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.

---

[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.
 

---

[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.
 

---

[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.
 

---

[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]
 

---

[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.

 

---

[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.

Albany antics

For those of you who, for some unimagined reason, haven’t been following New York state politics for the last couple of weeks, allow me to fill you in on the “coup”:

For years, the Republicans controlled the State Senate, while the Democrats controlled the lower house, the State Assembly. We became quite used to seeing the Assembly’s majority leader, Sheldon Silver, and the Senate’s majority leader, Joe Bruno, as they duked it out, yet had a good-natured respect for each other.

But then, last spring, things started going south, as it were, up north in Albany. Our Governor, Eliot Spitzer, started attacking Joe Bruno. Meanwhile, we soon learned, he (Mr Spitzer, not Mr Bruno) was seeing prostitutes professionally (their profession, not his... well, his too, I suppose). Before we knew it, Mr Spitzer was out, we had Governor Paterson, and then in the November elections the balance of power in the State Senate shifted.

But only by a little. The Democrats controlled the Senate, 32 to 30. We had a new majority leader, Malcolm Smith. The Republicans were unhappy, but, well, what could they do?

Last week, we found out.

In a surprising power-grab, brokered, it seems, by three-time failed gubernatorial candidate Tom Golisano, the Republicans courted two Democratic senators, Pablo Espada and Hiram Monserrate, both from New York City (the Bronx and Queens, respectively), and got their agreement to vote with them. And, then, Monday afternoon a week ago, they called for a roll-call vote on a change of leadership, over the objections of the Democrats, who called the vote “illegal”.

As planned, all 30 Republicans and the two “renegade” Democrats voted for the change, resulting in a “shared” leadership, which the Republicans are calling “bi-partisan”: Senator Espada gets the President Pro-Tempore position, and Republican leader Dean Skelos is the “majority leader”.

It will surprise no one that things went downhill from there. All work in the Senate stopped, as all efforts went into fighting about this issue. It went to court late last week, where a judge put off any decision, ordering the parties to sort it out like adults (ha!). Meanwhile, Senator Monserrate backpedaled, re-joining the Democrats and splitting the Senate 31-31. Of course, the Democrats then claimed that they were in power again, while the Republicans said that the last vote left them (well, technically their “bi-partisan coalition”) in control. But it mattered little who claimed to be in control, because there’s nothing, at the moment, to be in control of.

This Tuesday, the judge finally gave a ruling that did nothing at all — he still expects the Senators to work things out nicely.

The question that many are asking is why the two Democrats agreed to side with the Republicans. Their answer, naturally, is that they believe in bi-partisan leadership, but the real answer seems more personal. Senator Espada has recently been under investigation for financial irregularities, and Senator Monserrate is under indictment for attacking his girlfriend and cutting her with broken glass. Both senators have lost prestige in the Senate, some of which they hope to get back through this move. I can’t imagine, though, that they will survive the next election in their districts.

And, so, here I sit, looking at a State Senate that’s putting their personal needs ahead of the needs of the state, and looking at my own Senator, Vincent Leibell, a Republican who has been doing a good job, and whom I’ve supported in the past, not willing to replace him with a poorer Democrat just for partisan reasons. And I have to ask Senator Leibell where his support goes. I have to ask him what he has to say to voters such as I, who now see that the party is more important, at this point, than the individuals, however good a job they’ve done — his own Republican Party has made that clear.

I have to ask Senator Leibell what he can say to me as to why I should continue to support him, rather than voting against him — or, well, even running against him — because he participated in this ridiculous enterprise.

And so I have asked: I’ve written him a letter. If I get a response, I’ll post it in these pages.

Health care: cover everyone

Not wanting to worry about burying the lede, I’ll put it right out here: I’ve been saying for a long time that when we reform health insurance in the U.S., we need to make sure that everyone is covered. Not that everyone can afford it, not that everyone can buy it if they want to... because those result in not everyone being covered.

Like other first-world countries, like Canada and Japan and the United Kingdom and Sweden and France and Germany and the Netherlands, we just need to take care of our people. We need universal health coverage that people don’t have to think about. You need to see a doctor, you see a doctor... and it’s covered. You never see a bill. You don’t have to argue with someone about the treatment your doctor recommended.

That said, let’s back up and listen to NPRs report on Tuesday afternoon about Healthy Howard, a plan in Howard County, Maryland, which is meant to provide cheap coverage for all the uninsured residents of the county.

