But they managed to kill 400,000 Americans every year
I'm fairly certain that they didn't actually light the cig for me, nor did they put it in my mouth or anything else.
I started smoking of my own free will, and likewise, I stopped.
They've done plenty of scummy things along the way, but pretending they are the sole responsible party just makes you look stupid and unwilling to take responsibility for your own actions. Man up.
Not only did they manipulate you with the most expensive, sophisticated marketing programs the world has seen outside of government, and not only did they get you hooked to the most addicting drug known, they even convinced you that it was your free will, your fault and your personal responsibility.
The first part of the post that you're replying to is a quote from its parent. Maybe he just screwed up his tags or something, but he was trying to make the same point that you are.
I think I keep having a problem with Beta. I write a response, the quote looks OK in the preview, and then when I submit it the quote indentation disappears.
If you are a US citizen, I don't think you could get out of producing a document the court ordered you to supply by airmailing it to a confederate in another country. Similarly, if the data in question are related to Microsoft's US operations, then MS, being a corporation incorporated in the US, should be required to produce them.
That's what the tobacco companies did in the 1960s.
They did a lot of research to find out if cigarettes really caused lung cancer and all those other things.
If their research came out favorable to cigarettes, they could have waved it around to "rebut" the Surgeon General and get the regulators off their backs.
Their researchers found that cigarettes were harmful too.
So the tobacco executives told the researchers to kill all their animals, and destroy all their written results, and their lawyers wrote a few memos summarizing the whole thing. Lawyer-client privilege is the strongest secrecy you can have. Then they sent the memos to their law firm in London.
It finally got out. After a lot of lawsuits, the tobacco companies finally agreed to come clean with everything. But they managed to kill 400,000 Americans every year, and none of them went to jail. Eat your heart out, Osama bin Laden.
No injuries, marks, or other affects, permanent or otherwise.
They didn't have fun, to be sure, but brutal it wasn't.
Brutal is having your skinned peeled off in one inch strips, electrodes to the privates, hammer to the toes, peeling your finger nails off, propane torches, pliers and nipples, etc. THAT'S brutal.
These guys just didn't have a good time is all.
I'd like to chain you by your wrists and suspend you from the ceiling for 4 days, while trained fighters deliver peritoneal kicks to your legs, and see whether you still think that's not brutal. For as long as you survive.
Dilawar (born c. 1979 Ã" December 10, 2002), also known as Dilawar of Yakubi, was an Afghan taxi driver who was tortured to death by US army soldiers at the Bagram Collection Point, a US military detention center in Afghanistan.
He arrived at the prison on December 5, 2002, and was declared dead 5 days later. His death was declared a homicide and investigated and prosecuted in the Bagram torture and prisoner abuse trials....
On the day of his death, Dilawar had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days. A guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling. "Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying. Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned that most of the interrogators had in fact believed Mr. Dilawar to be an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.
They don't write like that for clickbait. They write like that because it's easier to read.
Seems to me that click-baiters also write like that.
How do you tell the difference? Without just "knowing"? i.e., There are tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of scholarly sites. And entirely unknown numbers of click-baiters.
I know what I write, and I know why I write it. I was writing like that before the Internet.
I should back off a bit, though. After I wrote that, I looked over some of my stories to see how I actually wrote the lead. Sometimes I did put the specific details in the first sentence. Here's one:
"Rituximab was superior to azathioprine for maintaining remission in antineutrophil cytoplasm antibody-associated vasculitis."
So that tells you everything you want to know in one simple sentence.
Preface: To simplify, I'm aware there are more racial and ethnic choices than black and white.
A disproportionate number of black people are also arrested for small-time pot possession charges, after the cops illegally search them, even though the pot usage in NYC is the same for blacks and whites. So if black people and white people use drugs in equal proportions, and the DA prosecutes 10 times as many black people as white for drug offenses, that would make it racist, wouldn't it?
The DA would be racist if, when brought forth an equal number of arrests for possession, chose to prosecute one race more than another based only on (or aided by) the color of their skin.
Are you conceding that a disproportionate number of black people are arrested for possession compared to white people? Because that was demonstrated in the testimony in the stop-and-frisk case before Judge Schendlin, which Slashdot wrote about.
RTFA they are using arrest records to determine priority in assigning cases and asking for bail. if you have a dozen arrests expect your case to get more attention than being arrested protesting one time
They're also arresting people for minor crimes and pushing them to be informers. If some informer says that you're a troublemaker or a gang member, you go in the database, with no opportunity to defend yourself.
Once you're in the database, the cops harass you with jaywalking arrests and illegal stop and frisks, until you get a dozen arrests.
