Automated detection of propaganda and cultural bias

The ability of word2vec to detect relationships between words (for example that “man” is to “king” as “woman” is to “queen”) can already be used to detect biases. Indeed, the biases are so easy to find, so blatant, that they are embarrassing.

Can this automated detection of cultural bias be used to detect deliberate bias, such as propaganda? It depends in part on how large the sample set is, and in part on how little data the model needs to become effective.

I suspect that such a tool would work only for long-form propaganda, and for detecting people who start to believe and repeat that propaganda: individual tweets — or even newspaper articles — are likely to be far too short for these tools, but the combined output of all their tweets (or a year of some journalist’s articles) might be sufficient.

If it is at all possible, it would of course be very useful. For a few hours, until the propagandists started using the same tool the way we now all use spell checkers — they’re professionals, after all, who will use the best tools money can buy.

That’s the problem with A.I., as well as the promise: it’s a tool for thinking faster, and it’s a tool which is very evenly distributed throughout society, not just in the hands of those we approve of.

Of course… are we right about who we approve of, or is our hatred of Them just because of propaganda we’ve fallen for ourselves?

(Note: I’ve seen people, call them Bobs, saying “x is propaganda”, but I’ve never been able to convince any of the Bobs that they are just as likely to fall for propaganda as the people they are convinced have fallen for propaganda. If you have any suggestions, please comment).

Vision

Human vision is both amazingly good, and surprisingly weird.

Good, because try taking a photo of the Moon and comparing it with what you can see with your eyes.

Weird, because of all the different ways to fool it. The faces you see in clouds. The black-and-blue/gold-and-white dress (I see gold and white, which means I’m wrong). The way your eyes keep darting all over the place without you even noticing.

What happens if you force your eyes to stay put?

I have limited ability to pause my eyes’ saccade; I have no idea how it compares to other people, so I assume anyone can do what I have tried.

On a recent sunny day, in some nearby woodland, I focused on the smallest thing I could see, a small dot in the grass near where I sat. I shut one eye, then tried to keep my open eye as still as possible.

It was difficult, and I had to make several attempts, but soon all the things which were moving stood out against all the things which were stationary. That much, I expected. What I did not expect was for my perception of what was near the point I was focused on to change.

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I didn’t take photos at the time, but this mock-up shows a similar environment, and an approximation of the effect. One small region near the point I was looking at tiled itself around much of my central vision. I don’t think it was any particular shape: what I have in this mock-up is a square, what I saw was {shape of nearby thing} tiled, even though that doesn’t really work in euclidian space. If I let my vision focus on a different point infinitesimally near the first, my central vision became tiled with a different thing with its own shape. The transition from normal vision to weird tiling felt like it took about a second.

How much of this is consistent with other people’s eyes (and minds), I don’t know. It might be that all human vision (and brains) do this, or it might be that the way I learned to see is different to the way you learned to see. Or perhaps we learned the same way, and me thinking about computer vision has literally changed the way I see.

Vision is strange. And I’m not at all sure where the boundary is between seeing and thinking; the whole concept is far less clear than it seemed when I was a kid.

iOS or Android?

“What’s best” always depends on what you want to do. This is my impression of which of iOS and Android is better in different circumstances:

Lowest cost	Android
Any specific single feature (best camera, dual-sim, FM radio, etc.)	Android
Best build quality	iOS
Easy to modify	Android
Secure from other people modifying it without you knowing	iOS
Smart Watch	iOS
Smart Watch if you don’t like the Apple Watch	Android
Virtual Reality	Android
Voice control interface	Android
MacOS integration	iOS
Meaningful choice of web browsers	Android

Falcon 9 to scale

Space rockets are Big.

Those quaint little pictures that show them next to Nelson’s Column or the Eiffel Tower don’t do them justice, partly because… well. I didn’t even realise how big the Eiffel Tower is until I visited it a few years ago.

So, here’s what the first stage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket looks like, next to Nelson’s Column. Take a close look at the bottom, both photos have people in them.

The image of Nelson’s Column [linked here] is licensed as Creative Commons Share Alike, which requires that “If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.”

Fortunately, the image from SpaceX [link] was licensed as CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication, which doesn’t interfere with my ability to release this as CC-SA-3.

Tasteless humour

So, a friend has convinced his workplace that the word ‘bottom’ is inherently funny regardless of context. ‘Bottom of the list’, ‘bottom of the filing cabinet’, etc. all lead to tittering. It got to the stage where one person made a file called ‘bottom’ just so that, in order to find out if they had the right unix permissions, they would type ‘touch bottom’ on the command line.

Well, I was wondering what other command line commands are funny when followed by ‘bottom’…

Andrew Neil interviews Theresa Maykov-bot

(Based on transcript: https://web.archive.org/web/20170522203428/https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/05/andrew-neil-interviews-theresa-may-full-transcript/, MayBot responses generated autonomously with http://kitsunesoftware.com/MarkovChainPredictiveText/)

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should

Python lets programmers redefine initializers at runtime. Don’t do that.

The C preprocessor lets programmers redefine “true”. Don’t do that.

Swift lets programmers use very foolish variable names. This may be the lesser sin, but still, don’t do that.

Given python has a reputation for relatively defect-free code, it’s remarkable how few guards it has for enforcing good code — no type safety, no access modifiers, only enforced indentation.