Re: [silk] Everyone's surveilling
On 12/09/2007, shiv sastry [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tuesday 11 Sep 2007 11:03 pm, ashok _ wrote: do you have any statistics to this effect... that cameras have reduced or prevented crime ? Yes http://www.thefoucauldian.co.uk/bb.htm The statistics show that video surveillance can improve security. With 90 % of banks now fitted with cameras, 50 % of robbers are identified and arrested within two years. Thanks to video surveillance in the Paris metro, 83 % of incidents are now detected, and arrests have risen by 36 %. The use of this technology in department stores has reduced shoplifting by two thirds. On the other hand, see this article (from slashdot): http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23412867-details/Tens+of+thousands+of+CCTV+cameras%2C+yet+80%25+of+crime+unsolved/article.do (or http://tinyurl.com/2n6zrz) A comparison of the number of cameras in each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any. Binand
Re: [silk] Everyone's surveilling
The link I quoted from was carefully selected of course. The ONLY crime whose likelihood is reduced by security cameras is said to be shoplifting. Regarding spying and surveillance, the more you spy, the greater the amount of resources you need to analyse the recorded data. In the absence of that you are recording trash that is good only for framing people who may have done nothing. The Indian nuclear tests in 1998 were done under 24 hour surveillance by US satellites. But they didn't nail anyone. But such inconvenient facts don't prevent anyone from surveilling more and more and more. As a result I believe that it is important to behave like one is being watched, reserving really private stuff to periods which you can document as being really private, or private enough for you to be comfortable. But that is all the freedom one has really. All freedom must be found within these constraints. A senior of mine, a Professor of Internal Medicine wrote a book called Trick or Treat which has nothing to do with surveillance, but he describes some of the less desirable side effects of overinvestigation in medicine - using all the high tech tools available. Often, such an overinvestigated person is discovered to have a previously undiscovered and completely unrelated symptomless condition that may not even require treatment. But its accidental discovery leads to anxiety, further investigation and, sometimes, even needless treatment. Surveillance for disease has become commonplace in many countries in the world. Surveillance for diabetes, heart disease, bone disease, dental disease, breast cancer, cancer of the cervix, colon cancer, and cancer of the stomach are routine in some part of the world or the other. While these tests are often a matter of choice, and one can refuse, I know of instances in which a person who fails to submit to surveillance but later develops a disease that could have been detected earlier is punished because his insurance will not cover him for not having cooperated earlier. Medical records of course serve as a permanent record that can pin you down and make you a crime suspect depending on how national laws choose to use the information. A national genetic database that is open for police to look at can always be compared with genetic samples from cells found on cigarette butts, or other sources at the scene of a crime. If you happened to be there - you join the list of suspects. shiv On Friday 21 Sep 2007 1:57 pm, Binand Sethumadhavan wrote: On 12/09/2007, shiv sastry [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tuesday 11 Sep 2007 11:03 pm, ashok _ wrote: do you have any statistics to this effect... that cameras have reduced or prevented crime ? Yes http://www.thefoucauldian.co.uk/bb.htm The statistics show that video surveillance can improve security. With 90 % of banks now fitted with cameras, 50 % of robbers are identified and arrested within two years. Thanks to video surveillance in the Paris metro, 83 % of incidents are now detected, and arrests have risen by 36 %. The use of this technology in department stores has reduced shoplifting by two thirds. On the other hand, see this article (from slashdot): http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23412867-details/Tens+of+thousan ds+of+CCTV+cameras%2C+yet+80%25+of+crime+unsolved/article.do (or http://tinyurl.com/2n6zrz) A comparison of the number of cameras in each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any. Binand
[silk] death of a parrot
alex's last words were you be good, i love you. a sad day for inter-species relations... -rishab http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9828615 Alex the African Grey Sep 20th 2007 From The Economist print edition Science's best known parrot died on September 6th, aged 31 Brandeis University THE last time Irene Pepperberg saw Alex she said goodnight as usual. “You be good, ” said Alex. “I love you.” “I love you, too.” “You'll be in tomorrow?” “Yes, I'll be in tomorrow.” But Alex (his name supposedly an acronym of Avian Learning Experiment) died in his cage that night, bringing to an end a life spent learning complex tasks that, it had been originally thought, only primates could master. In science as in most fields of endeavour, it is important to have the right tool for the job. Early studies of linguistic ability in apes concluded it was virtually non-existent. But researchers had made the elementary error of trying to teach their anthropoid subjects to speak. Chimpanzee vocal cords are simply not up to this—and it was not until someone had the idea of teaching chimps sign language that any progress was made. Even then, the researchers remained human-centric. Their assumption was that chimps might be able to understand and use human sign language because they are humanity's nearest living relatives. It took a brilliant insight to turn this human-centricity on its head and look at the capabilities of a species only distantly related to humanity, but which can, nevertheless, speak the words