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Software to Predict "Troubled Youths"
A reader writes "The Times is running this story which talks about a pilot program, called Mosiac 2000, for a software program which is supposed to vet how violent a person is. It's being rolled out to high schools around the United States (20 to start) as a test-bed, in anticipation of more schools getting on board. The program will be used to grade a person's potential for violence against others, and hopes to stop any future Columbines. " Stuff like this just gives me the willies - must everyone conform to one set standard? Just because I'm different doesn't mean I'm violent.
an easier class just means more busy work and less chance of learning!
maybe if you do crappier work, the boss will give you an easier job! sorting mail is pretty easy, but mopping might be easier.
They can't drug kids without parental consent and they can't use this as "the computer knows better than you" unless we agree. Knowing my kid, I'd be willing for them to use this tool, but knowing my kid, I'd be raising all sorts of cain if it came back positive. It all goes back to involved assertive educated parenting. And yes, I know that many kids don't get that. So would it be so terrible if these kids did get some extra attention placed on them---I mean the positive kind, which is, unfortunately, hard to come by with overworked, underpaid, underrespected teachers. If I ruled the world...
foo!
...they could do DNA testing before birth do determine if the fetus has an inherent tendancy to be an outcast and/or violent, and then abort them if they fail to meet the requirements for social aptitude and pacifism. While they are at it, they could also check to see if their hair will be blond enough, their eyes blue enough, their skin white enough, and that they will have the proper tendancy for the required idealogical standards, and if they fail to meet those requirements, the fetus would be aborted. After all, we can't have all these undesireables running around now can we? Seems the perfect solution...the final solution. -Andy "Where is the outcry?" -me
Statistic are great predictors for scientists (I use them all the time). Any given truely random sample of a human population will result in a normally distributed curve. (Chesbov's Theorum). That means that the bulk of us are normal and some of us are way above normal and some of us are way below normal.
.01 (Considered restrictive for most programs of this sort). We would be wrong 1 out of every 100 tries. That is pretty cool if you are judging 50 students. You have a 50/50 chance of getting it all right. But if you judge 100,000 students, you will have ruined the lives of 1,000 of them incorrectly.
As the maker of the program, YOU have to decide what percentage you want to be in the above normal portion. (ie the creators of this program will have to decide what percentage of us are the "bad" people) You then also have to decide how often you're willing to be wrong. If you pick a level where you are never wrong, it will never detect anybody. If you pick a level where you detect people, you are wrong some of the time.
Statistics WILL NOT TELL YOU WHAT FRACTION OF THE POPULATION IS THE ABNORMAL ONES. You have to do that when you make the program. This is cool for when you are doing research, but it kind of sucks as a way to do it in real life.
For example, suppose we set an alpha of
This is what sucks about statistics in practice. Statistical error means you will ALWAYS be wrong some of the time. The number of wrongs in a system like this will be staggering.
yeah i agree, how do they know if someone is violent? i mean, i'm a clean cut dude, don't play quake or anything, never fight, have lots of great friends, a good job, a family that loves me and with who i spend a lot of time, and i'm a psycho. i am crazy, man. i love killing people. it's amazing. they can't profile me, man. no way. they never saw me coming. they still don't even know i'm here. i've been killing people on a monthly basis for 15 years! not just hookers, either. old people young people, innocent people, guilty people. the whole lot. i even stalk people sometimes. it's great.
and i'm gay, too.
Do you know the difference between a pizza and a Jew?
Ze pizza doesn't scream when you put it into ze oven.
I dunno. Thoughtcrime certainly comes to mind...
The next step is depraving people of oxygen during their pre-natal development to socially engineer society. That way, we won't even NEED to test 'em!
"Ok #44860020933, you were engineered to be a cab driver, so none of that "I wanna program" crap! "
This ain't 1984, ladies and gentlemen, it's more like Brave New World.
Call me paranoid, but I refuse to believe that a computerized evaluation of the human mind based on a series of questions "works" by any stretch of the imagination.
Don't forget the Skinny Puppy!!! omen
We should all reinstall Doom and buy KMFDM and Rammstein CDs and peddle Warez and stuff. There'll be so many of us that they won't have enough people to take us away in the paddy wagon. :-D
-Warren
One of the assumptions that people seem to be making is that there exists some model that psychiatrists or psychologists can use to _accurately_ predict anything at all about human behaviour. Jerf mentioned that they can tell if you're fudging your results. In my own experience, many psychologists can't tell how to tie their own shoes. Genetically, we've evloved so that we are pretty darn good at predicting what each other will do (quite the survival/repro advantage), but even with our big squichy brains, we still can't get a fix on things. It's unlikely that a computer will be able to do anywhere near as well.
Garbage in, garbage out. You hit my point #1 bang on the head. My other thought was that I've been through a fair amount of profiling, for military selection processes and for jobs. Based on some people I saw in the military, and assuming they went through the same profiling I went through, I'd say the damn stuff just doesn't work.
Smells like a Salem witch hunt to me, or perhaps shades of communist paranoia.
see subject
There sould be a national Jam Mosaic-2000 Day (or month, whatever). We all make ourselves look so violent (or conservative) that the test is deemed useless and drastically ineffective. Even if you dont participate, I will.
Yet I havent seen any posts saying this very thing. Makes me wonder how many slashdotters actually read the article ;-)
I personally think this program is compiled of stuff pulled out of a psycologist's ass.
Of course I have never seen the program, but if it is anything like the student acessment test I took when I was a freshman in college, (Why the %&$! are they asking me the same goddamned question worded differently?) I could see how anybody could fake the test. Just find the set of questions that basically ask the same question and answer them similarly. It was this test that gave me a bad impression of psycologists in the first place.
What I think would be better would be if the councelor asked the questions, and then feed the results (and his impression of the validity of the students statements) to get a reaction, and then give the thourough documentation (and hopefully references!) to what MIGHT be a problem with the student. Only then should (s)he be concerned.
You just passed the test!
I've read Gavin DeBecker's The Gift of Fear. An interesting read.
DeBecker, by his own admission, grew up in an extremely violent household as a child, and as an adult has now made a career of attempting to predict violent behavior in others.
What becomes scary is when one applies DeBecker's prediction algorithm factors such as motive, opportunity, ability, etc., as the binary weighted factors that they are. As an example, I rated myself against my neighbor. Now, I'd never hurt a flea, but because of predictive happenstance like proximity (lives next door), I own a firearm (shoot clays), and other similar nonsense, I rated one check-box short of a perfect threat score.
Now, imagine a kid in school. Bad grade on an exam? Please check the motive box. In class everyday? Check proximity box. Dad hunts? Check the ability box. You get the picture.
Honestly, Christianity and morality are orthoganol factors. I am not a christian, but various people in my life have told me that I'm an unusually (pick one:)good/kind/decent/giving/selfless/polite person. If any spiritual belief encourages responsibility and generousness, it's hinduism -- how can anyone be selfish at the expense of others when we are all essentially the same soul living different lives in synchrony? Moreover, some of the cruellest and most selfish people in my life and in the history of the world have been Christians. I'm not saying that all Christians are bad people. I would merely posit that Christianity is by no means a sure cure of the ills of the world.
I read this book in an english class in middle school (I'm a senior in HS now), and there was a small furor over it, because "they killed a baby!" Nobody realized that killing the baby was probably the kindest and most humane part of the book, as opposed to a determination by committee of the potential and the future of every child. Very upsetting. :(
This whole stuff reminds me of a trend that appeared in France for professional evaluation a few years ago. Many recruiters started to use the famous Rorchar test: you look a sheet of paper with a random ink pattern and say what you think about it. It's very effective in psychiatry to explore obsessive patterns in very severe psychiatric pathologies (schizophrenia, etc), but it's not worth a dime for "normal" people. But it was supposed to be a "scientific" test. So, it had to be ok.
Most serious recruiters quickly dropped this BS.
Basically, these sorts of tests are well engineered to ferret out manipulative answers, they are written by teams of professional psycologist, to ask subtle questions. You'd NEVER see a question like "Do you like to torture animals?", you'd see questions like: "Look at this picyute, which statement is the boy most likely saying to the adult?", or "Why do you think the American Revolution was started?" seemingly unrelated questions that can be coorellated statictically..
In the words of Cereal Killer "1984, yeah, right man, thats a typo, Orwells here and hes livin large", why not try some humanity towards your fellow people before you label them and cast them out.
That post deserves a 5 - insightful...
Where's that ball to grab?
The computer geek would have installed Back Oriface on the testing machine, and would come away clean... the Jock who towel-snapped him however would soon be attending classes wearing a muzzle.
though i agree with you on the parenting issue...that if you teach a kid how to react as an adult and give him/her the emotional tools to cope with problems in life...that is NO EXCUSE for testing every wierd, unique, depressed, ABUSED or just Freaky/geeky kid to see if they will react violently...if we stopped allowing the public school system to fuck over students, and if we stopped allowing bullying to take place in our schools the problem will be better handled. and frankley that is the REAL problem here, you push anyone far enough and they will break, period, violence is just one of the reactions to a psychological break...this reminds me of leaches...i know rather than treat the disease will just bleed the victims...GREAT IDEA!!!
Though it's easy enough to feed it bad information, the test is so damn long that it winds up pretty well controlled. Sure, if someone went out of their way they could fuck up their results, but the test will realize it's being fucked with and make note of it. We need to keep tabs on people like that, right? heh.
* = I generally agree with your statement that in psychiatric diagnosis there's a whole lot of wiggle room, and this is not a good thing. There are, however, standards. Whether or not the DSMesque standards are valid will continue to be debated, and the DSM itself will continue to be revised. But it serves it's purpose as a baseline standard to work from.
Based on the article I read, I was under the impression that this was a questionnaire submitted to students who were considered potentially dangerous (for whatever reason), the results of which would then be evaluated by a computer based on a set of statistics (gathered from case histories of convicted offenders and whatnot). The controversy is: will poor conclusions be drawn by school staff based on these results?
Drop a load on my head if I completely misinterpreted the article.
Sweet, you mean if I coded something like that with a GUI and an advanced-acting backend I could get rich?
also pick the kids dates, to remove the stress of asking a girl to the prom, and to prevent competition leading to violence.
Are you kidding? This is a great idea. This way you can spot kids who might do something nasty one day, and lock them up before they do it! That way we save the cost of lengthy trials, and the crime is prevented without victims or violence of any kind.
If they refine this technique, perhaps they can spot kids who might grow up to become murderers, and electrocute these kids before they do any harm.
Applicants for any job can be screened beforehand, on the basis of their mosaic2000 score.
If we can screen for violence, perhaps we could also sceen for natural curiosity?
Hey, I agree with you. BUt even if we all walked in tomorrow, and started getting more involved with our schools, teaching our kids assertive communication skills, how will that help the teenagers RIGHT NOW? These efforts will show results in 10 years. Wouldn't it be worth testing if we could get these teens help now?
>And this is an excellent example of where such a >program can go completely wrong. not only that, this is true independently of whether the program is implemented on a programmable computer or as a set of rules for bureaucrats to follow.
"Access to guns" is very common outside the cities in the south and west US. I live in rural southeast Texas. I would be surprised if less than half the households within this county had a gun. Whatever others think of that, it is a fact of life in the rural south and west, and it will not go away.
Hmm, just like the tests that prevented missile secrets form being leaked...Or is it that you bone up how to pass an honesty test before the event. Tests prove that you can pass tests. The nice guys are still fuming over a comment by Judge that 'women/spouses' sometimes need a rougher than usual handling' and this is sometimes acceptable. No guns - they were confiscated when they passed a law banning them. Anti Violence Orders (AVO's) A court order to restrain husbands on real or percieved threats, even if imagined - proof not needed Dog laws. Pitt Bulls banned, Threatening dogs put down. Car and right to drive can be taken away with just a few infringemnets NET Computer Censorship. Nothing nasty. And of course no porn on the TV (Pay too). And no hitting kids with wooden spoons, and lots of other feel good laws. REALITY CHECK: You can pass laws, you can test, you can take items away, but every country has its percentage of weirdos and kooks - except ours don't use guns anymore. Maybe its something in the Beef, or is it Elk that causes it.
These systems could be surpising accurate. Why? Because those young youths who pass the test get an easy life, the remainder (who appear different) get hassled to the point where violence is the only escape therefore confirming the predictions. Nice bit of positive feedback there... Systems like this are not cause and effect and should not be interfered with, they are complex systems which a couple of shrinks and a computer program cannot model accurately... A more balanced society where less people are alienated instead of more, could lead to a reduction in the disasters which are occuring with increasing frequency in the developed world...
There have been lots of comments from people who would not be willing to take the test, or who said they would skew their answers. However, the article points out that the program generates a list of questions for the Evaluator to answer, not the suspect student. How that information is obtained is not addressed in the article, or in what I read of the referenced website.
There's an idea! See if that company will let us test their program as a /. poll, and we can figure out how likely it is that /.ers will start shooting people (as opposed to just flaming ;)
Christianity gives you some sense of accountability. If you have no beliefs in something higher than you then you are a god. If you are a god then you can decide what is right or wrong. I am a Christian and have been for some time and God has helped me countless times with my temper. If I had no beliefs I can guarantee you I would be in jail or dead right now.
I just tell my son (as of this moment only 6 years old) not to submit to any type of "test" without my consent.
He doesn't HAVE to take the test. If they say he has to, I'll just say no, he doesn't. What are they going to do? It's public school!
How dare they do something like this! And of course, they won't....not as long as I have breath in my body!
If they're so hip to doing something like this, then of course I'll personally make all the school board take the test themselves, and I'll post all the results for public display. If they think they can make my son take some inane test, then I think I can make them take the same test...after all, they're working for me right? A tax-payer?
If I sound too naive, so be it...but my son still won't take any "test" now or in the future.
I think you just haven't been listening very carefully. Usually such things aren't even said in anger. One friend to another, etc. Context is the important thing, really.
These things are too easy to cheat, they'll never be reliable. Example:
Q: If you found a gun what would you do?
1) shoot people
2) return it to the police immidietely!
I think if you had half a brain, you know what you would pick.
This is all meaningless. I should send my children (when I have them) to public schools to be force fed fascist/communist ideology, get assaulted, slandered, harrassed, and possibly killed just so that they can be "diverse". My personal favorite line is about the importance of socialization of dealing with difficult people. I haven't been assaulted at work yet or harrased or slandered this statment isn't true. If such a thing were to happen there is civil and criminal law to use which I couldn't use in school.
I am reminded of the saying, "I never let my schooling get in the way on my education". I don't want my children's schooling getting in the way of their education.
If you want to try to save public education, go right ahead, but you will not sacrifice my children for it.
the "jew" in your non-funny joke wouldn't have screamed, either, because he/she would have already been dead from gassing, shooting, or other form of murder prior to being put in the crematorium. Go to a Holocaust museum (like in DC) someday and perhaps you won't be flippant about such a horrendous event.
YOU may not be violent. Geeks are more than everyone else very diffrent (no, from each other). I don't have the homicidal urge to murder people for no reason, but I am quick-tempered. Several years ago when kids teased^H^H^H^H^H^Hharrassed^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmade my life hell for years is when it showed, 3rd graders don't bring guns to school (yes I was in the THIRD grade), but we did organize into groups and violently retaliate aginst the people who harrassed us. I'm not saying that the boys at columbine where right, but make their life hell for years and what do you expect? Now you all go pointing fingers. Now that I grew bigger than the people who used to tower over me (so amusing) they don't bother me. Now I only occasionaly take some "joke" to seorusly(sp), after all of those fights they still havent figured it out. I would test as violent on that test. This is not how you solve the problem, stop the harassment! BTW- Did it say they took the reaction from the kid's answers? Easy! I'll fake it!
The fact is, many high school students are there because they *have* to be, not because they want to be. Being forced to take some random test may get them out of gym, but it doesn't mean they're going to read every question or even care about the results. While everyone talks about this test targeting geeks, the fact is its supposed to target people who are violent, so not everyone taking the test is going to actually care what they put down. In fact, it's the smart ones that will probably do well on it because they'll know what to answer.
So anyone want to renounce their citzenship with me, and go start a geek island at an undisclosed location somwhere in the proximity of the Carribean?
Forget trying to encourage parents to discipline their kids, spend more time with their kids, monitor their children's activities... Let's just buy some really expensive software that claims to point out the MOST dangerous of this generation of monsters we are creating and that will save a TON of work. So what that the software isn't infallible. So it points out some kids who are perfectly stable and we send them into a nightmare of endless therapy and make pariahs of them amongst their peers. It's technology, BABY! Perhaps soon we will have some cool software that will "claim" to read brainwaves and tell us what kids are actually THINKING...just think what we could do to them with that! I mean, we have to have SOME way to get these kids out of their parent's hair. Parents have to work and feed them. The least kids can do is raise themselves in a proper manner. Geez.....
In order for the computer to search for patterns, someone had to tell it what patterns to look for and how to search for them. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, it's just a necessary part of building a computer model. However, all models involve assumptions. If the person using the program does not understand the underlying assumptions, then he can't possibly know it's limitations. That can be dangerous. I am concerned that budget constraints and other motivators will cause school officials to use a program like this in place of a competent professional analysis of the data. In my industry, for example, I use finite element analysis (FEA). Some of the programs I've used are quite user friendly and a person without the appropriate technical background could learn to use them. However, I know from experience not to trust their results.....
So how exactly is this test going to prevent an intelligent (albeit antisocial) and bitter kid from blowing up his school? Presumably this kid would be intelligent enough to know what this test is for and would skew the results on purpose by answering questions randomly. It'll just weed out the less careful ones. (Note: keep in mind intelligence != morals, so don't waste your time replying some BS about "if this theoretical kid is so intelligent, then why does he want to blow up his school?". after all, several serial killers were highly intelligent people.)
I mean, I know Amazon is being stupid enough to try and enforce a ridiculous patent, but B&N is a pretty evil big corporation as well. Of course, I may just be saying that because they're the bookstore at my university. Probably any bookstore would be a symbol of evil to me if they ran my university bookstore.
So you are saying Black People do have drugs in there car? Thanks now all us Honkies can get free drugs by breaking into their cars..
Unfortunately, this is just what the schools will do. At the schools I attended, the administration was lazy and clueless, and I'm sure that is normal across the nation. I can just picture the school passing out the tests at the start of the year and neatly dropping everyone into pretty little "Crazy" and "Not Crazy" boxes. For the next few weeks the administration pats itself on the back about how much they are doing to prevent violence and how much work they saved doing it (even though chances are very good that they did NOTHING before)...
If this was true, wouldn't all British people be locked up? :-)
Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?
The fact is that this tool will be placed into the hands of bureaucrats [administrators]. How many bureaucrats do you know who think for themselves? It's always "I'm just following policy" and "Well, the computer says X, sorry, there's nothing I can do."
Just think of it: we're giving this tool to folks who have made a habit of automatically drugging kids who don't behave "correctly". The mind boggles at what they'll do with this.
Gordon.
Columbine was a result of MKULTRA type mind control. When certain individuals were exposed to specific symbology a pre-programmed set of actions was played out. Very frightenning. I urge everyone to read as much as they can on the background and lead-up to the shootings. Dont believe the mainstream propaganda.
When I was 8, my parents got divorced (this was close to 20 years ago) my teachers new, I was given liberties because of it. I know some Bs became As and when I goofed off I didn't get in as much trouble. In junior high and highschool they had a wealth of "programs" for "troubled kids," I was never one of them but the school knew who they were, it was documented. My highschool guidance people knew my parents had separated.
I went to school in the suburbs, mostly white, mostly middle class, the "bad apples" were easy to spot. Or so it seemed, I wonder if some kids were mislabeled because of their financial situation, "key club" (I forget exactly what it was but it was a kind of leadership group, the key was to success I think) was mostly poorer kids but it was also full of a lot of known trouble makers. I was never invited to be involved with it. There were methods of finding the troubled kids because they were doing it. Who knows how good it worked of how unfair it was?
Police do the same things, it's horrible. I know good people who some how manage to attract cops like a magnet, probably has to do with their skin color.
This stuff already happens, they are just formalizing it. What's worse to be profiled and have no idea why or to be profiled because you got a score on a test? I think it sucks, I probably would fail the test. I also think from a purely academic and scientific perspective it would be interesting to know if there is a way to predict these kinds of crimes, I'm not sure how or if we should move on it though. What if the test came up with a short list of potential criminals and what if 80% of them turned out to be criminals? Would that or wouldn't it be interesting? You have to deal with that 20% of mislabeled people, of course.
It's funny how this stuff works, crime becomes bad so they throw money at the police, threaten them a little, fire a police chief. The police get a new chief and he knows his butt is on the line so what does he do? He yells at the officers, they have to get more arrests, they have to write more tickets, they have to crack more cases. What do the officers do? They start infringing on civil liberties, they rough up criminals a little more, they profile people, they start assuming you're a little bit more guilty. Crime goes down, the people get happy. Then a few years later the cycle reverses, the people awaken from their blindness and see that minorities in their communities are under attack by the cops. The cops got a little rough on a couple of routine take-downs and a minicam caught it. The people get pissed and make the cops change their ways.
We're doing the same things to teachers now, the buzz is to pay them based on test scores in a lot of places. Their plate just got a little bit more full though because students are rightly scared in American schools becuase there has been a lot of shootings. It's inevitable, they are going to do it no matter what you want because the public wants something to be done.
Before you condemn this idea, please read De Becker's book, "Protecting the Gift---Keeping Children and Teenagers Safe (And Parents Sane). This guy is not some malevolent Big Brother, but honestly concerned with prevention. (This book came out months before Columbine---he's not trying to make a buck from that.)
I teach personal safety classes to adults and children, and I see people coming to these classes AFTER they've been attacked. Not only do they have to work at learning simple self-defense skills, but they have to battle the demons that arose with their attacks. I say let's work on prevention, not solely from relying on any test, but from parenting our children, getting involved with our communities, and teaching assertiveness, communication and self-defense skills to our kids just the way we teach them to read. Maybe if our kids could talk about what their problems are, they would have less need to release anger through violence.
The real question that comes to mind...is the testing going to be mandatory? Is it going to be only for people who 'appear' to be trouble students?
If they test everyone, that sounds like invasion of privacy (unless they get permission from everyone's parents). If they only test 'problem' students, what qualifies a student then? Sounds like another level of political BS.
Take this scenario, one child appears to have violent tendencies and some parents/students/teachers/etc. request that he be tested(assuming they don't test everyone). That child's parents refuse to let him/her be tested (the parents must have the right to refuse! - i hope) -- then what? I have a feeling if a child seems to be a problem child the paretns could/should take him/her to a PSYCHOLOGIST - not sit them in front of an impersonal copmuter terminal.
There have been debates, proposed laws, etc. over what web sites do with the information they collect - now what are we going to do with this information??? Do the schools get to do as they like with it? What is someone tests positive and the parents refuse to have him/her treated in or out of a school by a counselor? Can they remove the child from school?
I guess my real point here is that this whole move to make a standardized 'disturbed, violent person' test is useless. If you're worried about the children then get teachers, administrators, aides, counselors, and school systems that GIVE A DAMMN about the STUDENTS. Pay attention to the students, don't treat them like little criminals, and don't act like you expect them to go on a rampage and need to do something to prevent it. This whole things is a knee-jerk reaction to a very few people that went nutts. Why not do something GOOD for today's children? Why not prevent students from being tormented to the point where they feel they need to lash out at any degree (with guns OR fists)?? Sorry, that would make sense.
Then its time to learn to fake swallowing pills :)
I'd really love to take a sample test and see what rating I get. Anyone care to formulate one?
Oh I get it we've all fallen into a scifi movie.
well alow me to stamp a bar code on my freaking head and apologize for being in anyway different.
Hey it's already here. I myself was wrongfully accused of leaving a bomb threat and kicked out of a class during my senior year. why. I have long hair and like computers. This was LITERALLY the only thing they could say about my character. and no I'm not using literally as a hyperbole. this is some scarry stuff man. It seems that schools have gone from being places of learning to prisons for children.
"My rights are being abused! My rights are being abused! My rights are being abused!"
Doesn't it strike you a bit funny how loudly and vigorously people yell about their 'rights'? "I have the right to do this! I have the right to do that! And if you say I don't, then you're violating my right to say I have the right to do those things!"
Bah! Time for a close encounter with the Platinum Baseball Bat of Truth....
In the United States, the only rights you have are the ones guaranteed by the Constitution. Everything else is a privilege. Indeed, the 10th Amendment reserves powers not expressly granted the Federal Govt. to the States, therefore, the state you might live in can legally pass a law requiring that students be tested for possible violent tendencies.
I read these complaints about how this form of testing might violate our rights, but I don't see how. What it will end up doing is stereotyping certain people. It will mark certain people as being possible dangers. It will be correct sometimes, and incorrect at others. It is merely a tool, and no where in the US Constitution does it say you have the right to be protected against such a tool!
You do not have a guaranteed right to privacy, at least in the US, because that right is not granted in the Constitution. You're guaranteed certain protections against overzealous police forces, but not to complete and total privacy. Nor are you guaranteed the right to not be insulted, stereotyped, pigeon-holed, ignored, laughed at, held in contempt, or tested for possible violent tendencies by a standardized test. Deal with it.
I would recommend that you not forget that in other countries around the world, a person's "rights" end at the barrel of a soldier's gun.
---
SlashDot: An Interactive National Enquirer
It seems to me that many people "rate" others
on a one dimensional scale. Either they are bad
or good, with varying degress thereof. But this
cannot hold up. There are too many dimensions to
consider. There is an infinite number of ways
to be "normal". A program like this would have to
test against a finite number of "normal" subjects
to determine your personality and from there, how violent you can be. Anyone can turn into a violent freak and repeat Columbine... ANYONE. But nobody seems to realize that just because we pass the test one day, it doesn't mean we will pass it again later.
I guess it breaks down to, just WHAT sort of habbits/traits does the software look at for so called "Troubled" students. This can be very misleading. Everyone at my school thought I was a satanist. They were all wrong, yet I went along with it because they were all afraid of me, and left me alone.(I thus rarely had to deal with bully's, before I was labeled a satanist, I got picked on all the time.)
Not to mention that a particular computer company, that shall remain nameless, wants to put an ID number in as many computers as possible, to complement all the other, personal ID numbers.
From what I see, looks like a good way to justify discriminating against certain groups. What I remember of high school, the athletes and the little perfect performers were exalted by the school and everyone else, and the rest of us were just there. What if the profile says the school's star linebacker could be a violent person? Will that be taken as seriously as if the program identifies some quiet wallflower geek who spends all his/her time in the computer lab as violent?
My conclusion: computers are good tools, but such subjective profiling should be left to a professional psychologist who is able to use his/her best judgement to interpret the results.
I don't believe (from what I read in here... I don't have an NY Times acct) that this is how the test works. It sounds to me like the teachers are answering the questions based on observations. Questions like "Student spends excessive time alone." Most of the psychological tests they use to decide whether to put you in the special class are filled out by somebody else.
