Happy retirement to two former colleagues

IBM has, as you might have seen in the news or rumour mills, done another “resource action” — what folks colloquially call a “layoff”, though it doesn’t fit the usual meaning of the term (they won’t be rehiring the people when business gets better). I’ve learned that today is the last day of work for at least two of my former and valued colleagues from Research Division.

David Singer is a Distinguished Engineer at the Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA. He’s in the IBM Academy of Technology, has been around since, it seems, before the Norman invasion, and has always been someone we could turn to for technical or business advice.

Nick Trio is a Senior Technical Staff Member, as I was when I left. He’s been on the Internet Society’s Advisory Council for some time, and has done work on IBM’s internal network and the Internet for many years. As with David, I’ve known him since I transferred to the Research Division, and have relied on him many times.

Once again, IBM is discarding its brightest, most experienced, most devoted technical experts in their effort to reduce U.S. staff and shift to Brazil, Russia, India, and China (“the BRIC”). It’s so sad, and it just seems the wrong decision.

Follow up: Who’s not on the Internet?

Have you been waiting for Verizon to install FiOS in your area? Eager to snag their lightning-fast broadband service, remove yourself from the ranks of the disconnected, or perhaps just upgrade from poorly connected?

You have, you are?

Damn. Too bad for you:

If Verizon Communications Inc. hasn’t already started wiring your city or town with its FiOS fiber-optic TV and broadband service, chances are you won’t get it.

[...]

That means Verizon will continue to pull fiber to homes in Washington, D.C., New York City and Philadelphia — projects that will take years to complete — but leaves such major cities as Baltimore and downtown Boston without FiOS.

[...]

That will still leave a third of its service area (excluding the territories it is selling) without fiber. And as Verizon has signaled this month that it’s focusing on communities where it already has franchises, it’s now becoming clear which ones are in and which are out.

So... those of you who still struggle with dial-up, or with unreliable, relatively slow broadband access will still have to wait for some FCC mandate or other government intervention.

Waddyagonnado?

Is this what democracy looks like?

With the passage of the health-insurance reform bill, congressional representatives have a lot of unhappy constituents — some, as I, unhappy because it doesn’t go far enough, and some unhappy because it goes too far. There are many who wanted no change at all.

But that’s the way things work in a representative democracy. Many of us try to influence our legislators by writing to them, by publicly writing about our ideas, by campaigning and protesting. Whether or not we agree with those writing letters and marching in the streets, we support the exercise of our first-amendment rights to petition our government.

We do not, though, petition our government with bricks and with threats.

From the New York Times article:

Democratic lawmakers have received death threats and been the victims of vandalism because of their votes in favor of the health care bill, lawmakers and law enforcement officials said Wednesday, as the Congressional debate over the issue headed toward a bitter and divisive conclusion.

Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland and the majority leader, said at least 10 House members had raised concerns about their personal security since Sunday’s climactic vote, and Mr. Hoyer characterized the cases as serious.

And from the Washington Post:

“To all modern Sons of Liberty: THIS is your time. Break their windows. Break them NOW.”

These were the words of Mike Vanderboegh, a 57-year-old former militiaman from Alabama, who took to his blog urging people who opposed the historic health-care reform legislation — he calls it “Nancy Pelosi’s Intolerable Act” — to throw bricks through the windows of Democratic offices nationwide.

And bricks have, indeed, been thrown. Offices — and houses — have been vandalized. At least so far, no one’s been hurt.

Nancy Pelosi reminds us that “these threats have no place in our country,” and that’s absolutely true. The vote doesn’t always go your way, and many of us had eight years to get used to that in the Bush regime. We debated, we wrote, we protested. We took our arguments to our legislators, to the Internet, and to the streets. We urged the impeachment of the president and we campaigned against those who passed laws we didn’t like.

Even in the worst of times, we overthrow our government in the election booth, and we throw our stones by flipping levers and punching holes, and making sure our chad is not hanging nor pregnant.

And we bring change about with words and the sharing of ideas. Not with bricks, or worse.

Carnivals!

Another reminder about those “secret questions” that go along with your password:

He gained access to Twitter accounts by simply working out the answers to password reminder questions on targets’ e-mail accounts, according to investigators.

Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:

• Skeptics’ Circle #133.
• Carnival of the Liberals, swan song.
• Math Teachers at Play #24.
• Carnival of the Godless #138.

Pelican

Pelican, in Monterey, CA

Air traffic detection and ranging

We all know that air traffic controllers use radar to track airplanes.

“Radar” is, as many of us do not know, an acronym for RAdio Detection And Ranging. A radar system uses reflected radio waves to determine an object’s location and distance, relative to the radar system.

Quick quiz: Name something else that gives us location information, these days.

Exactly: the Global Positioning System, GPS.

Of course, GPS gives an object’s position in absolute terms, but that’s fine. As long as we know the GPS coordinates of everything we’re concerned about, we’re OK. Apart from that, GPS gives better resolution and accuracy than radar does.

So, why shouldn’t air traffic control use GPS instead of radar?

Why not, indeed:

The Senate voted Monday to approve a bill that would speed the modernization of the nation’s antiquated air traffic control system by replacing radar with GPS technology.

The only catch is that GPS is a passive system, requiring the plane to get its location and send it to the controllers (as is currently done with altitude in the radar system). If there’s a malfunction in the plane, and the on-board GPS systems aren’t working, the controllers will need a backup system on their end. So I presume that the old radar won’t go away completely. (Of course, there’ll certainly be several parallel GPS systems on the planes, so it would take a severe failure to take them all out.)

TSA will track us at airports

According to USA Today, the TSA will be doing some tracking of our mobile phones at airports:

The Transportation Security Administration is looking at installing devices in airports that home in and detect personal electronic equipment. The aim is to track how long people are stuck in security lines.

They say that they won’t be tracking beyond that, that they won’t use the full “serial number” that they read, and that they won’t retain the numbers. Assuming, of course, that we trust them to keep to that, and that we believe it won’t change in the future.

It seems to me that this is another reason to turn off the bluetooth support when you’re not using it.

