Redistricting

Following the results of the 2010 census, many states are preparing to reorganize their congressional districts, as they gain or lose U.S. representatives (see here and here). My state, New York, will lose two of its 29 seats. Nearby New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Ohio will each lose one seat.

Meanwhile, states that have grown in population in the last ten years — Texas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, and others — will gain seats. This all makes sense from the view of having representation based on population, and the chart of the most and least populated congressional districts in the second link above is an interesting one.

There are two things about this that are bothersome, though.

The first is how we go about the redistricting. It’s done state by state, of course, with each state deciding its own rules. Most states (New York included) have their legislatures do it, which makes it a very partisan process. Districts are defined in ways designed to maximize the number of seats controlled by one particular party, the one that holds the majority in the legislature at the time of the redistricting.

Creating oddly shaped districts for these manipulative purposes is called gerrymandering, and it’s a very anti-democratic process. New York hasn’t fared too badly in that regard as far as the U.S. congressional districts go. Our worst example — notorious, really — is the 28^th congressional district, which is likely to be absorbed by neighbouring districts in this redistricting pass anyway. By artificially grouping the (Democratic) northern Buffalo suburbs in with Rochester, using a thin connecting strip along Lake Ontario, it protects the more rural 26^th district for a Republican representative.

It makes much more sense to make the redistricting non-partisan. States should create redistricting committees that are separated from the political process and not answerable to the legislature, and empower them to deal with the necessary changes.

The second bothersome thing is the effect redistricting has on the presidential elections. Because the electoral votes each state gets is directly related to the number of the state’s senators and congressional representatives, New York will collectively lose two votes — in the 2012 election we’ll get 29 electors instead of 31.

You might say that that’s as it should be, since our population has gone down, and I’d partly agree. The problem is that the effect is indirect, and, in a sense, New Yorkers — especially Republican New Yorkers, but the same is true for Democratic Texans — are disenfranchised in the presidential elections. In 2008, I could say with essentially 100% confidence that New York would give 31 electors to the Democratic presidential candidate, no matter how I cast my vote. Whether I voted for Mr Obama, Mr McCain, Mr Nader, Mr Barr, Ms McKinney... or whether I wrote in Pat Paulsen... it didn’t matter in the slightest.

In the 2012 presidential election, Republicans in New York will be slightly better off, in that they will know that New York will give only 29 electors to the Democratic candidate, rather than 31. Yet it still won’t matter how they vote. Redistricting gives a moderate shuffle to the numbers ever three presidential elections, but it still does nothing to address the underling problem of the obsolete electoral college.

So it’s time to put in another plug for the National Popular Vote plan, a mechanism to get each voter’s vote to count equally. New York has signed onto it, along with Illinois, New Jersey, Washington, Massachusetts, Maryland, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia. There’s widespread support, but we need to push more state legislatures to adopt it.

Good vs God

This morning, a friend pointed me to this article about a Catholic priest from Belgium who was being considered for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, when it came out that he had sexually abused a boy some 40 years ago.

Reading about that can lead one’s thoughts in various directions. Good people do bad things. Bad people do good things. Is this (this case in particular, and the whole Catholic-priests-raping-children issue in general) an example of the one or of the other? Or is it just that people aren’t black and white, and there’s good and bad in everyone?

What role does religion play in this? Maybe the teachings of the priest’s church had a role in moving him toward the good work he’d done, the stuff that put him on the short list for the Nobel prize. Then again, maybe he was inclined to do that sort of thing from the start, and that led him to the priesthood, with thoughts of service.

How do we judge causes and effects in situations like this?

And, ultimately, why does the Catholic church as an organization continue to try to hide these reports and downplay their importance, and why does it refuse to just open the whole thing up, admit and apologize for it, and seriously clean house? It’s clear that the scandal has harmed the church’s reputation and driven people away from it, and that attempts to cover it up aren’t working and are only exacerbating the ill effects.

Besides: trying to hide it is simply wrong, morally and ethically. I don’t need God to tell me that; I’ve talked before about people who wave their belief in God as a moral flag, yet do bad things every day, and we have a book about how people find morality outside of religion. If the Catholic church aims to give moral guidance to a billion people, it needs to be morally secure itself.

Of course, it’s all about power: those in power want to stay there, and being fully open about the sexual abuse would result in the downfall of many at and near the top of the hierarchy, likely including the odious Benedict XVI. The work has to come from below; those at the lower levels of the church hierarchy who do have the moral stability for it, and who are as outraged as I am about what has gone on and what continues to go on, have to be the ones to get the cleanup moving.

I'm dreaming of a white Boxing Day

As you’ve probably heard, we in the northeast got our first major snow of the season on Sunday. In New York, the airports were pretty much closed on Monday, in the aftermath (more than 1500 flights were cancelled), as were most of the commuter trains into the city. Even the subway system was screwed up. Things are getting back to normal, but aren't quite there yet.

Here’s the dig-out on Monday morning:

Taking anti-spam work personally

Via Brent, comes the AP story of a man who quit his job, went to law school, and now sues spammers:

Eight years ago, Balsam was working as a marketer when he received one too many e-mail pitches to enlarge his breasts.

Enraged, he launched a Web site called Danhatesspam.com, quit a career in marketing to go to law school and is making a decent living suing companies who flood his e-mail inboxes with offers of cheap drugs, free sex and unbelievable vacations.

I feel like I’m doing a little bit of good cleaning up the Internet, Balsam said.

As Brent says, Go! Go! Go!

As for me, I say it’s too bad I didn’t have the confidence to do something like that when I left IBM.

Follow-up on placebos

I wanted to do a follow-up to Friday’s post about a ridiculously flawed study of the effect of placebos. I have two follow-up points.

Point 1: The study is not blinded, but that is not a problem, as I see it. There are two types of blinding used in studies:

1. Blinding relative to the subjects: the subjects don’t know which group they’re in (and sometimes don’t know specifically what’s being studied). This reduces the influence of the subjects’ expectations and biases on the results.
2. Blinding relative to the researchers: the researchers don’t know which group a given subject is in. This reduces effects that the researchers’ behaviour toward the subjects will have on the results.

For this study, the whole point was not to blind it to the subjects. And since the subjects are either being treated or not, there’s nothing to blind relative to the researchers, either. The problem with the study isn’t the lack of blinding, but the bias that the instructions to the subjects provides.

Point 2: I see a reasonable way to evaluate what these researchers want to evaluate, which fixes the bias problem — or, more accurately, which makes that bias part of the study itself. It involves what I’ll call half blinding relative to the researchers.

Get, say, 300 subjects, and divide them into three groups of 100. Group A gets no treatment, just as one group got in the existing study. Groups B and C each get identical bottles labelled PLACEBO. Each bottle contains identical pills. Each bottle contains an instruction sheet that only the subjects see, and each subject is told to read his sheet and not to discuss with anyone what it says.

The instruction sheets for group B would say, This bottle contains placebo pills made of an inert substance, like sugar pills, that have been shown in clinical studies to produce significant improvement in IBS symptoms through mind-body self-healing processes.

