How Do You Vote? 50 Million Google Images Give a Clue (nytimes.com) 103
Artificial Intelligence is now being used to scan millions of pictures taken by Google Street View to glean insights like income or voting patterns, The New York Times reports. In a Stanford project, computers scanned millions of pictures of parked cars to predict voting patterns and pollution. From the report: The Stanford project gives a glimpse at the potential. By pulling the vehicles' makes, models and years from the images, and then linking that information with other data sources, the project was able to predict factors like pollution and voting patterns at the neighborhood level. "This kind of social analysis using image data is a new tool to draw insights," said Timnit Gebru, who led the Stanford research effort. The research has been published in stages, the most recent in late November in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In the end, the car-image project involved 50 million images of street scenes gathered from Google Street View. In them, 22 million cars were identified, and then classified into more than 2,600 categories like their make and model, located in more than 3,000 ZIP codes and 39,000 voting districts.
"AI" (Score:2, Troll)
ridiculous (Score:2, Interesting)
I hope they noticed my car, in front of my home, on election day. Like millions of others I vote by mail. Furthermore, there is probably an identifiable class of people who do that. A clear understanding of that segment of voters would interest those who pay for such studies more than the results of this ridiculous experiment.
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If you voted by mail, I feel bad for you. The USPS is neither a guaranteed-delivery service nor a secure one. If you cannot guarantee the chain of custody of a ballot, you cannot guarantee the privacy of your vote.
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How about you shut up until you understand how it's done? Voting by mail is excellent.
There are laws the actually do protect my privacy when using USPS.
" chain of custody of a ballot"
HAHAHAHAHAHHAhahaha. Yeah, the voting station have such a steller reputation for maintaining that.
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... Did you even bother to read the summary? It has nothing to do with if your car was in its spot on election day.
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Here's a snopes link on the subject. It links to local news articles related to the subject.
https://www.snopes.com/2015/10/01/alabama-drivers-license/ [snopes.com]
Assuming you still maintain the position that this did not occur, can provide links to back up that position?
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Alabama requires every voter to have a valid photo ID to cast a ballot. While a driver’s license is the most common form of ID in the state, Bentley said anyone without a driver’s license can go to any county register’s office and have a photo ID made and the closing of the DMV offices will not change that fact.
Bentley also pointed out that every probate judge in the state has the authority to renew driver’s licenses and the closing of the DMV offices will not change that fact.
Bentley said not only is the state not engaged in any effort to curtail voting, it is doing all it can to make sure anyone who wants to vote will be able to register to vote.
“We will go to people’s houses to have their picture made if they don’t have a photo ID in the state of Alabama,” said Bentley. “We’re not ever going to do anything to keep people in the state of Alabama from voting. And for them to jump to a conclusion like that, that is politics at its worst.”
Re:ridiculous (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not the poster you're responding too, but:
Snopes lost all credibility years ago when they had a Democractic activist doing their political fact checking. Interestingly, Google makes this particularly hard to search for now that they use Snopes as a fact checking basis, thus including "snopes" in the search pretty much takes you to snopes.com (-site:snopes.com takes you to other fact checking sites).
But, the sketchiness of the male founder or Snopes, who re-married to a former escort and pornstar who happens to also work for Snopes.com. Regardless of the truth of the matter, the original founders are in a nasty divorce and they're both quite willing to either cheat or lie to publicly ruin each other:
(From a right-leaning website: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4042194/Facebook-fact-checker-arbitrate-fake-news-accused-defrauding-website-pay-prostitutes-staff-includes-escort-porn-star-Vice-Vixen-domme.html)
I do not live in Alabama, but I know that people were saying the exact same things about Virginia, where I do live. This has not happened at all here.
It's somewhat unfortunate that you need to spend a whole $10 on a Voter ID, but it's also a myth that that is blocking people from voting to begin with. If it were, then Democrats would be submitting legislation to help such poor individuals get free ID cards. Instead, practically all Democrats cry "racism", which is amusingly racist: only black people cannot afford to get Voter IDs? If that's even remotely true, then there's a much bigger problem in the areas that are politically dominated by ... Democratic politicians.
Maybe instead of talking down about your favorite constituents, you all should actually try helping them?
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It should be treated as a quick way to find a lot of relevant primary sources, and it mostly does fine at that.
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Snopes lost all credibility years ago...
No problem. They're just providing an information hub. Since they cited sources we can assume Snopes isn't credible and go a level deeper.
Yes. Why should this be a problem?
If the credibility of the sites Snopes links to is highly questionable then that's something that can be demonstrated. I propose we start with the local news station, WHNT. http://whnt.com/2015/09/30/alea-announces-driver-license-office-closures-includes-t [whnt.com]
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The rest of his comment is just ad hom slander to attack Snopes with, it's not an actual argument and not worthy of further consideration.
