Category: Updates

Allison P. Davis mulls over Wyldfire, a new app where female users double as gatekeepers:

[F]emale users can sign up freely, but any man on the app has to be invited, theoretically creating a network of only women-selected desirable, dateable, single men. “Everyone has that one friend who they think is a great-quality guy but they either don’t want to date themselves or want someone else they know to date,” says brand manager Jesse Shiffman. Founders Brian Freeman and Andrew White created the app, “designed specifically around the needs of women,” after hearing several of their female friends complain about “getting creeped on” whenever they used Tinder. … By using existing social networks to build an expanded dating pool, it simulates a more desirable, “organic” dating experience – like Hinge, but with more options. …

But here’s a problem:

How many men in your inner circle do you consider dateable that you don’t want to date yourself? I have maybe two. On a good day. Will  “female-centric” dating networks turn into a smorgasboard for dudes? They might be “safer,” but they don’t necessarily increase chances of dating success for the female user.

Amanda Hess is similarly skeptical:

As Davis notes, that type of eligible bachelor – the single, straight guy you don’t want to date, don’t want to set up with any of your friends, and yet are eager to recommend to all female strangers in your general area – may be even more elusive than the guy who actually sparks your interest.

But let’s say we all have these men in our lives: Identifying a guy as an obvious creep isn’t easy, either. The Wyldfire system operates on the assumption that men who text aggressively crude material to strangers on the internet have no female friends in real life. While it’s tempting to believe that men who type with their penises have simply never had any contact with female human beings, who really knows what lies in the dark recesses of your friend’s Tinder messages? Not you – you just hang out at parties.

Update from a reader:

I wonder how many men are going to want to participate in an app where merely being invited to it means you’ve been implicitly turned down by the person who invited you.

An expert writes in (with a few updates below):

As a geologist, I’m surprised that the discussion of extensive mountain-flattening in China has so far ignored the most scary potential consequence: widespread earthquake damage. The danger doesn’t come from removing the mountains; it comes from filling in the valleys. In brief, soils that are being placed for future building construction need to be deposited in thin “lifts” a few feet thick and compacted carefully before the next layer is placed. Soils that are just dumped into valleys, in layers tens of meters thick, can not be properly compacted. They are very likely to turn into Jello when shaken, especially if they’re wet when the shaking occurs.

If you want to see a marvelous example of this, look at the damage to the Mission District in San Francisco during the Loma Prieta quake. Buildings constructed on thick layers of poorly compacted fill were far more heavily damaged than those a few blocks away, which were built on native soils.

The scale of what the Chinese are doing dwarfs any comparison with San Francisco.

Some of these cities could double in area, with nearly all of the additional construction space consisting of poorly compacted soil. Even if the new buildings stay up for a few years, the soils at depth will remain uncompacted and may liquefy during the next earthquake. And central China, where this work is being conducted, is subject to frequent massive earthquakes, at least as frequent and as intense as anything California has to offer.

Update from a reader:

Mine is a small correction: it’s the Marina District that was built on landfill, not the Mission, and the damage from the ’89 earthquake was worst in the Marina. I was living on Telegraph Hill at the time. My home was shaken, a few books and records knocked out of their cabinets, but there was no real damage to my house or to those of anyone around me on the hill. We lived on rock. Most of the Mission, if not all of it, is solidly on land.

But the Marina and much of the Embarcadero are on landfill. (There’s a fine poem by Robert Hass about how some of this came about, called “The Harbor at Seattle“.) Currently our home is at the beach, built on sand, and everyone knows what that means, or thinks they do. But it’s survived two temblors with just one crack, a minor one, in the basement walk way. Liquefaction is a potential problem.

But the “give” of sand, in an earthquake, might be advantageous. It’s the tsunamis we have to watch for. There are signs everywhere out here instructing you where to run. (“To the hills!”)

Another:

Your first update was correct, in part: It was the Marina, not the Mission, that the first reader probably meant to reference. But the Mission did have soil failures in 1906, and we have liquefiable soil around the entire Bay edge and along old Mission creek.

But while we’re correcting earthquake references in the 25th anniversary year of Loma Prieta, may I just note, as a structural engineer in San Francisco, how often I have to shake my head when clients say “My building is on rock” or worse, point out how little damage they sustained in 1989 – from a short earthquake centered 50 miles away! When our earthquake comes, rock sites are going to shake plenty too, and a lot harder than they did in ’89. Soil can explain why a distant site still feels strong shaking, but the real culprit is a weak or ill-conceived structure above the ground. (San Francisco has a new mandatory retrofit program addressing the worst of these. Come here in the summer of 2018, and you won’t be able to walk to the nearest google bus stop without seeing a dozen retrofits in progress. Meanwhile, both the A’s and the Giants are currently in first place …)

As for the uncompacted fill (the first reader’s point about China), the earthquake issue there is not just amplified shaking, but settlement. Shake all that loose soil, and if it slumps or settles just a few inches, that’s enough to crack foundations, roads, runways, buried pipelines, etc. It doesn’t kill as many people as structural collapses, but it can really mess with your local and regional economy.

