Sys Nica

Tuesday, July 10, 2018

This is a rather nice free alternative to Microsoft Word

https://www.wps.com/office-free?__c=1

Reverse Discrimination

The term "reverse discrimination" sometimes is used to describe a type of discriminationwherein members of a majority or historically advantaged group (such as Caucasians or males) are discriminated against based on their race, gender, age, or other protected characteristic. These types of claims typically arise in the areas of employment or education. Occasionally, the term also is used to negatively describe programs meant to advance or promote minorities and address inequality, such as affirmative action. While the term "reverse discrimination" is not expressly included in federal civil rights laws, these types of lawsuits are generally brought as discrimination cases under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other statutes.

Because anti-discrimination laws were originally enacted to prevent discrimination against minorities and groups that were historically disadvantaged and denied opportunities in the workplace, there has sometimes existed a perception that members of majority groups are not protected by the same laws. However, these laws generally prohibit all forms of discrimination based on protected characteristics, including those against members of a majority group (as established by the U.S. Supreme Court's 1976 McDonald vs. Santa Fe Trail Transport Co. decision).

As a result, the term "reverse discrimination" originated to describe these kinds of cases where members of a majority group are claiming they were discriminated against on the basis of their age, race, gender, or other protected characteristic.

What Is Reverse Discrimination?

While "reverse discrimination" is not specifically addressed under federal law, the term typically refers to situations where a member or members of a majority are discriminated against on the basis of a protected factor, such as race or gender. Common examples would include a Caucasian individual who is discriminated against in favor of a racial minority, or perhaps a man suing an employer because a woman was given favorable treatment at work on account of her gender. Diversity initiative programs (such as affirmative action) are generally designed to "level the playing field" in the workplace or educational settings, they also may run the risk of breaking discrimination laws despite their historical justifications.

Examples of "reverse discrimination" may include:

Making hiring or promoting decisions in favor of minority groups, despite the experience or seniority of Caucasian, male, or other majority applicants.
Hiring or promoting women solely on the basis of their gender over equally or more qualified males.
Refusing to hire or firing of persons under 40 years of age in favor of the hiring of persons over 40 years of age.
Rejecting an applicant for school while admitting a minority applicant solely on the basis of race (courts have stated that race may only be used as a "factor" in educational applicant decisions).

Reverse Discrimination in Employment: The Law

Courts have struggled with various types of discrimination cases, including those considered to be "reverse discrimination." Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, employers may not discriminate based on race, sex, gender, religion, or national origin, irrespective of who the victim of discrimination might be. In addition, under Title VII, employers may not create programs and policies that would have a "disparate impact" or adverse effect on members of a protected class. However, courts have interpreted this and similar state laws in different ways in discrimination cases with majority (Caucasian, male, etc.) plaintiffs. Although, some forms of discrimination in favor of minorities and historically disadvantaged groups like women have been upheld by courts, others have not, and it remains a contentious legal issue.

As with discrimination claims brought by members of historically disadvantaged groups, so-called reverse discrimination claims are not easily proven. The plaintiff has the burden of proving actual discrimination on the part of the employer based on race, sex, or another prohibited basis. Furthermore, a person making the claim must prove the following:

Evidence that plaintiff is a member of a protected class (for example, a member of a certain race, sex, or religion);
Similarly situated employees outside the plaintiff's class received more favorable treatment than the plaintiff;
Information that supports that the employer discriminates against historically privileged or majority groups; and
Plaintiff performed the job satisfactorily (if part of a promotion decision).

Reverse Discrimination, Affirmative Action, and the Supreme Court

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the use of affirmative action in college admissions in its landmark Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) decision, in which a Caucasian medical school applicant challenged a university's use of race in admissions. The Court held that race could be one of several factors in a college admissions policy, but that they couldn't use specific quotas based on race or any other single factor (such as age, gender, national origin, etc.).

