Skynet for school shooting prediction

This sounds likely to be fraught with false positives.

In particular, the language a student uses during an interview can help distinguish a high-risk teenager [shooter] from a low-risk one, according to previous research Barzman directed. That study concluded that the former was more likely to express negative feelings about himself and about the acts of others. He also was more likely to talk about violent acts involving himself and violent video games or movies.

My clique in high school were the metalheads, barely passing nerds, and social rejects. Self-deprecation was the basis of our humor. Violent video games or movies was the basis of our media consumption. The only one of us every accused of fighting was a case of mistaken identity as the first and last (not middle) names matched the very common actual guy of another race.

Artificial intelligence is the tool of choice for this kind of stuff. I hope the research is light years ahead of where this article describes it.

MS-13

Donald Trump references an international gang as the reason to secure the southern United States border. He claims the porous border allows members of this gang to enter the country at will.

The refugees trying to enter through the southern border are from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. MS-13 dominate these countries. The refugees are fleeing the violence of this gang and the inability of their country’s leaders to deal with the gang.

I guess the question then is why is MS-13 so entrenched in these countries? Well, in the 1980s, Salvadoran immigrants to the US during their civil wars ended up in Los Angeles. In protecting their people from the American gangs, they created their own who were deported to El Salvador. Weak governments were unable to control the gangs who consolidated into MS-13. In a nutshell, though, MS-13 was created in the US and exported to Central America where it has become a disaster and is coming back to hit us in the face. The sad part to me is that President Trump is all about deporting every member of MS-13 when deportation is what made them so powerful.

The United States is probably not a good place for refugees to come as MS-13 has a strong presence here. In fearing sons being recruited in CA, coming to the USA means they will be recruited here. MS-13 is also allied with the Sinaloa cartel, whose territory is along much of Mexico near the border with the USA, so staying in the camps outside the USA means facing the risk of MS-13 finding you there too.

Wonder if the United Nations considers the issue bad enough that they might get to go to places which are not in North or Central America?

Wellness Allergy

Work has a wellness program. One component involves a website that purports to educate users about healthy eating. The funny thing to me is that I was not going to participate at all until I found out that had potentially an allergy issue. So, I thought, why not try it? Maybe it can provide some ideas on things I can eat that are healthy?

Well, apparently healthy foods are allergy foods. It recommends eating more fish, nuts, soy, eggs, cheese*, whole wheat instead of unhealthy foods. Exactly the things that are likely allergens.

Yes, I know it is cow’s milk that is a possible allergen, so goat’s or sheep’s milk likely is fine.

MLM mashup with political tribalism

A very conservative friend shared a rant I’ve seen in the past. No big deal. Curiously, though, at the end (under the See More break) was a piece of text not consistent with the rest.

If You Want True Financial Freedom and Not Have to Worry about This Contact Me and I’ll Show You a Way To Be financially FREE in Five Years Private Message Me or Send Me an Email At xxxxxxxx@gmail.com

I did a search on the email and found some interesting things. There are several Facebook pages associated with it. A web site that looks like a cheap Multi-Level Marketing scam. Basically, they claim to have you invest your money in their products (as crowdfunding), you provide the labor of the marketing of the products, and you establish an eCommerce presence to sell the products. Then you make “reverse royalty payments.”

If royalty payments are you the seller paying the intellectual property owner, then reverse royalty payments are supposed to be the IP owner paying you, the crowdfunding investor?

It smelled foul.

Leveraging political tribalism has gotten this particular post 289,770 shares. That aspect is just amazingly brilliant. Hopefully, it just creates enough outrage that people do not actually read it enough to fall for the scam.

Why does Microsoft hate Edge?

I have the default browser set to Chrome in the Windows OS. So, when I click a link in Outlook, it opens in Chrome. So, any time an application opens Internet Explorer, it is obviously something weird.

Okay, confession time, it makes me wonder if I am computer illiterate every time IE opens.

Since Edge will be three years old this coming July, I kind of expected the switch by now. Why are Microsoft applications opening links in anything other than the default browser? And why are they picking IE instead of Edge?

I thought I would fix the issue by uninstalling IE. In Control Panel > Programs > Turn features on and off, one can choose whether IE is installed. Unfortunately, that seems to have broken the ability of programs to use the default browser. Reinstalling IE fixed that.

Why Trump should counter Russian meddling in 2018 elections

A common complaint the PotUS has is that Democrats should agree with him. He rails on Twitter about this lack of support.

The Russian meddling in the 2016 elections was designed to target certain groups of people to discourage them from voting. We were already divided. The meddling exacerbated it. So, Democrats would hate Trump even more because of it.

If he wants a real chance at getting Democratic voters to agree with him, then he needs to reverse the effects of the Russian Effect.

ISP Maybe Not Neutral

It looks like maybe my ISP is forging their Ookla speed test results. Whenever I use that speed test, I get the speed I paid for, but performance otherwise still seems slow. Whenever I use other speed tests, I get results that are a quarter to a twentieth as fast.

The tests were not concurrently run. They were sequentially back and forth several times for consistent results. I’d need a lot more data to say one way or the other. I have not gotten to the point of running a thousand automated tests on every tester I can find.

Both consistently slow or intermittently slow Internet speeds might explain the issues streaming Hulu and Netflix. If it was intermittent, then in testing the speed the service might decide high speed means give me HD quality, but then a slow down causes it to start buffering and before it downgrades the fast speed is back.

How many records are there?

On the surface, it may seem like an easy question. Data Owners typically think this has an easy answer.

If their data followed a very simplistic model, then it would have an easy answer. Just “select count(*) from table;” and report the value.

Unfortunately for Data Custodians, the data is often organized in relational data structures. In my case, we almost always buy a product and are not provided or not allowed to see schema documentation. So, this question requires making judgment calls.

  1. What kinds of data do I have? Hopefully, the tables have decent names that are meaningful. Learn how to use the product and the basic concepts of what things are will come with it. Assuming the tables are meaningful, then a review of the table names will suggest where the likely important data is stored.
  2. Research elsewhere if necessary. People blog about what they know. They ask questions in forums.
  3. Experiment. Change the value in the application and look to see whether it shows in the table.
  4. Count. Get the number of records for the relevant tables.

 

Likelihood to read a tweetstorm

I’ve noticed something weird about my reading habits. I think only read maybe 1 on 25 tweetstorms authored by someone I follow. I will read about 1 in 5 retweeted by someone I follow.

Tweets appear with most recent at the top and oldest at the bottom. So, when I encounter a tweetstorm in my feed, the natural inclination is to scroll to the end and read them in reverse order. It is an unnatural threading.

When someone retweets a tweetstorm, it is just the one tweet with a notation that there is more in the thread. So, I click the tweet, it opens a page with the tweets in order where I can read them in order. It feels natural.

I guess I could click the last tweet from those I follow, get taken to the end and scroll back up to the top. That would put things in the right order.