Bloomberg: ” China has a radical plan to influence the behavior of its 1.3 billion people: It wants to grade each of them on aspects of their lives to reflect how good (or bad) a citizen they are. Versions of the so-called social credit system are being tested in a dozen cities with the aim of eventually creating a network that encompasses the whole country. Critics say it’s a heavy-handed, intrusive and sinister way for a one-party state to control the population. Supporters, including many Chinese (at least in one survey), say it’ll make for a more considerate, civilized and law-abiding society.
Is this for real? Yes. In 2014, China released sweeping plans to establish a national social credit system by 2020. Local trials covering about 6% of the population are already rewarding good behavior and punishing bad, with Beijing due to begin its program by 2021. There are also other ways the state keeps tabs on citizens that may become part of an integrated system. Since 2015, for instance, a network that collates local- and central- government information has been used toblacklist millions of people to prevent them from booking flights and high-speed train trips…”
Wolfram Blog – May 28, 2019 — Daniel Lichtblau, Symbolic Algorithms Developer, Algorithms R&D – “Several Months Ago – I wrote a blog post about the disputedFederalist Papers. These were the 12 essays (out of a total of 85) with authorship claimed by both Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. Ever since the landmark statistical study by Mosteller and Wallace published in 1963, the consensus opinion has been that all 12 were written by Madison (the Adair article of 1944, which also takes this position, discusses the long history of competing authorship claims for these essays). The field of work that gave rise to the methods used often goes by the name of “stylometry,” and it lies behind most methods for determining authorship from text alone (that is to say, in the absence of other information such as a physical typewritten or handwritten note). In the case of the disputed essays, the pool size, at just two, is as small as can be. Even so, these essays have been regarded as difficult for authorship attribution due to many statistical similarities in style shared by Hamilton and Madison.S ince late 2016 I have worked with a coauthor, Catalin
Amazon’s helping police build a surveillance network with Ring doorbells
cnet – Its popular Ring smart doorbells mean more cameras on more doorsteps, where surveillance footage used to be rare. “If you’re walking in Bloomfield, New Jersey, there’s a good chance you’re being recorded. But it’s not a corporate office or warehouse security camera capturing the footage — it’s likely aRing doorbell made by Amazon. While residential neighborhoods aren’t usually lined with security cameras, the smart doorbell’s popularity has essentially created private surveillance networks powered by Amazon and promoted by police departments.
Police departments across the country, from major cities like Houston to towns with fewer than 30,000 people, have offered free or discounted Ring doorbells to citizens, sometimes using taxpayer funds to pay for Amazon’s products. While Ring owners are supposed to have a choice on providing police footage, in some giveaways, police require recipients to turn over footage when requested. Ring said Tuesday that it would start cracking down on those strings attached…”
Stoean, on a method for determining authorship from among a pool of candidate authors. When we applied our methods to the disputed essays, we were surprised to find that the results did not fully align with consensus. In particular, the last two showed clear signs of joint authorship, with perhaps the larger contributions coming from Hamilton. This result is all the more plausible because we had done validation tests that were close to perfect in terms of correctly predicting the author for various parts of those essays of known authorship. These validation tests were, as best we could tell, more extensive than all others we found in prior literature.
Clearly a candidate pool of two is, for the purposes at hand, quite small. Not as small as one, of course, but still small. While our method might not perform well if given hundreds or more candidate authors, it does seem to do well at the more modest (but still important) scale of tens of candidates. The purpose of this blog post is to continue testing our stylometry methods—this time on a larger set of candidates, using prior Wolfram Blog posts as our data source…”
