Celebrity Juries

I’ve been thinking a lot about high-profile cases like the Mehserle trial. People are really upset over that one. I don’t claim to be an expert on it, having not watched the trial, nor even learned about it until the jury was in deliberation. But one thing that strikes me is that the folks who are angry don’t seem to really have trusted the jury.

Well, that leads me to ask: who do Americans trust? Celebrities. We need celebrity juries.

This has been done before, to great effect, in the investigation into the Challenger explosion. (Remember Richard Feynman with the O-rings?) People trusted that result, it worked. I don’t know if the members of that committee really were experts, or if it even mattered.

Here’s what I propose: Go through the list of people applying for Dancing with the Stars or similar reality shows. (That, or hang around the back lots of Hollywood studios looking for child actors rummaging the dumpsters.) Offer these people a hot meal and some amount of legal training, and then let them continue their publicity-hungry ways.

Then, when there’s a major trial, call them in. Use focus groups as part of jury selection: go out and pick up the angriest-looking people picketing, and anyone they ask for an autograph is in. Obviously, a lot of them will be disqualified for drug or drunk-driving offenses, but there should be a sizable pool left over of celebs who never got caught.

Things go on normally from there. Celebrities may not be the brightest people, but they’re certainly no dumber than your average person. And they have enormous egos -- they’re less likely to be awed by police officers or expert witnesses.

Then when the trial is over and the jury comes back from deliberations, you trot them all out in front of the cameras. They smile and wave, and deliver the verdict. It may very well be the same one that an ordinary jury would bring back, but people will trust it more if it comes from celebrities.

Now, I’m not only saying this because I think that people are stupid. The point of the jury system in the first place was that a person should be tried by their peers -- not only for their own sake, but so that the community would trust that the result was the same as if they had personally been there. It’s not merely or even primarily about fairness, but about confidence. I don’t think that we have that anymore, our cities and communities are just too big, and we don’t know each other. But we do feel like we know celebrities, probably more than we feel like we know our neighbors in many cases. Ergo, in order for the public to have confidence in the results of jury trials, those juries need to be filled with what passes for our neighbors today. Sad, but possibly necessary. Maybe we can get away with just having celebrities as jury foremen.

(I was going to insert a Paris Hilton joke here, but I’m reminded that she’s actually the only person in her generation of her family to *make* money rather than just spend it. The jury, if you’ll pardon the pun, is still out on her, I think)

My God, It's Full of ... Puns

Just when I thought that there was no hope for artificial intelligence, my mind is blown by this. (h/t to PhysOrg) That's right: a computer that formulates and tells jokes, all based on that apex of humor, the pun. It is a little scattershot in its basic approach based on using Princeton's WordNet as a relational database / expert system (using the phonetic form to roughly judge whether two words sound similar. It seems to come up with some interesting results -- they remind me in some ways of the kinds of jokes five-year-olds tell. Some samples:

What do you call a cross between an emporium and a success?
A department score

What do you get when you cross a choice with a meal?
A pick-nic

And (possibly the best of the bunch)
Why is a bronzed handle different from a fringe benefit that is lordly ?
One is a tanned grip, the other is a grand tip

Oh my sides, they split.
(More here)

So, now we know how the inevitable robot armies intend to kill us all. I didn't think they'd be this cruel or ruthless, but I must now stop to wipe away a tear of pride. *wipe*

The software will eventually be available for download. I think that (with permission) this would actually be worth learning how to write iPhone apps.

Screw Celsius

I am in general in favor of the metric system. It makes sense, it's easy to use. But the Celsius scale (while fine for many scientific endeavors) is not appropriate for day-to-day human life.

Think of it this way: for most of us, the range of human temperature experience just fits the Fahrenheit scale better. 0F - 100F is a good range, matching quite well what many of us experience. One degree is large enough to be reasonably meaningful (with useful decades), but is fine-grained enough to not need decimals. Going outside the 0-100 range is really something: a particularly cold or blistering day.

When it comes down to it, the water cycle just isn't that relevant to day-to-day life. Water doesn't magically freeze completely when the weather hits 32F/0C, there's a considerable hysteresis going on there. Besides, you don't want your freezer right at freezing, you want it more like 20F, and your fridge below 40F. There's a distinct difference in the clothing you wear at 50F, 60F, 70F, 80F.

That's not to say that the Celsius decades are useless. They're not bad for broad generalities: -10 is quite cold, 0 is cold, 10 is chilly, 20 is warm, 30 is hot. But there's a big difference within those decades in terms of what you wear, what activities you plan, etc. When you're sitting at a desk for a long time, your preferred temperature may well be a fraction of a degree Celsius.

So, make a stand for Fahrenheit! For a more understandable people-friendly tomorrow!

What an awesome web we weave

The last thing that you want your robot army to do, when asked "Are you exterminating the human race?" is answer "Yes." Public relations fiasco right there. You can't possibly go on Oprah often enough to make up for that one.

The solution? Make sure your robots know how to lie. Fortunately, there have been great strides in this very field recently. Some folks in Lausanne, Switzerland have been working in evolutionary robotics: they developed a pretty nice platform (the S-bots, shown in that link towing a terrifically tolerant tot) that have a number of general-use actuators and sensors. At the same time, they developed a decent computer simulation of those robots so that they could try out control schemes -- including multiple iterations of an evolved controller.

