Topic Tuesday #83 2014/02/18 - "Viva La Revolution!"

Topic Tuesday #83 2014/02/18 - "Viva La Revolution!"

Let's see... what was in the news today...?

"Anti-Government Protests In Ukraine Turn Deadly" and here "Ukraine crisis: Police storm main Kiev 'Maidan' protest camp"
"Venezuela expels US diplomats"
"4 Dead In Thai Protests; Prime Minister Faces Charges In Rice Deal"
"U.N. Report Details North Korea's 'Crimes Against Humanity'"
"South Sudan’s Forces Clash With Rebels Near U.N. Base"
"Turkey's President Signs Law Restricting Web Use"

OK... Enough... there were some more but between Blogger being slow as molasses and being kinda fed up with the world at large, I'm through with headline hunting. 

What does this say? What does it say about our fellow man around the world that they are, in some cases, taking up sticks, stones, and Molotov cocktails to protest? Something is rotten. I can't put my finger on just what it might be, and rightly so, as it is a convoluted and tangled web filled with selfishness, greed, trickery, and deceit; and those are the good things.

I was watching Blade Runner just this afternoon and the opening places the story in a dystopian Los Angeles, November 2019. That's only 5 years away, and still no spinners (flying cars). When will there be "A new life awaiting us in the Off-World Colonies, your chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure."

Anyway, as broken as this world is, there are certain simple answers for many of the worlds problems. Follow the easy money. Laziness is a valid reason for something not happening. People are mostly selfish, at least enough to be able to predict a level of behavior. No one wants responsibility, unless there is something in it for them.
I'm not trying to be negative; I'm a genuinely hopeful and happy person. I am a realist however. Nearly every major event in world history is simultaneously more complex and simpler than we give it credit, and that is because people are involved. Simple motivations, complex outcomes. A little bit of chaos theory.
As Jim Morrison put it so appropriately in a drug induced writing binge, "People are strange, when you're a stranger."

Today is about awareness, not solutions. Think about the world and how small it is. You can go to your closet and find something made in Thailand. The internet is everywhere at the speed of electrons (provider not withstanding like Turkey). The world is a smaller place. we need to keep in mind the things that are happening all around us and not get too side tracked by bikini babes floating weightless in the vomit comet.
I will however include a picture of that to ensure lots of pageviews, since that is how we internet.



Topic Tuesday #64 2013/10/08 - "Rose Colored Glasses & BS Detector Goggles"

Topic Tuesday #64 2013/10/08 - "Rose Colored Glasses & BS Detector Goggles"

I am, by nature, an inquisitive person. I do not take anything at face value. Everything needs to be respected enough to first give it some thought before drawing any conclusion. There are always shades of grey and multiple points of view. What these POVs have in common are facts. It's been said you are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts, and I adhere to that in my daily life. It is important to not get lulled into a false sense of reality, as many of the opinions you have were manipulated without your knowledge a long time ago (maybe generations in the past). This, at its core, is skepticism. Doubt.
We have many built in tools for detecting fraudulent things. The ability to recognize deception is something we have honed over millennia. At the heart of the matter is a misinformation maelstrom; an arms race of lies. Better detection, better lies. Many concepts are so susceptible to deception that we think they are true, time and time again. The rose colored glasses of what we wish to be true, regardless of facts. And then...  Conspiracy theories! Delicious tabloid lies!
I love a good conspiracy theory, as much as the next guy, and can certainly buy into them from time to time. It takes patient research to ferret the facts out of a "conspiracy" for one simple reason, most of the information is factual. The conspiracy just strings multiple facts together with leaps of logic that are just outlandish enough to be both interesting and possible, even if unlikely. The more grand and secret they are, the more they play on our psyche.
We have to bust out the BS Detector Goggles and put away the rose colored specs that make life just a beautiful and heart warming paradise. What we need are tools. Here is a list inspired and expanded from Carl Sagan's own "Baloney Detection Kit" born from "The Demon Haunted World".
* First, we have to have data. As much hard data as possible. Quantifiable facts are all you should be interested in until it is time to reason beyond them.
* Whenever possible there must be independent confirmation of the facts. Verification is important.
* Now, quickly you can apply Occam's Razor, and then Hitchen's Razor in turn.
  Occam's Razor: "The simplest answer is often correct." (Very powerful tool.)
  Hitchen's Razor: "What which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
  With the one/two punch of these epistemological razors, you can quickly cut to the heart of an issue.
* Brainstorm. Don't simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy; spin more than one hypothesis.
* Tear it apart by yourself. Try to defeat the hypothesis. Can you falsify the argument? Is it testable? Can/have others duplicated the experiment and the result?
* In testing the arguments hypothesis, did it rely on shaky information? You've heard it before (and with good reason), a chain (argument) is only as strong as its weakest link.

