Carnivals!

You’ve all probably read, by now, about the study that shows that people who swear in response to pain tolerate it better:

The study, published today in the journal NeuroReport, measured how long college students could keep their hands immersed in cold water. During the chilly exercise, they could repeat an expletive of their choice or chant a neutral word. When swearing, the 67 student volunteers reported less pain and on average endured about 40 seconds longer.

Although cursing is notoriously decried in the public debate, researchers are now beginning to question the idea that the phenomenon is all bad. “Swearing is such a common response to pain that there has to be an underlying reason why we do it,” says psychologist Richard Stephens of Keele University in England, who led the study. And indeed, the findings point to one possible benefit: “I would advise people, if they hurt themselves, to swear,” he adds.

Interesting.

In other news, the Carnival of Education seems to be off for the summer — no announcement of it, but I haven’t been able to find it for the last three weeks.

Oh, God damn it! Shit!

Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:

• Skeptics’ Circle #115.
• Carnival of the Liberals #95.
• Carnival of Mathematics #54.
• Math Teachers at Play #11.
• Carnival of the Godless #121.

Gun control doesn’t work?

Today’s guest blogger, while I’m paying attention to presentations at CEAS, is frequent commenter Ray.

Oh, wait... lookee here (on page 51 of the associated report), where we find that for the year 2008/2009[1] the number of murders by gun in the U.K.[2] was a whopping 38, down from 53 in the previous year.

I expect it’s just a coincidence that the U.K. has strict laws concerning gun ownership.

Let’s see, since the population of the U.S. is around five times that of the UK, that number is equivalent to 190 gun-related murders in the U.S. Hmmm... that number doesn’t jibe too well with the typical reported annual U.S. rate of around 10,000.

I expect it’s just a coincidence that the U.K. has strict laws concerning gun ownership.

 
Ray, thanks for filling in with a topic so dear to my heart!

---

[1] According to the report, “estimates are derived from interviews carried out between April 2008 and March 2009 (BCS year ending March 2009).”

[2] It actually covers only part of the U.K., and doesn’t include Scotland and Northern Ireland. That doesn’t change Ray’s point very much, though: it changes the approximate factor from 5 to 5.6, which changes 190 to about 210. The order of magnitude is the same: we still have about 50 times the per-capita gun-murder rate here as there.

NYC sales tax, and taxable sales

Last Friday, I heard on the radio that the proposed ½% increase in New York City’s sales tax has been approved, making the total sales tax in the city 8.875%. The announcer on the radio said that the increase will bring the city an additional $60 million a month.

That means that people spend, on average, $1.2 billion a month on sales-tax–eligible purchases in New York City. That’s staggering, at some level. Though, I suppose when you consider the population of the city — more than 8 million in the five boroughs — and others in the area who buy things in the city, plus visitors... it doesn’t really come out to that much per person.

When I think of it that way, I wonder that it’s not more.

One lump, or two?

This morning I’m heading to California for a brief two days at the Conference on Email and Anti-Spam — I’m on the program committee again, which means I had to got to peer review some of the papers.

Yesterday morning, I got a note from the airline:

From: [the airline]
To: [me]
Subject: It’s time to check-in
 
Dear Barry Leiba,
 
Ready for your upcoming flight? Save time and check-in online now whether you are traveling with or without baggage. And don’t worry about reconfirming your flights - you’re all set!

It’s nice to know that I’m all set, but....

Sometimes, as English evolves, phrases morph into single words. Sometimes they go through an intermediate hyphenated stage first. “Today” and “tomorrow”, for example, each used to be two words: “to day” and “to morrow”. Then they were hyphenated: “to-day” and “to-morrow” took us into the 20th century. And now they’ve bonded, and no one separates them any more, except perhaps to be quaint and harken back to an older time.

Some words remain separate, never joining. “A lot” is always two words; there’s a lot of “alot” about, of course, but it’s unequivocally wrong. That may change some day, but I hope it doesn’t happen on my watch. “No one” is another that stays separate, and if you write it as a single word you’ll perhaps forgive me for thinking you’re talking about Herman’s Hermits.

But there are words that confuse us, because sometimes they stick together, and sometimes they travel separately. But words aren’t done to taste, as sugar in tea. The rule for many of those is that when they’re verbs they remain separate, and they can become one word or be hyphenated only as modifiers or nouns. “I use my everyday dishes every day.” When I see a sign that says something like, “Good food, everyday!”, I want to find a saw (to fix that saw?; sorry).

“It’s time to check-in,” fails, here. We have a verb, so it should be “check in”, two words. You check in at the check-in desk, take your purchases to the checkout counter to check out, log in from the login screen, and back up your hard drive with a backup program. There was a good turnout for the parade because so many people turned out.

And that last example shows how you can be sure: it’s in the past tense. We’d never be tempted, there, to use “turnedout” or “turned-out”, would we? With a present- or future-tense sentence, you might want to say, “I’d better backup my hard drive tonight,” but you’d never go for, “I backedup [or, perhaps worse, backuped] my hard drive last night.”

And with that, I’m off to California to talk more about how to fight spam.

Remember to back up your hard drive. Every day.

Branding on the web: a variation

I’ve written about top-level domains here and here, and noted there that people are increasingly using search engines to find what they’re looking for, making the use of domain names for branding ever less important. An interesting case study for how branding works is Snickers, a candy bar made by Mars, Incorporated.

Of course, Mars owns mars.com, and you can get some information about Snickers there. Mars also owns snickers.com, and, no surprise, that will also lead you to (far more) stuff about Snickers.

Going by what I wrote in these pages about TLDs, when ICANN opens things up, it’s possible — maybe likely — that Mars will also grab .mars and .snickers, and they could even register .candy and set up snickers.candy and other such domains.

But now I recently saw the banner on the right at my local gas station (click to enlarge; sorry, it's a poor-quality picture from my BlackBerry). There’s a depiction of a Snickers bar, but where the Snickers logo would be it tells you to “Do your part to BAR HUNGER”. The rest says, “Join the Snickers brand in providing at least 3,000,000 meals to those in need,” and it shows the Feeding America logo.

Want to know more? Sure... do you expect to go to snickers.com or mars.com for it? Think again:

Learn more at facebook.com/snickers

Not satisfied with what their own web site can do with it, they send you to social networking. You can become a Facebook friend with the Snickers brand, and work through that.

Is this, perhaps, the real future of web branding?

Two-faced security

A few weeks ago, I got a text message on my mobile. It said it was from my credit card company (and it had the right one). It said they had to talk with me urgently about my account, and I should call a given phone number as soon as possible.

In other words, it sure looked like someone was phishing for something... except that they did have the credit card brand correct. Chance, perhaps?

I did what you should do if you get one of those: I ignored the phone number in the message, pulled out my credit card, and called the customer service number on that. I told them what I got. They confirmed that it was from them — it was legitimate. They had flagged my account for unusual activity because of two charges from that morning, and they wanted me to confirm that I had my card with me, and that I had, indeed, made those charges. I did so, and all was well.

I’ve since logged into my account on their web site, and what do I see?

Clicking on the “Learn more” link gets me to a page that warns me about phishing scams. Among other things, it says this:

Text message verbiage varies, but may direct users to a web site or phone number, and usually contains something that claims to require immediate attention.

Ignoring the incorrect use of “verbiage”, this warning is telling me that these fraudulent messages do... exactly what their legitimate message did.

I call this “two-faced security” — security that on the one side warns me to beware of fraud, and on the other side encourages me to do exactly what the fraudsters would like. And I see it all the time.

The legitimate message should, in fact, have told me to do what I actually did. It should not have given me a phone number at all, but should have told me to call the number on my card. It should have given me instructions for finding the correct number out of band ("Go to our web site..."), in the event that my card was missing. We all know that the first thing I’ll have to do when I call the customer service department is give them my account number, possibly along with other personal information such as my name and address. If the “customer service department” I’ve called is actually the phisher’s, taken from their text message, that’s not good for me.

