Humans are out of the loop in planetary exploration, and most near Earth satellite work.
No they are not. The humans issue the instructions and the computer on the remote vehicle executes them. The fact that there is some pretty severe latency on the execution of the instructions doesn't change anything. The robots aren't making any decisions about what to explore. Even far from Earth probes like New Horizons were simply executing a series of pre-programmed steps in a sequence determined by people and humans have been in communication with it since day one.
A question of degrees. In 1969, human pilots were required, zero lag, for docking maneuvers... today, that can be fully automated. The extra-planetary probes make considerable decisions autonomously... we send a general instruction, they execute, but the instructions we send are becoming higher and higher level all the time. At some point, we may be sending a robot factory with general instructions to build enough robots to terraform 1000 sq km of surface for agriculture and deploy them to do that; those machines are still simply executing a series of pre-programmed steps in a sequence determined by people, and humans will be in communication with them throughout the task.
Should humans always be involved in shoot-to-kill decisions?
Yes. Absolutely yes. It is unethical to do anything else. Taking of a human life is a serious thing and it should be treated seriously. A human should have to make that decision and live with the consequences regardless of how the act is actually carried out.
A question of ethics, one on which I agree with your position. However, as world population rises from 7B to 14B and a country with 400M is attempting to "control" the whole show, I wonder when the "value of a human life" will decline below the threshold of requiring a human decision maker, in the opinion of the policy makers? Especially when those decision makers are ending up with PTSD working at Nellis.
Tech like "Fathom" http://www.movidius.com/soluti... doesn't execute simple instructions that the authors _think_ they understand. It's nothing new, neural nets have been in serious development for 20-30 years, but it's becoming more and more prevalent in "production" systems.
Humans are out of the loop in planetary exploration, and most near Earth satellite work. Should humans always be involved in shoot-to-kill decisions? The writers of RoboCop 2014 think so.
It's actually "good PR" to have pilots in the planes... shows we care enough to risk a man's life to do the task. Now, when the "manned" planes start flying with mannequins in the pilot's seat...
The Star Wars drone armies controlled from a single mothership are, of course, rubbish. Real systems developed in real battlefield environments would have considerable autonomy and redundancy.
Or, if you want to look at it this way, meat bags have one fatal flaw, just fling a bunch of hot metal through the air and they all fall over screaming, mostly dead within seconds.
To me, this is like those quadcopters that can play ping-pong - in a perfectly known environment; in the case of the copters, with fixed tracking cameras all around the room.
Getting that kind of total situational awareness in the field, with smoke and chaff and hostile signals in the air, can be more challenging. To paraphrase young Solo: "Good in a simulation, that's one thing, good in the real world, that's something else."
When I lived in the US for a while I really go the impression that everyone was trying to rip me off and I had to be constantly vigilant with every bill. It was quite draining, and while I'm not saying elsewhere is perfect, I certainly have experienced fewer of such problems here in the UK than in the US.
Possibly due to being a readily identified foreigner - I don't get as much of that in the US as I did in Europe, especially East Germany circa 1990.
But, yes, some corporate actors are just plain bad - I had a bank in 1992 (yes, they had computers back then) send me a monthly statement of account with a $20 addition error on it, in their favor - how in the hell does a computer generated statement make a $20 error? My solution to that was to quit using commercial banks and move to a Credit Union (non-profit banking entity, managed to serve clients rather than make a profit from them.)
Three strikes, mandatory minimums, zero tolerance, all of these "algorithmic legislations" have had disastrous consequences, they are too simple, too one dimensional, too inhuman to fit into real society in any beneficial way.
I reject your framing of the issue.
Clearly.
You are presuming that credit scores have any meaningful relationship to criminality
Not criminality, personality and ability (whether innate, or by grace of socioeconomic circumstance) to function smoothly in society.
without presenting any actual evidence that such an assertion is backed by facts.
