Error-ridden algorithm that controls the lives of Serco's immigration detainees
In Australia’s immigration detention centres, each detainee is given security risk ratings decided by an algorithm – but they’re not even told it exists.
Developed by Serco, the company tasked with running Australia’s immigration detention network, the Security Risk Assessment Tool – or SRAT – is meant to determine whether someone is low, medium, high or extreme risk for escape or violence.
Immigration insiders, advocates and detainees have told Guardian Australia the SRAT and similar tools used in Australia’s immigration system are “abusive”, “a blunt instrument” and “unscientific”. Multiple government reports have found that assessments can be littered with inaccuracies – with devastating consequences.
A.I. is a certain, serious threat but not because of far-off robot uprising fantasies. It’s already speeding up climate change and fuelling misinformation. https://foe.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/AI_Climate_Disinfo_v4_030124.pdf
The tobacco industry language that found its way into New Zealand ministerial papers
Very interesting, detailed account of how the tobacco industry has shaped recent backwards changes to tobacco policy in New Zealand, more directly than you might guess.
RNZ’s attempts to follow up exactly who did write the notes, and where suggestions such as freezing excise tax on cigarettes came from, have only raised more questions. Costello’s office declined an OIA request for reports, briefings and communications on the issue, on the basis that it would breach officials’ ability to provide ‘free and frank’ advice to ministers.
RNZ compared notes Associate Health Minister Casey Costello sent to officials, with a range of documents produced by the tobacco industry and its supporters. Intentional or not, there are frequent – and striking – similarities between the language and the rnz.co.nz
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Placement poverty: Putting the boot in to people who power our social infrastructure
Placement poverty is a real thing. I had to do around 1,400 hours of unpaid placement work for my degree and around 1,800 while I was at TAFE. It was incredibly valuable experience but I could only afford it because I lived at home and cost of living was much lower then.
I now routinely see postgraduate students who are unable to find any accomodation they can afford in Sydney. Who are having to choose between study and sleep because they still have to work more than 40 hours per week just to survive. Who often have to support dependents and family while they study full time because they’re under pressure to get their qualification quickly.
It’s often worse for undergraduate students in nursing, teaching and allied health. These students have to do hundreds of hours of unpaid placements as part of their training – mostly for the government agencies they’ll then go on to work for. These placements are often months-long blocks, making it difficult to earn any income while completing them.
Even though government has recognised the issue, it’s telling that they’ve made clear that addressing this is not a priority.
There’s a simple truth underpinning this: there’s never been a worse time to be a student.
Like thousands of other nursing students, Victoria Robinson needs to complete more than 800 hours of unpaid work placements to graduate.
And while the experience is valuable, the third-year student says juggling months of 12-hour shifts at a hospital, along with the work that pays her bills, is difficult…
“Throughout my last placement, I became ill. I had to go to the doctor. It was either the doctors that week or food,” she said.
“It might sound a bit dramatic, but it was $60 for the doctors or $60 for the food.”
It’s known as ‘placement poverty’ — and it’s ‘exploiting’ a generation of Australian students
‘Paying to be exploited’: The heavy tolls ‘placement poverty’ is exacting on students abc.net.au
Reader: www.abc.net.au
Daily shisha use: the tobacco control niche that’s not so niche any more
Between 1.8% and 3.6% of smokers use shisha daily across Australia, up from 1% just three years ago.
That’s the shocking result from the 2022-2023 National Drug Strategy Household Survey that was released Wednesday. It deals with a range of alcohol and other drug use, but I was interested in the data on tobacco use. In particular, what’s been happening with shisha use.
The 2022-3 survey results show a dramatic increase in the daily use of shisha in Australia over the COVID-19 period from 1% of smokers in 2019 to 2.7% only three years later.
Keep in mind that this is daily use. 45 minutes of shisha use equates with more than 100 cigarettes, so this represents a marked increase in overall tobacco consumption for people in this group.
We can be fairly confident this increase is real and that the rate is between 1.8% and 3.6%. The 95% confidence intervals for the 2022-3 survey are 0.9% and the rate of standard error is 17.7% (RSE, generally <25% is considered reliable for most practical purposes).
