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In case you missed it like I did, here's our own Nicole Belle with Nicole Sandler with their Fools on the Hill Sunday talking heads show roundup from past Monday. Nicole Sandler has more here: Grayson & Tudor – Florida Progressives!
And in hour two, Nicole Belle of Crooks & Liars returns for our weekly Fools on the Hill segment, discussing the Sunday talking head shows. Here’s her take on the Sunday shows:
So I think today’s theme is cluelessness:
Chris Matthews asks his panel if the Tea Party will have veto power over the 2012 GOP nominee. First and foremost, they are using Sarah Palin as some benchmark of influence, which is ludicrous. Her endorsement is by no means a shoo-in for any candidate right now, and there’s nothing that says her influence will strengthen in the intervening years. If anything, if she opts to pursue a national candidacy herself, I suspect that the media scrutiny will result in her having even less credibility.
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/node/39178
It also gives the tea party itself far more credit than they deserve. I think we’ve seen middling electoral success from them in primary races, but they have yet to show themselves successful in full elections and given the polls for Angle, Paul and others, I don’t think they should crow just yet.
Which segues nicely into Howard Dean. He points out to Candy Crowley that although the conventional wisdom is that the party in power suffers electorally in mid-terms, when your alternative is the Party of No, conventional wisdom may be wrong.
http://crooksandliars.com/nicole-belle/howard-dean-name-one-thing-republican
And then we have Dick Armey, the corporate head of the Tea Party, spouting off some truly unbelievable stuff:
http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/dick-armey-medicare-trashes-constitution
He says that Medicare trashes the Constitution. Huh? What does he think those lazy, entitled senior citizens should do? Work to pay for their Alzheimer’s treatment? For proof, he brings up the example of “the” Christian Scientist, whom we apparently should feel bad is being forced to sign up for a doctor to get Social Security. Of course, no one says he has to GO to the doctors, just sign up for Medicare. But again, David Gregory falls down on the job of calling out this crap, and lets Armey filibuster through the segment and not allow Granholm to respond.
And then, in light of the protests on the Cordoba House in NYC over the weekend, Fareed Zakaria wants to remind Americans that we are not in a war with Islam and that al Qaeda hates factions of Islam as bad as they hate us.
http://crooksandliars.com/nicole-belle/fareed-zakaria-gps-al-qaeda-vs-islam
By the way, a commenter made this video of the NYC protests when the haters went after a passerby, who happened to be a construction worker at Ground Zero and not a Muslim.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwaNRWMN-F4&feature=player_embedded
George Will thinks that the Mideast peace process is the biggest obstacle to Mideast peace.
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/node/39185
Amazingly, I actually agree with him if only for this story:
http://crooksandliars.com/ian-welsh/israeli-pm-natanyahu-america-easily-move
I think if we really want to see Mideast peace, then the US needs to come to grips with the dichotomy between what Israel officially tells us and what they say behind closed doors.
And then Fox chooses to use Judith Miller of all people to discuss the study that American people have lost faith in broadcast news
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/node/39175
Really, what can you say about them using the person the Bush White House used to feed propaganda about invading Iraq to?
Our own Howie Klein and Rep. Alan Grayson joined the show this week as well. Go over to Nicole's site to listen to the whole show.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will roll out more regulations on greenhouse gases and other pollution to help fight climate change,
top five are pictures from my new camera
After months of pressure from state attorneys general, Craigslist pulled its adult services listings offline over the Labor Day weekend. Visitors to the site were greeted with a black bar with the word "censored" in white text (as seen to the right) where the link to the adult services listings would normally be.
The adult services listings have been a perpetual source of concern for law enforcement, including numerous state attorneys general, who have said that listings facilitate prostitution and that children are often victimized by the ads. Craigslist originally had an Erotic Services section, but shut it down in May 2009 in response to pressure from law enforcement. The company had previously attempted to stave off criticism by verifying listings over the phone and working with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, but decided that having an entire section of the site devoted to the sex trade was a bad idea. Shortly after the erotic services section was yanked, it was replaced with the adult services section.
