Month: April 2012

Why Airport Security Is Broken—And How To Fix It

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More than a decade after 9/11, it is a national embarrassment that our airport security system remains so hopelessly bureaucratic and disconnected from the people whom it is meant to protect… So writes Kip Hawley, the former head of the Transportation Security Administration, in a must-read piece in The Wall Street Journal.

The main obstacle is at the front lines:

It is here, at the front lines, where the conundrum of airport security is in sharpest relief: the fear of missing even the smallest thing, versus the likelihood that you’ll miss the big picture when you’re focused on the small stuff.

Clearly, things needed to change. By the time of my arrival, the agency was focused almost entirely on finding prohibited items. Constant positive reinforcement on finding items like lighters had turned our checkpoint operations into an Easter-egg hunt. When we ran a test, putting dummy bomb components near lighters in bags at checkpoints, officers caught the lighters, not the bomb parts.

Kip Hawley concludes:

Looking at the airport security system that we have today, each measure has a reason—and each one provides some security value. But taken together they tell the story of an agency that, while effective at stopping anticipated threats, is too reactive and always finds itself fighting the last war.

Hawley finishes the piece with five suggestions on what TSA could do to improve the airport security process. I, for one, am looking forward to the day when I can board a plane with my water bottle.

Physicist Uses Math, Writes Paper, To Beat Traffic Ticket

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What would you do to get out of a traffic ticket, if you were convinced you were innocent? Probably not as much as Dmitri Krioukov, a physicist based at the University of California San Diego, who was fined for (purportedly) running a stop sign. In a paper titled “Proof of Innocence,” Krioukov argues three physical phenomena combined at just the right time and misled the officer:

We show that if a car stops at a stop sign, an observer, e.g., a police ocer, located at a certain distance perpendicular to the car trajectory, must have an illusion that the car does not stop, if the following three conditions are satis ed: (1) the observer measures not the linear but angular speed of the car; (2) the car decelerates and subsequently accelerates relatively fast; and (3) there is a short-time obstruction of the observer’s view of the car by an external object, e.g., another car, at the moment when both cars are near the stop sign.

When Krioukov drove toward the stop sign the police officer was approximating Krioukov’s angular velocity instead of his linear velocity. This happens when we try to estimate the speed of a passing object, and the effect is more pronounced for faster objects. In Krioukov’s case, the police cruiser was situated about 100 feet away from a perpendicular intersection with a stop sign. Consequently, a car approaching the intersection with constant linear velocity will rapidly increase in angular velocity from the police officer’s perspective. A sneeze caused Krioukov to slam on the brakes hard as he approached the stop sign. With a potential car blocking the officer’s view for a split second, it appeared as though Krioukov never slowed down.

This mathematical description swayed the judge (or maybe he was simply impressed by Krioukov dedication in writing a paper on this personal incident), and the case was dismissed. What a way to get out of paying a traffic ticket!

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(via Physics Central)

Matt Groening on The Origin of the Simpsons and Springfield

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In the May issue of Smithsonian Magazine, the creator of The Simpsons, Matt Groening, reveals the basis for the fictional city of Springfield, where the TV show is based:

Why do the Simpsons live in a town called Springfield? Isn’t that a little generic? 

Springfield was named after Springfield, Oregon. The only reason is that when I was a kid, the TV show “Father Knows Best” took place in the town of Springfield, and I was thrilled because I imagined that it was the town next to Portland, my hometown. When I grew up, I realized it was just a fictitious name. I also figured out that Springfield was one of the most common names for a city in the U.S. In anticipation of the success of the show, I thought, “This will be cool; everyone will think it’s their Springfield.” And they do.

This is the first public revelation of the basis of Springfield on the real-life town in Oregon. Here is Groening’s response on how he handled the question in the past:

I don’t want to ruin it for people, you know? Whenever people say it’s Springfield, Ohio, or Springfield, Massachusetts, or Springfield, wherever, I always go, “Yup, that’s right.”