Note that they have both light rings (three colors of LEDs) and light sensors. The robots are each controlled by a neural network, the inputs for which include input from those sensors, and the outputs drive motors and other actuators. The weights of each node are determined by elements on a single long string, which is treated as genetic material for a genetic algorithm. They run the robots with a randomized genome, and those robots that "survive" (get to a power source) have their "genes" passed on to the next generation (that is, the next iteration of the experiment) Neural networks are a nice handy way to bridge the gap between genetic algorithms and programmed behavior, actually. Anyone who's interested in playing around with these techniques would not do badly to start off with something like this.

Anyway, I haven't read the paper too carefully, but it sounds like the deception involves the fact that the power source (the "food") has one colored light, and the robots can change color to that same color when they are there (thus helping the other robots with different genes) or they can turn off their lights or turn a different color to give themselves a larger relative advantage! Of course, robots that are attracted to both color lights would gain a further advantage, thus increasing the dominance of that particular strain: a bunch of them with the same set of mutations could effectively hide the power source from other robots.

There's more coverage, with more videos at Singularity Hub. If you're interested in the bots themselves, the older swarm-bots have a page here, and the newer version is over here. The papers there are pretty approachable for technically-minded folks not in robotics, I think, but are not quite to the level of general consumption. Good stuff.

I guess the only remaining question, then, is that, having now learned to lie, will robots ever learn ... to love?

The answer is no.

Public Service Announcement

*cough, cough*
[Microphone feedback]
Is this thing on?
[tap, tap, tap]
(Oh, good.  Ahem.)

Ladies and Gentlemen, can we please stop pretending that the word "data" is plural?

Thank you.  Good night everyone, drive safely.

Or maybe we just suck

I recently read Michio Kaku's "Physics of the Impossible" - quite a good book, I highly recommend it. One of the sections was on time travel, and he repeated Stephen Hawking's observation that if time travel were ever to be possible, then why aren't we awash in time-traveling tourists now?

This is sort of taken for granted in this book, as elsewhere. And yet I cannot help but think that there are some assumptions there that ought not go unchallenged. It seems to me that there's a limitation on how long anything in the present day is going to be interesting to people in the future. There's really very little going on - it all seems important to us now, but in fifty years people will probably be mostly interested in a relative handful of things. In a hundred years, it seems to me that maybe only a few dedicated historians would come here, maybe to watch Obama's inauguration in person.

But it seems more likely to me that it'll take several hundred years, or thousands of years, to develop a working time machine. Who knows how long it would take to make the technology available to more than a lucky few. It took fifty years for low-orbital space travel to become available to a half dozen wealthy tourists, who had to train hard on the ground, then keep out of the way during a short mission. Who are their equivalents, I wonder, who are also more keenly interested in events of 1000 years ago than 2000 years ago, or 500? Why come back to the early 21st Century when there were such interesting things happening in Rennaisance Italy or in Roman-occupied Judea? (After all, a time machine, a camcorder, and an Aramaic-to-Chinese dictionary could clear up more than a few obnoxious arguments)

Let's face it, we're boring, and that's a strike against us. Speaking from a tourism point of view, we're the temporal equivalent of Ohio. Sure, we've got Obama's inauguration and the Iranian election, but in the thousand-year view of things they don't even amount to that huge ball of yarn.

On top of that, we're watching for time travelers. Or at least, we've managed to build ourselves a neat little surveillance society with lots of cell phone cameras, the concept of time traveling tourists, and "healthy" doses of novelty-seeking and paranoia.

Finally, it takes a special kind of mind to see today's successful experiments with visible-light invisibility and other negative-optics shenanigans, hypothesize a future civilization capable of time travel as a leisure activity... and still think that we'd actually be able to tell when the handful of bored tourists actually does show up.

, the Hunting of

Is snark a good thing or a bad thing? It's certainly entertaining, but is it, as Denby suggests in that interview, purely a destructive force? When we snark, are we exposing weakness in logic/rhetoric/belief, or are we merely snickering while Rome burns?

Great Minds...?

On a recent Slashdot thread (I nearly said "discussion". Hah!) posters reacted to HR.414, which purports to protect children from camera phone-wielding "predators" by forcing all new camera phones to make a noise when a photo is taken, which noise cannot be muted or turned down. ... Yeah.

Well, at one point (read: many points, repeatedly, but I only noticed one at first) someone asked about dead victims. I replied, " Clearly in addition to a piercing shriek (to alert the merely hard of hearing), the flash should be required at all times." and then added, "Oh no! What about the deaf *and* blind?!" (What? Don't you judge me, it's Slashdot. We don't evaluate etiquette independent of its context at this here blog. I bet you do lots of things at the orgies you habitually attend that we might snicker at over coffee)

Where was I? Anyway, the point of admitting that I post to Slashdot is to bring up the fact that right now fully half of the replies advocate the use of tasers. Looking elsewhere on the thread, where many other people made similar points, this is the commonest response. Now, those of you who know Slashdot understand that this is not mere agreement: posters there rarely even read the articles, let alone the mostly-invisible responses of their fellow posters. It's fair to assume that most of those people came up with this little gem on their own.

On the one hand, I think tasing strangers is funny. On the other hand, why tasers? Why not projectiles or a flame thrower? There are other suggestions in there: One AC suggested simulated flatulence. Shouldn't we expect to see a broader range of suggestions, if they're all independent? Is there some cultural element of the Slashdot mind that predisposes them to think of electric shock before all else?

I don't know, but I shall be thinking about it. At least until I bring myself to turn off emailed comment notifications. (Damn it, there's another one)