Staring At Empty Pages

American values

2012-01-24T10:11:00.000-05:00

It’s that time of year: a Tuesday near the end of January. It’s just past another anniversary of the president’s inauguration, and time for the annual tradition, the State of the Union address.

In this case, it’s President Obama’s third anniversary, and tonight he’ll give his third SotU speech. According to the Washington Post, this year’s talk will stress a return to American values.

All right, here it is: I’m sick to death of hearing about values. Values has turned into a codeword for reactionary politics, repression, and censorship. I don’t want to hear a speech about those kinds of values, especially from a president who has done little to fix the overstepping excesses of his predecessor, and, to the contrary, seems to embrace many of them.

American values used to be about freedom and opportunity, not control and rigidity. America was a country that didn’t abuse and arrest people for assembling peacefully. It didn’t arrest people for documenting how the police were handling situations. It didn’t keep political prisoners, detaining people indefinitely with no chance of formal accusation, trial, and defense. It didn’t limit the rights of people because of who they are, it didn’t restrict their access to medicines and medical procedures, it didn’t try to teach children mythology in science class, and it did not march a conservative Christian agenda down the streets everywhere.

You want to return to American values? Demilitarize the police, and get them back to engaging with the communities they serve and protect. Don’t send people off to secret prisons, close Guantánamo, and give everyone there a proper, open trial. Stop using terrorist the way dictatorships have used denunciation, as a way to whisk troublesome people away. When people get angry and want to protest, encourage them and give them a venue, don’t beat them down and throw tear gas at them as they sit non-aggressively. Allow yourself to be held accountable for your actions, and don’t threaten people who want to record what you’re doing. Don’t get involved in people’s private lives and personal decisions. And keep religion out of the government and public education. You can start that by not saying God bless in your speeches. Try it tonight.

Remember that American values came from our flight from having to live under someone else’s values. We can’t just replace the king’s values with those of your family, your church, or any other relatively small subset of Americans. Our values were set up to protect our rights and our freedom — everyone’s — and that is what we need to return to.

Oh, and fix the economy, yeah? Don’t just talk about it.

That argument again?

2012-01-17T14:29:00.000-05:00

New Scientist, which seems to run hot and cold out of the sensible science tap, is chilling our tootsies off with an icy-cold flow: an unattributed editorial titled The Genesis problem. In it, they make one of the oldest, lamest arguments that attempt to support creation myths over the Big Bang theory:

The big bang is now part of the furniture of modern cosmology, but Hoyle’s unease has not gone away. Many physicists have been fighting a rearguard action against it for decades, largely because of its theological overtones. If you have an instant of creation, don’t you need a creator?

Cosmologists, the editorial goes on to say, thought they had a workaround.

Well, no... no workaround is needed. The argument is that my creation story (the big bang) involves an entity that itself needed to be created, but your creation story works because it involves the creator misses the point that your creator is also an entity that itself needed to be created. You don’t get to make a set of rules for the one and ignore them for the other, and if one creation entity can exist without creation, then so can another.

No, what’s needed isn’t a workaround, but an explanation, an understanding. You, perhaps, have your understanding because someone made up an answer and you believe it: God has always been, and always will be. Cosmologists — at least the majority, who aren’t trying to fit cosmology into a theistic system — still have a piece that they don’t understand, because they’re not willing to make up an answer that doesn’t follow from the data. If they were, of course, their explanation could be very similar to the theistic one: the primeval atom always existed, and created the universe through the big bang.

We come into a clash of aspects of human understanding when we discuss any genesis explanation. People understand things to have beginnings and ends, and have a hard time coping with things without beginnings. And people like to have questions answered, definitively. When each answer uncovers more questions, we tend to be unsettled. That it seems easier to accept a God with no beginning than a primeval atom with no beginning is perhaps odd, but there it is. God can then be used to explain anything, wrapping things up nicely... for those who are willing to believe those explanations.

I’d rather accept that we don’t yet understand, than to make up facile answers that have no basis in reality. I even accept that we might never really understand it, might never have the real answers. We’ll keep looking at what’s actually there, and we’ll find what we’re able to find.

No mean feat

2012-01-12T14:19:00.000-05:00

Physicist Stephen Hawking turned 70 last weekend, and has been living with ALS — amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — for nearly 50 years. Usually, the disease is diagnosed in patients over 50, and they die within a few years. I was reading an article in Scientific American about Dr Hawking’s longevity. The article contains an edited interview with Dr Leo McCluskey, an ALS expert at the University of Pennsylvania.

One answer, in particular, struck me:

Sci Am: What has Stephen Hawking’s case shown about the disease?
Dr McCluskey: One thing that is highlighted by this man’s course is that this is an incredibly variable disorder in many ways. On average people live two to three years after diagnosis. But that means that half the people live longer, and there are people who live for a long, long time.

The mathematician in me rose up at that: no, on average does not mean that half the samples are on each side of the average. Average refers to the arithmetic mean — take a bunch of numbers, add them, and divide by the count (how many numbers you added) — and it’s easy to show, by example, how that’s wrong.

Suppose we had five patients with ALS. Suppose four of those patients lived for one year following diagnosis, and one lived for eleven years. 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 11 = 15, and 15 / 5 = 3. So on average, people in this sample lived for three years... and only one of the five (20%) survived more than even one year. Given Dr Hawking’s experience of on the order of 50 years, he could offset about 25 patients who succumbed after one year, and still give us a three-year average.

The problem with the arithmetic mean is that it’s easily skewed by outliers. In the extreme example here, if 96% of the samples are 1 and 4% are 50, we get an average of 3 — three times the normal value. That means that with such a situation, the average is useless in giving us any reasonable prediction of what to expect. More generally, if the numbers are widely variable, the average doesn’t tell us anything useful. If we have nine patients who made it through 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 years, respectively, what do we tell the tenth patient who shows up? 5 years, on average, sure, but, really, we might as well tell him to take a wild guess.

Averages are useful when the values tend to cluster around the arithmetic mean, particularly when the number of samples is large. They’re also helpful in analyzing trends, when we look at the change in the average over time... but, again, we have to be careful that a new outlier hasn’t skewed the average. Sometimes we adjust averages to try to compensate for the outliers — for example, we might eliminate the top and bottom 5% of the samples before taking the average.

Another common error is to confuse the mean with the median. The latter is often used in financial reporting: median income, median purchase price for houses, and so on. The median is a completely different animal from the mean. It’s, quite simply, the middle value. List all the sample values in increasing order, and pick the one in the middle (or one of the two in the middle, if the number of values is even).

In the first example above,^[1] if we write the values as 1, 1, 1, 1, 11, the median is the value in bold: 1. In the second example, we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, for a median of 5. You can see that in the first case, the median is not related to the mean, while in the second case it’s the same as the mean. It’s also the case that the mean (or average) is an artificial value that might not appear in the samples, whereas the median is, by definition, one of the sample values.

Also by definition, at least half the sample values are greater than or equal to the median (and at least half are less than or equal to it). In other words, Dr McCluskey’s statement would have been true (at least close enough) had he been talking about the median survival period, rather than the average. Medians are also less susceptible to skewing by outliers, as you can see from the first example.

But as the second example shows, when the numbers are all over the place, neither is of much use in predicting anything.

^[1] My examples use small numbers of values for convenience. In reality, both mean and median require a fairly large sample size to be useful at all.

What’s that rhyme?

2012-01-11T13:32:00.000-05:00

Now that I have the file-count limit sorted out on the audio system in my car, it’s much better at playing songs in random order. Now I’m hearing Yes, Linda Ronstadt, Steely Dan, Toni Price, and Jackson Browne, and not just artists in the alphabetic A’s and B’s.

Thus, the other day I heard a song from Los Lobos’ great album The Neighborhood. The song that came on was the one that opens the album, Down on the Riverbed, and it struck me, as it has before, that there’s a slight oddness to the rhyme in the chorus. It goes like this (emphases mine):

Down on the riverbed,
Down on the riverbed,
Down on the riverbed,
I asked my lover for her h...

...for her h...

You want it to be head, don’t you? I certainly do. They set you up with bed thrice, and what rhymes with bed? Well, head, most assuredly.

Of course, it’s hand; Down on the riverbed, I asked my lover for her hand.

Trips my brain up every time I hear that song.

Networking

2011-12-30T10:29:00.000-05:00

On NPR’s Morning Edition today was an item about a cable television channel called OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network. It seems that Oprah doesn’t have her usual golden touch on this one: the channel is almost a year old, and it hasn’t established much of a presence and following (yet?). I haven’t watched it, so I haven’t anything to say about its content. But, while OWN is a cute acronym and all that, I want to talk a bit about what a TV network is, and why this isn’t one. For younger readers, this will be a bit of history; for others, perhaps a trip through time and memories.

When I was small (and Christmas trees were tall)^[1], television programs were broadcast over the airwaves, as FM radio signals. They had their own frequency bands, and the spectrum was divided into twelve channels: 2 through 6 on one frequency band, and 7 through 13 on another — for historical reasons, there was no channel 1. The allocations were made such that each channel had enough bandwidth to carry the audio and video at the desired quality, with enough extra at the edges to minimize interference between adjacent channels. And the television set had a dial to select the channel — a large-ish, round, twelve-position switch that adjusted the tuner to receive the desired one of the twelve channels.

A service area with a moderate population might have had only one or two active channels broadcasting within its range, back in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Larger areas, such as New York City, would have four or five, or even as many as six. The programs were all in black and white (actually many shades of grey), just like the old movies, though modern movies had long been in colour, of course.

Content was expensive to produce. Local stations would produce their own programming, but the budgets were necessarily low. So television took the network idea from radio: a network was a content provider that would distribute programming to its affiliates. The network would sign up stations, one per area, to take its content (including much of its advertising), and during certain times of the day those affiliate stations would air the network’s content. That way, everyone could get I Love Lucy, The Ed Sullivan Show, and Car 54, Where Are You?, and they knew when their favourite shows would be on.

And they knew what channels to find them on. Everyone in the New York City area knew that channel 2 was CBS, channel 4 was NBC, and channel 7 was ABC, and those were the three networks that existed at the time. The station affiliations and channels were different in different cities, but if you moved to Miami, you’d learn that CBS was on channel 4 instead of channel 2, and you could still find Ed Sullivan without trouble.

Each TV station still aired non-network programming — local news, locally produced shows (such as children’s shows, where local kids were in the audience and sometimes on stage), and so on. Also, they didn’t operate 24 hours a day. They would sign on in the morning and sign off at night, and would sometimes have off periods during the day. During the off times, if you tuned to the channel you would see either a test pattern (a fixed image broadcast by the station) or snow (random, changing black and white dots, the result of the television’s attempt to interpret the background noise as a signal; TV sets nowadays detect the lack of signal and show a solid blue or black screen).

Those twelve channels, 2 through 13, were in the VHF bands. In the 1950s, stations started broadcasting on 70 new channels, 14 through 83, in the new UHF band... only, they had a serious problem: most television sets couldn’t receive their signals. And there was little incentive for people in large markets to worry about this: they already had all the television they could want in New York City, for example, on the VHF channels. The UHF channels were mostly inhabited by local-only, non-network stations, which generally failed. But in 1961, a new law required that by 1965, all new televisions have UHF tuners. Most accomplished this by adding a second tuning dial; the first had thirteen positions — channels 2 through 13, and UHF — and the second would tune 14 through 83 in seventy very tiny clicks.

The new channels opened the path for new networks, such as expanded educational and public TV networks (in the 1970s), and Fox and spanish-language networks (in the 1980s). But there was still the concept of local stations that were affiliated with content-distribution networks.

People got used to the term network, and with the idea that a network is big, with broader, better content... while a station or channel is a small, local thing, with little content of interest. With the cable television boom came hundreds of channels with direct content — no local stations, no affiliates. Some of them are called channels, but some are called networks, though they really aren’t. The Oprah Winfrey Network certainly isn’t the only one. The Food Network is another example, and there are others.

The distinction mostly doesn’t matter, and it’s really only of historical interest. But the NPR item makes one significant point in this regard:

Gerbrandt says cable is such a different animal than broadcast. For starters, people can’t find OWN.

Indeed: with the real networks, we all knew where the broadcast stations were on the dial. Now, with cable, those same affiliate stations have their old places, with low channel numbers. If you want CBS, NBC, and ABC, look in those low numbers — they’re still 2, 4, and 7 in the New York City area. But where’s the Food Network? The Discovery Channel? Sy-Fy? OWN? You have to learn where they are, which means that you have to want them in the first place. And with hundreds of channels available, it’s not so likely that we’ll stumble across them as we go from channel to channel.

It’s tough to develop a following.

^[1] Extra points if you know the reference.

Family values

2011-12-23T15:34:00.000-05:00

I don’t refer often enough to the excellent blog Halfway There, by the pseudonymous Zeno, a community-college math teacher in California. Apart from having picked an amusing combination of names (a reference, of course, to Zeno’s Paradox), blogger Zeno writes interesting things about socio-political news, frequently calling the right-wingers on their bullshit.

Today’s entry is a perfect example, where he lampoons a feigned Think about the children! argument against running a front-page photo of lesbian sailors kissing. In response to a letter to the editor in the Sacramento Bee, which said, in part, this:

Did anyone consider that young children might be confused by the display on the front page?
The Bee has selfishly and disrespectfully usurped the rights of parents to choose where and when to have a thoughtful discussion, with their children, about homosexuality. Believe it or not, there are still some families whose values are not reflected in the type of photo that The Bee published; and they are neither intolerant nor filled with hate.

...Zeno has this to say:

I can’t help wondering how Jane’s children managed to grow old enough to be confused without Mommie Dearest having had that thoughtful discussion she values so highly. It’s not as though most toddlers spend any time perusing the pages of the newspaper. And why should even older children be upset by a glimpse of a same-sex couple kissing on the Bee’s front page? Have they not seen plenty of same-sex kissing among family members and close friends? Doesn’t grandma kiss mommy? Doesn’t mommy have BFFs from high school or college who hug her and smooch her whenever they meet?
[...]
She wants us to believe that people who object to displays of same-sex affection are neither intolerant nor filled with hate. But I don’t believe that. Not filled with hate? Maybe, but that’s not self-evident. Filled with intolerance? Definitely.

Indeed. But let’s be even more direct about showing the bigotry behind that letter. Let’s suppose that the photo had not been of two women kissing, but of a black man kissing a white woman. And let’s look at the letter with that shading:

Did anyone consider that young children might be confused by the display on the front page?
The Bee has selfishly and disrespectfully usurped the rights of parents to choose where and when to have a thoughtful discussion, with their children, about interracial couples. Believe it or not, there are still some families whose values are not reflected in the type of photo that The Bee published; and they are neither intolerant nor filled with hate.

Would anyone seriously believe her claim of tolerance and love in that case?
No.

Believe it or not, there are still some families whose values are not reflected in images of warmth and affection. How sad for them.

Highway 61 revisited

2011-12-21T11:16:00.001-05:00

As I sit here with a Cesária Évora CD on in the house, I have an update to the car AV system issue, wherein it couldn’t stop playing Bob Dylan. That is, I found out why it’s playing a disproportionate amount of Dylan.

I noticed, as it played more songs, that it was not just playing a lot of Bob Dylan and the Beatles, but that it wasn’t playing anything beyond C in the alphabet. I have the files on the microSD organized in folders (directories) based on the artists and albums, so at the root level there’s a Bob Dylan folder, and that has sub-folders called Blonde On Blonde, Blood On the Tracks, Desire, and so on. In those folders are the MP3 files for the songs. I used the touch-screen interface to look in the folder of the current song, then went up to the artist level, and then to the root. I scrolled the list of artists, which should have gone from 10,000 Maniacs to Youssou N’Dour. But the list stopped somewhere near the end of the Cs.

Ha! There appears to be a limit to the number of directories. And with only around 1000 songs active, instead of the 4000 on the chip, the chances of Dylan had been multiplied by 4 for each play. No wonder I was getting so much! OK, I can work around that limit.

I took the chip into the house, put it in my computer, and wrote a script to pull all the files out to the root level, so there are no directories/folders. /Bob Dylan/Desire/03 Mozambique.mp3 became /Bob Dylan-Desire-03 Mozambique.mp3, and now I have 3984 files in the root directory, and no folders. Pop the chip back into the car system, and try it out.

Great! There’s a D... now an L... a G. Much better!

But it didn’t take too long to notice that it never played anything beyond L. I went to the list and scrolled again (and was happy that one can scroll backward, and it wraps around).

This time, it was easy to tell exactly: the files in each directory are numbered sequentially by the system, and with everything in the root directory I could see what the actual limit is: 2500 files, exactly. That’s horrid!

2500 files might be a reasonable limit when microSD chips only went up to 2 GB. But that was a while ago, and it’s perfectly easy to have 8000 files or more now, and higher-capacity chips are coming out all the time. It’s absolutely ridiculous to build in limits like this, considering how the technology is moving forward. Any reasonable file system has tossed such limits away long ago.

I’m trying to delete 1500 files from the microSD card, but it’s tough: the music on my computer is already selected from my far more extensive CD collection, and represents my favourites. How do I pick 1500 favourites to eliminate? The first 500 went gradually, but it wasn’t too awful. The second 500 were a real challenge. I’m still working on the last 500, and it’s very tough!

I’ll be writing to Pioneer, to express my displeasure and to see if there’s anything that can be done. And I guess I’ll go back to streaming the music from my BlackBerry, which still has all the songs, and for which there’s no such limitation.

Update, 4 p.m.: Pioneer's customer service gave me a prompt response, which confirms what I saw:

The maximum number of files on USB or SD that this unit will support is 2500. Currently there are no plans to change that specification. Your feedback is appreciated and will be passed along to product planning.

Patterns in randomness: the Bob Dylan edition

2011-12-15T08:44:00.007-05:00

The human brain is very good — quite excellent, really — at finding patterns. We delight in puzzles that involve pattern recognition... consider word-search puzzles, the Where’s Waldo stuff, and the game Set. We’re also great at giving patterns amusing interpretations, as we do when we fancy that clouds look like ducks or castles — or when we claim to see images of Jesus in Irish hillsides, pieces of wood, paper towels, and store receipts. Remember the cheese sandwich with the Virgin Mary on it, which sold on eBay for $28,000 in 2004? Miraculous, indeed.

It’s with the knowledge that we find apparent patterns in randomness that I approach this puzzling aspect of the random play feature of my car stereo. I’ve stuck in a microSD card that has about 4000 songs on it. I’ve put it on random play. And it appears to be playing songs in random order.

But it sure seems to be playing a lot of Dylan.

Bob, not Thomas. I like Bob Dylan, of course; that’s why I have quite a bit of him on the microSD card. But, for instance, on one set of local errands, it played two Dylan songs, something else, another Dylan, two other songs, then another Dylan. Four out of seven? Seems a bit odd.

Now, I know that if you ask a typical person which sequence is more likely to come up in a lottery drawing, 1-2-3-4-5, or 57-12-31-46-9, he will say not only that the latter is more likely, but that if the former came up he’d be sure something was amiss. In fact, they’re equally likely, and are as likely as any other pre-determined five-number sequence, but the one that looks like a pattern is one we think can’t be random. Similarly, it’s certainly possible to randomly pick four Dylan songs out of seven — or even four in a row, for that matter. And if there’s a bug in the algorithm that the audio system uses, why would it opt for Dylan, and not, say, Eric Clapton or the Beatles, both of which I also have plenty of on the chip?

So I played around with some numbers. Let’s make some simplifying assumptions, just to test the general question. Assume I have 20 songs from each artist, and a total of 4000 songs (and, so, 200 artists). If I play seven songs, how likely is it that two will be by the same artist?

It’s easier to figure out how likely it is that there won’t be repetitions. The first song can be anything. The likelihood that the second will be of a different artist than the first is (4000-20)/3999, about 99.5%. The likelihood that the third will differ from both of those is (4000-40)/3998. Repeat that four more times and multiply the probabilities: there’s a 90.4% chance of seven different artists in seven songs... meaning that there’s about a 9.6% chance of at least one repetition. Probably more likely than we might think.

Let’s look at Dylan, specifically. I have about 120 of his songs on there (3% of the total; maybe I should delete some, but that’s a separate question). What are the chances of having no Dylan in seven songs? No Dylan for the first is 3880/4000, 97% (makes sense: 3% chance of Dylan in any one selection). Continuing, no Dylan, still, for the second is 3879/3999. Repeat five more times and multiply: 71.3% chance of no Dylan, so there’s a 28.7% chance of at least one Dylan song if we play seven.

What about the chances of at least two Bob Dylan songs... a repetition of Dylan? Well, we figured out no Dylan above. Let’s figure out exactly one, and then add them. For the first to be Dylan and none of the others, we have 120/4000 * 3880/3999 * 3879/3998 * 3878/3997 * 3877/3996 * 3876/3995 * 3875/3994. About 2.5%. It’s the same for one Dylan in any other position — the numerators and denominators can be mixed about. So the chances of exactly one Dylan song out of seven is 2.5 * 7, or 17.5%. Add that to the chances of zero, 71.3 + 17.5 = 88.8%, so there’s an 11.2% chance of at least two Dylan songs in a mix of seven songs.

In other words, it’s a better than one in four chance that I’ll hear at least one Bob Dylan song, and a better than one in ten chance that I’ll hear at least two of them every time I take a 20- or 30-minute ride. Thrown in some confirmation bias, where I forget about the trips that had Clapton and the Beatles and Billy Joel and Carole King, but no Dylan, and I guess the system is working the way it’s supposed to.

