According to the FT, the database, known as MS Celeb, was first published in 2016. At the time, it was described by the company as the largest publicly available facial recognition data set in the world, containing more than 10 million images of nearly 100,000 individuals.
Those whose images were included in the database did not give their permission for the images to be used. Instead, their images were scraped off the web and off search engines.
Two other data sets have also been taken down since the FT exposed how they were being used by the Chinese. They include: the Duke MTMC surveillance data set built by Duke University researchers and a Stanford University data set called Brainwash.
Going by professional citations, Microsoft’s MS Celeb has been used by a handful of corporations, including Sensetime and Megvii, two suppliers of the growing state security apparatus in China’s Northwestern Xinjiang province.
The deadly pig virus that jumped from Africa to Europe is now ravaging China’s $128 billion pork industry and spreading to other Asian countries, an unprecedented disaster that has prompted Beijing to slaughter millions of pigs. But stopping African swine fever isn’t so easy.
Let’s see: It ‘jumped from Africa to Europe’ but the worry is about China’s pork industry? That’s a bigger jump than from Africa to Europe. Pardon me if I don’t seem concerned about China’s pork industry.
If we know anything about disease pandemics, it’s that not every victim will die. (Check the history of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.) If China has 440 million pigs, a significant portion of them will prove resistant. Once all of the vulnerable pigs die off, China will use the resistant pigs to rebuild their port industry. Sucks to be China, of course, but it’s not the end of the world, or even the end of the pigs.
This is the kind of hair-on-fire ‘journalism’ that gives news organs like Bloomberg a bad name.
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New York City public school teachers recently revealed that they have been instructed to reject “objectivity,” “written documentation” and “perfectionism” by Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, as part of his effort to “dismantle racism.” Carranza identified these values as tools of the “white-supremacy culture.”
Our cultural overlords are way ahead of Carranza. With lightning speed, we’ve abandoned old, hidebound, Anglo-Saxon facts-and-evidence standards in deference to new, fresh African folk tale standards. (According to J. Bekunuru Kubayanda, writing in the Afro-Hispanic Review, even Latin America and the Caribbean got their oral history traditions from Africa.)
I’m willing to believe it.
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The term “Gell-Man Amnesia effect” was coined by the late novelist Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park) in honor of the famous physicist who died last month. Murray Gell-Man had pointed out to Crichton that he had noticed that journalists aren’t very accurate at writing about his own specialty, physics, nor about Crichton’s, showbiz, so why do we trust them to write reliably about everything else?
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The degrowth movement wants to intentionally shrink the economy to address climate change, and create lives with less stuff, less work, and better well-being.
I’m doing my bit.
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The Washington Post reports that Colorado’s former governor and current presidential candidate John Hickenlooper, appearing at the California Democratic Party state convention this weekend, criticized socialism—imagine that!—and was promptly booed by the audience….
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Most of us can rant endlessly about the evils of the academy, and a cursory reading of any newspaper will reveal some absolutely batshit crazy event on some college campus. In spite of the ocassional flash of rational thought, the trend in American universities is clear; they are descending into madness. No thoughts of education, just a mad rush to the next mile marker on the road to a perfect idea-free hive of rigid orthodoxy.
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Software giant Salesforce will no longer allow retailers who sell some types of firearms to use its software, the Washington Post reports.
Well, that ought to make the decision about what CRM software to use a bit easier. Speaking as someone who has had to attempt to connect to SalesForce data for reporting purposes, I’v e never been impressed with the quality of their software.
This is the principle defect in the whole ‘software as a service’ concept. If you buy the software, you can use it or not, as you please. If you are merely renting the software, then the vendor can cut you off for any damned reason it pleases, including political correctness. This is why I don’t pay for streaming music services — the convenience doesn’t compensate for the insecurity. Never base your life on a service provided by someone else if you can avoid it; and, if you must, make sure that there are alternatives.
You will note that the higher the component of human labor, the higher the real price increases. Fields that have experienced low automation and therefore low increased productivity are the worst culprits; people are less efficient than machines. Once the logjam breaks and somebody figures out how to apply automation effectively to education and health care, things will get much better very quickly. Until then, we’re stuck doing it The Old Way, which sucks.
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It costs three times more to build a subway station here than in London or Paris. What if we could change that?
Proximate cause: Unions and their cozy relationship with corrupt Democrat politicians.
Long term cause: Corrupt Democrat politicians. New York City is historically the poster child for corrupt machine politics; the advent and flourishing of public-employee unions merely makes it worse.
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I have always been astonished by the proglodyte embrace of Islam, since Islam is based on a lot of behavior that proglodytes profess to abhor. The only explanation I can find is ‘the people who hate the people I hate must be awesome’.
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A website called Media Analytics lets you graph the New York Times’ usage of words and phrases from 1970-2017. For example, for years the New York Times used “whiteness” in articles about polar exploration, laundry bleach, and interior decorating. But suddenly, around 2015, “whiteness” became the Times‘ go-to racial slur.
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North Korea executed Kim Hyok Chol, its special envoy to the United States, and foreign ministry officials who carried out working-level negotiations for the second U.S.-North Korea summit in February, holding them responsible for its collapse, a South Korean newspaper reported on Friday.
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Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is in possession of an undergraduate degree in economics, does not know what “scarcity” means.
Or at least innumerate. The fact that this twit has a degree in economics demonstrates, as nothing else has, that education in America is seriously broken.
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It’s not so much a ‘castle’ as a fortified city, like Carcassonne in France.
However, the citadel is more than just a significant historical and architectural landmark: more than 800 years after it was built, some 2,000 to 4,000 descendants of the castle’s earliest inhabitants continue to live inside its fortified walls, rent-free, as their ancestors were given the land by local kings in return for their services to the kingdom.
Today, not only is Jaisalmer the last inhabited ancient fortress in India, but it serves as something of a living monument, where life goes on among the narrow lanes and crowded courtyards in much the same manner as it did in the 12th Century.
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Political Correctness to the contrary notwithstanding, many cultures (including African-Americans) consider lighter skin to be higher in status than darker.
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If it doesn’t come from an animal—or, I guess, if you wanna get technical and include Soylent Green in our definition, an animal or a human—then it’s not meat.
I’m surprised I have to explain this.
Preach it, brother.
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I have taught evolution and genetics at Williams College for about a decade. For most of that time, the only complaints I got from students were about grades. But that all changed after Donald Trump’s election as president. At that moment, political tensions were running high on our campus. And well-established scientific ideas that I’d been teaching for years suddenly met with stiff ideological resistance.
Proglodytes are quick to label their opponents ‘science deniers’ but don’t seem to realize when they do the same thing.
In class, though, some students argued insteadthat it is impossible to measure IQ in the first place, that IQ tests were invented to ostracize minority groups, or that IQ is not heritable at all. None of these arguments is true. In fact, IQ can certainly be measured, and it has some predictive value. While the score may not reflect satisfaction in life, it does correlate with academic success. And while IQ is very highly influenced by environmental differences, it also has a substantial heritable component; about 50 percent of the variation in measured intelligence among individuals in a population is based on variation in their genes. Even so, some students, without any evidence, started to deny the existence of heritability as a biological phenomenon.
Hey, it’s not as if they were interrupting Star Trek.
Of course, anybody who wants to know about the weather can do so from the Internet or The Weather Channel. Once you’ve interrupted to issue the warning, shut up and go back to what the watchers chose to watch.
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