Links - 3rd September 2019 (1)

Why is it so unacceptable for a white woman to pose with an African baby? - "An award-winning TV presenter has been banned from reporting on the homeless problem in London because she is black.Can you imagine the (entirely-justified) furore? And yet here we are, in 2019, receiving news that Comic Relief, a charity which has since 1985 used celebrities to raise more than £1bn for African causes, will no longer do so.Why? Because one such celebrity posted a picture of herself holding an African child on Instagram while filming a campaign to raise funds for neonatal clinics in Uganda. A fierce backlash ensued. Her crime? That she was white. It would - aptly - have been comical, had it not lost the charity £8m in donations.The charge against Stacey Dooley, a well-respected investigative journalist for the BBC (rather than a Love Island contestant doing one day's charity work to score Instagram likes) was led by Labour MP David Lammy, who accused her of “perpetuating tired and unhelpful stereotypes”, by posing as "a white, beautiful heroine, holding a black child". "The world does not need any more white saviours," he declared, boldly speaking on behalf of 7.5 billion humans... In a final blow, Lammy declared with a quite astounding level of flippancy, that it was images like Dooley’s that "keeps the continent of Africa poor". Not civil war or government corruption or unfair trade deals, or, yes, its colonial hangover, but pictures of white charity workers with black babies. Why, of all the entities he could have attacked, did he choose to lambast one with only good intentions? Perhaps Lammy, too, has good intentions, but like so many of his fellow Labourites, his rhetoric reeks of hypocrisy. After he criticised Comic Relief’s ‘white saviour’ approach, the Richard Curtis-led charity invited him to Africa to front their next campaign instead - an offer he snubbed because he didn’t want to “be part of their PR machine”.Dianne Abbot, a vocal critic against private schools, quietly but now famously sent her own son to one, a move even she conceded was "intellectually incoherent". Jeremy Corbyn boycotted a banquet with Donald Trump, a democratically elected president, on his recent state visit but was more than happy to break bread with Chinese president Xi Jinping, leader of an oppressive communist dictatorship, when he came to stay. Just this week Jo Brand, a hard-Left charity campaigner and avid Labour supporter, suggested, albeit jokingly, about pouring battery acid, rather than mere milkshakes, on one's political opponents. When Curtis bent to pressure and told MPs on Monday that he imagines the future of Comic Relief’s fundraising efforts “will not be based on celebrities going abroad”, Lammy, and his absurd campaign against Dooley, won. A ridiculous distraction from a hard truth: gone are the days when a photo of Princess Diana cradling an African child was merely a document of her charity work. Now, such an image is shameful."

Britain has blood on its hands over the brutal suffering of refugees across the Channel
Strange, I thought David Lammy was against white saviors
So does the UK have a responsibility to accept refugees from the hellish warzone that is France or not?

Rationally Speaking | Official Podcast of New York City Skeptics - Current Episodes - RS 193 - Eric Jonas on "Could a neuroscientist understand a microprocessor?" - "'I'm generally skeptical of a lot of the value of fMRI work. I think that the analogy that I make there is it's like trying to understand how your computer works with a thermal imager. Good luck with that... So people study c-elegans, this tiny little worm that has 302 neurons. We still don't really understand how its behavior works, and every single c-elegans has the same 302 neurons'"

