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This is Topic: Soft & Hard Technology
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Using software to model death row outcomes |
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Posted by: doclalor on Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - 01:31 PM |
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27 April 2005 | Christian Science Monitor
by Susan Llewelyn Leach
Convicts on death row can wait for years while appeals are filed and protests lodged. Many never get beyond this limbo. Others are executed.
What determines the final outcome? That is the question two professors, one a criminologist, the other a computer scientist, asked as they took 28 years of data on prisoners facing the death sentence and fed it into a software program.
What the software - known as an artificial neural network - managed to do was to predict with more than 90 percent accuracy who would be executed.
The implication, says Dee Wood Harper, one of the researchers and a professor of criminal justice at Loyola University in New Orleans, is that "if this mindless software can determine who is going to die and who is not going to die, then there's some arbitrariness here in the [United States justice] system."
The neural network, which learns by constantly scanning the data for patterns, was given 1,000 cases from 1973 to 2000 where the outcome was known. Once trained on that information, it was fed another 300 cases but without the outcome included. That's when its prediction proved highly accurate.
What some observers find alarming about the outcome is that the 19 points of data supplied on each death-row inmate contained no details of the case. Only facts such as age, race, sex, and marital status were included, along with the date and type of offense.
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Internet Security Expert: "To keep on using [Microsoft's] IE is like playing the lottery" |
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Posted by: doclalor on Monday, July 05, 2004 - 08:32 AM |
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Microsoft's browser dominance at risk as experts warn of security holes5 July 2004 | Independent [London]
by Charles Arthur, Technology Editor
Its curved blue "e" sits on almost every computer desktop in the world, but the global dominance of Microsoft's web browser could soon be over following a stark security warning from a senior panel of internet experts who say it opens the door to online criminals.
They are urging all users of Internet Explorer (IE) to stop using the browser because they say it is vulnerable to hackers and credit card fraudsters.
The alert, from the US Computer Emergency Response Team, comes as a blow to the global giant Microsoft, which has fought successfully to retain its dominance of the browser market - 95 per cent of internet surfers currently use IE.
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Check out payphone-project.com |
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Posted by: doclalor on Thursday, May 13, 2004 - 01:53 PM |
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Hello, Pay Phone Information? Enthusiast Provides the AnswerMay 13, 2004 | New York Times
by IAN URBINA
It started as an art project. Blue spiral notebook in hand, Mark Thomas spent afternoons walking the streets of Manhattan, compiling the numbers and locations of public pay phones. He posted them on his Web site in the hope that people would call them.
"There is real beauty in whimsical acts of contact between strangers," he explained. Soon his list expanded to include public phones at the top of the Eiffel Tower, in the basement of the Vatican, in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and at about 450,000 other places around the world.
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· The Dystopic Duo: Sharon & Bush
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On this day in history ... |
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1831
Silk workers' strike in Lyon, France, district de la Croix Rousse. The whole city rises in insurrection when Nationale Guard kills several workers.
1921
I.W.W. picketing miners massacred in Columbine, Colorado. (Yes, the same Columbine.)
1973
The Senate Watergate committee announces discovery of an 18 1/2 minute erasure on a tape of a Nixon-Haldeman conversation shortly after the Watergate break-in.
1981
More than 350,000 people protest in Holland against Reagan administration plans to deploy intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe.
1984
Three black activists refuse to leave South African Embassy, initiating months of civil disobedience.
1986
To protect Reagan from the exploding Iran arms-for-hostages scandal, Attorney General Ed Meese personally takes over the investigation (while tipping off National Security Advisor Poindexter, who notifies Oliver North ? North immediately begins destroying evidence); later that day Meese acts to keep the FBI out of the investigation despite his knowledge that, at least, the Arms Export Control Act had been violated.
1989
FMLN rebels in El Salvador trap US Green Berets troops in Sheraton Hotel in San Salvador.
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