As the NYT wrote in another story, it's almost impossible to fight these false charges. The DA charges you with a felony that could give you years in jail, keeps you in jail for months pre-trial, and then offers to let you go for time served if you plead guilty to a misdemeanor.
If I get arrested and the cops want me to turn somebody in, I'm going to tell them that there's this guy alen on Slashdot who's a really bad guy.
On that day, profiling just might start to make sense to you.
If I had a choice between getting mugged, and getting arrested by the cops on fake charges and charged with a felony, I'd rather get mugged. If I get arrested for a felony (like "assaulting" a cop), I'd have to spend thousands of dollars for a lawyer. They might set bail higher than I could afford, and I could stay in jail for months before I'm even convicted of anything (as a few New York Times stories showed). But I don't have to worry, because that mostly happens to people who are black.
After video cameras got popular, there were lots of cases where a cop swore under oath that a person assaulted him, and then the video showed that he was committing perjury. Do you think any of those cops were prosecuted for perjury? Or kicked off the force? Do you want to buy the Brooklyn Bridge?
The cop muggers are more dangerous than the civilian muggers.
Political correctness is used by idiots who either refuse to think for themselves or are unable to think for themselves.
The real world doesn't conform to how people wish it was. The real world is how it is, and sometimes it's not pretty. Certain classes of people are much more likely to commit violent crime, and those of us who have experience "on the street" KNOW THIS IS TRUE.
The underlying assumption is that the the accuracy of the data leads to lower crime. From what I've read, they are just better at tracking some criminals. To lower crime you'd have to be certain that new crimes were being committed by those criminals. But by focusing on a smaller population of criminals, this seems bound to pin crimes on the focus group rather than actually being a deterrent to more savvy criminals that have stayed out of focus.
Has it been demonstrated that crime rates are significantly lower as a result of this tracking?
No.
Just the opposite. When you compare crime rates in NYC with cities that don't have this tracking, they are identical. Crime has been going generally down nationwide, regardless of these programs.
Well the second paragraph of the summary makes it pretty clear it isn't just a database of "people who look like they could be criminals". They are repeat offenders of serious crimes. I don't really even get what you mean by "biased slice of the population". Yeah it's biased, because they have to include bad guys in the list. Otherwise what do you mean? Data isn't racist, which was my original point. I'm assuming unless they are the most bigotted people on the planet and somehow programmed that into their algorithm, their lists include a pretty fair percentage of each race, according to their relative rates of committing the crimes they are singling out as important.
Well the whole story makes it clear that it is a database of "people who look like they could be criminals". One kid got in because he was wearing a red shirt. They're convicted of trivial crimes, like jaywalking. And a disproportionate number of black people are arrested for jaywalking.
A disproportionate number of black people are also arrested for small-time pot possession charges, after the cops illegally search them, even though the pot usage in NYC is the same for blacks and whites. So if black people and white people use drugs in equal proportions, and the DA prosecutes 10 times as many black people as white for drug offenses, that would make it racist, wouldn't it?
The story also says that they put people in the database, with no chance to defend themselves, based on the claims that those people are "gang members" or "troublemakers," by anonymous informants, who are themselves arrested for small-time crimes. Can you give me a definition of a "gang member" that is consistent with the Bill of Rights?
FTA:
the list also includes active gang members, people whom the D.A. considers “uncooperative witnesses,” and a fluctuating number of violent “priority targets,”
“When prosecutors begin to compile databases and start doing so-called ‘smart prosecutions,’ you have to ask who is getting in the databases, what are the criteria and where are the outside checks?” says Steven Zeidman, director of the criminal-defense clinic at the CUNY School of Law. “More than a thousand people are arrested in N.Y.C. each day, and the overwhelming and disproportionate number of them are people of color arrested for ‘broken windows’ type offenses like riding a bike on the sidewalk or jaywalking. I was in court with a kid arrested for jaywalking; the arresting officer was from the gang unit, and he stopped the kid because he was wearing a red shirt that, according to the police, happened to be a gang color. He wasn’t in a gang, but he’s probably now in a database.”
... In recent years, tens of thousands of New Yorkers — a vast majority of them blacks and Hispanics — have been arrested for small amounts of marijuana after being searched under the Police Department’s now-scaled-back stop-and-frisk policy. Marijuana offenses were the top arrest category for the entire program in 2012...
They don't write like that for clickbait. They write like that because it's easier to read. Newspapers were writing like that even before the Internet.
Back in the days of paper, I wrote for a scientific newsletter. I actually wrote a couple of stories about plastic-digesting bugs. I used to pack as much information as I could into the first 150-200 words, like a journal abstract.
