To answer those who say, "What does some guy who invented an algorithm know about nuclear war," (1) IEEE Spectrum checked Hellman's claims with 2 reliable, independent experts and (2) A long list of people who do know about nuclear war signed on to his claims. You might take seriously the former director of the CIA, the former president's science advisor, 2 Nobel laureates, and the (Republican) former head of the FDA.
(But that is a reasonable question -- you get points for skepticism.)
This teaches 2 related lessons about journalism and science:
(1) There are 2 kinds of publications in the world -- those that check their facts and those that don't. The first are reliable; the second aren't. This is why some obscure guy publishing a blog can be more reliable than most major newspapers and TV stations. (Or in this case, why IEEE Spectrum is more reliable than most daily newspapers.)
(2) There are 2 kinds of scientists in the world -- those who gather a consensus of experts before going public, and those who don't. The first are reliable; the second aren't. (This is why that story recently about cell phones causing brain cancer by an Australian neurologist was complete bullshit.) Hellman is competent enough in science to know that.
Hellman's method isn't unfamiliar to those trying to gauge the risk of failure for complex systems, such as nuclear reactors. IEEE Spectrum asked J. Wesley Hines, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Tennessee, to examine Hellman's methods, which were detailed in the appendix of the Bent article. "I only read the appendix but feel his argument is rational and also feel his methods are justified," says Hines. "Some could argue with the numbers he used, but he does give logical reasons for using those numbers and admits that they have large uncertainties since the events have been rare in the past."
Robert N. Charette, who runs the risk-management consultancy ITABHI and is a regular contributor to IEEE Spectrum, agrees with Hines. However, he says Hellman should have also turned the analysis on its head. "The other side of the risk equation is, suppose you get rid of nuclear weapons. Does that increase the probability of war? Pretending there aren't any nukes, how many wars would we have had?"
And the signers http://nuclearrisk.org/statement.php
The above statement has been endorsed by the following Charter Signers:*
Prof. Kenneth Arrow, Stanford University, 1972 Nobel Laureate in Economics; see also Nobel Announcement
Mr. D. James Bidzos, Chairman of the Board, Verisign Inc.
Dr. Richard Garwin, IBM Fellow Emeritus, former member President's Science Advisory Committee and Defense Science Board; see also NY Times article
Adm. Bobby R. Inman, USN (Ret.), University of Texas at Austin, former Director NSA and Deputy Director CIA
Prof. William Kays, former Dean of Engineering, Stanford University
Prof. Donald Kennedy, President Emeritus of Stanford University, former head of FDA
Prof. Martin Perl, Stanford University, 1995 Nobel Laureate in Physics; see also Nobel Announcement
(BTW, here's a tip for any student. You used to be able to get a student membership in the IEEE, which includes a subscription to Spectrum and another (expensive) IEEE magazine of your choice, for some ridiculously low amount like $12 a year. It's a great deal for the magazines alone, although IEEE membership has even better benefits that most students don't even know about.)
I am sorely disappointed by the negative responses to this article.
Is this Slashdot? You sound like a bunch of klutzes who wouldn't know how to get into their cars if they locked the keys inside. Who wouldn't know how to fix their glasses if the frames broke.
It's called a concept. Ed Land, the founder of Polaroid, gave his engineers a block of wood small enough to fit into a back pocket, and told them to build an instant camera that size. And they didn't whine about how the technology wasn't ready for it, they built it! And that camera revolutionized p0rn.
If you can't build a holographic projector inside a teacup with $50 worth of parts, get out of the way for somebody who can.
1973 was the date of the Supreme Court's decision in Roe vs. Wade, which gave us a right to abortion. There was a golden age of freedom for a while. But whenever a politician takes power, he takes away your rights to aggrandize his own power.
The lesson is, you don't get freedom from the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. You have to fight for it.
Really? Exactly who had oversight over the FBI agents and the [Republican] Justice Department agents who data mined [Democrat] Eliot Spitzer's bank deposits? Or [Democratic] Governor Don Siegelman?
You are naive to believe that politics is involved. There is no shortage of republicans that have been burned by law enforcement including the feds. Hell, Spitzer himself authorized/requested plenty of investigations including those involving prostitution, that is part of the press frenzy of this case. Also, analysis of banking activity has been going on since the 1970s, maybe even the 1960s. Banks, auto dealers, etc have been required to report sufficiently large cash transactions for many decades. Your tinfoil had may be a little too tight, try loosening it up one rivet hole.:-) My question, which you haven't answered because you don't have an answer, is, exactly who had oversight in those two cases. If you don't know the answer, then you can't hold an opinion on the basis of facts, only on the basis of blind faith.
As Glenn Greenwald pointed out in the article on Salon that I linked to, the Justice Department under G.W. Bush has prosecuted 5 times as many Democrats as Republicans, and during legal process they have uncovered written instructions from the White House to prosecutors telling them to prosecute Democrats for political reasons, and one prosecutor was fired because she was one of those rare Republicans who had too much integrity to violate the law. In those linked articles you can also find the lame and not credible excuses that the White House gives to explain those written instructions.
If you believe them, you might want to buy the Brooklyn Bridge too, if you have not done so already. If you already bought the Brooklyn Bridge, you probably bought into the Bush Administration too.
Under previous regimes and in precedent times such organizations where named "Stasi" and "KGB".
Oh, Amerika, you are becoming what you fought so hard against...
