Slashdot Mirror

theodp writes "Over at Salon, Annie Keeghan does an Upton Sinclair number on the math textbook industry. In recent years, Keeghan explains, math has become the subject du jour due to government initiatives and efforts to raise the rankings of lagging U.S. students. But with state and local budgets constrained, math textbook publishers competing for fewer available dollars are rushing their products to market before their competitors, resulting in product that in many instances is inherently, tragically flawed. Keeghan writes: 'There may be a reason you can't figure out some of those math problems in your son or daughter's math text and it might have nothing at all to do with you. That math homework you're trying to help your child muddle through might include problems with no possible solution. It could be that key information or steps are missing, that the problem involves a concept your child hasn't yet been introduced to, or that the math problem is structurally unsound for a host of other reasons.' The comments on Keeghan's article are also an eye-opener — here's a sample: 'Sales and marketing budgets are astronomical because the expenses pay off more than investments in product. Sadly, most teachers are not curriculum experts and are swayed by the surface pitches. Teachers make the decisions, but are not the users (students) nor are they spending their own money. As a result, products that make their lives easier and that come with free meals and gifts are the most successful.' So, can open source or competitions build better math textbooks?"

blarkon writes "With ebook prices falling and some readers even unwilling to pay more than 99 cents for an ebook, some authors are starting to consider a move back to the patronage model that was successful in providing them with a living before the widespread use of copyright. Might such a model work or are the days where a midlist author can make a living off their work a relic of the 20th century?"

Geoffrey.landis writes "The 'creative class' was supposed to be the new engine of the United States economy, but according to Scott Timberg, writing in Salon, that engine is sputtering. While a very few technologists have become very wealthy, for most creative workers, the rise of amateurs and enthusiasts means that few are actually making a living. The new economy is good for the elite who own the servers, but, for most, 'the dream of a laptop-powered "knowledge class" is dead,' he says."

An anonymous reader tips news of a vulnerability discovered in the Diebold Accuvote voting system, which could be used to alter voting results without leaving evidence of tampering. Quoting Salon: "[T]he Argonne team's attack required no modification, reprogramming, or even knowledge, of the voting machine's proprietary source code. ... The team's video demonstrates how inserting the inexpensive electronic device into the voting machine can offer a "bad guy" virtually complete control over the machine. A cheap remote control unit can enable access to the voting machine from up to half a mile away. ... The video shows three different types of attack, each demonstrating how the intrusion developed by the team allows them to take complete control of the Diebold touch-screen voting machine. They were able to demonstrate a similar attack on a DRE system made by Sequoia Voting Systems as well."

bill_mcgonigle writes "After more than a year, Wired has finally released the (nearly) full chat logs between Adrian Lamo and Bradley Manning. Glen Greenwald provides analysis of what Wired previously left out. Greenwald writes: 'Lamo lied to and manipulated Manning by promising him the legal protections of a journalist-source and priest-penitent relationship, and independently assured him that their discussions were "never to be published" and were not "for print." Knowing this, Wired hid from the public this part of their exchange, published the chat in violation of Lamo's clear not-for-publication pledges, allowed Lamo to be quoted repeatedly in the media over the next year as some sort of credible and trustworthy source driving reporting on the Manning case.'"

decora writes "NPR, and dozens of other media sources, are reporting that NSA IT whistleblower Thomas Andrews Drake is innocent of all 10 original charges against him; including the 5 Espionage Act charges for 'retention' of 'national defense information.' Drake stared down the government to the last minute, rejecting deal after deal, because he 'refused to plea bargain with the truth.' The judge had even recently ruled that there was no evidence that Drake passed classified information to a reporter. In the end, he has agreed that he committed a misdemeanor: 'unauthorized access to a computer.' It is unknown what this means for the other non-spy espionage cases that Obama's DOJ currently has pending (Kim, Sterling, Manning), or the Grand Jury that is currently meeting to discuss Espionage Act charges related to WikiLeaks."

Okian Warrior writes "Since the rapture is tomorrow (May 21) at 6:00 pm local time (everywhere), I was just wondering: what plans does everyone have? I've got no specific plans for what to do. What will you be doing around 6:00 pm tomorrow?" If you're on the IT staff, you might want to consult this checklist of things to do or not do in the interim.

nightcats writes "An excerpt from Michio Kaku's new book appears at salon.com, in which he sees a dark economic future within the next 20 years as Moore's law is brought to an end when single-atom transistors give way to quantum states. Kaku predicts: 'Since chips are placed in a wide variety of products, this could have disastrous effects on the entire economy. As entire industries grind to a halt, millions could lose their jobs, and the economy could be thrown into turmoil.'" Exactly the way the collapse of the vacuum tube industry killed the economy, I hope.

Hugh Pickens writes writes "It's been said that history is written by the winners but Laura Miller writes in Salon about a counterexample as she reviews a new version of Lord of the Rings. The Last Ring-bearer was published to acclaim in Russia by Kirill Yeskov, a paleontologist whose job is reconstructing long-extinct organisms and their way of life. Yeskov performs essentially the same feat in his book. The Last Ring-bearer is set during and after the end of the War of the Ring and told from the perspective of the losers. In Yeskov's retelling, available in translation as a free download, the wizard Gandalf is a war-monger intent on crushing the scientific and technological initiative of Mordor and its southern allies because science 'destroys the harmony of the world and dries up the souls of men' and Aragorn is depicted by Yeskov as a ruthless Machiavellian schemer who is ultimately the puppet of his wife, the elf Arwen. Sauron's citadel Barad-dur is, by contrast, described as 'that amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle-earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic.'"