Of course, they go on to tell me what they’re doing to protect me:

[We are] serious about account safety. That’s why we’re requiring all Account Online users to create security questions. We may periodically ask you to answer those questions in Account Online as a quick identity check. That way, when you drop in to do business, we’ll know it’s you.

If you’ve been paying attention here, you’ll know how well those questions work... or don’t. But even apart from that, there’s a problem: as I said above, giving the account number is the first thing we’re used to doing when we call. Name and address next. By the time we get to the “security questions”, and realize that the bad guys haven’t asked them, it’s too late. Security doesn’t come from noticing the absence of something, because we’ll never notice until the horse is out of the barn.

The way to thwart this sort of attack is

1. for us to learn not to trust anything that’s sent to us, and use only contact information we’ve received separately, which we already trust, and
2. for our banks, credit card companies, and other institutions to stop training us to violate number 1.

On Francis Collins and double standards

PZ Myers gets at least one thing absolutely right as he joins the criticism of the appointment of Francis Collins as head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Dr Myers dismisses Dr Collins as a “lovable dufus with great organizational skills who’s [sic] grasp of the principles of science is superficial.” He goes on to add that his pushing of Christianity can’t be a reason to reject him, because “we’re in big trouble when we start using a religious litmus test for high political positions.” And then...

Oh, wait...we already do that. You know if someone with equivalent prestige and administrative credentials was even half as vocal about atheism as Collins is about Christianity, there’s no way she would even be considered for this appointment.

Sigh.

That is so true. We have our own “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” policy for atheism, these days.

It used to be the case that one’s religious beliefs fairly rarely came up in public discourse. JFK’s Catholicism was notable, but only because he was the first Catholic to hit the presidency. But that Catholicism wasn’t paraded in front of us weekly, he didn’t cross himself at the end of every speech, and no one really worried about our getting a Catholic Attorney General, as well, when brother Robert was appointed and confirmed.

It used to be the sort of thing one did privately. Religion was one of the topics polite people didn’t discuss with others who might be of different persuasions.

But now, public figures are held under suspicion if they don’t say, “God bless,” enough. According to several surveys, people would sooner have leaders who are Moonies than ones who are atheists — atheism is the single worst characteristic from the point of view of the “average voter”.

PZ Myers is absolutely right about that: atheists who speak out about it remove any hope of entry to high political positions. And that puts our country in big trouble.

Inventions we really need

Forget overhyped  cryptographic advances, and never mind laser weapons; we don’t need those sorts of things as much as we need a different kind of invention — one born in the minds of Mel Brooks and Buck Henry in the mid-1960s.

We need the Cone of Silence (see video here).

But we don’t need it to keep our conversations private, no. We need an enforced Cone of Silence on others, those who do not understand “indoor voices”, those who have no idea how to talk so that they can be heard clearly across the table, but not across the room.

Those such as the young woman facing us in the photo to the right (no larger version this time; you don’t need to make out her face).

I snapped the pic with my BlackBerry on Friday afternoon at the wonderful Black Cat Café in Irvington. It’s a small place, and a quiet one, usually. There were six people in the cafe at the time, making it about one third full, and you could hear not a peep out of five of us. But the sixth, the woman in the photo, was holding forth long and loud, projecting as to fill the Metropolitan Opera House with sound. It didn’t help that she was facing into the room.

For that, we need the Cone of Silence. Just picture it in the photo above, as in that video with Maxwell Smart and the Chief.

Ahhhhhhhhhh...

Logistics: do it wrong or do it right

I do love going to see the Independence Day music and fireworks at West Point. But I have to say that it’s really a logistical problem.

First, of course, there’s the minor silliness of the “security checks” at the entrance gate. Of course, as it’s a military facility, we expect security checks, but when you think about allowing tens of thousands of people to spend the day picnicking on the grounds, you wonder how they can really check them all with enough rigor to make it worthwhile.

And that’s the point: they can’t, but they want to make a show of it. So a show they make. Two separate checkpoints have guards looking at your driver’s license, proving only that you’re able to get something that looks passably like a driver’s license. No information is recorded — they don’t have a record that I, in particular, was there.[1] Nothing was scanned, nothing was looked up. Public Enemy Number One could wander in there, and as long as he had something that looked like a driver’s license, bearing something that looked like his photo, he would pass.

The second guy who checked my ID also looked in my trunk, and in the trunks of half of everyone else who came through; his partner peered into the trunks of the rest. I just had picnic trappings in there, but he didn’t look in the bags, and he didn’t look under the trunk floor. I could have had machine guns in the canvas bags that actually held collapsible chairs. I could have removed the spare tire and filled the well with explosives. He would never have seen them.

OK, so one gets through the security checks — and I must add, as a positive note, that the guards are very pleasant and friendly about it — and one parks, pulls out one’s picnic stuff, and walks over the Trophy Point. One surveys the lawn.

And one finds that it’s not so much a “lawn”, at this point, as it is a sea of tarps and blankets, nearly all of them unattended. Last time, I got there at 4:00. This time, a little before 2:30. I couldn’t tell the difference. Word has it that people arrive early in the morning to stake out their areas. They then leave and go about their day, coming back only shortly before the 8:00 start time. Some of them don’t even put out blankets or tarps, but just use “caution tape” to box out a prime parcel of turf.

Even at 2:30, there was nothing to be had but an area with its view partially obstructed by a tree. At least the tree provided shade for the day. I would have thumbed my nose at those stuck out in the full sun... except they weren’t there, and were probably enjoying the pleasant shade somewhere less crowded.

Finally, the people who don’t bring chairs, and prefer to sit on their blankets, really get a bad deal. When they do find a spot, it’s behind the claims of loads of other groups. At first, it all works out, but as the others begin to drift back in, the first thing they do is unfold their chairs and sit in front of the people who’re down on the ground. The blanket people can’t see a thing. And there’s no way they can tell in advance where the safe places are, because there’s no telling when the chair folks up front will return.

Contrast this with Wednesday’s visit to Shakespeare on the Sound, in Baldwin Park in Greenwich, CT. They had cops milling around and keeping an eye on things, but you barely noticed them. Of course, that’s a normal difference between a public park and a military academy, so never mind that.

It’s the next difference that struck me, as I passed the sign to the right, which you can click to make bigger, but it should be perfectly readable at this size; it says, “No Blankets/Chairs before 4:00 pm”, and adds that “Anything left before 4:00 will be held at park entrance”. Right. You can’t stop on the way to work in the morning and claim a spot. I suppose you could try coming by at 4 and dropping stuff off, then be back for the 7:30 performance. But 4:00 seems a fair time to allow people to start arriving, and at that point you might as well get there to stay.

They had another great setup, which I didn’t photograph: there was an inner circle marked off, closest to the stage, and it was labelled “Blankets and LOW Chairs Only.” Outside that marked area was another sign that said, “High Chairs Allowed.” Excellent! Give the people who will be low to the ground a chance to see. Someone is thinking.

It just doesn’t seem that hard to get some of these things right.
 

---

[1] Well, they do now.

The Interplanetary Internet of Tomorrow

After writing my post about DTN and the Interplanetary Internet the other day, I started thinking about what possibilities we will have opened up, after deploying an Internet in outer space:

Slide 8 from INET2001 presentation

 

It’s sad to say that this is the first thing I came up with:

Date: Tue, 09 Jul 2019 17:49:31 +6600
From: miss yolande conte <missyolandeconte_11@bigitn.mars>
Subject: Miss Yolande Conte.
 
Miss Yolande Conte.
 
In brief, my name is Miss Yolande Conte, I am 24 years of old and daughter to the late former President of Mars Colony of Guinea, Lansana Conte, who died on 23 December 2018, after a long illness, aged 74 years. In fact, I am the only family that knows the money he transferred off world to the Global Security Company House on Titan. he deposited the sum of ($ 6 million United States dollars
 
My father told me this Secretly that he deposit ($ 6 million United States dollars before his untimely death, now he is dead, I would like to seek your cooperation to help me move this money to your Planet for the continuation of my education and investment., I give you 20% of the total money if you can help me.
 
