Comments from a mutant slime-snake-monkey-person.
Barry Leiba
New York, United States
My work-related web page: http://internetmessagingtechnology.org
(Please see the note at the bottom of this page.)
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I decided, this year, not to make a particular point of it on the day: last Sunday, 25 January, was the start of the fourth year of these pages.
I started, in January 2006, urging Congress to impeach an abusive president. I continue, now in January 2009, welcoming a new president with enthusiasm and optimism. It’s a new world.
And you, my readers, have made writing this interesting and fun. Thanks for reading, and thanks for commenting.
On to year number four.
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Examinations of the brains of six deceased former National Football League players have shown damage indicating chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative condition caused by repetitive head trauma:
Using techniques that can be administered only after a patient has died, doctors have now identified C.T.E. in all six N.F.L. veterans between the ages of 36 and 50 who have been tested for the condition, further evidencing the dangers of improperly treated brain trauma in football.“It’s scary — it’s horribly frightening,” said Randy Grimes, who played center next to McHale on the Buccaneers for several years. “I’ve had my share of concussions, too. More than my share. My wife says I have short-term memory loss. It’s really scary to think of what might be going on up there.”
News flash: getting your head battered about for years... is not good for your brain. Who knew?
Well, actually, technically, we still don’t know. This isn’t a controlled scientific study, and doctors on the NFL payroll remind us of this, and tell us that as far as they know, if your head gets kicked in every few games, there’s no cumulative effect as long as it’s “managed properly” each time.
Now, I’m usually among the first to look critically at incomplete, flawed, or hasty studies, and to question judgments made with insufficient evidence. I often point out when questionable conclusions are drawn from such evidence. And it’s absolutely true that this needs to be studied more in order to be sure of what’s going on.
But there’s another set of points here: the suspected cause is so closely connected to known causes of the condition, the damage is sufficiently severe that quick action is warranted, and a properly controlled study would take too long to carry out and would be ethically questionable. Let’s look at each of those:
But we’re not talking about wondering whether the players’ diet of, say, more red meat than the average person is what’s causing the encephalopathy. If that were the question, I’d agree that the data don’t support it. We’re talking about a known connection, for which I think the existing data is sufficient cause to take action, pending more study.
Sure, study this more, by all means. But there’s enough evidence here as it stands to require action now, from an ethical point of view, even before further study.
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Early in my time at IBM, the group I was working in added two new members — both, as it happens, called Steve. One, we were told, had a fairly senior position, a higher rank than our manager, though in the technical track, and would be the most senior member of our team. The other was at a lower level, only a little above me in the hierarchy.
They were to arrive on the same day, and I was to present my part of the project to them. I felt uneasy about that. Not because I had any problem with public speaking or giving a technical presentation about my work, but because I worried that my little presentation about my petty project couldn’t keep the senior Steve interested.
When the day came and we all met in a conference room, I went to the blackboard — yes, chalk and blackboards, then, and overhead projectors with transparencies — and started my talk. I tried to make it interesting, and Steve T. stayed alert and asked lots of questions. He seemed to be getting it, and that was heartening. But, as I’d expected, Steve G. was all but nodding off. He sat wordlessly, holding his head up with his hand and looking quite bored.
No matter: as I said, I’d expected that. I was just finishing my first year there, right out of college, so it didn’t surprise me that what I had to tell them couldn’t hold the interest of someone with 15 years or more of experience.
But then I found that I’d mis-read the whole thing. It was Steve T. who had the experience and the senior position. He’d moved ahead by being alert and inquisitive, by taking everything in and analyzing it, by understanding every part of a project, even those parts that had been assigned to junior programmers fresh out of school. His experience had taught him to learn from everyone.
Steve G. wasn’t as young as I, and had been with the company for a number of years, but still held a junior position and probably always would. As I worked with him over the next months, I could see that. His carefree approach was reflected in his work. By not paying attention to all the details, he lacked the overall vision that would get him more responsible, more influential positions.
That was an important lesson to learn early on; the two Steves taught me something that I’ve relied on ever since.
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President Obama did an interview on Al Arabiya, and the interview was aired on Tuesday. You can watch it on You Tube: part 1; part 2.
Of course, the right-wing idiots have wasted no time before blasting him for appearing on Arabic television and talking to Muslims. Read the comment thread, if you can do it without retching from the illiteracy and the wingnuttery. Try these, for example:
I knew it obama is off to his new friends the muslims
Last week he refused to answer a question from FOX News (?) regargding lobbyists in his administration; this week he scheduled time for a television interview with Al-Arabiya.The previous president, of course, would never have done such a thing as give an interview on Al Arabiya. Never! [Eh? What’s that? Oh, um...] Well, OK, he actually did so six times. Imagine that.
OK, enough about that. What’d he say?
He opened it by saying that George Mitchell will “start by listening,” rather than “start by dictating.” Listen to both sides. Find out what they need. Come back and work out a response. Not telling them what to do, but mediating and helping them negotiate.
He said that we can’t just think about the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. There’s also Syria and Iran and Lebanon and Afghanistan and Pakistan. “These things are interrelated.” He talked of “communicating a message to the Arab world and the Muslim world that we are ready to initiate a new partnership based on mutual respect and mutual interest.”
Speaking of Al Qaeda, “There’s no actions that they’ve taken that, say, a child in the Muslim world is getting a better education because of them, or has better health care because of them.” He brought out a quote from his inauguration speech, “You will be judged on what you build, not what you destroy.” He gives the Muslim world credit for recognizing that “that path is leading no place except more death and destruction.”
Other sound bites:
“the Americans are not your enemy”
“what you’ll see is somebody who is listening, who is respectful”
“a drawdown of troops in Iraq, so that Iraqis can start taking more responsibility”
“the language we use matters”
“to the broader Muslim world, what we are going to be offering is a hand of friendship.”
Notably, President Obama has avoided inflammatory phrases and sabre-rattling rhetoric such as “war on terror,” phrases that draw cheers at rallies but that are empty on inspection. Instead, he talks in specifics. And we’ll be able to see the results, one way or the other.
