Month: January 2012

The World’s Creepiest Stalker

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After reading David Kushner’s piece “The Hacker is Watching” in this month’s GQ, the primary and overwhelming thought I had was this: better place a tape over my webcam as soon as possible. You will probably agree after reading the piece about Luis Mijangos, perhaps the world’s creepiest stalker:

He lived at home with his mother, half brother, two sisters—one a schoolgirl, the other a housekeeper—and a perky gray poodle named Petra. It was a lively place, busy with family who gathered to watch soccer and to barbecue on the marigold-lined patio. Mijangos had a small bedroom in front, decorated in the red, white, and green of Mexican soccer souvenirs, along with a picture of Jesus. That’s where he spent most of his time, in front of his laptop—sitting in his wheelchair…

Mijangos hadn’t always been disabled. As the child of a federal police officer in Mexico City, he’d grown up literally on the run. Whenever he heard a neighbor shout “¡Vienen!” he’d scramble onto his rooftop, watching in fear as strange men approached his front door. “I was terrified, because I knew that my father was in there,” he recalls. The men, federales, used to work with his father, but his dad tired of the corruption on the force and quit to open a seafood restaurant. Now he was just another target for extortion.

It’s a fascinating, yet disturbing, story of someone who felt reborn going into the dark depths of hacking:

Mijangos had one thing to help make him an expert hacker: time, and plenty of it. He spent all day in his wheelchair, digging deeper online. Hackers coalesced as teams, just like his old soccer club, and Mijangos printed up a T-shirt with the name of his squad, cc power (as in credit card). Working with one guy in particular, code name Manhattan, the scam went like this: Using a stolen Social Security number and other personal information, Mijangos would open a bogus merchant account at a bank. He’d then contact Manhattan, who’d charge money to the account using stolen credit card numbers. All the pair needed to do was withdraw cash at will from an ATM and split the profits evenly.

He wasn’t getting rich, but Mijangos says he earned enough to buy a $5,000 titanium wheelchair that he tricked out with $400 wheels. He felt reborn. “When it comes to hacking, yes, I’m not going to deny it—it’s like you feel like you accomplish something,” he says.

The stalker’s reach was unprecedented:

After casing the place for weeks, the feds had finally attained a warrant to search his home. They took everything they could find: four laptops, scattered thumb drives and memory sticks, and a BlackBerry. The archive of voyeurism was staggering: over 15,000 webcam-video captures, 900 audio recordings, 13,000 screen captures. In total, he had infiltrated more than 230 victims, including juveniles. At least one was as far away as New Zealand.

What set off Luis Mijangos on this dangerous, voyeuristic path? Opinions vary, and the author visited the stalker after his sentencing to get a better idea. You should read the piece to assemble a judgment of your own.

On Shyness

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“If you want to do something big in your life, you must remember that shyness is only the mind…If you think shy, you act shy. If you think confident you act confident. Therefore never let shyness conquer your mind.”

The quote above is advice for life from Arfa Karim Randhawa, the computer programming prodigy who became the world’s youngest Microsoft Certified Professional at 9 years old. Sadly, she has passed away at the age of 16 after reportedly suffering an epileptic seizure and cardiac arrest.

Ten Wisdoms from Thomas Jefferson

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In 1825, Thomas Jefferson was asked by a father to supply a few words of wisdom to his young son, Thomas Jefferson Smith (who had recently been named after Thomas Jefferson). The president responded with a handwritten letter, at the end of which was the following 10-point list of advice for the youngster titled “A Decalogue of Canons for Observation in Practical Life.” Following were Thomas Jefferson’s ten bits of wisdom:

1. Never put off till tomorrow what you can do to-day.
2. Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.
3. Never spend your money before you have it.
4. Never buy what you do not want, because it is cheap; it will be dear to you.
5. Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst and cold.
6. We never repent of having eaten too little.
7. Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly.
8. How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened.
9. Take things always by their smooth handle.
10. When angry, count ten, before you speak; if very angry, an hundred.

The advice is as applicable today as it was almost two hundred years ago.

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(via Lists of Note)

Passion vs. Big Problems

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Oliver Segovia has a message for the twentysomethings:

Like myself, today’s twentysomethings were raised to find our dreams and follow them. But it’s a different world. And as the jobless generation grows up, we realize the grand betrayal of the false idols of passion. This philosophy no longer works for us, or at most, feels incomplete. So what do we do? I propose a different frame of reference: Forget about finding your passion. Instead, focus on finding big problems.

Putting problems at the center of our decision-making changes everything. It’s not about the self anymore. It’s about what you can do and how you can be a valuable contributor. People working on the biggest problems are compensated in the biggest ways. I don’t mean this in a strict financial sense, but in a deeply human sense. For one, it shifts your attention from you to others and the wider world. You stop dwelling. You become less self-absorbed. Ironically, we become happier if we worry less about what makes us happy.