You are doing that, right?

Exponential

I hear talk all the time about exponential increases. Consider three very recent examples from the New York Times, here:

“Since the 1960s there has been an exponential increase in artists working with maps,” she adds, using Jasper Johns’s “Map,” from 1963, by way of example.

here:

[...] historically black colleges and universities actually serve more students today than they did 50 years ago because there has been an exponential growth in students pursuing higher education [...]

and here:

But he said first responders generally did not have enough training to deal with diversions that could be “almost exponential” compared with those faced by most drivers.

I’ll note that two of those are quoting someone, and the third is in a blog, for which the Times has slightly more relaxed standards concerning informal writing. But the point isn’t to pick on the Times, but to note how often people refer to “exponential” growth or increase.

Here’s the thing: “exponential” isn’t just a fancy or intensive way to say “large”. It has a particular meaning.

In grade school, we were given a problem to work out: Suppose your parents gave you a penny on the first day of January, two pennies on the second day, four on the third, eight on the fourth, and so on, doubling the number of pennies each day. On January 31st, how many pennies would you have, all told?

When you’re in the sixth grade, that’s not an easy problem. Of course, any computer geek can solve that instantly now: on day “n” you get 2^n-1 pennies, and you have a total of 2ⁿ-1 pennies collected. So your final total at the end of January is 2³¹-1, which is 2,147,483,647 — more than two billion pennies.

We were astounded by that answer, once we got it. And that is exponential growth.

Strictly speaking, exponential growth requires an interval, some repetitions of that interval, and growth over each of those intervals by a common factor. It can be a doubling every day for a month, as in the problem with the pennies. It might be a five-fold increase each year for several years. The point is that the thing being measured is increasing in the exponent, a quantity of n in the first interval, n² in the next, n³ in the next, and so on.

In fact, exponential growth doesn’t even have to imply fast or large growth. Note that if a population increases by 1% every decade... that’s exponential growth, though no one would really think of it that way. In this case, the interval is ten years, and the common factor is 1.01.

In practice, of course, it’s often not that straightforward, and we allow for variations and approximations. But we must insist on the interval thing, and of a pattern of applicable growth over some reasonable number of intervals (it won’t do to just say that something doubled, and to call that “exponential growth”; one interval is not enough to establish a pattern).

The first New York Times example, the quote about artists working with maps, has a starting point, but no interval. There may have been a large increase in the number of art works involving maps, but without more information we can’t call it “exponential”. The same is true for the blog entry about black university students. If we had data to back it up, it would be valid to say that over the last 50 years there’s been an exponential increase each decade. But as it stands, he just means that it’s gone up by a lot.

And I can’t even decide what the third example means, to say that “diversions” are “almost exponential”. I suppose we might say something like that if the number of diversions that first responders have to deal with is the square or the cube of those bedeviling others — for every four diversions you and I have, a first responder has to cope with sixteen, or maybe 64. But that seems awkward, as well as unlikely.

The guy just means that they have a great deal more diversions (I would say “distractions”) than the average driver.

When that’s what we mean, that’s what we should say.

Is it art?

For another in the “Is it art?” series, we turn to a bit of performance art in Greenwich Village:

Ms. Hanford is part of the gallery’s latest exhibit by Brian Reed. She stands fully naked under a suspended web made of various objects including shark eggs and teeth, beads and clay pipes. Her nakedness is essential, Mr. Reed explained, “so she can be fully at the center of that connectivity” of energy.

Some may call it art, others something less flattering.

We actually have two questions here: whether it’s art, and whether its being art should excuse it. (Well, and there’s a third question, about whether we should lighten up and not be so uptight about nudity, but it’s not that question that I’m addressing here.)

To the second question, we have this:

“Simply walking around naked in and of itself is not protected conduct under the First Amendment,” Mr. Kuby said. “But lying down in the street naked with other people in order to express the duality of nature versus man, or to illustrate some post-apocalyptic vision, is artistic and does communicate a message.”

Hm.

I’m very skeptical of that statement. Indeed, I can easily wangle an artistic excuse for “simply walking around naked”, in and of itself... or for pretty much anything else I might like to do. Why can’t one person who’s simply walking around naked be expressing the duality of nature versus man, or illustrating some post-apocalyptic vision?

If I say it’s art, does that make it art, at least at the level that it becomes protected by law?

And where do we draw the line between what we’ll protect and what we won’t? If those nude people whom Mr Tunick was allowed to photograph (read the article) had been, say, actively having sex, chasing people down the streets, or smoking marijuana, instead of just milling about amongst themselves, would the Supreme Court still have allowed it? Couldn’t all of those scenarios be justified as expressing some duality or other, in an artistic sense?

So, what do y’all think?:

1. Is it art?
2. Assuming it is (whether or not you personally agree), should it be protected?
3. What are the limits?

On peer review

In Adventures in Ethics and Science, Janet Stemwedel asks some questions about peer review — its purpose and its effect — prompted by strong online criticism of a peer-reviewed paper that was published with at least some significant review comments ignored.

One particularly interesting statement that Janet makes is in the second sentence of this paragraph:

As Bora was the "editor" of the paper rather than an official referee of the paper, it’s not clear whether the journal editors overseeing the fate of this submission actually forwarded Bora’s critiques onto the author, or if they did forward the critiques to the author but indicated that they wouldn’t count. Myself, if I were the author of the manuscript, I think I’d want more prepublication feedback, not less, on the theory that this would help me produce a stronger paper.

Now, there are certainly some authors — perhaps many, and perhaps some of them are even graduate students — who, like Janet, are eager for critical feedback from peer reviewers, the better to improve their papers, to make them faster, higher, stronger. Most of the authors I know, though, do not ride in that bobsled.

No, what I see, mostly, are authors that look at peer review as, to move the Olympics analogy to the summer games, hurdles to jump and bars to clear. Far from looking forward to suggestions for improvement, they are hoping for minimal required changes to get the paper published. Reviews that point out experiments that should have been done, data points that are missing, and analyses that are flawed or incomplete are decidedly not happily received, and will usually evoke not thanks to a thorough reviewer, but unkind epithets for a picky jerk.