Groening explains how The Simpsons got their start in 1987:

I had been drawing my weekly comic strip, “Life in Hell,” for about five years when I got a call from Jim Brooks, who was developing “The Tracey Ullman Show” for the brand-new Fox network. He wanted me to come in and pitch an idea for doing little cartoons on that show. I soon realized that whatever I pitched would not be owned by me, but would be owned by Fox, so I decided to keep my rabbits in “Life in Hell” and come up with something new.

While I was waiting—I believe they kept me waiting for over an hour—I very quickly drew the Simpsons family. I basically drew my own family. My father’s name is Homer. My mother’s name is Margaret. I have a sister Lisa and another sister Maggie, so I drew all of them. I was going to name the main character Matt, but I didn’t think it would go over well in a pitch meeting, so I changed the name to Bart.

The rest of the interview is a must-read. This bit caught my attention:

How typical is the Simpsons’ home of an American home? How has it changed?

I think what’s different is that Marge doesn’t work. She’s a stay-at-home mother and housewife, and for the most parts these days both parents work. So I think that’s a little bit of a throwback. Very early on we had the Simpsons always struggling for money, and as the show has gone on over the years we’ve tried to come up with more surprising and inventive plots. We’ve pretty much lost that struggling for money that we started with just in order to do whatever crazy high jinks we could think of. I kind of miss that.

The full interview is here.

On Virality and the Ecstatic Jason Silva

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John Updike famously said, “Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically.” It’s one of my favorite descriptions of Nabokov’s writing.

Today, I watched the video below. The creator of it, Jason Silva, uses the word ecstatic to describe how he wants to feel. Take two minutes out of your day to watch it:

[vimeo https://vimeo.com/29938326 w=600 h=400]

And then read this excellent interview with Jason Silva in The Atlantic:

I’ve heard you described in a lot of interesting ways, as a performance philosopher, an Idea DJ, or even as a shaman—What do those terms mean to you and is there anyone else out there that you see as performing a similar cultural role? Are there historical precedents for what you’re trying to do?
 
Silva: Definitely. I first heard this term “performance philosophy” on a website called Space Collective that was started by the Dutch filmmaker Rene Daalder as a way for humans to imagine what it might be like to eventually leave the Earth. I was reading an article about Timothy Leary that said that Timothy Leary and Buckminster Fuller used to refer to themselves as “performance philosophers,” and that really stuck with me. 
 
When Timothy Leary was in prison he was visited by Marshall McLuhan, who told Leary “you can’t stay way out on the fringes if you want to compete in the marketplace of ideas—if your ideas are going to resonate, you need to refine your packaging.” And so they taught Leary to smile, and they taught him about charisma and aesthetic packaging, and ultimately Leary came to appreciate the power of media packaging for his work. According to the article, this is where Timothy Leary the performance philosopher was born, and when he came out of jail all of the sudden he was on all these talk shows, and he was waxing philosophical about virtual reality, and downloading our minds, and moving into cyberspace. All of these ideas became associated with this extremely charismatic guy who was considered equal parts rock star, poet and guru scientist—and that to me suggests the true power of media communications, because these guys were able to take these intergalactic sized ideas and spread them with the tools of media. 
 
The problem, as I see it, is that a lot of these stunning philosophical ideas are diluted by their academic packaging; the academics don’t think so because this is their universe, they could care less about how these ideas get packaged because they’re so enmeshed in them. But the rest of us need another way in. We need to be told why these ideas matter, and one of the ways to do that is to present them with these media tools.
And these videos that you’re making now? How would you describe them?
 
