My primary complaint is that, through the whole process, they seem to be focusing more on the importance of getting felons and dead people off the voter rolls than on making sure legitimate voters can vote. I understand that there will always be mistakes, but they consider a 15% rate of error (of people who are removed who shouldn't be) to be reasonable. My feeling is, does the world really screetch to a halt if we let a felon vote? Can't we step back and see if there are other ways to do this? Because I think there are.
First, they are using matching algorithms that of course are making errors. They match on only the first 4 characters of the first name? A large but still partial match of the last name? These might make a reasonable starting point, but if all you've got is a partial match, wouldn't it be good to check it out? Perhaps send counties two lists - the certain matches, and the possible matches - and ask them to check it out?
Which gets to the second issue, taking this out of the hands of the counties. I think this is something appropriate to be handed on a local level. That's who processes the votes themselves, after all. But there is a technical reason this would make sense too - different counties can have different voter registration forms. It was pointed out that finding felons is hard, because people aren't required to give their social security number on their voter registration form. I am not for requiring social security numbers to be given. However, a quick web search of various voter registration forms online shows that each county does seem to require some piece of identifying information, though not all requiring the same one. Some ask for a state drivers license or state ID number, for example. Some ask for both a current and a previous address and voter registration information. There is a range of things counties can ask for. Now, once someone is a felon, and we're taking away their right to vote, we can go in and get all of these different types of information about them as well. The burden of enforcing felons from voting is put on the people imposing the sentence. Similarly, when someone dies, make sure the hospital gets this information. If weeding out ineligible voters is then put back into the hands of counties, they will know what information they have on hand, and what to check against. We seem to be talking about a piece of software here; it is unclear to me why the counties couldn't be given this software to help their task, rather than have to run it at the state level.
Finally, would it be that hard for the state to get in touch with people they remove from voter rolls? Go through the process a little earlier, and then inform people that they won't be permitted to vote anymore. If someone has been incorrectly removed, they can contest it. I know this is doable, because I get sent a postcard every election confirming that I am eligible to vote and where I should do so. A little communication could do a lot to eliminate errors.
Forget whether the Florida technique tempts conspiracy and corruption - it just seems like a bad system.
This movie actually made me uncomfortable while watching it. I mean, consider the scene where the hacker is asked to break into a secure site in 1 minute with a gun to his head, while one of the conspiracy's women is ... um ... "distracting" him (and yes, I'm going to give away plot here, because I want you all to not go see this movie that much). Does he shove her head out of his lap? No, of course not. The woman is a weapon working against him, but she's too pleasant a weapon to dispose of. Is there any reason at all to show us Halle Berry lounging around reading topless? It hardly garners a reaction from the hacker, no other men are around to be appreciating her - it's all for the movie audience without even a veneer of justification in the story being told.
What does all of this tell boys about the rewards powerful people can expect to reap and bestow? How can we expect men to take women seriously when blockbuster movies can objectify women to this degree without irony?
It's movies like this that make me want to see movie ratings get taken more seriously. I hate to imagine a young teenage girl going to this movie, and I'm sure it happens in large numbers, with friends and in mixed gender groups. How could someone who is still trying to figure out relationships between men and women be expected to sit next to a peer - someone they may go to classes with, or may be trying to figure out how to have a limited relationship with - and not feel awkward? What do you say afterwards?
I don't understand what this op-ed article from a recent NYTimes is trying to say about the medication of women. On one hand, she points out some anecdotal trends that I think a lot of people have noticed - more people seem to be taking psychoactive drugs. She mentions that women take more of these drugs than men do, and women have higher incidences of depression than men. She points out the irony that women were first prescribed antidepressants to cope with the boredom of stay-at-home life, and now they are prescribed antidepressants to cope with the stress of balancing family and work. But, rather than look at this contradiction, and the advertising blitz in recent years for these drugs, and the increase in insurance coverage for these drugs, and ask whether this isn't an indication that drugs are being prescribed in cases where what people really need is an honest re-evaluation of their life, she concludes that women are just crazy. I think... Either that, or this is a horrific failure at irony.
In other legal news, a battle is underway to determine who really came up with the idea of the BraBall, a giant ball made out of, of course, bras.
