Carnivals!

Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:

• Skeptics’ Circle #106.
• Carnival of the Liberals #85.
• Carnival of Education #211.
• Carnival of Education #212.
• Carnival of Mathematics #50.
• Carnival of the Godless #111.

4 July 1977 – 26 February 2009

Everyone is doing it, or nearly everyone.

Starbucks, Macy’s, and Toyota are doing it.

Boeing and Hertz are doing it.

BT and Disney and Viacom and NBC Universal are doing it.

Panasonic and Sony are doing it.

Lenovo and Microsoft and Intel are doing it.

And despite this outlook, IBM is doing it too: cutting jobs.

Yip-yip-yip-yip-yip-yip-yip-yip,
Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom,
Get a job.

Unlike the other companies above, IBM isn’t saying how many jobs are cut. But what I know is that IBM Research eliminated almost 200 positions in the US. Including mine. Yesterday was my last day at IBM, after almost 32 years.[1] Yesterday afternoon I turned in my keys and left the building for the last time.

We had a month from when we were notified to find other positions within the company; this was a “workforce reduction” — a “resource action”, as IBM calls it — and didn’t have to do with performance, or seniority, or any such... just about what projects they decided to keep, and which to cut. But, of course, with cuts in every part of the company within the US, it was essentially impossible to find any place that could add staff, so yesterday was the last day for nearly 200 of my Research colleagues, as well, and thousands more in the rest of the company have gone or will go soon.

It seems funny that the day coincides exactly with the Times article I cite above, which says this:

International Business Machines affirmed its full-year profit outlook on Thursday and forecast growth in its services business in the first quarter, in contrast to many technology companies that have scaled back expectations.

Shares of I.B.M. rose 3.7 percent, after the chief financial officer, Mark Loughridge, said at a Goldman Sachs technology conference that January’s results were consistent with the company’s forecast for at least $9.20 in earnings a share for 2009.

Nevertheless, I still have good things to say about the company. IBM was good to me for almost 32 years, and I’d been happy there. I got a lot from them, and I like to think that they got a lot from me. That time is over, and I’m looking for what’s next. And I’m glad for the many years I spent at IBM, and for the people I’ve known and worked with over that time.

Now, it’s on to something new.

 
I’ll leave you, today, with this video from the Silhouettes:

 

---

[1] Yes, my official start date was the 4th of July. My first two days with IBM were holidays, and I actually reported to work on the 6th. I liked to quip that they liked me so much, they made my start date a permanent holiday.

This page intentionally left blank.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

George

Little darling, the smiles returning to their faces
Little darling, it seems like years since it’s been here
Here comes the sun...
Here comes the sun, and I say,
It’s all right

George Harrison would be 66 years old today.

George was always my favourite Beatle. Go ahead, disagree if you like; you can prefer Paul, or John. I’ve always liked George — with the Beatles, with the Traveling Wilburys, with the various friends he often performed with, or just by himself.

And he wrote my favourite Beatles song ever:

I look at the world and I notice it’s turning
While my guitar gently weeps
With every mistake we must surely be learning
Still my guitar gently weeps

George Harrison died of cancer in late November of 2001. But today we can celebrate his birth. And his music.

We were talking
About the space between us all
And the people
Who hide themselves behind a wall
Of illusion
Never glimpse the truth
Then it’s far too late
When they pass away

Equal time for nonsense?

I don’t write about the evolution/creation argument here, because many people are covering it far better than I would, and I find it tedious. Incessant arguing among people who will fail to convince each other of anything reminds me too much, sometimes, of other pursuits than this blog. But there’s one aspect of it that I do want to say something about.

Eric Rescorla, over at Educated Guesswork, comments about a BBC radio programme, called Heart and Soul, that gave equal time to a real scientist and a young-Earth creationist:

In this second programme we hear from Dr Henry Morris III. He is Executive vice President of the Institute for Creation Research, founded by his father. He believes a literal interpretation of the biblical book of Genesis, suggesting that the Earth, life and humans were created over six days less than 10,000 years ago.

Not to go all PZ Myers on you here, but this is nuts. As far as I can tell, Morris indeed believes that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, but, put simply, he’s wrong. Yes, it’s true that a bunch of other people agree with him, but they’re wrong too. Yes, yes, it’s of course possible that the entire universe was created with fake evidence of age, but there’s no evidence for this whatsoever absent Morris’s preexisting religious commitments. We might as well consider the possibility that the world sits on the back of an invisible turtle. So, while I don’t dispute Morris’s right to believe what he believes, it would be great if the media would stop acting like it’s in any sense epistemically valid.

Eric gets the key point in his final sentence: no matter who believes it, the media do not have the responsibility to give it credence, and for them to do so debases them and abdicates their true responsibility.

I’ve talked before (and here) about the media’s habit of taking misguided steps toward “fairness”. While there may always be two sides to every argument, it’s not always the case that everything each side says is equally valid. In the case of the second link above, the media should be using the accepted medical term for a medical procedure, and should refuse to use an emotionally charged term that opponents made up for the purpose of deprecating the practice. Using the contrived term begs the question, very much like “How long have you been beating your wife?” does.

The entry in the first link suggests that the media stop publishing false statements with the notation that the subject denies them. They should check their facts, and refuse to give “ink” to claims that don’t check out. That is how they best serve their consumers.

Where does that put us in this case? I think it’s reasonable to tell people that some folks believe certain things, beyond all evidence. But it’s not reasonable for media outlets that base their reporting on verifiable facts to treat these beliefs as equal to conclusions drawn from evidence. We can find people with all manner of degrees and titles who support any side of any argument... the fact that they have degrees and titles doesn’t make them right, doesn’t make their beliefs true, and doesn’t make what they say newsworthy.

If a young-Earth creationist, with or without a title, should come up with evidence for his belief that can stand up to scientific scrutiny, that would be news. I would want to see that. Any scientist would want to see that. And if it continued to hold up, we’d have to re-evaluate our explanations for how things are.

