A bit of trivia: even though the Winter Solstice isn’t for another couple weeks, tomorrow will be the earliest sunset of the year (about 4:55 PM in San Francisco). That’s because even though the days will keep getting shorter until December 22nd, sunrise will be getting later even faster.
(Calculated over at Express Tech’s Sunrise and Sunset Calculator, which is only one I could find that includes seconds.)
Earliest sunset of the year Read More »
Seth Finkelstein over at Infothought comments on the media attention being given to Psyphon:
I’m all for this project, but the activism lesson I draw from its prominent coverage is NOT necessarily a happy one. There’s been activists working on this sort of stuff for years and years. The critical variable here is not technology, since those reporters wouldn’t be able to tell a Tor from a FreeNet. What matters is *ATTENTION*. The backing from the various organizational sponsors is the reason for the widespread publicity.
Seth beats this drum pretty regularly (usually with lament) but echos what Bill Buxton phrased as a battlecry at CSCW, namely that making an impact in the world isn’t about having brand new ideas, it’s about understanding which ideas are ripe for exploitation and then having the ability to marshal the right resources to get them into the world. Buxton feels that the research community in general isn’t putting enough effort into that last bit, and believes in the overall philosophy so much that he’s essentially become a full-time evangelist and public speaker rather than doing his own research.
Getting attention for your research Read More »
Today’s LATimes reports that Brandon Mayfield just won his $2 million lawsuit against the FBI for his wrongful detention in 2004. Brandon is the Oregon lawyer who the FBI pinched in connection to the 2004 Madrid train bombings because a partial fingerprint found in Madrid was a “close enough” match to his own. One quote from the article:
Michael Cherry, president of Cherry Biometrics, an identification-technology company, said misidentification problems could grow worse as the U.S. and other governments add more fingerprints to their databases.
The problem is emphasized in the March report from the Office of the Inspector General on the case, which reads much like a Risks Digest post and has a lot of take-home lessons. The initial problem was that the FBI threw an extremely wide net by running the fingerprints found in Madrid through the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), a database that contains the fingerprints of more than 47 million people who have either been arrested or submitted fingerprints for background checks. With so many people in the database the system always spits out a number of (innocent) near-matches, so the FBI then goes over the results. The trouble is that in this case (a) Mayfield’s fingerprints were especially close, and (b) the FBI examiner got stuck in a pattern of circular reasoning, where once he found many points of similarity between the prints he began to “find” additional features that weren’t really in the lifted print but were suggested by features in Mayfield’s own prints.
People tend to forget that even extremely rare events are almost guaranteed to happen if you check often enough. For example, even if there was only a one in a billion chance of an innocent person being an extremely close match for a given fingerprint, that leaves about a 5% chance for each fingerprint checked of getting such a false positive. If we were to double the size of the database, that would rise to almost 10%. This kind of problem is inevitable when looking for extremely rare events, and applies even more broadly to fuzzy-matching systems like the TSA’s no-fly list and Total Information Awareness (in all its newly renamed forms), which try to identify terrorists from their credit card purchases, where they’ve traveled or how they spell their name.
Look hard enough, and you’ll always find two identical fingerprints Read More »
The New Scientist has a write-up on an EU-funded prototype system called Tai-Chi that can turn ordinary surfaces into a touch-pad input device just by attaching a tiny piezoelectric sensor (i.e. microphone) to the surface. In one configuration, the system figures out where you’re touching / tapping by listening to how vibrations are distorted by the object and then either comparing to a database of vibration “fingerprints.” The method requires calibration to create the database, but they’re claiming accuracy to within a few millimeters.
Tai-Chi turns your desk into a touch-pad Read More »
From some email spam mail I just got:
Hi thisisjusttestletter. How are you ? Call me. Poor you, i don't even think how much spam you are recive. when they can
That makes two of us.
At least the spammers feel sorry for us… Read More »
Discover Magazine describes a cute study where they pit fake acupuncture (with secretly retracting needles) vs. sugar pills to see which placebo effect works better:
After 10 weeks, subjects taking sham pills said their pain decreased an average of 1.50 points on the 10-point scale. After 8 weeks, those receiving fake acupuncture reported a drop of 2.64 points. In other words, not receiving acupuncture reduces pain more than not taking drugs.
