A Fate Worse Than Grading

The economy got you down? Or have a stack of papers to grade? Don't fret. Life could be worse . . . Far worse. You could be sucked into a black hole.

This very entertaining video of astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson is very much worth watching. With great humor, he describes what would happen to you if you were sucked into a black hole, as well as the asteroid that's projected to come very close to Earth in 2029, possibly hitting the planet in 2037. Tyson is the author of Death by Black Hole (Norton 2007).

The video is here.

Hat tip: BoingBoing

Posted by Daniel Solove at 08:27 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Hard Times for Voting Machine Vendors

Election 2008 passed uneventfully, at least for appearance's sake. Although voters stood on long lines and administrators wrestled with machine malfunctions, it appeared that e-voting technology withstood the pressure of a robust voting season. But lest we not get too optimistic about the technology, reports have been trickling in about the inaccuracy of e-voting systems and the costs to repair them. In mid December, officials in Montgomery County, Ohio reported that tabulation software used with Premier Election Solutions' (formerly Diebold) touch-screen voting machines failed to count five votes in the city of Trotwood. Officials discovered that although the five votes were recorded to a memory card inside the machine, the votes were not counted by the tabulation software when the memory card was loaded to the tabulation server. Premier's Global Election Management System (GEMS) is the tabulation software that counts votes from memory cards. Ohio officials had no idea about the problem until a month after the November election, only learning about it when officials put the memory cards back into the voting machines to conduct a manual audit. Premier's GEMS is apparently responsible for dropped votes in a California county and the source of previous counting problems in Ohio's primary season.

And just when Premier might have thought the five uncounted votes would seem trivial enough to escape public outrage, Maryland came calling. Maryland's Attorney General has recently filed suit against Premier, seeking reimbursement of $8.5 million the state allegedly spent to repair security problems in its e-voting machines. As Maryland AG Doug Gansler explains, the lawsuit will resolve Premier's outstanding bill of $4 million to fix problems in its machines and the state's claim for reimbursement. "They should pay even more than [the millions we seek] because the system they sold us [for $90 million], where they said we would have reliable results that these are accurate machines and they could not be tampered with, has proven to be not true," noted Gansler.

Maryland has decided to scrap the touch-screen machines in favor of optical scanners, which have the advantage of leaving behind a paper trail that can be audited without having to worry about faulty printers. But, oddly, Maryland has chosen to purchase those optical machines from none other than Premier, the very company that it is suing for broken promises and faulty machinery. This begs the larger question: are states responsible for this e-voting predicament? When Congress appropriated billions of dollars under the Help America Vote Act to allow states to buy electronic machines that would put the memory of hanging chads behind us, states went on a mad spending spree, buying first and asking questions later. Contracts required little of the vendors, leaving states in the difficult spot that they are in today with inaccurate and insecure voting machinery. Now, they seem to be headlong into the same mistakes. Voting experts Aaron Burstein and Joseph Lorenzo Hall are studying the contracts that states enter with voting vendors and I look forward to the light that their work will shed on fixing this difficult problem.

Posted by Danielle_Citron at 10:29 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

How to Be a Useless Company: ATT and iPhones (with irony and a request)

I don’t buy Apple products. I was just starting to change my mind but Apple has managed to annoy me yet again. I wanted an iPhone. My brother noted that and thought he was getting me a gift card for the iPhone. But wait, I am an ATT customer for ten, yes ten, years. Through the Cingular back to ATT shift I have stayed with the service. My reward? I cannot get the new customer prices until March 19, 2009 when I am allowed to upgrade. (ATT business meeting: Eureka! Force delayed spending in a down market where people have many reasons not to spend! That’s a great idea!) If they said you can upgrade with the blasted two year contract and get the iPhone right now at the new customer price, would I do it? YES! When the time comes to upgrade and maybe shift cell service will I consider it? YES, YES, YES!!!!

Let’s talk goodwill. For the sake of a stupid business model, ATT and Apple have decided to annoy longtime, loyal customers. Now the iPhone is pretty cool. Is it cool enough that I would not consider a Blackberry? After the lame service, of course I would consider the Blackberry. In fact, I am considering switching cell companies just to demonstrate how lame ATT is. HEY APPLE! Get a clue. Exclusive partnerships are obviously working at one level, but ATT is silly. Their choice of cutting off old customers and thwarting their attempt to embrace Apple products is downright idiotic and makes people think less of Apple. In other words, how is it wise to prevent an alleged 72.9 million people (ATT’s claimed current customer base) from the better price? Sure Apple has had big sales, but it is still behind Nokia and RiM in a shrinking smartphone market. In hard numbers Apple sold 4.7 million units. Now if ATT is accurate about its customer numbers, one has to wonder whether letting customers upgrade phones and enter new contracts in mid-contract might be wise. I freely admit that ATT must have some double secret probation protected theory about its system that I, unfrozen caveman lawyer, fail to grasp.

The irony is there may be many of us who erroneously wanted the iPhone but can’t get it at a price that makes sense. And, as I looked around for options, I find that Blackberry has many useful features and maybe most of the services that I want. Who knows? Google’s nascent phone empire may offer more too.

So here is the request: Please share advice on what is the best phone for email, music, and Internet use? In addition, ideas for the best cell service are welcome too. See what happens when companies deny a customer from obtaining on impulse? The rational buyer returns and finds better options. Hmm maybe I should say thanks Apple and ATT.

