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Monday Miscellany, 7/29/24

Monday Miscellany, 7/29/24

Last updated on: July 29, 2024 at 8:50 am by Gene Veith

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Monday Miscellany, 7/29/24 2024-07-29T08:50:31-04:00 Gene Veith

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The looming sex-abuse scandal; artificial intelligence can’t keep up with politics; and why the great IT outage didn’t affect Southwest airlines.

The Looming Sex-Abuse Scandal

The Catholic Church has been marred by a decades-long sex abuse scandal involving priests and children. Similar disturbing revelations have come out about other churches as well. Other institutions ranging from the Boy Scouts to Hollywood have had their scandals. But a new sexual abuse of minors scandal is looming that will dwarf all of the others. It has to do with teachers in public schools.

James Varney of Real Clear Investigations reports on the problem, which is gradually coming to light despite the efforts of administrators, teachers’ unions, and government officials to keep it quiet:

Pointing to research from Hofstra University that found roughly 1 in 10 students in K-12 schools have suffered “some form of sexual misconduct by an educator,” Terri Miller, head of the advocacy group SESAME (Stop Educator Sexual Abuse, Misconduct and Exploitation), said the number of victims is staggering.

“The rate of educator sexual misconduct is 10 times higher in one year’s time than in five decades of abuse by clergy,” Miller said, noting that in 2021 the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops reported it had received nearly 4,300 sexual abuse allegations. “Another striking contrast is we are not mandated to send our children to church; we are mandated to send them to school.”

Read Varney’s article for details of both allegations and cover-ups.

Artificial Intelligence Can’t Keep Up with Politics

America’s political scene has gotten so complex, fast-moving, and tumultuous that it confounds not only human understanding but it also is flummoxing artificial intelligence.

Heather Kelly of the Washington Post has written a report entitled A week of nonstop breaking political news stumps AI chatbots. It seems that during the flurry of activity when Trump was shot, Vance was anointed, Biden quit, and Harris was elevated, the AI chatbots could not keep up, delivering incorrect, outdated, and incomplete information, to the point that some of them are now refusing to answer political-related questions.

The Post went on to study the problem, looking at how a number of different AI chatbots handled the news. These products, of course, rely on pre-existing information that is fed into them, and updates–such as those needed to report up-to-the-minute a news stories–take awhile to process.

The story quoted an expert on the topic, University of Washington professor Jevin West:

“The public needs to know we’re in a stage still where most of the citations and sourcing are post-hoc and going to lead to problems,” West said. He noted that, for now, we “need to rely a little bit more on some of the more formally trained gatekeepers,” meaning the mainstream media.

I would say that the bigger problem is not that AI doesn’t know certain things, but that it makes things up and presents them as factual. Hours after the Trump shooting, the Perplexity chatbot said that he was not shot. It also said that President Biden did not have COVID.

It’s important to remember to not necessarily trust what the bots say but to check them against traditional sources. “’They’re incredibly good at communication,’ West said. ‘They’re not being optimized necessarily for truth.’”

Why the Great IT Outage Didn’t Affect Southwest Airlines

What has been called “the largest IT outage in history” shut down systems around the world on July 19. CrowdStrike, a widely-used security program, had issued an update that was flawed, causing some 8.5 million computers running Microsoft operating systems to crash and making them unable to restart.

The outage affected banks, stockmarkets, hospitals, hotels, broadcasters, shops, and government services all over the world. Also airlines, causing the cancellation of thousands of flights.

Except for Southwest Airlines, which had no trouble at all. That is reportedly because Southwest still uses Windows 3.1, an operating system from the early 1990s. The software is so old that it doesn’t support CrowdStrike, so its failure had no effect.

In this case, it paid not to update.

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