What a great idea! If the country won’t do it, the state can. If the state doesn’t, well... the county is giving it a shot. For a very small payment — between $50 and $85 per person per month, they’ll give you a whole bunch of medical coverage. It’s a wonderful deal.

But here’s the thing: out of around 10,000 adults who ought to be getting this, fewer than 600 have applied for it.

Yow!

They attribute some of this to lack of awareness, and they’re working on that. But they cite two other reasons:

Reason 1:

Beilenson attributes the low numbers to the "young invincibles" in their 20s and 30s who think they’re going to live forever.

Reason 2:

“The costs are somewhat problematic, even though it’s very reasonable: $50 to $85 per person per month — far less than insurance,” Beilenson says. “Nonetheless, it is something, and for a lot of people who are having trouble holding jobs during this recession or have lost their jobs, economics plays some part of it.”

Even the cheapest health care program will strike some low-income working families as too costly.

And there it is, in black and white: some people don’t think they need it, and some aren’t willing (or able) to pay for it, however “affordable” it may be.

And when those people get sick, they’re in trouble, because they lack preventive care, and because they turn to hospital emergency departments instead of using the health-care system the way it was designed to be used. And the rest of us are affected too.

Now, when I first heard the item on NPR, I thought that Dr Beilenson, Howard County’s health commissioner, was heading there:

But the paltry enrollment figures have also confirmed Beilenson’s belief in the need for a reform that isn’t even on the table in Washington.

Indeed: universal coverage is not anything that any politicians are discussing. None of the front-runners in the 2008 election talked about it. No one working on legislation now is talking about it. Everyone’s afraid of considering it, afraid that someone will accuse them of supporting socialized medicine, as though that were a fate worse than... well, worse than not being covered. Having doctors work for the state is one way to achieve this, but it isn’t the only way.

But Dr Beilenson was about to cross that line, yes, and suggest universal coverage?

Well, no:

“I am 100 percent convinced that if we are going to have comprehensive affordable quality coverage for all and spread the risk amongst the entire population, you have to have individual mandates,” he says.

That means people would be required by law to have health insurance, something President Obama campaigned against.

We aren’t learning anything from this stuff, we really aren’t. The answer isn’t to require people to buy health insurance. The answer is to provide it for them, as part of the package of benefits they get from living in the United States. Howard County is proving that, right there on NPR.

Ex-judge Samuel Kent

A federal judge in Texas goes to prison this week, having pled guilty to obstruction-of-justice charges during an investigation of sexual harassment:

Judge Samuel Kent admitted to sexually harassing and abusing two female members of his staff, and was convicted of obstruction of justice. He is scheduled to report to prison Monday, but he has refused to step down and give up his salary until next year.

Wait, a moment: rewind that. How does he “refuse to step down” if he’s being sent to prison? Say what?

It’s actually pretty straightforward, and the reasons for the rule make sense when you think about it in a different context: federal judges are appointed by the President of the United States, and confirmed to lifetime positions by the U.S. Senate. They can often be unpopular locally, butting heads with politicians and other influential folks, and there need to be protections against their being taken down by local officials.

If a state court could remove a federal judge from office, that would, in general, be a bad thing. And, so, either he has to resign or he has to be impeached, or else he keeps his position... and his salary.

Of course, an ethical judge would do the right thing, here, and resign. But if Judge Kent were ethical, he wouldn’t have played grab-ass with his female staff for years, and he wouldn’t have lied to federal investigators.

But what surprises me are the comments by two of his supporters. I certainly expect his attorney, Dick DeGuerin, to take his side — it is the attorney’s job, after all — but a comment such as this is simply ridiculous:

How many times do you have to kick a man when he’s down? Sam Kent stepped up, took responsibility for what’s he done and he’s going to prison for it. Why do you have to totally humiliate him to boot?

“Totally humiliate him”? Well, no, we’re just expecting him not to continue being a judge and taking up a spot on the bench and a salary, after admitting what he’s admitted, after demonstrating unethical and illegal behaviour that doesn’t fit into what we demand of a judge.

And then there’s the comment of Paul Nugent, “a well-regarded Houston trial lawyer who has known Kent for decades.”

You know his wife, his high school sweetheart and the love of his life got brain cancer for five years. Judge Kent struggled with that.

Eventually, she was confined to a wheelchair, was incontinent and couldn’t talk. Now that took a toll on him. I’m not excusing anything Judge Kent may have done. I’m not excusing any law violations he committed, but it’s not just black and white.