The more I see this sort of thing, the more pride I have that we’ve elected someone who can lead the country out of the hole it was pulled into in the last eight years. This is a good interview, and it will make a difference in how we’re perceived, and, thus, in the cooperation we get in pursuit of peace and stability.
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When William Kristol was given a regular column on the New York Times’s op-ed pages, there was a lot of criticism of the decision from us readers. A conservative columnist on a liberal op-ed page? What were they thinking?
But, really, having a conservative column to read isn’t a bad thing. One needs an opposing viewpoint to consider. One needs thoughtful opinions from the other side. I read George Will, sometimes, for example, and I used to enjoy a good William F. Buckley column when he was alive, whether or not I agreed with what he had to say.
No, the galling part was the choice of Mr Kristol, a “Fox News” type of conservative. William Kristol isn’t Michelle Malkin, say, nor Ann Coulter, either of whom would have taken them beyond the brink. But neither is he the sort of columnist I’d expect to find with a contrasting point of view that I’d want to read.
And so I was not surprised when he wasn’t. His columns haven’t been insightful nor entertaining. He hasn’t had anything to say that was worth the print space or the Internet bandwidth to carry it. The experiment was every bit as silly as I thought it’d be.
I am, therefore, happy to see that it’s coming to an end. William Kristol has written his last regular column for the New York Times.
And that last column is as useless as the ones that came before it. He praises Ronald Reagan for putting conservatism back in front of the country. He hopes that Barack Obama will bring in a conservative liberalism that he — Mr Kristol — can live with. Blather, blather, blather.
The Times won’t say what they’ll do about replacing his pen with another conservative one. They’ll only say that they have “some interesting plans.”
That they may. In any case, I won’t miss William Kristol’s column at all.
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Over on Greta Christina’s Blog, GC has a nice piece about how it’s quite a stretch to think we were “intelligently designed”, when you consider some of the real failings of that design. The post, featured on this week’s Carnival of the Godless #109, was inspired by her reading of the book Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind.
GC’s analysis reminds me of my own statement about the three top things that demonstrate to me that there’s been no “intelligent design”. To wit:
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While I’m on silly stories, as in yesterday’s blog post, I should tell the one of a former colleague who used to keep a jar of M&M’s on her desk. Her well-publicized rules were two and simple:
I was often across the hall to talk about work, and would occasionally often snag a few. Sometimes I’d stop over just for a handful and a chat, which was part of the point of her having them there — to encourage a “get to know people” sort of morale. And, yes, once in a while I’d bring in a bag to refill the jar.
Others also stopped to chat and snack. Some did more of what you might call “drive-bys,” grabbing some candies without bothering to be social about it. No one else, though, ever brought contributions for the jar, though they all knew she asked for them.
Eventually, inevitably, she decided to let the jar empty. She asked me not to bring any refills, to see if others would do as it got more alarmingly empty. No one did.
It finally got down to one, lone disc at the bottom of the jar. No one would take the last one, and no one brought more.
And one day, with a sigh, my colleague ate the last one herself and took the jar home. And that was it for the office M&M’s.
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Assignment of user identifiers (or “usernames”, or whatever you call them; hereinafter “user IDs”) can be a bit tricky. Nowadays, we usually pick our own (and it becomes part of the email address), though sometimes there are limitations to what one is allowed to choose (Gmail, for instance, won’t allow something “too simple”, like “fred”). In the old days, though, they were often assigned to users automatically.
Automatic assignment was a particular problem for universities: how can we set up a mechanism whereby a raft of new user IDs — perhaps thousands — are assigned at the start of each school term? Some students will be back, and we might like to keep their old user IDs for them. Others will have gone and we can re-claim their IDs, but is it wise to use the same ID again so soon? Still others will be new, and will need new IDs that don’t conflict with existing ones.
When I was in school, my university solved this problem by using account numbers. Students didn’t keep the same account number from one semester to the next, nor even from one class to another, and no one could, without a list, match a particular account to a particular student. On the other hand, it allowed accounting to be separated among courses, and gave professors some control.
But many schools wanted their students to have some sort of “sensible” user ID; something like “barryleiba” is better than something like “30093486,12” in this case. I was involved, back then, in a conversation about this in relation to a system that limited user IDs to seven characters. One of the participants in the conversation talked of his university’s mechanism:
Their idea was to find a method that generally gave them a unique user ID, and from which one could usually figure out someone’s ID if one knew the student’s name. Collisions would be handled manually. The scheme they came up with was to take the first three letters of the student’s last name, followed by the first three letters of the first name, followed by the middle initial. Students with no middle initial would arbitrarily get “X” for the seventh letter; similarly, first or last names of fewer than three letters would be padded with “X”. So my user name would have been “LEIBARX” under that system (I have no middle name), and a student named Li Cho Hu would be “HUXLIXC”.
The system worked well for some time, he said. Until they got a student named Shirley T. Eaton.
The moral of the story is that no matter what system you have, you really need to have an easy way to bypass it, without a lot of red tape and “I can’t do that.”
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I looked out my office window yesterday, and saw, out of the corner of my eye, this banner that’s been hanging in my office, near the window, for the last four years and a few months:
I got it at the protest march on the Republican National Convention in 2004.
And yesterday, after looking at it and re-hanging it for the photograph, I gently folded it and took it home, happy to think that its need has passed for now — and hoping, optimistically, that its need be gone for good.
Oh, and then there’s this item from the New York Times. The RSS-feed blurb says this:
Took shots... ya think? Hardly unnecessary, though. We needed assurance that it will be turned around.On the White House: On Plane to Texas, Critiques of the Speech
Some on the Bush team thought the inaugural speech took unnecessary shots at the departing administration.
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It occurred to me that I’ve never posted my “This I Believe” essay to these pages. I’ll rectify that now.
This I Believe is... well, I’ll let them say it:
This I Believe is a national media project engaging people in writing, sharing, and discussing the core values and beliefs that guide their daily lives. NPR airs these three-minute essays on All Things Considered, Tell Me More and Weekend Edition Sunday.