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Not all of it. :)
For example, here's an obvious straw man... I do not live in Alabama, but I know that people were saying the exact same things about Virginia, where I do live. This has not happened at all here.
Here's a straight up troll... Maybe instead of talking down about your favorite constituents, you all should actually try helping them?
*sigh* The quality of discourse on this site continues to concern me. I notice in this case of this thread a lot of unsubstantiated assertions appealing to the polit
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" that would lead one to believe this site just exists to push an agenda."
what?
Owner Tribune Broadcasting
(sale to Sinclair Broadcast Group pending)
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Who are the moronic moderators who wasted 5 mod points making this AC moron visible? More of Putin's paid trolls with their herds of mod-point-wielding sock puppets?
Remember the passage where Mark Twain wrote about sieving his pilot's blood after the epic swearing at the other boat? Let me quote it here:
This was a red rag to the bull. He raged and stormed so (he was crossing the river at the time) that I judge it made him blind, because he ran over the steering-oar of a trading-scow. Of course the traders sent up a volley of red-hot profanity. Never was a man so grateful as Mr. Bixby was: because he was brim full, and here were subjects who would talk back. He threw open a window, thrust his head out, and such an irruption followed as I never had heard before. The fainter and farther away the scowmen’s curses drifted, the higher Mr. Bixby lifted his voice and the weightier his adjectives grew. When he closed the window he was empty. You could have drawn a seine through his system and not caught curses enough to disturb your mother with.
Imagine the same operation on ALL the sock puppets and ACs. Not a bit of credibility to be found and nothing to pay attention to.
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AH, nice to see you spread the GOP FUD about snopes. Tell me, are you just stupid, or do you do it on purpose?
Jesus Fucking Christ you people are stupid
Re: ridiculous (Score:1, Troll)
People who can't afford IDs should not be voting . Same goes for all kind of other thresholds
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You need a sarcasm tag for that one. If you're NOT being too subtle, then the "other threshold" should be set one notch above what you can satisfy.
Let me clarify that I do have the mechanistic perspective of seeing all human beings as UTMs. There is a fundamental equality in that, though each UTM is unique and different. We just have to accept that some of the UTMs are too slow to make the best possible voting decisions on any scheduled election day.
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I didn't say they can't afford them, I said they closed the places to get them after requiring them, but only in the areas with high minority populations.
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Voters need to be on the rolls regardless of whether or not they have photo ID.
That means, in clear text, that your cited example of "voter fraud" cannot be voter fraud - it can only be election fraud.
Something that voter ID will not help with.
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Just live with it... (Score:2)
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So? Like it mattered anymore.
Quite seriously, if you put a gun to someone's head last year and said "Hillary or Trump?" he'd probably have said "Oh just shoot already".
All that AI and they couldn't get 2016 right (Score:2)
The election was just over a year ago, but the vast majority of data mining "AI" got it wrong, including Google and Facebook.
So what's the point of making claims about the method used in the OP when it isn't tested and won't be tested for at least 3 years?
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'Nice cars' are a silly criteria anyhow. Test of how well the 'consumerism indoctrination' (TV) has worked.
'Bad' zip codes are full of nearly brand new 'nice cars', sitting in apartment complex lots and depreciating faster than they are being paid off. Moron owners, every one, R, D or independent.
You can't determine equity in a car by taking a picture. Buying something like an A8 or 7 series BMW on time, just proves the 'owner' is a vain, ego driven idiot. Which correlates with both parties _bases_.
B
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You can't determine equity in a car by taking a picture. Buying something like an A8 or 7 series BMW on time, just proves the 'owner' is a vain, ego driven idiot. Which correlates with both parties _bases_.
Which vain, ego driven party is more likely to buy a Prius?
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Does it account for all the nice cars being in a garage and invisible to street view?
Well I suppose they could combine it with Satellite View and assume there are nice cars in the garages they see. But then they could just forget about the cars and assess people's votes on what their houses look like in Satellite View. Or they could even (gasp!) just count the ballot papers to see how people voted.
Not sure I'm seeing the point of this. Is the idea to replace voting with scanning the cars in the streets? I suppose the results would be just as meaningful.
Re:How many gallons of stew from a few oysters? (Score:4, Insightful)
It does not have to account for garaged cars. All it has to do is show valid predictions. The criteria here is not to capture every single vehicle; it is to record a sample of sufficient size. That's how poling works. No one has to know how YOU voted. All they need is 1200 sufficiently random people to accurately predict the election.