My IRB Nightmare - "The training was several hours of videos about how the Nazis had done unethical human experiments. Then after World War II, everybody met up and decided to only do ethical human experiments from then on. And the most important part of being ethical was to have all experiments monitored by an Institutional Review Board (IRB) made of important people who could check whether experiments were ethical or not. I dutifully parroted all this back on the post-test (“Blindly trusting authority to make our ethical decisions for us is the best way to separate ourselves from the Nazis!”) and received my Study Investigator Certification...
IRREGULARITY #1: Consent forms traditionally included the name of the study in big letters where the patient could see it before signing. Mine didn’t. Why not?
Well, because in questionnaire-based psychological research, you never tell the patient what you’re looking for before they fill out the questionnaire. That’s like Methods 101. The name of my study was “Validity Of A Screening Instrument For Bipolar Disorder”. Tell the patient it’s a study about bipolar disorder, and the gig is up. The IRB listened patiently to my explanation, then told me that this was not a legitimate reason not to put the name of the study in big letters on the consent form. Putting the name of the study on the consent form was important. You know who else didn’t put the name of the study on his consent forms? Hitler... Study data are Confidential and need to be kept Secure. Never mind that all the patients’ other secure test results were on the online chart. Never mind that the online chart contains all sorts of stuff about the patients’ diagnoses, medications, hopes and fears, and even (remember, this is a psych hospital) secret fetishes and sexual perversions. Study data needed to be encrypted, then kept in a Study Binder in a locked drawer in a locked room that nobody except the study investigators had access to... Faced with someone even more obsessive and bureaucratic than they were, the IRB backed down and gave us preliminary permission to start our study...
[In our audit, it was found that] The woman in the corner office who kept insisting everybody take the Pre-Study Training…hadn’t taken the Pre-Study Training, and was therefore unqualified to be our liaison with the IRB. I swear I am not making this up. Faced with submitting twenty-seven new pieces of paperwork to correct our twenty-seven infractions, Dr. W and I gave up. We shredded the patient data and the Secret Code Log. We told all the newbies they could give up and go home. We submitted the Project Closure Form to the woman in the corner office (who as far as I know still hasn’t completed her Pre-Study Training). We told the IRB that they had won, fair and square; we surrendered unconditionally.They didn’t seem the least bit surprised... I feel like I was dragged almost to the point of needing to be in a psychiatric hospital myself, while my colleagues who just used the bipolar screening test – without making the mistake of trying to check if it works – continue to do so without anybody questioning them or giving them the slightest bit of aggravation...
'“research is not especially dangerous. Some biomedical research can be risky, but much of it requires no physical contact with patients and most contact cannot cause serious injury. Ill patients are, if anything, safer in than out of research.” As for social-science research, “its risks are trivial compared with daily risks like going online or on a date.”... To a lawyer’s eyes, IRBs are strangely unaccountable... Over time, IRB review has grown more and more intrusive. Not only do IRBs waste thousands of researcher hours on paperwork and elaborate consent forms that most study participants will never understand. Of greater concern, they also superintend research methods to minimize perceived risks. Yet IRB members often aren’t experts in the fields they oversee. Indeed, some know little or nothing about research methods at all.IRBs thus delay, distort, and stifle research, especially research on vulnerable subgroups that may benefit most from it. It’s hard to precise about those costs, but they’re high: after canvassing the research, Schneider concludes that “IRB regulation annually costs thousands of lives that could have been saved, unmeasurable suffering that could have been softened, and uncountable social ills that could have been ameliorated.”'...
I sometimes worry that people misunderstand the case against bureaucracy. People imagine it’s Big Business complaining about the regulations preventing them from steamrolling over everyone else. That hasn’t been my experience. Big Business – heck, Big Anything – loves bureaucracy. They can hire a team of clerks and secretaries and middle managers to fill out all the necessary forms, and the rest of the company can be on their merry way. It’s everyone else who suffers. The amateurs, the entrepreneurs, the hobbyists, the people doing something as a labor of love. Wal-Mart is going to keep selling groceries no matter how much paperwork and inspections it takes; the poor immigrant family with the backyard vegetable garden might not. Bureaucracy in science does the same thing: limit the field to big institutional actors with vested interests. No amount of hassle is going to prevent the Pfizer-Merck-Novartis Corporation from doing whatever study will raise their bottom line. But enough hassle will prevent a random psychiatrist at a small community hospital from pursuing his pet theory about bipolar diagnosis"
Liberals love regulation, yet GDPR helps big companies since they can take on the regulatory burden

