At my university, a large state university in a Great Plains state, our administration (and appallingly a faculty "task force") had the incredibly stupid idea of using bibliometric data (number of citations over a ten year period) to compare between fields. It turns out the average number of citations a paper receives in the short-run strongly correlates with the average number of citations in the bibliography of papers in the same discipline as the paper. The typical bibliography in microbiology and immunology runs for several pages (in small print) while the typical bibliography in mathematics might have from two to ten citations (there are longer ones, but they aren't typical -- in mathematics it is an honor to have your result turn "classical" and be cited and used without citation to the original paper in the bibliography).
Add to the folly that they proposed using data from commercial publishers whose database excludes the major house journals of some professional societies (notably the Association for Symbolic Logic) and the journals (some published by professional societies, others online only) set up by academicians in protest against abusive practices of commercial publishers.
This baleful trend is part of the rise of the all-administrative university in which management types, whatever lip-service they provide to the actual purpose of universities, behave as if university administration is the core function of a university, rather than research, scholarship or education.
Cloud storage has to be the weakest argument which can possibly be advanced here. If one is worried about security of files in the cloud, get an open source encryption program, check it for back doors, encrypt things on your local machine before putting them in the cloud and decrypt them when you get them back, rather than relying on the storage provider's encryption.
The real issues involve shared and communicated data in contexts where everything has to be done online because sharing keys by physical transfer is infeasible.
One wonders whether the NYTimes is cryptologically illiterate or is deliberately advancing a straw-man because they are really in favor of expanding the power of the state.
And why do you think that "attempting to sway someone with some kind of morality or religious pamphlet" should be treated differently than passing out Constitutions?
Freedom of speech and freedom of the press (pamphlets and copies of the Constitution are printed) only work when the protect speech and writing that someone objects to (as you evidently object to printed advocacy of morality or religion). I think the Framers of the Constitution thought it protected the advocacy of immorality and irreligion, even though they objected to those every bit as much as the biens pensants of turn of 21st century America object to morality and religion.
You do realize that "gun crime" is a specious category created for propaganda reasons. The murder victim is just as dead and his or her friends and relatives just as bereaved if the crime was committed with a knife or poison or the assailant's fists and booted feet than if it was done with a firearm. The unarmed pensioner menaced by a young tough with a knife is just as endangered and just as likely to turn over the money she is carrying as the same old woman menaced with a handgun.
The murder rate in the U.K. was lower than in the U.S. generally in the early 1900's when neither had significant legal impediments to firearms ownership, and, tellingly, than it was in New York state from 1911 onward when the Sullivan Act restricted gun ownership in New York, but His Majesty's subjects were free to own guns.
Likewise the murder rate in Russia is much higher than in the U.S. even though per capita private firearms ownership is about 1/10th that in the U.S. I suppose it's a great comfort to the relative of murdered Russians that it wasn't "gun crime".
Oh, all he needed to do was register? Did you read the article? Maybe at your university registration lets a student exercise their rights to freedom of speech and freedom of the press un-molested by the campus "authorities", but evidently at Modesto, it does so only if you confine your activities to a tiny "free speech area" and to a time-window some at some future date when the limit of two free-speakers per day isn't yet used up.
Private universities and colleges which limit free speech that is not disrupting classes deserve to be mocked and shamed. Public universities which do the same deserve to be mocked, shamed, *and* sued into submission to the First and Fourteenth Amendments, since their administrators and campus security personnel are agents of the state, and as such subject to the limits the Constitution places on the government.
Most utterances of our current President, whether true or false, fall under Frankfurt's definition of bullsh*t, and as such are more corrosive of honest political dialogue than actual lies. Obama says whatever seems expedient without regard for whether it is true or false, and has done so seemingly since he entered politics, if not before in his days as a community organizer.
"Three hops" from a given person could easily cover a goodly portion of the population of the world. And "three hops" from every person the U.S. suspects of ties to terrorism probably covers most of the e-mail users in the world.
I've thought about the claim that if one connects everyone to each of their acquaintances no one is more than six degrees of separation from anyone else, and came to the conclusion that it's likely true (leaving aside isolated tribes in the Amazon and African bush): I know I've met someone (the metropolitan archbishop of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese) who in turn has met not only every recent POTUS, but also Bashar Al Assad, add one more degree of separation (in terms of acquaintances) and I'm likely only three degrees of separation from every world leader and every notable in U.S. politics (and a fair number of unsavory types in the Middle East), add three more and...