But repetition of the standard talking points, none of which hold any water unless you close your eyes and believe them, is not news, not a second side of the argument, not an opposing viewpoint, not something that deserves equal time in the interest of fairness.

Young-Earth creationism is just made-up nonsense, and the media have no business giving it any credibility.

From Brooklyn to Montenegro

This item caught my eye because Lidija, who frequently comments here, is from Montenegro, the smallest[1] of the former Yugoslav republics. A Montenegrin[2] is on trial in Montenegro, charged with a murder in Brooklyn in 1990:

On Thursday, witnesses sat in Brooklyn courtroom and spoke into a video camera. Their testimony landed in a courtroom in Montenegro, where Smailj Tulja is on trial for the murder of Ms. Beal, who lived in the Norwood section of the Bronx.

Their words fought echoes, interpreters and occasional troubles with the video feed, as the witnesses were asked, in the occasionally vague style favored by the Montenegrin prosecutors, to remember events that took place decades ago.

We’ll skip the details of the condition of the victim’s body — it’s quite disturbing — and just give the medical examiner’s conclusion:

“The cause of death was listed as homicidal violence of an unspecified type,” Dr. Arden said.

Of course, as someone who specializes in computers and the Internet, I find the dual venue trial to be interesting. And I note that, while it would have been possible back in 1990, when the murder actually happened, it would have been much tougher to pull off. And now, it can be easily held over the Internet — in a number of ways.

Now there are, of course, a variety of commercial teleconferencing systems, such as IBM’s Sametime Unyte, Cisco’s WebEx, and Elluminate, as well as others. There’s Cisco’s high-end system, TelePresence, that would give a real punch to the proceedings. It could even be done in Second Life, or some other virtual world — imagine avatars of prosecutors, defense attorneys, and witnesses moving around a virtual courtroom.

In 1990, the idea was quite far fetched. There was no World Wide Web. The idea that we’d all have laptop computers, that each computer would have high-quality audio and high-definition video, that we’d have the Internet bandwidth to support this sort of thing... was science fiction.

And now, in 2009, this item is on page 19 of the New York Times, barely noticed amid the other news.
 

---

[1] If you count Kosovo, the independence of which is in dispute, Montenegro is the second smallest by area, but still by far the smallest in population.

[2] I’d have written “Montenegran”, but the Times spelled it with an “i”, and the CIA World Factbook entry confirms that spelling.

Nigerian scams work, redux

A few months ago, I wrote about a woman who fell for a “Nigerian scam” and lost close to half a million dollars. I wondered how she could believe it and get bilked. But, well, it isn’t just people like Ms Spears who get suckered.

Maybe you’ve seen it in the news: a Nigerian man and his accomplices have been scamming Citibank, to the tune of $27 million before they were caught:

Swindles in which someone overseas seeks access to a person’s bank account are so well known that most potential victims can spot them in seconds.

But one man found success by tweaking the formula, prosecutors say: Rather than trying to dupe an account holder into giving up information, he duped the bank. And instead of swindling a person, he tried to rob a country — of $27 million.

To carry out the elaborate scheme, prosecutors in New York said on Friday, the man, identified as Paul Gabriel Amos, 37, a Nigerian citizen who lived in Singapore, worked with others to create official-looking documents that instructed Citibank to wire the money in two dozen transactions to accounts that Mr. Amos and the others controlled around the world.

The money came from a Citibank account in New York held by the National Bank of Ethiopia, that country’s central bank. Prosecutors said the conspirators, contacted by Citibank to verify the transactions, posed as Ethiopian bank officials and approved the transfers.

On the one hand, this shows how one can trick anybody, with sufficiently careful planning. It almost sounds like a Mission: Impossible plot, on reading the details. These guys were good.

On the other hand, though, Citibank, which should have known better, fell into the trap of accepting in-band assurances. If I give you documents and ask you to wire money — large sums of money — to my colleagues and me, you’d better not use information I gave you to verify that the transaction is legitimate. And, apart from eyeballing signatures, that seems to be what they did:

Prosecutors said the scheme began in September, when Citibank received a package with documents purportedly signed by officials of the Ethiopian bank instructing Citibank to accept instructions by fax. There was also a list of officials who could be called to confirm such requests. The signatures of the officials appeared to match those in Citibank’s records and were accepted by Citibank, the complaint says.

In October, Citibank received two dozen faxed requests for money to be wired, and it transferred $27 million to accounts controlled by the conspirators in Japan, South Korea, Australia, China, Cyprus and the United States, the complaint says.

Citibank called the officials whose names and numbers it had been given to verify the transactions, prosecutors said. The numbers turned out to be for cellphones in Nigeria, South Africa and Britain used by the conspirators.

There’s the problem: Citibank called the numbers that the crooks gave them. Surely, they had contact information for the Ethiopian accounts, information that had been set up separately — out of band — when the accounts were set up. They should have verified the request through those trusted channels, rather than relying on new, unconfirmed information. Why they handled it this way is mystifying.

Of course, back on the Mission: Impossible TV show, they would have tapped into Citibank’s telephone system and redirected the confirmation calls anyway.

How much is that tiramisu in the window?

Readers outside the New York City area might not know about the city’s relatively new regulation, under enforcement for about seven months now, that requires most chain restaurants to display calorie counts on their menus. Though the law’s been controversial and under appeal, its enforcement means that places like McDonald’s and Starbucks — within the New York City limits — now have to tell you the calorie count, along with the price, of Big Macs, eggs McMuffin, bagels, scones, and slabs of banana bread.

One appeal, a major one, has just been settled:

In a victory for New York City’s campaign against obesity, a federal appellate court on Tuesday rejected the New York State Restaurant Association’s challenge to the city’s 2007 regulation requiring most major fast-food and chain restaurants to prominently display calorie information on their menus.

