Amazon UAS: What Other Applications Exist?
September 4, 2020
Amazon has been poking around unmanned aerial systems (aka drones) for years. According to “Amazon Wins FAA Approval to Deliver Packages by Drone,” some drones will be avoiding part-time drivers, grousing third-party services, and people who allegedly hang phones in trees to get a jump on other drivers. Traffic jams? Not a problem? Jamming and kinetic take downs? What is this a war zone?
The write up states:
Amazon unveiled self-piloting drones that are fully electric, can carry 5 pounds of goods and are designed to deliver items in 30 minutes by dropping them in a backyard.
Perhaps Amazon will market the Ring and DeepLens devices as must-have security mechanisms.
Some questions arose from the DarkCyber team after we learned about the FAA okay:
- Can Amazon equip its drones with high-resolution surveillance cameras?
- Can Amazon geo fence and area in order to obtain footage of a specific object or person of interest?
- Can Amazon modify its UAS technology to compete with companies like Anduril?
Worth monitoring?
Stephen E Arnold, September 4, 2020
Windows and Its Fan Boys: Sound Problems Plague Podcast
September 4, 2020
At the gym yesterday, I was listening to a new to me podcast called Windows Central. The program focused on the two phones stuck together. About 15 mintues into the podcast, one of the experts on the program could not turn off sound from another program running on his Windows 10 computer. There was muttering; there were unhelpful suggestions from a co-host; and there was the sound of clicks and sighing. Most amusing was the fact that the expert could not figure out from whence the unwanted sound was coming. Ah, Windows 10.
But there is a fix for our intrepid Windows’ cheerleader. “PowerToys Now Lets You Mute Your Webcam or Microphone on Windows 10” provides a link to a free but experimental control that allegedly may have solved the expert’s quite shallow mastery of Windows 10. (I mean an expert who cannot mute sound communicates a great deal about “experts” and, of course, about the Byzantine, increasingly exciting Windows 10 operating system.)
I want to point out that the $0.99 codec for HEVC which I downloaded from the Windows Store (!) did not install. But that was a minor problem compared to forced updates that killed my printer not long ago. Yes, Microsoft is a JEDI knight, but the fancy engineering powering the system has some — how shall I phrase it — issues. What happens in a battle when the sound does not work on a JEDI powered laptop? Telepathy? Luke Skywalker suddenly appears?
And for experts who cannot figure out why two sound streams are playing on a podcast? That will be a boost for these wizards’ credibility. No, I don’t understand why I want two phones held together with a hinge.
And, no, I did not listen to the entire program. I mean an expert who cannot control his machine’s audio. Amazing stuff.
Stephen E Arnold, September 4, 2020
Intel: Why the Horse Collar Outfit Stumble Is Wobbling
September 4, 2020
A story in Techradar helps illuminate the magnitude of the Intel wobble. Right, Intel. The outfit which has watched a smaller firm zip along in the desktop CPU market and repeatedly miss chip deadlines. Even Apple has reduced its dependence on the iconic company which uses buzzwords instead of silicon and more with it materials to make its point. “Here’s How Huawei and Other Chinese Firms Could Access Crucial CPU Technology without Restrictions” contains an interesting paragraph which may be made up but may not be:
The number of Chinese chip designers skyrocketed from 736 in 2015 to 1,780 in 2017. Many of these companies need CPU IP and some may not be inclined to use Arm. For them, MIPS and RISC-V architectures are two natural choices and MIPS has an edge over RISC-V right now. MIPS does have off-the-shelf high-performance CPU cores comparable to Arm’s Cortex-A70-series or Neoverse, but it is possible to use the MIPS architecture to build something powerful enough for servers. For example, China’s Loongson Technology develops MIPS64 CPUs for client devices and servers and there are also Green500 supercomputers based on MIPS CPUs.
Intel seems to be managing in a way that inadvertently makes its competitive posture scleotic.
Stephen E Arnold, September 4, 2020
Facebook Management: The High School Science Club Method Reveals Insights
September 3, 2020
An online publication called The Daily Beast published “Facebook’s Internal Black Lives Matter Debate Got So Bad Zuckerberg Had to Step In.” How accurate is the write up? DarkCyber does not know. It is not clear what the point of the “real news” story is.
The write up seems to suggest that there is dissention within Facebook over what employees can on the Facebook internal communication system. The write up makes clear that Mr. Zuckerberg, the Caesar of social media, involved himself in the online dust up. Plus the article describes actions that are just peculiar; for example, this quote:
“[L]et me be absolutely clear about our stance as a company: systemic racism is real. It disadvantages and endangers people of color in America and around the world,” Zuckerberg posted. Zuckerberg added that while it was “valuable for employees to be able to disagree with the company and each other,” he encouraged Facebook staffers to do so “respectfully, with empathy and understanding towards each other.”
What’s the dividing point between an opinion and a statement which is out of bounds? Does Mark Zuckerberg referee these in bounds and out of bounds events?