Not really, the FBI is subject to the oversight of a freely and fairly elected congress. That's incredibly different than the precedents you offer. Collecting and analyzing data is something that law enforcement has legitimately done for centuries, data mining is just automation.
Really? Exactly who had oversight over the FBI agents and the [Republican] Justice Department agents who data mined [Democrat] Eliot Spitzer's bank deposits? Or [Democratic] Governor Don Siegelman? http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/nyregion/21justice.htmlhttp://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/03/10/spitzer/index.html
I don't know how old you are, but when I was young the police used to watch the people.
My friend's father was sent to jail because of his Communist connections. My favorite physics teacher was blacklisted and had to leave the country because he couldn't teach here (he finally returned to teach my freshman physics course in 1959). They kicked the Communists out of the labor unions -- and the Communists (for all their faults) pushed the unions to drive a much better deal for the worker than they have today.
Under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI tapped Martin Luther King's phone and spied on him -- sort of like the way they spied on Eliot Spitzer today. So it's not much different today.
This is a guy who got screwed out of a lot of money because the state took his hard work without giving him a dime. I am not surprised that he finds the idea of people giving away their hard work for no money to be repulsive (even if it's voluntary).
This is a guy got screwed worse by capitalist entrepreneurs than he did by the state (which at least gave him a job and computers while it lasted). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris#History>
I wouldn't be so enthusiastic about capitalist competition if I were him. Guys like him don't seem to have a talent for it.
WSJ, 26 Dec 2006, Medical dilemma: spread of records stirs patient fears of privacy erosion; Ms. Galvin's insurer studies psychotherapist's notes; a dispute over the rules; complaint tally hits 23,896, Theo Francis.
(My notes, for people who are too lazy to even click on the link:)
In 1996, after her fiance died suddenly, Patricia Galvin left New York for San Francisco and was hired by Heller Ehrman LLP.
In 2000, Galvin began psychotherapy sessions at Stanford Hospital & Clinics with clinical psychologist Rachel Manber, who discussed her problems at work, her fiance's death, and her relationships with family, friends and co-workers. Manber assured Galvin that her notes would be confidential.
"I would never have engaged in psychotherapy with her if she did not promise me these notes were under lock and key."
In 2001, Galvin was rear-ended at a red light and suffered 4 herniated disks, which worsened.
In 2003, she applied for long-term disability. Her employer's carrier, UnumProvident Corp., said it would deny her claim unless she signed a release.
Manber assured Galvin her therapy notes would not be turned over. 3 months later, Unum denied her claim, because of psychotherapy notes about "working on a case" and a job interview in New York, which, Unum said, showed she was able to work. Galvin says they misinterpreted the notes.
In 2004, Galvin sued Manber, Stanford and Unum for malpractice and invasion of privacy, under California law. Galvin said "my most private thoughts, my personal tragedies, secrets about other people" were exposed.
In 2005, Galvin learned that Stanford had scanned Manber's notes into its system, making them part of her basic medical record. Stanford sent this file to Unum and the other driver.
Stanford said that "psychotherapy notes that are kept together with the patient's other medical records are not defined as 'psychotherapy notes' under HIPAA." It would be "impracticable" to keep them separate.
The health-care industry is scanning documents into electronic record systems. HIPAA gives psychotherapy notes special protection, but not when mixed in with general medical records.
Peter Swire, law professor, Ohio State U., explains why they wrote the rule giving confidentiality only to separate psychotherapy notes.
Stanford refused to separate her psychotherapy notes from other medical records. "Any time anybody asks for my medical records, my psychotherapy notes are going to be turned over."
In 2006, DHHS rejected Galvan's HIPAA complaint. From Apr-Nov 2003, DHHS had 23,896 privacy complaints, but hasn't taken any action. HIPAA exceptions allow release in connection with "payment" or "health-care operations."
Galvan, 51, is representing herself, because she couldn't find a California attorney with privacy experience.
Deborah Peel, Austin TX, psychiatrist and head of Patient Privacy Rights, says, "How many women want somebody to know whether they are on birth control?"
NYT, 26 Dec 2006, Costs of a crisis: Diabetics confront a tangle of workplace laws, N.R. Kleinfield.
Some companies fire diabetics for ostensible safety reasons, even though there's no evidence that they're unsafe. Courts nationwide have split on whether diabetes is a disability under the test that a "major life activity" is "substantially limited".
John Steigauf, 47, was a truck mechanic for United Parcel Service, but UPS put him on leave because of his diabetes. UPS claimed his blood sugar might plummet while he tested a truck, causing an accident, and he couldn't get an interstate commercial driver's license with insulin-dependent diabe
People are getting wise and no longer expect corporate/government news sources to provide them with anything close to the truth. More and more, they are turning to various independent Internet news sources, and make up their own minds about what is credible, and what is not.
As a journalist I'm not worried that citizen journalists will do my job better than me any time soon (although I wish they would, because it would be better for the world).
When I first started writing news, for alternative newspapers, I thought it was easy. I knew who the good guys were, and who the bad guys were, and all I had to do was expose them. Just try it. If only it were that easy.
The most important lesson I learned as a real journalist, as distinct from a hippie journalist, is that whenever you attack the bastards, always call them up and give them a chance to respond. Let them defend themselves, and then show how they're lying. Just try it. Every real journalist (Molly Ivins, for one) will tell you all the times they thought they had the guy nailed, but when they called him up, it turned the story completely around.
