Category Archives: General

Geek Stuff, General, Liberating Thoughts, Politics, Preparing for the worst

Double Checking AI

Why can’t we run an AI check on AI output, asking it to evaluate the output for bias? It can review the output for racial, sexual, gender, socioeconomic, political, and any other number of potential biases, then put out a summary chart so you have overview of the inherent bias in the report.

You should be able to submit any article or post you are reading for this treatment.

Interesting, Word Press has added an AI Assistant to preview what you are about to publish. This is what it provided for this article.

The idea of using AI to evaluate the output for bias is intriguing. It could be helpful to:

1. Conduct thorough research on existing AI models for bias evaluation.

2. Collaborate with AI experts to develop a system that can detect and summarize potential biases.

3. Test the system extensively by submitting various articles and posts for evaluation.

4. Consider integrating the AI Assistant into the publishing process to provide users with a comprehensive overview.

5. Ensure transparency by clearly communicating the limitations and scope of bias evaluation to users.

The addition of an AI Assistant to preview content in WordPress is indeed an interesting development.

General

Tv Shows I am watching

  • His Dark Materials (HBO)
  • The Expanse (Amazon)
  • Doom Patrol (HBO)
  • American Gods (Starz)
  • The Great British Bake Off (Netflix)
  • Death in Paradise (Britbox)
  • Murder in France (MHz)
  • Perfect Murders(MHz)
  • Captain Marleau (MHz)
  • The Brokenwood Mysteries (Acorn)
  • Shakespeare and Hathaway (Britbox)
  • Mock the Week (Britbox)
  • Mystery Road (Acorn)
  • My Life is Murder (Acorn)

General, Preparing for the worst

Checking Facts

There are a number of fact-checking organizations out there, confirming or dismissing statements made on the internets. I think it would behoove the social media companies that provide the platforms to use these fact checking organizations to append a link when a social media item is noted in a fact check.

As an example, if a tweet is noted in a fact check, then Twitter should include a link to the fact-check with the tweet. If a tweet has been fact-checked, it probably has a long life.

Facebook may be more problematic, since a lot of Facebook posts may be corrupted through a daisy chain of shares and repostings, but Facebook has the computer power to tie the posts back to a common fact-checked source. ‘Shopped photos are one area Facebook could definitely be good at.

Other social media services will have their own fact-checking issues. I think faked pictures are probably the greatest threat, since they can jump across language barriers.

There is an International Network of Fact Checkers that has a code of principles for a fact-checking site to be accepted as a member. This might serve a a basis for finding checked fact and tying it to the social media item.

There are other fact-checking sites that that run the gamut of the political spectrum and truthfulness, and they have been identified by Media Bias/Fact Check.

Some sort of automated review of fact-checking sites for new social media postings would be most useful to help maintain the integrity of information in the shared mediaverse. The reviews need to be recurring as well, since the original post may not be fact-checked for some time after the posting.

And, of course, the satirical posts need to be readily highlighted. Especially a post taken from a satire site and reposted to a ‘legitimate’ site. The world has gotten so strange that it is hard to differentiate satire from reality, or malicious intent.

General, Liberating Thoughts, Politics

Happy New Year! 2020

Happy New Year! 2020 – the year of Hindsight! I hope it is your best one yet.

2019 wasn’t the best of years, though we did get a chance to visit Ireland, meet some cousins, and attend a Worldcon, as well as a brief visit to Iceland on the way back. Between travel and medical issues I only got to spend half a year on the golf course. The good news is that, medically, I am back in the pink for 2020. Physically, I need to continue the exercising and stretching I began last year with the Silver Sneakers program down at the gym. That should also help on the golf course.

As we enter the election year, I am conflicted. I support Bernie Sanders wholeheartedly. I believe his Democratic Socialism platform is the best for the US moving into the 21st century. Our own Constitution starts with “We the People” and mandates to:

  • form a more perfect union,
  • establish justice,
  • insure domestic tranquility,
  • provide for the common defense,
  • promote the general welfare,
  • secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our descendants,

if that’s not Socialism, I don’t know what would be. But, the man is 78 years old; I really believe he would not survive first first term. I wish he had a groomed successor in his 50’s ready to go, but the other Democrats in the running don’t seem ready to adopt his platform. This also means his VP pick will be critical and I expect that “politics” will give us a less than optimal successor. It will be an interesting year.