But, damn, it plays a lot of Bob Dylan!

Hands-free is not enough

2011-12-14T10:26:00.000-05:00

The other day, we heard that the U.S. NTSB would be proposing a nationwide ban on mobile phone use, and people were speculating that it’d increase sales and use of hands-free calling. I thought that would be odd, since a number of studies have made it clear that it’s mostly talking on your mobile phone that’s dangerous, whether it’s hands-free or not. There’s cognitive interference when you talk to someone who isn’t in the car with you, and having the device be hands-free only helps with the mechanical aspects, not with the cognitive ones, and those appear to be more important from a safety point of view.

And, as I expected, the proposed ban includes hands-free devices. Quoting from their news release of yesterday:

No call, no text, no update behind the wheel: NTSB calls for nationwide ban on PEDs while driving
December 13, 2011
Following today’s Board meeting on the 2010 multi-vehicle highway accident in Gray Summit, Missouri, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) called for the first-ever nationwide ban on driver use of personal electronic devices (PEDs) while operating a motor vehicle.
The safety recommendation specifically calls for the 50 states and the District of Columbia to ban the nonemergency use of portable electronic devices (other than those designed to support the driving task) for all drivers. The safety recommendation also urges use of the NHTSA model of high-visibility enforcement to support these bans and implementation of targeted communication campaigns to inform motorists of the new law and heightened enforcement.
According to NHTSA, more than 3,000 people lost their lives last year in distraction-related accidents, said Chairman Deborah A.P. Hersman. It is time for all of us to stand up for safety by turning off electronic devices when driving.
No call, no text, no update, is worth a human life.

Note nonemergency use and other than those designed to support the driving task. There is no exception for hands-free devices in their recommendation.

The NTSB has no standing to force this; in the United States, the states make their own traffic rules. But Congress can back the recommendation with funding incentives, as they did with the now-defunct 55 MPH speed limit, and as they have done for laws requiring seat-belt use.

Rick Perry: stupid is as stupid does

2011-12-09T12:04:00.000-05:00

In case you haven’t been following the current Intervents over the past few days, let me call your attention to a Rick Perry campaign ad that was posted to YouTube on Tuesday. It’s called Strong, and it features a confident and concerned Rick Perry, bringing a very important point to his voters. Copying the copy from Governor Perry’s YouTube page:

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian, but you don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.
As President, I’ll end Obama’s war on religion. And I’ll fight against liberal attacks on our religious heritage. Faith made America strong. It can make her strong again.
I’m Rick Perry and I approve this message.

As I look at it now, it has 2,711,916 views, 10,401 likes, and 428,954 dislikes (as you might expect, comments are disabled). The numbers are increasing all the time, of course, but the dislikes are doing so very rapidly, making it, as one blogger notes, the most hated video on YouTube. It has well surpassed that horrid Friday, Friday thing, which only has 256,752 dislikes, and has taken almost three months to accumulate them, not just three days.

There are also, of course, many parodies popping up (I’ll let you have the fun of searching for them), most beginning, I’m not ashamed to admit than I’m an atheist, but some getting rather sillier (I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a dinosaur.?). And many are pointing out that the Gov’s jacket bears a close resemblance to the one Heath Ledger wore in Brokeback Mountain, adding ironic silliness to the mix.

(The dislikes are up to 430,321 now....)

The parodies and the silliness are great fun, but let’s not forget that this is meant to be a serious campaign video by a serious candidate for President of the United States. Mr Perry is waning in the polls; still, he’s not a long shot or a dark horse. He was the front-runner for a while. (Have I worn out the horse-racing metaphors yet?)

Where on Earth does he come up with the idea that there’s some sort of war on religion going on, when the religious asshats have been strangling the rest of us for years? One would have to be completely in a land of fantasy to think that atheists are running things. The notion that our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school is just ridiculous on its face, and any quick look around us will easily expose that as the lie it is.

What’s more, few of us would even want to stop kids from doing those things on their own. What we want is not to have public schools and other public, tax-funded institutions promote religion and prayer. No one’s closing down private schools and churches, and no one’s telling kids they can’t say a personal prayer or wish Merry Christmas to their friends.

And the idea that President Obama, a professed church-going Christian, is leading such a war is simply beyond stupid.

432,542.

I want to move to a country where you have to take an intelligence test to get in, even on a tourist visa.

Car navigation and audio system

2011-12-08T08:16:00.008-05:00

I have a new car (as of October), a Subaru Legacy. The new car has a Pioneer AVIC-X930BT navigation/audio system (I mentioned its anti-theft mechanism last week). After years of using maps and printed directions, or relying on my BlackBerry for the GPS task — it’s effective, but small and hard to use while one is driving — it’s good to have the nav system, with a nice, large touch-screen (the next model up also does voice-command activation).

I’m mostly happy with it, and only find two annoying quirks in the navigation system. The more irritating of the two is that there’s a safety disclaimer that I have to touch OK to dismiss every time I start up the system:

Caution!
This Navi product is intended solely as a driving aid. Review instruction manual and select route before driving. Navi is not a substitute for your attentiveness, judgement, and care while driving or moving your vehicle. Always observe safe driving rules and driving laws, and follow road signs even if they contradict Navi’s instructions. By pressing OK key, you accept the license agreement in the instruction manual.

I get the issue here: there are a good many documented cases of people driving onto railroad tracks, going the wrong way on one-way roads, and other such because they blindly and stupidly followed (what they thought were) their GPS systems’ instructions. But, really, I ought to be able to accept that safety and license-agreement message once, and be done with it. Or if they must remind me periodically, how about once a month? Even weekly would be better than having to deal with it every time I start the car.

The other annoyance is that the positioning system doesn’t seem to understand reverse gear. When I pull up my driveway and into my garage, the system doesn’t know where I am with respect to the roads. When I start up again, back out, and head up the road, it thinks I’m on the next block, and remains confused about that for a few minutes, while it acquires the GPS satellites and sorts out its actual location. That’s mostly comical, because I don’t need the GPS location to be accurate when I’m near home. Still, it’s rather goofy.

The most interesting thing about the system is that it replaces the audio system in the car, and includes AM and FM radio, CD and DVD player (including video), bluetooth audio streaming from your smartphone, playing your iPod, playing Pandora or Aha from the Inernet via an iPhone app, and playing music or video files from a USB device or microSD card. It makes for quite the music system.

I had been streaming music from my BlackBerry, but there’s not really a need — microSD cards are very cheap these days. I got a new card and copied all my music onto it. Thousands of music files live with the car. Very nice.

But there’s a problem, caused by a combination of an odd software choice in the Pioneer system and what happens to the microSD card on my MacBook. When I first plugged the microSD card into the audio system and turned on random play, it played the first song, gave me a popup message saying that unplayable files would be skipped, picked a random next song, and turned the random-play feature off.

Unplayable files?

I investigated. There turn out to be three things causing this, all related to hidden files (files whose names begin with ., which are hidden by the Unix file system that’s used on the Mac):

iTunes, which manages my music library on the Mac (and whence I copied the files), keeps a hidden file associated with each song, to keep track of metadata. When I copied the music directories, I copied all those as well.
Spotlight, a Mac feature that helps you search for things, creates a hidden directory structure called .Spotlight-V100 when it indexes the drive. This happens just because you plugged the microSD card into the Mac.
The operating system and the MacOS Finder create various hidden files and directories, both in the root of the drive and in its subdirectories: .Trashes, .fseventsd, and .DS_Store (that last exists in every subdirectory that’s been touched by the Finder).

I configured Spotlight not to index the microSD drive (which you can only conveniently do after it’s already done it), and then wrote a shell script to delete every file and directory whose name begins with . (and one had best be very careful about writing and running such a script). Every time I plug it into my Mac, I have to run the script on it just before I eject it when I’m done.

Now everything works great. The audio system no longer complains about unplayable files, and the random-play feature doesn’t get turned off. I find that truly an odd programming choice: not only to display the message (which is odd enough), but then to stop random play. But it’s also bad that MacOS treats removable media that way... it should assume that removable media formatted with FAT(32) will be used on non-Mac platforms, and not pollute it with Mac-specific stuff.

Subjunctively moody

2011-12-05T08:15:00.000-05:00

In his After Deadline column last week, New York Times editor Philip Corbett criticizes some overly complex sentences, reminding Times writers that, while Times readers needn’t be coddled, meanings need to be clear. One of his suggested corrections refers to this: [...] and Ms. King, who said she would ensure that the program be smart and entertaining. Mr Corbett has this to say:

At the end, there’s no need for the subjunctive be. The original assertion was something like, I will ensure that the program is [or will be] smart and entertaining. So, with proper sequence of tenses, make it was or would be.

He’s right, but this is a tricky one. We don’t use the subjunctive mood^[1] very often, so we’re not well versed in its use. Except for some common phrases, such as, So be it, and If I were king, the subjunctive has all but died out in speech and informal writing, and it’s uncommon even in formal writing nowadays. Spanish still uses it extensively (the rules for its use there aren’t the same as in English, though some are similar), but English, not so much.

And to top it all off, even when it is used we usually don’t notice: with notable exception of to be, most verbs use the same form for subjunctive and indicative in all but the third person singular. We may be using subjunctives, but we can’t tell.

A simple rule that many people remember is to use subjunctive with something that’s contrary to fact (as in the if I were king situation), but that only goes so far. In fact, it’s generally used not just for such conditionals, but also for demands, wishes, and desires. And that’s what makes it tricky with ensure.

A writer would correctly use subjunctive were he to say, Ms King said she would insist that the program be smart and entertaining. Be (subjunctive), not is (indicative), because of the demand. Ensure seems similar here: she insists that it be entertaining, so she will ensure that it be so. But no: she will ensure that it is so, or that it will be so. Assurance is not one of the situations where we use subjunctive mood. Why? Well, it just isn’t. Someone made these rules up a long time ago, and that’s that.

On the other hand, that should give us a clue as to why the rule is vanishing, n’est-ce pas?

^[1] Yes, mood. Subjunctive is a mood, not a tense, nor a case, nor an aspect. The other grammatical moods in English are indicative and imperative.

Metro Transit

2011-12-04T11:22:00.000-05:00

The photo on the right (click it to enlarge it) is a shot of a Whole Foods advertisement on a Metro-North train. Their unriveled commitment to quality clearly doesn’t extend to spelling.

In other New York City transit news, on a Manhattan-bound L-train from Brooklyn last night, there was a fake pile of poop on one of the benches. Passengers all speculated on whether it was fake (no smell, too neat and regular), with assured pronouncements that it was. Still, no one tested it, and no one would sit within four feet of it.

Only in New York.

National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012

2011-12-02T12:03:00.000-05:00

On Thursday, the U.S. Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act, an annual bill that provides for continued operation of the U.S. military. But this year’s 680-page bill includes yet more civil rights violations sanctioned by our legislature. Here’s NPR’s Steve Inskeep introducing their report:

The senate last night passed a defense bill that includes controversial provisions for handling terrorism suspects. The bill would send most detainees into military custody, not into the hands of the FBI, and it would allow the U.S. government to hold some suspects indefinitely, without charge, without trial. Those ideas ran into strong opposition from national security experts across the Obama administration, setting the stage for a possible veto by the president.

About halfway through the NPR report is this:

Carrie Johnson (NPR): But some Democrats and civil liberties groups said that left up in the air whether U.S. citizens could be detained in this country indefinitely without charges. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, says there’s nothing wrong with taking a hard line against American terrorists.
Senator Graham: I’m just saying to any American citizen, if you wanna help Al Qaeda, you do so at your own peril. You can get killed in the process, you can get detained indefinitely, and when you’re being questioned and you say to the interrogator, I want my lawyer, the interrogator will say you don’t have a right to a lawyer, ’cause you’re a military threat.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: what Senator Graham and those who spout the same rhetoric are missing is that we’re dealing here not with adjudicated cases, but with accusations. The rights they’re threatening were put in place to protect Americans from improper accusations — unfair, unwarranted, trumped up, perhaps specifically intended to put away someone who’s turned out to be inconvenient.

Back in the old days of tyrannical rule, the king would accuse anyone of anything, and the accusation alone would be cause to lock the accused in a dungeon indefinitely, with no hope of help or justice. When we formed this country, we put together a system of rights and guarantees to prevent such abuse and to protect our people from that sort of thing.

And yet that’s exactly what Senator Graham and others want to put us back into: a situation wherein a government that wants to silence someone and make him disappear need only make an unsubstantiated accusation of working with terrorists, and that person can be whisked away by the military, held in secret forever, and denied access to anyone — no family, no lawyers, no advocates of any kind to help him refute what may well be false accusations. No charge of an actual crime and no evidence are necessary.

I agree with Senator Graham that we should take a hard line against people who wanna help Al Qaeda. I’m just not willing to take accusations as fact and throw away the protections we have against abuse, and neither should anyone who supports the tenets this country was founded on be willing to do so. By all means, arrest people suspected of working with terrorists. Then give them access to legal support, tell them what crimes they’re charged with, and have fair and public trials, just as we do with people accused of murder, rape, arson, and all other horrible crimes.

These provisions need to be removed from the bill, and President Obama must veto it until they are removed.

Web-page mistakes

2011-12-01T08:19:00.002-05:00

I don’t understand, sometimes, how people put together their web pages. Who really thinks that, say, pink text on a red background looks good? Seventeen different typefaces on one page? A background image that makes people’s eyes cross?

One can argue that those are all matters of taste, and, after all, à chacun, son goût. And anyway, those things are easy enough to fix: one can apply a custom style sheet right in the browser, and override all those size and color and font and background things that were specified in the web page. There are instructions and bookmarklets floating around on the web... just stick one in your browser’s bookmark bar, and then click it when you encounter a retch-inducing or simply unreadable web page.

But there are lots of web-page problems you can’t fix up in your browser, because it’s the people who put together their web pages who don’t understand, and it’s not just in matters of personal taste. Perhaps one of the most annoying of these is what I call the lazy thumbnail error.

You’ve encountered these, surely: you’ll be looking at a web site for a business or organization, and you’ll click on a page labelled The Christmas Party, or Our Staff... and the page will take forever to load. You can’t see why, though: the Our Staff page shows maybe 20 people, from the company president to the secretarial staff, each with a small photo, a name, and a short paragraph by way of a bio. No big deal here. The photos are all tiny, something on the order of 100 by 120 pixels, like my mug at the top of these pages. What’s the problem?

The problem is that the photos aren’t as small as they look, because the webmaster was lazy about creating thumbnails for the staff pics. She asked everyone to send her a snapshot, and she put them all up on the web page with HTML like this:

<img src="staffPics/jane.jpg" height=200 alt="Jane Smith">

There... that makes all the photos the same height, 200 pixels. If someone sent a larger one, it gets scaled down, nice and small. Makes for a uniform look, and the page looks great.

What the webmaster doesn’t understand is that the scaling is not done at the server, but in the user’s browser. When the browser loads the page, it sees all these IMG tags, and it requests each image URL (such as staffPics/jane.jpg, in the example above). But it has no way to tell the server that it’s only going to display it 200 pixels high, and the server has no way to know. If Jane sent a high-res portrait, eight megapixels huge, the whole thing gets sent to the browser. And then the browser has to do the scaling itself, when it renders the page.

If ten of the twenty staffies have sent large photos, that simple Our Staff page can wind up being tens or hundreds of megabytes in size, despite how tiny the headshots look in the browser. Plus, there’s a load on the browser, which has to store the full-sized images and resize them for rendering — you can sometimes see that effect when scrolling the page is sluggish.

The solution is for the webmaster to take the time to create images of the right size (or close to it) from the start. If someone sends you a 2400 x 3200 portrait, scale it down to 150 x 200 yourself, and just put that image on the web page (there are programs available for this, which make it easier to handle a lot of photos). If you want to make the larger one available for clicking, something like this will do:

<a href="staffPics/full/jane.jpg"><img src="staffPics/thumbs/jane.jpg" height=200 alt="Jane Smith"></a>

The height=200 still ensures that they’ll all be the same height, in case the thumbnails aren’t all exactly the same size (there’s no harm in letting the browser do a small amount of re-scaling). But now people won’t have to grab all those high-resolution photos unless they actually want to.

A festive Chinese dish

2011-11-30T08:23:00.022-05:00

On a recent trip to Shenzhen, China, two colleagues and I went to a restaurant for dinner and happened onto a dish that was splendid to look at and delicious to eat. As we looked at the menu, the picture caught my eye: stripes of red, green, yellow, and brown. What is this?, I asked my Chinese-speaking colleague. He asked the waitress, and then told me it was eggplant underneath, and the stripes were red pepper, garlic, and such. We ordered it, and we all loved it. I decided I’d try making something like it at home.

I did that the other day. I wanted to make it vegetarian, so I replaced the ground pork (the brown strip) in the original with chopped brown mushrooms. I had a bunch of zucchini in the ’fridge, so I used that instead of eggplant for the base. And I made up a Chinese sauce on the fly — any tasty brown sauce will do, so try something based on hoisin, or oyster sauce, or black bean sauce....

Here’s the result (click the image above to see how it looked):

Vegetable with garlic sauce, festively presented

Ingredients:

About four zucchini or Chinese eggplant, sliced (see instruction 5)
Chopped fresh garlic, about 3 tablespoons
Hot red chilis, sliced or coarsely chopped, about 1/4 cup
Chopped brown mushrooms, about 1/2 cup
Chopped fresh cilantro, 1/4 cup or so
2 tablespoons hoisin sauce
2 teaspoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1/4 cup water

Cooking:

Get some rice started, if you want to serve rice with this. No, that’s not in the ingredient list.
Using a little mild cooking oil, sauté the garlic on low heat for a few minutes to soften. You want the colour, so don’t brown it. Set the lightly cooked garlic aside in a small bowl.
Do the same for the chilis, setting them aside in a separate bowl.
Sauté the mushrooms, and cook them until they get a nice, dark colour and lose much of their water. Set them aside in a third bowl.
Mix the hoisin, soy, sesame oil, and water, and set that aside. Alternatively, make up whatever sort of Chinese brown sauce you like.
I like to slice the zucchini or Chinese eggplant (the long, thin ones; don’t use the big fat ones we usually find in American stores) by cutting them in half lengthwise, then slicing each half crosswise on a diagonal, about 1/4 inch thick. That makes slices that are a good size and shape, and that look nice. However you do it, slice your vegetable.
Get a large pan nice and hot, with a couple of tablespoons of mild cooking oil in it. Make sure the pan is hot before you add the vegetable.
Sauté your sliced vegetable until it’s almost cooked — it should be tender, but not falling apart.
Add the sauce and finish cooking, letting the sauce reduce.

Serving:

Transfer the vegetable to a nice serving plate, and spread it evenly over the plate.
Using the chilis, garlic, cilantro, and mushrooms, cover the vegetable with stripes (see the photo).
Take a picture.
When everyone’s ready to tuck into it, use chopsticks or a spoon to mix it all around. You’ve destroyed the lovely look, but now it’s all about the taste.

Stan and George

2011-11-29T10:25:00.000-05:00

Today gave us one great musician, and took away another, both of whom I’ve written about in these pages before. Canadian singer/songwriter Stan Rogers was born on this day in 1949. English singer/songwriter George Harrison died ten years ago today. Go back to my earlier posts for my comments about them. Here, just a quotation or two from their songs.

Watch the field behind the plow
Turn to straight, dark rows
Feel the trickle in your toes
Blow the dust-cake from your nose
Hear the tractor’s steady roar
Oh, you can’t stop now
There’s a quarter section, more or less, to go
And it figures that the rain
Keeps its own sweet time
You can watch it come for miles
But you guess you’ve got a while
So east the throttle out a hair
Every rod’s a gain
And there’s victory in every quarter mile
— Stan Rogers, The Field Behind the Plow, 1981

Don’t have to be ashamed of the car I drive
[The end of the line]
I’m just glad to be here, happy to be alive
[The end of the line]
It don’t matter if you’re by my side
[The end of the line]
I’m satisfied
Well it’s all right, even if you’re old and grey
Well it’s all right, you still got something to say
Well it’s all right, remember to live and let live
Well it’s all right, the best you can do is forgive
Well it’s all right, riding around in the breeze
Well it’s all right, if you live the life you please
Well it’s all right, even if the sun don’t shine
Well it’s all right, were going to the end of the line
— George Harrison, et al, The End of the Line, 1988

Happy birthday, Jimi Hendrix

2011-11-27T19:12:00.000-05:00

Jimi Hendrix was born on this day in 1942, in Washington — the state, not the city. He died far too young, at 27.

And so castles made of sand
Fall in the sea
Eventually
— Jimi Hendrix, 1967

Anti-theft?

2011-11-24T08:30:00.003-05:00

The navigation system in my car has an anti-theft feature that’s interesting, in that it relies entirely on a sort of herd immunity. The system is installed in the car’s dashboard, so it’s somewhat involved to pull it out. Easy for a pro, to be sure, but I mean that it’s not like one of those that sits on top, and one can just grab it and run.

When it’s first powered on after installation, the owner has the option of setting a password. If a password is set and the unit is ever disconnected from the battery, as it would be if it were stolen (or, of course, when the car battery is replaced, or when servicing the car requires disconnecting the battery), the password has to be entered in order for the device to be used again. The only way to recover from a forgotten password is to have the manufacturer reset the system — and they will, one presumes, take some measures to ensure that you hadn’t simply boosted it.

The interesting thing about this mechanism is that there’s no way for a thief to know whether or not a password is set. This anti-theft feature does nothing to actually prevent theft, but only to prevent the use of the system after it’s stolen. That’s only a deterrent if the thief knows two things: that this model has this feature and that almost all owners set a password (so that the likelihood of stealing a usable unit is too low to be worth the trouble).