There was a story on This American Life http://www.thislife.org/ about a kid who was in Europe, and talked his way into a press conference with George H.W. Bush (the father, not the stupid one). Good work so far. Then he got a chance to ask the President of the United States a question on the environment. Bush said that he supported nuclear power because it would do, overall, less harm to the environment. He actually made some good points.
The kid hadn't done his homework. He didn't know how to frame a good question that would pin the bastard down, and he didn't know how to follow it up. He didn't know shit about the environment. Bush had probably answered the same question a dozen times before, knew more about the environment than the kid did, and knew how to give a good answer. TAL played a tape of the press conference, and it was painful for me to listen, because I'd been in that same situation so many times before. (If you want to become a citizen journalist, you can practice getting prepared by looking up that story on the TAL web site. This will give you an idea of how hard it is to do research.)
Who do you want grilling your so-called elected leaders -- Amy Goodman, or some well-intentioned "activist" who doesn't know his facts (like those ringers they have in the audience during the presidential debates)?
I'm not defending the White House press corps either. Sure, the average stoned activist could do a better job than Judy Miller, but that's a pretty low bar.
There is one case where citizen journalists can do a good job, and that's as first-hand eyewitnesses. I remember going to an anti-war demonstration during the '60s, and having the New York City police viciously attack non-violent demonstrators (including me), some of whom had brought their children, and put some of them in the hospital with permanent injuries, for no reason that I could see (or that the City's lawyers could come up with in subsequent lawsuits). Running for safety, I came across a bunch of guys with press badges, huddled safely away from the scene where they couldn't witness the police brutality. On WBAI-FM radio, we heard first-hand accounts of what happened on the scene, which was consistent with what I saw.
Next morning, I picked up the New York Times, and saw a complete propaganda job, quoting only the police and City officials, claiming that the demonstrators had started it, it was the demonstrators' fault, and the cops had behaved with proper restraint. The Times didn'
He also called for a halt to criticism of public institutions.
He's calling for an end to criticism of government institutions, specifically himself. This is particularly inappropriate given his record of incompetence and false charges against Mohammed Haneef.
Wouldn't we all like to be protected from criticism of ourselves and our incompetence.
From TFA:
Hall said that Microsoft's main concern, and the reason it sent out Big Foot letters in the first place, was security. Well, of course. Think of the children.
As a real journalist, I can tell you from first-hand experience that in the more credible publications, (a) if a journalist was getting anything of value from a company (money, travel and accommodations, etc.) he would not be allowed to write about that company. (b) If an expert were writing something about his specialty, and he was getting something of value from a company as a consultant or something (which is legitimate), that expert would have to disclose his financial arrangements to the readers.
You can see these disclosures in scientific journals all the time. I just signed a disclosure form myself, in which I affirmed that I had no financial interests in the story I was writing about.
I admit there are a lot of astroturf publications in which an advertiser can buy a story, sometimes written by a PR firm, without disclosure, but I think most people who read those publications realize what's going on and give them the credibility that's appropriate.
I think the biggest concern is, what happens if you get sued for libel? The American libel laws tend to favor journalists who are writing about public figures, which means almost anybody who is in the news. If I make a mistake, as long as I was acting in good faith, they can't get damages against me.
To win a case against a journalist, a public figure has to prove malice. Malice is a specific legal term which is different from the everyday meaning of the term, but one example of malice would be writing defamatory charges against a competitor.
The worst case I can think of offhand was a TV producer for one of the major networks, who left TV and went into public relations. One of her clients was a bank, which was competing with Safra. The ex-producer got the bright idea of faxing unfavorable stories about Safra to newspapers and magazines, most of them in underdeveloped countries. The stories were anti-Semitic and contained false, defamatory statements about Safra.
When she was working in journalism, she was used to keeping her sources confidential, but in public relations, there's no such confidentiality, especially when people get sued for libel, and lawyers start taking depositions. She was so stupid that she didn't realize that her fax machine was sending her own phone number at the top of the fax and could easily be traced back to her. So she and her banking client got caught. (But they would have caught her anyway, because when lawyers sue somebody for libel, they can force the defendants, or anyone connected with the case, to disclose lots of information.)
Safra sued them, and the bank finally settled for several million dollars, which Safra contributed to charity, as I recall.
But the point is, if you're a journalist, you're operating by one set of rules. If you're getting paid by a company, and acting in their interest, you're operating by another set of rules. If you don't disclose your financial interests in the matters you write about, you're skating on thin ice, and opening yourself to libel. You're also dragging your client into liability for big (multi-million dollar) damages. If they sue you, all the facts will come out.
I expect that Intel will decide that they don't want to be associated with Wayan any more.
Natalie Friedman, a senior who is not part of any sports programs, said she was called in by her dean and scolded about Facebook photos of her behind a bar at a friend's house with drinks visible. She declined to say whether she was drinking, saying that no one can prove there was alcohol in the beverages.
Friedman said some of the photos obtained by school officials show students holding drinks at weddings and family vacations.
Word processors vs. desktop publishers
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
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· Score: 1
When the first expensive "desktop publishers" came out, an editor pointed out to me that they weren't "publishers" at all, they were typesetters.
He said, "A publisher is somebody who hires a hooker for an advertiser."
Right. The problem as I see it is government policy-makers who either don't understand or don't care about the scientific method. Search Google for "Chris Mooney".