To be sure, this partly comes from the fact that knowing what reviewers will expect has already steered the paper, making it better than it would have been without the “threat” of failure in peer review. I’ve heard many authors note that they’ll have to do such-and-so experiment, include data on this or that, clarify the explanation of the methodology, beef up the evaluation section, or review more related work, lest the review process require it later (or, worse, reject the paper outright).

I agree with the sentiments of commenter number 5 to Janet’s post:

I have always operated under the impression that publication in a peer-reviewed journal constitutes an endorsement that the paper in question is reasonable, complete, and methodologically sound.

The peer review is doing quality control, making sure there are no obvious problems, holes, inconsistencies, or the like. It is not, though, endorsing the analysis and conclusions — the opinions of the researchers.

And that’s an important point. Research will often show particular patterns and correlations, but interpreting those and concluding cause and effect from those correlations is a tricky process. It’s fair for authors to include what they think they see, and it’s fair for reviewers to call the authors on it if they disagree. But I would not like to see a paper with clean methodology and solid results be rejected for this reason. The accuracy (or not) of the authors’ interpretation is what the community discussion of the published paper should be hashing out.

This all gets tricky when a paper has mixed reviews. Ideally, if we have three reviews they’ll all hover somewhere in the same area, perhaps giving somewhat differing recommendations, but basically agreeing on the quality-control aspects. But things are sometimes less than ideal, and it’s not uncommon to have one reviewer who loves the paper and one who hates it — one who gives a recommendation to publish immediately with no changes, and one who just votes to reject, or to re-review only after major changes are made.

It’s usually up to the editor to resolve things at that point, and the editor’s prerogative may be to accept the paper despite the dissenter’s serious — and, perhaps, quite valid — objections. That appears to be what happened with the paper that prompted this discussion (though, oddly, one of the strongest dissenters seems to have been the editor, so maybe none of the official reviewers registered a strong objection — which seems unlikely, because the methodology in the paper is seriously flawed, to the point of being entirely non-scientific). Different journals have different rules about the role of an issue’s editor, and the extent to which the editor can override one or more reviews.

The whole point of peer review is, after all, not to put the decision into the hands of a single person.

Something to bobble the mind

Yale’s law library has some important stuff, treasures to any legal scholar. Rare books. Irreplaceable manuscripts. Bobblehead figures of Supreme Court Justices.

Eh, what’s that?

Yes. “A hundred years from now, if someone wants to study the bobbleheads, where will they go? There needs to be an archive.” So says one of the librarians, and I suppose he’s right... though one might quibble about his premise.

“The bobbleheads are, not to overstate it, a little bit more than toys,” said Ross E. Davies, the editor in chief of The Green Bag, which calls itself “an entertaining journal of law” and created the dolls. “They’re portrayals of the work and character of these judges.”

I like this bit, especially:

The rarest item is a bobblehead of Justice Antonin Scalia featuring allusions to his majority opinions. Only one exists; the official version focuses on his dissents.

When Tasers should be used

I’ve spent a good few posts talking about the abuse of Tasers by police (here, here, and here, for instance). You might think that I’m against Tasers altogether, but that’s not true. I’ve consistently said that police officers must be trained in appropriate Taser use, and the rules for that must be enforced.

Appropriate use is in situations where the alternative would be shooting a gun. A Taser is “less-deadly force”.

Here, from last month in New York City, is a perfect example of appropriate user:

Police officers fatally shot a man in a Bronx apartment late Sunday after he refused to stop beating his mother with a frying pan, officials said on Monday.

The officers fired at the man, Satnam Singh, 27, five times, striking him three times in the torso, after he ignored their orders to stop, according to the police. Medical workers pronounced him dead at the scene.

The New York City officers did not have Tasers — they have not been widely deployed in New York City, and for good reason. But if they had them in this case, we wouldn’t have a dead man who “had a history of emotional problems.” We wouldn’t be wondering how trained officers could miss two out of five shots at a stationary target at close range. And we wouldn’t wonder where the two missed bullets went, and whether they could have hit the victim the officers were trying to protect.

It’s a tough balance, making these things available for officers to use appropriately, but preventing their abuse. Tough, but important.

Once more, on anonymizing data

How many times do we have to hear (or read) this sort of thing before it sinks in?: “Anonymized” data that’s aggregated in any significant way is no longer anonymous. We saw it in 2006, when AOL briefly released search data. We saw it in 2009, when researchers used information from Flickr to identify users in a Twitter network

And, now, Netflix has rediscovered it, in their attempts to have researchers data-mine their customers’ rental data:

But it turned out that letting very smart computer scientists and statisticians dig through the video rental site’s data had one major, unforeseen drawback. A pair of researchers at the University of Texas showed that the supposedly anonymized data released for the contest, which included movie recommendations and choices made by hundreds of thousands of customers, could in fact be used to identify them. [PDF]

So let’s say it again, all together now: when a lot of data about you can be put together and connected, the fact that each individual item has been “anonymized” is not sufficient to protect your anonymity (or any other sense of your privacy).

A friend of mine figures that it doesn’t matter anyway: as soon as computers came around and we started networking them and using the results, “all bets were off” on the idea of privacy. And that’s largely true. Still, we should be doing what we can to rein at least some of it in.

On the other hand, Google has my search data, my photos, and my email directly, along with whatever they get indirectly through agreements with other services. They probably know more about me than I know myself.

Follow up: Census

I got my census form yesterday, and filled it out. Easy-peasy, of course. Well, what could be hard? It’s only ten questions, and none of them involve complex calculations or in-depth knowledge. Here are the ten:

1. How many people were living or staying in this house, apartment, or mobile home on April 1, 2010?
2. Were there any additional people staying here April 1, 2010 that you did not include in Question 1?
3. Is this house, apartment, or mobile home — [owned with a mortgage, owned outright, rented, occupied without payment] ?
4. What is your telephone number?

