Special Harvard admissions for the wealthy: why I approve

One would think a commie like me would disapprove of the practice of special Harvard admission for the wealthy and privileged. Not so. Like the non-legacy admit Mankiw quotes I consider this a reasonable form of corruption, one with benefits for non-legacy funding. (I attended Williams College for "free", doubtless due to a similar sort of corruption.)

How can a socialist-commie-traitor approve of class-based privilege? It's the flip side of my dislike of the enthusiasm for 'merit based' rewards, and is really a sign of my twisted nature. After all, what is "merit" but the results of a genetic and social lottery? Get good genes, have the fortune of a supportive family (or not, in Newton's case), a few good teachers, and you have merit. The converse -- non-merit. To be born/adopted to wealth and privilege is a great gift, probably greater than winning the genetic lottery, but it's not substantively different.

So, all praise to those who enter Harvard by chance-given talent, but also to those who enter on the promise of their parent's future donations, and those who enter by compensation of their economic misfortune. It is all of the same.

BTW, a similar reasoning applies to reforming political corruption. The wealthy would never really accept having the same influence as a common voter; political corruption is the means by which the powerful get just enough extra influence so that they tolerate democracy. The problem we have now is that the "powerful" are being over-compensated with influence, for much the same reason that CEO's are over-compensated for their "leadership". We don't want to eliminate corruption in politics, we merely want to stop over-compensating the wealthy. They'd tolerate a democracy with less corruption that what we now live with.

Spam: blacklists are back, and the war may be turning

I didn't expect to have anything good to say about the spam wars after my recent Gmail meltdown. Surprise.

It began when I finally accepted that Google is a set of adaptive algorithms rather than a traditional corporation. That meant I could sit back and rethink things. Google was malfunctioning because I had redirected an unfiltered mailstream at Gmail, and Google seems to be effectively doing something I'd asked for years ago: selective filtering based on the managed reputation of an authenticated sending service. In this case Google was treating the 'sending service' as my redirector (which I don't think authenticates), rather than the distal source of the email. That meant faughnan.com acquired a reputation, from Google's perspective, as a really bad place.

Well, I can't be too mad if they're doing what I'd long urged everyone to do. It would have been nice if I'd known about it earlier, but them's the breaks. Don't do redirection to Gmail and expect it to like you for long.

So I turned off all the redirects, forwarded from Gmail to my ISP (VISI), flowed faughnan.com and spamcop.net to VISI's Postini service, and finally dropped all my email lists. Lists are very 20th century, this is the age of subscription/notification (Atom/RSS). Good-bye lists. The world calmed down.

With all the lists gone, and postini churning away, it was interesting to see what spam got through. Lots of political solicitations (Note to dems: you can get my money again when you stop spamming me) and various incredibly annoying newsletters. What they all had in common were that the domains were real. Yes, spam with persistent, verifiable, domains.

Some had unsubscribe links and some of those even worked -- though my experience with the political spam is that one's email gets back on their lists shortly after it's removed (recycled by the trading of addresses), just as in the world of physical junk mail. No matter, because with persistent and verifiable domains, personal blacklists work.

I've blacklisted 9 domains, all of whom have failed multiple unsubscribe attempts, and with postini and these few filters, my spam is gone. (Note Gmail filters will do this easily too).

1. mail.united.com
2. itw.itworld.com
3. theclubbingforum.net
4. travelmole.net
5. trustmakers.com
6. emaillabs.com
7. peakperformancellc.com

I have less spam in my inbox than I've had for five years. Wow. Sure my postini spambox has hundreds of entries, but I've reviewed them -- all spam, no false positives.

The war, dare I say, is turning. Next step, once I've verified with spamcop, is going to be to redirect my mailstream through spamcop and back into Gmail, which will then be receiving a "purified" stream. I'm hoping Gmail will "learn" that the domain has been "rehabilitiated". Gmail can forward copies to my VISI account, so I'll be back to having a local store of my email as well. Updates to follow.

Update 9/22/06: Spamcop approved my plans and Gmail is back in the loop. This is the current setup:

• several less used email accounts, including an ancient mindspring account, all forward to faughnan.com
• my faughnan.com email forwards to my spamcop.net address where the heavy filtering occurs. I
  
• my spamcop address forwards to my gmail address, that's where I keep a set of blacklist filters as above
  
• my gmail account keeps a copy and forwards to my visi.com address
• I use POP and IMAP on various machines to view and collect email from visi.com

So the mail I'm forwarding to Gmail is now cleansed by spamcop, which does a pretty darned good decent job. This also means that faughnan.com is no longer the proximal forwarding account, so what spam there is should count against it. BTW, a good tip for creating a "secret" mailbox like the visi account I use for POP services -- use GRC Passwords to create the username, something like "1E22F67AFD3116925A". That prevents spammers "guessing" the username and putting spam through.

