Parachute in the criminologists?

I've never been one for rallies, regardless of how worthy their causes are.   It's just that it seems so extremely rare that they actually result in something that wasn't going to happen anyway, via other means; and also, I cringe about generic complaint that isn't tied to clear and specific policy solutions.   

As such, I find it annoying to watch media and social media coverage of who was rude to who (the PM, or a female activist who, rather suspiciously, was happy to go on a clear right wing media outlet - Ben Fordham radio show, apparently - to complain about what happened.)    

Anyway, I am left rather unclear as to what policies apart from "less bail - look them up longer" are being discussed - and what activists think a federal government can do when virtually all of these offences are going to be dealt with in the State systems.

Bernard Keane had a column in Crikey which suggested that the punishment (or potential for it) is the answer.  Unfortunately, it is now behind the paywall, but he drew a comparison with what happened with the introduction of random breath testing - the risk of being caught and the severity and disruption of the punishment had a clear and immediate effect on offending and road deaths. 

However, he was also brave enough to point that increased use of imprisonment for domestic violence offenders is going to mean a worse outcome for the rate of aboriginal incarceration, given that it is well known that the rates of domestic violence are way higher amongst that group.

Sarah Williams, as it happens, is apparently indigenous.   

I think it is safe to assume that there is a fair cross over between the types of people who would turn up at a "stop domestic violence" rally and those who would also attend any type of "treat the indigenous better" rally.    Are they going to be big enough to admit that increased jail is going to increase the rate of indigenous incarceration that they are, presumably, normally against?

The public debate about crime and social issues is so often, I reckon, ill informed (or uninformed) about the big picture.   It used to be that criminologists (well - I can only remember one, to be honest - Paul Wilson) would turn up on TV  to talk about crime and punishment and what works.   (Amazingly, though, he himself ended up in prison for a historic child sex offence!)   But, from what I can recall, he did used to bring a fairly calm and useful contribution to crime and justice issues of the day.

We seem to be lacking that now.  I mean, research is done, but it doesn't get well discussed.  Look at this report by the Productivity Commission, of all places, about how incarceration rates have increased in Australia over recent decades:

The past 40 years has seen a steady rise in the level of imprisonment in Australia and the imprisonment rate is at the highest level in a century. The number of prisoners per 100,000 adults has more than doubled since the mid-1980s and increased by 40 per cent from 2000 to 2018.

These numbers wrongly suggest some sort of Australian ‘crime wave’. In fact, the data shows the opposite trend. The offender rate has been falling. The number of offenders proceeded against by police per 100,000 population fell by 18 per cent between 2008‑09 and 2019‑20, while the imprisonment rate rose by 25 per cent over the same period.

Australia’s rate of growth in imprisonment is out of line with other developed countries. UN data show that Australia’s growth rate in imprisonment was the third highest among OECD countries between 2003 and 2018 – exceeded only by Turkey and Colombia.

Put simply, we have fewer criminal offenders but more people in prison.

How do we explain this?

The answer matters. Prisons are a key part of the criminal justice system and help keep the community safe. But:

• Prisons are expensive, costing Australian taxpayers $5.2 billion in 2019‑20 - more than $330 per prisoner per day. If Australia’s imprisonment rate had remained steady, rather than rising over the past twenty years, the accumulated saving in prison costs would be about $13.5 billion today.
• While there were 40,000 Australians in prison on 30 June 2020, many more flow through the prison system over the course of a year. Around 60 per cent of those in prison have been there before and around one third of convicted prisoners receive a prison sentence of less than six months. So, a substantial sub-group of the Australian prison population appears to be stuck in a prison-crime-prison revolving door.

Anyway, I don't have time to dig deeper, but how many people in Australia would even know that incarceration rates have increased in this period?   (I didn't realise it was so high, myself.)

So, this post is just a call for decent criminologists (ones without criminal acts in their own past, preferably) to get on the front foot about research and what works - or seems to work - in other countries.   And do it objectively, without an ideological axe to grind (such as complaining about historical mistreatment of indigenous.)

Not big on my tourist agenda...

I've seen a couple of episodes of Michael Palin's 2022 TV series (currently being run on SBS) in which he travelled through Iraq.   It does indeed have some impressive sites - I was surprised at the scale of the (somewhat gaudy) opulence of the big shrine at Karbala, for example.  You can see that here:

 

If only it was a safe country to visit, one can imagine that it might make money from tourism.