The Central Perk, Beijing – Beijing, China - "One Beijing man’s obsession with the American TV show Friends has driven him to create a working replica of the show’s main hangout spot, the Central Perk cafe... each menu item is food actually mentioned on the show with an annotation stating which episode the snack appeared in. The café is popular among local college students, who often watch reruns of American TV shows to practice their English. For them, Friends has proven chock full of colloquialisms and mannerisms that cannot be picked up in class. And according to reports, it also offers another rarity in Beijing: cheap coffee, another godsend for college students. And in case a visit to a working coffee shop from a fictional television series which has been off the air for almost a decade isn’t enough of a “Friends experience,” Du has also constructed an exact replica of character Joey’s apartment next door to the Central Perk, complete with foosball table and oversize TV stand"

Why Was Generals 2 Cancelled? - Investigating Command & Conquer - YouTube

How to Increase Your Wi-Fi Signal - YouTube - "Do you need a stronger wireless signal or greater network access? I'm Mark Erickson, and this is Infinite Solutions. In this episode, I'll show you a simple hack to extend the range of your wireless card."
From 2007 but presumably still useful

A Brief History of Lao Sai in Singapore - "Singapore in the 1800s is not so different from say, Modern-day Northern Mali. According to Lee Yong Kiat’s Medical History of Early Singapore, a significant portion of hospital beds were devoted to the treatment of diarrhoeal diseases. At the Singapore General Hospital (European Seamen’s Hospital, 1849-1850), dysentery was the second biggest source of patients after ‘fever’. There were 26 cases of dysentery, with 6 deaths."

'End of Photography as Evidence': Realistic Photos Created by AI - "Artificial intelligence has been used to created hyper-realistic portrait photographs of men, women, and children of different races who never existed, prompting one author to declare the “end of photography as evidence.”“None of these faces are real. All made up by AIs. The end of photography as evidence,” declared author and Wired founding executive editor Kevin Kelly in a Twitter post, citing research from Nvidia... Facebook has also showcased the work of their A.I. research department, who are able to map different skins onto people’s bodies in real-time video.The technology allows you to make everyone in a video wear the same clothes, or have the same skin color.“It’s not hard to imagine this technology’s being used to smear politicians, create counterfeit revenge porn or frame people for crimes”... “Lawmakers have already begun to worry about how deepfakes could be used for political sabotage and propaganda.”"

Jenan Moussa on Twitter - Al Jazeera Arabic: Gas ovens killed millions of Jews... That's how the novel says. What is the truth of the #holocaust and how did the Zionist movement benefit from it?"
Al Jazeera English: "This Holocaust survivor retells the horror of ”what can happen when good people don't do anything.""
"Arabic content versus English content"

Beijing 2008, a painting by Liu Yi - "The work, titled “Beijing 2008”, depicts four young women playing Mahjong.The woman with the tattoos on her back is China. On her left, focused intensely on the game, is Japan. Across from China, the one with the shirt and head cocked to the side is America. Lying on the floor is Russia. And the girl standing on the right is Taiwan.Of China’s visible set of tiles “East Wind” has a dual meaning. Firstly, it signifies China’s revival as a world power. Secondly, it signifies the military might and weaponry that China possesses has already been placed on the table. On one hand, China appears to be in a good position, though we cannot see the rest of her tiles. Additionally, she is also handling some hidden tiles below the table, behind her foot."

Segments of Random Thoughts - Posts - "Higher education is a fraud. My brother (who is considerably younger than me) went to two very reputable UK universities for highly sought-after courses that are relevant to the job market. He came out in a worse shape than when he started his degrees. The universities did not teach him how to read or write, or how to structure an argument. Most importantly, they did not teach him how to think critically. I had to help him with his dissertation. I told my bro to get his act together because even I wouldn’t hire him. Few years ago I was made buddy/mentor of a fresh-from-uni graduate in the place where I used to work. The grad was so useless that he didn’t even pass his probation. How he got the job in the first place is beyond me. And the fact that people are in massive debts for this non-education is a scandal of epic proportions. Reflecting back on my own experience, I realised that my unis did not teach me anything useful either. Whatever skills I gained were purely down to me. If I ever have kids, I’m not going to encourage them to go to uni, unless they want to study STEM."

Sydney Watson on Twitter - "I feel like more taxpayers would support funding universities if they weren't churning out useless degrees & far-left ideologues. As long as that's the case, politicians are going to have a hard time convincing anyone to put their tax dollars towards "higher education"."