eldavojohn writes "It's a lengthy read, but Lawrence Wright at The New Yorker has released a 26 page expose on Scientology. In a world where such innocuous sounding words as 'squirrels,' 'security-checked,' 'disconnection,' 'contra-survival,' 'suppressive persons,' 'clear' and 'open season' carry very serious and heavy baggage, director Paul Haggis has exited after thirty four years of membership and massive funding. Now he speaks at length of Scientology's controversies. From how celebrities were recruited with a 10% commission by a worker at Beverly Hills Playhouse to the current investigation by the FBI of physical abuse and human trafficking, Wright draws surrounding histories and accounts of the Church including Anonymous' crusade. The length of this article reflects the unusually large number of individuals (12 cases of physical abuse) cited as testimony of Scientology Leader David Miscavige's inurement and physical violence. The case remains open as the FBI collects data and testimony — especially in relation to Sea Org. Most disturbing are the disappearances of people that the New Yorker piece enumerates. The piece concludes with the author's interaction with the Church that results in several conflicting foundational statements from its stance on homosexuality (Haggis' original reason for publicly leaving it) to almost all details of L. Ron Hubbard's naval service and discharge. The article ends with Haggis' quote: 'I was in a cult for thirty-four years. Everyone else could see it. I don't know why I couldn't.' You can find summaries of the lengthy article and its suspected results along with corresponding reports listing politicians involved with the Church. Copyrighted work, leaked government documents, PS3 encryption keys and everything else has been posted on Slashdot but only the Church of Scientology has forced comments out of existence."

eldavojohn writes "Scientific American is running a piece by science journalist John Horgan attacking pop physicist Brian Greene's latest offering, titled The Hidden Reality. He's not entirely alone; Not Even Wrong backs him up and reminds us of a growing list of multiverse propaganda. The journal Nature ran a short piece (subscription required) trying to remind everyone that Greene's book is more theory than fact, but apart from those three responses, the popular press seems to be gobbling up this tantalizing concept of a multiverse. NPR offers an excerpt while SFGate and The Wall Street Journal entertain us with interviews of the controversial Greene. The New York Times and Salon seem to think it's worthwhile, with Salon even calling it 'the science behind' the multiverse theory. The New York Times thought it worthwhile to give Greene an op-ed column. For better or for worse, Greene has certainly brought this great debate to the public's attention — similar to his exhibition of String Theory."

HJED writes "The US Justice Department has served Twitter with a subpoena for the personal information and private messages of WikiLeaks supporters. There's a copy of the subpoena here (PDF); boing boing has a detailed article. Twitter has 3 days to turn over the information."

eldavojohn writes "Over a hundred years after the death of its author, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will be released in a censored format, removing two derogatory racial slurs: 'injun' and 'nigger.' The latter appears some 219 times in the original novel but both will be replaced by the word 'slave.' An Alabama publisher named NewSouth Books will be editing and censoring the book so that schools and parents might provide their children the ability to study the classic without fear of properly addressing the torturous history of racism and slavery in The United States of America. The Forbes Blog speculates that e-readers could provide us this service automatically. Salon admirably provides point versus counterpoint while the internet at large is in an uproar over this seemingly large acceptance of censorship as necessary even on books a hundred years old. The legendary Samuel Langhorne Clemens himself once wrote, 'the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter,' and now his own writing shall test the truth in that today."

eldavojohn writes "Over a hundred years after the death of its author, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will be released in a censored format, removing two derogatory racial slurs: 'injun' and 'nigger.' The latter appears some 219 times in the original novel but both will be replaced by the word 'slave.' An Alabama publisher named NewSouth Books will be editing and censoring the book so that schools and parents might provide their children the ability to study the classic without fear of properly addressing the torturous history of racism and slavery in The United States of America. The Forbes Blog speculates that e-readers could provide us this service automatically. Salon admirably provides point versus counterpoint while the internet at large is in an uproar over this seemingly large acceptance of censorship as necessary even on books a hundred years old. The legendary Samuel Langhorne Clemens himself once wrote, 'the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter,' and now his own writing shall test the truth in that today."

Hugh Pickens writes "Glenn Greenwald writes in Salon that for more than six months, Wired's Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen has possessed but refuses to publish the key evidence in the arrest of US Army PFC Bradley Manning for allegedly acting as WikiLeaks' source. 'In late May, Adrian Lamo — at the same time he was working with the FBI as a government informant against Manning — gave Poulsen what he purported to be the full chat logs between Manning and Lamo in which the Army Private allegedly confessed to having been the source for the various cables, documents and video which WikiLeaks released throughout this year,' writes Greenwald. Wired has only published about 25% of the logs writes Greenwald and Poulsen's concealment of the chat logs is actively blinding journalists who have been attempting to learn what Manning did and did not do. 'Whether by design or effect, Kevin Poulsen and Wired have played a critical role in concealing the truth from the public about the Manning arrest,' concludes Greenwald. 'This has long ago left the realm of mere journalistic failure and stands as one of the most egregious examples of active truth-hiding by a "journalist" I've ever seen.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Netcraft posted two reports on the movement of the WikiLeaks website today. First the site was taken down by EveryDNS, who terminated the DNS provision for wikileaks.org. A few hours later, WikiLeaks moved to a Swiss domain (wikileaks.ch). Netcraft suggests this move could be because the wikileaks.org domain was registered with a US company, which could be influenced by the US government. The new wikileaks.ch site is hosted in Sweden, but redirects all of its traffic to France. Strangely, WikiLeaks has chosen to use EveryDNS again for their new domain." This follows Amazon's removal of WikiLeaks from their cloud hosting, which has the EFF and others worrying about free speech on the net as various hosting providers receive political pressure to censor certain content. Amazon claims their decision wasn't influenced by a government inquiry, while Tableau Software freely admits that a public request from Senator Joe Lieberman prompted them to take down WikiLeaks data visualizations.

Binary Boy writes "Bradley Manning, the US Army private arrested recently by the Pentagon for providing classified documents — including the widely seen Apache helicopter video — may have been duped by wannabe hacker Adrian Lamo, according to Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com. Lamo told Manning he could provide protection under both journalist shield laws, and the clergy-lay confidentiality tradition, and instead immediately turned him in to authorities in an act of apparent shameless self-promotion." The article also goes into Wired's role in the whole situation, the strange, sometimes sensationalist media coverage, and the odd similarity between this case and proposed scenarios in a US Intelligence report from earlier this year aimed at undermining Wikileaks.

