The dangers of letting algorithms enforce policy.

policy, responsibility, liability, descion making, algorithms, algorithmics, state, legal, locus, Sl

Policy algorithms can cause real damage that is difficult to remedy under existing legal protections, especially when algorithms terminate basic services. If community members are unfairly stigmatized by police surveillance or incorrectly denied care for acute medical conditions, it is nearly impossible to make them whole after the fact. So how do we preserve fairness, due process, and equity in automated decision-making?

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/04/the_dangers_of_letting_algorithms_enforce_policy.single.html

The way gevulot works is by generating a tree of public and private key pairs: a new pair is generated whenever the user has a…

quantum thief, fiction, provacy, Hannu Rajaniemi

“

The way gevulot works is by generating a tree of public and private key pairs: a new pair is generated whenever the user has a new memory, domain or experience they want to specify gevulot rights for. They are also encrypted with the pair above them in the hierarchy. The point is that only the individual is supposed to have access to the root.

‘Except that—’

”

–Hannu Rajaniemi in The Quantum Thief

"Lange hielt die Mauer nicht: Laut Auskunft der Deutschen Bahn musste die S-Bahn für zwölf Stunden aus dem Betrieb genommen…

wall, train, s11, Hamburg, S-Bahn, just another brick in the wall

“Lange hielt die Mauer nicht: Laut Auskunft der Deutschen Bahn musste die S-Bahn für zwölf Stunden aus dem Betrieb genommen werden, um die Mauer zu entfernen und den Waggon betriebsbereit zu machen.”

http://www.shz.de/hamburg/meldungen/unbekannte-mauern-s-bahn-tuer-zu-erst-auf-der-fahrt-entdeckt-id9583881.html

A synthetic muscle enhanced with carbon fibers for space-robots on the ISS An American company creates muscles out of an…

futurescope:

A synthetic muscle enhanced with carbon fibers for space-robots on the ISS

An American company creates muscles out of an advanced smart material that could be used in robots, expanding its capabilities while enabling them to go places considered too dangerous for humans. As astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) study how the material reacts to the space environment, scientists on Earth are investigating the application of these same muscles in prosthetics, allowing fabrication of extremely realistic replacements for people who have lost limbs.

[read more]

When the right nutrients come together in coastal waters, it can feed a phytoplankton bloom large enough to be visible to…

fuckyeahfluiddynamics:

When the right nutrients come together in coastal waters, it can feed a phytoplankton bloom large enough to be visible to satellites. The phytoplankton themselves are microscopic organisms that are easily carried along by oceanic flows. In fluid dynamics terms, they are passive scalars or seed particles–additives that reveal the structure of the flow without altering it. Here the phytoplankton uncover the large-scale turbulent structure of flow in the Arabian Sea. Check the scale in the lower right. Many of the green eddies and swirls in this satellite image are hundreds of kilometers across. Yet, if we could zoom way in, we would still see turbulence acting on scales down to the millimeter length or below. This incredibly large range of length scales–eight or more orders of magnitude here–is a common characteristic of turbulence and part of what makes it such a challenge to understand or model. (Image credit: NASA Earth Observatory)

If all the world’s a stage, and if we’re all constantly recording ourselves and each other on that stage, then it might be said…

“If all the world’s a stage, and if we’re all constantly recording ourselves and each other on that stage, then it might be said that we’ve become nonfiction characters in a kind of strange, endless live-stream performance documentary. With all the complexities embedded in the rendering of nonfictions, it becomes troublesome when our media and legal institutions get overly enamoured with, and wrapped in reproducing, the permanent state of ‘fictionalising reality’ that constitutes the form. I’ve written before about my desire for viewers of documentaries to better understand the volatile, intricate nature of nonfiction performance, but when put in this sort of Orwellian context, this interest can be seen as having to do with something more consequential and more frightening than a relatively straightforward question of aesthetics.”

–Read my finger | Unfiction | Sight& Sound | BFI (viajuhavantzelfde)

India’s democracy runs on 1.7 million electronic voting machines

India, elections, EVM, electricity, corruption, voting, BJP, EFF

During last year’s regional assembly elections in Chhattisgarh, for instance, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) filed a formal complaint after an Indian National Congress party elder allegedly told tribal voters that the EVMs would electrocute them if they voted for non-Congress candidates. The BJP won the election, but the Election Commission’s FAQ now reassuresprospective voters that there is no chance of electrocution from “short-circuitry or [any] other reason.”

http://qz.com/199553/indias-democracy-runs-on–1–7-million-electronic-voting-machines/

Self-organized patterns identify emergent behavior near critical transitions

complexity, SOC, criticality, correlation, phys.org, Tsai-Ching Lu, Hankyu Moon, dynamics

“We may speculate that humans explore such invariant cues to anticipate upcoming transitions. However, individuals may interpret the cues differently; some may go deeper to identify structural-revealing characteristics to optimize and adapt their action relative to critical transitions, while others may simply ignore the signals due to biased beliefs. It’s also possible that our brain has been wired to perceive such invariance as we perform perceptual or higher-level cognitive reasoning. There’s much to investigate.” “My highly ambitious, yet scientifically unfounded, conjecture,” Moon added, “would be that the brain might be performing linear algebra-based spectral analysis to decompose the dynamics and summarize the patterns!”

http://phys.org/news/2015–04-complicated-self-organized-patterns-emergent-behavior.html