Several observations:
- Facebook may be able to deal with pesky regulators in Europe and remind the government of Australia that the company has its own views of news, but managing a large company is a different category of problem. Dissention within an organization may not be a positive when regulators are keeping their eyes peeled for witnesses
- Employees within Facebook are manifesting behaviors associated with views and reactions to those views on the Facebook system itself; Facebook is a microcosm of the corrosive effect of instant, unchecked messaging. Will these messages be constrained by humans or smart software or both?
- Mr. Zuckerberg himself is offering a path forward that seems to suggest that a certain homogeneity of thought amongst employees is desirable; that is, disagree within boundaries. But what are the boundaries? Is it possible to define what crosses a shades of gray line ?
Net net: The high school science club management method which has gained favor among a number of Silicon Valley-centric companies is being pushed and pulled in interesting ways. What happens if the fabric of governance is torn and emergency fixes are necessary? Expulsion, loss of market momentum, de facto control of discourse, or insider threats in the form of sabotage, leaks, and unionization? That puts a different spin on social, does it not?
Stephen E Arnold, September 3, 2020
Facial Recognition: Who Is Against Early Diagnosis of Heart Disease?
September 3, 2020
The anti-facial recognition cohort may have a new challenge on their capable hands. Facial recognition is controversial. What if analysis of a face — for instance, in a selfie — can lead to an early diagnosis of heart disease. The person is alerted to visit a doctor. What if a life is saved? Is facial recognition granted a hall pass for a medical application?
I don’t want to dwell on fencing applications of pattern recognition. I would suggest that a quick look at “AI Expected to Detect Heart Disease via Selfies: Chinese Researchers” might be interesting. The write up states:
Facial appearance has long been identified as an indicator of cardiovascular risk. Features such as male pattern baldness, earlobe crease, xanthelasmata (yellowish deposit of fat around or on the eyelids) and skin wrinkling are the most common predictors.
And what about accuracy?
According to the results published in the European Heart Journal, the algorithm had a sensitivity of 80 percent and specificity of 54 percent, outperforming the traditional prediction model of coronary artery disease. Sensitivity refers to the algorithm’s ability to designate a patient with a disease as positive, while specificity is the test’s ability to designate a patient without disease as negative.
Interesting. How will anti-FR cohorts deal with medical technology which finds its way into different government agencies? DarkCyber does not have an answer, but perhaps pattern recognition will be banned? Perhaps not, however?
Stephen E Arnold, September 3, 2020
Facebook: High School Science Club Management in Action
September 3, 2020
The online information service Mashable published a headline which tells the story. And the story is a Dusie if accurate: “Mark Zuckerberg Blames Facebook Contractors for Kenosha Militia Fiasco.” The article states:
When it comes to mistakenly allowing a militia’s event page to remain on Facebook, even after concerned users reported it at least 455 times, Mark Zuckerberg wants you to know that the buck stops with his contractors.
The essence of the high school science club management method is to infuse entitlement and arrogance with a pinch of denial. The write up notes:
According to Zuckerberg, the reason Facebook chose to tacitly approve an event page that, by his own admission, violated the site’s own rules, is because the non-Facebook employees tasked with enforcing his company’s Byzantine policies didn’t understand them well enough.
The HSSC approach to management may be institutionalized in some Silicon Valley type outfits. That’s super, right? The elite science club is never wrong; for example, “It is not our fault that the stink bomb triggered smoke alarms and two students were hurt rushing from the building.”
Stephen E Arnold, September 3, 2020
Hello, Apple. Did You Read This?
September 3, 2020
One of the DarkCyber research team called my attention to a paragraph in “Is MacOS Becoming Unmaintainable?” The author has been explaining thing Mac for decades. I think this person qualifies as an individual who is or was part of the Apple faithful. Here’s the paragraph:
From all that I hear about Big Sur’s new Sealed System Volume, MacOS 11.0 isn’t intended to improve the situation. If every time your car had a problem you had to replace its engine, wouldn’t you consider that abysmal engineering? It might be acceptable for an iPhone, but surely not for a proper computer.From all that I hear about Big Sur’s new Sealed System Volume, macOS 11.0 isn’t intended to improve the situation. If every time your car had a problem you had to replace its engine, wouldn’t you consider that abysmal engineering? It might be acceptable for an iPhone, but surely not for a proper computer.
I wonder if anyone at Apple noted this statement. My hunch is that someone did. Does anyone care? Not any more. The notion of “too complicated, time consuming, and expensive to fix” combined with millennial wisdom guarantees deterioration it seems.
Stephen E Arnold, September 3, 2020
Consumer Control of Personal Data: Too Late, Chums
September 3, 2020
“The Economics of Social Data” is an interesting write up by a Yale graduate student (how much time did you put into this work, Tan Gan?), a Yale professor (George Bush’s stomping grounds), and an MIT professor (yes, the outfit that accepted money from an alleged human trafficker and then stumbled through truth thickets).
What did these esteemed individuals discover? I like this sentence:
Platforms focuses on ensuring consumers’ control over their individual data. Regulators hope that ownership and control over one’s own data will result in appropriate compensation for the data one chooses to reveal. However, economists need to consider the social aspect of data collection. Because an individual user’s data is predictive of the behavior of others, individual data is in practice social data. The social nature of data leads to an externality: an individual’s purchase on Amazon, for example, will convey information about the likelihood of purchasing a certain product among other consumers with similar purchase histories.