Dante D’Orazio takes note of this weekend’s big news out of London:

Eugene Goostman seems like a typical 13-year-old Ukrainian boy – at least, that’s what a third of judges at a Turing Test competition this Saturday thought. Goostman says that he likes hamburgers and candy and that his father is a gynecologist, but it’s all a lie. This boy is a program created by computer engineers led by Russian Vladimir Veselov and Ukrainian Eugene Demchenko.

That a third of judges were convinced that Goostman was a human is significant – at least 30 percent of judges must be swayed for a computer to pass the famous Turing Test. The test, created by legendary computer scientist Alan Turing in 1950, was designed to answer the question “Can machines think?” and is a well-known staple of artificial intelligence studies. Goostman passed the test at the Turing Test 2014 competition in London on Saturday, and the event’s organizers at the University of Reading say it’s the first computer to succeed.

Kabir Chibber looks back to Turing’s exact prediction:

He said in 1950:

I believe that in about 50 years’ time it will be possible to program computers… to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 percent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning.

While this didn’t happen by the year 2000, it seems Turing was off by only 14 years.

Nathan Mattise has more on this weekend’s breakthrough:

Eugene was one of five supercomputers tackling the challenge at this weekend’s event, held precisely 60 years after Turing’s death on June 7, 1954. It was designed by a team in Saint Petersburg, Russia, led by creator Vladimir Veselov (who was born in Russia and now lives in the US). An earlier version of Eugene is hosted online for anyone to interact with, according to The Independent (though with interest understandably high right now, we’ve been unable to access it).

“Eugene was ‘born’ in 2001. Our main idea was that he can claim that he knows anything, but his age also makes it perfectly reasonable that he doesn’t know everything,” Veselov said according to the event press release. “We spent a lot of time developing a character with a believable personality. This year we improved the ‘dialog controller’ which makes the conversation far more human-like when compared to programs that just answer questions. Going forward we plan to make Eugene smarter and continue working on improving what we refer to as ‘conversation logic.'”

Polly Mosendz suggests Goostman wouldn’t have passed the test if he weren’t a teenbot:

Developer Veselov explained that, “Our main idea was that he can claim that he knows anything, but his age also makes it perfectly reasonable that he doesn’t know everything.” So if the judges asked him something he was not programmed to know, judges might write that off as a factor of his age instead of his lack of humanity.

Pranav Dixit comments that “a chatbot successfully pretending to be a 13-year-old boy for whom English is a second language ain’t exactly Hal 9000,” but calls the event “an obviously exciting breakthrough.” Robert T. Gonzalez and George Dvorsky elaborate:

The chatbot is not thinking in the cognitive sense; it’s a sophisticated simulator of human conversation run by scripts. In other words, this is far from the milestone it’s been made out to be. That said, it is important, because it supports the idea that we have entered an era in which it will become increasingly difficult to discern chatbots from real humans.

“Having a computer that can trick a human into thinking that someone, or even something, is a person we trust is a wake-up call to cybercrime [and the] Turing Test is a vital tool for combatting that threat,” said competition organizer Kevin Warwick on the subject of the test’s implications for modern society. “It is important to understand more fully how online, real-time communication of this type can influence an individual human in such a way that they are fooled into believing something is true…when in fact it is not.”

Update from a reader:

This chatbot absolutely did NOT pass the Turing test – not even close. Nor is it a breakthrough in any technical or conceptual sense. “Passing the Turing test” does not mean fooling more than 30% of judges within 5 minutes – that’s just what Turing thought might be possible by 2000. Passing the Turing test means fooling a capable judge after an extended, thorough interrogation.

As hilariously demonstrated by MIT computer scientist Scott Aaronson, this chatbot cannot even tell you whether a shoebox is bigger than Mt Everest, or how many legs a camel has.

Another passes along this article, which “pretty much blows all the claims out of the water – and makes clear the whole thing was a PR stunt by a “scientist” who specializes in PR stunts.”