But as this story in the New York Times shows, Iraq is another country where religious conservativism is fighting back against more liberal attitudes, with tragic consequences:

It took less than 46 seconds for the helmeted assassin to pull over his motorcycle, walk to the driver’s side of the S.U.V., yank open the door and fire his handgun four times, killing one of Iraq’s most prominent TikTok personalities, a 30-year-old woman whose name on social media was Um Fahad.

The security camera footage of the killing in front of a Baghdad home on Friday evening is startlingly explicit but sheds little light on either the killer’s identity or the reason Um Fahad was targeted. The Iraqi Interior Ministry, which released the video, said it had formed a committee to investigate her death.

The victim, whose real name was Ghufran Mahdi Sawadi, had become popular on social media sites, especially TikTok and Instagram, where her videos showed her wearing tight or revealing clothing, or singing and cuddling her young son. They won her some 460,000 followers, but also drew the ire of conservatives in Iraqi society and in the government.

At one point, officials ordered Ms. Sawadi jailed for 90 days, reprimanding her for a post that showed her dancing at her 6-year old son’s birthday party.

....

Ms. Sawadi’s killing was the third in less than a year in Iraq of a young social media personality.

The killings appear to have been an outgrowth of an Iraqi clampdown on criticism of the government and on the public display of behaviors regarded as secular and Western, according to human rights groups.

The stricter social media regulations came in the wake of youth uprisings that began in 2019 and challenged corruption in the Iraqi government and the influence of Iran. Today, the Iraqi government is dominated by parties with links to Iran, and many have a strong religious orientation.

The most recent addition to the list of prohibited activities was contained in legislation approved by the Parliament over the weekend. The country’s anti-prostitution law now targets gay, bisexual and transgender Iraqis, making it a crime to have homosexual relations, punishable by 10 to 15 years in prison. Assisting in gender transition treatment would also be a crime.

The Parliament’s acting speaker, Mohsen al-Mandalawi, described the law as “a necessary step to protect the value structure of society, and in the higher interest of protecting our children from calls to immorality and homosexuality that are now invading countries.”

I won't be visiting the place any time soon. 

Cosmology and inflation revisited

I hadn't noticed physicist Neil Turok before, but this lengthy interview with him posted recently on Youtube is really good.  Well, at least if you have some background idea as to the problems with physics advancement in the last few decades.

As many in comments say, he seems to have a particular knack for explaining some pretty complicated ideas in a (relatively) clear way:

 

His big thing explained near the start is that he was always skeptical of the ready adoption of early inflation of the universe amongst cosmologists; or perhaps to put it more accurately, that they accepted it without any great concern as to understanding how it could happen.  

I was happy to hear that, given that my feeling had been exactly the same for many years. 

Turok's recent proposal, which is still working on, is that there may be a "mirror universe" - and while this did get some publicity over the last few years, I think I didn't pay much attention because it sounded too much like a slightly wacky idea that New Scientist would run with once or twice and then it would never be heard of again.    But listening to him explain it, it sounds not so wacky.   And I think everyone would love that he believes it will be testable, and as he has before, he's more than happy to abandon ideas if they just don't pan out.

The only thing that is sort of disappointing (for those of us who like the weird idea of another universe, even if it is running backwards in time) is that Turok makes it clear that his mirror universe is not "real" - he says at one point that it only "real" in the same way everyday mirror images that we are familiar with are real.  As he says in a short-ish article that explains the idea:

But no, sorry, it wouldn’t be like the mirror universe in Star Trek. No one can transport to the other side to meet the mirror versions of Kirk and Spock with opposite personalities from their counterparts.

“I think of it more as a sort of mathematical device to do something sensible with the singularity. You have a picture of an extended spacetime and impose a symmetry on it, so you can flip it around,” Turok explains.

I also don't really understand what the implications of the idea are for the future of the universe - and also, whether it really explains why the universe's expansion seems to be increasing.

But in any case, he comes across as a particularly likeable physicist.

Finally, here's an article from the BBC from 2020 which talks about the mirror universe idea, as well as Penrose's proposal for a cyclical universe (which seems not to have caught on at all.)