What is it that Mr Nugent thinks is “not just black and white”? Why, exactly, does he think that any of what he said should allow Mr Kent to continue holding his judgeship? Should he adjudicate from prison? Should he be placed back on the bench when he gets out?

The very idea is laughable.

But here’s the really bizarre thing: because Samuel Kent is a wealthy and influential man, people are trying to come up with excuses for giving him special treatment. Does anyone think that if we were talking about a poor man of Mexican or African descent, who works at the hardware store, anyone would be suggesting that his job should be protected and his salary paid while he’s in prison?

Let’s consider what fairness really means, here: Samuel Kent has totally humiliated himself, after abusing and humiliating women on his staff for years. He gets no special treatment just because he used to be in a position of trust and honour in the community.

Scientific garbage: enablers

In Cross-checks on ethics, I wrote about how well-meaning journals and conferences can miss ethics violations that include rigging experiments, making up data, padding the co-author list, and other cheats of that sort. Legitimate publishers of scientific studies and data can only go so far in validating what they’re asked to publish, and sometimes bogus papers get through.

There’s another side to the bogus-publication coin, though: the enablers. These are the journals and conferences that specialize in providing a forum for questionable — or downright garbage — studies and research reports.

At the questionable end are studies whose funding causes conflict-of-interest concerns, ones lacking rigorous methodology, and ones with insufficient data to deduce anything from the results. These problems usually are caught during peer review, if the papers are otherwise honestly written, and the top journals and conferences reject them. It’s easy to see how students, research faculty, and professors, living in a publish-or-perish environment, look to less reputable outlets for their work.

We’ve recently heard that Elsevier colluded with Merck — the pharmaceuticals company that made Vioxx, and that makes Fosamax, Vytorin, and Zocor — to produce a fake journal, one that looks like a peer-reviewed publication, but isn’t:

An “average reader” (presumably a doctor) could easily mistake the publication for a “genuine” peer reviewed medical journal, he said in his testimony. “Only close inspection of the journals, along with knowledge of medical journals and publishing conventions, enabled me to determine that the Journal was not, in fact, a peer reviewed medical journal, but instead a marketing publication for [Merck’s Australian subsidiary].”

In fact, soon after that it came out that Elsevier had a whole series of such “journals”:

Scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out a total of six publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals, but did not disclose sponsorship, the company has admitted.

This was particularly disturbing because of Elsevier’s reputation, and the extent of their publication world. But they aren’t the only outlet for dicey data. For years, now, there have been publications that will accept your work for a fee. That makes these pay-to-publish “journals” places where you can take that paper that’s been rejected everywhere else, and make it count on your résumé.

As I've participated in peer reviews, I’ve seen papers with no substance, and papers that are so far off topic as to be ridiculous (a mechanical engineering paper submitted to a computer science conference, for instance). Some people will submit anything anywhere, in the hope of getting something published.

But publications with no standards are... well, check this out:

So [Philip] Davis teamed up with Kent Anderson, a member of the publishing team at The New England Journal of Medicine, to put Bentham’s editorial standards to the test. The pair turned to SCIgen, a program that generates nonsensical computer science papers, and submitted the resulting paper to The Open Information Science Journal, published by Bentham.

The paper, entitled “Deconstructing Access Points” made no sense whatsoever, as this sample reveals:

In this section, we discuss existing research into red-black trees, vacuum tubes, and courseware [10]. On a similar note, recent work by Takahashi suggests a methodology for providing robust modalities, but does not offer an implementation [9].

And, yet, the paper was accepted, and The Open Information Science Journal would publish it for an $800 fee, “to be sent to a PO Box in the United Arab Emirates.” The director of publications claims that they knew it was bogus and were just trying to smoke the author out by pretending to accept the paper. That excuse seems unlikely, though I would believe that they’d have taken his $800, had he sent it, and then thrown the paper out.

The article goes on to mention the infamous World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI).[1] That conference, devised by Nagib Callaos (who claims to be a retired professor), and now in its 13th successful year, is basically a conference with no focus and no standards — and, hence, no standing — that exists for the purpose of making money by attracting participants. Speakers must pay the meeting fee to attend, which is what feeds the conference.

Most conferences expect speakers to pay the meeting fee, but what’s different here is the number of people they try to suck in, and the fact that they only allow each speaker to present one paper, and charge an extra fee (see here) if a speaker wants to present a second paper (for example, that of a colleague who didn’t have the money to travel to the conference). I know of no reputable conference that does that.

