#on extremely specific long-running humanities research controversies in some way or other i guess. that does track.

[unopenablebox]

every now and then one of my mutuals starts getting into something that one of my other mutuals has had a like self-directed home dissertation level of obsession with for years, and i still don't know anything about it either way but it's very funny learning what a normal trajectory of somebody experiencing it would be like

[nicholsonespersen22-blog]

Sex Workers To Get HIV Treatment, ARVs

Sex Workers To Get HIV Treatment, ARVs

South Africa has embarked on Africa’s first strategy to treat and prevent HIV among sex workers. South Africa will soon begin providing HIV treatment to HIV-positive sex workers upon diagnosis as part of its new announced national plan. Currently, most people living with HIV must wait until their CD4 counts - a measure of the immune system’s strength - fall to 500 before they can start treatment. At least 3 000 HIV-negative sex workers will also receive the combination ARV Truvada to prevent contracting HIV. When taken daily as https://www.2nd-circle.com/escorts-madrid/ -exposure prophylaxis, Truvada can reduce a person’s risk of contracting HIV by about 90 percent. In December, South Africa became the first country in southern Africa to register Truvada, which combines the ARVs emtricitabine and tenofovir, for use as prevention in December.

South Africa National AIDS Council (SANAC) CEO Dr Fareed Abdullah credited Health Minister Dr Aaron Motsoaledi for driving the plan’s creation. The plan comes on the heels of research released that found about 72 percent of Johannesburg sex workers surveyed were living with HIV. “The good news is that sex workers are showing a lot of responsibility and about three-fourths of sex workers are using condoms with their clients,” said South Africa National AIDS Council (SANAC) CEO Dr Fareed Abdullah. The bad news is although more than 90 percent of sex workers surveyed had tested for HIV, less than a third of those who were living with HIV had received treatment - far less than the national average, Abdullah added. Sex work is estimated to account for as much as 20 percent of new HIV infections in South Africa, according to Deputy Health Minister Joe Phaahla.

The three-year national plan also aims to reach 70 000 sex workers with a standardised package of services, including PrEP adherence support, delivered in part via a network of 1 000 of their peers. Deputy President and SANAC Chair Cyril Ramaphosa called the plan a chance for South Africans to affirm their rights. “This plan is about the human rights, about the rights of ordinary people,” he said. “Sex work is essentially work,” said Ramaphosa, who ended his address by embracing national leader of the Sisonke sex worker movement Kholi Buthelezi. Buthelezi joined other sex workers in calling for decriminalisation of sex workers to remain on the national agenda. “We are the vanguards of pleasure,” said Mpumalanga sex worker Lesly Mntambo. “Stop criminalising my adult body and what it is capable of doing.

In order to set them apart from "decent" women and avoid confusion, the church required that prostitutes adopt some type of distinctive clothing, which each particular city government was allowed to select. Those who argued against prostitution suggested all sorts of reasons for its existence. Andreuccio in II.5. This young woman is presented as extremely clever and exceedingly cruel. Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. Trans. G. H. McWilliam. Brundage, James A. Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. Bullough, Vern L. "Prostitution in the Later Middle Ages." Sexual Practices and the Medieval Church. Ed. Vern L. Bullough and James Brundage. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1982, pp.176-86. Karras, Ruth Mazo. "Prostitution in Medieval Europe." Handbook of Medieval Sexuality. Ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996, pp. Richards, Jeffrey. Sex, Dissidence and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages.

Getting a gang tattoo is about as smart as getting your girlfriend's name tattooed on your arm. Like you're never going to break up. Another thing to consider is what you want to take pride in representing. Is selling crack or date rape drug really something to brag about? What about Otis Garret and Dave Picton? The Hells Angels deny everything and keep secrets from their own members. They only reveal things on a need to know basis. Otis Garret was incarcerated for running a Hells Angels prostitution ring in San Fransisco. The woman who testified against him was murdered along with her twin seven year old daughters. There is nothing there to be proud of. I know a guy who wears Big Red Machine support gear. I asked about them selling crack and he just said he didn't ask about that part of the business. To me wearing support gear is like wearing a T-shirt that says I support Clifford Olsen and getting a Hells Angels tattoo is like saying I support Dave Picton. Something they did but deny.

