are doing is the same but backwards: turning photon energy into mass, i.e. m=E/c2."
https://phys.org/news/2018-03-underway.html
A better figure for the Brexit bus
It's nice to see people finally making sensible estimates of the cost benefit of being in the EU, instead of limiting it to much smaller direct costs. Why didn't anyone do this before hand ? Likely because everyone thought it was bleedin' obvious.
Dealing with fake news : putting theory into practise
I haven't found the time to watch that interview yet, but regardless of the magnitude of the effect of all this data-wrangling, it's abundantly clear that Facebook and CA have both been very naughty.
Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is facing intensified calls to appear in person at investigations into the social network's conduct. His company has been accused of failing to properly inform users that their profile information may have been obtained and kept by Cambridge Analytica, a data firm widely-credited with helping Donald Drumpf win the 2016 US presidential election.
Despite pledging that in 2018 he would "fix" his company, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has managed to avoid engaging with the site's growing number of critics - instead sending lawyers or policy bosses to various committee hearings. The 33-year-old's recent remarks on some of Facebook's controversies have been communicated in the relatively safe space of a blog post or video message published on his Facebook page.
Trouble is, since all those repeated denials as to how Facebook doesn't affect anything and isn't a news outlet, only for the massive u-turns as to how many users saw fake news, his credibility is near zero. Now that is not the same as saying that the influence of the propaganda was proportional to its prevalence : the point is he kept saying things he must have known weren't true.
This is a major breach that must be investigated," demanded Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. "It’s clear these platforms can’t police themselves. I've called for more transparency and accountability for online political ads. They say 'trust us'." She added: "Mark Zuckerberg needs to testify before Senate Judiciary."
The man in charge of Britain's investigation into Russian meddling in the democratic process said he too wanted to press Mr Zuckerberg on the issue. "I will be writing to Mark Zuckerberg asking that either he or another senior executive from the company appear to give evidence in front of the committee as part our inquiry," said Damian Collins MP. "It is not acceptable that they have previously sent witnesses who seek to avoid asking difficult questions by claiming not to know the answers."
If you remember this rather nice story :
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/9DkDWw1bnvG
... it's interesting to see some of the recommendations already being put into practise. First, we saw Facebook actually tell users that they'd seen false articles. Naturally it was widely reported that some users respondedvery badly idiotically to this (https://gizmodo.com/facebook-users-cry-censorship-after-being-told-which-ru-1822552451) but we still don't have any statistical data on whether this had an overall positive or negative affect. Without that we just have anecdotes, which are subject to strong selection effects.
So now we've got the second on the list - chief executives being hauled before politicians - being raised as a serious possibility. It'll be interesting to see how that one turns out, and even more interesting to see if the rest of the recommendations (limiting social media corporation acquisitions, labelling and/or removal of bots, transparency of algorithms selecting what's in users streams etc.) are followed.
But it bears repeating, yet again, that you wouldn't get a Trump or Brexit without pre-emptively bullshitting people into believing that a complete and utter cunt of a human being was better leader than a mildly dislikeable old lady because all politicians are the spawn of Satan, or that foreigners are responsible for making British bananas the wrong sort of bendy and therefore the EU is all about ze GERMANS (in Daily Mail random caps lock) eating your babies, for years and decades previously. People are just too damn stubborn to change their minds on such deep-seated ideological beliefs on a whim. Individuals can be capricious, but this is rarely the case for a whole population. You cannot possibly persuade people in a single year that a racist orange tiny-handed piece of human pestilence is more credible than a perfectly bog-standard politician... not in one year. Even then, Donald lost the popular vote and lost it badly. Conversely, no-one except the Brexiteer fringe cared much at all about the EU before the referendum : they were given a voice they should never have had, but it seems pretty clear now that the fault lies with the people least vulnerable to social media manipulation.
So again, social media : important, yes. Facebook : villainous, yes. The crucial factor in the shitty state of the world ? Nope.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43456390
Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is facing intensified calls to appear in person at investigations into the social network's conduct. His company has been accused of failing to properly inform users that their profile information may have been obtained and kept by Cambridge Analytica, a data firm widely-credited with helping Donald Drumpf win the 2016 US presidential election.
Despite pledging that in 2018 he would "fix" his company, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has managed to avoid engaging with the site's growing number of critics - instead sending lawyers or policy bosses to various committee hearings. The 33-year-old's recent remarks on some of Facebook's controversies have been communicated in the relatively safe space of a blog post or video message published on his Facebook page.
