Flutterby™! From 2010-02-01 to 2010-02-09

Giggle: How San Francisco deals with a Westboro Baptist/Fred Phelps protest.

("God Hates Retweets" on the bottom of this page wins.)

[ related topics: Religion Humor Bay Area Civil Liberties California Culture ]

Bruce Schneier on CNN points out that the Chinese hack of Gmail happened because of a backdoor put in for U.S. law enforcement agencies. Via Shawn.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Cryptography ]

Science Daily: Barefoot Running: How Humans Ran Comfortably and Safely Before the Invention of Shoes.

My experience wearing my Vibram 5 Fingers shoes has convinced me that shoes as we've known them up to now are largely a failure of technology, or at least evidence of insufficient technology. One of those failures is that I don't wear 'em when it's this wet and cold outside, but between these and Birkenstocks, the idea that we need less padding rather than more in the soles seems pretty solid.

[ related topics: Current Events Sports Shoes ]

Arggh!! Tomorrow is the primary election in Illinois, and I got 3 robocalls in one hour from various people running for state comptroller, and two circuit court judges. Does anybody know it these calls are effective? It seems to me that an advertising method that pisses people off so much would end up being counterproductive for the advertiser. I guess the question, though, is what equals counterproductive? I never listen for much more than 5 seconds of one, so sometimes I have no idea which candidate is being promoted. thus, I can't conclude that since Honest Nowicky doesn't use robocalls, I should support him instead of Chicken-in-every-pot Przcinski. And is the Annoyance Quotient a fair way to determine the government? When I was a kid they used to pass out emery boards for your fingernails with the hopeful's name; at least those had some utility after the election. And of course, here in Chicago we have another electoral curse: (pdf) Fake Irishmen.

[ related topics: Politics moron Consumerism and advertising ]

Holy crap, these people vote? Pew Research Test Your News IQ. Take the quiz to see the results, it's pretty easy (I got 12 out of 12), the results are disturbing.

[ related topics: Current Events ]

I think a large part of Dopp Juice: Genders and Drop-Down Menus is complaining to the wrong people: Dating web sites don't ask for your gender because they care, they're asking because their users care, and if your gender can't be fairly easily categorized, then you're probably not sifting through the masses trying to find that closest match because in the more open world of the Internet the fringe often finds it easier to cluster.

However, the overall point, that race and gender are getting harder to categorize and identify, is one worth pondering.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Net Culture ]

Some pictures from Sunday's bike ride.

[ related topics: Photography Bicycling ]

An abstinence only sex ed program that works? This appears to be the first study which shows one doing so. From the abstract for Efficacy of a Theory-Based Abstinence-Only Intervention Over 24 Months:

The participants' mean age was 12.2 years; 53.5% were girls; and 84.4% were still enrolled at 24 months. Abstinence-only intervention reduced sexual initiation (risk ratio [RR], 0.67; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.48-0.96). The model-estimated probability of ever having sexual intercourse by the 24-month follow-up was 33.5% in the abstinence-only intervention and 48.5% in the control group. Fewer abstinence-only intervention participants (20.6%) than control participants (29.0%) reported having coitus in the previous 3 months during the follow-up period (RR, 0.94; 95% CI, 0.90-0.99). Abstinence-only intervention did not affect condom use." ...

I haven't read the full text (it's there, it requires registration), but the NPR story says that this is very much not a traditional "abstinence until marriage" program, and that it focuses on how sex fits into "goals and dreams for the future".

So rather than preaching it offers the choice as a way they can have control over their lives. Hmmm...

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Sociology Marriage ]

Journal of Experimental Biology: Bees Recognize Faces Using Feature Configuration. Pictures of human faces, as distinguished from pictures of non-faces. Via this article, which links to this New York Times article and this report on a previous study, which was pointed out to me by Jaimey Walking Bear.

[ related topics: Cool Science Nature and environment ]

This morning I was driving to pick up a friend to take her to an appointment at the UCSF dental clinic, and I heard about this. Then Reka linked to it: Women dying from pregnancy related issues may have tripled in California over the last decade, and there may be a similar rise nationally.

That's 95 women out of an overall human population in California of under 38 million, so it's nothing like car crashes or people dying from smog leaking into the Central Valley from the LA basin, but a trend like that deserves a little look. One doctor thinks it may be related to labor induced before term, which doubles the chance of a C-section:

On average, a C-section brings in twice the revenue of a vaginal birth. Today, the C-section is the single most common surgical procedure performed in the United States.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Health California Culture ]

I've got a problem. I'm on the City of Petaluma Technology & Telecommunications Advisory Committee. One of the things that I'm interested in is promoting more open data. The folks in the city's IT department are strong believers too, every time I go poking through DataSF or PortlandMaps I get to thinking "heck, Petaluma has more of their data online".

One of the problems, however, is that a lot of the data is hosted in ways that aren't necessarily easy to mine. Petaluma buys a lot of drop-in software, some of it is hosted elsewhere. Often the problem with getting data out of the city is that the processes aren't computerized, or where they are they're not published in an easy to mine format.