Then I got a freelance assignment to cover a scientific conference for a wire service. I read a few of the wire service's stories, so that I could write in the same style. I was surprised to see that the lead sentence didn't have a lot of details about the name of the microorganism or whatever. They just wrote a short English sentence, as simple as possible, explaining what the story was about.
Then they'd have the specific details further down.
Sure enough, it was easier to read. And it was a little easier to write, too, especially on deadline where I don't have time for a second draft.
I looked around and I saw that most newspapers and trade magazines did it that way.
Yeah, there was an element of suspense to it, but the main purpose was to start out with a simple sentence.
The most demanding writing is for the radio. If somebody is listening to my wire service story on the radio, that lead has to be very simple. I don't want him to say, "Wait -- was that waxworms?" Get to the waxworms later.
I used to read CEN and ES&T, and I knew some of the people who wrote for it. Believe me, they don't need clickbait. They're a professional society magazine, and they're writing for their members, who get it free, but if the members don't read it, the publisher fires the editor and hires a new one. They're desperately trying to give their busy chemist members clearly-written, useful information with no bullshit, and they do a good job.
The tile of the ES&T article is, "Evidence of Polyethylene Biodegradation by Bacterial Strains from the Guts of Plastic-Eating Waxworms." Is that enough for you to chomp on?
Later on, you find out that the insect is Plodia interpunctella, and that the gut bacteria were Enterobacter asburiae YT1 and Bacillus sp. YP1. Do you really want that in the first 250 words?
It is true that if I were writing for bacteriologists, and they were waiting to find out which bacteria, I would put it in the lead. I can hear them saying, "E. asburiae! Who would have guessed?" But for most people, that detail can come later.
I don't think even-handed coverage is possible, when journalism as a whole is essentially paid trolling for one agenda or another. People just want to read stuff that reinforces their preconceived notions, and I am no exception.
Find me a story with no slant, and i'll show you a story (virtually) no one read.
As a journalist, I can tell you that there are a lot of different definitions of "even-handed", but it possible.
For about 50 years, the Wall Street Journal was very profitable, and it was owned by the Bankroft family, who hired the best editors they could find, gave them good salaries and budgets, told them to publish whatever they thought was important, and never influenced the news (unlike the New York Times). Their readers, the leaders of American finance want their own news to be straight. (They even had reporting on Israel/Palestine that both sides considered fair.) So that's the formula. Whenever you have those conditions, you'll have good reporting.
Then the money machine ran down, the next generation of Bankrofts weren't so idealistic, and they sold it to Rupert Murdoch, where it is now run pretty much as you say (though they have a lot of inertia).
There are other examples. I read the professional journals, which have news sections, which are usually pretty good. The Journal of the American Medical Association had a news section which was very good and not at all like the AMA policy. Then the AMA hired an executive director who was an asshole, who fired the editor of JAMA the first time JAMA printed something about politics that the director didn't like.
You had an Ebola story. I would define the task as gathering information, verifying it, identifying the important issues and organizing it. By that definition, I think the New York Times did a pretty good job. I got most of my information about it from Science magazine and New England Journal of Medicine. (The trade press covers stories with an order of magnitude more detail, they understand it better, and they know better how to identify the important issues and organize it.)
Jon Cohen did a lot of the Ebola coverage for Science. He covered the AIDS epidemic, wrote one of the leading books about it, and covered several other major epidemics around the world in the kind of detail Science magazine's PhD-level readers want to know. He has a salary that's enough to live comfortably and an expense account that can send him around the world. I can't imagine how crowd-sourced volunteers could ever deliver information about Ebola as well as Cohen could.
I could say the same for New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Lancet, BMJ, Reuters, and several other news sources. The big difference I notice is that your Bitt is a miscellaneous collection of stories, some of which is unverified bullshit, like Darrell Issa's pointless partisan attacks on Obama. There were easily 100 major stories on the Ebola quarantine that day. Why did you pick those 8?
If I were giving a journalism class, I would say, "A news story has to have a story."
There's a fire hose of information out there. The first job of a journalist is to throw out 99% of it. Then throw out another 90%. Then try to make some sense out of it.
For example, JAMA last week had 8 or 9 articles on the theme of reforming health care delivery. http://jama.jamanetwork.com/is... Each of those articles illustrated one important aspect of the problem, and they all fit in together. They deliberately had one article that contradicts another article.
Sorry to be so tough but that's the way editors treated me, and that's the way I treat reporters today. It's for their own good.
Give me a break. This sounds exactly like a political meeting I went to (and I won't name which party) where they spent 30 minutes adding a "to do" item being reducing the speed limits on all roads (interstates, etc.) to a max of 45 miles/hour. Not 55, 45. The main assertions is that vehicles get their best MPG at 35, and if one person is saved, the slower time for everyone is worth it
I find this hard to believe. I've never heard anybody seriously suggest reducing the speed to 45mph on interstates. I hope you won't be offended if I ask you for a citation.