Enforcement of the rule began in July 2008, with the appeal continuing. But the ruling on Tuesday, by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, eliminates, for now, lingering uncertainty over the rule.

“This is good news for everyone,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city’s health commissioner. “Nearly all chain restaurants are now complying with the law. Consumers are learning more about the food before they order, and the market for healthier alternatives is growing. We applaud the court for its decision, and we thank the restaurant industry for living by the rules.”

My view, as a resident of Westchester County, who usually drops in at Starbucks, Borders, and other cafés outside the city, is that this is an excellent law that makes a real difference... and I see why the restaurants don’t like it.

You see, out here in the blissfully ignorant suburbs, I’m happy to order my coffee with a side of scone. Because a “scone” isn’t like, say, a cookie or a piece of cake. Those are loaded with sugar and fat, and all; but a scone is a healthier alternative. And it dunks nicely into that cup of Joe.

And then, of a weekend, I sometimes wander into Metropolis to go to an art museum, say, or an event sponsored by the New York City Skeptics. When I stop for a coffee then, there are two numbers under that scone, and it’s hard to tell, at first, which one is the price and which the fat+carb index. The latter wins, at well over 450; the price is still less than that.

Here’s the thing: when I see that, when I look at that number, I don’t order the scone. I realize that I don’t want to use around ¼ of my calories for the day that way. And it’s not that I count my calories with any rigour; I don’t. It’s that the number whacks some sense into my head. It makes me realize that getting that scone — or, at various other places, the piece of cheesecake or the tiramisu — is stupid and unnecessary.

And, consequently, it encourages these places to have smaller alternatives. In place of something that could feed the entire tribe wandering through the Sinai, I can get a smaller morsel, something where the cents and the calories are each around, say, 100.

The law works. It doesn’t tell me what I can’t have. It just tells me what I need to know to decide what I really want.

Tainted

Remember when the Illinois state legislature was madly trying to come up with a way to present an interim US Senator other than by means of an appointment by Rod Blagojevich? Remember when the US Senate Democrats, led by Harry Reid, said that they would accept no Blagojevich appointee, regardless of who it is, because the disgraced governor’s selection would be too “tainted” by the scandal? Remember when Mr Blagojevich named Roland Burris, and the US Senate said “Nope, no Blagojevich appointee, too tainted.”

And then remember when Harry Reid start the process of backing down? First came “leaving the door open to negotiations”. Then there were the meetings and the setting of conditions. And finally, the conditions met, the backdown was complete: we saw Senator Burris seated.

We might have thought that the end of it, but for that nagging doubt, that voice in the back of our collective mind that told us that there was something else. That Harry Reid was right from the start, and shouldn’t have fallen into what seems to be the standard Democratic pit in recent years, the bottomless pit of spineless acquiescence.

Even so, we almost tuned that voice out, quieted it, squelched it, stifled it.

Almost. But it came bellowing back out, newly fortified.

Stronger and louder, day by day by day, until it became a demand for the resignation of a Senator seated only a month earlier — of a Senator that should not have been seated at all, because of the taint.

Senator Burris should be removed, and his position should be filled by a special election in Illinois.

The states need better ways of replacing elected officials than having it done by appointment. And the US Senate Democrats need a stronger leader than Harry Reid, who has let us down quite consistently for years now.

Oh, hell...

It seems that Pennsylvania doesn’t like blasphemous business names:

A Pennsylvania filmmaker sued the state on Wednesday for turning down his business’s name, I Choose Hell Productions, because state law prohibits names that “constitute blasphemy, profane cursing or swearing or that profane the Lord’s name.”

The filmmaker, George Kalman, contends his free speech rights were violated, as was his right to freedom against the establishment of religion.

One wonders what the state thinks of Guaranteed Overnight Delivery, which has trucks sporting “G.O.D.” in large capital letters. I don’t know whether they operate in Pennsylvania or not.

Mr Kalman’s ACLU lawyer says that “the statute seemed like it was from another era,” and it seems that way to me, too. But it’s far from the only such law. Usually, these bizarrely outdated laws aren’t enforced, and occasionally someone comes along and tries to clean them up and get them off the books.

It seems hard to defend this sort of restriction, considering how lopsided it is: I doubt that anyone would have objected to or denied an application for “I Choose Heaven Productions” or “God Is My Co-Pilot Productions”, though they’re arguably just as blasphemous. And they’re not even being fair about it; look, there’s a restaurant called Hell’s Kitchen in West Hazelton, and a shop called Hell Bent For Leather in Delta.

On the other hand, would we really want a store called, say, “All Kinds of Shit”? A restaurant called “Fucking Delicious!”?

The problem, of course, is that once the state restricts things like that, the restrictions can get out of hand. As they have here. And what’s both good and bad about our system in general is that people are allowed to do things that some other people don’t like.

I wouldn’t want to call my business “I Choose Hell”. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to try to tell someone else that he mayn’t.

Out of a job? Why not buy a car?

GM and Chrysler are still having problems. In addition to the $25 billion they got in the first round, they’re asking for another $14 billion. And on top of that, they’re planning to cut 50,000 jobs, all told.

But isn’t that a self-perpetuating cycle? This mode we’re in of responding to economic difficulties by cutting jobs is a monster eating its own tail. Jobs have been cut all over, from Starbucks and Macy’s to Microsoft and IBM, and our unemployment figures are at a many-decade high.

And that directly affects the car companies, along with anyone else who wants to sell anything.

Most people replace their cars well before they need to. Not I: I kept my previous car for 13 years and 248,000 miles, and my current car is almost ten years old, with more than 170,000 miles on it. But I’m in the minority; most people will replace a car while it’s still perfectly usable.

That makes most new-car purchases discretionary. If you’re out of a job, you’re not going to buy a new car any sooner than you have to. All these discretionary sales are left at the wrong end of the highway, as people instead put less money into maintaining their old cars.

That cuts the car companies’ bottom lines.