At this time, we just don't know how effectively the resulting data could be searched for unusual behaviour. Nothing of this scale has been done yet. That's my point.
But it could work, at least in principle, because all of the technology issues involved have already been solved for other problems. I don't agree that it could work in principle, with any technology that we have now or in the forseeable future. What evidence do you have? I put out a call for evidence.
The one thing that otherwise-intelligent techies miss is that computer-level technology problems are easy (given a blank check). It's the other problems that are hard, such as: how do you tell whether somebody is a terrorist? How do you tell from watching him in a crowd?
The remaining issue is how well you can automatically distinguish between a terrorist and a regular person when all you know about each is everywhere they have been in the last few years. Well, yeah. That's the problem. If you discover a terrorist, do you flag everybody who lives in his apartment building, and everyone across the street, as also a suspected terrorist, as Homeland Security often does?
People say, "Oh, we'll just collect everything, put everything into a big database, and run an artificial intelligence program for a week to find correlations." But lots of times people try that and it doesn't work (especially in medicine, where as you may have noticed we haven't cured cancer yet).
Being flagged with a false positive could prove rather inconvenient. Well, yeah. There are a number of U.S. residents who were arrested, chained, taken into a prison-like confinement, not told the reason for being held, and not allowed access to a lawyer, who later turned out to be innocent of anything except having an Arabic name. There were a couple of stories about that in the New York Times Magazine. One story was called, "Who is this Franz Kafka they keep talking about?" if I remember correctly. One guy was a doctor studying radiology at M.D. Anderson. Another guy was a salesman with the name Mohammed who coincidentally happened to be using the same computer that a 9/11 hijacker had used the same day at Kinko's, and he made the mistake of signing his name in the log. And then there's David Nelson.
Once again, my point is, yes, it might work, but what evidence do you have that it will work any time during your lifetime, other than faith in technology?
a sophisticated computer system to scan video images of city streets looking for everything from troublemakers to terrorists. The IBM system, called the Smart Surveillance System, uses analytic tools to index digital video recordings and then issue real-time alerts when certain patterns are detected. IBM's computer scientists must be getting paid quite a bit to endure the humiliation of making claims that every knowledgeable person knows are false.
These systems have been tested before, particularly in England, where Thatcher's government paid a shitload of money that could have been used for something useful, and the only useful thing they got out of it was well-designed studies that demonstrated that these screening systems don't work.
Here in Manhattan, we had a video monitoring system set up in the labyrnthine Columbus Circle subway station for a couple of years. It also had no effect on crime. (Nor did it have any effect on the cops beating up innocent people, who happened to be black.) The City took money that could have paid for more police (hopefully honest ones) and spent it on video toys instead. Duh.
Now we're getting these digital cameras all over NYC -- even though we have good data from England, from our own pilot programs, from the Atlanta Olympics, and elsewhere, that they don't do what their promoters claim. What it demonstrates is that a huckster can sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of useless digital junk to unscrupulous politicians accountable to a hysterical public and campaign contributors as long as it has blinking LEDs and they say the magic word "terrorism."
I challenge anyone to cite any scientific evidence, any pilot program -- not some security "expert"'s opinion -- that there are any computer "patterns" that can identify "troublemakers" or "terrorists".
Stop and think. The London suicide bombers walked on the subway with backpacks full of explosives. Innocent people go about their business on the subway all the time wearing backpacks. What pattern is there that a digital camera could spot?
The only good news in this story is that we Americans are finally ripping off the Chinese for a couple of hundred million dollars, which is good for the balance of trade. This is known in economics as the broken window fallacy.
Maybe we could sell them the Brooklyn Bridge too -- oh, wait, they already own it.
I can't believe how many posts I had to go through to find somebody who actually knows what he's talking about.
Adding additional steps into the process with bar-code scanners only complicates things and introduces further possibility of errors. Yes, you'd think computer nerds would know that. Don't they study engineering any more?
There actually are studies (in Archives or Annals, I always mix them up) that found that automating medical procedures sometimes causes worse outcomes. It's harder to type a prescription into a computer than write it by hand.
Oh and Slashdot... please stop with the non-sense. Yes, please.
Oh, forget it. It's hopeless.
I would rather pay money for useful information than get useless, biased, advertiser-influenced information free. I pay $100 a year for the Wall Street Journal, and about $600 a year for a bunch of science and professional magazines, because I want solid information, not the same AP or Reuters story 35 times over on Google News.
My time is too valuable to waste reading junk (with the possible exception of Slashdot).
The reason for the ban (which is supported by a lot of scientists, which is why Congress could do it) is not because Congress doesn't want to go to Mars, but because scientists have seen manned space programs suck up budgets that would otherwise go to robotic missions. And the robotics missions are the ones that bring in most of the science.
I just read in one of the science magazines (Science, I think, although I can't find the article) about how the European Union spent $1 billion to build a research satellite to be attached to the space station, which would collect data for many scientific projects. But NASA backed out of its commitment to put the satellite into space, because of shuttle problems, and now it's sitting in a clean warehouse and may never be launched.
I was brought up on science fiction like everybody else here, and I'd love to see a manned flight to Mars, but if you send humans to Mars, it takes a support system with 10 times the weight of a robotic lab, and you have to build everything to strict safety standards. So the cost is 10 or 100 times as much. A death can halt the program for a year. And they're much more likely to scrub a human mission if there are any safety doubts.