In June 2006, I submitted my essay. Its contents won’t surprise regular readers at all: it’s about First Amendment freedoms. It was particularly relevant during the years from 2001 to 2008, when we saw dire threats to many of our constitutional freedoms; nevertheless, it’s always relevant. Perhaps this, the beginning of a new era in the United States, is an especially good time to post it. NPR didn’t choose to air it, but it remains in the This I Believe Database. And, now, here:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”I believe in the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. When we think of it, most of us think of “freedom of speech”, but the First Amendment actually grants us five basic freedoms: freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom to petition the government. For me, as for most of us, the third doesn’t apply directly, though we rely on it; and most of us use the first to believe as we please, or not at all. Do we use the other three first-amendment rights as we should?
I believe that it’s critical, in a free society, not only to have these freedoms, but to use all five. I make it a point to do so, as often as is appropriate. I speak freely, writing political and social commentary in my own “blog” on the world wide web, and making comments in the blogs of others. I petition my senators and congressional representative, regularly sending them my views on current issues and on upcoming legislation, and urging them to take action as I would like to see it taken. I’ve exercised my freedom to assemble by having participated in several marches protesting the war in Iraq and other actions and policies of the presidential administration.
When I was growing up, in the 1960s, my father taught me the ideals that form our country’s foundation. He taught me about the equality of all people, and about the rights and freedoms that we all have. He taught me about the McCarthy era that had just passed, and used it as an example to show how easily those rights and freedoms can be undermined if we’re not careful. In those days of civil rights marches and protests against another war, he taught me to speak out for what I believe in, that each of us does have a voice in our society, and that the society is strongest when it hears from all of us.
It would be easier to sit back – to complain or not, as I might choose, but to refrain from participating. It would be easier to let others speak out, petition, and assemble. But I believe each of us must take advantage of these rights, to let it be known that we take them seriously and to play a role in our governmental process. And I fear that failure to exercise them would make it easier for them to be taken away. So I do my part, proud to claim these rights we were guaranteed at the founding of our country.
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Some folks have used public donation information and Google Maps to mark the houses of people who contributed money in support of Proposition 8, the California referendum against same-sex marriage:
It is exactly those arrows that concern supporters of the measure, who say they have been regularly harassed since the election — with threatening e-mail messages and sometimes boycotts of their businesses.“Some gay activists have organized Web sites to actively encourage people to go after supporters of Proposition 8,” said Frank Schubert, the campaign manager for Protect Marriage, the leading group behind the proposition. “And giving these people a map to your home or office leaves supporters of Proposition 8 feeling especially vulnerable. Really, it is chilling.”
It’s easy for those of us who support the right of everyone to marry to say something like, “And well they should feel vulnerable! They should be held to account for their opposition to civil and human rights.” But look at what’s going on:
It is exactly those arrows that concern supporters of the measure, who say they have been regularly harassed since the election — with threatening e-mail messages and sometimes boycotts of their businesses.Boycotts are entirely fair: it’s perfectly right to say, “I won’t do business with someone who would limit my rights.” But harassment and threats of harm are not the way to handle this. That sort of thing is the antithesis of what we want: it puts a limit on free speech of others, and it might likely result in an injunction against the reporting regulations, taking away the accountability that we fought hard to put into place.
We are moving forward in steps, despite the efforts of those so mystifyingly opposed to what seems obvious and harmless. Change will come, and we can make it happen. But not by threatening people, violating their privacy, and making them feel unsafe in their homes.
Update, 14:50: As noted in the comments, it’s not that these maps have created a pervasive atmosphere of fear, nor that the maps only exist on one side of the issue, nor that threats and vandalism are only happening on one side. As Thom points out, there are jerks on both sides.
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We are a nation of Christians and Muslims,
Jews and Hindus,
and non-believers.— President Obama, in his inaugural speech
Before he enter on the execution of his office, he shall take the following oath or affirmation:—"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."That is the last paragraph of article II section 1 of the United States Constitution. Right about noon today, in Washington, D.C., Barak Obama will say those words and become the 44th President of the United States.
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Let freedom ring! And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring... when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”With those inspiring words, Martin Luther King ended his most famous speech, about 45 years ago, in Washington, D.C. As we honour Dr King today, we may think about tomorrow, when, some 45 years later, we’ll take one more stride toward the dream he outlined in the speech.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
Tomorrow, on the other side of The Mall, we’ll inaugurate a new president, and a new kind of president: one with darker skin, different facial features, and a different ethnic background from those we’ve been used to before. One we’ve judged, as a nation of voters, not by the colour of his skin, but by the content of his character, and by our trust in him to do the job effectively and with integrity.
We aren’t finished; perhaps we’ll never be finished with our push for equality. But with something that would have been unthinkable in 1963 having come to pass in 2008, we’ve taken another large stride.
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This properly would go on Tuesday, but I wouldn’t mar that day with this sort of expression. Tuesday belongs to Barack Obama; to President Obama and to the American people.
Besides, this is more suited to light, whimsical weekend blogging.
So, today, slightly early, let us sing and dance and rejoice:
Ding, dong! The Witch is dead.
Which old Witch? The Wicked Witch!
Ding, dong! The Wicked Witch is dead.
Wake up, sleepy head. Rub your eyes, get out of bed.
Wake up, the Wicked Witch is dead.
He’s gone where the goblins go,
Below, below, below, yo-ho!
Let’s open up and sing and ring the bells out.
Ding, dong, the merry-o! Sing it high, sing it low.
Let them know: The Wicked Witch is dead!
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I always like it when spam arrives in a batch that sort of goes together in some linguistic or “literary” way. Sometimes it’s a batch of similar nonsense that makes a kind of haiku-like thing. Sometimes it’s... well, see for yourself. Here’s a set of three that arrived recently, at about the same time, apparently from the same spam run (the content was the same in all three, urging me to purchase some Viagra-like philtre). These are the subject lines — reordered by my own artistic license, but the words are all the spammer’s:
Put your doughnut in her oven
Postpone your love bomb’s explode
She’ll reward you so much
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You never know what’s going to happen in Australia. First a huge shipment of inflatable breasts goes missing (they eventually turned up at the wrong port). And now it seems that some sick wanker is nicking inflatable sex dolls and, well, using them for their intended purpose:
SYDNEY (Reuters) — An Australian man broke into three adult shops, had sex with blow up dolls named “Jungle Jane” and then dumped his plastic conquests in a nearby alley, local media reported Wednesday.I think the part about the DNA samples involves more information than I needed.“It’s totally bizarre. It’s a real concern that someone like that is out on the street,” said one of the owners of the adult sex shops in Cairns in northern Queensland state.
