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Peoples Cube to hit the BIG TIME!

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SECRET SERVICE SOFTWARE WILL 'DETECT SARCASM' IN SOCIAL MEDIA USERS

The software department of Peoples Store #86 is about to score a huge self-sustaining Government contract to identify itself!

Dear Leader's own Secret Service (known for its abilities to find abundance in liquor and lustful debauchery in the remotest parts of the world on a moments notice) needs help finding of all things--sarcasm. Enter the gracious services of The Peoples Cube and Red Square!

Like informing on dissident neighbors and parents, the more sarcasm the Secret Service is willing to redistribute tax dollars for, the more we can produce!

As a taxpayer, I could not be prouder!

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Well, I am certainly glad that I have no idea what this "sarcasm" stuff is.

OSarcasm.jpg

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Hmmm, sarcasm you say... if this software project is anything like the ObamaCare website and back end software project, a totally incompetent contractor will be paid billions and billions (my apologies to Carl Sagan) of dollars for software that is months late and that does not work and is not capable of working but displays a nice website graphic full of ethnically diverse peoples that make the user THINK it's working after which it produces references to "sarcasm" it found in the Battle Hymn of the Republic and old Peanuts comic strips before freezing the screen with a 404 error, at which point Obama will blame the whole fiasco on "h8rs" and raaaaaacism.

Let's see if it detects that.

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Prog Off.png

"Little Brother" a novel by Cory Doctorow, published by Tor Books.

If you ever decide to do something as stupid as build an automatic terrorism detector, here's a math lesson you need to learn first. It's called [highlight=#ffff99]"the paradox of the false positive,"[/highlight] and it's a doozy.

Say you have a new disease, called Super-AIDS. Only one in a million people gets Super-AIDS. You develop a test for Super-AIDS that's 99 percent accurate. I mean, 99 percent of the time, it gives the correct result -- true if the subject is infected, and false if the subject is healthy. You give the test to a million people. One in a million people have Super-AIDS. One in a hundred people that you test will generate a "false positive" -- the test will say he has Super-AIDS even though he doesn't. That's what "99 percent accurate" means: one percent wrong. What's one percent of one million? 1,000,000/100 = 10,000 One in a million people has Super-AIDS. If you test a million random people, you'll probably only find one case of real Super-AIDS. But your test won't identify one person as having Super-AIDS. It will identify 10,000 people as having it. Your 99 percent accurate test will perform with 99.99 percent inaccuracy. That's the paradox of the false positive. When you try to find something really rare, your test's accuracy has to match the rarity of the thing you're looking for. If you're trying to point at a single pixel on your screen, a sharp pencil is a good pointer: the pencil-tip is a lot smaller (more accurate) than the pixels. But a pencil-tip is no good at pointing at a single atom in your screen. For that, you need a pointer -- a test -- that's one atom wide or less at the tip. This is the paradox of the false positive, and here's how it applies to terrorism: Terrorists are really rare. In a city of twenty million like New York, there might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten of them at the outside. 10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent. One twenty-thousandth of a percent. That's pretty rare all right. Now, say you've got some software that can sift through all the bank-records, or toll-pass records, or public transit records, or phone-call records in the city and catch terrorists 99 percent of the time. In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test will identify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten of them are terrorists. [highlight=#FFFF99]To catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and investigate two hundred thousand innocent people.[/highlight]

Guess what? Terrorism tests aren't anywhere close to 99 percent accurate. More like 60 percent accurate. Even 40 percent accurate, sometimes.

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I was afraid of that. The lines of code are being written by squirrels running across the keyboard.


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But what if underhanded teabaggers and other domestic terrorists claim that their sarcasm is "dry wit" rather than sarcasm? After all, we progressive postmodernists know that a thing is whatever we choose to name it -- er, um, that is, assuming we can "know" anything, considering that there is no objective reality -- except, of course, that there is no objective reality -- oh dear me, my head hurts. What were we talking about, anyway?

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RedDiaperette wrote:But what if underhanded teabaggers and other domestic terrorists claim that their sarcasm is "dry wit" rather than sarcasm? After all, we progressive postmodernists know that a thing is whatever we choose to name it -- er, um, that is, assuming we can "know" anything, considering that there is no objective reality -- except, of course, that there is no objective reality -- oh dear me, my head hurts. What were we talking about, anyway?