When researchers taught capuchin monkeys how to use money, it didn’t take long for one of the male monkeys to offer a female one of the coins in exchange for sex. Prostitution is often called “the world’s oldest profession” with good reason; it is a form of exchange that predates the human species, and has even been observed among chimpanzees. Males tend to want sex much more frequently than most females are willing to accommodate, and where a demand exists it is inevitable that some individuals will choose to meet it for a price. The terminology used to discuss this subject is probably unfamiliar to some readers, so a short summary may be in order.

First and foremost is “sex work,” an umbrella term for all forms of labor in which the sexual gratification of the customer is the primary focus. Prostitution, stripping, acting in adult movies, providing phone sex, and the like are included. As you can probably guess, the boundaries are somewhat fuzzy; some dominatrices and burlesque dancers consider themselves sex workers, while others vociferously insist they aren’t. But in general, a “sex worker” is one whose job is specifically focused on the customer’s gratification, not merely tangential to it. As with the term “sex work” itself, there is some controversy regarding the exact meanings and extent of the terms for the various models of legislation.

I find that the simplest and most useful categorization divides all of the individual legal schemes into three broad categories. In the first, criminalization, the act of selling sex itself is illegal; despite the common American perception that this model is nigh-universal, it is actually the least common in the developed world. The United States and several communist and recently-communist countries are the only large nations which have full criminalization, but in the Swedish model (also called the Nordic model), only the act of paying for sex is de jure prohibited. The most common system, found in the majority of European, Commonwealth, and Latin American countries, is legalization. The act of taking money for sex is not illegal in and of itself; rather, certain activities associated with it are.

The specific activities prohibited under legalization schemes vary widely and arbitrarily; for example, while brothels are illegal in Canada, in Nevada they are the only legal venue for selling sex. Specific regimes also vary widely in extent: while in some there are so many prohibitions the act itself becomes de facto illegal, others differ from decriminalization by only the narrowest of margins. The third model, decriminalization, is at present found only in New Zealand and the Australian state of New South Wales. Under this system, sex work is recognized as a form of work like any other, and therefore not subject to any laws that do not bind other businesses. For example, brothels are regulated by zoning laws and the like rather than subjected to special criminal laws; sex workers are responsible for taxes and covered by workers’ compensation programs, and so forth.

For most of history, sex work was generally unregulated; exceptions to that rule were frequent, but nearly always local and temporary. ” And in the Far East, most of the laws were designed to maintain the rigid social order and class structure of those societies, rather than to police the private sexual arrangements of individuals. Indeed, up until the nineteenth century almost nobody imagined that prohibition could be done, let alone that it should. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the “white slavery” hysteria was in full swing. Yet despite this complete failure, Swedish-style rhetoric has been heavily marketed to other countries. …International authorities regard the NSW regulatory framework as best practice. Contrary to early concerns the NSW sex industry has not increased in size or visibility…Licensing of sex work…should not be regarded as a viable legislative response.

New Zealand decriminalized in 2003, with similar results; neither jurisdiction has had a credible report of “sex trafficking” in years. The reason for this should be obvious: despite the claims of prohibitionists to the contrary, the strongest hold any exploitative employer has over coerced workers is the threat of legal consequences such as arrest or deportation. Remove those consequences by easing immigration controls and decriminalizing the work, and both the motive and means for “trafficking” vanish. There is a popular belief, vigorously promulgated by anti-sex feminists and conservative Christians, that sex work is intrinsically harmful, and therefore should be banned to “protect” adult women from our own choices. But as the Norwegian bioethicist Dr. Ole Moen pointed out in his 2012 paper “Is Prostitution Harmful? ”, the same thing was once believed about homosexuality; it was said to lead to violence, drug use, disease, and mental illness.

These problems were not caused by homosexuality itself; they were the result of legal oppression and social stigma, and once those harmful factors were removed the “associated problems” vanished as well. Dr. Moen suggests that the same thing will happen with sex work, and evidence from New South Wales strongly indicates that he is correct. Sex worker rights activists have a slogan: “Sex work is work.” It is not a crime, nor a scam, nor a “lazy” way to get by, nor a form of oppression. It is a personal service, akin to massage, or nursing, or counseling, and should be treated as such.