   For each person living here:

5. What is the person’s name?
6. What is the person’s sex?
7. What is the person’s age (on April 1) and date of birth?
8. Is the person of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin?
9. What is the person’s race?
10. Does the person sometimes live or stay somewhere else? [college housing, military, seasonal residence, child custody, jail or prison, nursing home...]

I find the questions about race and ethnic origin to be especially interesting. I don’t know why they need to separate Spanish origin from any other racial or ethnic identity, nor why they need to identify which country your Spanish origin comes from (the choices for question 8 are Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and other (which you write in)). The choices for race in question 9 include the obvious sorts of things (white, black, American Indian (specify tribe)), but then break down “Asian” specifically (Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and other (specify)). They do the same for Pacific islanders (Hawaiian, Guamanian, Samoan, other (specify)).

Why should they care that someone’s Asian background is Japanese, as opposed to Korean, but not care that my European background, say, is Romanian and Polish, and not German or Czech? It seems odd.

Still, regardless of the curiosities, filling out the form could hardly be more straightforward. Which is why a segment of today’s Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC radio struck me as silly:

Census: The 10 Questions

Assistant Regional Census Manager Allison Cenac walks listeners through the 2010 Census form, question by question.

And, yet, on the show’s web page, there are quite a number of questions about it. I guess “straightforward” is a relative thing, and there are always edge cases.

But I like the woman who asks, in question 11, if he’ll also walk us through our tax forms. Now there is something that’s not at all straightforward for a good many of us.

Ooh! The time is getting nigh. I’d better get on that....

Jumbles and anagrams

“GORAC”

I’ve always liked doing those Jumble puzzles in the paper. And I’ve found them to be very easy.

CARGO

“TIDEF”

I don’t really set out to do them, actually. I see them somewhere, and I just idly look at them, and do them in my head while I’m standing there.

FETID

“NIROPS”

I might see one sitting on a nearby table at a coffee shop, and look at it upside-down while I’m stirring sugar into my coffee.

PRISON

“SHOIBY”

And, really, in the time it takes to put a little sugar in and snag a few paper napkins, I’ll have the thing done. My mind just happens to work that way, so that they mostly seem to fall right out for me. Not always, but more than 90% of the time.

BOYISH

Anagrams, though, are different. Here, we just have jumbled-up letters that you have to un-mix and turn into a word. But anagrams are all words — two words or phrases that make sense, and that have the same letters but in different orders.

The words “stop”, “spot”, “pots”, “post”, and “tops” are a set of anagrams.

And back in January 2008, BoingBoing showed us that “subtext” and “buttsex” are anagrams — they both fit as solutions to the jumble “euttsxb”. Who’d have imagined?

The best anagrams, riffing off the subtext of “buttsex”, are ones that have some sort of connection to each other. Preferably an amusing connection.

For example, “woman Hitler” is an anagram of “mother-in-law”. (Yes: punctuation and capitalization usually don’t count, and can be altered to suit.) In a similar vein, “he bugs Gore” is an anagram of “George Bush”.

And, while we’re on political figures, I’ll note that humourist Dave Barry pointed out, in one of his long-ago columns, that “Spiro Agnew” can be anagrammed into “grow a penis”. (OK, there’s no connection there: it’s just funny.)

These take much more creativity than just solving jumble puzzles does. And some anagrams that members of the National Puzzler’s League have come up with are quite different, involved, and truly amazing.

On the simple side, “beneath Chopin” becomes “the piano bench”, “moon starer” is “astronomer”, and “the desert oasis” “does ease thirst”.

Moving a step up, we have these:
I’d trust to these men in a scrape  =  the United States Marine Corps
oh, what stunning memento  =  the Washington Monument
theater to harmonious people  =  the Metropolitan Opera House
gem which cleans in a trice  =  electric washing machine
North hit a snag in career  =  the Iran-Contra hearings

One of my favourites:
inhaled, contrary to ban  =  tetrahydrocannabinol

One of the truly amazing ones:
can tell thee Hester hath worn an “A” bitterly  =  “The Scarlet Letter”, by Nathaniel Hawthorne

And, finally, one that’s absolutely unbelievable:

In one of the Bard’s best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten.

...is an anagram of...

To be or not to be; that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

---

The Jumble words early in this post are from the Jumble puzzle that was in the newspaper on 13 Jan 2010.

More user-interface follies

In days of old, when knights were bold, and they kept their data on large reels of magnetic tape, the tapes were stored in a central tape library, and were mounted by request on mainframe computers. Each tape in the library was given a volume serial. One requested a tape by its volume serial, which was six characters — letters and numbers.

Once in a while, one might need a fresh tape to write information to, which one would then read back in the same program, and the tape would not need to be kept in the library afterward. These were called scratch tapes, and the volume serial “SCRTCH” was reserved for such requests.

Now, if you needed a scratch tape and made the mistake of requesting it as “SCRATCH”, the program that handled the mount requests would see that you used seven characters, and volume serials could not be more than six. But more than that, it actually recognized the specific name “SCRATCH” and gave an error message similar to this:

Error: Scratch tapes should be requested as "SCRTCH".

And you had to re-submit the request with the “correct” volume serial.

This was just stupid. The computer knew what you meant. There was no question about it. So why complain and make you re-submit? Just do it!

There was a lot of that sort of thing back then. But, hey, those were the old days, and we’d never do that any more, right?

Well, not right. We still do it plenty.

We’ve all gotten automated email that said, somewhere in it, “Please do not reply to this automatically generated email. Instead, direct any questions to frobozz@example.com.” Now, there’s a header field called “Reply-To” that can be put into any email message, and that every email program understands, which controls what address the reply goes to. All they had to do to make replies work the way they and you want them to was to put this into the headers of the message:

Reply-To: frobozz@example.com

But they didn’t. Lazy programming, poor human factors.

On the other hand, it might be intentional: they might actually not want you to reply, and by making you take the extra step of manually entering the reply address (or even using copy/paste) instead of just clicking “Reply”, they may be discouraging it.

But, then, the other day I got the online proxy materials for the 2010 IBM Stockholder Meeting. It includes a control number that allows me to vote my shares online, and it looks like this:

Proxy Login Details:
Control Number:1234 5566 7788 999

Note: When voting your shares, please DO NOT cut and paste the 15-digit Control Number. You will need to enter the 15-digit Control Number without the spaces.

