AI is poisoned with bias against dark skin

 

Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini says she’s found that face-analyzing AI works significantly better for white faces than Black faces.

She tested software from Microsoft, IBM, and the Chinese company Megvii to see how well each of their face-scanning systems did at figuring out whether a person in a picture was a man or a woman—a task all three are supposed to be able to perform. 

If the person in the photo was a white man, her study found, the systems guessed correctly more than 99 percent of the time. For black women, though, the systems messed up between 20 and 34 percent of the time—which, if you consider that guessing at random would mean being right 50 percent of the time, means they came close to not working at all.

Google famously misidentified pics of Africans with gorillas. (Note: the pic to the left IS a real gorilla). No one wants to offend dark-skinned people, so they developed a program to automatically change the skin color in photographs. The European כוסית girl you may be considering on a dating site may well be in reality a Zulu or Andamanese. Not that this is bad, but if they start manipulating the appearance of people on the internet, they may end up giving clear blue eyes or yellow hair to everybody. Fat will be slimmed down and short people will become taller. And so on. 

Alternatively, Nordic persons will be changed into Africans, like President Donald Trump who was shown with strange orange skin in the media. Or healthy people will be given the appearance of sickness, like recent pics of Vladimir Putin.  But illusion will not make us free.   

Elliot suing the London Metal Exchange

 

Elliott, the macho hedge fund that forced Argentina to pay in full its bonds, making a few hundred million, is now suing the London Metal Exchange (pic) for 456 million dollars, for halting trading and canceling bets on the nickel market when chaos developed. 

WHAT HAPPENED ON MARCH 8?

The world's largest and oldest forum for trading suspended disorderly nickel trading after prices doubled in a few hours on expectations that China's Tsingshan Holdings and others would have to cut their large short position.

Short positions are bets on lower prices. Tsingshan sold large amounts on nickel using futures contracts, which the market expected it would have to buy back.

I presume that Mr. Singer is persona non grata in the United Kingdom. His heraldic animal must be the vulture. 

Buffet buys OXY

Buffet has bought all the OXY shares available and wants more. Is oil still the cheapest energy source? Is the electric vehicle craze a passing fashion?  Is all the green push to wind and solar energy a monumental failure? But I am losing with DELEK... 

Pic.: Armand Hammer, the former owner of OXY. Son of the founder of the American Communist Party.

They will fight

One of the questions raised by low fertility is if the boys will fight when the time comes. The typical Japanese, Korean, Chinese, or Russian soldier is an only child, grown in a family where he is the adored,  pampered treasure of elderly parents, in an aging adult society where the life of every child is precious. Will the State be willing to endanger and sacrifice its younger generation? 

Russia is providing the answer. It is risking the lives of its soldiers in a foreign land, and Russian boys are obeying orders and fighting.  

Diversity in Israel

 

The warning is written in the main languages of our country. Hebrew and Thai. 

Ricardo's Rent

 Alex Tabarrok writes: 

Why has housing become so expensive in high-productivity places? It is true that there are geographic constraints (Manhattan isn’t getting any bigger) but zoning and other land-use restrictions including historical and environmental “protection” are reducing the amount of land available for housing and how much building can be done on a given piece of land. As a result, in places with lots of restrictions on land use, increased demand for housing shows up mostly in house prices rather than in house quantities.

The prices in Israel are prohibitive, especially in Tel Aviv.  The apparent reason is that Israelis are earning good wages and saving and investing. Old-timers that invested in real estate are rich and harvesting the rent produced by the success of the country. 

Great Powers Politics weighs upon Israel

 

America has decided to combat China's progress towards economic supremacy and to punish Russia for impeding the expansion of NATO. Israel has international bidding to build the Haifa Nazareth light train line. Suddenly, the Chinese and Russian companies withdraw their offers or, probably, were rejected. Israel will pay more for this infrastructure and the quality will be inferior. This stupid blackballing is costing us a lot. But I understand that we must obey the orders of our leader - America.