In terms of e-mail communications, I communicate with my own bishop fairly regularly, he with the metropolitan archbishop, and he in turn has communicated electronically with Assad. So I would be swept up in a "three hop" search centered on the President of Syria. What this shows is that a "three hop" search is a fishing expedition and that while direct communications with a terror suspect might constitute probable cause, even a "two hop" search (which would catch my bishop when looking at Assad) is not based on probable cause, is a grotesque violation of the 4th Amendment, and in terms of improving national security is a complete waste of time.
I had a similar reaction to the Manning case: if they want to prosecute him, first, at very least, they should publicly excoriate and fire the nitwit(s) who came up with security protocols that gave an Army PFC, yes a PFC with a high security clearance, but still, access to diplomatic cables.
The fact that Snowden in theory was not supposed to have access to things he accessed (or so they say), makes the NSA maintenance of broad records of Americans activities all the more troubling. Even allowing, for the sake of argument, that standard NSA procedures do not allow access to any data about an identifiable American citizen, whether raw or the result of algorithmic analysis, without a FISA warrant, and even presuming (again for the sake of argument) that all FISA judges are honorable men with a deep commitment to the American constitutional order and the plain meaning of the 4th Amendment, how do we know that rogue agents (or maybe "rogue agents" with orders from Washington, cf. the Cincinnati IRS office) can't and won't access the data in violation of standard NSA procedures?
"There are cases where they could, inadvertently perhaps, collect—but not wittingly."
How does one inadvertently or unwittingly collect data [of any type] on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?
The question wasn't whether the NSA collected any data on Americans -- in which case, I jolly well hope they do, provided said Americans are in direct contact with people we reasonably suspect of being Al Qaeda or foreign intelligence operatives -- it wasn't whether the NSA collected any data on innocent Americans -- in which case the answer would have been responsive, and a follow up on how often this happens could have been asked. The question was "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"
If NSA data collection on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans were really inadvertent, then there be a different type of scandal here about the competence of the folks running the NSA.
The fact is that right of center political speech, defense of traditional morality, and overt expressions of Christian piety are already suppressed on many campuses by university administrations without any push from Washington, while left of center political speech, objection to traditional morality and attacks on Christianity are given free reign. Any organization which genuinely defends free exchange of ideas on university campuses will, in the present environment appear right-wing, just as any organization which genuinely defended free exchange of ideas on university campuses in the mid-1950's woudl appear left-wing.
Gee, a state-granted monopoly (in this case a patent) is abused because it was granted without the prices allowed to be charged for the product sold under the monopoly are not regulated? What a surprise!
For most things the free market works better than state-granted monopolies. When monopolies are necessary or highly desirable, as in the case of utilities, the rates monopolists are allowed to charge should be regulated in the public interest -- the moreso when the product the monopoly is granted on is one with inelastic demand as is the case with life-saving drugs with no real substitutes.
Basically people are remarkably stupid (or irrational) when it comes to risk analysis.
As the Cato Institute observes the probability of being killed by a police officer is about eight times the probability of being killed by a terrorist, but we will cede more and more power to the police (increasing the likelihood of dying in a misplaced no-knock raid) to "protect" us from terrorists. Ingredients in food or medications which on balance in small doses have beneficial health effects are banned if massive doses of the same chemical cause cancer in rats. I trust the reader can multiply examples almost ad infinitum.
In each case, the overblown risk is invariably used as an excuse for the expansion of government (in the American context, most often Federal government) power. Woe to politicians if the populace ever develops the ability to rationally weigh risks: as H.L. Mencken observed, "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
Glad to see someone besides mathematicians doing this
Now they need to follow the lead of the editorial board of Topology that resigned en masse: start a new open-access journal published by a professional society (or better still existing entirely online with all the copyright of all articles retained by the author except for permission to the journal to permanently maintain online and archive copies and to all parties to download and print copies from personal use the way Theory and Applications of Categories does).
Great article, except for the use of "IP" in place of copyright.
The phrase "intellectual property" and its acronym "IP", while that latter may have the virtue of brevity in comparison to the phrase "copyrights and patents" (or "copyright and patent" as appropriate) cedes too much territory to the maximalists.
Government-granted monopolies are not property, no matter how many times the lie is repeated. At least those of us who revere the original purpose of copyrights and patents (both under the U.S. Constitution and in the original British instantiations of the modern notions, the Law of Queen Anne and the Statue on Monopolies of 1648) and abhor their corruption by rent-seeking publishers, movies studies, patent trolls and the like, can stop repeating the lie and stop using the phrase "intellectual property" or "IP" except when quoting others. And when we quote them, if at all convenient to the flow of our rhetoric, we should follow with a deconstruction of the notion of "IP" as a corruption of the purpose of copyrights and patents.