Setting a password does absolutely nothing for your own device’s security — once it’s stolen, no thief will come put it back when he finds that he can’t use it nor sell it. Rather, we all depend on the widespread knowledge, at least among thieves, that everyone sets one. If I opt out, I’m covered by the rest of you. But if too many people opt out, then no one’s unit is safe.

And there is a big down side to setting a password: when your battery’s disconnected for service, if you’ve forgotten the password (which you only used once, maybe several years ago) your nav system becomes a brick.

Perhaps all in-dash navigation systems use this mechanism, and thieves are well aware of that (and new thieves soon will be). I wonder, though, how many owners choose not to set a password.

Degrees of separation

2011-11-23T10:36:00.000-05:00

New Scientist tells us about Facebook’s analysis of the friend relationships in their social network. Only four degrees of separation, says Facebook, goes the New Scientist headline. Here’s their summary:

A few months ago, we reported that a Yahoo team planned to test the six degrees of separation theory on Facebook. Now, Facebook’s own data team has beat them to the punch, proving that most Facebook users are only separated by four degrees.
Facebook researchers pored through the records of all 721 million active users, who collectively have designated 69 billion "friendships" among them. The number of friends differs widely. Some users have designated only a single friend, probably the person who persuaded them to join Facebook. Others have accumulated thousands. The median is about 100.
To test the six degrees theory, the Facebook researchers systematically tested how many friend connections they needed to link any two users. Globally, they found a sharp peak at five hops, meaning that most pairs of Facebook users could be connected through four intermediate people also on Facebook (92 per cent). Paths were even shorter within a single country, typically involving only three other people, even in large countries such as the US.

The world, they conclude, just became a little smaller.

Well, maybe. There are a lot of things at play here, and it’s not simple. It is interesting, and it’s worth continuing to play with the data, but it’s not simple.

They’re studying a specific collection of people, who are already connected in a particular way: they use Facebook. That gives us a situation where part of the conclusion is built right into the study. To use the Kevin Bacon comparison, if we just look at movie actors, we’ll find closer connections to Mr Bacon than in the world at large. Perhaps within the community of movie actors, everyone’s within, say, four degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon. I don’t know any people in the movie industry directly, but I know people who do, so there’s two additional degrees to get to me. We can’t look at a particular community of people and generalize it to those outside that community.

There’s also a different model of friends on Facebook, compared with how acquaintance works in the real world. For some people, they’re similar, of course, but many Facebook users have lots of friends whom they don’t actually know. Sometimes they know them through Facebook or other online systems, and sometimes they don’t know them at all. Promiscuous friending might or might not be a bad thing, depending upon what one wants to use one’s Facebook identity for, but it skews studies like this, in any case.

People would play with similar things in the real-life six degrees game. Reading a book by my favourite author doesn’t count, but if I passed him on the street in New York City, does that qualify? What about if we went into the same building? If he held the door for me? If I went to his book signing, and he shook my hand and signed my copy of his book? Facebook puts a big e-wrinkle on that discussion.

But then, too, it’s clear that with blogs and tweets and social networking, we have changed the way we interconnect and interact, and we have changed how we look at being acquainted with people. I know people from the comments in these pages, and from my reading and commenting on other blogs. Yes, I definitely know them, and some to the point where I call them friends in the older, pre-social-network sense. But some I’ve never met face to face, nor talked with by voice.

So, yes, the world probably is a little smaller than it used to be. It didn’t just get that way suddenly, of course; it’s been moving in that direction for a while. Everything from telephones and airplanes to computers and the Internet have been taking us there.

IBM will get a new CEO

2011-10-26T02:41:00.002-04:00

In my old company’s news: IBM has announced that Ginni Rometty will take over as President and CEO in January. From the IBM announcement:

Armonk, NY, October 25, 2011 — The IBM board of directors has elected Virginia M. Rometty president and chief executive officer of the company, effective January 1, 2012. She was also elected a member of the board of directors, effective at that time. Ms. Rometty is currently IBM senior vice president and group executive for sales, marketing and strategy. She succeeds Samuel J. Palmisano, who currently is IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer. Mr. Palmisano will remain chairman of the board.

That Ms Rometty is IBM’s first female CEO is still remarkable, though IBM has long been more progressive than most large corporations in its promotion of women to executive positions, women such as Ellen Hancock, Linda Sanford, Jeannette Horan, Harriet Pearson, and Maria Azua have held Vice President positions in the company, and I watched some of them, including Ginni Rometty, move up from mid-level to Vice President during my time in IBM.

I have every expectation that Ms Rometty will be good for IBM, and I look forward to seeing how the company does under her leadership.

It’s been a while

2011-10-25T04:29:00.000-04:00

I’ve noted before that my high-school friend Bill Irwin found these pages some while go, and we’ve reconnected. Such are the benefits of social networks, including blogs, as well as, yes, Twitter and Facebook, if you can accept those. I’ve also noted that after five years of mostly daily blogging, I decided to back off starting in February, cutting back to every two or three days instead.

About a week and a half ago, Bill posted a comment to my most recent entry here. The entry is perhaps fittingly titled Don’t make promises... [you can’t keep]; fitting because my promise of two or three blog entries a week has not been kept — that most recent post is dated 7 September, and today is 25 October.

I didn’t publish Bill’s comment, because I wanted to promote it to a top-level entry. And note that it took me a week and a half to get to that. Here’s what he said:

Alright, Leiba, I’ve had enough. You inspired me to start out on my own blog and now you’ve stopped your own. Dammit, what gives? Gimme some feedback, dude, I don’t won’t to lose contact with you after all these many years...

Mea culpa; mea maxima culpa. First, I’ll say that anyone I’ve (re-)connected with through these pages will not be lost: you know how to contact me, I know how to contact you, and we can stay in touch.

That said, I do want to keep writing here, and I do intend to. It’s clear that once I gave up the discipline of daily, I lost the push to do it altogether; it’s been too easy to turn an every so often commitment into no commitment at all. I might have to re-think how I get motivated to post here. Because I do have a number of things set aside to say, but I haven’t made the time to say them.

And I won’t, probably, for the next few weeks either. I’ll try to get something out here and there, but I’m in the middle of a batch of (mostly business) travel. I was at the Internet Identity Workshop last week; I’m in Paris for the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group this week. And the travels continue until I get back from the IETF meeting in Taipei on 18 November.

For now, I’ll post, below a panorama of the view from my hotel room, looking north from Montparnasse (click to enlarge). The major buildings are, left to right, Tour Montparnasse (Montparnasse Tower, the black office tower on the far left), Hôtel National des Invalides (the gold-dome, a military museum and hospital/residence for disabled veterans), Observatoire de Paris (the white dome), Basilique du Sacré Cœur (Sacred Heart Basilica, on the hill in the far rear), Abbaye du Val de Grâce, and Hôtel du Panthéon (the domes in the foreground).

Don’t make promises...

2011-09-07T11:41:00.000-04:00

It’s that time again: U.S. presidential elections are in a bit more than a year, so, of course, furious campaigning has started. The religious-fanatic morons are telling us how God is guiding them, but they’re just insane. Rick Perry, after officially praying for rain, is promising to end abortion while his state burns from the endless drought.

On the more sane side, yesterday I heard Mitt Romney on the radio, promising to eliminate taxes on investments for the middle class.

Of course, it was the same in the lead-in to the 2008 election, as it’s the same every time. Then, all the candidates, including the current president, promised to do this or that with tax reform, to create their version of health-care coverage, and so on.

Here’s the thing: they are all making promises they can’t keep. None of this is up to them.

Congress controls the budget. Congress levies taxes, and is responsible for any changes to the tax system. It took legislation to enact the health-care bill, which looked little like what Mr Obama (or anyone else) had promised solemnly and fervently.

That’s how our system of checks and balances, our tripartite government, works. The president can do certain things with executive orders. He can make appointments according to his own plans. He can call on executive agencies to do rule-making magic in support of his policies. He can limit Congress with vetos. But it’s the legislative branch that controls much of what the executive candidates like to promise. And even for the other things, the legislature can make laws that negate or forbid executive orders, can refuse to confirm appointees, and can override vetos. And it’s they who give the executive agencies their rulemaking authority in the first place, and they can change its scope or take it away. All overseen by the judiciary, of course, which will rule on disputes and can be predictable or full of surprises.

George Pataki was elected governor of New York in 1994, largely on his promise to restore the death penalty in the state. When he took office in January, he did just that... and the state’s highest court promptly declared the current death-penalty law to be unconstitutional. The State Assembly refused to address it with new legislation, and Mr Pataki’s campaign promise amounted to nothing.

To the extent that we believe campaign promises at all, we need to take them with large grains of salt, and consider whether the things the candidates are promising would actually be within their purview when they take office. If not, they can try to influence things, but the legislative and judicial branches are not often easy to steer.

It seems the songs we’re singing
Are all about tomorrow,
Tunes of promises you can’t keep.
Every moment bringing
The love I can only borrow,
You’re telling me lies in your sleep.
Do you think I’m not aware of what you’re saying,
Or why you’re saying it?
Is it hard to keep me where you want me staying?
Don’t go on betraying it.
Don’t make promises you can’t keep.
— Tim Hardin, Don’t Make Promises (1966)

Where does the money go?

2011-08-24T11:33:00.000-04:00

Microsoft’s Raymond Chen usually blogs about interesting things about Windows. He also throws in assorted items about other things, and today he points to some old articles about how professional athletes go broke, despite multi-million-dollar salaries.

One of the articles is an NPR story from May, and it contains this wonderful quote at the beginning:

They see [their salaries] as infinite, like it doesn’t end, like they can’t spend it all, says accountant Scott Bercu, who has handled the finances of professional baseball and basketball players. But, if you get $5 million a year, by the time you get done paying your agent and taxes, you have $2 million left to spend. That goes very quickly.

That goes very quickly, indeed, hm. I should say so! Certainly the last couple of million I saw went away before I even noticed it.

The point of the story is that unlike most highly paid people, these athletes aren’t hired for their business sense, and managing money is, let’s say, not their long suit... and, so, naturally, when they come into enormous salaries, they do what they’ve always done with money: spend it all. They need, the story says, education — just as they get training in playing their sport, they need training in money management.

I don’t know; I find this really hard to accept. Basic, rank stupidity just isn’t something I have much tolerance for, and most people don’t have to be told that even large quantities of limited resources are still limited. It’s hard to have sympathy for someone who’s paid five million dollars, only has two million left after some necessary expenses, and then finds that the two million just goes very quickly.

Maybe it’s just schadenfreude, but, no, I have no sympathy at all.

The race for prosperity

2011-08-20T10:40:00.000-04:00

Paul Krugman writes in the New York Times about how populations shifts and lower wages can appear to create jobs locally, but notes that it doesn’t translate into prosperity and doesn’t scale to a nationwide job plan. I agree with his analysis. But I have another question, which I’ll introduce in a sort of roundabout way.

A friend of mine once commented about arcade-game scores. Typically, when you hit a target in an arcade game, you score thousands of points — maybe 1000 for this, 5000 for that, and 10,000 for a big target — resulting in final game scores in the hundreds of thousands, and, for top scorers, in the millions.

Is that really any different from having the targets give you, say, 1, 5, and 10 points, with final scores in the hundreds, or maybe the low thousands? Everything is relative, isn’t it? If we peel three zeroes off of everyone’s score, all players still rank against each other in the same way. It may be a psychological thing to have a score over a million, but in comparison to other players, does it matter in real terms?

Put another way, does adding zeroes to everyone, equally amount any real improvement. The numbers are bigger, but is anyone better off than before?

No.

Now, is it the same with wages, prices, and cost and quality of living?

Were I to get a 10% raise, I’d be happy, of course. It certainly feels great to bring in 10% more money. And, hey, my co-workers are good at what they do also, so they deserve 10% more as well, don’t they? And if my boss is going to give us all 10% more pay, he’ll want that for himself as well.

Before we know it, lots of people are getting 10% raises. How does the company afford to do that? The folks controlling the profits want their 10% too, of course. So that means that prices have to go up. Now the people who work at other businesses, affected by rising prices at the ones that are giving out 10% raises, need wage hikes as well — they want to continue to afford the products and services they’re used to buying.

At some point, everything — everyone’s wages, as well as the prices of everything from food to fuel, housewares to housing to haircuts — is up 10%.^[1] And, of course, I’m still doing a great job and I deserve a raise... and the process repeats.

But is anyone better off? Does it matter, when this all accumulates for some years, whether I earn $10,000 a year and a dinner for two costs $5... or I earn $100,000 a year and a dinner for two goes for $50? If renting an apartment has also gone from $200/month to $2000 in that time, and gas, which used to cost 40 cents a gallon, is now $4, has anything changed in real terms? Despite the extra zero in my salary, the extra zeroes in the prices mean that my buying power is the same as it was. And if everyone has gotten that added zero, we’re all just keeping up with one another.

Nothing has changed.

I’m better off for a short time after getting my raise, until everything catches up to me. And that’s assuming I’m on the leading edge of the cycle; the people on the trailing edge of the cycle are always behind, and only catch up at the end, just in time for things to start moving away from them again soon.

The economic cycle is a zero-sum game, at least for the vast majority of the population. It will only ever be the people in control of the top who will make out. The rest of us place ourselves somewhere else in the hierarchy, some of us better off than others, and then, for the most part and with only small variations and jockeying, we’re all just running a perpetual race on stationary treadmills.

^[1] In fact, since the people getting the profits also want their raises, the prices need to go up by 10% to cover our raises, plus more to increase the profits. And since our suppliers want raises too, and are raising their prices, our prices have to go up even more to account for that. So the cycle is more complicated than this, but the point is the same.

Bird-Mountain

2011-08-13T10:35:00.000-04:00

Daniel Grayling Fogelberg would have turned 60 today, had he not left us at the age of 56, taken by prostate cancer. His home town, Peoria, Illinois, dedicated a memorial garden to him in its Riverfront Park last year.

I first came across Dan Fogelberg’s music with his second album, Souvenirs, in 1974 — it’s playing on my stereo as I write this. His subsequent Captured Angels and Nether Lands stay together in my mind as my two favourites; I can’t choose between them. He’s probably best known, though, for songs from Phoenix and The Innocent Age.

This song, which he wrote for his father and recorded on The Innocent Age, seems appropriate to dedicate to Dan today:

I thank you for the music and your stories of the road.
I thank you for the freedom when it came my time to go.
I thank you for the kindness and the times when you got tough.
And, papa, I don’t think I said I love you near enough.
The leader of the band is tired and his eyes are growing old,
But his blood runs through my instrument and his song is in my soul.
My life has been a poor attempt to imitate the man.
I’m just a living legacy to the leader of the band.
— Dan Fogelberg, from Leader of the Band

Inventing the Internet

2011-07-25T07:07:00.000-04:00

I’m in Québec City this week for the IETF meeting. A group of us were having dinner last evening, and at the end of the meal, as we were paying, the waitress asked us what we were all in town for. We told her were were at a meeting to work on standards for how things talk to each other on the Internet.

So she tells us about a crazy lady who comes in the restaurant every afternoon. The lady claims to have invented a bunch of things, and one thing she says is that she invented the Internet. After someone makes the required Al Gore joke, I say, well, to tell you the truth, no one at this table qualifies but we do actually have some people in our group who actually did invent the Internet. She says It’s one person who did it?, and we say no, maybe eight or ten or so... and at least four of them really are here this week.

Number 2 and trying harder?

2011-07-14T09:38:00.000-04:00

Yahoo news notes that LinkedIn is now the number 2 social network, behind, of course, Facebook. Brent Hailpern has an amusing way of pointing out what that means, really:

In related news, Beta is now the No. 2 video tape format after VHS.

Indeed, at what point is number 2 so far behind that it simply doesn’t matter?

In this case, LinkedIn isn’t really even relevant: its focus is entirely different from Facebook’s, and one wouldn’t really say that they compete with each other. This is really saying that MySpace has fallen so far back that it’s even gone below LinkedIn.

But another point is that the newcomer, Google+, is way down there at number 4 or lower. It’s in beta, of course, but, well, that’s just Google, where pretty much everything is in perpetual beta. But Google+ is aiming to be a Facebook competitor. Is there any hope? Should they bother? Shouldn’t they put their resources where they might do more good? Won’t Google+ just go the way of Google Wave?

It certainly happens that something new comes from way, way back there and pushes its way to the front. That can sometimes be due to the prominence of the company backing it, as happened when Microsoft Internet Explorer took over the world, to the dismay of Netscape (Who?). Google certainly has a prominent, powerful position, but it seems unlikely that that alone would bump Facebook out of the number 1 spot, or even seriously threaten to.

The other way for a newbie to move up is by providing important improvements over what’s already out there. Facebook’s recent partnership with Skype gives it immunity from Google Voice, but Google is marketing Google+ as having better privacy than Facebook — and, &deity knows, the latter has had a great deal of bad press for its handling of privacy issues and controls.

So, is Google+ a better social-networking choice from a privacy standpoint? We have one datapoint so far, and it doesn’t look good: the folks at F-Secure, a Finnish anti-malware company, note that as part of the Google+ rollout, Google will be deleting all private profiles, thus requiring you to make your profile public if you want to keep it. What’s more, they’ve done a lot of the same things that Facebook has done, quietly making new things public and/or enabled by default, so you really have to keep on top of things to be sure you avoid information leaks.

That doesn’t sound like an improvement to me.

Netflix abuses its customers

2011-07-13T10:03:00.000-04:00

In December, I complained about Netflix streaming: not enough of what I want to watch is available for streaming. But some is, and getting one DVD at a time in addition to the streaming makes up for the lack, at least somewhat. In the end, then, we decided to keep the $10 Netflix subscription.

But Netflix has just announced that it’s increasing the cost of that plan by 60%. That’s a lot!

They’re actually doing it by separating the streaming and DVD plans, and charging $8 for each. Here’s what they say about it in their email message:

We are separating unlimited DVDs by mail and unlimited streaming into two separate plans to better reflect the costs of each. Now our members have a choice: a streaming only plan, a DVD only plan, or both.
Your current $9.99 a month membership for unlimited streaming and unlimited DVDs will be split into 2 distinct plans:
Plan 1: Unlimited Streaming (no DVDs) for $7.99 a month
Plan 2: Unlimited DVDs, 1 out at-a-time (no streaming) for $7.99 a month
Your price for getting both of these plans will be $15.98 a month ($7.99 + $7.99). You don’t need to do anything to continue your memberships for both unlimited streaming and unlimited DVDs.
These prices will start for charges on or after September 1, 2011.

The good part, I suppose, is that people who do only want one of the services can save $2 a month (let’s skip the penny here or there). But the ~~assholes~~ nice people at Netflix are doing a massive 60% rate hike for those who want the same package they’ve been using.

And one thing that’s particularly irritating about this is that if Cablevision, Time Warner Cable, Comcast, or Verizon wanted a 60% rise in rates, they’d have to get permission for it from regulatory agencies, and they wouldn’t be allowed to dump it all on us at once. Netflix has no such restriction, and can do what it wants... it’s up to us to say No! by not buying their service.

And so I’m really undecided about what to do. On the one hand, I’ve gotten used to the streaming, despite its limitations, and it’s nice to have stuff available and to watch things on the laptop when I’m travelling (in the U.S.). It’s tempting to just drop the DVD service and continue with $8/month for the streaming.

On the other hand, I very much want to give Netflix a clear message that they can go fuck themselves, and hope they lose 80% of their customers and go out of business.

A Trick of the Gmail?

2011-07-12T09:31:00.001-04:00

When you’re looking at Gmail’s conversation list, it likes to show you just the first names of some of the people involved in the conversation — usually the first and last interlocutors, but sometimes others, depending upon repetitions and whatnot. It can be a bit odd sometimes. When I’m having a conversation that involves someone else called Barry, it can look like I’m talking to myself. And it’s often the case that there’s one particular Murray or Dave or Jim with whom I usually talk, but a message from a different person of the same name will throw me off.

But sometimes, the juxtapositions are just a bit amusing:

I guess it’s just that I’ve been a Genesis fan since way back.

Fourth of July, Miami Beach

2011-07-04T21:58:00.000-04:00

Premier[e]

2011-06-27T10:52:00.000-04:00

At Westchester County Airport (HPN), there are (among others) the following two ads:

Tranquility Spa
Westchester’s premiere day spa.

Dominican Sisters Family Health Service
New York’s premier visiting nurse service.

Never mind, for the moment, the pretentious use of premier — we’re talking about (mostly) affluent Westchester County, NY, after all. But note that the Dominican Sisters got it right, and the day-spa folks blew it:

Premier refers to the best of something, the leading example.

Premiere refers to the first, not the best. And even if premiere were what they meant, its use in this context would be odd. One might refer to a premiere offer for their opening day, but this just doesn’t work.

Someone obviously did not use the premier advertising agency.

New York Allows Same-Sex Marriage, Becoming Largest State to Pass Law

2011-06-25T08:14:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, the New York State Senate approved the bill, 33 to 29.

ALBANY — Lawmakers voted late Friday to legalize same-sex marriage, making New York the largest state where gay and lesbian couples will be able to wed and giving the national gay-rights movement new momentum from the state where it was born.

It’s about time!

Misconceptions about DKIM

2011-06-21T22:14:00.000-04:00

I chair the DKIM working group in the IETF. The working group is finishing up its work, about ready to publish an update to the DKIM protocol, which moves DomainKeys Identified Mail up the standards track to Draft Standard.

