I called Toronto Police. They don't take fraud reports over the phone. Typical of their lazy arsed existence. I'd just moved to the UK before this all happened, so I can't exactly go in person.
Will they do it by fax? When my husband's debit card was stolen from the US Mail before it ever arrived, and mysteriously activated by someone else, he was able to have the PD fax him the forms and then fill them out and fax them back, instead of driving 200 miles to the city that the fraud happened in.
That's exactly the point I stopped at also.... though I originally was looking at it just to see if it asked for a bunch of stuff you shouldn't just put into a form online, and then it said "Your risk is HIGH, because you never should have told us all this!"
There are a lot of people in my ZIP born in the 1970s. There are probably very few that would list my hobbies, which you can cross-reference in other places. Don't forget you need gender too, in order to do useful market research... that will keep people from confusing me with my husband. Still, even being able to narrow down to a household compromises privacy.
2) You can do all kinds of meaningful analysis on the age demographics of the population. And make policy decisions based on that.
Fully anonymous data producing useful results.
What kind of useful age demographics analysis can you do on the population with only that piece of data? You might use it to allocate Medicare spending, but it would work much better if you had income and health insurance information along with it, since not everyone over X age is dependent on Medicare. You might use it to allocate money to elementary schools, except those are in fixed locations, and you don't even know which STATE the children are in; the percentage of the population who is school age varies dramatically from one location to another. If you had the data from two points in time, you could make inferences about lifespan, birth rates, and health, but you don't; you just have ONE data point for everyone. You can't use it to allocate resources towards maternal/child health, because you don't know how many of those people in their childbearing years are women.
Seriously, give me ONE decent use for a distribution of ages without a single other piece of information. I really can't think of one that wouldn't have any good analyst cringing at the lack of control.
The idea was that everyone can be identified with only the birth date, gender and ZIP code? So... err... There is, in fact, not even one ZIP code that has two people living there of the same gender that happen to share a birthday?
Aside from the 87% part that others have pointed out, there may be some linguistic confusion about birthdate and birthday. A birthday is just month and day. A birthdate is month, day, and year... which dramatically increases the keyspace.
The real question is: who cares? How often will somebody have those identifiers tagged to a single person's data?
Try doing research on disease, like cancer rates. You need to look at age cohorts, and when you're trying to determine statistical significance, you do need to know if two people are a day apart in age, a month apart, a year apart, etc. You need gender, since many cancers (and other diseases) are specific to or far more prevalent among one gender. And ZIP code lets you take geography into account; aside from just urban/rural, east coast/west coast, if you find spikes in certain ZIP ranges, you can look at what they're near... like airports, power plants, gravel mines, etc.
There ISN'T any data but what I mentioned. No eye colours, height, sex, city names, states. Nothing but what I said.
And it totally depends on what you're looking at. For example, in disease research, age is a pretty important statistic. You want to be able to compare ages pretty exactly; it may be important that one person is a month older or younger than another. So, you need not just birthdays, but birthdates.
Geographical information is pretty important, too, to look at the effects of pollution, power plants, fires, etc. ZIP code is a good enough proxy for this. Of course, you *could* just work up a profile of each ZIP code on all the variables you expect to be important... but (1) you may not know what to look for until you know where to look for it; and (2) what are the chances that you wouldn't be able to figure out the ZIP code from that profile?
Gender, of course, is VERY important. You don't want your data on ovarian cancer rates thrown off by testicles, for example.
So, it may be impossible to do certain kinds of research without the data mentioned specifically in the article. ALL of it. That is a real issue.
Yah, I do that too. I have AARP invitations on my wall because they mined some database that shows I'm in my 70s. I also have lots of high school age directed mail because other databases show me as a teenager. Oh, and Medicaid and insurance scams and political propaganda targeted at seniors -- I get literally dozens of those a week.
Good job on thwarting advertisers with false info. Me, I think I'll try to avoid getting MORE junk if I can possibly help it.
Did it ever occur to you that if there were no anonymity and no secrets, selective enforcement of law would no longer be possible?
