Boots & Sabers

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Category: Technology

The Illusion of Control

by | 1824, 20 Apr 15 | , | 0 Comments

This is an interesting story about the sounds, buttons, and other things designed to give us the illusion of control.

All of these deceptions are arguably desirable. Whether or not you feel cheated by them, their effect is largely for the greater good. People feel happier with the world around them, more in control of events and comforted by the apparent efficacy of their actions. But what if the illusion of control had negative effects? What if it made people do things that weren’t just detrimental to themselves, but the whole of society?

These are the questions raised by Mark Fenton-O’Creevy and his fellow researchers. Back in 2003, they published a study on the illusion of control in financial traders. During a quick game, traders were told that pressing buttons on a computer keyboard “may” have some effect on the value of a financial index they were watching rise and fall. In reality the buttons had no effect on the index, its movements were pre-determined. But some traders felt their button-bashing had more impact than others. Their subjection to an illusion of control was therefore rated higher. The really interesting result was that Fenton-O’Creevy and his co-authors found that those traders were the ones who, in their real-life day jobs, earned less and were given lower performance ratings by their managers.

“A skilled trader should be able to reflect critically on their performance,” says Fenton-O’Creevy. “They should be able to tell if they made the right decision and got lucky, or made the right decision and it went badly.”

Utah Brings Back Firing Squad

by | 0709, 24 Mar 15 | , | 0 Comments

Good.

(CNN)Utah’s governor signed a bill Monday that brings back firing squads as a potential way to execute some death row prisoners.

Lethal injection remains the primary method for carrying out executions in the state, Gov. Gary R. Herbert said in a statement. A firing squad would only be used in the event the necessary drugs cannot be obtained.

“Those who voiced opposition to this bill are primarily arguing against capital punishment in general and that decision has already been made in our state,” said Marty Carpenter, a spokesman for Herbert.

“We regret anyone ever commits the heinous crime of aggravated murder to merit the death penalty and we prefer to use our primary method of lethal injection when such a sentence is issued. However, when a jury makes the decision and a judge signs a death warrant, enforcing that lawful decision is the obligation of the executive branch,” he said.

Death by firing squad is a quick and humane way to carry out a death sentence. The anti-capital punishment folks who oppose this are many of the same ones who have campaigned to make the drugs used for lethal injection so difficult to obtain.

Walker Fires Aide over Tweets

by | 0704, 19 Mar 15 | , , | 6 Comments

Ok… “resigned,” but whatever.

A digital strategist to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker resigned Tuesday night following an outcry over remarks on social media that seemed to disparage the Iowa caucuses.

Republican consultant Liz Mair had joined Walker’s political action committee, Our American Revival, ahead of the governor’s all-but-certain presidential run. Her departure came just one day after her hire was first reported.

“The tone of some of my tweets concerning Iowa was at odds with that which Gov. Walker has always encouraged in political discourse,” Mair said in a statement. “I wish Gov. Walker and his team all the best.”

Mair’s months-old comments, which surfaced Monday in the hours after her hire was first reported, put Walker’s campaign-in-waiting in a tough spot as outraged Iowa Republicans immediately called for her ouster.

“In other news, I see Iowa is once again embarrassing itself, and the GOP, this morning. Thanks, guys,” Mair wrote in one January tweet. In another, she suggested that Iowa should lose its role as the first-in-the-nation nominating state. “The sooner we remove Iowa’s frontrunning status, the better off American politics and policy will be,” she wrote.

First, on the content of her tweets, she’s right. Iowa’s parochial interests, like ethanol, have driven far too many national priorities because of its front-runner status.

Second, it was a mistake for Walker to let her go over this. He has a history of questionable staff choices and, if anything, his greatest failing has been misplaced loyalty. Yet in this case, he appears reactionary and disloyal. Mair’s tweets were not offensive and expressed an opinion shared by a large swath of voters. The fact that some Iowa bigwigs disagree does not make her wrong.

Walker would have been better served making a statement like, “I don’t share Liz’s opinion about Iowa, but there’s room in the Republican Party and my campaign for all kinds of opinions,” and moving on.

