Mediaboss Marketing

The Chrome extension allows voters to track how the main parties insert political messages into their Facebook feeds. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

A tool exposing how voters are targeted with tailored propaganda on Facebook has been launched in response to what is likely to be the most extensive social media campaign in general election history.

Experts in digital campaigning, including an adviser to Labour in 2015, have designed a program to allow voters to shine a light into what they describe as a dark, unregulated corner of our political campaigns.

The free software, called Who Targets Me?, can be added to a Google Chrome browser and will allow voters to track how the main parties insert political messages into their Facebook feeds calibrated to appeal on the basis of personal information they have already made public online.

It aims to show who campaigns are targeting, how much the parties are spending and will shed light on whether targeted adverts are crossing the boundary into fake news. The creators hope thousands of people will sign up.

It comes as both Conservatives and Labour plan extensive Facebook campaigns ahead of the 8 June poll. The Conservatives have rehired Craig Elder and Tom Edmonds, the digital consultants who worked on the 2015 election battle, in which the party spent 1.2m spent on digital campaigning, against Labours 160,000. This time, Labour is understood to be ready to spend around 1m.

Elder and Edmonds last year worked for Britain Stronger In Europe, the designated remain campaign in the EU referendum. In one instance, they targeted Facebook users who had expressed strong support for a Premier League team through likes with a post about the impact on their side of foreign players needing visas in the event of Brexit. People who had mentioned they liked surfing would receive a message about the value of EU regulations on beach pollution.

Andrew Gwynne MP, Labours campaign co-ordinator, has said targeted Facebook advertising will have a significant impact on the election. Labour will use a new system called Promote to identify specific people in a constituency at whom candidates will be able to target a message.

For the good of our democracy, its time to throw some light on this dark and unregulated area of campaign spending, said Sam Jeffers, who has helped to devise the software, which is available as a browser extension.

Facebook advertising is highly targeted and tailored to the recipient, battle-tested for effectiveness, yet invisible to anyone but the end user. There are no spending limits on digital ads, despite strict legal controls in other areas of campaign expenditure. It gives big money a strong voice in our elections.

The Electoral Commission, which regulates campaign spending, told the Guardian it would be carefully considering the use of social media over the coming six weeks. Even after 2015 it has expanded so much, a spokesman said. We want to make clear how greater clarity can be provided to voters.

Instead of parties simply declaring an overall amount spent on Facebook, it wants them to provide details on dates and topics covered in adverts.

Political Facebook ads emerged as a key tactic during the 2016 EU referendum. The official Vote Leave campaign pumped out about 1bn targeted digital adverts, mostly via Facebook. Vote Leaves campaign director, Dominic Cummings, has claimed it spent 98% of its 6.8m budget on digital.

It remains unclear how Arron Banks, the millionaire backer of the Leave.EU campaign, may deploy his social media team, which is based in his Bristol insurance company HQ and was schooled in political campaigning with guidance from Cambridge Analytica, a Washington-based firm partly owned by Donald Trump donor Robert Mercer.

Leave.EU is currently under investigation by the Electoral Commission over Elder and Edmondss roles and over whether it received any impermissible donations and whether its spending return was complete. Banks has denied breaching any electoral law.

We can use this information to help people understand why theyre seeing specific messages, said Jeffers. We might also be able to use the data to work out whether campaigns are operating within the law. For example, are they respecting national v constituency spending limits? Are they discriminating against a particular group of the population?

The Electoral Commission said that if a post promotes a candidate it must be accounted as constituency spending, which typically has a 15,000 limit. If it deals with broad party policy, it should be accounted nationally.

This was not as sophisticated as the psychographic techniques claimed by Cambridge Analytica. Its British chief executive, Alexander Nix, has said it gathers voters social media data and ranks them according to openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness (including whether you put others needs and society ahead of yourself) and neuroticism.

In a conference presentation, Nix gave the example of a campaign supporting the right to gun ownership: For a highly neurotic and conscientious audience you are going to need a message that is rational and fear-based, he said. That could lead to an image of a burglars hand smashing a window and a slogan about the second amendment being an insurance policy. For a closed and agreeable audience that cares about family and tradition, the slogan might be: From father to son, since the birth of our nation would work better.

Read more here:
Free software to reveal how Facebook election posts are targeted - The Guardian

FAIRMONT After applying for the grant in November 2016, Fairmont City Council has received $10,000 for the development of geographic information system (GIS) software.

City Manager Robin Gomez announced the grant acceptance at Tuesdays City Council meeting by presenting a large novelty check.

The software works by combining data and maps of Fairmont. Gomez said that while the technology has many uses, the city will use it to identify and establish historic resources in structures around town.

It will allow us to have more data, allow us to more easily analyze the locations and what we would be able to do with historic structures, Gomez said. It will help us with marketing certain structures like the Masonic Temple and help get a developer in there. Theres all sorts of possibilities that go with the GIS system, but our approach, since the grant is through the state Historic Preservation Office, is were identifying historic structures.