It seems to me this "remedy" -- continuing to charge users for a service you are no longer providing, rather than canceling their accounts -- is more worthy of the name "piracy" than sharing copies of electronic files whose content is the object of a government granted monopoly.
Of course health care is not provided by a free market. It is provided by a collection of state-granted monopolies. The latest medical advances (both drugs and medical devices) are all sold under government granted monopolies called "patents". Physicians collectively function like a medieval guild-monopoly -- the state licenses those who can practice medicine (yes, arguably for good reason, though there are places around the margins like delivering healthy babies and a good deal of primary care that can be provided equally well by non-M.D.'s but most of the several states shield physicians from competition) and the profession constricts the supply to keep rates up. In many places a local hospital has a genuine monopoly on providing many forms of health care, as there are no other facilities capable of doing the same for hundreds of miles around.
Even where hospitals in theory should compete, they do not, because third-party payment for most medical services prevents an effective market from developing (and the services are being provided as a front for the guild-monopoly of physicians and the monopolies of medical and pharmaceutical manufacturers).
And all of these monopolies, unlike utility monopolies, have their rates unregulated.
Don't look for anything to fix this. Just as in copyright and general patent matters all of us who read TechDirt are familiar with, the incumbents in the market like things just the way they are, have a lot of political clout, and now, rhetorical cover from the phrase "health care" having been turned into a Newspeak phrase that means any of "health care", "health insurance", "government-run/regulated health insurance", or probably one or two other things according to what the Party needs it to mean at any given moment.
Whatever you think of the Obama/Pelosi reform of health insurance, it didn't do anything to reform health care. What's needed is the recognition that health care is provided by state-granted monopolies and the will to regulate those monopolies as to rates charged.
This somehow reminds me of a former student's science fiction writings, which included a sentient race who knew they were designed, rather than evolved, because their genome and DNA-to-protein mechanisms were based on error correcting codes.
The argument that a DDoS attack is analogous to a sit-in is valid only in the case where the DDoS attack is implemented by lots of people logging onto the site (and hitting their refresh buttons repeatedly) all at once. If automated scripts are used to hit the refresh button or a botnet is used, it's more analogous to some sort of vandalism, say dumping a pile of trash in the entryway to a business.
It would be reasonable to protect hand-implemented crowd-sourced DDoS attacks on First Amendment grounds, while still treating automated DDoS attacks as hacking. (Treating DDoS attacks as terrorism is absurd: If any server is simultaneously running programs so critical to public safety that shutting them down might reasonably be considered a terrorist attack and programs that make it susceptible to DDoS attacks, whoever designed such a system should be sacked for incompetence, the functions split between two servers, and our civil liberties left relatively unmolested.)
Dollar coins, but fewer coins in your pocket anyway
Dollar coins are economical. Pennies (and arguably nickels and even dimes) are uneconomical and pointless -- we abolished the half-cent coin when its purchasing power was greater than that of a present-day dime.
To do it right, besides stopping production of one dollar notes, ramping up production of dollar coins, and abolishing pennies and nickels and adding rounding lines to all cash transactions, we need to introduce a two dollar coin.
On the post: DailyDirt: Measuring Scientific Impact Is Far From Simple
Bibliometric follies in the Heartland
Add to the folly that they proposed using data from commercial publishers whose database excludes the major house journals of some professional societies (notably the Association for Symbolic Logic) and the journals (some published by professional societies, others online only) set up by academicians in protest against abusive practices of commercial publishers.
This baleful trend is part of the rise of the all-administrative university in which management types, whatever lip-service they provide to the actual purpose of universities, behave as if university administration is the core function of a university, rather than research, scholarship or education.
On the post: NY Times: NSA Should Be Barred From Requiring Companies To Introduce Surveillance Backdoors
Cloud storage?
The real issues involve shared and communicated data in contexts where everything has to be done online because sharing keys by physical transfer is infeasible.
One wonders whether the NYTimes is cryptologically illiterate or is deliberately advancing a straw-man because they are really in favor of expanding the power of the state.
On the post: California College Tells Student He Can't Hand Out Copies Of The Constitution On Constitution Day
Re: Re: Re: staged
Freedom of speech and freedom of the press (pamphlets and copies of the Constitution are printed) only work when the protect speech and writing that someone objects to (as you evidently object to printed advocacy of morality or religion). I think the Framers of the Constitution thought it protected the advocacy of immorality and irreligion, even though they objected to those every bit as much as the biens pensants of turn of 21st century America object to morality and religion.