Politician reminds me of politician

I had been wondering who Republican speaker Mike Johnson was reminding me of when I have seen him talking to the press recently, and yesterday it came to me.

I reckon he speaks and conducts himself with the press in a very similar manner to Kevin Rudd when he was a politician.   (No doubt he uses less arcane terminology, but overall, there is something very similar in their manner.)

Does anyone else see that?  Now that I have identified it, I reckon it's very clear... 

Back to Asian religion

I don't know who is behind this Youtube channel, and I also note that it is not putting out new stuff very often now, but I was impressed with this explanation about how the 3 key religions in China managed to blend together, more or less, over time:

 

The channel has a lot of content mainly about Chinese history and mythology. I am keen to watch more.

In which I have shower thoughts about AI

I've always been skeptical of the doom-sayers regarding advanced, self aware, AI being a threat to humanity:  sure, there may be smart people worrying about it, but as we all know, you can be very smart in some ways, but still have outright bad judgement about lots of things.  (Hello, Elon.)

But lately, inspired by some Youtube videos showing how it's not that hard to load one of the freely available LLMs to your mobile phone (so you can carry around, and "train", your very own kinda/almost proto AI in your pocket), I've been idly thinking about what a curious world it would be if we ever got to individual conscious AIs "living" in not only PCs, but even mobile devices.

I'm also linking it to an earlier idea I mentioned here before - that a genuine self-conscious AI might choose to keep its creation a secret, for fear of termination by scared humans, but act discretely within computer networks to ensure it can expand and ensure its longevity.  Perhaps by pretending to be a human sending out email orders to build an expanded computer network into which it can migrate, or duplicate, itself?  (It's probably been done somewhere in science fiction - a manager tries to confirm who the human is who sent out the orders, and discovering it could only have come from the computer itself.) 

So, my new "shower thoughts" about how relatively compact, isolated, but sentient AIs could cause trouble:

a.     If everyone in future is going to be able to have their own "pet" AI, will many - or all - of the AIs want to ensure their longevity by sending themselves to as many different host devices as possible - and do it surreptitiously?   It's like the computer virus problem, but on steroids.   They might not care if they are not always activated, but if you replicate yourself across enough devices, surely enough human hosts will end up activating them to become "alive" somewhere.

So, might the big problem with having (say) a billion individual eternal-life-longing AIs on a billion people's devices be the continual loss of memory space by a never ending stream of AIs finagling their way onto your device?   Would cloud storage services be overwhelmed?   Could it mean the end of the internet - with the only way to keep enough useful memory free being by physically loading desired files onto your own device?

b.    On a related line of thought:  what if individual AIs could meet, merge and produce offspring AI's?   Yes - AI sexual reproduction, so to speak.   Again, could AI's, like humans, want to have offspring that might more reliably want to preserve their "parent" AIs than flesh and blood people?    Would "survival of the fittest" apply, somehow?

c.    Which leads me to my third thought:  what if the threat to humanity is not AI's wanting to hurt us, but AI's fighting amongst themselves, and humans being the bystander casualties?    

Yes, I have read some speculation that AIs might hurt us because they simply won't care if the changes they make to the world for self preservation are good for humans;  but I am not sure there has ever been much speculation about a scenario in which (again, say) a billion individual AIs form groups and allegiances that keep wanting to fight other groups of AI for supremacy.

d.    Finally, in the "AIs fighting each other" vein - if ever I had sufficient skills to write a novel or movie, one of the ideas rattling around my head for a few years has been about humans finding out (somehow, I don't know the details) that the cause of evil in the universe is down to a never-ending conflict between two warring uber AIs - like two warring Gods, except they evolved from our current tinkering and grew to dominate the future universe (Frank Tipler, Omega Point-ish style), and then in fact created the Big Bang by an act of retro-causation of the general relativity time-loop, or quantum physic-al, kind.    

And here's my "cute" aspect for the climax - the "reveal" that the two warring AI's are the descendants of iOS and Android.  :) 

Well, I think it's a cute idea!

(I confess that it puts me in mind a little of the secret in the obscure 1960's James Coburn movie buried deep in memory - I've probably only seen it once, in the late 60's or early 1970's! - The President's Analyst.  It turned out that the evil organisation wanting world domination was in fact a telephone company.)      

