Dale Carnegie - the condensed version

After the Great War and before WW II, following a divorce and during the Great Depression, Dale Carnegie wrote an optimistic book - "How to win friends and influence people".

It's good bathroom reading, easiest to take a little bit at a time. On reading it I wonder if some of Carnegie's "friends" came to doubt the sincerity of his sentiments, but it's hard to argue with the general principles of the latter half of the book.

I figured it'd be useful to have an edited version of his "rules" at hand, and thanks to Wikipedia that's not hard. These are the "rules" I like the most ...

How to Win Friends and Influence People

Twelve Ways to Win People to Your Way of Thinking

If you're wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.
Begin in a friendly way.
Start with questions the other person will answer yes to.
Let the other person do the talking.
Let the other person feel the idea is his/hers.
Try honestly to see things from the other persons point of view.

Nine Ways to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment

Begin with praise and honest appreciation.
Call attention to other people's mistakes indirectly.
Talk about your own mistakes first.
Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.
Let the other person save face.
Praise every improvement.
Give them a fine reputation to live up to.
Encourage them by making their faults seem easy to correct.

Now in the modern world, try doing all this over the phone, without ever seeing the other person!

PS. I want anyone who might know me to understand I'm not delusional -- I don't claim to practice these recommendations. Still, one must have aspirations...

How to crack a system

Cryptonomicon, a reasonably popular science fiction book, includes an excellent introduction to cryptography. So I actually knew most of what Schneier tells us about how passwords are cracked...

Schneier on Security: Choosing Secure Passwords

... AccessData sells another program, Forensic Toolkit, that, among other things, scans a hard drive for every printable character string. It looks in documents, in the Registry, in e-mail, in swap files, in deleted space on the hard drive ... everywhere. And it creates a dictionary from that, and feeds it into PRTK.

And PRTK breaks more than 50 percent of passwords from this dictionary alone.

What's happening is that the Windows operating system's memory management leaves data all over the place in the normal course of operations. You'll type your password into a program, and it gets stored in memory somewhere. Windows swaps the page out to disk, and it becomes the tail end of some file. It gets moved to some far out portion of your hard drive, and there it'll sit forever. Linux and Mac OS aren't any better in this regard...

It's somewhat reassuring to know Schneier isn't perfect. As others note in the comments (I looked) he's wrong about OS X -- both the user directory and the swap file can be optionally encrypted with modest performance impacts.

Personally, I store my passwords in an encrypted database and I generate the important ones from GRC's password generator. My answers to the "personal question" are long strings of angrily typed characters ...

XP, however, is kind of hopeless. Maybe Vista is different.

Seeking Dickens: mental illness and prisons

We really need a Charles Dickens for the 21st century. Emphases mine.

The Mentally Ill, Behind Bars - New York Times
Bernard E. Harcourt, a professor of law and criminology at the University of Chicago, is the author of “Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing and Punishing in an Actuarial Age.”

... Over the past 40 years, the United States dismantled a colossal mental health complex and rebuilt — bed by bed — an enormous prison. During the 20th century we exhibited a schizophrenic relationship to deviance.

After more than 50 years of stability, federal and state prison populations skyrocketed from under 200,000 persons in 1970 to more than 1.3 million in 2002. That year, our imprisonment rate rose above 600 inmates per 100,000 adults. With the inclusion of an additional 700,000 inmates in jail, we now incarcerate more than two million people — resulting in the highest incarceration number and rate in the world, five times that of Britain and 12 times that of Japan.

What few people realize, though, is that in the 1940s and ’50s we institutionalized people at even higher rates — only it was in mental hospitals and asylums. Simply put, when the data on state and county mental hospitalization rates are combined with the data on prison rates for 1928 through 2000, the imprisonment revolution of the late 20th century barely reaches the level we experienced at mid-century. Our current culture of control is by no means new.

... It should be clear why there is such a large proportion of mentally ill persons in our prisons: individuals who used to be tracked for mental health treatment are now getting a one-way ticket to jail.

Of course, there are important demographic differences between the two populations. In 1937, women represented 48 percent of residents in state mental hospitals. In contrast, new prison admissions have consistently been 95 percent male. Also, the mental health patients from the 1930s to the 1960s were older and whiter than prison inmates of the 1990s.

... One of the most reliable studies estimates that the increased prison population over the 1990s accounted for about a third of the overall drop in crime that decade.

However, prisons are not the only institutions that seem to have this effect. In a recent study, I demonstrated that the rate of institutionalization — including mental hospitals — was a far better predictor of serious violent crime from 1926 to 2000 than just prison populations. The data reveal a robust negative relationship between overall institutionalization (prisons and asylums) and homicide. Preliminary findings based on state-level panel data confirm these results...