The only way out of this mess is to keep people in their jobs, get people back into jobs, and get us all buying things again. Cut costs, cut travel, cut salaries. More job cuts aren’t going to do it.

Shining in the sun

I love how the New York City buildings get that sunny glow on beautiful, clear, crisp winter days. [Click the image to enlarge it, of course.]

This is the former MONY Building, 1740 Broadway, built in 1950 and designed by the same architects who designed the Empire State Building, some 20 blocks south. It’s only 25 stories, about a quarter of the height of its more famous cousin, yet it stands out quite clearly as one views it from the Broadway streets. And its 150-foot tower has always made it distinctive.

Standards for virtual worlds

In June 2007, PC World published an item asking whether virtual worlds need standards:

As the number of virtual environments increases, standards and vendor collaboration will help make teleporting between different worlds a smooth experience, ensuring, for instance, that your avatar arrives in a new world still wearing the clothes it donned in your home world.

The article outlines a conversation with Bob Sutor, IBM Software Group vice president (open source and Linux), in which he talks about standards issues in the virtual world environment, and plugs an event that IBM and Linden Lab had at MIT back then.

The consideration of standards for virtual worlds has now come to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). My IBM colleague David Levine, along with people from Linden Lab and other companies, have been doing the prep work for standards in this field, and they’ve requested a BOF session at the upcoming IETF meeting in late March to discuss it and to see if the IETF has the interest and workers to do it.

The BOF (MMOX — Massively Multi-Player Games and Applications) has been approved, and I will be co-chairing the session with Linden’s Meadhbh Hamrick (that’s pronounced “Maeve”, for those who don’t do Irish spellings). Meadhbh and her colleagues at Linden Research have written an Internet Draft detailing Linden Lab Structured Data to start things off.

The point will be to develop standards that will address the issues that Bob talks about in the article, allowing interoperability between virtual worlds and virtual-world components. Having standardized mechanisms and representations for this can really open up the field.

The BOF session is currently scheduled on Tuesday afternoon (24 March) from 3:20 to 5:00.

The other session I’ll be chairing at the San Francisco meeting is the DKIM Working Group, currently scheduled for Wednesday morning (25 March). We thought the DKIM group wouldn’t need to convene at this meeting, but discussion has perked up of late.

Black Xe

Oh, here we go; this will help: AP reports that Blackwater is changing its name to “Xe” (pronounced “zee”). Seems its management realized that its original name has become a dirty word because its employees went around pillaging and killing Iraqis, and otherwise being unethical pseudo-soldiers, so it’s going for the makeover — or, at least, the re-branding.

They won’t be fooling anyone, though. Excrement, by any other name will smell as....

Carnivals!

You think teenagers are self-centered? Some researchers have the idea that there are reasons for that which relate to brain development:

However, brain scans suggest that a teenage mind toils harder when inferring the outlook of others, compared with adults. And a brain region implicated in theory of mind, the medial prefrontal cortex, continues to develop through adolescence, Dumontheil says.

My parents always blamed it on Alice Cooper.

Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:

• Skeptics’ Circle #105.
• Carnival of the Liberals #84.
• Carnival of Education #209.
• Carnival of Education #210, posted very late, but finally here.
• Carnival of Mathematics #49.
• Carnival of the Godless #110.

Updates, and other shorts

A couple of weeks ago, I said that we shouldn’t delay the conversion to digital TV, because a delay would cause more confusion than benefit. The bill to delay it for four months passed, and President Obama signed it. And look: the first sign of confusion is already here, as AP reports that more than 25% of the country’s broadcast stations intend to convert on the original date, next week, because they already have their plans and schedules in place.

---

When I reported on Paris’s program of loaner bicycles for people to use around the city, back in the summer of 2007, I wondered about theft and vandalism:

What a great idea! At least for the startup, people are loving it. We’ll have to see how it works in the long run, with issues of theft and vandalism (reasons that I’d be skeptical about its success in New York City). This is something I’m going to keep an eye on.

Well, it turns out that we didn’t have to wait for it to come to New York to see those problems; they’re right there in Paris:

Of the 15,000 bicycles originally disbursed for the program, more than half have disappeared, reports the BBC, presumed to be stolen. Some Velib customers have even taken to filming their Velib (mis)adventures and posting the destruction of the bikes on video-sharing sites like YouTube (here’s one). The practice apparently even has its own catchy nickname: “Velib extreme.”

Nearly all of the original bikes have been replaced. At an estimated cost of roughly $500 each, the cost for replacing the entire fleet of 20,000 bikes would run about $10 million.

---

It’s long been a thorn in the paw of Washington, DC, that the city, home to the United States federal government, has no vote in the government. When I originally reported on this, the House of Representatives had passed a bill to change that. That bill was not expected to pass in the Senate, and it didn’t.

Now, nearly two years later, a new bill has finally cleared the Senate’s Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, and will go to the full Senate soon. Passage is not certain, but much more likely this time, and President Obama supports it. So do I.

---

In the “things are tough all over” department, a common problem in tough economic times — that companies (and individuals) don’t replace or upgrade things as often as they might otherwise — is affecting BlackBerry devices also:

The BlackBerry maker Research in Motion on Wednesday forecast profit at the low end of expectations because businesses are not buying its latest smartphone upgrades in the economic downturn.

[...]

New smartphones like the touch-screen Storm or high-end Bold were attracting new sales, the company said, but existing customers, mainly businesses, were not upgrading as frequently as expected, crimping profit margins.

Of course, the fact that the BlackBerry Storm is a big disappointment (and see the follow up) might also have something to do with that.

Two at two hundred

Two great men turn 200 years old today.

