Bruce Schneier reviews a paper about data mining, which unfortunately
includes the phrase “the Security-Liberty Debate” in its title.
He reiterates that
liberty is security.
It’s a liberty vs. control debate.Remember, this opinion is backed up by research. Continue reading— Data Mining and the Security-Liberty Debate, by Bruce Schneier, Schneier on Security, June 12, 2007
AP Photo/Don Ryan, FILE |
While the federal government tries to dump the costs of wildfires onto local governments, a new study indicates that federal policies have been making things worse:
"It was the conventional wisdom that salvage logging and planting could reduce the risk of high-severity fires," said Jonathan R. Thompson, a doctoral candidate in forest science at Oregon State, who was lead author of the study appearing this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Our data suggest otherwise."
They suggested that the large stands of closely packed young trees created by replanting are a much more volatile source of fuel for decades to come than the large dead trees that are cut down and hauled away in salvage logging operations.
—Scientists find logging dead trees after wildfire and replanting makes next year’s fire worse, by Jeff Barnard, AP, 11 June 2007
Salvage logging is removing dead trees after a fire. It turns out that doesn’t reduce the risk of fire, and close-packed new-planted trees increase that risk.
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James Duncan Davidson/O’Reilly Media |
In March, Carl Malamud finished organizing release on the Internet of videos of Congressional subcommittee hearings. Back in November 2006 Malamud was lobbying the Smithsonian Institution to rescind its exclusive contract with Showtime. Now he’s teamed up with others to multiplex such projects and get more done:
When you buy content, we get the material from the U.S. government and then upload the data to places like the Internet Archive, Google Video, and other fine content sources. Because this data is public domain, anybody can use the material without restriction!
— How Do We Do It? public.resource.org, accessed 9 June 2007
Continue readingPer Lessig’s agreement with CNN, we’ve uploaded both Presidential Debates to the Internet Archive:
The New York Times asked:
The steeply rising cost of preventing and suppressing wildfires, which burned more of the American landscape in 2006 than in any other year since at least 1960, is creating a rift between Washington and state and local governments over how the burden ought to be shouldered.Basically, wildfire costs have increased greatly in recent years, and the current federal administration wants to dump the costs onto states. Continue reading— As Costs of Wildfires Grow, So Does a Question, by Kirk Johnson, New York Times, January 3, 2007
Sometimes a politician says something so sensible you wonder why everbody
doesn’t say it:
There are lots of threats to you in the world. There’s the threat of a heart attack for genetic reasons. You can’t sit there and worry about everything. Get a life.
You have a much greater danger of being hit by lightning than being struck by a terrorist.
In terms of what you as individual on the streets should worry about is not whether the person sitting next to you on the subway is a terrorist. The likelihood of that is so small it is not something you should worry about.
—Buzz Over Mayor’s ‘Get a Life’ Remark, By Sewell Chan, Empire Zone, June 6, 2007, 9:46 am
The outlet that originally quoted Bloomberg, wcbstv.com, quotes several people as saying terrorism is a big threat. However, it also points out that New York City is the safest city in America, with violent crime in general low and decreasing. Maybe if that TV station and others reported that more often, instead of constant, irrational fear, more people would understand what Bloomberg is saying.
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Ben Hyde dug up a paper
about
Norms-Based Intellectual Property Systems: The Case of French Chefs,
which discusses the issues involved in the recent
case of the French chefs,
even though it was published before that foofaraw.
This paper makes me wonder if that’s what Apple is doing:
With great power comes great responsibility, and apparently with DRM-free music comes files embedded with identifying information. Such is the situation with Apple’s new DRM-free music: songs sold without DRM still have a user’s full name and account e-mail embedded in them, which means that dropping that new DRM-free song on your favorite P2P network could come back to bite you.The ars technica article goes on to recommend a trivial way to keep the music and ditch the identifiers, and points out that the presence of such an identifier on somebody else’s disk doesn’t necessarily prove copyright infringement. But maybe that’s not what Apple is really after. Maybe it’s so people will know that Apple could know, and other people could know, where you got your music. Like French chefs know where other chefs got certain recipes. Norms-based iTunes?We started examining the files this morning and noticed our names and e-mail addresses in the files, and we’ve found corroboration of the find at TUAW, as well. But there’s more to the story: Apple embeds your account information in all songs sold on the store, not just DRM-free songs. Previously it wasn’t much of a big deal, since no one could imagine users sharing encrypted, DRMed content. But now that DRM-free music from Apple is on the loose, the hidden data is more significant since it could theoretically be used to trace shared tunes back to the original owner. It must also be kept in mind that this kind of information could be spoofed.
— Apple hides account info in DRM-free music, too, By Ken Fisher, ars technica, May 30, 2007 – 01:39PM CT
-jsq
What happens when one famous chef copies another’s recipe?
The place is agog at the effrontery of Vigneron, since they believe he has brazenly ripped off one of chef Wylie Dufresne’s best-known dishes. By the looks of a feature in the current issue of Wired, Vigneron has created a showpiece dish of a “cyber egg,” the yolk of which is made of carrot-cardamom purée, surrounded by a white of hardened coconut milk. Very interesting, given that almost the exact same dish (minus a garnish of foam and carrot) has been served often at wd-50, is featured on the restaurant’s website, and, we are told by members of the staff, has been eaten by Vigneron at least twice. “It’s one thing to be inspired by a dish and to change the flavors to make it your own,” says line cook John Bignelli. “But to just steal everything? How can you do that?” Dufresne, staying above the fray, declined to comment.
— Did Marcel From ‘Top Chef’ Really Just Rip Off Wylie Dufresne? Grub Street, New York Magazine, 15 May 2007
You get a lot of commentary.
Continue readingIt appears that Science, the journal of the America Association for the Advancement of Science, itself the largest scientific society in the world, has updated its authoring guidelines to include advice for Office 2007 users. The news is not good.And here I thought maybe they were rejecting Word entirely. Ah, it could happen. Most papers in physics, mathematics, and computer science journals are already formatted in TeX, if I’m not mistaken. So there is some diversity in publishing software; it’s not all a monoculture.“Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent Word release that are incompatible with our internal workflow, which was built around previous versions of the software, Science cannot at present accept any files in the new .docx format produced through Microsoft Word 2007, either for initial submission or for revision. Users of this release of Word should convert these files to a format compatible with Word 2003 or Word for Macintosh 2004 (or, for initial submission, to a PDF file) before submitting to Science.”— SCIENCE PUBS REJECT ARTICLES WRITTEN IN WORD 2007, by Rob Weir, Rob Weir Blog, Thursday, May 31, 2007
Meanwhile, the main reason Science rejected Word 2007 is that it is not backwards compatible with previous versions of Word, thus illustrating the Microsoft dilemma: stick with the old and retain customers, or fix problems and lose some. Not so big a dilemma with Word, perhaps. How many submittors to Science are there, as compared with business Word users? But much more of a problem for security fixes that require breaking backwards compatibility.
-jsq
Why long tail graphs are usually shown on a log scale:
Unfortunately, the illustration works only as a large graph, because graphed out on small paper gives us only two discernable lines, one on each axis.
— A practical model for analyzing long tails, by Kalevi Kilkki First Monday, volume 12, number 5 (May 2007)
The sports field graph is a clever way of showing how the fat head of a long tail distribution can be extremely higher than the long tail; this is normally not so clear on log scale graphs.
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