Regional airlines, emergent fraud and enlightenment 2.0

When Salon's Patrick Smith says there's a cultural problem with the regional airline industry, I take his word for it ...

Ask the pilot | Patrick Smith | Salon Technology

... In the end, this is a terrible black mark for the regional airline industry, and it is liable to become a litigation nightmare for Colgan, the airplane manufacturer, and other parties as well.

Though, to some extent, the regionals had it coming. Traveling aboard regional aircraft remains extraordinarily safe, and I am not disparaging the thousands of professional, fully competent pilots out there who fly them for a living. Further, there is no need or reason for the public to be fearful or apprehensive about flying on a regional aircraft. Nevertheless, as highlighted here a few weeks ago, there is something dysfunctional in the cultures at these companies. There will be a lot of focus on pilot training in the weeks and months ahead, and good for that -- but the problem runs deeper. Between the lousy pay, the high-stress working conditions and the often hostile management under which regional pilots work ... all of this, on some level, is a potential risk to safety. And it needs to change.

I don't think this class of problem is unique to the regional airlines. I think it's one aspect of a culture of emergent fraud that's grown up in America over the past twenty to thirty years.

This morning I can't find a recent article I read on the gap between how people think they'll behave in ethically challenging circumstances and how they really do behave (much worse, as you might guess), but we do have lots of examples of how physicians are much more corruptible than they imagine. Astoundingly, even most politicians think they're not particularly corrupted by their donors. In the right economic and cultural climate fraud is as inevitable as the sunset.

Fraud will always be with us. Anthropologists and evolutionary biologists speculate that "fraud wars" drove the evolution of sentience. Fraud made us human, but life on a small, crowded, high tech planet means we have to beat it back to the low end of the historic range. That's a core part of the enlightenment 2.0 agenda.

Cheney/Bush and the GOP were fertilizers for fraud and deception. We're only starting to recover. The Colgan story will be soon forgotten, but it's a small marker of a much bigger problem.

Good news from India

Certainly Congress must be imperfect, but the alternatives worried most rationalists.

So this is good news.

BBC NEWS | South Asia | India opts for the middle path

.... It is a vote against ideological, language, caste and class extremism. It is the victory of the middle vote,' says historian Ramachandra Guha.

The vote was to some extent (how much I don't know) also a vote on India's current relationship with the United States. I wonder if Obama made that easier, especially for India's 140 million Muslims.

I ask Wolfram|Alpha …

I ask Wolfram|Alpha ..

Are you Skynet?

It replies



Not exactly a denial.

Update 5/16/09: I tried a real question - "What is the Muslim population of India?" and it didn't know. Google "knew". Rough start.

iPhone rumors I can believe in …

Strictly for fun, here’s a set of iPhone rumors I can believe in …

iPod Cameras To 'Charlies,' Apple Rumor Mill Chugging

… The PhoneArena and HardMac rumors come right on the heels of a rumor from those posted earlier this week by a Chinese Apple Web site and picked up all around the blogosphere. A source, cited by the Chinese Web forum, Weiphone, claims that a new iPhone will see storage upgraded to 32 GB, have a 600-MHz CPU speed (200 more Megahertz than current iPhones), and a jump to 256 MB of RAM. The Weiphone rumor also claims that the iPhone will get a 3.2-megapixel camera equipped with autofocus…

Why do I go for this one?

Well, they’re obviously all solid but incremental changes. A 50% speedup would be very welcome, besides the egregious problems with core productivity apps my iPhone is often a tad sluggish.

That’s not all though. What gets me is the RAM increase. That’s because Gruber, who’s very well informed but often coy, wrote …

…Apple was working on a vastly improved dock for your most-frequently used apps, and that there’d be one special icon position where you could put a third-party app to enable it to run in the background…

…The major limiting factor right now is RAM. There just isn’t much left for third-party processes on the current hardware’s 128 MB.

That last sentence is vintage Gruber. It’s his deniable way of saying the RAM will go up.

So the two mesh.

Em is getting my current iPhone of course. There are limits to chivalry.

PS. I’m quite pleased by the pictures my iPhone takes – even in dim light. A 3.2 megapixel camera with similar light sensitivity and autofocus would be a real delight.

