Monthly Archives: July 2018

… but this still struck me as cool. Finding correlations is an important part of just about any research being done, but this can be difficult with anything beyond single variable to single variable relations. Let’s let Donald Richards explain further in this interview from Quanta Magazine:

If you want to study the correlation between one batch of variables and another batch, then there is no single Pearson correlation to measure the strength of an association. A second problem, which people often overlook in everyday applications, is that the Pearson correlation coefficient should be used only when there is a reasonably linear relationship between the two variables. If the relationship is highly nonlinear then this method is inapplicable.

So what do you do then? Apparently, it’s a real mess to figure out the correlation coefficient, but Richards came up with a handy solution:

How does distance correlation work?

This is where the concept of a Fourier transform comes in. A Fourier transform is a way of breaking up a mathematical function into its component frequencies, similar to how a music chord can be decomposed into its constituent notes. All functions can be uniquely characterized by Fourier transforms, so people started to try to define the concept of a measure of correlation by using Fourier transforms. If you give me two probability distributions — the statistical spread of values that a variable takes on — and if I want to test whether the two distributions are the same, all I have to do is calculate their Fourier transforms. If these are equal then I know that the two probability distributions had to be equal to begin with. The distance correlation coefficient, in layman’s terms, is a measure of how far apart these Fourier transforms are.

I’m clueless on Fourier Transforms, but I think this sounds very cool – not only for what it is, but for this:

You wrote a paper last year giving examples where distance correlation improves on Pearson’s method. Talk about the case of homicide rates and state guns laws.

This was prompted by an opinion piece in The Washington Post in 2015, by Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at UCLA. The title of the article is “Zero Correlation Between State Homicide Rate and State Gun Laws.” What he did was — you know, my eyes bugged out; I couldn’t believe it — he found some data on the states’ Brady scores, which are ratings based on the toughness of their gun laws, and he plotted the Brady scores on an x-y plot against the homicide rates in each of these states. And if you look at the plot, it looks like there’s no pattern. He used Excel or something to fit a straight line to this data set, and he calculated the Pearson correlation coefficient for this data set, and it came out to be nearly zero. And he said, “Aha, zero correlation between state homicide rate and state gun laws.”

That’s not kosher?

I was horrified. There are so many things wrong with this analysis.

And I’ll leave off at that, but to note that not every blogger, even a highly educated one such as Volokh, is always right.

Back when the ACA was still under debate,  I remember the brouhaha over the medical device tax, mostly because of its impact on Medtronic and Senator Klobuchar fighting that tax. WaPo is now reporting that tax, not yet in force, may be repealed:

The House voted Tuesday to repeal the excise tax on medical devices, with nearly five-dozen Democrats joining all but one Republican in backing the bill.

The measure was approved on a 283-132 vote that comes before lawmakers leave Washington for their summer recess at the end of the week.

The 2.3 percent tax on some devices sold by medical manufacturers was created under the Affordable Care Act. It is not set to take effect until 2020, following a move by lawmakers to include its postponement as part of the deal that ended a government shutdown in January. But lawmakers of both parties have long sought to repeal the tax, arguing that its enactment could lead to higher prices for consumers as well as the loss of tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs.

Image credit: “Totally Subcutaneous Implantable Cardioverter-defibrillator in a Child With Complex Congenital Heart Disease and Infection in a Previous Transvenous System,” Revista Española de Cardiologia

It seems to me that medical device demand should be fairly inelastic, meaning that people don’t generally consider a medical device to be an optional part of their life. From crutches to defibs, you get the device in order to keep on living and being productive.

It’s hardly ever for entertainment.

So when the lawmakers proclaim the loss of tens of thousands of jobs, I have to wonder. Is it because the more expensive devices will be avoided due to cost, with less expensive devices substituted in their stead? Or are lawmakers just pulling this out of their asses? In fact, doesn’t this imply we’re indulging in frivolous medical procedures?

