Link Roundup July 2016

Arlington National Cemetery debated allowing QR codes on tombstones. Does technology belong in cemeteries?

When dealing with death, etiquette is paramount and new technology isn’t always welcome. But with a proper touch, technology — in the form of QR codes — has found a small foothold on some tombstones. The benefit is allowing cemetery visitors to scan a QR code on their smartphone, and have instant access to an online obituary, photos of the deceased and more information.

Are Face Recognition Systems Accurate? Depends on Your Race.

Law enforcement agencies haven’t provided many details on how they use facial recognition systems, but in June the Government Accountability Office issued a report saying that the FBI has not properly tested the accuracy of its face matching system, nor that of the massive network of state-level face matching databases it can access.

Why Knowing Your Genetic Data Can Be a Tricky Proposition

The rapidly dropping cost of sequencing in the past five years now makes it possible to execute large-scale PPGS projects to examine the benefits and harms, according to the authors, and there is evidence that patients may use risk predictions to make positive behavioral and lifestyle changes. But there is also the danger that the results could be distressing without any benefit, and false positives or uncertain results could prompt unnecessary and expensive follow-up care.

Living Food

With this project I proposed a future where food shifts towards being a channel of aesthetic experiences: What if food were consumed alive, as a fictional character? What if food was able to play with our cutlery and create hyper-sensations in our mouth?

Google Is Transforming NYC's Payphones Into a 'Personalized Propaganda Engine'

Since the interview, the full scope of Sidewalk Labs' ambitions has become clearer. The company has offered to build Columbus, Ohio, a computerized traffic management system that experts fear might gut public bussing and drive the city into a state of dependence on Google technologies. Even more ambitious are Sidewalk Labs' plans for the creation of a "digital district," perhaps built on land owned by Google or some other company or ceded to the purpose by an existing government.

Who Are Police Killing?

The racial group most likely to be killed by law enforcement is Native Americans, followed by African Americans, Latinos, Whites, and Asian Americans.

What Is Whiteness?

Our search for understanding in matters of race automatically inclines us toward blackness, although that is not where these answers lie. It has become a common observation that blackness, and race more generally, is a social construct. But examining whiteness as a social construct offers more answers. The essential problem is the inadequacy of white identity.

26 ways to be in the struggle beyond the streets

This list is designed to celebrate all the ways that our communities can engage in liberation. For a range of reasons, there are and always have been folks who cannot attend rallies and pro-tests but who continue to contribute to ending police and state violence against black people.

Too Traumatized to Science

The alarming deaths of these people who were minding their business. These tragedies hurt. They hurt in a way that is very real and personal and unhealing. And when I interact with other scientists, namely Black and Indigenous Scientists, the deep pain is shared...and the silence of our colleagues and institutions is deafening.

FIGHTING POLICE ABUSE: A COMMUNITY ACTION MANUAL

You've got to address specific problems. The first step, then, is to identify exactly what the police problems are in your city. What's wrong with your police department is not necessarily the same as what's wrong in that of another city. Police departments differ in size, quality of management, local traditions and the severity of their problems. Some departments are gravely corrupt; others are relatively "clean" but have poor relations with community residents. Also, a city's political environment, which affects both how the police operate and the possibilites for achieving reform, is different in every city. For example, it is often easier to reform police procedures in cities that have a tradition of "good government," or in cities where racial minorities are well organized politically.

My Summer at an Indian Call Center

Every month, thousands of Indians leave their Himalayan tribes and coastal fishing towns to seek work in business process outsourcing, which includes customer service, sales, and anything else foreign corporations hire Indians to do. The competition is fierce. No one keeps a reliable count, but each year there are possibly millions of applicants vying for BPO positions. A good many of them are bright recent college grads, but their knowledge of econometrics and Soviet history won't help them in interviews. Instead, they pore over flashcards and accent tapes, intoning the shibboleths of English pronunciation—"wherever" and "pleasure" and "socialization"—that recruiters use to distinguish the employable candidates from those still suffering from MTI, or "mother tongue influence."

Pokémon Go and the politics of digital gaming in public

Pokémon Go is a perfect storm of nostalgia, branding, design concepts, pre-existing data, and established technologies.

Miraculous Microbes: They Make Holy Statues "Bleed"--and Can Be Deadly, Too

In the early 1950s the U.S. government decided it would be a good idea to use S. marcescens in a bioweapon dispersal experiment dubbed Operation Sea-Spray. They burst balloons filled with Serratia over San Francisco Bay. Chosen because the red pigment makes it easily traceable, the supposedly innocuous bacterium so generously sprinkled over the bay was subsequently linked to several respiratory infections and at least one death. Since then the bacterium has been widely found to be an opportunistic human pathogen, capitalizing on its prowess in forming tight-knit surface communities called biofilms wherever it can.

The ASA's Statement on p-Values: Context, Process, and Purpose

Cherry-picking promising findings, also known by such terms as data dredging, significance chasing, significance questing, selective inference, and “p-hacking,” leads to a spurious excess of statistically significant results in the published literature and should be vigorously avoided.

Using Effect Size—or Why the P Value Is Not Enough

The effect size is the main finding of a quantitative study. While a P value can inform the reader whether an effect exists, the P value will not reveal the size of the effect. In reporting and interpreting studies, both the substantive significance (effect size) and statistical significance (P value) are essential results to be reported.

The Motherhood in Pokémon

The key point of analysis of these three mothers is that, unlike what happened with Johanna, their backstory didn’t result in any character development of evolution, and this even seems to be the reason why this never happens. They aren’t a receptionist, trainer, or racer, they were. What they are doing at the moment of the game doesn’t really matter, and once again their role shrinks.

Everyone's A Furry 2K16

Nobody has a job to worry about being dignified or losing anymore, so we're all posting our fursonas to our main.

Police asked this 3D printing lab to recreate a dead man’s fingers to unlock his phone

Jain and his PhD student Sunpreet Arora couldn’t share details of the case with me, since it’s an ongoing investigation, but the gist is this: a man was murdered, and the police think there might be clues to who murdered him stored in his phone. But they can’t get access to the phone without his fingerprint or passcode. So instead of asking the company that made the phone to grant them access, they’re going another route: having the Jain lab create a 3D printed replica of the victim’s fingers. With them, they hope to unlock the phone.

Google Has a Secret Interview Process… And It Landed Me a Job

Google’s recruiting process is well documented online, and from this point my experience was pretty typical. The only difference is that I didn’t need to go through a technical phone screen since I had already demonstrated some proficiency with coding through the foo.bar exercises.

My four months as a private prison guard.

"Does anybody know why we don't want them to individualize their uniform?" Parker asks us. "We want them institutionalized. You guys ever heard that term? We want them institutionalized, not individualized. Is that sort of a mind game? Yup. But you know what? It's worked over the couple hundred years that we've had prisons in this country. So that's why we do it. We do not want them to feel as though they are individuals. We want them, for lack of a better term, to feel like a herd of cattle. We're just moving 'em from point A to point B, letting them graze in the dining hall and then go back to the barn. Okay?"