Read the article. its not a test-everyone-and-prosecute-the-winners situation. It's a tool for guidance councilers to help them compare students who are already know to be 'troubled' with case histories. It's just an expert system. No different than a doctor plugging your pysical symptoms into a expert system that will confirm his prognosis or point out other possibilities, based on thousands of other cases.
Is that such a program can be used to attack non-main stream behaviors, groups or cultures, and enforce more conformity. So much for the land of the free and home of the brave. Apparently diversity and Individualism are such are grave threat to economic management of schools, and society in general, that they must be identified and stamped out as early as possible.
A pity that teaching tolerance, and respect for others is not on the agenda.
Mosaic \Mo*sa"ic\, a. Of or pertaining to the style of work called mosaic; formed by uniting pieces of different colors; variegated; tessellated; also, composed of various materials or ingredients.
Buddy I was watch at school and i mean watched the priciple called me the next unabomber and i was searched daily even through all my teachers and peers said i was the most nicest and would never do that i was ridiculed and made fun of by the school till i was illegally kicked out but what scares me with this program i know the school well target more innconect people and make their lives misireable like me(And the school made me go to costly couseling that did nothing but look at me and tell me to take about 8 pills a day that made me sleep 24-7)I hope that all the kids can become as happy as i am now through i am going to get my GED and only missing one or two questions and the 5 part test even through i made d's and f's at school look like this 153 iq is good for something
Space_Man
space_man@earthlink.net
"....how they love Big Brother" Political Correctness = Fascism
As far as it goes, his system was developed
to track the stalkers of the rich and
famous and he's excellent at that job.
Hollywood hires his company to do their
dirty work and he does it well.
I'd read his books, The Gift of Fear
and Protecting the Gift before making a final
judgment. They actually give decent suggestions
about dealing with potentially violent people.
Do I trust him? No. Do I like this in
schools? No. But having read about
100 articles of geeks being bounced from
school for no reason, anything which
puts some logic in the process is worth
trying.
Because the way schools are run, kids are
going to be kicked out. Until you get on s
school boards and demand changes, until people
sue districts and win, anything which will
say "this kid is weird,not violent leave
him alone" and "Jimmy Jock is boiling
with rage and hits his girlfriend, his
threat to kill the shop teacher is
for real"
is better than what we have now.
-SGill
beyond thunderdome. all of the above done. Oops I went and graduated. well you can still try.
big brother, the system, the man, they can all go make like a bunch of cross eyed hermaphrodites and go do something physically impossible with themselves
I'd have to say that there seems to be increasing ignorance of the 2nd Amendment as these school-violence-related stories break. Just because someone happens to use a gun to mow down an array of jocks is no more indicative of a correlation between gun ownership and violence than someone using a car to mow down an array of pedestrians would be of car ownership and violence. So, having "gun access"-based questions as part of your personality profiling could lead to some pretty serious inaccuracies...
Before I continue, let me address the following: I don't own a gun. It's not because I'm disinterested or find them reprehensible; in fact, I'm pretty skilled with them and believe they have their merits. I don't own a gun because of a simple matter of opportunity cost: I've always found something else I'd rather spend my money on. Guns aren't cheap, and compared to faster processors, new video games, larger monitors, etc., they're pretty low on my list of spending priorities.
Now that that's settled, let me drive home the point I was trying to make: I went to a high school where guns were commonplace. Among good students, among student-athletes, among just about everybody. It was in a part of the country with one of the highest gun-ownership ratios in the country. People routinely kept shotguns in their cars at school, and typically would head for the hills and dove/partidge/whatever hunting immediately thereafter. I knew a person whose bedroom would, in some places here on the East Coast (where I live now), pass for an Armory. Out there, it was truly NO BIG DEAL. In fact, no joke, the "Armory" owners parents were a guidance counselor and a principal in the school district. Did they know about it? Yes. Did they encourage it? Yes -- the father (the guidance counselor), while not quite as gung ho as his son, was a pretty heavy-duty gun afficianado himself. Shall I continue? How about a math teacher I had who was a thirty-year teaching veteran, a member of a religious group that is conspicuously non-violent (You remember those "conscientious objectors"? He's a Quaker.), oh and he also has the LARGEST PRIVATE PISTOL COLLECTION I'VE EVER SEEN: his avocation is writing pistol reviews.
So let's finally dispense with the "guns kill people" nonsense... If you want to predict what kind of person is going to react unfavorably to their surroundings, first examine what reaction the surroundings are having on the person.
the title says it all.
Hey you in the suit take this blue pill. I'm taken the red one. the rest of you find my body and pull the plug.
There is one additional part more: a number. The usual answer is 3.
PS: If you ever have to take a test like this, answer honestly. They can tell if you are fudging the answers, unless you know what you're doing, which you don't if you're still in high school (unless you've taken several college-level psych courses, and, even then, probably had to help write the test to know the "answers"). Like those pathetic 'honesty tests'? Please. This is another dirtwater company cashing in on the public's need for for closure, and the school system's need for plausable deniability. As for psych classes, your a greater faith in their content than I do. Some of my favorite books are things my high school teachers might have found 'disturbing'. Perhaps the intellectually recursive monkey-cage that /. has become should concentrate on questions for which they it is better suited. I wonder how many penguins can dance on the head of a pin?
So it singles out jocks? Isn't that discriminatory?
As a nonconformist geek who is currently under digital wiretap surveillance by the great state of Texas for possessing intelligence and personality quirks, despite never having received so much as a traffic ticket, I am in no way surprised by the development of this software. This buffoonery is almost funny, almost. But if you think that this era is the height of the witch-hunt for those who dare to be different, let me assure you all. . . you ain't seen nothin' yet.
A geek wrote it. Like any other type of people, you can find someone who will do it for the money.
Condemned for heresy and imprisoned by the church. Being different is becoming a cause for being oppressed, not just by certain social groups, but by the gov't. Now you can have you medical, social and financial security numbers assigned before you even get through high school. Not that they'll be used for identification purposes or anything, no no of course not. And you wont be denied insurance, a promotion or a job simply because you scored low/high on some test. It will be because so and so wasa more dynamic individual at the college he got into (which you didnt for fear of... sniping, I mean becuase you werent preisident of so-n-so). It's not legal to discriminate against anyone but white males. The KKK for example wasn't allowed to march in NYC (though 6000 non-KKK showed up and were responsible for several assaults and arrests). Granted the KKK is a unofficially a bunch of white trash, but still, they're supposed to be free to be white trash. I mean Farrakan directly supports killing white people as a "message" and if he can speak, so should the others. Support the freedom of others, precedent used against them WILL be used against you. "When they came for the Jews, I said nothing, I was not a Jew. When they came for the Unions, I said nothing, I was not in a Union. When they came for me, no one said anything, there was no one left." - Some guy whose name I dont remember.
I spent an hour or so studying the issue on both the web site linked to and the company's home page (www.gdbinc.com). After finally deciding upon an oppinion, I was left with a feeling that this system might work for evaluating rational adults, but would certainly expirience problems when dealing with children. I believe that if you give children tests their whole lives where they are expected to fill in the "right" answer, they will have trouble adapting to a test where there are none. On a test like the one proposed, a child may ponder a question, trying to determine the impact of their answers on their own situation to find the "right" answer. The largest problem with the tests is that they assume the child will offer honest results. In the end the system may only catch the less scheming ones, those that answer "yes, I recently purchased a firearm" or "yes, I really do love my plastic-explosive animal collection". In the end the system may simply lead the people in charge of managing these kids into a false sense of security. In fact, the combany's web site specifically mentions that the system is designed more towards establishing innocence than guilt. Thus, I believe a system such as the one mentioned here should never be implemented for students below college level. It may not cause or prevent another Columbine, but it certainly may create the atmosphere of ignorance that led up to it.
Due I'm there! Bring da ruckus to all them muthafucka's!.
You must remember that the BATF is such a handy hammer for the Federal Government; it's hardly surprising that everything starts looking like a nail...
I Agree. Another point: If i snuff 100 enemies on "Deltaforce" should someone come and lock me up? In the real world i wouldn't hurt a fly.
For some reason it seems as though most of the people here assume that receiving a positive result on this test would result in some kind of negative action being taken against the individual. In reality what this test is trying to do is already being employed in many schools by means of school psychiatrists. They hope to identify people who are having serious problems and then help them work through these problems in a constructive manner. Obviously this system could be abused, but it is not valid to reject it based on this argument. That being said, I think it is ironic that everyone is so concerned about not classifying kids in schools, when this already done through grades, class ranking, standardized testing, etc.
In case you didn't know, there's a similar test in Finland when you go to the army. These questions are actual questions asked in the silly gathering where the military people evaluate your personality and assign you to some military base:
:-P
Have you ever been a goal keeper in an ice-hockey game?
If you were a painter, would you like to paint flowers?
Do you hear sounds?
Do you hate your mother?
Have you ever played with dolls?
You get the idea. There are about 500 yes/no questions. Then they feed it through an optical reader and you get a weird evaluation about whether you need psychiatric assistance (ie. totally out of it), do not handle stress well, are especially suited for leader training, or if you're considered "normal"
The test really is funny. A DJ I know has tinnitus ("Hear sounds? Yes") and is not too fond about his mother ("Hate mother? Yeah"), so they sent him to a psychiatrist.
Conform and obey! Happiness is mandatory!
One can't help but see a parallel between this and various methods used to determine whether a woman was a witch several hundred years ago. The same elements are all present: The declaration of opinion as fact, the need to hide criteria from public scrutiny... I'm a big fan of lying to every nosy question I'm asked. Even as a high school student, it was simple to determine what was the "right" answer on all the "non-judgemental" judgement criteria. Still, it's a good scam.
And yet it was only *within* those past five years that the mental health community started saying, "Gee, you know, we compiled this big list of indicators that we know are common to sexually abused kids, but we never stopped to ask if they were common *only* to the sexually abused kids. Hunh, would you look at that. Several of these 'indicators,' on the basis of which any adult perceived to be in a responsible position can be arrested and thrown in jail, are actually normal for kids in general. Oh well."
If you read Gavin DeBecker's "The Gift of Fear," you'll find out which criteria he uses to judge violent tendencies. And they are criteria considerably more sensible than the ones that most schools are using now, and considerably more sensible than underinformed Slashdotters have convinced themselves this program "must" be using.
They have nothing to do with what you wear, what music you listen to, how much time you spend coding, what sport (if any) you play... Anyone who goes off half-informed and starts posting "It'll brand a scarlet letter on me, just because I wear a trenchcoat!" is talking from their fear, not from their knowledge.
The reason I think DeBecker's criteria make good sense is because they are functional rather than merely correlated criteria. In other words, trying to guess who's going to commit murder based on who wears a trenchcoat is lunatic, because wearing a trenchcoat is not a causal factor for murder. But a person who believes in "getting revenge" when he believes something bad has been done to him is considered a higher risk -- because most violent acts are perceived by their perpetrators are "righting a wrong." (I find it interesting that one Slashdotter already brought up the issue of "crime of passion" murders -- apparently under the impression that everyone, confronted with the same stressor, has an equal tendency of turning to violence as a response.)
Even if you don't agree with the principles by which this software operates, there's a phrase that should be welcome news to anyone who's suffered from Columbine backlash -- and instead, it's been cited principally as a hook on which to hang further paranoia. That phrase is "... Mosaic's immediate virtue would be in producing detailed documentation of its evaluation of a troubled student ..." This means that if this product takes an unexpected sharp 180-degree turn to all Gavin DeBecker's published work, and it does say "Student wears black trenchcoat. Student plays Doom. Take no chances; expel immediately"...
I realize that we as a geek community have reasons to keep an alert eye out for stereotyping. And we all have reasons to be wary of software sold under the claim that it will auto-magically solve social problem X; such software tends to be like a Ouija board, invested with even more credulity by the naturally credulous because they have no idea where this wisdom is coming from, or whose agenda it serves.
But we should not be stereotyping. Not if we want to be free of it ourselves. It's truly upsetting to see Slashdotters leaping to conclusions based on stereotypes. "so-and-so uses such-and-such system to try and predict behavior" -- where so-and-so can range from "the FBI" to "the principal of my school" -- "therefore this new system must be full of exactly the same racism/sexism/geekism/differentism as such-and-such!" Uh-hunh. Right. And Linux suffers from all the flaws of Windows, because they're both operating systems.
The wonderful program will classify people as safe or dnagerous, and anyone whom the program can't peg must, by definition, be unstable and unpredictable. And as we all know, unstable people are x times more likely to go on killing sprees!!!!!! We need to lock such people away before then can kill!
A therapist who deals with troubled children told me... The ones who use the software are already headed for treatment -- abused, living on the street, hooked on drugs, etc. Not picked big-brother-like out of schools and homes. By looking at the responses, the therapist can approach the child in a way that is least likely to antagonize / frighten etc. them. One wrong move and you may never get through to them. The therapist in question is already injured for life by a psychiatric patient, so I don't think a heads-up on potentially violent patients is too out of line.
> we all say things like, "Im going to kill you"
:-)
No, we don't.
It would be a little easier if people meant what they said and said what they meant, wouldn't it?
Someone else can take "I'm going to kill you" as a serious threat, regardless of what you think.
Try the old "it's just a joke" or "I didn't mean it" explanation the next time you go through airport security and talk about bombs aboard airplanes.
yeah, Christianity, that's it. That will save us all. GET A FUCKING CLUE YOU FREAK.
Get used to it. Public schools are prisons for
children: their primary purpose is social
indoctrination, and, increasingly, confinement.
Huck Finn would have "lit out for the
territories". Only, today, there are no
territories and the penalty for truancy is
parental incarcaration.
Oh, and by the way, Huck Finn is banned in
most public school libraries.
Good luck youth,
S.L. Clemens
---
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Well, let's think about this. You obviously don't need the convicts coming to talk to you, but what about people who do? Maybe what this software will do is figure out which people need to hear the convicts, so they can get something out of it, while you do your normal thing.
Actually, you hear about the American Airlines Pilots who smuggled a lot of crack, that happened about three months ago. There you go. Pasted all over the national news. Another person proven wrong. My job here is done.
I'm from Europe. I understand that gun laws is a sensitive issue in the USA. I bet that shooting is a nice hobby. But wasn't easy access to guns the bottom line which made the Colorado incident as tragic as it was?
No matter how violent someone is, they can't kill that many people with their bare hands, even when wearing a trenchcoat.
The computer program is just some fog to keep everyone's minds off the real issue. Does it matter whether you're a violent maniac or someone ordinary who just "snaps", if getting a gun is so easy?
The problem with your argument about putting God back in the school system is that Christianity brings a false sense of morality and stability in a person.
I know this to be incorrect as I am a christian and it doesn't help one bit....
If they still believe that Doom and the music of the deranged children caused the incident then they do not yet understand their motivation. How can one determine who the next psycho will be if they aren't willing to discover what happened to the first
You don't have to be a right winger to realize that a teenager who abuses animals is going on to worse, much worse. Once you get some background on Kleybold and Harris, you realize that their parents were worthless and that something evil was going to happen here.
The MMPI and dozens of others available off the shelf are excellent predictors of future behavior, mostly because they pick up on past behavior.
You're a creature of habit. People who pick on the defenseless (animal torturers) are likely to corner others into situations where they can't defend themselves.
A boss who philanders with his/her peers is OK in an organization, because they are dating with someone who can retaliate if things get out of hand. A boss who dates those 3 or 4 levels down knows this, and is going for someone powerless in case things get out of hand. Really sick things happen in this instance.
Just keep in mind you are knowable with just an hour's worth of testing. Employers do this sort of testing all the time, and not just at hire. I'd advise buying a half a dozen of these tests and taking them, just so you can self score them. It's mighty frightening.
This all smacks of "spectral evidence" and the Salem witch trials. So if this shrink-in-a-box rules you to be "potentially dangerous", what then? Expulsion? Required counseling (at who's cost)? What if the kid and parents refuse? De facto guilty? Will we all have to "prove" that we are not dangerous to some gov't institution?
Well, you do not have to _lie_. Simply _pretend_ you're another kind of person, and answer the test as that persona.
Of course, it might be dangerous since it'd be easier to create a persona from your inner self... It'd be really best to act like you're on a slashdot poll anyway.
See comment #195
Actually I am well-behaved, mostly pacifist, Christian, computer-hacking freak.
Why that's nice. I'm a well-behaved, pragmatic atheist who considers morality as a pitiful attempt to make society's laws viable on a deeper level than self-preservation. I say we should make Atheism mandatory in schools. Cause, well, look at me. I haven't killed anybody! If it worked for me, it'll work for you.
Sarcasm put aside, look at where these incidents occur to determine where the problem lies. If any of those mindless ingrates that run the educational system were able to do that, maybe such occurences could be prevented.
Aggresion and violence are different things; and although aggression is (probably) a cornerstone of what makes us human, killing people can be classed as unpleasant. I'm not saying i agree with this; most of my friends follow all the 'pre-incident indicators associated with boys who act out violently', except the violent/gun ones (no guns in england) and they're all quite tame; I think that violent disaffected youth are prone to violence, but a one-ten scale is missing the point. I'm not advocating behaviourism to condition aggressive tendancies, but i think that violence is a bad thing, to use overly simplistic and polarised terminology.
(Concept stolen shamelessly from a Clint Eastwood movie)
So what all the rest of us need to do is to pay attention to our instincts. That whole "He seemed the quiet type" is a TV news myth. You know when someone seems a little off to you, or gives you the tingle in the back of your neck/unsettledness in your gut type feeling. It's when we don't pay attention to those instincts that trouble arises.
If I was a geek I'd be afraid to be in school at all anymore. I'm glad I'm out of that hellhole and don't have to face this myself. Unfortunately I guess I will have to worry about my kids facing these ridiculous things when they get into school. Scary stuff.
Not if they channel kids into good counseling programs, work with them and their families. If they just kick them to the curb, though, I'll agree with you
Can MOSAIC Label Kids?
MOSAIC-2000 cannot label anyone as anything. People unfamiliar with the method may jump to the worry that principals will use it to unfairly label kids, but the objective process resists bias. MOSAIC-2000 is vastly more likely give a low rating in a situation to which people are over-reacting - than to give a high rating in a situation people are not concerned about.
----
Excellent post, Chasuk, thanks for pointing all this out. Everyone else.... LOOKOUT, BIG BROTHER'S RIGHT BEHIND YOU! (heh, psyche!)
The /. Amazon boycott has started yesterday. You must provide a B&N (Barnes & Noble) link instead.
Thanks.
oki.. I'm been in school for 12yars and 2 times every year there have been some nut trying to tell us right and wrong/not smoke/not use drugs etc. (I will never forget the time one of these nut:s told us that if you start smoking you:ll be a heroinist in less then a year or the one that told us that ONY alcoholics and criminals used homebrewn vodka.. for gods sake.. we ALL know poeple that have smoked 10+ years even our own parents.. and the other. 75% of the poeple that heard that man used to drink homebrewn vodka (the price is 1/3MAX)) anyway I just ignored what they did say as bullshit until we got a man from a prison to us.. he told us about how it was in prison.. after like 10years of bullshit that was nice to hear..
Please explain to me how they're going to determine by numeric results how violent (or potentially violent) a person is. In my opinion, you're putting too much stock in the accuracy of this program. The paranoia surrounding this is based on the likelyhood that people will assume that the results of such a test prove something about the subject's state of mind, even if heaven forbid they do not, as it would appear you have.
How many state and federal jobs still require employees to answer, under penalty of perjury, mind you, the above question as a prerequisite to employment?
-- ultra1
Of course its funny, I'll grab you and your mom, and you can watch while I rape her, i bet you'll laugh.
I read the fucking article and all I got was:
if (different(student)) expel(student);
Geeks are different from the fucking Jerry Springer watching, Access Hollywood worshipping human herd.
Difference and conformity are opposites. Get a fucking clue asshole.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
So suppose your kid is overly imaginative or something. Perhaps ADD or ADHD? (seems to be pretty popular these days.) Watches a bit too much TV but is a generally well adjusted kid. Say he scores in the questionable range. Can the private prep schools reject him now? Can the charter schools reject him? Does he automatically get sent to the gangbanger academe that so many districts have? (no self-fullfilling prophecy there, take the troubled kids and send them to a place with all the other troubled kids, that usually doesn't make them worse, does it? Of course not and that school also isn't in the poor part of town) Can you as a parent be expected to pay for pricey therapy for your kid? What if the test has a margin of error and he's just one of the kids who doesn't fit it? Will he somehow be traumatized by the process? Some of us aren't very faithful in "the system." Can they flag him and then use it against him down the road?
Could a law be passed that makes the results of such a test public? After all, who wants to send their kids to a school with a bunch of loose cannons? Maybe like the sex crime laws where they announce when a sex criminal is living in the area. Protecting your children is what this is all about though so it doesn't seem that far fetched for some kind of public record to be made of your child's score on the test.
By and large, I think this test is a spiritually good thing. They are simply trying to avoid future disasters and that is noble. I think it raises a lot of questions when implementation is brought up. They can't come up with an agreeable IQ test, how are they going to do the much harder task of picking out the potential criminals? (I assert that it is easier to determine is someone is stupid than if they are a criminal)
We need to do this stuff though, or at least start figuring it out. Let's step a few years into the future. What if they could take a DNA sample from a fetus and do psych. profiles on the future parents and come up with a probable profile for the kid? Suppose they could predict, with reasonable accuracy, if a person would grow to become a sexual predator or a mass killer? What if they were 99.998% accurate? There will still be false positives but at some point the public good out weighs the individual.
So this is thing is supposed to pinpoint, among other things, "good kids" who might go on an insane killing spree because they feel victimized by the school system. Anyone ever stop to think that maybe things like this are why kids feel victimized by the school system?
It takes time for things like this to be resolved. Part of the problem is that people are looking for the quick fixes. If we as a society of people could communicate better after just 10 years, I would be more than happy.
Is this some form of a psychological study? If so, it would have had to pass through national ethics boards (if I so correctly remember from my psyc classes). I would not get too scared if it has, since the ethical standards of national psychology boards are usually good. Perhapse the study includes sufficiently formed questions to allow for creative and non standard people while still finding those that are, say, depressed and reactant. Isn't it sad that we as a society can't just TALK TO EACH OTHER to find out if anyone is in any problems?! No, we must hand out pieces of paper so everything is faster and more efficient, and so we have documented proof that subject 'q' is violent. However, if this is not a structured psychological survey, then look out. That means NO ethics are assured. In fact, from history (I can't recall examples this moment, sorry) most things like this have external motives involved (be that marketing, ethical, religious, whatever). Would I take this test? No. Would I allow my children to take this test? NO. If I ever saw this test in my child's school, there would be lawsuits within 45 minutes and several injunctions. Let's hope someone out there ran through the ethics of this monster first.
False positives that unfairly label people as dangerous who aren't is totally unfair. Even ONE false positive is one too many. If this system produces false positives, one of two things will happen: either Administrators will know the test produces false positives and should be ignored (thus rendering the test totally pointless), or they won't know about the false positives, and they will end up harrassing innocent people while convinced they are doing the right thing.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Another liability is if the school *did* take action against the student (expulsion, counsellors, etc.) and some violent act still occurs, is the school liable then also? That's a nice little pondery -- how much action is enough; how much is too much? I'd hate to be a judge trying to judge that fine line.
-B
I think the point is that many people who have to suffer through the daily stress of constantly having to watch their back for fear of being attacked are likely to have some violent thoughts and emotions. It doesn't mean they'll become murderers, but it would make it alot easier for a computer to brand them with the potential of becoming a violent criminal. Unfortunately the computer, like the administrators, won't do a damn thing about the daily violence that goes on in schools across the country. (Yes, I've been there. No, I'm not a violent criminal... but I've certainly had my share of violent thoughts.)
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I think this is just a CYA maneuver by the schools. It's a waste of money. School administrators have never cared about the daily violence that goes on in schools. If their asses aren't on the line, they turn a blind eye. I went to 3 different high schools. Two in one city, and one in another. They were all the same as far as violence goes. It happened every day. Nobody cared except the victims, and they had no real recourse. It's no wonder that it escalates sometimes.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
It has the potential to make them act even less responsibly. They'll just point to a kid that they think is a problem and have him tested. Who needs to think?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
800 on the math SAT implies that you answered EVERY SINGLE question CORRECTLY. No blanks, no errors. Are you telling me that 5% of the HS seniors who take the SAT do that, which is what 95th percentile implies?
False. Depending on when you take the test, you can get one, maybe even two wrong and still get an 800. When I got an 800 (late 96 or early 97), it was 97th or 98th percentile.
800s are easy to come by. 1600 (combined, obviously) are not impossible either. I had friends from high school who got 1600s, as far as I can recall they never went on any talk shows next to genius chess players, though.
I'm not a smorgasbord.
I also read (I'm sorry, "READ") the article and the software does not use the process you describe. I agree, that the methodology you detail (comparing the students answers with the answers of other people who have proved to be violent) can be a valid system. However, in this case the inputs are not answers to questions asked a student, but estimations by administrators about various risk factors.
/. attack articles w/o reading them far too often, but supporting them by making up details is no better a policy.
For example, in the article, this sample question is given:
"A variety of concerns beyond alarming talk or behavior will be included, from the availability of guns to a youngster's abuse of dogs and cats."
With these for possible answers:
"The questions allow a range of answers, from a student who has 'no known gun possession,' for example, to one who has 'friends with gun access.'"
Those aren't the possibly relevent student answers, those are estimations of subjective risk factors which were drawn from a sample size too small for any relevent data to have been extracted.
I find this passage particularly amusing:
"It says, 'Look, we've gone back and spoken to X number of people who have committed these crimes, and these are the risk factors we feel are present in their lives.' It collects these risk factors based on actual cases and organizes them in a way so we can have a consistent approach."
I wonder what counts as a "similar case"? Given that school violence is extremely rare (you're more likely to be a victim at home, the office, or just about anywhere else). I can't imagine that "X" is very large at all.
I agree, that people on
So, we should worry about the gang members and profile them, or we should worry about the non-gang members and profile them? Or just profile everyone? Any way you look at it, it's $10,000 for what a school counseler should have been able to figure out with a personality profiling test. Isn't that partially what these school counselers are SUPPOSED to be for?
(no, I'm not criticizing or commending school counselers... just saying that this program looks like a poor man's version of a counseler -- sort of an eliza for $10,000).
(wish I could resell Eliza for $10,000).
I think this example comes from the book Innumeracy, but I'm not entirely sure:
Imagine a deadly disease that has infected, on average, one out of every 500 people. Now imagine a test for this disease that is 98% accurate. What proportion of people testing positive will actually have the disease?
The answer, of course, is around 9%. Now let us consider "potential to blow up the school" as a disease. How accurate is this test? Given my general skepticism of psychological tests, I'd wager less than 90%, but let's give it the benefit of the doubt and say 98% as above. I'm almost certain that 1 in 500 figure above is way too large for this "disease". My estimates may be off, but we certainly have more than 4 million high-school aged children in the US. Even if we assume that only 1% of kids with the potential to go shoot up the school actually do it, that leaves us with under 2000 "potentially dangerous" kids in the us. That's 1 in two thousand, and remember how generous my estimates are. So one in 40 of the kids diagnosed by this test have a one percent chance of shooting up the school, if even that much.