The instruction sheets for group C would say, This bottle contains placebo pills made of an inert substance, like sugar pills, that have no effect whatsoever. They will not affect your symptoms in any way.

Now, if groups B and C have similar results, we can legitimately say that placebos have their effect even when the subjects know they’re getting them. But if, as I suspect, group C has results comparable to those of group A, then what we’ve shown is that telling people the placebos are effective is the same as not calling them placebos — setting up the expectation of effectiveness is what gives the results.

If you want to call that mind-body self-healing processes, that’s fine with me. Well, almost fine: it’s not healing; it’s symptom relief. That your mind can help you feel better is no surprise. But it’s not going to heal your cancer, repair your liver damage, or kill viruses. Unless, perhaps, someone can show, with a properly designed study, that it can.

Merry Happy

Someone’s high on placebos

On Wednesday, this paper, published in PLoS ONE, hit the popular news in the medicine/science category, with articles such as this one from MedPage Today and this, from Reuters. The headlines are consistent, implying that the study has shown that the placebo effect works even when patients know that they’re getting placebos.

From the MedPage article:

While this may seem counterintuitive, the results suggest that physicians don’t have to resort to deception to harness the power of the placebo effect, Kaptchuk explained in an interview.

Conventional wisdom says that in order for a placebo to work you have to convince the patient that they are taking a real drug, he told MedPage Today.

However, the brain appears to respond to placebo in a way that conditions like IBS are susceptible to, Kaptchuk noted.

Counterintuitive, indeed, and enough so that it merits some serious scrutiny. My first thought was that the headlines are misrepresenting the study and the claims of the researchers, a common problem in the reporting of research in the popular press. But it seems that they are, indeed, reporting exactly what the researchers are saying, here.

I’ll note that the paper appears in a Public Library of Science (PLoS) journal, rather than in some other, more respected medical journal (such as NEJM or BMJ). I’ll also note that the lead researcher, Ted Kaptchuk, is associated with Harvard’s Division for Research and Education in Complementary and Integrative Medical Therapies, a connection the press just puts forth as Harvard, downplaying the fact that he does complementary medicine.

Those aren’t reasons to ignore his research or his results, of course. But they are points that should make us ask questions. On the other hand, we should ask questions with any study; that’s what science is about.

Now, the study is on IBS, which is a very subjective, catch-all condition of unknown etiology. They mention in the article that they expect this effect to work also with conditions such as fibromyalgia and chronic pain — also subjective conditions of unknown etiology — and depression and anxiety, more highly subjective stuff. And the study itself is entirely subjective, using self reporting exclusively, and not measuring anything.

That could be OK. If we’re looking for cures, we need to measure; if we’re looking for symptom relief, well, if you think you feel better, then you feel better. Where I have to scratch my head, though, is in wondering what their hypothesis was.

When you go into a study, you go in with a hypothesis, which your study might support or disprove. Even if it seems like you’re just wildly trying any drug that might work, you have a hypothesis: This drug might work. What’s the hypothesis, here? Placebos might work even if the patients know they’re placebos, is a valid hypothesis, I suppose, but to whom would it occur to even try that?

The answer shows up in the study: it would occur to people who think they can show mind-body self-healing processes. OK... again, a valid thing to consider. But that’s where we get into some problems.

We start with some very typical problems with medical studies... again, from MedPage:

Limitations of the trial included a relatively small sample size, too short duration to examine long-term effects, and the possibility of self-selection bias in that the trial may have selectively attracted IBS patients interested in mind-body interventions.

Many, many studies are too small, too brief, and suffer from various sorts of selection bias, and this one is no different. But to get the real kicker, we have to go into the paper itself and see how the placebos were presented to the patients:

Patients were randomized to either open-label placebo pills presented as placebo pills made of an inert substance, like sugar pills, that have been shown in clinical studies to produce significant improvement in IBS symptoms through mind-body self-healing processes or no-treatment controls with the same quality of interaction with providers.

Read that again. The patients were not told just that they were getting placebos. They were not told that what they were getting is an inert substance with no medical effect. They were told that what they were getting has been shown in clinical studies to produce significant improvement in IBS symptoms.

In other words, these pills are having exactly the same placebo effect as is well documented in pretty much every other medical study that involves placebos. And, to put the point forth directly, far from making this deception-free, they are deceiving the patients in the same way patients are deceived in every other administration of placebos.

Let’s line it all up:

1. You recruit people who have a condition that makes them feel horrible, that no one can tell them the cause of, and that no one has effective treatment for.
2. You give them a pill and you tell them that this has been shown to provide significant improvement for their condition.
3. They report that the pills did, indeed make them feel better.
4. You claim that you did not deceive them, because you told them they were getting placebos.

Bullshit. Whether or not you put the label placebo on it, you told them they were getting effective treatment. That biased the outcome, and the result should be no surprise to anyone. And it says... nothing. This study is worthless garbage.

Marketing: one size doesn't fit all

On the radio program Marketplace, yesterday, was an item about salespeople sending thank you notes to customers:

Sarah Siewert: And as soon as we got there, into the purse section, one of the saleswomen immediately approached us and was really attentive, she pulled purses from the back, she went through different options, different colors.

Marketplace: Typical shopping experience, right? As long as you get an attentive sales person, like Sarah did. She and her mom ended up buying a purse apiece. Then, a couple weeks later they both got letters in the mail from the saleswoman who’d helped them. They were thank you notes.

Sarah Siewert: It was a fully hand written note, referencing the exact bag we purchased. And on my note, she even had a nice reference to our alma mater.

The report went on to note that lots of stores, including JCPenney, are now doing this.

I find it interesting, because I think different customers will have different tolerance for that sort of thing. Perhaps women looking for high-end purses like it. I would not, particularly. And under some circumstances, I’d be very much put off by it.

First, I have to say that the fastest way to get me to leave your store is to be a salesperson who hovers and insists on helping when I’m just looking and don’t want help. I want the staff to be available, to show up just at the moment I’m looking for someone... but to stay out of my way, to disappear into the background and not to be anywhere near me, otherwise.

When I’m in looking mode, I want to be able to look at many items, pick some of them up, scrutinize them, check out the prices, put them down, maybe pick them up again, with no one interjecting choice bits about where this one is made, how good the quality of that one is, and so on. If I’m with someone, I want to be able to talk about the items with my companion, out of earshot of a sales rep.

When I’m ready for help, it’ll be obvious, as long as someone is paying attention. I’ll look around, trying to catch someone’s eye. I’ll have receptive body language, and I’ll be ready to ask questions and to listen to the answers.

And after the purchase, I don’t want follow-ups and junk mail. If you want me to come back to your store, do the right thing at the time of the sale, and then make sure you have things available that I want, at good prices. Do that, and I’ll be back, without anyone’s having to spend the time on a personal thank you note. Fail in that, and all the thank yous you care to send will do nothing.

Oh, and don’t call me by my first name, just because you saw it on my credit card. Very off-putting, indeed.