Posted by Deven_Desai at 07:46 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

Light Empirical Data On Films and Search

IMDb has a feature called MOVIEmeter Top 25 Films of 2008. It claims to be a distillation of the most popular films based on searches. So these rankings are "based not upon critical assessments or box-office performance, but the actual search behavior of over 57 million users of IMDb.com. They're the movies that were most often on people's minds, ones they were keen to get information on." As the site notes, the results reflects a mix of interests. Sure, the expected Internet/fan crowds' interests (e.g., Tron, Dark Knight, etc.) are represented. Yet perpetual favorites such as Shawshank and Godfather are present too (although the rest of the list is really about films in the past year or so). The searches for future films are for franchise or aspiring to be franchise movies (Terminator, Harry Potter, Star Trek, Transformers, Tron, Dragonball) or films featuring hot ticket actors such as Jason Statham. So maybe the list indicates a type of brand power. I personally am not a fan of Shawshank (yes I know heresy) and am a fan of Godfather (surprise, surprise, surprise). One might think they are on because there is a certain stickiness to the films in that they are accessible and considered good (compare Citizen Kane). In addition, they are apparently usually one or two on IMDb's top 250 list (by vote). The most likely reason they are on the list is that they both have had Blu-ray releases so some marketing etc. has brought them to the fore.

Which leads to a freebie for Amazon/IMDd: sell the search results to the film industry. Studios could have sense of what marketing is working and which actors are drawing attention to a film. Of course the Jolie's of the film game are obvious right now. But other, lesser known actors and film projects are more difficult to track. In fact IMDb already has star meters and movie meters to give a sense of week to week interest. So offering a picture of people's interest over a longer time frame may help a studio. One may not know whether an ad worked directly but if there were spikes in searches on IMDb that co-related to ad pushes, one may have a sense of what was working or not. Then again, these numbers probably don't show as much as folks think and as William Goldman said, "Nobody knows anything."

Posted by Deven_Desai at 05:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Booming Cybercrime Economy

As ars technica reports, the underground cybercrime economy is flourishing. A recent whitepaper released by security company Symantec documents the vast market involved in the sale and trading of stolen credit cards, bank account credentials, email accounts, software, and other data that can be exploited for profit. The report estimates that, for the period covering July 2007 to June 2008, the total value of advertised stolen goods added up to $276 million. The most advertised, requested, and expensive product was credit card information, probably because it is difficult for merchants to identify fraudulent transactions before an online sale is completed. Bank account data stood as the next most popular product, likely due to the fact that balances of accounts can be transferred online to untraceable locations within minutes. "Attack tools" are also prominent goods for sale--services that steal information through denial-of-service attacks, engage in spamming and phishing campaigns, and generate botnets. (Most of the stolen information is obtained and distributed through these services).

Protecting sensitive information from this underground market, however, is often difficult. Consumers and organizations can follow welll-known (but imperfect) strategies to protect themselves. They can use antivirus, firewall, and antiphishing software. Because computer users are themselves a large part of the problem, technology alone cannot reduce the theft of sensitive information. Individuals need to be educated about phishing, which lures people into giving up personal or corporate information. An estimated 3.6 million Americans fell victim to phishing last year, leading to losses of more than $3.2 billion. As computer scientist Lorrie Faith Cranor recently explained in Scientific American, the number of phishing victims can be reduced by constantly improving phishing detection software and updating computer users about new types of phishing attacks. At the end of the day, however, phishers and their criminal cohorts are constantly evolving their tactics to stay a step ahead of technologies that combat their efforts and improving their ability to evade law enforcement. Time, of course, will tell if this underground market grows even more robust in the months to come.

Posted by Danielle_Citron at 02:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Bending Journalism

Thomas O. McGarity and Wendy Wagner's book Bending Science: How Special Interests Corrupt Public Health Research is an extraordinary contribution to the sociology of knowledge. The typology of tools for bending science mentioned on page 10 of the book (spinning, packaging, harassing, attacking, hiding, and shaping) are elaborated in great detail in cases ranging from popcorn lung to alar panics. I predict that typology will eventually inform research on "bent journalism"--the range of so-called objective reporting subtly shaped by stealth sponsors.

On the Media does a great job covering such situations. This week it reports on conflicts of interest at the show The Infinite Mind, whose host earned "at least $1.3 million from 2000 to 2007 giving marketing lectures for drugmakers, income not mentioned on the program." Gary Schwitzer, director of the University of Minnesota’s Health Journalism Program, identifies "five sins of health reporters:"

Gullibility and naiveté as number one; a failure to discuss costs as number two; as number three, the failure to tell both how small might be the potential benefit and how large might be the potential harms; number four, [failure] to get independent sources; and, number five, to always be looking for conflict of interest in those sources.

Schwitzer's Health News Review grades health stories on these and other bases. Like McGarity/Wagner's chapters on "Restoring Science" and "Reforming Science Oversight," the Health News Review is essential reading for those concerned about the real material bases of conventional wisdom.

Posted by Frank_Pasquale at 08:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Medicalization Menace? A New Culture War

The NYT's Well blogger Tara Parker-Pope notes the new pride many of those with ADHD feel in the wake of Michael Phelps's success:

[T]he Olympic superstar . . . is emerging as an inspirational role model among parents and children whose lives are affected by attention problems. . . . Children with the disorder typically have trouble sitting still and paying attention. But they may also have boundless energy and a laserlike focus on favorite things. . . .

