Screenshot: A Weblog

I was having a discussion over dinner about the problems with current presidential primary process, particularly the scheduling of them - yeah, I know, it's a controversial stance! Pretty much everybody you talk to has an idea for what could make the current scheduling better, and we were arguing the merits of various hypothetical plans when somebody observed that perhaps people with more expertise and who had actually analyzed the relevant data had looked at this question. So it was home to Wikipedia and their US Presidential Primary page, and the also good FairVote page on Presidential Primaries.

The major variations seem to involve either (1) group primaries starting with small states, and then working up to larger states towards the end of the process, (2) ordering the primaries to start with a random sampling of primaries but with structure imposed to start with "easy" primaries and work up to the larger, more expensive ones, (3) working through regions of the country in turn, or (4) pulling one state from each of a set of regions for each of a set of primary dates. FairVote has nice details on how each of these work with sample breakdowns/schedules.

The cynic in me thinks it likely, though, that any of these plans is going to lead towards a bias towards particular groups/regions and against others, and that saavy analysts will be able to work out which these are and the constituency with the best lobbying power is going to win (if anything ends up changing). To me, this calls out for a different plan (yep, despite what I said about listening to people who actually know what they are talking about, I'm going to throw in my ignorant two cents...) based on pure randomness. Let's pick a set of primary dates, and then randomly order the states among those dates. In order to prevent a state from being consistently devalued by falling late in the process, if you are in the last quarter of the primaries in one cycle, you are guaranteed to be in the first half of the primaries in the next cycle.

Sure, in any given year, you could have a bad outcome - small states could get a disproportionate say, primaries could be located such that poorer candidates have a harder time competing, etc. But you would avoid systematic biasing and considering the long-range trends of presidential elections, these concerns ought to even out. Otherwise, the debate seems to focus on whether particular goals (giving larger, urban states more say, making campaigning easier on fringe candidates, etc.) actually is desirable or not. And as I like to remind my students when looking at various AI systems, you always want to ask yourself if your highly engineered system beats random chance....

Posted by Amanda at 12:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

There's a very nice summary and assessment of a proposal for a web of surveillance cameras around Pittsburgh over at Pittsblog today. The proposal is presented as an anti-terrorism measure and has multiple phases of cameras being installed, starting with major infrastructure but over time extending the web of cameras into "high-risk neighborhoods". Besides just a general sense that this much surveillance without a specific justification is problematic, Pittsblog offers the following criticism of the proposal:

The Pittsburgh plan is completely silent on what I call "the human back end." So Pittsburgh arranges to collect all of this surveillance data. What then? Who sees the data? What's done with the data? When? And why? For the dystopian version, watch Enemy of the State. It's not just local law enforcement watching. It's the bad side of the National Security Agency.

Posted by Amanda at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There are tons of ways in which the law doesn't keep up with technical developments, but this is an interesting example of technology perhaps pushing too far ahead of the law. A company was found guilty of unauthorized practice of law by virtue of their online legal expert system. The system was focused on bankruptcy law, and the sales pitch used stressed that this was "an expert system and knows the law. Unlike most bankruptcy programs which are little more than customized word processors the Ziinet engine is an expert system."

It seems that this use of "expert system" in the description was key to the ruling against the company, as it implied that more was done that simply filling out forms. I'm guessing that's where the distinction lies between this case and the huge number of tax preparation programs out there. I haven't seen tax software cross the line into claiming to have AI in them, though I'm sure such an approach would be as fruitful there as in bankruptcy law - and actually suspect that the "AI" in the bankruptcy system is not any more sophisticated than that in most tax preparation software. It's, in fact, interesting to consider how much of this is about the sales pitch of the system versus the actual behavior of the system.

Interestingly, on the legal side, the American Bar Association actually has a document on Best Practice Guidelines for Legal Information Web Site Providers, though it's focus is primarily on helping lawyers determine how much information and assistance they can provide through the internet, particularly considering jurisdiction issues of where one is authorized to practice law.