The Supreme Court addressed another challenge to affirmative action when University of Texas applicant Abigail Fisher, who is Caucasian, was denied admission to the school in 2008. She argued that by using race as a factor in the application process, she and other Caucasian applicants were disadvantaged and thus discriminated against. However, the Court again held -- Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin (2016) -- that "the race-conscious admissions program in use at the time of petitioner's application is lawful under the Equal Protection Clause."

What to Do if You Suspect Employment Discrimination

If you believe you were denied a job or promotion because of your race, gender, religion, or any other impermissible factor, you may wish to file a charge of employment discrimination against your employer with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) -- the federal agency that handles these types of claims -- or its state equivalent.

Get a Free Initial Assessment of Your Claim

The strength of a discrimination claim -- regardless of whether you consider it to be "reverse discrimination" -- hangs entirely upon the facts of your individual situation and the applicable laws and regulations. A lawyer can help assess your chances of success suing and give valuable advice about the collection and preservation of evidence. Contact a local attorney for a free initial case assessment to learn how the law can help ensure your fair treatment.

https://employment.findlaw.com/employment-discrimination/reverse-discrimination.html

Facial recognition software is not ready for use by law enforcement

Recent news of Amazon’s engagement with law enforcement to provide facial recognition surveillance (branded “Rekognition”), along with the almost unbelievable news of China’s use of the technology, means that the technology industry needs to address the darker, more offensive side of some of its more spectacular advancements.

Facial recognition technologies, used in the identification of suspects, negatively affects people of color. To deny this fact would be a lie.

And clearly, facial recognition-powered government surveillance is an extraordinary invasion of the privacy of all citizens — and a slippery slope to losing control of our identities altogether.

There’s really no “nice” way to acknowledge these things.

I’ve been pretty clear about the potential dangers associated with current racial biases in face recognition, and open in my opposition to the use of the technology in law enforcement.

As the black chief executive of a software company developing facial recognition services, I have a personal connection to the technology, both culturally and socially.

Having the privilege of a comprehensive understanding of how the software works gives me a unique perspective that has shaped my positions about its uses. As a result, I (and my company) have come to believe that the use of commercial facial recognition in law enforcement or in government surveillance of any kind is wrong — and that it opens the door for gross misconduct by the morally corrupt.

To be truly effective, the algorithms powering facial recognition software require a massive amount of information. The more images of people of color it sees, the more likely it is to properly identify them. The problem is, existing software has not been exposed to enough images of people of color to be confidently relied upon to identify them.

And misidentification could lead to wrongful conviction, or far worse.

Let’s say the wrong person is held in a murder investigation. Let’s say you’re taking someone’s liberty and freedoms away based on what the system thinks, and the system isn’t fairly viewing different races and different genders. That’s a real problem, and it needs to be answered for.

There is no place in America for facial recognition that supports false arrests and murder.

In a social climate wracked with protests and angst around disproportionate prison populations and police misconduct, engaging software that is clearly not ready for civil use in law enforcement activities does not serve citizens, and will only lead to further unrest.

Whether or not you believe government surveillance is okay, using commercial facial recognition in law enforcement is irresponsible and dangerous.

While the rest of the world speculated the reasons we are being monitored, the Chinese government has been making transparent the reasons they are watching all 1.4 billion of its citizens — and it’s not for their safety.

China’s use cases for face recognition software for surveillance are actually an outstanding example of why we have never and will never engage with government agencies — and why it’s an ethical nightmare to even consider doing so.

China is currently setting up a vast public surveillance network of systems that are utilizing face recognition to construct “social credit” systems, which rank citizens based on their behavior, queuing rewards and punishments depending on their scores. They’ve already proven in the case of arresting one man spotted by their CCTV network in a crowd of 60,000 people exactly how poorly this could go.

The exact protocol is being guarded, but examples of “punishment-worthy” infractions include jaywalking, smoking in non-smoking areas and even buying too many video games. “Punishment” for poor scores includes travel restrictions and many other punishments.

