Karan Tripathi

Context Matters: Human Faces Hinder Face Pareidolia Abstract. The human visual system readily processes illusory faces (IFs) as faces, a phenomenon known as face pareidolia. Building on evidence that IF processing elicits face-like neural activity and…

#OpenAccess in the February issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (@jocn.bsky.social):

Context Matters: Human Faces Hinder Face Pareidolia

This has been a trend in various countries. Researchers have diagnosed this in Denmark, Norway, and Germany. Recurrent reasons are lack of participatory and recursive design, training, and not addressing structural contingencies as a relevant factor in execution

I prefer Elder Vass, Tony Lawson, and Tuukka Kaidesoja (for a more naturalistic take). Also because I’m a social scientist 😅

Actor-Network Theory (as per criminologists)

The authors have conflated assemblage with apparatus and have reduced D&G’s original conception to a descriptive device. They could’ve benefited from reading the original D&G texts

This paper has reduced D&G’s conception of “assemblage” to an (a) apparatus, and (b) descriptive device. Authors could’ve benefited from reading the original D&G texts

I won’t name the article but it focuses on technology

Just read an article in @theoreticalcrim.bsky.social that has completely misattributed and misinterpreted Deleuze, and re-signified concepts without sufficient reason. Don’t even get me started on argumentative flaws. Sad to see this on our discipline’s only theoretical journal

UK is getting its Aadhar

Verizon Remains On The Legal Hook For Illegally Spying On You And Selling Your Movement Data (For Now) For decades, major U.S. wireless providers have collected sensitive customer movement and location data (often down to the meter), then sold it to a long list of random dipshits — usually without b…

TL;DR: Verizon is being held accountable for unlawfully tracking and selling customer location data without proper disclosure or consent, raising serious privacy concerns.

This was really helpful. Thanks for sharing

The silence of certain immigration scholars on Far Right marches, rise of Reform and its policies, and everyday embodied harms of migrantphobia is alarming and concerning. Pick a side, speak up, before it’s too late. Don’t compel us to expose your duplicity and hypocrisy.

Great!

Rich of you to think that a “Legal policy” would prevent police from doing what they intend to. One of the many liberal mythologies

Taking the power of procurement away from the police

I’ve been recommending this to folks in India left, right, and centre

My fieldwork has now brought me to Hyderabad, where I am conducting research with India’s most technologically advanced police force. I look forward to developing a deeper, more contextually grounded understanding of the social life of algorithmic evidence in criminal investigations and prosecutions

As part of my PhD fieldwork, I have joined Bureau of Police Research & Development - India’s state-owned policing think tank. I’ll be working as a research assistant for Tech & Modernisation Division - looking at use of AI in criminal investigation and evidence construction

I love sharing reports from left-leaning media outlets in my right-wing heavy family WhatsApp groups just to redistribute the pains of cognitive overloading.

Judicial PR is scary!

The politics of ground truth

How will they achieve “decryption”? Platforms are not going to acquiesce, so only option is use of force/violence to confiscate devices + roving searches

Proposed changes to tax laws are simply providing a remote legal backing to an already prevalent police practice - confiscating devices and roving inspection of personal chats

Quote card on a black background with a subtle tiled repeating image of a blue neon sign of a machine gun. Quote from Ed Vogel, author of "Turning Death into a Commodity," reads: "ShotSpotter is a way to monetize death by gun violence. It is constructed to extract profit from the murder of people in Black, brown, and poor communities rendered surplus by organized abandonment—a form of profit extraction that the prison–industrial complex had previously been unable to fully activate." Directly above the quote is Inquest magazine's colophon, a transparent serifed capital I in a white circle.

This week Inquest covered false promises: that the “new” drug war would be less punitive and more focused on public health (it is not), and that big tech policing product ShotSpotter makes communities safer (it does not). Read the full recap: mailchi.mp/inquest.o...

It’s all in the ground truth (or the lack thereof)

Defence AI is built by, and for, war capitalists.

U.S. Companies Honed Their Surveillance Tech in Israel. Now It’s Coming Home. After deploying AI tools in Israel and on the U.S. border, American tech companies are now powering domestic repression.

U.S. Companies Honed Their Surveillance Tech in Israel. Now It’s Coming Home.
theintercept.com/2025/04/30/i...

Great evincing of the punitive turn. Can’t wait to read the paper, especially the methods section

Authoritarian regimes have not just Co-opted “decolonisation” and “sovereignty”, but also “privacy” and “data protection”. State is claiming privacy against its own citizens.

Delhi Police arresting people based on facial recognition match score of 32%! At this point, such machine-driven ‘intelligence’ is simply a legitimation/rationalisation exercise.