The new section, which required credit card payments for listings that were reviewed by moderators before going live, failed to mollify critics. The attorney general of Connecticut and 37 of his colleagues across the country subpoenaed the classified site over what they described as its brothel business. In late August, Kansas attorney general Steve Six called on Craigslist once again to shut down adult services, saying that the site had not done enough to fight "illegal sexual activity on the Internet."
At this time, it's not clear whether craigslist is going to get out of the adult services business altogether. The classifieds giant has remained silent so far, not offering any rationale for its move. If this does indeed mark the end of the line for the adult services section on Craigslist, it doesn't mean that all adult services ads will magically vanish; they're likely to migrate to other parts of the site. That said, the attorneys general will no doubt view the apparent shutdown of the adult services section as a victory in their war against the online sex trade.
Read the comments on this post
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126833083
I've recently been writing on applying Open Source Intelligence methods to the problem of Monitoring Right Wing Extremists On Twitter.
People have expressed interest in how to better see what is happening ... and this can be done without engaging the extremists at all.
First, what we're looking for are screen shots with some additional context, and we want them added to the Wingnut Watch pool on Twitter. You can get a Yahoo account, find some interesting stuff, screen shot it, and place it in the pool.
Knowing how to make a report isn't all that much use without being able to find the content. There are a variety of free tools to do this.
Look at the Wingnut Watch pool - see the URL for the Wingnut Watch NetVibes console? This is the root of it all - there are various panels that show certain Twitter users and topics that make a good starting point.
It's interesting to take two of the worst of the worst and one lesser player, then place them into Follower Wonk's Twitter user comparison. Check the overlap between the accounts and you should find an interesting group to examine.
Twitalyzer is another potent package for exploring the discussion space. Get yourself a login and try every little thing, but pay careful attention to the Network Explorer feature under People and Groups. There is no quicker way I know to start with a specific account, figure out when they are active, who their associates are, and what they're talking about.
Followerwonk provides another handy tool in the form of a Twitter bio search that ranks those it finds by their follower counts. Using #wreckingcrew as a search will lead to the command and control communications for a cyberbullying operation run by @GregWHoward.
This is enough information to give you a good starting point. Just be sure the userid you pick for Flickr is in no way associated with anything in the real or virtual world that ties to you and you'll be able to keep an eye on things ... without looking over your shoulder for crazy people incited by this 'WreckingCrew'.
FYI follow on intimidation after this was published.
You know, I don't normally go in for what usually turn out to be empty, symbolic gestures, but I can really get behind the idea of cutting Congressional salaries. In fact, I think 10% is more like it! I also think we should charge them to use the medical clinic in the Capitol building, and they should have to pay for COBRA benefits when they lose their jobs, just like everybody else. It really galls me to think of them getting lifelong medical coverage:
Ann Kirkpatrick wants a pay cut and she’s getting testy about having to wait so long to get it.
Last March, U.S. Rep. Kirkpatrick sponsored legislation to cut congressional salaries a modest 5%, saying it was high time that Congress shared the pain with the rest of America. As U.S. workers have suffered layoffs, pay cuts and furloughs over the past two years, Congress has actually been spending more money than ever. In fact, if it hadn’t been for another bill that Kirkpatrick supported, Kirkpatrick and her colleagues in the U.S. legislature would have gotten automatic pay raises this year, as they did in 2008 and 2009.
The notion of cutting Congressional pay is wildly popular. A recent survey by the Rasmussen Reports found that 75% of Americans think members of Congress should cut their pay until the budget is balanced. And nearly one in eight think members of Congress should not be able to get a raise unless taxpayers vote for it.
As things stand, members of Congress set their own pay and they’ve been quite generous. Rank and file members of congress now earn $174,000 annually — more than about 97% of the rest of the country. That’s up 23% over the past decade.