Harcourt is careful to note that the prison/institution relationship is not a simple substitution, but I'd be surprised if there weren't a strong relationship. Humans are really not all that well put together. We're running a 15,000 yo cognitive system way out of its operational range. We do astoundingly well all things considered -- but, really, we're very buggy thinkers. We need to to rethink the "problem of the weak" on many levels.

Damn Interesting: The Woman with a Limp

Damn Interesting is a new pickup for me. I can't recall how I came across it. It's well named; it belongs on everyone's bloglist. Enjoy!

Domestic spying: thank heavens for the Dems

An old story, with a new twist. The Pentagon (you know, the military?) has been using "national security letters" to obtain banking records on "suspicious" US citizens. Cheney declares no patriot would object.

Once this would have been a bit shocking, but it's a yawn. The US military running its own domestic spy operations? Hardly a surprise! This time, however, there's a twist ...

Cheney Defends Efforts to Obtain Financial Records - New York Times

...Representative Silvestre Reyes, a Texas Democrat who is the new chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said his panel would examine the matter. Mr. Reyes also indicated that he might renew efforts to pass a law requiring various agencies to get court approval before issuing national security letters.

We're much better off than we were a month ago ...

Dubai: Slate's well-traveled tales

Looking for mammon in the Muslim World (By Seth Stevenson) is the first in a series of travel essays on Dubai, a small nation with vast wealthy and curious ambitions. It's fun travel writing, and a great story -- five entries so far. Recommended, of course.

Pasteurized milk, gut ecology, and google scholar

I left the milk out a bit long yesterday. It's still good, but the wee ones are at work, we'd better drink it quickly.

Which led me to think about how the pasteurization or irradiation of milk has altered the ecology of the human gut. Now that we think of ourselves as a superorganism, a walking ecology, it's obvious that altering gut ecology is not necessarily a good thing. It could impact obesity rates, bowel disorders, etc.

Now, of course, whacky ideas like this can be quickly researched. I didn't see an obvious directly relevant article, but it looks like the domain is being reasonably well explored. I also see that Google has quietly done some nice work with Google Scholar...

Books about Minnesota: Why they annoy me

Virtually all books about Minnesota annoy me, and it's getting worse. Take this seemingly excellent book: Hiking Minnesota With Kids. What could be wrong with that?

For one thing, most Minnesotans live within a one hour drive of the Wisconsin border. I don't want a "Hiking Minnesota with Kids" book, I want a "Hiking Minnesota and Wisconsin with Kids" book, or a "Hiking within 300 miles of the Twin Cities book".

I'm going to start boycotting all MN or WI only books, and buy every MN/WI book I see.

I can't be the only TC resident in a snit about this ...

PS. Some of the best hiking and around the TCs is in western Wisconsin ...

Even the dimmest eyes are opening ... A right wing flack reneges

Shrillblog quotes Rob Dreher (no permalink, alas). I've never heard of him, he seems like a dim right wing pundit. Things are very bad for Bush, and, alas, for all of us, when someone like him wakes up...

Crunchy Con: My All Things Considered commentary - Rod Dreher, Conservative blog, Beliefnet conservative politics and religion blog:


... I talk about coming to terms with the end of an illusion. As someone who came of political age under Reagan, I've been a conservative for most of my life (for the sake of brevity, NPR edited out the part of the essay in which I explained that I'd had a high school and early-college dalliance with liberalism). I disdained the Vietnam-era "hippie" mentality with regard to national security. I took it for granted that those people were hung up on Vietnam, and ought not be listened to because they were blame-America-first liberals....

I formed my political views on national security in the confident glow of Reaganism. For me, it was a fact of life that Republicans were strong, capable and confident, and Democrats were weak, vacillating and incompetent.... When Bush led us into the Iraq War, I thought the liberals who predicted doom -- and, crucially, the conservatives (like Buchanan) who did as well -- were either fools, cowards or unpatriotic. But now I see that I was the fool. In the NPR piece, I wrote about how I sat there watching Bush's speech and thought that when they get old enough to understand these things, I have got to teach my children never, ever to take the word of presidents or generals at face value. To question authority, because the government will send you off to kill and die for noble-sounding rot (e.g., crusading for democracy in the Middle East). And it hit me that this is precisely the message that so many of those who lived through the Vietnam experience tried to tell my generation -- in my case, and in the case of so many other Gen X Reagan Youth, in vain.

I give him credit for speaking up now. It may yet do some good it if turns enough GOP senators to prevent a filibuster of moves to reduce Bush's power.

Blumenthal on the end-game of the "surge"

How it unfolded, and how Baker failed to turn the tide.