A study conducted by the University of Toronto has found that exposure to fast-food logos can cause people to feel impatient and make them more likely to buy things. Subjects in the study were exposed to nearly imperceptible flashes of images (for 12 to 80 milliseconds) which included fast-food logos for some. The subjects were then asked to read about and choose between two different kinds of skin-care treatments, one of which was a three-in-one. Those who had the logos flashed before them read "significantly faster" and chose the more time-saving skin product. From the article: "The researchers concluded 'fast food, originally designed to save time, can have the unexpected consequence of inducing haste and impatience' and 'preference for time-saving products when there are potentially other important aspects upon which to choose a product.' So, basically, driving past a McDonald's on the highway has the potential to not only make you drive faster, it will make you more likely to buy two-for-one Pantene Pro-V Shampoo and Conditioner the next time you go to Duane Reade. One, it seems, is considerably less ominous than the other." I guess this explains why my nephews will chew on their seat belts and try to get out the windows just to be first into the McDonald's Playland.

Not everyone is a fan of great literature. In particular, reviewers on Amazon can be quite critical of some of the best loved classics. Jeanette DeMain takes a look at some of the most hated famous books according to some short tempered reviewers. One of my favorites is the review of Charlotte's Web which reads in part, "Absolutely pointless book to read. I felt no feelings towards any of the characters. I really didn't care that Wilbur won first prize. And how in the world does a pig and a spider become friends? It's beyond me. The back of a cereal box has more excitement than this book. I was forced to read it at least five times and have found it grueling. Even as a child I found the plot very far-fetched. It is because of this horrid book that I eat sausage every morning and tell my dad to kill every spider I see ..."

LoneHighway writes "Salon.com has a write up of what is being called an epic feat of Nerdity, the "Trinity, Help!" scene from The Matrix has been recreated using only Legos. It took 440 hours for Trevor Boyd and Steve Ilett to create Lego Matrix Trinity Help, which is a perfect shot-by-shot remake of a short but memorable scene from the Wachowski Brothers’ masterpiece, executed via stop-motion animation and a nearly infinite amount of Legos. They even provide a split screen comparison to the original. Very cool!"

Iranian state television's Channel Two is playing a Lord of the Rings marathon in an attempt to keep people inside watching hobbits and not protesting in the streets. Normally, people in Tehran are treated to one or two Hollywood movies a week, but with recent events the government hopes that sitting through a nine-hour trilogy will take the fight out of most of the protesters. Perhaps this was not the best choice in films if you want your people not to believe that "even the smallest person can change the course of the future."

charter6 writes "Gen. Kevin Chilton, the head of STRATCOM, just declared that the Law of Armed Conflict will apply to cyberwar, and that the US won't rule out conventional (read: kinetic) responses to cyber-attacks. This means that we consider state-supported 'hackers' to be subject to the Geneva Conventions and Customary International Law, including the rules of proportionality and distinction (i.e. if we catch them, we can try them for war crimes). Incidentally, it also means we consider non-state cyber-attackers to be illegal enemy combatants, which means we can do all kinds of nasty stuff to them."

Many different sources are talking about the latest scandal surrounding the warrantless wiretapping program. Incriminating evidence against California rep. Jane Harman was apparently captured some time ago on a legal NSA wiretap. However, Attorney General Gonzales supposedly intervened to drop the case against her because (and this is where the irony meter explodes) Bush officials wanted her to be able to publicly defend the warrantless wiretap program. "Jane Harman, in the wake of the NSA scandal, became probably the most crucial defender of the Bush warrantless eavesdropping program, using her status as 'the ranking Democratic on the House intelligence committee' to repeatedly praise the NSA program as 'essential to US national security' and 'both necessary and legal.'"

a whoabot writes "The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the Obama administration has stepped in to defend AT&T in the case over their participation in the warrantless wiretapping program started by Bush. The Obama administration argues that that continuation of the case will lead to the disclosure of important 'state secrets.' The Electronic Frontier Foundation has described the action as an 'embrace' of the Bush policy." Update: 04/07 15:18 GMT by T : Glenn Greenwald of Salon has up an analysis of this move, including excerpts from the actual brief filed. Excerpt: "This brief and this case are exclusively the Obama DOJ's, and the ample time that elapsed — almost three full months — makes clear that it was fully considered by Obama officials."

grassy_knoll writes "As a follow up to an earlier story, the Lori Drew 'cyber-bullying' trial has resulted in misdemeanor convictions." grassy_knoll quotes from the AP story as carried by Salon: "The Los Angeles federal court jury on Wednesday rejected felony charges of accessing a computer without authorization to inflict emotional distress on young Megan Meier. However, the jury found defendant Lori Drew guilty of three counts of the lesser offense of accessing a computer without authorization. The jurors could not reach a verdict on a conspiracy count. Prosecutors said Drew violated the MySpace terms of service by conspiring with her young daughter and a business assistant to create a fictitious profile of a teen boy on the MySpace social networking site to harass Megan. Megan, who had been treated for depression, hanged herself in 2006 after receiving a message saying the world would be better without her." Adds reader gillbates: "She now faces up to 3 years in jail and $300,000 in fines — a troubling precedent for anyone who has ever registered with a website under a pseudonym."

ma11achy was one of several readers to write about claims made by two former military intercept operators who worked for the NSA that "Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home." Ars Technica has a brief report as well, and reader net_shaman adds a link to Glenn Greenwald's opinion piece on the eavesdropping at Salon.

X0563511 alerts us to events in Minneapolis and St. Paul in advance of the Republican convention (which has been put on hold because of Hurricane Gustav). Local police backed by the FBI raided a number of homes and public buildings and confiscated computers and other material. From Salon.com: "Last night, members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff's department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than 'fire code violations,' and early this morning, the Sheriff's department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying. Jane Hamsher and I were at two of those homes this morning — one which had just been raided and one which was in the process of being raided." Here is local reporting from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: "Aided by informants planted in protest groups, authorities raided at least six buildings across St. Paul and Minneapolis to stop an 'anarchist' plan to disrupt this week's Republican National Convention. From Friday night through Saturday afternoon, officers surrounded houses, broke down doors, handcuffed scores of people and confiscated suspected tools of civil disobedience ... A St. Paul City Council member described it as excessive, while activists, many of whom were detained and then released without charges, called it intimidation designed to quash free speech."

Corrupt writes "I've admired Obama, but I never confused him with a genuine progressive leader. Today I don't admire him at all. His collapse on FISA is unforgivable. The only thing Obama has going for him this week is that McCain is matching him misstep for misstep."