If you want good science, a robot can do almost anything on Mars better than a human. Right now, the main purpose of a human on Mars is entertainment, like TV football or mountain climbing. As Theodore Sturgeon said when he watched a liftoff, they're spending billions of dollars just so that some space geeks like us could get an orgasm. He's right. I love the space program, but there's a constant amount of money, and you have to ask what it's taking money away from. It's a better orgasm to get electromagnetic data and readings from micro-sized analytical chemistry and physics labs.
The final bill for the war in Iraq will run around $1 trillion, according to the best estimates I saw. If GWB had spent $1 trillion on a manned Mars mission instead, I would have taken a guilty pleasure in it (ignoring for the moment the more socially pressing things money could go for). But he didn't. He pissed it away for a war, and the cupboard is bare. Now we have to go back to zero-sum budgeting in aerospace again.
Slashdot Mirror
(But that is a reasonable question -- you get points for skepticism.)
This teaches 2 related lessons about journalism and science:
(1) There are 2 kinds of publications in the world -- those that check their facts and those that don't. The first are reliable; the second aren't. This is why some obscure guy publishing a blog can be more reliable than most major newspapers and TV stations. (Or in this case, why IEEE Spectrum is more reliable than most daily newspapers.)
(2) There are 2 kinds of scientists in the world -- those who gather a consensus of experts before going public, and those who don't. The first are reliable; the second aren't. (This is why that story recently about cell phones causing brain cancer by an Australian neurologist was complete bullshit.) Hellman is competent enough in science to know that.
According to TFA http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/apr08/6099
Hellman's method isn't unfamiliar to those trying to gauge the risk of failure for complex systems, such as nuclear reactors. IEEE Spectrum asked J. Wesley Hines, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Tennessee, to examine Hellman's methods, which were detailed in the appendix of the Bent article. "I only read the appendix but feel his argument is rational and also feel his methods are justified," says Hines. "Some could argue with the numbers he used, but he does give logical reasons for using those numbers and admits that they have large uncertainties since the events have been rare in the past."
Robert N. Charette, who runs the risk-management consultancy ITABHI and is a regular contributor to IEEE Spectrum, agrees with Hines. However, he says Hellman should have also turned the analysis on its head. "The other side of the risk equation is, suppose you get rid of nuclear weapons. Does that increase the probability of war? Pretending there aren't any nukes, how many wars would we have had?"
And the signers http://nuclearrisk.org/statement.php The above statement has been endorsed by the following Charter Signers:*
Prof. Kenneth Arrow, Stanford University, 1972 Nobel Laureate in Economics; see also Nobel Announcement
Mr. D. James Bidzos, Chairman of the Board, Verisign Inc.
Dr. Richard Garwin, IBM Fellow Emeritus, former member President's Science Advisory Committee and Defense Science Board; see also NY Times article
Adm. Bobby R. Inman, USN (Ret.), University of Texas at Austin, former Director NSA and Deputy Director CIA
Prof. William Kays, former Dean of Engineering, Stanford University
Prof. Donald Kennedy, President Emeritus of Stanford University, former head of FDA
Prof. Martin Perl, Stanford University, 1995 Nobel Laureate in Physics; see also Nobel Announcement
(BTW, here's a tip for any student. You used to be able to get a student membership in the IEEE, which includes a subscription to Spectrum and another (expensive) IEEE magazine of your choice, for some ridiculously low amount like $12 a year. It's a great deal for the magazines alone, although IEEE membership has even better benefits that most students don't even know about.)
I am sorely disappointed by the negative responses to this article.
Is this Slashdot? You sound like a bunch of klutzes who wouldn't know how to get into their cars if they locked the keys inside. Who wouldn't know how to fix their glasses if the frames broke.
It's called a concept. Ed Land, the founder of Polaroid, gave his engineers a block of wood small enough to fit into a back pocket, and told them to build an instant camera that size. And they didn't whine about how the technology wasn't ready for it, they built it! And that camera revolutionized p0rn.
If you can't build a holographic projector inside a teacup with $50 worth of parts, get out of the way for somebody who can.
1973 was the date of the Supreme Court's decision in Roe vs. Wade, which gave us a right to abortion. There was a golden age of freedom for a while. But whenever a politician takes power, he takes away your rights to aggrandize his own power.
The lesson is, you don't get freedom from the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. You have to fight for it.
You are naive to believe that politics is involved. There is no shortage of republicans that have been burned by law enforcement including the feds. Hell, Spitzer himself authorized/requested plenty of investigations including those involving prostitution, that is part of the press frenzy of this case. Also, analysis of banking activity has been going on since the 1970s, maybe even the 1960s. Banks, auto dealers, etc have been required to report sufficiently large cash transactions for many decades. Your tinfoil had may be a little too tight, try loosening it up one rivet hole.
If you believe them, you might want to buy the Brooklyn Bridge too, if you have not done so already. If you already bought the Brooklyn Bridge, you probably bought into the Bush Administration too.
Not really, the FBI is subject to the oversight of a freely and fairly elected congress. That's incredibly different than the precedents you offer. Collecting and analyzing data is something that law enforcement has legitimately done for centuries, data mining is just automation.