Lincoln The sixteenth president of the United States. The Great Emancipator. Honest Abe. Abraham Lincoln, born in a log cabin to Kentucky farners, self-educated, he became a lawyer and a politician, and was elected president during a difficult time. He signed the Emancipation Proclamation, gave the Gettysburg Address, and successfully led the country through its Civil War, before being shot by assassin John Wilkes Booth in 1865 (the first American president to be assassinated; there have been three since). President Lincoln is widely regarded as one of our greatest presidents. His likeness is on the penny and the five-dollar bill, and he shares Mount Rushmore with presidents Washingon, Jefferson, and Roosevelt. When I was a child, the 12th of February was a holiday in many states, mostly in the north, honouring President Lincoln’s birthday. It still is a holiday in some states — including New York, where I now live — though some have merged it with Washington’s Birthday as Presidents’ Day.

Darwin Now, hey, something’s wrong here. This guy can’t be pushing 200. For one thing, he doesn’t have a beard. For another, his photo’s in colour. Hm. Someone must be steering me wrong, here, but this is Darwin, I know that. Wait, I know. It’s got to be a different Darwin, doesn’t it? [Flip, flip, flip. Shuffle, shuffle.] Ah! Here it is. Yep, different Darwin.

Charles Darwin That’s better. He looks 200, if he’s a day. Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England, northwest of Birmingham, near Wales. Quite the opposite of Lincoln, Darwin was born into a wealthy family and was well educated. He trained as a medical doctor, but preferred scientific examination of plants, animals, and rocks to medical studies and practice. It was in that regard that he joined what turned out to be a five-year voyage of the HMS Beagle. His observations and notes from that trip, with a great deal of time spent in remote areas and on islands, places in which flora and fauna developed in relative isolation, formed the basis for his idea of natural selection, a cornerstone of modern evolutionary theory. His most famous publication, “On the Origin of Species”, was published late in 1859, when Darwin was 50 years old. It’s his most famous work, but it’s far from being his only one; there’s quite a collection available at The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online. Between his travels, his writing, and his other work, he clearly had time for other things: Charles Darwin had ten children, two of whom died as babies. He died in 1882, at the age of 73.

Crowded prisons and alternative sentencing

On Monday, a panel of federal judges ruled that California will have to reduce its prison population by about a third:

Monday’s ruling signaled the court’s intention to cap the number of prisoners at about 101,000, a reduction of 55,000. It came after more than a decade of federal court orders from exasperated judges who demanded that the state improve its facilities and personnel, after the appointment of the most powerful federal receivership since the days of forced racial integration in the South, and after the death of scores of prisoners who committed suicide or died of preventable illnesses.

The judges encouraged the state to negotiate with inmates’ lawyers to cut the prison population from 156,000, which is about double the system’s capacity, within three years. If the state refuses to negotiate such a plan, the judges could order specific actions, including shortened prison sentences, diversion of nonviolent felons to county programs, and parole reforms that would cut down recidivism.

Few releases of prisoners would be necessary to reduce the prison population if the state carried out sentencing and parole reforms, which could save $903 million a year, according to the federal judges. They also argued that such reforms could be achieved without jeopardizing public safety.

Indeed; one major thing that could be done to help with this issue is something that’s come up before in these pages: alternative sentencing.

Alternative sentences aren’t a complete or perfect solution, and they’re not for all situations. But in many cases, sentences other than prison, sentences that allow convicted criminals to contribute to society, provide for their families, and make restitution to their victims, serve society as a whole far better than do prison sentences.

Yet we don’t use them often enough. “Tough on crime” platforms get candidates elected, and the resultant legislation that includes things like mandatory sentencing and “three strikes” laws wind up over-stuffing the prisons. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that swelling population of inmates is a good thing.

But Joe Arpaio styled prisons are not good for anyone. They punish, most assuredly; yet they neither rehabilitate nor deter:

The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office is responsible for vitally important law-enforcement functions in one of the largest counties in the nation. It defines its core missions as law-enforcement services, support services, and detention.

MCSO falls seriously short of fulfilling its mission in all three areas. Although MCSO is adept at self-promotion and is an unquestionably “tough” law-enforcement agency, under its watch violent crime rates recently have soared, both in absolute terms and relative to other jurisdictions.

Mistreating prisoners hardens them. Locking convicts up takes their resources away from society and puts their families on welfare, or worse. Giving them no productive role and no sense of pride and accomplishment during their sentences prepares them with none of these when they’re released.

And, yet, it’s so easy to say that we’re tough on crime — and it’s hard to get elected if you’re not. That train moves fast, and it’s hard to stop.

Of course, incarceration makes some things easier. It sets up easy supervision for large numbers of convicts. Supervising them under an alternative-sentencing system, managing their sentences, and making sure that they don’t do more crimes while they’re working off the first one are certainly challenges. But we benefit from meeting those challenges.

We have to understand how to use prison when it’s appropriate, yet how to use alternatives, too, when they’re appropriate — and how important it is to elect and appoint judges who support that, and to leave them the freedom to use their judgment.

Fun with search terms

I like to look at the search terms that led people to these pages. Because people seldom use quotes around phrases, their searches often wind up finding arbitrary blog posts (or monthly archives) that happen to contain each of the relatively common words in the search, though not in the order nor context they entered them in.

My favourite, for example, was this one, which showed up a couple of years ago:

please help me! i’m being hunted by a government agency that doesn’t exist.

The other day, I saw two, done a few hours apart, that both happened to hit posts I’d written about rape. My guess is that whoever searched for “rape at us military academies” and found Women, military academies, and sexual assault got what s/he was looking for.

I suspect the guy who searched for “men getting whpped and raiped by women”, and found Get raped, get whipped, did not.

An Internet in every pot

Is it wise, or wasteful, to spend money on expanding Internet access to rural areas?

At first glance, perhaps no line item in the nearly $900 billion stimulus program under consideration on Capitol Hill would seem to offer a more perfect way to jump-start the economy than the billions pegged to expand broadband Internet service to rural and underserved areas.