“He has been taking the dolls out the back and blowing them up and using the dolls and leaving them in the alley,” the owner, who gave the name of Vogue, told the Cairns Post newspaper.
Police told the Cairns Post that scientific officers had taken DNA samples, fingerprints and pictures of the crime scene.
Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:
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Finally!
Eric Holder, President Obama’s nominee for Attorney General, at his hearing today, responding to a question by Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy:
I agree with you, Mr Chairman: waterboarding is torture.
We all remember when Sarah Palin thought she was talking with France’s Président de la République, Nicolas Sarkozy. How silly! She should have known. Certainly, the prankster gave her plenty of obvious clues.
Ha, ha!
But easy though it be to make fun of her for it, identifying who’s really on the other end of a conversation — by phone, or by Internet — is a difficult problem. No less a source than the New York Times got caught in a similar trap with a letter purporting to come from Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, in late December (see the Editor’s Note that’s appended to the letter).
In reaction to that embarrassment, the Times published this last weekend:
A few weeks ago, as many of you will recall, we published what turned out to be a fake letter over the name of the mayor of Paris, whose office later confirmed that he did not write it. We apologized to him, and to you, the readers. And since then, we have worked to tighten our verification system for letters and enforce it more rigorously.We encourage our readers to keep writing letters, of course, and we are all for full and vigorous (but civil) debate. But we are asking for your help as we “trust but verify.”
From now on we will adhere unfailingly to our existing standards: we will consider only letters with full contact information — your name, address, current location and daytime and evening telephone numbers (not for publication). If your letter is being considered, we will call you and send back an edited version for your approval before publication.
[...]
The readers of this page deserve to know that the letters we publish are legitimate. While no verification procedure involving strangers and operating on a degree of trust can be completely foolproof, we will work to ensure that an error like this doesn’t happen again.
That’s certainly a laudable goal, verifying the source of every letter they publish, I’m quite certain that it’s impossible to do in general. For a letter purporting to come from a public figure, such as Mayor Delanoë, of course, it’s trivial: the paper can easily contact the mayor’s office directly, independent of the information supplied in the letter. But what about a letter from Joe Sixpack — or Barry Leiba?
As we know from the worlds of computer logins and customer service centers, the key to authentication — verifying the identity that’s provided to us — is having some mechanism that’s independent of the communication at hand. Before you can log in to your bank’s web site, you have to have set up a shared secret using some other mechanism. If you call for customer service, you’ll be asked questions that attempt to confirm that you have enough information about yourself and your account that you probably — to a level of certainty that satisfies them — are who you say you are.
But when you write to the New York Times, and you’re not a well known figure, the only information they can depend on having is contained in the communication itself. Requiring you to provide full contact information will filter out some of the true cranks, to be sure. For others, though, it’s easy enough to give bogus contact information, so that when they call to confirm, the call and the confirmation will go off without a hitch... and yet they’ll still be publishing a letter that isn’t from who it says it is.
Maybe that doesn’t matter. No one would really care to spoof a letter from me, and a letter saying it’s from Governor Paterson would likely be challenged by an independent call to the governor’s office. But what about someone in between? There are plenty of people whose names might carry more credibility than mine would, whose names people might want to falsely attach to letters to the editor, who would nevertheless not likely be subject to independent verification.
This is all related to the spam we get. Some of it is crafted to “come from” the IRS, or some such, and we — most of us, anyway — know that it doesn’t, really. Some of it says it comes from such non-existent folks as — to take some examples from my recent batch — “Daisy”, “Brittany”, “Hernando Mangold”, “Rodney Cluff”, and, um, “Ruby Hardon” (get it?). We don’t worry about those. But there’s the in-between stuff, the ones that spoof the identities of real people, and we, those of us who try to filter the junk out, have to deal with it appropriately.
Is the Times really going to hire a whole staff to check these things? Or, more likely, are we all going to just accept that authentication of this type of communication is hard to do, and that mistakes will be made?
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Have you noticed how people often say that you have a right to your opinion or belief as long as you don’t shove it in their faces, while they, at the same time, shove theirs in yours and see nothing wrong with that?
Here’s a case in point. Perhaps you’ve heard about the atheist ads that’ve recently been placed on London buses. Highly toned-down atheist ads, mind: they allow that there may be a God, but they say there “probably” isn’t:
THERE’S PROBABLY NO GOD.
NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE.
Here’s the, um, genesis of the ad campaign:
LONDON — The advertisement on the bus was fairly mild, just a passage from the Bible and the address of a Christian Web site. But when Ariane Sherine, a comedy writer, looked on the Web site in June, she was startled to learn that she and her nonbelieving friends were headed straight to hell, to “spend all eternity in torment.”Hoping to raise on the order of $8000, Ms Sherine and other organizers started collecting donations. In just four days they got 18 times that, and they now have over $200,000. The bus ads went up in London on the last day of 2008.That’s a bit extreme, she thought, as well as hard to prove. “If I wanted to run a bus ad saying ‘Beware — there is a giant lion from London Zoo on the loose!’ or ‘The “bits” in orange juice aren’t orange but plastic — don’t drink them or you’ll die!’ I think I might be asked to show my working and back up my claims,” Ms. Sherine wrote in a commentary on the Web site of The Guardian.
And then she thought, how about putting some atheist messages on the bus, as a corrective to the religious ones?
As one might expect, there are those who approve, those who don’t, and those who are just amused. Going back to what I said at the beginning of this post, here’s one of the disapprovers:
Not always positively. “I think it’s dreadful,” said Sandra Lafaire, 76, a tourist from Los Angeles, who said she believed in God and still enjoyed her life, thank you very much. “Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but I don’t like it in my face.”Indeed. Welcome to our world, Ms Lafaire. Walk around New York City. Or your own Los Angeles. Or nearly anyplace else. It’s hard to turn a street corner without seeing a church — a church that’s often sporting a message about God or faith. It’s hard to go a day without hearing someone, from a shop owner to the President of the United States, saying that God will (or should, or might, we hope) bless you. There are Christian billboards all over the place, telling us that we need saving.