Maybe I just don’t understand medicine.

David Post on The Volokh Conspiracy summarizes the finding of Maryland federal district court’s Judge Messitte that the suit by the Attorneys General of Maryland and D.C. concerning foreign emoluments paid to the President can continue:

So when a foreign government makes payments to the Trump Organization for the use of the facilities at the Trump Hotel in Washington – as several have done – this is an “emolument … from [a] foreign State” and therefore violates the Foreign Emoluments Clause. Similarly, the benefits received under the lease issued to the Trump Organization by the federal government for the operation of the Trump Hotel constitutes an “Emolument from the United States,” in violation of the Domestic E.C. …

The court adopted the broader reading pressed by the Plaintiffs, and I have to say that, at least on first reading, I find its analysis to be awfully persuasive. Judge Messitte looks pretty carefully both at internal, textual consistency and the “original public meaning” of the term at the time of the ratification of the Constitution, and all evidence – including pretty overwhelming evidence from Founding-era dictionaries and legal texts – does seem to point to the broader interpretation. …

But however this knotty little problem of constitutional interpretation is ultimately resolved, the ruling means that the suit will proceed for the time being. The political fallout from this ruling could be quite substantial, to put it mildly. Not because it will reveal any “emoluments” that haven’t already been reported on, but because the court could now allow the parties to proceed to discovery, and that could be the first time that the public gets a close look inside the Trump financial empire – at Trump’s tax returns, for example, which would almost certainly be relevant evidence in regard to the nature and scope of the payments that Trump has received to date. I think it is fair to say that that prospect makes Trump very unhappy; I can’t imagine many things he wants less than to have the Attorneys General of DC and Maryland poking around in his financial records. Those of us who harbor serious doubts about our President’s integrity and law-abiding nature have believed for a while that he’s hiding something in there, and we may be about to find out whether we’re right or not.

It’s a Gordian knot of a problem for Trump – to let go the profits he’s supposedly making on his businesses, or to let the process of discovery reveal the inner workings of his empire. The possibilities in the latter are endless – gross incompetency as a business manager, near bankruptcy destroying his mythical reputation, dubious loans from foreign sources … the Trump base will take a lot, but if the wrong thing popped up in those financial records, he could suddenly become dust on the breeze.

But will the judge permit discovery while the inevitable appeals drags on? I hope so, because the potential real damages to the nation are immediate and need to be stopped, if in fact they exist.

And, sure, I have a morbid interest as well.

Biotremology:

But Italian scientists have found a way to control leafhoppers without using chemicals or traps—in fact, their method isn’t even lethal. Using a laser device that picks up on tiny vibrations, researchers recorded the signals that males use to sweet-talk females. Then they attached small devices to plant stems to play back the pulsing noises they captured. It’s effectively shouting over the insects, preventing males from finding mates — though the sound isn’t audible to human ears. This experiment was also successfully tested on American grapevine leafhoppers.

This trick allowed the researchers to significantly silence males looking to hook up, which could help to deter their spread. It’s a clever method that could have broad implications for the agricultural industry, as more than 195,000 species of insect use vibrational signaling. The technology has emerged from a fairly new field known as biotremology, the study of vibrational communication in animals.

“There are a lot of pests that are not treated with environmentally-friendly strategies just because we don’t know their communication system,” says Rachele Nieri, an entomologist who worked on the project, along with two researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Valerio Mazzoni, an agricultural entomologist at the Edmund Mach Foundation. “If we want to manipulate the behavior of a pest that doesn’t use chemicals, but vibration, we need to know their communication, their language, to be able to disrupt it.”

From “Wine And Whines: Listening To Insect Booty Calls To Preserve Vineyards,” Tony Farah, D-brief.