Yeah, that’s just stupidity, unmitigated. It’s pretty likely that a good number of folks will transcribe a 15-digit number incorrectly, and it’s an avoidable situation. They could include the number without the spaces, so it can be copied and pasted. Even better, the web server could simply strip out spaces, dashes, or whatever, before passing it on to the proxy-vote handler. And in this case, they want you to do it and get it right, so the issue with the Reply-To doesn’t apply here.

More lazy programming, more poor human factors.

[I copied-and-pasted the number into a text editor, deleted the spaces, then copied-and-pasted that into the web page. It worked fine. But I suspect most people would just type it in, and then utter discouraging words if they typed it wrong.]

We need to think about this stuff when we provide user interfaces. Stop making every user do the work. Take an extra few minutes to help them out.

Lost in translation

Not surprisingly, machine translations are getting better, and will keep doing so. In a recent New York Times article about improvements to Google’s translator, we get a story of when Google co-founder Sergey Brin put some Korean into the translator they had available in 2004, and got out “The sliced raw fish shoes it wishes. Google green onion thing!” Yes, Google green onion thing; high praise, indeed.

This reminded me of something from 2005. A Korean who was trying to put together his own IMAP server was having a problem with it, and he posted a question to the imap-use mailing list. The message had obviously been machine-translated from Korean:

How are you?

It used sendmail + wu-imap in this time and it constructed the web mail. (It used Java mail API.)

But it will be a mail box where the file where the maildir is not is composed of one and sees, the mail box dosage will go over and only 3 mega that the loading which will hang the bedspread where the place hour which it does is caught too much long.

To after loading it is quick once, the bedspread.

Original like this probably slow bedspread?

Does not if not and there is a different option the case song which it does?Loading to be quick initially in only minimum information loading the case song where is not a possibility of doing?

It was clear that this was a real question, but it was also clear that there was no hope of deciphering it.

I sent a private note to the guy who posted the question, told him that the translation was unusable, and asked him to send me the question in Korean. He did, and I gave it to a Korean-American colleague, who provided me with a usable translation, which resulted in a good answer to the question.

Unfortunately, I didn’t keep the original Korean version, so I can’t put it back through a translator now, to see whether the result would be better.

We also never did figure out what Korean word kept getting turned into “bedspread”. The guy who ultimately translated it had no idea.

In a related story, a Taiwanese seller was once selling something on both American and German eBay (and probably in other countries, as well). The seller had put the English — which was itself somewhat spotty — through machine translation to get the German, and there were a few amusing things in it. The best was in the payment instructions: “Kein Kabeljau,” it said. “No codfish.” Or, as the original English had said, “No COD.”

Carnivals!

It's Pi Day. Pi time on Pi day, 3/14, 1:59 pm, by New York reckoning. Daylight Saving Time.

Happy Pi Day!

Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:

• Skeptics’ Circle #132 (this issue has been skipped).
• Carnival of Mathematics #63.
• Carnival of the Godless #137.

I ♥ NY, hellholes and all

For the latest example of People With More Time Than Sense, we look in my back yard, turning to the mayor of Peekskill, New York. Mayor Mary Foster took great offense at a Saturday Night Live sketch in which a mock Governor Paterson said, “Well, I’m going to do a farewell tour of upstate New York — hellholes like Plattsburgh and Peekskill.”

Rather than embracing the joke and rolling with it, Ms Foster decided to prove that being mayor doesn’t really entail much, and leaves her time to worry about this stuff. (Plattsburgh’s Mayor David Kasprzak did embrace the joke, according to the article, making him much funnier than Mayor Foster, but showing that he has even more free time.)

Does she really not know that SNL makes fun of everything? The faux Governor Paterson was also tossing merciless insults at Governor Paterson. Get a job, Mayor Foster (and the six residents who sent her email, complaining).

Romare Bearden

On this day in 1988 we lost one of my favourite American artists, painter and collagist Romare Bearden. His unique style is instantly recognizable, as I saw a week ago when I visited the New York State Museum, and spied a Bearden from across the room. Whether the work is a collage or a painting, in oil or in watercolour, you can rely on it to be vivid and engaging.

I had the pleasure of seeing the extensive Bearden exhibition when it stopped for a while in 2004 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. And let me say, if another Bearden exhibition should make the rounds, you should go out of your way to see it.

My favourites include Piano Lesson (1983), Card Players (1982), Quilting Time (1981), Up at Minton’s (1980), At the Savoy (1974), Three Folk Musicians (1967), and the massive and striking The Block (1971).

See the Romare Bearden Foundation web site for a good biography and a broad selection of his works.

Girl Scout at the door

A girl came to the door on Tuesday, selling Girl Scout cookies. Oh, what the heck: I bought a few boxes, if for no other reason than that she trod up my 300-foot driveway to ask.

She was only taking orders at this point, and she’ll come back to deliver them. I had to pick the kinds and the amounts, and fill out the order form, and, while the weather was very nice on Tuesday, it’s still on the chilly side. “Come in out of the cold,” said I, “while I decide what I want and fill this out.”

“Um, actually, I’m supposed to stay outside,” the girl replied. Yes, of course she is, and I said as much and went about choosing and writing, with the door open and the young entrepreneuse on the stoop making suggestions.

But it makes me sad about what we’ve made of the world. Our perception of things is very different from how it was when I was Scout girl’s age.

This despite that we were probably too permissive with this sort of thing in the past: it was probably never the best idea for a child to disappear into the house of someone the parents didn’t already know, with whom they didn’t already have an appropriately trusting relationship.

We have long ago left the safe environment of the village. Sigh.

Plagiarize! Let no one else’s work evade your eyes.

In case you haven’t been following the latest New York Times plagiarism scandal, you can get a good summary from ombudsman Clark Hoyt’s March 6th Public Editor column:

ZACHERY KOUWE, a Times business reporter for a little over a year, resigned last month after he was accused of plagiarizing from The Wall Street Journal. An internal review of his work turned up more articles — he said he was shown four — containing copy clearly lifted from other news sources.