Posted by Amanda at 9:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This article describes an experiment where onne of the world's top violinists plays for change in a subway station. The purpose is to determine if people recognize the quality of the performance out of context (spoiler: for the most part, no) but there is some interesting discussion of what this says about the current tempo of our lives and the ways in which we appreciate art. It would be really interesting to do the same experiment at the end of the day when the context is still the same but people are under less of a strict schedule, in general.

Posted by Amanda at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A couple of weeks ago, I was at a Free Software Foundation member's meeting at MIT, and during the lunch break I overheard an interesting conversation. I cluster of five stereotypical geeks (male, bearded, pony-tailed, etc.) were talking. One of thm was regailing his friends ith a story of a clueless woman he had the misfortune of listening to talk about her computer usage. This woman was talking to a friend about typesetting a paper using LaTeX - it was later determined that she worked in some capacity in a physics lab. She described how it was good for equations and the friend asked if it was expensive. The woman thought and said that because they were part of the lab it was free, but that if you just had to buy it it was really expensive. She then thought a little more and noted that she knew someone who had it on their Mac and it was free, but she thought it didn't seem as good and was probably a knockoff. The group laughed and generally concurred that this woman was painfully clueless and generally ought not be allowed computers at all.

Continue reading "Free Software Advocacy" »

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I browse the various Amazon.com sale pages occassionally, and I was looking at their DVD sales when I found their Girl Power DVD Sale (which hopefully will stay up for a little while so that link will work). I admit up front I have not seen the majority of these films but it seems that their criteria for "Girl Power" is fairly shakey and has little more to it than "has a female lead who is not 100% pathetic". Yes, some of these are good - I haven't seen Bend it Like Beckham but I have heard it is a good girl-centered story. The Secret of NIMH is a great movie, and I'm not sure I'd think to put iit in the "Girl Power" category, but it's not destructive and it celebrates intelligence, so I'll go along with that. But, Fever Pitch? Really? And, veering into the realm of films that I haven't seen, they can't do any better than Hello Kitty Becomes a Princess or a dozen different entries from the Strawberry Shortcake collection? Or a Bratz movie?!?!

It seems that Amazon has just decided to buy into the notion that there are "girl movies" and "boy movies" (with a few cross-over exceptions) and put together a "girl movie" sale under a slightly different name. Even if these films do have some positive gender role messages in them, wouldn't it then be preferable to get them into the movies boys are watching also?

Posted by Amanda at 7:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In a new wrinkle on security concerns about e-voting, a Diebold voting machine key is copied from a photo on the Diebold website [via Boing Boing]. According to this article, the keys for all of the voting machines are the same, are very simple, and a detailed photo was available online until this story came out. Once one has a key, the machine is open to sabatoge, including code insertion to transparently modify election results. The availability of the photo is almost an example of seemingly trivial information being potentially compromising in the wrong hands, except it doesn't seem that tricky to realize that you probably ought not put a close up photo of a key, or really any security device, on the internet. Even if you can't make a copy based on the photo, you'll learn a lot about what it will likely take to pick the lock. A company under so much scrutiny for their security really ought to know better.

Posted by Amanda at 9:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Via Boing Boing, this article draws a pretty awesome analogy between the RIAA and 17th century French button-makers who worked to block individual innovation to protect their business interests. The quote that is getting passed around the most on this topic as the demand by button-makers to be able to search people's homes to make sure that they were not using buttons made from outside the guild. Note that the analogy does not (from what I see at least) argue that individuals should be able to rampantly appropriate others' ideas without due credit and compensation, or argue for the theft of buttons because of the outrageous behavior of the button-makers guild....

Posted by Amanda at 5:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was talking with a colleague on Friday about the legality of backing up a video found online to an internal server as a safeguard for still being able to view the film in a class setting even if the network, or the film's server, goes down when one is planning to use it. While it is not entirely the same situation, the first item on the Copyright Office's list of exemptions from DCMA copying restrictions certainly suggests that doing so is not inconsistent with the Copyright Office's interpretation of fair use:

Audiovisual works included in the educational library of a college or university’s film or media studies department, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of making compilations of portions of those works for educational use in the classroom by media studies or film professors.

Other entries on the list of note include permission to break protection if the hardware it is on is obsolete, if the protections make the material inaccessible to the visually impaired, or if the purpose of the circumvention is to do security research.