Salon.com | Shuttle without diplomacy

… Informed correspondents of the Washington Post and New York Times related in conversation that Bush furiously called the [Iraq Study Group] report "a flaming turd," but his colorful remark was not published. Perhaps it was apocryphal. Nonetheless, it conveyed the intensity of his hostile rejection....

... Donald Rumsfeld had been sacrificed as the secretary of defense, but his replacement, Robert Gates, a former director of the CIA and member of the ISG, turned from skeptic into team player. The Joint Chiefs of Staff; Gen. John Abizaid, head of Central Command; and Gen. George Casey, commander in Iraq, all opposed the "surge" as no answer. Cheney and the neocons saw their opposition as the opening for purging and blaming them. The Joint Chiefs were ignored and sidelined, Abizaid was forced into retirement and Casey was removed (sent into internal exile as Army chief of staff). Their dissent, leaked to the Washington Post for appearance in the paper on the day of Bush's "surge" speech, was an extraordinary gesture by the senior military leaders to distance themselves from impending failure.,,

… The State Department has been completely sidelined in the making of Bush's latest and last policy on Iraq. Its experience in the Balkans remains thoroughly ignored. And Rice does nothing to call it to Bush's attention, for that would require her to point out his shortcomings. The State Department founders like a ghost ship. Rice meanders back and forth to and from the Middle East, the shuttle without the diplomacy.

After twice rejecting the job of deputy secretary of state, John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, was implored to accept it. In exchanging a Cabinet post for a sub-Cabinet one, a position of policymaking for an administrative post, Negroponte excited rumors that he would only have decided to make the switch if he believed that Rice would eventually leave and he would ascend to her job. But, once again, the logic of that Washington gossip is merely rational. Rice the irrelevancy remains Bush's indispensable devotee.

Congress alone will need to stop this president.

Sarbanes-Oxley means no features in future software updates from publicly traded companies?

The claim is that Sarbanes-Oxley has the unintended consequence of making it illegal, or costly, to distribute ‘free’ software updates.

Oh, about that 802.11n card in your C2D Mac | iLounge

... I’m not going to claim to understand this next part, which really just makes no sense to me at all, but the claim Apple’s making is that it _can’t_ give you the 802.11n-unlocking software for free. The reason: the Core 2 Duo Macs weren’t advertised as 802.11n-ready, and a little law called the Sarbanes-Oxley Act supposedly prohibits Apple from giving away an unadvertised new feature for one of its products. Hence, said the Apple rep, the company’s not distributing new _features_ in Software Update any more, just _bug fixes._ Because of Sarbanes-Oxley. If this is an accurate statement of Apple’s position, which as an attorney (but not one with any Sarbanes background) I find at least plausible, this is really crazy. ...

Presumably this falls under the category of a publicly traded company cheating shareholders of revenue. It is certainly startling if true, but it does seem plausible. It may, of course, be something that vendors like. It would not apply to non-publicly traded companies, which produce most of the software I like.

Sarbanes-Oxley is due for a review by Congress. I’ll ask my Representative to take a look at this claim.

Update 1/18/07: It looks like this is genuine:

Apple's alleged 802.11n enabler fee: blame Enron etc. | Reg Hardware

... The reason: changing a product's functionality changes the timeframe in which the manufacturer can recognise revenue from the sale of that product.

If Apple begins selling a product at the start of, say, Q1 and then adds a previously unadvertised feature to it at the beginning of Q2, under Sarbanes-Oxley, it has to recognise revenues from the product from Q2 onwards. Revenues recognised in Q1 run contrary to the rules enshrined in the Act. Unless, of course, the extra feature is a 'new' product, attracting its own revenue stream.

Crazy, but that's accountancy for you. Had Apple actually said at their launch that its latest Macs would one day be upgradeable to 802.11n, it could have avoided the charge, it seems...

Microsoft Vista, it was announced today, will be installed with a comprehensive feature set which may be unlocked over time for a fee. I wonder if Sarbanes-Oxley determined that.

I'm not sure this is all bad. Companies now have a clear economic incentive to deliver incremental value to existing solutions. If and when I want 802.11n support I have no problem with paying $5.00 for a driver. Perhaps Apple will consider adding phone support to iSync for a similar fee; I'd be delighted to pay $5.00 for official iSync support of my Motorola V3M.

Update 3/10/07: I'd read some coverage that claimed Apple was interpreting Sarbanes-Oxley incorrectly. I'd written our representative to ask about this, and Betty McCollum's office replied "Apple has to account for the separate value of a software upgrade that allows for additional capabilities from the hardware.... a nominal fee ... establishes a reportable value for the upgrade." So Apple has interpreted the law as congress understands it. At least when it comes to enabling new hardware capabilities, SO means Apple must account for the value delivered. A nominal fee is one way to do that. I wonder if there's more wiggle room when no hardware capabilities change ...?