The sex industries around the world are associated with serious forms of marginalisation, violence, exploitation, and even forced labour. Media, research, and fiction tell stories of sex workers being abused, exploited, and trafficked. They do it so often that we become almost indifferent to it, as almost always happens in front of horror. A sex worker killed in the Italian countryside, a sex worker robbed in Rio de Janeiro during a transaction, a sex worker leaping to her death from a brothel in Seoul. Poor people, what a life. Gendered, racist, classist, homophobic, and transphobic violence haunts the world of sex work, and many of us believe that states, intergovernmental organisations, and NGOs should do more to help.

Yet a lot is being done. Indeed, one finds that, especially following the 2000 UN Palermo Protocol, the last decade has seen a multiplication of interventions ‘against sex trafficking and exploitation in prostitution’ (see for instance UNODC). The problem is the efficacy of these interventions, as it is abundantly clear that the situation has not demonstrably improved in the intervening time. Poor people, what a world. But is there something more to know? We believe there is. This series addresses the violence, exploitation, abuse, and trafficking present in the sex industries, but it does so from the perspective of sex workers themselves. These are the women, men, and transgender people who are directly touched by the abuse, exploitation, and trafficking under discussion, and they are the people who actively and collectively resist all forms of violence against them.

By publishing their voices directly we hope to help readers resist indifference, on the one hand, and to become more critical of states’ interventions, which are widely regarded and legitimated as necessary to combat ‘trafficking’, on the other. All the authors of this series are involved in sex workers’ organising or have been in the past. This means that they are or have been part of organisations composed of, or at least led by, people who have direct experience selling sex. It is our hope that their contributions over the next two weeks will convey some of the radical richness and diversity of knowledge produced within the contemporary sex workers movement.

This movement is fragmented, stigmatised, and under-funded, yet it has continued to expand since its birth in the mid 1970s in Europe, the US, and Latin America. It now involves at least 273 groups that are part of the Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP), and many more individuals all over the continents. They have organised despite the fact that speaking out as a sex worker puts your relationships and families at risk. It exposes you to threats from your ‘employers' and may lead to harassment or arrest by the police, especially if you are an undocumented migrant. You may lose your political credibility, and even be accused of representing the interests of ‘pimps’ and taking money from them.

[harley623gaming-blog]

VBUCKS: The Google Strategy

Bucks Fortnite

Fortnite is one of the most popular ready in state, with an estimated 12m+ active monthly players. Fortnite conventions and credit aren't being promoted widely on top darknet marketplaces, by what I found. They're on Ebay They're on They're on Selly. How much dollars is there everybody making off of that? Hackers I interviewed say anywhere from $50 to $900 a week, depending on how help the software lives with the amount of time you have. V-Bucks can be earned in Fortnite by completing daily in-game concern or bought online.

There are several legal system which could be used to generate v dollars in fortnite. If you know how to use those properly, Then you are on the actual track. The aim, he replies, is to develop in Creative mode's achievement with producing players new tools to create also help with the exclusive humanity of "Fortnite" — including in take that nearer to the Imaginary Engine, Epic's extremely popular game development program.

Some criminal enterprises may be using Fortnite 's virtual currency to clean change. The Outside states that security firm Sixgill found evidence of criminals purchasing V-bucks in mass using stolen credit cards, then promoting the V-Bucks to players in a reduced figure to change it in "clean" money. Note: Please do not install any kind of hacks and never just click on any hacking links. If somebody outside Fortnite claims to offer you V-Bucks for frank change, record this toward Fortnite immediately because paying anyone claiming to sell you V-Bucks may bring about the loss of your money.

VBUCKS Your Way To Success

The Fortnite Battle Royale game is now the on-line phenomenon, largely because it is multi-platform and free-to-play. But in-game products, such as skins, must stay covered aiding the in-game currency V-Bucks. With 1000 V-Bucks costing around $10, there is a ready sell for discounted coins, which is where the criminals help. That web site describes an opportunity to be treated a gift card, got via a great authorized owner, or to be delivered a direct PayPal payment. The word "Fortnite" is a registered mark of Epic Games Inc. This agreement is not sponsored or sanctioned by Epic Games Inc.

FREE V-BUCKS using the latest FORTNITE HACK. By using the best fornite hack you can easily become your own free v-bucks. Fortnite is a house sandbox survival video game developed by Nations Can Race with Epic Matches, the last which and helps as writer with the sport. 1. Will not Play Every Fortnite. Play Every Time. With the Fortnite skill-gap widening about what seems like a daily basis, many community members believe to Epic Games have been very ‘friendly' to the casual playerbase.