Michael Dorf suggests on the Take Care blog that if the pro-choice decision Roe v. Wade is rescinded, and then Congress acts to restrict abortions nation-wide, overriding State laws, Congress may be rebuffed by SCOTUS thanks to the acts of one renegade … Clarence Thomas:

Jennifer Rubin of Right Turn remarks on President Trump’s contradictions:

Given these results and the dismal GOP numbers heading into the midterm elections, it is no wonder Trump is now crazily suggesting the Russians will interfere on behalf of Democrats. That raises the question as to why he’s been so lax in defending our election system, but more to the point it should serve as a warning signal that Trump might claim the 2018 midterm results are illegitimate.

If, as any sensible American hopes, the GOP takes a kick right to the family jewels, and Trump claims the mid-terms are illegitimate, then the proper response is this:

President Trump, you denied funding for election year security, you dismantled the cyberczar position, and therefore if any illegal shenanigans took place, domestic or foreign, it’s on you. You left this country wide open to it. Shut the hell up and be President. Or step down and face the legal music.

Don’t let him have his cake and eat it as well.

Chris Cillizza of CNN has a well-reasoned conniption fit over Trump’s latest attempt to build a bubble of iron around his followers:

If you blinked, you might have missed it.

At a speech in Kansas City to the VFW annual convention on Tuesday, President Donald Trump — amid one of his trademark anti-media rants — said this (emphasis mine):

“Stick with us. Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news. … What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

I know I keep saying this, BUT: That is an absolutely remarkable thing for any elected leader to say — especially when that leader is the most powerful person in the country. And I know I keep saying this too, BUT: That the President not only thinks like that but feels emboldened enough to utter it to a crowd of people — with cameras broadcasting it around the country — is downright scary.

Go back and read that full quote above. What Trump is saying is this: I (and those who support me) are the only ones telling you the truth. Anything you hear from anyone who is not me is not to be believed.

I more or less agree with Cillizza, so I shan’t repeat what he said. Rather, I’ll just note that Trump’s appeal is decidedly un-American as well as being American.

Why? Because Americans have a long history of believing themselves to be tough-minded, skeptical mongrels, all the while going to church (or other) where most of them believe in a supernatural creature for which there is no evidence – just the scary thoughts of societal chaos and black death.

If you run across a Trumpist who’s trumpeting that Trump is the only Truth, ask them who cut off their All-American balls. No, I’m serious, if not diplomatic. Ask them where they lost their American attitude of skepticism and tough-mindedness, of getting all the information, not just what this self-interested politician (it’s worth emphasizing, eh?) who replaced the swamp with a much, much worse swamp. It’s the big question: have they been sucked in by the King of Con-men, and make them prove that they haven’t.

They may not be convinced, but it’s at least a start.

Balloon flowers in the garden, holding it above the invisible sinkhole….

From NewScientist (14 July 2018):

Wearing a tie compresses veins in the neck, pushing blood into the skull, creating a pressure build-up that most likely crushes vessels and cuts blood flow, says Lüddecke.

In healthy people, a 7.5 per cent drop in blood flow in the brain is unlikely to lead to noticeable symptoms, says Steve Kassem at Neuroscience Research Australia in Sydney. However, it might create problems for smokers, older people or those with high blood pressure, he says. These could include headaches, dizziness and nausea.

One solution is to wear a looser tie, although this tends to look sloppy, says Kassem. “I think there’s probably enough room for us now to say, ‘Alright, maybe we should stop wearing ties altogether’.”

Yes! I’ve been saying ties are bad for us for nigh on forty years!

Barack Obama’s first Attorney General, Eric Holder, appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last night, and, watching it this morning, I was impressed by Mr. Holder’s ability to communicate. My Arts Editor commented that he seems to be sincere and not holding anything back, and I thought he seemed to have a good grasp on the fundamental nature of American governmental structures, although of course his remarks were constricted by the format. His remark about telling the President ‘no’ was the correct answer, and of course the current occupant of the White House won’t understand that.

