"And so her birthday was Monday," he said at the Wednesday, July 8 committee hearing. "I was 54 on June 14, so for a month, she was 19 years younger than me...

According to voter-registration records reviewed by the Weekly, veteran Sacramento-based lobbyist Heidi DeJong Barsuglia turned 36 years old on Monday, July 6.

In this case there were other sources who also identified Ms. Barsuglia, and it's not clear from the story whether OC Weekly actually arrived at her name through voter-registration records or simply used them for corroboration. However, EFF's Deep Links reports that it's actually not that hard to identify someone based on a few pieces of seemingly innocuous information like birthday, gender and zip-code:

Gender, ZIP code, and birth date feel anonymous, but Prof. Sweeney was able to identify Governor Weld through them for two reasons. First, each of these facts about an individual (or other kinds of facts we might not usually think of as identifying) independently narrows down the population, so much so that the combination of (gender, ZIP code, birthdate) was unique for about 87% of the U.S. population.

The linked-to abstract also mentions that about half the U.S. population are likely to be uniquely identifiable by only place, gender and date of birth, where place is basically the city, town or municipality where the person resides. And even if a search in a city as big as Sacramento came up with several potential matches, the hit that also happens to be a lobbyist working in an industry under Duvall's committee would be easy to spot.

My wife and I tried attending Rep. Pete Stark's town hall meeting on health care, but the room had filled to capacity long before we arrived. The crowd was *overwhelmingly* in favor of health care reform and our representative's support for it. Of the well several hundred people that couldn't get in, I saw exactly two signs opposing reform (far fewer than were pushing for more reform, e.g. promoting a single-payer plan). The mood was friendly and non-confrontational, and I had lots of good conversations and discussions with my fellow citizens out on the lawn in spite of not getting into the meeting itself.

Here are some of my photos from the event, and the rally was also diary'd over at the Daily Kos.

Back in 2005 I posted about Zubbles — colored soap bubbles that don't stain your clothing. Well, three and a half years later they're finally shipping product! (Currently available as a two-pack of Presto Pink and Blazing Blue.)

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

A new study published in The Columbia Science and Technology Law Review suggests that, in fact, patents deter innovation. The authors (one of whom, coincidentally, was my old roommate in grad school) created a patent simulation game that allows players to "invent" new products by arranging a sequence of widgets. These products can be sold to consumers, and the value of a sequence in the marketplace is related to its subsequence, so it makes sense for players to try to build off of particularly valuable sub-sequences.

Once a player has invented a previously undiscovered sequence, he may choose to open source the discovery or to pay a fee and patent it. Open sourcing a sequence simply prevents anyone from patenting any sequence based on it, while patenting a sequence allows the patent holder to license the sequence to other players and to sue anyone who infringes on the patent. If a patent holder decides to enforce his patent against an infringer, both players decide how many lawyers they wish to hire (again for a fee), and the case is decided by (virtual) die roll. Patent holders may also sell a patent outright to another player.

The researchers ran subjects in either a pure-patent version of the game that did not allow open source, a mixed version that allowed both patent and open source options, and a pure-commons version where patents were not allowed at all. Players were recruited from the incoming law school class, and were told that the player with the most money at the end of a trial would be given a prize. Their results show that players in the pure commons version produced more innovation (number of inventions), more productivity (number of inventions made) and higher social utility (amount of money each player ended with) than either of the other two variations. (The amount of innovations was not statistically significant, the other two metrics were very significant). Interestingly enough, they found no significant difference between the pure patent system and the mixed system for any of the three metrics.

It's easy to nit-pick these kinds of simulation-based experiments, both in terms of how parameters are set and more generally whether the simulation captures enough of the real-world dynamics to be useful. One nit I have is that (near as I can tell) the market value of a product is the same regardless of how many competitors are selling the same product, which would eliminate one of the primary purposes of gaining patent protection. I also wonder whether the stated goal of making more money than your fellow players discouraged strategies that help everyone equally (a rising tide raising all ships), and in particular whether it might have discouraged use of the "open source" option in the mixed variation.

That said, it's an interesting study, and in their discussion the authors cite many empirical and theoretical studies in the past few decades that have also brought into question whether patents actually promote innovation in the real world. The authors also suggest the possibility of more studies using their PatentSim game, and possibly even creating an online massive multiplayer version, which would presumably allow players to develop their strategy and experience with the game over longer periods of time.

(Via RiteReadWeb)

Senator Feinstein,

I was dismayed to hear your name being lumped together with Republicans and a handful of Democrats who are trying to scuttle any health care bill that includes a viable public option. As you are no doubt aware, the recent high price tags cited by the CBO do not take into account any price savings that a public option would generate by negotiating lower drug prices, doctor fees, and hospital costs, and forcing private insurers to be more competitive. As former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich recently put it, "projecting the future costs of universal health care without including the public option is like predicting the number of people who will get sunburns this summer if nobody is allowed to buy sun lotion." I also believe, as do many experts, that a strong public option, unhampered by restrictions inserted at the behest of the insurance industry, is the surest way to bring down the spiraling costs that are eating up the budget of every family, every business and every state in The Union.