Trouble is, since all those repeated denials as to how Facebook doesn't affect anything and isn't a news outlet, only for the massive u-turns as to how many users saw fake news, his credibility is near zero. Now that is not the same as saying that the influence of the propaganda was proportional to its prevalence : the point is he kept saying things he must have known weren't true.
This is a major breach that must be investigated," demanded Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. "It’s clear these platforms can’t police themselves. I've called for more transparency and accountability for online political ads. They say 'trust us'." She added: "Mark Zuckerberg needs to testify before Senate Judiciary."
The man in charge of Britain's investigation into Russian meddling in the democratic process said he too wanted to press Mr Zuckerberg on the issue. "I will be writing to Mark Zuckerberg asking that either he or another senior executive from the company appear to give evidence in front of the committee as part our inquiry," said Damian Collins MP. "It is not acceptable that they have previously sent witnesses who seek to avoid asking difficult questions by claiming not to know the answers."
If you remember this rather nice story :
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/9DkDWw1bnvG
... it's interesting to see some of the recommendations already being put into practise. First, we saw Facebook actually tell users that they'd seen false articles. Naturally it was widely reported that some users responded
So now we've got the second on the list - chief executives being hauled before politicians - being raised as a serious possibility. It'll be interesting to see how that one turns out, and even more interesting to see if the rest of the recommendations (limiting social media corporation acquisitions, labelling and/or removal of bots, transparency of algorithms selecting what's in users streams etc.) are followed.
But it bears repeating, yet again, that you wouldn't get a Trump or Brexit without pre-emptively bullshitting people into believing that a complete and utter cunt of a human being was better leader than a mildly dislikeable old lady because all politicians are the spawn of Satan, or that foreigners are responsible for making British bananas the wrong sort of bendy and therefore the EU is all about ze GERMANS (in Daily Mail random caps lock) eating your babies, for years and decades previously. People are just too damn stubborn to change their minds on such deep-seated ideological beliefs on a whim. Individuals can be capricious, but this is rarely the case for a whole population. You cannot possibly persuade people in a single year that a racist orange tiny-handed piece of human pestilence is more credible than a perfectly bog-standard politician... not in one year. Even then, Donald lost the popular vote and lost it badly. Conversely, no-one except the Brexiteer fringe cared much at all about the EU before the referendum : they were given a voice they should never have had, but it seems pretty clear now that the fault lies with the people least vulnerable to social media manipulation.
So again, social media : important, yes. Facebook : villainous, yes. The crucial factor in the shitty state of the world ? Nope.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43456390
Russian interference in the US elections
Interference in the 2016 US election and alleged cyber-attacks. They include 13 individuals charged last month by Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin accused the Russians of "destructive cyber-attacks, and intrusions targeting critical infrastructure". He said the sanctions would target "ongoing nefarious attacks" by Russia.
Five entities including the Russian military intelligence agency GRU are targeted in Thursday's sanctions. Also blacklisted is the St Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, which is accused of engineering an online disinformation campaign to sway the 2016 US presidential election. Yevgeny Prigozhin - an oligarch who allegedly ran the agency and is known as "Putin's chef" - and 12 of the agency's staff are also hit by the sanctions.
All 13 were charged in a February indictment by US special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating allegations that Russia meddled in the US vote to help Donald Drumpf win. Under the US sanctions, the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, and six of its employees are subjected to penalties for cyber-attacks.
The US treasury secretary said there would be additional sanctions to hold Russian "officials and oligarchs accountable for their destabilising activities". He did not specify when these penalties would be imposed, but stated they would sever the individuals' access to the US financial system.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43419809
Five entities including the Russian military intelligence agency GRU are targeted in Thursday's sanctions. Also blacklisted is the St Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, which is accused of engineering an online disinformation campaign to sway the 2016 US presidential election. Yevgeny Prigozhin - an oligarch who allegedly ran the agency and is known as "Putin's chef" - and 12 of the agency's staff are also hit by the sanctions.
All 13 were charged in a February indictment by US special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating allegations that Russia meddled in the US vote to help Donald Drumpf win. Under the US sanctions, the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, and six of its employees are subjected to penalties for cyber-attacks.
