I am … unhindered by talent

I suspect many of our readers will already have seen something about this, but just in case it hasn’t gotten a lot of U.S. press, Chancellor Alistair Darling (a very high ranking member of the British government) announced today in the House of Commons that 2 discs (CDs or DVDs - I’m not sure) were lost that contained highly confidential information for 25 Million Individuals. This data included names, dates of birth, insurance numbers, and (in some cases) bank account details — essentially all the toys you’d need to execute identity theft and fraud on a massive scale. The kind of stuff that an organized crime outfit would probably pay mucho top dollar for.

And the data was unencrypted.

Yup.

Unencrypted.

Makes you want to cry.

(In fairness, the discs were “password protected”, but no one seems clear on what that actually means. Given that most password systems for discs and files are child’s play to get through, without solid encryption on the other end “password protected” doesn’t offer much comfort.)

Unfortunately, as several of the talking heads pointed out, this is at some level inevitable as governments, corporations, and educational institutions move to larger and more centralized databases. Consider, for example, last year’s leak of the search histories of half a million AOL users.

The U of M at least tries to take these things seriously, but they don’t always get the stick by the right end. There’s a lot of noise, for example, about whether faculty like myself should be able to hold confidential student data (including things like homework grades) on our office computers or (far worse) on laptops or home computers. This is partly a security concern (stolen laptops are always a risk, who knows how well I’ve configured and updated my computers), and partly a data protection concern (how often do I actually backup my data). If they seriously go down this road, however, then one consequence is that all this grade data for the entire University is in one place. At the moment, if my computer gets lost or destroyed or stolen, there’s not much exposure. It would be painful and unpleasant for me and several dozen students, but the ripples would stop pretty quickly. If all that data is centralized, however, then the risk is arguably much greater, especially if it’s not managed well.

In reality, I’m not their real problem. I just don’t have access (and rightly so) to enough data to mess up very many people’s lives. There are admin and support staff, however, that have access to enormous amounts of sensitive information. Are they able to burn a couple of DVDs full of the stuff? Probably (but hopefully not easily). Are they trained on why that would be a really dumb idea? I think so.

But then I would have thought that staff at Revenue and Customs over here would have had that sort of training.

And apparently I would have been wrong.

Thanks to the fine folks at MonkeyRiverTown for the great photo.

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Over the weekend I finally found time for a major set of upgrades to all of the family blogs. One of many impetuses for this was the vast ocean of comment spam that I was dealing with from my blog. I had a CAPTCHA plugin running on this blog which wasn’t always easy for human users to deal with, and which was largely failing to keep out the spam. I was still getting 50-100 e-mails a day announcing the arrival of yet another bit of blog spam, and it sucked.

As part of the upgrade I turned on the Akismet anti-spam plugin that now comes standard with WordPress, and man is it wonderful. In the few days that it’s been working, it’s (correctly) identified roughly 100 spam messages per day, keeping them out of my mail spool and management work flow on the blog.

Unfortunately I only half turned off the old CAPTCHA plugin. The plugin code was all turned off, but the formatting of the comment submission area still had a (now empty) box for the authentication image, and the box for you to type in the code (which you couldn’t see). It turns out that you could post a comment ignoring the code, but that was hardly obvious from a user standpoint, and happily one of our regular readers pointed out the problem.

I believe the problem is now fixed, and I would be grateful if a few folks would post a randomoid comment on this post just to verify that all is now well.

If the Akismet tool continues to do such a good job, I’d like to turn off moderation altogether so that people’s comments will appear immediately. Stay tuned!

Thanks to freezelight for the cool photo.

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This is a detail of an old public water fountain set in the wall of a “great house” here in Colchester. Apparently something like 9 houses were destroyed to make room for this monster, so perhaps the fountain was an attempt to assuage some guilt?

For those who would like a little context, WeatherGirl posted a nice shot of the whole fountain.

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One of my constant struggles as an educator in computer science has been helping students see a bigger picture, look past the mundanities of yesterday’s “help wanted” page, and see what the world could be rather than what it has been.

