Pitos Blog

Ok, I am on a Frank Rich binge, but he does have one thought provoking article after another. In his column recently he wrote about The Other Plot to Wreck America:

“If they all skate away yet again by deflecting blame or mouthing pro forma mea culpas, it will be a sign that this inquiry, like so many other promises of reform since 9/15, is likely to leave Wall Street’s status quo largely intact. That’s the ticking-bomb scenario that truly imperils us all.” (from “The Other Plot to Wreck America”)

I just just finished reading the rare business/economics book (I usually skip them) called How Markets Fail. A highly readable and comprehensive review of economic theory as it evolved from Adam Smith to the present day. From the linked review in the Economist:

“For Mr Cassidy, the deeper roots of the crisis lie in the enduring appeal of an idea: that society is always best served when individuals are left to pursue their self-interest in free markets. He calls this “Utopian economics”. (from The Economist)

I suspect Mr. Cassidy would agree with Mr. Rich, above, and vice versa.

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Thomas Geoghegan has a fantastic column in the New York Times explaining the mess we are in because of the perversion of the fillibuster rule. I don’t know how we are going to get out of it, but… come on! You should definitely read the whole thing. Here’s a key quote. Doesn’t it make your blood boil?

“But the Senate, as it now operates, really has become unconstitutional: as we saw during the recent health care debacle, a 60-vote majority is required to overcome a filibuster and pass any contested bill. The founders, though, were dead set against supermajorities as a general rule, and the ever-present filibuster threat has made the Senate a more extreme check on the popular will than they ever intended” (from New York Times, “Mr. Smith Rewrites the Constitution”)

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I’ve been working quite a bit on the Open Source Digital Voting foundation project over the last 9 months or so. It’s really weird but I’ve turned myself into a mini-expert on how elections are organized and run here in the USA. It’s fascinating and way complicated.

OSDV is a non-profit organization dedicated to developing a suite of election (as in Democracy) hardware and software.

The umbrella name for that project is TrustTheVote: an open source project, which will work closely with election officials around the country to learn requirements and then develop software which in turn will be offered free of charge to those who want to deploy it. So we won’t be selling the technology, but we will be evangelizing it like crazy. Think Apache or Drupal.

Here are some links to satisfy your curiosity:

• OSDV
• TrustTheVote
• TrustTheVote Wiki
• Code, Code, Code

We are getting closer and closer to being properly funded with some major contributions so it is time for me to start finding people who might want to join the team. This being an open source project, the idea is of course that any interested person can look and work on the code.

But we also plan to hire 3 developers in the Boston area. Right now it looks like a good part of our code will be Ruby and Ruby on Rails. But that may change; it certainly will be broadened. Really more than anything I would ask if you consider yourself a really good software developer, who loves to design, write, debug and deploy code. And then secondly I would ask if working on a project that is mega ambitious and/but that has a chance to really have an impact on our society - whether that excites you.

Please contact me directly if you want to learn more or throw your virtual hat into the virtual ring.

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I’ve been part of the core tech team of the TrustTheVote project and recently have been blogging over there too. You can find today’s post about Open Source e-Voting here.

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An article from Canadian Healthcare Technology notes that US Healthcare wastes up to $800 billion a year. I don’t disbelieve this article but it doesn’t make me not want to start with healthreform now that it seems possible that it might happen this year, warts and all. One might even say that that it shows how from the perspective of the Canadian health system, the US system ‘has problems.’

The Massachusetts experience as covered in the press here is that the majority of the public like it; that it was consciously designed originally to try to tackle universal coverage and get to cost containment in future revs; oddly enough I have also heard some say that ER use has not gone down and some say because there are not enough doctors (or GP doctors or something.)

Here are some other articles that I thought were interesting:

Screening Debate Reveals Culture Clash in Medicine
The Wrong Side of History

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I was following a series of articles about the Brazilian e-voting system, which apparently underwent a white-hat hack test and survived. It started with this Slashdot article, “Hackers Fail to Crack Brazillian Voting Machines” Problem is that the original article is in Portugese (although remarkably well translated by Google Translation) and is a general news article, without technical specifics.

This took me to this Slashdot article about how elections in Brazil are running on Linux boxes. Interesting, and essentially what we at the OSDV are embarking on. But I was still not satisfied because I was not familiar with the source of the stories and wasn’t sure how much to believe everything I was reading. There was also a link to an interesting wikipedia article about Elections in Brazil.

Finally I wound myself to an article from the BBC, originally written in English, which talks about the Brazilian E-Voting system. The article is from last year and is more of an overview of the Brazilian system and does not talk about the white-hat test.