This challenges assumptions made by many working in tobacco control and public health that shisha use is infrequent.
We also know that use isn’t distributed evenly. 2.7% of all smokers may seem like a small proportion, but this increase disproportionately affects Arabic speaking communities and populations, people living in cities and regional centres, and other migrant groups.
This is also consistent with focus groups that Dr Lilian Chan and I conducted for the Shisha No Thanks project in 2022. People who used shisha told us that their use had intensified through the COVID lockdowns, but that this increase had continued afterwards and was increasingly complemented with e-cigarettes use.
We need to increase our focus on:
- increasing awareness of the harms of water pipe use (this remains low)
- providing avenues for quitting that are tailored to shisha users
- making sure use at food venues complies with existing laws
- enforcing and retail import conditions more consistently.
Sources
AIHW. (2024). National Drug Strategy Household Survey 2022–2023. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/illicit-use-of-drugs/national-drug-strategy-household-survey/contents/technical-notes
Spatial Apartheid Mapping by DAIR
To help researchers understand the current impact of spatial apartheid, we developed a dataset consisting of satellite imagery covering South Africa, accompanied by polygons labeled according to four classes of neighborhoods: wealthy areas, non wealthy areas, non residential neighborhoods and vacant land.
DAIR is active on the Fediverse, notably through their own Mastodon instance.
Spatial Apartheid Mapping dair-institute.org
Reader: www.dair-institute.org
Secretive firm behind voice no campaign billed taxpayers almost $135,000 via Coalition MPs, documents show via @RHW@mastodon.au
The secretive firm behind the no campaign in the voice referendum has claimed almost $135,000 in taxpayer funding, including almost $70,000 from the Coalition senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, as part of its work to help conservative politicians sharpen their messaging to voters.
The computer guys have arrived to tell historical linguists how to study language
In the manner of mathematicians and physicists telling other academic fields how they’re doing it wrong, the computer guys have arrived to tell historical linguists how to study language.
Mainstream historical linguists remain skeptical, however — of computational phylogenetics in general and the new result in particular. The main criticism is that the approach relies mostly on vocabulary and ignores word sounds and structures, such as the stems, prefixes and suffixes that make up a word. And the critics say that word meanings by themselves don’t give enough information to draw firm conclusions, no matter how sophisticated the computation.
A very interesting long piece, well worth your time.
A new look at our linguistic roots knowablemagazine.org
Reader: knowablemagazine.org
Discord, the internet's sewer, continues to be dangerous to you even if you're not on it
Discord continues to be every troll’s favourite platform:
Over the weekend, hackers targeted federated social networks like Mastodon to carry out ongoing spam attacks that were organized on Discord, and conducted using Discord applications.
Importantly these coordinated attacks seem to be targeting smaller fediverse instances according to Eugen Rochko, which may have less active moderation processes in place. These claims may be self-serving on Rochko’s part though, some of the best-run instances I know are smaller ones and mastodon.social is often a bin fire.
Discord took no action against server that coordinated costly Mastodon spam attacks | TechCrunch techcrunch.com
Reader: techcrunch.com
Eugen Rochko (@Gargron@mastodon.social) mastodon.social
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Mary Reynolds: from gardening to acts of restorative kindness
It used to be an acre of gorse, bramble, hawthorn, blackthorn, but someone got planning and had cleaned out the whole field to replace it with a garden. I stood there in horror – and I realized that I’d done this myself so many times in my career. They had nowhere else to go. We’re taking away their habitats, the agricultural land is poisoned, old growth forest decimated, and now the only hope they have is abandoned land or gardens. It just reminded me of Noah’s Arc, all those animals going onto the boat, but in reverse. So I decided to give up my job. I have to dedicate myself to righting the wrong I’ve done.
Interview with Mary Reynolds | Acts of Restorative Kindness (ARK) - ARC2020 via Metafilter
I watched American Fiction last night. I haven’t enjoyed a film that much in a long time. Jeffrey Wright and Cord Jefferson, so good. 4½ stars
