https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/08/04/federal-appeals-court-drug-dog-thats-barely-more-accurate-than-a-coin-flip-is-good-enough/

Sorta transcript:

Are police officers allowing their personal biases to influence how they treat the general public and possible criminal suspects? Yes, obviously. Have you not been paying attention?

What’s newsworthy at the moment, though, is the discovery that those personal biases are even screwing up canine units. Police often use drug-sniffing dogs in places like border crossings to identify and apprehend possible smugglers. Dogs are really good at this job: they have about 50x more olfactory receptors in their noses than humans, and the part of a dog’s brain that processes that information is about 40x the size of ours, proportionately speaking.

Dogs can use their noses to find drugs, people, and according to some preliminary research, even cancer cells. Here’s the thing, though: they need to be trained by a human to do that, and after training they have to work with a human to properly apply their training. And that’s where we run into the Clever Hans effect.

Clever Hans was a horse who got famous in the early 20th century for supposedly being able to solve math puzzles. You would ask him or write a problem on a chalk board, like “1+2”, and Clever Hans would stamp his hoof three times. Some of the questions were pretty complex, even, like "If the eighth day of the month comes on a Tuesday, what is the date of the following Friday?”

Clever Hans was usually right, but when researchers studied him more closely, they realized that he was only good at getting the answers right if the person asking the question knew the correct answer, and if Hans could see the questioner. In other words, Clever Hans really was clever, but he was much better at the art of reading a person than at mathematics. Even his owner probably didn’t realize that this was happening, at least in the beginning.

It’s a great example of the importance of double blinding your experiments -- making sure that the person running the experiment doesn’t know the desired result, and that the subject of the experiment doesn’t, either. Because it turns out it’s really hard to remain perfectly unbiased, as we’re all constantly giving off subtle hints about what we’re thinking or what we want to happen, and these can unknowingly influence the experiment.

You may already be able to guess how Clever Hans applies to drug-sniffing dogs. The dogs are usually properly trained in how to detect a drug, but when they’re working in the field, they are with a human who they desperately want to please.

A federal appeals court has just ruled that the use of a drug-sniffing dog was legal, despite the findings that the dog in question, Lex, signalled that he had found drugs 93% of the time he was used. His actual success rate at finding the drugs was only 59%. So he was constantly subjecting people to invasive searches, but was barely better than a coin flip at actually finding drugs.

It turns out that Lex’s handler was giving him a reward every time he alerted, whether or not the alert led to a drug discovery. So he learned that alerting = treat.

It also turns out that Lex’s success rate is higher than what was found in a study of Chicago drug dogs, who managed to correctly ID drugs just 44% of the time, or worse than a coin flip. And if you narrowed it down to Latino drivers, the dogs were only accurate 27% of the time. But they’re still used, and the federal courts have given their approval for their continued use, despite the fact that there are no controls in place to prevent the Clever Hans effect from subjecting millions of innocent people to unnecessary search and seizure.

The only scientifically reasonable next step is to either stop using the dogs or better yet, stop using police officers, since an unbiased dog should be able to do their job about 50x better than they can, and we’d probably see a significant decrease in the number of innocent people gunned down without provocation. Also a significant increase in tummy rubs. Everyone wins.

Here's the latest vlog. I got the idea for this video from a question I received on Tumblr about ways to improve one's attitude. I suggested one way would be to remove toxic people from your life, but I thought a bit more about the question of toxic people and thought I would expand on it in a video.

Hi guys, I read more of the second Harry Potter book, here’s my reaction to it :)

Let me know if you like/hate these videos and if you have any ideas about how to make it better!

Yo guys, 

Dan Brown, aka pogobat 

and I are starting a collaborative conversation on the topic of school, since it’s about that time of year once again where people are starting the school grind. This time, we’d like the hear YOUR thoughts! Send us video responses and we’ll discuss them in a video! If you want to send a video please do so by this THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 3RD!! All the info should be in the video:)

http://www.openculture.com/2014/12/chrissie-hyndes-10-pieces-of-advice-for-chick-rockers-1994.html

http://time.com/4016811/chrissie-hynde-pretenders-rape/

Sorta transcript:

Chrissie Hynde, lead singer of the Pretenders, has a new autobiography out in which she talks about how she was once raped by a guy in a biker gang. Which is horrible, and to make matters worse, she is coping with that memory by telling herself and others that it was her fault. And to make matter even worse still, she expands upon that broken thinking by telling other women that if they get raped, it’s their fault, too.

We’ve been over this territory many times before: telling women, as Hynde does, that if they wear high heels then it’s their fault they get raped because they should have planned to be able to run away from their attacker, leads to more and more ridiculous situations until we’re all in burkas being told that we deserve to get raped because we blinked the wrong way or showed a bit too much ankle.