The FCC on network neutrality

Yesterday, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved new rules related to network neutrality. The rules are no surprise, nor was the approval — we’ve known the basic contents for some time, and they’re right along the lines of the Google/Verizon proposal from August.

Key points of contention are these:

1. The rules allow for paid access to higher data speeds in a way that leaves things open for non-neutral deal between carriers and providers of services or content.
2. By stressing that carriers must not block legal web sites, the FCC leaves a gaping hole, the size of which depends upon one’s definition of legal.
3. Wireless broadband is treated differently from wired, and the rules allow much more non-neutral behaviour on the wireless side.

On point one, let’s look at three situations, and see how they’re different. Suppose my cable provider gives me Internet service at 5 megabits per second, but offers to make that 15 megabits per second if I pay another $10/month. Is that consistent with network neutrality? Most of us would say that it is.

Now suppose my cable provider gives me Internet service at 5 megabits per second, but if I stream data from Netflix that’s capped at 1 megabit per second. Is that consistent with network neutrality? Most of us would say that it is not. If I’m paying for 5 megabits per second with no limit on the number of megabits, they should not be artificially slowing down a service they want to discourage.

OK, but let’s go in the other direction, and suppose Netflix makes a deal with my cable provider. Suppose Netflix pays them some fee, and the result is that I get my 5 megabits per second normally, but when I stream from Netflix I get 15 megabits per second. Is that consistent with network neutrality?

The new rules seem to say that it is. Is it the same as the first scenario, or different? Does it matter whether I, the subscriber pay for better service, or Netflix, the content provider, pays for better service? That’s a matter for debate. Some say it’s bad on its surface, and is inconsistent with network neutrality. Others say that as long as any provider is allowed to pay for the improved service, it’s OK (there can’t be an exclusive deal). Still others think exclusive deals are OK, as long as it’s improving service, and not penalizing someone outside the deal. Maybe, but isn’t that a relative thing?

My own opinion is that there’s a fundamental difference that hinges on who pays, who benefits, and who gets left aside. If I pay, I benefit, and all services I use benefit equally. That seems neutral. If a service provider pays, only their services benefit. That’s not neutral. On the other hand, this is rather like a manufacturer paying for preferential display of their items in a store, and we do that all the time. This is not a black-and-white issue.

On the second point, the legal web site point, we have the Justice Department’s recent action of shutting down web sites that are purported to violate copyright rules. If the FCC’s highlighting of the legal point makes it easier for Internet carriers to police the Internet, I think it’s a very bad thing. Enforcement should stay in the hands of the enforcement agencies.

To look at the third point, we need to remind ourselves that wireless, in this context, refers not to WiFi, but to broadband over cellular service. I find it hard to accept that there’s a need for or a benefit to treating the two differently. With smart phones and iPad devices, and others like them, 3G service (and, soon, 4G) is becoming as important to accessing the Internet as wired broadband is. It seems detrimental, in general, to allow — even to encourage — different levels of service through the two paths. While it may be valid to limit data rates or volumes (in general, neutrally), I can’t see the need to restrict services and applications outright, and consider the inclusion of that in the regulations to be a real problem.

That’s not to say the new regulations are all bad — the transparency requirements are good, and there are other reasonable aspects to them. But I think there are fundamental flaws in the regulations, and they should not have been issued as they are. We’re very bad at regulating technology, and bad regulations can really bite us in the ass.

On streaming movies

A few months ago, I decided to try Netflix, after eschewing it for a long time. I never liked the idea that I have to pick one or two DVDs to have on hand, and that has to do for, say, a three-day weekend when it’s cold and blustery, and I feel like snuggling in and watching. What if the DVD I happen to have isn’t what I feel like watching right now? Maybe there had been a drama at the top of my queue when they sent it, but today I just want something light and comedic. Or maybe I did watch what I have, and there are still two days left with, now, nothing to watch because there’s no time to exchange a disc in the mail.

What won me over this time was the streaming. For the monthly fee, less than $10 per month, I get one DVD at a time by mail... but I can also stream anything, any time. I can watch on my computer, and I can also buy a device for my TV that will stream (in high definition, even) the movies there. That sounded great! The DVD is backup, for when something I want isn’t available for streaming, and most of the time it’ll be stream, stream, stream. I can even watch on my computer when I’m travelling! I bought a Roku box, and signed up.

The first thing I found, as I populated my queue, is that most of the things I want to watch are not available for streaming. They tell me, when I call customer support, that there are over 11,000 titles that can be streamed. And they’re right. If you want to watch the Law and Order TV series, or Barney the Dinosaur shows, you’re laughing. And, yes, there’s plenty of other stuff too. It’s just that almost everything I wanted to put on my queue is DVD only.

Now, of course, that speaks to my preferences, and one could say that it’s not Netflix’s fault. Only, I bought into the hype that the streaming would get me what I want, and, alas, to a large extent it doesn’t. I did find some foreign films that I’ve put on my streaming queue, and a few other things, as well. But for the most part, I’m left with one DVD at a time, and exactly the problem that I thought I’d have, which stopped me from signing up for Netflix before streaming.

And then someone suggested a BBC series called House of Cards (also series 2 and series 3), and I looked it up... it was streamable! Great; I added it to the queue and watched two episodes. When I went for the third, I found that it was no longer on my queue. Say what?

That was when I called customer support, and that was when they told me that they have over 11,000 titles for streaming. That was also when they told me that they negotiate streaming licenses with the content providers, and that the licenses for House of Cards and a few other things that had been on my queue had expired, and they were no longer available for streaming.

Netflix say that their goal is to get more and more available for streaming, but here’s the thing: it’s not up to them. They have to negotiate licensing contracts with the content providers — they can’t just buy the DVDs and make them available for streaming. And if the content providers are asking a lot of money for those licenses, Netflix can only afford to pay that for the titles that are sufficiently popular. If not enough people are streaming something, it doesn’t pay for Netflix to maintain a streaming license for it. So the whole system falls apart, and only the popular stuff (and the stuff the content owners are willing to let go cheap) is available. And that’s not what I was looking for.

Only, I’ve already paid for the Roku box. Does it make sense for me to kill my Netflix subscription now, and have an $80 device sitting there doing nothing? Is it worth the $10 a month to me, in order to get the streaming that I do have, along with the one DVD at a time?

Oh, and watching while I’m travelling? Yes, that works as long as I have an IP address in the United States. When I was in China, Netflix blocked the streaming, because the content licenses are only for use in the U.S.

Just be aware that as long as the content providers have a stranglehold on the system, nothing is as simple as it seems, and anything can change at any time.

We still shouldn't ask, but it's OK to tell, now

Everyone’s heard, surely, but it’s worth saying here anyway: this weekend, the U.S. Senate got rid of the odious Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell rule, by a vote of 65 to 31, with eight Republican senators joining the good guys.

It’s easy to forget that the rule was originally an improvement for gay rights in the U.S. military, compared with the situation before it went into effect. It’s easy to forget that, because it was such a small improvement as to escape notice for most. Now, our legislature has said that the military has to deal with homosexual Americans serving openly.

