superqwert

When the author writes:

"Even if face recognition can match a face with 99% accuracy, the sheer amount of faces available in police databases makes false positives inevitable. (The 1% error rate means that, if 10,000 people who are not wanted by the police undergo face recognition, 100 will be flagged as wanted)."

The author is not being fair.

Usually with technologies like these, developers will not aim for an accuracy of 99%, but a precision of 99% (that is what we do with Congestion Charging in London, where the ramifications of FPs are much lower [I work in Transport for London]). That means that for 10,000,000 people undergoing facial recognition, only 100 may be flagged as wanted, and only 1 will be a false positive. If we were talking about 99% accuracy, that doesn't necessarily mean what the author claims either. Accuracy is (TP + TN)/(P + N), meaning that the decrease in 1% from 100% can be in any of:- a lowering of TP or TN; or an increase of FP or FN. There is no reason to think that the 1% will all mean false positives.

Government? Most of these camera owners weren't government.

AIS devices are mandatory for all ships of 300tonnes+, meaning the data is open and can be monitored by anyone!

You aren't addressing the arguments at all here. With the error bars that black6 suggests, we cannot possibly infer anything of meaning over long periods of time.

This answer is more flippant than you can imagine.

#3 Is the worst - if we have learnt anything in the past century, it is that our attempts at behavioural changes rarely work[i], and even when they do they often result in the opposite effect[ii].

[i] - My favourite book that points this out is Behavioural Adaptation and Road Safety. Well worth a read. Examples are many, such as in the case of criminalising texting while driving, which results in "crotching" (texting from a phone on your lap) and has resulted in increased accidents.

[ii] - Plenty of examples of this already on the environmental scene:

    - let's use plastic bags to save trees! oh no plastic bags are worse!

    - let's use diesel rather than petrol! Here, have subsidies! Oh no, it's making everything worse

    - let's improve energy efficiency! oh no, now more energy is used! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

If the ground is sinking rather than the sea rising, the impact will be pretty similar!

That is very interesting! how do they know that a difference in a satellite measurement is not due to slippage in its orbit?

What sort of collaborators are you looking for? What data + assets do you have to work with?

Great ideas - you should build a start-up!

Well done, keep it going!

Which is caused by?

Do we have evidence as to what is causing the insane rise in OD deaths?

> Belief in God is at odds with a scientific view of the world

No, it's not.

> it's hard to be patriotic when every country has so many skeletons in the closet you'd think it's perpetually Halloween

When did nations not have skeletons in their closets?

Without defining what "Progress" and "Good" are, the whole concept that there is some sort of "Progress" is meaningless. If you can define those terms, you can maybe start to study such a topic - but the definition of such terms belongs to philosophy, not science. Technological advancement could certainly studied, but what we do or don't do with it can only be "Good" or "Progressing" to some idealistic goal if we have identified those.

if the distances between circles approaching another circle is more-or-less the width of the ball, the other balls will not affect it much.

+ The additional perturbations make the situation more random, rather than entirely based on the inconsistencies of the board design.

It seems that [1] is referring to roads though? Rail maintenance is far more expensive.

Nice find, I didn't see this before! I think the conversation should be left up so this can all be found, though.

Thanks a lot, this has been a most helpful reply!

Yes, but the evidence is required for this claim:

"Yet trains are far less emitting than aircraft"

Certainly not. Responsibility is a very complex issue, especially if you devolve it to the users, rather than keeping it in the hands of the managers/operators.

But even if we assume a large part of responsibility rests in the users, then the responsibility would clearly be only held by those planning to make the trip and deciding which form of transport to use (potential users).

There is a difference between decision making and calculations of change.

I am certainly not arguing that decisions shouldn't be made responsibly. I am merely trying to point out that the calculations that have been made are simplistic.

Good point, but once again - the crossing of thresholds is the major change, rather than the individual changes between thresholds.

In transport, we have learnt over the past century to not use aggregate models, as they do not provide the same detail and results as disaggregate models[p.18 Modelling Transport 4th Edition Ortuzar & Willumsen]. We should not lower our standards when discussing emissions and pollution.

This article above is a very worrying case - where the reader is encouraged to shame people for flying, without showing necessary statistics as to whether flying is indeed much worse than other transportation methods.

No, I'm arguing that the calculations for emission per person are simplistic.

If it becomes a trend, that will be good if indeed the efficiencies are true. As stated earlier, it is unclear how the calculations are made and whether the actual total emissions cost was lowered.

You're claiming the argument is wrong, then supporting it again.

The person(s) who go over or under the threshold are the ones that make a difference. If thresholds aren't breached by the amount of people changing route, then there is not a very significant difference.

As you indeed state:

"but you can still very much say the climate footprint of each passenger is (total plane print/passengers)"

You can indeed say as much, but "this is oversimplified".

Just to be clear - I am not arguing that we should not pick routes responsibly, with the environment in mind. I am merely trying to ensure we are clearer about what impacts we are actually making and that we are considering all the impacts and not just doing a simple calculation that actually misses out the many complexities of transport.

What evidence are you citing for environmental cost?

That is not what I am arguing at all. I am merely pointing out that it is unclear as to what the ecopassenger.com website is calculating and what we can gather from this information.

That is certainly true, but from the scale of the calculations, I am assuming that ecopassenger.com is not just calculating that difference, but the overall emmission cost as a ratio of flight.

What evidence are you citing here?