Fortnite kicked off Season 7 with a congregation of fresh map adjustment and skins to enjoy the feast season. Study indicates that Fortnite can be very addictive. Indeed, they have actually been declared to Fortnite is as addictive as heroin , with a single often-repeated story telling of a boy that continued playing the game in the shadow involving the approaching tornado. Now, Epic Activities is locating the items in place to bring these two worlds closer together, CEO Tim Sweeney told Business Insider in a conversation at the Ready Developers Conference past with Development. Eventually, he around, that plan stands to take "Fortnite" past their core, and make it a true online world.

Each new term gets a Battle Pass that provides accessibility to extra items, concern, and in-game currency. While you must be aware to how long is defer to run on a year, this a meaningful investment if you catch the Fortnite bug. After all, 200 million people can easily be wrong. While the game itself becomes free to play, participants could operate V-Bucks to purchase cosmetic items and unlock story with "Fortnite." The digital currency is a strong commodity — players spend more than $200 million a month on V-Bucks.

Prisons are abusing the hugely popular video game Fortnite to clean money over the in-game currency, The Free may reveal. According to a study by FortniteIntel, dataminers have remained check the cases with the latest 7.20 update to find clues about what Epic Games designs in releasing soon. Getting free v bucks doesn't mean that you should not spend the real change at all. There are batches of reductions and presents been well from Fortnite which can be beneficial when it comes to have free v bucks for your account.

Fortnite is a activity in which undergoes a lot of frequent updates. Week-by-week you can guess to establish patches that sometimes squash bugs or create minor differences to gameplay to help the overall game practice. The sim is the chief among many we are likely to get in hope. With forthwith let's encounter the customization board and educate what is there for us. We can ensure people how the Fortnite V Bucks Hack or Cell say almost nothing to do in this part of the game.

Videogame review website Eurogamer state this had accepted Fortnite about two weeks to hit the 10-million-player mark. The first step to follow is to eliminate the BattlEye development for the Fortnite game. Sweeney: We win a Fortnite non-event peak twice after Top stayed available. We allow gotten any visible cut into Fortnite. It's a strange thing. The only game you can see where its peaks drop in Fortnite playtime is FIFA. That another activity for everybody, quite popular around the world.

An essential section to Fortnite's uprising is just how relaxed and entertaining the experience is. It is one of the thing that will lead to hand-in-hand with Fortnite's free-to-play aspect. Epic Activities take only updated the in-game news give to be kidding the delivery of the upcoming weapon for Fortnite Battle Royale, The Explosive Bow. With Apex Legends,” EA is hoping to multiply the star of Fortnite,” a sort of hybrid of The Need Matches” with Minecraft” that lower 100 people on to the area to help attack each other for success.

Other scams include selling entry to help additional common Fortnite balance, and providing V-Bucks for free - but in reality charging for it. Parents are stricken with unexpected law as their own results are investing cash in in-game purchases for the hit video game Fortnite without their education - and sometimes baby because fresh as seven have blown big sums. If your child plays Fortnite, here's making sure they're not wasting your money without authorization.

Season 6 of Fortnite: Battle Royale has definitely been eventful with a number of momentous events. As the title suggests, you earn it before getting a competition during the course of Fortnite Season 8. Remember that LTMs (Limited Time Modes) do not count - instead, you need to accomplish a Solo, Duos or Squads match. Although many may reason that Epic has to do everything they could to keep casual players - among the largest pieces of the Fortnite player population - happy, others feel that practice can be harmful to the title's health.

Get your hands on free V-Bucks and swallow great products from Fortnite Battle Royale shop. A great performer who posts the work on DeviantArt has accused Epic Contest of stealing among her goals for a Fortnite skin. The Taro skin was made public into December 2018 as part of the Storm Familiars Put. Your Fortnite Counterattack EPIC program will be presented and emailed to you. The last two Fortnite” dances have still to be finished. As for the competition, Apex Legends” is the new game touted to slam Fortnite” off its primary spot in the future. However, the new Battle Royale game even take a long way to go before grasping the overhead.