Update 10/4/06: Since my original post, a few updates:

• spamcop does a decent job, but not quite as good as VISI's postini. I may try moving their spamassassin settings up a notch (default is minimal, spamcop is very domain focused)
• I added a Gmail filter so that email sent directly to my Gmail address gets a unique tag. Since only spammers and Gmail use that address it helps me quickly identify spam. More importantly, it's safe to mark email sent directly to my Gmail account as spam. If spam gets redirected to my Gmail account I delete it, I don't mark it "as spam". I think if I mark redirected email as spam Gmail assigns a poor reputation to the redirector, which I don't want.
• I'm now getting about 3-4 spams in my Gmail inbox daily, of which 75% is spam that passed through the spamcop filters. I'll see if I can improve that a bit but it's tolerable.

Update 9/6/09: An updated version of the problem. In the years since I wrote this I've taken Spamcop out of the picture, but a new quirk may have arisen.

Memo: no more phones for Joel

Sprint sent Joel Spolsky, entrepreneur, CEO, blogger, writer, uber-greek and smart person a phone to review. That was a mistake ...

Joel on Software

... The phone they sent me, an LG Fusic, is really quite awful, and the service, Power Vision, is tremendously misconceived and full of dumb features that don’t work right and cost way too much...

Joel is a good writer and he clearly loves his topic -- he rips Sprint and LG along several new dimensional planes. It's funny, but mixed in the swordplay is a serious point. Sprint is a complete mess. You don't screw up this badly without having a very dysfunctional organization. If I were on Sprint's board, I'd take this essay as justification to fire the CEO and bring in someone who can clean house.

Which brings me the second coming of the geeks, aka Apple's iPhone. Regular folks like the RAZR, but it doesn't move the geeks. Nothing does. All the phones are lousy. The network owners, like Sprint, are idiots. The iPhone shines like a beacon of hope, presumably carried on Apple's network (leased capacity). I'm sure it will be perfect... *

* Note to early adopters. Go ahead. Don't be worried about Apple's history of doing hardware alpha testing on their first set of customers ...

(Hat tip: Jim L)

One Republican in ten accepts evolution

Scientic American's Skeptic, Michael Shermer, tries to sell Evolution as good theology. It's a bit of a pointless exercise, and a feeble one at that, but the introduction included some remarkable numbers:

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Darwin on the Right -- Why Christians and conservatives should accept evolution

According to a 2005 Pew Research Center poll ... 60 percent of Republicans are creationists, whereas only 11 percent accept evolution, compared with 29 percent of Democrats who are creationists and 44 percent who accept evolution. A 2005 Harris Poll found that 63 percent of liberals but only 37 percent of conservatives believe that humans and apes have a common ancestry.

Wow. One in ten Republicans lives in the world of the rational. Democrats are four times as likely to be a part of the world of logic, reason, and evidence. You can make a very good guess about someone's political party if you ask them about Darwin.

I think this helps explain why so many GOP voters think Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. They live in a world well removed from mere evidence.

Update 9/21/06: The Royal Society takes on Exxon. Commetn: the GOP war on science is fueled by the GOP voter's antipathy to science.

Howel-Evans syndrome on Wikipedia

Nobody but a researcher, geneticist, or the few physicians who treat an afflicted patient, needs to know anything about this Howel-Evans disorder. I came across it because my real-world work involves medical ontology/knowledgebase maintenance, and I needed to know what this thing was.

So my eyes bugged out when the first hit I got was on Wikipedia, and it was an excellent description, probably written by a bored dermatologist (though I must admit that dermatology is more lively than industrial ontology):

Howel-Evans syndrome - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Howel-Evans syndrome is an extremely rare condition in which the skin of the palms of the hands, and soles of the feet, are affected (hyperkeratosis). The effects on the palms and soles is called tylosis, and in Howel-Evans syndrome, there is a predisposition to oesophageal cancer, particularly squamous cell carcinoma.

Howel-Evans syndrome was described in 1996 as being identical with palmoplantar ectodermal dysplasia type III...

Wikipedia is an honest-to-goodness 21st century wonder.

Your universe on drugs

The New York Times > Science > Image > Graphic: Separated at Birth lies two images side by side, one rather small, one a bit big.

To understand the title of this post, by the way, you had have beeen a young person in 1978 or thereabouts.

