The former association is probably tenuous at best, however the latter article actually seems fairly well done. The Sweeds are able to do some great large-scale studies, as they have a fairly homogenous population with amazing levels of data collection.
I read the article, and this study was fairly well designed.
The important conclusions of the study was that long term, high quantity use of phones (both cellular, and cordless) was associated with a several fold increase in brain cancer risk (about 3-6x the risk in those with over 2000 cumulative hours of use) and that this result was seen most clearly after 10+ years after the exposure, consistent with the possible long-term / slow developing nature of cancer.
To put this in perspective, the lifetime risk for brain cancer is about 0.5%. If the results of this study were true, and you were a cell phone addict, perhaps you could increase your risk 10-fold, meaning your chance of getting a tumor had risen to 5%? The risk of dying of other things is much higher (heart disease and stroke: 40%, other cancers 20%, etc.) so it may not be worth worrying about.
Could the results be bogus?
This study is a retrospective case-control design, which means that they took people diagnosed with tumors, found healthy control subjects (matched on age, sex and geographic location), and then asked both groups about their cell phone use over the prior 20 years. It's fairly easy with these sorts of designs to have confounds. One of the most common and easiest to understand confound are 'response biases.'
In this study, this could work in several ways: Perhaps people with brain tumor are pissed off, have heard about possible connections with cellphone use, and are (perhaps subconsciously) looking for something to blame. Thus, they tend to overstate their cellphone use. The controls, who have no tumors, have no particular agenda and report their cell use more accurately. Another form this could take would be if the tumor folks with high cell use respond to the surveys accurately, whereas the controls with high cell use just throw them in the trash. The authors have a few of points arguing against this thesis : first, the observed relationships follow a dose-response-latency model, which they suggest may not be likely to be how unequal response bias would look. Second, they had nearly identical and high response rates (90%) for both groups. Third, they found the relationships even when looking at cordless phones (which have generally not been demonized in the popular press).
One thing that did jump out at me were the demographic issues -- the authors mention that both gender and class (wealth, or socioeconomic status) are related to cell use (e.g. rich men use the most). They claim to have adjusted statistically for these issues, but the method was not described in this paper (it may be in their prior papers). However, in a retrospective case/control study like this, one should always question "is there anything unusual about group X". People with brain tumors? Wealthy males with very high cellphone use who were early adopters? Perhaps there is a core group of subjects that is driving the statistical relationship? E.g. high users are computer nerds who don't get enough sunlight, eat crappy diets and are vitamin deficient, and spend their lives in server farms inhaling chemicals from their computers? The authors did not report having measured any of these obvious confounds, which does leave a pretty big possible explanation: that the association between high cell use and cancer is true, but that the correlation is not causal.
What about a minor form of civil disobedience: On the next election, pick one seat (either that you don't care about or where the winner is a lock) and enter a write-in candidate. Use your own name, or a made-up name likely to be unique.
It would be my expectation that the # of votes cast for all write-in candidates should be public record. We could then use this method to see if our votes had been recorded at all.
(Hmm... I'm beginning to think about other hacks: buffer overflow via the write-in candidate option, anyone? )
I was pissed off to have to use the new machines. I was considering voting absentee on election day (as I read that this would involve a paper ballot), or else making a stink at the voting booth and demanding a paper ballot, but I was really busy, and knew that my votes weren't likely to be critical in this election, so I let it slide.
In a word, the system sucks. From a voter's perspective, here is what happens:
1) Walk in, they ask you for your address and name. No ID requested. 2) Sign your name IN PENCIL. 3) They ask for your party affiliation ("Green" oh that's cute!) 4) They hand you a smartcard. 5) Go to the machine, insert the card, and use the touch-screen to vote. 6) The interface is terrible: Looks like a demo I that someone wrote on the plane ride over to California. Fonts are hard to read, the layout is busy, etc. etc. Other interface bugs I noticed: If you hit the "Next page" button twice, it would blink the button twice, even though only one page was turned. Just crappy UI overall. 7) I was VERY tempted to write in my own name on the "Write in" section for one of the offices. My thinking was that write-in candidates must be public info, right? So I could use this as a sort-of checksum to make sure my ballot was really cast. Make up a fake write-in candidate for an office that I didn't care about, then check the election results later. But I chickened out. 8) The end of the process is the worst: You eject your card from the machine, take it back to the poll worker, who then throws it into the pile of used cards. I was struck by this: was my vote on the card that he had just threw back into the stack? Upon further reflection, I realized my vote was on the voting machine, but the appearance was that my vote had just been thrown away.
Now to be fair, steps (1) and (2) have always been that way. No ID required (for good reason), but why sign your name in pencil?
But the rest of the system did not inspire confidence. It felt very, very sketchy.
Regarding the 160 pages redacted from the 200 page report, State Budget Secretary James C. DiPaula Jr said: "The best security is for you not to give a road map to the people who want to do harm," DiPaula said.
This is simply false. HQX is an encoding scheme only. It does not contain any script handling or executable code options. The only way to hide a trojan horse is to make the executable itself malicious, which of course requires the user to launch it, which IE does automatically (in this case which is the point of this thread...). Normaly mac programs do NOT launch.HQX files after they have been unpacked.
Slashdot Mirror
First, please be aware that there is apparently a link between "texting" (sending an SMS) an being shot dead in your house:/ 04/02/BAGEUI24SP1.DTL
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006
The former association is probably tenuous at best, however the latter article actually seems fairly well done. The Sweeds are able to do some great large-scale studies, as they have a fairly homogenous population with amazing levels of data collection.
I read the article, and this study was fairly well designed.