It won’t happen immediately, though. Despite that gay people have been part of our society forever, the military has to figure out how to integrate them. Apparently, just ordering people to accept it, and doling out discipline when they don’t, isn’t sufficient.

According to the Secretary of Defense, things will move apace:

Mr. Gates has acknowledged that the president will be watching closely to ensure that we don’t dawdle or try to slow-roll this and that Mr. Obama expects the military to prepare as quickly as we properly and comprehensively could.

The president will not be the only one watching.

More stuff we don’t need

When I was travelling recently, I decided to browse the Sky Mall catalogue in the plane. Man, is that chock full of stuff we don’t need, far more seriously so (and at much higher prices) than the catalogues I’d found junk in the last time.

Let’s look at some of the silliest, complete with scans from the catalogue. Click on each small image for a larger, readable one.

The Canine Genealogy Kit

For $60 you can get your dog a DNA test. I really don’t know how much I can say about this, other than to note that they think a photo of a cute dog can sell pretty much anything. Well, and that it’s hard to think of a sillier way to waste $60.

The Water Squirting Remote Controlled Car

I’ll first note that this is labelled for ages 6 and up. Now, imagine buying your 6-year-old a $100 toy that drives around the house at up to 11 miles an hour in agile pursuit of targets, and that squirts water up to 15 feet. You hope it’s water in there, anyway.

Trust me: when I was six, you would not have wanted me to get my hands on one of these. Really.

The All Terrain Polaris Ride On

While we’re on too-expensive toys for six-year-olds, let’s have a look at this electric buggy, complete with radio. In and of itself, there’s nothing to complain about here — a nice little ride-on toy for the kiddies. For ages 5 to 10. Cool. But then we look at the price: $1,115, including the shipping. OK, I think a thousand dollars is a bit steep for a toy for a six-year old, don’t you?

The Authentic Southern Sweet Tea Brewer

When I was a lad — and now that I’m not, as well, come to think of it — I made iced tea by putting tea bags in a pitcher and pouring in hot water. That seemed easy enough, and it never occurred to me that one might need a gadget for it.

It occurred to the Hammacher Schlemmer people, though, and this is the result: for $50, you get get a thing that mixes the hot water and the tea and the sugar for you. And, in case you had any doubt, it can also make unsweetened tea.

You don’t need it.

The SpyEar

This doo-dad looks like a pen holder, but is really a surveillance device (wink-wink). Specifically, it’s a cell phone that will silently receive calls and let you listen to whatever it can hear. Isn’t modern technology wonderful?

But the part that I like is this: Best of all, the SpyEar features a working digital face with a clock, calendar, and thermostat. I presume they mean thermometer, but, really, it’s a clandestine surveillance device, but best of all it’s also a digital clock. Ooookay, fine.

Home decor options

Finally, we have these things, for folks that have all their taste in their mouths. A friend and I can’t figure out which is more hideous. I say it’s The Grand Ruler Life-Size Anubis Statue, for $1300 including shipping. My friend goes for the Basho the Sumo Wrestler Glass-Topped Table, only $260. Just from a price perspective, it’s hard to beat the Anubis monstrosity. But, hey: would you have either one in your living room?

Which has your vote for the worse of the two?

How many are that?

It might surprise you — it surprises me — that number agreement is a serious problem in technical papers and specifications. Having just reviewed a specification that’s full of number-agreement errors, I feel an urge to talk about the problem here.

In the easy case, things are... well... easy:

Bill and his brother are tall.

Bill and his brother is tall.

The second sentence is clearly both

1. wrong and
2. unambiguous.

That is, we know it’s wrong, but we also know what the writer meant to say, and, apart from tripping for a moment before reading further, we have no problem understanding this.

But try this pair:

I saw Bill and his brother, who are tall.

I saw Bill and his brother, who is tall.

In this case, both sentences are correct, but only the first one tells you that Bill is tall; his brother is tall in both of them. Now, it matters that we get the number correct.

Of course, you say. Any fool knows that.

Well, yes, mostly. But when sentences get complicated, some of this gets lost. Let’s try this one:

Data objects have a set of well-defined fields that include a single value and optional metadata.

Look at what we have in the sentence:

1. Data objects. [plural]
2. A set of fields. [singular]
3. Fields. [plural]
4. A single value. [singular]
5. Metadata. [collective; singular or plural]
6. A single value and optional metadata. [plural]

As it’s written above, the sentence says that multiple data objects share one set of fields. That’s not right, so let’s fix that first:

Each data object has a set of well-defined fields that include a single value and optional metadata.

Now comes the question that I don’t know the answer to: Which of the following is correct?

1. The set of fields contains one field with a single value and one or more optional fields that each contains metadata.
2. Each field in the set includes a single value and optional metadata.

The way the sentence is worded, number 2 is correct (imagine parentheses that start before well-defined and end after metadata). But the fact that the document is full of number-agreement problems makes it unclear what the authors really mean. The sentence has to be reworded:

Each data object has a set of well-defined fields that includes a field with a single value and optional fields with metadata. [Here, a set of well-defined fields is singular, so the verb is includes.]

...or...

Each data object has a set of well-defined fields; each field includes a single value and optional metadata. [Here, each field is singular, so, again, the verb is includes.]

The trap we too often fall into is forgetting that a set of things or a group of things, while it might look plural (especially when the clause defining the things is complicated), is singular. For example, compare these:

That group of Tea-Party voters who voted for the Republican candidate in the last election and who are looking for big tax cuts is influential.

Those Tea-Party voters who voted for the Republican candidate in the last election and who are looking for big tax cuts are influential.

Be careful of the difference. It can really matter sometimes.

Someone else’s impressions of a Mac

Here’s an odd essay in the Huffington Post (one might call that a tautology), a rant by one Joshua Kors, who calls himself an Investigative Reporter, about why he’s returning the iMac he just bought.

I say that it’s odd because it seems that anyone who’s paid any attention to recent technology would know a few things that Mr Kors seems not to: that Mac computers are different from Windows machines, that there are usually ways to accomplish what you want, if you’re willing to look into it a bit (investigate, one might say), and suchwhat.

When I got my first (and, so far, only) Mac, three and a half years ago, I knew there’d be differences between it and Windows, and I knew there’d be things it’d take me a while to learn. I wrote about some of those differences here and here. My overall impression was (and is) that Macs aren’t better than Windows machines, nor are they worse; they’re just different. And the differences in either take some getting used to, if you’re accustomed to the other. From my first impression, after only one day:

There’s a lot that seems like it’s wrong until you find out that it’s really there, and you just need to learn how to do it. I’ve found quite a few of those so far (the Dock is much nicer than it first seems, for instance). We’ll see how I like it as I learn more.

And that’s the thing: Mr Kors didn’t seem to be interested in learning the differences, or in figuring out what works better for him and what doesn’t. He says he was really excited to buy an iMac, but then, after two weeks, he returned it, annoyed:

Two weeks later I’m back at Apple headquarters — my teeth worn down, my face prematurely aged from endless hours of sleeplessness and technological frustration — certain that the iMac was the worst purchase I’d ever made.