He admitted to considering a Presidential run but pronounced the mid-terms to be on the top of his priority list, as well he might. It’ll be interesting to see if he runs, and if the “Fast and Furious” scandal is a taint or not on him.

Yes, it’s quite metaphorical.

Tongue firmly in cheek, The Addams Family (1991) makes a concerted effort to convince the viewers that a family with values diametrically opposed to conventional values could succeed, and by so doing they illustrate how many may be mere fluff – and the one that remains common, familial love, keeps the family together and chugging along when they are unexpectedly deprived of their family inheritance.

Along the way there’s enough word play and reversed situations to keep the eyebrows raised, although, as my Arts Editor commented, Thing is overly used, as if the special effects folks were given too free a hand.

But in the end, fine acting, a good story, and fun special effects make this movie a pleasant way to spend an evening. Even if the stage combat was more than a trifle iffy.

Deimatic:

This dramatic behavior “meets the predictions of what we call a deimatic display, which are anti-predator displays that there are not many examples of, and which are quite poorly understood — the theory behind these displays has only been properly developed in the last couple of years,” Whiting said.

“A deimatic display is designed to basically overload the sensory system of a predator,” Whiting said. “For example, if I walked up behind you and clapped my hands really loudly behind your head, you might be momentarily stunned and possibly a little disoriented, potentially giving an animal enough time to make its getaway. You find deimatic displays in animals such as mountain katydids, which lift their wings and display spectacular colors on their abdomens when predators approach.”

Noted in “To Scare Off Predators, These Lizards Stick Their Tongues Out,” Charles Choi, D-brief.

It Thistles. From Michigan:

Remember the Nunes memo concerning the FISA warrant for Carter Page? On Lawfare David Kris opines on the release of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act(FISA) warrant under an FOIA:

First, a huge amount of information is redacted in these FISA applications, but they still represent a monumental disclosure to the public. The government considers FISA applications to be very sensitive—and their disclosure, even heavily redacted, may have long-term, programmatic consequences long after we’re finished with President Trump. The government seems to have accepted that FOIA applies to FISA.

The balancing act when it comes to these sorts of things is very difficult, indeed. Did ham-handed President Trump just make it worse? Does he even get involved in this sort of thing? I don’t know.

But the real story here is the vindication of the Democrats’ position in the Nunes Memo imbroglio, at least according to Kris:

Now we have some additional information in the form of the redacted FISA applications themselves, and the Nunes memo looks even worse. In my earlier post, I observed that the FBI’s disclosures about Steele were contained in a footnote, but argued that this did not detract from their sufficiency: “As someone who has read and approved many FISA applications and dealt extensively with the FISA Court, I will anticipate and reject a claim that the disclosure was somehow insufficient because it appeared in a footnote; in my experience, the court reads the footnotes.” Now we can see that the footnote disclosing Steele’s possible bias takes up more than a full page in the applications, so there is literally no way the FISA Court could have missed it. The FBI gave the court enough information to evaluate Steele’s credibility.

There’s also more detail on the previous disclosure from the House intelligence committee Democrats’ memo on how Steele went to the press with the “dossier” when FBI Director James Comey sent his October 2016 letter to Congress disclosing the possible newfound importance of the Weiner laptop in the Clinton investigation. According to the FISA applications, Steele complained that Comey’s action could influence the election. But when Steele went to the press, it caused FBI to close him out as an informant—facts which are disclosed and cross-referenced in the footnote in bold text.

Nunes’ mid-term opponent, Andrew Janz, has been handed a tool for his attempt to unseat Representative Nunes, and it should go something like this:

Nunes was given the opportunity to take on an extremely responsible position, and he treated it disrespectively and completely missed its point, which would be to monitor the President, not to defend him against all charges. This has endangered the Country, and so Nunes must be replaced.

