11.02.06
GOP gearing up vote-suppression tactics
The GOP: the party of “the end justifies any means whatsoever“. Remember the threatening mob in Florida intimidating the election officials—a mob consisting of and run by GOP party hacks? Now, in Maryland, this:
A recently distributed guide for Republican poll watchers in Maryland spells out how to aggressively challenge the credentials of voters and urges these volunteers to tell election judges they could face jail time if a challenge is ignored.
Democrats said yesterday they consider the handbook, obtained by The Washington Post, evidence of a Republican effort to block people from voting Tuesday.
“The tenor of the material is that they are asking folks, if not directing them, to challenge voters,” said Bruce L. Marcus, an attorney for the state Democratic Party. “It’s really tantamount to a suppression effort.”
Advocacy groups including the National Campaign for Fair Elections, Common Cause and the NAACP, as well as a George Washington University professor who is an expert on voter suppression, agreed with that assessment.
Barbara Burt of Common Cause said the technique, last seen in Ohio in the 2004 presidential election, is an “insidious voter intimidation tactic.”
Republicans rebutted that charge, saying they merely are guarding against fraud. “I don’t think that’s borderline suppression,” said state Republican Party Chairman John Kane. “It’s making sure that people who have earned the right to vote are voting. We’ve had people die in wars to protect those rights.”
No one disputes the legality of having poll watchers set up folding chairs and monitor the election on behalf of their party. Typically, though, poll watchers are present to help ensure that their party’s supporters get to vote, not the other way around.
Democrats, for instance, have distributed advice to their poll watchers to “make sure that voters are not being turned away.”
“The key is the perspective each party brings to the process,” Marcus said. “Our philosophy is, if we have a qualified voter, we’re going to turn things inside out and upside down to get them to be able to vote.”
The GOP poll-watcher program, outlined in a 13-page document, states: “Your most important duty as a poll worker is to challenge people who present themselves to vote but who are not authorized to vote.”
It cautions, “Undoubtedly, the challenge process will be awkward and may cause consternation on the part of the challenged voter as well as the judges.” It advises, “If there is cause to make a challenge, you should not hesitate to do so merely because it upsets the challenged voter or the election judges.”
It adds, “If the election judge should try to ignore your challenge, point out that they would be committing a criminal offense punishable by not less than 30 days in jail.” Read the rest of this entry »
Megs and her catnip banana
Megs just plain loves her catnip banana, as who wouldn’t? For one thing, it’s banana-licking good. For another, the shape is just right for her to hug it with her front paws and kick the be-jesus out of it with her back paws. The banana resurfaced in the Big Cleaning (the same Big Cleaning that lost my sleep mask and a Go board—win some, lose some), and Megs feels she’s now much ahead of the game.
Mapping various categories
Neighboroo lets you pick the category and then see the map. Here are some of the categories:
- Lifestyle
- Politics
- Crime
- Elem School Rank
- Air Quality
- Home Price
- Apt Rent
- Cost of Living
- Commute Time
- Household Income
- Tax Rates
- Unemployment
- Population Density
- White
- Hispanic
- African American
- Asian
- American Indian
Chocolate doesn’t make kids hyper
Talk about a surprise! Everyone knows… But that’s why research is valuable. Read about it.
What is it with conservatives and lying?
They lie constantly, about everything. Didn’t their conservative mums and dads ever teach them to tell the truth.
From the Proposition 7 campaign in Nevada:
The Question 7 campaign has issued a news release responding to the latest radio ad from the Committee to Keep Nevada Respectable — which is run out of the office of controversial political operative Sig Rogich [the guy managing the Gibbons cover-up after Gibbons assaulted the cocktail waitress - LG].
Not surprisingly, our opponents are blatantly lying to voters about what Question 7 will do, claiming that Question 7 will prohibit employers from drug testing — which it doesn’t — and that CRCM is trying to “make street use of drugs legal” — which we aren’t. The best part? The commercial — which is full of lies itself — accuses Question 7 supporters of lying! It’s outrageous that our opponents are running an ad to deliberately mislead voters while pointing fingers at us for being dishonest.
A straightforward debate about Question 7 is one thing, but our opposition’s commercial is just ridiculous.