Other clues about WMSCI are these:

• The peer review process includes a provision for a “non-blind” review in which the author selects the reviewers (see item number 2 here).
• The enormous “program committee” — 284 members (see here). Normally, that’s the list of peer reviewers, but in this case it’s artificially inflated by the inclusion of, essentially, everyone who’s ever agreed to participate in the conference (and probably some who haven’t). It’s nice of Callaos, though, that he claims to have removed “those who manifested no interest.”
• The absence from the program committee of institutions that are respected in the field. There are no PC members from Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford, or Georgia Tech, for example. But there is one from Quinnipiac University, a small school in Connecticut that has no doctoral program in Computer Science.[2]
• The unbounded scope (see here) leaves no topic behind. The conference covers everything from user interfaces to information retrieval to object-oriented programming to ethics and computer crime to security and privacy and hacking to artificial intelligence to computer graphics to wireless networks to gaming to....
• The lack of sponsorships from reputable companies and organizations.

A few years ago, in an incident similar to the one engineered by Philip Davis, above, the SCIgen folks at MIT got a nonsense paper accepted to WMSCI 2005, and planned to attend and present the paper with a nonsense presentation (see the “Examples” and “Talks” sections on the SCIgen page). They outed themselves, though and Callaos rescinded the acceptance. And David Mazières, then at NYU, submitted this paper to WMSCI 2005. According to his web page, “We never received official notification of whether the paper was accepted or rejected.” The figures are especially inspired.

Of course, silliness aside, these for-profit-only journals and conferences are a real problem, in that they serve as traps for the unwary. Someone reading a paper and not knowing that the journal isn’t reputable might base a major grant proposal on junk, wasting a lot of time and money and causing much embarrassment. And if you wound up having your paper accepted to a phony conference, would you, once you realized it, be willing to admit that you were hoodwinked. What would your boss, who paid for the trip, think?

Companies and schools involved in research know what the first-tier and second-tier conferences are, their positions decided by other researchers and based on the quality of the work presented and the selectivity of the program committees. In my field, the first tier includes, for example, MobiSys, Ubicomp, and CHI, among a host of others. Second-tier conferences and journals are fine, too — they just don’t draw the best research work as well as the first-tier does. The faculty at any research university will know what’s reputable and what’s not.
 

---

[1] Please don’t confuse WMSCI with WMCSA, now called HotMobile, the International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, which is a reputable workshop.

[2] I don’t mean to disparage Quinnipiac University, only to say that its inclusion on a program committee for a real cybernetics and informatics conference wouldn’t be appropriate, especially considering the schools that are not there.

It may be unenviable, but it sounds cool

About a minute into the audio of this item from Friday, about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a speech he was to give today, NPR’s Lourdes Garcia-Navarro says, “Netanyahu is in an unenviable position,” for having to balance the demands of those in favour of expanding Jewish settlements with pressure from the Obama administration to stop the expansion and talk to the Palestinian leaders.

I could say a lot about all this, from a political point of view (I agree with President Obama, here), but this post isn’t about that. It is, of all things, about the sounds of the words.

Note how Ms Garcia-Navarro has to say that in a somewhat exaggerated staccato in order to enunciate it clearly: “is in an un-en-viable position.” It’s too bad she didn’t take the opportunity to include “on”, as well, perhaps as, “When Netanyahu takes the podium for his speech, he will go on in an un-en-viable position.” That would have turned a verbal gem into a perfect diamond.

How often does one get to combine syllables like that so nicely? Is there a name for doing that, akin to rhyme or alliteration?

You talkin’ to me?

I call this guy Travis Bickle.

Oddly named people: Théophraste Renaudot

I ran across the name of Théophraste Renaudot a while ago, during a visit to the Newseum in Washington, DC. Monsieur Renaudot seens to have had an interesting career during the first half of the seventeenth century. According to his Wikipedia entry, he was a physician, a pawnshop owner, a historian, and a publisher.

But what got him into the Newseum is his status as the father of the newspaper: in 1631, he established La Gazette, the first weekly printed newspaper.

