Technology

James Scott’s Seeing Like a State (about which I’ve blogged previously) talks about how the state imposes standards in order to make features legible, countable, regulatable, and taxable. J. Stephen Lansing’s Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali describes a case where the reverse happened. When Bali tried to impose a top-down system of scientifically designed order–a system of water management–on Balinese rice farmers, in the name of modernization in the early 1970s, the result was a brief increase in productivity followed by disaster. Rather than lead to more efficient use of water and continued improved crop yields, it produced pest outbreaks which destroyed crops. An investment of $55 million in Romijn gates to control water flow in irrigation canals had the opposite of the intended effect. Farmers removed the gates or lifted them out of the water and left them to rust, upsetting the consultants and officials behind the project. Pesticides delivered to farmers resulted in brown leafhoppers becoming resistant to pesticides, and supplied fertilizers washed into the rivers and killed coral reefs at the mouths of the rivers. Lansing was part of a team sponsored by the National Science Foundation in 1983 that evaluated the Balinese farmers’ traditional water management system to understand how it worked. The farmers of each village belong to subaks, or organizations that manage rice terraces and irrigation systems, which are referred to in Balinese writings going back at least a thousand years. Lansing notes that “Between them, the village and subak assemblies govern most aspects of a farmer’s social, economic, and spiritual life.” Lansing’s team found that the Balinese system of water temples, religious ritual, and irrigation managed by the subaks would synchronize fallow periods of contiguous segments of terraces, so that long segments could be kept flooded after harvest, killing pests by depriving them of habitat. But their attempt and that of the farmers to persuade the government to allow the traditional system to continue fell upon deaf ears, and the modernization scheme continued to be pushed. In 1987, Lansing worked with James Kremer to develop a computer model of the Balinese water temple system, and ran a simulation using historical rainfall data. This translation of the traditional system into scientific explanation showed that the traditional system was more effective than the modernized system, and government officials were persuaded to allow and encourage a return to the traditional system. The Balinese system of farming is an example of how local knowledge can develop and become embedded in a “premodern” society by mechanisms other than conscious and intentional scientific investigation (in this case, probably more like a form of evolution), and be invisible to the state until it is specifically studied. It’s also a case where the religious aspects of the traditional system may have contributed to its dismissal by the modern experts. What I find of particular interest here is to what extent the local knowledge was simply embedded into the practices, and not known by any of the participants–were they just doing what they’ve “always” done (with practices that have evolved over the last 1,000 years), in a circumstance where the system as a whole “knows,” but no individual had an understanding until Lansing and Kremer built and tested a model of what they were doing? [A slightly different version of the above was written for my Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology core seminar. Thanks to Brenda T. for her comments. More on Lansing’s work in Bali may be found online here.] ...

Chapter 3 of Langdon Winner’s The Whale and the Reactor (1988) is titled “Techné and Politeia,” a discussion of the relationship of technology and politics that draws upon Plato, Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson to recount historical views before turning to the “modern technical constitution.” The contemporary “interconnected systems of manufacturing, communications, transportation” and so forth that have arisen have a set of five features that Winner says “embody answers to age-old political questions … about membership, power, authority, order, freedom, and justice” (p. 47). The five features are (pp. 47-48): ...