Fortnite is the completely free multiplayer game where anyone and your friends collaborate to make the desire Fortnite earth or war to be the last one remaining. Play both Battle Royale and Fortnite Creative for FREE. Download at once also jump into the case. Most discounted Fortnite V-bucks sellers accept forms of cryptocurrency, including bitcoin and bitcoin notes. The semi-anonymous cryptocurrencies make it more trying for law enforcement firms to trail.

Extreme VBUCKS

To play Fortnite near it is whole potential, you don't really need a particularly good PC. The biggest advantage Epic Games take with Fortnite is the cartoon art style they chose, that does not require a ton of hardware even though it provides a nice whole experience. Fortnite players are pursued with cultural media scammers who are working websites claiming to offer free in-game currency, known as V-Bucks, to control accounts and pilfer personal data.

Researchers from Malwarebytes uncovered in March to scammers are operating data-stealing malware as well as cryptocurrency-stealing malicious convention in targeted strikes against Fortnite gamers. For 4K activity with Fortnite and other games, still, anything with a little more processing nation is suggested. Something like the i7-9700K or at least the i5-9600K is a solid decision designed for a higher-performing rig.

Now that Fortnite is a global sensation many dishonest players are trying to take advantage of players to want to get around different in-game gear. There are dozens of unofficial sites, youtube tapes, and jobs with community media that guarantee free V-Bucks. That likely that single one of these are fake. Casual gaming aside, Fortnite is a critical matter. New products can cause controversy if they never add the praise with the district the ones that enjoy in the un-sportsperson-like approach can be the subject of online opprobrium - even if they beat in-game records in the process.

You can get free V-Bucks for Fortnite, by acquiring points with PointsPrizes. Fortnite Battle Royale has arrived in Celtic Adventures at The Ruin of Kells. If you want to make convinced they grow a little they may operate in-game, Fortnite also offers specific companies as downloadable content (these are digital products you pay for in stocks). For example, the gamer might get The Crest Striker Pack , which unlocks the Hilltop Striker outfit, the Top Notch Bling Jam and 600 V-Bucks.

While the Rocket Launch incident was arguably the greatest "Fortnite Battle Royale" event so far, Epic Games has created many other interesting live events. Here's where to have three eliminations at pirate camps in Fortnite: Battle Royale. After doing this, weight the Epic Games Launcher and press on to the Fortnite tab. Having a Fortnite TELEVISION exhibit is absolutely far-fetched, as the storyline is similar to The Hunger Activities with Battle Royale.

The stolen cards are used to buy V-bucks, the personal currency in Fortnite. Typically, V-bucks are purchased to buy in-game outfits, weapons, emotes and other products in-game. For Fortnite and Epic Games, V-bucks have happened http://yousher.com/kadorav0n4/post-the-ability-of-152663.html a huge revenue run, with over $3 billion net profit for Epic Contest with 2018. Fortnite gets us stop up until stupid times in the morning. I've not become like this with a game because Black Ops.

[shirlleycoyle]

This Company Is Using Racially-Biased Algorithms to Select Jurors

In a short, polished video introducing his new company, attorney Alex Alvarez tells the story of a case he didn’t expect to lose. It was a straightforward slip-and-fall lawsuit pitting him against a less experienced attorney, and Alvarez was riding high off a series of “multi-million dollar” verdicts. He was shocked when this one didn’t go his way.

“If the reason I win or lose, or any lawyer wins or loses, is based on his skill level, then why did this happen?” Alvarez says in the clip. “And that started me on a quest to find out why jurors decide cases and how juries are deciding cases in America.”

Thus was born Momus Analytics, named after the Greek god of blame, criticism, and mockery—and part of a new and controversial breed of legal tech companies. Drawing on big data and machine learning techniques similar to those marketers use to determine whether to send you an ad for an SUV or a bicycle, these startups are offering attorneys unprecedented insight into jurors’ lives.

Some, like Momus, are also making unprecedented promises about the ability of that information to predict how a juror will lean in the deliberation room.

Lawyers, jury consultants, and legal technology researchers who reviewed Momus’ pending patent application at Motherboard’s request warned that the company may be founded on myth in more than just name. Rather than delivering superhuman insight, the experts said, Momus appears to be drawing assumptions from demographic information that has no reliable correlation to juror disposition—and some of the data it relies on may violate the constitutional prohibition against excluding jurors based on race or sex.