Bimo_Dude writes "Today (June 20), Steny Hoyer is bringing to the House floor the latest FISA bill (PDF), which includes retroactive immunity for the telcos. The bill also is very weak on judicial review, allowing the telcos to use a letter from the president as a 'get out of liability free' card. Here are comments from the EFF. Glenn Greenwald, writing in Salon, describes the effect of the immunity clause this way: 'So all the Attorney General has to do is recite those magic words — the President requested this eavesdropping and did it in order to save us from the Terrorists — and the minute he utters those words, the courts are required to dismiss the lawsuits against the telecoms, no matter how illegal their behavior was.'"

NoMoreCoal writes "Salon has up a story by Joe Romm, former undersecretary of energy during the Clinton administration, discussing a lesser-known alternative energy solution. It's a technology that (he claims) is ready to provide zero-carbon electric power big, fast, cheap and (most importantly) right now: solar thermal power. 'Improvements in manufacturing and design, along with the possibility of higher temperature operation, could easily bring the price down to 6 to 8 cents per kilowatt hour. CSP makes use of the most abundant and free fuel there is, sunlight, and key countries have a vast resource. Solar thermal plants covering the equivalent of a 92-by-92-mile square grid in the Southwest could generate electricity for the entire United States. Mexico has an equally enormous solar resource. China, India, southern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Australia also have huge resources.'" Interesting stuff, even if he does mention the Archimedes Death Ray.

Narrative Fallacy writes "If you've ever written about Apple products with even a hint of negativity, you'll appreciate Salon's excerpt from Farhad Manjoo's True Enough, about why the Apple tribe is so rabid. 'There are many tribes in the tech world: TiVo lovers, Blackberry addicts, Palm Treo fanatics, and people who exhibit unhealthy affection for their Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners,' writes Manjoo. 'But there is no bigger tribe, and none more zealous, than fans of Apple, who are infamous for their sensitivity to slams, real or imagined, against the beloved company.' Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg has even coined a name for the phenomenon — the 'Doctrine of Insufficient Adulation.' 'If I see the world as all black and you see the world as all white and some person comes along and says it's partially black and partially white, we both are going to be unhappy,' says psychologist Lee Ross at Stanford University. 'You think there are more facts and better facts on your side than on the other side. The very act of giving them equal weight seems like bias. Like inappropriate evenhandedness.'"

S1mmo+61 writes "Salon is analyzing a Time Magazine article today, a piece that essentially claims Americans do not care about the domestic spying. The analysis of the Time magazine piece (which is longer than the article itself) is interesting, if only as a quick history of domestic spying in the last eight years. 'Time claims that "nobody cares" about the Government's increased spying powers and that "polling consistently supports that conclusion." They don't cite a single poll because that assertion is blatantly false. Just this weekend, a new poll released by Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University proves that exactly the opposite is true. That poll shows that the percentage of Americans who believe the Federal Government is "very secretive" has doubled in the last two years alone (to 44%)'"

The US House has just approved a new bill that rejects the retroactive immunity to telecommunication businesses and denies most of the new powers for the US President to spy on citizens without a warrant. "As impressive as the House vote itself was, more impressive still was the floor debate which preceded it. I can't recall ever watching a debate on the floor of either House of Congress that I found even remotely impressive -- until today. One Democrat after the next -- of all stripes -- delivered impassioned, defiant speeches in defense of the rule of law, oversight on presidential eavesdropping, and safeguards on government spying. They swatted away the GOP's fear-mongering claims with the dismissive contempt such tactics deserve, rejecting the principle that has predominated political debate in this country since 9/11: that the threat of the Terrorists means we must live under the rule of an omnipotent President and a dismantled constitutional framework."

Mearlus writes "In the recent past co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons Gary Gygax has worked with Troll Lord Games, a small tabletop RPG publisher. Their forums have up a post noting that Mr. Gygax has apparently passed away. Gygax was known, along with Dave Arneson, as the Father of Roleplaying." Saddened reactions from well-known designers have already begun to appear online. Consider this is an in-memoriam Ask Slashdot question: How has D&D (and tabletop roleplaying) touched/improved your life? Update: 03/04 23:16 GMT by Z : With more time, official announcements have had time to appear. Many sites are featuring posts on Gygax's impact on gaming, including touching entries on Salon and CNet.

Lally Singh writes "BusinessWeek is reporting that Sony BMG is planning on dropping DRM from their music. Salon's Machinest had an interesting take on this; 'Actually, what's happened is quite ironic. It was the industry's own DRM mandates that tied many music-lovers in to Apple's music storefront (we all had iPods, and the only way to buy digital music for the iPod was from Apple). Now Apple's become too powerful for the labels. They need an alternative distribution channel — they want to get music to our iPods, but they don't want to go through Apple to do it. The only way to do that is to offer retailers like Amazon the chance to sell songs as plain, unrestricted MP3s, which are iPoddable.'"

An anonymous reader writes "FCC chairman Kevin Martin wants to relax rules on how many media outlets one company can own in one market. Democratic commissioner Copps wants to rally the public to stop media consolidation. He says he's 'blowing a loud trumpet' for a 'call to battle' to stop the FCC from giving big media a generous Christmas present."

rgiskard01 writes "Glenn Greenwald is reporting at Salon.com on a win for the EFF, in the battle for clarity regarding the telecom surveillance scandal. A federal judge ordered the Bush administration yesterday to accede to the EFF's Freedom of Information Act request. Assuming the White House follows the court order, they would have to make public their lobbying ties to the telecoms industry. 'These disclosures will reveal ... which members of Congress McConnell and other Bush officials privately lobbied. As an argument of last resort, the administration even proposed disclosing these documents on December 31 so that -- as EFF pointed out -- the information would be available only after Congress passed the new FISA bill. The court rejected every administration claim as to why it should not have to disclose these records.'" Greenwald goes on to argue that the order should be leveled against Senators as well, to get a sense of who else is in Ma Bell's pocket.

theodp writes "With a seven-page cover story on The Future of Reading, Newsweek confirms all those rumors of Amazon's imminent introduction an affordable ebook. Kindle, which is named to evoke the crackling ignition of knowledge, has the dimensions of a paperback, weighs 10.3 oz., and uses E Ink technology on a 6-inch screen powered by a battery that gets up to 30 hours from a 2-hour charge. Kindle's real breakthrough is its EVDO-like wireless connectivity, which allows it to work anywhere, not just at Wi-Fi hotspots. More than 88,000 titles will be on sale at the Kindle store at launch, with NYT best sellers priced at $9.99."

