Will the monkeys ever type Shakespeare?
A mini-autobiography of George Selgin.
If You Think You Can Hold a Grudge, Consider the Crow NYT
‘I like to be in prison.’ Miami and Broward bank robber tells judge to give ‘me the max’ Miami Herald
Fast Company: “If you have a black spatula in your kitchen, or other black plastic items around your house like takeout containers or children’s toys, they could contain high levels of toxic flame retardants. Those chemicals—which have been linked to cancer, neurological damage, and hormone disruption—may be a result of recycling contamination, specifically from electronics, the authors of a recent study theorize. Scientists from Toxic-Free Future and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam tested a range of household items made of black plastic and sold in the U.S., and found toxic flame retardants in many of them. The highest levels were found in a spatula, a sushi tray, and a beaded necklace. The results were published in the journal Chemosphere in early October. “These cancer-causing chemicals shouldn’t be used to begin with, but with recycling, they are entering our environment and our homes in more ways than one,” Megan Liu, study coauthor and science and policy manager at Toxic-Free Future, said in a statement. “The high levels we found are concerning.”
- Artificial Intelligence and Unconscious Bias Risk – Elizabeth Sweetland reviews: Meredith Broussard, More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech (MIT Press 2023). 248 Pages.
- Trump’s Election Lawyers Must Heed Their Ethical Duties – Attorneys Stephen Marcus and Bruce Kuhlikdiscuss the ethical responsibilities of lawyers in the context of predicted attempts by Donald Trump and his allies to undermine the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The authors argue that lawyers considering advocating unsubstantiated claims of election fraud should learn from the disciplinary actions taken against Trump’s 2020 election lawyers, adhere to their ethical duties, and follow the example of those who refused to violate their obligations to their profession and the Constitution after the 2020 election despite significant pressure to do so.
- AI in Finance and Banking, October 31, 2024 – This semi-monthly column by Sabrina I. Pacifici highlights news, government reports, NGO/IGO papers, industry white papers, academic papers and speeches on the subject of AI’s fast paced impact on the banking and finance sectors. Five highlights from this post: SEC to intensify scrutiny of AI tools; The Bank of England is establishing an Artificial Intelligence Consortium; Swift to Launch AI Fraud Detection for Global Banking in 2025; Economics of Artificial Intelligence Keynote; and Artificial Intelligence, the Economy and Central Banking.
- How Meta Brings in Millions Off Political Violence – CalMatters and The Markup used Facebook’s AI model to count the millions of dollars it makes after violent news events. By Colin Lecher &Tomas Apodaca.
- Threatening ‘the enemy within’ with force: Military ethicists explain the danger to important American traditions – Marcus Hedahl, Professor of Philosophy, United States Naval Academy and Bradley Jay Strawser, Professor of Philosophy, Naval Postgraduate School worry that Trump’s actions while president, and his comments about his plans for a potential second term, may put the military in a tough position. The July 1, 2024, Supreme Court ruling giving the president immunity for official acts – potentially including as commander in chief of the military – would make that tough position even more difficult.
- How foreign operations are manipulating social media to influence your views – Filippo Menczer and his colleagues study influence campaigns and design technical solutions – algorithms – to detect and counter them. State-of-the-art methods developed in our center use several indicators of this type of online activity, which researchers call inauthentic coordinated behavior. They identify clusters of social media accounts that post in a synchronized fashion, amplify the same groups of users, share identical sets of links, images or hashtags, or perform suspiciously similar sequences of actions.
- How your online world could change if big tech companies like Google are forced to break up – The Department of Justice may be on the verge of seeking a break-up of Google in a bid to make it less dominant. Renaud Foucart explains that if the government goes ahead and is successful in the courts, it could mean the company being split into separate entities – a search engine, an advertising company, a video website, a mapping app – which would not be allowed to share data with each other.
- AI in Banking and Finance, October 15, 2024 – Sabrina I. Pacifici
- Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, 4 new columns for October 2024