Blog Posts

October 2010

• 2010-10-04

  [story] This did happen

  PART 1: THE ELDERS Now, such a long time after first contact, it was hard to remember the times, so much earlier, when the elders had established the borders, such as they were, of the terrain, such as it was. The elders, The Elders, were no longer around, or visible even. But their influence certainly was felt.

  Yes, their Designees, in uniforms and head gear, were always around, and apparently in control. But really, they rarely meddled in these small disputes. Or was it a small dispute? Would it turn into something ugly to be retold over and over as plans were made for the future?

  First contact, in fact, had happened quietly, so quietly, it would have been easy to miss it. Or did it even...

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September 2010

• 2010-09-30

  I never remember anything

  Finally someone writes about somethingthat happens to me (and yes, to you) all the time.

  What was that movie about that we saw LAST WEEK?

  How come did it take till page 102 before you realized you had already read this book?

  No friends, no need to feel shame anymore. It seems like it happens to everyone (should I add, for you smart alecs out there – it happens to everyone — eventually.)

  “Did this mean that it hadn’t been a waste of time to read all those books, even if I seemingly couldn’t remember what was in them?” (from New York Times)

  #personal
• 2010-09-29

  Advice for New Graduate Students

  If you know anyone in graduate school (oops, or if you are in graduate school yourself, or planning to go to one), this is interesting reading: Advice for New Graduate Students from Freedom to Tinker: [Ed Felten says: This is the time of year when professors offer advice to new students. My colleague Prof. Jennifer Rexford gave a great talk to a group of our incoming engineering Ph.D. students, about how to make the most of graduate school. Here’s what she said: ]

  Those of you who know me, know that I collect quotations as a hobby. (The short version of the story is that I moved ...

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  #education
• 2010-09-29

  XMarks is the only thing that will sync Safari with Firefox

  And, it’s leaving us: “The past four years have been a wild ride for us: growing something from nothing to substantial scale, providing a simple service that people love because it simplifies their lives. We’ve learned tons along the way, often by making big mistakes. We’re really sorry that this last lesson means that you’ll have to find an alternative to Xmarks, but the alternatives exist and you’ll have no problem finding them.” (from Xmarks Blog)

  Again this shows how good ideas don’t always win.

  This was an excellent idea, but perhaps it suffered from the classic-cliche-VC-quip “It’s a feature not a product”, or worse, “It’s a product not a company”. I...

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  #technology
• 2010-09-28

  Owner of Segway dies in Segway accident

  This is just a weird weird happening: “His body was found late Sunday morning after a passer-by reported seeing a man plummet 30 feet into the River Wharfe, the police said, adding that a “Segway-style vehicle” had also been found.

  They did not say what had caused the accident.” (from New York Times)

• 2010-09-28

  Really? Gargling With Salt Water Can Ease Cold Symptoms – NYTimes.com

  Another old-wives-tail bunked. (opposite of de-bunked?) “At the end of the study period, the group that regularly gargled had a nearly 40 percent decrease in upper respiratory tract infectionscompared with the control group, and when they did get sick, “gargling tended to attenuate bronchial symptoms,” the researchers wrote.” (from New York Times)

  #health
• 2010-09-25

  Google’s servers

  From an article about Google’s hardware: “Google’s big surprise: each server has its own 12-volt battery to supply power if there’s a problem with the main source of electricity. The company also revealed for the first time that since 2005, its data centers have been composed of standard shipping containers–each with 1,160 servers and a power consumption that can reach 250 kilowatts.” (from CNET)

  There are lots of other choice tidbits about the design of the millions (?) of tiny servers that Google uses to run its data centers. Quite interesting.

  #technology
• 2010-09-24

  Ok, but what’s a quango?

  A BBC Headline says: “Leaked list suggests 180 quangos to be abolished” (from BBC Web Site)

  Inquiring minds want to know, what the heck is a quango? Before you look it up, can you guess? First I thought it was a derogatory word for some ethnic group. Then I thought it might be a currency. Who knows?

  #politics
• 2010-09-23

  This never happened: Russian Spy

  This never happened… We were working on some piece of software or something and the Russians invaded our workplace and demanded that we create it for them. We were threatened in big ways. We had a kind of a robot thing small which had a video camera and it was left in the Big room while we were put into a Small room. They demanded that we concede but we would not.

  I had doubts about it, why not just do it for them and be done with it? Otherwise we might all be killed and whats the point. We coud get the government to help us write a perfect contract that would make sure that if we did it they would release us what shame would there be in that?

  Then they decided to give us a little outdoor ...

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• 2010-09-20

  Get a free shipping box from the US Postal Service

  Just go to this link. United States Postal Service: Free Shipping Box

  Nothing more to it.

  No strings attached (as far as I can see 🙂

  No kidding. I just did it. Share and share alike!

• 2010-09-18

  How (not) to design a ballot

  My head is full of democracy and elections these days. How come, you ask? Well for the last year or so I’ve been working for the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation, on elections technology. This month’s focus is generating ballots for two elections happening in November. So more than usual, I am dreaming in black and white forms. Anyway… I came across a couple of instructive blog posts about the new non-lever voting that New York unveiled this month. Predictably, when dealing with humans, some people don’t like them. You can’t please them all, right? But really the objections raised here are quite legitimate.