Kaptchuk says that the rituals of medicine explain the difference: Performing acupuncture is more elaborate than prescribing medicine. Other rituals that may make patients feel better include “white coats, and stethoscopes that you don’t necessarily use, pictures on the wall, the way you reassure a patient, and the secretaries that sign you in.” Careful manipulation of such rituals could make all types of treatment more effective, Kaptchuk suggests.
(Thanks to Jill for the link!)
No acupuncture vs. no pill Read More »
I was in the Washington Park MAX Station in Portland yesterday, which includes a core sample taken during the tunnel’s construction along with a 16-million-year timeline showing when each sample had been at the Earth’s surface. Etched into the wall along the timeline include technical and mathematical discoveries, including 107 digits of pi. Only, I noticed as I read through the digits, it’s wrong. The first row is correct, but the rest looks random. My friend and I speculated on our ride back why that might be. Was it an estimate, the result of calculating only the first several terms of an infinite series? A deliberate retelling of an historically significant blunder? A secret code left by the artist that translates to “help, I’m being held captive in a Portland artist colony!”?
Google to the rescue, it turns out this was either a clever way of representing the first 1000 digits of pi, or more likely was a simple misreading of the reference book from which the number came. As Mark Cowan points out in Underground Pi, the numbers etched in stone in the subway were taken from A History of Pi, which prints the digits in rows of 10 groups of 10 digits. The artist clearly took his numbers from the first column in that reference, thus printing the first thru tenth fractional digits, the 101th-110th, etc.
Pieces of pi at Washington Park Station Read More »
In his closing plenary at this year’s CSCW, Bill Buxton made a provocative point about how to make a difference in the research world. His key point was that people often think of technology as alchemy, creating gold out of nothing. But alchemy (the creation of brand new ideas) is very hard and very rare, and is ultimately a fool’s game. Most progress comes not from alchemy but from prospecting, the recognition of good ideas that are already out there, the understanding of which ideas are ripe for exploitation and the ability to marshal the right resources to get them into the world. He quotes Alan Kay: “It takes almost as much creativity to understand a good idea as to have it in the first place.”
The example he gave was of the Blackboard, which was invented in 1801 and which Buxton claims revolutionized education more than every other technology introduced into schools since then put together. Before 1801 each child had his or her own slateboard, which he or she used to mark and correct answers before copying them down on paper. Buxton noted as an aside the irony that we’re now trying to reintroduce slates into the classroom in the form of tablet PCs, but his main point was the fact that there’re very few differences between a slate and a blackboard: a blackboard is just a slate that’s been made an order of magnitude larger and hung on the wall. A technologist looking for novel innovation might overlook such a “minor” modification, and yet that slight change made all the difference.
Buxton on alchemy vs. prospecting Read More »
This short “Perspectives” piece by Erik Vance, “Immigration For Lunch” really strikes a chord with me. Life without a large inflow of immigrants just sounds… boring to me.
Thinking politically with your stomach Read More »
The Guardian has a “gotcha” piece about how easy it is to crack the security on the RFID tags in the new UK passports. Bruce Schneier and Bruce Sterling have both commented favorably on the piece, but personally I don’t see what all the fuss is about. The RFID chip contains a cryptographically signed digital copy of the main page of your passport, including a digital copy of your photograph. The idea is that this way you can’t modify the name or paste your own photo into a stolen passport because the digital data won’t match, and you can’t modify the digital data because it has to be signed by the issuing country. After people expressed concerns that someone nearby could eavesdrop on the conversation between the passport and the RFID reader, they decided to encrypt the passport using your passport number, expiration date and date of birth, which is encoded using a barcode (or maybe a magnetic stripe). That way the customs official swiping your card can read the photo but someone eavesdropping on the RFID conversation can’t.
There’s only one concern the story mentions that makes even vague sense to me:
This means that each time you hand over your passport at, say, a hotel reception or car-rental office abroad to be “photocopied”, it could be cloned with equipment like ours. This could have been done with an old passport, but since the new biometric passports are supposed to be secure they are more likely to be accepted without question at borders.
Certainly people trust computers a little too much, but this sounds like something proper training would solve. The idea that the RFID chip can be cloned doesn’t seem like that difficult a concept to teach.
So what am I missing here?
UK passport RFID “gotcha”? Read More »