Firstly while I think that the IEEE meeting in question is interesting and worth attending, I've booked in for the WEHI Immunology Discovery Tour and the SecTalks Melbourne Meetup on that day, both of which are more interesting to me. But if medical research and computer security aren't interesting to you then the IEEE lecture in question seems worth attending. On Tue, 26 Apr 2016 01:38:43 AM Rick Moen via luv-talk wrote:
Everyone appears to be rah-rah about how successful this is going to be in every possible application, if not today in year n, then surely in year n+1 -- and indeed in some applications it works well enough. However, when I heard that DHS [USA Department of Homeland Security] seriously expected to use automated facial recognition as the reason to detain Bad People in airports and elsewhere (the 'FAST program' - Future Attribute Screening Technology, started in 2012), I thought 'Guys, you've never heard of the base rate fallacy, have you?'
Or, to put it another way, DHS is yet another institution needing to learn Bayes's Theorem.
The DHS is entirely based on cowardice, it wouldn't exist if the world was run by valorous people. There is no amount of learning that can make a coward act logically, they are based on fear. I think that the best definition of a coward is someone who acts in a way that increases the risk to themselves because they are so weak and fearful. The best example of this is the gun cowards. The NRA has succeeded in preventing the CDC etc from analysing the risks of guns and the cowards support them all the way. It's proven that having a gun in a home dramatically increases the incidence of successful suicide and of disputes ending in homicide.
through it in a year (it's a small regional), and it's very popular with terrorist such that we expect 100 terrorists to walk its halls in that year. So, the base rate of being a terrorist in the scenario is 0.0001. The base rate of being a non-terrorist in the scenario is 0.9999.
Terrorism appeals mostly to losers, how stupid does someone have to be to think that you can detonate C4 or detronator cord (based on PETN) with a match? But because of that loser and the cowards who want security theatre many of us have had to needlessly take our shoes off. If the terrorism masterminds had any mental capacity they would have sent losers with all manner of unusable explosives to increase the range of stupid hoops that we have to jump through at airports to appease the cowards.
o Actual terrorists fail to trigger the klaxon 1% of the time (false negative). And...
o Non-terrorists trigger the klaxon 1% of the time (false positive).
(These are invented example numbers of mine, but I think within a realistic ballpark.)
http://gizmodo.com/95-percent-of-fake-bombs-made-it-through-airport- securi-1708318199 No, the DHS, TSA et al are much less successful than that at detecting explosives. Also they steal from baggage and sometimes lose their guns in the secure area of airports.
http://arstechnica.co.uk/security/2016/02/the-nsas-skynet-program-may-be- killing-thousands-of-innocent-people/
Quoting from the article:
Anyone who names a computer system "skynet" is obviously happy with killing innocent civilians. This is obvious and doesn't even need discussion.
Once again, classic base rate fallacy. The 'failure rate of 0.008%' figure is totally wrong.
"On whether the use of SKYNET is a war crime, I defer to lawyers," Ball said. "It's bad science, that's for damn sure, because classification is inherently probabilistic...."
Skynet in fiction is an evil worse than the 3rd Reich. Noting this fact is not a Godwin violation as it's quite reasonable to compare genocides. Skynet in fiction aimed to exterminate the entire human race. The precedent when dealing with Nazis is that following orders is not acceptable as a legal defense. If the US had a functional justice system then the death penalty would be applied to the people deemed responsible. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/