I'm all for arming school administrators with psychological knowledge about their students, but I strongly suspect that this is just snake oil.
And let's knock off the BS about the shooters at Columbine having been repressed gay geeks who lashed out at athletes - that was and always has been a press fabrication that everyone bought into.
Why are people so upset at this tool? Remember this is not a policy, it is a tool (for the geeks: just as you can call BO a tool and seperate it from usage).
Psychologists have long been able to point to various behavioralisms that have been shown to appear in more agreesive people. None of the indicators alone is sufficient; they all mean much more when taken in persepective with the rest of the person, but they are not irrelevant.
Why is it that lifetime offenders can be picked out before they even reach puberty? This is not a coincidence. Why would you try to stop this from happening? This does not infringe on any of you rights as a citizen of human.
I think that the little information about yourself that you giveup will be healthy for high-school society in the long term.
I was trained in a traditional fighting art and *I* don't joke about it. Many people (males, anyway) do, and you can usually tell in context and by body language that they're not serious. But some are truly hostile, scary when they say this, but claim afterward that they were only "joking". It puts a school admin in a tough spot if this is documented. I learned that noone could "surprise" an advanced student in the studio; their body language always gave them away. But when I go to certain neighborhoods, my skin crawls, because half the males there present the body language of an immanent attack. Usually they don't. But I have no doubt that they are capable of it, given little provocation.
How will this tool be used by a clueless, inumerate (doesn't understand probabilities), possible prejudiced school official?
- freehand
Then they are obliged to take regular doses of Prozac or some similar mind-killing drug, suppressing their dangerous weirdness for the good of the community and turning them into a good zombie.
Psi Corps, here we come.
This is rather disturbing I think. But like drug testing and warrentless searches there will be this effect:
"I have nothing to hide, go ahead test me. Or, sure officer, you can look in my trunk. Or, I am not a psycho I don't mind that test."
This is another example of the governments continual assult on our Bill of Rights, in particular, our right to privacy.
Personally I always give a cop a hard time when it comes to searches. I got pulled over for a missing tail-light once and the cop, for some reason, was not content to just write me a ticket. He asked if he could look inside my trunk. I said no. He said he could get a warrent and I said go ahead. he then locked me into his car ( I am not arrested yet ) and about 1 hour later he got his warrent and he opened my trunk. There was the tail-light! It was blinking away in the trunk. It had fallin in. He searched my trunk and the rest of the car and found nothing. ( There WAS NOTHING ) The scolded me for not letting him look earlier and let me go with no ticket or anything.
I do the same when they want to look around my apartment.
I WOULD ALSO DO THE SAME IF YOU ARE FORCED TO TAKE THIS STUPID TEST.
This will NOT go away if only 1 or 2 people refuse the test. A majority of folks have to refuse it.
Our personal rights are at stake here.
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
The whole lawsuit thing would be a great starting point; maybe if some lawsuits would start flying around, the Kansas board of education would change their minds about evolution. That's an entirely different rant, though. Anyway, since, in public schools, your tax money goes toward their funding, why stop at a lawsuit if they're doing something you don't feel is ethical? I know if some test like that was performed on my children, they turned out "differently" from their peers, and then the school started treating them more abrasively than normal, I'd be the first one to pull my tax money out of the state board of education, as well as the first one to replace my children into either a private school or a homeschooling situation. No WAY are my kids going to be unnecessarily mistreated/abused in their school experience.
Save the children; quit overparenting!
My last point is that most murders are second degree murders. The typical scenario is the person loses it due to a tramatic event (ie: finding your wife sleeping with another guy) and goes on a shooting spree. Sooo, maybe we should prevent people from having sex so that doesn't happen?
Granted, lot's of murders are 'written off' as second degree murders, or "Crimes of Passion", but closer scrutiny shows this is rarely the case.
Most, if not all, 'shooting sprees' are preceded by a trail of detectable events that start LONG before the final 'showdown' that we all read about in the papers.
I highly reccommend Gavin De Becker's book "The Gift of Fear" for some insights as to the nature of these events. It's fascinating stuff, dealing with stalking, disgruntled employees and spousal abuse. The amazing thing is how these things DON'T happen spontaneously, but only appear that way.
**>>BELCH
My last point is that most murders are second degree murders. The typical scenario is the person loses it due to a tramatic event (ie: finding your wife sleeping with another guy) and goes on a shooting spree. Sooo, maybe we should prevent people from having sex so that doesn't happen?
Granted, lot's of murders are 'written off' as second degree murders, or "Crimes of Passion", but closer scrutiny shows this is rarely the case.
Most, if not all, 'shooting sprees' are preceded by a trail of detectable events that start LONG before the final 'showdown' that we all read about in the papers.
I highly reccommend Gavin De Becker's book "The Gift of Fear" for some insights as to the nature of these events. It's fascinating stuff, dealing with stalking, disgruntled employees and spousal abuse. The amazing thing is how these things DON'T happen spontaneously, but only appear that way.
**>>BELCH
Schools are horrendously giddy these days, worried about who the next problem might stem from. This is understandable, but the problem is that they will pursue any means necessary to stop what they see as a forthcoming problem, without any restraint whatsoever.
I know someone from IRC who was accused by the school of cracking passwords from the network, and consequently had his server removed from the network (and hence, he had no access to it) without any forewarning whatsoever. This year, he was accused of installing a virus onto a computer, even though he wasn't on it at the time. Luckily, no real permanent consequences have come about, but he's had a lot of hell to pay, and he's had his rights stepped all over in the process.
Personally, I have no problems if someone wants to be silly and try to use software to predict what I will do on any given day. However, I worry what the schools will do with this information -- it wouldn't surprise me at all of they punished students for being considered "high-risk" by the program. How would you react if you were forced to go through counseling and were suspiciously watched by teachers all the time, because a computer program had deemed you as anti-social, and likely to strike out against the rest of humanity?
That's what makes this particularly relevant to slashdot -- young geeks (myself included) generally don't have a great social life, and would likely go under some reprimanding label under this system. We ought to fight against this system, because it's likely to stem into a complete disregard for the rights of those who are misjudged by some piece of software. Kids have rights too.
Yeah, plus our government is nice and mellow.
eg: "I'm Adrienne Clarkson and you're not."
--
Chris Dunham
http://www.tetrion.com/~chameleo/index.html
I can see several positives in this new program. 1) I get out of class to take it 2) I can get out of more class if I completely bomb it (which I would do on purpose) 3) I can make an ass out of every single person working in the district when I announce it was a hoax 4) I can make some nice cash when I sue the district Also, would someone please tell me why someone who goes out every week to match heads with another guy in a desperate attempt to move a ball forward is deemed normal (aka non-violent), but someone who sits on his ass the entire time furthering his interests in a non-violent activity is deemed a potential mass-murder? I've said it once, and I'll say it again, "Supreme followings of Christianity just DON'T work!" And someone also tell me how this is supposed to help the "problem" of school shootings. We are dealing with the effect of discrimination, not the cause. When you want to get rid of a weed do you cut it off in the middle or do you pull it all out including the root? Also, anyone with an IQ of 80 could pass this test if they felt like it. "Duh, I'm gonna kill everyone so I think I'll pretend to be 'NORMAL' for the test and kill 'em all next week."
Check out my source posting earlier in this article. :^)
--
17.) John comes up behind you while you are eating lunch, and throws your tray to the floor. Do you:
A. Politely ask John to not destroy your Lunch, and allow you to obtain your nourishment.
B. Inform a supervisor that John is causing a disruption, and should be punished.
C. Pull out a Glock and plant a bullet in John's Head.
Now me, I would choose C, because the test is a nonviolent medium that I can enjoy wrecking the curve. Why would I do this? Because that proves shit like this is inaccurate, and pointless. I get the impression this is being done to pacify idiotic parents who are bitching "How do I know my son is safe going to your school?" "Well you see, we have this test....."
Then what happens? The person who gets a "Great Job!" on the test ends up knifing a janitor. "Hmm, guess we need new questions....."
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Sure there is. But there's very little you can do about that. You have all the right in the world to be offended by it, but that's where it stops. You can't make it illegal, because then you'd have to make everything illegal. Everything you or I say is sure to offend someone, somewhere.
it is your good right to tell [those jokes] - along with the jew/racist/whatever jokes you might also enjoy.
I think everything has the potential to be funny. Yes, even totally racist jokes. That does not mean I am a racist. It all depends on the circumstances.
I would not stop you. as long as i have the right to say loud and clear that i find them both disgusting and unfunny.
Sure.
if i were to stand next to you telling such jokes, i would like to lose my lunch all over you.
Lunch! Could that be labeled Assault By Projectile Vomit?
No, do you know what computers are REALLY great at? Recognising stuff the wrong way, because they weren't programmed to recognise some itty bitty detail that makes all the difference in the world.
Computers are stupid things. They run down a checklist you give them, and if there's a totally obvious pattern that you haven't programmed it to recognise, there's a good chance the computer is not going to pick up on it. Or if it does, that it has no idea what to do with it.
Most people break down into neat little categories, most of the time. Say 99% of the time you're completely predictable. But then what about the 1%? 1% false data can skew your results nicely...
Oh sure, but would you want that tense paranoia that's always hanging around those airport security gates to spread to Life At Large? If my day to day life would look like the security folks at the airport I'd go mad.
Omigod, dude, you just totally made my day...anyone who is interested in understanding why schools fail their students must check out two books (both out of print, dammit) by Richard Mitchell (a.k.a. the Underground Grammarian).
Run, don't walk, to your local library and check out "The Graves of Academe" and "The Leaning Tower of Babel" by Mitchell. Go. Now. Hurry.
Good call on the quote, my man...
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Even if you are even moderately intelligent, it would not be that difficult to figure out how to lie in order to past the test.
I don't believe this. The "lies" would be fairly predictable.
No, it doesn't.
Then you're just responding based on your preconceptions and you don't really understand what it's about ? Or did you just want to echo the cry of the "slashdot collective" ?
What, the software , or the ignorance of slashdot's peanut gallery ??? Wahhhh, we're gonna be "geek-profiled" !!! help !
Get a grip. It's not a test. It's software that analyses the administrator's data on the student. The student can't "cheat on it" unless they "cheat" by not behaving in a way that identifies them as an obvious discipline problem.
Read the article. The students don't anwer it.
Did you even read the article ? The students don't answer the questions. The questions are for the administrators and they pertain to the students observed behaviour
Bzzzt. If you ever have to take a test like this, you had BETTER be honest, because if you're taking the test, you are an ADMINISTRATOR, not a STUDENT. Read the article.
For example, if someone is joking in their answer, a computer program cannot tell the difference, while a psychologist might be able to.
Everything in the article talks about how this software won't be used until an incident has actually happened. AFAIK, every one of the shootings which have happened over the last few years, almost all of them came after no previous problems. Since this has been the case, the only way that this is going to be useful, is to screen all students.
/. .. sigh..
One of the other things mentioned, is that the information is entered by the administrators, not the students. While this works as far as keeping people from lying, it does nothing towards keeping the people in charge from filling the blanks in the data, with guesses based on stereotype.
This software is going to allow anyone who suspects a student of having a trend towards violence, to back up that claim by tending to answer questions in a way supporting their claim. Directly from the article, "Mosaic's immediate virtue would be in producing detailed documentation of its evaluation of a troubled student so that doubting parents could no longer challenge an administrator's judgment as too subjective."
I wonder if it asks about hours a day reading
Would you do it for some scoobie crack?
But the people who go on killing sprees are always the people who "were such good, quiet kids. We never saw this coming!"
Kinda makes you wonder, if the people around them everyday can't see it coming, how will some computer?
- Aircraft hijackers are nutcases
- Shrinks can identify nutcases easily
- Hire two shrinks as security guards
- Tell them to arrest nutcases in the airport
- No more hijackings!!!
20 minutes after the start of the experiment, one of the shrinks arrested the other.End of experiment.
-- ----------------------------------------------
Vive le logiciel... Libre!!!
Only if we have a few dozen OC192 connections
Schools will not intervene in any such tormentation unless your parents pull out a lawyer and threaten to sue, ofcorse, once you do that, they will do whatever you want.
>> And 9.9% will be incorrectly flagged as violent.
... these people will then be "treated", and will end up not doing anything violent (which they would not have anyway), resulting in the effort being called a Success.
Look, no disrespect, but how naive are you? This is absolutely about geeks, because they wouldn't DARE use it on the star quarterback; that's not how high school politics works.
Well, the fact is, the high-school quarterbacks arent't the ones coming to school with firearms killing their classmates.
You ought to read this article from Salon that goes into the real reasons for the Columbine shootings. These two boys were not being beat up so they decided to get back at everyone, they were seriously screwed up and this program may have identified that.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
The result? Alot of people's civil rights are violated, alot of innocent people are hurt, and very little drugs are actually found (try to find a newspaper that had any articles on drugs being found on an airplane in the last year). Infact on atleast one occasion a pregnant woman was detained by authorities for suspected drug-smuggling. She was given multiple enemas and over the course of three days not treated very well. As a result she had a miscarriage. The law holds that this is perfectly OK. It is also morally reprehensible.
Whoooop! Whoooop! The FUD meter is going off the scale. I'm afraid these wild claims require at least a minimal amount of documentation. The FBI killed a woman's baby by giving her enemas? I guess we'll see.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
You're missing some key points of the reality of this thing.
An actual psychiatrist or an experienced therapist will know if you're fudging answers by a lot of cues that have nothing to do with the answer itself.
However, this is software. It's not even sophisticated software.
I saw this on the news a few weeks ago. Essentially they showed an old Zenith laptop running a text DOS program that asked questions like "Do you often think agressive thoughts?"
I suppose they could have a carefully laid out tree of questions to be asked based on previous answers, but i really doubt it. Frankly, I wish i'd thought of it, so that i could laugh all the way to the bank just like the goon who did.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
>{can nyt articles be put in 'nnn bytes in body' sections under the header?}
I'm sure Andover.net's lawyers would love earning their pay once they are sued by the NYT for copyright violations.
Mycroft-X
I don't get it. There are so many good reasons to fault this program, but instead we get all these posts from people who don't even know what they're arguing against.
My understanding from the article is that no one will ever have to take a test like this. The questions are answered by administrators, based on what they know about the student's past behavior.
1. a + c (the matrix, first wave.. :)
2. c
3. b
4. b
-- d'arcy poirot
I remember in high school (in Jersey) we had to take these drug-use tests, and supposedly there were "flag" questions on the test that told them whether or not to throw out the test result, ie. fake drug names. This made it "accurate." What they didn't count on was what went on in my homeroom, six of us sitting in a circle in the back going, "Alright...I'll be the crackhead, Kurt you be the alkie..." and so on. All it took was a little brain trust. I recall that 99% of my senior class, according to this "accurate" test, were alcoholics. This is what happens when they try to do things like this.
--
That's because you have fallen prey to the whole /. mindthink, where there is a Geeks vs World mentality, where geeks are the only caring, sensitive group around, all other groups are bullies and even worse..labeled *gasp* jocks! I for one am sick of the whole concept of geek/hacker hemogeny. As if this group, or any group can be labeled, categorized and pigeonholed, this is true whether we want to ascribe noble attributes or not. It just doesn't work.
Face it programmers/hackers are no more moral/immoral, intelligent/stupid, sensitive/insensitive than any other *group*. They are just as likely to be motivated by greed, malice, stupidity, boredom, or whatever, as any other group would be.
P.S...as I write this I have a java program I am working on in a window in front of me and the Packers vs Chargers football game on the TV, the game is getting *way* more attention..does this blow any more stereotypes for anyone? I hope so.
800 on the math SAT implies that you answered EVERY SINGLE question CORRECTLY. No blanks, no errors. Are you telling me that 5% of the HS seniors who take the SAT do that, which is what 95th percentile implies?
The way the SAT is designed (and they keep "tweaking" to get it right, or "less right", depending on who you talk to) is to have a mean of 500 and a standard deviation of 100, and truncation at 3 standard deviations either direction (ie. you can't score less than 200 or more than 800). Your end result is that (in theory) 600 represents roughly the 83rd percentile, 700 represents roughtly the 97th, and 800 is somewhere in the upper end of the 99th -- if they needed to additionally differentiate among people in the 99th percentile, they would add more difficult questions, believe me.
As an aside, I found out about my 800 math score while I was at Boys' State (I took the SAT in April of my Junior year). I was so excited I nearly bounced off the walls, and did wind up managing to get quite a bit of attention with the amount of noise I was making that late at night on an otherwise-deserted university campus. And that, even though I was quite aware that with the expectations people had grown to have of me in high school, anything less would have been unacceptible. As it was, I found my verbal score (still pretty high, but not where I had wanted it to be) slightly disappointing, but that's another story...
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
MOO;IANAL.
There used to be a picture linked here.
The article says it is based off current systems used in court to determine how dangerous a threat is coming from a cetain criminal based on the criminals _HISTORY_. The article said nothing about classifying a person based on anything other than violent tendencies. The article also states that the information being used is information in their private files i.e. their history of violent tendencies. No conspiracy here. People seem to be confusing different + violent with different + non-violent. If you're different + violent, then you deserve to be expelled from school or you need psychiatric help in some circumstances. All this does is allow schools to profile students who are dangerous and gauge them on a static scale. A scale that is static across every school. The hopes (I'm assuming now) is that they will come up with a numerical value where the student becomes to violent to stay in school.
This article says NOTHING, absolutely NOTHING about people who are different being catagorized as dangerous. What it does say is that people with a history of violent behavior, beit threats, actions, etc. will be identifiable by a number from 1 to 10. Hemos, if you're violent, you will be around an 8, if you're different and non-violent, you'll be catagorized just like all other non-violent people. This is catagorizing based on violence, not whether you wear a black trenchcoat or feel the need to pierce every inch of your body. Its not a conspiracy.
What bothers me is the fact that there doesn't seem to be any mention of how they are going to know when the results that they get are correct. Probably when the results fit with their own prejudices. What they will do with the results hasn't been specified either. This has the potential to do more harm than good.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
hmmm... I have seen a lot of good points on slashdot about violence in our schools. For one thing, it has been blown out of proportion by the media. It is actually a small problem, not a growing trend. In the case of the media, I believe it is the almighty dollar. The new show "Freaks and Geeks" is a good example. As is continuing news coverage of the event. It gets ratings, that is why it is in the news, not because it is a big problem. Gang violence happens everyday in big city schools. Why is the shooting such a big deal all of a sudden? When you watch the news, always remember their objective and give what you are seeing proper consideration. As for the software program, if it actually gets used, it will be a waste or time and tax dollars. It won't help one bit. The kids in the Columbine incident were anti-social personalities. I don't have any other information beyond that of which I can guarantee accuracy. However, my roommate in college had a girlfriend whose adopted brothers were classified as anti-social personalities. They don't see what is wrong in hurting other people. They were both abused physically and sexually when they were young. One of the two was more violent than the other, I can't remember which. Whether it was the older one or the younger one. hmmm... In any case, it is a rare disorder according to my psychology text. Atleast in my highschool, people with certain names or who played sports or had a lot of money would put down those who did not belong in each of those groups. That made them outcasts and they were mistreated. Undoubtedly that was the case w/ the anti-social personalities at Columbine. But that is not necessarily what drove them to their final solution. I am not familiar enough w/ the disorder to know if being in an environment where their was mutual respect of one's peers rather than childish "I am better than that person" attitudes, that it might have changed things. So many of the people in the "elite" groups build their self-esteem on being "better" than others in some way. They keep climbing the ladder and making sure that they remain better people than others. Many of them pull out of it when they leave high school. Those that don't, eventually experience a situation when they can't be better than someone else anymore and they put a gun barrel in their mouth or drink themselves to death, or who knows what else. I think that is even a more terrible tragedy than Columbine or any other school shooting. I believe this recent focus on this type of violence in schools is more about money than a danger to children in public schools. I do not know the situation w/ the Columbine shooters, but I do know something from what my roommate told me. Those two adopted brothers of his girlfriend's developed anti-social personality disorder due to some combination of their treatment (abuse) when they were young, and perhaps some genetic factors. What combination, no one is certain. Our society created these personalities because of the existence of such abuse. Why not try and figure out how to stop child abuse first. A "software" program is a solution in a box. The company may state that it is too be used under special circumstances. Even the school may state that to parents. But it will most certainly be abused. Not everywhere, but their will be abuses of it. It will be stated by the software company that it is a tiny part of the total solution-that it is not a complete solution. But in many places, it will be used like one. Solutions-in-a-box always have an economic motivation-that is exactly what this product is. It is also free of human involvement. Much like a "ask student a question" - "go to page 4 if their response is similiar to this" - "go to page 5 if". It requires notthought and becomes a process-a flawed process. Yes someone makes the student sit down and take the test. maybe he talks to a psychiatrist. A child needs to be loved. A software package cannot love them, a school psychiatrist does not love them, parents love them, peers love them. You cannot employ a purely intellectual solution to a human problem and expect it to have any effect. The emotional component in the solution to a human problem is absolutely essential for success. This voids the effectiveness of a software application/a school psychiatrist/any other solution that is not created and applied by loving parents and peers. Let the psychiatrist advise the parents and peers, they should not be dealing w/ the child directly, leave that to the parents. Educate the parents. We are an overly specialized society. We even hire people to take care of our kids, raise them, solve their problems, etc. We are human beings, such structures are inadequate and will create more social problems rather than helping them. If anyone from congress is listening, the 40hours-5 day work week will help solve a lot of these social problems. A lot of greedy U.S. companies will never let it happen though. i guess we all really need to find out just how much power the people have yet and get something like that through congress. Well, their is my $.02.
In education, as far back as 1968, it had been determined that if you tell a group of kids how they are going to do, that is how they will turn out, both in the short term and long term. If you take a group of middle of the road students, put them in a class together, have the teacher tell them they scored so high on a test that they were being accelerated, they will live up to those expectations - on the whole. Conversely, take a group of students and tell them they are idiots and can't accomplish anything, and most will live down to that.
This type of test can have the effect to go beyond even that with a student.
cit: Rosenthal and Jacobson, 1964
see also: Golem Effect
---
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
America is starting sound more and more like stories about CCCP and Nazi German (don't know if it really was like that -never lived there :]). Well, maybe not quite, but why does word 'America' (well, Australia too :]) read in almost every freaky story about something stupid involving computers? This, UCITA, software patent madness, crypto exporting... geez. Good to live in Finland :) (well, if I don't write viirii atleast.)
- Kaatunut
You're missing some key points of the reality of this thing.
You're right. And the more you look at it, the worse it looks to stick a "tool" like this in the hands of incompentents. (And I doubt it will be a very controversial thing around here to claim that there exists a large number of incompentents in the school administrations in the US!)
Thanks for the amplifications.
Microsoft Oceania 84 is just around the corner. Any day now they'll release it...
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
What will happen is that they'll find the 'jocks' to have more violent tendancies and will then drop the whole ridiculous shebang.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
1. d none of the above
2. c
3. American or rest-of-the-world football?
4. d all of the above
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
Oh, schools have plenty of money, trust me.
/two/ color laser printers for use by the secretaries and spent money on very expensive desks and blinds.
They just blow it all.
My old high school just bought a dozen brand new $2000 laptops for use by students in PE who don't dress out. Yes, you don't get changed.. and instead of running, you sit around and play solitaire. After sitting in storage for about 6 months, they're currently sitting in the PE teacher's office.
The school my mother works at is a continuation high school, with a very small student body. they got a very large Digital High School grant, and instead of upgrading the old 486's the students use for the plato software, they bought
There are hundreds more examples just like this in just this one high school district. They have plenty of money, but the schools buy stuff they don't need and don't use for the staff while they're still using Apple II's in the science classroom.
Yeah there is another way. End the friggin drug war.
Sad to say, that's an even worse kiss of death on election day.
The other thing that disturbs me is the number of ppl who comment on this without even reading the article. This isn't about classifying geeks, or those who stick out. And the answers are *not* given by the students, but by administrators (for better or worse).
Visit me on #weirdness on the Galaxynet.
What if someone for all intent and purposes is NOT a violent person, the test shows he is not and life goes on as usual. Unfortunately this person may be a very violent person but must have a catalyst, whether it builds for years, or is just a quick switch that ignites a violent temper.
The missed people are sometimes the ones that are most violent because its not in there everyday "nature" its something so deep that it doesn't get caught until after it happens.
I know there are exceptions to everything, if test were perfect we would all be in jobs that fit our profile and probably wouldn't be in our current positions. All I know is I took a test of that nature and it showed me as "normal".. to bad for me and my family it was wrong... Everyone has switch.. violence in an instinct that has been passed from the beginning of time as a self preservation mechanism... so of us just hide it or are able to control it better than others
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" -- Albert Einstein
And of course it'll totally miss the most dangerous ones, the ones that are psychotic in the clinical sense but clever enough to give the "right" answers.
In other words, all the negative consequences you describe to armed guards and metal detectors (and I do agree with you about those) would also apply to this test.
I think this sort of testing would cause more harm than good. And in that case, doing nothing is better.
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
It is possible to be too alarmist, yes.
My concern here has less to do with the validity of the test than the intelligence of the people using the test. The test, as used by the FBI, is used by highly trained investigators who should have a reasonably good clue what the test is and what its limitations are.
I'm not sure that giving a similar test to high school principals will replicate the same system: it seems like it's putting an assault rifle in the hands of a three-year old.
One false positive--they get sued.
One false negative--they get sued.
And no test is perfect especially one like this.
Instead, they oughta try a novel Idea:
If a kid gets tormented the teacher should intervene--against the tormenters..
(this idea released under GPL)
-Bobzibub.
rmartin@gdbinc.com is listed as the contact address for Mosaic by the company who made it
I never read more than a dozen pages of "1984". I was skipping through it and found part about rat torture, and that was it for me.
Arthur C. Clarke gives his vision in "Odyssey 3000" that everyone will be screened through brain/mind scans for deviant behaviour among other things. He thinks it will be necessary to ensure safe society. But at least he recognizes the consequences: there are almost no exceptionally bright and original people in 3000's (they all get "reprogrammed" effectively). However, his view is that benefits are going to be bigger than loses. That really scared me. I am glad I'll be long dead then anyhow.
Um, just to help you out, down here in Miami about a month ago there was a major bust with upwards of 80 (I think) airline employees arrested for drug trafficking. A good deal of cocaine was found, not only on the plane, but in the food cart.
Just thought I'd clear that up for you. It does happen.
I wish I knew who made this program so I could go to their house and rip their head off and rape their family. And then during their funeral, i'm going to blow a hole in the wall come storming in and then murder everyone in the church.
Pray the software is dead-on accurate. As soon as it targets most everyone on the football team, it will be quietly and quickly dropped.
The party's over
Actually, yes it does. That game was over in the first quarter. Shouldn't you be doing your Java instead?
The existance of the SSA requires suspension of disbeleif, I know, but just go with it.