Silva: I see them as souvenirs that I’m bringing back with me from the ecstatic state. Some people have criticized me for being overly expository, they see me as the equivalent of a voice-over narrator in a film who’s telling you what’s happening on a screen even though you can see it right in front of you. But it’s not enough to feel the experience; it needs to be narrated in real time. That method really works for me because narrating my experience creates a self-amplifying feedback loop whereby articulating experience allows me to feel it in a richer way, which in turn helps me articulate it in a richer way, and so on. That feedback loop helps you sort of author your way into your experience, like writing your name on a tree and saying “Jason was here.” It’s a way of saying “I experienced something and it matters,” a way of throwing an anchor into something that’s ephemeral and trying to hold it in stasis. That’s what we do with all of our art. A beautiful cathedral, a beautiful painting, a beautiful song—all of those are ecstatic visions held in stasis; in some sense the artist is saying “here is a glimpse I had of something ephemeral and fleeting and magical, and I’m doing my best to instantiate that into stone, into paint, into stasis.” And that’s what human beings have always done, we try to capture these experiences before they go dim, we try to make sure that what we glimpse doesn’t fade away before we get hungry or sleepy later. 
Consider me an immediate fan.

Matt Taibbi on Obama’s JOBS Act

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Matt Taibbi has a strong opinion on Obama’s JOBS Act:

Ostensibly, the law makes it easier for startup companies (particularly tech companies, whose lobbyists were a driving force behind its passage) to attract capital by, among other things, exempting them from independent accounting requirements for up to five years after they first begin selling shares in the stock market.

The law also rolls back rules designed to prevent bank analysts from talking up a stock just to win business, a practice that was so pervasive in the tech-boom years as to be almost industry standard.

This is where I become less convinced. Are there really investors who pay attention to PowerPoint presentations and don’t do independent research before investing? 

Even worse, the JOBS Act, incredibly, will allow executives to give “pre-prospectus” presentations to investors using PowerPoint and other tools in which they will not be held liable for misrepresentations. These firms will still be obligated to submit prospectuses before their IPOs, and they’ll still be held liable for what’s in those. But it’ll be up to the investor to check and make sure that the prospectus matches the “pre-presentation.”

The JOBS Act also loosens a whole range of other reporting requirements, and expands stock investment beyond “accredited investors,” giving official sanction to the internet-based fundraising activity known as “crowdfunding.”

But the big one, to me, is the bit about exempting firms from real independent tests of internal controls for five years.

When I first read this, I asked myself: how does a law exempting a Silicon Valley startup from independent accounting actually encourage investment? If American companies have to have their internal processes independently verified before and after they go public, doesn’t that give investors all around the world a big reason to put their money here, instead of investing in, say, Mobbed-Up Siberian Aluminum LLC, or Bangalore Sweatshop Inc.?  

In other words, how does letting http://www.investonawhim.com go to market (and stay on the market for five years!) without publishing real numbers actually help the industry attract more financing in general, when the whole point of all of these controls is to make investment a less risky experience for the investor?

Get ready for the ostensible answer, because you won’t believe it. Here’s how CNN explained the reasoning behind that exemption:

Having 500 investors or raising $5 million previously forced a company to register with the SEC — a costly endeavor. Filling out stacks of legal forms and undergoing independent accounting audits can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The law loosens requirements for most companies by raising several thresholds.

We needed Barack Obama and the congress to compromise the entire U.S. stock market because it’s too expensive for a publicly-listed company with billion-dollar ambitions to hire an accountant?

There are multiple provisions of the bill, but it seems Taibbi is focusing on a sub-set of them. Still worth reading, however.

Death to Microsoft Word

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Tom Scocca, writing in Slate, argues that we should give up on Microsoft’s word processor. He brings up a few interesting points, especially this portion about how Microsoft Word bloats simple text with insane amount of metadata:

For most people now, though, publishing means putting things on the Web. Desktop publishing has given way to laptop or smartphone publishing. And Microsoft Word is an atrocious tool for Web writing. Its document-formatting mission means that every piece of text it creates is thickly wrapped in metadata, layer on layer of invisible, unnecessary instructions about how the words should look on paper. I just went into Word and created a file that read, to the naked eye, as follows:

the Word 

Then I copy-pasted that text into a website that revealed the hidden code my document was carrying. Here’s a snippet:

