And people are surprised?

Cheating report confirms teacher’s suspicions
http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/08/05/atlanta.public.schools.scandal/index.html

Shocking!  Night follows day!  Who could have possibly predicted such a black swan event?

I am dubious about this particular claim:

“Nobody knows yet how to write machine-scorable standardized test questions that are able to measure anything precisely excepting memory,” Brady says. “Memory is a thought process, but it’s a fairly low-level thought process.”

followed by this:

“There’s a whole range of thought processes: making inferences, generating hypotheses, and generalizing and synthesizing and valuing … that every human being engages in every day, and nobody knows how to test them (with standardized tests).”

I had a physics professor who I felt was diabolically clever at designing multiple-guess exams, he would calculate the ‘wrong’ answer (what you would get if you made some dumb assumptions) and put it along with the correct answer (instead of what appears to be the default, some random number).  If you didn’t have a clean grasp of the material, you could not answer the exam correctly at all.  What is your take?  Can standardized multiple-guess exams be made to test anything besides memorization skills?

Interesting points

Is Obama Smart?
A case study in stupid is as stupid does.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904140604576495932704234052.html

Normally it is quite challenging to read a piece from the WSJ and expect anything to be objective or analytical when it comes to democratic behavior (indeed, this article does slip into the typical about 2/3 through) but it does have some interesting points.  Either Obama is a genius who has sold his soul to the far right yet has convinced the far left he was the perfect man for the job (conceivable, since he survived some of the most poisonous politics in the country in Chicago) or he is the overconfident blowhard that is characterized in the article.  Without a doubt he is the typical lying sack of shit criminal politician that has infested every level of our so-called democratic government, but typically politicians are focused on re-election and if Obama has a strategy for reelection beyond saying he isn’t one of the republican candidates, it escapes me, so maybe he really is as dumb as the article makes out.

A trigger event?

Bank of America death-watch
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/08/09/bank_america/index.html

I found this an interesting article because it might become a proximal trigger event for the apocalypse.  Presuming the authorities ignore the situation (as the author supposes), when the shit does hit the fan it will be a way bigger mess and almost certainly lead to a massive domino effect a la Lehman Brothers.

BTW, anyone surprised that after a near record drop in the Dow the next day has a near record increase?  The sky is falling, the sky is falling!  Oops, I meant to say everything is fine!

Idiots are as idiots do

Bringing solar light bulbs to the world
http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/innovation/08/14/solar.light.bulbs/index.html?hpt=hp_bn7

The gist of the article is having huge faceless (and often brainless) organizations ramming unwanted solutions down the throat of poor/disadvantaged is the opposite of the way to get widespread adoption.  Find a way to enable these people to help themselves out of their pit and give them the tools to help them help others do the same and you can get HUGE leverage and cause massive revolutions in poverty.  In other words, allow the poor and destitute to turn themselves into middle class workers and you get an upward spiraling economy that basically has so much momentum that it drags the whole society up.

Perhaps it really is this simple…

A very plausible way to cut health care costs by close to 50%, yet wind up with a healthier, happier, longer-lived population:

Asking the right questions about health care
http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2011/08/18/asking-the-right-questions-about-health-care/?hpt=hp_bn6

Of course, it requires people to do something more than take a pill, but the article argues that it is actually easier in the long run to get them to change their overall behavior than continue taking pills.

The Elusive Big Idea

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/opinion/sunday/the-elusive-big-idea.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

I think this article is quite important to people who think.  Here is a sample that I hope will get you motivated to read it…

But it is especially true of big thinkers in the social sciences like the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, who has theorized on everything from the source of language to the role of genetics in human nature, or the biologist Richard Dawkins, who has had big and controversial ideas on everything from selfishness to God, or the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has been analyzing different moral systems and drawing fascinating conclusions about the relationship of morality to political beliefs. But because they are scientists and empiricists rather than generalists in the humanities, the place from which ideas were customarily popularized, they suffer a double whammy: not only the whammy against ideas generally but the whammy against science, which is typically regarded in the media as mystifying at best, incomprehensible at worst. A generation ago, these men would have made their way into popular magazines and onto television screens. Now they are crowded out by informational effluvium.