And were the FISA judges biased against Republicans? Kris again:

But it is worth noting that—and as the Democrats previously pointed out—the judges who signed off on these four FISA applications were all appointed by Republican presidents, including one George H.W. Bush appointee (Anne Conway), two George W. Bush appointees (Rosemary Collyer and Michael Mosman) and one Reagan appointee (Raymond Dearie). I know some of those judges, and they certainly are not the types to let partisan politics affect their legal judgments.

Retraction Watch notes that someone sincerely studied the long-debunked Shroud of Turin:

A year ago, PLOS ONE published a study claiming that there was strong evidence that a person wrapped in the Shroud of Turin — according to lore, the burial shroud of Jesus Christ — had suffered “strong polytrauma.”

Today, they retracted it.

According to the retraction notice for “Atomic resolution studies detect new biologic evidences on the Turin Shroud,”

Concerns have been raised that the data presented in this article [1] are not sufficient to support the conclusions drawn; the provenance, integrity and availability of the material used for the study have also been questioned.

Yes, they’re taking this old hoax seriously. Interested in an article or two on the subject? Skeptical Inquirer’s Joe Nickell has an article that gives a quick sketch of the Shroud’s background:

When the cloth first appeared in Lirey, France, in the middle of the fourteenth century, its owner could not, or would not, explain how he had acquired the most holy relic in Christendom. In 1389 a bishop reported to Pope Clement VII that it had been used in a faith-healing scam in which persons were hired to feign illness, then, when the cloth was revealed to them, to pretend to have been healed, “so that money might cunningly be wrung” from unsuspecting pilgrims. “Eventually,” he said, after “diligent inquiry and examination,” the “fraud” was uncovered. The cloth had been “cunningly painted, the truth being attested by the artist who painted it” (D’Arcis 1389).

This sordid origin of the supposedly sacred relic is corroborated by much other evidence. According to Jewish burial practices, Jesus’ body would have been washed and covered with burial spices, and the body wound in multiple cloths of plain linen. In contrast, the Shroud of Turin depicts an unwashed “body” without any myrrh and aloes, is a single cloth woven in herringbone pattern (a medieval but not first-century weave), and shows an anachronistic under-and-over draping style.

Moreover, there is no history of this cloth (there have been some forty True Shrouds) prior to its appearance in Lirey, and the image’s elongated forms are those of French gothic art of that period. Iconographic elements also date the image to the middle ages. The radiocarbon date, obtained by three laboratories, was 1260–1390 ce, consistent with the ca. 1355 hoax and forger’s confession. This is what is called corroborative evidence, and there is more.

Regardless, the authors of the retracted article are not pleased.

Peloton:

THE Tour de France is under way again. As they wind their way through the countryside, the 170 or so competitors will group tightly together in a pack – known as the peloton – to reduce air resistance and save their legs.

Noted in From “A swarm of 3D printed cyclists reveals the best position in the pack,” Steve Cassidy, NewScientist (14 July 2018, paywall).

This long dormant thread gets resuscitated in the light of an analysis of the Brit population who voted in the historic referendum on leaving the European Union. The Online Privacy Foundation funded and published the analysis, and here’s the meat of the summary of “The Role of Personality, Authoritarianism and Cognition in the United Kingdom’s 2016 Referendum on European Union Membership“:

The UK electorate’s views of EU membership appear to be strongly influenced according to people’s personality traits, dispositions and thinking styles. Participants expressing an intent to vote to leave the EU reported significantly higher levels of authoritarianism and conscientiousness, and lower levels of openness and neuroticism than voters expressing an intent to vote to remain in the EU. When compared with Remain voters, Leave voters displayed significantly lower levels of numeracy and appeared more reliant on impulsive System 1 thinking. In the experimental studies, voters on both sides were found to be susceptible to the cognitive biases tested, but often, unexpectedly, to different degrees.

Gaining a deeper understanding of the differences and similarities between Leave and Remain voters is an important area of study, not only to better understand UK society, but also to contribute to research exploring the effectiveness of psychographic targeting. In light of allegations of psychographic targeting during the referendum, it is important to understand whether, and to what extent, knowledge of voters’ core psychological characteristics and biases could be exploited, particularly through social media, to influence the way they form early opinions and subsequently process information.

