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About the Author

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Brian Patrick Strope worked as a researcher in high tech and AI for 30 years. He has an Sc.B. from Brown University in Electrical Engineering, where he first worked on speech recognition. After his undergrad degree, he designed workstation hardware for Hewlett Packard for 4 years. His MS and PhD degrees are from UCLA where he studied auditory modeling and robust speech recognition. He was a research engineer at Nuance Communications for 7 years as part of the Speech R&D group where he worked on speech detection, tuning strategies, and acoustic modeling. He was a research scientist at Google for 14 years, where he first helped build Google's early speech recognition systems, and later helped manage Ray Kurzweil's research efforts in Artificial Intelligence. Work from that team was first used in GMail's "smart reply" feature that provides response suggestions to emails. As a general process for representing meaning of language, the team's work was then used ...
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A New Policing Model

  Brian Strope What's the problem? Really? Oh dear... Okay, fair question.  Black people get killed by police too often. It's not slowing down. What's the solution? Change the model of how we police. Split up the role of the police officer into 3-4 separate roles held by 3-4 seperate people. But first we have to understand how we got here. Why is this happening? This is the part that people have to hear with friendly ears. It's because we're all racist. Yep, me too. And even more surprisingly to some, black people are, too. Doesn't make any of it okay. What? That's nonsense. I'm not a racist! I hear you thinking. Slavery and the abuse of black people are deeply institutionalized. Even after the first 250 years of full-blown slavery, the last 160 haven't been an uncomplicated walk in the park.  Turns out, slavery is very wrong. How do you support something very wrong for so very long? You institutionalize it. Mixing metaphors, you bake it into the fab...
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More Perfect Voting: Electoral College, and an Obvious Solution

Brian Strope Why is it there? Sadly there's a lot of misperceptions: it helps balance states' rights, it makes it so that the big states like California and New York don't dominate the little states like Wyoming. (Nope!) What is it really?  Practically, it means that every state (mostly) gets one big vote that's (mostly) proportional to the number of people living there, and that vote goes to one candidate, usually the candidate with the most votes in that state. So California's one big vote is worth 55 points, and Wyoming's one big vote is worth 3. California's is bigger because we have more people. Why would we do that?  The most obvious reason is that it's 1784, and we don't want to bother adding up individual votes across state lines. More darkly, though, the main reason is that it's a clever way for white land and slave owners to get 3/5ths representation for the black slaves they own. "I get to vote for myself, my family, and something...
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Enough, Time to Fix Prop 13

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Brian Strope   Summary Prop 13 is one of the causes of California's housing crisis. It contributes to long commutes, environmental damage, and homelessness. Fixing it is a non-starter politically.  A novel solution is proposed here. Instead of repealing it, or tweaking the numbers, we move the cap from the individual property owner to the state. Instead of saying your property taxes can't go up by more than 2% per year, we say the state revenue from all properties can't go up by more than 4%.  As fair market prices go up, and as more properties come online, the effective tax rate goes down for each individual property owner. Collectively, we only have to contribute our share to meet the state-capped revenue total. Instead of protecting your property against run-away property taxes, we protect everyone's property, including the next generation of future buyers. The change would be phased in over 20 years. For many of us who have been here for 20 years already, ...
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