I do think it is time for Congress to take back its constitutional duties and to stop ceding them to the executive. Especially sending American sailors, marines and soldiers into combat at the whim of the executive. Congress opened the door about letting the Executive use military force without direct Congressional approval and the Executive has ripped the door off the hinges. Our military actions throughout the world over the past 70 years have not been the actions of a democratic republic promoting its ideals to the world.

What we do seem to be doing is making the world safe for business. Not safe for the people who patronize the businesses but the businesses themselves. And to add some confusion to the mix, businesses are becoming multi-national and and by making the world safer for business we are making it less safe for ourselves, since if the business is engaging in practices our country deems unsafe, they will just move to another country that doesn’t prohibit or limit those practices. The practices are still unsafe and continue to create a harmful environment; it is just at a remove from us. And we still protect the overall business that is engaging in these practices. Realistically, we need to ban/prohibit these businesses from doing business in our country if we find them engaging in practices that we prohibit here because they are harmful.

Business concentrates money, politics concentrates power, concentrated money buys concentrated power, concentrated power can intensify concentrated money. We need to break this cycle. Let’s start by diffusing the power. Let Representatives have a maximum number of constituents, say 100,000 per Representative. Triple the size of the Senate and let the top three vote-getters be seated in each Senatorial election. Set a restriction that a person cannot hold successive terms of office. A Congressional incumbent can not run for the same office, but they can run in the following election when they are not the incumbent.

Congress should also incorporate sunset timelines into every bill, say 20-25 years, then the bill/law expires. Of course Congress may just reaffirm all the sunsetting bills en mass, so we restrict that so no more than half of the sunsetting bills can be approved in a bundle. The rest must be approved on to case-by-case basis.

On the money side:

  • 90% estate taxes on estates in excess of $5,000,000 should help prevent the concentration of wealth.
  • Political contributions can only come from registered voters or Citizens. Get businesses out of politics.
  • All political contributions are publicly available for review.
  • 90% income tax on incomes over $5,000,000 should help as well.

Actually, I have a whole income taxing scheme that I will discuss in a later post.

Happy New Year! Let the Fun Begin!

General

Cottages Galore

Back in 1986 or ‘87, Elaine asked me to get her a Fairytale Castle; she even pointed me at David Winter, an English sculptor who made cast sculptures of many English countryside buildings and a few fantasy castles as well. I began my quest going to some of the local stores which carried these sort of knick-knacks. While they had many different David Winter Cottages, I couldn’t find the Castle. But, I liked what I saw and picked up a few of the cottages whilst looking for the Castle. I even went to England in 1987 and searched the High Streets for the Fairytale Castle, but to no avail. And I continued to pick up a few pieces that intrigued me, such as the Green Dragon Pub and the Hogs Head Beer House.

The following year I finally found the Fairytale Castle and it joined the small collection I had started. Then I joined the David Winter Guild and started getting pieces regularly, and the collection grew. This continued for another 20 years until David retired in 2010.

In the Hay Creek house we had display cabinets to showcase many cottages and, if I remembered, we would rotate the stored cottages with the displayed cottages. We could display a fair number of cottages, maybe 20-30 at a time. Many of the cottages were small 2x3x4 sculptures, but some of them were massive. If you have a castle with a dragon sleeping around it, it is a big piece.

Then we decided to downsize. I inventoried the cottages as we were packing up and found that I have 184 David Winter Cottages (and Castles). Aaaargh. I can’t keep them all. We don’t have the display cabinets anymore. We have a mantle over the fireplace that can hold a few. Even if I were to religiously rotate them every month or so, we don’t have the space to store all the cottages not on display. (We are not going to fall into the suburban trap of renting a storage space. If it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t belong.)

My plan is to keep a few of the castles and the Christmas Cottages (and maybe a pub or two) and get rid of the rest. I’m not sure if it worth the hassle of putting them up on ebay. I don’t think the cottages command much of a market today. Maybe I should try a consignment shop?

This week I will organize the collection and figure out where to next.