Many of us don’t like that in our faces either. I don’t. But I accept it without much complaint, because it’s there, and it will be there whether I want it or not, because those who say it have a right to, and because I can ignore it if it bothers me.
And this isn’t really a “tit for tat” thing. Isn’t it nice to have an alternative view out there too, to stimulate discussion? Or is such discussion too threatening?
I wonder why that might be.
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That’s not entirely true. I get the whole “portal” concept, which has been around for a while. Facebook, and the similar services such as MySpace, collect a bunch of things in one place and give users a consistent view of it and a single place to go to find it. You can plug in your “friends”, and have one place to go to communicate with them, share things with them, see what they’re up to, and so on.
And if all of my friends use the same social networking service, and I consider all of my friends to be equal to each other, it works.
Only, they don’t, and I don’t. And that’s the part I don’t get.
My IETF colleague Eliot Lear has just joined Facebook, and his initial comments echo some of what puzzles me about it.
First, I have to buy into their security model. Do I like the idea of using a single identity and authentication for everything? As I operate now, I use separate authentication for email, instant messaging, blogging, and photo sharing — though Google is making its own play at blending them, if one uses GMail, Google talk, Blogger, and Picasa. Is it better to keep them separate, or to tie them all together?
Conventional security wisdom dictates keeping them separate, so that if one is compromised they aren’t all, and that one doesn’t accidentally leak things from one to another — one logs on to what one needs, and not to the others. Only, do I — does the average Internet user — need that sort of separation? Probably not; probably, most users are served well by having a single login. In fact, it’s arguably better: less logging on means less opportunity for one’s password to be compromised.
Of course, Eliot wonders about the authentication mechanism and the use of passwords in the first place, preferring better mechanisms. I agree, but I have two comments:
But that brings me to the question of authorization and access control. If something like OAuth allows me to use my login on one service to do something on another service, that starts to blur the boundaries even more. Again, it’s something that most Internet users won’t care about — something that will, in fact, be helpful to most users — but it makes it ever easier for someone to do “social engineering” to trick people into giving up personal information and giving access to personal and financial web sites.
Then, too, there’s the question of controlling access to the information I’m making available. Most access control on the Internet is too broad. I usually have but three choices: make things on “site X” private, make them public, or limit access to a specified list of users. I usually can’t give different access to one item from a site than to others. If I post two photos to Flickr, for example, I can’t limit access to them to different sets of users. These pages, on Blogger, are either all public... or all not.
Different sites, though, give different options, and by using different sites (and even multiple identities on some of the sites) I do have more options. Putting it all on a single social networking site seems to take much of that flexibility away.
And that’s something that some people, at least, care about, as we saw when Facebook tripped on its own feet with its “Beacon” feature (and here). Even among one’s friends, one has information that one is willing to share with some, but not with all. And many people turned out not to like it when Facebook unilaterally decided that it would start sharing something new with their “friends”.
Beyond the security model is the question of whether I have what I need already, with the services I use. Or, as Eliot puts it:
Why is Facebook even necessary? Isn’t this what we want the Internet to be in general? Why should this form of communication be limited to one site? For one, people are tired of spam on the Internet and so they are looking for an email replacement. Beyond that, having one’s own web server is a royal pain in the ass. But moreover, the comment I got more than once was that a blog is isolating. Why is that? What makes this blog isolating as compared to Facebook?
I certainly feel no need for it. I share what I’ve chosen to share, and I communicate as I choose to communicate. Isolating? Not at all: people can and do comment, as I comment on the blogs of others. Nothing isolating about that.
On the other hand, people who want to find me need to know where to look. Coming here and reading these pages doesn’t automatically get you my “tweets” (no, there are none; I’ll have another post about Twitter soon-ish), my email address, my IM identities, or my Flickr photos. Some of these are accessible from here if you look around (email and Flickr, for example), but it’s not automatic, not all in one place. And if you have dozens of friends like me, you don’t get all of us in one handy portal.
But what do Facebook users do when some of their friends are on MySpace, not Facebook? Or LiveJournal or Friendster? With many social networking sites around and no standardization, no bridges, no interconnection among them, it’s hard to be sure you can collect all your friends in one place. Maybe it works for a bunch of kids in the same school class, or folks in the same office or coffee klatsch. But it doesn’t work so well in the wild world of the Internet as a whole.
It also doesn’t work well when people have multiple roles and exist in different communities. I have some friends who use LiveJournal who don’t read these pages because they can’t get them in their LJ feed — which is how they read all their friends’ writings. Other colleagues and acquaintances tell me about MySpace, others talk of Facebook... since we’re not all on the same social sites, we don’t actually get everything in one place.
Worse, we can’t see everything even if we go look for it. If I want full access to what my Facebook friends want to share with me, I have to join Facebook. It is, of course, how each site differentiates itself: by getting as many members at it can. From that point of view, it’s arguably not in any of the social sites’ best interest to have standard linkage among them.
In the end, I think it’s a question of the way we’ve each gotten used to using the Internet and its tools. Certainly, whether I get it or not, users of the social networking services love them. And that’s probably the bottom line.
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Last week’s New York Times brought the disturbing news that the New York City police department is studying ways to jam mobile communication during “any attack”:
New York police officials are studying the feasibility of disrupting cellphone communications between terrorists during any attack, after revelations that gunmen in Mumbai received electronic transmissions during their killing spree in November.Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly raised the possibility in Washington at a Senate hearing on Thursday, but he noted there were technological hurdles to shutting down cellular service in a narrow location, like a hotel or movie theater.
This is a horrendously bad idea, and would be a terrible mistake.
The Mumbai gunmen used cell phones? Well, yes. They probably also used cars, and they ate food. And they used the Internet for email and for planning their routes with Google Maps. And... oh, right: they used guns.
The point is that they were not being high-tech terrorists. They didn’t have innovative, clever, cutting-edge technology in their hands. Cell phones are everyday gadgets; we’re long past the time when they can be considered something unusual, where anyone should be surprised that they’re used by criminals.