Proponents say it will create jobs, build crucial infrastructure and begin to fulfill one of President Obama’s major campaign promises: to expand the information superhighway to every corner of the land, giving local businesses an electronic edge and offering residents a dazzling array of services like online health care and virtual college courses.

But experts warn that the rural broadband effort could just as easily become a $9 billion cyberbridge to nowhere, representing the worst kind of mistakes that lawmakers could make in rushing to approve one of the largest spending bills in history without considering unintended results.

A “cyberbridge to nowhere”? Some people thought similar things about putting telephone service, television, and highways into the same rural areas. In the 21st century, fast Internet access is as important as those. It’s critical infrastructure that’s needed for education, commerce, and public services. Denying it to some town in Nebraska — or upstate New York — because it’s not as profitable a market as urban and suburban areas are is not the best thing for the country as a whole.

We’re long past the days when we should want or expect farmers’ kids to stay farmers, or, indeed, that farmers are uneducated, unsophisticated hayseeds who need little more than a stack of pancakes and a good pair of boots. Technology reaches to every aspect of our modern life, and those in rural areas, whether they work the land locally, or the world through telecommuting, need the technological infrastructure that we have in the cities.

It’s certainly true that we shouldn’t just throw money at it without planning it and doing it right. And it’s true that it will likely be quite costly. But it will be more costly not to do it. From the facilities it will provide to rural residents and workers to the better education it’ll help give the next generation, it will be worth it.

It’s wise.

My favourite thing to do with Brussels sprouts

In the Times, Emily Weinstein has just done a column about two different preparations of Brussels sprouts, “lemony” and “bacony”. After a bit of a kitchen fire, she proceeded, undaunted:

And then I went right back to the kitchen to keep cooking. Such is my love of Brussels sprouts.

My first exposure to them came after I moved to New York and saw them on the menu at Italian restaurants like Otto and Frankies — a vegetable so square it was hip. A little soft, a little bitter, they were nearly always good, no matter what the preparation.

Such, too, is my love of Brussels sprouts, though I know many who don’t share it. They are a somewhat “challenging” vegetable, being sort of mini-cabbages and having that cabbagy character that can be sulphurous if they’re overcooked. And, yes, they can be bitter. But a slight bitterness is a nice touch, and they can be tender and sweet if they’re prepared well.

Brussels sprouts, please, with a capital “B” and an “s” at the end, named for Brussels, Belgium. Not “brussels”, and most definitely not “brussel”, though it’s certainly easy to lose that final “s” when one’s speaking it.

My first exposures to them were not pleasant, being only to the overcooked variety, with the strong smell and taste, and with a mushy texture that made them prone to flattening themselves on the plate if they fell off my fork. And then I went to England — not a place held in world renown for its food (the cooking term à l’anglaise means “boiled”) — where they were served to me steamed just to tenderness, and they were delightful.

Both preparations that Ms Weinstein describes are nice ones, and I’ve done them shredded, with bacon, myself. But my favourite is the one Ms Weinstein’s had poor results with:

I began trying to roast them at home. Instead of buying broccoli — for years my go-to vegetable — I bought Brussels sprouts and heads of garlic, roasting them together in the same way my mother taught me to cook root vegetables. I could never get them quite right. They were either too crunchy or soggy, too oily or too dry; the outer leaves on the sprout always peeled off in the pan; the seasonings never quite worked. Still, I ate whole pans of them.

I prefer to slice the garlic, and I add salt, pepper, and olive oil — and that’s all; quite simple. Trim the bottoms of the sprouts, halve them lengthwise (if there be a “lengthwise” for something approximately spherical... but you know what I mean), and discard the outer, tougher leaves. My supermarket sells them in pint-sized tubs, and I use two. With that, I slice about four garlic cloves thinly — more, perhaps, if the cloves are on the small side. Toss the sprouts and garlic with enough oil to coat but not to soak, sprinkle with salt and pepper and toss again, and they’re ready for the oven.

I use a large, round, shallow pan, so they can mostly be in one layer. Kick the oven to 400F, and check them every ten minutes, giving them a stir when you do. They should be done in 20 or 30 minutes, depending on the size, and they’ll be tender and caramelized, sweet and garlicky, with just a touch of bitterness to let you know they’re not candy.

I, too, eat whole pans of them. Yum.

The end of the Sahsa and Malia dolls

What would you think if you were famous, everyone thought your young daughters were adorable, and a company started making dolls to represent them? You might be flattered; you might find it amusing. Or you might not. The Obamas did not, and they said so when Ty came out with “Sweet Sasha” and “Marvelous Malia”.

Ty has now decided to desist, as they certainly should in a situation like this.

White House officials were very, very pleased on Tuesday after learning that the company that makes Beanie Babies had decided to stop selling its Sweet Sasha and Marvelous Malia dolls.

A spokeswoman for the first lady, Michelle Obama, had protested that the dolls were inappropriately using “young, private citizens for marketing purposes,” even though the company, Ty Inc., insisted that the dolls were not intended to depict the Obama girls, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7.

Good on them for stopping, but here’s the thing: why do they see a need to be disingenuous? Not intended to depict the Obama girls? Come, now; who believes that? Let’s see:

1. They have the girls’ names.
2. They have brown complexions, like the girls.
3. They were presented as a pair.
4. They came out at the right time.

There’s no way on Earth that these dolls were “not intended to depict the Obama girls.” And it’s insulting to everyone for Ty to think we might believe such an obvious lie.

The next step for mobile phones?

The Times wonders, “Can the Cellphone Industry Keep Growing?”:

Analysts and investors are beginning to ask whether the industry can continue growing. The challenge is both simple and daunting: how to expand when more than half of the six billion people on the planet already have phones. And even in developing countries where there are underserved markets, subscribers spend less on phones and services.

On the surface, it sounds like that makes sense, but here: many, many people have cars, computers, televisions, and all sorts of other things, but we’re not suggesting that the time is past for growth in selling these products. Car sales go through periods of ups and downs, of course, owing to their price tags and the price of fuel. But people do eventually want new ones.

