I don’t think we’d ever get real safety statistics about companies in China.
China cares a great deal about its exports, and the testing by ANCAP / NCAP / NHSTA is the same in those export markets. Their safety record is not something they can hide. BYD alone is outselling Tesla, so there will be a large volume of real world data coming along shortly. The NHSTA is too gutless to make Musk share the data but they won’t be so shy with Chinese brands.
National Highways says the radar detects 89% of stopped vehicles - but that means one in 10 are not spotted.
At least 79 people have been killed on smart motorways since they were introduced in 2010. In the past five years, seven coroners have called for them to be made safer.
National Highways’ latest figures suggest that if you break down on a smart motorway without a hard shoulder you are three times more likely to be killed or seriously injured than on one with a hard shoulder.
No brainer. But then they quote this prick without directly challenging the contradiction:
The agency’s operational control director Andrew Page-Dove says action was being taken to “close the gap between how drivers feel and what the safety statistics show”.
The ‘gap’ seems to be a result of drivers having a much more accurate perception than the people paid to defend them.
National Highways says reinstating the hard shoulder would increase congestion and that there are well-rehearsed contingency plans to deal with power outages.
Just add more lanes. That’ll work. It’s never worked but obviously it’ll work. Fuckwits.
London’s police force has been forced to issue two apologies after officers threatened to arrest an “openly Jewish” man if he refused to leave the area around a pro-Palestinian march because his presence risked provoking the demonstrators....
It doesn’t matter? This incident was doubly antisemitic, preventing someone from protesting because they are Jewish, and assuming that pro-Palestinian protesters would attack them simply because they were Jewish (ie equating Jewishness with support for Israel and criticism of Israel with antisemitism).
Yes, he’s a provocateur. So what? If the copper had said it was because they wanted to keep the two groups of protesters apart (as they routinely do, or are supposed to do), that would be fine. But he decided to be racist about it instead.
When the female tennis players head back to Spain’s capital for the Madrid Open this week, they may be forgiven for letting out a collective groan. A quick glance at the tournament’s history shows a litany of gaffes, accusations of inequality and a full-blown sexism row just last year. Not exactly a highlight of the...
A movie weapons supervisor is facing up to 18 months in prison for the fatal shooting of a cinematographer by Alec Baldwin on the set of the Western film “Rust,” with her sentencing scheduled for Monday in a New Mexico state court....
She was crap at her job but she was also too inexperienced for it and employed to do it by cost-cutting producers who took so many shortcuts on set safety, half the crew walked out before this happened.
After the interview aired, Lehrmann was charged with sexual intercourse without consent, but the trial was abandoned in 2022 due to juror misconduct and not revived due to fears about Higgins’ mental health....
The legal system didn’t deal with it, as per fucking usual. He decided that he would use that fact to prove he was innocent, giving the court an opportunity to explain very carefully why he is quite clearly guilty.
This was a huge political scandal. It’s not reasonable to declare that the media should not have reported it.
This is an easy statement to make but context matters. In this case, he was not named by the media but had they not covered the story, he would never have been charged because it suited the political establishment to do nothing at all.
Higgins alleged she was raped by a colleague in an exclusive 2021 television interview with the Network Ten’s “The Project” program, which also raised questions about the official response by ministers and political staffers in the aftermath of the alleged assault.
After the interview aired, Lehrmann was charged with sexual intercourse without consent, but the trial was abandoned in 2022 due to juror misconduct and not revived due to fears about Higgins’ mental health.
Oh, please! Streisand the fuck out of it. Plenty of people have done what he did without ever being forced to acknowledge it was rape. Keep this story going for the sake of everyone, everywhere.
It is very easy to have a play with a benefits calculator to find out what reality looks like for yourself.
In-work benefits keep working people who earn less than they need to survive at or slightly above the poverty level. For people who are unable to work, due to sickness, disability or a lack of available jobs, it keeps them stuck below the poverty level with just about enough to survive but not to thrive.
As the article points out, the philosophy this system was built on was not necessarily well thought out at the time. In the post-covid era it is disastrous.