Posted by Amanda at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From last week over at badscience, this is one of the most succinct and compelling examples I've seen of why everyone needs to know math, particularly prob/stats math. The example centers on a legal case and everyone involved's inability to compare two conditional probabilities. Or, more properly, that the relevant thing to compare is conditional probabilities. It's one of those situations where knowing how to do the calculations isn't as important as knowing what the calculation you should be doing is.

Posted by Amanda at 9:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The latest Craigslist kerfluffle described here at Slashdot reminds me of the case from about a year and a half ago of someone posting their chat sessions with a plagiarist soliciting them for an essay. In both cases, you have people assuming that their one-on-one conversations will be kept private and sharing information with a complete stranger that they would not want made public.

Clearly, this is not a nice thing to do. I think it is also unethical - unlike the plagiarism case where the recipient of the advances was able to check that such behavior was prohibited at the student's school, there is no reason to believe that what these people are doing is wrong, even if they are married. Certainly, it is anti-social. The same "experimental results" about rates and types of responses to an on-line solicitation could have been reported while ensuring the respondants identities.

But, it is unbelievably stupid to not assume this will happen every time you share personal information over the internet. One response has been that this type of revelation of personal information is illegal, citing Washington state law. I hope the problem with this objection is obvious - not everyone on the internet is governed by the same laws - they may be in different states or countries. In short, there is no way to stop this without fundamentally changing the structure of the internet.

It's simple - if you wouldn't say it to your mom, your boss, your best friend, your worst enemy, and your next door neighbor, don't say it on the internet to a complete stranger!

Posted by Amanda at 7:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'll admit up front that I've never been a fan of books of trivia so this discussion of the growing popularity of trivia books was both surprising (there's really interest in those things?) and interesting [via A&L Daily]. The supposition made is that increased interest in trivia is a symptom of an increased desire for information mixing with an increased desire for instant gratification. There is also the suggestion that a focus on trivia reflects a loss of "the patience required to mine the deeper satisfactions of old".

There is no rigorous support for these claims, but they sound plausible to me. I think about the recent fashionability of spelling bees. I have no particular problem with spelling bees, and I certainly value the correct use of language, particularly in formal settings. But they seem like a prime example of extensive memorization being equated with intelligence, at least in their mass marketed presentation. I know that, in order to be competitive at a high level in spelling bees, one needs to know the influence of the etymology of a word on its spelling. But I would be really curious to see statistics on the number of spelling bee participants who go on to become linguists. Because, in the presentations I have seen of bees, there isn't any focus on the deeper understanding of the structure and evolution of language that could be built on top of a comprehensive knowledge of its constituent parts. And that may be due to the bees being presented for a trivia-focused society, but I have suspicions otherwise.

It is interesting to see the article describe trivia books as a offspring of the information age. This is unintuitive to me. As someone who has an always-on internet connection, I cannot imagine buying a trivia book. If there is a tidbit of information I want, I can likely find it on the internet, and if I can't my library's on-line catalog can help me find a credible source that will not only include that fact,but generally also an interpretation of it. And that is, I think, the key to why some people bemoan an interest in trivia. Facts are only interesting when you add interpretation. (Any students who have gone through my Fundamentals of Information Systems course with me are now flashbacking to our inforamtion = data + context forrmula....) Trivia is very carefully written to be striking without much interpretation - my guess is that the strikingness is often related to its ability to give a pat summary to a very complex topic. It doens't invite analysis and can even be phrased to discourage it. The first example in this article says "the first paved road was 7 1/2 miles long and 6 feet wide and was built in Ehypt... 4,600 years ago". After the initial expected response (I imagine) of "wow - that's long, and that's longer ago than one would have thought" the statement gives you nowhere else to go. All of the questions that scream to be answered - why was it built? what was it used for? *how* was it built? how is "paved" being defined? and how do we know this is the first paved road? - just sit there. The shame is that people have gone to the effort to collect all of these facts, but instead of building on the attraction of these nuggets to jump into these more interesting questions, actually stiffle those types of questions by quickly jumping on to the next context-free nugget.