Like Adrienne Rich's Marie Curie, or Kay Redfield Jamison's geniuses, these "disordered" individuals are simultaneously sufferers and successes.

They're also part of a larger cultural movement questioning the medicalization of various "deviant" personalities. Rather than treat boys for ADHD, some Norwegian schools just start them in school later. Allan V. Horwitz worries that "normal sadness" is being rendered socially unacceptable on account of pharmaceutical fixes:

Consumption of antidepressants has soared since 1990. Roughly 10% of women and 4% of men in the United States take antidepressant medication at any time. . . .The blurring of the distinction between normal intense sadness and depressive disorder has arguably had some salutary effects. For example, it has reduced the stigma of depression and created a cultural climate that is more accepting of seeking treatment for mental illness. Many people with normal sadness might benefit from medication that ameliorates their symptoms. However, the usefulness of medication for normal sadness, and especially the trade-off between symptom reduction and adverse effects, has not been carefully studied—partly because the necessary distinctions do not exist within the current diagnostic system.

The decontextualized definition of MDD, however, has had substantial costs. Since 1980, an enormous “medicalization” of unhappiness has occurred. Life’s ills—whether a failure to attain an expected promotion, ongoing conflict with a spouse, or overwhelming distress from coping with competing family and work demands—are too often treated as mental disorders based on the report of a few symptoms of sadness. The medicalization of social life triggered an immense rise in the consumption of antidepressants. The efficacy of these medications for the treatment of normal sadness is often overstated, and their potential to cause harmful effects has sometimes been underestimated.

Medicalization may also be contributing to cyberchondria. We should not ignore the market forces contributing to the process, as David Healy notes:

One consequence of the recent "biological" turn is that psychiatrists increasingly fail to appreciate the dynamic of their relationships with their patients. There is a growing split between pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy that is most evident in North American psychiatry. Actual time with patient is shrinking rapidly. Psychiatrists now commonly prescribe medications after only a brief encounter with the patient, and with only occasional follow-ups. . . .Prescribing antidepressants has become as antiseptic a therapeutic encounter as giving an antibiotic.

The antibiotic analogy is apt. As I argued last year, while the internal experience of equilibrium and happiness is often intrinsically good, the external display of such affect can be a positional good. We see increasing reports of people in competitive jobs taking pills or shots to maintain an upbeat affect and appearance. The competition to seem upbeat could become an arms race--individually rational, but collectively self-defeating. Antibiotic use can follow a similar pattern--while any individual wants to be on the safe side and take the drug, widespread overuse leads to resistance.

One more example of medicalization spawning collectively self-defeating behavior is cosmetic surgery. As Anthony Elliott's brilliant new book on the topic shows, “[T]he flipside of today’s reinvention craze is fear of personal disposability" (145):

My argument is that the new economy spawned by globalization intrudes traumatically in the emotional lives of people - with many scrambling to adjust to today's routine corporate redundancies. (...) [C]orporate layoffs, downsizings and offshorings are affecting people's sense of identity, life and work. (...) Many have reacted to this sense of social dislocation and economic insecurity - what I term today's pervasive sense of ambient fear - by turning to forms of extreme reinvention in general and cosmetic surgical culture in particular. Many are calculating that a freshly purchased face-lift or suctioning of fat through liposuction is the best route to improved lives, careers and relationships. (9)

As Charles Taylor argued in his great essay "What's Wrong With Negative Liberty," we should always interrogate the conditions under which choices are made. The enhancements achieved via the medicalization of hyperactivity, sadness, and plain looks are contestable. As market-driven pressures for conformity ratchet up, we may see new identity politics developing around introversion, hyperactivity, sadness, heaviness, and plainness.

Posted by Frank_Pasquale at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Cyberchondria: Too Much Bad News

According to the New York Times, health-related Web searches are making us unecessarily anxious. A Microsoft study released on Monday reveals that search engines often lead people to fear the "worst about what ails them." Web searches for medical problems are "as likely or more likely" to lead people to pages describing serious conditions as benign ones, even though the more serious illnesses are much more rare. For instance, a search for the term "headache" retrieved as many articles about brain tumors as those discussing caffeine withdrawal, even though the chance of having a brain tumor is extremely small. According to artificial intelligence researcher Eric Horvitz, people trust search engines to produce information as a human expert would and tend to look at just the first couple of results in a given search. When a search for "headache" produces "brain tumor" or "A.L.S." in its first few results, people seize on these terms as their "launching point." As a result, more than half of the study participants said that online medical queries had interrupted their day-to-day activities and made them anxious. And a third of the subjects escalated their follow-up searches to explore serious illnesses.

Our tendency to jump to awful conclusions is well-established. As behavioral economics literature suggests, an array of psychological undercurrents influence our behavior and decision making. For instance, the phenomenon of diagnosis bias causes us to ignore evidence that contradicts our initial assessment of a situation. (Anecdotally, Dr. Horvitz recalled his "medical schoolitis:" his tendency to believe that he suffered from the rare and incurable diseases that he studied in medical school.) And, as the Microsoft study suggests, we suffer from automation bias--the tendency to believe computer decisions in the face of contradictory evidence.

