… in 1988, a terrorist bomb exploded aboard a Pan Am Boeing 747 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people.
Amazonian wreckage?
This used to be Borders bookshop in Cambridge. Closed last week.
Christmas reading
Seen in Waterstone’s the other day.
Computational science
From this morning’s Observer column.
One of the diseases studied was lung cancer. The research revealed 23,000 mutations that were exclusive to the diseased cells. Almost all were caused by the 60 or so chemicals in cigarette smoke that stick to DNA and deform it. “We can say that one mutation is fixed in the genome for every 15 cigarettes smoked,” said Peter Campbell, the scientist who led the lung cancer part of the study. “That is frightening because many people smoke a packet of 20 a day.”
Although these stories are reports about medical research, they are really about computing – in the sense that neither would have been possible without the application of serious computer power to masses of data. In that way they reflect a new – but so far unacknowledged – reality; that in many important fields leading-edge scientific research cannot be done without access to vast computational and data-handling facilities, with sophisticated software for analysing huge data-sets.
In many significant areas, advanced research is no longer done by individuals looking through microscopes or telescopes, but by computers enabling investigators to collate, visualise and analyse the torrents of data produced by arrays of instruments…
Googling for Sociopaths
I’m currently reading Ken Auletta’s forthcoming book about Google
Many books have been written about Google, even though we’re all pretty familiar with the company to begin with, but what makes Ken Auletta’s Googled interesting is that it’s a history of the company as told by the incumbent sociopaths. These are the people Auletta has spent his life covering: the media moguls who tried to acquire and conquer their own empires of content and delivery. And to them what’s most shocking and galling about Google’s incredibly rapid rise is that instead of being engineered by a fellow sociopath, it was largely done by normal, decent people plainly applying the forces of new technology.
If you’re wondering what a sociopath is, then think Rupert Murdoch or the RIAA. Aaron has accurately nailed the sociopathic mentality:
It’s almost impossible to imagine life without Googling for something, checking your Gmail, or watching videos on YouTube — but sociopaths aren’t used to doing things that create value for people. They’re just interested in conquering more and taking control. When Disney bought ABC for $19 billion, it didn’t improve most people’s lives in any real way, but it did let Michael Eisner regain control of the company he once ran.
So naturally the sociopaths are outraged that their control is being taken away. Newspapers, book publishers, television companies, ad agencies — their businesses are all failing, while Google’s is on the rise. The sociopaths may be outraged, but this is exactly what’s supposed to happen. Most people don’t have a vested interest in whether ABC does well or even continues to exist. What they want are good television shows at a reasonable price, and if they can get those from Apple and Google instead of their local cable company, then bully for Apple and Google.
The thing that’s hard for the sociopaths to get their head around is that this isn’t because one of their rivals has outsmarted them — it’s just the march of technology…
Lovely stuff. Worth reading in full.
UK snow
Ben Marsh has come up with a really neat use of Twitter. If it’s snowing in your area, tweet the first part of your postcode followed by a score out of 10 for density of snow. So the tweet “#uksnow CB3 0/10” indicates that it’s not currently snowing in my part of Cambridge.
Regularly-updated UK map here.
Lovely idea. It’ll probably be used by the railway companies to justify pre-emptive cancelling of trains, though.
Learning from scam victims
Frank Stajano and Paul Wilson have written an intriguing paper on learning from scams. The abstract reads:
The success of many attacks on computer systems can be traced back to the security engineers not understanding the psychology of the system users they meant to protect. We examine a variety of scams and “short cons” that were investigated, documented and recreated for the BBC TV programme The Real Hustle and we extract from them some general principles about the recurring behavioural patterns of victims that hustlers have learnt to exploit.
We argue that an understanding of these inherent “human factors” vulnerabilities, and the necessity to take them into account during design rather than naïvely shifting the blame onto the “gullible users”, is a fundamental paradigm shift for the security engineer which, if adopted, will lead to stronger and more resilient systems security.
They give a detailed description of each scam scenario they studied. They’re all fascinating and repellent in equal measure. For example:
Jess identifies a young and wealthy mark in a café and descends on him with her charms. Once the mark
believes he’s making an impression on the pretty girl, Alex turns up, posing as a Bulgarian builder who
knows Jess. He has a lottery ticket which has won a prize of £2,800 but he can’t cash it because the
winner must show some ID and he, as an illegal alien, fears he will be deported if he shows his. So he
asks Jess to cash it in for him: in fact, he’ll let her keep all the winnings if she just gives him £1,000
cash. Alex leaves temporarily and, while he is away, Jess phones the National Lottery helpline to check
whether (or rather to prove to the mark that) it’s actually a winning ticket. It turns out that not only it is
but, thanks to the “bonus number”, it has actually won not just a couple of thousand but over a hundred
thousand pounds! And Alex doesn’t know! Poor Jess doesn’t have the thousand pounds cash that Alex
wants in exchange for the winning ticket, but perhaps her new friend the mark is interested in a piece of
the action? They’d pay Alex the thousand pounds he asked for and pocket the huge difference! Yes, the
mark is quite willing to side with Jess in defrauding Alex. Jess and the mark each pay Alex one half of
what he asked for and he gives them the winning ticket. Jess is happy for the mark to cash the ticket and
give her her share of the money later because it’s actually a worthless fake that Paul made earlier on his
inkjet printer after the winning numbers had been announced on TV.