Proponents of AI and other optimists are often ready to acknowledge the numerous problems, threats, dangers, and downright murders enabled by these systems to date. But they also dismiss critique and assuage skepticism with the promise that these casualties are themselves outliers — exceptions, flukes — or, if not, they are...
That kind of analysis is done all the time. But, even if we can collect all the relevant data (big if), the methods required are difficult to interpret and easy to abuse (we can’t do an RCT of being born female vs male, or black vs white, &c). A good example is the proliferation of analyses claiming that the gender pay gap does not exist (after you’ve ‘controlled’ for all the things that cause the gender pay gap).
It’s not easy to do ‘right’ even when done in good faith.
The article isn’t claiming that it is easy, of course. It’s asking why power is so keen on one type of question and not its inverse. And that is a very good question, albeit one with a very easy answer. Power is not in the business of abolishing itself.
Isn’t that a continuation of “why the outlier was culled”?
Not sure I follow, but I think the answer is “no”.
If you control for all the causes of a difference, the difference will disappear. Which is fine if you’re looking for causal factors which are not already known to be causal factors, but no good at all if you’re trying to establish whether or not a difference exists.
It’s really quite difficult to ask a coherent question with real-world data from the messy, complicated reality of human beings.
A simple example:
Women are more likely to die from complications after a coronary artery bypass.
But if you include body surface area (a measure of body size) in your model, the difference between men and women disappears.
And if you go the whole hog and measure vein size, the importance of body size disappears too.
And, while we can never do an RCT to prove it, it makes perfect sense that smaller veins would increase the risk for a surgery which involves operating on blood vessels.
None of that means women do not, in fact, have a higher risk of dying after coronary artery bypass surgery. Collect all the data which has ever existed and women will still be more likely to die from the surgery. We have explained the phenomenon and found what is very likely to be the direct cause of higher mortality. Being a woman just makes you more likely to have that risk factor.
It is rare that the answer is as neat and simple as this. It is very easy to ask a different question from the one you thought you were asking (or pretend to be answering one question when you answered another).
You can’t just throw masses of data into a pot and expect sensible answers to come out. This is the key difference between statisticians and data scientists. And, not to throw shade on data scientists, they often end up explaining to the world that oestrogen makes people more likely to die from complications of coronary artery bypass surgery.
No idea what your post, before or after edit, is trying to say. But the subject of your quoted sentence is “proponents of AI” not “AI”, and the sentence is about what is enabled by AI systems. Your attempt at pedantry makes no sense.
If you’re suggesting that it is possible to build an AI with none of the biases embedded in the world it learns from, you might want to read that article again because the (obvious) rebuttal is right there.
The data cannot be understood. These models are too large for that.
Apple says it doesn’t understand why its credit card gives lower credit limits to women that men even if they have the same (or better) credit scores, because they don’t use sex as a datapoint. But it’s freaking obvious why, if you have a basic grasp of the social sciences and humanities. Women were not given the legal right to their own bank accounts until the 1970s. After that, banks could be forced to grant them bank accounts but not to extend the same amount of credit. Women earn and spend in ways that are different, on average, to men. So the algorithm does not need to be told that the applicant is a woman, it just identifies them as the sort of person who earns and spends like the class of people with historically lower credit limits.
Garbage in, garbage out. Society has been garbage for marginalised groups since forever and there’s no way to take that out of the data. Especially not big data. You can try but you just end up playing whackamole with new sources of bias, many of which cannot be measured well, if at all.
It’s asking why don’t we use it for that purpose, not suggesting that there is anything easy about doing so. I don’t know how you think science works, but it’s not like that.
any kind of bureaucratic or rule-based decision-making
Human-written rules are often flawed, and for similar reasons (the sole human thought process that ‘AI’ is very good at reproducing is system justification). But human-written rules can be written down and they can be interrogated. But Apple landed itself in court because it had no clue how its credit algorithm worked and could not conceive how it could possibly be sexist if the machine didn’t get any gender data to analyse.
The CPS, and equivalents in Scotland, brought around a third of the wrongful prosecutions.
