Corporation Says It Will Run for Congress – Economix Blog – NYTimes.com.

Clever challenging of the recent SCOTUS decision that confers some rights of citizens upon corporations.  The ad, itself, I don’t find very clever, but the concept, definitely.

It’s too obviously satirical, and yet Murray Hill Inc. actually set up a paypal “support” link with the text “Murray Hill Inc. video program. This is NOT a federal campaign account or a tax-exempt donation.”.  So, they *will* accept money, but admit it’s *not* a campaign. Odd.

Links:  Murray Hill Inc. is launching the campaign with a website, Facebook page and YouTube video, products.

Paypal Images:

Murray Hill Inc PayPal

Murray Hill Inc, Support Paypal

Far too many people still use easy-to-guess passwords. Admittedly, keeping track of multiple passwords for every occasion is difficult, but at least one’s universal password should not be easily guessable!

A lot of people like KeePass (portable) to securely manage their passwords, though I have my own system.

Back at the dawn of the Web, the most popular account password was “12345.”

Today, it’s one digit longer but hardly safer: “123456.”

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Mr. Shulman and his company examined a list of 32 million passwords that an unknown hacker stole last month from RockYou…  The list was briefly posted on the Web, and hackers and security researchers downloaded it.

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Imperva found that nearly 1 percent of the 32 million people it studied had used “123456” as a password. The second-most-popular password was “12345.” Others in the top 20 included “qwerty,” “abc123” and “princess.”

More disturbing, said Mr. Shulman, was that about 20 percent of people on the RockYou list picked from the same, relatively small pool of 5,000 passwords.

That suggests that hackers could easily break into many accounts just by trying the most common passwords. Because of the prevalence of fast computers and speedy networks, hackers can fire off thousands of password guesses per minute.

One commenter also suggested this tool:  http://www.pctools.com/guides/password/

“As the focus on climate increases in the public’s mind, it can’t help but be a part of people’s planning about the future,” said Thomas Joseph Doherty, a clinical psychologist in Portland, Ore., who has a practice that focuses on environmental issues. “It touches every part of how they live: what they eat, whether they want to fly, what kind of vacation they want.”

While no study has documented how frequent these clashes have become, therapists agree that the green issue can quickly become poisonous because it is so morally charged. Friends or family members who are not devoted to the environmental cause can become irritated by life choices they view as ostentatiously self-denying or politically correct.

via When Trying to Preserve the Planet Strains the Relationship – NYTimes.com.

Wow, a clinical psychologist that focuses on environmental issues.  I suppose I’m not surprised as my first experience of meeting a vegan was getting yelled at.

Mikey Hicks is 8-years old, was born shortly before 9/11/01, and is on the terrorist selectee list for extra screening when flying. Story: Meet Mikey, 8: U.S. Has Him on Watch List

There are two problems with this type of screening that are well-illustrated in the article.

1) That the list’s only criterium for flagging a person is a name match. There are no other factors taken in account: not history, demographics, nor other intelligence. In one case, someone managed to avoid the list by changing his name. In effect, this renders the list totally useless in that it captures very high false positives and can easily made to result in false negatives.

2) There is no reason that this child has spent eight years, his entire life, on this list without some sort of effective recourse.

It points to a complete lack or interest or inability of our government to design an intelligent system.

My guess, is that it is designed this way so that no one actually needs to be trained. A computer flags the kids, and a TSA staff member does the computer’s bidding. There is no apparent place for the assessment of the TSA agent him or herself.

What a poorly thought-out use case.

An article in the New York Times today battles a common meme that it is more ethical to eat plants than animals because they don’t feel pain.

Sorry, Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too

“Even if you have quite a bit of knowledge about plants,” Dr. De Moraes said, “it’s still surprising to see how sophisticated they can be.”

It’s a small daily tragedy that we animals must kill to stay alive. Plants are the ethical autotrophs here, the ones that wrest their meals from the sun. Don’t expect them to boast: they’re too busy fighting to survive.

I, personally, find arguments regarding sustainability and environmental impact as more convincing arguments for vegetarianism than the ‘animals feel pain’ argument. Perhaps it’s the scientist in me that daily remembers that that I exist in an animal body and have animal needs, and that, regardless of ‘higher’ impulses, I am constrained by my physical being and my evolutionary nature.