Gomez said that while identifying and mapping historic structures is the primary goal, the city will also use the software to map out other specifics for the city.

We can add more data, such as all those different code enforcement cases and kind of where we have vacant properties, Gomez said. We can track where we have properties that the city owns that we would be looking to have redeveloped. It allows us to identify all fire hydrants throughout the city.

Worldwide, GIS software is used for a wide variety of historic, environmental and social purposes. For example, the software can be used to find which wetlands are most at risk by comparing their location on a map to heavy pollution sources. It can also be used to track animal migration patterns, as well as help businesses find a location for a new store.

While perhaps less relevant to Fairmont, GIS software also can help officials prepare natural disaster response and evacuation plans by identifying neighborhoods most at risk, escape routes and good location for shelters.

The software can also be used to study statistical trends, allowing cities to track such things as crime rates and precipitation rates over months and years, provided they have the required data.

Once the GIS software is implemented, the city will be able to easily update its maps going forward, Gomez said.

With the new technology and data, city officials will be able to make the best decisions in the future for a better Fairmont, he said.

Its just an endless amount of data that can be in one location that allows us to analyze and make better-informed decisions, Gomez said.

The rest is here:
Fairmont awarded GIS software grant - The Exponent Telegram (press release) (registration)

Chemical groups are defined by the spatial arrangement and bonding of multiple of atoms in space, but these atoms are proximate to each other. When chemical groups interact, e.g. through hydrogen bonding or -bond stacking, the strength of their repulsion or attraction may vary with their type, distance, and angle, but these are predominantly local effects. More complex bioactivity features may be described by considering neighboring groups that strengthen or attenuate a given interaction but, because even in these cases distant atoms rarely affect each other, the enforced locality of a DCNN is appropriate. Additionally, as with edge detectors in DCNNs for images, the applicability of a detector for e.g., hydrogen bonding or -bond stacking, is invariant across the receptive field. These local biochemical interaction detectors may then be hierarchically composed into more intricate features describing the complex and nonlinear phenomenon of molecular binding.

Now, I have no problem with the local bonding calculations that theyre talking about doing, although theyre subject to the usual disclaimers about the accuracy of the calculations. But the assumption that "distant atoms rarely affect each other" does not seem to me to be valid. Medicinal chemists are quite used to seeing changes in a structure-activity relationship when a reasonably distant atom is changed "You can get away with a methyl there as long as you dont have one over there". There are SARs that do work on the "greatest hits" principle, where you can independently mix-and-match various regions of the molecule, but the great majority of the projects Ive worked on havent gone that way, or not quite. And if Im interpreting that paragraph correctly, its explicitly aimed at the mix-and-match. Id say that the most common situation is the one where you can get away with independent changes within a given range, which can be a rather narrow one, and then all bets are off. And the only way to discover that youve gone outside those ranges is to go outside them.

As mentioned, AtomNet, to its credit, also brings in data about the binding target. But thats a tricky business, too. As is well known, binding sites accommodate ligands by adjusting their own shapes sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically and this is one of the hardest things to account for in virtual screening techniques. Likewise, the ligands themselves can adopt a range of conformations in response to a binding event, which also adds to the computational burden. Im not at all sure how this software deals with these problems, particularly the protein mobility one, but if I come across more details, Ill update this post.

From what I can see, the AIM program is screening databases of commercial compounds and furnishing the applicants with the 72 best purchasable hits. The compounds will be given an LC/MS quality check diluted to an appropriate concentration, and plated out, which is a good service. "Custom-chosen", though, does not mean "custom-synthesized", as youd imagine (I dont think anyone will be taking that on for free). Theyre asking that people come to them, ideally, with targets that have an X-ray protein structure and an identified small-molecule binding site, which is fair enough.

I would very much like to know what the hit rates will be for these, and I suspect that AtomWise very much wants to know that, too, which is why theyre offering to do this for people. The awardees get some potentially interesting molecules to test, and the company gets a presumably diverse set of real-world examples to test their technology against. (I should note that they already have agreements with several academic groups, and one with Merck (NYSE:MRK), for an unnamed project). Personally, Ill be surprised if theres much of an enhancement for many of these, but I wish the company luck, and I think that their commitment to putting their software to the test is admirable.

Is it "artificial intelligence", though? Thats a topic I touched on in my talk last year in Manchester. I think that if you time-machined people from the 1950s into our present-day world and hit them with Google Maps (for example), theyd probably call that artificial intelligence. "Sure, thats intelligent, although for some reason you only seem to have taught it about roads". From that standpoint, AtomWise would also be called AI, but from a modern perspective, if thats AI then so are the rest of the modeling and docking programs. Ill put that one down to press release language, and hope that it doesnt become a big part of their pitch.

