Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

Thousands Of Mathematicians Call For Boycotting Predictive Crime A.I. From Police

After a flurry of police brutality cases this year and protests swarming the U.S. streets, thousands of mathematicians have joined scientists and engineers in calling for boycotting artificial intelligence from being used by law enforcement.

Over 2,000 mathematicians have signed a letter calling to boycott all collaboration with police and telling their colleagues to do the same in a future publication of the American Mathematical Society, Shadowproof reported.

The call to action for the mathematicians was the police killings of George Floyd, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, and many more just this year.

“At some point, we all reach a breaking point, where what is right in front of our eyes becomes more obvious,” says Jayadev Athreya, a participant in the boycott and Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington. “Fundamentally, it’s a matter of justice.”

The mathematicians wrote an open letter, collecting thousands of signatures for a widespread boycott of police using algorithms for policing. Every mathematician within the group’s network pledges to refuse any and all collaboration with law enforcement.

The group is organizing a wide base of mathematicians in the hopes of cutting off police from using such technologies. The letter’s authors cite “deep concerns over the use of machine learning, AI, and facial recognition technologies to justify and perpetuate oppression.”

Predictive policing is one key area where some mathematicians and scientists have enabled the racist algorithms, which tell cops to treat specific areas as “hotspots” for potential crime. Activists and organizations have long criticized the bias in these practices. Algorithms trained on data produced by racist policing will reproduce that prejudice to “predict” where crime will be committed and who is potentially a criminal.

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Unusual ‘fellowship’ paid high-profile, repeat Democratic candidates between runs

Several repeat Democratic candidates in high-profile races who lost their 2018 bids for Congress got direct financial help from a nonprofit organization in the form of an unusual “fellowship” during the interim period before they launched 2020 campaigns.

New Politics is a 527 advocacy group that seeks to “revitalize American democracy by recruiting, developing, and electing servant leaders” — mostly veterans, but also those who were part of national organizations or worked in national security and intelligence — ”who put community and country over self.” It has an affiliated 501(c)3 charitable nonprofit group called the New Politics Leadership Academy, which hosts a training program for prospective candidates and a fellowship program.

Six unsuccessful Democratic 2018 congressional candidates were named fellows in the inaugural fellowship class in January 2019, and four of them later launched campaigns in major races again this year: Amy McGrath, Gina Ortiz Jones, Dan Feehan, and Roger Dean Huffstetler.

A press release announcing the program gave vague descriptions of projects, such as, “examine the nature of today’s political engagement with rural voters” or to “conduct research on how to further close the rural-urban political gap.”

Gabriel Ramos, communications director for both New Politics and the New Politics Leadership Academy, told the Washington Examiner that the opportunity to become a fellow was extended to both Republican and Democratic former candidates.

“The expectation of these fellows was that they would work to advance and inform NPLA’s mission of ‘revitalizing our democracy’ through their advocacy, research, and engagement with our community,” Ramos said in a statement. “The fellows worked on several initiatives related to NPLA’s leadership development and educational mission — including projects that provided NPLA with quantitative research about the rural-urban divide and insight into how issues that are typically understood as domestic or state-level challenges, may ultimately affect national security.”

Previous comments from the group’s founder and director, Emily Cherniack, seemed to suggest that the fellowship endeavor is part of a creative way to give perpetual candidates a financial cushion in the brief period between runs for office in back-to-back election cycles.

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