Wikileaks is releasing over 500,000 U.S. national text pager intercepts from September 11, 2001, over the next two days: From 3AM on Wednesday November 25, 2009, until 3AM the following day (New York Time), WikiLeaks will release over half a million US national text pager intercepts. The intercepts cover a 24 hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. The first message, corresponding to 3AM September 11, 2001, five hours before the first attack, will be released at 3AM November 25, 2009 and the last, corresponding to 3AM September 12, 2001 at 3AM November 26, 2009. Text pagers are mostly carried by persons operating in an official capacity. Messages in the collection range from Pentagon and New York Police Department exchanges, to computers reporting faults to their operators as the World Trade Center collapsed. This is a significant and completely objective record of the defining moment of our time. We hope that its entry into the historical record will lead to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of how this tragedy and its aftermath may have been prevented. While we are obligated by to protect our sources, it is clear that the information comes from an organization which has been intercepting and archiving national US telecommunications since prior to 9/11.The Transparent Society getting closer, it appears…

Numerous mass media outlets and blogs are reporting on the misdiagnosis of Rom Houben of being comatose for 23 years when he was really conscious, according to Belgian neurologist Steven Laureys, who has claimed for years to be able to treat patients allegedly in a persistent vegetative state with electric shocks and find that they were really in a minimally conscious state. Videos of Houben show him allegedly communicating via a keyboard which is pressed by a single finger on one hand–but his hand is being held by a facilitator, and he’s not even looking at the keyboard. Some still photos show the facilitator looking intently at the keyboard, while Houben’s eyes are closed. James Randi observes that this looks just like the self-deception of Facilitated Communication that was promoted as a way to communicate with severely autistic people, and Marshall Brain at How Stuff Works seconds that conclusion. I think it’s a bit too fast to conclude that Houben’s not conscious–brain scans could indeed have provided good evidence that he is. But what would be worse than having “locked-in syndrome”? Having somebody else purporting to speak for you with ideomotor-driven Facilitated Communication, while you were helpless to do anything about it. I’d like to see some double-blind tests of Houben, where he’s asked questions about events that occur when the facilitator isn’t present, as well as fMRI results during the process of facilitation (since there are brain activation differences between active and passive activities, which have been used to study such things as the perception of involuntariness during hypnosis–it shows features of both active and passive movement). I’d also like to see further opinion on Laureys methodology and diagnosis–it seems he has significant self-interest in promoting this case. UPDATE: Brandon Keim at Wired Science has finally asked the questions that those who have reported this in the mainstream media should have been asking. Here’s a 2001 review of the scientific literature on facilitated communication. UPDATE: The video on this story shows the facilitator typing for him while his eyes are closed and he appears to be asleep. UPDATE: A Times Online story claims that Houben’s facilitator, Linda Wouters, spent the last three years working with Houben to learn to feel tiny muscle movements in his finger, and that Dr. Laureys did tests to validate the technique: ...

Yesterday I heard Joel Garreau speak again at ASU, as part of a workshop on Plausibility put on by the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes (CSPO). I previously posted a summary of his talk back in August on the future of cities. This talk was based on his book, Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies–and What It Means to Be Human. Garreau was introduced by Paul Berman, Dean of the Sandra Day O’Connor School of Law at ASU, who also announced that Garreau will be joining the law school faculty beginning this spring, as the Lincoln Professor for Law, Culture, and Values. He began by saying that we’re at a turning point in history [has there ever been a time when we haven’t thought that, though?], and he’s going to present some possible scenarios for the next 2, 3, 5, 10, or 20 years, and that his book is a roadmap. The main feature of this turning point is that rather than transforming our environment, we’ll be increasingly transforming ourselves, and we’re the first species to take control of its own evolution, and it’s happening now. At some point in the not-too-distant future, he said, your kid may come home from school in tears about how he can’t compete with the other kids who are more intelligent, more athletic, more attractive, more attentive, and so forth–because you haven’t invested in the human enhancement technologies coming on the market. Your possible reactions will be to suck it up [somebody’s still gotta do the dirty jobs in society?], remortgage the house again to make your kid competitive, or try to get the enhanced kids thrown out of school. What you can’t do is ignore it. He then asked people to raise their hands who could remember when things were still prevalent: ...

The #1 “trending topic” on Twitter is “No God," apparently started by re-tweeting of “Know God, Know Peace. No God, No Peace.” This prompted atheists to jump in promoting the “No God” part of it, and then angry theists to complain about “No God” being the top trending topic–but perpetuating it with each of their complaints. The topic is generating lots of hilarity, as Attempts at Rational Behavior (@rationalbehavio) has pointed out in a couple of blog posts, with some people trying to start “Yes God” as an alternative topic–but including the words “No God” in their tweets! UPDATE (4:41 p.m., Arizona time): Twitter has decided to censor its “Trending Topics” list, and has merged tweets matching either “No God” or “Know God” into a topic labeled “Know God." If you actually click on that link to see the matching tweets (it explicitly does a search for either string), there are still a lot more that match “No God” than “Know God." UPDATE (10:10 p.m., Arizona time): Benjamin Black offers this entertaining commentary of what almost happened, which provides a better explanation of “Trending Topics” for those unfamiliar with Twitter. ...