Microsoft hopes to refine its search engines to detect medical inquiries and offer advice that would not automatically make Web searchers jump to the worst conclusions, thus serving as more of an adviser than a blind information retrieval tool. Given the move to personalize our searches based on our prior activity, the question remains whether new developments can alleviate the anxious (like the Woody Allen character Mickey in "Hannah and Her Sisters") from running into doctors offices to get CAT scans at the first sign of a headache.

Posted by Danielle_Citron at 09:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Obama and Technology

As many of you know, President-elect Obama plans on having a Chief Technology Officer position in his administration. Many moons ago I tried to track down the tech policies of the various candidates. At that time only Ron Paul had one (yes it really was that early in the campaign). Luckily over the course of the campaign season, other pieced together the candidate's positions. And now we even have Obama's policy paper available.

The folks over at Freedom to Tinker have a nice analysis of the paper. And the paper that Tinkerers David Robinson, Harlan Yu, Bill Zeller, and Ed Felten wrote, Government Data and the Invisible Hand seems to match at least part of the Obama technology platform. Still the paper argues that the ideas and problems regarding putting government information online are old. The crucial matter is how it one puts the information on line.

The NPR interview talks about "best of breed of technology" and "working with private tech firms" to import "the best applications to run federal government" and making the government more transparent. It plays a clip from Obama's speech to Google where he states that a universally accessible format for information will be used. So, what does that all mean? I am not sure. In the happiest of worlds, the administration is taking its cue from the Paper. But given the language of "best applications" and private tech firms, one should not be surprised that tech firms will try to be the provider of choice to the government. That point returns us to the paper.

As it argues:

In order for public data to benefit from the same innovation and dynamism that characterize private parties' use of the Internet, the federal government must reimagine its role as an information provider. Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, it should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that "exposes" the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data. The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large.

For all I know, Obama's people are talking to the folks who wrote the paper. If so, great. If not, they should.

As a side note I hope the Freedom to Tinker folks don't mind the Tinkerer moniker. It is a nod to an old Economist article. Nonetheless, if you all reject the name, give a shout and I will get rid of it.

Posted by Deven_Desai at 08:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

No Order Without Law Online

Truly disturbing article from the NYT on D.D.O.S. attacks. Basic conclusion: attacks are growing in frequency and scope, and commercial operators' main defense (excess capacity) will soon become obsolete. The worst part (I think):

Despite a drastic increase in the number of attacks, the percentage referred to law enforcement authorities declined. The report said 58 percent of the Internet service providers had referred no instances to law enforcement in the last 12 months. When asked why there were so few referrals, 29 percent said law enforcement had limited capabilities, 26 percent said they expected their customers to report illegal activities and 17 percent said there was “little or no utility” in reporting attacks.

Even our libertarian friends will admit, I hope, that protecting the internet from zombie computers is a pretty good use of the coercive power of the state. So I hope that this makes the list of things that the Obama administration starts paying attention to over the next four years.

Posted by hoffman at 06:57 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Deja Vu All Over Again: Detroit Blues

As many know Detroit is in the news. A recent L.A. Times story asks “Are the Big Three worth saving?” Now I hate the Pistons and have never been to Detroit, but that does not mean I think the auto industry should implode. Yet, with $25 billion in loan guarantees in place and new requests for government help, one has to wonder whether the industry did it to itself. And here’s the déjà vu of sorts. An article from 2000, yes that’s correct, 2000, called Detroit Plays Catch-Up In Race for Hybrid Car; With Fewer Subsidies, Japan Is Ahead details how despite $1.4 billion given to the auto industry, universities, and national laboratories, Japan, well, Japan kicked our butts. I hate that; not because the Japanese did well, but because this country can still do great things yet seems to squander opportunities. Could it be that Good To Great was not published in time? No. It was published in 2001, and Built to Last came out in 1994. Maybe it is good old fashioned corruption (perhaps Lessig will show that). Or maybe it is a bureaucratic problem. That many actors easily beget bureaucratic balderdash.

And now there are the calls for an energy plan that mirrors the moon shot. Would it go the same way as the previous investment? Maybe not. We seem to do better when we are up against the wall. Unlike the article’s point that in 2000 there was “little sign that Americans want high-mileage cars in an era of relatively low gasoline prices and rising national prosperity,” we are in a different place. So although we seem to be poor at preventative measures, we can move quickly to attack serious problems. But what is the best way to do that? One possibility is that the government needs to spread the money to small companies that are in fierce competition for a piece of the energy solution. Would that lead to railroad era problems? Possibly. But insofar as the moon shot paid a huge sum of money to a broad range of players, it probably had some waste, yet did not seem to create the large scale problems that the rail industry did.

To be honest I need to read more about the economics of the moon shot. So if anyone has suggestions for good reading please share. Nonetheless, it seems that we are in one of those moments in history when we can leverage possibility to solve one problem and in so doing gain a broad range of beneficial outcomes. It is sort of a perfect moment for Brett Frischmann’s work. We can invest in a serious piece of infrastructure and if we plan it properly (in other words limit the ability for the players to end up as neo-railroad barons), we can have tremendous spillovers (Brett and Mark Lemley wrote this article) for the economy and the country as a whole. That’s the hope at least.