Yes. Citizens will be denied access to flights, trains — transportation — all based on the “social behavior” equivalent of a credit score. If all of this constant surveillance sounds insane, consider this: right now the system is piecemeal, and it’s in effect in select Chinese provinces and cities.

Imagine if America decided to start classifying its citizens based on a social score?

Imagine if America and its already terrifying record of racial disparity in the use of force by the police had the power and justification of someone being “socially incorrect”?

Recently, we read about Amazon Face Rekognition being used in law enforcement in Oregon. They claimed that it won’t be a situation where there’s a “camera on every corner,” as if to say that face recognition software requires constant, synchronized surveillance footage.

In truth, Rekognition and other software simply requires you to point the software at whatever footage you have — social media, CCTV footage or even police bodycams. And that software is only as smart as the information it’s fed; if that’s predominantly images of, for example, African Americans that are “suspect,” it could quickly learn to simply classify the black man as a categorized threat.

Facial recognition is a dynamic tool that helps humanize our interactions with machines. Yet, desperate for more data, we’re seeing a preview in China of face recognition, when used for government surveillance, truly dehumanizing entire populations.

It’s the case of an amazing technology capable of personalizing experiences, improving interactions and creating positive feelings being used for the purpose of controlling citizens. And that, for me, is absolutely unacceptable. It’s not simply an issue for people of color, either. Eventually scanning software of any kind could measure the gait, the gestures, the emotions of anyone considered “different” by the government.

It is said that any tool, in the wrong hands, can be dangerous.

In the hands of government surveillance programs and law enforcement agencies, there’s simply no way that face recognition software will be not used to harm citizens. To my core, and my company’s core, we truly believe this to the point that we have missed out on very, very lucrative government contracts. I’d rather be able to sleep at night knowing that I’m not helping make drone strikes more “effective.”

We deserve a world where we’re not empowering governments to categorize, track and control citizens. Any company in this space that willingly hands this software over to a government, be it America or another nation’s, is willfully endangering people’s lives. And letters to Jeff Bezos aren’t enough. We need movement from the top of every single company in this space to put a stop to these kinds of sales.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/25/facial-recognition-software-is-not-ready-for-use-by-law-enforcement/

The jury is still out on the, "Mothman".

I for one am a person that believes in anomalies and that everything can be explained yet until there is a valid and practical explanation I will render no verdict.

“Mothman”, as the strange creature came to be called, is perhaps one of the strangest creatures to ever grace the annals of weirdness in America. Even though this mysterious and unsolved case has nothing to do with ghosts, it would be remiss of me to not include it in a section of the website about the unexplained.

The weird events connected to the Mothman began on November 12, 1966 near Clendenin, West Virginia. Five men were in the local cemetery that day, preparing a grave for a burial, when something that looked like a “brown human being” lifted off from some nearby trees and flew over their heads. The men were baffled. It did not appear to be a bird, but more like a man with wings. A few days later, more sightings would take place, electrifying the entire region.

Late in the evening of November 15, two young married couples had a very strange encounter as they drove past an abandoned TNT plant near Point Pleasant, West Virginia. The couples spotted two large eyes that were attached to something that was "shaped like a man, but bigger, maybe six or seven feet tall. And it had big wings folded against its back". When the creature moved toward the plant door, the couples panicked and sped away. Moments later, they saw the same creature on a hillside near the road. It spread its wings and rose into the air, following with their car, which by now was traveling at over 100 miles per hour. "That bird kept right up with us," said one of the group. They told Deputy Sheriff Millard Halstead that it followed them down Highway 62 and right to the Point Pleasant city limits. And they would not be the only ones to report the creature that night. Another group of four witnesses claimed to see the “bird” three different times!