It’s a pretty stupid thought process, but it IS what we should unfortunately expect from a woman coming out of rock and roll in the 70s and 80s. Unfortunately, to get by in a severely misogynistic culture, sometimes it can seem easier if you have to become one with the misogynistic culture. Become the “cool girl” who doesn’t care if she gets groped or raped, who doesn’t go out of her way to help other women, and who in fact helps enforce the existing hierarchy.

And if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that Hynde was already playing that role. In 1994, she had some truly shit advice for other women interested in getting into rock and roll, including insisting that they shave their legs. Because nothing says “rock” like spending a lot of time and money conforming to society’s expectations of you, am I right? She also suggests that women don’t sound “hysterical” by “belting” or “screeching,” which is in fact hysterical considering that “hysterical” is derived from a sexist idea that a woman’s over-the-top emotions come from her uterus, and considering that there were a number of amazing female singers who were about to hit it big by belting and screeching in 1994, like Courtney Love and Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney.

Hynde’s first point of advice is the worst by far, though: she says that women shouldn’t “complain about sexist discrimination.” Because again, quietly accepting abuse is SO fucking rock, right? I guess we should just be glad her number one tip for making it as a woman in the music industry was “suck a producer’s cock.”

It actually reminds me of Hilary Clinton, in a way. Bear with me: Clinton has the chance to become the first female President of the United States of America. Her toughest liberal competition right now is Bernie Sanders, who is way more radically progressive, and he’s spent decades maintaining a remarkably unwavering democratic socialist platform. If Sanders were anything but a white male, I don’t think he’d have a chance in hell. Those privileges balance out his radical ideals in the same way that Hilary’s conservative centrist ideals balance out the fact that she is a woman.

In other words, it’s really, really, really hard to be both a member of a marginalized group AND a radically progressive thinker who is accepted by the majority. People like that can kick off movements and inspire generations to come, but they also tend to get murdered.

So Chrissie Hynde worked hard and fought through a lot of sexist bullshit to be a woman in rock for that long, but she wasn’t good enough to do it without throwing other women under the bus. She wasn’t strong enough to do it without telling herself that the horrific things that happened to her were her fault. Because if we believe that something horrible is our own fault, we also get to have the optimistic hope that we can prevent it from happening again. It’s a comforting idea, but I much prefer to understand that shit happens and we should all fight back as best we can, even if we end up pissing some people off along the way. Because that’s truly rock and roll.

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/08/carbon-dating-suggests-worlds-oldest-koran-is-even-older-than-the-prophet-muhammad/

http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/latest/2015/07/quran-manuscript-22-07-15.aspx

https://c14.arch.ox.ac.uk/embed.php?File=dating.html#what

Sorta transcript:

Carbon dating suggests ‘world’s oldest’ Koran could be older than the Prophet Muhammad, states misleading headline crafted specifically to make atheists jizz their pants.

Let me start by saying that Muhammad definitely didn’t get any divine instructions to pass down any message ever, because there is no god. But some people believe that, anyway. Even though they’re wrong, this isn’t the evidence you’re looking for if you want to prove Muslims that their religion is baseless.

The University of Birmingham has a really old Koran, and some researchers there had it radiocarbon dated at a University of Oxford lab. Radiocarbon dating can be really fantastic for archaeologists and anthropologists to place certain organic materials within certain time periods within the past 50,000 years. It’s pretty accurate, but there are still error bars. In this case, the researchers found that the parchment probably dated between 568 and 645 A.D.

Muhammad supposedly got his revelation between 570 and 632 A.D. So right there, you have a lot of overlap that supports the current understanding that the various parts of the Koran were written down after Muhammad’s death. He died in 632, and this parchment could date to around 645. Done.

Even if that overlap wasn’t there, if the carbon dating showed the parchment must have been created, say, before 570 AD, it still wouldn’t prove the Koran was created before Muhammad. A parchment could have been created long before someone decided to write something on it.

And parchment basically means an animal skin. Radiocarbon dating works by measuring the amount of carbon left in something, which allows researchers to count backwards and see when that animal stopped consuming carbon, i.e., when they died, because the carbon isotope leaves the body at a reliable rate. So we know that the animal died between 568 and 645, but we don’t know when that animal was skinned, and when that skin was turned into parchment, which is a pretty interesting and painstaking process.

And then we don’t know how long that parchment was around before it was written on. Testing the ink may get us a little closer to pinpointing the date, but that’s really difficult, since ink only tends to have tiny amounts of carbon and it’s usually going to be co-mingled with carbon from the parchment.