This extra energy will have 2 effects. It makes it more likely that (1) you overcome the road barriers and drive off the road and (2) you roll over, and keep rolling over. The most common dangerous accidents is a rollover. The more times you roll over, the more likely it is that the roof will collapse, and it's pretty unlikely to survive a roof collapse, even if you are wearing seat belts.
Good thing most cars that feel safe at that speed have the technology to still get 30 MPG at that speed. Or, at least, mine does and it's a 2008 model year.
Your car gets 30 mpg at 85 mph? I'm surprised at that. As somebody else mentioned, resistance increases at the third power of speed.
Seriously though, haven't biologists doing sociological extrapolation via Prisoner's Dilemma been discredited enough yet?
No, it's been confirmed. Most people will reject a choice which will give them their maximum benefit, and instead take a choice which they think is fair.
This is mainly because people forget that the person who 'invented' game theory ended up being committed to an institution due to actually being a psychopath.
Neither John von Neumann nor Oskar Morgenstern was ever institutionalized. They are the two people credited with "inventing" game theory. You may be thinking of the subject of the movie A Beautiful Mind, John Nash. Nash was a prominent early theorist in non-cooperative games. The Nash equilibrium is named after him. Nash was a paranoid schizophrenic, not a psychopath.
Testing game theory through experimentation is much newer. Most of the early work was done purely on a theoretical basis and founded in pure logic. I.e. it didn't try to explain why people did things; it tried to determine how a perfectly logical person should react.
And when they test game theory experimentally, in laboratories where subjects get paid in real money, it seems to work. Most people cooperate, a few defect. They're more likely to cooperate in games that run several rounds than games that run a single round. They're more likely to cooperate in games where payers know who the defectors are and can punish them. If you tweak the games, you can set up rules where people have an incentive to cooperate, and do cooperate. There were a few publications about those studies in Science; maybe somebody can help me with the citation.
I used to read in the Wall Street Journal editorial page that the free market works because it assumes everyone will follow their selfish interest, and you can always depend on people to be selfish. In the experimental economics studies, people will spend their own money to punish defectors. A significant majority of people don't follow their selfish interests. They follow what they think is fair, even if they lose money.
So Milton Friedman is wrong. Ayn Rand is wrong. It took a while, but we finally proved it scientifically.
Most western government have rather low bang-for-the-buck
It's easy to forget just how much waste there is the private sector too.
Mostly because when a private company waste money, the general public doesn't care all that much...
But look at the crazy start-up investments made in Silicon Valley (VC for an app like YO). I could go on, but I'm sure we all have stories about waste in the private sector.
Yes, I worked for a large Fortune 500 corporation. The CEO was known for hiring his incompetent nieces and nephews and Connecticut neighbors and setting them up in high-paid jobs throughout the company. One good job title for an incompetent is "public relations."
It didn't matter that they were incompetent, because the company as a whole was profitable thanks to some operations where they they were very profitable and had a monopoly.
A viable company must be profitable enough that they can continue to operate even with some inefficiency. A successful company will have enough money to throw around that they can afford to pay for legitimate expenses such as capital investments and innovation, but also favors for the executives, political lobbying, comfortable jobs for a congressman's daughter, etc. There aren't any companies that operate with perfect efficiency throughout their operations.
If you can afford to maintain two active war for a decade, you can certainly afford better education for your children... or better infrastructures. Depends where your priorities are. I still maintain that the whole money sank in "defense" (which should really be called "offense") industries would probably have been of much better use locally, might it just be not to put the next few generations in debt.
It used to be called "war." The "War Department" was renamed "Defense Department."
Slashdot Mirror
But they managed to kill 400,000 Americans every year
I'm fairly certain that they didn't actually light the cig for me, nor did they put it in my mouth or anything else.
I started smoking of my own free will, and likewise, I stopped.
They've done plenty of scummy things along the way, but pretending they are the sole responsible party just makes you look stupid and unwilling to take responsibility for your own actions. Man up.
Not only did they manipulate you with the most expensive, sophisticated marketing programs the world has seen outside of government, and not only did they get you hooked to the most addicting drug known, they even convinced you that it was your free will, your fault and your personal responsibility.
The first part of the post that you're replying to is a quote from its parent. Maybe he just screwed up his tags or something, but he was trying to make the same point that you are.
I think I keep having a problem with Beta. I write a response, the quote looks OK in the preview, and then when I submit it the quote indentation disappears.