Then you're going to love my next tack: have you ever been to court? Have you ever experienced the numbingly impersonal, snap judgement nature of a courtroom, or pre-trial proceedings? Lawyers' time is (rightly, or wrongly) highly valuable, so they "get to know" their clients in shockingly brief interviews. Even protracted court cases determining guilt/innocence for serious crimes that might involve lengthy or life prison sentences are more about hiding information than "getting to know" the defendant. For minor crimes, the time spent considering sentencing is still a tiny fraction of a percentage of the time that the person has already and will in the future be incarcerated. So, better to let the judge read a police rap sheet and sentence the defendant based on how they dress and present in court? Credit history tells a deeper story of a person than that - more information can lead to better decisions, if you can trust the decision maker to not bias their decisions in unethical/illegal ways.
You are extrapolating purchasing and financial management behavior to have some relationship to criminality without any basis.
Not criminality, likelihood of delivering on a promise. All releases from incarceration involve a promise, spoken or implied "not to do it again."
Even a correlation isn't adequate because there are all sorts of ridiculous correlations [hbr.org] between completely unrelated things. You have to PROVE a causal relationship between an individual person's credit score and their likelihood to commit future crimes for your argument to have any basis at all. Good luck with that.
I don't have to PROVE anything, this is an internet discussion board, not a state legislature - and how often do you see state legislators PROVE anything to their colleagues before swaying their votes in the desired direction? Bloody well next to never. The real world of laws, enforcement, judgement and sentencing hinges more on political speeches and emotional appeals than it does on double-blind placebo controlled studies, published papers or even weak correlations. Would I wish that it would be otherwise? Sure, I know people who worked in highly effective post conviction drug counselling programs with wildly better recidivism rates than simple incarceration, no matter how you measured it: dollars, man hours invested, etc. They operated for long enough to see clear measurable improvements in the community; but every year their whole office was on the political chopping block until one year the political wind blew against them, and the whole place was shuttered to "save money" by shifting the expense to the prison system.
Good luck changing the world with hard evidence. Hard evidence is expensive to collect, cheap and easy to ignore in the legislature.
As others have said, the humanitarian side of the system errs on the side of forgiveness. If someone's credit is tanked, then don't consider their credit rating as a positive indicator of their compatibility with societies rules and expectations, look for other positive signs. This isn't saying "bad credit score: throw them under the jail and let them rot" this is saying "good credit score: indication that this person makes good on their promises, on a first offense give them benefit of the doubt and simple probation"
Unless you can show me some causal relationship between credit score and recidivism it should not be a consideration unless the case is about something related to personal finance. Even using it only as a positive has a skewing effect. Minorities, poor, elderly, young all are more likely to have poor credit ratings. So you are not helping the most disadvantaged groups but you are helping white, middle/upper class privileged people based on "evidence" that is unrelated to the case. It's no different than saying "he looks like a nice young man so we shouldn't punish him too hard". It makes zero sense.
Y'all ever been to Texas? "he looks like a nice young man so we shouldn't punish him too hard" gets taken to the extreme of letting rich kids off lightly for manslaughter, and executing innocents. You can say "it makes zero sense," to which the Texas judge (and most of the community) will say "that's how we do things here, son."
Algorithmic sentencing is one way to move toward a more consistent system, less subject to the vagaries of individual jurisdictions. Judgements still have to be made based on something, and credit scores (and, more specifically, the underlying data from which they are computed) are one of the strongest windows into personality and prediction of future behavior we have in today's society. Should it be different? Maybe, but I'd rather not have to submit to monthly personality interviews with my state sponsored psychologist - especially if I haven't been convicted of anything yet.
Totally different standards for homebrew - I was just making fun of classic Bob Ross stuff... I guess PBS was the closest thing to homebrew back in that day.
We bought an old Mercedes W220, and the homebrew maintenance videos for that thing on YouTube just blow me away, literally tell and show you the whole process from start to finish - a completely professionally produced video, with a focus on brevity and clarity, might only be 20% shorter - and these guys are still showing themselves having a beer when it's over (or in the middle, when necessary.)
My first black stain came from student loans that got erroneously put into repayment after my freshman year, showed multiple 120+ days past due on the report, nobody informed me until after graduate school almost 6 years later. These things get explained and the final decision takes those explanations into account.
So, if the algorithm says: "650, maximum sentence." that's a bad algorithm, use a judge instead. If the algorithm can take into account circumstances, disputes, resolutions, etc. then it might be less prejudiced than a human judge.