people speak: a parrot. The insight in question came to Dr Pepperberg, then a 28-year-old theoretical chemist, in 1977. To follow it up, she bought a one-year-old African Grey parrot at random from a pet shop. Thus began one of the best-known double acts in the field of animal-behaviour science. Dr Pepperberg and Alex last shared a common ancestor more than 300m years ago. But Alex, unlike any chimpanzee (with whom Dr Pepperberg's most recent common ancestor lived a mere 4m years ago), learned to speak words easily. The question was, was Alex merely parroting Dr Pepperberg? Or would that pejorative term have to be redefined? Do parrots actually understand what they are saying? Bird brained Dr Pepperberg's reason for suspecting that they might—and thus her second reason for picking a parrot—was that in the mid-1970s evolutionary explanations for behaviour were coming back into vogue. A British researcher called Nicholas Humphrey had proposed that intelligence evolves in response to the social environment rather than the natural one. The more complex the society an animal lives in, the more wits it needs to prosper. The reason why primates are intelligent, according to Dr Humphrey, is that they generally live in groups. And, just as group living promotes intelligence, so intelligence allows larger groups to function, providing a spur for the evolution of yet more intelligence. If Dr Humphrey is right, only social animals can be intelligent—and so far he has been borne out. Flocks of, say, starlings or herds of wildebeest do not count as real societies. They are just protective agglomerations in which individuals do not have complex social relations with each other. But parrots such as Alex live in societies in the wild, in the way that monkeys and apes do, and thus Dr Pepperberg reasoned, Alex might have evolved advanced cognitive abilities. Also like primates, parrots live long enough to make the time-consuming process of learning worthwhile. Combined with his ability to speak (or at least “vocalise”) words, Alex looked a promising experimental subject. And so it proved. Using a training technique now employed on children with learning difficulties, in which two adults handle and discuss an object, sometimes making deliberate mistakes, Dr Pepperberg and her collaborators at the University of Arizona began teaching Alex how to describe things, how to make his desires known and even how to ask questions. By the end, said Dr Pepperberg, Alex had the intelligence of a five-year-old child and had not reached his full potential. He had a vocabulary of 150 words. He knew the names of 50 objects and could, in addition, describe their colours, shapes and the materials they were made from. He could answer questions about objects' properties, even when he had not seen that particular combination of properties before. He could ask for things—and would reject a proffered item and ask again if it was not what he wanted. He understood, and could discuss, the concepts of “bigger”, “smaller”, “same” and “different”. And he could count up to six, including the number zero (and was grappling with the concept of “seven” when he died). He even knew when and how to apologise if he annoyed Dr Pepperberg or her collaborators. And the fact that there were a lot of collaborators, even strangers, involved in the project was crucial. Researchers in this area live in perpetual fear of the “Clever Hans” effect.
Re: [silk] death of a parrot
Rishab Aiyer Ghosh wrote: others. A shame, then, that he is now, in the words of Monty Python, an ex-parrot. Damn. Robbed a whole lot of silklisters of an obvious oneliner comment :)
[silk] A good way to cite wikipedia entries
Via the cryptography list, an object example in how to cite a wikipedia entry: See the section on Software whitening in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_generator (which was correct as of when I looked at it, a few minutes before the timestamp on this email; check the Wiki history to be sure). Udhay -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
Re: [silk] death of a parrot
On Friday 21 Sep 2007 6:24 pm, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote: Damn. Robbed a whole lot of silklisters of an obvious oneliner comment :):) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H6DSoqZz_s
Re: [silk] A good way to cite wikipedia entries
Wikipedia supports permanent links to specific revisions, like so http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hardware_random_number_generatoroldid=156233868 Cheeni On 9/21/07, Udhay Shankar N [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Via the cryptography list, an object example in how to cite a wikipedia entry: See the section on Software whitening in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_generator (which was correct as of when I looked at it, a few minutes before the timestamp on this email; check the Wiki history to be sure). Udhay -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
Re: [silk] death of a parrot
Nobody expects... a former parrot. Or the Spanish inquisition. Unless they are Terry Gilliam. Cheers Divya Sent from BlackBerry® on Airtel -Original Message- From: Suresh Ramasubramanian [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2007 18:24:55 To:silklist@lists.hserus.net Subject: Re: [silk] death of a parrot Rishab Aiyer Ghosh wrote: others. A shame, then, that he is now, in the words of Monty Python, an ex-parrot. Damn. Robbed a whole lot of silklisters of an obvious oneliner comment :)
[silk] This is the house that jack built ...
There's something about the patterns in this sentence that made me think of that rhyme ... http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/5148125.html (AUSTIN) Telephone service was out for seven hours in rural Central Texas after bees attacked a construction worker, causing him to jump off his tractor and hit a lever that lowered an auger that sliced a fiber-optic line. that tossed the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that made the house that jack built ... srs
