Presidential endorsements, Copa América update, tattoo recognition technology

"By contemporary standards, it comes so early in the process. Bill Clinton is endorsing Al Gore, which cleared the field and cleared the way for Al Gore to sweep the nomination. Only Bill Bradley opposed him, and he was eliminated pretty quickly by March. 



Gore had to walk a very fine line because he was happy to get the president's endorsement, and the president, despite all his difficulties and near removal from office because of the Lewinski scandal, actually left office as one of the top three most popular presidents of the modern age. So you would have thought that would have worked well for Al Gore, but he had to walk this tightrope because he didn't want to get tied down by this Lewinski scandal and he even told the media that President Clinton had lied to him about the Lewinski scandal as it developed in the White House. 



You might make that case that it would have helped Gore if he had let popular Bill Clinton go out and campaign for him, but he didn't and he ended up losing by a razor-thin margin. He even lost President Clinton's home state of Arkansas." 

"It was viewed as a rather tepid endorsement of his vice president. The good news for Bush 41 was that Ronald Reagan left office as a very popular president as he came to the end of his two terms, but there was also scandal surrounding the president: Iran-Contra. George H.W. Bush had maintained that he was not involved in that illegal process at all. 



It helped him because he swept to the White House with an overwhelming landslide victory over Michael Dukakis in 1988." 

"Nixon lost the popular vote to John F. Kennedy by only one-tenth of a percent. It was one of the closest elections ever in the popular vote, but Kennedy did have quite a margin in the electoral college. 



It's hard to say that that lack of enthusiasm from Eisenhower for Nixon doomed him, but it certainly didn't help him, and if he had given him a robust, enthusiastic, warm endorsement, Nixon could have won Illinois and would have put him within about seven points of winning the electoral college."

The NIST which is one of the oldest research institutions in the federal government has been running a research program with the FBI to encourage the development of algorithms that can identify tattoos, start to reveal their meanings, and connect people with similar tattoos to one another. This involved collecting data sets of tattoos—the first one was more than 15,000 images—and distributing them to third parties, including eight private companies. There were at least 19 third parties in all that received the data set and they were assigned a series of tests and then they either self-reported back. In a lot of cases, some didn't report back at all. ...It's a database that's already used in investigations by the FBI and various law enforcement. This dataset is mean to test and train tattoo recognition algorithms.

When we're talking about science, there are certain ethical standards for how things should be conducted. In this case, they used—almost entirely—tattoos collected in law enforcement settings, particularly jails and prisons. While you might think that prisoners lose a lot of rights once they're in prison, they actually have a lot more rights when it comes to being subjects in scientific experiments. In this case, NIST did not go through the ethical process prior to conducting the research and as a result, a lot of the research is ethically questionable and threatens privacy and civil liberties. Part of that is these images were handed to a lot of third parties with very little restrictions, but also a lot of the tests involved some questionable methodology that seemed to target people based on their religion. A lot of the white papers and presentations and instructions that were involved talked specifically about how tattoos can reveal people's religious and ritualistic beliefs, their political ideology, and their affiliations with various groups.

In a lot of ways, it's very similar and there's a lot of concerns over how facial recognition is being used by the private sector and by police, and there's a lot of comparisons that can be made on how people can be tracked by their faces, or in this case, by their tattoos on CCTV, in images online, but what's different about tattoos rather than face and fingerprints is that basically fingerprints don't tell you about people's beliefs. It isn't necessarily speech but tattoos are speech. They are how we express who we are, they may show our past, things that we used to believe in, but they also show whether you're connected to a military group, connected to a labor union. You might get tattoos that show your political beliefs...but also what religion you're a part of.

That might be true, but I think you can make the same argument about eliminating the Fourth Amendment [the right to be protected against "unreasonable search and seizure"] altogether. I think that, certainly, if you put video cameras in everyone's homes, maybe that would result in more successful investigations, but that isn't consistent with how Americans cherish their privacy and their freedoms.

NIST has a long history of cutting edge research and evaluations in the field of image processing. Several of these projects have assisted law enforcement agencies in advancing pattern analysis in fields such as fingerprint and ballistics matching and facial recognition. In 2014, NIST began working on a project to evaluate automated, image-based tattoo recognition technologies.



The project uses a database of tattoo images to fairly and reproducibly assess which algorithms from companies and research groups produce the highest-quality matches. The goal of the NIST project is to help ensure tattoo matching technologies are evaluated using sound science to improve accuracy and minimize mismatches. NIST communications materials (e.g., presentations, reports) have been updated to more clearly reflect the intent of this project.



NIST’s work on this project does not involve the use of human subjects as defined by federal regulations. The database contains images only, with no accompanying information on the individuals whose tattoos were photographed.



The project has been reviewed and determined to not meet the criteria for human subjects research as defined by federal regulations.