Posted by Deven_Desai at 12:00 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

Certification of Voting Machines: Little Reassurance to Voters

Election officials try to alleviate voters' concerns about the reliability of e-voting machines with the following refrain: labs ran our machines through rigorous testing and certified them as reliable and safe. But, of course, those officials fail to explain that many of the e-voting machines in use today were certified by labs whose credibility has been seriously called into question. The Election Assistance Commission has just suspended SysTest Labs, a company that tested and certified voting machines since 2001, due to their "failure to conform to procedures and requirements set by the National Institute of Standards and Technology." According to the EAC, SysTest failed to create and validate testing methods, maintain proper documentation of its testing, and employ properly trained or qualified personnel. The key question is really: if all of that is true, what did the testing lab do at all?

To add to voters' worries, another lab involved in testing today's e-voting equipment, CIBER, similarly faced suspension by the EAC in January 2007 due to its lax oversight of vendors' e-voting systems. And even long before CIBER's suspension, it was roundly criticized for its security and reliability problems. (CIBER appears to be back in the testing game, along with three other companies).

All of this suggests that the certification of these machines should give us little comfort--two of the four testing labs that certified the software running our voting machines were less than reliable. Moreover, as for all of the e-voting machines that we will use on Tuesday, vendors paid for the testing labs' services and the certification reports were never released to the public, raising concerns about the lack of impartiality of all of the testing labs.

Posted by Danielle_Citron at 02:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Voting 2.0

A cherished right in the United States is to vote in secrecy. But what if we don't want to exercise that right in secret? What if in this age of insecure and inaccurate e-voting machines we want to record our votes and our voting experiences, say with cell phones or video cameras? According to The New York Times, many voters plan to do just that, making it likely that this election will be the "most recorded in history."

Much like the online communities that came together to expose flaws in Diebold's source code in 2003 after activist Bev Harris discovered the code on an unsecured website, Web 2.0 platforms are emerging for the sole purpose of recording voting problems. Jon Pincus's Voter Suppression Wiki will let voters collaborate to collect examples of problems with voting, from exceptionally long lines or more direct actions to intimidate voters. Allison Fine and Nancy Scola are using Twitter to monitor voting problems. YouTube has created a channel, Video Your Vote, to encourage submissions. Even The New York Times has a Polling Place Photo Project on its website. Such public participation will no doubt generate crucial information for states and the Election Assistance Commission to study and may even enhance the legitimacy of this election.

Posted by Danielle_Citron at 06:59 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

An Important Resource for Combating Online Fraud: State Attorneys General

The Center for Democracy and Technology and the Center for American Progress have published a report entitled Online Consumers at Risk and the Role of State Attorneys General. According to the Report, the FTC received over 200,000 Internet-related fraud complaints this year, up from 16,000 in 2006 and 24,000 in 2005. And such numbers may be under-inclusive as consumers often do not know when they are victimized by malware.

The Report argues that state attorneys general need to devote more resources to combating online fraud as state consumer protection laws often offer greater protection to consumers than federal laws. To date, state action against online fraudsters has been limited—for example, in the past three years, state attorney generals have brought only 11 cases against spyware distributors, the same number as the Federal Trade Commission. The Report offers a number of strategies to assist a state attorney general's office, such as additional training of investigators and prosecutors on how to identify online fraud and abuse, enhanced computer forensic capabilities to trace and catch Internet fraudsters, and expanded partnerships with commercial and public-interest coalitions to fight online fraud. More aggressive action by a state attorney general's office would combat the notion that online fraud is an easy and cost-free way to make serious money.

Posted by Danielle_Citron at 06:05 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Evolutionary Pressures on Minds and Bodies

Corpus 2.0, a recent design project on potential human bodily evolution, has been spreading around the web. One model with a shoulder bump finds it much easier to keep her handbag steady. Other forms of "progress" include a "ridge in the nose developed for wearing glasses, ears moulded to accommodate earphones, a thumb with an extra joint for sending SMS messages more efficiently and a foot adapted to create the same posture as wearing high heels." This work struck me as a less critical version of the "future farms" and other body modifications both proposed and ridiculed at the "Design and the Elastic Mind" show at MOMA earlier this year.

While many find these particular modifications to bodily form grotesque, opposition to unfortunate evolutionary pressures on attitudes and mental habits strikes me as much less developed. That's one reason I cautioned against runaway "cognitive enhancements" in an article last year. The founder of Better Living Through Chemistry predicts that we should be happy to choose "average hedonic set point[s] of our children. . . . [so that] allelic combinations . . . .that leave their bearers predisposed to unpleasant states of consciousness . . . will be weeded out of the gene pool. . . [leading to] some form of paradise-engineering." Following Walker Percy, I think such people are actually quite useful to a world too prone to "irrational exuberance"--even if introversion is maladaptive for the introvert himself.

Posted by Frank_Pasquale at 09:12 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

E-voting Machine Glitches: Depressingly Reliable

Today's New York Times blog reports that early voters in West Virginia have found that e-voting machines manufactured by ES&S recorded their votes for Democratic candidates as Republican candidates. For instance, Calvin Thomas of Ripley, West Virginia explained that when he tried to vote for Senator Barack Obama, it registered the vote for Senator John McCain. He noted that his daughter had the same problem. ES&S voting machines in Tennessee reportedly have similar troubles, but in reverse: at least three voters compained that their machine registered votes for McCain as votes for Obama.