I can totally relate to this: fresh out of school with a Master's degree, couldn't get a home mortgage to save my life - totally had demonstrated ability to pay all the costs over the previous 12-18 months, but "insufficient history to secure a 30 year mortgage." I eventually did find a willing lender with good terms, and after a few decades of on-time payments, now they're trying to shove credit in every conceivable body orifice - phone contracts in the ears, store cards up the nose, etc.
As others have said, the humanitarian side of the system errs on the side of forgiveness. If someone's credit is tanked, then don't consider their credit rating as a positive indicator of their compatibility with societies rules and expectations, look for other positive signs. This isn't saying "bad credit score: throw them under the jail and let them rot" this is saying "good credit score: indication that this person makes good on their promises, on a first offense give them benefit of the doubt and simple probation"
If your credit score is tanked for reasons beyond your control, maybe you have community ties, family, a history of saving puppies, some other redeeming quality that might indicate a lenient sentence - or, if not, well, that's what the standard sentence is about: don't do the crime if you can't do the time.
"I'd be suspicious of anyone over the age of 35 who hasn't had at least one by that time."
And this is why, dear USA, your country is fucked.
My first dispute was with AT&T - back before their terms and conditions included "we can change the rules whenever we want by posting them on our website, your payment of your bill indicates your agreement with our current terms." They were the most f-ing arrogant company, ever. My personal dispute was because they tripled their billing rates, and only notified me by sending a bill with the newly tripled rates. It was worth the hassle I got for non-payment of the $35 just to be able to tell the story to anyone who would listen.
Clearly, credit score shouldn't be the sole, or even a heavy, factor in sentencing decisions - but it, or something like it, is one for human judges.
If I were writing the algorithm, I'd also look into things like: how hard has the person "actively worked" on their credit score - tell-tales like taking out a large number of trivial loans, active disputes in the system, etc. There's a baseline for the "average citizen," and there's cases where people's activities are 3SD outside the mean. One might say that "average" credit score activity can be factored into sentencing decisions (perhaps only in the lenient direction, if we're here to protect corner cases at the cost of underpunishing the deserving), while people with unusually whacked out credit scores can be sentenced in absence of any credit score weighting. An algorithm is better at not including information it has access to, once a judge has seen a whacked out credit score, that would bias him regardless of whether or not he is supposed to consider it.
That's called a credit dispute - I've had them, I'd be suspicious of anyone over the age of 35 who hasn't had at least one by that time.
If you've had one run-in with one crappy landlord, that should exonerate any impact that single case had on your credit rating (I managed to get through my crappy landlord experience without a court case, but many good tenants before me did not, and the algorithm could actually look into that and forgive them their head-butting since the pattern is clear that the other party is initiating trouble.) If you have a string of six evictions, with heavy visible consumer spending but you're making clear choices to just not pay your landlords - yeah, that's not so good as a recommendation that you'll follow through with a commitment to not repeat your other criminal activity. In-between, that's where it would be nice to have an algorithm taking into account things like prison crowding, current economic conditions and liklihood you can find gainful employment, etc. instead of a judge making a call based on "his gut feelings" which can often include race, or other personal prejudices of the judge.
Yes, but when the oil painting instructional video cuts away from showing painting to show you three cute squirrel babies that the artist is raising, that's content that could be more efficiently presented.
If the algorithm is secret, then it's worse than trusting a judge who can be removed from the bench any number of ways.
Judges are supposed to follow the law, which is public knowledge. If we're algorithmically systematizing sentencing, that algorithm needs to be public too - before the evidence comes out in the algorithm's output.
If the software is open source, transparent, and clear in how it functions, I'd rather have sentencing software than a judge in most cases.
The problem comes when you get politicians meddling in the software, writing in "zero tolerance" code and "mandatory minimum sentences" - they've done this already in the legislatures, tying judges hands in sentencing decisions. With the data available: prior convictions, credit scores, family ties, etc., software can determine probable outcomes of lenient sentences.
Yes, I'm saying credit score is a point for consideration in sentencing - not decision of guilt or innocence, but once guilt has been established, credit score tells about a person's history of making good on commitments, and should be a strong predictor of their likelihood of meeting terms of a suspended sentence, probation or parole.
The advantage of a computer algorithm is that it can be analyzed, refined, improved, and relied upon to function more or less as well as it did in the past (assuming the new inputs aren't radically different from the previous ones.)