There are obvious educational implications, both for the types of evaluations that we value of our students, and for the expectations of our students for what "learning" means. They reinforce the importance, in our "information age", of teaching students how to process and analyze - how to be active participants in information consumption.

Posted by Amanda at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The ACM"s public policy weblog has a nice discussion of Congress's need for scientific and technical advice, prompted by a hearing on Tuesday on the topic. As in most other domains, the need for advice comes not from a lack of information, but rather from information overload, and specifically highly technical information overload:

Congress does not face an information shortage. Each day hundreds of documents are dumped on Congress, many of them dealing with technical issues. One witness said that staffers now receive about 200 e-mails daily from advocacy groups. Numerous groups provide scientific advice to Congress including think tanks, professional societies (such as ACM), the National Academies, governmental agencies, and even Congress’ own research service. None of the witnesses argued Congress needed more scientific and technical advice. They argued it needed independent advice that was more closely aligned with Congress’ needs, and that this need couldn’t be fulfilled by the various outside groups.

Particularly interesting was the analysis of how the lack of interest in reconstituting the old Office of Technology Assessment would impact the effectiveness of organizations such as the ACM providing technical advice. There was a definite note of frustration in the article, though I wonder if anyone is really surprised by the observation that under the current system scientific recommendations often take a back seat to political recommendations. Not having a codified method for collecting such input is probably indicative of a lowered interest in such input, but it doesn't follow that a centralized clearinghouse for technical advice will guarantee that it is listened to.

At its heart, this seems like an education issue to me - so long as it is socially acceptable for even "well-educated" people to say that math and science are "hard" and beyond their grasp or interest, our government representatives are unlikely to have the inclination or abilities to evaluate even well-presented technical arguments.

Posted by Amanda at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Perhaps most surprising to me is that the latest discussion I've come across about ethical concerns with introducing robots into non-industrial settings is from someplace as mainstream as the Economist, but it's actually a nice summary of upcoming concerns [via Slashdot]. The article indicates that there have been many (in the 100s?) industrial robot accidents in the past 25 years, but the concern discussed at a recent European Robotics Symposium is what happens when robots move out of the industrial setting and interact with the general population. Major questions the aticle pulls out include:

Should robots that are strong enough or heavy enough to crush people be allowed into homes? Is “system malfunction” a justifiable defence for a robotic fighter plane that contravenes the Geneva Convention and mistakenly fires on innocent civilians? And should robotic sex dolls resembling children be legally allowed?

These are, obviously, very different questions. The first one is, I think, mostly prompted by efforts to build living-assistant robots that will "live" with elderly people and help them around the house, make sure they take medications, and offer companionship. It's that last piece that raises another, important question which isn't mentioned here - what happens to society if we bring robots into it in a personal way? If people bemoan the negative impact of the internet on community, what will the impact of personal companion robots be? Is it worth it, or are these robots a crutch for us not taking responsibility, as a community, for taking care of each other?

What I particularly like about this article, as compared to others I have read, is that after all of the slightly-hysterical talk of what will happen when we have robots around us, and the ubiquitous mention of Asimov's Laws of Robotics, the article ends with a very level-headed discussion of why these issues are not that different from safety concerns raised with other appliances we already have in the home. AI hasn't gotten close to building a robot that would really require this type of concern. Robots today may be autonomous but they are not intelligent, so we are far from worrying that they might act of their own volition instead of ours.

Posted by Amanda at 9:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is a great story of social engineering, wherein USB drives are "dropped" around a bank and employees pick them up and plug them into bank computers [via Slashdot]. This was done as part of a security audit, and what is particuarly interesting is that the employees knew a security audit was being done and knew that social engineering attacks were going to be attempted. The results:

Of the 20 USB drives we planted, 15 were found by employees, and all had been plugged into company computers. The data we obtained helped us to compromise additional systems, and the best part of the whole scheme was its convenience. We never broke a sweat. Everything that needed to happen did, and in a way it was completely transparent to the users, the network, and credit union management.