Such "vote switching" is a well-known problem and has occurred in prior elections. Indeed, a July 2007 investigative report revealed that 30 to 40 percent of ES&S's e-voting machines under review changed voters' selections. And Colorado's Secretary of State decertified e-voting systems manufactured by ES&S because tests demonstrated that the machines could not accurately count votes. Now we can add another certainty in life aside from death and taxes: e-voting machine glitches.

Posted by Danielle_Citron at 02:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Limitations of Technology and “Right Size” Challenges

Last week, I read that a hiker had come across the remains of adventurer Steve Fossett’s airplane near Mammoth Lakes, California (full story here). What was unique in the search for the downed plane last year was the nature and extent of the search and rescue effort. Thousands of people on their computers joined together to scour pictures taken by aerial photography in hopes of saving Fossett or at least finding the crash site. This distributed search network was part of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk – which breaks down massive tasks (like scanning through thousands of aerial photographs) into small portions that can be performed by thousands of individuals, taking up only a few minutes of their time.
Professor Yochai Benkler has been writing about these types of collaborative networks, most recently in his book The Wealth of Networks, and I’ve recently been thinking a lot about them too, especially what they might mean for the future of work (and accordingly, traditional labor and employment law doctrine). But before getting too excited about these new forms of distributed collaboration, I have to sound a note of caution.

After all, the Mechanical Turk searching didn’t end up finding Steve Fossett’s plane last year. Was it hubris to think that new technology could solve the problem of search and rescue? Well, perhaps it was one of those intractable problems – according to this account:

“rugged mountainous, tree-covered terrain gave … less than a 10 percent probability of detecting debris from the wreckage during aerial fly-overs. . .. The fact that a large portion of the small aircraft was fabric-covered and that the aircraft quite likely burned on impact leaving very little exposed fabric or metal, also made it harder to find.”

This doesn’t mean that the Mechanical Turk/distributed work technology isn’t useful, or that this type of search and rescue effort won’t be successful in the future. But perhaps this was too ambitious a task. My co-author Rob Rogers and I asked similar questions when I was writing about a different kind of collaborative knowledge gathering tool – prediction markets. Picking the “right size” challenge may be an important part of promoting these new technologies – instead of choosing problems that would be a wonderful advance, but which might be likely to fail. Which types of problems could be benefited from a distributed networking solution? Which will get them? Which will assist the development of the technology, and which may hurt it? In the meantime, RIP, Steve Fossett, who strove to explore new frontiers – even in death.

Posted by Miriam_Cherry at 05:29 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Deja Vu Blues

The saying "the more things change, the more they stay the same" is an unfortunate truth when it comes to our voting machines. In 2000, optical scanning machines in certain New Mexican counties counted a straight-party vote without distributing the votes to each of the individual party candidates. For instance, if a voter filled in the oval for a a straight-party Democrat, the scanner would record the ballot as cast but would not allocate votes to Presidential candidate Al Gore and the other Democratic candidates. Fast-forward to 2008: election officials in Sante Fe, New Mexico report that testing of their optical scanning machines revealed that a glitch in the memory cards prevented the tabulating machine from counting the votes in the Presidential, Senate, and House races when a voters marked their ballots indicating that they wanted to vote a straight-party ticket. Had the error not been caught, all of the county's tabulating machines would have been affected. Although the memory cards have been re-burned and fixed in these counties, concerns about the rest of the country's optical scanning machines remain. As e-voting and information security expert Peter Neumann noted during his presentation for Columbia University's Computer Science Distinguished Lecture series held this Monday, we should worry about the accuracy and security of the upcoming elections as it is the computer scientists who say that computers are unsuitable for voting.

Posted by Danielle_Citron at 05:19 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Extreme Case of Automation Bias

According to cognitive systems engineering literature, human beings view automated systems as error-resistant. In other words, we trust a computer's answers, even if evidence suggests that we should doubt them. Our automation bias was on full display on Monday night when a New York man drove onto railroad tracks because his GPS told him to do so. Luckily, the man and his passengers escaped injury before the train hit his car. A Metro-North spokesperson told reporters: "You don't turn onto train tracks even if there are little voices in your head telling you to do so. If the GPS told you to drive off a cliff, would you drive off a cliff?" If this train incident and another like it nine months ago provide any guidance, the answer may tragically be yes.

Wikimedia Commons

Posted by Danielle_Citron at 04:41 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Rulemaking 2.0

Government officials are increasingly adopting Web 2.0 technologies to connect with citizens. Governors and mayors are blogging and posting videos on You Tube. See here. The State Department has an internal wiki called Diplopedia, which it presented at the Wikipedia conference in Alexandria, Egypt. Perhaps agencies will similarly embrace Web 2.0 platforms to transform their e-Rulemaking efforts, which to date have simply reproduced offline NPRMs and comments online. Rumor has it that the ABA has a committee working on potential e-Rulemaking projects. If the ABA produces a report, it might interest the new administration, but only if online tools would cheaply and effectively bring together stakeholders and the public to discuss proposed agency action.

Posted by Danielle_Citron at 02:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Flaws in the Election Assistance Commission

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently appointed Barbara Simons to the Election Assistance Commission’s Board of Advisors, the federal body that sets voting technology standards for states that volunteer to be bound by them. As noted e-voting expert and computer scientist Professor Ed Felten explains, Simons is an accomplished computer scientist who will provide badly needed expertise on voting technology to the 37-member board. Before Simons’s appointment, none of the four board seats allocated for “professionals in the field of science and technology” had been filled.