The good thing is that there are a lot of big problems to go by: climate change, sustainability, poverty, education, health care, technology, and urbanization in emerging markets. What big problem serves as your compass? 

He then has suggestions on connecting with people, exploring the world, and developing situation awareness. Segovia concludes:

Happiness comes from the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, and what the world needs. We’ve been told time and again to keep finding the first. Our schools helped developed the second. It’s time we put more thought on the third.

I love photography and think I am relatively good at it. But am I changing the world with it? Not really. Does that mean I should abandon it, though? In my opinion, Segovia’s call is a challenging one: it is not trivial to find something that the world needs that you’re also good at and love doing.

On Memory Distortion and Invention

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A new study by Brent Strickland and Frank Keil at Yale has shown that people’s memory may become distorted in just a few seconds:

Fifty-eight uni students watched three types of 30-second video clip, each featuring a person kicking, throwing, putting or hitting a ball or shuttlecock. All videos were silent. One type of video ended with the consequences of the athletic action implied in the clip – for example, a football flying off into the distance. Another type lacked that final scene and ended instead with an irrelevant shot, for example of a linesman jogging down the line. The final video type was scrambled, with events unfolding in a jumbled order. Crucially, regardless of the video type, sometimes the moment of contact – for example, the kicker actually striking the ball – was shown and sometimes it wasn’t. 

After watching each video clip, the participants were shown a series of stills and asked to say if each one had or hadn’t featured in the video they’d just watched. Here’s the main finding. Participants who watched the video type that climaxed with the ball (or shuttlecock etc) flying off into the distance were prone to saying they’d seen the causal moment of contact in the video, even when that particular image had in fact been missing.

In other words, because seeing the ball fly off implied that the kicker (or other protagonist) had struck the ball, the participants tended to invent a memory for having seen that causal action happen, even when they hadn’t. This memory distortion happened within seconds, sometimes as soon as a second after the relevant part of the video had been seen.

This memory invention didn’t happen for the videos that had an irrelevant ending, or that were scrambled. So memory invention was specifically triggered by observing a consequence (e.g. a ball flying off into the distance) that implied an earlier causal action had happened and had been seen. In this case, the participants appeared to have “filled in” the missing moment of contact from the video, thus creating a causally coherent episode package for their memories. A similar level of memory invention didn’t occur for other missing screen shots that had nothing to do with the implied causal action in the clip.

This isn’t the first of such studies, but it is further evidence that the way we process memories may be easily manipulated…

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(via Research Digest)

 

The Financial Markets in 2011

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The best summary of what happened in the financial markets in 2011 comes courtesy of James Surowiecki at The New Yorker:

In 2011, the S. & P. 500 finished the year where it started. (To be precise, it fell 0.003 per cent.) But it was anything but a placid year in the stock market. Instead, there was extraordinary tumult throughout 2011, with a series of sharp rallies and brutal selloffs, the biggest of which sent the market down seventeen per cent in a couple of weeks. Even on a daily basis, stocks were startlingly volatile: the Dow Jones Industrial Average moved more than a hundred points on forty per cent of trading days, and there were more than sixty days on which the S. & P. index moved about two per cent or more (which in 2005, for example, it didn’t do once). Ordinary investors, who have watched the value of their 401(k)s yo-yo seemingly at random, have been left feeling understandably dazed and confused as they head into the new year.

Traders and professional money managers don’t seem to have any real clue about what’s going to happen, either. You might think that volatility would allow people with superior information and market sense to get ahead. But last year money managers did a very poor job of playing the market. According to estimates made by Goldman Sachs, as of the last week in December seventy-two per cent of core large-cap mutual funds had underperformed their market indexes. The average stock-market mutual fund was down almost three per cent for the year. And hedge-fund managers, who are supposed to thrive on volatility, did even worse, with hedge funds that focus on stocks falling more than seven per cent. Strikingly, some of the biggest flops came from superstars: Bruce Berkowitz, whom Morningstar named one of the money managers of the past decade, saw his flagship fund fall more than thirty per cent; the hedge-fund manager John Paulson, whose bet against mortgage-backed securities a few years ago has been called “the greatest trade ever,” saw one of his funds drop nearly fifty per cent.

Surowiecki then mentions that ordinary investors “chase performance” and suggests:

The sensible solution would be for investors to put their money into low-cost index funds and just keep it there. But that’s hard to do when the market is extremely volatile. Most of us find it difficult enough in normal times to take a long-term approach. So when prices are rising and falling two per cent a day, and when it seems like getting in or out of the market could be worth ten per cent of our portfolio’s value, the temptation to try to time the market is hard to resist.

Here’s where I don’t agree with Surowiecki. What’s so hard about choosing to allocate a certain percentage (or a set sum of your savings/salary) per year to index funds (regardless of market volatility)? You can’t time the market, so you might as well invest in an index (or a fund) that tracks the S&P 500 and let your cash sit there for as long as possible.

