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Big treat today. Readers will learn what an algorithm is. No, it is not a dismaying vision of Al Gore dancing the Macarena. An algorithm is a way to use data to spot correlations and then organize and initiate responses. Today they are made more capable and important because massive computing power has become inexpensive and plentiful. Intelligent Life a subsidiary publication of The Economist endeavors to explain;
… An algorithm, at its most basic, is not a mysterious sciencey bit at all; it is simply a decision-making process. It is a flow chart, a computer program that can stretch to pages of code or is as simple as “If x is greater than y, then choose z”.
What has changed is what algorithms are doing. The first algorithm was created in the ninth century by the Arabic scholar Al Khwarizami—from whose name the word is a corruption. Ever since, they have been mechanistic, rational procedures that interact with mechanistic, rational systems. Today, though, they are beginning to interact with humans. The advantage is obvious. Drawing in more data than any human ever could, they spot correlations that no human would. The drawbacks are only slowly becoming apparent. …
… Last year Target, a marketing company, yet again proved the power of algorithms, in a startling way. Its software tracks purchases to predict habits. Using this, it chooses which coupons to send customers. It seemed to have gone wrong when it began sending a teenage girl coupons for nappies (diapers), much to the anger of her father, who made an official complaint. A little later, the New York Times reported that the father had phoned the company to apologise. “It turns out,” he said, “there have been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of.” He was going to be a grandfather—and an algorithm knew before he did. …
NY Post tells us how NYU kowtows to Chinese communists.
NYU isn’t letting a pesky thing like human rights stand in the way of its expansion in China.
The university has booted a blind Chinese political dissident from its campus under pressure from the Communist government as it builds a coveted branch in Shanghai, sources told The Post.
Chen Guangcheng has been at NYU since May 2012, when he made a dramatic escape from his oppressive homeland with the help of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
But school brass has told him to get out by the end of this month, the sources said.
Chen’s presence at the school didn’t sit well with the Chinese bureaucrats who signed off on the permits for NYU’s expansion there, the sources said.
“The big problem is that NYU is very compromised by the fact they are working very closely with the Chinese to establish a university,” according to one New York-based professor familiar with Chen’s situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. …
Michael Barone catches MSNBC being ignorant. OK, you ask, what else is new?
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, who seems like a nice person, got caught making a huge historical mistake; he said George Wallace, the Alabama Governor who defied a desegregation order 50 years ago, was a Republican. Nope. He was a Democrat and ran in the Democratic presidential primaries in 1964, 1972 and 1976; he also ran for president as a third party candidate in 1968. Hayes either didn’t know that–surprisingly for a political commentator–or temporarily and perhaps conveniently forgot it. Or maybe he just figures that all political villains are Republicans. In any case he apologized for what he, appropriately, called a “stupid, inexcusable, historically illiterate mistake.”
Here’s another fact he and others may want to keep in mind as we remember the climactic events of the civil rights movement 50 years ago: Bull Connor, the Birmingham police commissioner who turned fire hoses and police dogs on peaceful civil rights demonstrators, was a Democrat too. In fact, he was Democratic National Committeeman from Alabama, at a time when each state and territory had just one male and one female member on the Democratic National Committee.
One more reminder: President John Kennedy’s endorsement 50 years ago this month of what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964 came in the third year of his presidency, in response to events in Birmingham and elsewhere; previously he had been reluctant to raise the issue for fear he would antagonize Southern Democratic officeholders and voters. Some on the left evidently want to depict the civil rights battle as a struggle between benificent Democrats and evil Republicans. It was no such thing.
Another fool from MSNBC gets a look from Roger Simon.
A few days ago, MSNBC commentator Martin Bashir, in high dudgeon, accused critics of the IRS scandal of racism toward Barack Obama. I’m not going to rehearse the number of black conservatives — including intellects of the stature of Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele — who would then be racists, or even go into my own personal story as a white civil rights worker in the South in the sixties (I’m older than Bashir) and how insulting it would be to people like me to be lumped in as racists because we object to the president’s policies.
Never mind the massive declines in racism in our (and other Anglo-Saxon) societies documented in a recent Pew Poll and never mind the late Andrew Breitbart’s offer of one hundred thousand dollars for evidence of the use of the n-word by even one of tens of thousands of Tea Party demonstrators for which not a single bid came forward.
What interests me is why people like Bashir maintain this need to brand anyone even vaguely to the right as racist. It’s almost a disorder worthy of classification in the DSM-5 — PRDS: Projective Racist Derangement Syndrome.
Actually, I don’t think it’s quite that sick, although it does have definite pathological aspects. A more obvious motivation is old-fashioned fear. …