Today I attended a lecture at ASU by Washington Post writer Joel Garreau, author of Edge Cities and Radical Evolution, about the future of cities. What follows is a rough sketch of his talk based on my notes. He began by saying that he’s interested in culture and values, and isn’t a “gear-head” about the emerging technologies that he’s written about (“GRIN” technologies–genetics, robotics, information systems, and nanotechnology). He currently studies cities–how they are shaped by technology, and how cities shape us. He started with a slide of an old Spanish map of the New World, which was mostly accurate, except for an oversized Florida and drawing California as an island. Why was California shown as an island? Because explorers in the Seattle area saw a body of water that went very far to the south, and explorers in the Baja California area saw a body of water that went very far to the north, and they just connected the dots. That error took 100 years to correct. Spanish explorers would land in Monterey Bay and carry boats inland, expecting to hit water, and they always commented that the Indians in the area seemed to be friendly. Garreau suggested that they were actually laughing at them for pointlessly carrying boats inland. When the explorers would fail to hit another body of water, they would report back that the map was wrong, only to be told that they must not have been where they thought they were. It finally took a decree from the King of Spain to change the map. His next slide was of the Los Angeles area, pointing out what he called “edge cities,” which he called “the biggest change in 150 years of how we build cities.” “Edge cities” are major and new urban centers around old big cities. They have a large amount of office and retail space, lots of jobs, and didn’t exist 30-40 years ago. They are popping up everywhere there is major growth. The area around John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California, is an edge city–it has 5 million square feet of office space (more than Memphis), 600,000 square feet of retail space. It’s not a suburb, or sub-anything. It’s not a bedroom community. It has the features of office parks and all traditional city functions. The edge cities in New Jersey in the greater New York area have more jobs than Manhattan. Phoenix was one of the earliest places to recognize that it was going to have more than one city center–we have major centers downtown, uptown/Central Avenure, Camelback/Biltmore, South Mountain, and Tempe (among others), and these were recognized as centers that would exist by city planners a couple of decades ago. Paris has La Defense as an edge city, as well as Marne-la-Vallee, where EuroDisney is. When superior locations for growth are first found, the rich people move in first, and tend to go uphill, upwind, and upriver, byt Marne-la-Vallee was a poor area that was planned to be an edge city by selecting it as the location for EuroDisney, and it succeeded. Boston edge cities include the Burlington Mall area, MIT area, downtown, Quincy/Braintree, and Framingham area. One major factor that has changed cities are the available modes of transportation. Chicago was formed as a rail town, based around inter- and intra-urban rail. Detroit was formed as an automobile town. The last industrial age downtown built in North America was Calgary, Alberta, Canada in 1914. In 1915, the one millionth Model T Ford came off the assembly line, and ended the old downtowns. The old industrial downtowns were from the 1840s to 1914, and existed because of the necessity of collecting raw materials in one place and having thousands of people there to work on those materials. Prior to those downtowns, cities were places like Jefferson’s Charlottesville, Washington’s Alexandria, and Lincoln’s Philadelphia. Most people earned a living from the land, and lived outside of cities. The automobile suddenly made places outside the old industrial cities far more valuable, like Long Island. Until 1955, the southwestern-most Major League Baseball team was in St. Louis, because movement by train placed constraints on scheduling. The Cardinals were thus the team rooted for by everyone further south and west. Once airplanes came into the picture, baseball could spread, and other cities could become major cities–Los Angeles, Dallas, Phoenix, Seattle, Houston. Garreau asked, if Chicago were leveled, what would you rebuild first–O’Hare, or downtown. O’Hare is more critical today. But the changes caused by automobiles and airplanes is nothing compared to the networked computer, which is making changes more significant and more rapidly than the automobile. He showed a photograph of a Kresge’s in the Capitol Hill area of D.C., explaining that it was a discount 5 & dime store, the K in K-Mart. He said Kresge’s is dead, and K-Mart is dying, but do you think the building is still there, and if so, what is it? The first guess–Starbuck’s–was almost correct. It is a coffee shop. He argued that Kresge’s and K-Mart has been killed by Wal-Mart, which is really an IT company that happens to sell sneakers. He claimed that when you buy a pair of sneakers at Wal-Mart, a process kicks off at check out that starts to make a replacement pair in Malaysia within 24 hours. So why are coffee shops popular, and why do people pay $4 for coffee? Is it the free wireless? He argued that it is a social thing, only marginally about the coffee and the wifi. The main factor around the physical environment is that the rare stuff we can’t digitize, like face-to-face contact, has much higher relative value than it did before. Bill Mitchell of the MIT Media Lab, and former head of the architecture department, has catalogued 87 forms of real estate in cities, all being transformed by information technology. One form is super markets. Garreau asked, if you could get hamburger and toilet paper delivered to your home for free, why would you get in your car to go get groceries? To buy produce or meat, was the answer suggested by the audience. He then showed a photo of a Freshfields, a modern farmer’s market, and showed a photo of booths with tables inside it–it’s also a place to sit and socialize. Another type of building is a prison. He suggested that we don’t need as many prisons if we use GPS anklets or bracelets for nonviolent offenses. He then argued that Moore’s Law will continue to hold for the forseeable future, and we’ve already seen 32 doublings in processors since 1959. The only thing comparable is railroad capacity doubling, which saw 14.5 doublings before leveling out due to requirements of coal, steel, and land, and being superseded