Star Trek -- the deep dive on the temporal discontinuities

This guy (I'm sure) really knows his Trek: Pop Culture Zoo - full frontal nerdity | ‘Star Trek’ - Strange Fascination Fascinating Me. He traces all the temporal implications of the great universe fork.

I'm impressed.

Strictly for those who've seen the movies.

BTW, I thought the movie was a bit on the silly side but definitely fun.

200 cases of illicit nuclear material trafficking each year

The 200 cases are the ones that get caught (emphases mine) …

Mohamed ElBaradei warns of new nuclear age | World news | The Guardian

ElBaradei, the outgoing director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said the current international regime limiting the spread of nuclear weapons was in danger of falling apart …

…He predicted that the next wave of proliferation would involve "virtual nuclear weapons states", who can produce plutonium or highly enriched uranium and possess the knowhow to make warheads, but who stop just short of assembling a weapon. They would therefore remain technically compliant with the NPT while being within a couple of months of deploying and using a nuclear weapon.

"This is the phenomenon we see now and what people worry about in Iran. And this phenomenon goes much beyond Iran. Pretty soon … you will have nine weapons states and probably another 10 or 20 virtual weapons states." …

Two hundred reports. Twenty-five states that either have nuclear weapons or can produce them with a month’s work.

And that’s if all goes as expected.

Yep, the Cost of Havoc is still falling.

We’re entering the new nuclear age. There’s hope however. Something unexpected allowed us to survive the first nuclear age. Maybe it's still around.

The interesting but irritating Grant study of life stories

Brooks, surprisingly, reports on an article from this month’s Atlantic Magazine pretty much straight up …

NYT They Had It Made – David Brooks

In the late 1930s, a group of 268 promising young men, including John F. Kennedy and Ben Bradlee, entered Harvard College. By any normal measure, they had it made. They tended to be bright, polished, affluent and ambitious. They had the benefit of the world’s most prestigious university. They had been selected even from among Harvard students as the most well adjusted…

…The study had produced a stream of suggestive correlations. The men were able to cope with problems better as they aged. The ones who suffered from depression by 50 were much more likely to die by 63. The men with close relationships with their siblings were much healthier in old age than those without them.

But it’s the baffling variety of their lives that strikes one the most. It is as if we all contain a multitude of characters and patterns of behavior, and these characters and patterns are bidden by cues we don’t even hear. They take center stage in consciousness and decision-making in ways we can’t even fathom. The man who is careful and meticulous in one stage of life is unrecognizable in another context…

It’s online, so worth a quick look. Or just read Brooks, he got most of it.

What Brooks misses though is the irritating aspect of the study. The study’s owner and interpreter is an unreformed Freudian, which makes him, in technical neuroscience terms, a loon. All of the stories are seen through the lens of Freud’s fact-free models of mind.

Stripped of the interpretation they’d be much more interesting. This is a group, for example, from which we should expect about 3-8 schizophrenics. How did they develop? What about those who didn’t meet the formal criteria for a late onset degenerative disorder of cognition, but showed some schizotypal features? Of those who did develop psychotic disorders, how many recovered? The last, incidentally, was an interest of one the mid-course managers of the study.

I hope someone gets to do that someday.

Incidentally, John Kennedy’s file will be available in 2040. If you’re under 30 now that will come much sooner than you can imagine.

The GOP is again the party of torture – and it might work for them

Fifteen months ago I wrote that the GOP wasn’t the torture party any more …

Gordon's Notes (Feb 2008): The GOP isn't the torture party any more

… Mitt "thumbscrews" Romney is gone. Even Ron Paul is gone. Only McCain and Huckabee are left.

McCain's opposition to torture is well known. But what about Huckabee?

In December he declared waterboarding was indeed torture.

Huckabee Chafes at 'Front-Runner' Label - washingtonpost.com

... Huckabee joined Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in declaring his opposition to the interrogation procedure known as "waterboarding," and said he would support closing the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a contrast with the other leading Republicans...

I'm surprised to be saying this, but the GOP isn't the pro-torture party they were in May of 2007, or even in November of 2007.

Every single GOP candidate that backed torture has been eliminated from contention.

Sure, the rabid right winguts of talk radio still pant ecstatically about the secret joys of agony, but their candidates are gone. Republican voters, after all, have a voice in what the GOP is.