His account, though, starts off with hyperbole and goes from there:

My iMac and I got off on the wrong foot. Turns out there’s a video camera embedded in the screen, and before I could boot her up for the very first time, she wanted to take my picture. For identity purposes, she said. I stumbled to the bathroom, brushed my hair (and my teeth), exchanged my raggedy Raiders t-shirt for a professionally ironed button-up and returned to my desk, smirking at the turn of events. My old PC didn’t care if I called the Pentagon in my bathrobe. My iMac apparently had registered with Match.com.

Come on, Mr Kors. Just put your cat in front of the camera, and move on. I do agree that the overly familiar tone of things is annoying, at least to this techie, but it’s also not rocket science to understand that it’s just fluff. Windows, too, wants a personal image for the login screen. Only, Windows starts off with some canned images — a chess piece, a flower, a skateboard, and so on. Whatever.

He goes on to complain about the mouse and the keyboard, before getting used to them. He complains that not all the software he wants is bundled with his machine (was it really so on Windows?), and that the software he’s used to doesn’t work (had no one clued him in about needing new software?), and he implies that he knows of no alternatives.

He says he knew that he wouldn’t be able to transfer files from one computer to another over the network, something that’s news to this Mac-and-Windows user, who does that all the time — Mac to Mac, Mac to Windows, Windows to Mac... it all works fine. In copying files using an intermediate external drive (a canoe, in his metaphor), he’s frustrated at the manual bookkeeping he has to do because he can’t figure out that copy; move to trash is the equivalent to move (yes, I find the two-step requirement mildly annoying as well, but it’s hardly critical).

Migrating settings from iTunes, Thunderbird, and so on is much easier than he makes out, with or without an ocean of Mac dork chat boards. Changing display fonts is also easy, and you don’t have to change the font size in your sent mail in order to do it.

All in all, it appears that Mr Kors didn’t want to try something new, but just wanted to write a rant. And so he did. Only, he comes across as an idiot in the process.

Well, he writes for the Huffington Post, so maybe that’s enough to make him come across as an idiot all by itself.

Search warrant needed for email

It’s a busy day, so I’ll just point to an Electronic Frontier Foundation report on a court decision that we should all be happy with:

In a landmark decision issued today [Tuesday; the link is to a PDF] in the criminal appeal of U.S. v. Warshak, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the government must have a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers. Closely tracking arguments made by EFF in its amicus brief, the court found that email users have the same reasonable expectation of privacy in their stored email as they do in their phone calls and postal mail.

Referring to those illegals

Last Thursday, I listened to a discussion on NPR’s Talk of the Nation about the use of the terms illegal alien and illegal immigrant. Go read the transcript and/or listen to the program.

There are a few issues conflated in this discussion, so let me separate them out:

1. There are the terms alien, immigrant, resident, and others, used to describe someone who’s in the United States and is not a citizen. These are sometimes combined, as in resident alien.
2. There are the modifiers illegal and undocumented (perhaps there are others as well), used to refer to a non-citizen who is here without a required visa, or who has overstayed his visa or violated its terms.
3. There’s the shortening, illegals, used as a collective term.

Issue number 1 is a complicated one, and is one that’ll get at least 40 answers from 50 people. One person might be perfectly happy to be referred to as a resident alien, while another might bristle at the alien part. Yet another might prefer visitor, saying that if he wanted to be an immigrant he’d apply for citizenship. And so on. We’ll never resolve that, and I don’t aim to try.

As for issue number 3, well: many such shortened collective terms are used derogatorily, and this one’s no exception. He’s one of those illegals, is never meant to be benign, and no protestations of, I didn’t mean anything by it, will convince me of that. So let’s just forget about that one.

But issue 2 is the interesting one: is it insulting to refer to illegal aliens (just picking aliens, here, somewhat arbitrarily)? Here’s how Ms Cepeda characterizes the question on the program:

No. You know what? I think it really is a debate about respect, and it is a debate about being careful how you say things. You know, I think one thing that’s really important to put into this context is that immigrants and Hispanics have felt very, very, very violently opposed by some people who would slur them with a term like illegals. Those things really, you know, go to the heart of the matter.

And, you know, some people who are advocates or even activists for the issue of illegal immigration have kind of gone over and focused on this, because it is important. It’s kind of like the day-to-day thing that could hit you in the donut shop when you least expect it. But, you know, as part of the larger immigration reform conversation, it’s perhaps not the most important conversation that we, as Americans and as new citizens, could be having.

Now, apart from my wanting to quote her hit you in the donut shop idiom, I wanted to highlight her point that it’s just about picking a term, on the one hand, but that it’s having respect for people and making them feel welcome (or at least not making them feel unwelcome) on the other. Generally, the people who refer to illegals don’t care a toss about making those people feel welcome at all. They’d rather see them go home.

Ms Cepeda points us to the legal statutes, and takes the terms from there:

But at the same time, you know, when I talk to DHS, when I talk to immigrations and Customs, immigration services, they say the same thing. We go by the letter of the law. Illegal immigrant, illegal alien, those are terminologies that can be found in the law. And, you know, that’s what they go by.

But it’s not quite as simple as that; here’s how I see it:

When we’re talking generally, about the law, about people, in general, who snuck in, who overstayed their visas... we can refer to them as illegal aliens and that’s pretty clear. We are, by the nature of our discussion, presupposing that there are people who have skirted the immigration laws. What we’re saying is that some people have entered or stayed illegally; referring to them as illegal aliens works.

But on the individual level, it doesn’t work. The police have to deal with illegal aliens, is fine; Joe is an illegal alien, is not: it’s making a judgment on Joe, and that judgment might not be correct. We might not have all the information we need. Joe has not had due process. He may be accused of being an illegal alien, just as he might be accused of any other crime. He might be guilty, and he might not.

On the individual level, referring to someone as an illegal alien is making a presumption of guilt. We prefer to take the approach of a presumption of innocence — something that’s notably lacking in how we treat non-citizens, though I continue to maintain that if presumption of innocence is a basic tenet of our justice system, it’s a human right that needs to be extended to everyone, regardless of what they’re accused of.

Of course, that means that there’s no simple term we can use for an individual that both conveys their status as being accused of illegal entry and does not make a presumption of guilt. That’s OK; I can cope with that. If I have to say, Joe is a citizen of Slobovia who’s accused of entering the U.S. illegally, that works. And that makes it easy to add, He denies the accusation, and explains the confusion with his visa status.

Security of auto control systems

While we’re on the joint subject of cars and security, I should dredge up this item that I’ve had hanging about for a few months. It’s from Ars Technica, and reports that researchers have hacked into the control systems of cars because those systems are often not secured:

The tire pressure monitors built into modern cars have been shown to be insecure by researchers from Rutgers University and the University of South Carolina. The wireless sensors, compulsory in new automobiles in the US since 2008, can be used to track vehicles or feed bad data to the electronic control units (ECU), causing them to malfunction.