Bennett Haselton has written in with an essay on a strange experiment on-line. He starts When you first hear about Amazon.com's "Mechanical Turk" service, which allows "requesters" to pay "Turk workers" a few pennies to complete some task which is hard to automate but easy for humans, what's the first application that comes to your mind? The system has been discussed previously on Slashdot, but I'll bet a week's wages for a Mechanical Turk worker ($1.45, according to one of them) that I was the first person who used it to pay people to write rebuttals to one of my arguments. Keep reading unless you want to fight about it.

The interesting result was that some of the rebuttals were quite insightful, and resulted in me making changes to the argument that I would make if I had to present it again. Judging by the literacy and intelligence of some of the respondents, most of them probably wouldn't need Mechanical Turk as a source of income, so I assume most of them fit the profile of this Salon.com writer and are doing it just for fun. Hell, you can find enough people on UseNet and Slashdot who will argue with you just for free.

But there were a few reasons I found this preferable to the conventional ways of gathering interesting rebuttals to your own reasoning. If you send out a sample argument to all of your e-mail buddies, you will probably get some useful replies, but they may start to think you're a little weird for asking them to evaluate your thought processes, especially if you do it over and over. Post an opinion on UseNet or Slashdot, and you may have to wade through a lot of crap to find the useful responses (while others may consider your post to be part of the crap that they have to wade through). And in both cases, there's the potential embarrassment of what you're asking for -- the risk of seeming so uncertain about your own opinions that you want other people to check your work for you. (I actually think that being uncertain about your own beliefs is a virtue, but it doesn't seem to be one that our culture prizes very highly.) Using Mechanical Turk addresses most of these problems; even though you're still admitting to total strangers that you might be wrong and asking them to shoot you down if they can, at least the evidence of your insecurity won't turn up when your next employer or Internet date does a Google search for your name. ("Damn it, I want a man who doesn't question his bumper stickers!")

So, while I didn't find it useful enough that I would run every opinion through the Mechanical Turk machinery to see what feedback I could get from it (I'm not paying a bunch of them to proofread this article), I did like enough to recommend it to people for certain arguments in certain settings. The main kinds of arguments that I would try out on the Mechanical Turk service would be about abstract philosophical or moral questions on issues that have been around forever, like abortion or the death penalty -- topics so explosive that you'd risk making your friends very uncomfortable if you test-marketed your arguments on them, and which would seem almost rude to post about in a public forum because the debate topics have been around for so very, very long. But on Mechanical Turk, $1 is apparently enough to get people to ignore the awkwardness and the exhaustedness of the topic and to focus on what you ask.

And what was the argument that I used to test it out? Perhaps the geek crowd will feel more sympathy with this than the general public does. Basically it was that the conventional wisdom behind allowing adults to smoke, but banning cigarettes for people under 18, is wrong. Either you can believe that smoking should be permitted for everybody, or that it should be banned for everybody, but there is no consistent set of assumptions that could lead you to conclude that smoking should be banned for people under 18 but allowed for everyone else. You have two groups of people under consideration -- people under 18 who smoke, and people over 18 who smoke. What possible reason could there be for wanting to protect the health of the people in the first group, but not the people in the second group?

The problem with the conventional reason for smoking age restrictions -- "Younger people have worse judgment, so they are more likely to smoke" -- is that if this is true, all that means is that the first group of people will be proportionally larger, relative to the total population of people in their age range. But even after that assumption, you're still left with two groups of people, who exhibit the same continued bad judgment with regard to smoking cigarettes. Treating the two groups differently, is a bit like saying we should have lighter sentences for female murderers than for male murderers, just because men are more likely to commit murder.

And yet this conclusion did give me pause, so this is a classic example of an argument where you'd want someone to check your work. Off I went to create a Human Intelligence Task (HIT) on Mechanical Turk simply asking people to read the argument and respond. In the first round, most responders missed what I thought was the point of the argument, and responded with some variation of "Minors are more likely to smoke because they have worse judgment", without addressing the question of why the two groups of smokers should be treated differently. A few people responded with variations of "We've always done it that way" (referring to similar restrictions on alcohol, pornography, etc.); fair enough, it just reminded me that if I asked the question again I'd have to say I didn't consider any argument valid that boiled down to "We've always done it that way".

But then came some more interesting responses. One worker replied that I was wrong to assume that the effects of a cigarette were "the same" on adults and minors because cigarette smoke has been shown to be more damaging to developing tissues. OK, that was worth a dollar. On the other hand, that just means that there is some number N cigarettes that would be just as harmful to an adult, as 1 cigarette would be to a minor, so you're still left without a consistent reason for why you'd let the adult buy those N cigarettes but prevent the minor from buying 1 cigarette. Then another user called me out on the opening line of my original argument, "There is no reason to ban cigarettes for minors but not for adults." He said, quite correctly, that I had only attempted to debunk the most commonly given reason, but it was wrong to conclude that there was no such reason.

So, this led me to another idea for how to present an argument and solicit feedback on Mechanical Turk: in the form of a series of mathematically precise statements, each one following from the previous ones. The new HIT was to ask users if they disagreed with the conclusion, and if they disagreed, then to identify the first statement that they disagreed with. The idea was that each statement would follow logically from the ones before it, so identifying any statement as the "first" one that they disagreed with, would be tantamount to a self-contradictory paradox.

Now, whether or not you want to use this format when running an argument past the Turk workers, depends on what your goal is. If you want to really find out if your own argument is valid, then breaking it down mathematically is one approach. On the other hand, if you already believe your own argument, and you're just trying to find the most persuasive way of phrasing it, then you may not learn anything useful by breaking it down into a series of mathematical steps, because that's probably not going to be the format of our final persuasive essay.

