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Hear ye! From this day forward, any monument or landmark unknown to Cultural Significance Minister Kalarius will have its status removed and any physical marker shall be decommissioned as soon as is logistically convenient. All current or future restoration projects are now cancelled to repair or renovate all monuments or landmarks that have been determined to look "worn and kinda crappy."

• Restoration Exchange Omaha
• Bishop Hill building
• Stone Slide at Murphy Field

We must never change anything lest we trample all over someone's nostalgia! In any case, your examples could be (or are being) renovated and refurbished so that future generations can enjoy them, this is a bloody sign for a business that isn't even at that location anymore, I think the vast majority of people that drive on 101 aren't going to miss it. If it's so culturally significant, why doesn't someone pay to fix it up and move it to a museum?

Also, I kinda like the title, maybe I'll add it to my sig ;)

• Restoration Exchange Omaha
• Bishop Hill building
• Stone Slide at Murphy Field

Somebody has to cover the cost of fraud protection when it's the IRS doing the identity theft.

http://journalstar.com/news/lo... http://www.nydailynews.com/new... http://www.nola.com/crime/inde... http://www.derbytelegraph.co.u... http://www.local10.com/news/mi... http://thenationonlineng.net/c... http://www.wowt.com/home/headl... http://www.nydailynews.com/new... http://ktla.com/2015/07/23/pol... http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/u... http://www.theage.com.au/victo... http://kdvr.com/2015/03/16/wom...

"This works really well for cancelling out advantages of size/weight/strength such as otherwise might be of concern to... I dunno... say, a skinny 16-year-old kid who's got a very big grudge against a high school teachers' lounge full of adults"

It also works really well for cancelling out advantages of size/weight/strength such as might be of concern to a handicapped person defending themself against an able-bodied attacker, or a woman defending her children against a larger and stronger man, or an elderly person defending themself against a younger and more capable attacker, or a single able-bodied man defending himself against multiple attackers.

There, fixed that for you.

Well, I guess they did actually hold a competition at the conference: they have an Apparatus Competition, and the device might have been built for that purpose. It's not really a "science fair", though; the focus is just showcase classroom instructional equipment, not conduct scientific research.

Anyway, to add insult to injury, I noticed that the article referred to the Ph.D. student as a "college student", as if they were an undergraduate.

Well, it wasn't worthy of publication. It's pretty simple to do. I had made some code available in the past, which used a variation of it to avoid abuses of message boards.

I'm not really looking for fame or fortune, so "father of...[anything but my kids]" doesn't interest me much.

But like I said, it's not rocket science. Did someone with the same identifier [username, cookie id, IP, etc, etc] vote the same way over a threshold for the same item? If so, disregard all their votes during tabulation. It does require all the voting information to be used during tabulation, not just a historical tabulation against the current numbers.

For example, I've seen voting that just does the following (in pseudocode)

$total_votes
$total_score

$total_score = $vote + $total score;
$total_votes++;

$current_score = $total_score / $total_votes;

That is fine and dandy until some schmuck has a script hit your voting script 100,000 times with the same vote. Now you can either purge the voting information, or let it ride.

The alternative is to record every vote with whatever identifying information you can. There are circumstances where you may not even record a vote, but that would only be obvious ones like if wget or curl were in the USER_AGENT string.

Now you can see if the same identifying information did the same action too many times. If you allow exactly one vote per user, disregard all the votes from any user who exceeds that threshold. To be polite, you may want to allow say 5 votes. Someone may click twice, but if they come back and do it 5 times, it's probably abuse.

Likewise, if you are confident that particular identifiers are bogus, you can prune those completely. For example, if you see inbound clicks from http://ballotstuffers.example.com/ automatically add those user identifiers to the list to disregard.

Hmmm.. There were a couple other methods. I can't remember those offhand, and I haven't had access to the code for a few years.

It could be said that this is sampling, but really it's just avoiding abuse. We aren't taking a percentage of the samples, we're taking all the votes from people who aren't likely to be fraudulent. If you take 1 in 10 samples for voting, and you have 11,000 votes (10,000 from ballot stuffers, 1,000 from legitimate voters), your ballot stuffers will still have the majority of the votes. If you automatically exclude 100 voters, who account for 10,000 of the 11,000 votes, you will likely have a fairly accurate vote. if you go with the IP as the user identification, you'll likely trim out AOL (who needs 'em) or any other group of people behind a common proxy or NAT. You'll still have the majority of voters being counted.

In real-world political elections, this would be obvious if say 10,000 residents in a district returned 110,000 ballots. Sadly though, that happens, and none of the votes are excluded from the tabulation. Here are some examples. You can go find more on your own.

The real solution to this, if you needed accurate votes, would be to require authentication for each voter, and only provide them with credentials once they proved that they are truly individuals. You may still have some fraud, but it would then be based on the fact that people will give away their votes. This is true of proxy votes. A bunch of people and I

Uh... I've heard of one too many cell phones smoking. I don't want to see another one....

:-)

The 2004 election revealed many problems with electronic voting: lost votes, undervotes, overvotes, and votes rolling over into negative numbers. These links are taken from the group blog E-voting experts:

• Broward Co., FL - ESS software on their machines only reads 32,000 votes at a precinct then it starts counting backwards: http://www.news4jax.com/politics/3890292/detail.ht ml
• Wichita Co., TX - Nearly 6,900 of 26,000 total early votes had 'undervote' for President. Human error to blame. County has software problems that need ESS to fix before they can run ballots: http://www.timesrecordnews.com/trn/local_news/arti cle/0,1891,TRN_5784_3303816,00.html
• Lancaster Co., SC - Unilect Patriot voting machines were used and failed. Printouts of votes had to be taken from the machines memories and hand-counted: http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/news/local/1 0094349.htm
• Mecklenburg Co., NC - More votes registered than voters: http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/news/politi cs/10094165.htm
• Volusia Co., FL - Diebold optical-scan machines had another failure with 6 machines having memory card failures. "Ion Sancho, the elections supervisor in Leon County, said officials with Diebold told him that the new, higher-capacity memory cards tend to have more glitches than older cards.": http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/elections/orl- asecvolusiaglitches04110404nov04,1,3289659.story?c oll=orl-news-headlines
• Craven Co., NC - Software glitch forces a recount which changes the outcome in one race.: http://www.newbernsj.com/SiteProcessor.cfm?Templat e=/GlobalTemplates/Details.cfmStoryID=18297Section =Local
• San Francisco, CA - A glitch in the new tabulation software made by ESS to handle IRV/RCV voting (more here) stoped the counting and forced a recount of 81,000 ballots.: http://www.internetweek.com/allStories/showArticle .jhtml?articleID=52200321
• Sarpy County, NE - 3000 phantom votes show up after an audit reveals that some tabulation equipment counted votes twice. (Im not sure if this is optical scan or some other system they used optical scan in 2002): http://www.wowt.com/news/headlines/1161971.html
• Willacy County, TX - Human error in reading results reports causes presidential votes for John Kerry to be counted twice and subsequently misreported to the Texas Secretary of State.: http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/state/101 23432.htm?1c
• Columbus, OH - An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said. Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,25

Deputy Sarpy County Election Commissioner Ed Gilbert says, "It affected 32 of the 80 precincts. And I suppose as many as 10,000 votes."