It’s really fascinating how researchers use various techniques to pinpoint dates like this. That’s the story, here, and also the fact that this manuscript may be the oldest portion of the Koran we have. That’s really cool and it helps us form a better picture of how Islam began and grew.

But there is no sense in taking this interesting little finding and forming an atheist circlejerk around it. It misrepresents the scientific research and just makes atheists look like ignorant assholes, and we don’t need another reason for theists to think that about us.

For the next entry into the RE: series I discuss Kim Davis, a county clerk who has made headlines for refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, and was jailed for this. She cites religious freedom as her reasons, but as you might imagine, I don't but it.

http://nightattack.tv/episode/81

It's our sixth annual DragonCon live episode! As is tradition, Tom Merritt, Veronica Belmont and Bonnie Brushwood join the show to talk about Justin's wedding, robot cockfighting, cosplay and Don't Get Brody'd.

This video is not about Fat Shaming, I made 

a video about that

 a while back that you can watch. This video is about how the internet tends to respond to things they deem offensive or harmful. I made this video pretty fast so I’m not sure if my point comes across thoroughly, but we’ll see :)

In this video, we continue the conversation that we started with Dan Brown and his audience on the topic of Education. Be sure to check out Dan's video after you watch this one!

Almost done with the book! I'll be moving on to Prisoner of Askaban soon :)

http://www.ksat.com/news/texas/muslim-boy-14-arrested-for-making-clock-mistaken-for-bomb_

Sorta transcript:

A 14-year old Muslim boy was arrested in Texas this week for making his own clock and bringing it to school. As we all know, clocks are a necessary feature of all the bombs we see on television. If it weren’t for the clock part, we would have no idea how much time we have left to run away, or cut the green wire, or hacksaw our arm off.

The good news is that the boy, Ahmed Mohamed, is getting a huge outpouring of support from the Internet, including from President Obama who invited him to bring his clock to the White House. That’s probably not going to ease the minds of the Texas high school administrators, of course, since they probably think Obama is a Muslim, too, and so he probably just wants to examine the death clock to find out how to put them into large-scale production and use them to take away Texans’ guns. Somehow.

This is all reminiscent of Kiera Wilmot, the 16-year old black Florida girl who was arrested and expelled from school two years ago for creating an unapproved small chemical reaction in a science lab. The reaction caused a “pop” and a bit of smoke, for which the girl faced felony charges.

I know it’s a bit of a done trope to say “in my day,” but seriously. When I was in high school, a chemistry teacher let my friends write their names in a flammable liquid on their tables and then set it on fire. And as I mentioned in a previous video, just prior to my day, when kids could drink at 18, my biology teacher would let seniors brew beer for their final project.

Of course, we also had jarts, aka lawn darts, aka deadly projectiles that you were encouraged to hurl at your siblings for a fun summertime activity. And when I say “deadly” I’m not kidding. Children were murdered by them. Even our “girliest” toys were lethal: Easy Bake Ovens may as well have come with a recipe for baked children fingers, and they were especially deadly when combined with flammable Rainbow Brite sleeping bags. Oh, and of course there were those Snack Time Cabbage Patch Kids that looked like they were eating little plastic snacks, which was super cute until they turned on our very children and began trying to consume their tiny fingers and strands of hair.

Chuckie was a documentary, you guys.

I guess what I’m saying is that things weren’t necessarily better before we had safety regulations, and we shouldn’t be fooled into false nostalgia. But we do have to strive to maintain a really difficult balance, between keeping kids alive and giving them room to make mistakes. Or for Christ’s sake, at least room to make something that looks like a pipe bomb but absolutely obviously is not.

I mean, I’m a person who travels with the Quizotron machine, which looks as close to a bomb as you can get without having a clock attached. If I were a Muslim man, I’d never get through security.

And that brings me to the other bit of bad news in Ahmed’s story: the school followed up with a letter to all the district’s parents in which they didn’t apologize, but instead advised them to make sure their kids say something if they see something. Way to make the racial profiling worse, assholes! How about this: if you see something, ask what it is. Maybe you’ll learn something, like how to make a clock and how to not overreact and end up nearly ruining a kid’s life.

I made this video pretty quickly and there's no script so it's not as polished as a normal video. But I wanted to share this with you guys because I often get questions and comments about the topic :)

Brian has finally cured his dance fever as he, Tom and Justin get ready to play Chatrealm Feud, watch Netflix and chill

The water on Mars announcement has inspired us to put our lab coats on. With the help of Dr. Kiki we bring butts to the audio listeners, we spread scientific knowledge to the art community, and we energize one of Brian's employees.