“Lawyers are not allowed to pick jurors based on race or gender, that’s a constitutional mandate,” American University Professor Andrew Ferguson, who has researched the use of big data for jury selection, told Motherboard. “The idea that the algorithm is going to weight race or gender or other protected classes in a way that could be outcome determinative—that’s a problem, because then you’re kind of tech-washing your racialized assumption of individuals.”

Alvarez and other Momus Analytics employees did not respond to multiple calls, emails, or written questions.

Momus begins by scraping public records and jurors’ social media posts. It then feeds the collected data into algorithms that determine scores for “leadership,” “social responsibility,” and “personal responsibility.” The company’s patent application lists several characteristics Momus relies on to reach those conclusions. Among them: people of Asian, Central American, or South American descent are more likely to be leaders, while people who describe their race as “other” are less likely to be leaders.

From there, the software spits out recommendations. “It will tell you who your best juror is, who your worst juror is, and all parts in between,” Alvarez says in another promotional video.

For many lawyers, the prospect is incredibly appealing. Voir dire can often seem like a mystic art, passed down through generations and often riddled with superstitions and ingrained biases. In some cases, an attorney may receive a list of the day’s jury pool, several hundred names long, only 24 hours in advance. With a limited number of questions, and an even smaller number of peremptory strikes to eliminate jurors without cause, the attorney must do their best to ensure that anyone predisposed against their client doesn’t end up on the jury.

For all but the wealthiest clients, who can afford jury consultants, doing actual research on jurors is all but impossible before most trials.

Other emerging companies are making more moderate promises, compared to Momus, and attempting to filter race out of their algorithms. The growing industry promises to help lawyers better serve their clients, but also raises questions about the balance between human and machine judgement in our justice system.

The long history of jury discrimination

Racial discrimination in jury selection—such as outright bans on non-white jurors—has been illegal in the U.S. since the Civil Rights Act of 1875, although that law did little to change the practices in many jurisdictions. In 1986’s Batson v. Kentucky, the Supreme court furthered that protection, ruling that it is unconstitutional to eliminate a juror with a peremptory challenge based on their race. But studies of decades of post- Batson cases show the decision failed to fully eliminate the practice.

Some counties with large African American populations have seen more than 80 percent of black jurors struck during selection in death penalty cases, resulting in all-white juries half of the time and juries with only one black member the remainder of the time, according to a report from the Equal Justice Institute. A separate study of the trials of 173 inmates who were on death row in North Carolina post- Batson found that black jurors were 2 ½ times more likely to be struck than non-black jurors.

Some researchers, including Ferguson, have suggested that in certain applications, big data could lead to more representative juries, but there are tradeoffs.

“There’s reasonable arguments out there that using big data—publicly available info on jurors—will prevent over-relying on only characteristics of jurors that we can see, including protected characteristics like race,” Drew Simshaw, a Gonzaga University professor who studies artificial intelligence and legal technology, told Motherboard. “But we don’t know if the data that’s being used is relying on data that reflects inequality, prejudice, and discrimination in society. The proprietary nature of the services, the lack of transparency, and this black box issue present challenges.”

Technology’s promise

When Larry Eger was a new attorney—”and I thought that I was maybe more attractive than I actually was”—he had a tendency to favor young women during jury selection, thinking they might be more amenable to him as an advocate for his client. With experience, he found he fared better with grandmothers.

Many trial lawyers have similar stories that inform their particular strategies for jury selection. “We have our own stereotypes in our head when we’re selecting a juror and when we look at the jury panel,” Eger, the elected public defender for Florida’s 12th circuit, told Motherboard. “And as a defense attorney, I’m going to guess that most of us have a certain prejudice that if you have a black juror he’s going to be more sympathetic, but so many other factors come into play.”

For most of the history of jury trials, lawyers had little to base their decisions on apart from what they could observe visually and discern from a limited set of questions. Egers described the algorithmic ranking of jury pools as “frightening,” but didn’t deny the allure of tools that quickly and automatically gather large amounts of data on jurors—especially if an opposing prosecutor is using them. “When your ox is being gored, you want to take advantage and do whatever you can,” he said.