Another sighting had more bizarre results. At about 10:30 on that same evening, Newell Partridge, a local building contractor who lived in Salem (about 90 miles from Point Pleasant), was watching television when the screen suddenly went dark. He stated that a weird pattern filled the screen and then he heard a loud, whining sounds from outside that raised in pitch and then ceased. “It sounded like a generator winding up” he later stated. Partridge’s dog, Bandit, began to howl out on the front porch and Newell went out to see what was going on.

When he walked outside, he saw Bandit facing the hay barn, about 150 yards from the house. Puzzled, Partridge turned a flashlight in that direction and spotted two red circles that looked like eyes or “bicycle reflectors”. They moving red orbs were certainly not animal’s eyes, he believed, and the sight of them frightened him. Bandit, an experienced hunting dog and protective of his territory, shot off across the yard in pursuit of the glowing eyes. Partridge called for him to stop, but the animal paid no attention. His owner turned and went back into the house for his gun, but then was too scared to go back outside again. He slept that night with his gun propped up next to the bed. The next morning, he realized that Bandit had disappeared. The dog had still not shown up two days later when Partridge read in the newspaper about the sightings in Point Pleasant that night.

One statement that he read in the newspaper chilled him to the bone. Roger Scarberry, one member of the group who spotted the strange “bird” at the TNT plant, said that as they entered the city limits of Point Pleasant, they saw the body of a large dog lying on the side of the road. A few minutes later, on the way back out of town, the dog was gone. They even stopped to look for the body, knowing they had passed it just a few minutes before. Newell Partridge immediately thought of Bandit, who was never seen again.

On November 16, a press conference was held in the county courthouse and the couples from the TNT plant sighting repeated their story. Deputy Halstead, who had known the couples all of their lives, took them very seriously. “They’ve never been in any trouble,” he told investigators and had no reason to doubt their stories. Many of the reporters who were present for the weird recounting felt the same way. The news of the strange sightings spread around the world. The press dubbed the odd flying creature “Mothman”, after a character from the popular Batman television series of the day.

The remote and abandoned TNT plant became the lair of the Mothman in the months ahead and it could not have picked a better place to hide in. The area was made up of several hundred acres of woods and large concrete domes where high explosives were stored during World War II. A network of tunnels honeycombed the area and made it possible for the creature to move about without being seen. In addition to the manmade labyrinth, the area was also comprised of the McClintic Wildlife Station, a heavily forested animal preserve filled with woods, artificial ponds and steep ridges and hills. Much of the property was almost inaccessible and without a doubt, Mothman could have hid for weeks or months and remained totally unseen. The only people who ever wandered there were hunters and fishermen and the local teenagers, who used the rutted dirt roads of the preserve as “lover’s lanes”.

Very few homes could be found in the region, but one dwelling belonged to the Ralph Thomas family. One November 16, they spotted a “funny red light” in the sky that moved and hovered above the TNT plant. “It wasn’t an airplane”, Mrs. Marcella Bennett (a friend of the Thomas family) said, “but we couldn’t figure out what it was.” Mrs. Bennett drove to the Thomas house a few minutes later and got out of the car with her baby. Suddenly, a figure stirred near the automobile. “It seemed as though it had been lying down,” she later recalled. “It rose up slowly from the ground. A big gray thing. Bigger than a man with terrible glowing eyes.”

Mrs. Bennett was so horrified that she dropped her little girl! She quickly recovered, picked up her child and ran to the house. The family locked everyone inside but hysteria gripped them as the creature shuffled onto the porch and peered into the windows. The police were summoned, but the Mothman had vanished by the time the authorities had arrived.

Mrs. Bennett would not recover from the incident for months and was in fact so distraught that she sought medical attention to deal with her anxieties. She was tormented by frightening dreams and later told investigators that she believed the creature had visited her own home too. She said that she could often hear a keening sounds (like a woman screaming) near her isolated home on the edge of Point Pleasant.