Why?

The old ones wear out, and the new ones have features that people want. Snazzy new design, innovations in the technology, and new, hot features are what convince people to replace the old clunker. Hold back the updates, and people will keep their old ones longer. Give them incentives to buy, and buy they will. And the same goes for mobile phones.

How many people had phones when the iPhone came out? How many bought iPhones anyway? It quickly became the “must have” device, because it showed innovation in obvious ways.

It won’t take another iPhone to push the market again. But it will take real motion, not just production of iPhone look-alikes, devices that just remind us that the iPhone is what everyone really wants to have. I love the BlackBerry devices, but I’ve had a look at the Storm, and I’m underwhelmed. It’s trying to be an iPhone, but it does it poorly. As is usual with these sorts of copies, they’ve come up with a thing or two that’s better than the iPhone, but on the whole it still falls short.

Mobile phones are a long way, now, from being phones, of course. They are that, but they’re also address books, calendars, note pads, email and instant-messaging devices, music players, web browsers, cameras, and toothbrushes. OK, not toothbrushes, but my dentist would probably like it if they were. They do nearly everything for us, and yet the challenge is for them to do more.

Let’s look for the next innovation. And on the way, let’s make changes that are incremental, yet significant, giving buyers reasons to buy new.

If the industry can’t do that — if it keeps trying to sell the same stuff we already have, with little changed but the name — then it deserves to wither.

“Yes we did!”

Bumper sticker seen the other day:

Digital signatures on a large scale

Researchers at University of Washington have been working on a simple system for putting digital signatures on recordings that are intended to become part of a historical record. Because it’s easy to falsify or tamper with digital recordings, their idea is to make the recordings verifiable. The New York Times reported on it last week:

A Tool to Verify Digital Records, Even as Technology Shifts

On Tuesday a group of researchers at the University of Washington are releasing the initial component of a public system to provide authentication for an archive of video interviews with the prosecutors and other members of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Rwandan genocide. The group will also release the first portion of the Rwandan archive.

This system is intended to be available for future use in digitally preserving and authenticating first-hand accounts of war crimes, atrocities and genocide.

It’s a laudable concept, but it’s an odd mix. The Times article has a few inaccuracies that I’ll point out here, but we can mostly work through them and assume what’s meant. Even so, I’m a little puzzled, but I haven’t been able to find the original UW information yet.

On the surface, this should be very standard stuff, and not worth writing home about. The typical way one sets up digital “authentication” like this is as follows:

1. The tribunal (for example) obtains a digital certificate from a recognized certificate authority. This certificate identifies the tribunal uniquely and securely, provided the private key for it is kept secure.
2. The certificate and its private key are used to create a digital signature to go with the electronic document in question. See my series on digital signatures for more about how that works.
3. Later, when the document is read/heard/viewed, it can be verified against the signature. If there is no signature, or the signature doesn’t match the document, then we can assume that the document’s been falsified or tampered with. If the signature matches, then we have confirmation that this is an unmodified document that was signed by the tribunal.

That mechanism is here now, has been around for years, and doesn’t need researchers to get it set up. So why is further research and development needed?

First, there are technical difficulties in doing this with large documents on a large scale, and we’ll get to those later.

Second, the whole process of obtaining and maintaining digital certificates, renewing expired ones, keeping them properly secured, and making sure that no one else can get a fake certificate identifying the tribunal is a cumbersome one. This definitely needs to be made easier, and doing so will benefit all uses of digital signatures.

Third, the whole certification model assumes a relatively short life of the certificates and the signatures. I sign an email message, I send it, you receive it, you verify the signature, and that happens within a few minutes, or hours, or days. Do we really expect that a digital signature will be secure and verifiable years from now — perhaps a great many years? Certificate authorities will come and go; keys may be compromised, resulting in revoked certificates; encryption algorithms and cryptographic hashes will fall to attacks; and myriad other things can happen over time that can render a digital signature meaningless over years and decades.

Fourth, data formats and encodings change over time. We develop better ones, and old ones become obsolete. Data files of today might no longer be readable decades from now, because the hardware and software needed might no longer be around. Who will be responsible for keeping track of this stuff over the years, and for making sure that we still have what we need to read it and verify it? Will it have to be periodically converted to new formats or media? Will we be able to make sure that the signatures go with it (that it’s re-signed, securely, each time it’s converted)?

The researchers are clearly not trying to address all of these issues, at least not now. From what I can guess from the Times article, it’s the first two that they’re working on. So let’s look at the inaccuracies in the article and some of the technical difficulties they have or will be encountering.

At the heart of the system is an algorithm that is used to compute a 128-character number known as a cryptographic hash from the digital information in a particular document. Even the smallest change in the original document will result in a new hash value.

No standard cryptographic hash algorithm produces “a 128-character number”. The MD5 algorithm produces a 128-bit number — that’s 16 characters (actually bytes), or 32 hexadecimal digits. But they surely aren’t using MD5, because that’s solidly broken now, and not reliable. SHA-1, commonly used now but starting to show weaknesses, produces 160 bits (20 bytes, 40 hex digits).

But the next paragraph addresses that and tells us that they’re not using either of those:

In recent years researchers have begun to find weaknesses in current hash algorithms, and so last November the National Institute of Standards and Technology began a competition to create stronger hashing technologies. The University of Washington researchers now use a modern hash algorithm called SHA-2, but they have designed the system so that it can be easily replaced with a more advanced algorithm.

SHA-2 is not an algorithm, but a collective name for a group of algorithms. Most likely, they’re using SHA-256 or SHA-512, which produce 256-bit and 512-bit hashes, respectively. Perhaps they’re using SHA-512, and the Times’s “128-character number” is really referring to the 128-hex-digit number that will come from that algorithm.