Amazon and the evil of cellphone companies

Tobacco companies are unequaled in the purity of their evil, but, in their defense, they have a certain dark style. American cell phone companies are evil in a sleazy, cowardly sort of way, a bit like Saruman's lackey Wormtongue.

I've been steeped in their vile juices as I balance my lust for the iPhone, my wife's need for a replacement for her beloved Samsung i500, and the vileness of Cingular. Amazon is a good weapon to expose Cingular's nature -- and Amazon's collusion. The Treo 680 seems a bargain at $50 with a $40/month plan, but watch what happens when one walks the billing trail at Amazon. The final shopping cart tells all ...

Amazon.com: palm Treo 680 Smartphone (Cingular): Cell Phones & Service

Cingular Nation 450 Rollover Minutes + palm Treo 680 Nitro Smartphone Product Bundle	$99.99	1
	+ Cingular Nation 450 Rollover Minutes (Monthly service charge of $39.99 billed by Cingular)		1
	+ Cingular 2 Year Contract (No Charge: Included with Cingular's Monthly Rate Plan)		1
	+ PDA Connect Unlimited (Browse the web and access e-mail.) (Monthly service charge of $39.99 billed by Cingular)		1
	+ Regulatory Cost Recovery Fee (Monthly service charge of $1.25 billed by Cingular)

The $40 mandatory "PDA plan" is where all the cost recovery occurs. Six months of this plan is exactly equal to the $250 Amazon chops off the phone price if you stay for 6 months ...

Oooooh, I hate the cell phone companies. My wife has commented on the resemblance to American auto manufacturers before Japan freed us from their rotting grasp. Who will save us from the cell companies? Not Apple, alas.

Update 1/11/07: Wow. My head spins. I spent about an hour today talking about phone price with 3 different Sprint business reps while also reviewing the web site. Here's the "secret sauce" to these discussion. Ask "What date does my contract expire?". When you learn that date, follow any question about rebates, credits, etc with the question "Does that change the date my contract expires?" The trick is that Sprint trains its reps to use different language, so they can answer "no" to questions for which any reasonable person would answer "yes".

The bottom line: If you don't want to change your contract expiry date, you go to a Sprint store and pay full price, or you buy a used phone on eBay or Craigslist. I'm told some Radio Shack stores will sell used phones, but I distrust the quality there. I have a visceral distrust for eBay, so it's Craigslist or list price.

Lastly, looking over the scam I first documented above, I'm thinking Amazon's a part of the deal too. In other words, they sold out. Well, it's not the first time.

The next time a politician hits me up for a donation, I won't ask them about healthcare reform or global warming, I'll ask them if they'll vote to require any cellphone vendor to accept a compatible unlocked phone.

The vengeance of the democrats

Many Republicans smoke. Few Democrats smoke. Nancy Pelosi demonstrates both good governance and mastery of the twisted knife...

Pelosi Bans Smoking Near House Floor

... House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, is a heavy smoker, often found at the center of a group puffing away in a corner of the lobby. He had little to say Wednesday about Pelosi's move. Questioned at a news conference, Boehner described it as 'fine.' He did not elaborate...

A picture accompanying the Google News summaries showed Pelosi holding an ornate chair that closely resembled a whip. Nice choice...

Searching a 100 million stars for something like us

A pair of astrophysicists want to divert a new radio telescope to identify radio-emitting civilizations:

Eavesdropping on the Universe

...The MWA-LFD is a radio telescope designed to detect and characterize highly redshifted 21-centimeter emission from hydrogen molecules in the early universe. Its key scientific goal is to create a three-dimensional map of ionized "bubbles" that formed as the first quasars and galaxies flooded space with ultraviolet light billions of years ago. ...

.... Loeb and Zaldarriaga calculate that by staring at the sky for a month, the MWA-LFD could detect Earth-like radio signals from a distance of up to 30 light-years, which would encompass approximately 1,000 stars. More powerful broadcasts could be detected to even greater distances. Future observatories like the Square Kilometer Array could detect Earth-like broadcasts from 10 times farther away, which would encompass 100 million stars.

I't's hard to get too excited about surveillance of 1000 stars. It seems unlikely that civilizations would radio-emit like us for long, the odds of catching a 100 year slice of radio emission in the 3 billion year slice of a habitable planet is pretty low. A hundred million stars though ... That would be about the right order of magnitude. So maybe in forty years ...

TIME releases their pre-arranged introduction to my new Apple iPhone

Apple's New Calling: The iPhone. A few minutes after the conclusion of the Keynote, the TIME magazine article is online.

…Apple's new iPhone could do to the cell phone market what the iPod did to the portable music player market: crush it pitilessly beneath the weight of its own superiority. This is unfortunate for anybody else who makes cell phones, but it's good news for those of us who use them…