See it before you go swimming
▻http://boingboing.net/2016/08/19/ominous-music-in-shark-videos.html
A new study suggests that the ominous background music often heard in shark documentaries correlates with viewers’ fearful and negative opinions of sharks. (For the source of this musical cliche, see the 1975 trailer for Jaws ....)
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1fu_sA7XhE
It is as if God created the devil and gave him jaws.
UC Davis Chancellor spent $400K+ to scrub her online reputation after pepper-spray incident / Boing Boing
▻http://boingboing.net/2016/08/17/uc-davis-chancellor-spent-400.html
Back in April, we learned that UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi had hired a sleazy “reputation-management” company to scrub her reputation and that of the university after the 2011 incident in which university police lieutenant John Pike hosed down peaceful protesters with pepper spray, jetting chemical irritant directly into their open mouths and eyes.
The bill for that “scrubbing” was over $175,000. But turns out that she hired two other companies to try to prevent the taint of scandal from landing on her, spending more than $400K in all on the fruitless exercise.
This isn’t her first terrible adventure in “reputation management.” At her previous job at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she forced her aides to edit her Wikipedia entry — over their protests — when it emerged that children of big-ticket donors were given admission preference to the university.
#USA #internet #réputation #wtf
Flood destroys home of man who believes floods sent to punish gays / Boing Boing
▻http://boingboing.net/2016/08/18/flood-destroys-home-of-man-who.html
Parfois on se demande si dieu existe ...
Amid the horror of floods that have covered southern Louisiana in recent days, a grim note of irony: Tony Perkins, the head of the anti-queer Family Research Council, is among those whose homes are underwater. Perkins believes natural disasters are sent to punish gays.
This week the Lord Almighty aimed his Holy Wrath at Louisiana, where among the thousands of people made homeless by flooding is hate group leader Tony Perkins, who reports that he had to escape his destroyed home by canoe. Perkins is on vacation this month, but today he called into his own radio show to lament the “biblical proportion” disaster that will allegedly force his family to live in a camper for the six months it will take to rebuild his home. Today’s guest host for Perkins’ show is former Family Research Council vice president Ken Klukowski, who now works for Breitbart.
This particular flood, he said, was not to punish gays. This one is a “an incredible, encouraging spiritual exercise.”
At least 13 are so far dead.
Comme disait Charlie c’est dur d’être aimé ...
#LGBT
Predictive policing predicts police harassment, not crime / Boing Boing
▻http://boingboing.net/2016/08/18/predictive-policing-predicts-p.html
In Chicago, the “Heat List” system is used to direct policing resources, based on data-mining of social media to identify potential gang-members; the model tells the cops where to go and who to arrest, and is supposed to reduce both violent crime and the likelihood that suspects themselves will be killed — but peer-reviewed analysis (Scihub mirror) of the program shows that while being on the Heat List increases your chances of being harassed and arrested by Chicago PD, it does not improve crime rates.
In the paper, published in the Journal of Experimental Criminology, Rand Corporation researchers conclude that “once other demographics, criminal history variables, and social network risk have been controlled for using propensity score weighting and doubly-robust regression modeling, being on the SSL did not significantly reduce the likelihood of being a murder or shooting victim, or being arrested for murder” but “individuals on the list were people more likely to be arrested for a shooting regardless of the increased contact.”
In other words, predictive policing predicts the police, not the crime. Moreover, as is so often the case, racist training data produces racist predictive models, which allow racist institutions to claim to be undertaking objective and neutral measures while continuing to be totally racist.
L’étude en question est accessible ici
Predictions put into practice : a quasi-experimental evaluation of Chicago’s predictive policing pilot
▻http://sci-hub.cc/downloads/6fa8/10.1007@s11292-016-9272-0.pdf
et son résumé
Objectives In 2013, the Chicago Police Department conducted a pilot of a predictive policing program designed to reduce gun violence. The program included development of a Strategic Subjects List (SSL) of people estimated to be at highest risk of gun violence who were then referred to local police commanders for a preventive intervention. The purpose of this study is to identify the impact of the pilot on individual- and city-level gun violence, and to test possible drivers of results.
Methods The SSL consisted of 426 people estimated to be at highest risk of gun violence. We used ARIMA models to estimate impacts on city-level homicide trends, and propensity score matching to estimate the effects of being placed on the list on five measures related to gun violence. A mediation analysis and interviews with police leadership and COMPSTAT meeting observations help understand what is driving results.
Results Individuals on the SSL are not more or less likely to become a victim of a homicide or shooting than the comparison group, and this is further supported by citylevel analysis. The treated group is more likely to be arrested for a shooting.
Conclusions It is not clear how the predictions should be used in the field. One potential reason why being placed on the list resulted in an increased chance of being arrested for a shooting is that some officers may have used the list as leads to closing shooting cases. The results provide for a discussion about the future of individual-based predictive policing programs.
Pfff ! ça fait du bien de voir ce genre d’évidences écrites dans une revue scientifique peer reviewed…
Vast collection of Amiga games, demos and software uploaded to Internet Archive / Boing Boing
▻http://boingboing.net/2016/08/08/vast-collection-of-amiga-games.html
▻https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_amiga?sort=-downloads
#jeux #acces_libre #amiga
Iranians connected to phishing attempt on tortured Syrian activist / Boing Boing
▻http://boingboing.net/2016/08/02/iranians-connected-to-phishing.html
Former Syrian National Council vice-president Nour Al-Ameer fled to Turkey after being arrested and tortured by the Assad regime — that’s when someone attempted to phish her and steal her identity with a fake Powerpoint attachment purporting to be about the crimes of the Assad regime.
Al-Ameer smelled a phish and sent the email to the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab (previously), who traced the attack and found a seemingly accidentally exposed logfile on the phishing site that points to the attack having an Iranian connection; “possibly a privateer and likely working for either the Syrian or Iranian governments (or both).”
Copyright Office to FCC: Hollywood should be able to killswitch your TV
▻http://boingboing.net/2016/08/04/copyright-office-to-fcc-holly.html
Now, the Copyright Office (one of the most thoroughly captured agencies in the federal government) has jumped into the fray, taking the legally nonsensical — and drastically anti-public-interest — position that copyright gives the rightsholder the power to minutely control the public’s conduct while they are in the presence of a copyrighted work.
For example, I was once in a digital TV DRM standards meeting where the MPA’s rep argued vehemently for a flag that would cause a set-top box to switch off any outputs that led to a remote screen (for example, a wireless retransmitter that let you watch TV that was being decoded in your living room on a set that was in your bedroom). He argued that “being able to watch a TV show in one room that’s being received in another room has value, and if it has value, we should be able to charge for it.” He made similar arguments about limiting the length of time that a viewer could pause a show, arguing that while a 15-minute pause to go to the bathroom could be had for free, longer pauses (say, to settle a crying baby, cook dinner, or helping your kids with their homework) should be monetizable.