The findings from this research raise important questions regarding the use and framing of numerical and non-numerical data during UK political campaigns. In a situation where “In general, political campaign material in the UK is not regulated, and it is a matter for voters to decide on the basis of such material whether they consider it accurate or not” (The Electoral Commission, 2018) the research also raises the question of whether existing regulatory controls need to be amended. Not only do many voters lack the skills to critically evaluate the information which is being presented, their inherent beliefs and biases clearly influence the way in which they process this information. Considering these factors, a fundamental question is raised as to whether direct democracy in the form of binary, winner-takes-all, referendums is an appropriate mechanism for deciding major and complicated political issues, such as constitutional changes. More broadly, constitutions may need to be adapted to take into account fundamental shifts in societies’ use of technology and consumption of information.

Which all ignores the fact that we, and everyone else who uses representative democracy, elect representatives not only to represent us, but to become experts in the subject matter of government so that us plebes, who often haven’t the time to master the ugly details, don’t have to – and so we’re not subject to the uninformed opinions of our unwashed brethren.

I do wonder how numeracy correlates with general analytical skills, though. Here’s the paper’s comment:

When compared to Leave voters, Remain voters had higher levels of numerical risk literacy, were more likely to engage in analytical System 2 thinking, and tended to perform better in deductive reasoning tasks. In all three areas, older voters tended to perform significantly worse than young voters intending to vote the same way.

Numeracy

Figure 6. Differences in Berlin Numeracy Test results for Leave and Remain voters by age group and sex. Error bars represent 95% confidence interval of the mean.

Cognitive Reflection

Figure 7. Differences in Cognitive Reflection Test results for Leave and Remain voters by age group and sex. Error bars represent 95% confidence interval of the mean. Points below the dashed red line denote a greater tendency for impulsive System 1 thinking, while points above the red line denote a greater tendency for reflective System 2 thinking.

Reasoning

Figure 8. Differences in Wason card selection task scores (abstract reasoning cards) for Leave and Remain voters by age and sex. Error bars represent 95% confidence interval of the mean.

Some may argue that direct democracy is important because it expresses the will of the people, but I don’t buy it. Go form a party and get elected, says I. It’ll subject those candidates to close examination, whether they like it or not, and so long as the major media players remain honest and vigilant, the populace stands a chance of evaluating those candidates on their policy views and their general competency.

Deborah MacKenzie of NewScientist (14 July 2018, paywall) remarks:

Around a third of people in Western societies have an authoritarian personality. This personality type is partly determined by genes, and features a strong desire for order, obedience, conformity and cohesion within the “in-group” with which the person identifies.

While personality traits are generally thought to stay roughly stable over a person’s life, some of them can be made to shift. “Threatening circumstances can make less authoritarian people significantly more authoritarian,” says Jost.

The real message of the analysis by Sumner and his colleagues is that politicians of all stripes need to find messages to attract voters across a range of personality types, says Tillman. “The Leave campaign and the Republicans have done a better job of appealing to authoritarian voters. The challenge for rival parties is to understand why and respond to it.”

Which I rather sadly notes completely ignores the possibility of improving the population from being knee-jerk, emotion-driven people to being more analytical and thoughtful.

Observed on our recent visit to Michigan were these reminders of the classic Satnrday Night Live continuing series of skits…

In the third part of his tri-partite weekly column, Andrew Sullivan broods in New York on the fracturing of his favorite spot of the outer Cape Cod, the disappearance of the dunes he thought eternal:

Sometimes I wonder when we look back on this age, and its awful politics, and disgusting discourse, if we are actually missing the real story. The vandalism we are doing to our political way of life may at some point be repairable. Perhaps a future president will be able to reconstruct the discourse, or bind some of the wounds, or abate the tribalism. Perhaps the American people will rediscover resources of empathy and civility and reason that seem to have abandoned us for the moment.

