Total Information Awareness...Take 2

Oy...

Check out this Wall Street Journal (of all sources!) article on how Total Information Awareness is being resuscitated:

The rules now allow the little-known National Counterterrorism Center to examine the government files of U.S. citizens for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them.

And

The agency's best-known product is a database called TIDE, which stands for the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment. TIDE contains more than 500,000 identities suspected of terror links. Some names are known or suspected terrorists; others are terrorists' friends and families; still more are people with some loose affiliation to a terrorist.  

Yeah, that means you, you threat to national security peace activists. 

Facebook and Pinterest posts not included.  

Yet.

Contraception Costs

Rush's obscene comments are based either on a profound ignorance of how most woman-based contraception works, or on a profound cynicism about the American public's ignorance of how it works. Or (since we're talking about Rush, here) both.

I'm a computer scientist, so let me put it in computer science terms.

Cost of the most popular male-based contraceptives (i.e. condoms): O(n), where n is the number of sexual encounters. (Withdrawal not included.)

Cost of most female-based contraceptives (e.g. pill, IUD): O(1), with a large constant.

For non-computer scientists: to oversimplify somewhat, a function f(n) is O(n) if it is roughly proportional to n. In other words, as you increase n, you also increase f(n). A function f(n) is O(1) if it really doesn't matter how big n gets, it's always the same value. A good example of an O(n) function might be cost-of-gas-per-week as a function of number of miles driven. As the number of miles goes up, so does the amount I'm paying for gas (assuming prices don't drop). An example of an O(1) function: price-per-gallon as a function of the number of miles driven. It really doesn't matter how many miles I'm driving -- the cost per gallon remains the same.

Which brings me back to Rush. He thought he was being so clever with accusing Ms. Fluke of having so much sex that she couldn't afford to pay for it. Whereas for most forms of birth control that are fully in a woman's control (and I think that last bit is significant), it really doesn't matter whether you're getting it once an hour or (as primly as Rush or Rick could desire) conceding it once a year...the cost is the same. And it's jolly expensive, even for once a year.

Which is in stark contrast to the most popular male method: pay per use, and a fraction of the cost of the dinner/movie that precedes its use.

Why is that?

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that we're having this national conversation about who pays for birth control. Who wants to pay more to let women have control?

Bullets for Boobs

Amidst all the flap about the Susan G. Komen foundation de-funding of Planned Parenthood, I was amused to find a reference in the NYT editorial to a pink-ribbon branded, pink shotgun shell.

I guess some people just feel better killing Bambi knowing they supported a couple of boobs along the way.

What did YOU eat last year?

NPR offers some food statistics on the American diet, based on data provided by the USDA (which, by the way, contains historical data, as well, going back to 1909). I've often wondered about these...especially meat consumption.

Some highlights (which I believe are based on 2009 numbers): Per person per year we have

• 1996 lbs overall -- yes, that's just about a ton, or about 5.5 lbs/day -- really???
• 185 lbs meat - or a little over a half a pound a day -- really? Every day?
• 141 lbs sweeteners - that's nearly half a pound of day -- yikes!!! and
• 85 lbs fats
• 197 lbs wheat and grains -- really???
• 630 lbs dairy, as compared with
• 688 lbs fruits and veggies (415 veggie, 273 fruits, and that includes bulk stuff like corn and potatoes)
• about 2700 calories/day -- and we wonder why we might be getting obese.

I have to hope that some of that is wastage (food we buy but throw away).

Convention on the Rights of the Child - Too hot to handle

Incredible:

The United States and Somalia are the only two countries that haven't ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, an international treaty that recognizes the human rights of people younger than 18.

I'd never heard of it, before, but apparently it was signed in 1989 and took effect 1990. We've had 22 years to get with the program, but still can't bring ourselves to do it. Never mind how well some of the signatories are implementing it, but really...we can't bring ourselves to even make the token gesture of ratifying it???

The Convention on the Rights of the Child includes such controversial provisions as

Guiding principles (pdf): The guiding principles of the Convention include non-discrimination; adherence to the best interests of the child; the right to life, survival and development; and the right to participate. They represent the underlying requirements for any and all rights to be realized.