Does this imply that a light bulb has flickered to life in the research cubbies of these influential scholars? Let’s grind forward:
While consumers can experience positive externalities, such as real-time traffic information, very little curbs the platform from trading data for profit in ways that harm consumers. Therefore, data ownership is insufficient to bring about the efficient use of information, since arbitrarily small levels of compensation can induce a consumer to relinquish her personal data.
Remember. I reside in rural Kentucky and most of my acquaintances go bare foot or wear work boots. It seems that after decades of non-regulation, governmental hand waving, and sitting on the porch watching monopolies thrive — a problem?
The fix? Here you go:
In terms of policy implications, our results on the aggregation of consumer information suggest that privacy regulation must move away from concerns over personalized prices at the individual level. Most often, firms do not set prices in response to individual-level characteristics. Instead, segmentation of consumers occurs at the group level (e.g. as in the case of Uber) or at the temporal and spatial levels (e.g. Staples, Amazon). Thus, our analysis points to the significant welfare effects of group-based price discrimination and of uniform prices that react in real time to changes in market-level demand.
Translation: Too late, chums.
Stephen E Arnold, September 3, 2020
Intel Code Names: Horse Feathers, Horse Collars, and Fancy Dancing
September 3, 2020
Intel loves code names. And what a knack for coinages? Pentium. What’s not to like. I noted this item last year (2019) I believe:
Intel, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy, Argonne National Laboratory, and Cray, is building the nations first Exascale supercomputer. By accelerating the convergence of high performance computing and artificial intelligence, Exascale supercomputing will advance scientific research and enable breakthroughs in neuroscience and cancer research, aerospace modeling and simulation, and theoretical research of our universe. The Aurora system will be based on the future generation of the Intel® Scalable Processor, the future Intel® Xeon® compute architecture, the next generation Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory, and supported by Intel’s One API software.
Note the word choice: Convergence, high performance, artificial intelligence, Exascale, super computing, modeling, simulation, theoretical research, scalable, Optane, and One API.
Do I have a problem with this English major with a minor in marketing writing? Nah. Makes zero difference to me. We switched to Ryzen 3950X silicon. Workin’ just fine.
However, the venerable New York Times published “Intel Slips, and a High Performance Supercomputer Is Delayed.” That write up stated:
Intel, the last big US company that both designs and makes microprocessors, signaled in July that it might for the first time use foundries owned by other companies to make some cutting edge chips.
Now it’s September, and how is Intel doing?
Not too well. The Argonne Aurora supercomputer is delayed. Chinese computer scientists rejoice.
Is this Intel stumble important?
Yes, buzzwords and MBA speak cannot disguise the fact that Intel cannot deliver on time and on target. But, wow, Intel can spin fancy phrases; for example, Optane as in “Argonne can Optane its supercomputer.”
Another Covid moment?
Stephen E Arnold, September 3, 2020
Predictive Policing: A Work in Progress or a Problem in Action?
September 2, 2020
Amid this year’s protests of police brutality, makers of crime-predicting software took the occasion to promote their products as a solution to racial bias in law enforcement. The Markup ponders, “Data-Informed Predictive Policing Was Heralded as Less Biased. Is It?” Writer Annie Gilbertson observes, as we did, that more than 1,400 mathematicians signed on to boycott predictive policing systems. She also describes problems discovered by researchers at New York University’s AI Now Institute:
“‘Police data is open to error by omission,’ [AI Now Director Rashida Richardson] said. Witnesses who distrust the police may be reluctant to report shots fired, and rape or domestic violence victims may never report their abusers. Because it is based on crime reports, the data fed into the software may be less an objective picture of crime than it is a mirror reflecting a given police department’s priorities. Law enforcement may crack down on minor property crime while hardly scratching the surface of white-collar criminal enterprises, for instance. Officers may intensify drug arrests around public housing while ignoring drug use on college campuses. Recently, Richardson and her colleagues Jason Schultz and Kate Crawford examined law enforcement agencies that use a variety of predictive programs. They looked at police departments, including in Chicago, New Orleans, and Maricopa County, Ariz., that have had problems with controversial policing practices, such as stop and frisk, or evidence of civil rights violations, including allegations of racial profiling. They found that since ‘these systems are built on data produced during documented periods of flawed, racially biased, and sometimes unlawful practices and policies,’ it raised ‘the risk of creating inaccurate, skewed, or systemically biased data.’”
The article also looks at a study from 2016 by the Royal Statistical Society. Researchers supplied PredPol’s algorithm with arrest data from Oakland California, a city where estimated drug use is spread fairly evenly throughout the city’s diverse areas. The software’s results would have had officers target Black neighborhoods at about twice the rate of white ones. The team emphasized the documented harm over-policing can cause. The write-up goes on to cover a few more studies on the subject, so navigate there for those details. Gilberston notes that concerns about these systems are so strong that police departments in at least two major cities, Chicago and Los Angeles, have decided against them. Will others follow suit?
Cynthia Murrell, September 2, 2020
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