One technical problem we might eventually run up against is the maximum data size that can be hashed at once. With SHA-512, that size is about 2125 bytes, or something on the order of 4 followed by 37 zeroes. It’s big. In contrast, one terabyte is about 1 followed by 12 zeroes. It’s probably big enough. But we have a history of saying that and being wrong, and if it’s not big enough, the data will need to be split into pieces and signed, and then the mechanism for putting the pieces back together must itself be signed. Granted, though, they don’t have to deal with this any time soon.

The main technical problem they seem to be dealing with is making the process automated and usable by non-technical people. Someone from the tribunal needs to take a video recording, say, that has been in her hands all the time, put it into the system and attest to its accuracy through a mechanism that she can understand and trust well enough to make her attestation.

I’d love to see the user interface they’ve set up for that, and the processing behind it.

“Whoops, I did it again.”

Since I’ve talked about it before, a number of times, here’s the latest:

Guess what company showed a record profit for 2008, despite the economy, despite the bank crash in the forth quarter, despite the decline in gas prices in the second half (and especially the fourth quarter). Go on, guess.

Yes, that’s right! It’s Exxon Mobil, and it wasn’t a very hard question.

Despite collapsing oil prices in recent months, Exxon Mobil, the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, still managed to set a record for last year as the most profitable American corporation ever.

Exxon earned $45.2 billion in 2008, beating the record it set in 2007 for most profitable corporation, at $40.6 billion. That came despite a fourth quarter in which income fell 33 percent, owing to the steepest drop ever in oil prices, as the economy went into a tailspin.

I just feel ill. I should create a new category, “UnmitigatedGreed”.

TV, or not TV: that is the digital

You all know, of course, that broadcast TV is scheduled to switch from analogue to digital on the 17th of February. You all know, of course, that the switch only affects the old style broadcast system, the one that goes through the air and is picked up by an antenna. You know that, right? If you have cable, satellite, FIOS, or any other system like that, you do not have to worry about this. In fact, you don’t even need to worry about it if you use an antenna, but you have a new TV that already has a digital tuner.

Your service provider might be doing some digital conversions of its own — mine has been switching selected channels to digital for a while now — but that’s purely its own decision, independent of the well publicized broadcast switch, and it’s responsible for informing you and making sure you have what you need.

But how many people still use antennas? Doesn’t everyone have cable (or some other piped-in system) by now? It’s easy for someone who lives where I do to ask that question: I can get nothing over the air but snow and hiss without some serious structure on my roof, and so it’s pretty obvious that everyone around here would get their TV service through a service provider. But in New York City, and in other cities, the situation is different.

First, the cities are closer to the broadcasters, and set-top antennas usually suffice to pull in the standard local stations. Users won’t get Bravo and E!, and one wonders how they can survive thus, but that’s how it is. Second, the cities are home to more poor people than the suburbs are, and, well, if one doesn’t have to pay $30 to $50 a month to watch Grey’s Anatomy, one can use that money for, oh, say, food.

The government even set up a plan to help people with the conversion: it offered coupons to defray $40 of the cost of a converter box. Unfortunately, it screwed that up. It defined bizarre rules about how to get and use the coupons. It didn’t anticipate that people would not understand who needed the converters, so, because many people who didn’t need the coupons got them, they ran out. And it made no allowance for the concept that people would not be able to figure out what to do — what to buy, how to install it, and so on.

The result of all this is that the government’s determined that the 17th of February will bring disaster. Grey’s Anatomy, along with All My Children and Wheel of Fortune, will be unwatchable by the myriad Americans who will not have the right setup.

The government is right about this.

They have decided that the answer is to delay the conversion by four months, to give them time to get yet more publicity out and more coupons printed and sent (and funded), and to give consumers time to buy their converter boxes and get them installed. The Senate has passed the delay, and the House is working on it.

The government is wrong about this.

I have sympathy for people who, despite more than three years of planning and publicity, still don’t know what’s happening. I have sympathy for people who don’t understand what they need to do. I have sympathy for people who have bought their converters but have no idea how to install them. And I realize that even when they’re installed, we won’t be sure they’re all working right until the cutover happens and we find out how many TVs don’t work, though they have converters on them.

But I also know, from many years of experience with these sorts of things, that changing the cutover date will make little difference. The problems will be there whenever the conversion happens. And the 17 February date has been set and publicized for so long that any change will cause a great deal of confusion on top of that.

Let me repeat that key point: we’ll have about as many problems on 12 June as we will on 17 February. That’s because no change like this goes smoothly. Any such change makes a lot of things break. We will never be “prepared” for the change.

The best we can do is be prepared for the aftermath.

Rather than worrying about delaying the conversion — and the inevitable avalanche of difficulties — we should be setting up infrastructure for accepting reports of problems and sending out help for fixing them. We want to create jobs? By all means: let’s hire an army of technicians who can go out to people’s houses and install converter boxes, or fix failed installations.

Then let’s do the cutover, deal with the problems, and move on to the next issue.
 

---

Update, 10 PM: This video should answer the question Thomas brought up in the comments. [Hat tip to Educated Guesswork for the link.]
 

Update, 4 Feb: The delay has been passed in both houses of Congress, and the president plans to sign it. Let the confusion come.

Carnivals!

Divine images appear in all manner of places:

FORT PIERCE — A 42-year-old woman without insurance and mounting medical bills plans to sell an MRI scan of her brain in which the image of the Virgin Mary seems to appear.

[...]

In 2002, Latrimore had an MRI of her brain done and the results were stashed in her thick pile of medical records. Her sister-in-law looked at the sheet recently and pointed out what appeared to be the image of the Virgin Mary.

It looks more like Meryl Streep to me, but, then, what do I know? I’m an atheist.

Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:

• Skeptics’ Circle #104.
• Carnival of the Liberals #83.
• Carnival of Feminists #71.
• Carnival of Education #207.
• Carnival of Education #208.
• Carnival of Mathematics #48.
• Carnival of the Godless #109.