If you are a US citizen, I don't think you could get out of producing a document the court ordered you to supply by airmailing it to a confederate in another country. Similarly, if the data in question are related to Microsoft's US operations, then MS, being a corporation incorporated in the US, should be required to produce them.
That's what the tobacco companies did in the 1960s.
They did a lot of research to find out if cigarettes really caused lung cancer and all those other things.
If their research came out favorable to cigarettes, they could have waved it around to "rebut" the Surgeon
General and get the regulators off their backs.
Their researchers found that cigarettes were harmful too.
So the tobacco executives told the researchers to kill all their animals, and destroy all their written results, and their lawyers wrote a few memos summarizing the whole thing. Lawyer-client privilege is the strongest secrecy you can have. Then they sent the memos to their law firm in London.
It finally got out. After a lot of lawsuits, the tobacco companies finally agreed to come clean with everything. But they managed to kill 400,000 Americans every year, and none of them went to jail. Eat your heart out, Osama bin Laden.
"Brutal"
No injuries, marks, or other affects, permanent or otherwise.
They didn't have fun, to be sure, but brutal it wasn't.
Brutal is having your skinned peeled off in one inch strips, electrodes to the privates, hammer to the toes, peeling your finger nails off, propane torches, pliers and nipples, etc. THAT'S brutal.
These guys just didn't have a good time is all.
I'd like to chain you by your wrists and suspend you from the ceiling for 4 days, while trained fighters deliver peritoneal kicks to your legs, and see whether you still think that's not brutal. For as long as you survive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Dilawar (born c. 1979 Ã" December 10, 2002), also known as Dilawar of Yakubi, was an Afghan taxi driver who was tortured to death by US army soldiers at the Bagram Collection Point, a US military detention center in Afghanistan.
He arrived at the prison on December 5, 2002, and was declared dead 5 days later. His death was declared a homicide and investigated and prosecuted in the Bagram torture and prisoner abuse trials....
On the day of his death, Dilawar had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days. A guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling. "Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying. Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned that most of the interrogators had in fact believed Mr. Dilawar to be an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.
They don't write like that for clickbait. They write like that because it's easier to read.
Seems to me that click-baiters also write like that.
How do you tell the difference? Without just "knowing"? i.e., There are tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of scholarly sites. And entirely unknown numbers of click-baiters.
I know what I write, and I know why I write it. I was writing like that before the Internet.
I should back off a bit, though. After I wrote that, I looked over some of my stories to see how I actually wrote the lead. Sometimes I did put the specific details in the first sentence. Here's one:
"Rituximab was superior to azathioprine for maintaining remission in antineutrophil cytoplasm antibody-associated vasculitis."
So that tells you everything you want to know in one simple sentence.
Preface: To simplify, I'm aware there are more racial and ethnic choices than black and white.
A disproportionate number of black people are also arrested for small-time pot possession charges, after the cops illegally search them, even though the pot usage in NYC is the same for blacks and whites. So if black people and white people use drugs in equal proportions, and the DA prosecutes 10 times as many black people as white for drug offenses, that would make it racist, wouldn't it?
The DA would be racist if, when brought forth an equal number of arrests for possession, chose to prosecute one race more than another based only on (or aided by) the color of their skin.
Are you conceding that a disproportionate number of black people are arrested for possession compared to white people? Because that was demonstrated in the testimony in the stop-and-frisk case before Judge Schendlin, which Slashdot wrote about.
RTFA
they are using arrest records to determine priority in assigning cases and asking for bail. if you have a dozen arrests expect your case to get more attention than being arrested protesting one time
They're also arresting people for minor crimes and pushing them to be informers. If some informer says that you're a troublemaker or a gang member, you go in the database, with no opportunity to defend yourself.
Once you're in the database, the cops harass you with jaywalking arrests and illegal stop and frisks, until you get a dozen arrests.
As the NYT wrote in another story, it's almost impossible to fight these false charges. The DA charges you with a felony that could give you years in jail, keeps you in jail for months pre-trial, and then offers to let you go for time served if you plead guilty to a misdemeanor.
If I get arrested and the cops want me to turn somebody in, I'm going to tell them that there's this guy alen on Slashdot who's a really bad guy.
I glossed through the lengthy article and didn't see if the DA's "Moneyball" approach is working, and to what extent if it is.
The article just touched on this, but major crime statistics have been going down around the country, for reasons that aren't too clear.
Geographically, crime has been going down as much in NYC as anywhere else, so all these approaches didn't make any difference.
Over time, the crime rate has been going down in NYC as these approaches come and go, so all these approaches didn't make any difference.
Just wait until you get mugged, little boy.
On that day, profiling just might start to make sense to you.
