1. You see, it's just like Klout, which is obviously a perfect representation of the underlying social world, but used for police targeting. 

"Wernick explains that the CPD’s crime database also obviously identifies everyone in the city who’s been arrested for and / or convicted of a crime. Though he wouldn’t share specific details about what went into the algorithms, he says those algorithms are quickly able to narrow down the list of people who 'clearly have a high likelihood of being involved in violence.' He says it even ranks them according to their chance of becoming involved in a shooting or a homicide.

'It's not just shooting somebody, or being shot,' he says. 'It has to do with the person’s relationships to other violent people.'

This is in line with what Andrew Papachristos, a Yale sociologist and Chicago native, calls a social networking theory. When it comes to violence, Papachristos recently told Chicago Magazine, 'It’s not just about your friends and who you’re hanging out with, it’s actually the structure of these networks that matter.'

So while Wernick acknowledges that sometimes people such as Robert McDaniel — who haven’t been convicted of a violent crime — may find themselves in the wrong social networks, their presence on the list is not random.

A press liaison for the NIJ explains in an email: "These are persons who the model has determined are those most likely to be involved in a shooting or homicide, with probabilities that are hundreds of times that of an ordinary citizen."

Commander Steven Caluris, who also works on the CPD’s predictive policing program, put it a different way.

'If you end up on that list, there’s a reason you’re there.'"

2. The afterlife of Pizza Huts. 

"These beautiful structures, most likely now devoid of the table-top Pac Man machines, dot the American landscape. Some provide ethnic food, some, used cars, and a rare few are now municipal buildings. Whatever their current purpose, we can always be reminded of the mediocre pizza that was once served in these establishments. That, and those red plastic cups."
 

3. Millions of tiny mirrors measure oxygen levels in man's foot, save his fourth toe from amputation.

"Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) can help surgeons make quick decisions in the operating room, as it detects issues not visible to the naked eye..

La Fontaine cited a case in which HSI allowed an injured patient’s toe to be saved, a toe which he initially thought would require amputation. HSI monitors oxygen levels in the tissues, which provided instant analysis of this patient’s foot. La Fontaine said his first impression had been that both the fifth and fourth toes would have to be removed to eliminate a risk of infection in the dead tissue. Surgeons routinely need to amputate because of infection or lack of blood flow to a part of the body, he noted. 

The HSI images helped La Fontaine decide exactly how much dead tissue needed to be removed from the patient’s foot, and he found that only the fifth toe required amputation...

La Fontaine’s HSI instrument used a Texas Instruments digital micromirror device, a set of millions of tiny mirrors each measuring about 1 µm. The device generates high-resolution images to indicate the presence of certain molecules. "

4. Landscape forensics.

"Reading a landscape is tricky: you need to look hard to detect unseen dynamics, hidden workings. What you see depends on what you are looking for, and where you are looking from: a geologist, a developer and a birdwatcher will see different possibilities in the same plot. That which is plainly visible is often only a small part of the story of a place, and the available evidence is viewed through the lens of prior knowledge and beliefs. This poses a problem for landscape photography, which by its nature must represent the visible. How do we visualize climate change, for example, or politically disputed claims on land and resources?

Bezzubov’s series Things Fall Apart (2001-07), depicts the aftermath of natural disasters in India, Indonesia, Thailand and the United States. The pictures function in part as documents of these tragic events, but the series as a whole does not convey enough specific information to be useful as documentary work. Rather, the images blend together to form a more generalized, and aestheticized, portrayal of destruction, following the long artistic tradition of appreciating the melancholy beauty of ruins and nature’s destructive power. That tradition is closely tied to the idea of the sublime — a sensation of beauty and terror in the face of nature’s power — prevalent in 18th and early 19th century philosophy and landscape art, and often understood as a way of experiencing the divine. Nature’s power is certainly evident in Bezzubov’s images, but the knowledge that human-caused climate change has increased the frequency and strength of catastrophic storms reshapes our sense of the sublime."

5. The computer-generated proof to a long standing math theorem is basically uncheckable by humans.

"Erdős thought that for any infinite sequence, it would always be possible to find a finite sub-sequence summing to a number larger than any you choose - but couldn't prove it.

It is relatively easy to show by hand that any way you arrange 12 pluses and minuses always has a sub-sequence whose sum exceeds 1. That means that anything longer – including any infinite sequence – must also have a discrepancy of 1 or more. But extending this method to showing that higher discrepancies must always exist is tough as the number of possible sub-sequences to test quickly balloons.

Now Konev and Lisitsa have used a computer to move things on. They have shown that an infinite sequence will always have a discrepancy larger than 2. In this case the cut-off was a sequence of length 1161, rather than 12. Establishing this took a computer nearly 6 hours and generated a 13-gigabyte file detailing its working.

The pair compare this to the size of Wikipedia, the text of which is a 10-gigabyte download. It is probably the longest proof ever: it dwarfs another famously huge proof, which involves 15,000 pages of calculations.

It would take years to check the computer's working – and extending the method to check for yet higher discrepancies might easily produce proofs that are simply too long to be checked by humans. But that raises an interesting philosophical question, says Lisitsa: can a proof really be accepted if no human reads it?"

And tomorrow is the 75th anniversary of the Spanish poet Antonio Machado's death during the Spanish Civil War. This poem was found in his pocket: "Estos días azules y este sol de infancia."

Today's 1957 American English Usage Tip:

apropos is so clearly marked by its pronunciation as French, & the French construction is so familiar, that it is better always to use of rather than to after it. Apropos of what we were saying... The OED & Webster, however, both allow to, and it has been used by many well-regarded writers: Is there not a passage in Spix apropos to this? (Disraeli).

Thanks, David K! 

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