From 1633 to 1642, M Renaudot ran public conferences on topics of interest, and published proceedings. In her book Making Science Social, Kathleen Wellman gives us a sense of those conferences, and of the popular scientific culture of the time. From the blurb from the book:

Between 1633 and 1642, the French physician and philanthropist Théophraste Renaudot sponsored a series of public conferences in Paris. These conferences offered an open forum for wide-ranging discussions of a variety of topics, including science, medicine, gender, politics, and ethics. No matter the topic, participants consistently used scientific reasoning as a new standard of evidence. The conferences thus recast the rhetorical traditions of the Renaissance and prefigured the social sciences of the Enlightenment. They provide a candid snapshot of intellectual life at the dawn of the scientific revolution in France.

Interesting man, Théophraste Renaudot.

[And speaking of the Newseum, my favourite item at the Newseum web site is their Front Pages page.]

“This is not a toy”

That’s what’s often written on plastic bags, lest parents let their tiny tots put them over their tiny heads.

It seems, though, that the tots aren’t the only ones with tiny heads, and that we have to remind parents that other things aren’t toys, either. On Monday, NPR had an item about parents who give their mobile phones to their toddlers, and are then surprised when said toddlers don’t treat the devices with the respect due expensive and vital electronic equipment.

A one-year old puts the phone in her mouth. Well, yes: that’s what one-year-olds do.

An 18-month-old speed-dials 9-1-1. When the police arrived, mom jokes with them: “I pointed out my youngest and told the officer, ‘There’s the culprit. There he is. Take him. I need some sleep,’ ”

Ha-ha.

A three-year-old deletes vital data from the phone, and other children send empty email to the entire address book, or simply throw the phone across the room or drop it in the toilet.

NPR meant this as a light-hearted item, but I have a different view: Hey, parents... what are you thinking?

If your two-year-old thought your Swiss Army knife looked cool, would you give it to her? Or, “Here, little Johnny, have one of my cigarettes. Shall I light it for you, or do you want the lighter too?”

I don’t care how much they want to hold your phone. Don’t give it to them until they’re old enough.

You have to wait until they’re at least four.

“Branding” for email and web sites

John Levine notes that using secure branding can be an effective way to combat phishing. “Secure“ branding, in this sense, means using trusted authorities to verify the credentials of a web site or email sender, and then displaying branding information, such as a logo, in a trusted area of the application window, done in a way that would be hard to attack.

John is certain right, in principle, but the difficulty is that principle doesn’t necessarily translate into reality, for a number of reasons.

First, I’ll note that the “extended” security certificates that newer browsers recognize and use to display additional visual cues (the “green bar” he refers to) are really what the standard certificates were originally meant to be. That is, in the beginning, Internet certificate authorities were supposed to do reasonable vetting of businesses before issuing them certificates.

We can see how well that worked: not at all. Anyone can get a certificate for any domain they own (and sometimes for ones they don’t). Beyond that, anyone can create their own certificates, and then convince users to accept them... that part is easy enough, because when a browser or email program runs across a certificate it doesn’t trust, it asks the user what to do, and most users have simply learned to say “trust it,” for reasons I’ve discussed before.

OK, so the theory is that now we have a version that gets it right, and that these extended certificates really will only be issued to properly vetted organizations. That is, paypal.com can get one, but poypol.com can not, even though it is a properly registered domain as of this writing (registered on 30 March 2009, with fake “whois” information). I’m not sure how we assure ourselves that the vetting will last, and will not fall into the “anyone who pays can get one” trap, nor how we can prevent a bad guy from tricking the system somehow. But let’s stipulate, for now, that it’s true, and that no phisher will ever get a “green bar” in the browser frame.

So let’s look at how different browsers show this. Click the image below to see it full-sized.

The first three images show three browsers — Firefox, Safari, and Opera, all run on MacOS — and you can see (the red-circled bits) that they each use a different way to display the green “this has been verified” information. Firefox puts it at the beginning of the address field, Opera puts it at the end, and Safari puts it at the top right of the window, in a shade of green that barely looks green to me, actually. Personally, I think the Firefox way looks the coolest. But cool or not, the key is for it to convey crucial information, and they all do that.

Only, because each browser does it in a different way, things are open to confusion. We might think that because most users only use one browser, that wouldn’t be a problem, that each user would get used to her own browser. In practice, though, the difference does confuse the situation, because most users are less aware than we think about what the browsers do, what the cues are, and what those cues mean.

In Why Phishing Works, a study presented at CHI 2006, by Rachna Dhamija of Harvard University and two University of California colleagues, users were asked questions about what browser cues they noticed, and what the users thought they meant. They were also asked to explain what they thought they had agreed to when they clicked on security pop-ups that warned them of problems with certificates.