The final quote was, I felt, the most significant in a way:

““The main value of the system is that our society believes in it,” he  said” (from How Brazil has put an ‘e’ in vote)

This quote, from a Mr. Rocha, the engineer who created the first electronic ballot boxes in Brazil, is especially significant to me, because it expresses what I believe too, which is, no matter how good or perfect voting systems are, cryptographically, scientifically or technically, in the end, nothing will work if there’s not a general feeling of confidence and trust in it.

An analogy: I drive across a bridge, not because I believe that the engineer that designed it is infallible (don’t have time to think about that) or that in fact, it can never fail (there might be an earthquake at just that instant) but, just because, at the core, I have confidence and trust in the system that put that bridge there.

Which is why one needs to be careful about systematically sowing distrust and fear about elections based on exotic technical arguments. Just a personal opinion.

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Check out Targeted Copyright Enforcement: Deterring Many Users with a Few Lawsuits(from Freedom to Tinker:

“One reason the record industry’s strategy of suing online infringers ran into trouble is that there are too many infringers to sue. If the industry can only sue a tiny fraction of infringers, then any individual infringer will know that he is very unlikely to be sued, and deterrence will fail.” (from: Targeted Copyright Enforcement: Deterring Many Users with a Few Lawsuits)

The post links to an article which explains a ’scheme’ to still be able to deter infringers: basically, the enforcer tells the world that they will sue the infringers alphabetically. In other words, the one whose name (or other ID) starts with an “a” will get sued first.

Well this is supposed to deter the “Ables” and “Andersons” and so on, which now will put the “Bakers” and “Bozos” at risk, and so on.

Sounds kind of like the hangman’s dillemma.

Do you think it would work?

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I wrote the other day about the ‘amusing’ dust-up between the RealClimate blog and Levitt and Dubner, authors of Super Freakonomics.

Well today I see in the Wall Street Journal, a defense of Levitt and Dubner, but it’s an odd one. It actually supplies no facts (unlike the article I sited) just a criticism of ‘pro-climate-change’ (forgive the generalization) people not being open to new ideas:

“But perhaps their biggest sin, which is also the central point of the chapter, is pointing out that seemingly insurmountable problems often have cheap and simple solutions. Hence world hunger was largely conquered not by a massive effort at population control, but by the development of new and sturdier strains of wheat and rice. Hence infection and mortality rates in hospitals declined dramatically as doctors began to appreciate the need to wash their hands” (from the Wall Street Journal)

Other than being amused by the tone of “An Open Letter To Steve Levitt“, the original cat fight paper that I cited (note that if Steven Levitt was a woman I would probably be accused of sexism by calling it a cat fight) in my previous post, that article itself had a bit of fishyness to me.

My eyes rolled a little when the RealClimate article used a google search for ‘world electricity consumption‘ as the starting point of a highly quantitative argument (Google’s answer, via www.cia.gov, is 16.83 Trillion KWh / year, in 2005). Wolfram Alpha says it’s 15.45 Trillion KWh, in 2007) Pretty close, so probably that’s ok.

Technorati Tags: realclimate, wsj, globalwarming

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Sunlight Foundation is a very cool organization that I’ve been close to. They are involved with many efforts to further government transparency and accountability, often using technology, but not only.

Recently they ran their second competition looking for interesting and useful applications and tools to be built using or leveraging data published by government.

It’s a clever model: offer $10,000 or so to a winner who creates and submits the most interesting entry. Give applicants encouragement, publicity and assistance. I have to believe that this creates a groundswell of energy and hacking that furthers the foundations goals and uses the prize money in a highly leveraged way.

““By setting government data free on its new Data.gov site, the Obama administration enabled and encouraged the creation of fresh, new ideas that could help citizens get more involved in their government,” said Clay Johnson, director of Sunlight Labs. “Seizing upon this important moment, Sunlight organized this Apps for America contest to catalyze the development of useful applications and visualizations to make this information more comprehensible to more people. We also wanted to demonstrate to the government that when it makes its data available, it makes itself more accountable and creates more trust and opportunity in its actions.”

The latest Apps for America competition has just announced its winners.

The first prize winner is Datamasher.org, a Web application designed by Forum One Communications that lets anyone—no programming background required—choose different government data sets and mash them up to create visualizations and compare results on a state by state basis.

The second prize winner is GovPulse, which allows viewers to quickly search the Federal Register in a variety of ways, including by agency or date. And the third was ThisWeKnow.org, which lets users type in their zip code and get back a wealth of information about their neighborhood drawn from different agencies.

Very cool!

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More stuff that I learned at Transparency camp.

Every city has their own way of talking. In New York, I guess you talk about wall street and finance and so on. In L.A. you talk about movies and moviestars. In D.C. you talk about all things politics. (In Boston you talk about the Red Sox

The President’s limousine, is known as “The Beast“

You’ve heard the expression: “It’s easier to apologize than to ask permission.” In DC it’s “Proceed until apprehended.”

You mark yourself as an out-of-towner if you don’t know what CQ stands for.

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