Now, judges - they come to their position through politics and lawyering, two selection criteria that would seem to get you the last people you would want to determine what is fair or reasonable for "the people at large." Even 200+ years ago this was recognized and is the basis for "trial by jury of peers" laws, and everyone knows that amounts to a random lottery style decision, but it's still better than leaving it up to a judge.
Totally agree, which is why I'll read/skim a dozen text pages before clicking on a YouTube "HowTo" that is clearly labeled as being "exactly what I'm looking for."
Once in a great while, it's nice to kick back and watch somebody do a technical walkthrough of something I'm interested in... I especially like the tools demonstrations where they take you through from ground zero through getting all the tools you need, showing you how the tools are used, and completely doing the job on the video - this could be for cars, software tools, construction, or whatever. But, that's mostly for entertainment, when I'm actually doing the job, a page of procedural text is usually more useful than 30 minutes of instructional/demonstration video.
Pitch correctors mostly remove the chipmunk effect.
Personally, I don't need to consume entertainment at high speed, the point of entertainment for me is to enjoy a stretch of time, not to consume a quantity of media. If I consume less media, I don't feel less entertained.
The healthcare systems are a flipping nightmare from an interoperability standpoint - so many things all trying to hang together in a single functional ecosystem, so little in the way of true standards (HL7, DICOM, yeah like saying you speak an "Eastern Language" something between Farsi and Mandarin.)
In those systems are records that literally are "worth money," so, yeah, low hanging fruit.
There's a lot of easy targets in healthcare, in part because so many hospital IT departments are so f-ing paranoid that they lock down their networks to a point of near dysfunctionality, especially in places like operating rooms. So, device makers, not wanting to add to the security frustrations, tend to rely a bit on that network paranoia and keep their device security relatively simple - who wants to be sent out to a customer site to help work through a security issue with the device, right?
Plus - big money, plus - splashy scare factor grabs the press' attention, plus - FDA just woke up about "cyber security" not too long ago (first "guideline" published late 2013).
Slashdot Mirror
Humans are out of the loop in planetary exploration, and most near Earth satellite work.
No they are not. The humans issue the instructions and the computer on the remote vehicle executes them. The fact that there is some pretty severe latency on the execution of the instructions doesn't change anything. The robots aren't making any decisions about what to explore. Even far from Earth probes like New Horizons were simply executing a series of pre-programmed steps in a sequence determined by people and humans have been in communication with it since day one.
A question of degrees. In 1969, human pilots were required, zero lag, for docking maneuvers... today, that can be fully automated. The extra-planetary probes make considerable decisions autonomously... we send a general instruction, they execute, but the instructions we send are becoming higher and higher level all the time. At some point, we may be sending a robot factory with general instructions to build enough robots to terraform 1000 sq km of surface for agriculture and deploy them to do that; those machines are still simply executing a series of pre-programmed steps in a sequence determined by people, and humans will be in communication with them throughout the task.
Should humans always be involved in shoot-to-kill decisions?
Yes. Absolutely yes. It is unethical to do anything else. Taking of a human life is a serious thing and it should be treated seriously. A human should have to make that decision and live with the consequences regardless of how the act is actually carried out.
A question of ethics, one on which I agree with your position. However, as world population rises from 7B to 14B and a country with 400M is attempting to "control" the whole show, I wonder when the "value of a human life" will decline below the threshold of requiring a human decision maker, in the opinion of the policy makers? Especially when those decision makers are ending up with PTSD working at Nellis.
Tech like "Fathom" http://www.movidius.com/soluti... doesn't execute simple instructions that the authors _think_ they understand. It's nothing new, neural nets have been in serious development for 20-30 years, but it's becoming more and more prevalent in "production" systems.
Humans are out of the loop in planetary exploration, and most near Earth satellite work. Should humans always be involved in shoot-to-kill decisions? The writers of RoboCop 2014 think so.
It's actually "good PR" to have pilots in the planes... shows we care enough to risk a man's life to do the task. Now, when the "manned" planes start flying with mannequins in the pilot's seat...
The Star Wars drone armies controlled from a single mothership are, of course, rubbish. Real systems developed in real battlefield environments would have considerable autonomy and redundancy.