by the automobile. The IT limits are the laws of physics, the marketplace, human ingenuity, and our culture and values, and he argued that only our culture and values set real limits for the forseeable future. (In a class yesterday, one of my professors said that a physics professor speaking at ASU last year said that we’ve reached the physical limits for silicon chips, and won’t see any more doublings, but a subsequent new development has already refuted him with a four-times improvement due to nanotechnology–presumably this.) Sequencing the human genome was thought nuts, impossible, and/or would cost a fortune, but was done in 2000 at a fraction of the expected cost, far sooner than anyone expected, thanks to Moore’s Law. Garreau suggested that ten years from now, anything you can put in a lab for $1 million will be something you can put in your home for $1,000; anything you can get now for $1,000 will be “pocket lint.” He used USB memory fobs as an example of today’s “pocket lint." He showed a photo of students at CMU in a computer lab, and asked, “Is there a future for physical university campuses?” He gave a yes, on the grounds that this is where you “meet your first spouse and friends for a lifetime”–the social aspects. Distance learning has been around for a very long time (Benjamin Franklin did learning-by-mail), but it’s always a second choice. Shopping malls, he said, are turning into entertainment spaces. He cited his friend Jaron Lanier (a virtual reality pioneer), who suggests that the first thing to disappear will be escalators, replaced by rides–so when you go up by ferris wheel and come down by water slide, think of Lanier. He observed that if you go to a mall at 10 a.m., you’ll see the senior mall walkers, and if you go in the afternoon, you’ll see “drug dealing rugrats.” (He didn’t note, but I thought of how Arizona Mills Mall in Tempe has turned one space into an indoor miniature golf course.) Office space–is there any future to it? Again, he argued for the social aspect, and maintained that the accidental casual face-to-face contact is impossible to digitize, yet he finds the random conversation at the printer jam (the modern equivalent of the water cooler) to be his most productive time of day. To this, Prof. Brad Allenby objected that there is casual contact in World of Warcraft and Second Life, and we shouldn’t assume that such things can’t be digitizable. Another audience member suggested that because human beings need touch, we need real physical contact. (But that assumes the impossibility of tactile telepresence.) Yet another pointed out that movie theater attendance is up, even though you can watch online or at home cheaper. Garreau said, supposed you decide face-to-face matters, but only need it two days a week–how would that affect where you live? If you only needed it 3 days a month, then where might you live? He said some cities will live, if they are good for face-to-face contact. Others will die, if they aren’t. We’re headed to a profound shift of what is urban/urbane, and cities like Santa Fe are the future. It has 63,000 people, opera, restaurants, second-hand boot stores. The top fastest-growing metro areas are smaller cities that are like villages with face-to-face spaces and are somewhat dispersed. The top ones are Wenatchee, WA, Provo-Orem, UT, Grand Junction, CO, Gulfport-Biloxi, MS, and Myrtle Beach, SC. The top states for real estate price appreciation are Utah, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. Other example cities in this model include the Adams-Morgan area of D.C., Tempe, AZ, and Marrakesh. He then briefly turned to other technologies. He said that Craig Venter says that by the end of this year he will have an organism that “eats CO2 and poops gasoline.” (And his company has just received $600 million in funding from ExxonMobil.) Nanotech may build membranes that purify water. These things will impact where cities become feasible. “Is Darfur the next garden spot?" He then referred to a book by Leo Marx of MIT, titled The Machine in the Garden. He argued that in the industrial age, we suffered a split–we had to come into the cities and leave nature behind. Now we’re trying to put what we like about cities into a garden. In the final Q&A, he said he has a hidden assumption that we will continue moving forward and not go back to pre-industrial society; he said “no petroleum engineers think we’re running out of oil, only cheap oil." He said that we’re seeing a new explosion of religious fervor, and included environmentalism in that, saying that it has its own saints and heretics. He thinks human beings are “hardwired to have faith–even Russia made Marxism into faith,” but said that he’s “a hardcore rationalist” even though “rationalism doesn’t seem to be emotionally satisfying.” He said, following Popper, that “science can’t tell you what is true, only what is false, but it can changes minds without killing people.” (I disagree with his statement that science can’t tell you what is true–theories that keep passing tests do at least approximate truth.) An audience member commented that virtual environments can convey mental and physical aspects, but not emotional and spiritual. Garreau agreed, but I think both (and a few other questioners) were making an unwarranted assumption that virtual environments will not be able to reach a point of being indistinguishable (or very nearly so) from real environments, and thus allowing effective conveyance of body language, subtle gestures, and so forth, perfectly adequate for transmitting emotional information. (As for spiritual properties, I think they’re in need of demonstration before we worry about them–and given claims that have been made about them, it’s surprising that the questioner thought physical proximity was a limitation.) In a conversation with Prof. Allenby afterward, he also pointed out that we may be better able to make judgments of trust in a virtual environment because we are more alert to the possibility of a partial presentation of a personality and to intentional distortions. There are also some types of cues that are more accurately picked up audibly, while visual information can overwhelm those cues. Prof. Allenby also noted that major technological changes may turn what we now think of as fundamental truths into contingencies, and that may include some aspects of what we call human nature. Garreau ended by observing that past predictions of what the future will be like have usually been wrong, becasue things are more complex and more expensive then we think–and then we get blindsided by innovations like the iPhone. ...