I'm starting to write some Perl to convert what is available online to a form that I hope mine some of that data. I've written some bots to datamine Accela Citizen Access, draw building permits on a map. I've extracted voting records from Granicus hosted meeting minutes, so that I can look for voting patterns (oddly, I haven't gotten much excitement for that data set...). The latest hack, and one that might actually have some interest, takes meeting announcements and dumps them into Twitter.

Tim at the city is, rightfully, reluctant to take these hacks under his wing. He's got limited budget and limited staff and doesn't want to take on more responsibility without an economic justification or a clear directive from the town council. He's also worried about my projects pushing support load over on his department; the city's gotten phone calls requesting support and clarification and such that stemmed from a third party pothole tracking database. And they're a Microsoft shop, which means that they're not always able to be out there on the bleeding technology edge.

The upshot is: I'm happy to host and run these on my own machines. I want to make these processes as reliable as possible so that I'm an ally to Tim, Trae et al, rather than yet another yahoo spawning support calls for systems that aren't theirs. If I can build reliable systems, I can build trust and work towards getting some publicity on the city web page. However, I'm not a sysadmin. I'm a coder with a different sort of release process who sometimes dabbles in continuous deployment and sysadminnery as a hobby.

Any of you sysadmins out there have suggestions on some reading for building and running robust systems? How should I set up test procedures so that I catch when apt-get upgrade causes Moose to decide that name is now a reserved member name and some obscure Perl script that I never thought to check the return from because it's been working flawlessly and has no real failure mode decides to spew trash? What's the best practice for a process that deals with an email that may only be sent once a month, making the test cycle rather long? How do I best track all the cron jobs and interconnected email addresses and web spiders so that when I'm moving some system to another machine I get everything?

Does this book exist? Or is that list about the best run-down on where to start building such systems you know of?

[ related topics: Books Microsoft Perl Open Source Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Net Culture Maps and Mapping Databases ]

Investment bank Lazard Inc.'s bonuses so big they wiped out Q4 profits, almost wiped out the full year's profits:

Lazard Chief Executive Kenneth Jacobs, who took over from the late Bruce Wasserstein last fall, argued that he had no choice but to pay his people to protect and build the franchise. ...

They'll make it up on volume?

[ related topics: Economics ]

Slate has a nice slide show of architectural near misses. The problem is often some designer pushing the design to the limits of the technology, and then a foot farther. Frank Lloyd Wright is in here, with his fabulously cool but troubled Fallingwater House, to say nothing of his notorious leaky roofs. There was also a design at the Art Institute School in Chicago, where the visionary architect made a stairwell that was 10 feet wide at the top and the bottom, but only 5 feet wide at the middle landing. thus, he created a bottleneck on a fire exit. How the city inspector let him get away with it I don't know, but they eventually corrected the problem.

[ related topics: Art & Culture Architecture - Frank Lloyd Wright ]

Wired UK: Carl Hart: The Drug Data Pusher.

The article is marred by a couple of flaws, as Topspin has pointed out to me before amphetamines != methamphetamines, but it's a look at a guy who's doing studies on addiction using actual drugs in the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

[ related topics: Drugs Health ]

Another take on the IPad: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/i...weekinreview/04ipad/blogSpan.jpg

Global warming and my acquiescence to the California lifestyle make this extremely unlikely, but should I live somewhere where snow remove is necessary, I'm getting a Sno Wovel (Via Rafe).

[ related topics: Cool Technology Global Warming ]

Interesting: Combatting bribes with a zero Rupee note.

[ related topics: Currency ]

Perhaps the most intriguing idea for political communication in many a moon: The Peace Blimp. Take a look at the suggestions for what message the Dirigible of Love would carry. My favorites are "Who is John Galt?" and "We have always been at war with Eastasia."

[ related topics: Politics Objectivism Aviation History moron ]

I'm sure some of you with a little more background on this can correct me, but if I have my history right, once upon a time, on a site called 4chan, there was a channel called /b/ in which people posted pictures. I've never delved there, but I'm told that many of the pictures pushed... shall we say... the bounds of propriety.

In response to some of this, the denizens of said channel created a mascot, named "Pedobear", who put his seal of approval on those images which could be interpreted as exploiting children. (Some say that this occurred on a predecessor called "2chan", I'm having trouble finding a serious history that I feel comfortable linking to).

I've only seen the later secondary effects of Pedobear, who is occasionally tossed into a thread to gently tell people that they're being tasteless or creepy or something else with regards to the sexualization of children.

Pedobear has come a long way. In fact, a Polish newspaper has just printed a picture of Pedobear as one of the Vancouver Olympic mascots. Apparently last July, Michael R. Barrick was mucking around with images and thought he spied a similarity in artistic styles, that image made it to the first page of Google Image search, and the rest is history.

Hat tip to MeFi.

It's frankly kind of surprising that he(?) showed up in the winter Olympics first, I'd expect womens' gymnastics would be the first event covered, but there's probably a Pedobear friendly contingent at ladies' figure skating.

[ related topics: Children and growing up moron Journalism and Media Art & Culture Sports Net Culture ]

Rudolf Amman is looking for more references on link attribution in the early (ie: pre 2k) weblogs.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]