This one wins, everyone else go home.
Más moda que lesbiana anarquista escuchando skrillex pelirroja vegetariana con tumblr,que le gusten los superheroes de la Marvel o Dc, que le guste la nutella, anda en skate, se pone mostacho en las fotos, es adicta a starbucks y a las vans y endeuda a los papis con una cámara de mil megapixeles con la cual se fotografía en un espejo.
This man, James Verone, robbed a bank for one dollar. Why only one dollar? Because he knew that in prison he could get the medical care he could not afford with his part time salary as a convenience store clerk. He was approved for food stamps, but they did little to help his finances. Between his back problems, carpel tunnel, and arthritis, he simply couldn’t handle the pain any longer.
On June 9th, he sent a letter to his local paper, the Gaston Gazette, that stated: “When you receive this a bank robbery will have been committed by me. this robbery is being committed by me for one dollar. I am of sound mind but not so much sound body.”
He then took a cab to the RBC Bank, and handed the teller a note asking for one dollar and medical attention. He quietly took a seat in the lobby and waited for police to arrive.
Since Verone only stole one dollar, he was only charged with larceny. His bail, which he doesn’t plan to pay is set at $2,000, reduced from the normal $100,000. He’s scheduled to see a doctor this Friday, and hopes to get foot surgery, back surgery and to have a protrusion on his check treated.
To me, this is the perfect example of how disturbingly corrupt and unjust our health care system has become under HMO’s. For this man, or any person for that matter, feels that he needs to be imprisoned just to see a doctor, is ridiculous.
This is exactly what I hate about America. Why is it that you can buy an entire house with money you don’t have, but still can’t apply for health care if you don’t meet the requirements? That’s messed up.
(via supermansbabygirlx0)
Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, writes about two information trends he worries will limit the news and ideas we’re exposed to.
The first is robots which we’ve written about here. These aren’t the tin can humanoids seen in jurassic sci-fi but rather artificial intelligence used by the likes of Narrative Science, an Illinois-based startup that turns data into written prose.
For example, as Morozov points out, Forbes uses Narrative Science to automatically generate articles on corporate earnings statements. Other organizations use the company’s data analysis and Artificial Intelligence to create articles on real estate, sports and polling.
The second trend is the personal customization that all the Internet heavies are working so hard to fulfill. For example, we know that the ads we see as we go from site to site reflect where we’ve been and what we’ve indicated we’ve liked before we arrive at the page in question.
Remove ad tracking and replace it with content and we begin to see that the content we’re exposed to is similarly customized to our tastes. Have a political slant, the recommendation engine algorithm will make sure you get your daily dose of red meat.
So what happens when you marry the two? When robot generated news articles can be endlessly produced on the fly at little to know cost and those articles are customized to a viewers taste? We have something along the llnes of what Morozov describes here:
[T]he rise of “automated journalism” may eventually present a new and different challenge, one that the excellent discovery mechanisms of social media cannot solve yet: What if we click on the same link that, in theory, leads to the same article but end up reading very different texts?
How will it work? Imagine that my online history suggests that I hold an advanced degree and that I spend a lot of time on the websites of the Economist or the New York Review of Books; as a result, I get to see a more sophisticated, challenging, and informative version of the same story than my USA Today-reading neighbor. If one can infer that I’m also interested in international news and global justice, a computer-generated news article about Angelina Jolie might end by mentioning her new film about the war in Bosnia. My celebrity-obsessed neighbor, on the other hand, would see the same story end with some useless gossipy tidbit about Brad Pitt.
Producing and tweaking stories on the spot, customized to suit the interests and intellectual habits of just one particular reader, is exactly what automated journalism allows—and why it’s worth worrying about. Advertisers and publishers love such individuation, which could push users to spend more time on their sites. But the social implications are quite dubious. At the very least, there’s a danger that some people might get stuck in a vicious news circle, consuming nothing but information junk food and having little clue that there is a different, more intelligent world out there.
The upside to this downside state of affairs is something we’ve mentioned before: automation technologies like those from Narrative Science could theoretically free up journalists to do deeper, more analytical work.
The downside to the downside: as algorithms push us into information silos nobody will actually see it.
Evgeny Morozov, Slate, A Robot Stole My Pulitzer!
“Killing children is wrong unless you are the United States of Israel”