I am an omnivore. I have nutritional needs that perhaps can be met on a vegan diet, but it requires effort that I consider unnatural. However, I think people eat too much meat, and I still do not understand how a burger at McDonald’s can cost less than a salad.

Historically, for most people, meat-eating was reserved for special occasions. For better and sometimes worse, refrigeration and mass transit have changed the immediacy of eating a just-slaughtered full animal.

I think I would feel better about eating meat if I slaughtered my own animal, but until I get there, I am comfortable eating it rarely, but for health and other reasons.  It does not make sense to elevate one animal kingdom above another as more worthy to live just because we belong to it.

An ancient thought that captures the difficulty of our duality as self-conscious animals.  Psalm 8:

5 What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that Thou thinkest of him?
6 Yet Thou hast made him but little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.
7 Thou hast made him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet:
8 Sheep and oxen, all of them, yea, and the beasts of the field;
9 The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea; whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.

Posted today on the freakonomics blog:
Where Has All the Viagra Spam Gone? By DANIEL HAMERMESH

I assume that the spammers realized that the return per period of time — the price of the activity — was less than its marginal cost: the opportunity cost of their time. They have shut down the business and moved to other activities that might yield higher returns.

A simple look at the comments proves how little thought (hopefully) he put into his post.

Link Daniel, you really should give credit where credit is due and thank your mail admins and others who are fighting to keep the spam out of your inbox.

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Link

Ouch, is this how research is done these days?

As all the other comments have mentioned, the spam is still flowing (at the same rate if not more) only it’s your filters that are better.

Your hypothesis is simply incorrect.

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Link

My spammers must have a lower opportunity cost of their time than your spammers, as I have no shortage of bank presidents, fabuloulsy rich widows, and foreign dignitaries offering me millions of dollars just to hold onto their money for them for a few weeks.

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Link

All of the major mail filtering companies (Messagelabs for example) publish daily statistics and monthly intelligence reports about spam, viruses, other malware and what this month’s favoured delivery method is. If you’re going to write an article about whether spam is increasing, decreasing, or remaining about the same, you really do have an obligation to your employer (and audience) to at least glance at well-known and freely available sources of information about your subject, don’t you think?

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Link

As an academic economist, I expect you are familiar with the Bayesian branch of statistics. Spam filters are generally a real-life implementation of Bayes’ theorem.

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Link

I agree that spam mails have lessened since last year, but not for the reasons you think Mr.Hammermesh…

The marginal cost of sending a batch of spam mail is, I believe, close to zero. If the marginal cost exceeded the marginal benefits, spammers would change their strategy, for example, by taking off e-mail contacts who have never responded to their mail. However, they never bother to narrow down their audience. Why? MB>MC.

Plus, the major reason spam mails may have lessened(if at all) would be because of legal crackdowns on such spammers. The effect of such crackdowns may not be as big as we’d want, but the fact that spammers now know they face possible legal consequences may be what raised their MC…(though I doubt it, since they can just move to lawless countries and send spam from there)

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etc.

Now that we have so much data, we need tools to manage and understand it.  This reminds me of my eternal quest for a better to-do list that can manage all my tasks. There is just too much data for traditional tools to manage.

In a speech given just a few weeks before he was lost at sea off the California coast in January 2007, Jim Gray, a database software pioneer and a Microsoft researcher, sketched out an argument that computing was fundamentally transforming the practice of science.

Dr. Gray called the shift a “fourth paradigm.” The first three paradigms were experimental, theoretical and, more recently, computational science. He explained this paradigm as an evolving era in which an “exaflood” of observational data was threatening to overwhelm scientists. The only way to cope with it, he argued, was a new generation of scientific computing tools to manage, visualize and analyze the data flood.

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“We have access to too much data now to understand what’s going on,” Dr. Horvitz said….

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In his chapter, “I Have Seen the Paradigm Shift, and It Is Us,” John Wilbanks, the director of Science Commons, a nonprofit organization promoting the sharing of scientific information, argues for a more nuanced view of data explosion.

“Data is not sweeping away the old reality,” he writes. “Data is simply placing a set of burdens on the methods and the social habits we use to deal with and communicate our empiricism and our theory.”

From A Deluge of Data Shapes a New Era in Computing , Book: The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery

An article in the New York Times reminds us that, especially with the way people consume information today, a scientific, evidence-based recommendation is not sufficient to change a policy.  A well-constructed PR campaign is also required.