Earlier in the year, researchers from the University of Washington and University of California San Diego showed that the ECUs could be hacked, giving attackers the ability to be both annoying, by enabling wipers or honking the horn, and dangerous, by disabling the brakes or jamming the accelerator.

The new research shows that other systems in the vehicle are similarly insecure. The tire pressure monitors are notable because they’re wireless, allowing attacks to be made from adjacent vehicles. The researchers used equipment costing $1,500, including radio sensors and special software, to eavesdrop on, and interfere with, two different tire pressure monitoring systems.

The pressure sensors contain unique IDs, so merely eavesdropping enabled the researchers to identify and track vehicles remotely. Beyond this, they could alter and forge the readings to cause warning lights on the dashboard to turn on, or even crash the ECU completely.

The earlier work, from May, said that there was some security built into the system, but it was insufficient. Still, someone needed access to the inside of the car at some point, to plug into the On-Board Diagnostics (OBD-II) port under the dashboard. Once they could do that, they could reprogram the workings of the car — an example given in the earlier article suggests a program that might wait until the car was going at 80mph, and then disable all the brakes.

With the newer work, attacking the wireless tire-pressure monitors, there’s the danger of attacks from the outside that take advantage of the wireless system. The researchers show how to track cars using that, but if more of the control system is exposed to wireless attacks, things can get very bad, indeed.

It boggles my mind that anyone could put any sort of control system into a vehicle and not secure it. The technology to do secure communication among parts of a system is well known, inexpensive, efficient, and effective, and there’s really no excuse for cutting corners there.

Security of auto ignition systems

New Scientist tells us that the encryption between electronic key fobs and car ignition systems has been cracked in many cases. The reason is that most car manufacturers are using weak and/or home-grown encryption:

A device fitted within the key fob of a modern car broadcasts an encrypted radio signal to the car as the driver starts the vehicle. If the signal is recognised by the car’s receiver, it responds by sending an encrypted signal to the engine control unit (ECU), which allows the car to start. If the driver tries using the incorrect car key fob, the ECU locks down the engine.

For over a decade, immobilisers have played a crucial role in reducing car theft, says Nohl. But the proprietary encryption keys used to transmit data between the key fob, receiver and engine are so poorly implemented on some cars that they are readily cracked, Nohl told the Embedded Security in Cars conference, in Bremen, Germany, last month.

Last year he took just 6 hours to uncover the algorithm used to create the encryption key in a widely used immobiliser — the Hitag 2 made by Dutch firm NXP Semiconductors — making it easy to de-immobilise any car using that algorithm. And in 2005 Ari Juels of RSA Labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, took under an hour to crack an encryption system sold by US technology firm Texas Instruments.

Juels says that these cracks were possible because the proprietary algorithms that the firms use to encode the cryptographic keys shared between the immobiliser and receiver, and receiver and engine do not match the security offered by openly published versions such as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) adopted by the US government to encrypt classified information. Furthermore, in both cases the encryption key was way too short, says Nohl. Most cars still use either a 40 or 48-bit key, but the 128-bit AES — which would take too long to crack for car thieves to bother trying — is now considered by security professionals to be a minimum standard. It is used by only a handful of car-makers.

This dovetails with the advice that computer security experts usually give:

1. Use only modern, well known cryptographic algorithms, which have been thoroughly tested for their security properties.
2. Use them with modern parameters, including currently accepted key lengths.
3. Use only mature, well tested implementations. Resist the temptation to write your own.

On point 1, security is not enhanced by using a secret algorithm. Quite the opposite: open, well known algorithms have been scrutinized by the top experts in the field, and are, to the best of our knowledge, secure and impractical to break. That fabulous and super-secret algorithm you came up with may pass your security testing, but it’s almost always the case that once algorithms like that get into use, we find weaknesses in them and they fall fairly quickly.

It’s arrogant to claim that you can devise a better algorithm than the collective great minds of the world can. And if you can, yours should stand up to the public scrutiny needed for an assurance that the algorithm is really better. If secrecy is a necessary part of the algorithm, be assured that it will fail.

Point 2 should be obvious: computing capabilities speed ahead, and for most modern encryption algorithms, the key length directly relates to the time required to break the encryption. If we don’t increase key lengths over time, faster, more powerful processors will crack our systems.

On point 3, we have to remember that encryption algorithms are complex and particular. Bugs in the implementation can result in huge holes in the security... and bugs are inevitable in any implementation. Using a mature implementation, one that’s already been thoroughly debugged, gives the best chance of avoiding such holes. Coding an implementation yourself is a sure way to a weak crypto suite.

It seems counter-intuitive, but with modern encryption, the more public the algorithms and the implementations are, the better the security picture looks.

Can you be “pro-life” when there's no life there?

The Ridger, pointed out an item in the Washington Post magazine section, citing a particular section. The article is by a religion writer called Julia Duin, and it describes her bus ride from New York to D.C. for the Stewart/Colbert rally at the end of October. She talks with a number of folks on the bus, along the way.

But Ms Duin is a writer, not a reporter, and her story isn’t an attempt at unbiased reporting, but a piece that includes her opinions — sometimes strongly. Here’s the part that The Ridger noted, where Ms Duin is talking with her seatmate, Robert Woudenberg, a 46-year-old man from Rockland County, just across the river from me:

[...] But I decline to argue with Woudenberg about this, as the conversation soon shifts to his 21-month-old daughter, whom he dotes on. Before she was born, I learn, there was another pregnancy. Doctors told Woudenberg and his wife that the fetus had no heartbeat, and she was advised to abort.

Why couldn’t you have at least allowed your child to live out its short life in the womb? I ask.

I have strong feelings on this, not just because of my faith but because of a 2009 article I wrote about a Silver Spring organization called Isaiah’s Promise, which encourages women with problem pregnancies to bring their babies to term. The women I had interviewed told me that doing so was less traumatic than aborting the babies would have been.

Woudenberg responds with a line I often hear: that if an unborn child has some kind of abnormality, it’s best to abort him or her sooner and let the mother get on with her life. He argues that my position is a minority one; I say it’s the more compassionate one for the mother, for whom an abortion is an added trauma, and for her helpless child, for whom nine months in the womb will be the only life he or she knows.

I talked this over with a sonographer who does ultrasounds on pregnant women. She spends all day, every work day, looking at babies in utero, mostly with good news for the mothers, sometimes with sad. Here’s an approximation of her response to the above:

No, no, that doesn’t make sense at all. There’s no grey area here. Dead [she extends her left hand]. Not dead [she extends her right hand]. A fetus with no heartbeat is dead [she waves her left hand]. That’s it: it’s dead. There’s no life for it to live out, in the womb or anywhere else. It doesn’t know anything, it’s not enjoying being in there, it’s not growing (in fact, it will probably atrophy if it’s left inside), it’s not kicking or moving around. It’s not alive.

This woman is confusing a problem pregnancy, perhaps a congenital defect that will result in the baby’s death soon after birth... with a fetus that’s dead now. It’s not a problem pregnancy; there is no pregnancy any more. And removing it isn’t an abortion. Abortion is terminating a pregnancy; this has already terminated.