Shockingly, it seems they don't like torture any more -- if they ever really did…

I was wrong.

Today Romney is running for 2008. Limbaugh and Cheney are ascendant. The GOP is the Party of Limbaugh, and the Party of Torture.

It’s not a foolish move. Torture is far more popular in America than I had thought (emphases mine) …

… 55% of Americans believe in retrospect that the use of the interrogation techniques was justified, while only 36% say it was not. Notably, a majority of those following the news about this matter "very closely" oppose an investigation and think the methods were justified.

We Americans are still in a very dark place. I am even more mystified by Obama’s victory. In the context of this support the GOP’s embrace of the joys of torture may make political sense. This is true even as, in one of history’s great ironies, the Bush team seem to be edging away from the torture policy.

This will be a long struggle. I believe Obama will do everything feasible to get us away from the road to oblivion, but he’s still got a huge uphill fight. Consider the short list of political problems he has to face

• Americans don’t believe that radical change in the earth’s climate is a potential threat to civilization
• Americans are completely unready to accept the best possible health care option - “Crummy Care”.
• We can’t try prisoners who are alleged to have been directly involved in the 9/11 attacks because our torture practices make the cases legally illegitimate
• Afghanistan and Pakistan
• The collapse of the world economy, now running on unsustainable performance-enhancing fiscal stimuli
• The ever falling cost of havoc
• North Korea
• India and Pakistan
• The tenuous status of America’s legal framework
• China’s political and economic stability (perhaps the greatest near term threat)

It’s a long, long road.

See also

• Torture and the case for replacing a rotten CIA (and from 2007)
• Cheney’s claims of torture effectiveness are lies: This says more about Cheney and his ilk than about torture. My opposition is not based on the stupidity of torture as a form of interrogation, it’s based on the world we want to live in.
• Cheney drowned his victims until they told him Iraq was behind everything
  

In 1994 we expected these things to disappear ...

I've been trying to remember the things that, back in the early 90s, we thought would disappear.

Many of them lasted longer than we then expected, but their time is coming. Here's the list, and the current status ... (items with an * were added after the original post, thanks to my readers for ideas!)

1. pay phones: almost gone
   
2. fax machines: still here, but I rarely get a fax any more. I do send them on occasion.
3. newsprint: going away
4. the telegraph: gone
5. home phones: going
   
6. metered phone calls - esp. long distance: still around, maybe starting to go
7. graduate school: we still have them, but there are many more distance programs. Post-secondary education seems overdue for an upheaval. It's fantastically expensive.
8. letters: these are really going away. I never get anything at the office. At home I'm down to checks, weddings and funerals.
9. encyclopedias (home, printed): I think they're largely gone, but I do miss them.
10. modems* (see fax): We were sure these would be gone by 1999. They're still used by millions of Americans. I think they'll be gone within five years, but ...
11. analog broadcast standard resolution TV*: We expected TVs to change much faster than they have. So we expected resolution/display convergence (same hi res for TV and computer) and we had a fuzzier set of ideas about technology convergence. Instead the standard TV has hung on. If not for the forced transition to digital signals I think they might have lasted another ten years. So a remarkable slow transition.
    

Note that in the early 90s we did not expect paper to go away -- that was the 80s. So it's not surprising that paper is still with us -- at least as a transitional display surface. Likewise we did not expect printed books or textbooks to go away.

On the other hand, we also didn't expect music CDs to look obsolete. That one was a surprise. I don't remember expecting film to vanish -- digital cameras really entered the mainstream around 1997 and experienced astounding improvements over the next 9 years or so.

I'll update this post if I think of other things that we expected to disappear based on our early experience with "Archie", "Veronica", "Gopher" and that foreign thing that ran on NeXT machines.

In retrospect the predictions weren't entirely wrong, but it's taken about 3-10 times as long as expected. I blame the hang time on Canopy economics; it's the long persistence of obsolete technologies that I find interesting.

Anyone remember other things that we expected were facing the end-times back in 1994? I'm not looking for new things we expected to happen (Example: micro-currencies - still not here for real). I'm looking for mainstream technologies of 1994 that geeks thought were obsolete -- especially if we were wrong (so far).

Star Trek NG's torture lesson

I think this was one of the top four Star Trek episodes ever made. I remember it just as described here ... Star Trek: The Next Generation's eerily prescient torture episode. - By Juliet Lapidos - Slate Magazine.