Car on blocks in the front yard (Score:2)
How hard is this predicting-votes-from-an-image anyway? Let's look for some clues.
A brand-new shiny F-250 Super Duty Turbo Diesel parked in the driveway to a ramshackle house?
The name of a roofing business painted on this truck?
A rusted 1990 Buick LeSabre with the hood up parked on the front lawn?
An NRA bumper sticker on each vehicle?
A Trump-Pence sign hand painted on a 4X8 sheet facing the roadway?
Yet another abuse of technology--pre-voting (Score:3)
I think this story could have been bundled into the recent story about abuses of technology. We could be using computers to increase our freedoms and give us more and better choices, but over-controlled elections are NOT helping. Why bother to vote when the outcome has already been so heavily manipulated?
Let me focus on the specific problem of gerrymandering that this technology would obviously support (too well). Partisan redistricting has two principles, and both of them are based on predicting how people will vote next time. So far the main data has been prior voting patterns, but this will help YUGEly. Principle 1 is making your districts safe, which usually means a cushion around 5%. Principle 2 is wasting your opponent's votes in concentrated sacrificial districts, which is normally required because you would barely need to tweak the districts if you actually had more voters. The worse abuses of partisan gerrymandering are when actual minorities of the voters get to "win" the legislatures. (We've actually seen that in recent elections for the House of so-called Representatives, thanks to diabolical gerrymandering in such states as Texas.)
So let me switch angles to a possible computer-based solution in two parts:
Part 1: Guest voting. If you don't like your own district (for example because it is so gerrymandered that your vote is meaningless), then you would be able to reject your ballot and vote as a guest in one of the neighboring districts. The more they gerrymander the districts, the MORE options voters would have and the LESS predictable the outcomes of the elections.
Part 2: Allocate the voting power based on the actual outcome of the election. Easiest to make this clear with a simple example using three districts, A, B, and C. Assume half the voters of District A decide to vote as guests in Districts B and C, with one quarter going to each district. Then whoever wins A only gets 1/2 vote in the legislature, and the legislators from B and C get 1-1/4 votes each. The total of the 3 districts is still 3 votes in the legislature, but each voter gets truly equal voting power in the legislature. (Non-voters, too. Each non-voter gets the same 0% representation, but that's true now, too.)
An amusing side effect is that the winner still has incentive to actually represent ALL of the voters who voted for AND against him, because even those negative votes still contributed to his influence in the legislature. Also the voters are motivated to vote because they know they are increasing the voting power in whichever district they pick.
So let me be the first to admit that it will never happen. Certainly not via an evolutionary path, much as I prefer evolution to the alternatives. No "Fantasy" mods on Slashdot, eh?
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I considered your first ideas, but every angle I could think of was just subject to some new form of gaming. The problems with your second idea are that the approach doesn't scale and that technology has changed so much since the Constitution was written. In general, that's why I think we need to focus on scaleable solutions that have negative feedback loops against the gaming. With guest voting, the harder they gerrymander, the worse the gerrymandering will work and the harder it will become to predict (or
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And I strongly agree with you, but I think we need to do that through a variation of "following the money" to break the motivation of the gerrymandering politicians. I think any attempt to tweak the rules of the redistricting process will only create a new game for them to play. We need to change the game in such a way that gerrymandering itself is counterproductive so they might as well district on some rational and nonpartisan basis, such as minimizing the lengths of the borders between districts that div
Or look at voter registration (Score:3)
So how is this different than voting records? (Score:3)
So how is this different than voting records that have
names addresses voting history and party affiliation?
The reality is cars, voting like TV news is a market and market
share and differentiation to keep the market is critical.
Some think that FoX vs. CNN is about morality and politics...
it is about market share.
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So the idea is to count cars, property, rent, work, unemployment, education, number of illegal migrants in an area.
That gives some idea of the wealth, buying habits, education level and group think of an average person.
How they will be swayed by the politics of more wars, more spending on illegal migrants, more support of interventions around the world, more spending to support other nations. Accepting more il
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"Voting records are full of people who no longer vote, do not vote or who vote many, many times."
no, not really. Stop lying.
Parking Lots? (Score:1)
Just look for the fucking Priusâ(TM). Iâ(TM)ll give you no guesses as to how they vote.
Now give me my grant money.
Distance to polling booth (Score:2)
Just because they photographed (Score:2)
Behaviour which can be predicted, (Score:2)
can be more easily manipulated and controlled. It's now impossible for us to stuff the 'big data' genie back in the bottle, so we need to start finding ways to either poison the data en masse or find ways of using it to our advantage. I hate the rape of our privacy that is now pretty much taken for granted, but the thing I hate more is that there is no reciprocity and therefore there's nothing even close to a level playing field. The concentration of huge masses of personal data in a few hands, both paralle
Sedans vs extended cab trucks (Score:2)
Isn't this just a subtle exit poll?