Did it ever occur to you that there have been and probably will again be times when morality and legality are not aligned?
Once upon a time, it was possible for people to be property. Assisting them to escape was theft. The Underground Railroad depended on anonymity and secrecy.
So did a guy named Schindler, who conspired against his government to save thousands of innocent lives.
Salman Rushdie wrote a boring book, but didn't deserve to die for it, so it's probably a good thing he was able to hide his whereabouts from his countrymen. And look what happened when the word got out that Alan Turing was gay.
Your thesis holds true only so long as those in power share your conscience, which is rarely true at this point in human history. Someday, maybe. Now, no.
The problem is that they obtain it without your consent and without directly compensating you. For example, if I don't actively block web bugs, cookies, HTTP "ping", analytics tools, and other similar attempts, then that data will be gathered whether or not I like it.
When you walk into some brick-and-mortar stores, there's someone standing at the front door counting you as you walk in. Because they can see your face, if you walk out and back in again, they probably won't re-count you. This helps them sell stuff, and possibly make money in other ways, too; for example, Costco does this, and they have their "road show" events where they may collect money from companies that come and sell stuff in the store. They partner with American Express to try to sign you up for a credit card while you're there.
Do you wear a mask and sneak in the back door to avoid them counting you?
I mean, yes, to some extent, you have a point, but blocking EVERYTHING is the same as avoiding having a guy standing at the door to a store counting your head as you walk in. It's not an unreasonable thing for a website to count the folks who visit, and to "recognize" them in some way to avoid counting the same person multiple times in rapid succession.
I'd also like to see online games that require proof of age above 30---I don't claim that all people above 30 are reasonable or that the kids are all annoying, but in general I'd prefer to play with people of my own age group.
Heck, don't need that. Just get proof of age when people create accounts, and allow a filter based on birthdate.;-) "Ignore everyone under 25" for example.
Presumably a prude who objects even to simple nudity must have had a mother who kept her pants on through the entire birth, and insisted on the baby closing its eyes before being allowed to suckle her breast.
Have you looked at our rising c-section rates and our abysmal breastfeeding rates lately? We are seriously damaging women's and children's health over this prudishness. You thought you were joking, but it's dead serious business.
They count whether something is "realistic" or not. Total Recall could show tits in full lighting, because there were THREE of them, so it was clearly not "real." Same goes for giant blue schlong.
This fire is to the standard SoCal fire season as a Carroll-sized mushroom growing at the foot of the Space Needle would be to Seattle mold.
It really is big. Yes, we have them every year, but it's been more than 15 years since we've had a fire anywhere near THIS bad. This is the largest single brushfire we've had in over 100 years.
Nice catch. My boss is conducting a site visit with folks from Keck right this second, for a funding app we have in to them. I texted her that tidbit so she can drop it into the conversation.;-)
Actually, different mountains altogether. Griffith Park is on the eastern end of the Santa Monica Mountains, while Mount Wilson is in the San Gabriel Mountains.
Most people are familar with the Golden Rule (Do unto others as you would have them do unto you), and most in business are familiar with the other golden rule (He who has the gold makes the rules). I would just be cautious about any study that is funded by a game producer that concludes that games are good for you.
I don't doubt that such a positive correllation is possible. I just am leary of any study that finds in favor of the payor.
One of these days, the deep pockets that fund this type of research will wise up, and start a tit-for-tat scheme... The Dairy Council will fund a $500,000 project that shows playing video games makes you a genius, and Nintendo will fund a $500,000 study that finds milk makes you superhuman.
I have an MR machine, I have 3-months to kick back and travel the world giving 10 minute seminars while my research subjects regulate themselves. Please, someone tell me what I must do.
Usually a PHS 398 Research Plan. Careful, it can't be more than 25 pages for Items 2-5.
It also raises a few more interesting questions... boys and girls tend to excel in different areas (math vs. language, for instance). Could these different strengths and weaknesses be a result of video game use, or could they be in part a cause of boys' higher inclination to play video games? Of course, it could also be completely unrelated (cue "correlation is not causation").