DKIM is a protocol that uses digital signatures to attach a confirmed domain name to an email message (see part 7, in particular). DKIM started from a simple place, with a simple problem statement and a simple goal:

Email messages have many addresses associated with them, but none are authenticated, so none can be relied on.
Bad actors — spammers and phishers — take advantage of that to pretend they are sending mail from a place (a domain name) the recipient might trust, in an attempt to fool the recipient.
If we can provide an authenticated domain name, something that’s confirmed and that a sender can’t fake, then that information can be used as part of the delivery system, as part of deciding how to handle incoming mail.

It’s important to note that mail signed with DKIM isn’t necessarily good mail, nor even mail from a good place. All we know is that mail signed with DKIM was digitally signed by a specified domain. We can then use other information we have about that domain as part of the decision to deliver the message to the user’s inbox, to put it in junk mail, to subject it to further analysis or to skip that analysis, and so on.

Domain example.com signed this message, is just one of many pieces of information that might help decide what to do.

But some people — even some who have worked on the development of the DKIM protocol — miss the point, and put DKIM in a higher position than it should be. Or, perhaps more accurately, they give it a different place in the email delivery system than it should have.

Consider this severely flawed blog post from Trend Micro, a computer security company that should know better, but doesn’t:

In a recently concluded discussion by the [DKIM Working Group], some of those involved have decided to disregard phishing-related threats common in today’s effective social engineering attacks. Rather than validating DKIM’s input and not relying upon specialized handling of DKIM results, some members deemed it a protocol layer violation to examine elements that may result in highly deceptive messages when accepted on the basis of DKIM signatures.

The blog post describes an attack that takes a legitimately signed message, alters it in a way that does not invalidate the DKIM signature (taking advantage of some intentional flexibility in DKIM), and re-sends the message as spam or phishing. The attacker can add a second from address, and appear to the user to be from a trusted domain, though the DKIM signature is not.

The attack sounds bad, but it really isn’t, and the Trend Micro blog’s conclusion that failure to absolutely block this makes DKIM an EVIL protocol (their words) is not just overstated, but laughable and ridiculous. It completely undermines Trend Micro’s credibility.

Here’s why the attack is overstated:

It relies on the sender’s ability to get a DKIM signature on a phishing message, and assumes the message will be treated as credible by the delivery system.
It ignores the facts that delivery systems use other factors in deciding how to handle incoming messages and that they will downgrade the reputation score of a domain that’s seen to sign these sorts of things.
It ignores the fact that high-value domains, with strong reputations, will not allow the attackers to use them for signing.
The attack creates a message with two from lines, and such messages are not valid. It ignores the fact that delivery systems will take that into account as they score the message and make their decisions.

Apart from that, the blog insists that the right way to handle this attack would be to have DKIM go far beyond what it’s designed to do. Rather than just attaching a confirmed domain name to the message, DKIM would, Trend Micro says, now have to check the validity of messages during signature validation. Yes, that is a layer violation. Validity checking is an important part of the analysis of incoming email, but it is a separate function that’s not a part of DKIM. All messages, whether DKIM is in use or not, should be checked for being well-formed, and deviations from correct form should increase the spam score of a message. That has nothing to do with DKIM.

In fact, the updated DKIM specification does address this attack, and suggests things that delivery systems might do in light of it. But however good that advice might be, it’s not mandated by the DKIM protocol, because it belongs in a separate part of the analysis of the message.

Others have also posted rebuttals of the Trend Micro blog post. You can find one here, at CircleID, and look in the comments there for pointers to others.

Trusted identities

2011-06-03T07:30:00.005-04:00

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) now has a way to do a change of address online, on their web site. Nicely, it’s even all using https (SSL/TLS), keeping it encrypted, which is good.

On the first page, you select whether it’s a permanent change or a temporary one, and specify the dates.

On the second page, you select whether the change is for an individual or a whole family.

On the third page, you give the old and new addresses.

On the fourth page, you get this:

For your security, please verify your identity using a credit card or debit card. We’ll need to charge your card $1.00.
[? Help]
To prevent Fraud, we need to verify your identity by charging your card a $1.00 fee. The card’s billing address must match your current address or the address you’re moving to.

If you click the ? Help link, here’s what it tells you:

Identity Verification — Credit/Debit Card
In order to verify your identity, we process a $1 fee to your credit/debit card. The card’s billing address must match either the old or new address entered on the address entry page. This is to prevent fraudulent Change of Address requests.
Please note that the Internet Change of Address Service uses a high level of security on a secure server.

I have a few problems with this:

They’re asking for credit card information in a transaction where no one expects it. They’re assuring you that it’s secure, but how does one know? This is a classic phishing tactic.
They’re assuming you have a credit card to give them. Lots of people don’t have credit cards. I know some.
They’re charging you a dollar to change your address online, a mechanism that’s surely cheaper for them than to have you walk into the post office to do it. That’s nuts.

To be sure, they do have to do something to make sure that people don’t change each other’s addresses as pranks, or worse. But do they really need to charge you a dollar for it? They could make a charge and then rescind it. They could give you an alternative to use a bank account, and verify it the way PayPal does, by making a withdrawal of a few cents and then depositing it back. That would also help for people who have no credit cards, but do have bank accounts — still not everyone, but it’s something.

Or you can just say, Eff this; I’m not giving the post office my credit-card information and paying them a dollar for what I can do for free, and then go into the office and waste a clerk’s time on it.

This is why there are proposals for secure identity verification. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has an initiative called National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) that covers this sort of thing. Whether or not NSTIC is the right answer, we need to get to where we have this kind of verification available, without having to hack the credit-card system for it.

What are people searching for?

2011-06-02T10:06:00.000-04:00

I had a conversation with a friend the other day, a piece of which went like this:

Friend: Do you know who Contessa Brewer is?
Me: Is Contessa her name, or is she some kind of royalty?
Friend: She’s a news anchor on MSNBC.
Me: No, never heard of her.

I don’t watch MSNBC, you see. I don’t eschew it purposefully, but I just don’t happen to watch it. So later, when I had a chance, I did a Google image search to see what she looks like, and whether I might have seen her after all. I haven’t.

But here: Google image search shows me, at the top of the search results, some related searches to the one I made. I’d searched just for the name. Here were the related searches, which I presume are ordered by popularity:

contessa brewer legs
contessa brewer msnbc
contessa brewer cleavage
contessa brewer bikini
contessa brewer body

She’s a news anchor, but all most men want to do is see her legs and cleavage.

Men are such pigs. Damn, but it makes me embarrassed to be one.

70 Bob

2011-05-24T07:09:00.002-04:00

Today is the birthday of, among others, Robert Zimmerman, who turns 70.

70.

Geez.

To everyone with a birthday today:

May God bless and keep you always
May your wishes all come true
May you always do for others
And let others do for you
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
May you stay forever young
May you grow up to be righteous
May you grow up to be true
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you
May you always be courageous
Stand upright and be strong
May you stay forever young
May your hands always be busy
May your feet always be swift
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift
May your heart always be joyful
And may your song always be sung
May you stay forever young
— Bob Dylan, 1974

Creating jobs?

2011-05-16T07:41:00.002-04:00

I’ve said before how much I like the radio show This American Life. This week’s episode, How To Create a Job, was an interesting one. I was especially interested near the end.

Throughout the show, they look at the difficulty of actually creating jobs — new jobs, where jobs didn’t exist before. In Act Three, we see that in many cases, it’s really just a matter of shifting the jobs around. They were always there, but we’re looking at a different there, moving jobs to Phoenix or Houston, from, say, California. That might make things look better in Phoenix or Houston, but overall, the U.S. economy hasn’t been improved by creating more jobs.

But then it was the intro to Act Four: Be Cool, Stay In School that really make me sit up. Here’s Ira Glass:

OK, here’s something I didn’t know before we started working on this week’s radio show. I knew that 9% of Americans are unemployed. But college graduates: their unemployment rate is half that, 4.5%. People with PhDs, it’s even better, 2% unemployment. High school grads are right near the national average, 9.7% unemployment. And people who did not graduate high school: their unemployment rate is almost 15%.
Which means, the unemployment problem in this country is mostly a problem for the uneducated, the unskilled.
And what’s strange is that those economic development people that Adam and Julie just talked to, they are mostly focused on attracting jobs for the highly educated, for people with at least college degrees.

To finish Act Four, Adam Davidson tells us this, after saying that America is still manufacturing a lot of stuff, in a lot of factories:

But pretty much everyone in those factories needs to have some basic math proficiency. They need to be trusted with expensive, precision equipment. You’re probably not getting a factory job if you don’t have at least a high school degree and some advanced technical training. The experts call it high school plus. If you don’t have a high school degree, plus some more training, some more specialized skill, you are, increasingly, locked out of the middle class.
And that’s a lot of people: 80 million Americans over 25. That’s 40% of the adult population, are in that group.
Having some training or education after high school used to be a great way, one of the most reliable ways, to make it into the middle class. But over the next few years, more and more, it’ll be the only way.

Now, most of my readers have lots of post-high-school training. Most of you have college degrees; some have PhDs. And I know that some of you have lost jobs and have had trouble finding work in this economy. We probably already have a sense that more education correlates with lower unemployment, though that’s little consolation when you, personally, fall into the bottom of the statistics.

It’s an interesting episode; give it a listen.

[And, by the way: Act Four talks about a program called Pathways Out Of Poverty. I don’t know about you, but I — probably though my training at IBM — make acronyms out of everything. And, well, sometimes people might want to think about that a bit before they name their organizations.]

A photo, after a while of no posts

2011-05-13T14:00:00.003-04:00

I’ve been too busy to post to these pages for the last couple of weeks, and I miss it. Too much going on with work; very busy with a couple of IETF working groups, along with other discussions and whatnot. And it turns out that Blogger has been having some problems, and some recent posts were removed in the process of fixing them, so it’s just as well, I guess.

So for now, here’s a photo from last week’s breeze through Amsterdam for a couple of days of meetings.

First of May

2011-05-01T07:22:00.002-04:00

A favourite of mine, from way back:

When I was small and Christmas trees were tall
We used to love while others used to play
Don’t ask me why, but time has passed us by
Someone else moved in from far away
Now we are tall and Christmas trees are small
And you don’t ask the time of day
But you and I, our love will never die
But guess we’ll cry come first of May
The apple tree that grew for you and me
I watched the apples falling one by one
And I recall the moment of them all
The day I kissed your cheek and you were gone
Now we are tall and Christmas trees are small
And you don’t ask the time of day
But you and I, our love will never die
But guess we’ll cry come first of May
— B., R., & M. Gibb, 1968

Ephemeral clouds

2011-04-27T14:28:00.000-04:00

I’ve talked about cloud computing a number of times in these pages. It’s a model of networking that in some ways brings us back to the monolithic data center, but in other ways makes that data center distributed, rather than central. A data cloud, an application cloud, a services cloud. An everything cloud, and, indeed, when one reads about cloud computing one sees a load of [X]aaS acronyms, the aaS part meaning as a service: Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and so on.

I use email in the cloud. I keep my blog in the cloud. I post photos in the cloud. I have my own hosted domain, and I could have my email there, my blog, there, my photos there... but who would maintain the software? I could pay my hosting service extra for that, perhaps, but, well, the cloud works for me.

It works for many small to medium businesses, as well. Companies pay for cloud-based services, and, in return, the services promise things. There are service-level agreements, just as we’ve always had, and companies that use cloud-based services get reliability and availability guarantees, security guarantees, redundancy, backups in the cloud, and so on. Their data is out there, and their data is protected.

But what happens when they want to move? Suppose there’s a better deal from another cloud service. Suppose I, as a user, want to move my photos from Flickr to Picasa, or from one of those to a new service. Suppose a company has 2.5 terabytes of stuff out there, in a complex file-system-like hierarchy, all backed up and encrypted and safe and secure... and they want to move it to another provider.

In the worst case, suppose they have to, because their current service provider is going out of business.

Recently, Google Video announced that they would take their content down, after having shut the uploads down (in favour of YouTube) some time ago. This week, Friendster announced that they would revamp their service, removing most of their data in the process.

Of course, you understand that when I say their data, here, I really mean your data, yes? Because those Google Video things were uploaded by their users, and the Friendster stuff is... well, here’s what they say:

An e-mail sent Tuesday to registered users told them to expect a new and improved Friendster site in the coming weeks. It also warned them that their existing account profile, photos, messages, blog posts and more will be deleted on May 31. A basic profile and friends list will be preserved for each user.

Now, that sort of thing can happen: when you rely on a company for services, the company might, at some point, go away, terminate the service, or whatnot. But what’s the backup plan? Where’s the migration path? In short...

...how do you save your data?

Friendster has, it seems, provided a exporter app that will let people grab their stuff before it goes away. Google Video did no such thing, and there’s a crowd-sourced effort to save the content. But in the general case, this is an issue: if your provider goes away — or becomes abusive or hostile — how easy will it be for you to get hold of what you have stored there, and to move it somewhere else?

Be sure you consider that when you make your plans.

[Just for completeness: I have copies on my own local disks of everything I’ve put online... including archives of the content of these pages. If things should go away, it might be a nuisance, but I’ll have no data loss.]

Separation of church and Texas?

2011-04-22T15:03:00.000-04:00

In a wonderful display of why we need to get religious nuttiness away from the halls of gummint, Governor of Rick Perry of Texas ranted thus yesterday in an executive proclamation that’s just in time for Earth Day:

WHEREAS, throughout our history, both as a state and as individuals, Texans have been strengthened, assured and lifted up through prayer; it seems right and fitting that the people of Texas should join together in prayer to humbly seek an end to this devastating drought and these dangerous wildfires;
NOW, THEREFORE, I, RICK PERRY, Governor of Texas, under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Texas, do hereby proclaim the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas. I urge Texans of all faiths and traditions to offer prayers on that day for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities and the restoration of our normal way of life.

Texas has as a state ... been strengthened, assured and lifted up through prayer?

Indeed.

This proclamation seems as clear a violation of the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment as I’ve seen in a while.

One might say that it does no harm. One might say that he makes it clear that it’s not just Rick Perry’s prayer, not just Christian prayer... that Governor Perry explicitly calls on all faiths and traditions.

The problem is that he still shoves some sort of faith in prayer into the faces of many, many people who consider prayer to be so much bullshit. This is totally inappropriate — just as inappropriate as if he’d said we should pray to Jesus, we should beseech Allah, or we should ask for the intercession of the spirit of Elvis.

It’s fine if Mr Perry thinks putting his hands together and muttering will do some good in relieving the drought. It’s fine if he wants to get his friends to join him in it. It’s even fine if he says so on statewide television when some talk-show host interviews him.

It’s not fine when it becomes an official proclamation. That’s crossing a line.

But here: I intend to draw an outline of Texas in the dirt in my garden today, and bury a ceremonial dried bluebonnet blossom in the approximate position of Austin therein. I will say Light-beam feelie! three times while holding my hand over the buried bluebonnet, and I am certain that within the month, it will have worked its magic and Texas will have had much-needed rain.

I know this to be the true answer, and far more effective than that prayer stuff. See if it isn’t!

Exercise while you work

2011-04-20T08:06:00.038-04:00

I just got something new: a laptop desk that attaches to a treadmill. I tried it out yesterday, and it works great. It’s a little hard to type while I’m using it, but it works OK if I slow the treadmill down a bit. When I’m just reading, I can push it up to quite a brisk walking pace.

I gave it a go for an hour yesterday morning, and another hour yesterday afternoon, and I like it a lot. It’s a great way to avoid sitting in one place all day while I work. I may try some speech-recognition software as an alternative to typing, which, if it works well, might let me spend more time on it.

The treadmill might be a little noisy to use during conference calls, but those seem ideal times to get an extended period of walking in. I’ll have to try it, and see how that goes.

So far, with limited use, I can say that I really recommend it for anyone who works from home and sits at a desk all day!

Why is this night different?

2011-04-19T13:41:00.001-04:00

Last night began the Jewish festival of Passover, one of several Jewish holidays (as was the recent Purim) whose stories can be summed up somewhat as, Someone tried to kill the Jews. The Jews survived. It’s time to eat. In this case, the someone involved the ancient Egyptians, or at least their Pharaoh and his advisors. Legend has it that the Jews were enslaved in Egypt, Moses led a revolt, with God’s assistance it succeeded, the Jews wandered in the desert for forty years, and wound up in Canaan. Somewhere along the way were a burning bush, plagues on the Egyptians, parting of the Red Sea, a pillar of fire, manna from heaven, and the handing down of the ten commandments. The story is told in the biblical book Exodus, in a 1956 movie with Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner, and every year at two seders — ceremonial dinners on the first and second evenings of Passover.

Tonight, for the second seder, I’ll be joining Murray Spiegel for a very different seder, indeed. That Times article is from 2002, but Murray’s been doing this for years, and continues to. Last year’s theme was the musical Oliver, with bits of the story set to tunes from the musical, clips of The Four Questions spoken in various languages, including Na’vi (from the movie Avatar), and a bizarre puzzle to solve to find the afikomen, the hidden piece of matzah that’s part of the ritual.

We don’t know what the theme will be — we never do, until we arrive — but we know there’ll be about 30 people there, and we’re told to expect a late night.

Why is this night different from all other nights?
On all other nights we eat either leavened bread or matzah; on this night, only matzah.
On all other nights we eat all kinds of herbs; on this night, only bitter herbs.
On all other night, we do not dip even once; on this night, we dip twice.
On all other nights, we eat either sitting up or reclining; on this night, we recline.

מה נשתנה הלילה הזה מכל הלילות
?
שבכל הלילות אנו אוכלין חמץ ומצה; הלילה הזה, כלו מצה
שבכל הלילות אנו אוכלין שאר ירקות; הלילה הזה, מרור
שבכל הלילות אין אנו מטבילין אפילו פעם אחת; הלילה הזה, שתי פעמים
שבכל הלילות אנו אוכלין בין יושבין ובין מסבין; הלילה הזה, כלנו מסבין

Equal-Pay Day

2011-04-12T08:03:00.011-04:00

Today, 12 April 2011, is Equal-Pay Day in the U.S. If you took the median-salary American man and the median-salary woman, and started paying them both on the first of 2010, today is the day when the woman will have finally earned what the man took in through 31 December, about 14 weeks ago.

Of course, it’s not that simple. You can’t just take any man and any woman and make that comparison. The figure that’s used for this is the median income: take all the men’s annual salaries, list them in order of lowest to highest, then pick the one in the middle. Do the same for women’s salaries. Compare. The median of the women’s salaries is about 78% of the median of the men’s. We could use the average (mean) instead of the median, but for these sorts of economic comparisons it’s typically the median that’s used, because it doesn’t suffer from skewing by the extremes at the edges.

The problem is that the majority of the gap comes from the fact that men and women are not equally represented in all the different jobs... and the jobs that employ primarily men just so happen to pay more than the ones that employ primarily women. I can’t imagine how that happened, but, well, there it is. Nurses earn less than doctors. Beauticians earn less than plumbers. Teachers earn less than corporate executives. And so on.

And it doesn’t stop there: what about college-educated women? What about those with PhDs? Because another fact is that more women than men are finishing college, these days, and more women than men are completing PhD programs. Doesn’t that fix it?

No. For one thing, when we look at the fields that women are getting degrees in, we find the same thing: the fields that attract women more tend to be the less lucrative ones.

But also, when we break it down by field we still find differences. In April of 2007, the American Association of University Women released a study titled Behind the Pay Gap (PDF). The study showed that female biological scientists earn 75% of what their male colleagues do. In mathematics, the figure is 76%; in psychology, 86%. Women in engineering are almost there: they earn 95% of what the men do. But less than 20% of the engineering majors are women.

The other argument for why there’s a pay gap is that women and men make different decisions about their lives. Women choose motherhood, a bigger hit against career advancement and salary opportunities than fatherhood. More women work part time. And so on.

The AAUW study looked at that. They controlled for those decisions, and they compared men and women who really could be reasonably compared. They looked at people in the same fields, at the same schools, with the same grades. They considered those of the same race, the same socio-economic status, the same family situations. They didn’t just compare apples to apples; they compared, as economist Heather Boushey puts it, Granny Smith apples to Granny Smith apples.

And they found that even in that case, there’s an unexplained pay gap of 5% the year after college, which increases to 12% ten years later. From the study:

The pay gap between female and male college graduates cannot be fully accounted for by factors known to affect wages, such as experience (including work hours), training, education, and personal characteristics. Gender pay discrimination can be overt or it can be subtle. It is difficult to document because someone’s gender is usually easily identified by name, voice, or appearance. The only way to discover discrimination is to eliminate the other possible explanations. In this analysis the portion of the pay gap that remains unexplained after all other factors are taken into account is 5 percent one year after graduation and 12 percent 10 years after graduation. These unexplained gaps are evidence of discrimination, which remains a serious problem for women in the work force.

It has gotten better: if today the general pay gap is about 20%, 15 years ago it was 25%, and 30 years ago, 35%. The improvement is good news.

But the speed of the improvement is not. The disparity of pay between male-dominated fields and female-dominated ones is not. The gap in pay between highly trained men and women in the same field is not. And that unexplained 5-to-12 percent is certainly not.

Let’s keep pushing that date back, and look for the year when equal-pay day is December 31^st.

Is it art?

2011-04-11T14:31:00.000-04:00

The item to the right (click it to enlarge) is on display at the Czech National Gallery at Veletržní Palác. As you can see, it comprises two white-painted wooden chairs that are tied together with rope.