The important conclusions of the study was that long term, high quantity use of phones (both cellular, and cordless) was associated with a several fold increase in brain cancer risk (about 3-6x the risk in those with over 2000 cumulative hours of use) and that this result was seen most clearly after 10+ years after the exposure, consistent with the possible long-term / slow developing nature of cancer.
To put this in perspective, the lifetime risk for brain cancer is about 0.5%. If the results of this study were true, and you were a cell phone addict, perhaps you could increase your risk 10-fold, meaning your chance of getting a tumor had risen to 5%? The risk of dying of other things is much higher (heart disease and stroke: 40%, other cancers 20%, etc.) so it may not be worth worrying about.
Could the results be bogus?
This study is a retrospective case-control design, which means that they took people diagnosed with tumors, found healthy control subjects (matched on age, sex and geographic location), and then asked both groups about their cell phone use over the prior 20 years. It's fairly easy with these sorts of designs to have confounds. One of the most common and easiest to understand confound are 'response biases.'
In this study, this could work in several ways: Perhaps people with brain tumor are pissed off, have heard about possible connections with cellphone use, and are (perhaps subconsciously) looking for something to blame. Thus, they tend to overstate their cellphone use. The controls, who have no tumors, have no particular agenda and report their cell use more accurately. Another form this could take would be if the tumor folks with high cell use respond to the surveys accurately, whereas the controls with high cell use just throw them in the trash.
The authors have a few of points arguing against this thesis : first, the observed relationships follow a dose-response-latency model, which they suggest may not be likely to be how unequal response bias would look. Second, they had nearly identical and high response rates (90%) for both groups. Third, they found the relationships even when looking at cordless phones (which have generally not been demonized in the popular press).
One thing that did jump out at me were the demographic issues -- the authors mention that both gender and class (wealth, or socioeconomic status) are related to cell use (e.g. rich men use the most). They claim to have adjusted statistically for these issues, but the method was not described in this paper (it may be in their prior papers). However, in a retrospective case/control study like this, one should always question "is there anything unusual about group X". People with brain tumors? Wealthy males with very high cellphone use who were early adopters? Perhaps there is a core group of subjects that is driving the statistical relationship? E.g. high users are computer nerds who don't get enough sunlight, eat crappy diets and are vitamin deficient, and spend their lives in server farms inhaling chemicals from their computers? The authors did not report having measured any of these obvious confounds, which does leave a pretty big possible explanation: that the association between high cell use and cancer is true, but that the correlation is not causal.
Looks to me like the comments, archived at the URL below, while biting and harsh, were not "hate speech" and had almost zero profanity:/ wapo/
http://www.democraticunderground.com/archive/2006
What about a minor form of civil disobedience:
On the next election, pick one seat (either that you don't care about or where the winner is a lock) and enter a write-in candidate. Use your own name, or a made-up name likely to be unique.
It would be my expectation that the # of votes cast for all write-in candidates should be public record. We could then use this method to see if our votes had been recorded at all.
(Hmm... I'm beginning to think about other hacks: buffer overflow via the write-in candidate option, anyone? )
I was pissed off to have to use the new machines. I was considering voting absentee on election day (as I read that this would involve a paper ballot), or else making a stink at the voting booth and demanding a paper ballot, but I was really busy, and knew that my votes weren't likely to be critical in this election, so I let it slide.
In a word, the system sucks. From a voter's perspective, here is what happens:
1) Walk in, they ask you for your address and name. No ID requested.
2) Sign your name IN PENCIL.
3) They ask for your party affiliation ("Green" oh that's cute!)
4) They hand you a smartcard.
5) Go to the machine, insert the card, and use the touch-screen to vote.
6) The interface is terrible: Looks like a demo I that someone wrote on the plane ride over to California. Fonts are hard to read, the layout is busy, etc. etc. Other interface bugs I noticed: If you hit the "Next page" button twice, it would blink the button twice, even though only one page was turned. Just crappy UI overall.
7) I was VERY tempted to write in my own name on the "Write in" section for one of the offices. My thinking was that write-in candidates must be public info, right? So I could use this as a sort-of checksum to make sure my ballot was really cast. Make up a fake write-in candidate for an office that I didn't care about, then check the election results later. But I chickened out.
8) The end of the process is the worst: You eject your card from the machine, take it back to the poll worker, who then throws it into the pile of used cards. I was struck by this: was my vote on the card that he had just threw back into the stack? Upon further reflection, I realized my vote was on the voting machine, but the appearance was that my vote had just been thrown away.
Now to be fair, steps (1) and (2) have always been that way. No ID required (for good reason), but why sign your name in pencil?
But the rest of the system did not inspire confidence. It felt very, very sketchy.
Sierra Aircard 750 drivers (GPRS) are available for Mac OS X too...
http://xochi.com/aircard
From the Fox News article
Regarding the 160 pages redacted from the 200 page report, State Budget Secretary James C. DiPaula Jr said: "The best security is for you not to give a road map to the people who want to do harm," DiPaula said.
NY Times article
Washington Post article
Cox cable modem in San Diego has been awesome for me, 2500kbps downloads, one day wait for installation, etc.
The transition to cox.net was trivial (change my email from @home.com to @home.net), reboot my airport to get a new dhcp address.
Of course, YMMV.
This is simply false. HQX is an encoding scheme only. It does not contain any script handling or executable code options. The only way to hide a trojan horse is to make the executable itself malicious, which of course requires the user to launch it, which IE does automatically (in this case which is the point of this thread...). Normaly mac programs do NOT launch .HQX files after they have been unpacked.
Cingular has announced pricing of $70/MB. Read this thread for more info...