Politics & Other Issues

Hey, did you notice there is an election in the US coming up next week? Seems like a good time to clear the queue of some election-related links! Worried about what might go wrong with eVoting? A Rice professor has been exposing the vulnerabilities in the system Texas uses, showing that brief unsupervised access to the machine can compromise the integrity of the software. In fact, while I haven’t seen any authoritative explanation for how this has happened or how widespread it is, evidence does seem to be coming in that straight party ticket voting may result in inaccurate vote … Continue reading Four more days

There has been a lot of kerfluffle in the local papers about the possibility of making I-80 a toll road, which I have followed with only very modest interest as I rarely if ever drive on I-80, but a recent description of how the state proposes to use cash-free tolling to mollify local drivers caught my eye. The proposal is that if you are a local driver and you sign up for EZ-Pass, you will not be charged tolls for local trips – hopefully this will reduce the risk that local drivers will avoid I-80 and funnel extra traffic onto … Continue reading Maybe a bit paranoid….

There are a lot of “know your rights”/”how to deal with the police” videos floating around the internet, some of which are entertainingly cheesy with enactments of possible scenes. While a bit longer and less dramatic, Boing Boing recently linked to a nice team lecture by a law professor and a cop about why you should never talk to the police, even if you are innocent. The law lecture component has nice historical and legal context about the fifth amendment, but also a really nice explanation of why you should take advantage of your fifth amendment rights even if, or … Continue reading No I don’t know how fast I was going….

I was having a discussion over dinner about the problems with current presidential primary process, particularly the scheduling of them – yeah, I know, it’s a controversial stance! Pretty much everybody you talk to has an idea for what could make the current scheduling better, and we were arguing the merits of various hypothetical plans when somebody observed that perhaps people with more expertise and who had actually analyzed the relevant data had looked at this question. So it was home to Wikipedia and their US Presidential Primary page, and the also good FairVote page on Presidential Primaries. The major … Continue reading Or you could just let Pennsylvania go first….

There’s a very nice summary and assessment of a proposal for a web of surveillance cameras around Pittsburgh over at Pittsblog today. The proposal is presented as an anti-terrorism measure and has multiple phases of cameras being installed, starting with major infrastructure but over time extending the web of cameras into “high-risk neighborhoods”. Besides just a general sense that this much surveillance without a specific justification is problematic, Pittsblog offers the following criticism of the proposal: The Pittsburgh plan is completely silent on what I call “the human back end.” So Pittsburgh arranges to collect all of this surveillance data. … Continue reading Phased surveillance

This article describes an experiment where onne of the world’s top violinists plays for change in a subway station. The purpose is to determine if people recognize the quality of the performance out of context (spoiler: for the most part, no) but there is some interesting discussion of what this says about the current tempo of our lives and the ways in which we appreciate art. It would be really interesting to do the same experiment at the end of the day when the context is still the same but people are under less of a strict schedule, in general.