So for the moment there are two balls of bras. Ms Duffy describes her “BraBall” as “a monument to the average American woman”. Mr Nicolino drags his “Big Giant Bra Ball” on a trailer attached to a pink Cadillac and says that women have been known to rip off their bras spontaneously and hand them to him.
So is Nicolino's ball a monument to women who will give total strangers their underwear? [via News We Can Use]
I don't usually read the spam I get, but the e-mail I just received about www.infidelitytoday.com caught my eye for its absurdity factor. So you don't have to go check how they follow up their claim of being able to categorically prove, in 5 minutes, whether your spouse is faithful or not, they mail you a chemical test to detect semen, along with directions on all the places you might want to look for it. This just seems so sad, and so stupid, and yet I suspect they'll find a market for their product.
Watching the hockey game last night, the following conversation (roughly) occurred:
(Ad for a new action show, Alias, with an impractically dressed female lead)
Me: Oh please!
Them: It had to happen. Dark Angel was a success, and the knock-offs are coming out now.
Me: The season of the action babe...
Them: Yeah! Every night, another action babe! Turn on the TV, action babe on a motorcycle. Click...action babe in heat. Click...action babe using a computer. Ooooo!
Me: It's not fair.
Them: You had the 80s. You got Don Johnson and David Hasselhoff.
Me: Ewwww! I didn't want them!
Them: Mmmmm - action babes....
The action babe in question at least had this going for her - she's "a grad student by day/spy by night". Mmmm yeah! Those grad students are a sexy bunch! It's already a flawed premise, though; who's going to believe in a grad student who actually works during the day, and never shows up at night? Her cover will be blown in a week!
If this is the media's way of responding to my rant last week about the lack of graduate students in television and movies, I kind of wish they hadn't....
This IBM ad, "Daydream", pisses me off. Programmers from a parallel universe are looking for a tech solution. They find a beautiful woman who knows everything they need to solve their problems. The downside - she's just a daydream. Implication? Well, if you want to be nice, it's that you need IBM because there is no wonder-programmer out there who can solve all your problems. It just so happens that the mythical creature they're dreaming of is a female hacker. Thanks, IBM, for putting a competent woman in your ads. Next time, try not making her disappear at the end.
This album is just wrong, in an utterly hilarious way. Go listen to some of these clips. [via Uncle Bob]
A study found that, when boys find guns, they are very likely to play with them, even when they've had education about guns. Groups of boys were placed in a room to wait for their parents and told they could play with the toys on a shelf there. A gun was put in a drawer - 75% of the boys found the gun, and 75% of those played with the gun, including waving it around at each other, and pulling the trigger.
The bottom line message that researchers want parents to get is that we cannot put the burden of gun safety on children. As one researcher said, boys are boys, and they are curious, and cannot be counted on to do the right thing when they find a gun, even in boys as old as 12. Therefore, the onus is on parents who have guns to have them locked away.
The NRA claims the study is flawed because it was a room in a hospital, and the boys would have assumed that the room was safe. That's just stupid - first, I don't believe children would react to a hospital as some type of ultimately safe place. Second, it doesn't change the import of the results, since children may also assume their home, and their friends' homes, are safe places. Why can't the NRA come out and say that the study is evidence of the importance of not storing guns where children can get to them? Does political debate really have to happen on such a black-and-white level that you can't admit any legitimacy to a point made by the other side?
The hospital argument just points up, to me, the extent to which children will poke around and find things you think are hidden. I don't know exactly what they told the kids, but if I were in an official-type place like a hospital and told that I could play with the toys on a shelf, I don't think I'd be poking around the various drawers. Which makes me wonder - if they did the study with girls, and it did turn out that they played with the gun less, would it be because they didn't have the same interest in guns, or would fewer of them find the gun at all? Why aren't girls as involved in gun accidents? Are we doing something right with girls that we aren't with boys, or are they just not poking around and finding them? [via Breaching the Web]
In an era of stunning new maps--of the canyons of Mars, the rugged terrain of the ocean bottom and the intricate human genome--an international team of astronomers is undertaking the most ambitious map-making project yet: They are surveying the sky.
and forget which publication you are reading. That one turns out to be from an article over at LA Times on creating the ultimate map of the stars. Which should have been obvious, but my brain processed "surveying the sky" as, well, trying to map out clouds and wind and stuff like that.