Many would come to believe that the sightings of Mothman, as well as UFO sightings and encounters with “men in black” in the area, were all related. For nearly a year, strange happenings continued in the area. Researchers, investigators and “monster hunters” descended on the area but none so famous as author John Keel, who has written extensively about Mothman and other unexplained anomalies. He has written for many years about UFO’s but dismisses the standard “extraterrestrial” theories of the mainstream UFO movement. For this reason, he has been a controversial figure for decades. According to Keel, man has had a long history of interaction with the supernatural. He believes that the intervention of mysterious strangers in the lives of historic personages like Thomas Jefferson and Malcolm X provides evidence of the continuing presence of the “gods of old”. The manifestation of these elder gods comes in the form of UFO’s and aliens, monsters, demons, angels and even ghosts. He has remained a colorful character to many and yet remains respected in the field for his research and fascinating writings.

Keel became the major chronicler of the Mothman case and wrote that at least 100 people personally witnessed the creature between November 1966 and November 1967. According to their reports, the creature stood between five and seven feet tall, was wider than a man and shuffled on human-like legs. Its eyes were set near the top of the shoulders and had bat-like wings that glided, rather than flapped, when it flew. Strangely though, it was able to ascend straight up “like a helicopter”. Witnesses also described its murky skin as being either gray or brown and it emitted a humming sound when it flew. The Mothman was apparently incapable of speech and gave off a screeching sound. Mrs. Bennett stated that it sounded like a “woman screaming”.

John Keel arrived in Point Pleasant in December 1966 and immediately began collecting reports of Mothman sightings and even UFO reports from before the creature was seen. He also compiled evidence that suggested a problem with televisions and phones that began in the fall of 1966. Lights had been seen in the skies, particularly around the TNT plant, and cars that passed along the nearby road sometimes stalled without explanation. He and his fellow researchers also uncovered a number of short-lived poltergeist cases in the Ohio Valley area. Locked doors opened and closed by themselves, strange thumps were heard inside and outside of homes and often, inexplicable voices were heard. The James Lilley family, who lived just south of the TNT plant, were so bothered by the bizarre events that they finally sold their home and moved to another neighborhood. Keel was convinced that the intense period of activity was all connected.

And stranger things still took place..... A reporter named Mary Hyre, who was the Point Pleasant correspondent for the Athens, Ohio newspaper the Messenger, also wrote extensively about the local sightings. In fact, after one very active weekend, she was deluged with over 500 phone calls from people who saw strange lights in the skies. One night in January 1967, she was working late in her office in the county courthouse and a man walked in the door. He was very short and had strange eyes that were covered with thick glasses. He also had long, black hair that was cut squarely “like a bowl haircut”. Hyre said that he spoke in a low, halting voice and he asked for directions to Welsh, West Virginia. She thought that he had some sort of speech impediment and for some reason, he terrified her. “He kept getting closer and closer to me, “ she said, “ and his funny eyes were staring at me almost hypnotically.”

Alarmed, she summoned the newspaper’s circulation manager to her office and together, they spoke to the strange little man. She said that at one point in the discussion, she answered the telephone when it rang and she noticed the little man pick up a pen from her desk. He looked at it in amazement, “as if he had never seen a pen before.” Then, he grabbed the pen, laughed loudly and ran out of the building.

Several weeks later, Hyre was crossing the street near her office and saw the same man on the street. He appeared to be startled when he realized that she was watching him, turned away quickly and ran for a large black car that suddenly came around the corner. The little man climbed in and it quickly drove away.

By this time, most of the sightings had come to an end and Mothman had faded away into the strange “twilight zone” from which he had come... but the story of Point Pleasant had not yet ended. At around 5:00 in the evening on December 15, 1967, the 700-foot bridge linking Point Pleasant to Ohio suddenly collapsed while filled with rush hour traffic. Dozens of vehicles plunged into the dark waters of the Ohio River and 46 people were killed. Two of those were never found and the other 44 are buried together in the town cemetery of Gallipolis, Ohio.