Or, if you want to look at it this way, meat bags have one fatal flaw, just fling a bunch of hot metal through the air and they all fall over screaming, mostly dead within seconds.
To me, this is like those quadcopters that can play ping-pong - in a perfectly known environment; in the case of the copters, with fixed tracking cameras all around the room.
Getting that kind of total situational awareness in the field, with smoke and chaff and hostile signals in the air, can be more challenging. To paraphrase young Solo: "Good in a simulation, that's one thing, good in the real world, that's something else."
Sorry for being blunt before.
When I lived in the US for a while I really go the impression that everyone was trying to rip me off and I had to be constantly vigilant with every bill. It was quite draining, and while I'm not saying elsewhere is perfect, I certainly have experienced fewer of such problems here in the UK than in the US.
Possibly due to being a readily identified foreigner - I don't get as much of that in the US as I did in Europe, especially East Germany circa 1990.
But, yes, some corporate actors are just plain bad - I had a bank in 1992 (yes, they had computers back then) send me a monthly statement of account with a $20 addition error on it, in their favor - how in the hell does a computer generated statement make a $20 error? My solution to that was to quit using commercial banks and move to a Credit Union (non-profit banking entity, managed to serve clients rather than make a profit from them.)
Three strikes, mandatory minimums, zero tolerance, all of these "algorithmic legislations" have had disastrous consequences, they are too simple, too one dimensional, too inhuman to fit into real society in any beneficial way.
I reject your framing of the issue.
Clearly.
You are presuming that credit scores have any meaningful relationship to criminality
Not criminality, personality and ability (whether innate, or by grace of socioeconomic circumstance) to function smoothly in society.
without presenting any actual evidence that such an assertion is backed by facts.
Then you're going to love my next tack: have you ever been to court? Have you ever experienced the numbingly impersonal, snap judgement nature of a courtroom, or pre-trial proceedings? Lawyers' time is (rightly, or wrongly) highly valuable, so they "get to know" their clients in shockingly brief interviews. Even protracted court cases determining guilt/innocence for serious crimes that might involve lengthy or life prison sentences are more about hiding information than "getting to know" the defendant. For minor crimes, the time spent considering sentencing is still a tiny fraction of a percentage of the time that the person has already and will in the future be incarcerated. So, better to let the judge read a police rap sheet and sentence the defendant based on how they dress and present in court? Credit history tells a deeper story of a person than that - more information can lead to better decisions, if you can trust the decision maker to not bias their decisions in unethical/illegal ways.
You are extrapolating purchasing and financial management behavior to have some relationship to criminality without any basis.
Not criminality, likelihood of delivering on a promise. All releases from incarceration involve a promise, spoken or implied "not to do it again."
Even a correlation isn't adequate because there are all sorts of ridiculous correlations [hbr.org] between completely unrelated things. You have to PROVE a causal relationship between an individual person's credit score and their likelihood to commit future crimes for your argument to have any basis at all. Good luck with that.
I don't have to PROVE anything, this is an internet discussion board, not a state legislature - and how often do you see state legislators PROVE anything to their colleagues before swaying their votes in the desired direction? Bloody well next to never. The real world of laws, enforcement, judgement and sentencing hinges more on political speeches and emotional appeals than it does on double-blind placebo controlled studies, published papers or even weak correlations. Would I wish that it would be otherwise? Sure, I know people who worked in highly effective post conviction drug counselling programs with wildly better recidivism rates than simple incarceration, no matter how you measured it: dollars, man hours invested, etc. They operated for long enough to see clear measurable improvements in the community; but every year their whole office was on the political chopping block until one year the political wind blew against them, and the whole place was shuttered to "save money" by shifting the expense to the prison system.
Good luck changing the world with hard evidence. Hard evidence is expensive to collect, cheap and easy to ignore in the legislature.
As others have said, the humanitarian side of the system errs on the side of forgiveness. If someone's credit is tanked, then don't consider their credit rating as a positive indicator of their compatibility with societies rules and expectations, look for other positive signs. This isn't saying "bad credit score: throw them under the jail and let them rot" this is saying "good credit score: indication that this person makes good on their promises, on a first offense give them benefit of the doubt and simple probation"
Unless you can show me some causal relationship between credit score and recidivism it should not be a consideration unless the case is about something related to personal finance. Even using it only as a positive has a skewing effect. Minorities, poor, elderly, young all are more likely to have poor credit ratings. So you are not helping the most disadvantaged groups but you are helping white, middle/upper class privileged people based on "evidence" that is unrelated to the case. It's no different than saying "he looks like a nice young man so we shouldn't punish him too hard". It makes zero sense.
