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?

Staying motivated

Annapurna pointed out a nice link. 33 Ways to Stay Creative.

Fortune cookie du jour

"Be a Winner."

Glad we cleared that up. Next, I expect I'll get one that says "Buy Low, Sell High."

And the cookie was stale, too. Maybe that was the problem. Do fortunes go bad after a while?

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.

NY Times Paywall -- reprise

I did some experiments this afternoon. I'm pretty sure it's cookie-based, as I thought it would be.

'Nuff said.

For what it's worth, I just found Cory Doctorow's analysis/prediction of what the paywall would be, posted on the same day as mine. True to form, he came up with a much darker, deeper, hacker-oriented set of possibilities for how the paywall might work, but makes some of the same points as I did.

Ever wonder where all your energy is going?

This is a very interesting interactive graphic. It shows how much energy was produced in 2009 by various sources (e.g. solar, coal, petroleum, etc.), how it was used by various sectors (residential, industrial, commercial, transport), and how much was used vs. wasted. It's a little hard to read, at first, but stick with it.

A total of 94.5 quadrillion BTU (QBTU) was produced, of which solar was, by far, the smallest source (0.1 QBTU), and petroleum the largest (35.9 QBTU). Of these, 38.2 QBTU was used to produce electricity, with the remaining 56.3 used directly. (Though I'm a little confused -- the solar link doesn't show it being used to produce electricity.)

I think there must be some policy lessons in there, but I'm sure they won't be learned.