If I had a choice between getting mugged, and getting arrested by the cops on fake charges and charged with a felony, I'd rather get mugged. If I get arrested for a felony (like "assaulting" a cop), I'd have to spend thousands of dollars for a lawyer. They might set bail higher than I could afford, and I could stay in jail for months before I'm even convicted of anything (as a few New York Times stories showed). But I don't have to worry, because that mostly happens to people who are black.
After video cameras got popular, there were lots of cases where a cop swore under oath that a person assaulted him, and then the video showed that he was committing perjury. Do you think any of those cops were prosecuted for perjury? Or kicked off the force? Do you want to buy the Brooklyn Bridge?
The cop muggers are more dangerous than the civilian muggers.
Political correctness is used by idiots who either refuse to think
for themselves or are unable to think for themselves.
The real world doesn't conform to how people wish it was. The real
world is how it is, and sometimes it's not pretty. Certain classes of
people are much more likely to commit violent crime, and those
of us who have experience "on the street" KNOW THIS IS TRUE.
Those certain classes include NYC cops.
The underlying assumption is that the the accuracy of the data leads to lower crime. From what I've read, they are just better at tracking some criminals. To lower crime you'd have to be certain that new crimes were being committed by those criminals. But by focusing on a smaller population of criminals, this seems bound to pin crimes on the focus group rather than actually being a deterrent to more savvy criminals that have stayed out of focus.
Has it been demonstrated that crime rates are significantly lower as a result of this tracking?
No.
Just the opposite. When you compare crime rates in NYC with cities that don't have this tracking, they are identical. Crime has been going generally down nationwide, regardless of these programs.
Well the second paragraph of the summary makes it pretty clear it isn't just a database of "people who look like they could be criminals". They are repeat offenders of serious crimes. I don't really even get what you mean by "biased slice of the population". Yeah it's biased, because they have to include bad guys in the list. Otherwise what do you mean? Data isn't racist, which was my original point. I'm assuming unless they are the most bigotted people on the planet and somehow programmed that into their algorithm, their lists include a pretty fair percentage of each race, according to their relative rates of committing the crimes they are singling out as important.
Well the whole story makes it clear that it is a database of "people who look like they could be criminals". One kid got in because he was wearing a red shirt. They're convicted of trivial crimes, like jaywalking. And a disproportionate number of black people are arrested for jaywalking.
A disproportionate number of black people are also arrested for small-time pot possession charges, after the cops illegally search them, even though the pot usage in NYC is the same for blacks and whites. So if black people and white people use drugs in equal proportions, and the DA prosecutes 10 times as many black people as white for drug offenses, that would make it racist, wouldn't it?
The story also says that they put people in the database, with no chance to defend themselves, based on the claims that those people are "gang members" or "troublemakers," by anonymous informants, who are themselves arrested for small-time crimes. Can you give me a definition of a "gang member" that is consistent with the Bill of Rights?
FTA:
the list also includes active gang members, people whom the D.A. considers “uncooperative witnesses,” and a fluctuating number of violent “priority targets,”
“When prosecutors begin to compile databases and start doing so-called ‘smart prosecutions,’ you have to ask who is getting in the databases, what are the criteria and where are the outside checks?” says Steven Zeidman, director of the criminal-defense clinic at the CUNY School of Law. “More than a thousand people are arrested in N.Y.C. each day, and the overwhelming and disproportionate number of them are people of color arrested for ‘broken windows’ type offenses like riding a bike on the sidewalk or jaywalking. I was in court with a kid arrested for jaywalking; the arresting officer was from the gang unit, and he stopped the kid because he was wearing a red shirt that, according to the police, happened to be a gang color. He wasn’t in a gang, but he’s probably now in a database.”
They don't write like that for clickbait. They write like that because it's easier to read. Newspapers were writing like that even before the Internet.
Back in the days of paper, I wrote for a scientific newsletter. I actually wrote a couple of stories about plastic-digesting bugs. I used to pack as much information as I could into the first 150-200 words, like a journal abstract.
Then I got a freelance assignment to cover a scientific conference for a wire service. I read a few of the wire service's stories, so that I could write in the same style. I was surprised to see that the lead sentence didn't have a lot of details about the name of the microorganism or whatever. They just wrote a short English sentence, as simple as possible, explaining what the story was about.
Then they'd have the specific details further down.
Sure enough, it was easier to read. And it was a little easier to write, too, especially on deadline where I don't have time for a second draft.
I looked around and I saw that most newspapers and trade magazines did it that way.
Yeah, there was an element of suspense to it, but the main purpose was to start out with a simple sentence.
The most demanding writing is for the radio. If somebody is listening to my wire service story on the radio, that lead has to be very simple. I don't want him to say, "Wait -- was that waxworms?" Get to the waxworms later.