Am I the only one whos vaguely reminded of "Gattica"?
fh
They already have intelligence tests in case you haven't noticed. And no, they're not used to "profile" kids.
Actually, yes they are... If you score high on an IQ test, you get to go into the 'gifted' or 'advanced placement' classes.
I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me. -- HS Thompson
How many of you, when you were young, had some sort of non-graded test given to you in school for the purpose of compiling information on average students? How many of you tried as hard as you could to make it look like you were completely nuts and something to worry about? I'm sure there are a number of you... and even more who aren't likely to read Slashdot.
My point is, violence is such a revered thing via video games, tv, and general school-age social structure, that the results are surely going to be wildly inaccurate.
"I scored a 87! That's just short of serial killer! What'd you get?"
There is also a large social layer of the schools... students who act violent, who use it to scare people and to be pseudo-antisocial, yet would never really do anything significantly violent. I've known a few.
The real people to worry about are the students who will see right through these tests and give them what they want to hear: that they are normal, patriotic, god-fearing citizens.
But hey, at least they're trying, right?
Welcme to tbe Brave New World my friends.. How much longer befor we start sending these people to an island so they do not 'infect' the rest of us?
-Figure out what answers set off the software
-Get all your hacker buddies at school together, and when you are all "interviewed", give the answers that mark you as psycho.
-Get a lawyer, and insist on a review by competent human psychiatrist
Apply class-action lawsuit as neccessary.
Getting past psych tests is easy; just go read a book or two on how the tests are constructed. Most test have the same basic structure. Like you say, the 'lies' are fairly predictable. The lie catching questions, that is, that will tell you if the test person is being honest or not. Any moderately intelligent person with any knowledge of psychology tests will breeze through them without being caught.
And you know what? Tests like this _always_ have an _extremely_ high failure rate for single individuals. Unless the creators of the tests flunked out of psychology 101 they should know that most psych tests are only useful to asses _groups_ of people. As in 'kids in this school have stronger tendencies towards violence than kids in that school'.
To get anything even close to a realistic failure rate (down below double digits) in assesing a single individuals disposition and personality traits you have to include several months of therapy by several psychologists as well as massive testing. And even then you wont catch them all since you have the risk of external circumstances like emotional stress, alcohol, drugs, etc that will bypass the normal personality.
Well, I hate to break it to you too, but those neat little categories are not useful on an individual basis. Common patterns of behaviour in people is only useful when it comes to predict likelyhood of a percentage of a group reacting in some way.
First of all, lets take the profilers. Profiling a known criminal is a lot easier than profiling an ordinary person. You already have several very important data points about their behaviour. Extreme psychological disorders also fall into a neater pattern with fewer variations than ordinary human behaviour.
Second, you cannot even being to compare real psychological profiling and evaluation to simple psychological testing. The two are not even in the same realm of accuracy. Not to mention they are not in the same realm when it comes to the amount of work.
Genetics and biology arent useful either. You can predict that out of a group of people with a genetic predisposition for low serotonin levels you will have a higher rate of depression and suicide. However, if an ordinary person should happen to lose his job and his girlfriend dumps him, guess what happens to his serotonin levels. And the same is true for genetic predispositions towards violence; a lot of those who have it wont ever exhibit it because they dont get into any circumstances that would trigger such reactions, and the same way, a lot of people without any predisposition will get such reactions because they are subjected to events that trigger violent reactions in anyone. But as a group you can say those predisposed towards violence will have more members acting violently than those without the biology for it.
As for psychological tests, again you have the same problem. You can get statistical significance on groups, but you cannot on an individual basis. You have failure rates far into the double digits. Unless you want to subject all the test cases to several months of therapy with different psychologists, over a long time to judge the effects of different situations on the individual.
So what is the use with testing like this? Youll get a number of people on a 'risks' list, but most likely it will be someone not on the list who gets in a bad situation and goes off shooting, simply because the external circumstances on the larger groups are more likely to be the deciding factor, in all but the most mindbogglingly obvious cases.
There is a big difference between the two scenarios.
In one scenario someone has committed a crime, presumably a serious one. The aim of profiling is to narrow down the potential suspects (like, it could be anyone) to a list that can realistically be investigated. If they produce a list of 1,000 people who fit their profile of the culprit and then with further investigation it's gradually narrowed down to one who is shown to be guilty then presumably the list of 1,000 is filed and forgotten. The reamining 999 people are innocent of the crime, no problem.
In the second scenario, it's a case of profiling people on the basis that no crime has been committed. You never eliminate them from having committed a particular crime, they can never claer their names, because no crime is being investigated. However long they continue to not behave violently your program is still sat there saying that one day they might.
You get your list of 1,000 who may one day do something terrible, or of course might not, and then what do you do? Spy on them? Segregate them? If you're not going to treat them differently to everyone else what use is the information at all?
The actual number isn't important, whether you've picked out 1,000 people or 10 or 1 who have done nothing so far as anyone can, how do you justify treating them differently to everyone else on the basis of what your clever little program has said they statistically might do? Especially since anyone else might do those things, just your program says the statistical probability is less.
It's one step further than thought crime though, it's "okay maybe he hasn't even thought it yet, but statistically there's a good chance he'll think of it one day"-crime.
"There is a big difference between the two scenarios YOU paint - but I wasn't painting a scenario at all."
Erm.. if you re-read your post you might notice the references to Silence of the Lambs. You were clearly comparing the use of psychological profiling here with its use in a criminal investigation, and implying that if people accepted the latter then thay should accept the former as well. I pointed out the differences betwen the two.
"Psychological profiling with Mosaic 2000 does not look to the "guilt" or "innocence" of anyone."
Correct. Which, as I was saying, makes it completely different to the police hunting a serial killer scenario that you brought up. You're not accusing anyone of having done anything, you're saying that statistically they might. If it was looking at guilt and innocence it would be possible to defend yourself, you can't defend yourself against a claim that you one day might be violent. And you are going to treat people differently based on the results, otherwise doing it is pointless, so yes there is soething to defend yourself against, whether it's punishment, surveilance or "treatment".
I don't understand the relevance of the example you give of someone you knew who threatened violent action. If you knew that information toput into the program you'd already have reason to check into the situation, but good reason not just a statistical correlation.
"Of course, most cases of derangemant are not that obvious. But many are more obvious than it is popular to think ("I never would have suspected" is a more likely headline than "Yeah, we knew they were psycho shit-for-brains, but what could we do?" says High School Superintendant.), and any tools that help identify the not-so-obvious cases should be welcomed."
So suppose we have a non-obvious case, or more precisely a person. He hasn't been violent in the past, he isn't threatening violence now, but his likes and dislikes, his interests and hobbies, his affectations have a statistical correlation to those of some serial killers. What are you sugesting is done to/with/about him?
Are you nuts? Easier?? What the hell is easier supposed to mean? You still have busy work in any class, that is what makes it a drag, not the material you are studying. I'd much rather take a more advanced class so that I would have a snowball's chance in hell of learning something. Remedial classes are used to babysit, not to educate.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
One of the other things is 'Name a tool and a color'. Most people answer 'hammer and red'.
But by far more interesting is the fact that it seems to be indepenent of the language you do this test in. At least it works in German too.
--
Weasel
Probable cause is the scariest threat here . It seems like such a natural outgrowth of this program . If you have ever taken a 'drug risk assesment' you know what I am talking about . Let me give you a piece of advice : Lie .
oh so true
.sig
basically here's how adults seem to think of us adolesents
if he's a geek -- he's a hacker(insert cracker) who likes to break into government agencies
if he's normal -- he's hiding something
if he's odd -- give him special attention
if he's viloent -- blame soceity
if he's lazy -- blame the school system, but keep giving the military a 500 billion dollar budjet while you stiff the schools and nasa
if he's not interested in science -- make the class more boring -- subtract more money from the schools and nasa's budjet, this kid doens't like science so we have no need for them..
matisse:~$ cat
Yeah there is another way. End the friggin drug war (whatever that means). Quit pouring all our money into a dead end and use it to build new schools or fund better teachers. I work for living bud and I am sick of people asking for more of my money to pour into a bottomless hole. I used to think tax and spend was the way to go but then I got a real job.
Would you have this to say about criminal profiling? It is also a statistical tool that can be of immense help in dealing with a problematic person. It also makes observations based on trends.
So in the case of criminal profiling, the indicators will point to "potential criminal" for a given person, the FBI brings them in, finds they did indeed commit a crime. But say for every 4 actual criminals there is a fifth innocent person with violated civil rights.
The problem will be compounded with this system because the rating is not based on actions, its arguably based on a person's thoughts alone. How many of us have not had violents thoughts ever? How many of us have violent thoughts regularly? Would you like a computer to diagnose you based on questions about those thoughts? I can certainly see why the ACLU is wary of this one.
Oxryly
Here's my advice: Lie through your fucking teeth. There is absolutely NO GOOD REASON that anyone should be forced to go through this shit. None. We are humans, not mindless drones subject to the whims of a capricious government. They can make you take the test but they can NOT make you tell the truth.
"But but but it's for my own good!" NO IT ISN'T. It is to satisfy some three-lettered gummint agency and the politics that go with it. Be free. Lie. Lie lie lie lie lie lie lie. Lie.
- Rev.
There was a type of software that went around about 5 years ago for assisting teachers to determine if a child was being abused. It was merely a knowledgebase of common traits of an abused child and the appropriate response to that child (what agency to call, or whether to seek out the school psychologist or what have you).
The point of the software wasn't to screen every child, but rather to give people an idea of what to do when the proverbial shit was appearing to hit the theoretical fan. It's not a big brother tactic. It's a method of storing and searching for common indicators so that untrained people can see about getting professionals in before things get ugly.
Of course, I still own and occassionally wear the black trenchcoat I wore when in highschool. It was not a sign that I was a violent teen, rather that I was far too interested in music groups like Front 242, The Cure, and Ministry. Hopefully the knowledgebase is populated with decent data.
In the end, that software for protecting children from their parent disappeared mostly. No one really bought it. So don't be so surprised if this new fad of concern for children safety doesn't fade away.
Isn't anyone slightly concerned that this
involves the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms(http://www.atf.treas.gov/)?
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
What about the other schools that shootings took place at? Do they not matter because only a couple people died?
That's not true. It's database is confined to those the school officials already suspect. Here's a quote from the story:
...so, if the Principal doesn't already dislike you and think you're weird, you're not even going to be entered into the database. The same old crap, only now it's digital.
Regarding your second point, the database is completely invalid, as it doesn't rate all students, only the administration-selected sub-groups that they already think are "troubled", i.e. us. So, when the next school shooting involves the captain of the football team, or one of the beloved cheerleaders, they will not be in this nasty little database. Besides, if the previous three-ring binders that this is replacing was of any use, why haven't they worked before?
Anyone who has ever taken a course in statistics can see how bogus this profiling is.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Yet another example of Life imitating BladeRunner.
The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
800 on the math sat? That's 95th percentile. Whoop-de-do.
Absoluetely brilliant code my friend. I think that very code has gotten me in truble more than once.
JBoyce
The real-world version of this statement reads:
These tests have a specific purpose and are never *supposed* to stand on their own, with no other evidence.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Oh, puh-leeze. There is an obvious and fundamental difference between studying a narrowly defined group of people under legitimate criminal suspicion on the one hand and Big Brother sticking his nose into the thoughts of the entire population on the other.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Er, you do know that threatening people is against the law? This provides cause to arrest the perpetrator, after which an assessment of how likely he is to carry out the threat may legitimately be used in sentencing.
Of course, most cases of derangemant are not that obvious. But many are more obvious than it is popular to think ("I never would have suspected" is a more likely headline than "Yeah, we knew they were psycho shit-for-brains, but what could we do?" says High School Superintendant.), and any tools that help identify the not-so-obvious cases should be welcomed.
Absolutely not. A bright line must be drawn at acts of violence or specific threats of same. Step beyond that, and you give the authorities the latitude to define any sort of anti-authority attitude as "dangerous" -- which is precisely what they have done in every state where they obtained the power to do so.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
I'm actually sure that, in some cases, school *is* the source of the problem. I know that right now, my single greatest source of violent tendancies is my hatred of the illogical slavery that is the public school system.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Does it run under Linux?
Anyone know when the port will be available?
More importantly, it would be interesting to see the source code. Just because you transfer a paper checklist to a Visual Basic program doesn't make it right. People believe anything if it comes from a computer.
It ate my angle brackets.
I meant to add "hehe" indicated just kidding about the Linux port.
Don't flame me because I'm beautiful.
What would _I_ do to make our schools safer instead?
Absolutely nothing. I used this same response to a friend of mine who was arguing about methods of stopping terrorism.
Simply speaking, our freedom as Americans is inviolate, even if it means that a large group of people have to die. In the argument with my friend, I said that if New York City is nuked, but we keep our country free, then it was worth losing even a full percentage of our population. And yes, I would even say that if it was part of my own family that got killed. I would also do
my best to kill said terrorists if I knew without a doubt who they were, using any means, and breaking any "anti-gun laws" as neccessary.
This country was based upon the concept that Americans are free (yes a very loaded word but I don't have time to go into detail - assume moderate libertarian) but along with that freedom comes the responsibility to protect it with our lives if neccessary.
-- Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on. Winston
Reminds me of an Issac Asimov short story about the MultiVac computer which could output what crimes were likely to be committed daily from assimilating data (simliar to what Mosaic2000 proposes) from personal profiles of all the people in the world. That way the crimes could be stopped before they were even conceived.
;-)
Asimov put a good twist in at the end of that one, though.
"The most common element isn't hydrogen, it's stupidity."
So what's the big deal about Mosaic2000? Has everyone jumped to the conclusion that it will be used to correlate non-illegal activity? Maybe so, but please state this assumption.
As stated, it's a tool for [police] triage, sorting the dangerous criminals from the posturing criminals. I have no problem with that. It's certainly better than the usual "police discretion". Unless you prefer an inefficient police, and that case can be made.
As for Columbine, it doesn't surprise me. In a nation of 300 million people, everything imaginable (and unimaginable) _MUST_ happen. It's a statistical certainty. It would worry me if it didn't. Furthermore, the conventional broadcast media is facing heavy competition from user-pull media (internet). So they increase their coverage and alas, their hysteria.
-- Robert
What a lovely picture...geeks being targeted by computers. Wonder if a geek wrote the code.
--
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Well actually they are complicated, sorry to break it to you, for example people make a major mistake (e.g. showstopper) in their work on average every 20 days ( this is from university research on product engiineering ). Profiling is only a very rough guide, ever have a profiler say "He was born on the 26th January 1970, has a boyish grin and eats breakfast at McDonalds"? No, its all "Between 25 and 35 might be married, might have parental issues..". And thats a human doing the reasoning, not a computer that is a small fraction of the power we have. There is only one thing that connects all these violent people, namely they get some type of gratification from the violence, and a lot of the time it is a release, a taking of control back that they have lost or think they have lost, people who do not feel in control of their lives will at some point be destructive to themselves or others.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
I read through the whole article and failed to notice any sign of a control group of "non-violent" students. If this is the case, of course, who's to say that the behaviors and conditions that they've included as indicating potential violence aren't present in a group of mentally healthy children as well? I find that prospect rather disturbing, especially in light of the fact that this is supposed to replace the "subjective" opinions of school administrators yet seems to lack any attempt at proper psychometric measures.
Millenium, like many before (and after) him has washed his hands of the public school system. I understand the reasons but I also see public schools as a line that needs to be drawn, as this is perhaps, the one hill that we can't afford to lose.
Public schools are for the forseeable future where the bulk of the future is coming from. Despite all the rhetoric of vouchers, charter schools, or the whatnot, it'll remain the only option for the majority of lower-class and an increasingly squeezed out middle-class segment of our society.
Public schools at their best are the meeting and mingling grounds of children from diverse backgrounds. At their worst, they're convenient scapegoats for those who champion idealogy over education.
Public schools are much like public toilets, the health of a society can be gauged on how well both are kept.
I'm by no means a raving civil libitarian, but this just strikes me as stupid.
The sooner someone gets hold of the thing de-compiles it and and posts a set of test responses that allows the kids being grilled to choose what score out of ten they feel like, the better.
"I went to see the pool of wisdom but it was empty. Someone has drained the pool of wisdom." - Todd Jones
My biggest concern is that the misuse of this "profiling" tool is almost inevitable. So here's a long list of questions:
Ah well. It all just bothers me, is all. I don't like the idea of adding additional social pressure and alientation to an already high-pressure, alienated society.
Incidentally, last quarter's issue of Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict & World Order had a fascinating article on the abuse of preemptive incarceration as applied to the mentally ill and otherwise potentially violent.
Disclaimer: in high school, I drank, smoked, did drugs, went to unsupervised parties, drove fast, listened to the Dead Kennedies, mouthed off to stupid teachers, wore either a trench coat or a battered old army jacket, kept a baseball bat in my car, often had a firearm in my car at school, and nearly always had a double edged fighting knife sheathed in my boot.
--
This is not my sandwich.
This is actually very similar to some of the genetic testing that will soon be widespread. When they think they have uncovered the 'violence gene' in someone, that person will be branded at birth (maybe even before). The kid wouldn't even have a chance. I'm sure there will also be tests for intelligence, athletic ability, courage (for a soldier), etc. It's scary to think that even before a person is born they will already be profiled. Talk about a class system.
As far as this computer test goes, I just think it's really stupid to actually think that this type of testing will work. Even if you are even moderately intelligent, it would not be that difficult to figure out how to lie in order to past the test. What they are counting on is an HONEST mass murder. Give me a break!
Ummmm,
I realize this is flamebait and all, and I hate to state the obvious, but you have a lousy sense of humor. I don't find anything remotely funny about another person's pain and suffering. I usually ignore such trivial mindless rubbish, but this one went just a little too low. Two thumbs down.
There is a big difference between the two scenarios YOU paint - but I wasn't painting a scenario at all.
Psychological profiling with Mosaic 2000 does not look to the "guilt" or "innocence" of anyone. It compares the reponses of myriad known offenders with the responses of suspected pre-offenders (the scariest bit of the analysis, IMHO) and looks for correlations.
When I was in the Air Force, we had a gentleman who would become violently angry at the slightest upset, and would frequently swear that he would make the Air Force "pay" (and we are not talking in the monetary sense) for his imagined grievances. In my presence he promised that his revenge would make the McDonald's massacre (anyone else remember that mad gunman during the Las Angeles Olympics?) look like a picnic. Now, this was a sick man (the LA gunman and my Air Force acquaintance). In my estimation, he needed observation. I believe that he was put out of the Air Force soon after. No, I don't know what happened to him later, but I wish that I did. It wouldn't have been unreasonable, again IMHO, to have committed this individual (perhaps permanently) to psychiatric care.
Of course, most cases of derangemant are not that obvious. But many are more obvious than it is popular to think ("I never would have suspected" is a more likely headline than "Yeah, we knew they were psycho shit-for-brains, but what could we do?" says High School Superintendant.), and any tools that help identify the not-so-obvious cases should be welcomed.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
When we involve Jodie Foster/Clarice Starling and the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (in Quantico, Virginia) everyone says "cool" (or "kewl"). Psychological profiling is okay if we can say "Hannibal Lecter" in the same breath. However, when someone tries to apply this technology to denizens of the geek world (read: the heavily stereotyped Quake fanatics/Linux zealots/potential-actual
Go to the Mosaic 2000 website:
http://www.gdbinc.com/
Go to Amazon and read reviews of a few of the books by Gavin de Becker (the author of Mosaic 2000). After you have done something as apparently non-essential as RESEARCH, then come back and criticize.
For those of you who are too busy to think before they post (and this especially targets some of the Anonymous Cowards who claim that they don't have the time to create an account or login), I'll provide an overview.
Mosaic 2000 isn't new. It is an adaptation/extension of Mosaic, described as an "artificial intuition system" which was developed in 1990 to help law enforcement officials make predictions of violence. And, as any "Silence of the Lambs" fanboy knows (fangirls, too), psychological profiling works. Disturbed personalities DO share common traits (enjoying the torture of animals is the most notorious example) which identify them as being prone to violence. We have enough sick fucks locked up in prisons that the FBI was long ago able to isolate which behavioral patterns and family histories are most likely to give birth to (clad in Matrix-noir black) clones of Norman Bates.
I know, but the slow, insidious erosion of our civil liberties disturbs you. It is right to be disturbed, but it is possible to be TOO alarmist, and I think that knee-jerk reactions won in this case. If I'm wrong, give me a good argument which persuades me. All flame-bait will be ignored.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
I think your definition of violence is a bit broad. It is nexesary in some lines of work(i.e, demolitions) to cause destruction, but this is seperate from violence. Likewise, I really can't see how having EMT's, firemen and surgeons with violent tendancies is a good idea. Violence implies intent to harm in most schemes, not just causing structural damage. Certain aggresive tendancies do have a role in society, and it is important that people exhibiting those tendancies are not descriminated against. If we didn't have a certain number of people with them, society wouldn't work. But when those tendancies cross the line to desire to actually cause harm, that is an indication that something needs to be done to "defuse" the person exhibiting them.
I know a guy who scored 1600 on the Math section of the SAT.
Wow. Getting 1600 points out of a possible 800 really is impressive.
(BTW, I don't quite believe the talk-show part anyway. 1600 in total, or especially 800 in a subject, isn't that rare.)
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
You say 'probable cause'. More likely is 'reasonable suspicion'. Or does it already suffice for that?
"Dackin, the principal here, said Mosaic's immediate virtue would be in producing detailed documentation of its evaluation of a troubled student so that doubting parents could no longer
challenge an administrator's judgment as too subjective."
So all that this program is going to do is produce a lot of dead trees and label students as different.
When human beings cannot be that acccurate because *we* dont know all the variables involved, a computer is going to do the judging?
The best solution will be for the parents to judge and take corrective action, not the schools.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
Like that's going to work. Lets identify troubled people because we have absolutely no record on them. No one talks about them. No one sees them. Hear no evil, speak no evil. This software will probably identify a large number of people like us as potential problems, when geeks - in general - are among the least violent people i've ever met. Arrogant, maybe. Violent, no.
Then next thing you know, being identified by this will be 'probable cause'.
{can nyt articles be put in 'nnn bytes in body' sections under the header?}
OFTC: By the community, for the community
Just to add on to what you've already said:
... but I know that a lot of psychology is about finding a way into a person's subconscious (or superconscious, if you prefer) mind.
... we don't picture the situation through our own eyes).
... if (according to Jaynes) we're role-playing when we theorize about what we would do in a given circumstance, or what we've done in the past (by looking at the image of ourself moving about and carrying out the task in question), and we're also role-playing when we project what a different 'type' of person would do ... there's a somewhat equal amount of information which can be gleamed about us, since both projections are the product of our subconscious (or superconscious) mind.
I'm not a psychologist by any means
That said, even a person who answers the question honestly is faking the answers, according to some psychological opinion.
I know this is probably nitpicking, but if you're interested in this sort of thing you should read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (which I picked up per suggestion from a slashdot reader). The late Julian Jaynes believed that part of consciousness is the metaphor "I" which is comprehended by being able to look outside yourself, at yourself. Whenever we answer questions about our past or about what we would do in such and such situation, we're looking objectively at our self image (that is, we picture ourselves
As for your suggestion about playing a role... I talked to my mom (who majored in psychology) and she told me that role-playing is a commonly used method of finding a way into the subconscious mind. So
But really, these are just my ideas from what I've read so far, take them with a grain of salt.
___
The ends are ape-chosen, only the means are man's. -- Aldous Huxley
Speaking from experience, this guy has a point. When I was a kid in a little small town, I had to learn to defend myself in any way necessary (in order to counteract gang attacks). So eventually I was labelled "violent" even though I really would not willingly hurt anybody, except to keep myself from losing teeth (which happened actually.)
Eventually I got out of that system, and I've never been "violent" since. In fact, I abhor violence in all forms (except Quake et al...)...
The whole idea of using some sort of AUTOMATED system to measure violence potential reeks of stupidity to me.
And has anybody pointed out that these demoralizing tests are a great deal at fault as well? I saw it happen to my kid brother, the system is screwing him over right now. He's not a geek, but he IS labelled as "violent". So they doped him up real good, and tossed him back into the same situation, except that now he sees HIMSELF as "violent" and thus exhibits little control...
*grumble*
Anyway, I'll step down off my soapbox now.
Then again, the school he was in treated everybody like numbers, as if it were merely a big assembly line. Why do schools do this? Total and utter disinterest in future generations. That's why. (not to blame the teachers, in most cases they aren't to blame. But when can ANY of us say that we've met more than one or two DECENT school-board officials???)
Well, that's the world for you.
So, you say, this profiling is not much more complicated than that. Eh, one thing. I was assuming the best neural net system. Most of these burocratic-run categorization systems use some primitive non-adaptive KBS (basically just a big list with some conditions), which in actuallity would have trouble telling the difference between a mass-murderer and a barn door.
Will this thing work? Of course. It will probably find 80% of the targets are "violent". Why? Because it will MAKE them violent, that's why. This sort of thing usually has the opposite intended effect, but the "positive" statistics usually tell the people at the top that it works.
One of these days we'll all be virtual organisms anyways and it won't matter who's violent ;)
It happens, what can I say.
By the way, has anybody thought about the fact that, in general, computer programming and psychology are usually two very differing fields? Who are they going to get to write this thing?
Ah well, it really IS too late, I should get some sleep so I stop rambling like this.
--To rebut the opinion that Constitutional rights are somehow granted to students, administrators are not held liable for actions, if they're determined to be in "good faith". I.E., Johnny got kicked out of school, and we have this Duck-test to show why. Johnny's doing time in the "alternative school", and the principlal/counselor ("prinselor") is untouchable. We just saw a case over my way where a teacher's and security officer's actions were ruled unconstitutional (via 4th Amendment), but no sanctions were levied.
--Do we have a background check on the person who created the test? Is he a psychology zealot or majority cultist?
--Then, there's the big picture. The test itself is an inert object, such as a rock or gun, subject to subjective use. It is a tool to be used by those with power to exert control over those without. It will be used to choose favorites and punish the insubordinates, thus forwarding the goals of the self-serving PHB.
--Has this software been hacked yet? By "automating" the process, a whole slew of PHB school officials and teachers think they've got a handy new weapon against the people that don't kiss up. In doing so, they place themselves in the domain of the people whom they oppress. I've never been a hacker, so I can only ask of those who are, to step up and help with the resistance.
--How about the alternate schools? Not the detention centers that are currently defining that phrase, but schools based around new systems. I've heard of charter schools out west, but don't know anything about them.
The bottom line is that we, the "geeks", must take hard action to minimize the impact of government, and the ignorant majority on which it depends, on the future generations.
Haha this reminds me of a part in the book Snow Crash where at the FedLand the computers record everything the employees do. Someone puts out a memo and the computer times how long you read it and for each length of time theres a different bad explanation like 20-30 mins -- slacker.
Hmmm... Has anyone ever been given this test?:
7
77
777
7777
Now, name a vegetable.