But they’re also used by normal people. They’re also used by law-enforcement and rescue personnel. And that’s as true during a crisis as it is in everyday life. Having the communication layer that cellular and satellite service provide is critical during any emergency situation — including during a terrorist attack.
Commissioner Kelly acknowledges that:
But he stressed, under questioning by senators, that care must be taken in pursuing such plans, suggesting that widespread shutdowns could hamper emergency personnel or keep civilians from making emergency calls."Care must be taken"? We aren’t in a position to block cellular or satellite communication — especially the latter — so specifically that we can avoid hurting emergency communication. And if the 9/11 attacks taught us anything, it should be the importance of effective communication during such a crisis. On United Airlines flight 93, passengers with cell phones provided important information about what went on in the airplane. And in New York City, lack of good communication among emergency personnel hampered the rescue work.
The damage we would do by trying to cut off wireless communication would far exceed the benefit of having it available. Any study that police officials undertake must start with that and go from there. Any plan must consider only tightly targeted shutdowns, and consider what would happen to civilian or emergency communications that should fall within the affected zone (for example, had they cut off cell service to one of the Mumbai hotels, what would that do to any civilians who were trapped there and now had no way to communicate their presence or whereabouts?).
We need to be very careful here.
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I like Bill Maher’s “New Rules” segment, in which he talks briefly about a few things he would change, annoyances he would eradicate, if he could. Think of it as a less whiny version of Andy Rooney. It serves a purpose: we all need to vent about stupid things that annoy us.
So here’s mine for today.
New rule: box lids must either be square, or be sufficiently non-square that there is no question about their correct orientation.
Really.
I have this box of chocolates. Its lid measures 180 mm × 185 mm (yes, I’ve just measured it). That 2.7%-ish difference isn’t enough to notice when I look at it, so each time I have to close the box I have about a 50-50 chance of getting the orientation right.
OK, it’s a small thing, I grant. But I can’t just leave the lid off: the chocolates would get cat hair all over them. How bad would it have been for them to make the thing 5 mm (less than two tenths of an inch!) wider?
Well, there are were only 16 chocolates in the box. I guess I’ll just have to eat them, and the problem will soon go away.
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I’m always interested in what innovations technology spawns. The base technology is often wonderful enough, but what people think of doing with it is what’s really fascinating. And as someone who’s in the business of trying to find innovative ways to use technology, I especially appreciate it.
I worked in what was then IBM’s Federal Systems Division when we had a part of the contract to develop the Global Positioning System (I didn’t work on the system myself, but many of my colleagues did). Conceived (and funded) for the military, the GPS system was opened up for civilian use — first with some restrictions (encryption keys were needed to get full resolution out of the system, so civilians couldn’t establish location as accurately as the military could), and then, in 2000, with full resolution.
Since then, of course, everyone knows about GPS devices, even if they don’t fully appreciate how the technology works, and just how cool it is. Many of us have GPS navigation systems in our cars, or we have handheld versions — I have one in my BlackBerry. And what would we do without them? We might not even be able to find the railroad tracks.
Well... soon, we won’t imagine how we ever played golf without one. Yes, Garmin, one of the top three GPS makers (the others are TomTom and Magellan), has come out with a GPS device just for golfers.
This year, one new Garmin device in particular caught our eye: the Approach G5. This waterproof, handheld GPS device uses the satellite-based GPS network, first developed by the military, for a cause vital to homeland defense: It calculates a golfer’s distance to the center of the green or other features of the golf course, so he can select the proper club.The device is similar to the binocular-like rangefinders popular with some golfers today. But those gadgets use lasers to approximate the distance from the golfer to the target. With the Approach G5, Garmin touts the precision of the GPS network and its touch screen, which lets duffers specify with a few taps on the screen the exact distance to where they want to place the ball.
A cool use of technology. Can it be extended to other uses? This one’s clearly a specialized device: it will come pre-loaded with the layouts of “about half the golf courses in the United States”. But does this provide the germ of an idea that someone else will take to other domains?
It’s expensive, too: $500. But, as a Garmin salesman points out, “People pay $200 to $300 for a club and $200 for green fees in this sport.” Might the Approach G5 be worth, say, two new high-end golf clubs? I don’t golf, so I don’t know how helpful this would be.
I do know that it would be cool, in general, to have a handheld device that would show me an aerial view of where I am, let me touch other points, and immediately show me the path and distance to them. Put Google Maps together with a GPS device, and I’d like that. Maybe not $500 worth, though....
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Alfred Brendel retired last month. I’ve known Mr Brendel for many years. OK, not Mr Brendel, exactly: I’ve known his music; he’s one of my favourite classical pianists, especially for Mozart and Beethoven. Some of the first classical recordings I ever bought (on LP) were of Mr Brendel’s playing, Mozart concertos and Beethoven sonatas. And now I have CDs of his complete sets of the Mozart concertos and of the Beethoven concertos and sonatas.
To fit with that, his last concert before his retirement was in Vienna in December, where he played Mozart.
The news of Alfred Brendel’s retirement, which he announced about a year ago, but which I only heard after his final concert, got me thinking about my other favourite classical pianists. The powerhouses of the older years are in my collection, of course: Vladimir Horowitz, Rudolph Serkin, Sviatoslav Richter, Claudio Arrau — all dead for some time now. Van Cliburn and Vladimir Ashkenazy are still around, and the latter, at least, is still active, mostly conducting now. I’ve always loved Mr Ashkenazy’s performances of the Russian masters, particularly Rachmaninov and Prokofiev, and his old recording with Itzhak Perlman of the Prokofiev violin sonatas is, to my ear, the best made.
But, really, for classical piano I mostly prefer the ladies. I think it’s the gentler touch — though no one who hears Martha Argerich’s performance of Prokofiev’s 3rd concerto would ever accuse her of touching the keyboard too gently. Prokofiev wrote a percussive piece, and Ms Argerich played it perfectly — and I realize that she was still in her 20s when she made the recording that I have (coupled with an equally marvellous version of Tchaikovsky’s first concerto).