Y'all ever been to Texas? "he looks like a nice young man so we shouldn't punish him too hard" gets taken to the extreme of letting rich kids off lightly for manslaughter, and executing innocents. You can say "it makes zero sense," to which the Texas judge (and most of the community) will say "that's how we do things here, son."
Algorithmic sentencing is one way to move toward a more consistent system, less subject to the vagaries of individual jurisdictions. Judgements still have to be made based on something, and credit scores (and, more specifically, the underlying data from which they are computed) are one of the strongest windows into personality and prediction of future behavior we have in today's society. Should it be different? Maybe, but I'd rather not have to submit to monthly personality interviews with my state sponsored psychologist - especially if I haven't been convicted of anything yet.
Totally different standards for homebrew - I was just making fun of classic Bob Ross stuff... I guess PBS was the closest thing to homebrew back in that day.
We bought an old Mercedes W220, and the homebrew maintenance videos for that thing on YouTube just blow me away, literally tell and show you the whole process from start to finish - a completely professionally produced video, with a focus on brevity and clarity, might only be 20% shorter - and these guys are still showing themselves having a beer when it's over (or in the middle, when necessary.)
My first black stain came from student loans that got erroneously put into repayment after my freshman year, showed multiple 120+ days past due on the report, nobody informed me until after graduate school almost 6 years later. These things get explained and the final decision takes those explanations into account.
So, if the algorithm says: "650, maximum sentence." that's a bad algorithm, use a judge instead. If the algorithm can take into account circumstances, disputes, resolutions, etc. then it might be less prejudiced than a human judge.
I can totally relate to this: fresh out of school with a Master's degree, couldn't get a home mortgage to save my life - totally had demonstrated ability to pay all the costs over the previous 12-18 months, but "insufficient history to secure a 30 year mortgage." I eventually did find a willing lender with good terms, and after a few decades of on-time payments, now they're trying to shove credit in every conceivable body orifice - phone contracts in the ears, store cards up the nose, etc.
As others have said, the humanitarian side of the system errs on the side of forgiveness. If someone's credit is tanked, then don't consider their credit rating as a positive indicator of their compatibility with societies rules and expectations, look for other positive signs. This isn't saying "bad credit score: throw them under the jail and let them rot" this is saying "good credit score: indication that this person makes good on their promises, on a first offense give them benefit of the doubt and simple probation"
If your credit score is tanked for reasons beyond your control, maybe you have community ties, family, a history of saving puppies, some other redeeming quality that might indicate a lenient sentence - or, if not, well, that's what the standard sentence is about: don't do the crime if you can't do the time.
"I'd be suspicious of anyone over the age of 35 who hasn't had at least one by that time."
And this is why, dear USA, your country is fucked.
My first dispute was with AT&T - back before their terms and conditions included "we can change the rules whenever we want by posting them on our website, your payment of your bill indicates your agreement with our current terms." They were the most f-ing arrogant company, ever. My personal dispute was because they tripled their billing rates, and only notified me by sending a bill with the newly tripled rates. It was worth the hassle I got for non-payment of the $35 just to be able to tell the story to anyone who would listen.
Clearly, credit score shouldn't be the sole, or even a heavy, factor in sentencing decisions - but it, or something like it, is one for human judges.
If I were writing the algorithm, I'd also look into things like: how hard has the person "actively worked" on their credit score - tell-tales like taking out a large number of trivial loans, active disputes in the system, etc. There's a baseline for the "average citizen," and there's cases where people's activities are 3SD outside the mean. One might say that "average" credit score activity can be factored into sentencing decisions (perhaps only in the lenient direction, if we're here to protect corner cases at the cost of underpunishing the deserving), while people with unusually whacked out credit scores can be sentenced in absence of any credit score weighting. An algorithm is better at not including information it has access to, once a judge has seen a whacked out credit score, that would bias him regardless of whether or not he is supposed to consider it.