Bruce Schneier (who provided the link to the paper) summarises the scenarios in his monthly newsletter (which is itself required reading IMHO).
1. The distraction principle. While you are distracted by what retains your interest, hustlers can do anything to you and you won’t notice.
2. The social compliance principle. Society trains people not to question authority. Hustlers exploit this “suspension of suspiciousness” to make you do what they want.
3. The herd principle. Even suspicious marks will let their guard down when everyone next to them appears to share the same risks. Safety in numbers? Not if they’re all conspiring against you.
4. The dishonesty principle. Anything illegal you do will be used against you by the fraudster, making it harder for you to seek help once you realize you’ve been had.
5. The deception principle. Things and people are not what they seem. Hustlers know how to manipulate you to make you believe that they are.
6. The need and greed principle. Your needs and desires make you vulnerable. Once hustlers know what you really want, they can easily manipulate you.
Inexplicably, Bruce misses out the seventh ‘principle’:
7. The Time principle
When you are under time pressure to make an important choice, you use a different decision strategy.
Hustlers steer you towards a strategy involving less reasoning.
As it happens, I know (and admire) Frank Stajano. He’s smart and charming and — if I remember rightly — an expert in martial arts. But he keeps such odd company!
The ‘news agenda’, the public sphere and the Net
This diagram (from The Uncensored War, Daniel Hallin’s book about the media and the Vietnam war) is the heart of a terrific essay by Jay Rosen on journalism’s role in stifling public discussion while pretending to enhance it. Sample:
1.) The sphere of legitimate debate is the one journalists recognize as real, normal, everyday terrain. They think of their work as taking place almost exclusively within this space. (It doesn’t, but they think so.) Hallin: “This is the region of electoral contests and legislative debates, of issues recognized as such by the major established actors of the American political process.”
Here the two-party system reigns, and the news agenda is what the people in power are likely to have on their agenda. Perhaps the purest expression of this sphere is Washington Week on PBS, where journalists discuss what the two-party system defines as “the issues.” Objectivity and balance are “the supreme journalistic virtues” for the panelists on Washington Week because when there is legitimate debate it’s hard to know where the truth lies. There are risks in saying that truth lies with one faction in the debate, as against another— even when it does. He said, she said journalism is like the bad seed of this sphere, but also a logical outcome of it.
2. ) The sphere of consensus is the “motherhood and apple pie” of politics, the things on which everyone is thought to agree. Propositions that are seen as uncontroversial to the point of boring, true to the point of self-evident, or so widely-held that they’re almost universal lie within this sphere. Here, Hallin writes, “journalists do not feel compelled either to present opposing views or to remain disinterested observers.” (Which means that anyone whose basic views lie outside the sphere of consensus will experience the press not just as biased but savagely so.)
Consensus in American politics begins, of course, with the United States Constitution, but it includes other propositions too, like “Lincoln was a great president,” and “it doesn’t matter where you come from, you can succeed in America.” Whereas journalists equate ideology with the clash of programs and parties in the debate sphere, academics know that the consensus or background sphere is almost pure ideology: the American creed.
3.) In the sphere of deviance we find “political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of society reject as unworthy of being heard.” As in the sphere of consensus, neutrality isn’t the watchword here; journalists maintain order by either keeping the deviant out of the news entirely or identifying it within the news frame as unacceptable, radical, or just plain impossible. The press “plays the role of exposing, condemning, or excluding from the public agenda” the deviant view, says Hallin. It “marks out and defends the limits of acceptable political conduct.”
Anyone whose views lie within the sphere of deviance—as defined by journalists—will experience the press as an opponent in the struggle for recognition. If you don’t think separation of church and state is such a good idea; if you do think a single payer system is the way to go; if you dissent from the “lockstep behavior of both major American political parties when it comes to Israel” (Glenn Greenwald) chances are you will never find your views reflected in the news. It’s not that there’s a one-sided debate; there’s no debate.
As I say, a terrific essay, well worth reading in full. The comments (including Daniel Hallin’s) are also illuminating.
Android apps pass 20,000 mark
Not quite iPhone level yet, but still coming along nicely. 38% cost money and 62% are free.
[Source]
Why the Google home page is the way it is and more…
Fascinating interview with Marissa Meyer, covering her early time in Google and the aesthetics of the home page (among other topics). Released as work in progress by the BBC Digital Revolution team. They’re releasing their video rushes for downloading and re-use under a CC-type licence. And also including rough transcripts. Terrific idea, which reminds me of why I’m glad to pay the licence fee.