Geek Stuff, General

Try Something New

I used to be able to write a post on my web page – https://www.stardel.com/eg – and it would automatically cross-post to my Facebook page. Then Facebook took that functionality away. Now, I can only cross-post to a Facebook page I manage, and, evidently, I don’t manage my own home page. So, I set up a FB page I called – Jack Heneghan’s Page – (in a burst of creativity,) and now I can cross-post to that.

However, I don’t have a lot of people looking at my NEW page since no one knows about it. So, I will try to share the post on the NEW page to the OLD page and see what happens.

One of the reasons for doing this is that I stopped using exemplia gratia for posting bits and primarily looked at FB to catch up with other people. I didn’t really use FB to post items for myself, just to comment on other’s posts. I would like to get back to posting my own thoughts and to keeping them in a central place where they don’t get lost in a torrent of other posts.

It’s an experiment, we’ll see how it works.

General, Preparing for the worst

A concern

Here is an article that lays out one of my main concerns of the past decade. Back when the markets tanked, the Fed began buying up those bad collateral debt obligations in stages and ended up with 4 TRILLION Dollars of bad junk on its books. As the article points out, other Central Banks were doing the same and globally they hold almost 15 TRILLION Dollars worth of bad debt.

This propped up the stock markets artificially for the big boom period that certainly helped me towards retirement, but what happens when that hyper pumping-up stops? We are probably about to find in the next year or two. I can only hope my portfolio (and my retirement) survives what is coming, because I have no idea how to protect it.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/stock-market-investors-its-time-to-hear-the-ugly-truth-2019-01-05

General

Happy New Year!!!!

2018 was a year of much change. We have sold one home and downsized into another. We have left the countryside and moved into town. Rags, our last horse, passed away at 33 (that’s old for a horse.) We had him for 25 years. We were homeless for a few months and wandered around the southwest, finally settling into a new-built home in Colorado Springs.

We are looking forward to 2019, hopefully a bit more stable than 2018. We are planning a trip to Ireland in August. I hope the Passport Office will reopen up in time for me to renew my passport.

I wish everyone a great New Year and may 2019 be better than the last.

General

Reading those Terms of Service

I have often been annoyed by Terms Of Service agreements you have to click on and agree to in order to install a piece of software.  It might be some software you just want to look at and once you try it you never look at it again.  Doesn’t matter, you don’t know if you sold your soul somewhere in some sub- sub- clause. At least I can use a throw-away email address when signing up for most applications.

But I think that all these End User License Agreements and Terms of Service agreements should be natural fodder for a peer-reviewed summaries of these agreements. And then I found ToS:DR, which seems to try this. I am still looking it over, but it seems to provide point by point elements of the agreements and whether those points are good, bad or neutral.  They are looking for the community to provide input on different services. I am going to make LibraryThing  the service I will experiment with.

The other part of this I would like to see are reviews of the phrases in the boilerplate template clauses for the Terms of service Agreements. What phrasing is considered user friendly, what is considered user hostile? Maybe taking each phrase and translating it into plain english.

AND WHY IS THE LIABILITY SECTION ALWAYS IN ALL CAPS?

General

Wright again

Jim Wright continues to write thoughtful monographs. This one is on the quest to find Judeo-Christian values, so often the subject of political demagoguery.

Schwartz defines ten basic human values based on the criteria above:

  • Self-Direction: independent thought and action–choosing, creating, exploring.
  • Stimulation: excitement, novelty, and challenge in life.
  • Hedonism: pleasure or sensuous gratification for oneself.
  • Achievement: personal success through demonstrating competence according to social standards.
  • Power: social status and prestige, control or dominance over people and resources.
  • Security: safety, harmony, and stability of society, of relationships, and of self.
  • Conformity: restraint of actions, inclinations, and impulses likely to upset or harm others and violate social expectations or norms.
  • Tradition: respect, commitment, and acceptance of the customs and ideas that one’s culture or religion provides.
  • Benevolence: preserving and enhancing the welfare of those with whom one is in frequent personal contact (the ‘in-group’).
  • Universalism: understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature.

http://www.stonekettle.com/2017/10/the-myth-of-judeo-christian-values.html