I understand how comments can be misinterpreted, and how often nuanced positions can be blown into a for-or-against bullet point, and so I hope you can set the record straight on your position by answering a simple question: Do you support immediate implementation of a public health-care option, undiluted by being broken into co-operatives and unfettered by restrictions as to its ability to negotiate for lower prices from drug companies and health-care providers? If not, what are your reasons for withholding your support?

Thank you, and I look forward to your response.

Sincerely,
Dr. Bradley Rhodes
Alameda, CA 94501

Update 6/24/2009: TPM just received a clarification from Feinstein's office on her position.

Update 7/21/2009: Here are the responses from Senators Feinstein and Boxer. The key paragraphs from Sen. Feinstein:

One of the many proposals being considered to reform our system is to create a health care plan that is publically operated. Please know that I am reviewing all health care reform options and I will keep your comments in mind as the Senate continues to work to improve health care for all Americans.

The key paragraph from Sen. Boxer:

I was pleased to be an original co-sponsor of S.Res.156, a resolution expressing the sense of the Senate that health care reform legislation should include the establishment of a federally backed insurance pool.

Introduced by Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), S.Res.156 says that any reform of the nation's health care system should give consumers a choice of an affordable, federally backed option to introduce competition in the health insurance market and contain health care costs. I support this approach.

I'm looking at one of your most iconic images, this is the photo of a young Afghan girl... she's wearing a brick-red head scarf and there's a green background and her eyes are just popping off the screen...

I think that just about says it all. You can also view an online gallery of what some of the great photos taken with Kodachrome look like after they've been scanned, digitized, and re-rendered on whatever computer monitor you happen to have. Such vivid colors!

This is just a prototype and so probably an unfair criticism, but I do note that when the demonstrator selects a different document and says "we are able to quickly move from any of the last five documents you've been reading" there is an 8.5 second delay before the new document comes up.

It's a sobering thought that, if my wife and I had been born into our grandparents' generation, it would have been illegal for us to be married in California, because she's Asian and I'm Caucasian. That ban was also overturned by the California Supreme Court, who in 1948 declared that our anti-miscegenation law violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Only that time there was no way that 52% of the voters could overturn that right simply by passing a ballot measure.

Fear and ignorance always bring out the worst in us, and the rights enshrined in a democracy's constitution are there, in part, to prevent a majority from acting on those base emotions in a way that tramples a minority. In this case, the State Supreme Court has declared that we voters need to grow up and do the right thing ourselves. I hope we do it soon.

1. A US supermax prison
2. A prison in, say, France or Jordan, outside of our jurisdiction or control
3. Ninety miles off the Florida coast, in a country with whom we have no formal diplomatic relations, which as recently as 1980 emptied their jails of thousands of criminals and encouraged them to smuggle themselves into the US

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, you testified about your negotiations with Amazon regarding the Kindle electronic reader. Could you tell us about that?

JIM MORONEY: Somebody was bringing up the Kindle as the solution we should all be focused on. And I love the Kindle. I read books on it all the time. My problem is that after negotiating and negotiating and negotiating, the very best deal we could get from Amazon was to split revenues for whatever price we decided to charge. We could get 30 percent of that money. They get 70 percent.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Wow.

JIM MORONEY: I could have probably lived with that, but there was another clause in there that they would not give me relief on, and that said that they have the right to relicense my content to any portable device, not just an Amazon-owned device, any portable device. In essence, I was giving them a complete licensing agreement for nothing for all of my content, period.

I'm sort of – that’s - give away my future, you know.

If Amazon came back – I thought maybe they'd call today – and said, do you know what, we'll give up on that little clause about the relicensing of your IP, I would have said, okay, you know what - I'll try this thing at 70/30 and see if it works. But nobody called today, as far as I can tell.

Compare that to Apple, who keeps about 35% to 40% of the price of the 99-cent purchase price for a song sold on iTunes. Of course, Apple's main business model is selling iPods while Amazon's main business model is selling content, but even so I'm surprised Amazon is demanding such a high percentage for what still amounts to an untested market. Maybe they figure (probably correctly) that newspapers are desperate enough to go for it?

Am I missing some obvious source source, or has video made such headway now that nobody even bothers making audio-only versions available anymore?

I had the pleasure of meeting Frankie at several of the dance workshops, camps and talks that he taught over the years. He had an incredibly infectious energy and sense of humor about life and the dancing and music he loved, which I think did much to make the swing dance community such a welcoming place to be. He will be missed.