The part that annoys me more is the "72 potential medicines" line. Screening hits are potential medicines in the same way that AtomWise is a potential Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) sure, they all start out this way, but not many make it through to the end. People are confused enough about where drugs come from and what it takes to get them there; Im never happy to see more confusion being dumped in on top of what weve got.

Link:
Free Compounds, Chosen By Software - Seeking Alpha

Okay, so lets say youve run your Belarc report and installed HWInfo. You know what youre working with, but how do you know how your computer will perform under a heavy load? There are dozens of stress-testing utilities out there, but Prime95 and MemTest86+ are two stalwarts. Prime95 uses your processor to calculate extremely large prime numbers, and MemTest86+ taxes your RAM with several different memory-straining algorithms. If youve got a flaw in your setup, these utilities will smoke it out. Hopefully, the smoke in this situation is figurative.

MemTest86+ is especially useful because you can boot to it, so if you suspect a memory problem is making Windows unstable, you can bypass the operating system entirely and test the hardware from the BIOS level.

Also, if you feel like contributing to a larger cause, Prime95 is part of GIMPS, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. There are cash prizes for using Prime95 to discover new Mersenne primes!

Read the original post:
12 free utilities that can give you more control over your PC - PCWorld

High noon is approaching in a standoff over part of a controversial bill dealing with "stand your ground" self-defense cases.

The House and Senate have both backed passing a bill that would shift a key burden of proof in "stand your ground" cases, but they have taken different stances on an important legal detail.

The Senate is deciding which chamber's proposal to put up for a vote next week, the final scheduled week of the 2017 legislative session.

Sen. Rob Bradley, a Fleming Island Republican who is sponsoring the Senate bill (SB 128) said Thursday the issue won't "die in messages" the process of bills bouncing back and forth between the House and Senate.

The issue stems from a Florida Supreme Court ruling in 2015 that said defendants during pre-trial hearings have the burden of proof to show they should be shielded from prosecution under the "stand your ground" law. The House and Senate would shift that burden to prosecutors, a change backed by groups such as the National Rifle Association.

In changing the burden of proof, the House wants to require prosecutors in "stand your ground" cases to overcome the asserted immunity sought by defendants through "clear and convincing evidence."

But the Senate, which rejected the "clear and convincing evidence" language earlier this session, wants a higher standard known as "beyond a reasonable doubt."

Critics contend that either the House or Senate approach to the issue would make it easier for people involved in fatal shootings to use stand your ground when there are no victims to counter the self-defense claims.

The Senate approved the bill 23-15 on March 15, while the House gave its version a 74-39 vote of support on April 5.

While the stand your ground issue remains to be resolved, Second Amendment advocates have had relatively little to show for the legislative session.

On Thursday, the Senate prepared for a possible vote Friday a measure (SB 616) that would allow people with concealed-weapons licenses to hang onto their handguns until they reach security checkpoints inside courthouses.

The proposal cleared the Rules Committee on Tuesday. But even if it is approved by the entire Senate, the fate of the bill remains to be seen as the House doesn't have a companion bill.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Greg Steube, a Sarasota Republican who is sponsoring a number of firearm-related bills including the courthouse measure, said he hopes House Speaker Richard Corcoran will pick up the proposal when it comes over from the Senate.

Steube refused to say many of his other proposals including proposals that would allow people with concealed-weapons licenses to openly carry guns or carry firearms on university campuses or into airport terminals are dead for the session.

Steube has been unable to advance many of the bills through his divided Judiciary Committee, largely because of opposition Sen. Anitere Flores, R-Miami.

"They're still live bullets, I mean the language is alive, but I think the members of the Senate have made it very clear where they're at," Steube said.

On Wednesday, the Senate voted 22-13 to approve a measure (HB 849) that would allow people with concealed-weapons licenses to pack heat at private religious institutions that have schools.

The proposal will have to go back to the House because the Senate included a change that would prohibit people from carrying guns during school hours or when school activities are underway. The restriction was not included in the bill when passed by the House.

Supporters have said people with concealed-weapons licenses should be able to be armed at churches for security reasons.

"In this era across the country, we have had attacks during worship services, burglaries or thefts or robberies during worships, and people appear at church services with problems," Sen. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, said. "There is a security aspect in every environment and many people are willing to embrace that responsibility."

Outside of law enforcement officers, state law prohibits people from carrying guns at schools.

With some high-profile gun bills getting stuck in the Senate, the House hasn't focused on the measures.

"Obviously, I think there is interest in the House, but without any movement in the Senate, we've decided to spend time on things that we can actually get done," Rep. Neil Combee, an Auburndale Republican who is a key backer of gun-rights bills, said early this month.

Here is the original post:
Burden of proof changes to 'Stand Your Ground' laws still in limbo - Orlando Weekly (blog)