Survival and development rights (pdf): These are rights to the resources, skills and contributions necessary for the survival and full development of the child. They include rights to adequate food, shelter, clean water, formal education, primary health care, leisure and recreation, cultural activities and information about their rights. These rights require not only the existence of the means to fulfil the rights but also access to them. Specific articles address the needs of child refugees, children with disabilities and children of minority or indigenous groups.

Protection rights (pdf): These rights include protection from all forms of child abuse, neglect, exploitation and cruelty, including the right to special protection in times of war and protection from abuse in the criminal justice system.

Participation rights (pdf): Children are entitled to the freedom to express opinions and to have a say in matters affecting their social, economic, religious, cultural and political life. Participation rights include the right to express opinions and be heard, the right to information and freedom of association. Engaging these rights as they mature helps children bring about the realization of all their rights and prepares them for an active role in society.

But what was I thinking? Best interests of the child. Protection from all forms of child abuse. Preparing them for an active role in society. Silly me.

Good piece on the importance of locally grown food.

The notion of importing fruits and vegetables, the idea of having everything “fresh” all the time, was until recently inconceivable and is likely to become so again, as production and transportation costs rise and the absurdity of the “system” becomes evident even to those who now profit from it. When we ignore large-scale production of local food we invite apocalypse, or at least food shortages.

I always wonder about those $1.79 strawberry specials in December.

Should we regulate babies?

There's some very thought-provoking discussion on assisted reproductive technologies in today's New York Times Room for Debate section.

The fertility industry in the United States is largely unregulated. This lets consumers and business people dictate what is acceptable, what is normal and what is allowable -- including the extreme cases like the one sperm donor who had 150 children. Are such situations a problem? Many other nations, like Britain, regulate the fertility industry more closely. Should the U.S. emulate them?

Personally, I think our society might benefit from a little regulation in this area...at very least things like truth-in-advertising about the successes and problems of these technologies, requirements on practitioners' training, quality control on procedures, that sort of thing. However, I am horrified to read that to the extent that there are current FDA guidelines, they suggest that gay men should not be sperm donors unless they have been celibate for 5 years, ostensibly to prevent AIDS issues. Don't straight men get AIDS, too???

Special police? Really?

Am I the only one who thinks this is a terrible idea? First heard about it on WBGO, in a segment on Newark Journal, called Life After the Newark PD.

Apparently there is an organization, known as the Newark Special Police Association, "whose members are trained at the Newark Police Academy and certified by the state training commission. The group has traditionally arranged work for officers with the city’s housing authority, schools and hospitals." However, through this organization, unemployed cops are now getting hired by PSE&G, to essentially do security guard duty. I'm ok with that. What alarms me is that these guys have "full police powers to make arrests on the job."

Don't get me wrong. I'm all in favor of giving unemployed folks gainful employment, especially in their areas of expertise. And it's kind of PSE&G to pick up the tab. But really? Giving police powers to what is essentially a security guard or mercenary? Even assuming that PSE&G does its job and never abuses its authority, aren't we going down an incredibly steep and slippery slope? Full police powers are generally reserved for the government, where, in a democracy, the government can be held accountable. If one of these guys goes bad, who's accountable?

Name of Blackwater ring a bell?

Banning Social Media?

It's kind of hard to believe that anyone in the "free world" is seriously entertaining the concept of setting limits on FaceBook and Twitter.

"Free speech is central to our democracy, but so is public safety and security," said Ivan Lewis, the shadow secretary of culture in the House of Commons, according to London's Guardian newspaper. "We support the government's decision to undertake a review of whether measures are necessary to prevent the abuse of social media by those who organize and participate in criminal activities."

Well...let's not even talk about the much touted role of social media during the Arab Spring. Brits are, of course, expected to behave better than those rowdy Arabs, and besides they have no good reason to question their government. But I digress.

I can't begin to imagine how they'd implement measures "to prevent the abuse of social media" that would be effective against "those who organize and participate in criminal activities" like those we've been witnessing in London over the last week or so, but measures that would not also cripple those who want to get the hell out of the way of those activities, or who want to engage in legitimate activities. There are three possible approaches they could be meditating: (1) shut down the entire social media infrastructure (e.g. shut down access to FaceBook altogether) or (2) maintain a targeted list of those known to "organize and participate in criminal activities", and just shut down their access or (3) identify criminal activities in progress and shut them down. None of these are very good.

