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The Daily PollTHE CEO OF Mars One has hit back at critics of the project, including an Irish applicant who described it as “hopelessly flawed”.
Earlier this week, Trinity College astrophysicist Dr Joseph Roche told Medium the ranking of candidates for the one-way mission is determined purely by the amount of funding they have raised for the mission.
“I have not met anyone from Mars One in person … Initially they’d said there were going to be regional interviews… we would travel there, we’d be interviewed, we’d be tested over several days, and in my mind that sounded at least like something that approached a legitimate astronaut selection process.
“But then they made us sign a non-disclosure agreement if we wanted to be interviewed, and then all of a sudden it changed from being a proper regional interview over several days to being a 10-minute Skype call,” Roche said.
The Irishman had made it into the top 100 candidates but was booted from the programme after his comments breached a confidentiality agreement.
‘Simply not true’
However, Mars One CEO Bas Lansdorp has released a video in which he disputes Roche’s claim that candidates were selected on how much money they donated to the programme, saying this is “simply not true”.
He said the mission is still feasible, and the selection process “will be much more thorough from here on”.
“We started our astronaut selection with over 200,000 applications that were submitted online. The application included a video and a lot of psychological questions for our candidates. We used that to narrow down the candidates to about 1000 that had to do a medical check, which was very similar to the check for NASA astronauts.”
Interestingly, it is not so complex to determine who is not qualified to go to Mars, which is what we have been doing so far. Our next step is to find out, from the people who we think might be qualified, which ones have what it takes. The selection process will be much more thorough from here on.
“Going to Mars is very difficult, for example NASA has been talking about going to Mars in 20 years for more than 45 years now. Of course, NASA needs a return mission which is much more complex than our one way mission but it shows how difficult Mars exploration is.”
What do you think? Will the Mars One project land people on the planet?
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I’m waiting for Irish people to be tagged as ghosts
Funniest headline I’ve read in ages!
Google need to stop monkeying around.
The algorrillm needs some fine tuning.
Is it caus they black?
It’s a bit like when Nikon brought out their blink detection software years ago. It asks “did someone blink?” I noticed it myself on my L100 and it worked fine. The problem arose when pictures of Asians were mistaken as someone blinking, even though they were not.
Since Nikon is an Asian company, one wonders what sort of quality control they had on that one.
What kind of ape wrote that program.
That’s fierce funny altogether.
Light relief from the Greece crisis.
Can’t foresee a Terminator situation any time soon
I’ll be black.
For anyone thinking this is a person in google tagging black people as gorillas: http://rocknrollnerd.github.io/ml/2015/05/27/leopard-sofa.html
Check your algorithmic privilege.
Mortifying.
ilikegrasss
Seems like they have a racist/s in Google
I don’t think computers can be racist. They’re aren’t that advanced in AI yet.
Nor are they so advanced in recruitment…
This is an AI issue, not a human issue.
Perhaps if it wasn’t a human issue it wouldn’t have been an AI issue.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2014/05/29/2-of-google-employees-are-black-and-just-30-are-women/
So it’s not the fault of the person who programed the AI(long way off real AI) who is at fault?
Black people don’t look anything like Gorillas . If it can tell the difference between a Leopard and a Jaguar then it should be able to tel the difference between a person and an Ape.
Don’t see how labeling a black person as a Gorilla is racist..sure aren’t we all as equally related to the gorilla?
After that handsome gorilla the other day I;d say many of us would take kindly to being more gorilla-like :)
Well said Fozz. Sure Gareth Bale is the absolute spit of a gorilla. He gets fierce abuse for it. And I have yet to hear anyone call it a racist insult.
@Paul Roche
Maybe white and Asian males are just better at this kind of work.
Do you think a negroe programmer would have missed this?
You’re supposed to say “black”.
Perhaps, but I intended to write “negro”, the “e” hung around after an unsuccessful edit of an original plural… Maybe it should look for job on Google…
Looks nifty, can I download from the ApeStore?
There is a simple solution to that issue. It would involve swapping two words. Although I think gorillas would not like to be named humans. Just imagine what animal rights activists would say.
Think how clever you have to be to screw up on this level.
How do you test every possible scenario for photograph classification? I’ve been fooled by more than one elbow, myself.
Facial recognition insists in asian
Well then, I think it’s time for me to get a software update too. I honestly had to do a double take.
All aboard the lets get offended at anything band wagon.
‘Get machetes to think more like the way people do’ (quote) . Keep digging !
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