On the post: California College Tells Student He Can't Hand Out Copies Of The Constitution On Constitution Day
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: staged
The murder rate in the U.K. was lower than in the U.S. generally in the early 1900's when neither had significant legal impediments to firearms ownership, and, tellingly, than it was in New York state from 1911 onward when the Sullivan Act restricted gun ownership in New York, but His Majesty's subjects were free to own guns.
Likewise the murder rate in Russia is much higher than in the U.S. even though per capita private firearms ownership is about 1/10th that in the U.S. I suppose it's a great comfort to the relative of murdered Russians that it wasn't "gun crime".
On the post: California College Tells Student He Can't Hand Out Copies Of The Constitution On Constitution Day
Re: staged
Private universities and colleges which limit free speech that is not disrupting classes deserve to be mocked and shamed. Public universities which do the same deserve to be mocked, shamed, *and* sued into submission to the First and Fourteenth Amendments, since their administrators and campus security personnel are agents of the state, and as such subject to the limits the Constitution places on the government.
On the post: Down To Just A Few Possibilities: President Obama Either Lied Or Is Ignorant About The NSA
Lying vs. Bullsh*tting
Most utterances of our current President, whether true or false, fall under Frankfurt's definition of bullsh*t, and as such are more corrosive of honest political dialogue than actual lies. Obama says whatever seems expedient without regard for whether it is true or false, and has done so seemingly since he entered politics, if not before in his days as a community organizer.
On the post: NSA Official Admits Agency's Surveillance Covers Even More People Than Previously Indicated
Three Hops and Six Degrees of Separation
I've thought about the claim that if one connects everyone to each of their acquaintances no one is more than six degrees of separation from anyone else, and came to the conclusion that it's likely true (leaving aside isolated tribes in the Amazon and African bush): I know I've met someone (the metropolitan archbishop of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese) who in turn has met not only every recent POTUS, but also Bashar Al Assad, add one more degree of separation (in terms of acquaintances) and I'm likely only three degrees of separation from every world leader and every notable in U.S. politics (and a fair number of unsavory types in the Middle East), add three more and...
In terms of e-mail communications, I communicate with my own bishop fairly regularly, he with the metropolitan archbishop, and he in turn has communicated electronically with Assad. So I would be swept up in a "three hop" search centered on the President of Syria. What this shows is that a "three hop" search is a fishing expedition and that while direct communications with a terror suspect might constitute probable cause, even a "two hop" search (which would catch my bishop when looking at Assad) is not based on probable cause, is a grotesque violation of the 4th Amendment, and in terms of improving national security is a complete waste of time.
On the post: Prometheus, Meet Thomas Jefferson: On Fire, Stealing And Sharing
Re: Ideas can't be copyrighted
On the post: Perhaps The NSA Should Figure Out How To Keep Its Own Stuff Secret Before Building A Giant Database
Secrecy protocols
The fact that Snowden in theory was not supposed to have access to things he accessed (or so they say), makes the NSA maintenance of broad records of Americans activities all the more troubling. Even allowing, for the sake of argument, that standard NSA procedures do not allow access to any data about an identifiable American citizen, whether raw or the result of algorithmic analysis, without a FISA warrant, and even presuming (again for the sake of argument) that all FISA judges are honorable men with a deep commitment to the American constitutional order and the plain meaning of the 4th Amendment, how do we know that rogue agents (or maybe "rogue agents" with orders from Washington, cf. the Cincinnati IRS office) can't and won't access the data in violation of standard NSA procedures?
On the post: Clapper: I Gave 'The Least Untruthful Answer' To Wyden's 'Beating Your Wife' Question On Data Surveillance
WTF???
How does one inadvertently or unwittingly collect data [of any type] on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?
The question wasn't whether the NSA collected any data on Americans -- in which case, I jolly well hope they do, provided said Americans are in direct contact with people we reasonably suspect of being Al Qaeda or foreign intelligence operatives -- it wasn't whether the NSA collected any data on innocent Americans -- in which case the answer would have been responsive, and a follow up on how often this happens could have been asked. The question was "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"
If NSA data collection on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans were really inadvertent, then there be a different type of scandal here about the competence of the folks running the NSA.
