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markfrankel18

Why Police Lineups Will Never Be Perfect - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Eyewitness testimony is hugely influential in criminal cases. And yet, brain research has shown again and again that human memory is unreliable: Every time a memory is recalled it becomes vulnerable to change. Confirming feedback—such as a detective telling a witness she “did great”—seems to distort memories, making them feel more accurate with each recollection. Since the start of the Innocence Project 318 cases have been overturned thanks to DNA testing. Eyewitness mistakes played a part in nearly three-quarters of them.
markfrankel18

Giving Yourself Away Online - The New Yorker - 0 views

  • Recently, at the Dumbo Arts Festival, in Brooklyn, an artist named Risa Puno stood at a table and gave out cookies in exchange for personal information such as a driver’s license number, a mother’s maiden name, or the last four digits of a Social Security number. This information was entered on a form that assigned values to various pieces of identifying data—one point for your first pet’s name, three points for your home address, five points for your fingerprints, and so on—and different types of cookies required different numbers of points.
  • Maybe, instead of asking why people don’t react rationally to online threats, we should be asking whether it’s possible to react rationally to the contradictory ways in which we engage with the Web
markfrankel18

Want to spin your data? Five Ways to Lie with Charts - 0 views

  • In the right (or wrong) hands, bar graphs and pie charts can become powerful agents of deception, tricking you into inferring trends that don’t exist, mistaking less for more, and missing alarming facts. The best measure of a chart’s honesty is the amount of time it takes to interpret it, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology perceptual scientist Ruth Rosenholtz: “A bad chart requires more cognitive processes and more reasoning about what you’ve seen.”
sleggettisp

5 Crucial Lessons for the Left re Climate Change & Capitalism From Naomi Klein's New Bo... - 1 views

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    This post first appeared at In These Times. In her previous books The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007) and NO LOGO: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs (2000), Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein took on topics like neoliberal "shock therapy," consumerism, globalization and "disaster capitalism," extensively documenting the forces behind the dramatic rise in economic inequality and environmental degradation over the past 50 years.
Lawrence Hrubes

The drone operator who said 'No' - 0 views

  • The drone operator who said 'No' 21 January 2015 Last updated at 00:57 GMT For almost five years, Brandon Bryant worked in America's secret drone programme bombing targets in Afghanistan and elsewhere.He was told that he helped to kill more than 1,600 people, but as time went by he felt uneasy with what he was doing. He found it hard to sleep and started dreaming in infra-red. Brandon Bryant told Witness about his doubts and the mission that convinced him it was time to stop. Witness is a World Service programme of the stories of our times told by the people who were there.
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Ants Handle Traffic Better Than You Do : NPR - 0 views

  • Could studying ants reveal clues to reducing highway traffic jams? Physicist Apoorva Nagar at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology thinks the answer is yes. Nagar says he got interested in the topic when he came across a study by German and Indian researchers showing that ants running along a path were able to maintain a steady speed even when there were a large number of ants on the path. Nagar says there are three main reasons ants don't jam up. Number one, ants don't have egos. They don't show off by zooming past people. "The second thing is, they do not mind a few accidents, or collisions," say Nagar. So unless there's a serious pileup, they just keep going.
  • The third reason, he says, is that ants seem to get more disciplined when paths get crowded, running in straighter lines, and varying their speed less. They're less likely to make unexpected moves in this sort of heavy traffic. It's the kind of steady control you see when a computer is controlling a car rather than a human. There's less variability unless it's absolutely called for. Nagar felt this kind of behavior could be explained by something called the Langevin equation, an equation physicists use when describing the movement of liquids, or how individual atoms behave in a lattice.
Lawrence Hrubes

We Know How You Feel - 0 views

  • Today, machines seem to get better every day at digesting vast gulps of information—and they remain as emotionally inert as ever. But since the nineteen-nineties a small number of researchers have been working to give computers the capacity to read our feelings and react, in ways that have come to seem startlingly human. Experts on the voice have trained computers to identify deep patterns in vocal pitch, rhythm, and intensity; their software can scan a conversation between a woman and a child and determine if the woman is a mother, whether she is looking the child in the eye, whether she is angry or frustrated or joyful. Other machines can measure sentiment by assessing the arrangement of our words, or by reading our gestures. Still others can do so from facial expressions. Our faces are organs of emotional communication; by some estimates, we transmit more data with our expressions than with what we say, and a few pioneers dedicated to decoding this information have made tremendous progress. Perhaps the most successful is an Egyptian scientist living near Boston, Rana el Kaliouby. Her company, Affectiva, formed in 2009, has been ranked by the business press as one of the country’s fastest-growing startups, and Kaliouby, thirty-six, has been called a “rock star.” There is good money in emotionally responsive machines, it turns out. For Kaliouby, this is no surprise: soon, she is certain, they will be ubiquitous.
markfrankel18