I used to read CEN and ES&T, and I knew some of the people who wrote for it. Believe me, they don't need clickbait. They're a professional society magazine, and they're writing for their members, who get it free, but if the members don't read it, the publisher fires the editor and hires a new one. They're desperately trying to give their busy chemist members clearly-written, useful information with no bullshit, and they do a good job.
The tile of the ES&T article is, "Evidence of Polyethylene Biodegradation by Bacterial Strains from the Guts of Plastic-Eating Waxworms." Is that enough for you to chomp on?
Later on, you find out that the insect is Plodia interpunctella, and that the gut bacteria were Enterobacter asburiae YT1 and Bacillus sp. YP1. Do you really want that in the first 250 words?
It is true that if I were writing for bacteriologists, and they were waiting to find out which bacteria, I would put it in the lead. I can hear them saying, "E. asburiae! Who would have guessed?" But for most people, that detail can come later.
I don't think even-handed coverage is possible, when journalism as a whole is essentially paid trolling for one agenda or another. People just want to read stuff that reinforces their preconceived notions, and I am no exception.
Find me a story with no slant, and i'll show you a story (virtually) no one read.
Here's one. http://news.sciencemag.org/arc... According to Feedly, it had 100+ readers on Feedly alone. I just read it yesterday.
As a journalist, I can tell you that there are a lot of different definitions of "even-handed", but it possible.
For about 50 years, the Wall Street Journal was very profitable, and it was owned by the Bankroft family, who hired the best editors they could find, gave them good salaries and budgets, told them to publish whatever they thought was important, and never influenced the news (unlike the New York Times). Their readers, the leaders of American finance want their own news to be straight. (They even had reporting on Israel/Palestine that both sides considered fair.) So that's the formula. Whenever you have those conditions, you'll have good reporting.
Then the money machine ran down, the next generation of Bankrofts weren't so idealistic, and they sold it to Rupert Murdoch, where it is now run pretty much as you say (though they have a lot of inertia).
There are other examples. I read the professional journals, which have news sections, which are usually pretty good. The Journal of the American Medical Association had a news section which was very good and not at all like the AMA policy. Then the AMA hired an executive director who was an asshole, who fired the editor of JAMA the first time JAMA printed something about politics that the director didn't like.
I'm a journalist. After looking at your samples http://larrysanger.org/wp-cont... http://larrysanger.org/wp-cont... I was wondering what the benefit is of Infobitt over Google News.
You had an Ebola story. I would define the task as gathering information, verifying it, identifying the important issues and organizing it. By that definition, I think the New York Times did a pretty good job. I got most of my information about it from Science magazine and New England Journal of Medicine. (The trade press covers stories with an order of magnitude more detail, they understand it better, and they know better how to identify the important issues and organize it.)
Jon Cohen did a lot of the Ebola coverage for Science. He covered the AIDS epidemic, wrote one of the leading books about it, and covered several other major epidemics around the world in the kind of detail Science magazine's PhD-level readers want to know. He has a salary that's enough to live comfortably and an expense account that can send him around the world. I can't imagine how crowd-sourced volunteers could ever deliver information about Ebola as well as Cohen could.
I could say the same for New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Lancet, BMJ, Reuters, and several other news sources. The big difference I notice is that your Bitt is a miscellaneous collection of stories, some of which is unverified bullshit, like Darrell Issa's pointless partisan attacks on Obama. There were easily 100 major stories on the Ebola quarantine that day. Why did you pick those 8?
If I were giving a journalism class, I would say, "A news story has to have a story."
There's a fire hose of information out there. The first job of a journalist is to throw out 99% of it. Then throw out another 90%. Then try to make some sense out of it.
For example, JAMA last week had 8 or 9 articles on the theme of reforming health care delivery.
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/is... Each of those articles illustrated one important aspect of the problem, and they all fit in together. They deliberately had one article that contradicts another article.
Sorry to be so tough but that's the way editors treated me, and that's the way I treat reporters today. It's for their own good.
You'll have to file a freedom of information request for that.
You want to say different? Come up with the stats in Montana highways.
Montana Traffic Safety Problem Identification
FFY 2011
2009 Data
http://www.mdt.mt.gov/publicat...
P. 103 (PDF p. 113), "Collisions with Animals"
4 fatalities in 2009.
Give me a break. This sounds exactly like a political meeting I went to (and I won't name which party) where they spent 30 minutes adding a "to do" item being reducing the speed limits on all roads (interstates, etc.) to a max of 45 miles/hour. Not 55, 45. The main assertions is that vehicles get their best MPG at 35, and if one person is saved, the slower time for everyone is worth it
I find this hard to believe. I've never heard anybody seriously suggest reducing the speed to 45mph on interstates. I hope you won't be offended if I ask you for a citation.