Among the companies selling big data insights to lawyers are Vijilent and Voltaire. Both scrape the public records and public social media profiles of jurors and run them through versions of IBM Watson’s Personality Insights tool, which uses natural language processing algorithms to categorize the jurors’ within the “big five” personality traits model (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion and introversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism).

Given how difficult it is to collect data on juries, the research into the correlation between personality traits and jury decisions is extremely limited. But at least one study has found a slight relationship between jurors with higher levels of extraversion and conscientiousness and not-guilty verdicts in criminal trials.

Vijilent and Voltaire differ from Momus in a significant way: They don’t claim to predict how jurors will judge a particular case.

“Our goal is to use AI and [machine learning] tools in data processing,” Basit Mustafa, the founder of Voltaire, told Motherboard. “In terms of actually selecting the bias [a juror might display], we want to actually leave that more up to the human.”

A client might ask Voltaire to run a search on a juror and flag any posts that contain keywords like “gun,” “food poisoning,” or “cancer,” depending on the type of case. The company would send back a report including the jurors’ big five personality assessment, a list of posts with flagged keywords, and other insights—for example, are they friends with doctors, and might therefore enter a medical malpractice case with a particular bias?

The company doesn’t honor requests to search for keywords related to protected classes like race or sex, Mustafa said, and it specifically turns down cases that are likely to stray into those areas, like housing discrimination.

The “Momus Methodology”

Momus Analytics’ publicly provides no details about how it takes the next step and determines the best and worst jurors for a case. The actual software appears to have been programmed by Frogslayer, a Texas company that creates custom software.

In its patent, Momus describes a machine learning model trained to rank jurors, but does not explain what data it used to train such a model. It does, however, provide lists of the kind of data the model considers determinative of a juror’s leadership qualities and bias toward personal or social responsibility.

In addition to race, the factors that Momus says indicate a propensity for leadership include: “alliance with negative social issues,” “US postal service as a profession,” “having a master’s level or higher of education,” “affiliated with the Democratic Party,” and “supporter of the NRA or hunting.” Traits indicative of non-leaders include: “profession as a boat captain or airplane pilot,” “profession in social work,” and having any level of education less than a master’s degree.

“I disagree that those are accurate and reliable predictors of whether somebody would be a leader or have a high level of personal or social responsibility,” Leslie Ellis, the current president of the American Society of Trial Consultants, told Motherboard. “In my experience of talking to thousands of mock jurors, post trial interviews, and having done a good amount of academic research on jurors, I would not rely on these characteristics to be predictive of either of those traits.”

“What we have seen in all sorts of different types of jury research … is that those types of easily quantifiable characteristics are very often not what’s actually predicting or correlating with the verdict. More often, they act as proxies for other things,” she added.

Nonetheless, parts of the legal community have embraced Momus Analytics.

The company launched last year and its software is currently only available to a select group of plaintiff’s attorneys, but it claims the methodology behind the program has led to verdicts worth more than $940 million since 2008. Motherboard reached out to six attorneys that appear to be responsible for some of the verdicts Momus claims as success stories. None of them responded to calls or emails.

The National Law Journal recently named Momus one of its 2020 emerging legal technologies and the National Judicial College invited Alvarez, the company’s founder, to speak at a judges’ symposium on artificial intelligence and the law.

Both Vijilent and Voltaire have been tempted at times to move further toward the kind of predictive analytics Momus advertises. Rosanna Garcia, the founder of Vijilent, told Motherboard that she initially considered offering predictions about jurors’ to clients but found the level of interest didn’t justify the difficulty of training the models. “You would have to take data insights from 100-plus jury outcomes in order to be able to train your model” and that data is hard to come by, she said.

About a year ago, Mustafa turned down an offer from an IBM salesperson to incorporate Watson’s Tone Analyzer feature into Voltaire for a small additional licensing cost. Tone Analyzer employs ”sentiment analysis,” a field of natural language processing that analyzes the tone and emotion with which people write about certain subjects. The technique is ubiquitous in digital marketing—although research has found that certain applications tend to discriminate against groups like African Americans in their analysis.

“I looked at the data and thought, ‘that’s just flat out wrong,’” Mustafa said. “That’s really scary to me, as someone who’s trying to sell insight to lawyers. I don’t think that people come down to scores, flat out. I don’t think you can do that.”

This Company Is Using Racially-Biased Algorithms to Select Jurors syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/