But the real project, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, seems very cool. They are collecting a very high resolution set of images of the sky, and are going to assemble them to develop a three dimensional model of the universe. And the images on their site are beautiful.
I was chagrined to discover that I neglected to mention Jump the Shark when was first made aware of it several months ago, thus depriving some friends the pleasure of knowing about it sooner. For those still not in the know, it is a site dedicated to recording the moments when good television shows turn bad. Vote for shows you think took a nose dive, and when you think it happened. Read the extensive debate about exactly when the X-Files went over, and which Saturday Night Live cast killed the last of the show's humor. A fun browse...
Tonight, a friend and I were the last two people in the country to go see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I think we missed something, because it was a nice movie and all, but I wouldn't have spotted it as a "Big Deal" movie had I seen it when it first came out. I kept having giggle fits and thinking it was funny, and I'm not sure if I was supposed to. I suspect it's horribly unsophisticated of me to say this, but I find subtitles make it difficult to get pulled into a movie. I think it's because you aren't looking at the actors' faces while they're speaking, so you lose a lot of the emotion of what they are saying. So, I thought it was fun, in a "flat characters flying around" sort of way. They certainly flew very nicely.
This story is a testament to how resourceful kids will be when they're trying to do something they're not supposed to. He got nuclear materials by pretending to be a school teacher asking for information about doing radioactivity demonstrations, and later pretending to be a professor researching nuclear reactions. I suspect that this type of information is more closely guarded now, but I would think this approach could work with many types of "secret" information. It is, of course, key that this kid was dedicated enough to study the science he was playing with seriously enough to discuss it with other experts.
I wondered how his parents didn't notice, but it sounds like the set of parents that he lived with most of the time (his father and step-mother) did notice, and eventually stopped letting him experiment at all. Unfortunately, his mother and step-father, who he visited on the weekends weren't as tuned in, and I guess never spoke to his other set of parents. Actually, they seem pretty clueless:
... he shifted his base of operations to his mother's potting shed in Golf Manor. Both Patty Hahn and Michael Polasek admired David for the endless hours he spent in his new lab, but neither of them had any idea what he was up to. Sure, they thought it was odd that David often wore a gas mask in the shed and would sometimes discard his clothing after working there until two in the morning, but they chalked it up to their own limited education. Michael says that David tried to explain his experiments but that "what he told me went right over my head." One thing still sticks out, though. David's potting-shed project had something to do with creating energy. "He'd say, `One of these days we're gonna run out of oil.' He wanted to do something about that."
Ultimately, it took the government $60,000 to clean up the potting shed. The scary thing is that the clean up happened after his mother threw out, through unknown means, the major parts of his experiments. The government clean up was just of the lab materials that were left behind.
Over at All Too Cozy, Lyn asks for suggestions of lists to post. I got to thinking about it, and decided not to waste the effort just on her! Here's my list of lists to build journal entries around:
- 10 things I should throw away, but can't
- 10 books I wish I hadn't read
- things my dream house must have
- stuff I wish I had in my fridge
- stuff I wish I didn't have in my fridge
- constellations I can identify
- the last 10 people I've spoken to
- my scars and how I got them
- 5 things in plain view I'd forgot I owned
I enjoyed Chicklit's recent reviews of a bundle of books describing a variety of feminist utopias. The only one of the books reviewed that I've read is Gilman's Herland, which I also thought was well done. One aspect of all of the books, which the reviews point out and I found striking, was that the utopias were all based on the assumption that women, perhaps even in isolation from men entirely, developed significant scientific advances that saved their communities. I thought it was interesting that, while the books all seem to assume that women are less ambitious and more supportive of community and communal living than men - stereotypes of female nature, they also assume that women have intellectual, and specifically scientific and inventive skills - something definitely lacking from the feminine stereotype.
Of course, feminist utopias are as ludicrous, when taken seriously, as any other utopia that a social agenda may create. But, particularly when read in a historical context, they can be quite revealing as to what aspects of gender roles are being assumed to be inherent as compared to socially dictated.
Archive
of Entries
Background
Sites of the Week
Polls & Discussion
Update List
Portal