Archive for 2019

NOW THIS IS MORE LIKE THE 21ST CENTURY I WAS HOPING FOR: Drug which makes human blood ‘lethal’ to mosquitoes can reduce malaria spread, study shows.

In a very-slightly-related topic, I woke up in the middle of the night a few weeks back with the introduction to a fantasy novel in my head and wrote it down. Called “Poison Soul,” it was about a guy who, when his soul was eaten by the Great Old Ones, forced them to vomit it back up, along with all the others they’d eaten. Sort of the Lovecraftian version of a bad shrimp. Don’t know if I’ll ever get anywhere with it, but it was weird to wake up with several paragraphs written in my head. And, frankly, if you’re going to deal with soul-eaters, something like that just makes sense.

NO MORE EMOTIONAL SUPPORT GORILLAS IN THE CLASSROOM?: “U. Minnesota proposes banning emotional support animals from classrooms, offices.”

I had a student a few years ago who gleefully told me about his efforts to annoy his landlord by demanding the right to two large canine emotional support animals. That’s the problem with our legal system. We create entitlements on the assumption that they won’t be used as a weapon. But that assumption turns out to be unwarranted.

OPEN THREAD: You know what to do.

SO THE INSTA-WIFE AND I HAVE BEEN WATCHING “GOD FRIENDED ME” ON CBS, AND LIKING IT. A “God” account on Facebook sends the protagonists friend suggestions, which guide them toward people who need help. Is it God? Is it AI? Is it someone else? We don’t know yet. But the show is engaging, the cast is likable and, though interracial, not the least bit woke, and the writing is good. I’m surprised it’s getting so little buzz.

NEWSWORTHY: The ghastly massacre in Christchurch this week is certainly newsworthy and richly deserving of the universal condemnation it is getting. But let’s also spare a thought for the massacre of over a hundred Christians at the hands of Muslim militants in Nigeria these past few weeks. So far it has been ignored in the MSM.

P.S.: It’s more evidence for my study (with Hal Pashler) showing that one’s political views tend to bias one’s judgment about what is newsworthy. Yes, I know that should be obvious, but you might be surprised at the extent to which journalists argue that their own views do not bias their reporting.

CULTURAL CONCEPTS OF DECENCY AND RESPONSIBILITY: IBM’s photo-scraping scandal shows what a weird bubble AI researchers live in.

Really, for industry insiders, IBM did nothing out of the ordinary. AI researchers hoover up data from various corners of the internet all the time to feed the ever-hungry machine-learning algorithms that require massive amounts of it to train. Instagram photos, for example, are a common source of image data; the hashtags often conveniently correspond to the content of the photos, making it extra easy to generate labeled data. New York Times and Wall Street Journal articles are also a common source of data for well-written, copy-edited sentences. Even better that they are categorized by topic: technology, business, sports.

In fact, scraping data from publicly available sources is so much of an industry standard that it’s taught as a foundational skill (sans ethics) in most data science and machine-learning training. Meanwhile, most tech platforms are designed to invite such scraping by offering APIs with direct access to their data. Until recently, this was done without second thought. (Hello, Facebook.)

To more and more people, it seems that they see ordinary people as experimental subjects. That isn’t a good place to be.