Mr Hoyt calls for a full accounting by the Times, listing all the instances they turned up where plagiarism was clear, and telling readers what’s being done to address the situation in general, beyond the dismissal of Mr Kouwe.

For Mr Kouwe’s part, according to Mr Hoyt he expressed his own surprise at being shown what he’d done. It’s an honest mistake, he says, editing copied material in without remembering that it had been copied, thinking that it was his own writing.

I find this completely puzzling.

I’ve never worked at a news desk, and have never had the pressure, stress, competitiveness, and tight deadlines for my writing that Mr Kouwe faced, and that his colleagues still do. Perhaps it’s the pressure and deadlines that explain it. Perhaps when one is under that kind of stress, one does forget. And yet....

1. When I get source material, I keep it separate. And I never include it without attribution. Look around these pages: there’s nothing that shows up here written by someone else, unless it’s within quotation marks or in a <blockquote>. I can’t understand how a professional writer can carelessly mix up his own writing with copied material.
2. I know my own writing. Perhaps more to the point, I know what’s not my own writing. Once in a while, there’ll probably be something that could go either way, but in general I can just look at something and say, “That’s not mine; I didn’t write that.”

I want to believe Mr Kouwe when he says that it was an accident. I just find it very hard to. And, anyway, I doubt he’ll be working for any reputable news organization again. But what am I to think when the next journalist makes a similar claim?

In any case, dear readers, be assured that every sentence, clause, or phrase in these pages is my own, unless it’s clearly identified otherwise.

[Thanks to Tom Lehrer for this post’s title.]

Plagiarize!
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes.
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes.
So don’t shade your eyes,
But plagiarize! Plagiarize! Plagiarize!
(Only be sure always to call it, please, “research”.)

— Tom Lehrer, “Lobachevsky”

The Censusman Cometh

It’s 2010.

Notice that the year number ends in a zero. That means it’s time for the decennial United States Census, and that’s cool for a couple of reasons. One is that we get to use the very cool word “decennial”, and the other is that we get to be counted. And if more of us live here, and fewer of you live there, well, we get more money, more representatives in Congress, more teachers, more hospitals, more firefighters, more... well, we get more. You see.

Imagine, then, how excited I was yesterday, when I found in the day’s post an envelope from the U.S. Census Bureau! Breathlessly, I tore it open, pen in hand, ready to do my civic duty.

Imagine, then, how disappointed I was yesterday, when I found in the envelope not a census form to complete, but a letter, just three paragraphs long, bidding me keep my anticipation hot for just a little while longer, just another week:

Dear Resident:

About one week from now, you will receive a 2010 Census form in the mail. When you receive your form, please fill it out and mail it promptly.

Your response is important. Results from the 2010 Census will be used to help each community get its fair share of government funds for highways, schools, health facilities, and many other programs you and your neighbors need. Without a complete, accurate census, your community may not receive its fair share.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Sincerely,

Robert M. Groves
Director, U.S. Census Bureau

The letter was even dated “March 8, 2010”, the very day that it was received. Quite a coordinated mailing, yes?

Quite an amazing, coordinated, monstrous waste of money!

Here: let’s send everyone a letter, telling them to expect a letter next week. OK, well: anyone who would ignore the census form will ignore this letter too, don’t you think? Can you imagine someone opening this and saying, “Damn, it’s a good job they sent this! Otherwise, I’d have completely missed the form when it finally arrived, but now, now I’ll be a-watchin’ for it, you bet!”?

No, I can’t imagine that either.

The U.S. Census Bureau has been doing a lot of advertising, promoting the 2010 Census (I guess I’d better capitalize it too), and I think that’s been a good use of their money.

This is not; this is just stupid.

Who’s not on the Internet?

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has reported on a survey of non-Internet households:

For many Americans, having high-speed access to the Internet at home is as vital as electricity, heat and water. And yet about one-third of the population, 93 million people, have elected not to connect.

It’s not surprising that the ranks of the non-connected are disproportionately

1. older,
2. rural residents, and
3. less affluent.

It’s also not surprising that the reasons given for not opting into the Information Superhighway (remember that moniker?) include

1. cost,
2. discomfort with computers, and
3. the view that that the Internet is a "waste of time".

Congress wants the FCC to provide a plan for increasing the adoption of broadband Internet access, and the guy who managed the survey says that lack of Internet access puts those people “at a distinct disadvantage.”

Well, yes and no.

In the early 1990s, as the worldwide web was beginning to take off, a couple in their 80s asked me if they “need a computer.” Hm, I said, that depends upon what you mean by “need.” I suggested that if they wanted to learn about computers and the Internet, and embrace the upcoming technology, they absolutely should get a computer. But they don’t need one. I still think that’s true.

Whether you need to be on the Internet, and are “at a distinct disadvantage” without it, is still a question of what you will do with it, and what stage of your life you’re in.

Children — and families with children — are almost certainly at a distinct disadvantage without ready access to the Internet. The educational and social opportunities that such children will miss are crucial, and that lack will affect the children for the rest of their lives. Unfamiliarity with using computers and the Internet will limit job possibilities. For a child in school today, not being on the Internet is almost like not being able to read and write.

Middle-aged adults may be at a disadvantage if they have a job — or hope to get one — for which it’s important to be computer- and Internet-savvy. If they have school-aged kids, of course, they should also be providing Internet access to them, and it’d also be good for them to be able to supervise what they do, and perhaps help them.

But there are plenty of people who can happily choose whether or not to deal with the Internet without being at any disadvantage for their choice. At least for now, we can still buy things in stores, we can still listen to the radio and read newspapers, we can still call people on telephones, we can still watch television. For those who feel the Internet is a waste of time, it probably is. We can easily get through life without the Internet, even if some of us find that hard to fathom.

One third? Yeah, I figure that’s a good estimate of the portion of the population that can manage without the Internet. The most compelling reason to address that portion is that the third that doesn’t have it is probably not the right third (the “less affluent”, above, for example).