This blog is entering its fifth year today, and the content will be shifting a bit now that I am returning to school. Today was my first day of new graduate student orientation before classes begin next week; I’m a Ph.D. student in Arizona State University’s Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology program, which is beginning its second year. This is an interdisciplinary program within the Graduate College and allied with the School of Life Sciences, so today’s orientation was with new graduate students from other programs in SoLS. SoLS has 250 graduate students in 11 programs, of which 49 are entering this semester. (I chatted a bit with a couple of new graduate students in neuroscience.) There seems to be a wealth of supporting organizations and structures to SoLS programs to assist in getting funding, doing research, participating in education and public outreach, and dealing with administrivia. I’ll be delving into as much of it as I can, and periodically reporting on items of particular interest here. From today’s orientation, a few items that are part of SoLS education and public outreach are worthy of note. ASU has an “Ask-a-Biologist” program online, which you can also follow via Twitter. That program is intended for students in grades K-12, and is projected to hit a million visitors this year. There’s also the Science Studio Podcasts for adult education. And the International Institute for Species Exploration website. There’s also a program run by SoLS graduate students called Graduate Partners in Science Education, where graduate student volunteers work with underprivileged and at-risk junior high school students on field biology research projects. My current aim in the HSDST program is to build upon my past graduate experience in philosophy and cognitive science, my career in Internet services and information security, my interest in skeptical inquiry and critical thinking, and my interest in law to explore the concepts of trust and reputation as they pertain to online and digital media. At the moment, I’m signed up for a seminar on “Law, Science, and Technology,” a seminar on “Human and Social Dimensions of Climate Change,” the HSDST Core Seminar and Colloquium, and a course with one of my favorite undergraduate philosophy professors on Advanced Logic (that’s my “just for fun” class). Tomorrow’s a reception for all of the new graduate students at ASU’s Tempe campus, and later in the week I have some training on fire and lab safety–and next week, it’s back to class. ...

This is the sixth and final part of my summary of TAM7, covering the last day’s events on Sunday, July 11. Part 1 is here, part 2 is here, part 3 is here, part 4 is here, part 5 is here, and my coverage of the Science-based Medicine conference begins here. Sunday’s continental breakfast was served while an old James Randi television appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show from 1986 was shown. This brought back some old memories–I think I have the show on videotape in my archives, as I think we showed it at a meeting of the Phoenix Skeptics. Randi appeared with a faith healer (“Amazing Grace”), a psychic (Joyce Keller), and an astrologer (Irene Hughes), which led to some entertaining and ridiculous exchanges of words. Randi showed his footage that exposed Peter Popoff using a wireless transmitter and receiver to fake the “word of knowledge,” and did some spoon bending. Joyce Keller claimed she was entitled to his $10,000 prize, and Oprah mistakenly claimed that Randi had brought his own spoons, which she corrected herself about after a commercial break. This was followed by the Sunday refereed papers, which were again organized and moderated by Ray Hall, professor of physics at California State University, Fresno and at Fermi National Labs. Don Riefler, “Teaching Critical Thinking in a Therapeutic Setting” Don Riefler, Direct Care Supervisor at the Jessie Levering Cary Home for Children in Lafayette, Indiana, gave a talk about strategies he’s used to teach critical thinking to underprivileged/institutionalized children at the Cary Home, complete with positive reinforcement in the form of candy distributed to members of the audience who gave good answers. He discussed several categories of common “thinking errors” which included both logical fallacies and heuristics that lead to problems when overgeneralized. As part of his teaching, he has kids conduct ESP experiments with Zener cards, which he uses to teach them about erroneous inferences they draw about their skills. This provoked the first critical question (from regular ScienceBlogs commenter Sastra), asking whether his referral to “success” and “failure” in the Zener test suggests to kids that it’s a matter of effort. (I neglected to record his response.) In answer to a question of how he deals with religion he said that he avoids it and shuts down talk of religion or ideology. David Green, “Patently Ridiculous: The Perfect Sommelier” David Green, a Senior Patent Examiner at the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, gave a talk that was essentially a sequel to a talk he gave at TAM5. He spoke about “The Perfect Sommelier,” a product that claims to “align tannin molecules with magnets to age wine faster.” He compared how the patent application for this product was handled in the U.S. vs. Canada. In