Indeed. It’s certainly a valid choice for a woman to make, if she wants to leave her dead fetus inside her for a while, until her body expels it. If she feels that will be less disturbing to her, less traumatic, than having a doctor help remove it, that’s fine. But there’s no sense in which she’d be doing it for her unborn child. Her unborn child is dead, and that’s a terrible thing for her to have to face. If softening it in some way helps her... good.

We don’t know how far along the pregnancy was — perhaps Mr Woudenberg didn’t say, or perhaps Ms Duin just prefers to leave that out to help make her point, just as she does by referring to the helpless child as he or she. The heartbeat should first have shown up at 6 weeks, so it could have been lost any time after that. The current standard for viability is 24 weeks. And, of course, full term is 40 weeks. If it died after 24 weeks, we’d consider it a stillbirth. But no matter what, it’s not a helpless child.

It’s dead.

Ms Duin is a religious-fanatic, nonsensical moron, looking to try to preserve some sense of life and sentience for an erstwhile being that has none of either to preserve. And insisting that it’s the right thing to do. And berating a man who probably still feels horrible about having lost his first child before it was born, expecting him to share her delusional fantasy of a happy baby soul floating contentedly inside its mother.

I continue to be puzzled that we accept such fantasy from otherwise thinking adults, that we actually encourage and praise such magical thinking, and that we publish garbage like this in reputable media.

Jim Morrison's pardon

Wednesday would have been Jim Morrison’s 67th birthday. In one of the most famous events in his life, he was arrested in 1969, charged with indecent exposure at a concert in Miami. A few days after the concert, it was claimed that he’d opened his pants on stage. He and his band, along with many concertgoers, said that wasn’t true. He was convicted, and he appealed the conviction, but he died before the appeal was ever heard.

Thursday, the day after Morrison’s 67th birthday, Florida’s current governor, Charlie Crist, issued a pardon for Jim Morrison, wiping the slate clean and returning him to a presumption of innocence of the 1969 charges.

This is probably a good thing, really... but it’s not a very important thing. In fact, it might have been just as well left alone, left to be part of Morrison’s eclectic mystique. Governor Crist has no doubt made some friends who are fans of The Doors... and angered others, such as those who would rather not think that the police officers who testified might have lied.

But note Florida’s attorney general, Bill McCollum, who, though he voted in favour of the pardon, was ‘disturbed’ by all the attention paid to a dead celebrity when the board spent hours hearing cases involving living people seeking forgiveness trying to repair their lives.

Indeed: the main point is that I have to wonder when I see officials spending their time — sometimes a little time, but often a great deal of it — dealing with things that don’t matter very much, or even at all. We designate state or national trees, birds, mammals, reptiles, and even insects. We designate official state and national activities, at the behest or some group or other that will benefit from the publicity of having its pet activity so recognized. Our legislators spend time debating and voting on non-binding declarations and resolutions about this thing and that, anywhere from repeating yet again that we honour those who died in one disaster or another, to repeating yet again that Christmas is important to us.

It’s just silly. Go have unpaid interns write that stuff up and present it to classrooms to use as exercises in mock government. And now spent your time with real government.

That said, well... thanks, Governor Crist, for reminding us that Jim Morrison was a great artist. Whether or not the audience in Miami saw in 1969 what the TSA would be seeing routinely today, if he were still with us.

Is your credit card bank tracking what you do with your money?

Well, hey, you bet!

On Wednesday morning, CNN had a feature, which I saw in the hotel breakfast room, about tips to tell whether your bank is spying on you. The CNN reporter described the situation, which seemed to be that your bank is tracking transactions that you do with their instruments (credit and debit cards, ATM withdrawals, and so on), and is analyzing the patterns. A change in pattern might indicate a change in your situation, which the bank might want to respond to by being particularly watchful, or by making additional offers of business to you. Or it could indicate outright fraud, outside of your control, which they want to catch.

After hearing that, the anchor asked the correct question: Is this really spying? The reporter responded by saying, They know everything about you.

Well, no. They know everything that you do with things they control. They know what’s in your credit report. They know whatever their partners tell them, but it wasn’t clear from the report whether banks share this information with each other. I suspect they don’t, because it can give them competitive edges over each other.

Of course, if you have three credit cards with different logos that are managed by the same bank — say, Citibank — then that bank knows about all three of those cards. I expect my bank to track and analyze my activity. I’d be very surprised if they didn’t.

CNN spends too much of its time, these days, with fluffy, overhyped pieces.

Photo ID to ship Christmas gifts

According to a report I heard on the radio on Tuesday, United Parcel Service is making a change this month that will require folks shipping packages (such as, say, Christmas gifts — not an insignificant bit of business, you know) to show photo ID with the same name as the sender on the package.

According to the item on the radio, they think customers will understand, that, as UPS says, the customers will appreciate that this is for security and safety.

Bullshit.

This will cause endless annoyances. What happens when one person wants to go mail packages for several friends, hm? And how finely will they pick on this? If Jane Smith wants to mail a package prepared by her husband, Mark Smith, will that be OK? What if Jane goes by her maiden name, Jane Jones? What if she hyphenates, Jane Jones-Smith?

This is just asking for an already stressful holiday season to get that much worse. People can just use another shipping service, assuming that USPS, FedEx, and others don’t follow suit. But this is just stupid, and provides no safety and security at all. It makes things inconvenient for legitimate shippers in many cases, and people who are real threats will just get fake IDs.

This is worse than security theatre. It’s security nonsense.

Fever

That’s the good kind of fever.

Right now, I have the bad kind of fever, the kind where you wake up in the middle of the night and wonder whether the heat will turn your brain into a rutabaga, and hope that the fact that you’re thinking that means it won’t.

And I have two days of meetings at my company’s U.S. headquarters in Santa Clara, CA. I bet the folks I’m meeting with will be just delighted at my hacking cough and my nose blowing, yes, indeedy.

Making your airport friendly for laptop users

It seems that Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, at least in the H & K concourses, go out of their way to make sure there are no accessible power outlets near the seating. There’s a set of carels that have two duplex outlets each, along with a small shelf and an uncomfortable seat. But near the regular seating for the gates... rien.

People sit on the floor near the few outlets that an be found along the walls, but they fill up quickly. And sitting on the floor isn’t ideal, of course.

Contrast that with San Francisco, where I flew into, which has plenty of accessible outlets right around the seating areas.

While we’re at it, big kudos to the airports that provide free wireless Internet service. Neither ORD nor SFO do that.

Considering Wikileaks

Wikileaks, having recently released details of hundreds of thousands of confidential U.S. diplomatic cables, has been tossed into a maelstrom of troubles over the past week. Amazon, which had hosted the web site, terminated that arrangement, reportedly under pressure from the U.S. government. Its DNS registrar, EveryDNS.net, pulled the Wikileaks domain out of the domain name service, prompting them to move to a Swiss domain name. PayPal has blocked donations to Wikileaks by permanently restricting their account, saying that the illegal activity that Wikileaks engages in violates PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy. And on top of all of that, founder Julian Assange is now an international fugitive, as Interpol has backed a Swedish warrant for his arrest (the Swedish charges are unrelated to Wikileaks activities, though Mr Assange says they are yet another attempt to shut Wikileaks down).