[pointer: Brin]

Gordon's Notes: a graph

The HTML DOM Visualizer Applet will render websites as a graph. Careful - it sucks cycles. My G5 iMac went into windtunnel mode as long as the page was up.

Here's a graph of Gordon's Notes. I don't know how to interpret it, but I do wonder about that tight dnese cluster in the top left.


By comparison, here's Gordon's Tech. Very similar though rotated. I did it twice to see if I'd missed something. I'd guess the big cluster is OS X related ...



By comparison, my old web site has very few pages (though they're much longer than blog postings):



Ok, so that wasn't all that useful ...

Generals won't join Rumsfeld's staff?

Amid the all-too-plausible fears that the GOP is going to invade Iran, comes something that surprised me:

INTEL DUMP - National Insecurity?

...However, his appointed successor REFUSED To accept the Army's highest position, preferring to retire rather than work with Rumsfeld and the Bush administration. Many other generals also refused the Army's highest position, and for the first time in US history an already-retired general had to be recalled to active duty to become chief of staff, an unprecedented show of no confidence in Rumsfeld and the administration by the officer corps of the US Army...

If this is true, it's been kept pretty quiet. If the US Army leadership fears and despises the Secretary of Defense, isn't that news?

Philip Morris, Exxon and the Climate Change Deniers

George Monbiot, a journalist for The Guardian, has written a book about junk science and the global climate change "deniers" (by which he means skeptics who deny reason). He's excerpting the book on his blog.

The story is appalling of course, but it's also darkly hilarious. Even I, with my twisted admiration for the sheer unrelenting evil of the tobacco lobby, didn't expect this one. I really did laugh.

Sure Exxon and Cheney and Bush and all the usual evil, corrupt and stupid men and women have been promulgating junk science (it became junk science when all of the rationalist skeptics decided the case was made). Sure a surprising number of British journalists are even dumber than David Brooks (hard to imagine). But Philip Morris funding climate change deniers?!? That's hilarious.

Why? Monbiot claims it was somehow related to Philip Morris' attack on science, in alliance with the GOP of course. Science can be so inconvenient. Personally, I think it's just sheer evilness. The executives of Philip Morris are so steeped in evil they just can't help themselves any longer. They are compelled to be bad.

Guilty of dishonor of the first degree: America

I wrote of the Aher case in Jan 2004 and again in Feb 2005. The Canadian investigation confirms that Mr. Aher was falsely accused of terrorism by Canadian officials, and that the RCMP may have tried to cover up their error. The judge could not rule directly on the legality or morality of the American action, but the very end of a NYT article summarizes things fairly well:

Canadians Fault U.S. for Its Role in Torture Case - New York Times:

... On Sept. 26, 2002, the F.B.I. called Project A-O and told the Canadian police that Mr. Arar was scheduled to arrive in about one hour from Zurich. The F.B.I. also said it planned to question Mr. Arar and then send him back to Switzerland. Responding to a fax from the F.B.I., the Mounted Police provided the American investigators with a list of questions for Mr. Arar. Like the other information, it included many false claims about Mr. Arar, the commission found.

The Canadian police “had no idea of what would eventually transpire,’’ the commission said. “It did not occur to them that the American authorities were contemplating sending Mr. Arar to Syria.”

While the F.B.I. and the Mounted Police kept up their communications about Mr. Arar, Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs was not told about his detention for almost three days. Its officials, acting on calls from worried relatives, had been trying to find him. Similarly, American officials denied Mr. Arar’s requests to speak with the Canadian Consulate in New York, a violation of international agreements.

Evidence presented to the commission, said Paul J. J. Cavalluzzo, its lead counsel, showed that the F.B.I. continued to keep its Canadian counterparts in the dark even while an American jet was carrying Mr. Arar to Jordan. The panel found that American officials “believed — quite correctly — that, if informed, the Canadians would have serious concerns about the plan to remove Mr. Arar to Syria.”

Mr. Arar arrived in Syria on Oct. 9, 2002, and was imprisoned there until Oct. 5, 2003. It took Canadian officials, however, until Oct. 21 to locate him in Syria. The commission concludes that Syrian officials at first denied knowing Mr. Arar’s whereabouts to hide the fact that he was being tortured. It says that, among other things, he was beaten with a shredded electrical cable until he was disoriented.

American officials have not discussed the case publicly. But in an interview last year, a former official said on condition of anonymity that the decision to send Mr. Arar to Syria had been based chiefly on the desire to get more information about him and the threat he might pose. The official said Canada did not intend to hold him if he returned home.

