Radio Rant
May. 25th, 2007 11:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rwrylsinOne thing I'll say for UK radio, it provokes more thought in the morning that anything I ever encountered on Australian breakfast radio. I'll also give it points for the fact that it is the callers and 'experts' that make me turn it off in disgust rather than the presenters - who appear to be rational human beings if you can believe such a thing.
Anyway, apparently I need to purge morning radio out of my system, so bear with me while I rant.
Yesterday the topic was apparently a proposal to fingerprint all schoolkids and keep them in a database. A caller had buzzed in to say that on the bright side, it could be used to prove you were innocent of a crime rather than just prove guilt.
Er, no. Sledgehammer and nut observations aside, it doesn't really work. There's a reason for the innocent until proven guilty approach.
Look at it from a more familiar tech perspective, if they don't find your fingerprints at a crime scene that just means that they didn't find them, not that you weren't there. If they find non-matching prints, well, no reason to assume they *must* belong to the criminal, which is why they should only be used in conjunction with other evidence to prove guilt. Same applies to DNA.
Speaking of which, it should also be noted that a DNA test doesn't involve comparing every base pair in the sequence to distinguish you as a unique snowflake from everyone except your genetic twin.
Consider fingerprints again. We all got taught at school that your fingerprints are unique. Except of course that they aren't, they're just variable enough that you're unlikely to get a match in a small set of people. Once you start fingerprinting an entire country you run into duplicates, hence the need for complete sets of prints rather than individual fingers.
Of course, theoretically at least, you could still get someone with a matching set, the odds are just vanishingly small.
For DNA they check key markers. A single marker is likely to be shared by a lot of people, so you check a set, the selected set giving a distinctive pattern on the gel. The more markers you check, the less chance of a duplicate, but there are practical limits to how many you can check, and as a general rule of thumb the better the test the more it costs.
Their searchable database isn't going to contain your complete genetic code for comparison, it's going to contain your pattern for a given set of markers. A state-wide database will run the risk of duplicates. As this is a government database I expect they'll opt for the second-cheapest workable test they can.
So remember kids, don't let them DNA test you on the off-chance that you will one day not commit a crime.
Going back to the day before, we had the question of whether girls were genetically programmed to like pink. A curious idea. If it's sex-based it will have to be on the X chromosome and recessive (requiring two copies to manifest). I confess the mechanism quite escapes me, especially since I have to account for the fact that in our team meeting that day all the people wearing pink were males. (Pink shirts or ties for men seem to be in fashion at the moment).
Perhaps the fact that I don't like pink can be explained by me having a blackaphilic allele of the default colour preference gene? But then some days I prefer purple... A purple-preference pathogen perhaps?
Might explain the fashion industry...
Bah.
Anyway, as someone reasonably pointed out, the whole pink/blue thing is a relatively recent phenomena, and when it came in there was (apparently) argument about which colour was best for which sex. Pink, as a pale red, could be considered more masculine, while pale blue was traditionally a more feminine colour. Pity the point seemed to be brushed over.
I do wonder which rock they found their psychologist under, who proposed that pink was more feminine because it was flesh-toned and evoked memories of the mothers breast. Um, first question, what if your mother didn't have pink skin? 'cause, you know, some people don't.
Sometimes you really can try too hard to explain things, and I'm deeply suspicious of people looking to explain everything with genetics. In Nature vs Nurture, nurture has a say in quite a lot of things.
I guess it would be nice if it were natural for girls to like pink and therefore not our fault at all - because of course we'd never tell a little boy "not that, pink is for girls, you're not girl are you?" or say to a little girl "Oh look, isn't it pretty and pink?"
Actually I suspect I don't dislike pink so much as what it represents. Pink flowers can be appreciated as they are. I feel I can get away with this because I'm not just a program running on a meat computer, I am not wired to like or dislike pink, it is merely a colour I can perceive and associate with other things. I do not expect to find a gene for "disliking pink as a social construct". But maybe that's just because I have a gene for "refusing to believe in predestination".
Anyway, apparently I need to purge morning radio out of my system, so bear with me while I rant.