John Meis is your good guy without a gun who stopped the bad guy with a gun yesterday in WA. http://t.co/Or3BHcb23D pic.twitter.com/F4cXcUU3jX

— SFDB (@sfdb) June 6, 2014

A shooting last Thursday at Seattle Pacific University, a small evangelical Christian school, ended with only one death thanks to the courage of a student volunteer security guard:

The 26-year-old shooter, identified by Seattle’s KIRO-7 as Aaron Ybarra, was armed with a shotgun, a knife, and several rounds of ammunition. When Ybarra paused to reload, a student security guard pepper-sprayed him and pulled him onto the ground. Several other people held him down until the police arrived. As Seattle’s assistant police chief Paul McDonagh told reporters, “But for the terrific response of the people at Seattle Pacific University, this incident might have been much more tragic.”

The Internet thanked the hero, engineering student John Meis, by buying every item listed on his and his fiancée’s wedding registries and raising, as of this writing, over $48,000 for their honeymoon. But would Meis have stopped Ybarra sooner if he had been carrying a gun? Making a case for the virtues of gun restrictions on college campuses, Evan DeFilippis argues that the “good guy with a gun” theory isn’t backed by evidence:

Even if a student or professor were to confront a shooter, their chances of stopping a bad guy with a gun would be slim. This should be self-evident given that New York City Police, for instance, only hit their target in 18 percent of cases. The average student or professor would likely have a substantially lower hit rate, thereby increasing the threat to innocent bystanders.

A 20/20 segment, “If I Only Had a Gun,” showed just how hopeless the average person is in reacting effectively to high-stress situations. In the segment, students with varying levels of firearm experience were given hands-on police training exceeding the level required by half the states in order to obtain a concealed carry permit. Each of these students was subsequently exposed to a manufactured but realistic scenario in which, unbeknownst to them, a man entered their classroom and begin firing fake bullets at the lecturer and students. In each one of the cases, the reaction by the good guy with a gun was abysmal.

Sarah Posner interviews the Rev. Rob Schenck, an evangelical leader who has soured on the religious right’s “unholy alliance” with the NRA. This incident, he says, should wake up the evangelical community to America’s gun violence problem:

Evangelicals, Schenck said, “have been quiet and have not entered robustly into the discussion on the moral and ethical dimensions of firearms ownership and use. We need to have that.” He said he has met with pastors and other church leaders, offering advice on how to address these issues from the pulpit, and said he hopes pastors, Sunday schools, and other Christian education programs begin to teach on the “theological and moral implications” of gun ownership and use. He said he plans to give a formal address on the topic at the annual convention of the Evangelical Church Alliance, which he chairs, in Branson, Missouri in July. Through speaking engagements, private meetings with clergy and religious leaders, and press conferences in Washington and around the country, he hopes to “catalyze a national conversation with church leaders.”

Update from a reader:

Unfortunately, the “good guy with a gun” theory was just tested in Las Vegas. After killing two police officers:

The suspects then fled on foot to a nearby Wal-Mart, where Jerad Miller fired a single shot upon entering, police said. A patron at the store who carried a firearm confronted Jerad Miller, not realizing that he was accompanied by Amanda Miller, who shot and killed the man, police said. He was identified as 31-year-old Joseph Wilcox of Las Vegas.

“Joseph died trying to protect others,” Sheriff Doug Gillespie said.

Emmett Rensin exposes it:

The Daily Currant is a fake-news site of a different stripe: one entirely devoid of jokes. Whether this humorlessness is intentional or not—the site’s founder contends his critics don’t have a sense of subtlety—the site’s business model as an ad-driven clickbait-generator relies on it. When Currant stories go viral, it’s not because their satire contains essential truths, but rather because their satire is taken as truth—and usually that “truth” is engineered to outrage a particular frequency of the political spectrum. As Slate’s Josh Voorhees wrote after Drudge fell for the Bloomberg story, “It’s a classic Currant con, one that relies on its mark wanting to believe a particular story is true.” …

The creators of these sites, when they can be identified at all, aren’t talking. With the exception of National Report, these sites don’t have mastheads. When they allow contact at all, it’s through blind submission forms—not always in English—or generic email addresses. Most also use third-party services to mask the identity of the domain owner. Despite attempting to reach out to dozens of sites, I got only two replies. One was from Empire Sports News’s Aaron Smith, who said he was “possibly” willing to talk, but went silent at the first mention of ad revenue. Barkeley, of The Daily Currant, responded to my request for an interview with a brief email that read, “You’re more than welcome to do a takedown piece on our website. But you’ll have to do it without help. Good luck.” He ignored my follow-ups.

Daily Currant editor Daniel Barkeley writes in:

The passages you quoted seem to imply that we aren’t open with the media. That is 100% not true. I have done at least a dozen interviews with major news publications in the past few years. In this particular case, however, the journalist behaved in a manner I did not consider to be professional and wanted no part of the article.

It should be said that the Daily Currant has had some great parodies of Palin over the years – Dish links here and here.