Since I consider NG to be the about the best television ever made, this would be in my list of the best TV ever.

It is astoundingly prescient.

The days of debug.exe

I use to copy assembler code from PC Magazine and BYTE, and compile it with MS-DEBUG.EXE. That's the way early DOS utilities were distributed. I think there was a way in slightly earlier issues of BYTE to read in the assembler code with something like paper tape? (Not at all sure about that last one!)

Later we could download the assembler, and then the exe files.

I'd forgotten about, until I read this obit ... MS-DEBUG 1981 - 2009.

Why Win 7 will work - XP is toast

Windows 7 is Vista 2.5. Not enormously different, but clearly improved. Sure it's a resource hog by the standards of 2004, but today's machines will manage it (especially with 3+ GB of RAM).

That will help Windows 7 succeed, but Tom Reestman pegs the real driver ...

Mac Love - GigaOM - Salon.com

... The biggest thing Windows 7 has going for it, by far, is that while after six years XP was showing it’s age, after nine it’s almost comical....

XP is going the way of Windows 98.

When Win 98 first came out, it was pretty good by the standards of the day. After years of patches and virus attacks and disinterest it was a broken wreck.

XP's not quite there, but it's close. Most of all, it's a security nightmare. Antiviral software bogs down most any machine.

Windows 7, aka Vista 2.5, will be a great success -- because XP is finished.

Oprah Winfrey is a problem

Oprah Winfrey is now promoting irrational beliefs about vaccination and autism.

She can't possibly cause as much harm as the hundreds of thousands of people effectively killed by the irrational beliefs of Thabo Mbeki. She will cause harm though. Some children that should have lived will die, and much energy that might go to preventing or managing cognitive disorders will be wasted countering her stupidity.

Whatever good she's done in her life will soon be outmatched by the harm she will cause.

If you are a person of reason, don't let your money go to Oprah Winfrey.

Update 5/16/09: Salon article on the Oprah problem. Twenty years ago "Dear Abby" had a milder version of the Oprah disease -- she championed the surgical and medical advice of her elite physician friends, even when there was no supporting science.

Weirdest email ever

Via my old web site's contact link, I just read the weirdest email I've ever gotten...

... My name is ... and I am a Casting Producer for the ABC hit reality show 'Wife Swap.' We are currently casting for our fifth season and we are looking for families that are really into Ski Joring together or one family member is very passionate about the sport.

The premise of Wife Swap is simple: for seven days, two wives from two different families with very different values exchange husbands, children and lives (but not bedrooms) to discover what it's like to live a different family's life. It's an interesting social experiment and a great way to see your family in a whole new light. It is shot as a documentary series, so NO scripts and no set. It's just one camera that is documenting your life.

Families that appear on the show will receive a financial honorarium for lost wages, time and commitment. And if you refer a family that appears on the show you would receive $1000. Here at 'Wife Swap' we look for a two-parent home with at least one child between the ages of 6 and 17 living at home full time.

If you are interested, please email me your contact information and tell me a little about your family. Or if you would like to refer a family, please email me their contact information and I will be in touch.

Casting Associate Producer
RDF Media USA
100 6th Ave, 3rd Floor,Suite 3-29
...

I figured it was some kind of phishing scheme, but the skijoring referral comes from an old page of mine, written when Molly was young. Kateva, our current mongrel, isn't big on pulling.

RDF USA exists, and so does the wife swap tv show - though it's not quite as exciting as it sounds "...the wives from these two families exchange husbands, children and lives (but not bedrooms)".

I'm sure that would work really well with our children.

Turns out even the person who signed the email exists; she has a LinkedIn page that fits the story (I omitted her name).

So it looks real. I won't mention this to my wife, there's way to high a risk she'd bail for a two week break.

Still, skijoring?!

Anyway, if you're into skijoring and weird TV shows, send me an email and I'll pass it on to the casting director. It could be your big break.

Amazon Vine – free products for reviews

Interesting move from Amazon …

Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more

…As a top reviewer, we would like to invite you to join Amazon Vine. Open to a limited number of customers, Vine members receive pre-release and new products - free of charge - in exchange for customer reviews…

I can’t afford free things I don’t need, so I’ll have to pass on this one.