**When dealing with people, I highly recommend familiarizing yourself with "Logical Fallacies". We use them all the time in our speech and politicians pop them out every few words. I suggest taking a look at https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/home and http://www.fallacyfiles.org/taxonomy.html but here are a few of the very popular:
* Begging the question (assuming an answer in the way the question is phrased).
* Ad hominem - attacking the arguer and not the argument.
* Straw man - caricaturing (or stereotyping) a position to make it easier to attack.
* Argument from "authority".
* Loaded Question - a question that couldn't be answered without appearing "guilty".
* Argument from adverse consequences (putting pressure on the decision maker by pointing out dire consequences of an "unfavourable" decision).
* Appeal to ignorance (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence).
* Confusion of correlation and causation.
* Post hoc, ergo propter hoc - "it happened after so it was caused by" - confusion of cause and effect.
* Meaningless question ("what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?).
* Non sequitur - "it does not follow" - the logic falls down.
* Special pleading (typically referring to god's will).
* Observational selection (counting the hits and forgetting the misses).
* Statistics of small numbers (such as drawing conclusions from inadequate sample sizes).
* Misunderstanding the nature of statistics (President Eisenhower expressing astonishment and alarm on discovering that fully half of all Americans have below average intelligence!)
* Inconsistency (e.g. military expenditures based on worst case scenarios but scientific projections on environmental dangers thriftily ignored because they are not "proved").
* Suppressed evidence or half-truths.
* Excluded middle - considering only the two extremes in a range of possibilities (making the "other side" look worse than it really is).
* Short-term v. long-term - a subset of excluded middle ("why pursue fundamental science when we have so huge a budget deficit?").
* Slippery slope - a subset of excluded middle - unwarranted extrapolation of the effects (give an inch and they will take a mile).
* Weasel words - for example, use of euphemisms for war such as "police action" to get around limitations on Presidential powers. "An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public"

Now hopefully you have prepared your own kit and can interrogate the world for facts.
Don't let the skeptics of the skeptics get you down either. Just because you traded your rose colored lenses in for a magnifying glass and ask a lot of questions and seem rather contrary, doesn't mean that the reality we share has changed, or that something tastes different because you know more about it. What they will be unhappy with is not being able to get a fast one over on you any more.
I'm all out of gum, watch out for the weasel words!

Topic Tuesday #47 2013/06/11 - "Big Brother / Big Data"

Topic Tuesday #47 2013/06/11 - "Big Brother / Big Data"

Orwell would be pointing a malnourished finger at all of us and chanting, "I told you so".
I don't go into the dystopian conspiracy theories, but as they are part of our culture, they still must be examined. Today the magnifying glass is on "Big Data". You may have heard the term, and if you haven't, you will.
Wikipedia summarized it thusly:
Big data is a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications. The challenges include capture, curation, storage, search, sharing, transfer, analysis, and visualization. The trend to larger data sets is due to the additional information derivable from analysis of a single large set of related data, as compared to separate smaller sets with the same total amount of data, allowing correlations to be found to "spot business trends, determine the quality of research, prevent diseases, link legal citations, combat crime, and determine real-time roadway traffic conditions.

 Big Data is just that, BIG. Veritable truckloads of data available on demand and manipulatable to yield a variety of correlations. It's enough to give you the heebie-jeebies, but honestly, it is unavoidable.
Big Data is a side effect of our increasingly technological society. We have devices that generate information that can be captured and logged. Most of it is innocuous. Like temperatures, wind speed, and rainfall.  
We take weather measurements every few seconds (this would be a data set, like a spreadsheet) in thousands of weather stations all over the world (a larger data group, a collection of spreadsheets). Now imagine that you have all this information collected from all the weather stations all over, and now you can see patterns. With patterns you can make predictions. Voila, you have a rudimentary weather model and can start to predict storm patterns.
Now extrapolate that out further. Do you have a credit card? Congratulations you have your own data set of purchasing patterns! This information is stored and used to determine fraud patterns. If suddenly you are outside your normal spending patterns or regions, you may be flagged with a fraud alert, keeping you safe. The dark side of the credit card industry is they have a tendency to sell/share that information with marketers and even law enforcement. In this way your habits become a recognizable pattern. Patterns can be identified, and some are as unique as a finger print.
It is safe to assume that if your have a device that generates a loggable data set, you can be sure someone somewhere is collecting it, and someone else wants it for some reason. Some will want to make life easier for you, others for themselves. Some will profit from it, and others will suffer. And I haven't even got into facial recognition!