That's called a credit dispute - I've had them, I'd be suspicious of anyone over the age of 35 who hasn't had at least one by that time.
If you've had one run-in with one crappy landlord, that should exonerate any impact that single case had on your credit rating (I managed to get through my crappy landlord experience without a court case, but many good tenants before me did not, and the algorithm could actually look into that and forgive them their head-butting since the pattern is clear that the other party is initiating trouble.) If you have a string of six evictions, with heavy visible consumer spending but you're making clear choices to just not pay your landlords - yeah, that's not so good as a recommendation that you'll follow through with a commitment to not repeat your other criminal activity. In-between, that's where it would be nice to have an algorithm taking into account things like prison crowding, current economic conditions and liklihood you can find gainful employment, etc. instead of a judge making a call based on "his gut feelings" which can often include race, or other personal prejudices of the judge.
Yes, but when the oil painting instructional video cuts away from showing painting to show you three cute squirrel babies that the artist is raising, that's content that could be more efficiently presented.
If the algorithm is secret, then it's worse than trusting a judge who can be removed from the bench any number of ways.
Judges are supposed to follow the law, which is public knowledge. If we're algorithmically systematizing sentencing, that algorithm needs to be public too - before the evidence comes out in the algorithm's output.
Algorithms are much harder to bribe, with money, political favors, etc.
If the software is open source, transparent, and clear in how it functions, I'd rather have sentencing software than a judge in most cases.
The problem comes when you get politicians meddling in the software, writing in "zero tolerance" code and "mandatory minimum sentences" - they've done this already in the legislatures, tying judges hands in sentencing decisions. With the data available: prior convictions, credit scores, family ties, etc., software can determine probable outcomes of lenient sentences.
Yes, I'm saying credit score is a point for consideration in sentencing - not decision of guilt or innocence, but once guilt has been established, credit score tells about a person's history of making good on commitments, and should be a strong predictor of their likelihood of meeting terms of a suspended sentence, probation or parole.
The advantage of a computer algorithm is that it can be analyzed, refined, improved, and relied upon to function more or less as well as it did in the past (assuming the new inputs aren't radically different from the previous ones.)
Now, judges - they come to their position through politics and lawyering, two selection criteria that would seem to get you the last people you would want to determine what is fair or reasonable for "the people at large." Even 200+ years ago this was recognized and is the basis for "trial by jury of peers" laws, and everyone knows that amounts to a random lottery style decision, but it's still better than leaving it up to a judge.
Totally agree, which is why I'll read/skim a dozen text pages before clicking on a YouTube "HowTo" that is clearly labeled as being "exactly what I'm looking for."
Once in a great while, it's nice to kick back and watch somebody do a technical walkthrough of something I'm interested in... I especially like the tools demonstrations where they take you through from ground zero through getting all the tools you need, showing you how the tools are used, and completely doing the job on the video - this could be for cars, software tools, construction, or whatever. But, that's mostly for entertainment, when I'm actually doing the job, a page of procedural text is usually more useful than 30 minutes of instructional/demonstration video.
Pitch correctors mostly remove the chipmunk effect.
Personally, I don't need to consume entertainment at high speed, the point of entertainment for me is to enjoy a stretch of time, not to consume a quantity of media. If I consume less media, I don't feel less entertained.
The healthcare systems are a flipping nightmare from an interoperability standpoint - so many things all trying to hang together in a single functional ecosystem, so little in the way of true standards (HL7, DICOM, yeah like saying you speak an "Eastern Language" something between Farsi and Mandarin.)
In those systems are records that literally are "worth money," so, yeah, low hanging fruit.
I was going to say "low hanging fruit."
There's a lot of easy targets in healthcare, in part because so many hospital IT departments are so f-ing paranoid that they lock down their networks to a point of near dysfunctionality, especially in places like operating rooms. So, device makers, not wanting to add to the security frustrations, tend to rely a bit on that network paranoia and keep their device security relatively simple - who wants to be sent out to a customer site to help work through a security issue with the device, right?
Plus - big money, plus - splashy scare factor grabs the press' attention, plus - FDA just woke up about "cyber security" not too long ago (first "guideline" published late 2013).
Rubber tired trains, that can leave their "tracks" like any hybrid truck.