Really? Exactly who had oversight over the FBI agents and the [Republican] Justice Department agents who data mined [Democrat] Eliot Spitzer's bank deposits? Or [Democratic] Governor Don Siegelman? http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/nyregion/21justice.html http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/03/10/spitzer/index.html
I don't know how old you are, but when I was young the police used to watch the people. My friend's father was sent to jail because of his Communist connections. My favorite physics teacher was blacklisted and had to leave the country because he couldn't teach here (he finally returned to teach my freshman physics course in 1959). They kicked the Communists out of the labor unions -- and the Communists (for all their faults) pushed the unions to drive a much better deal for the worker than they have today. Under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI tapped Martin Luther King's phone and spied on him -- sort of like the way they spied on Eliot Spitzer today. So it's not much different today.
This is a guy got screwed worse by capitalist entrepreneurs than he did by the state (which at least gave him a job and computers while it lasted).http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris#History>
I wouldn't be so enthusiastic about capitalist competition if I were him. Guys like him don't seem to have a talent for it.
Here's some of the problems you can have when the confidentiality of your medical records is compromised.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06362/749444-114.stm
WSJ, 26 Dec 2006, Medical dilemma: spread of records stirs patient fears of privacy erosion; Ms. Galvin's insurer studies psychotherapist's notes; a dispute over the rules; complaint tally hits 23,896, Theo Francis.
(My notes, for people who are too lazy to even click on the link:)
In 1996, after her fiance died suddenly, Patricia Galvin left New York for San Francisco and was hired by Heller Ehrman LLP.
In 2000, Galvin began psychotherapy sessions at Stanford Hospital & Clinics with clinical psychologist Rachel Manber, who discussed her problems at work, her fiance's death, and her relationships with family, friends and co-workers. Manber assured Galvin that her notes would be confidential.
"I would never have engaged in psychotherapy with her if she did not promise me these notes were under lock and key."
In 2001, Galvin was rear-ended at a red light and suffered 4 herniated disks, which worsened.
In 2003, she applied for long-term disability. Her employer's carrier, UnumProvident Corp., said it would deny her claim unless she signed a release.
Manber assured Galvin her therapy notes would not be turned over. 3 months later, Unum denied her claim, because of psychotherapy notes about "working on a case" and a job interview in New York, which, Unum said, showed she was able to work. Galvin says they misinterpreted the notes.
In 2004, Galvin sued Manber, Stanford and Unum for malpractice and invasion of privacy, under California law. Galvin said "my most private thoughts, my personal tragedies, secrets about other people" were exposed.
In 2005, Galvin learned that Stanford had scanned Manber's notes into its system, making them part of her basic medical record. Stanford sent this file to Unum and the other driver.
Stanford said that "psychotherapy notes that are kept together with the patient's other medical records are not defined as 'psychotherapy notes' under HIPAA." It would be "impracticable" to keep them separate.
The health-care industry is scanning documents into electronic record systems. HIPAA gives psychotherapy notes special protection, but not when mixed in with general medical records.
Peter Swire, law professor, Ohio State U., explains why they wrote the rule giving confidentiality only to separate psychotherapy notes.
Stanford refused to separate her psychotherapy notes from other medical records. "Any time anybody asks for my medical records, my psychotherapy notes are going to be turned over."
In 2006, DHHS rejected Galvan's HIPAA complaint. From Apr-Nov 2003, DHHS had 23,896 privacy complaints, but hasn't taken any action. HIPAA exceptions allow release in connection with "payment" or "health-care operations."
Galvan, 51, is representing herself, because she couldn't find a California attorney with privacy experience.
Deborah Peel, Austin TX, psychiatrist and head of Patient Privacy Rights, says, "How many women want somebody to know whether they are on birth control?"
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116709136139859229.html
NYT, 26 Dec 2006, Costs of a crisis: Diabetics confront a tangle of workplace laws, N.R. Kleinfield.
Some companies fire diabetics for ostensible safety reasons, even though there's no evidence that they're unsafe. Courts nationwide have split on whether diabetes is a disability under the test that a "major life activity" is "substantially limited".
John Steigauf, 47, was a truck mechanic for United Parcel Service, but UPS put him on leave because of his diabetes. UPS claimed his blood sugar might plummet while he tested a truck, causing an accident, and he couldn't get an interstate commercial driver's license with insulin-dependent diabe
People are getting wise and no longer expect corporate/government news sources to provide them with anything close to the truth. More and more, they are turning to various independent Internet news sources, and make up their own minds about what is credible, and what is not.
News sources such as these: http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/
You mean like, "First Hour: Allan Favish in the murder of Vince Foster"?I give up. You've found a news source less reliable than Judy Miller.
When I first started writing news, for alternative newspapers, I thought it was easy. I knew who the good guys were, and who the bad guys were, and all I had to do was expose them. Just try it. If only it were that easy.
The most important lesson I learned as a real journalist, as distinct from a hippie journalist, is that whenever you attack the bastards, always call them up and give them a chance to respond. Let them defend themselves, and then show how they're lying. Just try it. Every real journalist (Molly Ivins, for one) will tell you all the times they thought they had the guy nailed, but when they called him up, it turned the story completely around.
There was a story on This American Life http://www.thislife.org/ about a kid who was in Europe, and talked his way into a press conference with George H.W. Bush (the father, not the stupid one). Good work so far. Then he got a chance to ask the President of the United States a question on the environment. Bush said that he supported nuclear power because it would do, overall, less harm to the environment. He actually made some good points.
