Year: 2019
The FACES of Justice
The ACLU and several other public interest groups have filed a brief with the Florida Supreme Court urging them to look into the use of automated facial recognition in criminal proceedings. In 2015, two undercover cops purchased $50 of crack cocaine from a Black man on a Jacksonville street. Instead of arresting him on the… Read more
Green New Disaster
I’ve been meaning to write something about the “Green New Deal” for a while now, but it’s been such a vague concept that I wasn’t sure how to address it. Should I write about the letter to Congress signed by hundreds of environmental and liberal-leaning groups? Or maybe the Sunrise Movement’s grand strategy? It would… Read more
Model Justice — Starting Over
It’s been a while since I wrote about my Model Justice project, which is an attempt to build a software model of certain aspects of the criminal justice system. In my last post on the subject, I explained why I was abandoning the Insight Maker systems modeling environment in favor of the Python general-purpose programming language. Since then,… Read more
State of the Union 2019
I skipped reviewing the State of the Union speech last year, so I thought I’d give it a try this year, since I have to be awake for something else anyway. The official White House transcript wasn’t up yet when I started this, so I’m using the Vox rush transcript of President Trump’s notes. It’s a… Read more
Racist Algorithms
So the other day, according to someone named Ryan Saavedra, newly elected congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that algorithms are racist: https://twitter.com/RealSaavedra/status/1087627739861897216 Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) claims that algorithms, which are driven by math, are racist — Ryan Saavedra @RealSaavedra Ocasio-Cortez says a lot of crazy things, but this is not as crazy as it sounds.… Read more