There’s lots of other stuff at the (very extensive and interesting) gallery for which I don’t have to ask this question, but for this piece, here it is: Is it art?

What do you think?

We decline!

2011-04-09T12:01:00.000-04:00

I’m back from Prague, and recovering from the trip. I talked about the Czech language after my 2007 visit, and mentioned the case endings. This trip’s given me something else to say about that.

After the IETF meeting, during the vacation part of my stay, I moved to a hotel called The Golden Tree. In Czech, golden tree is zlatý strom, and there were a few things around that said that. But that’s the nominative case. Hotel names are frequently (usually, it seems) rendered as U [something], where the word u is like the french chez, meaning at the place of. That throws it into the genitive case, so the proper name of the hotel is U Zlatého Stromu.

Czech has three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and seven cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative, and instrumental), so the combinations of endings as nouns are declined and adjectives are changed to match can be dizzying.

Unlike German (but like other Slavic languages, such as Russian), Czech declines proper nouns, including people’s names. And they decline everyone’s names, not just Czech ones, or ones that look like they might be Czech.

This trip included a visit to the Czech Museum of Music, which had an exhibit called Beatlemánie, about the Beatles. I had to see that, of course.

It was amusing to see the names declined. The most interesting was Sir Paul’s. He was Paul McCartney when it was nominative, of course. But when a display talks about The Solo Career of Paul McCartney, it becomes Sólová dráha Paula McCarneyho.

Paula McCartneyho ?

Oy!

Clapton is God!

2011-03-30T11:03:00.000-04:00

I’m at the IETF meeting in Prague this week, so there’s little blogging to be done. But I wanted to note that Eric Clapton turns 66 today, and to give you two of my favourites of his performances. Enjoy.

Happy Eltonmas

2011-03-25T09:13:00.000-04:00

Today is Sir Elton John’s birthday; he’s 64. Here are two of my favourites of his songs. Enjoy the next eleven and a half minutes.

Snow, Donald Trump, and climate change

2011-03-23T09:59:00.000-04:00

It’s snowing lightly in the New York area this morning, and it expected to continue through the night and into tomorrow. We might get some early closings of the schools, which would mean I don’t play volleyball tonight; that’s sad. And, of course, though it’s not (yet) sticking to the roads, it’s doing its part to mess up traffic, or so I hear on the radio. Still, I like snow. It makes the world look pretty. And it’s expected, here, at this time of year.

Donald Trump was on the local suburban radio station this morning, promoting his television show by having a chat with the morning-drive personalities (DJ being such an obsolete term). But during the greetings, he started things by pronouncing that global warming is hooey (not his word, but I forget the specific words he used). It’s ridiculous, of course, he said: look at this snow, and it’s spring. And warming, well, this was the coldest winter I can remember.

I guess Donald Trump has just fired all the scientists.

But, see, here are some of the things that are not true:

It is not true that it’s unusual to have a bit of snow in our area at the end of March, or even the beginning of April.
It is not true that this was the coldest winter on record, or even for many years, and if it’s the coldest he can remember, he has a short memory.
It’s not true that Donald Trump is a climate scientist, or any kind of scientist: he’s a businessman, and is apparently good at that. Others are good at other things, such as studying climate.

And here’s what is true:
As a businessman, Donald Trump has a strong interest in making people think there’s no problem. Regulations that address climate change at the expense of his business interests obviously won’t be making him happy.

I prefer the term global climate change, which gets us away from the idea that everything is monotonically warming, and that any time it’s unusually cold we should call the whole idea into question.

But what I really prefer is that we not pay attention to what businessmen such as Donald Trump — or clergymen such as Cardinal George Pell, or politicians such as Senator James Inhofe, or actors, or sports figures — have to say about science. Look to the scientists in reference to the scientists, and give preference to those who specialize in the field in question.

As with most topics, in the case of climate change you can certainly find disagreement among scientists as well. Unanimity is rare. But the vast majority of those qualified to weigh in will tell you that global climate change is a problem, and that we can and should work toward fixing it.

We don’t need to hear from someone who runs a business competition on television.

Send me an e-mail?

2011-03-22T11:25:00.000-04:00

The New York Times has not just gone astray with its payment scheme; it’s gone completely off the deep end, gotten lost in the forest, fallen off the cliff and into a pit, and is knee-deep in any other mixed and fractured metaphor you can devise... linguistically.

See, they have recently updated their style guide, removing, according to editor Philip Corbett, some aging or outdated technical terms, such as CD-ROM, floppy disk, Dictaphone, Usenet, newsgroups, VHS, CAD-CAM and I.S.D.N. Yes, they used to use periods in ISDN, as they still do in I.B.M., I.P. address, C.P.U., and others. But I’m happy to see that they’re eliminating the dots in USB, URL, and PDF.

They also agree with me on capitalizing Web and Internet.

But here’s where they now err:

We no longer have to write about people sending an e-mail message — we can call it an e-mail. The term is also acceptable as a verb. (For now, at least, we are keeping the hyphen for this and similar coinages like e-commerce and e-reader.)

I’m apathetic, disinterested on the hyphenation issue. I, myself, omit the hyphen and prefer email, but I think it’s fine either way. But I insist that email, avec hyphen ou sans, be used in a parallel way to mail. It only makes sense, yes? And one would never say, I sent him a mail. Of course not.

A letter is parallel to an email message, and they should keep it that way. If one wants to be shorter, it’s easy: I sent him email, works fine, just as I sent him mail, does.

But the New York Times is giving in to sloppy, lazy usage, such as is unbecoming the Gray Lady.

Oh, Noes!

The ultimate Hamantash

2011-03-21T17:01:00.000-04:00

Long-time readers are well aware of three things, at least, about me:

I’m flamingly atheist; I think religion is silly, at best, but
I grew up in a Jewish family; also,
I’m a math geek.

The combination of the first two can sometimes be a little odd. There are many ways in which the Jewish culture stuck, though the belief system never took hold at all. I love Passover seders, for instance, especially if I can be irreverent about them (more about that in a few weeks). I look forward to certain traditional foods (while at the same time relishing shellfish and anything related to pork). That sort of thing.

One favourite food has always been Hamantashen: triangular pastries associated with the Jewish festival of Purim, filled with poppy-seed paste or fruit filling (prune, cherry, apricot, or raspberry, usually). They’re little hand-held, individual fruit pies, and well-made ones are true delights.

It’s Purim now (well, this past weekend), and the Hamantashen are in the air. And Seattle food blogger Deborah Gardner has tied it all in with the math-geek bit to make the ultimate Hamantash (that’s the correct singular; Hamantashen is plural (I’m a language geek, too, remember)): the Sierpinski Hamantash, modeled on the Sierpinski triangle.

Doesn’t it look grand? ! חג שמח

The New York Times paywall cometh

2011-03-18T11:04:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, the NY Times sent this message by email to all registered users. An excerpt:

This week marks a significant transition for The New York Times as we introduce digital subscriptions. It’s an important step that we hope you will see as an investment in The Times, one that will strengthen our ability to provide high-quality journalism to readers around the world and on any platform. The change will primarily affect those who are heavy consumers of the content on our Web site and on mobile applications.

Here’s their FAQ list and the prices. As you can see, the minimum charge is $15 per month, which comes to $180 per year. That’s a lot, especially compared with free. Part of the charge is for use of smartphone or tablet apps, and they do not offer a subscription that’s web only.

Cory, at BoingBoing, doesn’t think it will work, and I agree with him. There’s bound to be confusion about how much you can see. For instance, while, according to the FAQ, you’ll always be able to read things that someone posts to a blog or that you get from a Google search, they will count against your 20 free articles a month. So if you’re not a subscriber, you can read 20 articles from the Times site, and then read 20 (or 40, or 80) more posted on someone’s blog... if you do it in that order. But if you read the articles from the 20 blog posts first and then want to snag an article directly off the Times site, you’ll have to pay. You gonna keep track of that?

Well, they say they’ll keep track of it for you, but, really, it seems a complicated mess.

Apart from that, I wonder about the links I’ve already posted. I presume that blog links will be identified in a way that the site can recognize, tagged with a token of some sort. It seems unlikely that using the referrer field that the browser sends would be reliable enough for them. But all those old Times links I’ve been posting for the last five years lack any sort of tag, so will those suddenly be blocked by the paywall? Probably, and that will be very irritating.

I also take exception to their characterization of the change as affecting primarily heavy consumers of the content on our Web site. 20 articles a month is nothing, and I would not call someone who reads one article a day a heavy consumer, in any sense. No, this will have a profound effect on the habits of a great many casual Times users, who check out a couple of items a day or so. If I want just 5 articles a month beyond the 20 free ones, I’ll have to pay $15 each month for that.

I likely won’t. I almost assuredly won’t.

So the result will be that the Times will no longer be my go-to news source for background on what I say in these pages. I’ll look to other sources instead. And I’ll do that with sadness and regret, because I think the New York Times is the best source around... and that’s the best reason I can think of for them to look for ways to fund their content other than by charging for it, article by article. They’re a business, yes, but they’re also a public service, and an important one.

Or perhaps it’s that they’re not a public service any longer. Sigh.

Republicans vs NPR

2011-03-17T21:19:00.000-04:00

I sent the following message, last week, to my congressional representative, Nan Hayworth (R-NY 19):

The recent departure of executives from National Public Radio, and the events that triggered them, have fueled discussion in Congress about eliminating its federal funding. That would be a disastrous decision. Public radio and television provide and important service to the American public, with news, arts, and nature programming that is not connected to commercial interests. Their news agencies, in particular, benefit from their ability to remain impartial. Federal funding is entirely appropriate and necessary for these organizations, and Congress must not eliminate nor significantly reduce that funding. Ms Hayworth, please tell me your viewpoint on this matter, so that I may understand where you stand. And I urge you to stand on the side of the American public’s need for the high-quality news and arts programming that NPR and PBS provide.

I got no response. Or perhaps I did: today, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to eliminate federal funding for NPR:

The House voted on Thursday to cut off funding for National Public Radio, with Democrats and Republicans fiercely divided over both the content of the bill and the manner in which it was brought to the floor.
Under the measure, sponsored by Representative Doug Lamborn, a Republican from Colorado, stations could not buy programming from NPR or any other source using the $22 million the stations receive from the Treasury for that purpose. Local NPR stations would be able to use federal funds for operating expenses, but not content.
The time has come for us to claw back this money, said Representative Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee.

According to the voting, representative Hayworth voted against it. I’m not surprised, as she’s a newly seated Republican. But it’s very clear that she is not representing her district, which is very much in support of National Public Radio.

It matters little, really, because the measure will almost certainly not pass in the Senate, and so it will die. But what these idiot Republicans are doing is unfortunate, frightening, dangerous. And the partisanship that has settled in our legislatures since 2000 is the most dangerous part of all.

Happy Pi Day

2011-03-14T13:59:00.004-04:00

[Thanks to commenter "D." for the image.]

Mathematics and advertising

2011-03-11T07:27:00.000-05:00

I occasionally post here about abuse of mathematics (such as this post, and this one, and this one). I occasionally post about silly advertising (try here and here). And sometimes I get to combine them in an item about abuse of mathematics in advertising (this is a good example).

The other day, the excellent web comic XKCD covered the combo very nicely, and included some of the things I often ~~whine~~ ~~get huffy~~ ~~kvetch~~ whine and get huffy about:

Hold the mouse over the comic to see Randall Munroe’s extra text, present in most of his drawings. Click the comic to visit his web page. And while you’re at it, you might check out my other favourite XKCD comics: Sandwich (it’s a Unix joke), Snopes, Correlation, Can’t Sleep (warning: only extreme geeks will get this), and Spinal Tap Amps.

Illinois Governor Signs Capital Punishment Ban

2011-03-10T11:34:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, Illinois joined the civilized world, including 15 other states, by abolishing the death penalty. Their reason? One of sense:

Since our experience has shown that there is no way to design a perfect death penalty system, free from the numerous flaws that can lead to wrongful convictions or discriminatory treatment, I have concluded that the proper course of action is to abolish it, Mr. Quinn [Illinois Governor Pat Quinn] said in a statement.

In 2000, at the same time that Texas Governor George W. Bush was crowing arrogantly that every one of the people executed in his state during his reign — well over 100 — was guilty and deserved to die, the governor of Illinois at that time, George Ryan, suspended the death penalty because DNA evidence proved that a disturbing number of the death-row inmates there were, in fact, innocent.

Before then, George Pataki won the election for governor in New York with the promise of reinstating the death penalty here. And our state’s top court subsequently declared the law unconstitutional. No one has been executed in New York since 1963. The Massachusetts law has also been declared unconstitutional by its state courts.

The thirteen other states that do not have death penalty statutes at all are Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

In contrast, Texas has killed 466 inmates since 1976. Virginia is a very distant second, at 108. In fact, Texas has executed more people than the next six states, combined (Virginia, Oklahoma (96), Florida (69), Missouri (68), Alabama (50), and Georgia (49)).

Illinois executed 12 prisoners between 1976 and Governor Ryan’s moratorium in 2000. Hooray for them for making it clear that they’ll kill no more.

“Hey, that’s my camera, Charlie!” “This is my farm, Clyde!”

2011-03-09T08:10:00.006-05:00

Here: What do you do when people (such as animal-rights activists) take pictures of your farm in order to document abusive practices?

The answer, of course, should be obvious: you make it a felony to photograph farms.

Yes, the Florida state senate is considering a bill, SB 1246, that will do just that. From the Times:

Photographers — perhaps including some ghosts from Farm Security Administration days — are astir at news of a bill introduced by State Senator Jim Norman of Florida that would make it a felony to take a picture of a farm without the owner’s permission.

The bill is short, so let’s include the text, as introduced in the Florida Senate yesterday, here in its entirety. Paragraph (2) is the operative one.

A bill to be entitled
An act relating to farms; prohibiting a person from entering onto a farm or photographing or video recording a farm without the owner’s written consent; providing a definition; providing penalties; providing an effective date.
Be It Enacted by the Legislature of the State of Florida:
Section 1. (1) A person who enters onto a farm or other property where legitimate agriculture operations are being conducted without the written consent of the owner, or an authorized representative of the owner, commits a felony of the first degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084, Florida Statutes.
(2) A person who photographs, video records, or otherwise produces images or pictorial records, digital or otherwise, at or of a farm or other property where legitimate agriculture operations are being conducted without the written consent of the owner, or an authorized representative of the owner, commits a felony of the first degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084, Florida Statutes.
(3) As used in this section, the term farm includes any tract of land cultivated for the purpose of agricultural production, the raising and breeding of domestic animals, or the storage of a commodity.
Section 2. This act shall take effect July 1, 2011.

Get all your Florida farm picture-taking done by June, now.

[I’ll note in passing that this also seems to make it illegal for someone to snap pics of your back-yard marijuana crop. Just sayin’.]

Update, 14:20 — Adding something I said in a comment elsewhere:

When I was in college (at University of Florida), I would see a great sunflower farm as we drove up I-75. When the sunflowers were blooming in row after row, it was really beautiful and striking.

The idea that if one’s passenger should snap a shot of that on the way by, without first stopping at the farmhouse for a written photo release, then one might be liable to prosecution for a felony... is pretty insane.

And the idea that they’re even considering this is equally insane. This is not the country I grew up in.

You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

2011-03-08T16:12:00.001-05:00

There’s a phrase given to us by the venerable computer game called Adventure, which fits many situations. The game, in which one explores caverns, searches for treasures, and solves puzzles to obtain the treasures and bring them back to the surface, contains two mazes.

Most adventurers find the first maze when they go south from a particular room in the cave. You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike, says the computer, adding that there are passages leading off in all directions. One’s first thought is to go north to retrace one’s steps, but, well, the passages are twisty (and little), and going north from there only lands one in another room within the maze. Again, You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

The directions are not random, and there actually is a well-defined maze here, which one can map. Enter the maze while carrying as many items as you can, and you can drop the items like bread crumbs. You have to keep carrying the lamp in order to see, but as you drop the rest, one by one, the rooms become distinct:

You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
There is a bottle of water here.
You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
There is tasty food here.
You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
There are some keys on the ground here.

Interestingly, the maze comprises two lobes, connected by a single passage. Because the only (non-magic) exit from the maze is the way you came in, wandering into the far lobe makes it much more difficult to ever get out, and you’re likely to run out of battery power in your lamp, fall into a pit in the dark, and die.

Such is the maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

The second maze is interesting only for its differences. It’s also entered by heading south, from a different starting room. Its map is much more complex than that of the other, with many more passages interconnecting the rooms, though with fewer rooms. When you enter it, you see, You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all different.

But this time you don’t have to leave bread crumbs; you have only to read the descriptions carefully:

You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all different.
You’re in a maze of little twisty passages, all different.
You’re in a twisty maze of little passages, all different.
You’re in a little twisty maze of passages, all different.

...and so on.

The all-different maze is cute, and, as I said above, mostly there for its contrast with the all-alike maze (most adventurers stumble into the all-alike one first). There’s a treasure in the all-alike maze, so you have to go in there (and kill the pirate) in order to get it. There’s nothing you need in the all-different maze, and experienced adventurers just avoid it.

And anyway, it’s the first description that’s stuck with us as a catch phrase: You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

When you’re having a discussion that keeps going around in circles with no hope for resolution: You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

When you’re debugging a problem, but everything you try just makes the problem happen without adding any clue as to why: You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

When you’re trying to deal with bureaucracy, and every attempt to get something done just sends you to another office that you know won’t help any more than the last did: You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

Very useful sentence, that.

A funky church for a Sunday post

2011-03-06T08:11:00.000-05:00

Here’s an interesting little church in upper Manhattan.

Reasonable network management

2011-03-04T09:58:00.000-05:00

Back in December, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission released a Report and Order specifying new rules related to network neutrality. The rules have since been challenged in court in separate suits by Verizon and Metro PCS. They’re also under attack by the House of Representatives, though whatever they do is unlikely to pass the Senate and the president.

The Report and Order is quite long and involved, a typical federal document that runs to 194 pages (here’s a PDF of it, in case you’d like to read the whole thing). On page 135 there begins a statement by FCC Chairman Genachowski, which contains, on page 137, five points, key principles, as Mr Genachowski says, that lead to key rules designed to preserve Internet freedom and openness. That’s sort of an executive summary of the document.

I’ll note principles four and five here:

Fourth, the rules recognize that broadband providers need meaningful flexibility to manage their networks to deal with congestion, security, and other issues. And we also recognize the importance and value of business-model experimentation, such as tiered pricing. These are practical necessities, and will help promote investment in, and expansion of, high-speed broadband networks. So, for example, the order rules make clear that broadband providers can engage in reasonable network management.
Fifth, the principle of Internet openness applies to mobile broadband. There is one Internet, and it must remain an open platform, however consumers and innovators access it. And so today we are adopting, for the first time, broadly applicable rules requiring transparency for mobile broadband providers, and prohibiting them from blocking websites or blocking certain competitive applications.

In apparent response to those points, and taking transparency seriously, Verizon Wireless has recently updated their Customer Agreement (Terms and Conditions). If you scroll down to the bottom of that document, you’ll find a section called Additional Disclosures, the first paragraph of which says this:

We are implementing optimization and transcoding technologies in our network to transmit data files in a more efficient manner to allow available network capacity to benefit the greatest number of users. These techniques include caching less data, using less capacity, and sizing the video more appropriately for the device. The optimization process is agnostic to the content itself and to the website that provides it. While we invest much effort to avoid changing text, image, and video files in the compression process and while any change to the file is likely to be indiscernible, the optimization process may minimally impact the appearance of the file as displayed on your device. For a further, more detailed explanation of these techniques, please visit www.verizonwireless.com/vzwoptimization

That URL at the end lacks the http at the beginning and has not been made into a clickable link, but if you copy/paste it into your browser’s address bar, you’ll be redirected to a long page called Explanation of Optimization Deployment, full of technical details. It’s perhaps the most detailed and technical disclosure I’ve seen presented to consumers, full of terms such as Internet latency, quantization, codecs, caching, transcoding, and buffer tuning.

I have to say that the policy looks reasonable. They say that they apply their optimization (not really the right term, here, but that’s the marketing spin) to all content, including Verizon Wireless branded content. They compress images and transcode video to reach a compromise between fidelity to the original content and what’s likely to be useful on a mobile device, conserving transmission resources by doing it. But it also benefits the consumer by way of reduced data charges. They also, basically, stream the content (buffer tuning), so if you stop a video in the middle you don’t have to transmit (nor pay for the transmission of) the unwatched portion.

The only disadvantage of any of this as I see it is that there’s no way to turn it off. If you notice degradation of your video content and want to watch the original — and are willing to pay for extra data transmission that entails — you can’t.

As a first step, this looks good: it’s a reasonable policy that preserves the essence of neutrality and fits the reasonable network management model. Of course, Verizon Wireless may just be testing the water, introducing changes a little at a time, with the most benign changes first. We’ll have to see.

URL shorteners

2011-03-01T07:53:00.016-05:00

If you’re ~~a twit~~ a Twitter user, you’ve likely used one or another of the URL shorteners out there. Even if you’re not, you may have run across a shortened URL. The first one I encountered, several years ago, was tinyurl.com, but there plenty of them, including bit.ly, tr.im, qoiob.com, tinyarrow.ws, tweak, and many others.

The way they work is that you go to one of them and enter a URL — say, the URL for this page you’re reading:

http://staringatemptypages.blogspot.com/2011/03/url_shorteners.html

...you click a button and get back a short link, such as this one:

http://bit.ly/eqHg3S

...that will get users to the same page. The shortened link redirects to the target page, and won’t take up too many characters in a Twitter or SMS message. It also may hide the ugliness of some horrendously long URL generated by, say, Lotus Domino.

