23Jan / 2024

DNA face to facial recognition in attempt to find suspect

In an effort to find a suspect in a 1990 murder, there was a police request in 2017 to use a 3-D rendering of a face based on DNA. For Wired, Dhruv Mehrotra reports:

The detective’s request to run a DNA-generated estimation of a suspect’s face through facial recognition tech has not previously been reported. Found in a trove of hacked police records published by the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets, it appears to be the first known instance of a police department attempting to use facial recognition on a face algorithmically generated from crime-scene DNA.

This seems like a natural progression, but it should be easy to see how the pairing of the tech could cause all sorts of issues when someone’s face is poorly constructed and then misclassified with facial recognition. What’s the confidence interval equivalent for a face?

Tags: crime, DNA, ethics, facial recognition, privacy, Wired

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23Feb / 2022

Statistician answers stat questions

For Wired, stat professor Jeffrey Rosenthal answered statistics questions from Twitter, such as how likely it is you win the lottery, why election polls seem wrong all the time, and how statistical testing works. This was an entertaining and educational 16 minutes.

Tags: Jeffrey Rosenthal, questions, Wired

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29Dec / 2021

Anonymized data is rarely anonymous

Justin Sherman for Wired points out the farce that is anonymized data:

Data on hundreds of millions of Americans’ races, genders, ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, political beliefs, internet searches, drug prescriptions, and GPS location histories (to name a few) are for sale on the open market, and there are far too many advertisers, insurance firms, predatory loan companies, US law enforcement agencies, scammers, and abusive domestic and foreign individuals (to name a few) willing to pay for it. There is virtually no regulation of the data brokerage circus.

Tags: privacy, Wired

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25Aug / 2021

Machine learning explained at five difficulty levels

For their 5 Levels series, Wired brought in Hilary Mason to explain machine learning at five levels of difficulty. Mason’s explanations are super helpful at every level.

Tags: Hilary Mason, machine learning, Wired

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12Apr / 2021

Code (data) as therapy

For Wired, Craig Mod writes about how he uses code as a way to find order during less coherent times:

Break the problem into pieces. Put them into a to-do app (I use and love Things). This is how a creative universe is made. Each day, I’d brush aside the general collapse of society that seemed to be happening outside of the frame of my life, and dive into search work, picking off a to-do. Covid was large; my to-do list was reasonable.

The real joy of this project wasn’t just in getting the search working but the refinement, the polish, the edge bits. Getting lost for hours in a world of my own construction. Even though I couldn’t control the looming pandemic, I could control this tiny cluster of bits.

A couple of years ago, I spoke about how FlowingData is a personal journal in disguise. I find myself turning to data and charts, because those things feel familiar and can be a source of comfort.

So while reading Mod’s essay, it was easy to substitute in data and nod my head in agreement.

Tags: Craig Mod, health, Wired

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22Mar / 2018

Charts, maps, and statistics helped stop gerrymandering in Pennsylvania

Issie Lapowsky for Wired:

The change that’s already come to Pennsylvania may not have been possible without the research Kennedy and three other expert witnesses brought to light. They took the stand with a range of analyses, some based in complex quantitative theory, others, like Kennedy’s, based in pure cartography. But they all reached the same conclusion: Pennsylvania’s map had been so aggressively gerrymandered for partisan purposes that it silenced the voices of Democratic voters in the state. Here’s how each came to that conclusion—and managed to convince the court.

This is a great story of visualization and data put to use for a greater good. The analyses solidify the points, and the charts drive them home.

Tags: gerrymandering, Wired

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18Oct / 2016

Seeking solace in data

I think many of us can relate to this during the odd election cycle. Marcus Wohlsen for Wired describes the constant visits and refreshes to FiveThirtyEight for new polls and projections.

Evan is a poll obsessive, FiveThirtyEight strain—a subspecies I recognize because I’m one of them, too. When he wakes up in the morning, he doesn’t shower or eat breakfast before checking the Nate Silver-founded site’s presidential election forecast (sounds about right). He keeps a tab open to FiveThirtyEight’s latest poll list; a new poll means new odds in the forecast (yup). He get push alerts on his phone when the forecast changes (check). He follows the 538 Forecast Bot, a Twitter account that tweets every time the forecast changes (same). In all, Evan says he checks in hourly, at least while he’s awake (I plead the Fifth).

This was me for a while, and no matter what the forecasts say, I never feel good about what I see. Because there’s always a chance.

Tags: election, FiveThirtyEight, Wired

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28May / 2015

Size of Minecraft

I tried playing Minecraft a couple of times but quickly lost interest. Clearly not the case for millions of others. Wired did a bunch of back-of-the-napkin math on how big Minecraft is and put it in an 8-bit video. Find answers to such burning questions such as the volume of the Minecraft world or the time it would take to explore the entire world in real life.

My niece and nephew play the game and its incarnations all the time. I think they even make YouTube videos of them playing. I still don't get it.

Tags: game, Minecraft, Wired

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05Feb / 2015

And the Title II goes to…

According to multiple reports and his own opinion piece in Wired, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is ready to propose rules to protect Net Neutrality by extending Title II utility status to broadband. Wheeler wrote in Wired:

Originally, I believed that the FCC could assure internet openness through a determination of “commercial reasonableness” under Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. While a recent court decision seemed to draw a roadmap for using this approach, I became concerned that this relatively new concept might, down the road, be interpreted to mean what is reasonable for commercial interests, not consumers.

That is why I am proposing that the FCC use its Title II authority to implement and enforce open internet protections.

This appears to be a victory for the grassroots activism that has been fighting the large telecom lobbyists. The full details of his proposal are not yet available. So, we shall have to wait and hope that today’s optimism is well founded in the fine print of a 300+ page document.

Filed under: Follies of the Human Condition Tagged: FCC, Federal Communications Commission, Internet, Linkonomicon, Net Neutrality, Title II, Tom Wheeler, Wired