Mr. Arar said he appealed a recent decision by a federal judge in New York dismissing the suit he brought against the United States. The report recommends that the Canadian government, which is also being sued by Mr. Arar, offer him compensation and possibly a job.

Mr. Arar recently moved to Kamloops, British Columbia, where his wife found a teaching position.

The FBI lied to the RCMP, then abducted Mr. Aher and sent him to be tortured. There has been no statement, no apology, no offer of compensation from the Bush administration.

Insofar as we are all American citizens, even those of us who've jeered, heckled, berated and campaigned against the neo-GOP and the Bush administration, we share in the responsibility for the kidnapping, torture of this man. In a way, the failure to apologize is almost as loathsome as the policies that led to the crime.

We are guilty of dishonor in the first degree, and we should be pilloried in the stocks.

Update 9/21/06: Hilzoy is very familiar with this case. He brings in some more details on the role torture played in producing the false claims against Mr. Aher. It's easy to understand why Venezualan crackpots win applause every time they mock Bush.

DRM means the vendor must own the hardware: lessons from iTunes and phones

Heh, heh. Saw this one coming a mile away. With the DRM update in iTunes, iTunes phones won't play newly purchased DRMd music.

Digital rights management means that whatever plays the content (music, video) must be updated every time the DRM is updated -- and the latter occurs every time a weakness is discovered in the DRM mechanism. Such weaknesses are inevitable (some are driven simply by faster hacking hardware), so updates will occcur every few years.

So every few years all the hardware that works with the DRMd media must be updated. That takes time and money, and sometimes it just won't work. The hardware is obsolete. It works best if the owner of the DRM also owns the hardware.

So if your phone is going to play Microsoft's DRMd music, it needs probably be a Microsoft phone. If it plays Apple's FairPlay DRMd music (btw: AAC is the format, NOT the DRM, AAC is not an Apple product) it better be an Apple phone.

Interesting how these things work.

Google solicits search feedback: working with an algorithmic mind

Even as Google has been infuriating me by (probably algorithmically) filtering out my comments and questions to the Gmail Google groups help forum, the google-mind is asking for my feedback in other domains. When I'm signed in to personalized search, the bottom of the screen now has a discrete feedback link to this form:

Dissatisfied with your search results?

Thanks for helping us improve our search. While we aren't able to respond directly to comments submitted with this form, the information will be reviewed by our quality team

The Google mind is divided. In a similar vein, Google seemed to have removed the feedback form I used to complain of splog misidentification, but when I submitted my mislabeled blog URL for clearance via the old method the CAPTCHA sign of doom vanished immediately instead of the old 3 day wait.

Working with an entity that functions by alogorithm, rather than by traditional human thought, is ... different. I cannot model Google the way I can sort-of-model a human; to work with Google I need to understand the underlying algorithms and resulting emergent behaviors. The Google-mind is not sentient (quite yet), but it has emergent behaviors that are starting to feel as complex as those of my dog -- albeit far less appealing than those of Kateva.

Managing algorithmic entities with emergent behaviors will be a new skill for the emerging generation, much as using a PC was for my generation, using a phone was for my parent's generation, and driving a car was for my grandparents.

See also.

Why antibiotics make some GI infections more dangerous

Back when I was a real doctor, perhaps 10 years ago, it was a mystery to me why some GI infections became so much more dangerous when treated with antibiotics. I knew enough to follow the treatment guidelines, but not why. The explanations I read were unconvincing.

Now I've heard a convincing story, courtesy of The Loom. The lethal toxins are produced by viruses, and bacterial death by antimicrobials unleases the viruses:

The Loom : Why Tainted Spinach And Antibiotics Are a Bad Match

Like other microbes, Escherichia coli O157:H7 carries a number genes that were delivered to it by viruses. In some cases, the viral DNA has mutated to the point that it cannot produce new viruses, and so the genes can only be passed down from one generation to the next. In other cases, the viruses are dormant but still independent. In response to stress, Escherichia coli starts making new copies of the virus, which then burst out of their host. Antibiotics are among the stresses that trigger the viruses to escape. It's a good strategy for the virus, because it can escape from its host before the antibiotics kill the bug. It's not so good for the host [jf: the bacteria], of course, and can be pretty bad for us as well. That's because the toxins in Escherichia coli that can cause organ failure are actually carried by the viruses. The genes only become active as the host begins making new viruses. That means that if you take antibiotics for infection with Escherichia coli O157:H7, you may wipe out the infection, but you may also trigger organ failure...

Our GI immune system has presumably evolved to kill the bacteria without triggering release of the viruses. A tricky and complex maneuver. Antimicrobials are less discriminating.