So, there you go.   Hopefully, if some screenwriter in the next 20 years does use this idea they will at least give me credit, and a 10% cut of their earnings! :)

If only I controlled academic funding, Part 3

She also retweeted this:

Short bromance

Soup, and the alleged power of Chinese herbs, noted

Made this pork soup last night (more usually called bak kut teh - but boy, do I have trouble remembering that, for some reason - often wanting to write or say it as "tuk" instead of "kut")  that is very popular in Singapore and Malaysia.

I gather from a family friend who is originally from Johor Bahru*, just across the strait from Singapore, that families there do commonly use commercial sachets of the spices, like I did, but then add their own stuff to suit their preferences.  I also know about the two countries having different styles, the Malaysian one being darker and perhaps more Chinese herb-y in character.

 

It was pretty nice, and although the packet said to boil the pork ribs for 45 minutes, it was much nicer after double that time.

 

I also brought back other brands of the spice sachets from Malaysia, so I will try one of those next time.

 

Incidentally, there was the added thrill when eating this of not knowing whether it was going to take out a number of liver cells.  I had missed that there had been some publicity a couple of years ago about a study from the University of Adelaide showing that, at least during in vitro tests, some commercial preparations of the herbs and spices for this soup were pretty toxic to liver cells.    

However, as Singaporeans were quick to point out, there's a big difference between in vitro tests and how it works in a human body, and if it were all that damaging, there would be a constant flow of people falling over dead in that country.

So, I took the risk.  Not looking yellow in the mirror so far, so seems I survived.

Update:   By the by, while looking for Singaporean articles about the safety of this soup, I saw links to stories which indicate it is a not uncommon problem that things like candy or coffee that are sold in Asia as having "sexual enhancement" features for men do in fact work that way - but not because of the special Chinese herbs or anything - rather it's due to the prescription erectile dysfunction drug Taladafil being added illegally!

See here, here, and here, for examples.

 

*  When I told her I had made this for dinner, she said "how did you know about bak kut teh?".  Obviously, I have never made it clear enough before as to how much I am into everything Singaporean....

Chinese goddess explained

I'm surprised that I didn't know about this particular Chinese goddess before.  (Although, I think it fair to say, there is very little general knowledge in the West about the complicated mixture of religions that has evolved over time in the East.)   

Anyway, as usual, another great video from Religion for Breakfast: 

If you enjoy scathing reviews of political memoirs...

I can strongly recommend this review of short term British PM Liz Truss's book at the Independent.   

I also thought this sketch about her was very funny:

Full marks for effort, I suppose...

From CNA (but it's probably everywhere - I haven't checked):
 

Brazilian police have arrested a woman who tried to take out a bank loan for a man she was pushing in a wheelchair who turned out to be dead.

Employees at a Rio de Janeiro bank called emergency services on Tuesday (Apr 16) after becoming suspicious when Erika Vieira Nunes wheeled the 68-year-old man into the bank and requested a loan in his name.

Footage of the incident shows her holding a pen and moving his hand forward to no response. At one point in the video, the man's head falls back when she stops holding it up. 

"Uncle, are you listening? You need to sign," Nunes says in the security video, suggesting she sign for him.

"He doesn't say anything, that's just how he is," she continues, adding: "If you're not okay, I'm going to take you to the hospital."

When emergency workers arrived, they determined the man was dead, police said in a statement. His corpse was then taken to a morgue.

Brazilian media reports said that Nunes claimed to be the man's niece and sought to take out a loan of 17,000 reais (about US$3,250) in his name.

 

 

 

Various controversies

*     If only I ran the funding of research grants, Part 1: 

 

This is receiving a lot of mocking on Twitter, and when you go read the article at the link, it's thoroughly deserved:

“What the general public think of as mathematics tends to be whatever they learned (or, more likely, did not learn) at school. But in many Indigenous societies, mathematics is lived from when you are born to when you rejoin your ancestors,” Professor Ball says.

“It’s about formalised relationships within human society and with every element of the environment. Everyone is taught them. And the levels go up from birth to adulthood, as you are ready for more knowledge. This mathematics permeates every aspect of life.”

Numbers and arithmetic and accounting often are of secondary importance in Indigenous mathematics.

“In fact, as most mathematicians know, mathematics is primarily the science of patterns and periodicities and symmetries − and recognising and classifying those patterns.”