The results show that we cannot assume that users will understand what the computer is trying to tell them, or how. For example, some users in the study did not notice the padlock symbol — the symbol in the browser frame that tells you that you have an encrypted “SSL” connection to the server — at all. Of those who did, some didn’t understand what the padlock symbol was telling them. Some didn’t realize that there’s any difference between symbols in the browser frame (under control of the browser) and those in the web page itself (under control of the web site, good or bad). And some actually “gave more credence to padlock icons that appeared within the content of the page.”

There’s no reason to think that the “green bar” situation will be any different. The fourth image above shows a mock-up that I made of how a fake PayPal web site could, using the domain poypol.com, put a fake paypal.com green bar within the web page itself. A smart web site could even use the identification that it receives from the browser to make a browser-specific fake. It won’t fool everyone, of course, but it’s likely to fool a pretty high proportion of the users.

We’ve also seen very clever junk web sites that use scripts that pop up small, menu-less browser sub-windows positioned to cover key parts of the main window. One such site very effectively covered the address bar with its own replacement, a technique that could fool all but the most savvy users into thinking that there was a legitimate green “OK” in the trusted browser frame.

Of course, a well-designed system such as John describes will help some users, and I’m not saying that we shouldn’t do it. But it will take a lot of cooperation from software vendors, and a great deal of user education. And what I worry about is that, while we may protect some portion of the user community, we could well make things much worse for the users who don’t understand, but who get false security from their misunderstanding.

Cross-checks on ethics

We’ve another instance in a series of discredited scientific studies, this latest one in the medical field. The short version here is that Dr Timothy Kuklo, who worked for the U.S. Army, wrote a paper about a bone-growth product called “Infuse”, claiming that it was very effective for treating the traumatic bone injuries that many soldiers have been coming home with. He had some co-authors on the paper, including Dr Romney Andersen. Except the co-authors had nothing to do with the paper, and didn’t know it existed until Dr Andersen heard about it and started an investigation.

There’s little new here with respect to the paper itself, but what I want to talk about is some of the criticism being given to the peer-review and publication process that allowed this to happen. In particular, the New York Times article, saying that this “shows how medical journals may fail to conduct adequate due diligence on the studies they publish”, implies, thought doesn’t say outright, that the journal should have:

1. contacted all the paper’s co-authors,
2. checked the paper’s data, and
3. looked into the financial backing of the study.

In her comments about the incident, Janet Stemwedel, of the blog Adventures in Ethics and Science, supports the first point thus:

Dr. Andersen was never contacted by the British Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery that published the paper on which he was listed as a coauthor — he didn’t know about the paper (and his supposed role in it) until it had already been published. How hard would it have been for the journal editors to email all the named authors — to let them know the manuscript had been received, to transmit copies of the referee reports, to acknowledge receipt of the revised manuscript, etc.?

Indeed, that would be nice. As someone involved with conferences, journals, and magazines, I can say that some do routinely send correspondence to all authors, while others communicate only with a designated “corresponding author”, usually the one who put the submission into the tracking system. I can also say that some authors are pleased to get copies of the communication, and some decidedly are not, preferring to avoid extra routine email. But we could say that the benefit outweighs the small annoyance it gives some people.

Except, it doesn’t. First, it would require reprogramming some of the tracking systems even to permit it. Some of the systems only capture contact information for one author. Unless the email addresses of the other authors are in the text of the paper, those addresses aren’t available... and even if they are, it’s a manual process to get them.

But second, the information is all put into the system by the author who submitted it. If Dr Kuklo would put Dr Andersen’s name on the paper, would sign Dr Andersen’s name to the copyright release, why on Earth wouldn’t we imagine that he’d also supply bogus email addresses for Dr Andersen and the other alleged authors? He could simply sign up for some free ones that he checks himself, and no one at the Journal would be the wiser.

While it might be nice to check in with all the authors, doing so won’t really provide assurance of anything.

Now, there is another issue in this case, in that one of the journals (one that actually rejected the paper) refused to give co-author Andersen any details about the paper or its reviews, saying that they communicate that confidentially only with the corresponding author. That’s just bizarre, and that journal needs to change its policy.

On the question of checking the paper’s data, well, that’s what the peer-review process is for, and there’s no reason to think that any “due diligence” was lacking there. It’s simply not possible to independently repeat a study and replicate results before publishing a paper. When new data are developed, all we can do in the short term is to review the paper — review the methods, the controls, the data collection, and so on — and make a judgment about whether it meets reasonable standards. Perhaps reviewers might ask to see raw data, if the paper only has graphs or summaries. Maybe the reviewers would demand more information about the study’s methods before accepting the paper for publication.