At the recent 2010 Computational Intelligence in Games conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, there were competitions for making race car controllers, human-like FPS bots, and Ms. Pac Man players, among others. The competition that drew my interest, however, was the Mario level design competition, which challenged entrants to create procedural level generators that could generate fun and interesting levels based on information about a particular player’s style. The restrictions on entries (use only fixed numbers of gaps, coin blocks, and Koopas) meant that the winner would have to be cunning: it wouldn’t be easy to just estimate player skill and make the level more or less difficult by adding or removing obstacles; you would instead have to find ways to place obstacles that made the same obstacles more or less difficult. And because entries would be played by players at different skill levels, they would have to be flexible and adjust their output over a broad range of difficulties to get a high score. Finally, because score was based on the audience’s relative rating of enjoyment between level pairs, there would be no way to game the system and optimize some metric set without making truly enjoyable levels. Between these constraints, the winning entry should have been a demonstration of the power of procedural content generation to adapt to players of different skill levels, which is one of several reasons that PCG is useful in games. Unfortunately, the competition design may have been a bit too clever.
I say this because the winning entry (submitted by my fellow EIS student Ben Weber) didn’t have any of the desirable properties mentioned above (you can read about its algorithm in the previous post). Ben hacked together a simple generator in a couple of hours of spare time, which built levels by scattering things about randomly over the course of a few passes. Ben’s entry ignored the data about the player, and didn’t try to work with the constraints, instead just ignoring them and then adding a final processing pass that made sure they were satisfied (which my entry did as well, to be honest). Thus rather than showcasing smart PCG that adapts to the player in order to provide an enjoyable experience, the competition seemed to give evidence that a good randomized (or even static) level could beat the best efforts at adaption.
So what does this tell us about the competition? Did it have a flawed design? Is the best that considerable research into procedural content generation has to offer worse than a few hours of hacking?
Personally, I think that there are a couple of things to take away from this. First and foremost, the competition was a success because it resulted in six practical functioning generation systems. One of the main goals of any academic competition is to motivate the creation of working systems from research ideas, and this one succeeded at that. Second, I think that the design of the competition could have used some more work. It focused on adaption, which is pretty difficult to measure, and the evaluation framework wasn’t quite up to the task. A really great competition not only provides motivation for system building, but also becomes a means of comparing the practical results of different approaches to a problem, and I don’t think that the CIG 2010 results were strong enough to be valid in this regard.
On the other hand, Ben’s victory should be taken seriously. It’s evidence that a strong level design (embedded in his algorithm, in this case) can have a large influence on fun, and that adaption (at least as done by the other competition entries) may pale in comparison. Of course, I don’t think that the competition results are quite strong enough to say that conclusively, but it certainly is worth investigating the tradeoffs between raw level design and adaption. Perhaps future competitions should pick a different aspect of PCG to encourage, or at least think hard about how they are designed as experiments. Of course, part of the problem may lie with the entrants: only one of the entries from EIS stressed adaption, since our work in this lab is more focused on having a large and interesting output space for our generators, and on working with humans during the design process. If other entrants treated the issue similarly, it may have been the case that there simply weren’t any entries with strong adaption techniques in the competition.
Despite mixed results, the competition was fun: I got to show off my own generation algorithm (which unfortunately broke during the competition itself) and meet other people to learn about their efforts. And even though the experiment design wasn’t ideal in practice, the constraints motivated me to address the issue of adaption within my system, which wouldn’t have happened without them. When I gave a talk that explained my entry the response was pretty positive, and Alex Champanard from AiGameDev.com mentioned the competitions prominently in his review of the conference. If the level generation competition is repeated next year at CIG 2011 in Seoul, it’s likely to see continued participation from EIS, and maybe we’ll even become perennial favorites.
(For the curious, the slides from my talk at CIG and the paper that presents the algorithm I used for my entry are available from my website at http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~pmawhorter/research.html)