Although appointing Simons is an important step in the right direction, more e-voting experts and technologists must be appointed and now. The EAC’s board is knee-deep in public hearings about the newest version of the Voluntary Voting Standards Guidelines (VVSG). This version of the VVSG—a massive 600 page document—has received serious criticism for its prescription of numerous contested requirements for voting technology that arguably hinder experimentation. The critics’ argument makes a tremendous amount of sense as rapidly-changing technologies are often best guided by standards that can accommodate rapid change. Professor Felten suggests that 10% of the board ought to be reserved for technologists. Even more technologists would be better as a central function of the EAC is the enhance accuracy and security of voting technologies. The majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate who appoint the board members should be seriously considering appointing e-voting experts, such as Professors Felten, Dan Wallach, and Avi Rubin for board membership.

IImage by Joebeone, from Wikicommons, under a CC-BY-2.5 license

Posted by Danielle_Citron at 07:45 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

What Comes Around Goes Around

Today's New York Times reports that a 68-year-old broker stole over $600,000 from elderly clients and then lost most of his loot in an Internet fraud scheme. The broker received an email from someone claiming to represent his distant relative who had died and left him over eight million dollars. The broker took the bait and wired overseas more than $400,000, apparently believing that the money would aid in the release of the inheritance.

Despite the significant publicity devoted to exposing such scams, consumers continue to fall prey to email fraudsters in significant numbers. Reports suggest that 29% of Internet users have been deceived by spam emails. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Australians lost $36 million dollars last year to fraudsters claiming affiliations with Nigeria. An intriguing new scam involves fraudsters who set up fake profiles on dating sites, stringing along targets for months before agreeing to meet and then asking for money to help pay for a plane ticket. Some, like the Nigerian High Commission, suggest that the deceived are as guilty as those who ask for money and thus should be subject to arrest as well. That sentiment may not convince many, but in the case of the New York broker who stole his clients' life savings, the email scam is truly just deserts.

Posted by Danielle_Citron at 09:21 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Harnessing the Wisdom of Crowds to Spot Spin

According to Business Week, this month marks the birth of Spinspotter, a website that lets users identify and discuss phrases in news stories that smack of bias. The website owner, a former Microsoft executive, will generate income by selling advertisements connected to the bias-infected new stories identified by users. For instance, Toyota might want to hang Prius ads around the phrase "gas guzzler." Or Microsoft and Apple might want to buy ad space next to a news article that deems Windows Vista a "bug-filled failure."

This is an intriguing, and mischevious, combination--users expose media bias (or its gullibility to spin doctors) while spin doctors append ads to win back or capture those cynical eyeballs. Given the site's construction around key phrases, bias accomplished through silence may be missed. So often, media outlets emphasize the positive in politicians and industry such that the lack of criticism reveals a bias worthy of the SpinSpot treatment. But if crowds are indeed wise, they may find a way to highlight those bias-filled silences.

Posted by Danielle_Citron at 05:44 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

The Right to Have Our Votes Count

In early August, Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Bruner sued Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold), alleging that Premier's e-voting machines lost hundreds of votes cast in Ohio's primary election. At first, Premier blamed the machines' malfunction on conflicts caused by antivirus software from McAfee Inc. Now, Premier has accepted responsibility for the problem. In a letter to Secretary Bruner, Premier's President admitted that logic errors in the machines’ source code caused the machines to lose the votes.

This is a major problem not just for Ohio but for all of the states using Premier’s e-voting machines in November. (Premier is one of the four top vendors of electronic voting machines used by states across the country). Premier has released a product advisory notice, telling users of its e-voting machines running the troubled software how to avoid lost votes. To fix the problem, poll workers have to check the vote-counting servers to see if all memory cards are shown as uploaded. Although the company has submitted “fixed” software for federal certification, the new and improved version will not be certified before the November election.

This November, votes cast on Premier's machines will be counted accurately only if poll workers execute the fix correctly. This seems like a dangerous gamble as poll workers likely do not have technical backgrounds. So the puzzling question remains--why is it so hard to ensure that e-voting machines count our votes accurately? Something is clearly amiss with the testing authorities working in connection with the Election Assistance Commission--they failed identify the logic error. Yet a variety of agencies, such as the NSA and FAA, oversee mission-critical systems that do not fail (at least not often). For instance, airplanes employ software and planes do not fall out of the sky. Perhaps, as Bruce Schneier suggests, voting machines need to undergo the same assurance practices as airplanes do in order to ensure that our votes are counted accurately.

Posted by Danielle_Citron at 06:49 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

E-Voting in California

Last summer, California’s Secretary of State Debra Bowen investigated the state’s electronic voting machines after allegations that they lost, added, or flipped votes. Teams of computer scientists found that the state’s e-voting systems had major security holes in their design and were vulnerable to attacks. California has now replaced its e-voting machines with the optical scan machines that it used for mail-in voting, only leaving one e-voting machine per precinct to accomodate voters with certain disabilities. Secretary Bowen recently explained to Government Technology that the decision to get rid of the machines came down to the concern that the state had no way to ensure that insiders, such as vendors and election officials, had not tampered with the machines’ software to alter the results. This concern is certainly justified. Party officials often control the administration of elections, and partisanship has long been a driving force in election officials' dirty tricks . (Roy Saltman details these abuses in his comprehensive book on the history of voting machines). Because e-voting machines are black boxes whose actual operation cannot be checked, fraud perpetrated by vendors and election officials would be hidden from view.