One way this has often played out has been in debates over programming languages and development tools. Students are (quite legitimately) concerned with their near term employment prospects, and so they tend to focus what they’ve heard of, and what they see in the job web sites. Unfortunately that is almost always an exercise in looking backwards in time. When I started in 1991, the problem was getting students out of Pascal and C and start thinking about objects. Now we’re working to add things like Ruby and Python to our Java-heavy toolkit. Constant throughout has been the difficult task of getting them to take (semi-) functional languages (Scheme, Haskell) seriously or, in fact, any language doesn’t have a “For dummies” book at their local mega-bookshop.

I need to be fair, though, and make it clear that we’ve always had students who could see the bigger picture, and have often pushed us faculty to open some important new doors. I suspect that we’ve actually been luckier in that respect at UMM than many other programs. That said, you still get groaners (often very vocal) who never seem to be happy unless you’re emphasizing whatever tool or language they’re firmly convinced is their only road to employment.

This is one of the reasons that it makes me so happy to see the list of programming languages used in the One Laptop Per Child project:

We will support five programming environments on the laptop: (1) Python, from which we have built our user interface and our activity model; (2) Javascript for browser-based scripting; (3) Csound, a programmable music and audio environment; (4) Squeak, a version of Smalltalk embedded into a media-rich authoring environment; and (5) Logo. We will also provide some support for Java and Flash.

OK, we can debate the details (and I’m sure people have and will), but let’s skip all that shall we? Let’s instead note that none of these was a “heavy hitter” 5 or 10 years ago, and there are plenty of people who would (wrongly in my opinion) argue that none are terribly important today. How many data structures classes in the U.S., for example, (a key “bread and butter” course in most computing curriculums) use any of these languages? I’m sure there are a few (especially Python), but proportionally I bet it’s pretty tiny. (Try searching either Amazon or the web for textbooks for such a course, for example.)

It’s also worth considering impact here. Sure, I doubt that anyone’s likely to start building inventory control systems in Logo, but should that be the issue? What’s the real opportunity for impact here? How do I change the world? By building accounting systems? Or by contributing to a project that plans to put computers and software in the hands to millions of kids all around the world?

You want to make the world a better place? You want to really fight terrorism? Then give people hope, a chance to grow and make their world better. Give them something to protect. Contribute to a project like this.

And, if you’re contributing to this project, you apparently program in Python, JavaScript, CSound, Squeak and Logo.

So let’s put an end to the whining about these not being “real” programming languages and nobody building “real” programs with them. I’ve written a crapload of Java code in my day that only a handful of people will ever use. Some bright bulbs used Squeak to build Scratch, which I suspect will be used by millions. Hmmm … which do I find more impressive?

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The internet here at the University of Essex has been zooming between deceased and intermittent all morning, turning all these computers into environmentally unfriendly paperweights. Man, have I become an on-line junkie or what?

I was actually forced to spend the morning reading!

Reading things printed on paper!

Good thing I had printed off some papers I needed to review, or would have been completely adrift.

Now I get to find out if I can actually sneak this through one of the tiny windows of connectivity and get it out there in the world, a tiny digital distress signal in a little WordPress bottle.

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All the Guy Fawkes fireworks around here got me digging back into some old photos that I’d never done anything with from the 4th of July in Monticello, Wisconsin. Sub-Evil and I were in Wisconsin for an annual family gathering, and we went out to the fireworks with my dad, my sister, and her friend Neil. Good fun was had by all, and too many photos were taken by me!

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My sister (and co-author) is visiting Linköping University in Sweden this week both as an external examiner on a PhD defense, and giving a talk as part of a seminar entitled “Conservation biology in animals — behavior, genetics, welfare”. The first half of her talk is on work we did together, using computer simulations to better understand the impact of changes in selection pressure on genetic and phenotypic diversity of populations. This will (I think) be the first public airing of these results, so this is pretty exciting stuff.

I actually made the mistake of peeking a bit at what a flight would cost to join her, and we got all excited when the early results were actually very promising. Unfortunately further examination made it clear that “zipping over to Sweden for a few days” would in fact run close to $1K, which is money we really don’t have at the moment.

Sigh.

I’d never been to Scandinavia before, and it would have been really cool to hear the talks (especially hers) and meet the other biologists at the seminar. But such is life.