Anyway, the new mathematical format of the argument was (slightly reworked from what I posted on Amazon):

1. Government should ban smoking by people under 18, because of the harmful health effects.
2. If that's true for the entire group of underage smokers, then it's also true for each individual smoker under 18. In other words, even if only one person under 18 smoked in the entire country, it would still be justified for the government to ban them from smoking.
3. Whatever bad health effects are caused by the average person under 18 smoking 1 cigarette, there is some number N cigarettes that would cause the same bad health effects in the average adult who smoked them.
4. If banning 1 person under 18 from smoking 1 cigarette is justified (even if they were the last smoker on Earth), and the health effects would be the same for an average adult who smoked N cigarettes, then banning 1 adult from smoking those N cigarettes would also be justified (again, even if they were the last smoker on Earth).
5. If banning 1 person over 18 from smoking would be justified, then the same logic would apply to every person over 18, which would imply banning smoking for all people over 18.
6. Hence, if you believe that smoking should be banned for people under 18, then the same logic would lead to a ban on smoking for people over 18 as well.

The response from a lot of workers who responded to this HIT was that... I lost them. Each of them identified the first statement in the list that they disagreed with, as required by the HIT, but many commented that the whole thing was phrased confusingly. There was no clear winner for the first statement that people disagreed with, but several people picked #3 and #4, arguing some version of "People under 18 have less developed judgment." (I still say that doesn't matter, because you're talking about comparing a person under 18 who smokes, with a person over 18 who smokes, and their judgment in both cases is the same, etc.) So this particular experiment failed -- it didn't make it easier to persuade people by formulating the argument as a series of steps, and it also didn't lead to any agreement on what was the Achilles' Heel of the argument itself.

However I think the general idea, of using Mechanical Turk to find sparring partners, may be useful to a lot of people. If you were interested in publishing some kind of persuasive argument, you could use an Amazon HIT to have readers compare several different versions of the same argument and identify the one that they thought was most convincing. If you were feeling more philosophical and simply wanted to know if your argument was correct, you could pay people to look for flaws in it (and here is where the mathematical phrasing could come in handy). If you're crafting an argument for public consumption, you could even have HIT workers build up your argument for you -- start with a position and have them come up with reasons supporting that position -- although to me that feels like a cheapening of the debate process that crosses the line, because you're not even trying to reason your way to a conclusion, instead starting with the conclusion you want and then working backwards (not that this isn't what a lot of debaters do anyway!). My own interest would be to see next if certain types of arguments are more likely to persuade people who are more mathematically inclined (by asking respondents to indicate how well they did at math in school). Perhaps arguments with flowery language are more likely to appeal to people who were English majors, while arguments spelled out as a series of logical steps are more likely to appeal to people who look at things in a mathematical way (also known as the "real" or "right" way of looking at things).

Maybe my preference for the controlled, user-reimbursed process of "debating" that is enabled by Mechanical Turk, has to do with a lifelong focus on bottom-line results: Decide what the result is, and judge the process by how well it brings about that result. I don't think debate and discussion should be like soccer, valued for the fun and the exercise; I think a good debate should actually get somewhere, persuading the participants or the listeners of a new point of view that builds on their old one, or else the debate has failed. If paying HIT workers kills the "spirit" of a good debate but helps achieve the goal, then so much the better. On the other hand, we'll never run out of people who enjoy the process of debating and arguing for its own sake, and will continue to debate things into the ground without anybody paying them. Hey look, here come some of them now!...

Bennett Haselton has written in with an essay on a strange experiment on-line. He starts When you first hear about Amazon.com's "Mechanical Turk" service, which allows "requesters" to pay "Turk workers" a few pennies to complete some task which is hard to automate but easy for humans, what's the first application that comes to your mind? The system has been discussed previously on Slashdot, but I'll bet a week's wages for a Mechanical Turk worker ($1.45, according to one of them) that I was the first person who used it to pay people to write rebuttals to one of my arguments. Keep reading unless you want to fight about it.

The interesting result was that some of the rebuttals were quite insightful, and resulted in me making changes to the argument that I would make if I had to present it again. Judging by the literacy and intelligence of some of the respondents, most of them probably wouldn't need Mechanical Turk as a source of income, so I assume most of them fit the profile of this Salon.com writer and are doing it just for fun. Hell, you can find enough people on UseNet and Slashdot who will argue with you just for free.

But there were a few reasons I found this preferable to the conventional ways of gathering interesting rebuttals to your own reasoning. If you send out a sample argument to all of your e-mail buddies, you will probably get some useful replies, but they may start to think you're a little weird for asking them to evaluate your thought processes, especially if you do it over and over. Post an opinion on UseNet or Slashdot, and you may have to wade through a lot of crap to find the useful responses (while others may consider your post to be part of the crap that they have to wade through). And in both cases, there's the potential embarrassment of what you're asking for -- the risk of seeming so uncertain about your own opinions that you want other people to check your work for you. (I actually think that being uncertain about your own beliefs is a virtue, but it doesn't seem to be one that our culture prizes very highly.) Using Mechanical Turk addresses most of these problems; even though you're still admitting to total strangers that you might be wrong and asking them to shoot you down if they can, at least the evidence of your insecurity won't turn up when your next employer or Internet date does a Google search for your name. ("Damn it, I want a man who doesn't question his bumper stickers!")

So, while I didn't find it useful enough that I would run every opinion through the Mechanical Turk machinery to see what feedback I could get from it (I'm not paying a bunch of them to proofread this article), I did like enough to recommend it to people for certain arguments in certain settings. The main kinds of arguments that I would try out on the Mechanical Turk service would be about abstract philosophical or moral questions on issues that have been around forever, like abortion or the death penalty -- topics so explosive that you'd risk making your friends very uncomfortable if you test-marketed your arguments on them, and which would seem almost rude to post about in a public forum because the debate topics have been around for so very, very long. But on Mechanical Turk, $1 is apparently enough to get people to ignore the awkwardness and the exhaustedness of the topic and to focus on what you ask.