the U.S., patent examiners made two objections to the application, first, that it was obvious or already known, and second that the “subject matter is inoperable–the theory of operation cannot be correct.” The first objection failed, since the invention was sufficiently different from prior art in various ways (such as having magnets at both ends of the bottle, not just at one end). And, based on the Longer (“lawn-jay”) test, under which the description of the invention must be accepted as true unless there’s a reason to doubt it, it passed on the second as well, and was granted two U.S. patents. Green said that it essentially comes down to a he-said/she-said debate, and the patent office has to be biased towards issuance of the patent. In Canada, the same objections were made as in the U.S., along with a third. David Green had read a Swift article about a test of the product, so the third objection was a rejection on the basis of double-blind research evidence showing that the product doesn’t work, published in the Journal of Wine Research. That study concluded that “no evidence was found to suggest that The Perfect Sommelier improves the palatability of cheap red wine.” The manufacturers responded to the first two objections in the same way they did in the U.S., but for the third, they asserted that their evidence in the form of testimony overrides the double-blind research. And then they abandoned their patent claim in Canada. The reason they did this, Green explained, is because of “U.S. file wrapper estoppels”–that what you do in a foreign patent application can affect your patent in U.S. court. If they had continued with their claim in Canada and been denied–or if they had failed to file a response to the objections–that could have impacted their U.S. patent. What this demonstrates, Green argued, is the importance of doing solid investigations and research on such products, and getting them published and spreading the information around (e.g., online), so that patent examiners can find it. It can make the difference between a nonsensical product getting a patent or being denied a patent. At this point I took some time to chat with Ray Hyman, and came in a little bit late for the next presentation. Adam Slagell, “Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt: The Pillars of Justification for Cyber Security” Adam Slagell, Senior Security Engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, spoke about claims made for security and security products that we should be skeptical of. He pointed out that there’s no such thing as perfect security, and there are always tradeoffs to be made between security and usability/convenience/etc. He spoke a little bit about TSA “security theater,” pointing out the gaping flaw in the “no fly lists” that comes from the separation of checking ID and boarding pass at the security checkpoint from checking your boarding pass at the gate. He also questioned the point of shoe removal, which led to the first comment on his talk from Ian, an airport security officer at Gatwick, who argued that forcing shoes to go through the X-ray machine does close a genuine vulnerability. (Ian also argued that the liquid restriction makes sense, though he didn’t respond to Slagell’s point that you can carry multiple 3-ounce containers and combine their contents with those of your associates after you go through screening. Most interestingly, Ian said that airport metal detectors go off randomly in addition to when they detect metal.) Slagell argued that signature-based antivirus products are obsolete, since polymorphic malware and use of packers are extremely effective at eliminating signatures, and observed that companies are starting to create products based on white-listing, only allowing pre-defined sets of software to run on a machine. (At last year’s New Mexico InfraGard conference, Anthony Clark and Danny Quist spoke in some detail about different kinds of packers, and offered a set of criteria for measuring AV effectiveness that included use of methods other than signature-detection, such as anomalous behavior detection.) He unfortunately didn’t have time to talk about passwords. Another questioner asked what users behaviors are useful to stay secure, to which Slagell replied that you should keep systems patched and backed up. (There is actually some argument, at least for corporations, to be somewhat selective in patching, since many patches aren’t applicable, have other mitigations, and have potential for reducing availability themselves–but there is no substitute for having a vulnerability management program in place.) Steve Cuno, “The Constructive Skeptic: Rebranding Skepticism at the Grassroots Level” Steve Cuno, chairman of RESPONSE Agency, Inc., gave an excellent talk last year at TAM6, and he gave another great presentation this time as well. He started by saying that skeptics have a branding problem. What is a brand? Is it a name and logo? A great slogan? What you say about yourself? He gave some counterexamples for each of these, including some nice vintage ads (e.g., “They’re happy because they eat lard” from the Lard Information Council). AIG had the slogan “The strength to be here.” (He didn’t mention any of my favorite unintentionally ironic bank slogans.) He gave an example slogan for skepticism: “Skepticism: Doubt worth