Twitter histories of events are vanishing - Salon.com - 1 views

  • Nowadays, we’re very good at telling history in real time. Live-tweeting, livestreaming, Instagraming, link sharing, instant commenting — everyday lives and major events are recorded and narrated from every angle as they happen. A new study has found, however, that these minutes-old histories may not be built to last.
  • As the Technology Review reported:A significant proportion of the websites that this social media [around the Arab Spring] points to has disappeared. And the same pattern occurs for other culturally significant events, such as the the H1N1 virus outbreak, Michael Jackson’s death and the Syrian uprising. In other words, our history, as recorded by social media, is slowly leaking away.
  • So it seems that social media sites like Twitter do not remain as fecund a resource over time as they do in real time. But no historian has ever worked on the assumption that all, or even most, information about an event is preserved, let alone even recorded. Not even Twitter has changed that.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Earth - Why does time always run forwards and never backwards? - 0 views

  • Newton's laws are astonishingly successful at describing the world. They explain why apples fall from trees and why the Earth orbits the Sun. But they have an odd feature: they work just as well backwards as forwards. If an egg can break, then Newton's laws say it can un-break.This is obviously wrong, but nearly every theory that physicists have discovered since Newton has the same problem. The laws of physics simply don't care whether time runs forwards or backwards, any more than they care about whether you're left-handed or right-handed.But we certainly do. In our experience, time has an arrow, always pointing into the future. "You might mix up east and west, but you would not mix up yesterday and tomorrow," says Sean Carroll, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "But the fundamental laws of physics don't distinguish between past and future."
Lawrence Hrubes

To Pi and Beyond - The New Yorker - 0 views

  • Entertaining the idea of a peculiar long number such as pi puts me in mind of its cousins twice removed, prime numbers, which have so many strange properties. Prime numbers are those numbers, such as 3, 5, 7, 11, and so on, that can be cleanly divided only by one and themselves. Primes and pi suggest a benign infinity, a pleasing order—pi because of its endlessness and its relation to the circle, and primes because no matter how far you travel on the number line you will always encounter a prime, as Euclid proved in 300 B.C. Recently, Yitang Zhang solved a problem involving prime numbers called bounded gaps that had been open for more than a hundred years. Zhang proved that no matter how far you go on the number line, even to the range where the numbers would fill many books, there will, on an infinite number of occasions, be two prime numbers within seventy million places of each other. (Other mathematicians have reduced this gap to two hundred and forty six.) Before, it had not been known whether any such range applied to prime numbers, which seem to behave, especially as they get larger, as if they appear at random.
  • Number theory is a discipline done for no purpose. It is practiced by people who believe that numbers have properties that exemplify an orderliness and beauty in the universe. The story of numbers is a story of creation not directly contained in the Scriptures, but if a divinity didn’t create numbers and their properties, what accounts for them? The necessity of counting doesn’t entirely explain pi or primes. A breakthrough in number theory is called a discovery, not an invention. There isn’t yet any explanation for the properties of pi or for primes. There is only the sense of wonder that the world contains such extravagant mysteries so close at hand.
markfrankel18

The case for considering robots people - Quartz - 0 views

  • “If we are dealing with robots like they are real people, the law should recognize that those interactions are like our interactions with real people,” Weaver writes. “In some cases, that will require recognizing that the robots are insurable entities like real people or corporations and that a robot’s liability is self-contained.” + Here’s the problem: If we don’t define robots as entities with certain legal rights and obligations, we will have a very difficult time using them effectively. And the tool that we have for assigning those things is legal personhood.
Cisco Walker

Humans Need Not Apply - 0 views

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    Following the replacement of horses with horsepower, what is our future?
markfrankel18

In a bad mood? Head to Facebook and find someone worse off -- ScienceDaily - 1 views

  • When people are in a bad mood, they are more likely to actively search social networking sites like Facebook to find friends who are doing even worse than they are, a new study suggests. "One of the great appeals of social network sites is that they allow people to manage their moods by choosing who they want to compare themselves to," the authors said.
markfrankel18

A picture-perfect nose job: how the selfie is boosting demand for plastic surgery - Quartz - 0 views

  • An annual study released earlier this year by the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery showed that one in three surveyed doctors have seen an increase in requests for surgery due to patients’ dissatisfaction with their image on social media.
  • Doctors say patients come to them with selfies they took to show where they think they need improvement. Some surgeons point out that with the selfie’s characteristically distorted angle, it does not provide an accurate representation of one’s face.
Lawrence Hrubes

Rage Against The Machines | FiveThirtyEight - 0 views

  • Computers are very, very fast at making calculations. Moreover, they can be counted on to calculate faithfully—without getting tired or emotional or changing their mode of analysis in midstream. But this does not mean that computers produce perfect forecasts, or even necessarily good ones. The acronym GIGO (“garbage in, garbage out”) sums up this problem. If you give a computer bad data, or devise a foolish set of instructions for it to analyze, it won’t spin straw into gold. Meanwhile, computers are not very good at tasks that require creativity and imagination, like devising strategies or developing theories about the way the world works. Computers are most useful to forecasters, therefore, in fields like weather forecasting and chess where the system abides by relatively simple and well-understood laws, but where the equations that govern the system must be solved many times over in order to produce a good forecast. They seem to have helped very little in fields like economic or earthquake forecasting where our understanding of root causes is blurrier and the data is noisier. In each of those fields, there were high hopes for computer-driven forecasting in the 1970s and 1980s when computers became more accessible to everyday academics and scientists, but little progress has been made since then.
John Mikton

9 Little-Known Google Tools You Should Be Using - PolicyMic - 1 views

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    9 Little-Known Google Tools You Should Be Using
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