  If this important yet rather esoteric topic interests you, here are three good ...

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  #design
• 2010-09-17

  Ever heard of the Johari Window?

  I came across the idea of the Johari Window during one of the presentations at the Bif-6 Conference. I’d never heard of it before. To me it’s an interesting formalism to think about ones self knowledge. Reading about the Johari Window on Wikipedia (where else) but it was an interesting way to understanding personality. “Room 1 is the part of ourselves that we see and others see. Room 2 is t he aspect that others see but we are not aware of. Room 3 is the most mysterious room in that the unconscious or subconscious part of us is seen by neither ourselves nor others. Room 4 is our private space, which we know but keep from others.” (from Wikipedia)

  Who knows if this approach (reminiscent a little bit of Myers Brigss) is well known, respected or in total disrepute. It spoke to me, so I thought I would share it.

• 2010-09-10

  Future of the university

  I saw an article in the New York Times and other places about the future of the University, and even the End of the University. I have a bit of a curiosity about this topic as Lecturer at Brandeis University. Here’s a blog post from a Professor of Philsophy at Calvin College analyzing those articles and giving his own perspective, where he says: I’m very sympathetic to trying to move beyond the department-as-fortress model which currently dominates higher education, despite all of our talk of interdisciplinarity. While we might have a veneer of cross-discip...

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  #education #brandeis
• 2010-09-09

  The Tor Anonymizer

  Have you heard of this thing, the Tor Anonymizer? Ok again admittedly another highly geeky system, but pretty fascinating. Makes you think that the handwringing worrying of the security wonks isn’t as over the top as all that. Tor is a sophisticated privacy tool designed to prevent tracking of where a web user surfs on the internet and with whom a user communicates. It’s endorsed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil liberties groups as a method for whistleblowers and human-rights workers to communicate with journalists, among other uses. (from Rogue Nodes Turn Tor Anonymizer Into Eavesdropper’s Paradise

  Read the article, it’s a fascinating look into the world of security.

  #technology
• 2010-09-07

  Mathematical Foundations of Consciousness?

  Say what? I came across this paper; Mathematical Foundations of Consciousness. I generally love this stuff: Mathematics and writings on the nature of consciousness. When I saw this paper the title really intrigued me. Now my math is not strong enough to tackle anything like PhD level math (in fact my math knowledge beyond under graduate level is definitely uneven.) “The self-referential qualities of consciousness place it outside conventional logic(s) upon which scientific models and frameworks have heretofore been constructed. However more contemporary mathematical development has begun to deal with features of self-reference. We shall address Schrödinger’s...

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  #mathematics #science
• 2010-09-06

  Location Proofs

  The more businesses reward me for showing up at their establishments, the more likely it will be that a bad guy would want to pretend that they were there to garner those rewards. I came across a very interesting paper that proposes the notion of ‘location proofs.’: Enabling new mobile applications with location proofs)

  From the paper: “Location is rapidly becoming the next “killer application” as location-enabled mobile handheld devices proliferate. One class of applications that has yet-to-emerge are those in which users have an incentive to lie about their location. These applications cannot rely solel...

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  #technology
• 2010-09-05

  All about passwords

  Continuing my quest to get into the subtleties of security and measures to protect against ‘bad guys.’ I came across an interesting article in the New York Times, about choosing passwords. One of the fundamental questions that i grapple with is the right way to think about the tradeoff between measures to protect against ‘what might happen’ and the ill effects or unintended consequences of those measures on real life. Typical example: if you require people to have long complicated passwords to protect their logins, they end up writing them down or emailing them around which is a lot worse. Anyway, here’s a bit from the article:

  “At t...

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• 2010-09-04

  The Effect of Snakeoil Security: wheels within wheels

  As you can imagine I’ve been reading and learning more about security with my work in Elections (http://www.trustthevote.org). It’s a hall of mirrors and I struggle to really grasp when a possible threat is worse than the cure for it — in real world terms, rather than theoretical terms.This article is perceptive and deep and easy to understand at the surface, but hard to understand profoundly: The Effect of Snakeoil Security from ha.ckers.org web application security lab: This goes back to the bear in the woods analogy that I personally hate. The story goes that you don’t have to run faste...

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August 2010

• 2010-08-31

  Why I now have an email signature

  We’ve been on an SEO binge over the last 4-6 weeks. I’ve been educating myself by listening and reading to everything I can find my hands on. What’s SEO anyway? It stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and it refers to the science and art of getting your site to come up when people are searching with Google or one of the other search engines.

  As I tell the story to many people, I summarize what I’ve learned by noting that it’s all more or less common sense, once you hear it. But for some reason common sense isn’t always so common. The source that I have learned the most from (and where I’ve learned to really appreciate educational podcasts is the ...

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  #business
• 2010-08-29

  Branding: by Steve Jobs (my hero)

  [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmG9jzCHtSQ&fs=1&hl=en_US]

  #business #apple