This extra energy will have 2 effects. It makes it more likely that (1) you overcome the road barriers and drive off the road and (2) you roll over, and keep rolling over. The most common dangerous accidents is a rollover. The more times you roll over, the more likely it is that the roof will collapse, and it's pretty unlikely to survive a roof collapse, even if you are wearing seat belts.
You can spend many happy hours reading
Montana Traffic Safety Problem Identification
FFY 2011 (2009 Data)
http://www.mdt.mt.gov/publicat...
"Single vehicle, run-off-the-road crashes accounted for 28.9% of all crashes in Montana and accounted for 59.1% of all fatal crashes."
The elk issue is dealt with in
Montana Traffic Safety Problem Identification
FFY 2011
2009 Data
http://www.mdt.mt.gov/publicat...
P. 103 (PDF p. 113), "Collisions with Animals"
4 fatalities in 2009.
Also of interest, from the executive summary:
SINGLE VEHICLE, RUN-OFF-THE-ROAD CRASHES
Single vehicle, run-off-the-road crashes accounted for 28.9% of all crashes in Montana and accounted for 59.1% of all fatal crashes.
Good thing most cars that feel safe at that speed have the technology to still get 30 MPG at that speed. Or, at least, mine does and it's a 2008 model year.
Your car gets 30 mpg at 85 mph? I'm surprised at that. As somebody else mentioned, resistance increases at the third power of speed.
Could you learn how to correctly quote a comment ? I have no idea where the quote is, and where your answer is...
I know how to quote a comment. My user number is lower than yours.
In Slashdot beta, even when it looks right in preview, it loses the quotes after I submit it.
Seriously though, haven't biologists doing sociological extrapolation via Prisoner's Dilemma been discredited enough yet?
No, it's been confirmed. Most people will reject a choice which will give them their maximum benefit, and instead take a choice which they think is fair.
This is mainly because people forget that the person who 'invented' game theory ended up being committed to an institution due to actually being a psychopath.
Neither John von Neumann nor Oskar Morgenstern was ever institutionalized. They are the two people credited with "inventing" game theory. You may be thinking of the subject of the movie A Beautiful Mind, John Nash. Nash was a prominent early theorist in non-cooperative games. The Nash equilibrium is named after him. Nash was a paranoid schizophrenic, not a psychopath.
Testing game theory through experimentation is much newer. Most of the early work was done purely on a theoretical basis and founded in pure logic. I.e. it didn't try to explain why people did things; it tried to determine how a perfectly logical person should react.
And when they test game theory experimentally, in laboratories where subjects get paid in real money, it seems to work. Most people cooperate, a few defect. They're more likely to cooperate in games that run several rounds than games that run a single round. They're more likely to cooperate in games where payers know who the defectors are and can punish them. If you tweak the games, you can set up rules where people have an incentive to cooperate, and do cooperate. There were a few publications about those studies in Science; maybe somebody can help me with the citation.
I used to read in the Wall Street Journal editorial page that the free market works because it assumes everyone will follow their selfish interest, and you can always depend on people to be selfish. In the experimental economics studies, people will spend their own money to punish defectors. A significant majority of people don't follow their selfish interests. They follow what they think is fair, even if they lose money.
So Milton Friedman is wrong. Ayn Rand is wrong. It took a while, but we finally proved it scientifically.
Most western government have rather low bang-for-the-buck
It's easy to forget just how much waste there is the private sector too.
Mostly because when a private company waste money, the general public doesn't care all that much...
But look at the crazy start-up investments made in Silicon Valley (VC for an app like YO).
I could go on, but I'm sure we all have stories about waste in the private sector.
Yes, I worked for a large Fortune 500 corporation. The CEO was known for hiring his incompetent nieces and nephews and Connecticut neighbors and setting them up in high-paid jobs throughout the company. One good job title for an incompetent is "public relations."
It didn't matter that they were incompetent, because the company as a whole was profitable thanks to some operations where they they were very profitable and had a monopoly.
A viable company must be profitable enough that they can continue to operate even with some inefficiency. A successful company will have enough money to throw around that they can afford to pay for legitimate expenses such as capital investments and innovation, but also favors for the executives, political lobbying, comfortable jobs for a congressman's daughter, etc. There aren't any companies that operate with perfect efficiency throughout their operations.
Read my comment above.
If you can afford to maintain two active war for a decade, you can certainly afford better education for your children... or better infrastructures. Depends where your priorities are. I still maintain that the whole money sank in "defense" (which should really be called "offense") industries would probably have been of much better use locally, might it just be not to put the next few generations in debt.
It used to be called "war." The "War Department" was renamed "Defense Department."