![[1103] Raccoons Are The Champions, My Friends!](/comics/2019-08-01-1103-raccoons-are-the-champions-my-friends.png "[1103] Raccoons Are The Champions, My Friends!")
No time for losers
Cause raccoons are the champions of the world!
We received an impressive number of 2506 votes for our latest poll in the last three days. Here are the results:
What will be the solution to the German question?
- Lebensraum (living space) in the East (39%, 973 Votes)
- A state of increasing apathy, followed by the Next Big Thing™ (37%, 922 Votes)
- The American Melting Pot (24%, 611 Votes)
The same poll ran on our German website, with 276 votes and the following results:
- Lebensraum (living space) in the East (47%, 130 Votes)
- A state of increasing apathy, followed by the Next Big Thing™ (34%, 95 Votes)
- The American Melting Pot (18%, 51 Votes)
- Sandra: I am Sandra North.
- Woo: And I am Woo.
- Sandra: And we have very important news for you!
- Sandra: Scientists from Syracuse University have carried out extensive, rigorous tests to determine the cutest animal species on Earth! And it’s…
- Woo: …the raccoon!
- Sandra: While neither adult raccoons nor raccoon kits won their respective brackets, their combined rating was better than that of any other species![1]
- Charts: Adults – Pups – Overall
- Text box: 1. Zafarani, Reza; Phoha, Vir V.; Jain, Atishay; Zhou, Xinyi (2019-04-26). “Analysis of the Cuteness of Different Animal Species with regard to Age and Sex”. https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.11679
- Vega: Daddy, is this what they call “Fake News”?
- Woo: Of course not, Vega. Don’t you see this reference to a scientific paper?
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This is not Fake News, this is Data Manipulation. Not the same thing!
Ah, I see what you did there!
It’s interesting to see how what some may see as a simple idea (detect and block fake news) can have complex paths to implementation. The idea that even for humans, identifying manufactured or otherwise nonfactual information is difficult when you only look at the content itself, vs being able to identify the path said info took. It’s also interesting to think that even when we think we have all the information, that checking said info is critical in making a sound decision.
Ah, yes, a great article, cited properly. Except you may have typo’d the article title a little bit 😛
@ drakray:
I don’t know if there’s a solid definition for fake news in the public sphere yet, so I would argue that data manipulation is a form of ‘fake news’, as it doesn’t impart the correct information on people. And news is all about bringing information about new things to people moderately accurately and moderately unbiased as far as I’m aware. So anything that breaks that could, I reckon, be called fake news.
the link literally dosent go no where so i ger the joke
http://arvix.org/abs/1904.11679
lol (:
clever clever
I’m… confused?
The reference lead to Cornell, not Syracuse… and the paper is about developing a model for Fake News Detection, even in the absence of facts; a “potential spam flagger” for fake news, if you will.
@ jim:
You typed it wrong. It’s arxiv.org, not arvix.org. I know, I know, easy typo.
Looking at the poll results… are there more English readers than there are German???
Or maybe the Germans don’t like participating?
@ Evilbob: arxiv is a Cornell system but iirc its just a database, not necessarily all of work from the university. Also I think you found the joke.
Finally, the German refugee arc is over. Hopefully.
Data manipulation is rife!
Recently I saw a report regarding unemployment – General population excluding minority = 4% for minority 5% Margin of error 1.2%
Headline “Minority 25% more likely to be unemployed!”
@ Kamica:
Yeah, I forgot the /s at the end lol
Sorry, but black pugs rule the cuteness scale.
@ Evilbob:
Yes, Novil has mentioned several times that there are a lot more English than German readers. It’s the reason why the physical book is only available in English and why a handful of strips are not translated because it would be a lot of effort for a relatively small number of readers.
“Fake News Early Detection: A Theory-driven Model”‘ I like the joke in this comic. Here is a link for the lazy (like me): link
A.I. isn’t really any smarter than humans, nor is “automatically unbiased” or something.
It might offer a different perspective, but in the end there’s humans that provided the data and the algorithms used for the training and learning, humans that will ultimately judge if “it works”.
There’s been studies showing that A.I. have a visible tendency to reflect the expectations and prejudice of their creators.
Above that, it’s been shown that you could trick picture analyzing A.I. into making errors so obvious that no human would make them (so a system looking for other patterns is probably sufficiently easy to trick as well).
Damn! I would have sworn squirrels or cats are the cutest. But if it’s a scientific paper, it has to be true ^^
On a more serious note, even if there were such a paper, asking people for what their *opinion* is, is not really objective. Maybe measuring the amount of certain hormones, oxytoxin or serotonin etc. in response to watching cute cat videos would be more reliable.
However, using Google, jou can find a series of scientific papers about animal cuteness. F.e.:
PERCEPTION OF CUTENESS IN ANIMAL MASCOTS/CHARACTERS
Baby schema in human and animal faces induces cuteness perception and gaze allocation in children
The Science of Adorable
etc.