believing in.” He called all of these proposed brand definitions “brand flatulence: you may like the sound and smell of your farts, but nobody else does." He gave as his prototypical example of what branding really is the example of Nordstrom’s. There’s no particular logo or slogan involved, but people think of Nordstrom on the basis of the values that are expressed by the company through its employees and the experience you have as a customer. The essence of creating a brand is creating a positive customer experience. And the way for skeptics to give skepticism a good name is by self-policing “to deliver positive brand experience." He suggested that the way to do this is to delay giving yourself a label, and when you do identify yourself with a label, anchor it in something positive. Instead of saying “I don’t believe in …”, think through and express what you do support. For example: I believe in what the evidence supports.I believe in honesty, integrity, equal rights, and treating one another with dignity and respect.I believe in and defend the right of all people to believe as they choose.Do things that are positive. He gave the example of the GLBT protests at the annual April Mormon Church Conference, which, rather than picketing and protesting, engaged in protest by cleaning up parks, visiting shut-ins, and doing positive and helpful things in the name of their cause. The result was to get tons of positive press. He heartily endorsed TAM7’s vaccination support and food drive, and further added that we should play nice. Being controversial and using insults may work for media figures, but not for the grassroots. Be sure that messages are well-timed. And remember that some people just don’t care–to quote Will Rogers, “Never miss a good opportunity to shut up." A summary of Cuno’s talk may be found on his blog. Brian Dunning, “What Were the ‘Lost Cosmonaut’ Radio Transmissions?" Brian Dunning’s talk was a sequel to one of his Skeptoid podcasts on Achille and Giovanni Judica-Cordiglia, a pair of Italian brothers who built equipment to monitor radio transmissions from spacecraft at an installation they called Torre Bert. They successfully recorded the October 1957 launch of Sputnik I, Sputnik II with Laika the dog in November 1957, and then a few oddities. In February 1961, they recorded what they reported as a “failing human heartbeat,” when there was no known flight. In the same month, they recorded a “voice of a dying man,” again with no known flight. In May 1961, they recorded the voice of a woman, Ludmila, speaking about how she was “going to re-enter,” which they attributed to a secret female cosmonaut mission that resulted in her death. There are no corroborating reports of these transmissions, despite the fact that the U.S. Defense Early Warning system began in 1959. And there were no female cosmonauts in 1961. The female cosmonaut program wasn’t approved until five months after the recording, and the first five women selected for the program a year later. Yuri Gagarin had just launched in Vostok 1 in May 1961, and for the Vostok 2 launch in August 1961, they had to scavenge Gagarin’s space suit to make a suit for the second cosmonaut. So there was no way there was a female cosmonaut launch in May 1961. At the time, the U.S. was flying X-15s. Did the Soviets have some kind of space plane? The Soviet Kosmoplan never got off the drawing board, and its Raketoplan was developed, but wasn’t ready for testing until 1962. A jet fighter? The YC-150 didn’t fly high enough. Dunning also ruled out the Mig-21 and high-altitude balloons. The conclusion–get your own Russian translators. Dunning got four Russians to listen to the recording, and found that it didn’t say what was claimed, but instead was almost 99% unintelligible, with the rest being numbers. He also found that the source of the transmission was not moving, but was at a fixed position. Although he didn’t come to a definitive conclusion, he was able to at least eliminate a number of possibilities–sometimes that’s the best you can do. Christian Walters and Tim Farley, “How Are We Doing? Attracting and Keeping Visitors to Skeptical Websites” Tim Farley was another return speaker, this time with Christian Walters. They talked about how the over 650 skeptical websites should measure acquisition of visitors and take actions to keep them and to obtain high search engine rankings. First, how you’re acquiring visitors can be measured by looking at rankings on search engine result pages (SERPs), Google PageRank, and Yahoo link strength measurements. These measures are all increased by receiving links from other web sources, of which important sites are social media sites like digg, reddit, delicio.us, Facebook, and Twitter. Another important factor is having good page titles, which include popular search terms. The META keyword tags are no longer so important. By using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, you can find what popular search terms are. Sometimes they are surprising–for instance misspellings of some terms (like accupuncture) get more search hits than the correct spelling. It’s also a good idea to put the keywords from your title into the URL, rather than use URLs as some blogs do that only have a page ID in them. The anchor text of hyperlinks to your pages should also contain the appropriate keywords, and