Here’s the press release from the proponents of Prop 7: Read the rest of this entry »
Soldier committed suicide because of torture
Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher:
The true stories of how American troops, killed in Iraq, actually died keep spilling out this week. On Tuesday, we explored the case of Kenny Stanton Jr., murdered last month by our allies, the Iraqi police, though the military didn’t make that known at the time. Now we learn that one of the first female soldiers killed in Iraq died by her own hand after objecting to interrogation techniques used on prisoners.
She was Army specialist Alyssa Peterson, 27, a Flagstaff, Ariz., native serving with C Company, 311th Military Intelligence BN, 101st Airborne. Peterson was an Arabic-speaking interrogator assigned to the prison at our air base in troubled Tal-Afar in northwestern Iraq. According to official records, she died on Sept. 15, 2003, from a “non-hostile weapons discharge.”
She was only the third American woman killed in Iraq, so her death drew wide press attention. A “non-hostile weapons discharge” leading to death is not unusual in Iraq, often quite accidental, so this one apparently raised few eyebrows. The Arizona Republic, three days after her death, reported that Army officials “said that a number of possible scenarios are being considered, including Peterson’s own weapon discharging, the weapon of another soldier discharging, or the accidental shooting of Peterson by an Iraqi civilian.”
But in this case, a longtime radio and newspaper reporter named Kevin Elston, unsatisfied with the public story, decided to probe deeper in 2005, “just on a hunch,” he told E&P today. He made “hundreds of phone calls” to the military and couldn’t get anywhere, so he filed a Freedom of Information Act request. When the documents of the official investigation of her death arrived, they contained bombshell revelations. Here’s what the Flagstaff public radio station, KNAU, where Elston now works, reported yesterday:
“Peterson objected to the interrogation techniques used on prisoners. She refused to participate after only two nights working in the unit known as the cage. Army spokespersons for her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques Alyssa objected to. They say all records of those techniques have now been destroyed. …”.
She was was then assigned to the base gate, where she monitored Iraqi guards, and sent to suicide prevention training. “But on the night of September 15th, 2003, Army investigators concluded she shot and killed herself with her service rifle,” the documents disclose. Read the rest of this entry »
After traumatic event, stay awake
An article in October’s Biological Psychiatry reports that immediate sleep maintains emotional memories and suggests an intriguing hypothesis – that post-traumatic stress disorder could be prevented by stopping people from sleeping immediately after a traumatic event.
A research team, led by psychologist Ullrich Wagner, asked tired participants to learn neutral texts (such as a piece about dressmaking) or emotional texts (such as a piece about child murder).
Some of the participants slept immediately, others were kept awake for three hours after learning.
Four years later, the participants were tested for how well they had remembered the texts.
Those who had slept immediately after learning had better memory than those who hadn’t, but only for the emotional topics.
This suggests that sleep helps consolidate memory most effectively for emotional material.
The researchers argue that these results suggest a simple way of dampening the impact of intense memories that form one of the main features of post-traumatic distress disorder: intrusive vivid memories of the event.
“From a clinical perspective, our results suggest the use of sleep deprivation in the immediate aftermath of traumatic events as a possible therapeutic measure to prevent a long-term engravement of these events in memory, thereby at least partly counteracting the development of PTSD as a disease thought to reflect overconsolidated emotional memories.”
Although not widely known, sleep deprivation is not a new treatment for psychiatric disorders.
It is known that missing a night’s sleep can significantly improve mood, even in people with severe depression.
Unfortunately, the improvement is often lost when people catch up on their sleep and it is still not clear why these effects occur.
Link to abstract of ‘Brief sleep after learning keeps emotional memories alive for years’.
Link to abstract of ‘Therapeutic use of sleep deprivation in depression’.
Oceans ruined, seafood gone
42 years—that’s how much longer we’ll have seafood. Then: no more.
The world will run out of seafood by 2048 if steep declines in marine species continue at current rates, according to a study released today by an international group of ecologists and economists.
The paper, published in the journal Science, concludes that overfishing, pollution, and other environmental factors are wiping out important species across the globe, hampering the ocean’s ability to produce seafood, filter nutrients and resist the spread of disease.
“We really see the end of the line now,” said lead author Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Canada’s Dalhousie University. “It’s within our lifetime. Our children will see a world without seafood if we don’t change things.”