Comrade Red - we do not choose to name anything. We accept whatever is told us to accept. I found that extremely hard to do - not until Comrade O'Brien at MiniLuv took me into room 101. Only then was I able to accept The Truth™ to be whatever they said it was to be. That was The Objective Truth™- whatever they said it was, thus, The Current Truth™ - and trust me... that current is shocking! Sometimes, they threaten you with something – something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, "Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so." And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't really mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself. And after that, you don't feel the same toward the other person any longer.... but... I digress... what were we talking about?

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Tovarichi wrote:I was afraid of that. The lines of code are being written by squirrels running across the keyboard.
Squirrels running across the keyboard? Hah! You think that's bad? Just yesterday, during an electoralelectrical storm with lightning and all, we found several of those suckers summarily FRIED from doing this on our power lines. Yeah, all over the street. They caused power outages everywhere! Not to mention the nasty clean-up.
Oh, and I'm not being sarcastic.

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"we found several of those suckers summarily FRIED from doing this on our power lines. Yeah, all over the street. They caused power outages everywhere!"

These are, no doubt, Obama-approved squirrels who sacrificed their lives saving us from the evils of coal-fired electrical generating plants. They were merely being proactive after hearing Dear Leader's new energy directives.

That may seem like sarcasm today, but sure as I'm fat and over fifty, a leftist will propose using tax money to implement a new federal program that trains squirrels to demolish the current electrical grid and force us to use "green" energy.

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Komrade Katz wrote: That may seem like sarcasm today, but sure as I'm fat and over fifty, a leftist will propose using tax money to implement a new federal program that trains squirrels to demolish the current electrical grid and force us to use "green" energy.
Heh, heh, heh./snarc/sarc

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Pamalinsky wrote:
Tovarichi wrote:I was afraid of that. The lines of code are being written by squirrels running across the keyboard.
Squirrels running across the keyboard? Hah! You think that's bad? Just yesterday, during an electoralelectrical storm with lightning and all, we found several of those suckers summarily FRIED from doing this on our power lines. Yeah, all over the street. They caused power outages everywhere! Not to mention the nasty clean-up.
Oh, and I'm not being sarcastic.

Electric Craptek-jpg.jpg

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Captain Craptek,

Snort! Snort! Snort! (bwahahahaha!)Only those FRIED by grabbing that much power would brag about it. Just before dropping like a fly. Heh, heh, heh.

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Captain Craptek wrote:[It will identify 10,000 people as having it. Your 99 percent accurate test will perform with 99.99 percent inaccuracy.

An excellent analysis as far as it goes, comrade. But I ask you what if the test is RIGHT and those other 10,000 people you say are disease-free actually have the disease and simply do not know it or lied about it on the test?

I think you would agree, comrade, in the interest of public safety and the careers of the Party elite (which are in reality the same thing) it would be wise to find some disease these other disease-carriers are carrying lest the general public lose confidence in our abilities to run their lives smoothly. I think you would agree that such an event would be a far greater tragedy than a few thousand proles being executed unnecessarily.

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Opiate of the People wrote:
Captain Craptek wrote:[It will identify 10,000 people as having it. Your 99 percent accurate test will perform with 99.99 percent inaccuracy.

An excellent analysis as far as it goes, comrade. But I ask you what if the test is RIGHT and those other 10,000 people you say are disease-free actually have the disease and simply do not know it or lied about it on the test?

I think you would agree, comrade, in the interest of public safety and the careers of the Party elite (which are in reality the same thing) it would be wise to find some disease these other disease-carriers are carrying lest the general public lose confidence in our abilities to run their lives smoothly. I think you would agree that such an event would be [highlight=#FFFF99]a far greater tragedy than a few thousand proles being executed unnecessarily[/highlight].

Proles again! Why are these proles always complicating our plans with their silly little personal preferences? "Oh...me...Oh,...my....why can't I just eat that fat burger and drive my SUV?" Why can't they just stand up, line up, and SHUT UP? We don't have to execute them Comrade Opiate, we can simply put them in holding areas under "observation" till the sun goes nova and swallows the Earth. By then we'll be out-a-here!


 
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