The US treasury secretary said there would be additional sanctions to hold Russian "officials and oligarchs accountable for their destabilising activities". He did not specify when these penalties would be imposed, but stated they would sever the individuals' access to the US financial system.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43419809
The continuing adventures of Boaty McBoatface
Nice to hear that Boaty is still a happy little sub.
"Boaty McBoatface" has executed its most daring dive yet. The nation's favourite yellow submarine swam under a near-600m thick ice shelf in the Antarctic, returning safely to its launch ship after 48 hours away. It was an important test for the novel autonomous vehicle, which was developed at the UK's National Oceanography Centre (NOC).
Boaty's handlers now plan even more arduous expeditions for the sub in the years ahead. This includes a traverse under the sea-ice that caps the Arctic Ocean.
Boaty gathered data on the way water moves through the cavity, measuring temperature, salinity and mixing. This will help scientists better understand how the Filchner will respond if warm water were ever to get under the shelf to begin melting it - something that is happening in other regions of the Antarctic today.
Dr Peter Davis, a BAS oceanographer on the project, told BBC News: "The ice steams cover an area perhaps 10 times the size of the UK. So, the shelves hold back a huge amount of ice. And if they are unleashed, or released, they could result in some substantial sea-level rise that will impact everyone no matter where we are on the globe."
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43378290
"Boaty McBoatface" has executed its most daring dive yet. The nation's favourite yellow submarine swam under a near-600m thick ice shelf in the Antarctic, returning safely to its launch ship after 48 hours away. It was an important test for the novel autonomous vehicle, which was developed at the UK's National Oceanography Centre (NOC).
Boaty's handlers now plan even more arduous expeditions for the sub in the years ahead. This includes a traverse under the sea-ice that caps the Arctic Ocean.
Boaty gathered data on the way water moves through the cavity, measuring temperature, salinity and mixing. This will help scientists better understand how the Filchner will respond if warm water were ever to get under the shelf to begin melting it - something that is happening in other regions of the Antarctic today.
Dr Peter Davis, a BAS oceanographer on the project, told BBC News: "The ice steams cover an area perhaps 10 times the size of the UK. So, the shelves hold back a huge amount of ice. And if they are unleashed, or released, they could result in some substantial sea-level rise that will impact everyone no matter where we are on the globe."
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43378290
Monday 19 March 2018
"Robots are people too", says idiot
Here we see a bunch of weirdos criticising another bunch of weirdos for doing weird but essentially harmless acts that do not affect anyone else in any way.
Paris councillors are due to decide on the future of a business where clients are charged €89 ($109; £78) to spend an hour with a silicon sex doll, local media report. Communist councillors and feminist groups have been calling for the closure of Xdolls. Currently, Xdolls is registered as a games centre, but opponents argue it is effectively a brothel. Owning or operating a brothel is illegal in France.
But its critics want to see it shut. Nicolas Bonnet Oulaldj, a communist [well there's your problem] councillor, is taking the matter before the Council of Paris - the deliberative body responsible for governing the city - which is meeting this week. "Xdolls conveys a degrading image of the woman," he is quoted as saying in Le Parisien.
He and his fellow councillors are calling for a ban on Xdolls, saying operates like a brothel. Mr Lousquy says the dolls are sex toys and that he does not see them as degrading to women. Lorraine Questiaux, lawyer and spokesperson for a Paris feminist association, says "that in France, every year, there are 86,000 women raped". "Xdolls is not a sex shop. It's a place that generates money and where you rape a woman," Ms Questiaux, who also wants the centre closed, adds.
Umm, less Questiaux is actually suggesting there are real women being violated, with the sex doll thing as a front, that's the dumbest thing I've heard this month.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43463625
Paris councillors are due to decide on the future of a business where clients are charged €89 ($109; £78) to spend an hour with a silicon sex doll, local media report. Communist councillors and feminist groups have been calling for the closure of Xdolls. Currently, Xdolls is registered as a games centre, but opponents argue it is effectively a brothel. Owning or operating a brothel is illegal in France.
But its critics want to see it shut. Nicolas Bonnet Oulaldj, a communist [well there's your problem] councillor, is taking the matter before the Council of Paris - the deliberative body responsible for governing the city - which is meeting this week. "Xdolls conveys a degrading image of the woman," he is quoted as saying in Le Parisien.