Obama and Clinton Traded Emails

by | 2138, 9 Mar 15 | , | 0 Comments

As one would expect…

President Barack Obama exchanged emails with Hillary Clinton on her private, nongovernmental account while she was serving as secretary of state, the White House said Monday. But he did not know that she used a private system exclusively for government business, press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters.

Obama “did, over the course of his first several years in office, trade emails with the secretary of state,” Earnest said. “I would not describe the number of emails as large, but they did have the occasion to email one another.”

Obama told CBS in an interview broadcast over the weekend that he found out that Clinton had set up and maintained a private system that she used for official business “the same time everybody else learned it through news reports.”

So the questions remains… why did nobody, including her boss, raise a stink about Clinton using a personal email account to conduct the people’s business?

Paul Allen Finds the Musashi

by | 1954, 4 Mar 15 | , , | 0 Comments

Very cool.

Manila (AFP) – Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen said Wednesday he had found one of Japan’s biggest and most famous battleships on a Philippine seabed, some 70 years after American forces sank it during World War II.

Excited historians likened the discovery, if verified, to finding the Titanic, as they hailed the American billionaire for his high-tech mission that apparently succeeded after so many failed search attempts by others.

Allen posted photos and video online of parts of what he said was the battleship Musashi, found by his M/Y Octopus exploration vessel one kilometre (1.6 miles) deep on the floor of the Sibuyan Sea.

“World War II battleship Musashi sank 1944 is found,” Allen announced in a Twitter post that has been re-tweeted close to 19,000 times.

Hillary Broke Law With Private Email Address

by | 0713, 3 Mar 15 | , | 9 Comments

C’mon… that’s just basic accountability.

Washington (CNN)Hillary Clinton did not have a State Department email account while she served as America’s top diplomat, a senior state department official said Monday, and instead used a personal email account during her four years on the job.

Using personal email as a sole method of communication appears to break rules outlined by the National Archives and Records Administration. The government agency stipulates that personal email can only be used in “emergency situations,” and when used, the emails “are captured and managed in accordance with agency record-keeping practices.”

There’s only one reason that Clinton would have used a private email account instead of a government one… she intended to obscure her activities from scrutiny. Why would she want to keep her activities secret? Logic would dictate (an homage to Spock) that she intended to engage in unethical and/or illegal behavior.

What is more telling is that nobody said anything. Government officials, cabinet members, possibly foreign dignitaries, and even possibly the president himself were receiving emails from Clinton from a gmail account or something and never raised a stink about it. It makes you wonder how many other Obama officials are hiding their correspondence.

Head Transplants

by | 1023, 1 Mar 15 | | 0 Comments

If he can get this to work, I can think of soooo many useful applications.

Surgeon Sergio Canavero, director of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group in Italy, thinks he’s developed a new technique for head transplants that will avoid some of the problems caused by earlier attempts at such surgeries involving dogs and monkeys.

“In a paper published in Surgical Neurology International, he has outlined his technique: first, both the transplant head and the donor body would need to be cooled in order to slow cell death,” CNETexplains. “Then, the neck of both would be cut and the major blood vessels linked with tubes. Finally, the spinal cords would be severed, with as clean a cut as possible.”

Divers Find Lost Thermonuclear Bomb

by | 1017, 1 Mar 15 | , | 3 Comments

What a vacation story! Thankfully they found it before the Iranians did.

Savannah| A couple of tourists from Canada made a surprising discovery while scuba diving  in Wassaw Sound, a small bay  located on the shores of Georgia. Jason Sutter and Christina Murray were admiring the marine life of the area when they stumbled upon a Mark 15 thermonuclear bomb that had been lost by the United States Air Force more than 50 years ago.

UPDATE: This story is just that… a story. It’s false according to Snopes.

Government Seizing Control of Internet

by | 2255, 25 Feb 15 | , | 10 Comments

Without a vote by Congress, of course. That’s not the Obama way.