If you are interested indicate me as a trusted partner. Can I trust in this transaction? If you receive this letter, please send me an email indicating your interest to assist me, so that we can finalize everything and please respond to my private email address/ missyolandeconte1@hotmail.mars
 
Respectfully,
Yolande F. Conte.

On racial awareness

On Monday, Miss Incognegro wrote about having black dolls to play with as a child, what it meant to have a doll that looked more like her, and the idea of being “color blind”. It’s a good post; go read it, and, while you’re there, look at yesterday’s post, too, about watermelon.

Miss Incognegro ended Monday’s post with the question, “What are your childhood memories and recollections about race and racial awareness?”, and I commented on that in the blog entry. I think it’s worth repeating it here, so what follows is what I said there — my comment followed one by a black man called Jovan.

 
From a white guy looking at it from the other side: Like Jovan, I grew up in a racially mixed environment — a few years ago, a friend looked at my high school yearbook (1974), and was surprised to see all the different-coloured faces, among the teachers as well as among the students. My father always taught me that everyone’s the same... or, really, that everyone’s an individual, and you judge each person for what s/he is, and the shade of skin makes no difference. I internalized that at an early age.

I started my life in Brooklyn, but we moved to south Florida when I was quite young, and that’s where I grew up. Realize that “south Florida” is not “the South”, but that other parts of Florida are, so I sporadically had glimpses of what that meant. It was the early 1960s when we went there, and, while it was unknown where I lived, I did see “Whites only,” and “No coloreds,” signs in other parts.

I’ve always been skeptical of people who say they “don’t notice” skin colour. Of course we notice it, just as we notice hair colour and style, and choice of clothing. The question isn’t whether we notice it, but what it means to us. The difference never meant anything to me, because of how I was brought up, and I often “didn’t notice” in the sense that the race of someone often didn’t really stand out for me, until someone pointed it out.

I’ll share one particular story that stays with me. My family had black-and-white TVs only, and the first program I ever saw in colour was the Star Trek episode “The Ultimate Computer” (so I can even tell you the date, thanks to IMDB: 8 March 1968, so I would be 11 in a month). I went to a friend’s house, and it was the first time I saw the colours of all their shirts (references to “red-shirted guards” didn’t mean much to me before that). The episode was about a scientist [Dr Richard Daystrom, right, played by William Marshall] who invented a computer system that could run the whole starship by itself. The Enterprise got to test it out, and, of course, there were some bugs in the system that they had to work out.

As the episode progressed, I heard occasional mutterings, grunts, and grumbles from my friend’s father, a middle-aged man from the deep South. Finally, about halfway through, the scientist said something and my friend’s father said, “Huh. This is ridiculous! They’re making out like he’s as smart as they are.” I replied, “He’s smarter! He’s the scientist!” I was quite impressed by scientists, you see. And friend’s dad burst out with, “But he’s a n*!”

So. Yes, now it was pointed out. Of course Dr Daystrom was a Negro, as we’d have said at the time, but what difference did that make? I didn’t know what to say, and, as a not-quite-11-year-old I had the sense not to say anything. So we watched the rest of the show. And I don’t remember spending any time around that friend’s father after that, but I’d have felt very strange if I had.

What makes me feel sad is that, while we’ve come a very long way in the 41 years since then, there are still people today who would respond as my friend’s father did.

Delay Tolerant Networking

New Scientist reports on networking from space. If you grew up with the Gemini and Apollo NASA programs, as I did, you remember that they used to have scheduled communication times when they could contact the astronauts. Without the Star Trek concept of “sub-space radio”, which seemed to work pretty much all the time except when the plot demanded that it not, NASA had to catch communication as catch could.

But in those days, much of the data came back with them physically. That’s no longer true, and craft such as the International Space Station will stay up there for a good, long time. What they give us has to come back in the same way we get most of our data now, the way you’re getting this: the Internet, or, more precisely, a network similar to the Internet.

And the article gets the central points right: the key to the system is an experimental protocol called Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN).

While the Earth-bound internet uses a protocol called TCP/IP to allow distant machines to communicate over cables, the ISS payload uses delay-tolerant networking (DTN), which is being developed to cope with the patchy coverage in space that arises when spacecraft pass behind planets or suffer power outages.

If data passing between computers using TCP/IP goes missing, the two keep communicating until everything has been sent. But in space such to-ing and fro-ing of data is impractical.

DTN circumvents this problem by commanding each node in the network to store information until it can find another node that can receive it. Data is relayed in a chain and should only need to be transmitted once.

DTN got its first live space test last fall, but it’s the culmination of a number of years of research anchored in the IETF — actually in a sub-organization called the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), technically independent of the IETF.

The work started in a group rather fancifully called the Interplanetary Internet Research Group (ipnrg), and is now in the more down-to-Earth, but no less lofty, Delay-Tolerant Networking Research Group (dtnrg), co-chaired by my DKIM working group co-chair, Stephen Farrell. Meanwhile, the ipnrg continues as the Internet Society’s Interplanetary Internet Special Interest Group (IPN SIG), which Stephen also chairs.

Of course, the “interplanetary” aspect of all this is compelling to those of us fascinated by space exploration and astronomy. But DTN also applies to the Earth-bound Internet in many ways. The dtnrg’s charter talks about some of it:

The Delay-Tolerant Networking Research Group (DTNRG) is chartered to address the architectural and protocol design principles arising from the need to provide interoperable communications with and among extreme and performance-challenged environments where continuous end-to-end connectivity cannot be assumed. Examples of such environments include spacecraft, military/tactical, some forms of disaster response, underwater, and some forms of ad-hoc sensor/actuator networks.

Among the challenges to be addressed are: large delay for transmissions resulting from either physical link properties or extended periods of network partitioning, routing capable of operating efficiently with frequently-disconnected, pre-scheduled, or opportunistic link availability, high per-link error rates making end-to-end reliability difficult, heterogeneous underlying network technologies (including non-IP-based internets), and application structure and security mechanisms capable of limiting network access prior to data transit in an environment where round-trip-times may be very large.

And, indeed, the DTN Architecture document, RFC 4838, addresses issues from transport and routing to network management and security.

If space be the final frontier, we’ll be taking the Internet there with us.

Scientists, versus “normal” people

At Educated Guesswork, my IETF colleague Eric Rescorla notes how his ears “pop” when his car is moving fast and he closes the sun-roof:

I noticed the other day that if I’m driving my car on the freeway and close the sunroof my ears pop.

Now, Eric’s a scientist, so what’s the first thing he does about this?

He develops a hypothesis, of course:

After a bit of thinking, I concluded that what was going on was the Bernoulli effect: the air flowing over the sunroof lowers the pressure of the interior of the car. Then when you close it you get a sudden pressure change back to ambient pressure.

And next? Well, one has to test one’s hypothesis, right?

Initial experiments confirm this: my Polar 625SX [heart-rate monitor] has a built-in barometric altimeter. I repeatedly opened and closed the sunroof and watched the altimeter and readings seemed to consistently differ by about 75 feet. Obviously, there’s some uncertainty here because the road isn’t totally flat; if you wanted to be really sure you’d go over the same sections of the road again and again with the sunroof open and closed and measure the difference. Still, since I’m not exactly publishing this in Nature, it seems good enough for now.

Tom Lehrer, in his preamble to his song about Lobachevsky, notes that, “some of you may have had occasion to run into mathematicians and to wonder, therefore, how they got that way.” The same is true of any sorts of scientists. We’re a strange lot, to those who don’t see a need to contemplate an explanation for every little oddity we notice.

Some years ago, our work group at the office was planning to order some pizza to be delivered for a working lunch. The co-worker who organized the order came to me and said that she was going to order some set of large and small pizzas, depending upon how much folks wanted to eat. She asked me how many slices I wanted.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “It depends whether they’re slices from a large pizza, or from a small one.”

“I’ll figure that out when I have the count of slices. How many do you want?”

“But,” I persisted, “they’re not the same size. I don’t know, until I know the size of the slices.”

She rolled her eyes. “Just tell me how many slices you want.”

I said two, but I thought (and probably said aloud) that I might want more if one or both of them were small.