This is reminiscent of a similar social engineering test I read about maybe a year ago, where free CDs were given out on the street. The lure of free stuff is hard to combat. And, thinking about it, if I found a USB drive left in my classroom, I very well might put it in my computer to see if I could identify who it belonged to. It's the old tension between perfect security requiring people to eliminate their instincts for trust and helpfulness.

I wonder what would happen if you tried the experiment with something dropped around a place that might be biologically contaminated - pieces of candy, say. How many people would take it and eat it?

Posted by Amanda at 3:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This is a well-written discussion of the privacy concerns with Web 2.0, including a nice dissection of how the most reasonable business model for the growing number of social networking style sites is their use as data mining sources for a company's other operations [via Clicked]. For example,

Flickr is perhaps one of the most interesting ones. Search for 'cat', and Flickr will record the most popular photo clicked. By associating the colour and picture data within photos with keywords used to search, Yahoo is slowly building a database of human identification. It has often said that the differentiator between Yahoo and Google, going forward, is that Yahoo wants the web processed by humans and Google wants it done by robots. Google uses algorithms to generate anything to do with its business. Yahoo, with its acquisition of Flickr and Delicious and whatever else is on the horizon, wants people - and social networks - to define how it does business.

I like this example a lot as an illustration of the motivations of business for supporting Web 2.0 activities, but it is a bit removed from the problem of personal privacy violations. What scares me the most is the accessiblity and marketing of these tools to increasingly younger and less savvy audiences who may not consider that what they put out there on the internet will be there forever, and that not everyone viewing your information is your friend.

It is tempting to be part of a community - particularly one that it seems so easy to get into and that puts so few real demands on one. But the online communities being built seem predicated on sharing about oneself in a biographical manner - where are you from? What do you do? Show me a picture. Tell me what you like to listen to, or watch, or do. This is, I think, somewhat unlike some of the earlier on-line communities built around BBSs or MUDs or so on, which allowed and really supported a wide range of personal revealment.

I'm interested to see where this plays out in the next five years.

Posted by Amanda at 5:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hosted at the University of Vermont, this Web Essay on the Male Gaze, Fashion Advertising, and the Pose has a nice discussion of the issues in advertising portrayals of female beauty with a combination of scholarly references and good imagery. Worth checking out - it may not be Killing Us Softly, but it's an interesting read. I particularly like the photoshop job they do in the first few slides.

Posted by Amanda at 5:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

In a confluence of information-security news and a new update from Cockeyed.com, the recommendation to "tear up" an unwanted credit card application is tested and found to be wanting. I've been reading this site for years, so I'm included to believe the story, though I am shocked that they would accept a torn-up and taped-together application. The bit about changing the address and phone number on the original is brilliant too, though if his parents' address is on his credit history from an old account or something, it slightly mediates the horror of the thing (but not my much). Either way, it's a phenomenal failure of security on the part of the credit card company. Makes me glad I invested in a decent cross-cut shredder.

Posted by Amanda at 4:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Obviously, voting is broken everywhere. Our neighbors in Ohio are getting most of the attention for their 10 hour lines, but things are pretty broken here in Pennsylvania as well, mostly in the form of polling places running out of provisional ballots early in the day and turning people away.

Watching the news just now, I learned that while Pennsylvania was 80 degrees during much of the day ysterday, north Texas was hit with snow. I'm too tired to carefully craft my quip about hell freezing over.

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Numbers one and two in a growing series of photo essays:

Election Day 2004, Southwestern Pennsylvania

Election Day 2000, Upstate New York

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I've been into several Borders and Barnes & Noble bookstores this past month, mostly browsing the magazines. I am appalled that in several (but to be fair, not all) of them, science magazines are shelved in the "Men's Interest" section, right next to Maxim and Stuff. I know this is the case for the Borders in Ithaca, NY. I'd love to hear if this is the case for stores around other people as well. Do you think we could find a way to make it more uncomfortable for a teenage girl to pick up a copy of Scientific American or Discover?