But in the end, no one will know whether the data are reliable until other scientists do other experiments that either back up or refute the results. The journals simply can’t be held responsible for that, beyond the normal process of peer review.

To the point about the financial backing, it’s on the fringe of ethics, and what I consider an ethics violation, not to disclose relevant backing for your work. A simple footnote, such as, “Part of this work was done with funding from Medtronic,” would suffice, and one sees that all the time when the authors are following reasonable ethical guidelines.

But, again, the disclosure must be made by the authors, and it is they (in this case, Dr Kuklo alone) who are responsible for failure to disclose. It is not up to the journal (or the peer reviewers) to investigate this, and it cannot be so. They haven’t the time, nor the personnel, nor the other resources necessary for that.

The fact is that for the most part, the integrity of peer-reviewed scientific publication is dependent upon the integrity of the authors. And authors determined to publish at any ethical and scientific cost can and will do so. The best we can do is to expose them afterward, and to foster an environment where ethical behaviour is its own reward.

Social conscience and art

In his blog, Bill Irwin writes about singer Beck Hansen, and those who avoid his music because he follows Scientology.

I think Beck is a great artist and am coming to more fully appreciate the depth and beauty of his music. To make his Scientology connections a litmus test for whether or not I listen to him makes no sense to me. I have no problem with various religions coming under scrutiny and being criticized. I do have a (very big) problem with followers of various religions being stigmatized for their beliefs.

I have very mixed feelings about this sort of thing. I similarly know Jews who won’t listen to Wagner’s music because "he was anti-Semitic," or because "Hitler liked it."

On the surface, I agree with Bill. It would be silly to do a background check on all artists, and only listen to the music (or view the paintings or sculpture, or watch the films or plays) of those who agree with me politically, spiritually, morally, or whatever. Some people won’t see Tom Cruise films because of his outspokenness about Scientology. Some won’t see Mel Gibson films because of his drunken tirade.

Johann Sebastian Bach was a devout Lutheran, and wrote a great deal of church music — hundreds of church cantatas, many oratorios, masses, and so on. There’s no doubt that I don’t share his piety and that his music doesn’t move me with its focus on God and Christianity. Yet his Mass in B minor is one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written. I love the Saint John Passion and Saint Matthew Passion, as well as the Magnificat. I listen to my recording of Emma Kirkby singing Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen (Hail to God in all the lands) with delight, but with no interest in praising God. To Bach, it was about God, and about the music. To me, it’s just about the music.

And, as Bill says, people may consider Scientology to be kooky, but is it really any kookier than anything else? If you’re not a follower, it doesn’t seem to me that the story of Xenu is any stranger than the story of Jesus, what with the son of God thing, and rising from the dead, and taking away our sins, and all. Can your thetan reach nirvana, after all, to mix a bit of Buddhism in? Is bringing life to Earth in DC-8 jets really sillier than a talking snake or a non-burning burning bush?

The thing that gives me pause, though, is that it’s not just a question of “kooky” beliefs or whether I agree with them. Scientology can be very aggressive about preventing its followers from leaving, reportedly to the point of making them prisoners. And it’s certainly aggressive in filing lawsuits to silence its critics. Does that take Scientology to an OT level that makes it different? There are certainly Christian sects that also take aggressive action to pen their flock.

What would I think of avoiding the work of an artist who supported, say, IRA bombings, or one who supported ETA or Aum Shinrikyo... or the Westboro Baptist Church? If doing that is reasonable, then how do I decide which associations are severe enough to merit a boycott, and which should I accept as merely being “different” — disagreeable to me, perhaps even odious, but not bad enough to say that I won’t listen to musicians who side with them?

Will I stop seeing Jim Carrey movies because of his anti-vaccination activism? You know, I just might.

Generally, I try to make my decisions based on the individual artists. I find that Tom Cruise disturbs me, but John Travolta does not... and it’s a matter of how they each behave as individuals, not because of their association with Scientology, per se — but his association with Scientology certainly has a major effect on Tom Cruise's weirdness. I judge Isaac Hayes more harshly since he left South Park, reportedly because they had an episode ridiculing Scientology. Because, you see, he seemed to have no problem with their episodes ridiculing Judaism, Catholicism, Islam, or Mormonism. South Park tosses equal-opportunity insults around, and it’s hypocritical not to be bothered until they get around to you.