But the dunes? They tell me that nature can, at some point, bring them back, that breaches this great can eventually be healed by time and new currents and tides. But the reemergence of a landscape inevitably takes far longer than its destruction. And the grief is as real as the wait is long.

Andrew, it’s called climate change, and many of us worry more about that than we do about our politics, as horrifying as some of our brethren have become in their pursuit of stasis.

Clare Garvie of Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology remarks on the employment of facial recognition software in the pages of WaPo:

Imagine attending a public gathering — a political rally, an immigration-policy protest or a pro-life march — and police officers walk through the crowds demanding each attendee show identification. You would be justified both in your outrage at this intrusion and in refusing to comply. In this country, a police officer needs to suspect you of committing a crime before stopping you on the street and requiring an answer to the question: “Who are you?”

Face-scanning surveillance does away with this. The technology enables a world where every man, woman and child passing by a camera is scanned, despite no prior suspicion of wrongdoing. But their faces are nonetheless compared against the profiles of criminals and other people wanted by the police. It enables a world where people can be identified and tracked from camera to camera throughout a city — simply because they chose to get a driver’s license.

But, speaking as a software engineer, there’s an implicit assumption that each face in the crowd is being recognized. This is not necessarily how the system must work. Imagine – and this is easy for me to imagine – a system which has been programmed with the faces of those wanted for their alleged association with criminal activities, and flagging those who match those parameters set for the scan, while those who do not match are simply ignored.

It’s very easy to imagine a court hearing testimony from a forensic software engineer, testifying that a system is, or is not, designed in the above manner, and permiting or not, respectively, testimony deriving the facial recognition system. Why?

Because that’s how “it” works today, where “it” consists of police officers searching for suspects on foot. Those they don’t recognize as being the suspects or witnesses of interest are ignored and probably not recognized at all, unless they are acquainted with the officer. If we’re going to be very technical about this, the software is somewhat better than the police officer, although since the officer is unlikely to use this incidental information to track the movements of honest citizens, the point is exceedingly fine and can be ignored.

But, as she mentions, and as my long-time readers know, China is using this sort of software to track their entire population, and for advocates of freedom, it’s a nightmare situation. One wonders how the Chinese feel about it.

Garvie then indulges in an incomplete observation:

And what happens if a system like this gets it wrong? A mistake by a video-based surveillance system may mean an innocent person is followed, investigated, and maybe even arrested and charged for a crime he or she didn’t commit. A mistake by a face-scanning surveillance system on a body camera could be lethal. An officer, alerted to a potential threat to public safety or to himself, must, in an instant, decide whether to draw his weapon. A false alert places an innocent person in those crosshairs.

Facial-recognition technology advances by the day, but problems with accuracy and misidentifications persist, especially when the systems must contend with poor-quality images — such as from surveillance cameras.

Sure. And how does this differ from a human eye-witness? It doesn’t. Garvie should admit to the point and submit an analysis which compares the endpoints of mistakes by human and software, along with rates of false identification.

As facial recognition systems come closer and closer to being autonomous artificial intelligence system, there will be some important questions raised about the transition from being a hammer to an intelligent agent. But I think the points made here are tangential to those important questions, which are not fully developed in my mind.

Noticed during the recent vacation trip, and I suspect I’ve photographed it before. All I can think is root ball…

And then onwards. “That’s a nice boulder.”

Concerning President Trump and his missteps, a reader writes:

Just under half of all Americans, including one out of five who vote Republican, now describe Trump’s behavior as “treasonous.” I’m not sure he can distract, doubletalk, or accuse his way out of this one.