See:  Mammogram Math regarding the recent brouhaha that resulted from a recommendation to reduce mammogram screening frequency in not-at-risk populations.

I just read From Has Conceptual Art Jumped the Shark Tank? (By DENIS DUTTON) and loved it. Rather than merely analyze the aesthetic or financial value of conceptual art, he describes where it fits in humanity’s art history.  He argues, yes, the ideas behind each work may be interesting, but that their value entirely depends on the concept.  That is, the works themselves are rather ordinary and uninteresting.  The exhibit no, what he calls, virtuoso. He describes what he believes is the earliest known form of art, not drawings, but tools:

The earliest stone tools are choppers and blades found in Olduvai Gorge in East Africa, from 2.5 million years ago. These unadorned tools remained unchanged for thousands of centuries, until around 1.4 million years ago when Homo ergaster, Homo erectus and other human ancestral groups started doing something new and remarkable. They began shaping single, thin stone blades, sometimes rounded ovals, but often in what to our eyes are arresting symmetrical pointed leaf or teardrop forms. Acheulian hand axes (after St.-Acheul in France, a site of 19th-century finds) have been unearthed in their thousands, scattered across Asia, Europe and Africa, wherever Homo erectus roamed.

The sheer numbers of hand axes indicate a rate of manufacture beyond needs for butchering animals. Even more curious, unlike other prehistoric stone tools, hand axes often exhibit no evidence of wear on their delicate blade edges, and some are in any case too big for practical use. They are occasionally hewn from colorful stone materials (even with decoratively embedded fossils). Their symmetry, materials and above all meticulous workmanship makes them quite simply beautiful to our eyes. What were these ancient yet somehow familiar artifacts for?

The best available explanation is that they are literally the earliest known works of art — practical tools transformed into captivating aesthetic objects, contemplated both for their elegant shape and virtuoso craftsmanship. Hand axes mark an evolutionary advance in human prehistory, tools attractively fashioned to function as what Darwinians call “fitness signals” — displays like the glorious peacock’s tail, which functions to show peahens the strength and vitality of the males who display it.

I was really moved by, what I see, as his conclusion that beauty and skill are more durable values than the fleeting concept. It seemed to answer my occasional thoughts about what happened to art in the last century.

The appreciation of contemporary conceptual art, on the other hand, depends not on immediately recognizable skill, but on how the work is situated in today’s intellectual zeitgeist. That’s why looking through the history of conceptual art after Duchamp reminds me of paging through old New Yorker cartoons. Jokes about Cadillac tailfins and early fax machines were once amusing, and the same can be said of conceptual works like Piero Manzoni’s 1962 declaration that Earth was his art work, Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 “One and Three Chairs” (a chair, a photo of the chair and a definition of “chair”) or Mr. Hirst’s medicine cabinets. Future generations, no longer engaged by our art “concepts” and unable to divine any special skill or emotional expression in the work, may lose interest in it as a medium for financial speculation and relegate it to the realm of historical curiosity.

In this respect, I can’t help regarding medicine cabinets, vacuum cleaners and dead sharks as reckless investments. Somewhere out there in collectorland is the unlucky guy who will be the last one holding the vacuum cleaner, and wondering why.

Wow. Very clear, very simple.  He does not say that the conceptual art is meaningless, only that its meaning is frail and mortal.

Update: The Times published letters to the editor.

Computerized Health Records

DP: What’s the downside of paper?

DB: It doesn’t capitalize on the tremendous power of computers, which have transformed the use of information in every other part of our lives, business and travel and leisure.

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DP: Where do we stand relative to other countries?

DB: Most other countries have much more use of electronic health records than we do.

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DP: How is all of this supposed to bring down medical costs?

…. So I avoided giving the patient a dose of radiation that he didn’t need. I avoided the expense of that test. And I got the information sooner.

DP: And how much does it cost? For, say, one doctor?

DB: On average, the cost is between $40,000 and $50,000, of which about a third is the software and the hardware, about a third is the cost of getting it set up in the office, and about a third is maintaining it. …

DP: I’m sure you hear this at the cocktail parties all the time: “What about my privacy?”

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But people on my Medical Informatics list are leery of this.  That is, it sounds like a nice idea, but has a lot of issues both from the technological point of view and usability, in addition to privacy and the others. There is some discussion of this at NEJM and AMIA