At the kind invitation of Michael O’Neill, I am going to the University of Dublin to give a talk in early December, which will be lots of fun. I’ve been to Ireland once before, to give a talk at the University of Limerick, and really enjoyed it. I’ve never been to Dublin, though, so I’m quite excited. Dublin Tourism has a very cool set of free podcast walking tours (smart people, them) which I’ve been listening to as a way of figuring out where I want to visit in my limited tourism time.

Thanks to Dead Man … Walking for the photo. Gotta love all those bikes, eh?

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Paul Rand is responsible for a number of iconic pieces of graphic design (e.g., the classic IBM logo), and this is a nice short film combining examples of his work with short snippets that I assume came from interviews with him. Some great quotes include

A work of art is realized
when form and content are indistinguishable.
When form predominates, meaning is blunted,
but when content predominates, interest lags.
But the genius comes in when both of these things fuse.

and

Don’t try to be original, just try to be good. That might sound naive, but it’s true.

There’s a neat bit where he goes over the “language of form”, listing important concepts like texture, shape, balance, and tension. It would be fun to sift through my photographs and look for a good examples of each of these. And probably revealing as well, since I strongly suspect some of his terms would be much better represented in my images than others.

Tip o’ the cap to Panopticist for the pointer via 37Signals.

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I just finished a long overdue upgrade of all the UnhinderedByTalent.com WordPress installs, so everyone’s all spiffy and shiny now.

The photo (from the Green Fair where we met the River Nene folks) is just there to fool you into believing this post actually had content :-).

Someone asked over on Flickr if I knew who this was. I didn’t have a clue who he was until the question prompted me to do my homework. You’re looking at Bob Breeks, the guitarist and singer for The Bad Terrorists, a band here in Colchester. They were played with (I’m assuming) reduced amplification at the fair, so you really couldn’t hear the vocals for crap, but the playing was quite fun.

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These (American) ladies recently won an international bridge competition in Shanghai, and displayed their little sign when receiving their prize. The sign was prompted by questions from players from other countries:

“What we were trying to say, not to Americans but to our friends from other countries, was that we understand that they are questioning and critical of what our country is doing these days, and we want you to know that we, too, are critical,” Ms. Greenberg said, stressing that she was speaking for herself and not her six teammates.

Anyone who’s traveled much (or simply interacted much with folks from other parts of the world) in recent years, will recognize the situation. Many U.S. government policies including, but not limited to the Iraq fiasco, are broadly condemned worldwide. In my experience, however, most folks are clever enough to distinguish between the government and its people (something many Americans appear to struggle with), so one of the first things they often ask about is where you stand on the war. The faculty and graduate students at the University ask me. Sub-Evil’s schoolmates ask him. I’m hardly surprised that it came up around the coffee pots and meal tables at an international bridge tournament.

Apparently, however, there are those who believe that it’s unacceptable for these people to publicly separate themselves from the current administration. The women didn’t make any sort of policy statement and criticize any particular actions. All they did is self-identify as being in the near (or actual - depends on the election) majority of voters that didn’t tick the Shurb box on the day. Yet the United States Bridge Federation has chosen to void their bowels and enter the full court press on these players:

[The sanction] calls for a one-year suspension from federation events, including the World Bridge Olympiad next year in Beijing; a one-year probation after that suspension; 200 hours of community service “that furthers the interests of organized bridge”; and an apology drafted by the federation’s lawyer.

It would also require them to write a statement telling “who broached the idea of displaying the sign, when the idea was adopted, etc.”

Alan Falk, a lawyer for the federation, wrote the four team members on Nov. 6, “I am instructed to press for greater sanction against anyone who rejects this compromise offer.”

Hey, we even have some classic “We’ll reward you for folding early and turning against your friends”. Charming, really. Participating in the international circuit is a key component of the income for some of these ladies, so this is serious business, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s hard for them to stand up to this level of pressure. I hope they can get some really good lawyers and smack the crap out of these small-minded dweebs. I’d not be surprised (or blame them), however, if they try to find a quick way out of this with minimal damage.

Thanks to 21st Century Citizen for the pointer. They source to the NYTimes, which is where they (and I) got the photo.

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