He and his fellow councillors are calling for a ban on Xdolls, saying operates like a brothel. Mr Lousquy says the dolls are sex toys and that he does not see them as degrading to women. Lorraine Questiaux, lawyer and spokesperson for a Paris feminist association, says "that in France, every year, there are 86,000 women raped". "Xdolls is not a sex shop. It's a place that generates money and where you rape a woman," Ms Questiaux, who also wants the centre closed, adds.
Umm, less Questiaux is actually suggesting there are real women being violated, with the sex doll thing as a front, that's the dumbest thing I've heard this month.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43463625
The UK is taking Cambridge Analytica seriously
The UK's Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham says she will seek a warrant to look at the databases and servers used by British data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica.
Ms Denham had demanded access to Cambridge Analytica's servers by 18:00 GMT but said the firm had missed her deadline. "I'm not accepting their response so therefore I'll be applying to the court for a warrant," she said. "We need to get in there, we need to look at the databases, we need to look at the servers and understand how data was processed or deleted by Cambridge Analytica."
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43465700
Ms Denham had demanded access to Cambridge Analytica's servers by 18:00 GMT but said the firm had missed her deadline. "I'm not accepting their response so therefore I'll be applying to the court for a warrant," she said. "We need to get in there, we need to look at the databases, we need to look at the servers and understand how data was processed or deleted by Cambridge Analytica."
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43465700
Learning by pure correlation produces bizarre and inexplicable results
AI does not understand the difference between correlation and causation, or anything much at all, really.
This data-driven approach means they can make spectacular blunders, such as that time a neural network concluded a 3D printed turtle was, in fact, a rifle. The programs can’t think conceptually, along the lines of “it has scales and a shell, so it could be a turtle”. Instead, they think in terms of patterns – in this case, visual patterns in pixels. Consequently, altering a single pixel in an image can tip the scales from a sensible answer to one that’s memorably weird.
Neural networks don’t have language skills, so they can’t explain to you what they’re doing or why. And like all AI, they don’t have any common sense. A few decades ago, Caruana applied a neural network to some medical data. It included things like symptoms and their outcomes, and the intention was to calculate each patient’s risk of dying on any given day, so that doctors could take preventative action. It seemed to work well, until one night a grad student at the University of Pittsburgh noticed something odd. He was crunching the same data with a simpler algorithm, so he could read its decision-making logic, line by line. One of these read along the lines of “asthma is good for you if you have pneumonia”.
“We asked the doctors and they said ‘oh that’s bad, you want to fix that’,” says Caruana. Asthma is a serious risk factor for developing pneumonia, since they both affect the lungs. They’ll never know for sure why the machine learnt this rule, but one theory is that when patients with a history of asthma begin to get pneumonia, they get to the doctor, fast. This may be artificially bumping up their survival rates.
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180316-why-a-robot-wont-steal-your-job-yet
This data-driven approach means they can make spectacular blunders, such as that time a neural network concluded a 3D printed turtle was, in fact, a rifle. The programs can’t think conceptually, along the lines of “it has scales and a shell, so it could be a turtle”. Instead, they think in terms of patterns – in this case, visual patterns in pixels. Consequently, altering a single pixel in an image can tip the scales from a sensible answer to one that’s memorably weird.
Neural networks don’t have language skills, so they can’t explain to you what they’re doing or why. And like all AI, they don’t have any common sense. A few decades ago, Caruana applied a neural network to some medical data. It included things like symptoms and their outcomes, and the intention was to calculate each patient’s risk of dying on any given day, so that doctors could take preventative action. It seemed to work well, until one night a grad student at the University of Pittsburgh noticed something odd. He was crunching the same data with a simpler algorithm, so he could read its decision-making logic, line by line. One of these read along the lines of “asthma is good for you if you have pneumonia”.
“We asked the doctors and they said ‘oh that’s bad, you want to fix that’,” says Caruana. Asthma is a serious risk factor for developing pneumonia, since they both affect the lungs. They’ll never know for sure why the machine learnt this rule, but one theory is that when patients with a history of asthma begin to get pneumonia, they get to the doctor, fast. This may be artificially bumping up their survival rates.