I have a mixed opinion of the matter of releasing the confidential documents, as well as about the other things Wikileaks has released in the past.

I’ve worked with classified, proprietary, personal, and otherwise confidential material often during my career, and I well understand that some information should be kept confidential. Even in cases where openness and public scrutiny are important, there’s value in being circumspect about some things. Personnel matters, obviously, fall into this category. Plans often need be kept quiet until they’re carried out. Trade secrets and other confidential company information should be distributed only as there be need to know — and government agencies can have confidential company information as well. We often don’t reveal sources, to avoid discouraging those and future sources from coming forward. The fact that even Wikileaks doesn’t disclose the identities of the leakers is testament enough to that.

We have to balance the benefit that comes from the disclosure of information against the damage caused by that disclosure. Sometimes, it’s easy to see where the balance lies. If we disclose payoffs to a government official that have been feeding a program that serves only to line the pockets of a few, the benefit is clear, and the damage is only to those involved in the corruption. On the other side, if we expose a covert agent, citing a public right to know, there might be no tangible benefit and we may risk the life of the agent and many of his associates.

Sometimes, the determination isn’t as straightforward. With the diplomatic cables, it’s likely that they fell wildly on each side of the balancing point, with many landing too close to it to judge easily.

Whistle blowing is an important part of the checks against corruption and other forms of abuse, and it’s important for us to have a way for people to publicize the sorts of things that need to have light shone on them. At the same time, though, not everything should be so illuminated. The set of diplomatic cables is one case where discretion would have been better. The problem with an arrangement such as Wikileaks is that there’s no one sifting through the items in the set and making intelligent choices about which ones to release and which ones to hold back, at least for now.

On the other hand, while I understand the desire to shut Wikileaks down as a result of this, that heavy-handed approach isn’t going to be effective, and probably isn’t the right way to go about it. It would be better to try to establish some sort of liaison that looks for voluntary discretion. Here, too, we have to find that same balance: the benefit of shutting down a system that exposes confidential information indiscriminately, against the damage done by removing a mechanism for safely exposing waste and corruption.

One singular sensation

I’ve run across this often, and, particularly, a few times recently: someone talked about singling out four talks at a conference; someone else spoke of a teacher’s singling out three students for criticism, though others had also done poorly on the assignment. Another wrote about the singling out of Muslim travellers, on suspicion that they might be terrorists.

The clue, here, should be the word single: you can’t single out multiple things. You just can’t. Please don’t try.

Four talks may be given as examples, three students may be selected, Muslim travellers may be picked on or set apart or characterized, whether or not they should be. But in none of these cases may they be singled out.

Using it incorrectly dilutes the term and devalues it, as is too often done with terms such as unique (the most unique) and literally (I literally died). We may have lost all of these, but I hope not.

Domain name seizure

The Electronic Frontier Foundation notes that the U.S. government has launched a crackdown on web sites that are accused of violating copyrights. The government has done this by seizing the domain names, having the names removed from DNS resolution — the process that converts the name you give to your web browser into an actual Internet address.

Over the past few days, the U.S. Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and nine U.S. Attorneys’ Offices seized 82 domain names of websites they claim were engaged in the sale and distribution of counterfeit goods and illegal copyrighted works.

One major problem, as EFF reports it, is that at least some of the web sites included in the sweep are not in the business of illegal distribution, and are actually trying to do the right thing, taking down bad material when they find out about it.

What’s as disturbing, though, is the U.S. government’s attempt to censor the Internet this way. As the EFF points out, sites that are able to will only find other options, using non-U.S. DNS servers (as they are already doing). Meddling with the low-layer workings of the Internet this way is not a good thing. Shutting down web sites without due process is also not a good thing. As the Federal Trade Commission struggles with trying to address real cyber crime such as phishing and other forms of fraud, the entertainment industry has found a way to bypass the difficulties and get the Department of Justice to do preemptive copyright enforcement for them.

We criticize the government of China for blocking web sites they don’t like. It seems to me that we’re now doing the same thing. That our reasons are different matters little: this isn’t the way to deal with these issues.

This also does not make me comfortable when I think about how they might handle network-neutrality legislation.

Et tu, NY Times?

Can you stand one more item about airport security screening? The New York Times published an editorial supporting the scanning machines last week (on opt out day).

What’s remarkable is how out of character the editorial is for the Times. I was surprised that they, who usually staunchly support civil and constitutional rights, favour the machines. That’s unexpected, but not remarkable: the Times and I don’t always agree, even if we usually do. The remarkable part is what appears to be the main bit of their argument: they seem to like the scanners mostly because the Republicans don’t.

In their eagerness to pin every problem in America on President Obama, prominent Republicans are now blaming his administration for the use of full-body scanners and intrusive pat-downs at airports. Those gloved fingers feeling inside your belt? The hand of big government, once again poking around where it should not go.

Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and a Republican presidential hopeful, called the scanners and the pat-downs a humiliating and degrading, totally unconstitutional intrusion, in an interview on Fox News. If the president thinks such searches are appropriate, Mr. Huckabee said, he should subject his wife, two daughters and mother-in-law to them. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said the Transportation Security Administration had gone too far, and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas suggested T.S.A. agents be sent to the Mexican border, where he said, absurdly, that we need security substantially more than in our airports.

OK, Governor Perry was talking nonsense, yeah. But, hey, despite the fact that I think Mike Huckabee is a bonehead who usually isn’t worth listening to, this time he’s right: the machines and the molestation are humiliating, degrading, and in violation of the fourth amendment’s guarantee against unreasonable search. That level of invasiveness would only be acceptable with probable cause — a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing. We accept scans of our baggage, perhaps somewhat reluctantly, but treating every passenger as though she were caching a weapon in her underwear, with not even the slightest reason to think it so, goes beyond what we do in America, at least heretofore.

Our Constitution is there to protect us from abuses by authority. And whether the constitution is violated by a right-wing war criminal, or a president who we’d like to think is on our side, it’s wrong and we have to stand against the violation. When we see abuse of power, we have to call it what it is and rein it in before it goes too far to stop.

And, of course, it doesn’t help that this abuse was prompted by a ridiculous situation: a guy smuggled some crappy explosives aboard in his underwear, managed only to burn himself in intimate places before being subdued, and was arrested when the undamaged plane landed. His father had warned us about him, but the warnings weren’t taken seriously enough. Oh, and at least some reports say that the new scanning machines wouldn’t have detected what he was carrying anyway.

The Times is right that the sort of profiling that some of the opponents suggest isn’t the right answer either. But the Times is wrong to suggest that the abuses are individual problems that were merely handled in a ham-handed way. There’s clearly a pervasive pattern of bad policy and worse implementation, and both need to be fixed.