I had a positive return on my portfolio in 2011, the majority of which consists of index funds. The key is diversification and a “buy and hold” strategy.

The Most Important Idea in Advertising

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What is the most important idea in advertising? As I’ve been reading about all the latest products being unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I was reminded of my all-time favorite scene from the TV Show Mad Men. In the episode titled “The Wheel,” Don Draper and his company is tasked with presenting a pitch for Kodak’s latest product, a projector which they have dubbed “The Wheel”. How Don Draper pitches the product (and its new name) is nothing short of incredible. Just watch:

Following is the text of Don Draper’s pitch for “The Carousel”:

Well, technology is a glittering lure. But there is the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash. If they have a sentimental bond with the product…My first job: I was in-house at a fur company. This old pro copy writer. A Greek named Teddy. And Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is “new.” It creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion. But he also talked about a deeper bond with the product. Nostalgia. It’s delicate but potent…”

Teddy told me that in Greek, nostalgia literally means “the pain from an old wound.” It’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship. It’s a time machine. It goes backwards and forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again.

It’s not called the wheel. It’s called THE CAROUSEL. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Round and around, and back home again. To a place where we know we are loved. 

If you’ve never watched Mad Men and this clip doesn’t convince you to start watching it, nothing else will.

The Intersection of Math and Pasta

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The New York Times has a short piece on Sander Huisman, a graduate student in physics at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, who decided to plot pasta shapes on his favorite software, Mathematica (I prefer Matlab myself, though I’ve used Mathematica in college and grad school).

Mr. Huisman figured out the five lines or so of Mathematica computer code that would generate the shape of the pasta he had been eating — gemelli, a helixlike twist — and a dozen others. “Most shapes are very easy to create indeed,” he said.

Here is a rendering of one of the pasta shapes he posted to his blog:

Pasta Rendering in Mathematica

You can see the other Mathematica renderings in Sander’s blog post. Fun and tasty!

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(via Gourmet Pigs)

The Philosophy of Ricky Gervais

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In this New York Times Magazine piece, Ricky Gervais (star of the television show The Office in Britain) explains what I think is a life philosophy:

“I know I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said of the Golden Globes. “If I had done something wrong, it’d have been terrible. If I have to go, ‘They’re right,’ that’s a terrible feeling.” He said the only reliable metric for success was his own satisfaction with his performance. “The only thing that matters is, did it turn out like I wanted it?”

If you’re chasing after positive reviews, demographic trends or a lucrative box office, Gervais said, “you’ve already failed.” But, he added, “if your only ambition is to get something off your chest and render it exactly as you wanted it, then you’re bulletproof.”

Another tidbit comes from how Ricky Gervais uses his Twitter account:

Since the summer, Gervais had become more active on a dormant Twitter account he set up in 2009, and upset a swath of his million or so followers with his frequent use of the word “mong,” a shortened form of the word “mongoloid.” Gervais argued that the word was also drug slang, as in “monged out,” and his point, he said, “was that words don’t have hatred built in — it’s how you use them, it’s about intent.” In any case, he said: “You can’t really explore it on Twitter because you only get the reaction. You don’t get the discussion.” A few days later, he got into an electronic slapfest with a Twitter user named @GodsWordIsLaw, who had called him a “vile creature” and accused him of tweeting “anti-Christian bigotry all day long.”

 

The Importance of Teachers

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Nick Kristof summarizes the research of having good vs. bad teachers as a fourth grader:

Having a good fourth-grade teacher makes a student 1.25 percent more likely to go to college, the research suggests, and 1.25 percent less likely to get pregnant as a teenager. Each of the students will go on as an adult to earn, on average, $25,000 more over a lifetime — or about $700,000 in gains for an average size class — all attributable to that ace teacher back in the fourth grade. That’s right: A great teacher is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to each year’s students, just in the extra income they will earn.

The study, by economists at Harvard and Columbia universities, finds that if a great teacher is leaving, parents should hold bake sales or pass the hat around in hopes of collectively offering the teacher as much as a $100,000 bonus to stay for an extra year. Sure, that’s implausible  — but their children would gain a benefit that far exceeds even that sum.

Conversely, a very poor teacher has the same effect as a pupil missing 40 percent of the school year. We don’t allow that kind of truancy, so it’s not clear why we should put up with such poor teaching. In fact, the study shows that parents should pay a bad teacher $100,000 to retire (assuming the replacement is of average quality) because a weak teacher holds children back so much.

Fascinating research. The full paper behind the research is here (PDF link). The researchers are careful to leave the following note, however:

[M]ore work is needed to determine the best way to use VA (value-added approach; a teacher’s value-added is defined as the average test-score gain for his or her students, adjusted for differences across classrooms in student characteristics such as prior scores) for policy. For example, using VA in teacher evaluations could induce counterproductive responses that make VA a poorer measure of teacher quality, such as teaching to the test or cheating. There will be much to learn about these issues from school districts that start using VA to evaluate teachers.