It helps a scammer if the victim thinks they would never be the kind of person who falls for scams. Successful fraud depends on the fraudster generating compliance by imposing their definition of the situation on their target. Erving Goffman (1952) outlines the process of ‘cooling the mark out’ – …
Describe the problem. Follow the instructions, jeez. Learn a totally new syntax to describe the problem again. Okay, don’t follow those instructions, follow these. No, you have to do this totally different thing first. Yeah, it doesn’t work automatically. You have to change it from ‘not working mode’ to ‘working …
We want to be useful to society. But any attempt to show that or to have it guide us either destroys what we are, or turns us into technical servants or mouthpieces of other peoples’ ends. If you want to see how that turns out, enjoy listening to Christian Rock. …
Many grants have I reviewed, grasshopper. This blog post is meant to give some advice on how to frame a grant effectively so it appeals to reviewers. The first point is to look for what data scientists call “Stop words”. Stop words in data science are terms that are not …
Tech doesn’t kill people, over capitalised techbros kill people. We are in the tail end of the AI hype/panic cycle. We are all well beyond noting that LLMs can reproduce human failings. It is vital that if we are to use a tool like ChatGPT or any generative AI to …
At the current moment there is growing concern about the role of digital systems in creating and furthering ‘harm’ across a range of domains (Powell, Stratton, and Cameron 2018). What harm means is often taken as read, or left to subjective claims. There is, or should be, fundamental disagreement as …
One of the ways in which trust is signalled in criminal groups is the fact of having been in prison. It is a signal that is costly and hard to fake. The better the system is at punishing the guilty, the cleaner the signal. Therefore in order to disrupt the …
Is crime in competition with being law abiding? For rational choice theorists the answer is mostly yes. The decision to commit crime is a calculated judgement based on self interest. There is nothing particularly special about criminals or crime. In contrast both deviance theory and bio-psychological criminology say there is …
There is a spike in exports of household white goods and consumer electornics to former Soviet Central Asia and the neighbourhood. Why is that? The assumption is they are headed by hook and by crook to Russia. What for? It is claimed they are needed for the war. There is …
It is difficult to understand the appeal of Ardern, Sturgeon, Trump and Johnson without recognising that politics is about providing psychological goods: the warm bath of a seratonin hit, with the odd excitement of a dopamine rush to break it up now and then. Western politicians have given up on …