Posted by Amanda at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

There's little as disheartening for one's faith in government than spending a day working from home with C-SPAN 2 on the the background. After watching over four hours of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations hearing on Dietary Supplement Ephedra, I saw a vice president of a company be lambasted for not knowing what part of the cow their herbal supplement's "bovine extract" came from, including a self-righteous speech from a congressperson about how disgraceful that people are producing and selling these things without even knowing what goes in them. And I heard another corporate representative say: "Scientists do not like to express things in percentages.... or in any other terms", as justification for why an expert witness did not feel comfortable with one of the company's claims. That doesn't even count the side discussion of the difference between "buff" and "ripped" in the context of examine product advertisements. I'm just sitting here cracking up at this point. I guess it's just the typical problem of getting things done with too many people in the room.

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Puttering through my Amazon.com Gold Box today, I got an offer for a product that made my jaw drop: the Barbie Real Vacuum. It's a fully-functional handheld, cordless vacuum in a Barbie motif - pink with flowers and the Barbie logo. It's advertised, both in the text and in the accompanying video, as for little girls, to encourage them to clean their own rooms. There is also a blue version, but without the child-specific description (it's mentioned as one of a wider range of uses). So we're clearly not talking about a line of child-themed vacuums. And the age range they give is 6 years and older, which falls pretty well with the Barbie age bracket - don't Barbies lose their appeal around the early teen years? So, basically, we've got a product to encourage young girls that cleaning is fun, targeted at an age range in which heavy cleaning like vacuuming (as compared to just picking up after themselves) might reasonably fall to the job of their parents.

And it's particularly a shame, because of all of the cleaning jobs, vacuuming would be the easiest to turn into a boy-appealing activity, if we're going to go around following stereotypes. It's noisy. You push a machine around. It's like lawnmowing - a stereotypically guy job - but inside. And don't we think of boys as the ones who will make all kinds of messes that might require more extensive cleanup? But the child-themed vacuum, out of all of the possible themes, is Barbie. Color me shocked.

Oh fine, the damn thing is cute. All the more reason to have a wider selection....

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In one of the odder results of the "war on terror", the tightening of the boarders has driven up drug farming within the US, and national parks are being combed by national-park ranger commandos for marijuana farmers, including in land under wilderness designation. It's both a public safety problem, with hikers reporting encountering masked men with automatic weapons, and an environmental problem:

"This is massive-scale agriculture that is threatening the very mission of the national parks, which is to preserve the natural environment in perpetuity and provide for safe public recreation," says Bill Tweed, chief naturalist at Sequoia National Park. "[Growers] are killing wildlife, diverting streams, introducing nonnative plants, creating fire and pollution hazards, and bringing the specter of violence. For the moment, we are failing both parts of our mission, and that is tragic."

"This is everyone's problem," says Tweed. "It's not just a question of the moral and legal issue of marijuana. It's an issue of commercial-sized agriculture devastating the mission of national parks to preserve land ... for generations.

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We've already seen with computer technology the kinds of misguided laws that can come about when laws about a new technology are created on an as-it-comes-up basis and often with regards to extreme cases. Biotechnology and genetical engineering are heading the same way and again the legal system doesn't really seem to be keeping up; I'm guessing in five to ten years time the Supreme Court will be sorting these issues out as well. There's what looks like it might actually be an interesting program on PBS tonight on how far biotechnology has come and what legal questions are already pending: Bloodlines: Technology Hits Home. The associated website has some good stuff on it, including the observation that right now, these issues are largely governed at the state level (and as theoretically appealing as I find that, I think we're clearly going to need some federal guidelines here as well). I also have a more-than-idle curiosity about whether these questions will become derailed by a fetal-rights, anti-abortion agenda.

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Almost everyone seems to have "cash back" credit cards now, whether you get straight money or credit at a particular vendor or service provider. Now you can have a percentage of your credit cards charges go to supporting animal shelters and humane societies through AnimalSafe. I haven't explored the details of the cards or the organization behind them, but it seems like a convenient way to direct some money to a good cause.