Obviously another study is required. Where do I sign up?!
Since the differences have been documented well before the advent of video games, they're definitely not causative.
However, there is a theory that the differences are NOT innate, but rather, a result of socialization that begins as soon as gender is known. We speak to boys and girls differently, even if they're newborns. We talk about them differently, play with them differently, and even perceive them differently. Now that most children's genders are known months before they are born, that gender socialization can begin in utero (and several experiments have documented that fetuses learn from repeated experiences before they're born, such as being read the same book or hearing the same piece of music).
It's a difficult theory to test. While there are children who are born with the wrong external genitalia, who don't learn their chromosomal gender until secondary sex characteristics begin developing at puberty, they're hardly a "normal" sample to test on (usually, they were exposed to high levels of androgens or estrogens in utero, causing the development of the "wrong" genitalia), nor are they a statistically significant sample. It's impossible to hide a baby's gender from EVERYONE; even if you could, you wouldn't get human subjects clearance on raising a cohort of girls as boys or boys as girls. But the fact that we can't test it doesn't mean we can *ignore* it, either, and there may still be ways to test... such as:
* Testing for differences in toddlers whose gender was known at the 20-week anatomy scan vs. those whose gender was unknown until birth * Evaluating parents' attitudes toward gender based on self-reports and observational studies, and then evaluating their children's "gender-based" skills
These methods might detect a difference, in which case, it's more likely that the difference is primarily socialization... or they might not, in which case, you know practically nothing, because it may be that the slight delay in gender socialization or the attitudes of parents vs. the rest of society isn't enough to outweigh the onslaught of gender socialization children go through from day one. But it might be fun to see.
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I called Toronto Police. They don't take fraud reports over the phone. Typical of their lazy arsed existence. I'd just moved to the UK before this all happened, so I can't exactly go in person.
Will they do it by fax? When my husband's debit card was stolen from the US Mail before it ever arrived, and mysteriously activated by someone else, he was able to have the PD fax him the forms and then fill them out and fax them back, instead of driving 200 miles to the city that the fraud happened in.
That's exactly the point I stopped at also.... though I originally was looking at it just to see if it asked for a bunch of stuff you shouldn't just put into a form online, and then it said "Your risk is HIGH, because you never should have told us all this!"
There are a lot of people in my ZIP born in the 1970s. There are probably very few that would list my hobbies, which you can cross-reference in other places. Don't forget you need gender too, in order to do useful market research... that will keep people from confusing me with my husband. Still, even being able to narrow down to a household compromises privacy.
2) You can do all kinds of meaningful analysis on the age demographics of the population. And make policy decisions based on that.
Fully anonymous data producing useful results.
What kind of useful age demographics analysis can you do on the population with only that piece of data? You might use it to allocate Medicare spending, but it would work much better if you had income and health insurance information along with it, since not everyone over X age is dependent on Medicare. You might use it to allocate money to elementary schools, except those are in fixed locations, and you don't even know which STATE the children are in; the percentage of the population who is school age varies dramatically from one location to another. If you had the data from two points in time, you could make inferences about lifespan, birth rates, and health, but you don't; you just have ONE data point for everyone. You can't use it to allocate resources towards maternal/child health, because you don't know how many of those people in their childbearing years are women.
Seriously, give me ONE decent use for a distribution of ages without a single other piece of information. I really can't think of one that wouldn't have any good analyst cringing at the lack of control.
The idea was that everyone can be identified with only the birth date, gender and ZIP code? So... err... There is, in fact, not even one ZIP code that has two people living there of the same gender that happen to share a birthday?
Aside from the 87% part that others have pointed out, there may be some linguistic confusion about birthdate and birthday. A birthday is just month and day. A birthdate is month, day, and year... which dramatically increases the keyspace.
The real question is: who cares? How often will somebody have those identifiers tagged to a single person's data?
