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This Impenetrable Program Is Transforming How Courts Treat DNA Evidence (wired.com)
mirandakatz writes: Probabilistic genotyping is a type of DNA testing that's becoming increasingly popular in courtrooms: It uses complex mathematical formulas to examine the statistical likelihood that a certain genotype comes from one individual over another, and it can work with the subtlest traces of DNA. At Backchannel, Jessica Pishko looks at one company that's caught criminal justice advocates' attention: Cybergenetics, which sells a probabilistic genotyping program called TrueAllele -- and that refuses to reveal its source code. As Pishko notes, some legal experts are arguing that Trueallele revealing its source code 'is necessary in order to properly evaluate the technology. In fact, they say, justice from an unknown algorithm is no justice at all.'
I think it is very reasonable to ask access, covered by NDA, to a source code when such code is used to produce results for criminal prosecution. Unless they can show independent third-party validation of their tool.
We have seen issues with red light cameras, we have seen issues with labs doing drug testing on hair, we have seen child abuse panics from psychology "experts". Both methods and experts have to be open for independent, impartial validation. Otherwise they are no better than a duck test.
Disagree. Bad code can cause normal behavior 99% of the time, abnormal 1% of the time. See also, THERAC-25.
I've done some genomic work, during the Human Genome Project. I had to step away from the work due to my concerns about the lack of quality. The analysis software of the data, to assemble longer genesic fragements for testing and verification, was so very very poor that all the scientists learned to ignore the analysis and order longer sequence manually, by eyeballing it with their personal experience. It was hideously expensive to do this constantly, especially with the amount of sequences to sample and test and which came back "does not work". Part of the result was that, because they were probing in the dark, they got far more false positives that had to be tested later, as part of an even longer or overlapping sequence, that even *that* data was unreliable.
We have *had* crime labs falsify evidence, with cases like https://www.cbsnews.com/news/a... . Without the ability to verify the provenance of the data, of the results, and of the analysis tools, the DNA analysis can be far too easy to falsify. It should be as verifiable as the scales used to measure the weight of drugs, or the spectrographic analyzer and its software.
Well it's only be ~10 years since the Inconvenient Truth. I'm not sure what "near future" mean. If that means 1 year to you or 50 years to the rest of us. (I think his film was aiming at the year 2100, but I don't recall exactly).
Here's an example, some islands are completely covered by water at high tide. http://theconversation.com/sea...
The most up to date information has projections range from 0.2 meters to 2.0 meters (0.66 to 6.6 feet) of sea level rise in the next 100 years. [Melillo et al., 2014]. And that's the thing about science, you'll find that it is never 100% accurate and if you look back to previous theories and predictions can be embarrassingly inaccurate. But the scientific method generally leads to better answers through many iterations of models, research and theories.
Al Gore's 20 feet rise greatly exceeds the most conservative models, as you've already noted. On the other hand if all the ice covering Antarctica, Greenland, and in mountain glaciers around the world were to melt, sea level would rise about 70 meters (230 feet). That's the far extreme of what could be done with the matter available on Earth, it's not at all likely. (maybe if the Earth's axis tilted to expose the poles? Or maybe if 10's of thousands of years went by and we acquired an atmosphere like Venus that make air temperature nearly uniform across the planet, including the poles?)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire