Corporations behaving badly: Multinational Monitor describes the ten worst corporations of 2001: Abbott, Argenbright, Bayer, Coca-Cola, Enron, ExxonMobil, Phillip Morris, Sara Lee, Southern and Wal-Mart.
Monsanto isn’t on the list, but should be right up there given the evidence of its decades-long concealment of PCB contamination in an Alabama town. Washington Post
Spotting the face of deception
The airports of the future could identify potential terrorists by using a lie detector that spots concealed blushing with a super-sensitive thermal imaging camera. Liars are betrayed by the heat that rushes to their face when they tell a fib, according to scientists in the United States. Blood flow to the surface of the skin around the eyes increases when someone tells a lie. BBC
Yes, and when someone is emotionally aroused for any of a myriad of other reasons — being nervous about flying, missing the people left behind, hassled by traffic or security procedures at the airport, having just had a stimulating interaction with an attractive stranger, etc. This proposal is another example of technological innovation without thought. Although polygraph technology has always been controversial, it has the advantage at least of not being a random sampling of the person’s physiological state of arousal but a controlled experimental probe in response to specific questions, analyzed by a trained technologist. The supposed advantage of this new system is that it gives instantaneous results to untrained observers … of the ilk of the minimum-wage workers currently responsible for airport security. I trust that, because of the enormous potential for (and potential cost of) false positives, this technology will never see the light of day.
In related news, an ACLU report reviews the failure of face recognition technology in Tampa, Florida.
Facial recognition technology on the streets of Tampa, Florida is an overhyped failure that has been seemingly abandoned by police officials, according to a report released today by the American Civil Liberties Union.
System logs obtained by the ACLU through Florida’s open-records law show that the system never identified even a single individual contained in the department’s database of photographs. And in response to the ACLU’s queries about the small number of system logs, the department has acknowledged that the software — originally deployed last June, 2001 — has not been actively used since August.
“Tampa’s off-again, on-again use of face-recognition software reminds us that public officials should not slavishly embrace whatever latest fad in surveillance technology comes along,” said Howard Simon, Executive Director of the ACLU of Florida, which made the records request last August.
The logs obtained by the ACLU also indicate that the system made many false matches between people photographed by police video cameras as they walked down Seventh Avenue in Tampa’s Ybor City district and photographs in the department’s database of criminals, sex offenders, and runaways. The system made what were to human observers obvious errors, such as matching male and female subjects and subjects with significant differences in age or weight.
An Adobe Acrobat version of the full report is downloadable from a link at the site. This finding parallels the discussion the crime-fighting failure of public video surveillance in widespread use in the UK, as discussed in a New York Times Magazine article to which I blinked earlier this fall.
John Nichols: Reich’s Candidacy is Intriguing Idea:
As someone who covers politics, I think there is nothing more disturbing than the penchant of Americans who have been entrusted with Cabinet-level posts to hightail it into the private sector as soon as their terms end. It is a good thing that Clinton administration aides such as Reich and former Attorney General Janet Reno are looking to make bids for governorships in Massachusetts and Florida, respectively.
(…) The idea of having someone who is actually, er, smart, serving in an important position may seem outdated in this moment of the mediocre. But it remains appealing to those of us who actually have to cover campaigns and governments.Madison Capital Times via CommonDreams
Monbiot: This is The Year of the Right: But Progressives Can Fight Back if They Abandon All the Old Strategies. “There is a widespread fallacy that the destruction of society was engineered in recent times, notably by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The notion is comforting because it suggests that the trend is reversible. But social fragmentation has been the work of centuries.
” Guardian UK via CommonDreams
A serial killer analyzes serial killing: ‘The 1960s “Moors Murderer,” Ian Brady, still haunts the British psyche. His recently published book shows why.’
Sorry, a spate of hardware problems (of my own making, of course) on my home system has prevented me from posting for the past several days of intensive tinkering and tweaking. I think I’ve got things on an even keel now, and will be back at it again… Happy New Year, belatedly, to you all.