I dance the body electric

Researchers are playing with ways to turn body energy into usable electricity:

It may not seem like it, but even the laziest of couch potatoes is a human dynamo. The act of breathing — of moving the ribs to draw air into the lungs and expel it — can generate about a watt of power. And if the potato actually gets up off the couch and walks briskly across the room, each heel strike can produce even more power, about 70 watts’ worth.

[...]

Michael C. McAlpine of Princeton and colleagues have developed a promising approach for converting body movements into electricity. They’ve printed piezoelectric crystals onto flexible, biocompatible rubberlike material.

Of course, when I hear about brisk walking and heel strikes, well, the next thing I think about is dancing — contradancing, square dancing, ballroom dancing — and how we could take advantage of human-generated electricity to power the dances.

We could use the power to run the amplifiers for the music, and even to power the lights. If the juice should run a bit low, the band would play something a little faster, kick up the tempo and get us moving more.

This could really appeal to the “green” community of contradancers, to whom the idea of a self-sustaining dance even would really have some appeal. Imagine a dancer-powered dance weekend! In fact, a couple of years ago, the big Dance Flurry up in Saratoga Springs fell victim to a regional power failure, which was quite disastrous for the festival. Hey, if they’d had foot power to fall back on, they could have salvaged more than they did (though the hotel rooms would still have been cold).

And think of where this could take Dance Dance Revolution. Get enough true aficionados together, and they could replace a whole coal-burning plant!

[Thanks and apologies to Walt Whitman for the title. I suppose that if Ray Bradbury and Weather Report can steal it, well, so can I.]

Sketch me!

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while, just as a lark. To the right is a sketch of me that was done as I had a beer (several, I’m sure, to tell the truth of it^[1]) in McSorley’s Old Ale House in 1982. Click it, as usual, to enlarge.

I didn’t know the guy was sketching it, and when he finished he showed it to me, and then offered it up; I liked it, and I took it and thanked him. I presume he was a student at nearby Cooper Union, just around the corner from McSorley’s, but he as well might have been from anywhere around New York City. One can expect artists of various sorts to pop out in Greenwich Village and SoHo.

I didn’t get his name, either. If I read the signature correctly, it’s Dan McVeigh. A Google search of that name turns up a singer/songwriter from Ontario, which is probably not the same guy. So I guess I don’t have an early sketch by a famous artist, here. It might have been worth thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands, even — you never know. But, no, not likely.

In any case, I still like it, and I scanned it some years ago. And here it is, now shared with the world.

---

^[1] McSorley’s, at the age of 156 now, is the oldest bar in New York City. Until 1970, women weren’t allowed in, and when I used to go there with my cousin and his NYU-alumni friends, there was still but one loo in the back, shared by all. Beers were two for a dollar in 1982 — they would only sell them two apiece — and we were there to drink many of them that afternoon.

I haven’t been there in years, and I wonder what the beers cost now. I should pay it a visit. I have neither the capacity nor the inclination to have as many as I did at 25, but the place has a character that I’d like to experience again.

Green pictures of dead presidents

Here’s a blog post with a collection of money “defaced” and turned into art. There are some interesting ones there (I like number 6, 12, 15, 23, 29, and 30, particularly... and you sorta have to love 18 for its sheer excess).

Going in the other direction, though, is a work of art that’s in San Francisco’s de Young Museum of fine arts. Over there on the right is a picture I took of it last summer (click to enlarge).

It’s a portrait of George Washington... made from a boatload of folded-up dollar bills (each of which has, of course, the very portrait of George Washington on it. To top it off, the piece, by Ray Beldner, is called E Pluribus Unum, a slogan that appears on each bill and means “from many, one,” which also describes the construction of the piece itself.

So, instead of doing art on a piece of paper money, this takes a bunch of pieces of paper money and turns them into a work of art. And it has that bit of recursion to it that pleasantly warms a computer programmer’s heart.

[The title of this post is the title of a song by Jon Sirkis.]

Stop-and-frisk, and the 4th amendment

Profiling is a controversial topic — I barely need to say that, really. Among the general public, there are those who feel that they have nothing to hide (though, let’s be honest, those tend to be those who don’t usually “fit the profile”), and those who feel over-burdened by profiled stops. There’s the common sarcastic comment that someone was “pulled over for Driving While Black.”

Even among the police, there are two sides. Stick a “profiler” into a kidnapping investigation, and you’ll see plenty of animosity, as the “real investigators” just want to do their jobs, while the profiler is giving them sometimes-vague, wispy ideas about the kidnapper. His parents are probably divorced. Probably. He doesn’t like his mother. Where’s that going to lead the investigation?

Yet we rely on some sorts of profiles to narrow our searches, to give us a better chance of finding the wrongdoers. Obviously, when we have a specific description for a specific crime, it makes the job possible, especially in a city of 8 million residents. We know the guy who snatched the purse was a young white man with blonde hair, about five-foot-eight, 160 pounds, wearing a denim jacket. There’s a physical profile. There’s no point in stopping black men or Latinos, nor tall white men, nor bald white men (he could have shaved his head after the robbery, of course, but...).

But that profile is sufficient narrow and sufficiently focused on the crime at hand to be useful. What if we just generally thought that purse snatchers are most often young white blonde men, and we just started shaking down every white guy under 25 with blonde hair? Would that be acceptable, do you think?

And so we have New York City’s stop-and-frisk policy, which results in a huge number of blacks being stopped, and a pretty heft number of Latinos as well. Very few of these stops result in arrests, and the police department’s own statistics say that, apart from that, very few really had much cause to be stopped. It’s just that the officers involved felt that they had a plausible reason to stop them.

The fact is, of course, that a police officer can always claim a plausible reason to stop you. You were, he need only say, “acting suspiciously,” such a vague observation that it can’t possibly be contested. Maybe you were looking around furtively — or maybe you weren’t sure which way you needed to go, or maybe the officer just needed something to say.