The 14 researchers from Canada, Panama, Sweden and the United States spent four years analyzing all the available data on fish populations and ocean ecosystems to reach their conclusion. They found that by 2003 — the last year for which data on global commercial fish catches is available — 29 percent of all fished species had collapsed, and that the rate of population collapses has accelerated in recent years.
As of 1980, just 13.5 percent of fished species had collapsed, even though fishing vessels were pursuing 1,736 fewer species back then. Today, the fishing industry harvests 7,784 species commercially.
“It’s like hitting the gas pedal and holding it down at a constant level,” Worm said in an telephone interview. “The rate accelerates over time.” Read the rest of this entry »
Zotero: another useful Firefox (2.0) extension
Via Boing Boing, this terrific Firefox extension for scholars in the humanities. It does require Firefox 2.0, though:
Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself.
- Automatic capture of citation information from web pages
- Storage of PDFs, files, images, links, and whole web pages
- Flexible notetaking with autosave
- Fast, as-you-type search through your materials
- Playlist-like library organization, including saved searches (smart collections) and tags
- Platform for new forms of digital research that can be extended with other web tools and services
- Runs right in your web browser
- Formatted citation export (style list to grow rapidly)
- Free and open source
Useful little tools: double-sided tape
Scotch (3M) sells three varieties of ready-made double-backed tape for sticking together two flat surfaces. Their Double Stick Tape (model #137) does what a self-connecting loop of ordinary tape does, but more tidily and sure. Their Double-Coated Tape (model #667) is similar but you can re-position the tape. For most uses – scrapbooks, posters, etc – I much prefer this kind. Their Photo Mounting Tape (Cat. 002) is double-side, not positionable, but acid-free. This is what you want to use for archival stuff.
Amazon sells all three, natch.
Why I like to wait a while
Another bug found in Firefox 2. Minor, but still. I think I’ll wait another month or so before migrating to Firefox 2.
A second security flaw that could cause the new Firefox 2 browser to crash has been publicly disclosed.
The vulnerability lies in the way the open-source browser handles JavaScript code. Viewing a rigged Web page will cause the browser to exit, a representative for Mozilla, the publisher of the software, said Wednesday. Contrary to claims on security mailing lists, the bug cannot be exploited to run arbitrary code on a PC running Firefox 2, the representative said.
This flaw in the JavaScript Range object is different from the denial-of-service vulnerability in Firefox 2 that was confirmed by Mozilla last week. That bug is related to a more serious security hole, which was fixed in earlier versions of Firefox, the organization has said.
The two “crashers” are the only publicly released vulnerabilities that have been confirmed by Mozilla in the week since Firefox 2 was launched. The issues are only minor, the organization has said.
By contrast, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 update suffers from a spoofing flaw, discovered a week after Microsoft released IE 7 on Oct. 18. The vulnerability could help crooks mask phishing scams, the type of attack Microsoft designed the browser to thwart.
According to Secunia, a security monitoring company, there are at least two other vulnerabilities in IE 7. Microsoft has disputed these issues, saying that one reported problem lies in Outlook Express, not IE 7, and the other is a part of the product design, not a flaw.
Release of the new Web browsers set off a race among bug hunters to come up with the first security hole in either program. So far, though, none of the reported flaws could be exploited to hijack a PC running the browser, the most serious type of vulnerability.
Esperanto: A seductive cause, possibly lost
Esperanto was created by Ludovic Lazar Zamenhof, an ophthalmologist and Polish Jew, to serve as a universal second language. The idea was that each person would learn, in addition to his or her mother tongue, one additional language: Esperanto. Since it was created, it was designed to be easy to learn: simple grammar, use of affixes to generate many words from few roots, no exceptions (e.g., no irregular verbs).
As a language, it emerged in rather polished form, due to obstacles that were doubtless frustrating at the time. Zamenhof, for example, returned from university eager to resume work on the language, only to discover that his father, contemptuous of his efforts, had burned all his notebooks and work to date. This seeming setback actually enabled Zamenhof to begin anew, but now knowing what he learned from the experience of his first effort: a clean slate but a greater understanding.
Then when he thought the work was finished, government censors balked at the idea of a “secret” language, and publication was delayed for some years. In the meantime, Zamenhof translated into Esperanto much of the Bible, some plays of Shakespeare, and other works. This effort led to more polishing of the language.