The Federal Communications Commission is about to usher in the most dramatic government intervention in the Internet in two decades — heralding a liberal shift toward greater oversight of one of the nation’s most important economic engines.

Majority Democrats at the agency are expected to vote Thursday to approve FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s net neutrality plan, which will regulate broadband like a public utility to ensure all Web traffic is treated equally. They’re also poised to encourage towns and cities to compete with the dominant telecom companies in providing Internet service to consumers.

Taken together, the two moves, which are vehemently opposed by the FCC’s two Republican members, represent a seismic shift in the relationship between the government and the companies that run the Internet — and mark the biggest change to communications policy since the 1996 Telecom Act.

No Drone Zone

by | 1922, 22 Feb 15 | | 0 Comments

Heh.

NoFlyZone.org lets you register your address online, letting drone manufacturers and fliers know that their machines are not welcome near your business or home, according to a report from TechCrunch,

I suspect a well-aimed shotgun blast will get the message across too.

 

Obama Moves to Regulate Internet

by | 2108, 9 Feb 15 | , | 21 Comments

Yes, that’s what “net neutrality” means. It’s not about neutrality. It’s about government control.

“President Obama’s plan marks a monumental shift toward government control of the Internet. It gives the FCC the power to micromanage virtually every aspect of how the Internet works,” Pai said. “The plan explicitly opens the door to billions of dollars in new taxes on broadband… These new taxes will mean higher prices for consumers and more hidden fees that they have to pay.”

In his initial cursory overview of the plan, the commissioner said it would hinder broadband investment, slow network speed and expansion, limit outgrowth to rural areas of the country and reduce Internet service provider (ISP) competition.

“The plan saddles small, independent businesses and entrepreneurs with heavy-handed regulations that will push them out of the market,” Pai said. “As a result, Americans will have fewer broadband choices. This is no accident. Title II was designed to regulate a monopoly. If we impose that model on a vibrant broadband marketplace, a highly regulated monopoly is what we’ll get.”

Samsung: We’re Listening

by | 1416, 8 Feb 15 | | 0 Comments

That’s a wee  bit unsettling.

You can control your SmartTV, and use many of its features, with voice commands. If you enable Voice Recognition, you can interact with your Smart TV using your voice. To provide you the Voice Recognition feature, some voice commands may be transmitted (along with information about your device, including device identifiers) to a third-party service that converts speech to text or to the extent necessary to provide the Voice Recognition features to you. In addition, Samsung may collect and your device may capture voice commands and associated texts so that we can provide you with Voice Recognition features and evaluate and improve the features. Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.

Feminism in the Tech World

by | 1620, 18 Jan 15 | , | 0 Comments

Here’s an interesting take from a woman working in high tech.

I was there because I loved working with technology, and I gravitated to people who shared the same passions. Everything else was background noise.

I have since been made painfully aware that my experience is atypical. Every time, it has been a woman who has done so. Every time, it has been a lesson in how the woman I am talking with expects the tech world to relate to her and other people like her. This was pointed out with particular clarity in a conversation I had last year, face-to-face with a friend who, after patiently hearing me out about how comfortable I’ve always felt and still feel in the tech community, suggested, “Have you ever considered that most women don’t experience things the way you do?”

Read the whole thing.

Revenge Porn Heads to Court

by | 2111, 3 Jan 15 | , | 0 Comments

Let’s hope that cases like this deter the behavior.

The trial for Keslin Jean Jacques, a Milwaukee man who posted nude and seminude photos of his ex-girlfriend on the Internet after a breakup, is scheduled to begin Wednesday. Jean Jacques, 31, was charged in April for publishing a sexually explicit image without consent.

In case you thought this guy had any redeeming qualities…

Jean Jacques taunted his ex-girlfriend, saying she couldn’t stop him from posting the photos because the governor hadn’t yet signed the bill. But Walker had signed it 12 days earlier.

And, of course, if you don’t want naked pictures of you ending up on the internet, then don’t let people take pictures of you while you are naked.

Wills Online

by | 1939, 28 Dec 14 | , | 0 Comments

This is kind of morbid, but interesting.