<!—[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:WordDocument>
<w:View>Normal</w:View>
<w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom>
<w:TrackMoves/>
<w:TrackFormatting/>
<w:PunctuationKerning/>
<w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/>
<w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>
<w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent>
<w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> 

And it goes on:

<w:LsdException Locked=”false” Priority=”22″ SemiHidden=”false”
   UnhideWhenUsed=”false” QFormat=”true” Name=”Strong”/>
<w:LsdException Locked=”false” Priority=”20″ SemiHidden=”false”
   UnhideWhenUsed=”false” QFormat=”true” Name=”Emphasis”/>
<w:LsdException Locked=”false” Priority=”59″ SemiHidden=”false”
   UnhideWhenUsed=”false” Name=”Table Grid”/>
<w:LsdException Locked=”false” UnhideWhenUsed=”false” Name=”Placeholder Text”/>

And on: 

<w:LsdException Locked=”false” Priority=”70″ SemiHidden=”false”
   UnhideWhenUsed=”false” Name=”Dark List Accent 5″/>
<w:LsdException Locked=”false” Priority=”71″ SemiHidden=”false”
  UnhideWhenUsed=”false” Name=”Colorful Shading Accent 5″/>
<w:LsdException Locked=”false” Priority=”72″ SemiHidden=”false”
   UnhideWhenUsed=”false” Name=”Colorful List Accent 5″/>
<w:LsdException Locked=”false” Priority=”73″ SemiHidden=”false”
   UnhideWhenUsed=”false” Name=”Colorful Grid Accent 5″/>

The whole sprawling thing runs to 16,224 characters. When I dumped it back into Word, it was an eight-page document. 

So where did Scocca type his post?

This piece started out as a Gmail message, which saved automatically and was easy to access at home, at the office, or on my phone in transit. Then I switched over to TextEdit, which gives me a bigger window to work with and handles line breaks more cleanly than Gmail does. For protracted edits, I create a Google document, so multiple readers can work on it at once. If they want to track the changes, they can read the revision history. For short blog posts, I write straight into the publisher.

A lot of my compilations happen on Gmail as well. I like TextEdit for Mac OS X as well. Something that the author neglects to mention, however, is Word’s ability to integrate together with the other Office products: Excel and PowerPoint. I think this ability to link objects (a chart in Excel or a graphic in PowerPoint) into Microsoft Word is something that I have found to be very useful.

My final take: don’t be singing eulogies for Microsoft Word just yet.

On Instagram and Facebook

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This piece by Paul Ford who compares Instagram and Facebook is well-written, savvy, and less “tech-y” than anything I’ve read since the announcement.

Remember what the iPod was to Apple? That’s how Instagram might look to Facebook: an artfully designed product that does one thing perfectly. Sure, you might say, but Instagram doesn’t have any revenue. Have you ever run an ad on Facebook? The ad manager is a revelation — as perfectly organized and tidy as the rest of Facebook is sprawling and messy. Spend $50 and try to sell something — there it is, UX at its most organized and majestic, a key to all of the other products at once.

To some users, this looks like a sellout. And that’s because it is. You might think the people crabbing about how Instagram is going to suck now are just being naïve, but I don’t think that’s true. Small product companies put forth that the user is a sacred being, and that community is all-important. That the money to pay for the service comes from venture capital, which seeks a specific return on investment over a period of time, is between the company and the venture capitalists; the relationship between the user and the product is holy, or is supposed to be.

Also, props to Paul Ford for one of the best analogies I’ve read in a long time:

In terms of user experience (insider jargon: “UX”), Facebook is like an NYPD police van crashing into an IKEA, forever — a chaotic mess of products designed to burrow into every facet of your life.

Definitely take five minutes out of your day to read the whole thing.

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Unrelated, but “How To Say I Love You” is one of Paul Ford’s gems from last year. A must-read.