Although it seems a colossal waste of the $450 million California counties spent on e-voting hardware and software, democracy will be better served so as long as the optical scan machines provide a more accurate and secure solution. Bowen recently urged Los Angeles to adopt open source e-voting. This is a step in the right direction. Open source code voting machines would be more transparent, accurate, secure, and accountable. They also might be cheaper. Last month's LinuxWorld conference hosted a mock election of open source code voting machines. At a price of $400, the voting machine is a tenth of the cost of proprietary machines because it is simply designed and based on free software. Open Voting Consortium hopes to announce the adoption of its open-source e-voting system by at least one large county in California soon and would like to provide their services to the rest of the state by 2012.

Posted by Danielle_Citron at 05:24 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

The Greening of Venture Capital

It seems that everyone is going green these days, and venture capital is no exception. VCs are directing lots of money to start-ups developing more efficient solar panels, synthetic ethanols, and other clean technologies. Some see this sector as the next Internet. There is huge market potential and a favorable political climate on both sides of the aisle.

There also appears to be widespread agreement that measures aimed at existing energy sources (like carbon cap-and-trade systems) might be useful in the short term, but that innovations in clean tech are our best long-term solution. President Bush repeatedly mentioned the need for clean technologies in a recent speech on climate change, and Al Gore made headlines when he joined the leading venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins last November. According to the Financial Times, KP just tripled its set aside for future clean tech investments.

Yet for all the VC dollars being funneled to clean tech, there is a healthy dose of skepticism about its market potential. Some think that the real story here is liberal, rich-enough VCs like KP’s John Doerr using their market power to direct investors’ money to serve an environmental cause regardless of whether the investments will turn a profit.

Am I a clean tech believer or skeptic? Answer below the fold…

When I started paying attention to this issue, I was a skeptic. The model that worked for the Internet doesn’t seem to fit here. First, VCs must exit their investments and return profits to investors after 10-12 years, a pretty quick timeframe. Yet cost-competitiveness in clean tech may be 20-30 years away. Second, while the typical Internet investment may be $5-$10M, for clean tech it can be closer to $100M. This requires more money from investors and a higher price at exit to produce the same returns those investors have come to expect from the Internet. Finally, there may not be enough experienced entrepreneurs entering the clean tech sector. While engineers at IT companies left their jobs to form Internet start-ups, engineers at big energy companies may not be likely candidates to form clean tech start-ups.

On the other hand, some recent developments in the solar field are encouraging. Solar is the front line of clean tech. Until recently, its high costs and low efficiency have been significant impediments to competitiveness. However, Bloo Solar’s Larry Bawden recently told a group of Stanford entrepreneurship students that solar technology has rapidly progressed from silicon panels to thin film panels to super thin films that use 90% less material. Bawden also noted that in the US alone, five times more capital has been poured into solar in the past two years than in the past fifty. Due to great demand for solar panels, mostly from Germany, some solar stocks are performing very well. For instance, Phoenix-based First Solar sold shares for $20 in its 2006 IPO and is now trading at over $250. Also, if US regulations direct or encourage changes in current energy practice (a seemingly inevitable trend), we can expect to see more market opportunities and therefore more clean tech innovation.

Bottom line: While outcomes are uncertain, one thing is clear – VC investments in clean tech will only increase for the foreseeable future. It will be something to watch, with potentially major ramifications for us all.

Posted by Darian_Ibrahim at 11:05 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

So What's the Silicon Valley End-Game?

Nicholas Carr is one of the leading commentators on internet culture, and his article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" will influence discussion of its effects for a long time. Here's one conclusion from the piece:

Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” . . .

[T]heir easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

The Google goals may seem a bit overambitious given AI's failure to master the emotional dimensions of speech recognition and production. Nevertheless, the merger of man and machine remains a tempting trope for new economy superstars, primarily because the very idea of "superhuman intelligence" can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What does it mean for a machine to be "smarter" than people? On the positive side, certainly we can "get" the fact that a computer can do millions more computations per second than a human can. But number-crunching or chess-playing are but small aspects of human intelligence. Cashing out the "smarter than human" claim probably involves an inevitably comparative orientation to results. In other words, the machine would have to aid some human in manipulating or beating other humans in competition. So our consideration of machine smarts may already be limited to areas of human competition (as opposed to cooperation)--a telling focus built into the very idea of comparison here.

For example, consider the claims about an "end of theory" (where the most important scientific results reflect brute number-crunching) predicted by Long Tail author Chris Anderson:

At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn't pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.

Google's founding philosophy is that we don't know why this page is better than that one: If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that's good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required. That's why Google can translate languages without actually "knowing" them (given equal corpus data, Google can translate Klingon into Farsi as easily as it can translate French into German). And why it can match ads to content without any knowledge or assumptions about the ads or the content. . . .

This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.

In other words, humans are atoms, and the social sciences can be assimilated to the natural sciences. It's hard to believe that this tired assumption, exhaustively debated and refuted in the 1960s and 70s, is au courant again. Social science is always already a tool for certain purposes