The fourth amendment to the U.S. Constitution is meant to protect us from “unreasonable searches and seizures”:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The trouble is that if the police needed to get a warrant to stop a criminal on the street, every street thug would get away. So the courts have adjusted things, allowing an officer of the law to assess probable cause personally, in minute-to-minute situations, where warrants are impractical. Like when they’re chasing a purse snatcher, or a suspected one.

And, of course, as happens with these sorts of things, that allowance for judgment is being abused. Most disturbing, though, is that it’s not just being abused by officers on the street, but it’s being abused by department policy sent down from the top levels of the city’s government.

New York City’s streets are not being made safer by these shakedowns, nor by the subsequent privacy disaster of keeping permanent records of everyone they’ve stopped. What’s more, the practice is eroding what connections have been established between the police and the communities. This policy has police officers performing unreasonable searches, in violation of the fourth amendment. It needs to be shut down.

Demise of the bake sale?

We seem to have a series on education this week, and today’s entry looks at what used to be an institution in learning institutions: the bake sale. A policy panel of the Department of Education in New York City has unanimously approved a policy change that will ban the sale of home-baked cakes, brownies, and cookies, but will allow the sale of Pop-Tarts, packaged cookies, and Doritos.

In what is truly a WTF? move, the city is attempting to ensure healthier foods available for purchase — the rules specify maximum calorie counts, maximum fat levels, and such, and ban homemade items because “it’s impossible to know what the content is, or what the portion size is.”

And, yet, it simply seems ludicrous to forbid dad’s zucchini bread and mom’s cranberry cookies, but to allow Pop-Tarts and Chips Ahoy. A kid won’t be able to buy a mini-loaf of multigrain health bread, but can snag four bags of Doritos.

Yes, that makes sense.

Ms. Puccini, whose children attend the Children’s Workshop School in the East Village, said the regulation appeared to be a “blatant attempt by food companies such as Pepsi-Cola and Kellogg’s to reap enormous profits at the expense of our children” — an opinion shared by many of the more than 200 readers who commented on an In the Schools item on City Room this week outlining the policy. Ms. Puccini added that the school should focus on eliminating the high-fructose corn syrup in many cafeteria items.

Indeed. The Department of Education should not be trying to regulate this stuff. It needs to look to make its mark elsewhere.

He wrote the book

Teachers, especially at the college level, have been using their own books for textbooks for a long time, and that’s a fine thing. In college, we’d often want to have a particular professor for a class because “he wrote the book.” But now, textbook publisher McMillan will be introducing changeable textbooks that allow teachers not only to reorganize the material that’s there, but actually to rewrite sections as they want them to be. It will let them rewrite the book.

In a kind of Wikipedia of textbooks, Macmillan, one of the five largest publishers of trade books and textbooks, is introducing software called DynamicBooks, which will allow college instructors to edit digital editions of textbooks and customize them for their individual classes.

Professors will be able to reorganize or delete chapters; upload course syllabuses, notes, videos, pictures and graphs; and perhaps most notably, rewrite or delete individual paragraphs, equations or illustrations.

“Readers,” the Times asks, “can modify content on the Web, so why not in books?”

The good side of this, of course, is that teachers will be able to correct real errors, update changing information, and point students to new studies and results, without having to wait for a new edition of the book to come out. But, really, teachers have been doing that forever, by providing adjuvant material to accompany the textbook — in my school days, it was a few mimeographed sheets, or lecture material that students were expected to note themselves.

“There’s an error in the textbook,” we might have been told, or “We have new information since the textbook was printed.” That worked for us, and it made the process quite visible.

But the answer to the Times’ question is that with this mechanism, changes can be made quietly, without an opportunity for review, without pointing out what the changes were.

Creationist science teachers can undermine their science classes by altering the sections about evolution.

Racist or sexist history teachers can alter history, minimizing the contributions of certain people.

Teachers can change information simply because they disagree with it, perhaps because of political, social, or religious ideology.

Even when the changes are intended to correct facts, it’s harder to identify the corrections, and, so, harder to determine whether the corrections are themselves actually correct.

This technology certainly has potential. I wonder, though, how it will turn out to be used — and abused — and whether it will work in practice.

I guess we’ll just have to see. I hope someone will be watching very closely.

Open criticism on the Internet

With the backing of the ACLU, a young woman is now, a few years after the fact, going to court to sue her high school principal. The principal suspended her from school for creating a Facebook page that criticized her English teacher.

The student, Katherine Evans, is seeking to have her suspension expunged from her disciplinary record. School officials suspended her for three days, saying she had been “cyberbullying” the teacher, Sarah Phelps. Ms. Evans is also seeking a “nominal fee” for what she argues was a violation of her First Amendment rights, her lawyers said, and payment of her legal fees.

[...]

She turned to Facebook to vent her frustration. At home on her computer, Ms. Evans created a Facebook page titled “Ms. Sarah Phelps is the worst teacher I’ve ever had” and invited past and current students of Ms. Phelps to post their own comments.

Some students wrote comments agreeing with Ms. Evans’s criticism of Ms. Phelps. Others offered support for the teacher. After a few days, Ms. Evans took down the Facebook page.

This seems a straightforward thing, to me. Students have caricatured, mocked, and criticized their teachers probably since the day teachers came to exist. Of course, when I was in school, we were limited to drawing the caricatures in our notebooks, writing taunting comments surreptitiously on the blackboards, and passing insults and name-calling by word of mouth. We didn’t have the Internet.

Now, there are web sites where one can “rate” teachers. Kids can savage their teachers on blogs, on Twitter, on social networking sites, openly or semi-anonymously. That Ms Evans chose to do it openly, and, in fact, in a way that allowed expressions of support as well as criticism, strikes me as a demonstration of more of a sense of fairness than one might generally expect. That there were no threats involved says to me that this was handled in a reasonable way by the students.

And in an unreasonable way by the school administration. This is exactly the sort of free exchange that should accepted... even encouraged, and used as a “teaching moment”. The educators involved should have shown that they were not afraid of free speech used responsibly, and that open criticism does not undermine their authority.

Instead, they damaged their authority and credibility themselves by overreacting. I hope Ms Evans wins her suit, so that the educators can be the ones who learn from the experience.