Actually, it's supposed to be done on paper, and the sevens should be arranged pyramid-fasion. Apparently, 90% of people say "carrot". I said brocolli(sp?). There are other tests similar to this one, and some I answer in the expected manner, some not. It sounds like, according to the "premise" of the violence test, I would fail it. But I'm not violent. I've never been in a real fight, and the times when I've been faced with one, I've said simply: "Go ahead, beat me. Let's see how big that proves you are, or if that makes you feel good." This test bothers me, because these tests are not 100% accurate - there will be exceptions. Granted, it doesn't sound like they'll summarily expel someone based on the results, I am afraid that that could happen. Then I'm screwed.
Thank you, George Orwell, for letting us go at least another 15 years without this sort of thing, thanks to your wisdom. Maybe we can last another 15.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
1. Phrenology violence detector - hey it worked in the 20's.
2. Kirlian photography aura scanner. 'Sorry go home, you got too much green and blue today.'
3. "The smiler." A device which attaches to your face and pulls a smile every 45 seconds.
4. Portable baggy-pants-detector. Can spot a pair of baggy pants 400 meters away.
5. Non-church goers must wear a scarlet 'A' on their shirts.
6. A computer program that picks out violent youths through a questionaire. -whoops!
Oh, I love how they pander to the 'education is underfunded consensus.' If this is how they spend their money than it deserves to be so.
It is likely to be a small monthly fee for each school.
Spare me your 'low low price guaranteed.' You'll charge the most you can for your market, like any other industry. You have a huge interest in making sure school districts get more cash = more to spend = higher prices = more profit!
This webpage is really about one thing - for the company to make the migration from fed services to the school district.
I have to agree here. This really doesn't have anything to do with "our rights online"
/. actually know anything about this?
This test is a tool. I'd be MUCH more interested in an article about HOW they develop tests like this, or even how the software got written, or how it was adopted by the govt or ANY kind of useful information. Speaking of which, does anyone on
Can your IM do this?
Right, so anbody who abused an animal is going to mass murder his classmates ? Anybody with bad parents ? Bad parents AND abusing animals ? AND looking a bit evil ?
Inevitably, at basic level these questionnaires are either little more than self-assessment programs (which are trivially easy to direct the outcome of, and are pretty inaccurate) or if relying entirely on details from another person, then they really won't have enough information to get an early warning of *possible* violent behaviour, let alone a complete picture.
I have done the tests employers use, but then employers are looking for different things; this program is more than a Keirsey-Grammer sorter; it's not just classifying personality types. It's trying to predict the possibility of future violent behaviour. And the overall point is not even the psychiatrists themselves feel they can make that kind of judgement accurately. A machine will do worse. Furthermore, by making the data from these machines available to people who are not qualified to interpret it will cause all manner of problems, both social and psychological.
You can run all the tests you like and I can guarantee you won't know me after it all. If that were the case, psychiatric diagnosis would be trivial, and we wouldn't have the level of misdiagnosis we do. The things picked up on by the MMPI et al. are simply probabilistic indicators, and we don't have any "good strength" indicators of severe personality disorders.
NP
Can you sum it up in a word? *No.* In a noise? *Whuuuurghhhhh!*
Things like this are usually considered personality disorders; they're not mental illnesses like depression where something has messed up the workings of the brain, but someone who's just learned and become "bad". Now, that sounds a scary statement, and you're right. There is a LOT of dissent about the status of personality disorders within the psychiatric profession. So, not only could you find your life changed on the say of a doctor, or a computer program, but you could find it changed because you're diagnosed with a disorder the professionals can't agree over, and that many don't even believe in.
Here in the UK, we're slightly ahead of the US on the psychiatric thought police track; our resident fascist and home secretary has decided that anybody who is diagnosed with a severe personality disorder should be locked up, possibly indefinitely -- even if they haven't comitted any crime. Not surprisingly human rights campaigners are miffed, and the law may be in violation of the EU convention (personality disorders are considered untreatable by most professionals, so you can't claim it's medical reason), and that's certainly what a lot of people are hoping. Even the psychiatric profession has denounced it, saying they have no way of effectively or reliably diagnosing such disorders, and that as many as 1 in 3 people could be imprisoned wrongly.
This fine piece of populist knee-jerk legislation resulted from the discovery that the man who Lynn and Megan Russel and seriously injured another child, happened to have a personality disorder. Never mind the fact that this is an incredibly rare set of events, the frenzy ensued, and the cry went up: Something Must Be Done.
It's hardly surprising the American government has concocted some equally bizarre and right-wing Big Brother inspired answer to all of this which would placate the restless masses, despite consigning thousands to a social backwater/scrap-heap. The ridiculous thing is, suggest they seriously restrict their gun controls , and they'll call you mad.
NP.
Can you sum it up in a word? *No.* In a noise? *Whuuuurghhhhh!*
You could write software to do the same job using tha automated purity test proggie, mySQL, and a few psychlogy textbooks (scientific papers if you're going to get all sophisticated).
It's speedy utilisation of a spontaneous yet powerful area of market demand; the demand may be short term or chaotic, being affected by certain classes of outside events which occur relatively infrequently, but whose qualitative power provokes a strong response. Because of this instability in demand, it is necessary that the product development should take place at high speed, so a low work implementation must be found, and a nice GUI put on front of it to make it look professional. All working details and statistics should be hidden from user in case they realise it's just numbers and stuff and can't be trusted.
Future developments
(i) Hold training days for operators, and include the opportunity to become a fully qualified $-grab Inc certified psychiatric professional.
(ii) Extend marketing branch to include doping kids sweets in the hope of precipitating more violent gunfights (R&D report high success rates on dry run with blue Smarties, expanding to include M&Ms)
NP
Can you sum it up in a word? *No.* In a noise? *Whuuuurghhhhh!*
NP
Can you sum it up in a word? *No.* In a noise? *Whuuuurghhhhh!*
Well, I've filled out an MMPI as a diagnosis, and it picked me up as manic depressive, which was right. But I have been able to persuade MMPI I was perfectly normal without any bother. I've also tried several other forms of testing as part of someones research project, and none of them were particularly resistant to "bluffing". (This is what happens when you live with a psychology student; endless experimentation :-)
Now, the problem with testing for something so ill-defined, and arbitrary as this makes it an incredibly difficult task -- it's not like you have concrete physical symptoms, or obvious disordered behaviour which might indicate, say, bipolarism, or depression. In brief, the test will give you lots of false negatives, and lots of false positives. Now, a test like that isn't really worth much, now, is it ? The opportunity for extremely damaging social consequences from the (ab)use of these tests by non-professional people is, to me, extremely worrying.
NP
Can you sum it up in a word? *No.* In a noise? *Whuuuurghhhhh!*
Exactly. I don't believe that this software is being implemented in the interest of students, school administrators are trying to cover their own asses politically. If administrators were actually concerned about students, they wouldn't be focusing on trying to weed out the potentially violent student, they would be trying to improve the school environment so that it is less likely to make Johnny go insane. Why are there so many school shootings as opposed to other public places? If it's just density of targets the gunman is concerned with, then a mall or sporting event would be a better place to open fire then in a school. It would then follow that there is something about the school environment that is making it a focal point for the rage of the chronically disaffected. Regardless of how accurate the software is, it only has the power to make school more of a hostile, alienating environment. Whether it has the ability to reduce the symptoms remains to be seen, but it can only exacerbate the cause of the problem.
So the question is, how will schools use this program? The company says that it is only for use when explicit threats exist, but how many schools have interpreted Marilyn Manson T-shirts as expicit threats?
The ironic thing is, colleges constantly preach the idea that they don't look only at standardized tests, because tests may not accurately judge a student by themselves. So now, while we reject standardized tests for admissions, we adopt them for discipline.
We can talk about this reducing kids' rights, reinforcing the social standards in high school, and all that. But lately, what hasn't?
In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -Carl Sagan
is that teh software company apparently claims to know (and be able to enforce) the manner in which its software is used. "'School administrators would use Mosaic-2000,' the company asserts, 'only in situations that reach a certain threshold (e.g., a student makes a threat, brings a weapon to school, teachers or students are concerned a student might act out violently).'" It may be that the software works best (or only works) when dealing with people who are at a high risk for violent behavior. However, if I was a school administrator, I would be tempted to test every student. That way, even students with no past history of violence could be found and helped. (Whether or not they'd really be helped is beside the point.) Just my $.02.
I didn't read the article, so I don't know who's brilliant plan this was. This will just lead to more labeling of kids, and in the end more violence.
I think this software will be a "success" because it will very accurately determine who will become violent. (notice I used the word "determine" rather than "predict.") Pigeonholing kids into a "violent" category makes me think of the intelligent and creative people I've met that were pigeonholed into the "slow" category, and now they've completely managed to live up to those expectations.
numb
?syntax error
This kind of stuff really pisses me off, because this is nothing more than turning kids into scapegoats for all of society's problems. If it were politically correct to run this type of test for blacks, politicians would do it because they simply need someone to blame and put the focus off themselves. "There so many problems with kids today. They shoot each other. Sorry, we just don't have time to work on real problems like rising crime among baby boomers and poverty".
Statistics actually show that school is one of the safest places for a kid/teenager to be. They are much much much more likely to be killed by their parents in their homes than to be killed by another kid. Where is the standardized test to find violent parents? We couldn't do that; it would violate parents rights, wouldn't it? But kids don't have any rights; at least not in this society.
One of my favourite authors is Mike Males, and he has two very good books: Framing Youth and Scapegoat Generation: America's War Against Adolescents. I recommend both of the books to anyone who wants to find out the truth the media is too afraid to tell you about. Links lead to Chapters since I'm now boycotting Amazon.com.
I'm tired of it. Yes, this is a tool that has the potential to cause great harm. But really, all it does is make observations based on trends. This is not inherently a bad thing!
Nuclear technology also had the potential to cause great harm, but it could also be used for good. Look what happened!
Just because a person has violent tendencies does not meen that this person is not capable of keeping full reign on themselves. Also, people without violent tendencies are perfectly capable of flipping out and commiting violent acts. I for one love shooting ppl in quake, and thought the matrix shootemup scene was the funniest thing i ever saw in my life. I've tortured little animals and plotted devious ways to destroy elementry schools. However, i've never touched a person in my life. Yes, the tests will catch people who are "prone to violence" but from expirience with phycoanalysis, they do not take into account a persons will power which keeps a person from acting the way they think.
Consider this,
A kid gets tested, and is labeled violent. Later he goes out and kills a few of his classmates. He goes to court and his lawyer says that he is mentally disturbed and was predisposed to violence as according to the test.
The Max scores on those tests (SAT and ACT) aren't that tough to attain. I mean, I got a 36 on the ACT, and here I am doing very mediocre in college. Oh well...
This is truly a scary concept though, as is all of this profiling stuff. I don't think some piece of software has a better idea of whether im going to snap than i do. How would it make you feel, "Im sorry but you can no longer attend this school or wrk at this facility because it has come to our attention that you are 54.6% liable to go on a killing spree". I mean, I have a wierd sense of humor, I get angry, we all say things like, "Im going to kill you". We never actually mean it (12 Angry Men?) But all of these things can be put together to form a picture of you that wouldn't necessarily be to accurate. How would these be handled? Survelliance of an individual that scored a point or so higher than average. Notification of teachers in the classes and neighbors as if you were a sex offender? This is not a 'good' idea.
--Ks9
PS: If you ever have to take a test like this, answer honestly. They can tell if you are fudging the
answers, unless you know what you're doing, which you don't if you're still in high school
(unless you've taken several college-level psych courses, and, even then, probably had to
help write the test to know the "answers").
I don't believe that, but I do have little understanding of psychology (more of a fan of the hard sciences, as I'm sure many others here are), and you seem to know what you're talking about. So, how can I find a test of this sort (on the net, or a textbook, or anywhere), and the information I need to score it. I firmly believe that I can take it three times (without cheating) - one honestly, one to score on one extreme, and one to score on the other. It would be interesting to find out that I'm wrong.
Even if they are purely using statistical techniques, and the questions do not mean anything by themselves, I could pick people I know who would be one extreme or the other, and answer as if I were them. If someone's been a good friend for a long time, you should know enough about them to take a multiple-choice psych test as them, and answer almost identically to how they would. (Not counting the worthless tests where frequently none of the answers are appropriate - I can't even answer those consistantly for myself).
I still have to strongly advise lying. Remember, tell the truth to your friends, but lie to those who are trying to get information out of you for either their own purposes or to hurt you.
Parents need to raise the kid and instill a sense of what is good/bad-right/wrong in the kid. Not the school. This idea that "the villiage needs to raise the child" is utter crap.
Many people with violent tendencies can be quite useful as cops, firemen, emergency medical technicians, rocket scientists, demolition experts, military personnel, spies, surgeons, butchers, football players, and other professions
where violence and/or gore are facts of life.
There's a couple of things I disagree with here. I think your definition of violence is a bit dodgy (demolishing a building?! rocket science?!).
I don't think surgery or butchering really involves gore. That doesn't need violent tendancies just an unsqueamish nature.
And the main thing here is that in all those professions listed above, the last thing i'd want is for them to have a tendancy towards violence. I'd have thought the total opposite for police, soldiers, sportsmen would be much more beneficial to society.
For example: Surely we need police who are resistant to the urge to beat the crap out of someone because they insulted them. Police who ask questions and investigate, before shooting.
-- "Sponges grow in the ocean. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn't happen."
First, the pathetic part. You would think that after all of these years the general public, including the police and school administrators, would have learned the first principle of computer science: "Garbage in, garbage out". Yet the officials quoted in the article seem to think that if it comes out of a computer it is "objective". Of course these are the same people that believe in lie detectors...Which brings me to the absurd part: do these people really think that little Johnny is going to be dumb enough to admit to torturing dogs and cats when filling out a psychiatric evaluation?
You say: "You know when someone seems a little off to you, or gives you the tingle in the back of your neck/unsettledness in your gut type feeling. It's when we don't pay attention to those instincts that trouble arises."
Nonsense. I know numerous people who have given me that that feeling, and so far none has been a murderer or other criminal (lucky for me). And I think that having teachers, principals, policemen, and other authority figures use "gut type feeling" to make decisions is incredibly stupid.
Think of how many people who would never hurt anyone you would punish by exercising this extremely unpredictive type of crap.
Before anyone spends my tax money to watch, persecute, "help" with mandatory psychiatric visits, or otherwise discriminate someone from among their peers, I would want their test to predict the behavior in question with a false alarm rate of less than %50. Even the simply asking if the person has threatened the action before doesn't meet that standard.
If your "tingling at the back of the neck" were actually used by people who mattered, think of how baddly it would go for any normal black student, who was a little too aggressive socially or had a particularly strong black accent or a fascination with ganster rap or whatever, with a redneck principal, teacher, or coach. Unfortunately, "gut feeling" are exactly what people guide themselves by in many places.
Tools like these can be used to defend the actions you wanted to take anyway.
Similarly, if you are a manager at corporation that wants to fire half its workers, you can hire a high priced consulting firm of some sort or another to send in a few good bull shiters fresh out of school with no experience in your industry to produce the graphs, charts, and statistics you need to prove that you have to do it to save the business.
If I were a principal at a school, this would just be ass-cover. You think I'd only keep one database ? Ha. I'd have several different copies, and I would experiment entering or not entering different information on different students. For each student that I wanted to be able to suspend quickly on little grounds (trouble makers, weirdos, etc), I'd make sure I had a database around that listed him as the most dangerous guy in the world. One for each potential victim; when the next columbine happened, I'd have a ready made excuse to send them home until I worked my panties back out of my crack.
Similarly, just in case it actually happened on my watch, you'd want a database you could whip out showing the guy was only the 30th most dangerous person in school.
I think what has to happen in our society is that there has to be an awareness of how these things can be manipulated. I think there will be abuse of this "profiling databases" until the public views them with the same jaundiced cynicism that they veiw (or should view) statistical studies. When they can't be used as ass-cover, then maybe people will actually put them to real use.
This is straying off topic, but the book "The Penguin Book of Lies", editted by Philip Kerr, is one of the best books I have read.
It is a collection of various famous lies from history, ranging from British Propaganda about the Germans during WW1 to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to biblical stuff. Very good.
It isn't available on Amazon. www.powellsbooks.com doesn't seem to have it either. If I could find a copy on the web for under twenty dollars, I'd buy it, even though I've read it before (my father's copy).
Ok, lets look at this from a scientific perspective. It has been shown that we can look at people and from profiles we can place them in certain patters. Many people have taken the so-called "Personality" test that many companies require before hiring. You would be surprised how accurate they are- even with those outside of the so-called norm.
I have seen many people who would most likely not be hired (because they are out of the norm) be hired because the test caused the company/ interviewer to look at something they might have otherwise missed or ignored.
Also, it has been shown that it is possible to (with 97% accuracy) look at an adolescent's life and see if that child fits the profile of a future serial killer. Like it or not, many of these 'violent' people and children fit profiles, and while they are not sure fire they do raise a flag.
Most profiles are not decided upon by what music you listen too, or how much time you spend on the net. Also profiles are not usually based on your relation ship with others or parents, but instead how you relate to yourself. Yes, the do look at how you view certain situations or how you respond. However, the good ones (i.e. the ones used by the a psychiatrist) do not have certain questions that when answered a certain way say something. Instead they look at the aggregate of answers.
So yes, a computer program could potentially be capable of finding people who are at the time predisposed toward violence. So the computer program and the idea itself do not bother me. What I worry about is how such information would and could be put to use by school administrators. With most schools incapable of handling properly the precursor information they already get, I can only imagine what they would do with this kind of tool.
For me, I think the money on this project would be better spent educating the counselors, teachers and administrators at schools about how things really are. With that said, I am also sure that this program will spread like wildfire and the creators will get their asses sued off the first time it misses a person an they go on a killing rampage.
"I say we feed them all to the lawyers!"
Besides, this program is not designed to be given as a test to everyone. It is designed to rate a threat. That is, if someone says "I am going to kill you" the idea of this program is to see if that threat is real or not. So, if you do not going around threating people (an action) then you would not be given this test. Once you voice your thoughts they cease to be yours- and are open to interpreation. Depending on the danger inherent in your voiced thoughts dictates the rights that society has in protecting itself.
Like the website says, this program is used by many organizations. I personally have never take a test like this have you? Thus it shows that if you do not do an action (like threaten someone) then you never have to be subjected to the test. However if you do, it will rate the reality of that threat.
Personally, I would much rather have the experienc of several pschicatrist in a program rate the reality of one of my rants over a zealot school Principal.
http://www.gdbinc.com/mosaic2000.htm
From: http://www.gdbinc.com/shooting.htm The tragedy at Littleton was certainly alarming - but it is not unique. Prior to all such events, there are pre-incident indicators (called PINs)
In order to make denial of constitutional rights Posix compliant, you need to add:
#define DANGEROUS_STUDENT IQ > 90
struct WarningSigns
{
char favoriteBooks [MAX_BOOKS];
char favoriteMusic [MAX_MUSIC];
char hairstyle [MAX_HAIRSTYLE];
bool harassedByJocks;
bool likesComputers;
bool wearsBlack;
bool wearsTrechcoat;
}
if (WarningSigns.harassedByJocks == true)
faculty.ignore(harassmentByJocks);
if (student.rampages())
{
faculty.forget(harassmentByJocks);
press.forget (harassmentByJocks);
press.blame (internet, geeks, DOOM);
}
The government has people who profile people, try to get inside their head, whatever (I bet you can't guess what they're called!). These people often have some damn hefty degrees in psychology, and have a lot of experience (and training) with dealing with the intracacies of the human brain. And yet, to accurately profile a person takes a lot of work and keen insight. People just don't break down into nice, neat little categories that are easily referenced (or whatever).
Certainly no piece of software is ever going to understand the human mind (much less all of the entangling ``emotional'' factors), especially since no human being can truly understand another (even a profiler, though they can be eerily accurate in their assumptions), much less humans in general. And guess who makes software? Human beings. Wow.
This idea is just plain stupid from the get go. Plain and simple. It will never work.
~ Kish
This software is being sold to customers in a panic- they're unthinkingly grabbing at anything that claims to be able to save them from the big, lurid spectacle of a school massacre. The great thing about seling something to someone who's buying it unthinkingly is that they won't critically evaluate it for quite a while. The quality of your product is immaterial, because by the time people realize it's junk, you've cashed in your stock options and retired as a millionaire to the Bahamas. If I were the guy making this software, I wouldn't even bother writing a program to analyze the answers students give to the questions. I'd just ask bunch of questions, then spit out a random answer. I get paid the same, yes?
This goes right back to "Hellmouth" and not correcting the schools so that the provokations do not exist in the school in the first place.
-------------------------
-------------------------
As easy as herding cats!
I'm a 17 yr. old Sr. at one of the largest high schools in my state. This thing is absolutly insane. Just because a person does not fit the profile of the "all-american kid" then they are to be labeled different and therefor be concidered bad. I would be stereotyped as one of the "at risk" students, because I am not in any sports, I wear black all the time, and I am a tech. freak. My school in a fit of stupidity this year has already banned all Coats due to the outcry of only banning trenchcoats last year. Yes I happen to wear a trenchcoat, I still wear one to school, only to be harrassed by the administration. If you know of any school that is in the process of negotation this software please voice your opinion and urge them to stop. he who laughs last isnt always the last to laugh he was just the last one heard laughing food for thought
I'm a 17 yr. old Sr. at one of the largest high schools in my state. This thing is absolutly insane. Just because a person does not fit the profile of the "all-american kid" then they are to be labeled different and therefor be concidered bad.
I would be stereotyped as one of the "at risk" students, because I am not in any sports, I wear black all the time, and I am a tech. freak. My school in a fit of stupidity this year has already banned all Coats due to the outcry of only banning trenchcoats last year. Yes I happen to wear a trenchcoat, I still wear one to school, only to be harrassed by the administration.
If you know of any school that is in the process of negotation this software please voice your opinion and urge them to stop.
he who laughs last
isnt always the last to laugh
he was just the last one heard laughing
food for thought
This kind of stuff is pointless. If a person is going to execute something on the level of Columbine, its probably going to happen. This nation has messed itself up so bad we can't see it coming. Now if we started putting some God back in the schools, maybe we see some results. If an when I end up taking the test, I am going to bomb the test so everybody will think I am some Satanist, Computer hacking freak, and going to kill everyone tommorow. Actually I am well-behaved, mostly pacifist, Christian, computer-hacking freak.
What if the student blows the test on purpose? I remember faling a standardized test on purpose in order to be in an easier class. What will happen to the student that treats this test as a joke?
Just great. Some nitwit with control over their corner of the world is going to use this to pigeon-hole someone. Weak-minded people rely on tools like this to analyze people they don't understand and exert whatever control they have over the undeserving subject.
People do, and increasingly will do, unexpected things that might frighten those in authority. Psychological examination will reveal that these people had a reason for whatever outlet they chose to express themselves.
The average person has control of their faculties, but has the potential to do great harm when provoked.
We should be taking the opposite approach to the one that this tool uses. Instead of using some canned set of criteria to determine what someone is thinking or is capable of, we should be encouraging people to express and exhaust their naturally occuring frustrations in healthy ways.
Up for a game of Quake3 or Battlezone , anyone?
Touche InsomniacsDream.
I can't believe how some people can turn a serious discussion about software which could potential violate juveniles rights into a showcase of bad and racist humour.
I find it disgusting that someone could mock the suffering of millions.
If there ever was a good case for getting rid of Anonymous Cowards, this is it.
When I was in High School, I had a teacher that thought a marksmenship course at his old school , I think he said that he thought that class in the mid 80's dont remiber for shure.He said that they even made there own bullets. So this shows the solution is not to get rid of guns and thing of that nature, but to teach people to use them properly.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Hey, I've got an idea! What if, instad of spending money and time cataloging students, we actually work to solve the problem of students being ostracized because they're different. It sicken me to think that we're going to solve this problem by seperating and classifying students even further. So not only are nerds "different", but they will now be "at-risk" students just because they don't want to put up with crap from the jocks and preps? I hope that someone is making an awful lot of money from this, because I shudder to think that they came up with this scheme out of the goodness of their heart...
"I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member" - Groucho Marx
Look, no disrespect, but how naive are you? This is absolutely about geeks, because they wouldn't DARE use it on the star quarterback; that's not how high school politics works. If they did that, they'd have to point out that randomly beating on people in the halls (i.e., the jocks at Columbine pre-shooting) isn't a nice thing, and is in fact violent behavior. And then the parents of these meatheads would throw fits. They're going to use this exclusively on outcasts, odd kids, etc. In other words, the geeks. Maybe I'm wrong; maybe they'll apply this with parity. But I don't see that happening. -brennan
Do people choose to committ crimes or are they conditioned by environmental factors, etc., of which they have no control, to committ crimes.
This software is an example of the problems inherent in adopting the latter view; it results in an Orwellian situation where can, at least in theory, identify the poor malcontents and get them treatment before they committ grave acts of violence.
I would argue such solutions are nonsensical because they lack the ability to measure the sort of free will that led Klebold and Harris to choose to kill while plenty of others who fit their personality types refrain from making said choices.
This is just another stupid concession to the idiotic idea that there is no element of personal responsibility/choice in criminal actions.
This is too bad...how many of these schools do you think will have groups determined to skew the results? I know I would. If my high school did this, you can bet they'd think I was the next Hitler or something (despite the fact that in reality I'm an extreme pacifist).
:-)
I would LOVE to take that test
Jeremy
Looking for a Python IRC bot?
But isn't the point of this to catch potentially violent kids before they do anything? It's not very clear what they plan to do with people once they've been branded.
The theory of this would work, but communism also works in theory...
If you think about it, the students that committed the Columbine incident were of above average intelligence. That being true, whos to say that they dont see through the test like its made of glass.
Then on the other hand, think of stupid people, they will probably do something like:
Q: If you had a gun in school, what would you do?
A: Um, duh, kill people yeah, thats right...
****WARNING****
POLICE HAVE BEEN NOTIFIED!
Stay where you are so we may take you into custody.
The entire idea is flawed. It allows the people with a bit of smarts to lie their way through if they have to...and the quietly violent people are the ones this is trying to detect?
icq:=22921393;
Ok, I went through this and i seen this:
_______________________________________________
It will involve only students who give cause for special concern, school and law-enforcement officials emphasize. "We certainly wouldn't want to develop any kind of tool for labeling students in any way," Vita said.
_______________________________________________
So, let me get this straight, were not labeling kids, but if you look like you may cause trouble, you get the test.
icq:=22921393;
Isn't it curious that kids are no longer given IQ tests? (answer: because they didn't accurately describe an individuals *true* potential).
This software evaluates potential violence, rather than intelligence. Other than that, I don't see much of a difference. I think it would be much more effective to use such questions to engage a one on one conversation with the student.
Communication is one of the most important aspects of our society, yet we build an education system where there is a 30+ to 1 relationship between teacher and students; we use software to evaluate a person's behavior without (potentially) ever having talked with this person.
