Month: January 2018

(credit: Adam Jones, Ph.D.)

In 2016, ProPublica caused a stir when it evaluated the performance of software that's used in criminal justice proceedings. The software, which is used to evaluate a defendant's chance of committing further crimes, turned out to produce different results when evaluating black people and caucasians.

The significance of that discrepancy is still the subject of some debate, but two Dartmouth College researchers have asked a more fundamental question: is the software any good? The answer they came up with is "not especially," as its performance could be matched by recruiting people on Mechanical Turk, or performing a simple analysis that only took two factors into account.

Software and bias

The software in question is called COMPAS, for Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions. It takes into account a wide variety of factors about defendants, and uses them to evaluate whether those individuals are likely to commit additional crimes and helps identify intervention options. COMPAS is heavily integrated into the judicial process (see this document from the California Department of Corrections for a sense of its importance). Perhaps most significantly, however, it is sometimes influential in determining sentencing, which can be based on the idea that people who are likely to commit additional crimes should be incarcerated longer.

Enlarge / Elon Musk speaks during the StartmeupHK Venture Forum in Hong Kong, China, on Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. (credit: Justin Chin/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Tesla has been a huge success under Elon Musk's leadership, rising in value from less than $4 billion six years ago to $59 billion today. On Tuesday, Tesla's board announced that it had convinced Musk to stay at the helm for another decade with a truly gargantuan performance-based pay package.

The pay package is tied to the value of the company's stock as well as revenue and earnings targets. If Tesla's stock never rises above $100 billion, Musk will get nothing for a decade's work as Tesla's CEO (aside from increases in the value of the stock he already has). If the stock reaches a value of $100 billion—and the company either achieves revenues of $20 billion or earnings of $1.5 billion—Musk will get 1 percent of the company's stock, an award worth $1 billion.

Things get a lot more generous from there. If the stock rises to $150 billion (and Musk reaches another revenue or profit target), Musk gets another 1 percent of the stock, which will be worth $1.5 billion. That pattern continues in $50 billion increments until Tesla's stock rises above $650 billion—at which point Musk will get a stock award worth $6.5 billion. Musk's stock awards will total $45 billion if he hits all 12 milestones.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

Apple announced this morning that the wait for its HomePod smart speaker is nearly over. HomePod will be available starting February 9, with preorders beginning Friday, January 26. The home speaker that houses the company's virtual assistant Siri will initially be sold in the US, UK, and Australia, and will be available in France and Germany this spring.

The company first announced HomePod at last year's WWDC with the hopes of releasing it in December for $349, ahead of the holiday season. However, that deadline came and went and those who wanted an Apple version of Amazon's Echo and Google's Home were left waiting.

Apple's announcement doesn't detail anything we didn't already know about HomePod. The cylindrical speaker is powered by Apple's A8 chip and uses an array of six microphones to pick up your calls of "Hey, Siri" from across the room, even with music playing. It also uses real-time acoustic modeling, audio beam-forming, and echo cancellation to create a rich sound experience, and its spacial awareness feature lets it automatically adjust to produce the best sound for its location in your home.