For women with the lighter touch, there are Mitsuko Uchida — wonderful with the Mozart sonatas — and Cristina Ortiz (the recordings I have of her all seem to be unavailable now).
Finally, youngest of the bunch in my list, Hélène Grimaud, who I’ve really enjoyed for Chopin, Brahms, Ravel, and Schumann. Lots of good recording of hers are out there; try this, and this as fine samples.
Who are the bright, young piano stars of today? I haven’t looked for or bought new classical recordings in some years, and it seems that these days it’s the violinists who get the press. But the Tchaikovsky and Van Cliburn competitions are still going, as is the William Kapell competition at University of Maryland. I guess there’s a new crop out there I should give a listen to.
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Philip Corbett has a blog in the New York Times in which he talks about linguistic issues that come up in reference to Times articles. In his latest column he talks about “Discussing Disabilities”, citing an admonition in the paper’s stylebook to avoid using phrases such as “the disabled” and “the blind”, preferring those words’ use as adjectives (“blind people”) rather than as nouns.
Mr Corbett goes on to say this:
The difference between “the disabled” and “disabled people” (or “people with disabilities”) is subtle but significant. The shorthand might occasionally be unavoidable — in tight headlines, for example. But it’s better to refer to people who, among other characteristics, have some disability, rather than to use the disability as the sole label.To me, all of this, and that second paragraph especially, represents the pinnacle of hyper-PC silliness. All of the examples in the “Discussing Disabilities” section seem just fine as written. And that makes sense, since none of them are talking about a person — they are all talking about the disabilities, so it makes sense that the emphases lie there.Some advocates, in fact, object to any phrase that refers to the disability before the person. They would uniformly use “people who are blind” rather than “blind people,” or “a person with a disability” rather than “a disabled person.”
Note the difference between the article that’s talking about software that reads food labels to people who can’t (where I think “the visually impaired” works fine), and an article that might be talking about how social workers need to work differently with blind people than with sighted ones. In the latter, I do agree that the emphasis is on working with people, and the phrasing should support that.
But apart from that, English uses word order for understanding, not for decoration. Indeed, it certainly can sometimes be used for emphasis... but more often, we say things as we do because that’s the way it’s said in English. Adjectives (and other modifiers) come before what they modify; when I say that I have a bottle of “red wine”, I’m not emphasizing the redness at the expense of the wine-hood. And a phrase like “wine that is red”, unless it’s taking poetic or humorous license, looks foolish.
Take this New York Times article, for instance, with the headline, “Helping a Blind Woman Build a Future”: does it in any way undervalue the woman because it puts the word “blind” first? Of course not. It would sound contrived to say it as, “Helping a Woman Who Is Blind Build a Future”; that’s just not the word order we’d normally use in English.
Insistence, in general, on convolutions such as “person who is blind” because of some illusion that “blind person” dehumanizes the subject is misguided. We should write in a way that works well for what we’re writing. Respect (or dis-) comes from the whole, not from one or two disembodied phrases.
Give me your people who have been deprived of rest, your people who are economically disadvantaged,
Your large groups of people forced to spend time in close quarters who are yearning to breathe free,
Those in unfortunate circumstances in your overcrowded communities.
Send these, people at high risk of being without housing and having to spend nights exposed to the elements, to me,
I lift my politically correct thesaurus beside the golden door!— freely adapted, with apologies, from Emma Lazarus
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There’s a fight going on in Washington, D.C. — not in Congress or in the White House, but in the city government, between the school chancellor and the teachers’ union. The chancellor wants to build a better staff of teachers by getting rid of the poorer performers. To do that, she proposes ending the tenure system and establishing a merit-pay system... and, in return, giving good teachers significantly more pay:
Washington D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee is fast becoming the country’s best-known urban school reformer. But her proposal to do away with teacher tenure and replace it with an ambitious merit pay program has divided the teachers union.
This is a case that suffers significantly from conflation of a number of its aspects:
Teacher tenure does not require the continued employment of bad teachers. It’s widely thought that “You can’t fire teachers who have tenure,” but that takes the concept too far. What’s true is that you can’t fire them without good cause. The precise terms are in their contracts.
The purpose of tenure is to give teachers the freedom to teach without unreasonable pressure to toe particular lines drawn by school administration. A tenured teacher needn’t bow to pressure to give good grades to the school’s football star. A tenured teacher with unpopular views can’t be fired because the school is embarrassed about those views. We often need to allow teachers to be innovative — or unconventional — and the tenure system protects teachers in that regard...
...as long as they teach effectively. A bad teacher, though, can be fired for cause, even if that teacher is tenured. And that gets us to the point about the union contract.
How difficult it is to get rid of a tenured teacher who’s no longer effective is controlled by the contract with the union, where the operative definition of tenure is specified. That means that there’s an option someplace between where they are now and where they’d be if tenure were completely abolished. Chancellor Rhee could negotiate changes to the contract that would retain tenure but would change the criteria by which under-performing teachers could be dismissed. Such an agreement would keep the academic-freedom benefits of the tenure system, while requiring teachers to remain effective and relevant. It would give teachers a reason to push themselves, goals to be achieved, without their having to worry about their jobs whenever they wanted to try something new.
Moreover, tenure gives good teachers an incentive to stay where they are, rather than getting a foot in the door and a few years of experience at a “challenging” school, and then moving out to the suburbs where things may be easier. Giving them tenure — which would be lost if they transferred elsewhere — holds them within the system.
Any merit pay system, in any job environment, is tricky to administer. Performance evaluations are always subjective, even when goals are clearly documented. That works both ways, though: it gives administration the flexibility to excuse a failure to reach specific milestones if the reasons for missing them are in the ultimate best interest of the business — in this case, of the students.
A combination of a merit-pay system that allows excellent teachers to be paid what they’re worth, a tenure system that provides them protection from inappropriate administrative action, and a union contract that gives the administration the ability to dismiss teachers that aren’t teaching well is a package that’s in the best interests of administrators, good teachers, and students.
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PhysioProf notes (rather rudely, but I gather that’s his style) his opinion on the order of authors listed on multi-author papers:
The second and third authors are asterisked as “equal contributors”! What a motherfucking joke. The only people in the entire world who could possibly give a shit about that are their parents. HAHAHAHAHAH!He does note that his comments apply only to papers in his field, and that other fields might have different customs.