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What I like best about this NYTimes Magazine article on the unionization of UPenn graduate students is the part where union organizers say they solicited support at a funeral. Given the advance press time on the magazine section, the article is able to allude to the Yale organizing strategy of holding a non-NLRB vote to demonstrate the desire for a grad union, but couldn't include the fact that it turned out Yale grad students didn't want a union. (Of course, their only mention of Cornell was as the recipient of advice on how to resist a union which the university didn't even take...) The Times article focuses on the corporatization of the university as the force necessitating grad student unionization, but it would have been nice to see some of the detailed descriptions of UPenn adminstrative facilities interspersed with descriptions of national labor organizations' facilities. Corporatization is happening on both sides of the equation. I suspect the corporate union is a necessity for handling industrial and large-scale labor disputes, but many graduate students question whether they want to introduce that influence into their doctoral program.

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A couple of months ago Vicky from U.S. News and World Report called me up, and I nearly hung up on her, having no interest in subscribing and a general loathing of telemarkers. Good thing I was sleepy and slow on the receiver - with their annual Graduate School Rankings issue came a renewed interest in Cornell grad students' choice not to form a union last year. The first two paragraphs of the article are online, or you can stop by your local newsstand, flip to p. 66 of America's Best Graduate Schools 2004 and check out their presentation of my thoughts (wheee - my name's in the second sentence of the article!). If you are an extremely petty person, you can also notice that this time around the Cornell union organizers were not invited to put their spin on the loss, instead giving space to organizers on other campuses.

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The much-referenced 1996 book Shock & Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance by Ullman and Wade out of the National Defense University is available on-line. I've only had a chance to skim it, but it seems worth a closer look. I find it particularly interesting (beyond the obvious reasons) because it's written as a proposal which remains to be tested and lays out what evaluations remained to be done, and what fundamental changes in military organization and training they believed needed to be made for their strategy to be effective.

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I'm not sure how a freelance photographer working in Kuwait manages to maintain a website of photos from the past few days, but its interesting viewing.

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It's pretty clear that everyone has had their minds made up about this war for a while, and we've now reached the "talking-past-each-other" phase of debate, but we've also reached a point where our options are fairly narrow. I'm upset that events have proceeded such that the only moral thing I think the US has left to do is completely demolish the Iraqi government, but seeing the destruction and chaos, we've pretty much guaranteed misery and suffering for the people there if we don't manage to get our own food and aid into the country. I think that humanitarian concerns were pretty far down on the list of reasons for invading Iraq, but it is now imperative that we follow through with any resources necessary to help the Iraqi people - in the long term as well as the next few weeks. I certainly hope that everyone supporting this war remembers to be equally supportive of large amounts of their tax dollars going overseas in less violent packages over the coming years. Tearing something down is always easier than putting something better up in its place.

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I was slightly bothered by the article Faked Out: Looking for counterfeit goods, sheriff's deputies go bargain hunting [via PCJM] and I'm not sure if it's due to poor writing or poor policework. The article describes the efforts of police to track counterfeiting of brand-name goods, particularly clothes. But there are also many descriptions of ways in which items can be slightly altered to appear to be an original while not quite being trademark infringement. And it is very unclear in the article about what types of items the police are buying and trying to eliminate. Because if you're really a brand-name snob, I don't think a "Tipfany" bracelet or a "Barley-Davidson" belt buckle are going to fool anyone. I was laughing my ass off at Nike's example of a manner in which trademark infringment can degradate brand identity:

Nike, a popular target among counterfeiters, has been copied in everything from fake sneakers to Nike-logo jewelry to Swoosh-embroidered yarmulkes. "We make performance product," Manager says, "but a yarmulke's not necessarily, with all due respect to the religious symbolism, a performance athletic product."

But, to return to the heart of the article, maybe the police are focusing on real trademark infringment instead of the many iff-ier cases they describe, in which case I still wonder at the police spending their time on detecting and preventing this type of action. It seems like it should be covered more like copyright infringement and patent law, and pursued primarily through the courts. The justification of having the police track down counterfeit t-shirt rings?

Some authorities suspect that the trail might lead to organized crime syndicates and terrorist organizations. The International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition, a Washington, D.C.-based group that combats counterfeiting, reports that criminal groups originating in China, Vietnam and Northern Ireland have all sold counterfeit goods to support their activities. It also claims that the sale of fraudulent merchandise may have financed the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Though the Dallas County Sheriff's Department has not focused on counterfeiting until recently, heightened concerns about homeland security prompted it to investigate. As the information came to us that there was the possibility that some of these type of organizations may fund organized crime or terrorist organizations, we became interested," Peritz says. "We have yet to find an affirmative link in any of these [businesses] between organized crime or terrorist organizations."

