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Notes from Coed:Ethics conference, London, 13 July 2018

Cori Crider - "When data kills" / Weaponised AI

• Imam Salem bin Ali Jaber preached in Yemen against Islamic extremism; guest at a wedding of relative; hit by a US Hellfire missile fired from a drone. Relative Faisal made contact with Cori, went to Washington DC. No explanation ever made by government (although compensation was paid).
• Decision-making process behind the attack not known exactly. But there is significant evidence that such attacks serve to further radicalise people; attack results in ~3x more new recruits than extremists killed by attack.
• Most drone attacks are not on named individuals, but rather "signature strikes" — a euphemism for killing people the military doesn't even know, but who match a certain behavioural pattern (perhaps based on metadata — Hayden: "we kill people based on metadata"
• Skynet (known through Snowden relevations): use machine learning to try to find courier

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console.log('first script start');
function sleep(milliSeconds){
    var startTime = new Date().getTime();                    // get the current time
    while (new Date().getTime() < startTime + milliSeconds); // hog cpu until time's up
}

sleep(2000)
console.log('first script end');

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Styling native elements

Native HTML controls are a challenge to style. You can style any element in the web platform that uses Shadow DOM with a pseudo element ::pseudo-element or the /deep/ path selector.

video::webkit-media-controls-timeline {
  background-color: lime;
}

video /deep/ input[type=range] {

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It's hard to quarrel with that ancient justification of the free press: "America's right to know." It seems almost cruel to ask, ingeniously, "America's right to know what, please? Science? Mathematics? Economics? Foreign languages?"

None of those things, of course. In fact, one might well suppose that the popular feeling is that Americans are a lot better off without any of that tripe.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way throughout political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

Politicians have routinely striven to speak the language of Shakespeare and Milton as ungrammaticaly as possible in order to avoid offending their audiences by appearing to have gone to school. Thus, Adlai Stevenson, who incautiously allowed intelligence and learning and wit to peep out of his speeches, found the American people

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var tabbableElements = 'a[href], area[href], input:not([disabled]),' +
	'select:not([disabled]), textarea:not([disabled]),' +
	'button:not([disabled]), iframe, object, embed, *[tabindex],' +
	'*[contenteditable]';

var keepFocus = function (context) {
	var allTabbableElements = context.querySelectorAll(tabbableElements);
	var firstTabbableElement = allTabbableElements[0];
	var lastTabbableElement = allTabbableElements[allTabbableElements.length - 1];