Indeed; this is a tricky point. It’s easy in many cases (and some of the comments to PhysioProf’s post point out that when it’s not easy, it’s often due to bad project management). Whoever did the most work on the project gets to be first author. If there’s a faculty advisor or other senior person who has ultimate responsibility, she goes last. Everyone in between, they say, is chopped liver.
For the rest of this, I’ll talk about my field, computer science.
So let’s back up, first, and talk about who gets to be an author. In the Real World, someone who writes a significant part of the text is an author. Anyone who doesn’t, isn’t. But this isn’t the Real World; it’s Academia. Here, an “author” is someone who contributed significant work to the project, someone who was responsible for some of the results that the paper is describing. It helps if that person also wrote some of the paper, but it’s not strictly necessary (and, depending upon that researcher’s writing skills, the other authors might be very happy about that). It’s considered Very Bad Form for some project members to get together and write a paper, leaving one or two project members out.
But there are two ways to list the authors, and it’s not always clear which method’s been used.
Method 1: The first author is, ideally, the person who contributed the most to the project and to the paper. Other authors are listed in order to significance of contribution, with equal contributions or minor authors placed in alphabetical order. There can be problems here: suppose Smith did the most work on the project, but Jones took the lead in writing the paper, and led the way to doing extra work to get more detailed results needed for a good journal article. Is it Smith or Jones who gets listed first?
Sometimes decisions like that will come down to who’s more politically important, who’s in greater need of more first-author papers, or something like that. Sometimes, they’ll be considered “equal contributors”, and we have the “two first authors” situation for which PhysioProf expresses severe disdain.
Method 2: List all authors strictly alphabetically. This can have odd consequences, giving a so-so contributor first billing because his name happens to be Aanders (or relegating Zelazny to the end of the list, even though she wrote 70% of the text and had the original idea that sparked the work).
But the fact is that being first is important, and especially so if there are more than two authors. A paper by Aanders and Zelazny will probably be cited as “Aanders and Zelazny”. One by Aanders, Jones, and Zelazny will likely be cited as “Aanders, et al”, and if there are more authors the “et al” citation is a certainty. No notations in the paper about levels of contribution will change that.
But what about decisions for hiring, tenure, and the like? Yes, in computer science, as in biomedical science, you need a selection of first-author papers to make the right impression. If Aanders and Zelazny collaborate frequently, they’d better take it in turns to be listed first... no one is going to give Zelazny a break because her name is at the wrong end of the alphabet,
This makes author lists an unfortunately cutthroat game, sometimes. I’m happy that it’s never been a point of contention in any papers I’ve been involved with.
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For a long time, I thought that bank robberies — at least, the kind where someone with a sock over his head walks into a bank with a gun — were something that happened in the past. That nowadays, it’s done the Bernie Madoff way. Then I started seeing the occasional story on the local news about a local bank robbery. And now there’s this story:
Five Banks Are Robbed in Single Day in the City
The bank runs that regulators feared when they announced plans for an economic bailout in September brought to mind mobs of frantic customers swarming local banks, withdrawing all their deposits.But that terminology took on a different meaning on Monday when banks across New York City were deluged by abrupt withdrawals of another kind: robberies. In what may be the latest sign of the harsh economic times, five banks in four boroughs were robbed on Monday, four of them within an hour and a half.
But if the robberies, in their frequency and timing, were startling, so too was their brazenness. Most of them occurred in heavily trafficked areas in broad daylight, including one that took place steps away from Lincoln Center in the middle of the afternoon.
Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:
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We generally take it for granted, when we read books, that non-fiction is... well... non-fiction. We expect memoirs, autobiographies, to present the author-subject in a positive light, of course, and perhaps to skip a few of the less flattering details — most writers aren’t terribly eager to highlight their own failings — and truth is often open to interpretation. But basic facts are assumed to be correct; it’s where non-fiction starts.
Once in a while, though, someone crosses the line between “spin” and outright falsification. Occasionally, someone lies. In recent years, James Frey made up part of the story of his recovery from drug addiction, and Margaret Seltzer, in her memoir of growing up as a foster-child amid gangs and drugs went farther, making up the whole thing — including her racial background.
And now, a nice old man, a Holocaust survivor named Herman Rosenblat, turns out to have made up some key details about how he met his wife at the Buchenwald concentration camp:
A man whose memoir about his experience during the Holocaust was to have been published in February has admitted that his story was embellished, and on Saturday evening his publisher canceled the release of the book.And once again a New York publisher and Oprah Winfrey were among those fooled by a too-good-to-be-true story.
This time, it was the tale of Herman Rosenblat, who said he first met his wife while he was a child imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp and she, disguised as a Christian farm girl, tossed apples over the camp’s fence to him. He said they met again on a blind date 12 years after the end of war in Coney Island and married. The couple celebrated their 50th anniversary this year.
What’s the real problem, though? It’s entertainment — can’t it be OK to add a few “facts” that didn’t really happen? Doesn’t every family have stories that are told through the years as true, though everyone knows they didn’t really happen that way?
I have three points on this.
Point one: This stuff is supposed to be non-fiction, and that matters. Readers expect to be able to trust what’s there, and they deserve to get it. It’s a violation of readers’ trust to make up details just because they sound nice.
Point two: Readers give more latitude to non-fiction, especially to autobiographical things, in terms of writing quality. If we want to read about someone’s life — say, the trials of someone trying to shake a drug habit or get away from a youth around gangs — we’re willing to accept dry or less-than-polished prose. If you want us to read a novel, you’d better be a better writer. The standards are higher for that, and it’s not fair to readers to fail to meet them and to justify it with a false claim of “reality”.
Point three, relating to this particular case: Stories dealing with the Holocaust are especially touchy. We really have to know, when we’re reading about something that emotional to that many people, what’s truth and what’s a yarn. Fiction based on the Holocaust is certainly fair, but it needs to be clear that it’s fiction.
The general point is that you have to be honest with your readers.
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I am not a number!
I am a free man!
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