When my colleague left, I went to the white board. Let’s see... a large pizza was 14 inches across (7-inch radius), and is cut into eight slices. A small pie was 12 inches (6-inch radius), cut into six slices. So, for the large:

π × 72 / 8 = 19.24 square inches per slice

...and for the small:

π × 62 / 6 = 18.85 square inches per slice

A slice from a small pizza is only 2% smaller than a slice from a large pie. In other words: they’re about the same, close enough as not to matter.

Of course, my co-worker knew that intuitively. I had to be the mathematician, and work it out with a dry-erase marker.

Carnivals!

Today we have the Independence Day edition of the bi-weekly web carnival roundup. Yesterday was a beautiful day, here in New York’s lower Hudson Valley, with a bright blue sky and friendly white clouds. We added the requisite red in the form of wine, at Trophy Point on the West Point campus of the U.S. Military Academy.

Here’s a short video clip I took of Sergeant First Class Mary Kay Messenger singing some Broadway tunes (“Matchmaker, Matchmaker”, from Fiddler on the Roof, in the clip) with the West Point Band:

Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:

• Skeptics’ Circle #114.
• Carnival of the Liberals #94, including “Health care: U.S. vs Canada”.
• Carnival of Education #229.
• Math Teachers at Play #10.
• Carnival of the Godless #120.

New employment

This is one of those rare posts that’s just personal information, without redeeming matters of general interest at all: I am once again employed.

I’ve just started work as an Internet standards consultant for Huawei Technologies, a Chinese networking and software company. Huawei are very serious about participating in the development of Internet and industry standards. I’ll be representing them in my work in the IETF and other standards groups, and it was for them that I went to the OMA meeting last week. I’m working with their software research group,

It’s the part of my job that my previous employer had been backing away from for some time, and it’s particularly gratifying to see a company that’s increasing its emphasis on it — gratifying because I think it’s important to the Internet and the computing industry as a whole, as well as being a good investment for the company.

Huawei thinks so too. This is from the Technology page of their web site:

Standards
Huawei understands the significance of standards in the technology industry, thus we participate in various standards and specifications groups. Through active participation in these groups, Huawei has been making continuous contribution to the telecoms industry. We are committed to realizing the vision of network convergence, where communications and networking services are genuinely merged together.

I’m looking forward to the work and the collaboration.

Declaration of Independence screen saver

Colonial Williamsburg is basically a theme park about colonial days in America, the time in the 18th century before and around the establishment of the United States. It can be somewhat kitschy[1], but it can also provide a good bit of education about U.S. history.

Their web site has lots of good information, along with some computer wallpaper, ringtones, and screen savers (you might have to click on “Screensavers” after visiting the link). Appropriate to this weekend, check out the Declaration of Independence screen saver.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

They are words to live by, indeed.
 

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[1] It’s one of those places where the staff tries to stay in character as colonial types, pretending not to know about wrist-watches and cell phones, and such. It’s the kind of place spoofed by South Park’s episode called “Super Fun Time”.

Volunteer Ambulance Corps

I tried a new adventure this week: I did a ride-on shift with the Ossining [NY] Volunteer Ambulance Corps. Some background:

I play volleyball with a paramedic at the O.V.A.C., and when I was at IBM I worked with two volunteer Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs). I’d often said that I admire people who do that sort of thing, devoting their time to helping people. When I told my volleyball teammate that I’d been laid off, she suggested that it might be an opportunity to look at something completely new... like taking EMT or Paramedic training.

The idea struck a spark, but it took a few months for me to get around to setting up a ride-on, where I’d really get to see what they do.

For those who don’t know the difference: EMTs have a relatively brief training period, and are only authorized for basic life support (BLS) tasks: CPR, giving oxygen, splinting, that sort of thing... and, of course, transport. Paramedics have significantly more training, and they can perform advanced life support (ALS) tasks, such as running IVs, giving certain medications, and using the defibrillator. Ossining has two ambulances — one with two EMTs and one with an EMT and a paramedic — and a “fly car” — an SUV that a paramedic goes alone in.

The protocol at Ossining is that whenever possible, either both ambulances or the two-EMT ambulance and the fly car go to a call. That ensures that there’s a paramedic there, so ALS is available. And if the paramedic decides that ALS isn’t necessary, the EMTs take care of the situation and, if necessary, the transport, leaving the paramedic available for the next call.

On my day, we had an extra EMT with us, one who is just finishing his paramedic training. I rode in the “bus” with my paramedic friend and two EMTs.

The shift started at 8 A.M., but it wasn’t until a little before 10 that we got our first call. After that they came pretty steadily, with just short gaps... six calls for us, all told (and a couple of calls we didn’t go to because we were busy — the fly car took those).

The calls varied in scope:

1. A worker felt strange, enough so that the crew called us. The paramedic asked some questions, did some basic exam. Blood pressure high, nothing else obvious. EMTs transported him to the hospital.
2. A woman cut her leg. EMTs cleaned and bandaged it, no transport needed.
3. A man with a history of emphysema complained of shortness of breath. Nothing immediately urgent, so EMTs gave oxygen and transported him.
4. A woman fainted at her workplace. Vitals were normal when we got there, but paramedics gave her a saline IV and we took her to the hospital. Very nice (new) emergency department. Not crowded, not hectic.
5. A woman was in an auto accident, complaining of neck/back pain. No ALS needed, but the other bus was busy, so we transported her.
6. A man thought he was having a heart attack at his workplace. He looked pale and ashen when we arrived, high blood pressure and tachycardia (rapid heartbeat). Paramedics gave him aspirin, nitroglycerin, and saline, monitored him (EKG, BP, oxygen level) in transit — his stats went back to normal.

And that was the day. No traumas, nothing very challenging,[1] but a variety of things that let me see these folks in action.

Two things struck me, in particular. The one I completely expected is that the paramedics and EMTs are well trained, competent, and effective. The area covered is small enough that we were just a few minutes from every call. Everyone knew just what to do, and did it with confidence.

The other thing was less obvious: they have a practiced, easy “bedside manner”. One of the most important parts of what they have to do is to make the patients feel calm, safe, and relaxed. Think about it: you’ve collapsed at work and the ambulance has come for you! You’d have to be agitated, frightened. And the EMT talks with you calmly, the paramedic has a soothing manner with you. It’s OK. We’ll get you to the doctor, and you don’t need to worry. I could see the difference that made.

I’ve asked my volleyball teammate to let me know when the next EMT class is. I’m going to learn to do this, as part of giving back to the world.
 

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[1] I actually felt a little odd at the start of the day, in that I knew that if we didn’t get any calls I’d wind up spending the day watching dumb stuff on TV... but that it was kind of weird to hope that a few people would get sick or injured so that my day would be more interesting.

Woody, on meaninglessness

I’ve always loved Woody Allen’s movies. Not all of them equally, of course, but most of them are at least amusing, and some are true masterpieces. Annie Hall, of course, the one that won the Academy Award for Best Picture (1977), is at the top of the list. My other favourites are Hannah and Her Sisters, Manhattan, and Play It Again, Sam.

Mr Allen has a new movie out, called Whatever Works, and Terry Gross recently interviewed him on her radio show, Fresh Air.

His movies, almost all of them, display a depressed angst, a kind of existential difficulty that’s hard for some to take. As he points out, his movies aren’t autobiographical... and yet they certainly reflect the man’s own philosophy and internal troubles.

Here’s a transcript from 6:38 into the audio:

Terry Gross: So, may I ask, what are some of the real problems that making movies distracts you from?

Woody Allen: Well, they distract me from the same problems that you face, or that anyone faces. You know, the uncertainty of life, and inevitability of aging, and death, and death of loved ones, and mass killings and starvations, and holocausts and... not just the man-made carnage, but the existential position that you’re in, you know, being in a world where you have no idea what’s going on, why you’re here, or what possible meaning your life can have, and the conclusion that you come to after a while that there is really no meaning to it, it’s just a random, meaningless event. These are pretty depressing thoughts, and if you spend much time thinking about them, not only can’t you resolve them, but you sit frozen in your seat, you can’t even get up to have your lunch.