The barristers the CPS employs to bring prosecutions are the same barristers used by the Post Office, using the same courts and the same judges.
This scandal just shines a light on how impossible the criminal justice system is for ordinary people with more limited means. Bates vs PO only happened because they managed to find 555 claimants (500 being the minimum their funders needed to risk it).
There was a case settled in 2003 because the court appointed a single independent expert to act for both sides and he pointed out all the holes in the Post Office case. That should have been the end of it. But they made the Cleveleys subpostmaster sign a confidentiality agreement, slandered the expert, and carried on prosecuting.
All barristers are only as good as the evidence given to them
That’s not entirely true. The Secret Barrister made a good point on the site I won’t visit to grab the link: people always ask how you can defend someone you know is guilty; they never ask how you can prosecute someone who you know is innocent.
We have an adversarial system, not an inquisatorial one. Barristers are paid to present one case or the other, not decide what is true for themselves.
There are barristers and judges who may well be sanctioned, professionally if not also criminally, for their part in this scandal. Richard Morgan is one that sticks in my mind. He relied on an entirely circular argument (Lee Castleton signed off the accounts therefore the reliability of Horizon is irrelevant, even though it produced the accounts that Castleton had to sign if he wanted to continue trading). If you read/watch his appearance at the inquiry, it appears to literally dawn on him during the questioning. He was professionally negligent and he should not be allowed to get away with it.
Batteries are too heavy for many applications (including, arguably, cars).
That doesn’t make hydrogen the only solution but it is at least a currently available solution. I posted a link about why the Orkneys (population 23k) are producing hydrogen and switching much of their transport to it: they have so much wind the UK (population 70m) national grid can’t take all the power they generate from it.
BYD unveils luxurious Sea Lion 07 mid-size electric SUV interior poised to rival Tesla's Model Y (electrek.co)
[BBC News] Claims that smart motorways tech leaves drivers at risk (www.bbc.co.uk)
London police apologize after threatening to arrest ‘openly Jewish’ man near pro-Palestinian protest (www.nbcnews.com)
London’s police force has been forced to issue two apologies after officers threatened to arrest an “openly Jewish” man if he refused to leave the area around a pro-Palestinian march because his presence risked provoking the demonstrators....
Land of the dinosaurs: baseline of sexism overshadows tennis in Madrid (www.theguardian.com)
When the female tennis players head back to Spain’s capital for the Madrid Open this week, they may be forgiven for letting out a collective groan. A quick glance at the tournament’s history shows a litany of gaffes, accusations of inequality and a full-blown sexism row just last year. Not exactly a highlight of the...
Gun supervisor for 'Rust' movie to be sentenced for fatal shooting by Alec Baldwin on set (apnews.com)
A movie weapons supervisor is facing up to 18 months in prison for the fatal shooting of a cinematographer by Alec Baldwin on the set of the Western film “Rust,” with her sentencing scheduled for Monday in a New Mexico state court....
Accused rapist who tried to clear his name loses blockbuster defamation trial against TV network | CNN (edition.cnn.com)
After the interview aired, Lehrmann was charged with sexual intercourse without consent, but the trial was abandoned in 2022 due to juror misconduct and not revived due to fears about Higgins’ mental health....
Thousands of disabled people ‘will get £2,800 a year less under universal credit’ (www.theguardian.com)
Single people with long-term disability that stops them working will be much poorer after rollout, Resolution Foundation says...
On Being an Outlier (www.goethe.de)
Proponents of AI and other optimists are often ready to acknowledge the numerous problems, threats, dangers, and downright murders enabled by these systems to date. But they also dismiss critique and assuage skepticism with the promise that these casualties are themselves outliers — exceptions, flukes — or, if not, they are...
The Bloody Math (www.the-reframe.com)
Worth giving this a click but here’s a few summary paragraphs:...
Alan Bates considers private prosecutions of Post Office bosses (www.bbc.co.uk)
Former sub-postmaster Alan Bates says he will consider raising funds for private prosecutions of Post Office bosses over the Horizon IT scandal....
How is the hydrogen made? (slrpnk.net)
cross-posted from: slrpnk.net/post/8569504...