Try doing research on disease, like cancer rates. You need to look at age cohorts, and when you're trying to determine statistical significance, you do need to know if two people are a day apart in age, a month apart, a year apart, etc. You need gender, since many cancers (and other diseases) are specific to or far more prevalent among one gender. And ZIP code lets you take geography into account; aside from just urban/rural, east coast/west coast, if you find spikes in certain ZIP ranges, you can look at what they're near... like airports, power plants, gravel mines, etc.
There ISN'T any data but what I mentioned. No eye colours, height, sex, city names, states. Nothing but what I said.
And it totally depends on what you're looking at. For example, in disease research, age is a pretty important statistic. You want to be able to compare ages pretty exactly; it may be important that one person is a month older or younger than another. So, you need not just birthdays, but birthdates.
Geographical information is pretty important, too, to look at the effects of pollution, power plants, fires, etc. ZIP code is a good enough proxy for this. Of course, you *could* just work up a profile of each ZIP code on all the variables you expect to be important... but (1) you may not know what to look for until you know where to look for it; and (2) what are the chances that you wouldn't be able to figure out the ZIP code from that profile?
Gender, of course, is VERY important. You don't want your data on ovarian cancer rates thrown off by testicles, for example.
So, it may be impossible to do certain kinds of research without the data mentioned specifically in the article. ALL of it. That is a real issue.
Yah, I do that too. I have AARP invitations on my wall because they mined some database that shows I'm in my 70s. I also have lots of high school age directed mail because other databases show me as a teenager. Oh, and Medicaid and insurance scams and political propaganda targeted at seniors -- I get literally dozens of those a week.
Good job on thwarting advertisers with false info. Me, I think I'll try to avoid getting MORE junk if I can possibly help it.
Did it ever occur to you that if there were no anonymity and no secrets, selective enforcement of law would no longer be possible?
Did it ever occur to you that there have been and probably will again be times when morality and legality are not aligned?
Once upon a time, it was possible for people to be property. Assisting them to escape was theft. The Underground Railroad depended on anonymity and secrecy.
So did a guy named Schindler, who conspired against his government to save thousands of innocent lives.
Salman Rushdie wrote a boring book, but didn't deserve to die for it, so it's probably a good thing he was able to hide his whereabouts from his countrymen. And look what happened when the word got out that Alan Turing was gay.
Your thesis holds true only so long as those in power share your conscience, which is rarely true at this point in human history. Someday, maybe. Now, no.
The problem is that they obtain it without your consent and without directly compensating you. For example, if I don't actively block web bugs, cookies, HTTP "ping", analytics tools, and other similar attempts, then that data will be gathered whether or not I like it.
When you walk into some brick-and-mortar stores, there's someone standing at the front door counting you as you walk in. Because they can see your face, if you walk out and back in again, they probably won't re-count you. This helps them sell stuff, and possibly make money in other ways, too; for example, Costco does this, and they have their "road show" events where they may collect money from companies that come and sell stuff in the store. They partner with American Express to try to sign you up for a credit card while you're there.
Do you wear a mask and sneak in the back door to avoid them counting you?
I mean, yes, to some extent, you have a point, but blocking EVERYTHING is the same as avoiding having a guy standing at the door to a store counting your head as you walk in. It's not an unreasonable thing for a website to count the folks who visit, and to "recognize" them in some way to avoid counting the same person multiple times in rapid succession.
\>
I'd also like to see online games that require proof of age above 30---I don't claim that all people above 30 are reasonable or that the kids are all annoying, but in general I'd prefer to play with people of my own age group.
Heck, don't need that. Just get proof of age when people create accounts, and allow a filter based on birthdate. ;-) "Ignore everyone under 25" for example.
Presumably a prude who objects even to simple nudity must have had a mother who kept her pants on through the entire birth, and insisted on the baby closing its eyes before being allowed to suckle her breast.
Have you looked at our rising c-section rates and our abysmal breastfeeding rates lately? We are seriously damaging women's and children's health over this prudishness. You thought you were joking, but it's dead serious business.
They count whether something is "realistic" or not. Total Recall could show tits in full lighting, because there were THREE of them, so it was clearly not "real." Same goes for giant blue schlong.