so your internal links within a site should make a point of using them. It’s important to describe your site with an XML SiteMap or via RSS feed, which you get for free with blogs. When you link to other sites, you are dividing up your own link strength among the sites you link to, unless you use the NOFOLLOW tag, which you should do when linking to sites you don’t want to promote in search engine results. NOFOLLOW is also a good idea when linking to sites that may engage in spam or other abuse, to prevent that abuse from reflecting on your site, as it might in Google search engine results, for example. The Million Dollar Challenge: Dowser Connie Sonne Everyone had to leave the auditorium for preparation for the JREF Million Dollar Challenge, with Danish dowser and former police detective Connie Sonne (who has described her alleged powers in an interview with Alison Smith of JREF). Everyone had to sign an agreement to remain silent and not disturb the proceedings before filing back in–and everyone remained quite quiet for the hour or so that it took for the test. This was a preliminary test, with a 1 in 1000 probability of success by chance, which, if successful, would allow Connie Sonne to go on to the official challenge for the JREF’s $1,000,000. The protocol for the test was developed in conjunction with Connie Sonne and both sides approved. She signed paperwork describing the protocol and agreeing that she woudl go ahead with the test. Connie Sonne claimed to be able to use a pendulum to identify playing cards without looking at them, and she successfully did this when she was able to see the cards. Sets of playing cards, A-10, for each of three suits were placed separately into envelopes. Each of those envelopes for the same suit was placed into a larger envelope, with the suit written on the outside. Banachek ran the test (I thought to myself at the time that this was a likely source of future complaint, given his skill at illusion), opening each of the three suit envelopes, one at a time, and rolling a 10-sided die to indicate which card from the suit Connie Sonne was required to locate. The ten individual card envelopes were spread out in front of her, and she used the pendulum to identify which envelope she believed contained the appropriate card. For the first set, she was supposed to find the 3 of hearts, for the second, the 7 of clubs, and for the third, the ace of spades. The cards she picked were the 2 of hearts, which was in the second envelope of the first set, the ace of clubs, which was in the seventh envelope of the second set, and the 2 of spades, which was in the first envelope of the third set. Banachek opened all of the envelopes from each of the three sets so that she could see that there was no trickery, and she agreed that all was done fairly. At the subsequent press conference, she continued to maintain that all was fair, but that there was some reason she wasn’t supposed to reveal her powers to the world yet. But by the next day, she decided that she had been cheated somehow by Banachek. Her main point of evidence was that Banachek identified the ace of spades from the third set before pulling the card out of the envelope–but it was the last card of the set to be opened, and he identified it after the end of the envelope had been cut off and as he started to pull it out. The cards were visible inside the envelopes once the ends were opened. On July 13, she made her accusation of cheating on the JREF Forums: Hi out there…now I know why Banacheck was “the card handler”. I have been cheated. I did find the right cards. And there is one more thing. At the stage, Banacheck said to me BEFORE he even looked in the envelope I had cut…and here is spade ace, the one you looked for!!!! I first hit me now about that ….but maybe you can see it yourself if someone get the video. I dont care about the money, that wasnt the reason why I came. So no matter what you think out there……I was CHEATED!!!!! ConnieIt was a typical response to the Randi challenge from an honest proponent of a claim who doesn’t understand why the claim failed under test conditions, resolving the cognitive dissonance by placing blame on the experimenter. That concludes my summary of TAM7–I look forward to attending TAM8 next year. ...

Ed Markey (D-MA) and Anna Eshoo (D-CA) last week introduced HR 3458, The Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009 (PDF). This bill is much better than past bills in that it doesn’t contain any prohibition on classes of service or preferential treatment of packets based on protocol or application, as opposed to based on source, destination, or owner. It still, however, gives the FCC new powers to regulate the Internet and puts the onus of developing specific regulations on the FCC. And it looks like the language will give the FCC the power to regulate Apple’s iTunes store with respect to iPhone Internet-related applications, as well as to force the opening up of wireless walled gardens. The bill leaves open to the FCC the ability to treat “private transmission capacity services” as exempt from the requirements of the bill, so long as they don’t impact Internet capacity for the end user. It also provides disclosure requirements for ISPs to report on any methods they use for network and capacity management that may impact Internet traffic. ...