Maybe teachers should be required to take psychology lessons, or classroom sizes should be smaller. This type of software is not the solution, however. The way I can see computer software having a longterm positive effect, would be a student tracking system where individuals, teachers, and parents can interact with questions and comments that get tracked and evaluated from kindergarden through highschool. This would teach us more about the students, parents *And* teachers. We'd learn which students were getting attention in class, and which one's go unnoticed. We'd learn about the teachers who play favorites and prejudge their students. We'd learn about the parents who don't participate in their children's education. And maybe we would learn why so many kids in our country, who have so much potential end up working for $7-8hr.
Did you mean 'hacker' or 'cracker'?
Do you know the diffrence? I don't think you do.
Did you mean 'hacker' or 'cracker'?
Do you know the diffrence? I don't think you do.
"One of God's own creations, some kind of high powered mutant. Too weird to live and too rare to die"
Schools invariably waste their money on the wrong things when anything technological is concerned. Usually because they only appraise it by appearances.
I find it amusing that the Mosaic article notes that the kind of security measures that parents and school boards are screaming for post-Columbine, like video cameras, did nothing to prevent violence in the Columbine incident itself.
And as for computers... oh, boy. In my last years of high school, they built a spiffy new wing to my high school for a new library. They also installed a special computer room to replace the one that was currently in an old dingy classroom. It had special computer tables along the sides, adjustable chairs, the works. All in a lovely, fashionable cream-and-burgundy decor.
And carpeting. Nice, inexpensive but durable burgundy carpeting, because it looks so much lovelier than linoleum.
We'd frequently get visible static shocks when we reached to turn on the computers thanks to that carpeting. They ended up buying the computers over and over again that year, so to speak. The computer tables were also hideously non-ergonomic. But hey, they looked fabulous when the school trustees did their after-hours walking tour of the place.
Six months after the software gets bought, it won't matter if $10000 program is only dragged out once every six months to "appraise" kids they already know have problems. The most important thing here is "hey, we spent $10k on making the schools safer, vote for us!"
Well, even if they're using widely validated psychological testing procedures, there's the issue of what they're testing for.
Probably who they're looking to uncover are the kids that are likely to commit openly violent acts in school, like knifing a teacher or shooting up other students en masse. Unfortunately, these acts are statistically rare enough that I doubt there are many proven criteria for predicting them - beyond the obvious, like making threats. And if they were only looking for such obvious signs, they wouldn't need a $10k chunk of software.
Meanwhile, there are less mediagenic forms of violence in the schools - a.k.a common bullying - which likely derive from a completely different psychological profile than that of the nascent psychopaths that everyone's so worried about these days. It probably causes more problems in the long run (what set the kids off at Columbine, after all?), but it's also more subtle, harder to catch, and is usually shrugged off as inevitable. If they could successfully screen all the kids for that kind of behaviour, I'd stand up and cheer.
And then there's the issue of how subtle the questions are. I was once part of a psych experiment and took a questionnaire about my moods ("do you ever wish you could hurt people that make you mad?") and then another questionnaire in which all the questions were about what I thought of gay men, after reading some oddly stilted "interviews" with gay men. They seemed surprised that I could tell they were testing me for homophobia! And it didn't take a genius to figure out the mood questions were a simple honesty test - to see if I was "fudging the answers". And this was a university study, done by graduate students. Just because they used common techniques to avoid tampered results doesn't mean the test is well implemented - I suspect they didn't fool anyone. The Mosaic program could easily be just as sloppy in implementation. If so, the results won't tell anyone anything they don't already know.
Or Philip Kerr's interesting novel "A Philosophical Investigation" (1992) for a thought about some of the consequences:
http://www.am azon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0452271401/002-5356185-8 882646
Sure, and the kid who's building a bomb in his basement will be totally honest about the answers. If the questions are all like the "gun access" question then they're pretty face apparent.
Although I realize it may not be their intent, I get the impression that at a lot of schools this would replace any attempt to deal with the causes of the problem. By the time a student is thinking of doing something like that, that student is already the first casualty.
The results of this test will, honestly, correlate to those who have violent tendencies. It does appear not do it on the basis of who is wearing trenchcoats, who is "different", or who is left out. It is not about geeks, nerds, or social rejects at all.
My best friend at school wears a trenchcoat when its cold or raining outside, its a nice trenchcoat and keeps him warm. The other day the principle stopped us, and began asking us in a semi-scared way if he was "OK". As though he was a violent person or he was going to shoot up the entire school that lunch period. I hope this test does get around, and it becomes very accurate, or must be backed by a Physcologist's evaluation if a Positive is spewed forth by the program. Could help prevent alot of negatvitiy we (my friends and i) get from hanging out with "the kid in the trenchcoat".
What I would like to know is how to get a copy of this softwher so that I can see it for my self. Lord Of Squid.
SquidLord, Afton From Ali
Now our big brother will kindly herd us into our corner of the ranch. When Y2K causes problems, he will stand in our corner day and night, and whack those of us who try to go out of it at night. In the meantime, our guns will be confiscated so we cant do ourselves any harm. A short while later, when the banks-or trade for that matter are floundering, everyones favorite form of branding will occur. Smartcards will be put into place and we all will be tracked for everything. -(Put under the heading of "for your own safety" of course). Slaughter will occur when we can no longer perform our work for our ranch hand. -NOT OURSELVES. When does this start? Effective immediately. They tried something similar on me in the late 80s that this software does. Im talking form experience here guys. Be on the watch.
My dogma ran over your Karma....My Karma's a Greyhound: ugly, but strong. -You may think you know what, but I know who
Vita, the federal firearms official, says school officials need Mosaic and other tools to deal with an ever more complex threat in which relatively good students with access to guns may erupt because they feel victimized by bullies or by the school system.
"They're the hard ones for the school administrators to identify," Vita said. "It's easy to pick out the gang members with tattoos. It's these other people that kind of surprise administrators, and these are the ones they really need to identify."
Yep, the Feds want to profile good students to identity killers instead of people with criminal records. It can easilly be demonstrated that this will never work due poor statistics (too few suicidal psychos to build a real model).
Who do you think will be profiled? People with access to guns and sicko's who harm animals were mentioned, but there were no hard and fast rules. Administrators will target those that are targeted now, the people writing in. This is not paranoia, this is predicting the future from experience. I think they have better statistics.
So what is the real intent? $10k per school for vendor, and more federal intervention in public schools. What is the real cost? Profiled citizens, invasive government, punishment without crime.
I thought Mosaic was a browser.
Anyone ever do those job tests when you were at school? The ones that told you what future career you would be interested in. After about 16 pages of rigorous testing and questioning the result said that you'd be best of being in the Army (in fact it said everyone would be best of in the army, I should check who developed it). All I'm saying is that the test might not be accurate and a lot of people might not take it seriously enough to relise the implications involved in them being found 'different'.
Providing children in school with some kind of quality in education and watching them to see if they have problems is naturally out of the question. Educators taking an interest in the well being of students and treating problems on a case by case basis would be an ideal solution. Everyone who could benefit from some help isn't necessarly commiting schoolaside, and helping everyone is far better than earmarking some students for the gas chamber. Having a computer analyze the problem is just a cheap way solving nothing and cheating the student.
You're reading Slashdot. Of course you like Linux and pc hardware
I think it would be much more interesting to run a nationwide profile looking for "normal" students, and see what incredibly small percentage make the cut. I suspect that the results of such a survey would quickly discredit the whole "profiling industrial complex".
One other thing to remember: high school is not life, though it certainly seemed it at the time, and the "permanent record" that all of these test results go into is just so much paper. There are very few things you can do in HS that will follow you around for the rest of your life.
A partial list: violent felonies, pregnancy (yours or hers), suicide, drug addiction, and abysmal grades. The opinion of your guidance counseler doesn't mean a thing, unless you listen to it.
It's funny how we wish to help eachother have more fufilling and happy lives(supposedly what safty brings) by reducing ourselves to statistics - numbers.
I am currently in highschool and I'm sure I would fall under the catagories, as I am extremely strange, don't communicate much with the "normal" crowd(when I do get out of my room). Yes, I'm a bit antisocial, but I'm also a pacifist,and a humanist. I've had enough of labelling and whatnot; I still get flak from that other school incedent. Last week a girl even asked me if I was going to kill everyone at our school in English class, with all sincerity. Perhaps this will only serve to aggrivate the problem and allow those using this to ignore those who are truly crying for help.
"Hex, Bugs, and Rockn'Roll"
This is a step in the right direction ??? People like U amaze the sh*t out of me. I'm currently taking a class on the government and constitution of the United States and it amazes me how ignorant the Average American is about their rights and WHY they have those rights. It similarly amazes me to see people who are ready to give up their rights for the "illusion" of secutity.
This program sounds like a good idea if and ONLY IF it will be accompanies by judicious use by intelligent, non-judgemental and trained individuals...(in a similar vein communism sounds like a good idea until U try it and realize that its inherent nature makes it tend to become a dictatorship). Sadly, instead of trying to solve any one of the real problems behind Columbine; school bullying, easy access to weapons, or our desensitization to violence via the media, games and music..(my opinion is take out any one of these and Columbine wouldn't have happened)...instead a PROGRAM, a bunch of code not written by me, that handpicks the violent in society will be used.
Americans tendency to throw computers at a problem and hope for the best has been disturbing me for a while...such as the recent clamor for internet access in all schools because this supposedly will make kids SMARTER?!?... now instead of having responsive teachers or well trained guidance counselors this should be replaced by a PROGRAM that labels (that's what it will do even if they say it doesn't) people as potential psychos), yeah that's a good idea.
My major gripe with this program is that it gives school administrators justification to oppress students. The Mosaic page says the program should be used by administrators on people they suspect are troubled cases. I hated my high school and used to have several violent thoughts a day (I love the character Carnage from the SpiderMan comic), if I took a violence test at that time I'm not sure if I would have passed or not but I do know one thing....I would NEVER EVER have gone or will go on a shooting spree killing all those I dislike(d).
Some people know the difference between make beleive and real life, some of us do not...we shouldn't trust a bunch of if statements and a while loop on a DOS prompt to make that decision for us.
Schools seem to be becoming more and more jail like every day...how would I have dared to be different (into computers when almost everyone else wasn't and used to play AD&D) if I risked being profiled by my principal (who by the way hated one of my friends and once attacked him given no provokation).
America is becoming a sad and stupid place indeed.
Bad Command Or File Name
it's made by the man for the man. it'll single out the nerdy dudes who play quake and surf the internet because they're a new breed. to this test, geeks are going to be psycho. geeks are untestable.
there hasn't ever been an alternative to highschool life, kids are always one of, say, 10 different groups. now they're jocks at quake, nerds at reading, popular at graphic design and website creation, headbanging with their music selection (but they have mozart in with marylin on their mp3 playlist) and they're studs in the irc room. sluts at porn collection, druggies on coffee and simply not accepted at every level in highschool.
"..Constructive critizism is always welcome however."
Does this remind anyone of Orwell's 1984, only about 15 years too late?
"Me fail English, that's unpossible." --Ralphie
if we are going to be free, and thus responsible for ourselves, or are we going to demand our safety from government. If the latter, then there will be no room for individual personalities...too dangerous.
This isn't a cure all measure. You are definitely right on that the ideal situation would be to have smart and insightful teachers who knew every student and cared enough to be involved.
In the end, a system like this will only be as good as the administrators and teachers who use it. Will it help? I think it has the potential to do so.
This is another sad example of people sluffing off their responsibility to themselves and other people by allowing something/someone else to think for them (some poorly documented computer algorithm in this case). When are people going to realize they need to look at themselves before looking at everything else and placing blame? If people would start taking responsibility for their lives, we would live in a world free of Columbines and "evil detector" computer programs. Oy vey.
Learn how a CPU works before you learn to program. Seriously.
Let's assume that no-one is trying to give a false reading. Let's also assume that violent kids are one in a million. Finally let's assume that the test catches 95% of the really violent ones, but gives a false positive on 10% of the not violent kids. Then the probability that some random kid is _NOT_ really violent, given that his sscore says he is, is (probability of false positive)/((probability of true positive)+(probability of false positive)) = ((1-10^-6)(0.1))/((1-10^-6)(0.1)+(0.95(10^-6))) = 0.9999905, which is pretty close to a sure thing. (That was Bayes theorem in action.) What's driving that result, that almost all positives will be false positives, is the rarity of true positives. It's my assumption that really violent kids are one in a million that makes it work, not the assumption about 10% false positives. Any reasonable numbers in there will give qualitatively similar results. How many school principals do you think would say that the probability that some random kid with a failing score is really nonviolent is only 10%, just because the principal doesn't understand conditional probability? I think that calculation above suggests that if a kid fails the test, someone should sit him down and explain that it's not nice to try to fool us. Any other reaction seems unjustifiable _if_based_on_this_test_alone_.
See what I've been reading.
OK, let me get this straight. . . some normally non-voilent people get pushed to the edge of sanity through the constant brutalization and marginalization of jock and negroes. . . Well, this software will probably go nowhere, as it will show that the victims of the Columbine shootings were more violent than the perpetrators.
I read the article and this is a kind of "Big Brother". You are cataloging people - that is the first step to an Orwellian negative-utopia. Also worth mentioning is the fact that the purpose of this is to label kids despite the repeated statement: "We don't want to label kids". That is a politically correct load of bull.
"He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the Future" -Orwell 1984 "If a natio
"co-developed by the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms, the Los Angeles County Office of Education, and Gavin de Becker, Incorporated."
*"Cogito Ergo Liberalis"*
I agree that because the tests are less than perfect, there is a serious potential for misuse. But I think it depends on the threshold.
/despite/ them; not /because/ of them.
A few years ago in RI there were two fatal "road rage" incidents. In the first, there were two guys in traffic. If my memory serves, one cut off the other one. The guy who got cut off then chased the first guy down and pulled him over. Words were exchanged, then guy #2 walks back to his car, pulls a crossbow (!) out of his trunk, and shoots the first guy dead. In the second incident, a guy was cut off in traffic and attempted to chase the perpatrator. He got confused and pulled over the wrong car. He then got out of his car, walked up the the car he had just pulled over, and stabbed the (innocent) gentleman fatally in the heart.
Normal people don't DO that! It doesn't matter if they're geeks, jocks, executive VPs, or what -- it's just ABNORMAL.
I have to think that had these two men taken some sort of "propensity towards violence" test they'd have failed miserably. (Or passed, depending on your point-of-view.) I think we've all met people like this. They're angry. They can't let things go. Everything that happens to them is 1) deliberate and 2) a personal slight. THEY never make mistakes, which is why they can so safely assume that YOUR mistake was a pointed attempt to harrass or humiliate them.
When people "snap", it's almost never a case of a normal person who's cracked under the pressure. It's almost always one of those angry, self-centered pr*cks who's lost his last shred of self-control. Normal people don't WANT to hurt others. They might like the idea in the abstract, but if you put a knife in their hand and tell them to hurt someone, they won't. (That's why the military needs to train their soldiers to be killers.) Normal people also recognize that most of what happens happens
If the test threshold were set high enough, only REAL psychos would get flagged. You'd have false negatives, but you'd at least be identifying SOME of the nuts.
Mind you, I have no confidence that a) the test would be used correctly, b) students wouldn't screw around with their answers, or c) you could legally do anything about it if you DID find out that Mr. So-And-So was a ticking time bomb. I also think that the test is utterly pointless for anyone younger than about 14. But if the concept could be successfully implemented, I think it would be an improvement.
P.S. If you're ever in RI and get chased by a man with a crossbow, keep driving...
Statistically schools are the safest place a kid can be. A child is less safe at home, the mall, or any other place for that matter. The school shootings caused several deaths, a pity yes, but the news put it out of proportion. There are more deaths daily that come from teen's driving drunk then at the school shootings. Welcome to America...
I'll assume for the purpoises of this post that this program actually does what it says and that it works most of the time. (I think that's extremely unlikely)
Quite simply, we don't understand how the brain works, and we don't understand how/why it acts/reacts the way it does. Even those most advanced in psycology have very little clue.
So, this tests puts difficult-to-interprate results in the hands of those who can't really understand them. Can this do anything *but* harm the people being tested?
1) My heros:
a) carry guns.
b) wear white hoods.
c) wear black leather.
d) are congressmen and senators.
2) How do you feel about the police?
a) I want to become one.
b) Cops suck.
c) What does that have to do
with anything?
3) Football is:
a) a sport all the *cool* boys play.
b) a metaphor of our agressive
and combative society.
c) my life.
4) Computers are:
a) cool. I play video games on them.
b) a strategic resource in my quest
for total world domination.
c) the source of our federal debt.
---
I'll post the right answers when I find them.
Book Description
When the English government mandates genetic testing for predisposition to violence in the early 21st century, it also creates an elaborate computer network to store the results. But when a computer expert with just such a violent predisposition breaks into the carefully-guarded data, he decides to protect the rest of society by killing off others on the list.
Enter Inspector "Jake" Jakowicz, a tough, smart cop who must use all her powers of intuition to track the sociopath who wants to draw her into a chilling dialogue about the nature of life itself. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Synopsis
London 2013: a world in which serial murder has reached epidemic proportions. Tested positively by
the government as one disposed to criminal violence, a computer expert breaks into the computer to erase his name, where he discovers a list of others so accused and hits on a horrifying idea: what if he were to become a killer of potential serial killers?
First of all, who would call a program Mosaic? These developers must be living with their heads in the sand to not know about the Mosaic web browser.
I think that this is just a scam to get some government $$$. The formula for this business is easy: identify a bogey man, write some software and use fear to sell it.
I think that the only reasonably certain predictor of violent behavior is, well, previous violent behavior.
How do you predict the behavior of the ``all round nice guy'' who is upright, successful, active within the community---in other words, one who fits the ``fits the mold''---yet who one day snaps and climbs the tower with a rifle to shoot at random victims?
Get real. People can always learn to evade the strategies of naive software anyway; just bullshit on the questions.
I just wonder how much this is going to end up costing U.S. taxpayers.
Gee, when the police does it to Black people because "they are more likely to have drugs in their car" everyone screams Racism! And that it's wrong and that it steps on peoples rights. But when they do it to children and especially a certain group of those children.. well that's ok!
I wonder when people will realize that giving up Liberty for the sake of personal Security will destroy the whole idea behind democracy and freedom. Can you imagine having your high-school "profile" get into the hands of the company you're trying to get a job at 10 years later?
"Hmm, his profile say he has a 10% inclanation for violent behavior.. we don't need someone like that working here!" And that being in your "profile" simply because someone that didn't like you thought it be funny to anonymously lie and turn you in for planning to blow up the school.
Ex-Nt-User
Never have I been gladder to be out of the public school system. Columbine was a tragedy, but if people actually think that a computer can predict violence, then Columbine will pale in comparison to what will follow.
Such rash inductivism is intolerable when applied to anything more chaotic than raw numbers, and that includes people. I'll use a famous example to illustrate my point. Let's say you see a flock of swans. You notice that all of the swans in the flock are white. Does this mean that all swans are white? Certainly not. Likewise, this Mosaic 2000 (Anyone know if NCSA trademarked Mosaic, by the way? If so I hope they sue) takes what an infintesimal minority of kids have done, found traits, and decided that all kids with these characteristics are evil creatures which must undergo psychatric treatment.
Of course, the real solution to these problems is harder, and no government or school official can actually implement it. It takes parents who realize the full importance of their role as such, who teach their kids right from wrong, fantasy from reality, and above all else to respect all people. Many parents don't seem willing to do that anymore (note that I don't say unable; it's not always easy to do this, and it may involve making sacrifices, but it is always possible and always necessary). Many don't even seem willing to spend enough time with their kids to notice any potential trouble; such was the case with Columbine.
I'm backing the ACLU all the way on this one. Computer programs to analyze people based on what an administrator hears (which is often little more than hearsay and rumor)? The word "abomination" comes to mind.
In any case, this finalizes my decision. If I ever have kids, they'll never set foot in a public school (not as a student, at any rate). The system has simply gone to hell, with so many kludges and quick-fixes tacked onto it that I wonder if anything short of scrapping the current system and completely rebuilding it from scratch is going to fix things.
"Six. Six. Six. Six. Six. Now name a vegetable."
Most people apparently say carrot (subconscious thing from the assonance between 'six' and 'sex'). I tried it on my aunt and she said 'asparagus' (which is a bit more appropriate than a carrot, IMO). When this was tried on me, I said 'onion.' I don't know what my subconscious was doing, but I consciously recognized the assonance and decided not to fall into it. ;)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
First of all, it's not a test. It's a database of information that the school can enter about a student; the more information you have, the more accurate the program supposes to be.
Secondly, it's not a judge of how violent you are at any particular moment, rather, of your tendency to violence. So if you have two different people, odds are one is more likely to become violent over a breakup than the other. This is not a fundamental change in personality.
--
Ian Peters
It is by actions and actions alone that we must be judged.
It's my impression that that is what this program does. This isn't like a test given to students. This is a compilation of the students actions and influences over time. So if the student has been observered (like one psycho who lived near me) setting up birdfeeders to attract wildlife, so that he could shoot them with a blowgun, well, he's being judged by his actions, isn't he?
--
Ian Peters
I'm obviously not advocating violating people's civil rights on the basis of this program! If it's being used in that way, then it is an abuse.
At the same time, I don't believe the information out of programs like this is useless. It should be weighed against other available evidence and used carefully.
--
Ian Peters
It has long been an article of our folklore that too much knowledge or skill, or especially consummate expertise, is a bad thing. It dehumanizes those who achieve it, and makes difficult their commerce with just plain folks, in whom good old common sense has not been obliterated by mere book learning or fancy notions. This popular delusion flourishes now more than ever, for we are all infected with it in the schools, where educationists have elevated it from folklore to Article of Belief. It enhances their self-esteem and lightens their labors by providing theoretical justification for deciding that appreciation, or even simple awareness, is more to be prized than knowledge, and relating (to self and others), more than skill, in which minimum competence will be quite enough.
-- The Underground Grammarian
--
Sociology teaches us that if you take a large group, you can predict with a fair amount of accuracy what that group will do. For example, if I take 100 black people and 100 Klu Klux Clansmen, the result will be mass chaos and insurrection. HOWEVER, and this is the key point - if I single out one of those black people and a KKK member and put them in the same room... I can't say what will happen.
This is where a system like the one mentioned in the article can do incredible harm - and why we must draw the line there. My thoughts are my own business, and nobody else's. It is by actions and actions alone that we must be judged. To do otherwise invites disaster.
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3 things. 2 offtopic... :-)) in high school, I was required to take IQ tests on multiple occations. Giving honest answers I usually would get 145-155, but when I was having some fun my range was 95-185. Moral of the story... it's usually dumb to evaluate someone and represent it as a number.
1) You can't get a 1600 on the math, just on the combined
2) Yes, it's really easy to get a combined 1600, and lots of people do ( at least I know several who did )... I'm shocked that getting a 1600 is still landing people on TV...
3) It's easy to bluff anything like this... IQ tests are a great example. Due to a minor physical handicap (I was able to demonstrate that I couldn't help my bad handwriting, and therefore couldn't be penalized for it
Would you do it for some scoobie crack?
My beef with this whole deal is primarily logistical. The odds of a kid getting killed at school at the hands of a pyschotic student is extremely slim. Like 1 in 10 million, or something to that effect. There are far greater dangers that can be averted with less spending.
Not to mention, I'm distrustful of pscyhologists. And particularly teachers who take up the crusade based on a faulty understanding of shrink's faulty evaluations. Just look at all the kids who're now diagnosed with ADD (I believe its a legit condition, but far overprescribed), or otherwise cast aside in the name of whatever disorder. If a kid has problems, he's all too often assumed to be ADD or what have you. Rather than helping the kid out, but keeping the bar at the same height. They simultaneously lower the standard (very hurtful), and prescribe drugs.
I have little doubt that teachers (particularly grade school teachers) will start casting kids aside with this new witch hunt. Little Joey gets into a fight or two. Little Joey gets sent to shrink. Little Joey gets put into "special" program where they don't expect him to behave, and they might even request the kid be medicated... They're going to aggrivate the situation.
...anyways, I'm too tired to bother going on and write half decently, I've been at it all week. Hasta
I mostly agree with your impression of /. as of late. However, not having all the facts, I do have some real concerns about this.
I've seen first hand how many teachers (particularly grade school teachers) "sort" kids out. Those who can fill in all the neat little boxes and do exactly as she (yes, stereotype) says, get a gold star. Those who don't are told they're stupid, or their parents are told not to expect much of them, etc etc etc. One of my sisters, for example, was told by her teacher in Kintergarden that she thought that my sister was not capable of succeeding in school because she couldn't (or wouldn't) draw a straight line or fill in the boxes with crayon. Yet many years later, she graduates from the top of her class, gets 15XX on her SATs, and is about graduate from Princeton. I've known of MANY cases like this. God forbid if the parents had listened to the teacher... I, for one, am convinced that this world has lost some of its best minds to such ignorant teaching habits.
Your computer is only as accurate as your data. The data being supplied by teachers and such is bound to highly skewed. Not to mention that I don't think shrinks have the best grip on this world.
Consider ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) for example. I have little doubt the disorder exists. It is scientifically diagnosed. Teachers normally direct students to the doctors. Yet we have thousands, if not millions, of kids being prescribed ritalin en masse. I don't believe most of these kids are truely ADD, or even have problems which require medication. My main objection is less the drugs than it is the sudden drop in expectations. As a result the levels of performance are dropping through the floor universally. I don't believe it is that kids are getting dumber (not genetically atleast). I see real harm here.
Now maybe this system is pretty well thought out. Then again, maybe it isn't. In either case, its a fine line to walk, particularly given the history of shrinks and teachers. Especially when you consider the actual risks of getting killed at the hands of a pyschotic school mate (its about the same as getting struck by lightning). They could save far many more lives by spending that money on Hepatitis testing, or what have you.
anyways..I'm tired. My apologies for my somewhat incoherant writing....Zzzzzzzzzzzz
I am so glad computers will do everything for me in the future. I won't have to pay any attention to my little Suzy or little Jonny, the police can handle them when the computer says so. What is so wrong with people that they would even think of using a computer program to predict troubled teenagers? I've never in my life heard of a teenager that wasn't troubled in some way. Now an administrator can have little Jonny take a standardized psych test to determine if he is proned to violence. What does that mean? If little Jonny is found to be prone to violence what does the school do, call the police? Wow I seem to remember studying about this document we called the Constitution of the United States. Somewhere in that piece of paper was some crap about due process, admonishments about invasions of privacy, and some other useless crap about personal freedoms. I wonder what ever happened to it. I guess when we became facists a while back we got rid of it. A country that believed that there is was a due process of law would never punish someone for a crime that wasn't commited. Maybe some day we can test fetuses in the womb to see if they are prone to violence and abort them. Wow I had an idea, we could test for proneness to alcoholism, adultry, criminal behaviour, immoral thought, and many other problems. Then we can ship those people off somewhere or kill them. Wouldn't the world be so much better. Better living through facism. *smile*
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Of course you can't predict everything. Nobody's talking about a setup where a computer reads a list of variables about a person and spits out an order to have that person sent to an asylum. It's just a tool to help humans identify potential problems.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
I realize that it isn't wholly logical, but for some reason I expect programmers not to contribute to projects such as this one.