On the other hand, it will also hide the URL that it points to. When you look at the bit.ly link above, you have no idea where it will take you. Maybe it’ll be to one of these august pages, maybe it will be to a New York Times article, maybe to a YouTube video, and maybe to a page of pornography. Click on a shortened URL at your own peril.

In addition, any URL you post, long or short, might eventually disappear (or, perhaps worse, point to content that differs from what you’d meant to link to), but if you post a load of shortened URLs to your blog or Twitter stream and then the service you used goes out of business, all your links will break at once. That didn’t used to happen, but can now. And because some of them use country-code top-level domains (.ly, .im, .tk, and .ws, for example), the services may be subject to disruption for other reasons — one imagines that the Isle of Man and Western Samoa might be stable enough, but if you’ve been watching the news lately you might be less sanguine about Lybia.

The more popular URL shorteners can also collect a lot of information about people’s usage patterns, using cookies to separate the clicks from distinct users. If they can get you to sign up and log in, they can also connect your clicks to your identity. There are definite privacy concerns with all this. URL shorteners run by bad actors can include mechanisms for infecting computers with worms and viruses before they send you on to the target site.

Of course, any URL can hide a redirect, and any URL can hide a redirect to a page you’d rather not visit. It’s just that URL shorteners are designed to hide redirects, and there are no lists of best practices for these services, along with lists of reputable shorteners that follow the best practices.

What would best practices for URL shortening services look like? Some suggestions, from others as well as from me:

Publish a usage policy that includes privacy disclosures and descriptions, parameters, and limitations for other items such as the ones below.
Provide an open interface to allow browsers to retrieve the target URLs without having to visit them. This allows browsers to display the actual target URL on mouse-over or with a mouse click. Of course, shortening-service providers might not want you to be able to snag the URL without clicking, because they may be getting business from the referrals. Services such as Facebook, while not shorteners, front-end the links posted on their sites for this reason. So we have a conflict between the interests of the users and the interests of the services.
Filter the URLs you redirect to, refusing to redirect to known illegal or abusive sites. Provide intermediate warning pages when the content is likely to be offensive, but not at the level of blocking.
Provide a working mechanism for people to report abusive targets, and respond to the reports quickly.
Don’t allow the target URL to be changed after the short link is created.
Related to the previous item, develop some mechanism to address target-page content changes. This one is trickier, because ads and other incidental content might change, while the intended content remains the same. It’s not immediately clear what to do, or whether there’s a good answer to this one.

Meanwhile, I never use URL shorteners to create links, and I try to avoid visiting links that are hidden behind them. I like to know where I’m clicking to.

Update, 11 March, this just in from BoingBoing:

Dear readers! URL shorteners’ popularity with spammers means we’ve blocked some of the big ones (at least temporarily) to cut down on the spammation. Sorry for the inconvenience! While we plan a long-term fix, just use normal URLs. You are welcome to use anchor tags in BB comments, too.

IP blocklists, email, and IPv6

2011-02-28T11:37:00.000-05:00

Engineers in the Internet Engineering Task Force, in the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, and elsewhere have been debating how to handle e-mail-server blocklists in an IPv6 network. Let’s take a look at the problem here.

We basically have three ways to address spam, in our goal of reducing the amount of spam in our inboxes:

Prevent its being sent in the first place.
Refuse to accept it when it’s presented for relay or delivery.
Discard it or put it into a junk mail folder at (or after) delivery.

The last is handled by what we usually think of as spam filters, which analyze the content and other aspects of the messages. Dealing with the first involves law enforcement, as well as adoption of best practices for legal email marketers. To implement the second, we try to do various analyses during the actual transmission of the email messages, in order to respond at the protocol level with some sort of refusal. It’s rather like standing between your postal carrier and the mailbox at your house, and telling the carrier that she may put this envelope into the box, but she should take those two catalogues and the credit-card offer right back to the post office with her.

And one can actually imagine doing that, by looking at the envelopes and applying rules such as, If it’s pre-sorted, it’s probably junk, and, The more urgent it claims to be, the more likely it is to be junk. But a better way, still, would be if we could get this to happen as soon as the junk mail entered the postal system, by having a way to say, See that guy who’s dropping that pile of mail at the post office? He only sends junk, and when you see him coming just make him go away. Don’t even let him bring his pile in the door.

We have that in our email systems, in what we call IP blocklists (or blacklists). These are lists of the numeric Internet addresses of email servers that we think send so much spam that we won’t even let them come to the door. When one of these servers makes an Internet connection to one of our mail servers, we don’t even start an email protocol exchange with them — we just refuse the connection. We make them go away.

Estimates vary as to what portion of attempted spam this blocks, but at least some estimates are on the order of 90%. Despite the problems with this mechanism (legitimate mail servers do find themselves on blocklists, for various reasons, and sometimes have a hard time getting the list-managers to remove them), it’s a critical one in the fight against spam, saving a great deal of time and computing resources by cutting the spam messages off much earlier in the process.

But note that it deals with IP addresses. Today, of course, that means IPv4 addresses, those things that look like 192.168.0.1, and that there are around 4 billion of. 4 billion is a large number, but, as we’ve seen, it’s notably finite and manageable. It’s reasonable to take every IP address we ever see trying to send mail, and keep it on a list, sorting the addresses into the good ones and the bad ones. It’s feasible to block Internet connections from the ones in our list that are marked bad.

Not so when we consider IPv6. Bumping the IP address from 32 bits to 128, bumping the 4 billion up to a billion billion billion or so — the number doesn’t matter, at that point — makes it infeasible to keep a list of bad addresses. There are enough addresses there to allow the bad guys to use a new one every time, so we’d never see repeats. There are, of course, ways we can group addresses into large blocks, and know that any address we see in one of those blocks will be bad, but even that isn’t enough to make it work.

We could switch to a pass list, a whitelist of known good addresses — that would still be small enough to be manageable — and refuse anything else. But that makes it very hard for an organization to deploy a new server, or for a new organization to join in.

John Levine has one approach: leave the email system on IPv4 for the foreseeable future. Even, John points out, when many other services, customer endpoints, mobile and household devices, and the like have been — have to have been — switched to IPv6, we can still run the Internet email infrastructure on IPv4 for a long time, leaving the IP blocklists with v4 addresses, and a system that we’re already managing fine with.

Of course, some day, we’ll want to completely get rid of IPv4 on the Internet, and by then we’ll need to have figured out a replacement for the IP blocklist mechanism. But John’s right that that won’t be happening for many years yet, and he makes a good case for saying that we don’t have to worry about it.

At least not until he and I have long been retired

Personal watermelon

2011-02-27T11:44:00.000-05:00

Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

2011-02-25T17:04:00.000-05:00

I’ve been meaning to change my credit-card PIN (not PIN number, please; PIN already includes the word number) for a while now. I don’t need it to be reset... I know the current one, and I just want to change it. For whatever reason, one can’t do that from the web site, but only by calling in. Having just returned last night from meetings in Orlando, where I’ve been all week, I decided to call in.

When I connect, I first get a cheerful voice telling me the great news (their phrase, not mine): they have changed their system, and now I can speak things like my account number, my selections, and such, rather than just entering them from the number pad. In other words, they have a new IVR system.

Joy.

It suggests that I might press 2 para español (I don’t), and then asks for my account number. I choose to enter it the old-fashioned way, and I follow with my zip code when the prompt requests it. It correctly identifies my account and spends a minute or two reciting every detail about my account that it can think of, whether I want to hear it or not: my account balance, my remaining available credit, the portion of my remaining available credit I can use for cash advances, the amount and date of my last payment (along with thanks for sending it in), the minimum payment currently due and the due date. I wait all this out.

It then tells me what to say if I want to hear all that again (&deity, no!), suggests two other things I might say, and gives me a fourth choice, I want to do something else.

I want to do something else, I say.

Briefly tell me what you would like to do, it says. For example, you could say, ‘I want to change my PIN number.’ Yes, it says PIN number; waddyagonnado? But it’s funny that the very thing I want to do is the example it gives. I say, in the nice, clear voice I speak in, I want to change my PIN number, including the word number, just as prompted.

I’m sorry; I didn’t quite understand you. Not quite, you see. Almost, perhaps, but not quite. It asks me to try again, to just say a few words. I guess some folks bloviate, become logorrhetic, or otherwise confuse the electrons.

I want to change my PIN number.

No joy.

It fails on the third try, as well, and then sends me to a human, who, as they’re trained to do, apologizes for the trouble I’m having, and tells me that he can transfer my call to the PIN-changing system. Great! So he does. I wait a moment...

...and find that I’m back to the beginning of the whole process, from the Spanish prompt to the account-number prompt to the zip-code prompt, and I listen again to the account status message. It’s so nice that my minimum payment is only $24, though, of course, I would never pay off my balance at that rate. Nevermind. I again tell it that I want to do something else, I again tell it that I want to change my PIN, and it again fails to understand me thrice.

I get a second human.

I moan to this second human that the IVR system isn’t understanding me, and he offers to stay on the line with me while I try it again. This way, he can hear what’s going wrong and direct it to the right place anyway. Great!

I/we go back through the whole thing again... Spanish, account, zip, status info, do something else, change PIN, change PIN, change PIN. See?, I say, while the IVR system says it will connect me with a human operator. But my friend isn’t there after all, and in a moment a third person responds and, as the others, sympathizes with me for the trouble I’m having. She tells me that they are having problems with their system, implying that they know about it but are inflicting it on everyone anyway.

She offers me an easy solution: I can use the option numbers instead of the speech recognition. Of course, now that the speech reco is in there, they don’t list the numbers any more, but she tells me what they are: press 4, then 2. Great! She sends me back into the abyss.

Spanish, account number, zip code... but now, as it starts to read my account status to me I barge in with an aggressive 4 on my number pad, and it stops in its tracks and asks me to say what I want to do, again suggesting that I might say, I want to change my PIN number. Instead, though, now savvier, I press 2.

I’m sorry; I didn’t quite understand you. It didn’t understand the number on the pad either. I press 2 again and get the same second oops message, and a third try brings the promise of a human. It’s possible that it had understood me all along, but the PIN-setting system is what’s really broken. Human number four comes on the line, and, yes, I did get four different people.

I tell this one what happened, and he says that the only way to change my PIN is to go through the system that way — it’s so sensitive that they don’t want human operators to know the customer’s PIN (I suppose that makes sense). He tries to get me to do it again, but, feeling like a mouse in a maze or, perhaps, a Candid Camera victim, I decline, say that he should please report that the system is horridly broken, and I’ll try calling in another time in hope that it will have been fixed. He tries not to let me go, but I say, No, thanks very much for the help. Bye, and I hang up.

I should have stayed in Orlando.

Forty seven seconds to walk

2011-02-19T23:14:00.000-05:00

You know how some intersections in some cities have digital count-downs, telling you how many seconds you have to cross before the walk signal changes to don’t walk? How do they come up with the times?

I just waited at a corner, and when the walk signal came on, the timer started at 47. Who decided that it should be 47 seconds, and not, say, 45, or 50? And why? Is there really any sense in which 47 seconds is enough, but 45 isn’t, and 50 is too long? Why should two or three seconds one way or another matter?

One wonders.

Watson’s third day

2011-02-17T07:43:00.017-05:00

I hadn’t planned to make three posts, one per day, about Watson on Jeopardy!, but there ya go. The third day — the second game of the two-game tournament — was perhaps even more interesting than the first two.

Watson seemed to have a lot more trouble with the questions this time, sometimes making runs of correct answers, but at other times having confidence levels well below the buzz-in threshold. Also, at many of those times its first answer was not the correct one, and sometimes its second and even its third were not either. Some of the problems seemed to be in the categories, but some just seemed to deal with particular clues, regardless of category.

Watson also did not have domination of the buzzer this time, even when it had enough confidence to buzz in. I don’t know whether they changed anything — I suspect not, since they didn’t say so. It’s likely that Mr Jennings and Mr Rutter simply were more practiced at anticipating and timing their button-presses by then (remember that the three days’ worth of shows were all recorded at the same time, a month ago).

Those factors combined to make Watson not the run-away winner going into the Final Jeopardy! round that it was in the first game. In yesterday's final round (category: 19th-century novelists), all three contestants (and your reporter, at home) came up with the right answer, and Watson pulled far ahead with an aggressive bet that Mr Rutter didn’t have the funds to match. Mr Jennings, meanwhile, chose to be conservative: assuming he would lose to Watson (the first game’s results made that certain), he made his bet of only $1000 to ensure that he would come in second even if he got the answer wrong.

The result, then, was Watson winning the two-game match handily, and earning $1 million for two charities. Other charities will get half of Mr Jennings’s and Mr Rutter’s winnings (whether that’s before or after taxes, I don’t know; I also don’t know whether taxes will reduce Watson’s million-dollar contribution).

One other thing: in a New Scientist article yesterday, talking about the second day and the first Final Jeopardy! round, Jim Giles makes a sloppy mistake (but see update below):

Watson’s one notable error came right at the end, when it was asked to name the city that features two airports with names relating to World War II. Jennings and Rutter bet almost all their money on Chicago, which was the correct answer. Watson went for Toronto.
Even so, the error showed another side to Watson’s intelligence: knowing that it was unsure about the answer, the machine wagered less than $1000 on its answer.

Of course, Watson’s wager had nothing to do with how sure it was about the answer: it had to place the bet before the clue was revealed. Its wager had something to do with the category, but likely was far more heavily controlled by its analysis of the game position and winning strategy. In determining its bets, it runs through all the bets it and its opponents might make, and decides on a value that optimizes its own position. And its strategy in the second game was different from that in the first

Update: The New Scientist article was updated shortly after it was published. It now says this:

Even so, the error did not hurt Watson too much. Knowing that it was far ahead of Jennings and Rutter, the machine wagered less than $1000 on its answer.

Watson’s second day

2011-02-16T07:42:00.002-05:00

Commenting on yesterday’s entry, The Ridger notes this:

I find looking at the second-choice answers quite fascinating. "Porcupine" for what stiffens a hedgehog’s bristles, for instance. There is no way that would be a human’s second choice (after keratin). Watson is clearly getting to the answers by a different route than we do.

That’s one way to look at it, and clearly it’s true that Watson goes about determining answers very differently from the way humans do — Watson can’t reason, and it’s all about very sophisticated statistical associations.

Consider that both humans (in addition to this one, at home) got the Final Jeopardy question with no problem, in seconds... but Watson had no idea (and, unfortunately, we didn’t get to see the top-three analysis that we saw in the first two rounds). My guess is that the question (the answer) was worded in a manner that made it very difficult for the computer to pick out the important bits. It also didn’t understand the category, choosing Toronto in the category U.S. Cities, which I find odd (that doesn’t seem a hard category for Watson to suss).

But another way to look at it is that a human wouldn’t have any second choice for some of these questions, but Watson always does (as well as a third), by definition (well, or by programming). In the case of the hedgehog question that The Ridger mentions, keratin had 99% confidence, porcupine had 36%, and fur had 8%. To call fur a real third choice is kind of silly, as it was so distant that it only showed up because something had to be third.

But even the second choice was well below the buzz-in threshold. That it was as high as it was, at 36% confidence, does, indeed, show Watson’s different thought process — there’s a high correlation between hedgehog and porcupine, along with the other words in the clue. Nevertheless, Watson’s analysis correctly pushed that well down in the answer bin as it pulled out the correct answer at nearly 100% confidence.

In fact, I think most adult humans do run the word porcupine through their heads in the process of solving this one. It’s just that they rule it out so quickly that it doesn’t even register as a possibility. That sort of reasoning is beyond what Watson can do. In that sense it’s behaving like a child, who might just leave porcupine as a candidate answer, lacking the knowledge and experience to toss it.

No one will be mistaking a computer for a human any time soon, though Watson probably is the closest we’ve come to something that could pass the Turing test. However good it can do at Jeopardy! — and from the perspective of points, it’s doing fabulously (and note how skilled it was at pulling all three Daily Doubles) — it would quickly fall on its avatar-face if we actually tried to converse with it.

Watson’s first day

2011-02-15T11:38:00.000-05:00

Interesting.

Watson did very well on its first day. In order to have time to explain things and introduce the concept of Watson, they set it up so that only two games are played over the three days. The first day was for the first round, and the second day (this evening) will have Double Jeopardy and Final Jeopardy.

It wasn’t surprising that there were a few glitches, where Watson didn’t fully get the question — for instance, answering leg, rather than missing a leg, in describing the anatomical oddity of an Olympic winner. And, as we knew might happen, Watson repeated an incorrect answer from Ken Jennings, because the computer has no way to know what the other contestants have said.

What I found interesting, though, is that Watson does have a very strong advantage with the buzzer. Despite the attempts to smooth that out by setting up a mechanical system whereby Watson sends a signal to cause a button to be physically pushed, and despite whatever the humans can do through anticipation, it’s clear that people just can’t match the computer’s reactions. Almost every time Watson was highly confident of its answer — a green bar (see below) — it won the buzz. Surely, on things like the names of people in Beatles songs, Mr Jennings and Mr Rutter were as confident of the answer as Watson was, and had the answers ready well before Alex finished reading. Yet Watson won the buzz on every one of those.

It was fun to have a little of Watson’s thought process shown: at the bottom of the screen, we saw Watson’s top three answer possibilities, along with its confidence for each, shown as a percentage bar that was coloured red, yellow, or green, depending upon the percentage. That was interesting whether or not Watson chose to buzz in. On a Harry Potter question for which the answer was the villain, Voldemort, Watson’s first answer was Harry Potter — it didn’t understand that the question was looking for the bad guy, even though the whole category related to bad guys. But its confidence in the answer was low (red, and well below the buzz threshold), it didn’t buzz in, and Mr Rutter gave the correct answer (which had been Watson’s second choice).

Of course, they didn’t use any audio or video clues, according to the agreement — Watson can neither hear nor see — but they didn’t seem to pull any punches on the categories or types of questions. It feels like a normal Jeopardy! game.

Oh, and by the way: the TiVo has it marked as copy-protected, so I can’t put it on a DVD. Damn. I don’t know whether regular Jeopardy! games are that way or not; I’ve never recorded one before.

Government oversight of the Internet

2011-02-14T07:27:00.005-05:00

Now that the protests in Egypt have led to a change in leadership — an outcome that seemed inevitable for a while, though now-former-President Mubarak denied that it would happen — I want to go back and look at a key event during the last few weeks, when the Egyptian government disconnected the country from the Internet

It appears that removing an entire country from the internet is surprisingly easy, by making changes in a system known as the border gateway protocol (BGP). This system is used by ISPs and other organisations to connect to each others’ networks, so the Egyptian government just had to order ISPs to alter the BGP routing tables to make external connections impossible.
Looking at BGP data we can confirm that according to our analysis 88 per cent of the ‘Egyptian internet’ has fallen off the internet, reports Andree Tonk of BGPmon, a site dedicated to monitoring changes in the BGP. A recent report for the OECD cited the BGP as a weak point in online infrastructure that needs to be secured — a prediction that seems to have now come true.

As the report makes clear, it’s not technically difficult, at least not for a relatively small country with a relatively centralized connection to the Internet. And we see countries such as China and Iran using similar techniques to do more selective blocking (the latter has, I understand, responded to the events in Tunisia and Egypt by joining the former in blocking access to blog sites such as this one). The issue isn’t technical, but one of policy: is the government allowed to cut off the Internet?

Of course, with countries where the government makes its own authority, the answer is always Yes. But what about in the U.S., where the government was limited, at least through the end of the 20th century, to abiding by its constitution, legislation, and a judicial system?

For one answer to that question, we can look to Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who, along with Senators Susan Collins (Maine) and Tom Carper (Delaware), introduced legislation to enhance the security and resiliency of the cyber and communications infrastructure of the United States.

The Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010, S.3480 (here’s a PDF of the latest version as of this writing) was introduced last June and was entirely replaced by Senator Lieberman in December (you have to go to the bottom of page 197 of the PDF to see the new version). The December version was reported to the Senate from the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, which Mr Lieberman chairs (and on which his cosponsors sit). It’s now on the Senate’s legislative calendar. (The corresponding House bill is H.R.5548.)

The bill, if it should become law, would create a new operational entity within [the Department of Homeland Security]: the National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications (NCCC).

The NCCC would be led by a Senate-confirmed Director, who would regularly advise the President regarding the exercise of authorities relating to the security of federal networks. The NCCC would include the United States Computer Emergency Response Team (US-CERT), and it would lead federal operational efforts to protect public and private sector networks. The NCCC would detect, prevent, analyze, and warn of cyber threats to these networks.

The bill creates, in addition to the NCCC, quite a number of offices, councils, task forces, and programs, some of which make sense and some of which probably don’t. It creates the Office of Cyberspace Policy, whose Director is appointed by and reports to the President. It creates the Federal Information Security Taskforce, comprising executives and representatives from more than a dozen government agencies. And so on.

The entire bill is quite extensive, running well over 200 pages. And what’s frightening about it is that it puts the U.S. government right in the middle of the operation and management of the Internet within the United States and its territories — and keep in mind how central U.S. operations and U.S.-based services are to the Internet as a whole. It’s difficult to understand the effect that all this new administration will have on the operation of the Internet within the U.S., and the effect that it could have if it’s mismanaged, if it tries to respond to perceived threats, if it’s affected by right-wing zealots or other dubious elements that inhabit the U.S. political community.