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180316-why-a-robot-wont-steal-your-job-yet
Sunday 18 March 2018
Satire and lies affect the brain differently
Back in early 2017, Maria Konnikova wrote a piece that explained what happens to the brain when it has to incessantly process lies. She cited research that shows that the brain has to first accept a lie as true, only to analyze it, then refute it. Over time, the brain tires of that process and slowly starts to accept the lies as true. She refers to a fascinating, if disheartening, 2015 study, that showed that if people repeated the phrase “The Atlantic Ocean is the largest ocean on Earth” enough times, the Atlantic Ocean started to seem like the largest ocean on Earth.
We know that fake news headlines, Drumpf B.S. and NRA skewed logic does in fact get cognitive traction even among those of us not predisposed to accept those falsehoods. Yet, those viewers who watch satire and other types of ironic comedy do not lose the ability to detect the ways that these comedians use creative deception to be funny. While more research is needed to fully make the case, there seem to be two main reasons why satire viewers may be better at detecting falsehoods than those who don’t consume this type of humor.
Satire viewers enjoy using their reflective cognitive abilities, which are effortful, typically deliberative and require working memory, over intuitive cognitive abilities, which don’t require higher order cognition... The second part of the story is that processing humor cognitively involves pleasure. There is a cognitive reward for processing a joke that leads to laughter or amusement. Jokes engage both analytical and affective cognitive processes. Watching Samantha Bee or Colbert or Oliver dissect falsehoods is both analytically engaging and fun. The element of fun may be part of the reason why we keep getting the joke but can get worn down by incessant lies. When lies are processed through comedy, we don’t lose the ability to detect them as false.
And that may well be why these comedians keep being attacked as a danger to the NRA, the Drumpf agenda and right-wing extremism. Each time a comedian ironically makes fun of the right-wing mindset, they help engage our analytical thinking in a fun way.
Here's an idea for a psychological study : take a group of NRA members or other assorted lunatics and stick 'em down to watch Colbert et al. over a protracted period. Compensate them for their trouble. Determine if this makes them more or less able to engage in correct analytic reasoning and/or bullshitting*, or if it just causes the backfire effect and makes them cry their little snowflake hearts out. Does watching satire cause increased reasoning, or is it just because people who like analytical thought watch shows that require analytical thought anyway ? Or is this complete bollocks ? Numbers required.
* Just as a good liar must first understand the truth, so a persuasive bullshitter must understand rhetoric - which requires analytic reasoning.
https://www.salon.com/2018/03/17/the-science-of-satire-and-lies-watching-colbert-can-fight-right-wing-brain-rot/
We know that fake news headlines, Drumpf B.S. and NRA skewed logic does in fact get cognitive traction even among those of us not predisposed to accept those falsehoods. Yet, those viewers who watch satire and other types of ironic comedy do not lose the ability to detect the ways that these comedians use creative deception to be funny. While more research is needed to fully make the case, there seem to be two main reasons why satire viewers may be better at detecting falsehoods than those who don’t consume this type of humor.
Satire viewers enjoy using their reflective cognitive abilities, which are effortful, typically deliberative and require working memory, over intuitive cognitive abilities, which don’t require higher order cognition... The second part of the story is that processing humor cognitively involves pleasure. There is a cognitive reward for processing a joke that leads to laughter or amusement. Jokes engage both analytical and affective cognitive processes. Watching Samantha Bee or Colbert or Oliver dissect falsehoods is both analytically engaging and fun. The element of fun may be part of the reason why we keep getting the joke but can get worn down by incessant lies. When lies are processed through comedy, we don’t lose the ability to detect them as false.
And that may well be why these comedians keep being attacked as a danger to the NRA, the Drumpf agenda and right-wing extremism. Each time a comedian ironically makes fun of the right-wing mindset, they help engage our analytical thinking in a fun way.
Here's an idea for a psychological study : take a group of NRA members or other assorted lunatics and stick 'em down to watch Colbert et al. over a protracted period. Compensate them for their trouble. Determine if this makes them more or less able to engage in correct analytic reasoning and/or bullshitting*, or if it just causes the backfire effect and makes them cry their little snowflake hearts out. Does watching satire cause increased reasoning, or is it just because people who like analytical thought watch shows that require analytical thought anyway ? Or is this complete bollocks ? Numbers required.
* Just as a good liar must first understand the truth, so a persuasive bullshitter must understand rhetoric - which requires analytic reasoning.
https://www.salon.com/2018/03/17/the-science-of-satire-and-lies-watching-colbert-can-fight-right-wing-brain-rot/
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