Mida’s chess corner: Chess in Trieste, Ankara and… Lugano
October 19th, 2008 by adminArray AGAINST THE WARSunday, September 9th - At Dusk~ (8pm)Le Petit Versailles -346 East Houston St at Avenue CSubways: F/V >> Second Avenue - J/M >> Delancey StreetFREE VOluntary Contribution âVers Reves: Am-er-iqueâCeleste HastingsSoundscape/Costume/Butoh Dance Transfiguration of Sisyphusâs bondage - social, personal & transpersonal power over life and death. Againâ by Ed Halter Village Voice, May 8th, 2007Film-Makersâ Coop Executive Director: MM SerraDVD Curator: Lynne SachsDVD Project Manager: Lili WhiteDVD Tech Programmer: Bosko BlagojevicPoster & Cover Design: Ben Oldenburg LPV programs are made possible by Allied Productions, Inc.,Citizens for NYC, Green Thumb/NYC Dept.
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-ne Madeleine L’Engle, the woman responsible for me reading almost every book in the junior adult section of the Vandenberg Library when I was twelve, has died at the age of 88.
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Looks like government is getting into more business driven pseudoscience (cf. personality tests like the Myers-Briggs) by backing Voice Risk Analysis to detect benefit cheats.So, are lie detectors, and particularly voice stress recognition systems any good? Standard polygraphs (as administered by trained and experienced personnel) detect physiological signs associated with lying, although these can be absent in the truly psychopathic, you can learn to fool them, and anxiety can also produce them. Most studies of standard polygraphs are carried out on offenders, and they tend to find fairly high detection rates. Reported figures are typically of the order of a sensitivity (proportion of liars detected) of 76% and specificity (number of confirmed truth-tellers) of 63% (’average’ values), with 87% and 88% representing the upper range of estimates (’maximal’ values), which doesn’t sound too bad. But the utility of the polygraph (or any test in fact) very much depends on how likely it is that the suspect is guilty (the prevalence of true positives in the population) because if few people are guilty then even though only a small proportion of truth-tellers are falsely declared liars the large number of truth-tellers tested compared to the small number of liars means that most people reported as liars will actually be truth-tellers. Conversely, if most people you are testing are guilty (and thus liars) then even though a lot of guilty people will be detected, a lot of those declared innocent will actually be lying.To make that rather convoluted explanation a bit more concrete, I refer you to a rather famous paper by Brett et al (1986, Lancet) which used the figures above (the ‘average’ and ‘maximal’ values). They showed that when the prevalence of offenders in the population is assumed to be 5% (i.e. not many, such as with benefit cheats) there was a 10% positive predictive value, that is only 1 in 10 positive tests are actually lying, with the rest falsely accused (that is with the ‘average’ values, using the ‘maximal’ values they find 25% true positives).For a pre-test probability of 50% (e.g. criminal investigations, hopefully, maybe) the positive predictive value is 67% (88% with the ‘maximal’ values), a gain in certainty after the test of only 17%, with 33% of positive results still false positives. If most people are liars (90%) then the negative predictive value is only 23% with 77% of negative test results generated by lying subjects. It is often said that if you are innocent you probably don’t want to take the risk of being falsely labelled a liar, and thus a suspect, while it may be worth taking the chance if you’re guilty anyway, as it could throw them off the scent!So we know that polygraphs aren’t going to be that great at detecting liars in the population, even though they do work to some extent. There was a study done last year (Gamer et al 2006, Int J Psychophysiol) of polygraph measures (heart rate etc)* and voice stress recognition. It used the Guilty Knowledge Test (GKT):If, for example, a robbery of a fuel station is examined, a typical GKT-question could be:
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-ne I just learned that Madeline L’Engle passed away yesterday, September 6th, 2007 of natural causes.
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The rules of my mission are that I should identify all lifeforms however, so recently I left an outside light on after dusk and was delighted to come back an hour later to find the moth seen in photo one (click to enlarge).From the characteristic lemon-yellow colouring and patches of brown on the costa (the leading edges of the wing), and using my copy of ‘Butterflies and Moths of Britain and Europe’ (Collins), I’m confident in my identifying my moth as the Brimstone Moth.My moth’s Latin name is Opisothograptis luteolata, which, by piecing together snippets of information from various sources, I believe translates as Opistho =backwards , graptis=graphics/writing , luteolata= yellowish : the yellow-with-backward-facing-graphical-symbols moth though I’m happy to be corrected.In an effort to learn more about moths I have been reading the excellent and scholarly ‘Moths’ (Michael Majerus, The New Naturalist series).
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(no annotations: too many moves).Borisek,J (2506) - Caruana,F (2549) [B41], Trieste 7.9.20071.e4 c5 2.Nf3 e6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 a6 5.c4 Nf6 6.Nc3 Bb4 7.Bd3 Nc6 8.Nde2 Qc7 9.a3 Be7 10.Bf4 Ne5 11.Rc1 b6 12.0–0 Bb7 13.b4 d6 14.Bxe5 dxe5 15.Ng3 0–0 16.Qe2 a5 17.Rb1 Ba6 18.Rfc1 Rfd8 19.Qe3 h6 20.Bf1 Ne8 21.Qe1 Bg5 22.Rc2 axb4 23.axb4 Nd6 24.Na4 Bb7 25.Nc3 Ba6 26.Na4 b5 27.Nc5 Nxc4 28.Bxc4 bxc4 29.Nxa6 Rxa6 30.b5 Rad6 31.Nf1 Rd4 32.b6 Qb7 33.f3 Be7 34.Ne3 Bc5 35.Kh1 Bxb6 36.Nxc4 Qc7 37.Rbc1 Ba7 38.h3 f6 39.Kh2 Qd7 40.Na5 Rd1 41.Rxd1 Qxd1 42.Qxd1 Rxd1 43.g4 Be3 44.Nc6 Kf7 45.h4 Rd2 46.Rxd2 Bxd2 47.Kg2 Ke8 48.Nb8 Ke7 49.Kf1 Kd6 50.Ke2 Ba5 51.Kd3 Kc7 52.Na6 Kb6 53.Nb8 Bb4 54.g5 Be7 55.gxh6 gxh6 56.Kc4 h5 57.Nd7 Kc6 58.Nb8 Kd6 59.Na6 f5 60.Kd3 Bxh4 61.Ke2 Bg3 62.Kf1 h4 63.Kg2 Be1 64.Kh3 Kc6 65.Nb8 Kc7 66.Na6 Kd6 67.Kg2 Ba5 68.Kh3 Bd8 69.Kg2 Kc6 70.Nb8 Kc7 71.Na6 Kb6 72.Nb8 Kc5 73.Nd7 Kd4 74.Nf8 fxe4 75.fxe4 Kxe4 76.Nxe6 Be7 77.Ng7 Kf4 78.Ne6 Kg4 79.Nc7 h3 80.Kh1 e4 81.Nd5 Bg5 82.Kg1 Kg3 83.Kh1 Bf4 84.Kg1 Kf3 85.Kh1 Be5 86.Kg1 h2 87.Kh1 Bd6 88.Nc3 e3 89.Nb5 Be5 0–1
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