Wow.

Indeed, should one so internalize the struggle to find meaning, and collect all the troubles of the word under one’s hat, one might indeed find oneself unable to function. For most of us, though, it doesn’t come to that.

Because Mr Allen really does have it there, in what he says: there is really no meaning to our individual lives. The are, indeed, just random, meaningless events, from a cosmic point of view. From a universal vantage point, our meaning, our purpose, is to be part of the life-cycle of the Earth. There’s no more nor less to it.

And then, one day a very unusual thing happened in the village: a little baby boy was born. A boy named Oblio. Now, don’t get the wrong idea: the being born part wasn’t unusual. Little kids were being born all the time in that village. What was unusual was that Oblio, unlike any of the other babies born that day, or any other day, had no point! He had no point at all.

Of course, that doesn’t mean our lives need to be meaningless, purposeless, pointless.

Woody Allen responds to his existential angst by “distracting” himself with filmmaking. All the things he has to deal with in that endeavour, he says, leave no time to think about the disturbing stuff. But, really, can anyone but him say that filmmaking is, for Mr Allen, a distraction? Surely, it’s his purpose. He entertains us with his films, and he has a fulfilling life from that. Filmmaking is Woody Allen’s meaning.

It’s not, though, a meaning imposed from on high. It’s one he has developed himself. In looking for a meaning, he’s found one, or created one for himself. In lamenting the meaninglessness of life, and its randomness, he’s made his less random and more meaningful.

How is it we are here, on this path we walk?
In this world of pointless fear, filled with empty talk

— Michael Pinder

And so it is with us all. We all fulfill our natural purpose, the cycle-of-life part. But we each make our own “higher purpose” in what we do while we’re in that cycle.

The three famous people who died last week, Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson, made it their purpose, as does Mr Allen, to entertain. Some decide their purpose is to help people, and they become teachers, firefighters, and physicians. Some lead, some provide services, some make things that others use; those are their meanings. For me, it’s my work with computers and the Internet. Our natural “purpose” provides us with the intelligence to develop our own, individual meanings of life.

And that’s the point.

Confidence!

It’s always been clear that we like it when people are firm, not wishy-washy. John Kerry lost the 2004 presidential election in large part because he was derided for having changed his vote.[1] Where sense might tell us that changing your mind after serious consideration of new information is a good thing, and a sign of intelligence and reason, we have something working against that, which made the label “Flip-Flop!” stick like a “Kick me!” sign on his back.

This isn’t news, of course, and isn’t, in itself, interesting. What is interesting is that we have studies (you knew we would) that show that people consistently prefer confidence even when it’s consistently wrong:

The research, by Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shows that we prefer advice from a confident source, even to the point that we are willing to forgive a poor track record. Moore argues that in competitive situations, this can drive those offering advice to increasingly exaggerate how sure they are. And it spells bad news for scientists who try to be honest about gaps in their knowledge.

Indeed, the studies explain our real-work experience with leaders in politics and business who make strong, confident statements about things they know nothing about; who make wild, confident predictions about things they can’t possibly predict with any hope of accuracy; who make bold, confident decisions, and then stand by them even when they turn into disasters.

Mission accomplished!

The problem, though, is that honesty is considered weakness, and serious consideration of facts becomes a bad thing. And that’s dangerous. It’s also how the sorts of people who are firmly confident in fantasy garner support. Religious fanatics, conspiracy theorists, denialists of AIDS and climate change and the Holocaust, are all vehemently confident. Scientists, at least when we’re being honest about it, must always admit to some amount of uncertainty, however small. We don’t know everything there is to know about evolution, about viruses, about cancer, or about the global climate... but when we admit to a gap in what we know, we fall victim to this effect. We are uncertain, so we lose ground.

An example of this is something I quoted in these pages last fall, talking about the Large Hadron Collider. The fear-mongers have latched onto a crazy notion that the LHC will create a black hole that will destroy the world. Scientists are as sure as we can be that this is ridiculous, and, “No, it can’t happen,” would not be an unreasonable way to answer the question. And, yet, physicist Janna Levin answers by saying, “Well, it’s interesting, ’cause you can never say ‘never,’ actually, and the best things you can say are that it’s incredibly, ridiculously, extremely unlikely that anything like that can happen. [...] But can I say it’s a physical impossibility? I can not.”

I like the way New Scientist ends the article, with Dr Moore demonstrating the very effect we’re talking about:

So if honest advice risks being ignored, what is a responsible scientific adviser to do? “It’s an excellent question, and I’m not sure that I have a great answer,” says Moore.

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[1] Well, that and because he ran a crappy campaign. But, hey.

Health care: U.S. vs Canada

About a year and a half ago, former Canadian Prime Minister Kim Campbell was on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC, the local public radio station here in New York. Among other things, the topic of health-care coverage came up (listen at 30:10 into the audio), and Ms Campbell said, as part of her answer, “It’s interesting, because there are all sorts of myths here about Canadian health care, and I can’t answer all of them now, but the point is that the system is rational and it is accountable to the public.”

At the time, I wished I could contact Ms Campbell and get her list of myths. But now another Canadian — this time, Rhonda Hackett, a clinical psychologist now living outside of Denver — has written an article about Canadian health-care myths, published a few weeks ago in the Denver Post.

Read the article; it makes a number of things very clear. Allow me to summarize some points that one gets from Ms Hackett’s list:

United States: 31% of health-care money goes to overhead (paperwork, company salaries & profits, and so on).
Canada: 1% of health-care money goes to overhead.

United States: 17% of the gross domestic product (GDP) is spent on health care.
Canada: 10% of the GDP is spent on health care.

United States: Less than 85% of the population is covered, and many of those have inadequate coverage. The U.S. has many “hidden” costs when uncovered people go to emergency facilities in order to get health care.
Canada: 100% of the population is covered through the normal system.

United States: Insurance companies often overrule doctors’ health-care decisions.
Canada: Your doctors are the only ones who make your health-care decisions.

United States: 14.4% say they have unmet health-care needs.
Canada: 11.3% say they have unmet health-care needs.

United States: You have to find a doctor who’s in your health insurance plan.
Canada: You go to any doctor.

United States: Doctors are private businesses; they do not work for the government. Their fees are reimbursed by the health insurers.
Canada: Doctors are private businesses; they do not work for the government. Their fees are reimbursed by the government, which acts as the health insurer.

Ms Hackett finishes with a story of her aunt, who’s waited 14 months in Canada for elective knee-replacement surgery. The wait may sound bad, until you realize that she will get her new knee next month. In the U.S., she could not have afforded it, ever.

Further, according to Ms Hackett, Canadians do not pay significantly higher taxes, overall.

Professor Ralph Selfridge, 1927-2008

One of my mentors has shuffled off this mortal coil. I’ve only just learnt of it, but Ralph Selfridge (see a reference to him in these pages here, and pronounce it “rafe”, please) died about ten months ago. He was one of my computer science professors at University of Florida, and a friend at the time, but one with whom I, sadly, did not stay in touch with. I have, though, in the Internet age, periodically “googled” him, to check in. And so I knew that he’d retired from UF in 2002.

I once again searched for him on Friday, and found his obituary. With sadness, I went to the “guest book” link there, read the entries, and then added my own.

Here’s what I said:

I’ve only just found this through a Google search, casually looking for where my favourite professor is now. I’m sad, this time, to find the answer.

In 1974 thru 1977, I was finishing my mathematics degree at University of Florida, and studying computer science — I went on to a career at IBM, where the latter served me much more than the former. I met Dr Selfridge early in that time, and loved him immediately for his quirky style, his quick wit, and his easy rapport with the students who could appreciate him.

Dr Selfridge taught me the finer details of the APL programming language, as well as many aspects of being a first-class computer scientist. I’m grateful to him for his role in where my life and career went.

Some of that learning happened in class, and some of it happened at the Rathskellar or the Orange and Brew on Friday afternoons, in what he called the Alcoholic Programmers’ League. We, the students who joined him, felt rather like accolytes accompanying Plato or Socrates.