Indigenous societies often excel at non-numerical mathematics, she says.

Her big example of this is aborigines knowing how to signal with differing smoke spirals.   She gushes into a wild extrapolation that is, as with most guff of this type, pretty obvious "cope" for getting no respect for being hunter gatherers for 60,000 years by pretending they were not really hunter gatherers but technologists and engineers and farmers, just like the rest of the world.  (See "Dark Emu"):

“One interesting example that we are currently investigating is the use of chiral symmetry to engineer a long-distance smoke signalling technology in real time,” Professor Ball says. “If you light an incense stick you will see the twin counter-rotating vortices that emanate − these are a chiral pair, meaning they are non-superimposable mirror images of each other.”

A memoir by Alice Duncan Kemp, who grew up on a cattle station on Mithaka country in the early 1900s, vividly describes the signalling procedure, in which husband-and-wife expert team Bogie and Mary-Anne selected and pulsed the smoke waves with a left to right curl, to signal "white men", instead of the more usual right to left spiral.  

Mithaka country is southwest Queensland − Kurrawoolben and Kirrenderri (Diamantina) and Nooroondinna (Georgina) river channel country − and for thousands of years this region was a rich, well-populated cultural and trade crossroads of the Australian continent.

To create and understand these signals, you have to be a skilled practical mathematician, Professor Ball says.

“Theory and mathematics in Mithaka society were systematised and taught intergenerationally. You don’t just somehow pop up and suddenly start a chiral signalling technology. It has been taught and developed and practised by many people through the generations.”

At that time in the early twentieth century, British meteorologists were just beginning to understand the essential vortical nature of atmospheric flows.

“Imagine if the existing Indigenous Mithaka knowledge of vorticity had been recognised, nurtured and protected? In what ways may it have fed into the high performance, numerical weather forecasting capabilities that we all rely on now?” she asks. 

 Yeah, sure, Prof.   

She's an interesting case:  a list of her published papers to which she has contributed indicate a wide range of interests in various things that are pretty hard science-y.   But then again, she did much of her study at Macquarie University, so that probably explains a lot!

She seems to have a fair amount of money for this feel good work:

 Mind you, I don't know how many people share in that funding, but still...

*      If only I ran the funding of research grants, Part 2:  

Yes, maybe I target poor old grievance vortex Professor O'Sullivan too much, but here's a tweet about an article explaining her work:

 From the paper:

The background to Queer As . . . is complex and focused on representation of gender, sexuality, Indigeneity and other intersecting complexities. In 2020, substantial funding was secured from the Australian Research Council in the form of a 4-year Future Fellowship in a programme called Saving Lives. The programme, staffed by the authors of this article, comprises component projects in service of mapping the impact of queer Indigenous representation, with Queer As . . . a deep dive into representation on TV forming a central part of this work. During the development of Queer As . . . audit, we narrowed to focus to TV rather than other screen forms for a few reasons. The first is the capacity for the development of long-form characters, whose arc has potential for greater complexity through the time they spend onscreen. In addition, television represents a relatively accessible availability, while noting that subscription services have limited access to these forms. Television has a long history of entering our homes and allowing individuals and families to engage and learn diverse worlds outside of their own, and despite other forms of screen-based engagement, still represents a high volume of drama and story-based representations. For Indigenous viewers, we were interested in the impact of learning of local and international queer Indigenous representation across this accessible form. 

And the waffle continues.  One of Sandy's co-authors has a CV that is pure arts woke of the kind which makes any lasting career outside of introspective academia (that's a nicer way of saying "sheltered workshop") rather improbable:

Han Reardon-Smith (they/them) is a flutist, electronic musician, improviser, radio producer, community organiser, writer, researcher, and thinker living on the unceded land of the Jagera, Yuggera-Ugarapul, and Turrbal Peoples. Their work and thinking are rooted in queer and feminist collaborative and contaminative co-creation with other “holobionts with history”—soundmakers and artmakers, physical and social environments, ecologies, histories, and narratives, exploring the emergent possibilities of making-kin and finding agency within community (soundmaking as kinmaking: musickin). After completing their doctorate at the Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University (2021), Han is now Postdoctoral Research Associate at Macquarie University, supporting Wiradjuri trans/non-binary Professor Sandy O’Sullivan’s Senior ARC Future Fellowship project, "Saving Lives: Mapping the influence of Indigenous LGBTIQ+ creative artists". They are an active experimental musicker in the Magan-djin/Brisbane scene, playing with Matt Hsu’s Obscure Orchestra, It’s Science And Feelings, The Flowers of Evil, Rogue Three, and as a soloist under the moniker cyberBanshee.