Option 1 shuts down access for the good guys (which is most people), too. And in the middle of a crisis that includes people trying to find out about and avoid the riot (I mean criminal activity) hot-spots. Option 2 involves (a) a massive game of Whack-a-Mole, (b) massive surveillance generally considered incompatible with a free society and (c) stifling free expression for a lot of people accidentally swept up. Option 3 suffers from the same weaknesses as Option 2, with slightly better aim at the mole, but would need to be done real-time. And FaceBook says it does Option 3, anyway.

I can't see Option 1 being put into practice. Social media information is simply too useful, including to governments. However, I am sorry to say I can easily imagine governments, (including those in the "free world") attempting some variation of Option 2 and Option 3, where "criminal activities" are more and more loosely defined over time. FaceBook will become incredibly convenient for facilitating McCarthy-like witch hunts, and in fact, rather than shutting down sites associated with undesired activities, I see them governments monitoring them as honeypots. Especially when armed with subpoenas for FaceBook logs of users' friending histories.

None of this is to say that I think we should do nothing, and sit back and allow riots to take place freely. I just don't think limits on social media are a useful response. Would we shut down email, too? How about cell phone service?

Technology is always a double-edged sword.

Just saying.

Edited to add (8/14): Rebecca MacKinnon has a much more articulate analysis of how bad an idea this is.

Bill Gates is getting serious about crap

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is apparently sponsoring research to reinvent the toilet!

I think it's fabulous.

A couple of years back, BBC reported that public sanitation was considered by doctors the best medical advance in over a century. It's really sad that it's not available for a large portion of the world. Toilet technology improvements could really make inroads into that. In particular, the ability to process sewage locally, with minimal access to water infrastructure could make huge improvements in quality of life.

Apart from health considerations, the other big benefit they are looking into is use of raw sewage for energy generation (possibly using the energy for processing the waste, to recover water and minerals). Why should it only be cattle whose waste products produce power?

Suffocating women

Picture worth 1000 words.

Shame on the SCOTUS.

No vacation nation

Oh yeah... and while we're at it... another reason it's not so hot being a (working) US mom: not enough vacation time.

CNN has a piece on how lame our national vacation policy is, compared with other "advanced" nations.

Germany is among more than two dozen industrialized countries -- from Australia to Slovenia to Japan -- that require employers to offer four weeks or more of paid vacation to their workers, according to a 2009 study by the human resources consulting company Mercer.

Finland, Brazil and France are the champs, guaranteeing six weeks of time off.

But employers in the United States are not obligated under federal law to offer any paid vacation, so about a quarter of all American workers don't have access to it, government figures show.

That makes the U.S. the only advanced nation in the world that doesn't guarantee its workers annual leave, according to a report titled "No-Vacation Nation" by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal policy group.

For the record, mandatory (paid) leave is not just good for your mental health. It's a must from a computer security point of view -- it's one tool for detecting fraudulent activities -- the vacationer's backup will be exposed to the vacationer's records and may come across fishy transactions.

It's not so hot to be a US mom

In fact, "The United States ranked number 31 out of 43 developed countries," according to this article. It goes on to say,

Only 58% of U.S. kids go to preschool compared with 98% in Iceland, 95% in Norway and 82% in Australia.

Compared with other developed countries, U.S. scored dead last is in the issue of paid maternity leave, Powers said. In the U.S., the typical family leave is 12 weeks compared with six months to a year in Europe, where mothers can bond with their babies and establish good breast-feeding practices.

The CNN article is based on statistics Save the Children's 12th annual Mothers' Index, which "analyzes health, education and economic conditions for women and children in 164 countries". It is worth taking a look at. Among the other horrifying statistics, we have

• An under 5 mortality rate of 8 per 1000 live births -- only 10 "developed" countries countries do worse (places like Albania, Belarus, Romania, etc.)
• A lifetime risk of maternal death of 1 in 2100, higher than any of the 43 developed countries except Albania, the Republic of Moldova and the Russian Federation

It never fails to amaze me how we manage to be the richest country on earth, and yet take such poor care of women and children.