Over the years, I’ve wished I’d kept in touch with Dr S, but settled for the occasional Google search. I’ll search no more, now, but I’ll always remember Ralph Selfridge with very, very much fondness.

Travel follies

Whenever I travel, I run into a few things that always puzzle me, so I thought I’d put them down here. Nothing really significant, nothing Earth-moving... just a few tiny, minor things.

Where to put the towels

Every hotel, now, has joined the “save the world” network. Even if that really means “save the hotel’s money by washing your towels less often,” I still approve of it because it does conserve water, and, no, I don’t need the towels washed every day.[1] &deity knows, I don’t wash them every day at home.

But the puzzling part is the instruction card. They all say about the same thing; this is what the one in the hotel in Boston says:

Together we can save millions of gallons of water from chlorine and detergents.

YOU DECIDE

Leave towels you wish to re-use hung up or on the rack.

Towels you leave on the floor will be washed.

Conservation takes care of everyone.

Help us make a world of difference.

So the question is this: What do they do with a towel I leave on the vanity, or on the bed?

It’s not hung up or on the rack.

It’s not on the floor.

Maybe it’s just the computer geek in me, who thinks that anything unspecified is undefined, but I always wonder about the fate of those towels I leave sitting next to the sink.[2]

Turn-down service

This is the thing where the housekeeping staff will come ’round in the evening and pull the sheet and blanket down so the bed is ready for you. But... how hard is that for me to do myself? Why would I particularly want them to do it?

And, especially, why do they come around at 8 or 9 in the evening, bang on the door, and ask me if I want it? If I’m out, I suppose there’s no harm in their coming in and turning the bed down, but if I’m in my room then, I certainly don’t want them bothering me with it.

Is everything all right?

Speaking of not wanting to be bothered, we get to the “Is everything all right?” call. That’s something that more hotels seem to be doing, wherein they call your phone (or send someone to your door, which is what the Boston hotel did) a half hour or so after you check in, asking if the room is OK and if you need anything.

That might seem fine, but... if there’s a problem, I know how to get in touch with the front desk, so I don’t need to be disturbed. And there are times when I’ve been travelling for some significant part of the day, or I had to get up for an early flight, or both, and when I get to the hotel the first thing I do is have a lie down, maybe hoping for a light snooze. The last thing I want is to be awakened a few minutes after I’ve dozed off.

I can put the “do not disturb” sign on the door to protect against that intrusion, but most hotel-room phones lack a DND button, and I never remember to unplug the phone cord.
 

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[1] I also like it that they’ve stopped throwing away the partially used soap bar. That used to irritate me, but these days I can happily use the same bar all week, and they’ll leave it there for me.

[2] And I guess that means that I don’t follow instructions well.

Poken (not Pokémon)

I’ve been in Boston for the week, attending the Open Mobile Alliance meeting. Whenever one goes to meetings, one does the dance of the business card exchange. Because it’s my first OMA meeting, I have more of it going on than usual, as I’m meeting a lot of people for the first time. So I’ve collected a batch of 2-inch × 3.5-inch cards, which I then have to copy information from and put it into my address book. And there’s no hope of reading these things without my reading glasses.

They’re inconvenient, to be sure, but they do work, and we’re used to them. Everyone has them. And guess what:

No one has tried to pull out a poken.

Yes, some folks have come up with another idea for an electronic business card. We tried various mechanisms for “beaming” contact information between mobile devices, but none of them caught on because of setup issues and security concerns. Some people have even tried passing out memory devices with their data loaded onto them, but that’s just too expensive to be practical. Now we have poken.

Basically, it’s a revisiting of “beaming”, but with some twists that resolve many of the problems we had with that in the past. There’s no setup issue — you touch your poken to mine, and we record each other as contacts. Because physical contact (or at least very close proximity) is required, most of the security problems are gone (they had to do with remote reading). The poken devices are even meant to be “fun”, looking like goofy characters with overly large “hands”, and the exchange is made to resemble a handshake. A device costs about $20... a little expensive for what it is, but certainly cheaper than a box of cards.

A poken can hold 64 contacts. I can’t tell from the web site what happens when it’s full — whether I can still give out my information, even if I can’t receive any more. But, still, we’ve all had that occasion when we arrived at a day of meetings with only two cards left. Damn! Forgot to reload. That seems less likely to be a problem here. Also, the poken timestamps the information exchange, so you know when you got your contact’s “card”. That seems like it could be handy.

Possibly the “fun” aspect is one that’s blocked it from the business community so far. Business cards are businesslike. Poken are toys.

But beyond that, the system introduces its own issues.

The main one is that you aren’t actually exchanging information. What you’re exchanging are, essentially, poken access tokens, which you take to the poken web site to get access to the real information (which then, in turn, points to a profile somewhere else, such as LinkedIn or Facebook, as chosen by each contact). Related to that, the reason there aren’t any setup problems is that it’s a single, proprietary system. Everyone has to have a poken, not any other device. Everyone has to sign up at the poken web site. Poken, thus, has all your contact information. Most people won’t be bothered by that. Some will.

Also, here’s what the “How does it work?” page says about accessing contacts, emphasis mine:

Your contacts can view your Poken Card on doyoupoken.com, but, if they want to see more, they only have to click the logo to see your profile on the social networking site you’ve chosen to share. On the Poken site you and your friends can view your contacts alphabetically, or chronologically in your “social timeline.” You can also send messages, group contacts with a label, write notes for yourself about each contact, and so much more.

Here, again: my friends can view my contacts. Are “friends”, here, the same as “contacts”? If so, I certainly don’t want all my contacts to see all my contacts. If not, then, despite their protestations to the contrary, poken is setting up yet another social networking site. In any case, it’s clear that their success is directly connected to how many people join. And, since they have access to all the contacts of their members (you can bet there’ll be a way to upload non-poken contacts to their system, part of the “so much more”), there’s a great deal of proselytizing, data mining, and second-level marketing available to them here.

Whether or not any of this bothers you, it’s likely that you’d want to export your contacts from poken and import them to some other address book or contact list. The web site doesn’t mention anything about that capability. If it exists, it’s certain to be a manual process. Having some new service that manages your contacts might be inconvenient.

Of course, in order for two devices to be able to exchange data, they must have power — they have small lithium batteries. According to the faq, the battery “should last approximately six (6) months,” but heavy use will reduce that. Better be sure you have a spare battery to hand.

Another serious issue is what will happen to your contact information if the company should collapse. Of course, your device itself would become less “fun” in that case. More importantly, though, you’d probably lose your contacts unless you’ve been able to export them, and have done so regularly.

The poken idea does seem to be getting some adoption by the younger, cooler set, so maybe it will catch on and succeed. I’ll watch it, and see what happens. Meanwhile, you can have my business card.

Mother's maiden name, revisited

New Scientist reports on a study that shows how bad “secret questions” are at protecting your accounts:

What’s your secret question? Your mother’s maiden name? Your first pet? For many people, facts like these are all that protect their email and other accounts should they forget their password.

Now a new study (pdf) by researchers at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, US, reveals just how easy the answers of such security questions are for other people to guess.

Acquaintances of 32 webmail users — people with whom they would not normally share their login details — were asked to try and guess the answers users assigned to protect their accounts. The volunteers managed to guess correctly nearly a fifth of the time, raising questions over how secure the commonly used system is.

Of course, the study doesn’t “raise” these questions: many of us in the computer security business have been railing against this stuff for years, and I noted it in these pages two years ago. But the study provides documentation of the problem, with statistics to back up our arguments.

If you have to use a “security question”, consider my advice from that 2007 item, and treat the answer not as the real answer to a question, but as a second password:

What might not be obvious, though, even with the maiden name thing, is that you don’t have to tell them the truth. It’s a password. So when you hear, “What’s your mother’s maiden name?”, mentally turn that into, “Please give me an alternative password for your account, in case you forget the other one.” And instead of saying, “Johnson”, say something like, “Jules Verne, green cheese”. Yeah, they’ll probably respond, “Say what?”, but just insist on it and make them put it in their records.

