Apr. 25th, 2010

thewayne: (Default)
I post this as a curiosity. It's really just a timing weirdness: had he been added to the list a few hours earlier, he might have been prevented from boarding. As it was, he was peacefully taken off the flight by law enforcement agents and nothing happened.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36718880
thewayne: (Cyranose)
“Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.”
Albert Einstein.

I came across it in a comment on an article on Wired at http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/04/the-day-einstein-died. Apparently it sources as authentic.
thewayne: (Default)
It is now alleged that the administration shot "thousands" of pictures from student laptops. The student who was thought to be popping pills while actually eating Ike & Mike candies, was also photographed while sleeping.

The lawsuit is seeking class-action status on behalf of all students of the district. It also alleges that the IT administrator is a voyeur and is seeking forensic discovery of her home computer. She's been placed on administrative leave and is taking the 5th on all questions being sent her way, including when asked if she's ever copied photos from this system to her personal computer.


Ugly, ugly, ugly.


http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/04/webcamscanda/
thewayne: (Default)
I always wanted to work with sound recording and DJ equipment, and I'm working with recording right now to experiment with making a podcast. This woman is house/dance DJ and uses two iPads and a mixing board. Total cost: less than $1200, including the software, and drop another $100 for a preamp to take the output of the mixer into your laptop for recording if you should so desire.

The article has an 18 minute video demoing all of this.

http://gizmodo.com/5520913/the-ipad-dj
thewayne: (Default)
"...the Florida State Department of Juvenile Justice will use analysis software to predict crime by young delinquents, putting potential offenders under specific prevention and education programs. Goodbye, human rights!

They will use this software on juvenile delinquents, using a series of variables to determine the potential for these people to commit another crime. Depending on this probability, they will put them under specific re-education programs. Deepak Advani—vice president of predictive analytics at IBM—says the system gives "reliable projections" so governments can take "action in real time" to "prevent criminal activities?"


So VERY not good. You can't get 100% reliable projections. You can't get zero false positives and zero false negatives. You can only get that kind of accuracy with hindsight, and even then you probably won't get zero false positives and negatives.

I really like the Slashdot headline: Innocent Until Predicted Guilty.

http://gizmodo.com/5517231/crime-prediction-software-is-here-and-its-a-very-bad-idea

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/04/16/1224234/Innocent-Until-Predicted-Guilty
thewayne: (Default)
This is pretty awesome. They can actually shoot the robots (i.e. sniper training) and have the other robots react to the shot and take cover!

They can be run as remote-control devices, or programmed for scenarios that could be altered by the programming on the fly as the robots take casualties. They can also be programmed for hostage situations where one or more of the robots are hostages being shepherded around by the bad guys.

Very cool stuff. I believe in providing the highest quality training to people who might have to take lives, and this is a definite step in the right direction.

http://singularityhub.com/2010/04/12/video-of-newest-sniper-targets-robots-on-segways/

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/04/12/2056245/Aussie-Army-Trains-With-Fleet-of-Robots-On-Segways

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