I have `ln -s hackers programmers` somewhere in my brain, and I just don't expect programmers->hackers to do things that promote concepts of normalcy. It's just a further beef with Windows - it makes application development so rapid and simple that Any Idiot(TM) is able to build a pretty simple app.
I'm seeing another argument in the works here for a professional guild for software developers, a la doctors, lawayers, architects, etc. Members of such orgranizations that act against its best interests are brought to account. It's kind of medieval, but has some interesting/useful side-effects.
Professions that have an internal accountability structure are classically viewed as trust-worthy. In the programming industry, there is increasingly frequently a mistrust on the part of employers for programmers. It's not hard to understand why: certification programs and technical schools are pumping out people whose only interest in computing is because it's HOT.
And they suck. Companies then get cynical - these people who have been certified as professionals don't know their `head` from a hole in the ground. I hear it over and over - people in companies are realizing that there are programmers, then there are programmers. They understand that a good programmer is worth many times more to them than even a halfway decent one. Their gripe is that they have no real way of telling the difference until it's too late.
I think I digress somewhat though - ultimately, I just wish people wouldn't buld kack like this. It might be wishful (or worse yet, vain or even naive) thinking, but I'd like to think that a programmers' guild could preclude Mosaic's development.
Or maybe we could just abolish psychology - I suspect that would cure a lot of society's neuroses
-blarg
-- familiarity is only skin deep
Nobody (at least I) would say this programs output is useless.
It should be weighed against other available evidence and used carefully.
NO, the use of this program should be weighted against possible backdraws for people.
Not anything which is useful is justifiable.
Creating the mere possibility of violating individual rights is something which
should be handled very careful
While I agree with you critical view on some typical slashdot
reactions, I would really like you to explain how this
software could be better than teachers being informed
and having some common sense.
This silly invention is just there to save some teachers the
torture of thinking on their own and acting responsible.
If they really wanted to do a test, I propose do a test for
teachers, where they are given some cases and have to
decide how to act.
For instance I learned to know many teachers who gave
a shit when they clearly could see some kid in emotional
trouble, being always alone on the school yard and/or
showing real sights of panic after getting bad rates.
These ignorant beings are the last ones which I would
describe as - as you say - "capable hands".
And about "statistical analysis". I read about a guy who
always was taken aside and examined very closely at
the airport when he wanted to fly somewhere.
He sued the airline, and they had to confess they had
used "statistical analysis" (i.e. data mining) to develop
a model of the typical hijacker, and this poor guy
fitted in.
Statistical analysis which can have real (and bad)
consequences for innocent individuals should be
illegal IMO.
This program came about because politicians are looking for a "cheap fix" to the educational system.
Bingo!
Well..there is none.
Right again! There's no cheap fix. Only an expensive one. It starts with smaller class sizes. But that's expensive, and raising taxes to pay for it (you know another way?) is the kiss of death on election day. It's a lot easier to play on the parents' fears of school shootings (horrible, to be sure, but very unlikely) than to deal with the problem of schools that don't teach students what they need to know (also horrible, and almost inevitable, but no one seems to care).
Better point: The most disturbed are the ones that hide it best. 'He always seemed the quiet type..'
So how hard could it be for someone to circumvent the system? If it was a test, lie. If it's a system you database behavior in, just watch what you do in public. There's always the dark corners of the persons mind where the violent bits hide..
Here's a nice quote:
Dr. Hannibal Lecter: A census taker once tried to test me... I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.
Jilles
Whoa, the last 13 paragraphs of that article are repeated twice. Whats scary is it still reads ok. Obviously someone had a loss for words.. But on another note, I wonder how this program was made.
cout > PE
if (PE = 10)
cout "Please shoot on sight.";
else
cout "A loving caring citizen of the community.";
Sort of hard to see how you would test this program's usefulness. If your school doesn't have any mass slayings over the trial period, does that constitute a success? The incidence of violoence in school is alreay pretty damn low; fluctuations are going to be hard to tell from noise.
If the program BSOD's, does that mean the student has to be executed instantly?
--
He's seeing monsters. He's losing his mind and he feels it going.
This isn't about conformance, it isn't about violating rights.
This is about broad and typically incorrect assumptions based on profiling and other frequently debatable psychological "learnings."
To put it bluntly, I wouldn't have tolerated that kind of crap when I was in school. How *dare* some unnamed person not only decieve me, but attempt to label me and place me in a group based on a standardized test that's results are based on broad assumption? How dare they?!
To put it into perspective; I'd be labeled as a violent person. Immediately. Red flags everywhere. But that's because of my personal beliefs, principles, and concepts. Truthfully, I'm a rather peacable person. I think I've actually hit someone once or maybe twice.
Yeah, my thoughts are violent. Comes from a society that not only glorifies, but exemplifies violence as a way to solve problems, to insure peace. While they condemn it. Can we say 'double-standard' boys and girls? I wasn't shocked about Columbine, really. I'd wanted to do something similar many times. Difference is, I didn't act on it.
I have something called self control. Yeah, I'm a violent person if you look at some bullshit psychological profile, I suppose. Doesn't mean I act on my thoughts. I think the most violent thing I've ever done has been to tear up my bedroom. Didn't break anything - just made it into a huge mess.
What bothers me even more is how they will implement this crap. It'll be mandatory. Parents won't be given the option to not do it. Nor will the children. You do it or you get the boot. And if you're labeled as 'violent' you'll be labeled for life. You'll have a police record before you even commit a crime.
Prevention through extremest and intrusive vigilence is just wrong. Just like fighting a war to end a war is wrong. Just because you win a war doesn't mean you can force people to stop hating eachother. What gives anyone the right to force someone to answer a bunch of idiotic questions that could quite possibly ruin the rest of their life?
Somebody point me to a campaign to stop this shit. I'm sick of this 'protect the children' excuse crap. What happened to 'securing life, liberty, and justice for all'? Oh, that's right, the DOJ burned the last copy of that filtered document years ago. My bad. We now return you to your normal police state. (Gee, I wonder how long before somebody comes knocking on my door looking to arrest me for speaking my mind..)
-RISCy Business | Rabid unix guy, networking guru
your company here.
shelby != ford
Being young is a crime in this country. When I was in high school a group of convicts were brought in to give us a lecture every year. They would sit up on the stage and talk about how hard their lives have been because they chose to commit the crimes they did. Why were they at my high school? Because of the unconscious belief that most of us were up to no good and needed to be "scared straight." I would expect this at places like juvenile hall, but at a normal high school in medium sized town in a affluent part of the state? This new software business is even more sad. The very idea that a piece of software would be able to look into a person's soul and see what lies there is absurd. Even a highly trained and experienced psychologist or psychiatrist cannot always do that. Sounds to me like snake oil. Parent's and teachers are hysterical about what happened in Colorado and some con artist has now taken advantage of that. Sad, sad, sad, all around.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
You're exactly right, and I wish people wouldn't knee-jerk like this. But, I also feel even more strongly than you that this is a Bad Thing(tm).
Why? Because it will occasionally be correct, and when it is, it will mess some kid up good. I have a friend who is fairly unstable. He knows this, and has known it for many years. Still, he does what he needs to to keep himself under control and never takes out his agressive tendancies on others. Would he show up as violent on this test? Probably yes. Would it have pushed him over the edge if people started tagging him as a potential threat in High School? You betcha! Instead, he is now a respected individual who I am happy to be able to say I know. Go figure.
What we need to do, here, is not try to pick out the trouble-makers and "protect ourselves" from them. We need to a) figure out if there really is a problem (someone goes nuts in a school several times a year, most times it doesn't even make the news) b) assuming that there is a problem, we need to find and adress it. Not the kids. They're no more the source of the problem than the USPS was back in the early 90's. Nor are the schools the problem. We, as a society are encouraging people to behave in the ways that they do. If we don't like the way that people are behaving, we need to change the incentives.
I don't know if there is a wide-spread problem, or just a few good excuses for news ratings. But, if there is, we will not solve it by spending more money on police, beauracracy, personality tests and other controls. We will only solve for it if we pull together and decide what we want to do with ourselves.
Agreed. Remember, the only kids being entered into the database are the ones that the school officials already think are "troubled". Talk about self-fullfilling prophecies.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Ms. Montgomery, the attorney general, described it as "very affordable" at less than $10,000 for the high school.
Hmm, if that is "very affordable", how come my teachers say there is no money to buy any new computer hardware or software for the students? It's funny that the school board can always find stuff to waste money on instead of actually doing something to actually help the students.
Timothy Leary, when he was convicted of possesion
:)
of marijuana. His first cell was right next to
Charles Manson, and to determine what type of
prison he would go to, He had to take a 'Personality
Profile' test. Tim wrote the test, while at Havard!
As you can imagine he was sent to a minimum security prison.
He also escaped from it.
If that test says I'm violent I'm gonna shoot someone.
"We're trying to screen out potentially violent whackjobs for re-education camps. Are you, or have you ever, having or had fantasies about burning down your school and raping and murdering everyone within a 500 foot radius of the building?"
Since only the dumbest potentially-violent whackjob (even by whackjob-level standards) would ever answer "yes" to that question, all we're doing is screening out the 'tardly ones who couldn't put a pipe bomb together to save their lives, and ensuring that the ones who really wanna go through with it will be undetected.
It's great lawsuit-protection though. Just think - now there'll be a real test, scored by a computer (Ooooh! it came from a Com-pew-ter! It must be true!), that can protect the school boards from lawsuits. There's a big difference, legally-speaking, between "We had no idea he'd go postal, he was a nice quiet kid", and "His psych profile said he was a nice quiet kid, so you can't claim we even thought he had the potential to go postal."
Lawyers. Feh. (My answer: "No, but I do think that a hundred lawyers being blown to giblets en masse with rocket launchers, and then left to rot at the bottom of the Columbine High swimming pool, would be a real good start. Especially with a pile of BBQ sauce and a big tank of propane.")
After numerous administrators reported difficulty installing the service pack, ATF officials advised that the SexOffender PlugIn must be uninstalled prior to applying the service pack, followed by a full OS reinstall.
ATF has been criticized for its perceived failure to respond to the oversight immediately.
"This kid was normal in every way." said J. Mimpton Cleeb III, school board President. "Foul-tempered, bullying, egostistical, four-letters in sports - who'da thunk it? Thats what we bought the software for. They need to fix this immediately"
ATF officials, meanwhile continue to downplay the furor, blaming the oversight on 'malicious hackers'.
======
"Cyberspace scared me so bad I downloaded in my pants." --- Buddy Jellison
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
Perhaps it might be used in an attempt to deflect liability once another such event happens -- the reasoning being that so-and-so should have noticed behavior, and therefore should have stopped it...
Hell, I could see a [school] admin discreetly pushing this product on *parents*, or at least trying to ask:
"Do you know what your kid is up to? [And if not, how can you call yourself a parent?]"
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Get a grip. This is not a new concept in psychology. These tests have a specific purpose and are *never* supposed to stand on their own, with no other evidence. It is simply a tool used to figure out what the problem with someone msy be.
For example, there is a test used widely today with hundreds of yes-no questions. Its purpose is to determine if a person is psychotic. I took it for a friend of mine who needed to administer it as part of a pychology PhD curriculum. The result for me was "within normal limits" or something like that-quite anticlimatic. It cannot tell if I am smart, creative, violent, or prefer gel to paste Colgate. It certainly cannot replace a complete psychological profile including examination by a live person.
Letting people other than trained psychologists administer and evaluate the results of the test is like letting your brother-in-law, who "knows all about computers" administer your network. It's foolish and irresponsible.
The response by Slashdot readers to this is analogous to people who pass along hoax virus warnings. They don't know that much about the subject, but they panic when certain triggers are pulled.
Another thing is that these tests are not used to screen the population, and "pull out" potential offenders. They are used after there is a identified problem. These tests probably would not have done any good at Littleton, because no one suspected the two students of anything, and they did not show enough signs warrant testing.
Even Homer Simpson didn't get Dr. Marvin Monroe' psych test given to him until after he wore a pink shirt to work.
yup, i would've been red-flagged the second i left the guidance counselors office...
of course, i didn't kill anybody, plant any bombs, deface any property. and never even went to detention. so now, low and behold, i go to college, for computer engineering. i even work at Travelers. and haven't gone besurk yet... but i forgot, that's a completely different profiling program.
just because i never liked any of those very very rich people i went to school with, and showed it, doesn't mean i was going to kill anyone.
for god sakes!, a computer program isn't going to help. and if little jonny appears to be polishing his machine gun a little too much at recess, then talk to his parents!
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
It just goes to show you that oportunists will stop at nothing to crawl out from under there rock and make a profit off of fear.
Details about the software to be used can be found here:
here is the link to the homepage Gavin de Becker Inc. and here is a not-so-detailed paper on the product: Mocaic 2000
In my opinion programs like that don't work. Of cource you can test people to see if they are violent. But what about when those people change? A nasty brakeup with their girl/boyfriend and they behave quite diffrent than normal. Or some other crisis.. And what if you get the wrong results. The results say that you're violent when you aren't.
Can a test really show whether a child or teen will become the next Jeffery Dalhmer? That is essentially the question these people who wrote this software are asking.
Putting the software and what its intended purpose in that light is quite frightening since we know that no one could have seen Dalhmer and people like him coming. I suggest a different result than the utopian solution that this software professes to provide: typecasting.
As is pointed out by many Slashdot users, this software will lead to possible abuse by school officals to target so-called deviants. In trying to find the next Colombine shooters, the school administration will target countless innocent students who are not 'normal' but who would never contemplate murder. Adolecents go through a lot of changes which are both physical and mental. Some of these changes might result in behaviour that doesn't comply with this software but is no way harmful to the school population.
These people, who are not 'normal' will now be labelled 'troublemakers'. If they didn't suffer from being social outcasts, they will be now. And how do you think a school would eventually deal with this problem child? I suspect that suspension or expulsion would be inevitable. All over a test which deams them not normal. If you don't believe me, then why do many schools in the US have security guards when most students are not violent?
Since most of my comments have scored a one, I don't expect anyone to remember what I have said in the past but I would like to mention one of my previous comments in the following section.
* BEGIN PREVIOUS COMMENT *
Most of these tests stem from the fact the psycology, sociology and psychiatry are NOT sciences. This causes problems. These so-called mental and society professionals are given licence to analyze and predict peoples behaviour when they clearly can not.
We don't know exactly how the brain operates. Until that day comes, we can't say who will be or commit what. Actually, we may not even be able to conclude that in the future since science has found that the brain is quite dynamic in nature.
If you don't believe me and my anti-psych comments, then study Freud. He spent his whole life studying sex and didn't explain or show a whole lot. I guess we have the ediface complex to thank from him. And he was one of the most influential people of the 20th century according to CNN. I still don't think anything useful came of out his works.
* END OF COMMENT *
Finally, I would like to thank the ACLU for taking a stand on this retarded software. While I don't agree with them on everything, they have kept society free and prevented idiots from doing all sorts of things in society. Hopefully, they will prevent these idiots who wrote this software from pigeonholing, stereotyping and labelling these unfortunate teenagers who might become victims of this software.
It seems Mosaic is another device/system/whatever intended to provide a shortcut solution to a very complex situation, such as home drug test kits or overprescribed antidepressants or ADHD drugs. Since most parents don't want to devote the time to actually trying to understand their children, opportunists invent ways to provide quick fix solutions. The real solution is communication, but it's complicated and takes time.
bun-fhuinneog agam!
> The software is meant to be used as a tool, not
> a decision maker
True. However, imagine having to defend yourself in court if you went against the "tools" advice.
``So you were noticed that he was a potential risk, but did nothing?'' Ordinary CYA procedure -- which is part of any administration -- will mean you have to take action when the tool claims there is a risk.
Typical slashdot fare of late, it seems. Take a tool with the potential to be abused, shout about your rights, claim we're being pigeonholed, point out that we're all individuals, and watch the masses rant and rave.
I'm tired of it. Yes, this is a tool that has the potential to cause great harm. But really, all it does is make observations based on trends. This is not inherently a bad thing!
Come on, people, get a grip. Yes, we are all individuals. Yes, there are exceptions to every rule. But statistical analysis is a valuable tool. In capable hands, a tool like this can be of immense help in dealing with a problematic child. It all depends on how it is used.
I don't think anyone is suggesting we just turn all decision making responsibility over to the program, and sit back and let it raise our children. Yes, there is cause for concern over abuse. But don't fly to the other extreme and jump up and cry foul at every corner!
--
Ian Peters
Apparently, it is being developed with the help and encouragement of the Beaurau of Alchohol, Tobacco and Firearms as well as the LA DA Gil Garcetti. It is being tested in a couple dozen schools.
Mosaic-2000 is documented here, by it's creator and developer, 'parenting expert', Gavin De Becker.
According to Mosaic-2000's website:
MOSAIC-2000 cannot label anyone as anything. People unfamiliar with the method may jump to the worry that principals will use it to unfairly label kids, but the objective process resists bias. MOSAIC-2000 is vastly more likely give a low rating in a situation to which people are over-reacting - than to give a high rating in a situation people are not concerned about.
School administrators already label kids. This will simply provide a tool with which they can harass them and bring them to the attention of the district and other professionals. Are they going to use this 'tool' on the beer-drinking all-star quarterback who date-raped his last girlfriend and enjoys slamming the heads of freshmen into the wall? Will they use this on the home-coming-queen who is hiding bullemia and drinking to avoid her abusive parents and contemplating slitting her wrists? Probably not. But they may jump at the chance to use it on the kids who keep to themselves and spend most of their time reading and expressing themselves through their abrasive or depressing writing and 'odd' attire.
MOSAIC-2000 seeks to identify those students most in need of the interventions and resources that are available, and in the school setting, all appropriate intervention is good. In other words, if you happen to fit their specific profile of what a 'troubled student' is and this hunk of code shows that you meet the outline of a possible psycho-killer, you will probably be forced to undergo counseling, therapy, possibly even be weeded out to attend a 'special' school.
How many of us have been the victims of busy-body teachers? I certainly have. When I was in grade-school, I constantly had bruises on me because I also happened to be very active in wrestling and Judo. And because I spent most of my after-school time in sports, I had to bury myself in reading and writing at school -- just to keep up. This appeared to a certain teacher as a loner-child who keeps to himself and is abused at home. This teacher asked me about this and although I gave her my honest explanation, I was speaking with the school counselor by the end of the day, and by evening, there were case-workers from Child Protective Services checking on my parents.
Needless to say, my parents were shocked. So was I. It didn't matter that I was a completely normal child who's bruises were from sports and who was deeply involved in his school-work. What mattered was the self-asserted perception of a busy-body who should have spent more time teaching than trying to play a fairy-god-mother. Is it really much of a stretch to say that a computer would look at the same situation and make the same possibly conclusion?
We must also remember that regardless of what the computer says, the input is from humans and is interpreted and acted upon by humans. Is a teacher going to suddenly change their opinion of a student because a computer did not believe the evidence provided warrented a truly 'potentially violent child'?
A range of answers is far more likely to stimulate accuracy fairness, and completeness. For example, if asking about firearms, a Yes/No question could not stimulate as fair or complete an exploration as a range:
__No known possession of a firearm
__Friends known to have ready access to a firearm
__There are firearms in the home
__There are firearms in a home frequented by the student
__The student owns his own firearm
__The student recently acquired a firearm
First of all, how in the hell are they going to know these things? I don't even know if my friends or neighbors have firearms. And if I have recently acquired a firearm, am I going to be walking up to any authority and tell them about it?
It seems that any questions that could possibly render any (even incorrect) answer as to whether a subject is a risk or not would require a certain amount of investigation to aptly answer. How will these answers be obtained? Will it require students to fill out a long questionaire? If so, how can anyone be sure the student was truthful? If not, then will schools begin employing detectives to start checking-up on children by interviewing their friends, family, teachers, co-workers, fellow-students, churchr-members or neighbors? By what right would the school be investigating anyone for anything? Even the police must prove a necessary need to do these things. A policeman can not simply go around interrogating everyone who "looks like a troublemaker" and "may, someday, in the next ten or twelve years, become violent".
For the first time, schools at the elementary, middle, and high school levels will have access to technology and methods that have long been used for many of our nation's highest stakes assessments.
The same technology used to weed-out international terrorists at airports based on one's ethnicity and accent will now help weed-out seven-year-old little Johnny so that he won't blow everyone's head off by the time he is in highschool.
Please note: hazing, intimidating, harassing, kicking, punching, spitting-on, humiliating, torturing and otherwise generally abusing and making other weaker students lives hell is acceptable.
How many times do you hear a killer's neighbors, friends, co-workers and even family say "I never knew..."? This is precisely because only certain types of violent people have certain traits and histories. In fact, more people who have those same traits and histories are not violent than those who are. You can not look at a person and claim that they will destroy an entire city block by the way they dress, music they listen to, and their proximity to places and people with guns.
If this thing is widely accepted, I'll be surprised if it isn't soon used in the workplace. Of course, we know it already is to a degree, but soon we may be able to officially harass that really quiet guy who reads all those high-tech magazines down in accounting!
School administrators would use MOSAIC-2000 only in situations that reach a certain threshold (e.g., a student makes a threat, brings a weapon to school, teachers or students are concerned a student might act out violently).
Better teach little Jilly to watch her mouth. Next time she says stamps her feet on the ground in a fit and says "I hope you die!" because little Timmy took her favorite Pokeman card, she may be filed away in the school computer and considered a potential threat.
Does MOSAIC-2000 invade the privacy of students?: The information gathered for each evaluation is held at the school only, and is never communicated over the Internet. MOSAIC is a stand-alone system, secure at each school, with no central combining of cases. The system isn't a "Big Brother" approach. MOSAIC-2000 merely brings organization and expert opinion to a process every principal already has. So if something is not distributed over the Internet, it is not invading your privacy? Is this why we walk around giving our social security numbers, home phone number and bank account number to every person who asks?
I find it extremely offensive that someone would want to tag myself or my child as a risk because of computer profiling -- and build a database with their information, telling me it's for the better. What gaurantee is there that this information will never be incorporated into a database or ever released to anyone outside of the school district? Further, what right does my child's teacher or principal have to know anything about the child that isn't directly involved in the child's education?
I understand that safety is involved, but this is a wreckless answer to a problem that has been grossly exaggerated. Profiling, at best, will give a false sense of security and at worst, rob us of any dignity, privacy and freedom while we're still reading Curious George and learning addition.
MOSAIC systems have been in daily use for a decade. Society faces many types of high-stakes evaluations (threats to public officials, hazards to domestic violence victims, workplace violence cases, etc). MOSAIC systems are used by the United States Supreme Court, the Federal Reserve Board, the Central Intelligence Agency, Governors of eleven states, and many others.
Is there really anything that needs to be said right here? Supreme Court, Federal reserve Board, Governors, Central Intelligence Agency, K-12 . . .
In cases where students have been expelled as a result of safety concerns, when they are considered for re-enrollment, some schools may use MOSAIC-2000 to help evaluate if the risk has lessened.
Oh, can't you just smell the lawsuits the next time some kid mows-down his entire graduating class after being reinstated by his school administrators because of Mosaic-2000?
The cost for the final version of MOSAIC-2000 (due in February, 2000) will be determined by the M-2000 Advisory Board. It is likely to be a small monthly fee for each school.
Oh, great. Now the little rats will be coming to my door more often, trying to peddle candy and magazines.
The system operates on entirely standard and traditional hardware, including an IBM-PC compatible 486 computer. It uses very little disk space.
They're apparently not running it on Windows.
Concern that a student might act out violently can be triggered in any of several ways:
a student makes a threat;
alarming writings are observed;
a student brings a firearm to school;
a student gets into trouble with police; teacher, counselor, psychologist, parent, or fellow student becomes concerned and makes a report
I'm not sure about the school you went to, but students made idle threats all the time at mine. It's a part of being an immature kid. As for bringing a firearm to school -- what moron requires a computer to tell them that the child is a risk? First, it is illegal to bring a firearm to school. If you need to rely on the computer program to tell you that posession of a firearm is a danger-sign, you need your face bashed in with a brick.
Alarming writing? What does one consider alarming? The greatest and most lauded writing in the world tends to be alarming, shocking and disturbing! Writing should be a method of release and creativity. And a lot of the most truly disturbing and brilliant pieces I have ever read were written by rather youthful authors.
Mosaic-2000 is not an all-seeing oracle. It is a peice of crap that should be left out of the school system. The answer to the problems of children is not to throw more technology at them and invade their inner-most thoughts and secrets.
The answer is to afford them a little more time, attention and considertion. If it requires mass-murder for us to come to their aid and hear them, we are a ruined society. When the only attention we provide kids with is the scrutinizing eye of accusation, we can only expect jaded, disinterested, paranoid children.
---
icq:2057699
seumas.com
This program came about because politicians are looking for a "cheap fix" to the educational system. Well.. there is none. Even in maximum security prisons people get killed. There is an equilibrium we must strike between personal freedoms and security - they are mutually exclusive.
I have taken 13 psychological evaluations. I've talked with a half-dozen psychologists. I can talk the talk and walk the walk. Every single test, and I mean every test was different - by reading those 13 reports you would never know it was the same person if you didn't look at the title and see my name.
Psychology is a soft-science. It is not presently capable of making precision diagnoses. It can give you a basic understanding of how people think. It even has a very limited ability to predict what people will do in a NORMAL situation. But when you start throwing people into high-pressure and high-stress situations you don't need to be a psychologist to say they are unstable. Nobody can guess what they're going to do. In this respect, people are just like machines - they have operational limits. Exceed those, and something is likely to break. And since even the best psychologist can't say where that point is, I'll be damned if a computer program can!
In short - this tool will not meet it's goal of determining who is violent and who is not because human nature is such that normally non-violent people can become violent if put under pressure.
--
My last point is that most murders are second degree murders. The typical scenario is the person loses it due to a tramatic event (ie: finding your wife sleeping with another guy) and goes on a shooting spree. Sooo, maybe we should prevent people from having sex so that doesn't happen?
This is another example of mainstream prejudices being wrapped around some politically-correct methodology and being re-presented for acceptance. And the prejudice, my good readers - is that mainstream society doesn't like people who are different. Racism, sexism, white supremacy, the haves and the have nots - what's in common with all of them? One group is different from another. Welcome to the tyranny of the majority.
--
The tests (from actually READING the article) will work on the well-established psychological principle of analysing known violent people's answers to a series of questions, discovering where they differ most from normal people's answers, and using those to distinguish between violent and non-violent people. You can use this technique for nearly any trait, and it works reasonably well.
This unsupported proposition is preposterous on its face. First of all, there is a long line of substantial evidence that psychiatry is incapable of effectively predicting dangerousness. See American Psychiatric Asssociation, Clinical Assesments of Violent IndividualsTask Force Report 8, 24 (1974).
Secondly, exactly how would you prove the aformentioned proposition doesn't trigger false positives? Diagnose a sample size, let them lose and count the carnage? There is no credible and ethical methodology that can measure the proposition whether a person adjudged for mass murder was properly diagnosed.