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Who doesn't love a heart-warming story of overzealous mall security guards? Oh, I'm sure the mall will come out with a statement explaining that the men were being disruptive, and malls are certainly private property, but it behooves us all to remember that "fake police" (or the mall/campus/private security guard nature) can in practice get you arrested nice and quick if they like. I know someone who was stopped and had their camera confiscated recently for taking pictures of the outside of the Cornell greenhouses because they contain fertilizer, which has that whole bomb-making connection. Harassment of our citizens is not a good tradeoff for "security". [via genehack]

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I'm a Miss Manner's fan, and it is surely poor manners to admit that my favorite bits are when she repremands the "etiquette police" for their own poor manners. But last weekend she wrote a wonderful editorial about nostalgia and idealization of old-fashioned courtship in which she comments on why 50's style dating disappeared. She says:

Dating was universal in theory, but not in practice, leaving plenty of people lonely, if not ashamed, for lack of Saturday night alternatives. The presumption that a date was the only natural way in which the sexes could mix put a damper on nonromantic relationships that now provide a variety of other social activities.

Far from encouraging respect, dating fostered competition. Those seeking to break hearts were pitted against those striving to overcome inhibitions. The progression from courtship to marriage lacked a stage for the development of friendship.

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Because it's good to focus on the positive as well as the negative: Conferees in Congress Bar Using a Pentagon Project on Americans, and Total Information Awareness is on hold until the privacy and civil liberties impact can be more thoroughly examined.

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The Boston Globe Magazine yesterday ran a case study of one pharmaceutical company's efforts to keep generic alternatives to their expensive name-brand drug at bay, thus maintaining high prescription costs.

Through lawsuits, the makers of Prilosec have managed to keep the generics at bay while unleashing a half-a-billion-dollar marketing blitz to move people off Prilosec and onto Nexium, their costly, patent-protected new Purple Pill, which even their own studies show to be barely more effective than the original.

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Philosophically, this NYTimes Op-Ed piece on the Homeland Security Act and privacy violations meshes with my own concerns, but such precise predictions of what will come to pass made me go look up the Information Awareness Office and have a look for myself. It's an interesting read. My guess is that they do want to collect a wide and possibly irrelevant seeming collection of personal data - their approach is heavily learning-based, and it seems that they hope to tease out correlations that people wouldn't normally spot by learning correlations that work rather than building and testing correlations they hope would work. Problem is, where's their positive data going to come from, and do they have any prayer of statistical significance with many more non-terrorists than terrorists in the bunch? This isn't a domain where the technology can be applied blindly with complete reliability. I don't want to give up my privacy for a needle-in-the-haystack search relying on technology of questionable relevance.

Don't even get me started on how pissed I am that the military applications of NLP are moving beyond translation tools and simple extraction/summarization into this kind of software. I was wondering who was funding all that research into automated story telling....

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As predicted by my quote at the end of this article in the Cornell student newspaper, I've spent the past week since the unionization vote catching up on my sleep and some of the other aspects of my life which were sorely neglected for the past month. After devoting at least 40 hours a week to this activity (and I don't know who I'm trying to kid pretending any obsession of mine could take over that little of my life), I was quite burnt out from even thinking about the whole process. But I'm now well enough rested to reflect on the experience.

Continue reading "Defeating CASE/UAW" »

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Cornell graduate students voted down the proposed CASE/UAW union in a landslide of 1351 against to 580 for! Wooooo! If you're interested in the history of the anti-CASE/UAW effort, check out our website at AtWhatCost.org. I've been spending basically every waking hour on this for the past several weeks (and many hours that should not have been waking...) so I'm thrilled. I got to be at the vote itself and watch them count the ballots. It was the closest I've been to a democratic process in person, and it was thrilling.

I'll talk about this more in the next few days I'm sure, but for now I just want to give my thanks and love to Allen, Anne, David, John, and Mariajose. We did it, guys!

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