Ok... but the original commercial US release. How's that?
And what does that have to do with the completely different Observatory at Mt. Wilson?
The Griffith Observatory was threatened in the 2007 fire season... two years ago.
We have four seasons just like the rest of the world, but instead of winter, spring, summer, fall, ours are flood, riot, earthquake, and fire.
As common as mold in Seattle.
It's there
Get use to it
This fire is to the standard SoCal fire season as a Carroll-sized mushroom growing at the foot of the Space Needle would be to Seattle mold.
It really is big. Yes, we have them every year, but it's been more than 15 years since we've had a fire anywhere near THIS bad. This is the largest single brushfire we've had in over 100 years.
Nice catch. My boss is conducting a site visit with folks from Keck right this second, for a funding app we have in to them. I texted her that tidbit so she can drop it into the conversation. ;-)
I can't see anything past photo 13.
Actually, different mountains altogether. Griffith Park is on the eastern end of the Santa Monica Mountains, while Mount Wilson is in the San Gabriel Mountains.
I used to play the original tetris on a 386.
Really? I didn't know there were arcade emulators for the 386. Myself, I used to play the original Tetris in the campus game room.
Most people are familar with the Golden Rule (Do unto others as you would have them do unto you), and most in business are familiar with the other golden rule (He who has the gold makes the rules). I would just be cautious about any study that is funded by a game producer that concludes that games are good for you.
I don't doubt that such a positive correllation is possible. I just am leary of any study that finds in favor of the payor.
One of these days, the deep pockets that fund this type of research will wise up, and start a tit-for-tat scheme... The Dairy Council will fund a $500,000 project that shows playing video games makes you a genius, and Nintendo will fund a $500,000 study that finds milk makes you superhuman.
Where do I go to get funding to do stupid stuff like this?
Grants.gov.
I have an MR machine, I have 3-months to kick back and travel the world giving 10 minute seminars while my research subjects regulate themselves. Please, someone tell me what I must do.
Usually a PHS 398 Research Plan. Careful, it can't be more than 25 pages for Items 2-5.
It also raises a few more interesting questions... boys and girls tend to excel in different areas (math vs. language, for instance). Could these different strengths and weaknesses be a result of video game use, or could they be in part a cause of boys' higher inclination to play video games? Of course, it could also be completely unrelated (cue "correlation is not causation").
Obviously another study is required. Where do I sign up?!
Since the differences have been documented well before the advent of video games, they're definitely not causative.
However, there is a theory that the differences are NOT innate, but rather, a result of socialization that begins as soon as gender is known. We speak to boys and girls differently, even if they're newborns. We talk about them differently, play with them differently, and even perceive them differently. Now that most children's genders are known months before they are born, that gender socialization can begin in utero (and several experiments have documented that fetuses learn from repeated experiences before they're born, such as being read the same book or hearing the same piece of music).
It's a difficult theory to test. While there are children who are born with the wrong external genitalia, who don't learn their chromosomal gender until secondary sex characteristics begin developing at puberty, they're hardly a "normal" sample to test on (usually, they were exposed to high levels of androgens or estrogens in utero, causing the development of the "wrong" genitalia), nor are they a statistically significant sample. It's impossible to hide a baby's gender from EVERYONE; even if you could, you wouldn't get human subjects clearance on raising a cohort of girls as boys or boys as girls. But the fact that we can't test it doesn't mean we can *ignore* it, either, and there may still be ways to test... such as:
* Testing for differences in toddlers whose gender was known at the 20-week anatomy scan vs. those whose gender was unknown until birth
* Evaluating parents' attitudes toward gender based on self-reports and observational studies, and then evaluating their children's "gender-based" skills
These methods might detect a difference, in which case, it's more likely that the difference is primarily socialization... or they might not, in which case, you know practically nothing, because it may be that the slight delay in gender socialization or the attitudes of parents vs. the rest of society isn't enough to outweigh the onslaught of gender socialization children go through from day one. But it might be fun to see.
No, but it improves your skill at following a pair of Bavarian twins through the woods...