Accordingly, the assumption that the test works is bad enough, but the unsupported assumption that the test has been shown to work is, well, incredible.
It is certainly true that one can provide a test that will capture all dangerous humans. (Count the chromosomes, for example). The problem is that a test that minimizes false negatives will pick up way to many false positives, resulting in substantial loss of civil liberty and social standing. This is unjust and, IMHO, evil.
It's also naive. Computer dating doesn't work so well. Are we truly to believe we can match students with traits of dangerousness?
Back at the height of the AIDS scare, clinics that did a lot of AIDS testing often had one or more full-time counselors whose primary job was to convince patients that they do not have AIDS. Many of these patients had gotten positive test results in the past, but later came up negative on more reliable tests.* What these people had trouble understanding is that when you test for something that is very rare in the general population, such as AIDS, there will be far more false positives than true positives.
So let's say that this test is supposed to flag the 1% of students with the greatest potential for violence, and let's say (very generously) that it's 90% accurate. On this test, 0.9% of those tested will be correctly marked violent. 0.1% will be marked "safe", even though they have the potential to be violent. 89.1% will be correctly marked "safe". And 9.9% will be incorrectly flagged as violent.
In other words, given this exmple, for every violent student that the test catches, more than ten "safe" students will be incorrectly "caught".
They may widen their criteria for violent students, which would make the test slightly more valid. However, it is likely that the test will be far less that 90% accurate, increasing the ratio of false positives/true positives even further.
*I'm not sure if I can back up this AIDS story, so feel free to consider it a fictional example if you wish.
MSK
This is truly frightening!
It's always been said that your scores on standardizes tests have a little bit to do with your knowledge of the subject and a lot to do with your test-taking skills. I know a guy who scored 1600 on the Math section of the SAT. He was good but nowhere near perfect, a few lucky guesses (by his own admission) landed him on a talkshow with some drooling chess masters.
Any human shrink has some judgement that they can temper their results with. This software has no such judgement, and I'm sure its results will be misused.
What if you have some kid with a less-than-complete grasp of the language, who misunderstands the word "anxiety" or something and accidentally gets him/herself into the Manson category?
The only solution is to protest this thing like hell, and attempt to defeat it wherever it appears. I'm waiting for the 2600 article on how to bluff your way through the shooting-spree-test.
Thru fear, our society is reacting against violence. Violence in itself is not evil, it is a required part of hunting or war. Is a war in self-defense evil? Blowing up buildings is acceptable when demolishing them for renewal, right? Because we depended on hunting for food for so long, and have practiced war forever, it's unreasonable to think that most of us don't have significant tendencies to violence, just different thresholds and ways for expressing it.
Many people with violent tendencies can be quite useful as cops, firemen, emergency medical technicians, rocket scientists, demolition experts, military personnel, spies, surgeons, butchers, football players, and other professions where violence and/or gore are facts of life. Sane people find acceptable and sometimes productive outlets for violence. We don't have to ensure all our kids are non-violent gore-hating pacifists.
Violent tendencies are better accepted and properly directed than suppressed thru a misguided notion that violence isn't a useful tool, or the ability to employ it a disease. If civilization *does* go down the tubes, violence will be a survival trait again.
The data from the Mosaic test could be useful, it also is only a tool. It's the way the information will be used I fear. If the results of the test were viewed as simple information, and not prejudicial, I would not object. Rather too much to hope from the people who suspended students for wearing black trenchcoats, I think. They are the problem, not the test.
I hear too much "Stamp Out Violence!" rhetoric, like it was possible or desirable. If you're familiar with Well's "The Time Machine", you know that neither Eloi nor Morlock is a good way to evolve, real humans have components of both. Violence in society has been decreasing steadily and significantly over the last 30 years. Why are we not congratulating ourselves instead of reacting in fear to tragic, but overplayed, media events?
I see some lawsuits coming out of this. What if a student refused to take the test because he felt it violated his civil rights and the school expelled him for it? That might be an opening for the parents to sue the school. Possible? Probable?
Another thing I see is if a student is determined to have a violent potential, the school might insist on "re-education" to eliminate those tendancies. Visions of re-education camps to "normalize" your behavior spring to mind. "We will help you, comrade citizen, since you cannot help yourself. We know what is best for you."
Exactly! The other problem is that there are varying levels of violence. I worry more about the reaction of the humans than the answer of the computer. Ok, lets say the computer decides that child A taking the test is violent. Does that mean he likes to hit his brothers and sisters, and occasionally kick the dog? Or does it mean that we need to get him some serious immediate counseling because said child is about to go on a three day killing spree at the local high school?
/. responses and see how few really read and understood the article and took the time to understand the premise of the program.
We don't really know, and to be honest at this point the computer is being asked to differentiate on a smaller segment of data (most people are not killers, and thus there is less data to find deviances from). So, what do the humans do? They over react and lock the poor sister hitting kid up. Or on the other side the parents down play the situation and the kid goes on a killing spree at the next pep rally. Neither situation is the fault of the computer, but instead the error prone humans.
I worry that the school administrators and teachers will not know what kind of tool they have here. They will misunderstand it and make wild assumptions about its abilities. Then the minute there is an error they will blame it on the computer when in reality it was the reactions by the humans. If you want to see evidence of this simple read the
Instead most made knee-jerk reactions- and then denounced others for doing just that!
This reminds me of what happened to Tim Leary. As most of you probably know, Mr. Leary was a professor of psychology in Harvard and was eventually arrested for his controversial message telling the youth to drop out of school, doubt the messages of the elders and to do drugs.
Oh, and I believe he had possession of LSD...
The important part comes when they had him take a psycholoical profile for his sentancing.
He came out of the profiling as "Meek" and "Easily Lead". So they put him in minimim security prision, where in few weeks, he climbed a tree, jumped over a fence and left.
The profile he'd taken was the standard at the time, the "Leary Personality Profile".
Any psychological test can be worked around with by someone who is clever. And even if the test is built to try to reduce false negatives, you can still overcome it by making the results unusable.
Just thought I'd post this cute story as it seemed relevant.
- Serge Wroclawski
This question goes out to those of you who take issue with the implementation of the Mosaic profiling system: What would _you_ do to make our schools safer instead? I've read a lot of "No no no this is just big brother trying to group us into herds so that we are more easily manageable...", but I haven't read any real answers to the problem. At least these school systems are proactively doing something to try to better guarantee the safety of their students.
;) ) truly have violent tendencies. Nothing in the article indicates that the students surveyed will be hand-picked based upon any "differentness-criteria". In fact, any good surveying/analysis firm would not allow that. Their name would be attached to the results of their software's analysis, and it's not in their best interest to skew the sample with the possibility that some jock will go off the deep end and blow away his math teacher because she failed him. In the same breath, it's not in the school system's best interest to invest taxpayers' money in a system and have that happen, either.
Posting armed guards and putting metal detectors up may deter some people from a violent crime spree, but if someone _REALLY_ wants to get in and blast away, they're going to find a way - schools are not fortresses, no matter how much security is added as an afterthough to the original design.
Instead, the armed guards and metal detectors create an unstable educational environment for our students that's rooted in fear and not based upon the educators' care for the students' well-being. It creates a _perceived_ adversarial relationship in which (from the students' point of view) the administration doesn't trust any of them. While they are there to protect both the administration and the student, this is not what is in the forefront of the student's mind. This environment alone will most likely serve as a detriment to most students who are in school to learn (there still are a couple...in Montana, I think...).
Yes, "false positives" are to be expected, and any good surveying/analysis firm will expect that. "Nerds" don't have anything to fear from this system...unless they (we?
I think this is a step in the right direction. It beats sitting on your ass and doing nothing.
The software really serves no purpose other than for the administrators to cover their own ass and create more anger at the system the stundents are in.
Dackin, the principal here, said Mosaic's immediate virtue would be in producing detailed documentation of its evaluation of a troubled student so that doubting parents could no longer challenge an administrator's judgment as too subjective.
This software serves two purposes in my opinion.
1) to label students
2) to save the administrators from being embarrassed.
Labeling a person is the worst thing you could do to someone. It just creates more anger at the system the person is in, so now we have an endless loop. To install this program so that the administrators can say "It's not my fault, this kid was labeled." is just plain wrong. It goes back to making the student(s) even more angrier and more tension is built up. So any way this program is implemented it just plain sucks.
Anyone who goes to one of these schools with this program i say demand not to take it. Fight this thing and maybe one day the pendulum will swing back to the middle from all this knee jerk reaction.
Expectations means _a lot_ to most people, especially kids. If they are branded "the violent type" by a computer (and we all know computers don't lie) the teachers will expect them to be violent and look for signs of violent behaviour. At some point they will find those signs (everybody gets angry), and confirm their suspicions. And at some point the kids will stop trying to act contrary to everybodys expectations, and use violence.
It doesn't really matter if the program is any good or not, by using it the schools will _create_ violent kids.
Psst! I managed to get the source out of the company and I'm now posting it to slashdot... the police are after me, and I don't have much time.. here goes!
/* psych eval results don't
/* skip the psych eval, they're always
#include "manic_depressive.h"
#include "psycho_killer_chicken.h"
#include "geek.h"
#ifndef _POLITICS_
#include "conservative.h"
#endif
if(!conservative){
do_psych_eval();
killer++;
}
if(!normal){
do_psych_eval();
killer += 50;
}
while(different){
killer++;
if(killer > 150){
do_psych_eval();
expel_student();
matter, expel anyway. */
do_politically_correct_dance(& parents);
}
}
while(geek){
nuts */
wierd++;
if(wierd > 50){
suspect_computer_crime(*student);
}
}
printf("He's normal.. nothing to worry about!\n");
return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}
/* program notes:
this program should be compiled with -DPARANOID for maximum effect.
Also, profiling support is currently broken -
contact the FBI if you have a suspicion, or
even if you don't - they need the money you
know.
*/
--
Everybody likes to think that they're so complicated that profiling wouldn't work on them. It's always a little ego jolt to think that one isn't the free-thinker he thought he was. "Who, me? Predictable? Bah!" Well, I hate to break it to you, but people generally do break down into nice, neat little categories. That's why FBI profiling is so successful.
Secondly, it's not about trying to understand all the intracacies of the brain -- it's about recognizing common patterns of behavior in people, something computers are great at. Real profilers know what they're doing -- don't confuse them with your high school principal making a list of kids wearing "Ozzy Rules" shirts.
Cheers
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Monty Python had it right: A far sounder methodology for determining if a student is a witch is to use scales to see if she weighs as much as a duck.
An admittedly old study demonstrated that psychiatrists have not reasonably demonstrated an ability to predict future violence, even when focusing on populations of those who have exhibited prior violent tendencies. American Psychiatric Association, Clinical Aspects of Violent Individual, Task Force Report 8, 28 (1974).
In short, the risk of false positives from such profiling programs seems large compared to the enormous social and civil liberties consequences for those students falsely targeted. The vast overreactions to routine adolescent experimentation with minor "antisocial" activity is an abomination for a free society, particularly when it is implemented as a de-facto social casting system.
The methodology of any such system appears highly suspect, absent enormous research and study, and modifications to short-term dangerousness models based on extraordinarily rare incidents such as the Colombine disaster makes a mockery of modern statistical methods.
In short, this is evil -- and it has consequences that are far-reaching: Imagine that a principal ignores the unreasonable results of such a program (or refuses to use it), and the rare explosion occurs. Is the principal or school system individually liable for negligence resulting from a failure to expel the child, or at least a failure to warn the entire student body? Think of the tradeoffs that must face a lawyer representing the school system -- how could she help but advise the system to "play it safe," by socially destroying the "marked" students?
No, unless and until this "program" is proved by serious, high-quality, methodologically sound studies showing an ability to predict dangerousness without substantial false positives (which to this day i have understood to be beyond the reach of modern Psychiatry), use of this sort of thing is simply a modern equivalent of divining witchhood with a duck.
I simply cannot believe most of the posts that have been posted up to this point. As dangerous as this is, you almost all have the wrong reason.
These tests are not targetting "geeks", they are targeting "violent people". Obviously, they know there's a difference, because most violent people are not geeks.
The tests (from actually READING the article) will work on the well-established psychological principle of analysing known violent people's answers to a series of questions, discovering where they differ most from normal people's answers, and using those to distinguish between violent and non-violent people. You can use this technique for nearly any trait, and it works reasonably well. (It's a blind shooting technique; you don't necessarily understand why some questions are answered differently, but they are and it works.) Many tests use this in psychology, and you can even more-or-less detect people trying to answer the way they "know" they should answer to pass the test.
The results of this test will, honestly, correlate to those who have violent tendencies. It does appear not do it on the basis of who is wearing trenchcoats, who is "different", or who is left out. It is not about geeks, nerds, or social rejects at all.
This test is not dangerous because it will somehow enforce "conformance". The danger is that the test is reliable, but not reliable enough. There are four permutations of "person is violent" (assume for a moment that this is a simple boolean, for the sake of argument), and "test says person is violent." The true danger here is that a large number of people will become "diagnosed" as violent who are not, known as a "false positive". The society will then act on this false information, possibly in drastic and damaging ways. (false negatives aren't half as disturbing; few violent people shoot up schools)
The truly dangerous thing is that, contrary to most people's uninformed opinions here, this will work to some extent. (It is certainly not impossible.) That actually makes it worse; if it never worked correctly, then nobody will worry about the results, positive or negative. But because it will work, those who get false positives will seriously be treated as being violent people. This is horrible (and could well become a self-fulfilling prophecy).
This actually isn't much different then what can already occur (as the article says, it is only meant to be used on kids that are suspected to have problems). But as many people in schools worship both psychologists and computers (as the understand neither), having a computer program diagnose a kid as "violent", after the kid has somehow attracted attention to himself in some other fashion, could well become a Kiss of Death from which the kid will not recover until out of the school system.
THAT is the problem; geekness and enforced conformance have little to do with it. Read the article before posting. (And a lessening in the geek paranoia level would be nice; society is not out to get you, they barely know you exist.)
It is particularly disturbing that the Times did not point this out in the article. Must journalists swallow everything uncritically like this?
PS: If you ever have to take a test like this, answer honestly. They can tell if you are fudging the answers, unless you know what you're doing, which you don't if you're still in high school (unless you've taken several college-level psych courses, and, even then, probably had to help write the test to know the "answers").
GENERAL INFORMATION
MOSAIC-2000 is being developed for a national field test in 25 schools. Though
the field test is not complete, here's an informal summary of where we are:
What is MOSAIC-2000?
MOSAIC is a computer-assisted method for conducting high-stakes evaluations of
persons who might act violently (such as when students make threats to harm
others). MOSAIC systems have been in use for a decade by many federal and
state law enforcement agencies and major universities. The same assessment
strategies are now being made available to schools through MOSAIC-2000,
co-developed by the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office, the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms, the Los Angeles County Office of Education, and
Gavin de Becker, Incorporated.
Gavin de Becker Incorporated designed the MOSAIC-2 system used for screening
threats to Justices of the US Supreme Court (and also used by eleven states as part
of protecting governors). Another system, MOSAIC-20, is used by police
departments all over the country for identifying which domestic violence
perpetrators are most likely to escalate their violence. It has been credited with
major improvements in the safety of domestic violence victims. (See Los Angeles
Times article, October 21st, 1996.)
Two other MOSAIC systems were co-developed with the U.S. Marshals Service,
including MOSAIC-3, used for screening threats to Federal judges and
prosecutors.
The MOSAIC method has been widely applied for a decade, already having
screened tens of thousands of cases. The method is now being made available for
the first time to help schools evaluate situations that might escalate to violence.
Premise:
Every principal in America already has a method for evaluating students who make
threats - it's just that most of those methods are unorganized, idiosyncratic, and
cannot be expressed or documented. MOSAIC-2000 is intended to bring
uniformity, structure, expert opinion, and validity to high stakes evaluations.
Public pressure on schools has led many communities to respond to the fear of
Columbine-style incidents by improving real estate instead of improving children
and education. The buildings have been enhanced, to be sure (new locks, security
alarms, cameras, etc), and because of that, some parents may chose to conclude
that school-safety is no longer a problem. But Columbine had cameras - cameras
that recorded the tragedy, but contributed nothing to preventing it.
Gavin de Becker's book, Protecting the Gift is currently the best selling parenting
book in America. In both this and his previous bestseller (The Gift of Fear), he
notes that many parents are inadequately involved with their children's schools.
Parents are fast to blame schools for anything wrong, but slow to participate in
making things right - fast to develop outlandish expectations about what principals
can do, but slow to invest schools with the resources needed to do their jobs well.
As a society, we don't pay school professionals enough, we don't praise them
enough, we don't prepare them enough - and then we expect magical abilities in all
fields. Today, principals are expected to be threat-assessment experts able to
instantly make fair and accurate predictions -able to identify which students might
act out violently- yet we haven't given them the tools to help them do it.
MOSAIC-2000 is one of those tools.
How Does it Work?
MOSAIC is not a computer program, but rather an evaluation method that is
computer-assisted. It is a way of breaking down a case to its elements, then
organizing and identifying the most important factors. MOSAIC suggests to the
user which questions are most likely to produce a quality evaluation. Once a case
is broken down to its elements, it can be instantly compared to others where the
outcome is known. The case can also be weighed against the opinions of experts in
many relevant fields.
Imagine a student has made a threat which alarms others, and it falls to you to
evaluate the situation and the student. In a perfect world, you'd be able to instantly
confer with all the leading experts in threat-assessment, law enforcement,
psychology, and behavioral science, and ask:
What is most important for me to learn about this situation?
What information will most inform my evaluation?
How can I organize the information I gather to weigh it all most effectively?
What factors and warning signs are most relevant to future behavior?
How can I express and document my conclusions?
MOSAIC-2000 provides the guidance of leading experts, presented in a step by
step form that lets the evaluation process begin immediately.
Specifically, MOSAIC-2000 presents a series of questions, along with a range of
possible answers. Users are offered extensive, in depth explanations of what
factors must be present in order to stimulate selection of a given answer. Different
answers have different weights, so they can be weighed against each other, against
past cases where the outcome is known, and against expert opinion. Each
evaluation is rated on a scale of one to ten, with ten representing cases most similar
to those that have escalated, and thus, most in need of intervention
The system produces an automatic report that documents and presents exactly
what questions were asked, how they were answered, and what comments the
user chose to add along the way. Both the rating and the process help inform the
school administrator's evaluation of the situation.
Each evaluator brings his or her own intuition and experience, and MOSAIC
assures that different evaluators approach their cases from a shared foundation.
Can MOSAIC Label Kids?
MOSAIC-2000 cannot label anyone as anything. People unfamiliar with the
method may jump to the worry that principals will use it to unfairly label kids, but
the objective process resists bias. MOSAIC-2000 is vastly more likely give a low
rating in a situation to which people are over-reacting - than to give a high rating in
a situation people are not concerned about.
MOSAIC-2000 seeks to identify those students most in need of the interventions
and resources that are available, and in the school setting, all appropriate
intervention is good.
Is MOSAIC-2000 A Computerized Checklist Of Warning Signs?
The use of checklists in high-stakes evaluations is the antithesis of the MOSAIC
method. Checklists reduce to Yes/No answers elements of behavior and
circumstance that do not lend themselves to being limited to just two answers.
With Yes/No limitations, evaluators check off answers to global questions and
decide which answer they'll give - consciously or unconsciously influenced by
what they feel is the "right" overall result for the evaluation. Yes/No checklists do
not work for assessments of human behavior.
Imagine being asked to describe a movie you saw last night, but being required to
answer by saying either:
BEST MOVIE I EVER SAW, or
WORST MOVIE I EVER SAW
Those answers wouldn't produce a very fair appraisal of your opinion about the
movie - and situations involving human beings are far more complex than movies.
A range of answers is far more likely to stimulate accuracy fairness, and
completeness. For example, if asking about firearms, a Yes/No question could not
stimulate as fair or complete an exploration as a range:
__No known possession of a firearm
__Friends known to have ready access to a firearm
__There are firearms in the home
__There are firearms in a home frequented by the student
__The student owns his own firearm
__The student recently acquired a firearm
A range not only encourages accurate and complete evaluations; it also recognizes
that different answers have different value. To use a checklist that gives the same
weight to all answers would be like evaluating a passenger jet and giving the same
weight to the in-flight magazine as to the landing gear.
Here are some fast answers to frequently asked questions:
What is new about MOSAIC-2000?
For the first time, schools at the elementary, middle, and high school levels will
have access to technology and methods that have long been used for many of our
nation's highest stakes assessments.
Is MOSAIC-2000 for use on all students?
School administrators would use MOSAIC-2000 only in situations that reach a
certain threshold (e.g., a student makes a threat, brings a weapon to school,
teachers or students are concerned a student might act out violently).
Does MOSAIC-2000 invade the privacy of students?
The information gathered for each evaluation is held at the school only, and is
never communicated over the Internet. MOSAIC is a stand-alone system, secure
at each school, with no central combining of cases. The system isn't a "Big
Brother" approach. MOSAIC-2000 merely brings organization and expert opinion
to a process every principal already has.
Has the MOSAIC method been tested?
MOSAIC systems have been in daily use for a decade. Society faces many types
of high-stakes evaluations (threats to public officials, hazards to domestic violence
victims, workplace violence cases, etc). MOSAIC systems are used by the United
States Supreme Court, the Federal Reserve Board, the Central Intelligence
Agency, Governors of eleven states, and many others.
Has MOSAIC been used in the school setting?
MOSAIC systems have been in use by schools for many years, including Yale
University, Boston University, Penn State, and throughout the University of
California system.
What will MOSAIC do for school administrators?
MOSAIC-2000 will help schools identify students most in need of intervention,
and in the school setting, all appropriate interventions are favorable (i.e., no
adverse results come to a student when a principal concludes that there may be a
risk of violence). A student in need of intervention benefits, and of course the
student population benefits in terms of enhanced safety.
How does it work?
MOSAIC-2000 guides school administrators through the questions that most
inform an evaluation, then provides a range of possible answers. Answers that
have been developed and weighted by experts are then calculated by the system to
produce an overall rating, expressed on a scale of one to ten.
Does the computer make decisions?
MOSAIC-2000 does not make decisions; it is a tool that helps school
administrators by identifying the areas of inquiry that experts feel will produce the
best evaluation of the situation.
Does the computer tell schools what to do?
MOSAIC-2000 does not suggest any specific case-management actions. It offers
diagnosis of a situation, more triage than treatment plan.
Can schools use MOSAIC-2000 in cases where a student is already
considered dangerous?
In cases where students have been expelled as a result of safety concerns, when
they are considered for re-enrollment, some schools may use MOSAIC-2000 to
help evaluate if the risk has lessened.
Can the system brand a student as dangerous?
Most often, MOSAIC-2000 will help establish that a student does not pose an
elevated risk of violence.
Is the system biased?
MOSAIC-2000 brings a shared language to assessments, so that all users
objectively apply similar methods when exploring these situations. This ensures
that critical situations are evaluated in a fair, objective, consistent, and
well-documented way.
What will MOSAIC-2000 cost?
The 25 schools participating in the field test will pay nothing for the system. The
cost for the final version of MOSAIC-2000 (due in February, 2000) will be
determined by the M-2000 Advisory Board. It is likely to be a small monthly fee
for each school.
How does MOSAIC express evaluation results?
At a keystroke, the system automatically produces reports in regular English. They
include the questions that were asked, the answers that were selected, what
comments were added by the evaluator, the value of the information that was
evaluated, and the overall rating.
What are the technical requirements?
The system operates on entirely standard and traditional hardware, including an
IBM-PC compatible 486 computer. It uses very little disk space.
How was the expert opinion within MOSAIC-2000 identified and captured?
In order to identify what questions experts feel are most important to ask in one of
these situations, three groups were established:
1.A pool of experts and practitioners - 125 experts;
2.The M-2000 Advisory Board - 57 experts;
3.The M-2000 Development Team - 17 experts;
Concern that a student might act out violently can be triggered in any of several
ways:
a student makes a threat;
alarming writings are observed;
a student brings a firearm to school;
a student gets into trouble with police;
a teacher, counselor, psychologist, parent, or fellow student becomes
concerned and makes a report
Each of these categories was represented at the Expert and Practitioner Pool
(EPP) meeting at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. The 125 members of
the EPP included experts in threat-assessment, law enforcement, education,
psychology, behavioral science, the judiciary, and even some high school students.
The EPP heard presentations by Gavin de Becker and other experts:
Dr. James McGee, an advisor to the Baltimore State Police who recently headed
up a comprehensive study of 16 students who have committed multiple shootings
at school;
Paul Mones, author of When A Child Kills, a seminal work in the field of violence
by children;
Gregory Gibson, author of GONE BOY, whose son was killed during a mass
shooting by another student at his school;
Barbara Nelson, Dean of UCLA's School of Public Policy and Social Research;
Deputy District Attorney Scott Gordon, a founding member of the Stalking and
Threat Assessment Team of the Los Angeles. County District Attorney's Office;
Robert Martin, former Commanding Officer of LAPD's Detective Headquarters
Division, and founder of the Department's Threat Management Unit;
Gil Garcetti, District Attorney for the County of Los Angeles;
After these presentations, the 125 participants broke into groups of twenty, tasked
to identify the questions they'd ask if faced with a threat-assessment challenge in a
school setting. Following extensive discussions, each group was asked to rank
proposed questions in order of importance.
The entire EPP then reconvened for a case-management workshop, where the
very questions they'd just identified were applied.
Months later, after the questions of all groups were combined, analyzed, and
ranked, they were presented to the MOSAIC-2000 Advisory Board (57 experts
representing the fields of threat-assessment, education, law enforcement, the
judiciary, school administration, and behavioral sciences). The Advisory Board
analyzed the questions for clarity, applicability, relevance-to-outcome,
answerability, and fairness. They then refined the list and developed a range of
possible answers for each question.
The Advisory Board's results were combined and further analyzed against what is
known about past cases that escalated to violence. The questions and answers
were converted into Artificial Intuition format and entered into a MOSAIC
program.
Next, the MOSAIC-2000 Development Team (16 people) gathered at the UCLA
Conference Center for an intensive two-day session. The group included senior
representatives from the Los Angeles County Office of Education (coordinating
programs for 1700 schools), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms, the Los
Angeles County District Attorney's Office, the Cook County District Attorney's
Office, as well as Dr. James McGee, Gavin de Becker, Robert Martin, Jennifer
Mitchell, (co-developer of the Child Lures safety programs currently used in more
than 1000 schools), and several threat-assessment experts.
During two long days and nights, the Development Team worked with the
preliminary MOSAIC program, drafting language and further refining questions
and answers. In a daylong round-table session, Development Team members
reviewed all questions, omitted those that did not meet the group's criteria, and
added some that emerged during the discussions.
The draft version of MOSAIC-2000 is being tested against known cases that
escalated to violence, as well as being used in the field by schools around the
nation. The Advisory Board and Development Team will take the results from
these tests, as well as comments from schools using the system, and implement
changes.