A way to get rich

If we could somehow penetrate the bureaucracy and get access:

An e-ripoff of the U.S.
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/21/opinion/la-oe-sparrow-medicare-fraud-20110821

To me the solution isn’t to do away with the electronic payments, but to invest in serious validation before payment.  Given the half billion in money already lost (and I am sure it is lost, I doubt they could recover a nickle on a dollar) pay someone like us to put in some fraud detection and instead of immediately sending a check, wait 24 hours and do some analysis first.  I am sure that it takes very little cleverness to deduce what ‘normal’ behavior is (i.e., people who are legitimate) and put in filters to look for whatever isn’t matching, then do some deeper analysis on that.  My understanding is that in almost all cases the fraud is the minority (though sadly, minority might still be 20-30%) so with effective ‘legitimate’ filters one could substantially reduce the load on the servers.  However, as mentioned in the article, there are powerful forces on either side that won’t want to employ anyone like us to actually quantitate fraud (even if we are reducing it (perhaps especially if we are reducing it)).  When I worked at FINRA (the brokerage cops), my boss wanted to mine the data to look for patterns that indicated fraud rather than waiting for the fraud to be reported and then develop queries to find them.  No one was interested in doing so and I often wonder if he ever made any impact.  However, given the dramatic drop in cost for hardware it would seem fairly simple to develop a system that could basically be plugged into their network to analyze the data and give some sort of score on the level of fraud and then take a percentage of the amount of fraud detected.  Then, we ‘work for free’ which should make the bureaucrats very happy, that is until they see the checks they would be writing.

Oh well, it was just a thought…

Unhackable morons?

The quest for an unhackable code
http://money.cnn.com/2011/09/02/technology/unhackable_code/index.htm?source=cnn_bin&hpt=hp_bn5

I started to study cryptography quite a few years ago (more than 15) and very quickly came to the realization that ‘unbreakable’ codes are meaningless because it is so trivial to hack the rest of the system. Why bother spending billions on a farm of super computers when you can break into the target’s room and place a camera where it can watch the keyboard (presuming, naturally, you can’t just install a key logger remotely)?  Even if it takes only a week to break encryption, why wait a week when you can be ‘breaking’ the code at the same speed the recipient is?  On top of all this, it is well accepted in the cryptography community that any ‘unbreakable’ algorithm needs to be publicly available for people to analyze and the true number of people competent enough to meaningfully analyze such algorithms is tiny, probably in the dozens, certainly less than hundreds, and without them spending a few years trying to find weaknesses, any claims of ‘unbreakability’ are total hogwash.  I am willing to put money that the guys mentioned in the article are amateur cryptographers and likely their algorithm has at least one hole large enough to drive a truck through.  And, of course, as mentioned above, even in the unlikely event it really was unbreakable (whatever that means), it is no more secure than triple DES, let alone AES or any of the other accepted algorithms because of the silly-assed humans operating either end of the clear text.

I have argued with several people obsessed about quantum cryptography and what a waste of time I think it is.  First and most critical, presuming the mere interception of the communication stream means the message can’t be decrypted (which is what I believe gets people so excited), then I already control your ability to send messages since I can deny you access to any message as long as I have access to it, which, naturally, means you are limited to secure communication channels to begin with making the whole point of the communication channel irrelevant.  Second, no less than above, if I can easily (trivially) snoop the plain text at either end, then the strength of the cryptography is totally irrelevant.

I guess the article goes to show the depth of ignorance of the media that cover such topics.  Anyone who understands the subject would realize there is no news here, nothing the slightest bit interesting.

Proof, as if it were needed

of the dramatically anti-science attitude in the US:

The Science of Injustice
Capital murder case highlights Texas courts’ resistance to physical evidence
http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2011-08-19/the-science-of-injustice/

This amuses me (in a very dark way) the most:

‘Delmore and the Montgomery County D.A.’s Office appear to stand firmly with the Court of Criminal Appeals, or at least with Judge Cathy Cochran, who in a 2009 opinion wrote that the science could not explain the circumstances lending weight to Swearingen’s guilt. “The hallmark of a scientifically sound hypothesis is that it is consistent with, and accounts for, the totality of the known facts,” Cochran wrote. “If Melissa did not die until December 29th, where was she and what was she doing from her disappearance … until 21 days later?” she continued. “When all of the other known facts and evidence are wholly inconsistent with a particular scientific hypothesis, the reasonably objective scientist revisits that original hypothesis, looking for a flaw. Although one does not doubt the honesty and sincerity of these medical examiners, their theory that Melissa did not die until December 29th or 30th because of the relatively intact state of some of her internal organs is flatly contradicted by an incredible wealth of other evidence. They have made no attempt to account for or explain this other evidence or provide an alternate hypothesis.”‘

Clearly, this judge, doesn’t know what ‘facts’ are.  Circumstantial evidence (the entirety of this case) is not ‘fact’ and no amount of such evidence can possibly trump any single true fact.  If we continue along this path too much longer we will start to suffer what Germany under Hitler and China under Mao did: persecution of the educated, intellectual ‘elite’.  Unless we start to see a reverse in this trend (I am not terribly optimistic), then people who think intelligence, education and ‘facts’ are important should be looking for someplace else to live.