I have read the bill’s summary, along with parts of the bill itself, but haven’t had time to read the whole bill yet. It’s not clear how bad it could be, nor, indeed, whether it will be bad at all... but I’m very skeptical of the result of putting such a large set of deep layers of U.S. government bureaucracy in the middle of the operation and management of the Internet. And I’m deeply worried about giving authority to make operational decisions to people who have insufficient technical knowledge to understand the ramifications of those decisions, who may have political or ideological motivations that do not coincide with what’s best for the Internet, and who can implement their decisions without the checks-and-balances oversight that protects us in other parts of our lives.

I have lots more reading to do.

Jeopardy! tomorrow

2011-02-13T12:24:00.001-05:00

Monday through Wednesday are the days when the Jeopardy! games will air that pit IBM Research’s Watson computer against former champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

My TiVo is set to record them, and it’s also recorded last week’s NOVA program, Smartest Machine on Earth (which you can watch on the PBS site). I’m eager to see how the games, recorded last month, came out.

Update, 15 Feb, answer to Nathaniel’s question in the comments: Ken Jennings says this, on his blog:

On Twitter, Watson (okay, his human handlers) have said that video will be posted on Watson’s website on Thursday, for those unable to watch one or more of the games live. You know: non-Americans, the gainfully employed, the Tivo-less, those with significant others expecting a romantic night out tonight instead of a quiz show, etc.

And visions of greengage plums dance in my head

2011-02-11T11:18:00.002-05:00

A week ago, New Scientist told us about some new research technology by Toshiba, a system that recognizes fruits and veg at the self-checkout station:

Its system, developed by Susumu Kubota and his team at Toshiba’s research centre in Kawasaki, Japan, uses a webcam, image recognition and machine-learning software to identify loose goods, such as fruit. The company claims the system can tell apart products that look virtually identical, by picking up slight differences in colour and shape, or even faint markings on the surface.
When shoppers want to buy, say, apples at existing self-service checkouts they must choose the right product from a long list of pictures on a screen. Toshiba’s technology, part of which was presented last year at the 11th European Conference on Computer Vision in Chersonissos, Greece, compares the image captured by the webcam against a database of images and detailed information on the item’s appearance. The software uses an algorithm to produce a list of pictures of similar items, with its choice for the closest match at the top. If this choice is the correct one, the checkout user presses a button to confirm the purchase.

The system isn’t quite ready yet, and Toshiba hopes to commercialise the system within three years. They note, Similar ideas designed to identify products without barcodes have never made it to market in the past.

Indeed. Let’s go back to this item from 2003, where USA Today talks about some IBM research, including a system called Veggie Vision:

Researchers at IBM recently assembled several of the high-tech machines for a demonstration at their Industry Solutions Lab in Hawthorne. Among them were the smart shopping cart, a computerized produce scale called Veggie Vision, and a fascinating projection tentatively dubbed the Everything Display.
[...]
There doesn’t seem to be any controversy about Veggie Vision, a scale for fruits and vegetables that is hooked up to a digital camera and a library of hundreds of pictures of produce. When a shopper puts tomatoes on the scale, the machine evaluates their color, texture and shape to determine what they are, then weighs and prices the purchase.
Not only can it tell an apple from a tomato, but unlike some checkout clerks, it can tell a McIntosh apple from a Red Delicious.

Sound familiar? It did to me, because I knew some of the people who worked on Veggie Vision, colleagues at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center. And, while the USA Today article is from 2003, the conference papers about Veggie Vision, as well as the patents covering the technology, are from 1996 and 1997 (see this page for the IBM Research description, and links to the papers and the patents). It’s all there, complete with reading through the bag and machine learning.

I remember being impressed with the system (and the cool name), back when my colleagues were working on it and demonstrating it within the research lab. We had a good one, thought I, and according to the IBM Research web page, The system is now ready for prime time, and its developers have signed field test agreements with two scanner manufacturers and one company that makes self-checkout systems.

So, what happened? Why isn’t the IBM system out there at all the self-checkout stations? Why is Toshiba making the science-and-technology news for re-inventing what IBM had ready for market ten years ago? I’d hate to see Toshiba get the credit for what my IBM colleagues did so much earlier.

I have no information about that, alas... only the vague frustration that I often found, where good research projects would never seem to go where we thought they should, after they left the lab.

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be;
and that which is done is that which shall be done:
and there is no new thing under the sun.
— Ecclesiastes, chapter 1, verse 9 (King James Version)

Foiling offline password attacks

2011-02-10T07:36:00.000-05:00

Jarno, at F-Secure — an excellent Finnish anti-malware company — has posted a nice analysis of encoding password files. Because he assumes some knowledge of the way things work, I’ll try to expand a bit on that here. Some of this has been in these pages before, so this is a review.

A cryptographic hash algorithm is a mathematical algorithm that will take some piece of data as input, and will generate as output a piece of data — a number — of a fixed size. The output is called a hash value, or simply a hash (and it’s sometimes also called a digest). The algorithm has the following properties:

It’s computationally simple to run the algorithm on any input.
Given two different inputs, however similar, it’s very likely that the hashes will be different (it is collision resistant).
Given a hash value, it’s computationally infeasible to determine an input that will generate that hash (it is preimage resistant).
Given an input, it’s computationally infeasible to choose another input that gives the same hash (it has second preimage resistance).

Cryptographic hash algorithms go by names like MD5 (for Message Digest) and SHA-1 (for Secure Hash Algorithm), and they’re used for many things. Sometimes they’re used to convert a large piece of data into a small value, in order to detect modifications to the data. They’re used that way in digital signatures. But sometimes they’re just used to hide the original data (which might actually be smaller than the hash value).

Unix systems used to store user names and passwords in a file called /etc/passwd, with the passwords hashed to hide (obfuscate) them. A standard attack was to find a way to get a copy of a system’s /etc/passwd file, and try to guess the passwords offline. If you know what hash algorithm they’re using, that’s easy: guess a password, hash it, then look in the /etc/passwd file to see if any user has that hash value for its password.

Nowadays, most systems have moved away from storing the passwords that way, but there are still services that do it, there are still ways of snatching password files, and the attack’s still current. Jarno’s article looks at some defenses.

Salting the hashed passwords involves including some other data along with the password when the hash is computed, to make sure that two different users who use the same password will have different hashes in the password file. That prevents the sort of global attack that says, Let’s hash the word ‘password’, and see if anyone’s using that. Of course, if the salt is discoverable (it’s the user name, or something else that’s stored along with the user’s information), users’ passwords can still be attacked individually.

Even using individual attacks, it’s long been easy to crack a lot of passwords offline: we know that a good portion of people will use one of the 1000 or so most popular passwords (password, 123456, and so on), and it never has taken very long to test those. Even if that only nets the attacker 5% of the passwords in the database, that’s pretty good. But now that processors are getting faster, it’s feasible to test not only the 1000 most popular passwords, but tens or hundreds of thousands. All but the best passwords will fall to a brute-force offline attack.

The reason offline attacks are important is that most systems have online protections: if, as an attacker, you actually try to log in, you’ll only be allowed a few tries before the account is locked out and you have to move on to another. But if you can play with the password file offline, you have no limits.

Of course, the best defense is for a system administrator to make sure no one can get hold of the system’s or the service’s password file. That said, one should always assume that will fail, and someone will get the file. Jarno suggests the backup defense of using different salt values for each user and making a point of picking a slow hash algorithm. The reasoning is that it doesn’t make much difference if it takes a few hundred milliseconds for legitimate access — it doesn’t matter if a login takes an extra quarter or half second — but at a quarter of a second per attempt, it will be much harder for an attacker to crack a bunch of passwords on the system.

Just two small points:

First, Jarno recommends specific alternatives to SHA-1, but he doesn’t have it quite right. PBKDF2 and HMAC are not themselves hash algorithms. They are algorithms that make use of hash algorithms within them. You’d still be using SHA-1, but you’d be wrapping complexity around it to slow it down. That’s fine, but it’s not an alternative to SHA-1.

The same is the case for bcrypt, only, worse, bcrypt uses a non-standard hash algorithm within it. I would not recommend that, because the hash algorithm hasn’t been properly vetted by the security community. We don’t really know how its cryptographic properties compare with those of SHA-1.

Second, Jarno suggests that as processors get faster, the hashing can be changed to maintain the time required to do it. He’s right, but that still leaves an exposure: because the server doesn’t have the passwords (only the hashes of the passwords), no hash can be changed until the user logs in. If the system doesn’t lock out unused accounts periodically, those unused accounts become weak points for break-ins over time.

That said, this is sound advice for system administrators and designers. And perhaps at least a little interesting to some of the rest of you.

What to teach children

2011-02-09T07:51:00.009-05:00

On Tuesday, a local radio talk show hosted by Brian Lehrer included a call-in segment about sleep-over parties for children. It seems that some parents don’t allow their children to host or to attend them. Who knew? The guest for the segment was a pediatrician called Perri Klass.

I wasn’t especially interested in the topic (and some of the commentors on the web page agree in ridiculing tones), and I’m not especially interested in talking about it here. But I happened to be in my car and I heard it... and what did interest me was the last caller, Max in Larchmont. Here’s my transcript starting at about 12:35 into the audio stream:

Max: I’m calling because I’m wondering if the doctor has heard about people having problems with religious and political differences. I have three kids, and when they sleep over at other people’s houses, especially if they’re religious... my wife and I, we teach our children that religion is a pernicious force in the world, and is a terrible thing, and sometimes the parents of other kids get upset if my kids tell them that while they’re doing their prayers or something.
Lehrer: Well, while they’re doing their prayers may not be very nice. But, all right, so how do you handle it... Max, how do you handle it?
Max: We just... I don’t know if the doctor agrees, I think children should be legally shielded from religion until they’re sixteen. I think it’s crazy to expose children to superstitious ideas like that; it makes them dumb. And I think a lot of the kids are swayed when my kids meet their kids and they stop going to Hebrew school and so forth, and I think that’s a good thing.
Lehrer: Thank you, Max. Doctor Klass, any response?
Klass: Well, I’ll just make a general response, which is that if you’re gonna let your children go over to other people’s houses, either for sleep-overs or during the day, you’re gonna have to teach ’em to be good guests. Leaving aside your politics and leaving aside your religious issues, if you’re going to go into somebody’s house and you’re going to accept their hospitality, part of growing up is learning to be a good and respectful guest. Now, that doesn’t mean that you have to agree with things that you absolutely don’t agree with, and it doesn’t mean you have to necessarily join in practices which aren’t yours, but you do have to learn how to be polite, or, in the great way of the world, you won’t be invited back.

Some of the last batch of comments talk about Max’s call (unfortunately, they’re not numbered, but start with MP from Brooklyn at 11:58, and read up from there). Some think it’s a prank call, and not real. Some support the attitude (Robin from NYC, YZ from Brooklyn). One, Samantha from Sunny Riverdale seems to think the kids should be shunned for their parents’ attitude. That certainly seems the good, Christian thing to do, eh?

I agree with Max: as I’ve said many times, I consider religious indoctrination to be tantamount to child abuse. Teaching children made-up nonsense as truth, whether it be...

about Xenu the space dictator abducting his citizens, bringing them to Earth, and then killing them by blowing up volcanoes, or
about Apollo driving his chariot across the sky, carrying the sun through the day, or
about a talking snake convincing a primordial couple to sin by eating the wrong fruit, or
about a virgin who had been separated from that original sin giving birth to God’s son, who was then tortured to death but rose from the dead to rule in heaven, or
about Isildur defeating Sauron and severing his finger (and ring) in the Battle of Dagorlad,

...is ludicrous, and, yes, often makes them dumb. It certainly ill prepares them to think critically, when we demand that they accept preposterous stories without question, simply because it is written, it’s God’s word, and they must have faith. We spend far too much time either actively promoting belief in fantasy or passively allowing it to interfere with the education we need to be giving children — see, for example, this article.

All that said, though, I agree with Dr Klass: we don’t call people our friends, go to their houses, eat their food, sleep in their beds, and tell them, while we’re there, that their beliefs are stupid and ridiculous. Whatever we think, and however public we are about it otherwise, when we’re invited to people’s homes we make a choice: we decline the invitation if we’re unwilling to be civil, or we accept the invitation and stay clear of things that we know will upset them.

And, so, it’s a pity that Max and his wife have what I think is an admirable approach to teaching their children sense and reason... and yet have chosen not to teach them civility and the polite behaviour of a guest.

AOL to acquire dumpster full of garbage

2011-02-08T10:55:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that AOL will pay $315 million for the Huffington Post, using this headline:

Betting on News, AOL Is Buying The Huffington Post

The problem here is that the HuffPo hasn’t been news in several years, if it ever was at all. I used to follow it in my feed reader, occasionally finding things of interest, but at least for the last three of its less than six years, it’s just been full of pointers to other people’s news, inane commentary, new-age silliness, quackery, and other junk. I stopped following it at all well over two years ago.

AOL apparently hasn’t. To be sure, there are things to be found there that are worth reading — I just don’t find it worth panning through the pebbles to find those few bits of pyrite, and there certainly isn’t anything that rates as gold. But with AOL’s content coming up even emptier, I guess the acquisition will be some sort of a boost, at least.

But news? Not unless something changes. Not unless Ms Huffington tosses the likes of Deepak Chopra and the other crazies that post there, and goes back to the substantive commentary that she used to have more of than now.

And it will be up to Ms H, indeed; according to the report:

Arianna Huffington, the cable talk show pundit, author and doyenne of the political left, will take control of all of AOL’s editorial content as president and editor in chief of a newly created Huffington Post Media Group. The arrangement will give her oversight not only of AOL’s national, local and financial news operations, but also of the company’s other media enterprises like MapQuest and Moviefone.
By handing so much control over to Ms. Huffington and making her a public face of the company, AOL, which has been seen as apolitical, risks losing its nonpartisan image. Ms. Huffington said her politics would have no bearing on how she ran the new business.

Well, best of luck to AOL’s new Huffington Post Media Group, but I, at least, am more skeptical than the HuffPo has ever been.

The Internet is falling!

2011-02-04T14:45:00.001-05:00

The big Internet tech news this week is that the last block of Internet addresses, for the version of the Internet Protocol (IP) that we mostly use (IPv4), has been allocated. Or, as the headlines are saying, we have now run out of Internet addresses. Of course, it’s filled the tech media, as above, but it’s shown up in the mainstream press as well; here it is from the New York Times, and from The Guardian.

What does it really mean, that we’ve run out of IPv4 addresses?

Well, for one thing, it doesn’t mean that we’ve run out of IPv4 addresses. The Times gets it better than the other articles, in its headline:

The Last Block of IPv4 Addresses Allocated

The last address has not been assigned, not by a long shot. IPv4 addresses are allocated to organizations in large blocks — sometimes blocks of 60,000 or so, sometimes blocks of more than 16 million. Those organizations then assign addresses within those blocks, sometimes individually and sometimes in sub-blocks. What has just happened is that the last large block of addresses has been allocated. There are still many, many IPv4 addresses available for assignment, within many of the blocks that have been allocated.

For example, IBM has a 16-million-plus block of addresses comprising all addresses that start with 9 (that is, every address of the form 9.x.x.x; they also have some of the 129.x.x.x range). Those 9.x.x.x addresses are assigned within the company’s network. Not all of them are assigned, of course; there aren’t more than 16 million devices within the company.

Similarly, Internet service providers, such as Comcast and Verizon, have large blocks of their own, some for use within the company, and some to provide to their customers.

Many companies have blocks that are much larger than they need, far more than they could ever imagine using for their normal networks. Those blocks were allocated to them in earlier times, before the worldwide web and the explosion of Internet usage, when we never thought it would matter. Or they were assigned later, when we assumed that IPv6, with many orders of magnitude more addresses, would be well deployed by now. (I’ll note that it would be very difficult, even though large portions of the allocated blocks remain unused, to reclaim the unused bits and to reallocate them.)

Let’s not be Chicken Little, here; the sky is not falling, an the Internet is not imminently doomed. Indeed, the Internet will mostly run fine, as it is, for many years yet. We’ll all be able to read our email, buy from Amazon and eBay, use Facebook, and see YouTube videos.

Eventually, we’ll be crowded out by expanding Internet use, though we have techniques to keep that at bay for a long time. What will be blocked by this are — and this should be a familiar refrain to readers here — new applications, new uses of the Internet. To move into the future, beyond email and eBay, Facebook and YouTube, we need to move to IPv6.

We have enough IPv4 addresses for now, and for a while, to accommodate putting every computer on the Internet, as long as we’re thinking of computer as we have been: desktops and laptops. Maybe iPads, too. But now add Kindles and other eBook readers. Add smart-phones. Consider that every mobile phone is a smart-phone. Do we have enough v4 addresses for all of that?

Now move into the Internet of things: add every car, because our cars need to be online. Add every television (they’ll stream video directly), every stereo receiver (streaming music, radio stations, and other audio from the Internet), every portable music player from boom box to iPod Nano. Are we getting there? Include appliances: alarm clocks, refrigerators, coffee makers. Include home- and building-automation targets: thermostats, light switches, and so on. Put in sensor networks, traffic-control and monitoring systems....

Well, given all that, we ran out of v4 addresses long ago. It’s not really the v4 address-space depletion that should be driving the move to IPv6, but the need for more address space for future applications. If you don’t think that sort of thing is important, consider this news item about electric-grid problems stemming from the recent ice storm in Texas:

FORT WORTH, Texas — A high power demand in the wake of a massive ice storm caused rolling outages for more than eight hours Wednesday across most of Texas, resulting in signal-less intersections, coffee houses with no morning java and some people stuck in elevators.
The temporary outages started about 5:30 a.m. and ended in the afternoon, but there is a strong possibility that they will be required again this evening or tomorrow, depending on how quickly the disabled generation units can be returned to service, the chief operator of Texas’ power grid said in a release.

Consider the potential consequences of intersections without traffic signals and people stuck in elevators. We’d like to shut the power down in an area selectively, killing most of it but leaving the elevators running (at least until they open on the next floor), leaving a trickle of emergency lighting, leaving the the traffic lights running. We can do that, if everything’s addressable, and the power control system is set up to allow distribution with sufficient granularity.

But if it takes a Chicken Little scare — The Internet is falling! The Internet is falling! — to get IPv6 out there, well, here it comes.

The scions of Sagan

2011-02-03T11:33:00.000-05:00

Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Greene are the Carl Sagans of the 21st century. I’m happy that Carl Sagan’s 1980 TV series, Cosmos is available for streaming on Netflix, and I’ll soon re-watch it.

Neil deGrasse Tyson hosts the TV program NOVA ScienceNOW, and gives wonderfully amusing and insightful talks, some of which are on YouTube. Brian Greene did a PBS program about string theory, called The Elegant Universe, based on his book of the same name. Both scientists have a way of making science interesting and understandable to the general public, and both are excellent, charismatic speakers. If you have a chance to see or hear either of them, do it.

A week ago, or so, Dr Greene was on the radio program Fresh Air, a 34-minute segment called A Physicist Explains Why Parallel Universes May Exist (promoting his new book, of course, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos). Go give it a listen.

The second boy is half price

2011-01-30T07:40:00.001-05:00

Quite the deal they have going this weekend at a store in the local shopping mall:

Peer-to-peer means many things

2011-01-29T07:29:00.001-05:00

I have a bone to pick with New Scientist’s headline writer. For an article about Google’s blocking of certain search terms in their instant results, the headline reads thus:

Google censors peer-to-peer search terms

In fact, the article tells us that the terms in question relate to torrent downloads. The article doesn’t mention peer-to-peer at all; it’s only in the headline. And the headline gives the wrong impression.

Peer-to-peer is not synonymous with file sharing of questionable legality. In fact, it’s not synonymous with file sharing of any kind: file sharing is one application of peer-to-peer protocols, but there’s a lot of other stuff on the Internet that works peer-to-peer.

Some examples:

Instant messaging
Networked games
Many voice-over-IP systems
Any other SIP-based application

Many of these services put two end-user systems in touch with each other, and then use peer-to-peer protocols, keeping any central servers out of the picture — and out of interference, eliminating any bottlenecks that a server might cause.

The fact that many people violate copyright by using peer-to-peer file sharing to pass around copyrighted material sometimes gives peer-to-peer a bad name. But a lot of useful stuff that’s legally solid and non-controversial is peer-to-peer as well. Let’s not tar all of those with the same brush.

Challenger: 25 years

2011-01-28T15:30:00.001-05:00

Rain, reign, rein

2011-01-27T18:19:00.002-05:00

I was going to give today a miss, but then I read, for the 17,248th time, I think, the phrase given free reign. And now I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more.^[1]

There’s rain, the water that falls from the sky. That can be free, but no one thinks that he was given free rain means anything interesting.

There’s reign, the rule of a king, or the metaphorical equivalent. One can be given the freedom to reign, I suppose, but think about it: what does it mean to be given free reign?

Then there’s rein, the strap by which we control a horse. When we pull the reins in, we control the horse more tightly. When we let up on the reins, we exert less control. And when we give [the horse] free rein, we let it do as it pleases.

The phrase is given free rein.

^[1] No, it’s just a Network reference.

When do your wacky ideas get in the way of your job?

2011-01-26T14:41:00.002-05:00

There’s been a lot of talk around blogland about the case of Martin Gaskell. Dr Gaskell is an astronomer, and was, in 2007, up for a position at University of Kentucky, where he would be director of the MacAdam Student Observatory. According to all reports, he was highly qualified, and would have been likely to get the job. They then, as we Internet technologists refer to it in very technical terms, Googled him, and found aspects of his religious beliefs that led them to hire someone else.