So I have very mixed feelings. I know neither Beck’s music nor how Beck behaves publicly with respect to his Scientology beliefs. I think I’d most likely agree with Bill, and wouldn’t use that association as a reason not to listen. But because I don’t dismiss it as “just a religious belief”, I don’t think the question is always straightforward.

Computers in movies and television

In 2007, I had a series in these pages about technology in Star Trek. I remembered that series the other day, when I read an article in New Scientist about the science in Battlestar Galactica.[1]

The New Scientist article focuses on human physiology and psychology, and on gravity and g-forces. It doesn’t look at power, speed, computers, astronomical issues, or any of a number of other things that would have been fun to see covered. Oh, well.

But it made me think to come back to the idea of how technology is portrayed — in particular, how computers had been and are depicted in movies and television.

Star Trek, of course, and other futuristic stories, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (which, at the time the movie was made,[2] was still set more than 30 years in the future), sported talking computers that showed varying degrees of intelligence. The Enterprise’s computer mostly responded to spoken commands and queries, but other computers in the Star Trek universe were semi-sentient to the point of being able to be confused or tricked, an angle that was central to the plot of more than one episode. And 2001’s HAL-9000, well... we all know what happened there, whether or not we understood what was happening.

But cinematic views of contemporary computers have always been somewhat odd, usually aimed at being obvious or flashy. In the old days, they always consisted of banks and banks of tape drives and flashing lights, long after real computers had few or none of those. As personal computers came around and more people had more realistic images of computers — boxes on their desks, rather than mysterious roomfuls of equipment — the tape-drives-and-lights depiction had to change.

Now, computers look like what we’re used to seeing, but what they can do seems just about unlimited. The stuff that’s comical now has to do with those limitless capabilities and the silly user interfaces.

Computers on television can search for anything, find anything, display anything. They can zoom in on the minutest details, rotate images in three dimensions to show any perspective, and go through millions or billions of data records or documents in no time at all. They understand commands or queries in human language, just as the Star Trek computer did, except we have to type the instructions, not speak them.

The interesting thing about that last bit is that it’s actually backward from what the real technology can do: we’re much better at having a computer turn the spoken language into the right words than we are at having the computer understand what those words and sentences mean. My former colleagues at IBM’s Watson Research Center have long had the ViaVoice products working quite well, but they’ve only recently begun a “grand challenge” project to get a computer to understand human-language questions well enough to play Jeopardy! competitively.

We often see police investigators zooming in on low-quality surveillance videos and “enhancing” a cropped portion in order to identify a face, read a sign or a car’s license plate, or the like. A certain amount of computer-enhancement can, indeed, be done, and technology for image processing is getting better all the time. That said, for the most part what they’re doing is ridiculous. Image data can only be extrapolated to a point, and the reality is that information that isn’t there can’t be created out of nothing. A low-resolution image can’t magically become high-resolution with the aid of a computer, and if you zoom in on a 30-pixel-square portion of a grainy, one-megapixel security-camera image, you will never, with any computer, get a clear image of the suspect’s face.

The same goes for the 3-D rotation: such manipulation is possible, and it’s done all the time when the 3-D data are available. But a two-dimensional source does not have that information, and, beyond approximation and guesswork, such an image can’t be rotated to show a side view.

When was the last time you did a search on your computer and wound up with a large blinking, beeping box in the middle of the screen, saying, “NO MATCH FOUND”? A pop-up box with an “OK” button on it, maybe, but we just don’t have them blink and beep repeatedly.

The other thing we don’t have them do is display the thing to be searched for — often a face or a fingerprint — on the left side of the screen, while rapidly flashing all the unmatched images we’re searching through on the right side. That may look cool on TV (which is why they do it), but in reality it would slow the search down so much that it’d be entirely useless. No one would ever design a real search program that did that.

Finally, in the movies people always seem able to go up to any computer, start any program, and use it expertly. They can even do this with special-purpose computers, not just ones that run Windows or Unix or MacOS. To address the most ridiculous case that comes to my mind: it would simply not be possible to connect your laptop to a space-alien’s computer and upload a computer virus that would take out the computer system and defeat the aliens.

Suspension of disbelief has its limits.
 

---

[1] The recent, well-received series, of course, with Edward James Olmos, not the horrible, short-lived one from the late ’70s, with Lorne Greene.

[2] And, for the record, the book came from the movie’s screenplay, not the other way around.