Actually, the cutest animal species is gals in swimsuits. Hint, hint. 😉
@ Evilbob:
Or Germans that are counted as English, because they use the “English” site…
@ jim:
You misspelled the URL. It does go somewhere, but not to the paper you would think:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.11679
@ jim:
You mis-typed the URL. It defintiely goes to a research paper 😉
https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.11679
@ DuCake:
D’oh. Previous commenter already captured that :-p
Well, if the paper doesn’t support the news report, that’s just bad science journalism. Maybe Sandra should look for a different career.
Also, don’t trust reports that don’t mention the methodology used – lying with statistics is easy and common. Both in the news and in papers with an agenda.
Raccoons are miniature bears with long tails, primate brains and prehensile hands. And, as everyone know, Bears Are Bad News.
Here online they’re cute, snarling at you from the inside of your apartment dumpster, not so much!
Let’s break down “fake news”.
The idea of something fake is “not real”. Fake information, for example, is “not true” because it is does not describe real data, and equally (except in the realm of fantasy or science fiction, where such things are entertainment) “not legitimate” in that it is not a reliable source of information.
The idea of “news”, meanwhile, is “reporting”. In other words, “an attempt to disseminate information that may be desired, out of need or lack, by its audience”.
“Fake news”, then, is “not legitimate news”, and for the purpose of this discussion that means that it is “not an attempt to disseminate information that may be desired, out of need or lack, by its audience”.
Moreover, we can exclude from the definition anything that contains “for entertainment”, since the concept of “fake” implies a deliberate if not malicious attempt to mislead, in this context.
In other words,
1. “Fake news” provides plenty of weasel room for those accused of producing it to say “but this is a fiction for entertainment purposes! It was never intended to address an audience’s need for or deficiency of information!”
2. “Fake news” is a very general, if not meaningless, phrase that mostly has applications only as an attack on someone’s reputation as a journalist or publisher of news.
I should mention that attacks on a journalist’s reputation are by definition always ad hominem, because the goal of journalistic criticism should always be to verify the integrity of data, and not to attack someone’s reputation.
Attacks on a publisher, meanwhile, can carry a little more legitimacy, but only in a “follow the money” sense – you cannot, by identifying a small publication’s general ideological slant, determine the veracity of the information it relies on. That requires separate, actually-useful research into the data, and not its presentation. The best you can do without this research is to use it to question the motives of the publisher, and then you should still only use your findings in that regard as a single data point.
As even children in decent grade school maths classes would know, you cannot draw any geometric shape without at least three points to connect the lines that make it.
The same is true when considering the shape of facts; you need consecutive, plural data points to judge the veracity of any claim.
The simple fact of the matter is that people who shout “fake news” are not investigating data, they are regurgitating ad hominem attacks on a journalist or publication. It requires more than such an attack to refute even a claim like “the sky is full of mud”, even if it’s plainly a baseless claim.
Oh, and I should add, the reason that “fake news” is nearly meaningless is because “news” by itself is also a poorly-defined concept.
This is because “information that may be desired, out of need or lack, by its audience” is a definition impossible to use to classify information before its audience is even known.
Desire is specific to an individual. Need is a fallacious notion except from a biological systems perspective, and from a moral perspective it is very individual, to the point that no one will ever comprehensively agree on what every entity needs.
And lack? Lack implies an absence of something that some entity might want, out of need or desire.
To be certain, then, there is no universal definition for “news”; only an infinite number of subjective ones.
“Fake news”, then, is also infinitely subjective, to the point of being a meaningless phrase.
@ TachyonCode:
If you take the time to bother yourself and look stuff up yourself you usually have better chances to tell if some “news” is more likely credible or not. But that means you’d have to do more than read just the 2″ headlines of your favorite yellow press issue or the newest hype on facebook.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.11679.pdf in case anybody wanna see the joke, also thanks to you guys my biologist girlfriend wants to know if you could mesaure adorableness
@ clickbait:
That’s exactly my point.
I was kind of hoping that it was actually citing a study about animal cuteness. Not all research that gets written up is high-quality or impactful.
Cuteness is simply neoteny. Anything that’s shaped like a baby (round headed, big eyed, snub nosed) is, by definition, cute. We’re genetically coded to go, “Awwwww”. Round fluffy animals get the same thing. Then they grow up . . .
I’d like to refer
mntfr
@ BorgLord
to this post by @ Hegel Marx:
http://www.sandraandwoo.com/2019/08/01/1103-raccoons-are-the-champions-my-friends/#comment-568109
@ Evilbob:
I am a German reader, but on the English website, for example. Took me a bit to realise there even was a German version. I sometimes check it when there is a joke I am curious about how it got translated. Since there are quite a few plays on words for a bilingual webcomic.
Remember: There are Lies
Damned Lies
and STATISTICS!
@ MasterDiver:
Don’t forget that of 1300 laypersons asked over 700 said that they don’t understand statistics and the remaining 600% claimed they can’t do percent calculations.
Well, actually:
@ MasterDiver:
Statistics is often used incorrectly, in the same way that a drunk uses lamp-posts—for support rather than illumination.
Lies, vile lies and statistics.