The NIST project is about measuring the effectiveness of algorithms for accurately matching digital images.  The NIST project is not about the many complex law enforcement policies or approaches that may be related to images of tattoos.



We are reviewing the EFF report and will carefully consider their concerns.

"The Twilight Zone gets at two important aspects of the work that we're doing. First of all, the places that we travel to are somewhat dark, they're actually called mesophotic reefs, or middle light reefs and it's so deep that it's really this sort of mysterious deep blue or even dark light down there and so it kind of is twilight. And then the second is really of course, it just really captivates the mystery of the place and the sense of unknown. All of the work that we can do down there, there's so much left to explore on our planet."

"What we do, is we use a closed circuit re-breather and it's basically a machine that recycles the air that you're breathing over and over again. It's kind of like breathing in a bag, except without the passing out part. So we have a filter on our back that is a scrubber that removes the carbon dioxide that we exhale through a chemical reaction and then we have a small tank of oxygen that we can add oxygen back into what we call the loop...and that enables us to do dives up to about seven hours in length."

"You know it's really fascinating because a lot of the corals and other animals that are down there we can just collect and bring up and all we have to manage is make sure that they're in the same temperature and the same sort of lighting in which they were collected...we actually developed...a portable fish decompression chamber and when we collect the fish we put them inside this chamber at about 200 or 250 feet deep and we seal it up and then that now becomes the world's deepest aquarium...it keeps the fish at the same pressure at which we collected them for as long as we want and we connect it to a pump on the surface and over a period of a couple of days we can slowly acclimate them to surface pressure."

Quite a lot. But more than arts and culture, I think that downtown, where we’re located, has really seem some phenomenal evolution. You know that moment on Bunker Hill where you could sort of shoot a cannon down the street and not hit anybody at 9 o’clock at night to where now downtown is a vibrant live-work space with a lot of culture, amazing food, cocktails, lots of arts? Just a great place to be for families as well as just the community at large. 

I think the Grand Performances has sort of claimed a fame through the decades. It has been bringing artists from around the world to Los Angeles because our programs are free and we tend to be a little bit more experimental, and our goal is present the performing arts traditions of the many different communities that make up this city. We’ve had the opportunity to introduce a lot of artists and different art forms from around the world because we don’t have to worry about selling seats. The Hollywood Bowl has 18,000 they have to sell, so there’s very little real opportunity for a lot of experimentation there. Grand Performances, I think, has played a really important role in bringing new and different voices to our city, in spite of the fact that many of those artists have been well established in their native countries or in their parts of the world… We’re privileged to be able to present artists that are not well known. It’s an opportunity for people to come and take a risk. 

We all know that Latino culture is an ongoing and important part of the makeup of our city, because we are now well above 40 percent Latino in Los Angeles. I think to actually acknowledge that in a very specific and thoughtful way is really important... To look at the Latino community and some of the political challenges, the cultural challenges that the Latino community has and shares with us as a broader population is just an important thing. I don’t think that we have never not presented Latino culture. It’s been an ongoing part of Grand Performances' trajectory and the things that we do. This year, we’re actually saying ‘This is important’. ... I don’t think you can be in Los Angeles and not be a little bit Latino. 

I think of it as us having the opportunity to sit on the sofa and listen to them having a personal conversation. I think it’s going to be funny, it’s going to be fun. I’m hoping for personal revelations. These three gentlemen have known one another for a long while and I think it’s going to be one of those full of chisme, just a lot of fun. They’re just going to tell stories and we hope they tell stories about one another — you know, an inside glimpse. 

Primarily, we’re going to be looking at the art of making escabeche, which is that wonderful relish that is on every single taco table in the city. It’s a relish that’s made of carrots, jalapeños, onions and bay leaves. Ernest Miller, who is part of the slow food movement here in Los Angeles, is going to be conducting this workshop for us, and each person that comes will have an opportunity to put together a little bucket of the makings and they’ll take it home and it’ll ferment on their counter and in a few days they’ll have a batch of really great escabeche for their eating. We do have a limited number of people that we’re going to be able to accommodate at that one so send us your RSVP. I think for us to try and pretend that culture is only the high arts or only the art is putting our head in the sand because Los Angeles is a city of food. I think talking about food is a very important part of the arts.

I hope that people walk away inspired to have conservations with their neighbors, to shake hands, to smile instead of just walking with their head down or their faces buried in their phones — to interact with people and to try something new. We all talk about wanting to be experimental and we all think that we like to try new things. When I want to have a meal, I go to the places that I know. I encourage people to try something new. The beauty of what Grand Performances offers is because it’s all free, all you’re really risking is the time and a little bit of transportation effort. When I first came to Los Angeles, I was really excited to move here, because as an Asian-American woman who grew up in the mid-West, I stood out a lot and I came to Los Angeles because I wanted to be able to blend in, and I think that’s one of the beautiful things. You come to Grand Performances and you’re part of a crowd, you’re part of a mixed community and you are part of Los Angeles.