The relative number of sedans versus extended cab trucks owned in a neighborhood, can be correlated with political leanings.
Perhaps, substituting a survey of vehicles parked near a polling place makes for a better indicator still, because it reflects voter turnout?
https://news.stanford.edu/2017... [stanford.edu]
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OK, go ahead and mod me down for not RTFA'ing!
If I'd read the original posting, I'd have realized they were referring to exactly the same Stanford study I just posted. Sorry!
Re:Donald TRUMP (Score:4, Informative)
Clinton stole the election from Sanders and the U.S. and her inept campaigning netted 5 million fewer votes than the Democrat in the previous election, resulting in her loss.
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Aren't you making the GP's point, then?
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Right, she campaigned to her constituants, losing the states that gave her opponent far more electoral votes for an easy win. Stupid decision that saved us from one mess and got us another. Vote third party!
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"Easy"
Also,. She would have been an excellent president. Of course, some of us have read here writing and been watching her career. She was only really smart and understood international frameworks as well as had a plan to pivot dying communities in the US.
Did you even know that? have you read here stuff on foreign policy? trade? Her paper on how to pivot those communities which included how to pay for it? No? I thought not, child.
I'll vote for who has a proven record of understanding issues and is smart, n
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A bit of Ad hominem fallacy there. She is smart and corrupt as hell. Voting third party is just a means to an end, to break the hold the two parties have over our freedom. They're both highly authoritarian, and routinely remove freedoms from Americans. We need to get people thinking, not just voting for "their" party.
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No, Hillary lost the Presidential vote by 77 votes. That's 25% less votes than Trump got, which is a pretty decent majority. (The 2016 Presidential election was 304-227 [wikipedia.org].)
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Do you not understand the Electoral college?
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That seems like an odd question to ask of someone who pointed out the Electoral College vote is the vote for president and the other votes are for who is going to be voting in the electoral college.
Did you not understand the post?
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DNC is a corrupt organization, so that's good on him. The rest of what you said was relatively accurate.
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What alternative action do you propose that Sanders should have taken instead of running as a Democrat?
You do realize that both the Democratic and Republican parties have made state ballot access laws almost impossible for a 3rd party candidate to be in the ballot in all 50 states, right? And that's just one of the impediments to running as a 3rd-party or an independent candidate. Sanders did exactly what anyone who is serious about running for president needs to do.
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That's funny.. I don't recall Jill Stein jumping on the Dem's ticket to run her election.
But then Stein is a Green and has an actual platform and party. Bernie was just a one trick pony (other than GIVE IT FOR FREE!!! did he really have anything else to say?) and the fact he couldn't build his own party kind of says a lot.
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other than GIVE IT FOR FREE!!! did he really have anything else to say?
ok, so you are a disingenuous oaf who actual didn't read anything about anyone. Got it.
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He had to in order to get base votes. Sucks, but it's a reality that some people only vote letter. His followers whine, I don't see him doing it so much except when specifically asked..
"who thought they were entitled to win. "
so pretty much everyone who runs then?
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Divide and conquer still works (Score:2)
Is there an older account than Caesar's report on dividing and conquering? However the tactic is much older than Rome.
Putin divided and conquered the Democratic Party before he did it to America as a whole. Count me as one of the suckers who was conned into donating to Sanders before the New York primary when I should have donated to the Democratic Party in Michigan.
However Putin doesn't actually deserve much credit for merely harvesting the mindless mushrooms. He just noticed that we'd cultivated a huge cr
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In the Democratic nomination contest, Clinton got 3.7 Million more votes than Sanders did, so the only way this could possibly be true is if declaring the person with more votes to be the winner, is somehow akin to "stealing".
Anyone who believes that, pines after dictatorship, not democracy.
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You clearly didn't follow any of the trickery and manipulation. It's understandable to make that statement from ignorance
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You are deluded if you think a atheist jew could have taken the bible belt.
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Display of public reputation? (Score:3)
If Slashdot had a better mechanism for aggregating and displaying and filtering based on public reputation, then I would adjust my settings to render such trolls (possibly a paid professional?) invisible. (I think you're referring to 5161731? Probably just a fresh sock puppet, but I'd also tweak my setting to deal with fresh sock puppets.)
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Now I'm curious what you did. There is a setting that is useful against ACs, but most of the settings are not really related to the earned reputation of the author. What I'm actually advocating would be linked more directly to an improved and more symmetric version of karma.