On the post: DOJ And Dept. Of Education To Colleges: Start Restricting Free Speech On Campus Or Kiss Your Federal Funding Goodbye
Re: Don't Trust "FIRE"
On the post: Doctors Call Out Novartis For Insane Pricing On Cancer Drug
State Granted Monopolies
For most things the free market works better than state-granted monopolies. When monopolies are necessary or highly desirable, as in the case of utilities, the rates monopolists are allowed to charge should be regulated in the public interest -- the moreso when the product the monopoly is granted on is one with inelastic demand as is the case with life-saving drugs with no real substitutes.
On the post: If Everything Is A Threat, Then Nothing Is
(Ir)rational risk analysis
As the Cato Institute observes the probability of being killed by a police officer is about eight times the probability of being killed by a terrorist, but we will cede more and more power to the police (increasing the likelihood of dying in a misplaced no-knock raid) to "protect" us from terrorists. Ingredients in food or medications which on balance in small doses have beneficial health effects are banned if massive doses of the same chemical cause cancer in rats. I trust the reader can multiply examples almost ad infinitum.
In each case, the overblown risk is invariably used as an excuse for the expansion of government (in the American context, most often Federal government) power. Woe to politicians if the populace ever develops the ability to rationally weigh risks: as H.L. Mencken observed, "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
On the post: Awesome: Entire Editorial Board Of Journal Of Library Administration Resigns In Support Of Open Access
Glad to see someone besides mathematicians doing this
On the post: The Insanity Of Making A 'Wizard Of Oz' Film In Today's IP Climate
"IP"
The phrase "intellectual property" and its acronym "IP", while that latter may have the virtue of brevity in comparison to the phrase "copyrights and patents" (or "copyright and patent" as appropriate) cedes too much territory to the maximalists.
Government-granted monopolies are not property, no matter how many times the lie is repeated. At least those of us who revere the original purpose of copyrights and patents (both under the U.S. Constitution and in the original British instantiations of the modern notions, the Law of Queen Anne and the Statue on Monopolies of 1648) and abhor their corruption by rent-seeking publishers, movies studies, patent trolls and the like, can stop repeating the lie and stop using the phrase "intellectual property" or "IP" except when quoting others. And when we quote them, if at all convenient to the flow of our rhetoric, we should follow with a deconstruction of the notion of "IP" as a corruption of the purpose of copyrights and patents.
On the post: Comcast: We Won't Terminate Your Account Under Six Strikes; We'll Just Block Every Single Website
Piracy
On the post: Healthcare Isn't A Free Market, It's A Giant Economic Scam
Not a free market? No, Duh!
Even where hospitals in theory should compete, they do not, because third-party payment for most medical services prevents an effective market from developing (and the services are being provided as a front for the guild-monopoly of physicians and the monopolies of medical and pharmaceutical manufacturers).
And all of these monopolies, unlike utility monopolies, have their rates unregulated.
Don't look for anything to fix this. Just as in copyright and general patent matters all of us who read TechDirt are familiar with, the incumbents in the market like things just the way they are, have a lot of political clout, and now, rhetorical cover from the phrase "health care" having been turned into a Newspeak phrase that means any of "health care", "health insurance", "government-run/regulated health insurance", or probably one or two other things according to what the Party needs it to mean at any given moment.
Whatever you think of the Obama/Pelosi reform of health insurance, it didn't do anything to reform health care. What's needed is the recognition that health care is provided by state-granted monopolies and the will to regulate those monopolies as to rates charged.
On the post: DailyDirt: Storing Data On DNA
DNA and encryption
On the post: Anonymous Launches White House Petition Saying DDoS Should Be Recognized As A Valid Form Of Protest
DDoS by a crowd v. DDoS by robots
It would be reasonable to protect hand-implemented crowd-sourced DDoS attacks on First Amendment grounds, while still treating automated DDoS attacks as hacking. (Treating DDoS attacks as terrorism is absurd: If any server is simultaneously running programs so critical to public safety that shutting them down might reasonably be considered a terrorist attack and programs that make it susceptible to DDoS attacks, whoever designed such a system should be sacked for incompetence, the functions split between two servers, and our civil liberties left relatively unmolested.)
On the post: DailyDirt: Cool Coins, Unpopular Coins...
Dollar coins, but fewer coins in your pocket anyway
(see C.G.P. Grey's charming video advocating the abolition of pennies at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5UT04p5f7U)
To do it right, besides stopping production of one dollar notes, ramping up production of dollar coins, and abolishing pennies and nickels and adding rounding lines to all cash transactions, we need to introduce a two dollar coin.
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