The New Scientist article makes another valuable point, quoting Ross Anderson of Cambridge University: that because online services often use your email address as a secure way to contact you, your email account is a particularly critical one to protect. When I was reminded of that, I changed the password on my email account from one that already was probably better than yours, to one that’s better still.

As an alternative to the “mother’s maiden name” thing, Microsoft suggests something similar to the “web of trust” that’s used with some systems of security certificates. Instead of picking a “security question”, you designate a set of people you know and trust. If you forget your password and request access, the service gives recovery tokens to those you designated. You collect some number of those tokens from them, and the service accepts that as evidence of your identity.

If you’re careful to pick trustworthy friends to designate, that really sounds like a good scheme.[1] I hope it catches on.
 

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[1] The only real drawback I can see is that your designated friends will all know when you need your password reset. If that happens a lot, you might find it embarrassing. (It also means you can’t recover access to your account with a single message or phone call, but that’s probably a good thing, from a security point of view.)

Truth, justice, and the American way

Last week was a dark one for sensible, fair American justice:

Prisoners have no constitutional right to DNA testing that might prove their innocence, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday in a 5-to-4 decision.

The court divided along familiar ideological lines, with the majority emphasizing that 46 states already have laws that allow at least some prisoners to gain access to DNA evidence.

The problems with this are clear:

1. The constitutional argument goes to due process, and it seems obvious to me. I can’t understand how five Supreme Court Justices don’t see it that way.[1] It just makes sense to examine evidence that we weren’t able to examine — technologically — at the time of the trial.
2. Many of the state laws are inadequate. For example, some only allow it for death-penalty cases, but will allow someone to die in prison rather than review the DNA. And in any case, prosecutors oppose the petitions, not wanting to risk having their convictions overturned.
3. No argument about how much trouble it might be will win me over, when we’re talking about years of someone’s life spent in prison for not knowing. No argument of “convicted in a fair trial” can counter the unfairness of a false conviction. If we don’t put the priority on a person’s life, what are we?

Such is the legacy of the Bushes, père et fils, and Ronald Reagan; this is where they’ve left us.
 

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[1] Actually, I can, when I consider who four of those five are. I’m disappointed that Justice Kennedy joined them.

Binary multiplication, the computer (and Ethiopian?) way

In the 360 blog (sub-heading, “12 tables, 24 chairs, and plenty of chalk”), blogger Ξ (Xi) recently wrote about “Ethiopian Multiplication” (and followed it up with a series of interesting posts on different ways to multiply, here, here, here, and here, so far).

Here’s the “Ethiopian” version, as Xi tells it:

Here’s the basic idea: Suppose you want to multiply two numbers like 14 and 12. You could use your fingers, of course, but here’s another way:

Start with the two numbers on top. Halve one, ignoring any remainders or fractions, and double the other, stopping when you get to 1.

14 & 12
7 & 24
3 & 48 [See how I ignored the fact that halving 7 leaves 1 left over?]
1 & 96 <— Stop here.

Now look at the numbers on the right. Some are across from an even number: in this case, 12 is across from the original 14. Ignore those, and add the rest. So we’ll add 24, 48, and 96, which were across from odd numbers, and get 168. And that’s the product! Isn’t that cool?

It’s cool, because it’s binary... but it’s not at all surprising that it works. Look at what we’ve really done: In the left column, we’ve represented the multiplier (14, here) in binary, where even numbers represent 0 and odds represent 1. In the right column, we’ve multiplied the multiplicand (12, here) by the corresponding powers of 2. Thus:

0	14			12	(12 × 20)
1	7			24	(12 × 21)
1	3			48	(12 × 22)
1	1			96	(12 × 23)

By “ignoring” the numbers on the right that match even numbers on the left, we’re omitting the entries that correspond to a binary zero.

Think about how we learn to do long multiplication in school. If we multiply 12 by 14 using that method, it looks like this:

     1 2
     1 4
  ------
     4 8   (12 * 4 * 100)
   1 2     (12 * 1 * 101)
  ------
   1 6 8

We use the visual left-shift on the second line of the answer to represent multiplication by another 10 (the shifted “12” really means “120”).

And that’s exactly what the Ethiopians were doing, except instead of doing it in decimal (powers of ten), they were doing it in binary (powers of 2):

          1 1 0 0   (binary representation of 12)
          1 1 1 0   (binary representation of 14)
         --------
          0 0 0 0   (12 * 0 * 20)
        1 1 0 0     (12 * 1 * 21)
      1 1 0 0       (12 * 1 * 22)
    1 1 0 0         (12 * 1 * 23)
  ---------------
  1 0 1 0 1 0 0 0   (binary representation of 168)

Now, why the Ethiopians did their multiplication in binary isn’t clear, but one can surmise that it’s easier to learn to double and halve arbitrary numbers than it is to learn the units multiplication table (quick!: What’s 8 times 7?).

But here’s the thing: now that we’re using digital computers, we can readily see that this is essentially how computers do multiplication internally. Basic logic circuits to take binary numbers and add them or shift them are easy, and that’s really all this has: a one-bit shift to the left doubles, while a one-bit shift to the right halves, and then we add things up at the end (or, really, as we go). So to look at the algorithm a computer would use, let’s assume we have a computer with at least three “registers”, and a “condition” indicator that’s set if we shift a “1” bit off the end of a register.

01 Load first number into R1
02 Load second number into R2
03 Set R3 to zero
04 Shift R1 right one bit
05 If condition is not set, jump to 07
06 Add R2 into R3
07 If R1 is zero, jump to 10
08 Shift R2 left one bit
09 Jump to 04
10 Store R3 as answer

If we’re robust about it, we’ll also check for an overflow after step 06 (the answer is too large for our registers), but that’s basically it. It’s a simple, fast method, requiring the simplest computer hardware instructions.

To see how it works with the 14 * 12 example, we’ll run through it:

Instruction	R1	R2	R3	cond
01 Load first number into R1	14
02 Load second number into R2	14	12
03 Set R3 to zero	14	12	0
04 Shift R1 right one bit	7	12	0	no
05 If condition is not set, jump to 07				no	(jump)
07 If R1 is zero, jump to 10					(no jump)
08 Shift R2 left one bit	7	24	0	no
09 Jump to 04
04 Shift R1 right one bit	3	24	0	yes
05 If condition is not set, jump to 07				yes	(no jump)
06 Add R2 into R3	3	24	24
07 If R1 is zero, jump to 10					(no jump)
08 Shift R2 left one bit	3	48	24
09 Jump to 04
04 Shift R1 right one bit	1	48	24	yes
05 If condition is not set, jump to 07				yes	(no jump)
06 Add R2 into R3	1	48	72
07 If R1 is zero, jump to 10					(no jump)
08 Shift R2 left one bit	1	96	72
09 Jump to 04
04 Shift R1 right one bit	0	96	72	yes
05 If condition is not set, jump to 07				yes	(no jump)
06 Add R2 into R3	0	96	168
07 If R1 is zero, jump to 10					(jump)
10 Store R3 as answer	0	96	168

The interesting thing is that if you ask beginning computer students to write a low-level program for multiplication, most of them will use the old lesson that “multiplication is repeated addition”, and do something like this:

01 Load first number into R1
02 Load second number into R2
03 Set R3 to zero
04 If R1 is zero, jump to 08
05 Add R2 into R3
06 Decrement R1
07 Jump to 04
08 Store R3 as answer

The program is two steps shorter... but it will take much longer to run, because the loop is dependent on the value of the number, rather than on the number of bits (that is, the problem is now order n, as opposed to order log(n)).

Truth and rumour and journalism

The New York Times recently ran an item about bloggers and other online writers “competing” with mainstream journalism. A main point of the article was that news-bloggers often take more risks, do less fact-checking, worry less about reliability of sources, and so on. And the idea, it seems, is that when they miss — a “fact” isn’t, or a source turns out to have been wrong — it doesn’t matter much, because they’re “only bloggers”, but when they hit, they have a real scoop.