Checks (and balances) or checks (and bargains)?

Apparently, there are plans afoot to sell off Federal government real estate assets that are not in use.

Sure thing...no problem...we're in the red...raise some cash. Couple of national forests -- who needs them? We can always grow more trees.

However, I was struck by one item in the article:

"This approach will enable us to cut through the red tape and overcome the special interests and parochial politics that have traditionally slowed or halted progress when efforts have been made to reduce government's real estate footprint one asset at a time," the official said.

(emphasis mine).

Now I've seen my share of bad processes, but in my experience, a lot of what is considered "red tape" (i.e. administrative cost and process) is there precisely to put a check on special interests and other bad behavior. Probably the best way to cut red tape, the place you'll really get the biggest bang for your buck in efficiency, is to remove all the scrutiny on the real estate transactions. That's almost certainly where the big administrative costs are. But without the oversight, special interests may have free rein to bully petty government bureaucrats into selling the real estate at just about any price they choose.

In other words, you can cut through red tape OR you can overcome special interests. I question whether you can do both. Well...OK...you probably could do both (given that the oversight processes are sub-optimal). But if I were a betting woman, I'd put money on the cut-red-tape-only solution being implemented. In today's climate.

Thomas Paine: Someone you should get to know

I just read a fairly painful biography of Thomas Paine (Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of the Modern Nations by Craig Nelson). However, despite the technical difficulty of getting through the text, I'm really glad I stuck it out, just for the sake of getting to know about this amazing individual.

I will be the first to admit that my knowledge of American History is shamefully thin. So forgive me if I go mushy about something everyone else already knows. I've decided they should assign Common Sense as required reading in high school American History, and I'm looking forward to reading Rights of Man.

Paine was a revolutionary among revolutionaries, a visionary among visionaries. In a community of extraordinary enlightenment thinkers, he was able to surpass all of their abilities to break out of the prejudices of the age.

This is a man who could see past monarchy in a time when it was taken for granted. Not so special...all of those revolutionaries did. But unlike those more commonplace icons like Washington and Jefferson and Hamilton, etc., he also championed universal suffrage (i.e. not property-based voting rights), abolitionism, feminism, something like Social Security and a one-time grant to young adults to start out in life. And he got himself into a lot of trouble for advocating Deism as opposed to the more narrow organized Christianity.

The breadth of his knowledge and vision is mind-boggling. He designed working bridges, wrote on economics, political science, religion, law. In his own time his writings were both blockbuster best-sellers and banned on two continents. Though he could have gotten rich on his published works, he deliberately refused royalties, in order to reduce the printing costs and make his work accessible to all. He was an active participant in both the American and French Revolutions (and was even a legislator in France until things got really nutty, when he was locked up for 8 months, escaping execution by a sheer accident).

His advanced thinking got him many friends in the most advanced circles. But his intellectual honesty also ended up alienating many of those same friends, as they could not or did not care to understand his meanings. In addition, interested parties published twisted interpretations of his works, which often created violent mobs against them.

As a society we nominally espouse many of the principles first set forth by Thomas Paine. But if he were to come back today and state the same things he did then, I suspect he'd still be controversial, misunderstood and condemned. Can you imagine anyone today proposing that every young adult should, as a right, be officially handed, let's say, $10,000 so that they could start a business or go to college or do whatever they needed to, to become a productive member of society?

I found this particular biography (which I actually listened to on CD) very hard to follow. It roughly follows the major chunks of his life: early life in England to age 37 in 1774; participation in the American revolution; return to Enlightenment gentleman's life in England; participation in the French Revolution; and return to America. But within these chunks, the text jumps around a lot in time, and not for any good reason, as far as I can see. The jumps seemed to me more like a stream of consciousness rather than in the interests of following any clear themes. The one thing that I found extremely valuable about the book is that it quotes liberally from Paine's works and correspondence, which really gave a good feel for his ideas and his historical context. Amazon reviewers gave the book 4 1/2 stars, though, so maybe my frustration is just because I generally don't read history books.

As one tidbit of trivia, after reading some of this material, I realized that there are several references to Paine's works in the preamble to The MTA Song (which you can listen to here)

I'm adding Thomas Paine to my list of people I'd like to meet, if they ever invent a time machine.