Decius wrote:

How LED signs become a national emergency.

The story here doesn't strike me as particularly novel. The underlying lesson is that security is all about incentives. We've been talking about that here for a long time now. Let's take a walk through the archives:

Workshop on Economics and Information Security, from January 2002:

Many system security failures occur not so much for technical reasons but because of failures of organisation and motivation. For example, the person or company best placed to protect a system may be insufficiently motivated to do so, because the costs of system failure fall on others. Such perverse incentives raise many issues best discussed using economic concepts such as externalities, asymmetric information, adverse selection and moral hazard. They are becoming increasingly important now that information security mechanisms are not merely used to protect against malicious attacks, but also to protect monopolies, differentiate products and segment markets. There are also interesting security issues raised by industry monopolization and the accompanying reduction in product heterogenity. For these and other reasons, the confluence between information security and economics is of growing importance.

This workshop continued; in 2004 I cited the Third Annual Workshop on Economics and Information Security, which posed such questions as:

Can market forces ensure that firms will act to improve security?

Later that year, we enjoyed Old-school British anti-piracy ads, including one that encourages you to rat out your school teachers for cash.

Earlier this year I recommended Anderson's 2001 paper about Why Information Security is Hard. This is always worth reading, and now seems like as good a time as any. I'm still loving the quote from 1849, about first-class and third-class carriage service:

Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

Bruce's "CYA decisions" are the superfluous trappings of the rich. Fear is the new Comfort.

Also, I note another recommendation, from last year, about Costs and Consequences of Transformation and Transparency:

The economics of ‘information-rich’ environments inherently inspire perverse incentives that frequently generate unhappy outcomes.

The context is slightly different but the message is quite applicable:

Any objective review of private sector experiences with digital transformation offers RMA champions evidence more sobering than inspiring. The potentially enormous benefits of net-centric transformation should be valued only in the context of their potentially enormous costs. These cost-benefit ratios have not been adequately assessed. The fundamentalist dogma of the RMA transformation ideology recalls the aphorism, “Be careful of what you want because you’re sure to get it.”

There is also Nassim Nicholas Taleb and his Black Swans:

Many hedge fund managers ... are just picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. And sometimes the steamroller accelerates.

In a world of Black Swans, the first step is understanding just how much we will never understand.

Fear is the new Comfort

This man wants to control the Internet. And you should let him.

...

A system of linked computers like the Internet is obviously a network, but so are jetliners, human bodies, and even bacterial cells. They’re all networks because they are made up of lots and lots of parts that work together. Robust networks have parts that continue to work together smoothly even if conditions fluctuate unpredictably. In the case of the Internet, a million people may try to send e-mail at once. Doyle knows, however, that networks that look perfectly sound can be headed for collapse with little warning. Control theorists have pondered living things for decades, but until recently they lacked the mathematical tools to analyze them as they would a technological system. Doyle and his colleagues have created some of those tools.

This Man Wants To Control the Internet

Stories of people trying to exorcise their inner demons.

TAL is always worth your time. In many shows, every segment is good. I attribute this to host Ira Glass's recognition of the importance of abandoning crap. The stories that make it onto the show have passed quite a test.

In this particular episode, Act One (which is the heart of the show this week) is absolutely excellent.

Glass has said: "If you're not failing all the time, you're not creating a situation where you can get super-lucky." By this logic, then, episode 340 qualifies as super-lucky.

Act One. And So We Meet Again.

Sam Slaven is an Iraq War veteran who came home from the War plagued by feelings of hate and anger toward Muslims. TAL producer Lisa Pollak tells the story of the unusual action Sam took to change himself, and the Muslim students who helped him do it. (34 minutes)

Here's the situation:

In May 2006 at the age of 28, Slaven began taking classes at Parkland Community College in Champagne, Illinois. One day, he came across a bearded man in a hallway who looked Middle-Eastern and Slaven found himself wanting to physically hurt the student. He describes how his mind raced as he battled his physical desire to be violent while his mind was reminding him that he was no longer on the battlefield. Slaven was astonished at his reaction and thought, "What have I become?"

Sam Slaven (The Veteran) and Yousif Radeef (The Bearded Man) are pictured at right, along with Dennis Kaczor, faculty advisor for MSA.

Apropos of recent events, one blogger notes:

There's a scene in there where American soldiers in Iraq are tasing each other for fun. You can hear them screaming and laughing in the audio.

On that note:

As Army captains who served in Baghdad and beyond, we've seen the corruption and the sectarian division. We understand what it's like to be stretched too thin. And we know ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

This American Life - 340: The Devil in Me

... visiting delegations from faraway planets are likely to be very small in size. The only resource of interest … will be knowledge. These purposes can be realized with relatively small observation, computation, and communication devices. Such spaceships are thus likely to be smaller than a grain of sand, possibly of microscopic size. Perhaps that is one reason why we have not noticed them.

Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the laity. I would go further: in Technopoly, all experts are invested with the charisma of priestliness. Some of our priest-experts are called psychiatrists, some psychologists, some sociologists, some statisticians. The god they serve does not speak of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity. And that is why such concepts as sin and evil disappear in Technopoly. They come from a moral universe that is irrelevant to the theology of expertise. And so the priests of Technopoly call sin “social deviance,” which is a statistical concept, and they call evil “psychopathology,” which is a medical concept. Sin and evil disappear because they cannot be measured and objectified, and therefore cannot be dealt with by experts.

Ideas don't explode; they subvert. They take their time. And because they change the way we think, they are less visible than a newly paved national highway or the advent of wall-sized television screens. After a while, someone notices that we're not thinking about things the way our parents did.

So where do the economies of scale come from? They come from cultivating a readership community that feels empowered and comfortable enough to contribute its own content to the commonweal. You have to facilitate it, encourage it, weed it, use the proper tools, accept setbacks, take it on as a life project. Or someone does. Not necessarily you.

Those YouTube debates are such a waste of time; just move everything to HotOrNot ...

People asked to rate the competence of an individual based on a quick glance at a photo predicted the outcome of elections more than two-thirds of the time.

Nearly 300 students were asked to look at pairs of photographs for as little as one-tenth of a second and pick the individual they felt was more competent.

The participants were shown photos of leading candidates for governor or senator in other parts of the country, but they were not told they were evaluating candidates. Those who recognized any of the photos were not counted.

When the elections took place two weeks later, the researchers found that the competency snap judgments predicted the winners in 72.4 percent of the senatorial races and 68.6 percent of the gubernatorial races.

That's the AP story.

Here's the abstract of the technical paper:

Here we show that rapid judgments of competence based solely on the facial appearance of candidates predicted the outcomes of gubernatorial elections, the most important elections in the United States next to the presidential elections. In all experiments, participants were presented with the faces of the winner and the runner-up and asked to decide who is more competent. To ensure that competence judgments were based solely on facial appearance and not on prior person knowledge, judgments for races in which the participant recognized any of the faces were excluded from all analyses.

Predictions were as accurate after a 100-ms exposure to the faces of the winner and the runner-up as exposure after 250 ms and unlimited time exposure (Experiment 1).

Asking participants to deliberate and make a good judgment dramatically increased the response times and reduced the predictive accuracy of judgments relative to both judgments made after 250 ms of exposure to the faces and judgments made within a response deadline of 2 s (Experiment 2).

Finally, competence judgments collected before the elections in 2006 predicted 68.6% of the gubernatorial races and 72.4% of the Senate races (Experiment 3).

These effects were independent of the incumbency status of the candidates. The findings suggest that rapid, unreflective judgments of competence from faces can affect voting decisions.

Also online at PNAS (including supporting information).

Predicting political elections from rapid and unreflective face judgments

This is a programmatic paper, marking out two directions in which the study of social media can contribute to broader problems of social science: understanding cultural evolution and understanding collective cognition. Under the first heading, I discuss some difficulties with the usual, adaptationist explanations of cultural phenomena, alternative explanations involving network diffusion effects, and some ways these could be tested using social-media data. Under the second I describe some of the ways in which social media could be used to study how the social organization of an epistemic community supports its collective cognitive performance.

Social Media as Windows on the Social Life of the Mind

This is a really cool study.

In one experiment, Kassin asked volunteers to perform a challenging task on a computer but warned them not to touch the "Alt" key or risk damaging a computer. Volunteers were told that the computer had been damaged and were asked whether they hit the banned key. In reality, the volunteer did nothing wrong. Most volunteers denied it, but as the initial task they were given was made difficult, they became less sure because they were distracted. When researchers had confederates lie about having seen the volunteers hit the Alt key, the number of people who confessed went up to 100 percent. Every stage of increased pressure led ever larger numbers of volunteers to believe they were really guilty.

Don't think of cheney's law, or of this:

And Attorney General Ashcroft then stunned me. He lifted his head off the pillow and in very strong terms expressed his view of the matter, rich in both substance and fact, which stunned me — drawn from the hour-long meeting we’d had a week earlier — and in very strong terms expressed himself, and then laid his head back down on the pillow, seemed spent, and said to them, But that doesn’t matter, because I’m not the attorney general. ... There is the attorney general, and he pointed to me, and I was just to his left.

Remember:

"It's very important that the American people understand this. After 9/11 the gloves came off."

Those gloves have since gone missing ...

Ms. Gustitus said: “He [the Attorney General nominee] said he didn’t know if waterboarding is torture.”

Mr. Giuliani said: “Well, I’m not sure it is either. I’m not sure it is either. It depends on how it’s done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it.

Confessions Not Always Clad in Iron