When he finally did publish the language, he abandoned “ownership,” as it were: he said that the language belonged to those who spoke it. He did publish a fundamental core of the language—the basic rules—and said that these rules had to be observed. The result is that Esperanto, instead of being bedeviled by constant tweaking (as happened with other created languages) benefited from the kind of stability that natural languages derive from having many speakers and a body of literature.
In addition to being easy to learn and well-adapted for communication, Esperanto is free of political taint: the thing that makes people who speak the language of Country A resist accepting the language of Country B as the international standard. Would English speakers accept French as the single international language? Will the French accept English—as an official and universal standard language? Mais non.
Why is it still seductive as a cause? The EU today has 20 (twenty!) official languages. The cost of translating material into all those languages and hiring interpreters for meetings is substantial: US$1.3 billion a year. With that amount of money, it would be easy to create training materials and a training system for citizens of EU countries to learn Esperanto—which, as noted above, is easy to learn. And then they could talk directly to each other, without the need for interpreters and translators. And international contracts could be prepared in a language that all parties understand.
Perhaps it should also be noted that Esperanto is fun to learn and to use.
UPDATE: If you Google “learn esperanto”, you’ll find many resources. Here’s one.
My left-field interests
I think I’ve blogged about this before, but my interests have always been sort of left-field: carom billiards instead of pocket billiards, squash instead of racquet ball, sabre fencing rather than, say, tennis, and the like.
But there’s a special category of things that make a lot of sense and that I can more or less prove should be adopted widely, but somehow are not: Esperanto, for example, or the Dvorak keyboard, the FITALY keyboard, Go (the board game, in the US), Forth (the programming language), … Friends can probably recall others.
Something about these ideas—well, these causes—captures my imagination and my zeal, and I will advocate for them at the drop of a hat.
UPDATE: Also, contract bridge—not so left-field when I learned it, but now out of the mainstream.
The Dvorak keyboard
A commenter suggests that, since I like the FITALY keyboard, I should take a look at the Dvorak keyboard. And I have. In fact, I bought three (3) Smith-Corona manual portables sometime in the 70’s. Three kids, you see. And The Eldest really used it. She was in college, and it was great: not only very efficient, but also people asking to borrow her typewriter took a look at the keyboard layout and said, “Never mind.” 
These were the original Dvorak layout. I worked with a guy (this would be around 1984) who was on the ANSI committee developing the ANSI standard layout for the Dvorak, and he said they were told they had to use the existing key combinations–for example, the “?” had to be an upshift character. This was too bad: ? is fairly common and should not, I think, require the use of the shift key. Of course, with computers, the “/” and the “\” are now more commonly used than before.
I did learn the keyboard, and typing on a Dvorak felt very strange—as if your hands weren’t really moving: the great majority of keystrokes took place on the home row, whereas with the QWERTY keyboard, your hands are moving all over the place.
But the power of networks overcame my Dvorak impulse. Plus I type 90-100 wpm on QWERTY, so the QWERTY fits my needs. Research suggests that the productivity improvements that were discovered in the experiment run by the US Navy are illusory. (The person running that experiment, incidentally, was Mr. Dvorak himself.)
John Dvorak, the computer columnist and gadfly, is related to Keyboard Dvorak—a nephew, I think.
FITALY is not in the same category, though the thinking that produced it is the same. Whereas a two-handed touch typist can be quite productive using a QWERTY keyboard, if you’re entering characters by means of a stylus, the QWERTY layout really is substantially less efficient. You don’t have the use of both hands, so the scattering of the most commonly used letters does reduce one’s speed and accuracy.
So QWERTY for two hands, FITALY for stylus: that’s my motto. But I did like the original Dvorak keyboard quite a lot.
Who is this person?
Yet another useful Firefox extension. I’m reminded of the differing philosophies of Psion and Palm. Psion decided that it would develop the applications on its very powerful and neat handheld, whereas Palm decided that it would develop a core of applications but also provide developer’s kits and easy ways for third-party applications to be loaded onto the Palm. The Psion, great though it was in many respects, went no place. The Palm is still with us. Firefox’s strength as a browser are the endless useful extensions.
Who Is This Person? lets you highlight any name on a web page and see matching information from LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Google News, Technorati, Yahoo Person Search, TailRank, ZoomInfo, IMDB, MySpace and more.
