MaastrichtTreat

> If the father of a girl travelling to Syria to join Isil had no idea what she was planning, what hope does her computer have?

Algorithms can tell if you're pregnant before you know it. Wasn't that Target incident also about a father having no idea his daughter was pregnant until the machine learning algorithms indirectly informed him? I can't really trust the article's conclusions if it contradicts these well known events.

Freakonomics had an episode recently "Is there a better way to fight terrorism?" [1] An interesting statistic they note is that occupation is the primary cause of terrorism. Rather than focus on prediction, why not focus on the causes?

[1]: http://freakonomics.com/2015/02/13/is-there-a-better-way-to-...

I have always heard that a focused gradient descent outperforms genetic algorithms in every application domain.

Another problem is no storytelling. Podcasts like Radiolab do well communicating science to the public because they have mastered telling a slow & engaging story and discussing the implications while not jumping to them.