And isn’t that an amazing fact? An American President so untrusted, whose behavior is so awful, and yet he doesn’t resign, and his party, despite the dismay of many members, refuses to do much more than mutter among themselves. Now, it’s true other Presidents have suffered such poor reputations, but some – such as Lincoln – have rebounded in their reputations, while others had the grace to resign (Nixon), die, or be ignominiously trashed by history.

Of course, it’s possible Trump will manage that rebound. Perhaps he’ll take Putin prisoner when Putin visits the White House in the fall, put him on trial, and then onwards to jail.

But it seems unlikely. Trump’s affinity for autocrats, an inclination which should horrify every American, will forbid him from doing so.

His followers may believe he’ll do that, though, or may even believe that it’s OK for Russia to interfere in our election because “their” side won, not realizing how much this embitters and energizes their perceived opponents – and forgetting the critical point that we’re all Americans, and therefore we’ve agreed that we will play by the rules. Egged on by conservative media, we continue explore a series of ever-more horrifying abysses.

It’s becoming a measure of the failure of the moral systems in America. Perhaps we fail to take morality seriously any longer, with the evangelist movement leading the way.

A reader writes concerning my critique of Michael Anton’s opinion column on birthright citizenship:

I think your argument about “jurisdiction” may be incorrect. The “plain meanings” of words change over decades, for one. But it appears from what you’ve written, that the author of those words contemporaneously clarified exactly what he meant, even though it slightly differs with a current legal definition. And it’s logical: at the time, it would have been easy to consider someone who claimed allegiance too and citizenship in another country to NOT be subject to U.S. jurisdiction. That idea continues somewhat today, in the mechanism of extradition.

I absolutely shiver at the thought of the meanings of legal words, the underpinnings of our entire legal system, actually drifting. It’d be rather like gluon and meson trading definitions, which doesn’t matter until someone tried to do a physics experiment using the old words and the new meanings.

Ka-boom!

The reader is right that, in Anton’s piece, that Senator Turnbull had apparently defined the meaning, as I noted in my initial post. But today, also in WaPo, Elizabeth Wydra, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center^[1], rebuts Anton’s article. To the particular point of my reader:

Those who attack birthright citizenship, as did former Trump official Michael Anton in a recent Post op-ed, often go out of their way not only to misrepresent the plain meaning of the words of the 14th Amendment and those who drafted and ratified it, but also to ignore the racist and bloody history that required it in the first place. Sen. Lyman Trumbull, for example, a leading advocate in Congress for the citizenship clause, was quoted by Anton as somehow supporting his twisted reading of the clause.

Except it was Trumbull who answered the racists of his own time who worried about “naturalizing the children of the Chinese and Gypsies born in this country.” Trumbull said the citizenship clause “undoubtedly” would do that, and that a child of such immigrants “is just as much a citizen as the child of a European.” In other remarks, Trumbull made it even clearer, saying, “Birth entitles a person to citizenship, that every freeborn person in this land, is, by virtue of being born here, a citizen of the United States.”

Those who, like Anton, deny the plain meaning of the citizenship clause and its powerful history love to focus on the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction,” as if somehow they can make the clause say the opposite of what it actually says. They have even added to Trumbull’s statements — it’s amazing what slipping in an extra “[or]” will do — in ham-handed attempts to distort their meaning (which have been criticized across the ideological spectrum).

Either Anton, like myself, is ignorant of parts of the 14th Amendment debate, or deliberately conceals the full information (much like Fox News), or Wydra is engaged in similar deceit. In the absence of the time to research the subject more fully, I must reluctantly turn to circumstancial evidence. In this case, Wydra’s defense leaves the meaning of jurisdiction untouched, which I find more reasonable and preferable than the implications of Anton’s position. Without more first-hand evidence and analysis, I am inclined to stand by my analysis.

Any historians in the crowd?

¹I give her position simply as a courtesy, not to suggest she has dispositive authority. I am not familiar with her institution, it could be the equivalent of a mail-order church for all I know.

The orange lilies from a week or so ago continues, and I find it so charming I just have to publish a few more pics.