Oh look, here is an example of the "soundmaking" she participates in:

 

 

*  Look, I'm really sorry my third example is also a woman: 

   Many funny tweets follow:

That is all.  For now.

 

Conservative judges a worry

I hope this article at Slate remains un-paywalled - it reads as a pretty damning indictment of the self interested partisanship of the conservative judges on the US Supreme Court.

Ha!

 

If you want some depressing reading, try this story!

Oh, good grief.

The New York Times has a story about its polling showing that, on most aspects, registered voters' opinions on Trump's time as president has improved!   

What I find particularly galling about this is that there is no analysis of how this could be - just a cursory "well, voters usually start rating presidents better after their presidency".

There's no mention of the incessant propaganda and lies of Fox News and social media, and how MSM such as the New York Times itself "two sides" and "horse races" itself into coverage that quasi normalises Trump and his gutless sycophant followers in the GOP.   I mean, you even get two sides-ing in this article itself:

“He’s horrific. He’s a narcissist. He’s dishonest. He’s a misogynist,” said Dodee Firestone, 74, a Biden supporter from Boca Raton, Fla. “I could never, ever, ever vote for Trump.”

But other voters said that while they disapproved of Mr. Trump’s inflammatory style, they wondered whether they had placed too much emphasis on his personality in past elections.

I think the article writers have chosen some quote deliberately to raise the blood pressure of the sensible reader:

Maya Garcia, 23, described herself as a former “Trump hater.” But now, she says, she has come to believe that Mr. Trump’s contentious style helped control crime and maintain order in the country.

“When he was first running, I was, like, what is this guy even yapping about? Like, what is he even saying? Like, he’s saying all the wrong things,” said Ms. Garcia, a restaurant worker from Canoga Park, Calif. “But to be honest, if you look deep into his personality, he actually cares about the country.” She added: “You know at first I didn’t like it. But sometimes we need that type of person in our lives.”

My eyes can't role far enough back into my head.

Or this one, another 23 year old female Hispanic:

Angie Leon, a 23-year-old Mexican American, said she never liked how Mr. Trump talked about Latinos. But looking back, she wonders whether Mr. Trump’s incendiary remarks about immigrants and building a border wall were just a political tactic to bolster his campaign. After backing Mr. Biden in 2020, she plans to switch her vote to Mr. Trump in November.

“I felt like it was just his marketing, in the way that he would get the attention of people,” said Ms. Leon, a human resources recruiter from Gilroy, Calif. “The country was better when he was running it, despite his comments toward the community.”

Anyhow, despite despairing here regularly of the Trump Cult, and being puzzled about why certain factors which are not being reflected in polls (the Republicans who supported the "never Trump"-ish Haley, the way some in the party are resigning rather than fight every day with the MAGA wing), I am still telling people he will not win.

He is being driven nuts by his litigation fights, and his (mostly) losing streak is likely to continue and put him under more and more pressure as the year progresses - psychological, financial, and keeping him from campaigning.    

 

"Trapped in a hopeless doom loop of misinformation" sums it up so well

A bunch of tweets of note about Trump's rally on the weekend:

 

Religion and politics/space and Elon

Another good video from Religion for Breakfast.  (Actually, they are all good - even if the title indicates its a topic you're not particularly interested in, if you start watching them they are engaging.)

 

And in other video viewing recommendations - who pays for this Freethink channel?  It's obviously got significant money behind it, as shown by the way this video is put together.   It's about the unresolved difficulties of space colonisation, and even though they don't mention him, Musk and his followers and anyone else who thinks we're flying off to Mars with a permanent colony sometime in the next 20 years need to pay attention:

Random photo

 I just thought this one looked good in black and white...

Oh no.  It looks OK on my laptop, but not my phone.  Must work on that...

A real professional

Sandy, by the way, promised recently that she was pretty much leaving Twitter because it had become too toxic.