The kid hadn't done his homework. He didn't know how to frame a good question that would pin the bastard down, and he didn't know how to follow it up. He didn't know shit about the environment. Bush had probably answered the same question a dozen times before, knew more about the environment than the kid did, and knew how to give a good answer. TAL played a tape of the press conference, and it was painful for me to listen, because I'd been in that same situation so many times before. (If you want to become a citizen journalist, you can practice getting prepared by looking up that story on the TAL web site. This will give you an idea of how hard it is to do research.)
Look at what I think is one of the best news sources in English: Democracy Now http://www.democracynow.org/ Take a look at this: http://www.democracynow.org/2008/1/28/the_democrats_suharto_bill_clinton_richard There is no way that any citizen journalist is going to be able to question Richard Holbrooke or Bill Clinton about human rights the way Alan Nairn and Amy Goodman did. Or this http://www.democracynow.org/features They know their facts thorougly.
Who do you want grilling your so-called elected leaders -- Amy Goodman, or some well-intentioned "activist" who doesn't know his facts (like those ringers they have in the audience during the presidential debates)?
I'm not defending the White House press corps either. Sure, the average stoned activist could do a better job than Judy Miller, but that's a pretty low bar.
There is one case where citizen journalists can do a good job, and that's as first-hand eyewitnesses. I remember going to an anti-war demonstration during the '60s, and having the New York City police viciously attack non-violent demonstrators (including me), some of whom had brought their children, and put some of them in the hospital with permanent injuries, for no reason that I could see (or that the City's lawyers could come up with in subsequent lawsuits). Running for safety, I came across a bunch of guys with press badges, huddled safely away from the scene where they couldn't witness the police brutality. On WBAI-FM radio, we heard first-hand accounts of what happened on the scene, which was consistent with what I saw.
Next morning, I picked up the New York Times, and saw a complete propaganda job, quoting only the police and City officials, claiming that the demonstrators had started it, it was the demonstrators' fault, and the cops had behaved with proper restraint. The Times didn'
Men are good for nothing but sex and programming.
I can live with that.
He's calling for an end to criticism of government institutions, specifically himself. This is particularly inappropriate given his record of incompetence and false charges against Mohammed Haneef.
Wouldn't we all like to be protected from criticism of ourselves and our incompetence.
As a real journalist, I can tell you from first-hand experience that in the more credible publications, (a) if a journalist was getting anything of value from a company (money, travel and accommodations, etc.) he would not be allowed to write about that company. (b) If an expert were writing something about his specialty, and he was getting something of value from a company as a consultant or something (which is legitimate), that expert would have to disclose his financial arrangements to the readers.
You can see these disclosures in scientific journals all the time. I just signed a disclosure form myself, in which I affirmed that I had no financial interests in the story I was writing about.
I admit there are a lot of astroturf publications in which an advertiser can buy a story, sometimes written by a PR firm, without disclosure, but I think most people who read those publications realize what's going on and give them the credibility that's appropriate.
I think the biggest concern is, what happens if you get sued for libel? The American libel laws tend to favor journalists who are writing about public figures, which means almost anybody who is in the news. If I make a mistake, as long as I was acting in good faith, they can't get damages against me.
To win a case against a journalist, a public figure has to prove malice. Malice is a specific legal term which is different from the everyday meaning of the term, but one example of malice would be writing defamatory charges against a competitor.
The worst case I can think of offhand was a TV producer for one of the major networks, who left TV and went into public relations. One of her clients was a bank, which was competing with Safra. The ex-producer got the bright idea of faxing unfavorable stories about Safra to newspapers and magazines, most of them in underdeveloped countries. The stories were anti-Semitic and contained false, defamatory statements about Safra.
When she was working in journalism, she was used to keeping her sources confidential, but in public relations, there's no such confidentiality, especially when people get sued for libel, and lawyers start taking depositions. She was so stupid that she didn't realize that her fax machine was sending her own phone number at the top of the fax and could easily be traced back to her. So she and her banking client got caught. (But they would have caught her anyway, because when lawyers sue somebody for libel, they can force the defendants, or anyone connected with the case, to disclose lots of information.)
Safra sued them, and the bank finally settled for several million dollars, which Safra contributed to charity, as I recall.
But the point is, if you're a journalist, you're operating by one set of rules. If you're getting paid by a company, and acting in their interest, you're operating by another set of rules. If you don't disclose your financial interests in the matters you write about, you're skating on thin ice, and opening yourself to libel. You're also dragging your client into liability for big (multi-million dollar) damages. If they sue you, all the facts will come out.
I expect that Intel will decide that they don't want to be associated with Wayan any more.
This student shouldn't have any trouble getting into law school.
From TFA http://www.startribune.com/local/west/13549646.html
Natalie Friedman, a senior who is not part of any sports programs, said she was called in by her dean and scolded about Facebook photos of her behind a bar at a friend's house with drinks visible. She declined to say whether she was drinking, saying that no one can prove there was alcohol in the beverages.
Friedman said some of the photos obtained by school officials show students holding drinks at weddings and family vacations.
When the first expensive "desktop publishers" came out, an editor pointed out to me that they weren't "publishers" at all, they were typesetters.
He said, "A publisher is somebody who hires a hooker for an advertiser."
Right. The problem as I see it is government policy-makers who either don't understand or don't care about the scientific method. Search Google for "Chris Mooney".
My question is, can you cite a published study where it's worked on applications like security? The answer is no.