And what was the argument that I used to test it out? Perhaps the geek crowd will feel more sympathy with this than the general public does. Basically it was that the conventional wisdom behind allowing adults to smoke, but banning cigarettes for people under 18, is wrong. Either you can believe that smoking should be permitted for everybody, or that it should be banned for everybody, but there is no consistent set of assumptions that could lead you to conclude that smoking should be banned for people under 18 but allowed for everyone else. You have two groups of people under consideration -- people under 18 who smoke, and people over 18 who smoke. What possible reason could there be for wanting to protect the health of the people in the first group, but not the people in the second group?

The problem with the conventional reason for smoking age restrictions -- "Younger people have worse judgment, so they are more likely to smoke" -- is that if this is true, all that means is that the first group of people will be proportionally larger, relative to the total population of people in their age range. But even after that assumption, you're still left with two groups of people, who exhibit the same continued bad judgment with regard to smoking cigarettes. Treating the two groups differently, is a bit like saying we should have lighter sentences for female murderers than for male murderers, just because men are more likely to commit murder.

And yet this conclusion did give me pause, so this is a classic example of an argument where you'd want someone to check your work. Off I went to create a Human Intelligence Task (HIT) on Mechanical Turk simply asking people to read the argument and respond. In the first round, most responders missed what I thought was the point of the argument, and responded with some variation of "Minors are more likely to smoke because they have worse judgment", without addressing the question of why the two groups of smokers should be treated differently. A few people responded with variations of "We've always done it that way" (referring to similar restrictions on alcohol, pornography, etc.); fair enough, it just reminded me that if I asked the question again I'd have to say I didn't consider any argument valid that boiled down to "We've always done it that way".

But then came some more interesting responses. One worker replied that I was wrong to assume that the effects of a cigarette were "the same" on adults and minors because cigarette smoke has been shown to be more damaging to developing tissues. OK, that was worth a dollar. On the other hand, that just means that there is some number N cigarettes that would be just as harmful to an adult, as 1 cigarette would be to a minor, so you're still left without a consistent reason for why you'd let the adult buy those N cigarettes but prevent the minor from buying 1 cigarette. Then another user called me out on the opening line of my original argument, "There is no reason to ban cigarettes for minors but not for adults." He said, quite correctly, that I had only attempted to debunk the most commonly given reason, but it was wrong to conclude that there was no such reason.

So, this led me to another idea for how to present an argument and solicit feedback on Mechanical Turk: in the form of a series of mathematically precise statements, each one following from the previous ones. The new HIT was to ask users if they disagreed with the conclusion, and if they disagreed, then to identify the first statement that they disagreed with. The idea was that each statement would follow logically from the ones before it, so identifying any statement as the "first" one that they disagreed with, would be tantamount to a self-contradictory paradox.

Now, whether or not you want to use this format when running an argument past the Turk workers, depends on what your goal is. If you want to really find out if your own argument is valid, then breaking it down mathematically is one approach. On the other hand, if you already believe your own argument, and you're just trying to find the most persuasive way of phrasing it, then you may not learn anything useful by breaking it down into a series of mathematical steps, because that's probably not going to be the format of our final persuasive essay.

Anyway, the new mathematical format of the argument was (slightly reworked from what I posted on Amazon):

1. Government should ban smoking by people under 18, because of the harmful health effects.
2. If that's true for the entire group of underage smokers, then it's also true for each individual smoker under 18. In other words, even if only one person under 18 smoked in the entire country, it would still be justified for the government to ban them from smoking.
3. Whatever bad health effects are caused by the average person under 18 smoking 1 cigarette, there is some number N cigarettes that would cause the same bad health effects in the average adult who smoked them.
4. If banning 1 person under 18 from smoking 1 cigarette is justified (even if they were the last smoker on Earth), and the health effects would be the same for an average adult who smoked N cigarettes, then banning 1 adult from smoking those N cigarettes would also be justified (again, even if they were the last smoker on Earth).
5. If banning 1 person over 18 from smoking would be justified, then the same logic would apply to every person over 18, which would imply banning smoking for all people over 18.
6. Hence, if you believe that smoking should be banned for people under 18, then the same logic would lead to a ban on smoking for people over 18 as well.

The response from a lot of workers who responded to this HIT was that... I lost them. Each of them identified the first statement in the list that they disagreed with, as required by the HIT, but many commented that the whole thing was phrased confusingly. There was no clear winner for the first statement that people disagreed with, but several people picked #3 and #4, arguing some version of "People under 18 have less developed judgment." (I still say that doesn't matter, because you're talking about comparing a person under 18 who smokes, with a person over 18 who smokes, and their judgment in both cases is the same, etc.) So this particular experiment failed -- it didn't make it easier to persuade people by formulating the argument as a series of steps, and it also didn't lead to any agreement on what was the Achilles' Heel of the argument itself.

However I think the general idea, of using Mechanical Turk to find sparring partners, may be useful to a lot of people. If you were interested in publishing some kind of persuasive argument, you could use an Amazon HIT to have readers compare several different versions of the same argument and identify the one that they thought was most convincing. If you were feeling more philosophical and simply wanted to know if your argument was correct, you could pay people to look for flaws in it (and here is where the mathematical phrasing could come in handy). If you're crafting an argument for public consumption, you could even have HIT workers build up your argument for you -- start with a position and have them come up with reasons supporting that position -- although to me that feels like a cheapening of the debate process that crosses the line, because you're not even trying to reason your way to a conclusion, instead starting with the conclusion you want and then working backwards (not that this isn't what a lot of debaters do anyway!). My own interest would be to see next if certain types of arguments are more likely to persuade people who are more mathematically inclined (by asking respondents to indicate how well they did at math in school). Perhaps arguments with flowery language are more likely to appeal to people who were English majors, while arguments spelled out as a series of logical steps are more likely to appeal to people who look at things in a mathematical way (also known as the "real" or "right" way of looking at things).

Maybe my preference for the controlled, user-reimbursed process of "debating" that is enabled by Mechanical Turk, has to do with a lifelong focus on bottom-line results: Decide what the result is, and judge the process by how well it brings about that result. I don't think debate and discussion should be like soccer, valued for the fun and the exercise; I think a good debate should actually get somewhere, persuading the participants or the listeners of a new point of view that builds on their old one, or else the debate has failed. If paying HIT workers kills the "spirit" of a good debate but helps achieve the goal, then so much the better. On the other hand, we'll never run out of people who enjoy the process of debating and arguing for its own sake, and will continue to debate things into the ground without anybody paying them. Hey look, here come some of them now!...

ntk writes "Glenn Greenwald from Salon has a long, informative interview with Cindy Cohn, the EFF attorney leading the suit against AT&T over their warrantless wiretapping of their customers. It talks about why the White House is pushing for retroactive immunity against the telco, what the suit has revealed so far, and how little Congressfolk appear to know about how Internet traffic is being monitored."

Berkeley Breathed has a note up on his site: "Note to Opus readers: The Opus strips for August 26 and September 2 have been withheld from publication by a large number of client newspapers across the country, including Opus' host paper The Washington Post. The strips may be viewed in a large format on their respective dates at Salon.com.."

owlgorithm writes "Salon reports that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has been leaked four days before it hits bookstores. It turns out that someone with access to the American edition of the book has taken a photograph of every one of the pages and made them available via bittorrent. Publishers may well be quaking in their boots, but in some places the quality is barely legible. On many pages the pirateer's hands are in the pictures with other pages needing a bit of Photoshopping just to make out the words. It appears many of the sites have been removing the content, naturally enough."

Adambomb writes "It seems that the deal that saved Net radio at the 11th hour, the new terms that would limit the maximum fee for multiple-channel Web radio broadcasts, contains a hook. To qualify for the cap, broadcasters must work to ensure that stream-ripping is not feasible. Given that the analog hole will always exist as far as I can imagine in such scenarios, is this even possible?" The article mentions the measures Net stations could easily take but have been reluctant to — lowering bit rates, playing jingles over the music, cross-fading songs. How long before they are backed into using these techniques?

mrbluze writes "It appears that more and more of the data collection sanctioned by the US government is passed through the hands of private enterprise, Salon reports. 'Because of the cloak of secrecy thrown over the intelligence budgets, there is no way for the American public, or even much of Congress, to know how those contractors are getting the money, what they are doing with it, or how effectively they are using it. The explosion in outsourcing has taken place against a backdrop of intelligence failures for which the Bush administration has been hammered by critics, from Saddam Hussein's fictional weapons of mass destruction to abusive interrogations that have involved employees of private contractors operating in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Aftergood and other experts also warn that the lack of transparency creates conditions ripe for corruption.'"

notNeilCasey writes "The U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority, which formerly governed Iraq, accidentally published Microsoft Word documents containing information never meant for the public, according to an article in Salon. By viewing the documents using the Track Changes feature in Word (.doc), the author has been able to reconstruct internal discussions from 2004 which reflect the optimism, isolation and incompetence of the American occupation. Download the author's source document or look for more yourself. 'Presumably, staffers at the CPA's Information Management Unit, which produced the weekly reports, were cutting and pasting large sections of text into the reports and then eliminating all but the few short passages they needed. Much of the material they were cribbing seems to have come from the kind of sensitive, security-related documents that were never meant to be available to the public. In fact, about half of the 20 improperly redacted documents I downloaded, including the March 28 report, contain deleted portions that all seem to come from one single, 1,000-word security memo. The editors kept pulling text from a document titled "Why Are the Attacks Down in Al-Anbar Province -- Several Theories." (The security memo and the last page of the March 28 report can be seen here, along with several other CPA documents that can be downloaded.)'"

notNeilCasey writes "The U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority, which formerly governed Iraq, accidentally published Microsoft Word documents containing information never meant for the public, according to an article in Salon. By viewing the documents using the Track Changes feature in Word (.doc), the author has been able to reconstruct internal discussions from 2004 which reflect the optimism, isolation and incompetence of the American occupation. Download the author's source document or look for more yourself. 'Presumably, staffers at the CPA's Information Management Unit, which produced the weekly reports, were cutting and pasting large sections of text into the reports and then eliminating all but the few short passages they needed. Much of the material they were cribbing seems to have come from the kind of sensitive, security-related documents that were never meant to be available to the public. In fact, about half of the 20 improperly redacted documents I downloaded, including the March 28 report, contain deleted portions that all seem to come from one single, 1,000-word security memo. The editors kept pulling text from a document titled "Why Are the Attacks Down in Al-Anbar Province -- Several Theories." (The security memo and the last page of the March 28 report can be seen here, along with several other CPA documents that can be downloaded.)'"

bheer asks: "Salon's Since You Asked column is carrying an interesting question right now — what do you say in interviews after getting fired as a fall guy at your last job? Cary Tennis, who writes the column, admits he may not be the best person for this sort of question. So I thought I'd ask others what they thought about this. Software developers are sometimes able to get away blaming the business requirements/analysis process, but anyone with any experience in this business probably has had nightmares about being the fall guy and may even have a strategy or two up their sleeve. How would deal with being in such a crummy position?"

bheer asks: "Salon's Since You Asked column is carrying an interesting question right now — what do you say in interviews after getting fired as a fall guy at your last job? Cary Tennis, who writes the column, admits he may not be the best person for this sort of question. So I thought I'd ask others what they thought about this. Software developers are sometimes able to get away blaming the business requirements/analysis process, but anyone with any experience in this business probably has had nightmares about being the fall guy and may even have a strategy or two up their sleeve. How would deal with being in such a crummy position?"

theodp writes "Amazon will pay an undisclosed amount to IBM to settle a long-running patent feud, and the two companies have agreed to a long-term patent cross-licensing agreement. Information Week wonders if an insurance dispute prompted Amazon's settlement, noting that Atlantic Mutual sued Amazon back in March to escape any obligation to reimburse the e-tailer should it lose the case brought by IBM. Amazon had relied on Atlantic Mutual's backing in an earlier legal battle it waged against tiny InTouch. 'Amazon, whose chief executive, Jeff Bezos, is a vocal advocate of patent reform, has had numerous patent issues in the past. In 2005, the technology used in its 1-Click checkout system came under scrutiny as potentially infringing upon a similar product made by a small Virginia-based company called IPXL Holdings. Meanwhile, the US patent system itself is experiencing growing pains as Congress continues to explore the possibility of updating it to better serve the needs of the 21st-century business world.'"