London (AFP) – Some 41 million British wills dating back to 1858, including those of Winston Churchill and Princess Diana, were made available in an online database Saturday.

The government’s full archive of wills from England and Wales, stretching back more than 150 years, has been put on the probatesearch.service.gov.uk website.

It includes the wills of World War II prime minister Churchill; novelist Charles Dickens; Diana, princess of Wales; children’s writer A. A. Milne; code-breaker Alan Turing; writer George Orwell and author Beatrix Potter.

North Korea Threatens Counteraction

by | 1928, 21 Dec 14 | , | 0 Comments

That’s about the worst denial ever.

While steadfastly denying involvement in the hack, North Korea accused U.S. President Barack Obama of calling for “symmetric counteraction.”

“The DPRK has already launched the toughest counteraction. Nothing is more serious miscalculation than guessing that just a single movie production company is the target of this counteraction. Our target is all the citadels of the U.S. imperialists who earned the bitterest grudge of all Koreans,” a report on state-run KCNA read.

“Our toughest counteraction will be boldly taken against the White House, the Pentagon and the whole U.S. mainland, the cesspool of terrorism,” the report said, adding that “fighters for justice” including the “Guardians of Peace” — a group that claimed responsibility for the Sony attack — “are sharpening bayonets not only in the U.S. mainland but in all other parts of the world.”

North Korea Behind Sony Hacks

by | 2105, 17 Dec 14 | , | 1 Comment

As everyone suspected.

The U.S. is ready to blame North Korea for the crippling hack attack at Sony Pictures, as the studio said Wednesday it would cancel next week’s planned release of its controversial comedy “The Interview.”

U.S. investigators say an announcement pinning the blame on hackers working for the Pyongyang regime could come as soon as Thursday.

Because of the North Korean regime’s tight control of the Internet in the reclusive country, U.S. officials believe the hack was ordered directly by the country’s leadership.

North Korea experts say the country has spent its scarce resources on building up a unit called “Bureau 121” to carry out cyber attacks.

Consider that a foreign nation managed to hack a company, threaten people, keep a movie from being released, and cost the American economy millions and millions of dollars while also exposing tens of thousands of people to identity theft and worse. This is what cyber war looks like and we aren’t doing so well at it.

Blocking the Unemployed

by | 1852, 16 Dec 14 | , | 0 Comments

That’s just flat out unacceptable.

From 2011 to 2014, jobless workers had 3.6 million calls blocked by the state and in an additional 1 million cases the unemployed hung up after being put on hold, the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau reported Tuesday. These numbers for the call centers don’t count the state’s automated phone lines for unemployment benefits, because the state doesn’t track the number of dropped calls to the automated system.

The audit confirmed reports reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that showed that the state has often been unable to handle the rush of calls from workers who were laid off because of the cold winter months and the recent deep recession.

Most workers can file for benefits online and do get their benefits quickly. But the phone problems date back at least to 2009 and got worse last winter even though overall jobless claims were falling.

Auditors found that almost 1.7 million phone calls to state centers by jobless workers were blocked last fiscal year because there was no one to answer the calls and not enough phone lines available to put the workers on hold. That left those callers no choice but to try to phone again later for help.

During most of the fiscal year ended in June, less than 10% of jobless workers’ calls were blocked by the state. But the problem spiked in December of 2013 and January of 2014. During those winter months marked by high seasonal unemployment and a large number of calls to the state, more than 80% of the unemployed workers calling for help were blocked.

Chicago Moving to Require E15

by | 2109, 8 Dec 14 | , | 1 Comment

Be sure to fill up before entering Chicago.

CHICAGO (WLS) –The Chicago City Council is set to take up a proposal about E15 gasoline. The council’s finance committee passed the ordinance Monday.

Supporters say the 15 percent ethanol and 85 percent gasoline blend reduces smog and helps the environment. But not everyone agrees that city gas stations should be forced to sell the fuel.

If the full city council passes the ordinance, Chicago will be the first city in the country to require the sale of E15 at all gas stations.

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