Yesterday the topic was apparently a proposal to fingerprint all schoolkids and keep them in a database. A caller had buzzed in to say that on the bright side, it could be used to prove you were innocent of a crime rather than just prove guilt.
Er, no. Sledgehammer and nut observations aside, it doesn't really work. There's a reason for the innocent until proven guilty approach.
Look at it from a more familiar tech perspective, if they don't find your fingerprints at a crime scene that just means that they didn't find them, not that you weren't there. If they find non-matching prints, well, no reason to assume they *must* belong to the criminal, which is why they should only be used in conjunction with other evidence to prove guilt. Same applies to DNA.
Speaking of which, it should also be noted that a DNA test doesn't involve comparing every base pair in the sequence to distinguish you as a unique snowflake from everyone except your genetic twin.
Consider fingerprints again. We all got taught at school that your fingerprints are unique. Except of course that they aren't, they're just variable enough that you're unlikely to get a match in a small set of people. Once you start fingerprinting an entire country you run into duplicates, hence the need for complete sets of prints rather than individual fingers.
Of course, theoretically at least, you could still get someone with a matching set, the odds are just vanishingly small.
For DNA they check key markers. A single marker is likely to be shared by a lot of people, so you check a set, the selected set giving a distinctive pattern on the gel. The more markers you check, the less chance of a duplicate, but there are practical limits to how many you can check, and as a general rule of thumb the better the test the more it costs.
Their searchable database isn't going to contain your complete genetic code for comparison, it's going to contain your pattern for a given set of markers. A state-wide database will run the risk of duplicates. As this is a government database I expect they'll opt for the second-cheapest workable test they can.
So remember kids, don't let them DNA test you on the off-chance that you will one day not commit a crime.
Going back to the day before, we had the question of whether girls were genetically programmed to like pink. A curious idea. If it's sex-based it will have to be on the X chromosome and recessive (requiring two copies to manifest). I confess the mechanism quite escapes me, especially since I have to account for the fact that in our team meeting that day all the people wearing pink were males. (Pink shirts or ties for men seem to be in fashion at the moment).
Perhaps the fact that I don't like pink can be explained by me having a blackaphilic allele of the default colour preference gene? But then some days I prefer purple... A purple-preference pathogen perhaps?
Might explain the fashion industry...
Bah.
Anyway, as someone reasonably pointed out, the whole pink/blue thing is a relatively recent phenomena, and when it came in there was (apparently) argument about which colour was best for which sex. Pink, as a pale red, could be considered more masculine, while pale blue was traditionally a more feminine colour. Pity the point seemed to be brushed over.
I do wonder which rock they found their psychologist under, who proposed that pink was more feminine because it was flesh-toned and evoked memories of the mothers breast. Um, first question, what if your mother didn't have pink skin? 'cause, you know, some people don't.
Sometimes you really can try too hard to explain things, and I'm deeply suspicious of people looking to explain everything with genetics. In Nature vs Nurture, nurture has a say in quite a lot of things.
I guess it would be nice if it were natural for girls to like pink and therefore not our fault at all - because of course we'd never tell a little boy "not that, pink is for girls, you're not girl are you?" or say to a little girl "Oh look, isn't it pretty and pink?"
Actually I suspect I don't dislike pink so much as what it represents. Pink flowers can be appreciated as they are. I feel I can get away with this because I'm not just a program running on a meat computer, I am not wired to like or dislike pink, it is merely a colour I can perceive and associate with other things. I do not expect to find a gene for "disliking pink as a social construct". But maybe that's just because I have a gene for "refusing to believe in predestination".
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no subject
Date: 2007-05-25 12:52 pm (UTC)I have never liked what people think I should like.
Or maybe I just inherited my mother's loathing for a colour she was dressed in and which never suited her (the eldest of four daughters and the only one with red hair). She recounts the frustration of people peering into the pram which held either my sister or myself, and demanding to know which sex the child was, since my mother had dressed us in green or orange or brown, and they couldn't tell. And one can't say a boy is beautiful, nor can one say that a girl is big.