But seeking credibility may be a less-important strategy for the blogs at this stage. Mr. Arrington, a lawyer, is quick to point out that he has no journalism training. He is at ease, even high-minded, in explaining the decisions to print unverified rumors.

Mr. Arrington and the other bloggers see this not as rumor-mongering, but as involving the readers in the reporting process. One mission of his site, he said, is to write about the things a few people are talking about, “the scuttlebutt around Silicon Valley.” His blog will often make clear that he’s passing along a thinly sourced story.

The point is that when you consider the resources needed to do all the real, you know, journalism work, you see that the little guy can’t compete with the big media outlets... but there is, they say, a place for that little guy and his tossing out of questionable material, hoping that enough of it is right — or right enough — to have value.

I’m uncertain. It seems to me that we used to call such people “gossip columnists”, and we used that as a pejorative term. When we wanted to know what was going on in the real world, we turned to the real news and we expected reliable facts and reliable sources, news items written by reporters who took the time to investigate what they were reporting on. Breaking stories demanding urgent reporting were always different, of course, but even then we expected something with real facts.

When we wanted to know who was dating whom in Hollywood, who was on the outs and who was having whose baby, well, we were happy to turn to whispered, unsourced, unchecked innuendo, often put in the form of rhetorical questions. “And who’s that sexy blonde who’s was seen with Herkermer Biffelwogg in Cannes last month?”

And now, it seems, the latter is encroaching on the former. Now that one no longer needs a publisher to be published, now that one can be a soi-disant journalist on a whim, trained by no one and hired by no one, now that any 10-year-old with a broadband connection[1] can publish what he has to say to the world, readers, not writers, are often the ones expected to check the facts.

The Times article describes a situation where a blogger ran with a rumour (about the health of Apple’s Steve Jobs) that turned out to be right:

Mr. Lam says it taught him a lesson. “If we don’t have rumors, what do we have as journalists?” he asks. “You have press releases. So maybe there is some honor in printing rumors.”

Is that really the dichotomy: what isn’t “rumour” is just canned material released for gullible journalists to reproduce with little editing and less thought? I don’t think so. That’s clearly not what Woodward and Bernstein did with the Watergate break-in. It’s not even what Damon Darlin did for this very New York Times article. Mr Darlin neither printed someone’s press release nor pasted random rumours into his computer. He talked to people. He made some phone calls, he probably followed chains of references, he sorted and culled what he got, and he wrote an article with some though behind it.

There’s still lots of that sort of reporting out there, and it’s what I prefer to read.

I’m not sure to what extent I have any interest in rumours, but I know this: I expect to see them labeled as such. Facts, opinions, analysis, and rumours are all different things, and it needs to be clear which is which.[2]
 

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[1] I used to say, “any 10-year-old with a modem,” but, well, times have changed.

[2] In case there’s any question: I cite my sources, and everything else here is opinion, always. But, then, I also don’t claim to be a journalist.

Carnivals!

Quip of the week...

It’s been unseasonably cool here in New York. While discussing the weather report the other day, which called for a sunny day, “high in the sixties”:

“High in the sixties” also describes a lot of people I know.

Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:

• Skeptics’ Circle #113.
• Carnival of the Liberals #93.
• Carnival of Education #227.
• Carnival of Education #228.
• Math Teachers at Play #9.
• Carnival of the Godless #119.

No Carnival of Mathematics this time, as far as I can find.

Susan Werner

The town of Ridgefield, CT, has a series of concerts in their park during the summer. The series is too-cutely called “CHIRP”, an acronym for “Concert Happenings In Ridgefield’s Parks” (see, I told you it was too cute; also, be warned that the web site is hideous, playing music at you unbidden, making annoying sounds when you move the mouse around, and assaulting you with bouncing photos), and last Tuesday their guest was the wonderful Susan Werner.

It was a beautiful, cool evening, perfect for food, wine, and music in the night air. And Ms Werner ended the first half of her concert with my favourite of her songs, “Time Between Trains”.

But before that, she did songs I hadn’t known, from her recent albums. In particular, she did some from The Gospel Truth, from 2007. And in the album’s title, “Truth” is the operative word, over “Gospel” — here’s what the Chicago Tribune said about it, as quoted on Ms Werner’s web site:

Susan Werner takes on the church in contemporary American life in this gospel/bluegrass-tinged collection of 11 new originals. Quite possibly the first “agnostic gospel” album, this CD surveys the wide variety of viewpoints regarding the church today, ranging from earnest and uplifting handclap choir rousers such as “Help Somebody” to the introspective and critical “Forgiveness” and “Sunday Mornings,” pausing along the way for comic relief in the frank and humorous “Our Father” and what is sure to become the anthem of agnostics everywhere, “Probably Not.” A project sure to confirm Werner’s reputation as “one of the most innovative songwriters working today.”

That “frank and humorous ‘Our Father’ ” was my favourite, and here it is, for your enjoyment too (and you can hear bits of the songs, along with Susan Werner’s comments, on this video; don’t miss it):

Our Father (The New, Revised Edition)

Thy kingdom come to every nation
Thy will be done in everything we do
Lord, lead us not into temptation
And deliver us
from those who think they’re You

Lord send us forth to be of service
To build the schools and dig the wells
And deliver us from the creepy preachers
With their narrow minds and very wide lapels

Lord give us strength to bring compassion
to every corner of the world
And please allow for women in the Catholic priesthood
And remind the pope that he coulda been a girl

Lord deliver us from politicians
Who drop Your name in every speech
As if they’re Your best friend from high school
As if they practice what they preach

Juneteenth + 12 squared

Today is the 144th anniversary of Juneteenth. I like that, because it combines three things that matter to me: words ("Juneteenth"), mathematics (144 is 12 squared), and social justice, freedom, and equality.

That last is, of course, the point.

The Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order by Abraham Lincoln, which declared slaves in the dissident Confederate states free, went into effect on the first day of 1863. At that time, it applied to ten states, which remained under secession,[1] though it specified exemptions. Of course, since the order applied only to states that were still out of Union control, its effect was brought through with the advance of Union troops, and slaves were freed over time.

A major event in the abolition of slavery came two and a half years later, in 1865. On the nineteenth of June of that year, General Granger and his Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, and on that day the slaves in the last holdout state were officially declared free.

Of course, not every person was actually freed on that day, and, indeed, we would fight hard for civil rights for the next century, and yet still have segregation and lynchings and refusal to allow blacks to vote, though they had that legal right. Titular freedom and equality may come with the stroke of a pen; real freedom and equality are more elusive.

But we celebrate a significant achievement today, nonetheless. The return of Texas to the Union did have real consequences for everyone, slave and free man alike. Beyond that, we celebrate the nation’s resolution to work toward freedom and equality, however long it might take.

We’re not done yet; it will still take longer. But we’ve come a great distance in the last 144 years.

By the President of the United States of America.

Whereas, on the twenty-second day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit:

“That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and FOREVER FREE, and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.

“That the Executive will, on the first day of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be in rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any State, or the people thereof, shall on that day be, in good faith, represented in the Congress of the United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such State shall have participated, shall, in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such State, and the people thereof, are not then in rebellion against the United States.”

Now, therefore I, ABRAHAM LINCOLN, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief, of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion, do, on this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and in accordance with my purpose so to do publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days, from the day first above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof respectively, are this day in rebellion against the United States, the following, to wit: Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, (except the Parishes of St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James Ascension, Assumption, Terrebonne, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the City of New Orleans) Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia, (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkley, Accomac, Northampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Ann, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth), and which excepted parts, are for the present, left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued.

And by virtue of the power, and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward SHALL BE FREE! and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.

And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence, and I recommend to them that, in all cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.

And I further declare and make known, that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.

And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.

In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty three, and of the Independence of the United States of America the eighty-seventh.

By the President: A.Lincoln
William H. Seward, Secretary of State.

 

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[1] Interestingly, it did not free slaves in several border states that had not officially seceded, and, thus, were not covered by the executive order. They kind of skipped that bit when they taught us about it in grade school. They didn’t teach us about the exemptions, either.