Death and Taxes

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Tax Day is coming April 15… This news should be unsettling for more than the obvious reason of the yearly deadline. According to a new study, deaths from traffic accidents around April 15, traditionally the last day to file individual income taxes in the U.S., rose 6 percent on average on each of the last 30 years of tax filing days compared with a day during the week prior and a week later. The research was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

What’s more curious is that even allowing Americans to file their taxes electronically hasn’t negated the crash trend, lead researcher Donald Redelmeier said. The findings suggest stress, lack of sleep, alcohol use, and less tolerance to other drivers on tax deadline day may contribute to an increase in deaths on the road.

They say death and taxes are two certain things in life. Seems like they also go hand in hand.

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(via Bloomberg)

Mitt Romney: A Quantum Leap Forward

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A recent remark by Mitt Romney’s senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom, that upon clinching the Republican nomination Mr. Romney could change his political views “like an Etch A Sketch,” has become a national sensation. David Javerbaum seizes upon the opportunity to write this awesome piece on the quantum theory of Mitt Romney. As you’ll see, the Romney candidacy represents (literally) a quantum leap forward. It is governed by rules that are bizarre and appear to go against everyday experience and common sense, which can be narrowed down as follows:

Complementarity. In much the same way that light is both a particle and a wave, Mitt Romney is both a moderate and a conservative, depending on the situation. It isnot that he is one or the other; it is not that he is one and then the other. He is both at the same time.

Probability. Mitt Romney’s political viewpoints can be expressed only in terms oflikelihood, not certainty. While some views are obviously far less likely than others, no view can be thought of as absolutely impossible. Thus, for instance, there is at any given moment a nonzero chance that Mitt Romney supports child slavery.

Uncertainty. Frustrating as it may be, the rules of quantum campaigning dictate that no human being can ever simultaneously know both what Mitt Romney’s current position is and where that position will be at some future date. This is known as the “principle uncertainty principle.”

Entanglement. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a proton, neutron or Mormon: the act of observing cannot be separated from the outcome of the observation. By asking Mitt Romney how he feels about an issue, you unavoidably affect how he feels about it. More precisely, Mitt Romney will feel every possible way about an issue until the moment he is asked about it, at which point the many feelings decohere into the single answer most likely to please the asker.

Noncausality. The Romney campaign often violates, and even reverses, the law of cause and effect. For example, ordinarily the cause of getting the most votes leads to the effect of being considered the most electable candidate. But in the case of Mitt Romney, the cause of being considered the most electable candidate actually produces the effect of getting the most votes.

Duality. Many conservatives believe the existence of Mitt Romney allows for the possibility of the spontaneous creation of an “anti-Romney” that leaps into existence and annihilates Mitt Romney. (However, the science behind this is somewhat suspect, as it is financed by Rick Santorum, for whom science itself is suspect.)

As a huge physics nerd, I love this.

Tyler Cowen: New Rules for Foodies

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In his new book, An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies, Tyler Cowen argues that while Americans often pay to eat well, expensive food isn’t always the best. Cowen shares his tips on eating food that’s better for you, your wallet, and the environment:

1. Embrace imported food

“The locavore movement claims local food is better for the environment, but food from far away is often transported by boat, which actually costs very little in terms of energy. If you purchase something from a farmer who has to drive hours to reach distant markets that call themselves ‘local,’ that’s not very fuel efficient.”

2. Break your habits.

“After a certain age, most people have a very set supermarket routine that keeps them from trying new foods. For one month, try an ethnic or new supermarket. Even the simple act of learning a new store layout will force you to change your habits and consider alternative products–which can actually end up helping you save money.”

3. Eat regional, not local.

“Consider what your environment is good at. For example, the United States is very good at mixing–cultures, workers, ideas, and food. Composition-intensive dishes will be most satisfying. In contrast, simpler is better in places such as Italy, where recipes have been the same for years. Less immigration can mean less innovation in food.”

I am not much of a foodie, but the book looks intriguing. The second tip is something I am going to put into action.

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(via Fast Company)