This, of course, is where the accounts begin to differ. Dr Gaskell sued the University of Kentucky on grounds of religious discrimination; the university said that it wasn’t his religion, in general, that was a problem, but his specific views on things like the age of the universe, things that have direct bearing on the job at hand, that informed their decision.

In November of 2010 (things don’t always move quickly in the court system), a federal judge ruled that the case could go forward, and a date was set for February. Last week — what has prompted the new interest in talking about it — they settled out of court, ending the legal proceedings. The University of Kentucky will pay Dr Gaskell $125,000, without making any admission of wrongdoing.

Paying to make the problem go away is common, but unfortunate: it leaves everything fuzzy. Dr Gaskell’s supporters will claim that they won, and that there was, indeed, improper discrimination against him. His detractors will say that he extorted money from the university. Neither is really true.

More broadly, though, this case isn’t just about Dr Gaskell, and settling with him leaves open the question of when a person’s beliefs — religious or otherwise — make it reasonable to rule that person out for certain jobs. And should religious beliefs have any more protection in that regard than beliefs rooted elsewhere?

Richard Dawkins, in a BoingBoing guest post, has given his opinion on the matter. I mostly agree with him, but I can’t say that unequivocally. Read his essay, either now or after you’re done here.

I’ll answer the second of my questions two paragraphs up before I discuss the first: No, I do not think the reason one believes what one does has any bearing on how we should treat that belief. If you believe, say, that people should be at peace with each other, and that war is always evil, it shouldn’t matter whether you’re a Quaker or you come by that from somewhere else. If you’re vegetarian, what’s the difference whether it’s because you’re Hindu or because you simply can’t bear to see animals die? If you believe that the Universe is about 6000 years old, whether you get that from the bible, from a science fiction story you once read, or from a private sense that came to you one evening, it’s all the same. We shouldn’t be any more critical of what you think because you learnt it in church... but neither should we be more tolerant of it for that reason, if it gets in the way of what we’re working with you for.

And that leads us to the other question: When is it acceptable to say that what you believe is inconsistent with the job we’re hiring you for? Can a vegetarian expect to get a job as the sole food critic for a small newspaper? There’s an obvious issue there, but, surely, a vegetarian Hindu couldn’t reasonably sue the paper and claim religious discrimination. You have to be able to do your job.

Of course, there’d be no reason to prevent a vegetarian from, say, being the director of a university astronomical observatory. It’s likely we’ll all agree on that point.

At issue here, though, is that certain beliefs can damage your credibility to the point that, while they might not stop you doing your job, they could easily make it impossible for people to take you seriously in it. Were I, for instance, to apply for a job as Internet technology advisor for a right-wing tea-party senator, I might very well be able to give sound technical advice while choking back my revulsion to the senator’s political agenda... but could the senator ever trust that I wasn’t trying to undermine her in some way, given what I’ve written in these pages? Of course not.

Where I have a little trouble fully agreeing with Professor Dawkins is about where we draw the line. Between beliefs that can live in the background without having any effect and those that clearly whack one’s job in the face, there’s a continuum, and we have to decide when there’s enough effect to matter.

To be sure, we often think of college professors as being a bit kooky. It’s clear to me that the University of Kentucky people made a reasonable decision in this case, and it bothers me that they had to agree to pay Dr Gaskell off. But other cases are bound to be less clear, and it may be fine to hire the professor with the nutty ideas sometimes... even if the students do have a laugh once in a while, he’ll still have enough credibility to teach them what needs to be taught.

Ideally, of course, I fully agree with Professor Dawkins: we want clear thinkers in our universities, and accepting people who support discredited or fringe ideas in areas not connected to their main expertise still pollutes the clear-thinking pond. We’d like to select, say, Holocaust denialists, moon-landing skeptics, homeopathists, and idiots who still think that President Obama was not really born in Hawaii, and make sure none of them are teaching at our colleges and universities. It’s a nice goal. In practice, though, we have that sort of situation all the time, and I’m not sure how rigorous I want to be in avoiding it. Should Stanford University have distanced themselves from William Shockley because of his ideas about eugenics? Perhaps, perhaps not.

What’s clear, though, is that we have to prevent every employment decision from being the basis of a religious discrimination suit. In this case, the judge who allowed it to go forward made the wrong choice. It only cost the university $125,000, but it’s set a precedent that makes me very queasy.

Not with our drugs, you won't!

2011-01-25T11:24:00.000-05:00

Those of us who abhor execution have gotten some temporary good news: Hospira, the only U.S. company that manufactures sodium thiopental, has ceased its production:

The sole American manufacturer of an anesthetic widely used in lethal injections said Friday that it would no longer produce the drug, a move likely to delay more executions and force states to adopt new drug combinations.
The manufacturer, Hospira Inc., of Lake Forest, Ill., had originally planned to resume production of the drug, sodium thiopental, this winter at a plant in Italy, giving state corrections departments hope that the scarcity that began last fall would ease.
But the Italian authorities said they would not permit export of the drug if it might be used for capital punishment. Hospira said in a statement Friday that its aim was to serve medical customers, but that we could not prevent the drug from being diverted to departments of corrections and the company did not want to expose itself to liability in Italy.

It’s temporary, because states are likely to approve alternative drugs — Oklahoma already uses pentobarbital — but according to the Times, the delay could be considerable because of the process required to get changes approved. Some states (such as Texas, which seems to have an insatiable itch to kill prisoners) clearly will push a new protocol through as quickly as possible, while others may be in less of a hurry.

This is also interesting as a demonstration of how one country can affect another through its policies. We’re used to using embargoes for this, to varying effect, but the problem with embargoes is that they often cause pain to the populace without resulting in policy changes in the government. In this case, Italy’s approach was simple, targeted, and effective.

Five years

2011-01-24T10:46:00.000-05:00

Today is the last day of the fifth year of these pages. As always, thanks, everyone, for reading and commenting over the years.

I started out with a goal of posting every day, and have mostly met that goal — I figure that out of 365 days, I post on at least 330 of them, and probably more. (On the other hand, I’ve just missed two days in a row, this past weekend.) Since 25 January, 2006, there have been 1826 days and 1909 entries in these pages (counting this one), averaging more than one a day... so, the days that got multiple posts outnumbered the ones where I missed.

I posted a lot more about politics in the earlier years, during the Bush administration, when I had more to be outraged about. That’s not to say that I’m thrilled with how things are going now — to be sure, there’s still plenty of political stuff to be discussed — but, somehow, I feel less moved than before to spend the time writing about it.

And, in general, while I still want to write here, I’m feeling less moved to do it every day, seven days a week, 365-ish days a year.

I’ll announce, then, officially, that every day is no longer the goal. I’ll still post on most days, I think, but my stated goal will go down to, say, three times a week. I’m sure I’ll exceed that goal most of the time. But if you visit and don’t see anything for a day or two, don’t be concerned: there’ll probably be something here on the day after. And if you’re using the RSS/Atom feed to follow what’s here, you probably won’t even notice.

Again, thanks to all of you for reading and commenting, and I hope you’ll continue.

Breaking the wind

2011-01-21T11:02:00.000-05:00

How did I miss this?

Joe Barton is the congressman from Texas who apologized last June to BP for how badly we were treating them in the wake of the oil spill. That was enough to bring him out as a bozo, but I expected nothing else from a Tea-Party congressman from Waco, who represents part of the Dallas-Ft Worth area.

Thing is, he chaired the House Energy and Commerce Committee from 2004 through 2006, and has just been given the committee's title of Chair Emeritus, what with the Republicans controlling the House again. And, so, we wonder just what he knows about energy.

That’s when we get to the question of how I missed this, his concern about using wind power, which he voiced early last year:

Wind is God’s way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it’s hotter to areas where it’s cooler. That’s what wind is. Wouldn’t it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up? Now, I’m not saying that’s going to happen, Mr. Chairman, but that is definitely something on the massive scale. I mean, it does make some sense. You stop something, you can’t transfer that heat, and the heat goes up. It’s just something to think about.

Wind power is a finite resource. Using wind power slows the wind down, which causes the temperature to go up. Presumably only in the areas where it’s hotter; in the areas where it’s cooler, it only makes sense that they’d stay cooler. I guess. So, in other words, we can interfere with God pretty easily, omnipotent being that he is, just by putting up some windmills. Yes, indeed, it’s just something to think about.

I want to leave this country and move someplace sane.

More police behaving badly

2011-01-20T10:14:00.000-05:00

It’s been a while since I’ve written about rape (some of the most significant ones are here,here, and here). But via BoingBoing I’ve just read about a case in San Antonio that’s unusually disturbing: a police officer on duty handcuffed a suspect — a transgender prostitute — then drove her off to a quiet spot and forced [her] to commit multiple sex acts.

It’s disturbing that it happened, that a law officer would do such a thing. But what’s more disturbing is that the prosecutor charged him not with felony rape, despite the DNA and GPS evidence supporting the victim’s story, but with misdemeanor official oppression. Craig Nash lost his job and was sentenced to one year in jail.

One year, for violently abusing the trust we gave him as an officer of the law.

From what we’re given in the news article, it appears that the victim’s story is legitimate. In addition, a second victim, from a couple of years earlier, came forward. Nevertheless, the prosecutor gave the (former) cop a plea bargain, agreeing to charge him only with the misdemeanor and not to pursue the second accusation.

WTF?

Apart from that, even if the sex had been consensual, an on-duty officer having sex with a suspect is sufficiently wrong at so many levels as to warrant a penalty of much more than a year in jail. Think of the opportunities for abuse that crop up here: threatening women with arrest in order to get sex,^[1] releasing arrested suspects in exchange for sex, and so on.

It makes no difference how good a police officer he was in other ways or at other times. It certainly makes no difference how good a family man he is. None of that mitigates this crime.

We place a great deal of trust in police officers, and we give them a great deal of power. They must be held accountable for the misuse and abuse of that trust and power, and the punishments must be serious, not just slaps on the wrist. Dismissal, of course, but then real prison time, not just a token jail sentence. We have to show no tolerance for abusive or illegal — not to mention vile — behaviour.

I’ll note the related case from Custer County, Oklahoma, wherein former sheriff Mike Burgess had established a systematic system of sexual abuse. He got 79 years in prison.

^[1] Personally, I consider this to be fully fledged rape, using a threat of arrest instead of, say, a knife or a threat of a severe beating. I’m not sure where the law would stand on it.

As a pedant, I...

2011-01-19T14:22:00.000-05:00

My town is moving into the 21st century, beginning a program wherein we can sign up to receive our property tax receipts by email. Of course, we have to mail them a piece of paper in order to sign up, but let’s not expect the moon, eh?

The letter announcing this and containing the form to send in begins this way:

As the Receiver of Taxes, it has been important to provide you with first-rate customer service as well as up to date and cost effective office practices.

Ms Breining, our Receiver of Taxes, has fallen into a very popular pit, one containing enough writers that I think she should be able to climb out on the others’ backs.

Any sentence that begins with as [role] must go on to have a subject that matches the role. I am the author of this entry. If I should say, As the author of this entry, I must be the subject of the rest of the sentence.

Correct: As the author of this entry, I think that getting language right is important.
Incorrect: As the author of this entry, getting language right is important.

The subject of the incorrect sentence is getting language right, but that is not the author of this entry.

It should be easy to get this one right, but it seems to be hard. A common error with the as [role] construction happens when there are two people involved, and the as gets attached to the wrong one:

As the representative on duty, call me if you have any problems.

The implied subject here is you (you call me), but it’s the me who is the representative on duty. Rewrite it one of these ways:

As the representative on duty, I am on call in case you have any problems.
As the representative on duty, I invite you to call me if you have any problems.
I am the representative on duty; call me if you have any problems.

In fact, it’s often best to avoid the as [role] thing. It’s prone to error, and it’s often awkward or stilted anyway. But if you want to use it, please use it correctly.

As the Receiver of Taxes, I consider it important to provide you with first-rate customer service as well as up-to-date and cost-effective office practices.

Maybe we’ll talk about the demise of the hyphen another time (she did use it in first-rate, but left it out of the other compound modifiers).

Customer service

2011-01-18T07:29:00.010-05:00

I’ve recently had to deal with a customer service issue with a large company (from the customer side) that’s worked out like about 80% of the customer service issues I’ve had with large companies. I figure that my customer service experiences go something like this:

Around 10% are resolved straight away.
Around 10% are never resolved to my satisfaction.
Around 80% work out roughly as I’m about to describe.

We can quibble about the particular balance, and perhaps yours balance very differently. But here’s what recently happened:

I went to the store with my issue, and talked with an associate. The associate was neither sympathetic nor helpful, and denied that there was a problem. I asked to speak with a manager.

The manager was, in this case, neither sympathetic nor helpful, and treated it the same way the associate did. Usually, the manager is at least sympathetic or apologetic, but not this time. There was nothing, he said, that he could do. I asked to speak with the store manager, who turns out to be out until next week.

I called the chain’s customer service line by phone, the next business day. The customer service representative said she was sorry I wasn’t happy, but, as those at the store did, merely explained why it was not really a problem. I asked for a supervisor.

The supervisor was also sorry I wasn’t happy, but accepted that a problem existed. Nonetheless, he said there was nothing his department could do. He referred me to another department, giving me their phone number.

That department was sorry, acknowledged the problem, and offered to buy me off with a store credit, which I declined. She understood why I declined, and said that she could escalate the problem and have someone call me back. I thanked her for the help and confirmed phone numbers.

The call-back came the same day, and the problem was immediately resolved entirely to my satisfaction, with apology for the inconvenience and thanks for doing business with their store.

Now, on the one hand, I am happy that they sorted things out. But I have too much experience with this sort of thing, and I’m well aware of both why they handle it this way, and what the problem is with that way of handling it.

They do this because they know that most people will stop after one or two levels. Even persistent folks will likely stop by the third, and almost everyone will take the store credit, which mostly guarantees that they’ll come back to the store to spend it. Those who give up (or those who take the store credit and don’t use it) don’t cost them any real money. In other words, for most people who call with these sorts of complaints, the business never has to make it right.

The problem with that is that it creates ill will. It leaves customers feeling angry, frustrated, cheated. They end up with people who are not inclined to go back to the store. Even if one sticks with it, as I did, until someone agrees to resolve the issue, the customer is left with a bad taste and a low opinion of the business.

Of course, exactly because it’s a national chain, they don’t care, at least not at the micro level. The loss of my business means nothing to them, and they will not get enough complaints and enough disaffected customers to amount to anything, really. And because it’s a big store that sells a lot of things, it’s likely that even most of the annoyed customers will be back anyway, despite themselves.

And, so, whenever I have to deal with a real customer service problem — not a simple return (most places handle those just fine), but a problem that one has to explain and get someone to fix — I enter into the process steeled for talks with four or five people. I’m always polite, but firm and clear about what I expect.

And when it turns out to be among the 10% where the first person responds, I’m sorry for the problem, Mr Leiba, and I’ll take care of it for you right away, well... then I’m very happy.

He had a dream

2011-01-17T11:34:00.000-05:00

In honour of today’s remembrance of Martin Luther King, Jr, today’s entry is a pointer to a Fresh Air radio program to air today, a talk with Clarence Jones, who helped write Dr King’s famous I Have a Dream speech.

Text without context, in this case especially, would be quite a loss. One might imagine standing before an audience and reading Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech verbatim, but it is a stretch to believe that any such performance would sow the seeds of change with, as Dr. King put it that day in Washington, the fierce urgency of now. The vast crowd, the great speaker, the words that shook the world — it all comes as a package deal. We are truly fortunate to have a record.

The IETF at 25

2011-01-16T11:17:00.003-05:00

The first meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) was held on this day in 1986, making today the IETF’s 25th birthday, in some sense.

The IETF is the organization that’s developed and documented most of the standards that the Internet runs on, from the protocols that define how data is transferred, to those that get the data packets to the right place, to those that specify how to send and retrieve email. A visit to these pages involves the use of dozens of IETF standards — along with some standards produced by other bodies, such as IEEE and W3C — that work together flawlessly (mostly) to let you read what I’ve written.

Getting all that standardized to make everything interoperate is a sometimes difficult task that can be frustrating and fun at the same time. I’ve been working with the IETF for about two thirds of those 25 years, and it’s the part of my job that I enjoy the most.

Many folks wonder if the Internet isn’t finished, and ask why the IETF is still around. The answer is that new features are always needed as new applications and new technology push the limits of what we have, and demand updates to old standards and creation of new ones.

So, happy birthday to the IETF... and thanks to all my colleagues who’ve devoted a great deal of their time and expertise to this work.

Neighbours

2011-01-15T08:08:00.007-05:00

No interlopers, these:

Watson and Jeopardy!

2011-01-14T07:57:00.009-05:00

Today, the folks at Jeopardy! will be recording the competition, to be aired on 14-16 February, between IBM’s Watson computer and two of the game’s biggest champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. I’m told that the Watson Research Center lab is closed to employees today, and that employees were asked to work from home or make other working arrangements for the day.

They did a practice round that Watson won, and you can watch some video of that in the ZDNet article. In that round, no one answered any questions wrong — it will be interesting to see how it all works out when the errors start coming in — and it looks like Watson has an edge on the buzzer timing.

Some observers are not impressed by all this. One commenter to the ZDNet article says, This is not progress. I’ve talked with others who think the whole thing is a WOMBAT.^[1] And, indeed, one has to wonder about an expenditure of a million dollars on a replica Jeopardy! set (according to CNN Money).

But, of course, they want to make a spectacle of this, just as they did with Deep Blue and Garry Kasparov.

Spectacle aside, though, is this just a silly waste? We’ll have to see what comes of the technology after the Jeopardy! match. It’s not directly clear what IBM did with the technology that went into Deep Blue, but it’s unlikely that the technology that has gone into Watson will languish. If all these projects do is produce machines that can play chess or Jeopardy!, then, indeed, they’re wasteful, no more than novelties.

But, surely, technology that can understand human-language questions and answer them has many practical uses. Such a system could be a useful front-end to many systems that have to direct people to the right experts, diagnose problems, and answer common questions. Of course, on the other side, many of us might find ourselves more frustrated than we are already, when it becomes even harder to get a real human on the phone.

Though, might we be getting closer to passing the Turing test? Perhaps before too long we won’t be able to tell whether we have a real human on the phone or not. And if that computer, Watson XVII perhaps, can answer our questions and give us a smooth and pleasant experience in the process, does it matter?

It’s clear that, while word processors and spreadsheets are useful, it’s games that have really pushed and expanded the limits of technology. 3-D graphics rendering, hand-held motion sensors, and even parts of the underlying network technology are where they are because of games. If we take advantage of where the games move us and use the technology beyond the realm of entertainment — by, say, rendering images of heart scans in 3-D to give doctors diagnostic capabilities that our parents’ doctors couldn’t even dream about, and allowing them to perform surgery with amazing levels of precision — then what we spent on the frivolity of the games was well worth it.

So let’s see what’s next for the Watson technology after Jeopardy!

We’ve come a long way since Eliza.

^[1] WOMBAT = Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time

Badges? I don’t have to show you any stinking badges.

2011-01-13T14:14:00.000-05:00

Bruce Schneier points out this paper (pdf here) that analyzes the ease of getting fake law enforcement credentials and then using them successfully.

Today, badges convey that the bearer is granted the authority to enforce laws established by a governmental or quasi-governmental entity and are cherished by law enforcement officers. The issue is that there are over 17,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States all with different badges and credentials issued to their personnel. This is not including, the over 70 different federal law enforcement agencies that issue badges and/or credentials. And in there lies the problem. How do you know a cop is a cop?
The most common response to that question is usually, if they walk like a cop. Talk like a cop. And look like a cop, then they are a cop. The assumption is further built upon when being presented with a badge and identification card. But that is not always the case.

It’s probably not surprising that they found it easy to obtain, cheaply, fake badges, and that those badges then allowed them pretty much unimpeded access to whatever they wanted. In other words, real badges provide little real security.

As someone who’s worked in secured facilities, where badges are required for access, I can say that how well all of this works very much depends upon how the badges are used, and the bottom line is that it’s useless to expect reasonable enforcement by having people look at others’ badges. They will too often fail to look, and when they do look they will be unable to detect the fakes.

But not all setups rely only on visual inspection. At one facility, a guard eyed your badge at the gate, but that was designed only to block tourists — to keep arbitrary curious people from wandering onto the premises. But to actually get into the building, everyone had to pass a badge reader and enter an identification code on a keypad, a two-factor authentication process (something I have, and something I know). The reader validated the badge, making it harder to get a fake through. The identification code made sure that I matched the badge — not just that I bore a passing resemblance to the guy in the photo, but that I actually knew the code that was stored in the database for that particular badge.

That defeats attempts to clone a badge, or to put arbitrary information (or none at all) on the magnetic strip. Getting through that system would require compromising an individual and specifically stealing or copying his credentials and obtaining the corresponding identification code... or, alternatively, finding a way to get in that bypasses the badge readers. There might have been such a way, but none was apparent to me.

Once inside, we’re back to the visual checks again, so one can wander unimpeded through much of the building. But the process at the entrances repeats for access to certain areas of the building, again requiring either badging in (with reader and ID code) or opening a lock with a combination unique to that area.

I don’t think there’s any way to completely get rid of visual inspection of credentials, but we have to minimize it. The public is especially vulnerable, in cases where someone dresses like a cop and has something that looks like a badge. But for official buildings and other secured areas we do have alternatives, and we should be using them rigorously.