Hmmm. Multiple-system organ failure and sepsis must be imagined rather differently now than it was back in the day. Doubtless reasearchers have been looking for similar viral payloads in a wide range of infections. The trick may be to slow bacterial replication without stressing the viruses too much, so that the human immune system can survive long enough for a quieter means of bacterial assassination.

PS. Speaking of The Loom, I think of it and about 70 of my other favored blogs everytime I read about how the blogosphere is full of blather and nonsense. Such claims are so absurd that, on reading them, I not only turn the article aside I put the author into a metaphorical trashbin.

Be evil: Gmail, spam, data lock and a digital identity bill of rights

My Gmail acount is dying of dysfunctional spam filtering. Too bad. Well, I can just delete it and start over. After all, I've always been careful to keep a local repository of all my email -- I don't have to try to download via POP tens of thousands of messages. I don't even need my Gmail address, I only ever give out personal email addresses that redirect to Gmail. I've been so careful to maintain a layer of indirection ... or have I?

Ahh. Not so fast. Google checkout (purchase records), Picasa Web Albums (just paid $30 for the 9GB storage), Google Earth (I have the upgrade account, also $30 or so), my search history, my Google spreadsheets, my Google Apps -- there's are now 15 services inextricably linked to my Google digital identity -- and Gmail is the core of that identity. Soon my blogs, including this one, will move to that identity. Some of this data can be extracted, much cannot.

So can I keep the Gmail account in a sort of moribund state, setting spam filtering to an extreme level? No, Gmail doesn't allow one to control spam filtering. Yahoo email does, Gmail does not. You get the default.

It's a nasty situation. I'm wed to Google, but my bride is demonstrating sociopathic tendencies. Divorce is very expensive. Such are the perils of "data lock", but ownership of digital identity is worse than conventional "data lock" -- it starts to smell a bit like indentured servitude.

We need a digital identity bill of rights. I'll write more on this, but here are two a list off the top of my head:

1. Digital identity must be portable using a well defined public standard.
2. Digital identity must be independent of services. In other words -- there's a layer of indirection between my digital identity and my email account, my credit card account, my eCash account ...
   

Only two requirements, but it's a start. It means that neither Google nor Microsoft nor my credit card company nor my checking account can own my digital identity. They may host my digital identity, but I need to be able to migrate it, with appropriate authentication, to another host without breaking the associated services.

Google, unwittingly or with full knowledge, is now Evil. How can Google become less evil? They could adopt the Digital Identity Bill of Rights. The first step would be to separate a user's Gmail address from Google's digital identity, the next step would be to adopt and define an open standard so that Google customers could opt to migrate to another Digital Identity host.

If Amazon, Yahoo, or even Microsoft were to adopt this Bill of Rights, they'd get my business. I think Amazon would be my first choice.

Update 9/22/06: But then things began looking better ...

Will winner take all work?

The Winner-Take-All Society is a world in which most of the productive surplus of a society is concentrated in the hands of a few winners -- irregardless of whether they win by virtue, luck, malice, talent or some combination thereof. This is our world.

In our world it is not unusual to see a CEO exercise over $30 million in stock options. That money could have gone to shareholders, or to existing employees, or to customers, or to business partners, or to recruit and retain new talent -- but it went to the winner.

This makes sense if one accepts the notion that the CEO is the company, and that success or failure is determined by the CEO. This is a popular notion; it is widely accepted by a vast array of journalists, consultants, senior executives, writers of best selling business books, the Harvard Business Review and, of course, CEOs.

It might be true. I have no great evidence to the contrary -- but I have doubts. In the world of medicine observational studies are notoriously unreliable and misleading; real data comes from genuine experimentation -- experiments that can't be done in the world of billion dollar corporations. If one believes that modern business is as complex in some ways as living organisms, it's likely we don't have any real evidence to support the belief that the CEO is the company.

There's room for a contrarian opinion -- that companies that do well are the product of hundreds, or thousands, of significant contributors -- most of whom are invisible -- and numerous external uncontrolled variables we can call "fortune" and "circumstance". If you buy this story, then there's a problem with winner-take-all.

The problem is that those contributors are human, and they have the human compulsion to "punish cheating". They will, unconsciously or consciously, respond to "winner take all" in a myriad negative ways. in time this will affect the performance of the corporation, though, not, perhaps, the winnner's take.

This is fundamental human biology -- it cannot be readily changed. Winner take all carries the seeds of its own destruction.

Update 9/16: I didn't expect a supporting argument from a sports article.