The one thing that otherwise-intelligent techies miss is that computer-level technology problems are easy (given a blank check). It's the other problems that are hard, such as: how do you tell whether somebody is a terrorist? How do you tell from watching him in a crowd? The remaining issue is how well you can automatically distinguish between a terrorist and a regular person when all you know about each is everywhere they have been in the last few years. Well, yeah. That's the problem. If you discover a terrorist, do you flag everybody who lives in his apartment building, and everyone across the street, as also a suspected terrorist, as Homeland Security often does?
People say, "Oh, we'll just collect everything, put everything into a big database, and run an artificial intelligence program for a week to find correlations." But lots of times people try that and it doesn't work (especially in medicine, where as you may have noticed we haven't cured cancer yet). Being flagged with a false positive could prove rather inconvenient. Well, yeah. There are a number of U.S. residents who were arrested, chained, taken into a prison-like confinement, not told the reason for being held, and not allowed access to a lawyer, who later turned out to be innocent of anything except having an Arabic name. There were a couple of stories about that in the New York Times Magazine. One story was called, "Who is this Franz Kafka they keep talking about?" if I remember correctly. One guy was a doctor studying radiology at M.D. Anderson. Another guy was a salesman with the name Mohammed who coincidentally happened to be using the same computer that a 9/11 hijacker had used the same day at Kinko's, and he made the mistake of signing his name in the log. And then there's David Nelson.
Once again, my point is, yes, it might work, but what evidence do you have that it will work any time during your lifetime, other than faith in technology?
These systems have been tested before, particularly in England, where Thatcher's government paid a shitload of money that could have been used for something useful, and the only useful thing they got out of it was well-designed studies that demonstrated that these screening systems don't work.
Here in Manhattan, we had a video monitoring system set up in the labyrnthine Columbus Circle subway station for a couple of years. It also had no effect on crime. (Nor did it have any effect on the cops beating up innocent people, who happened to be black.) The City took money that could have paid for more police (hopefully honest ones) and spent it on video toys instead. Duh.
Now we're getting these digital cameras all over NYC -- even though we have good data from England, from our own pilot programs, from the Atlanta Olympics, and elsewhere, that they don't do what their promoters claim. What it demonstrates is that a huckster can sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of useless digital junk to unscrupulous politicians accountable to a hysterical public and campaign contributors as long as it has blinking LEDs and they say the magic word "terrorism."
I challenge anyone to cite any scientific evidence, any pilot program -- not some security "expert"'s opinion -- that there are any computer "patterns" that can identify "troublemakers" or "terrorists".
Stop and think. The London suicide bombers walked on the subway with backpacks full of explosives. Innocent people go about their business on the subway all the time wearing backpacks. What pattern is there that a digital camera could spot?
The only good news in this story is that we Americans are finally ripping off the Chinese for a couple of hundred million dollars, which is good for the balance of trade. This is known in economics as the broken window fallacy.
Maybe we could sell them the Brooklyn Bridge too -- oh, wait, they already own it.
There actually are studies (in Archives or Annals, I always mix them up) that found that automating medical procedures sometimes causes worse outcomes. It's harder to type a prescription into a computer than write it by hand. Oh and Slashdot... please stop with the non-sense. Yes, please.
Oh, forget it. It's hopeless.
Agreed, for a different reason.
I would rather pay money for useful information than get useless, biased, advertiser-influenced information free. I pay $100 a year for the Wall Street Journal, and about $600 a year for a bunch of science and professional magazines, because I want solid information, not the same AP or Reuters story 35 times over on Google News.
My time is too valuable to waste reading junk (with the possible exception of Slashdot).
The reason for the ban (which is supported by a lot of scientists, which is why Congress could do it) is not because Congress doesn't want to go to Mars, but because scientists have seen manned space programs suck up budgets that would otherwise go to robotic missions. And the robotics missions are the ones that bring in most of the science.
I just read in one of the science magazines (Science, I think, although I can't find the article) about how the European Union spent $1 billion to build a research satellite to be attached to the space station, which would collect data for many scientific projects. But NASA backed out of its commitment to put the satellite into space, because of shuttle problems, and now it's sitting in a clean warehouse and may never be launched.
I was brought up on science fiction like everybody else here, and I'd love to see a manned flight to Mars, but if you send humans to Mars, it takes a support system with 10 times the weight of a robotic lab, and you have to build everything to strict safety standards. So the cost is 10 or 100 times as much. A death can halt the program for a year. And they're much more likely to scrub a human mission if there are any safety doubts.
If you want good science, a robot can do almost anything on Mars better than a human. Right now, the main purpose of a human on Mars is entertainment, like TV football or mountain climbing. As Theodore Sturgeon said when he watched a liftoff, they're spending billions of dollars just so that some space geeks like us could get an orgasm. He's right. I love the space program, but there's a constant amount of money, and you have to ask what it's taking money away from. It's a better orgasm to get electromagnetic data and readings from micro-sized analytical chemistry and physics labs.
The final bill for the war in Iraq will run around $1 trillion, according to the best estimates I saw. If GWB had spent $1 trillion on a manned Mars mission instead, I would have taken a guilty pleasure in it (ignoring for the moment the more socially pressing things money could go for). But he didn't. He pissed it away for a war, and the cupboard is bare. Now we have to go back to zero-sum budgeting in aerospace again.
Plus Richard Feynman. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman