miscellaneous factZ

… a witches’ dance of idiocy and adult hypocrisy. DuPont, for instance, and his wonderful grandfather, and grand old state of Ohio, and the golden state of Iowa, and the flag, red, white, and blue, all its stripes, all its stars, and the flag a thousand times over, and Americanism till your ears ached, and the slaves and the tariff, and Abraham Lincoln, mauled and dragged about and his name taken in vain, and his spirit degraded, prostituted to every insincerity and used as window-dressing for every cheap politican. The incredible sordidness of that convention passes all description. It was a gathering of unsanitary callous men who blasphemed patriotism, made a mockery of Republican government and filled the air with sodden and scheming stupidity.

Walter Lippman on the 1916 Republican Convention

Money Cases

• 1988 First National Bank of Chicago is the victim of $70-million computer heist. [1]
• 1994, summer. Russian crackers siphon $10 million from Citibank and transfer the money to bank accounts around the world. Vladimir Levin, the 30-year-old ringleader, uses his work laptop after hours to transfer the funds to accounts in Finland and Israel. Levin stands trial in the United States and is sentenced to three years in prison. Authorities recover all but $400,000 of the stolen money. [1]

To Investigate

• Kevin Mitnick

Biblio

1. http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Timeline-of-hacker-history
2. Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown (available in a digital edition - just search online)

The tests carried by the English mathematician Dr Soal are often cited as powerful evidence for the existence of ESP phenomena. However there is strong evidence that Soal engaged in fraud in order to obtain his results and thus such claims should be viewed with caution.

Soal originally became interested in psychical research when he conducted a lengthy series of ESP tests, hoping to provide independent corroboration of Rhine’s work. He tested 160 people over a five-year period and analyzed the total of 128 350 guesses against the targets (symbols on the cards) they were attempting to ’see’. He found nothing but chance results and promptly stopped his ESP research, criticizing Rhine for what he considered must be errors in the methods he used to produce positive results.

That might have been the end of the story, had it not been for the influence of yet another English researcher, Whately Carington. In his own ESP tests, using drawings as targets, Carington had discovered strange displacement effect. Sometimes a subject would miss the target he was trying to guess and instead reproduce the previous day’s targets or even the one to be selected at random the next day. Carington urged Soal to re-examine his statistics and look for such a ‘psychic displacement’. The mathematician did this, and sure enough the effect was found in the results produced by two subjects, Basil Shackleton and Gloria Stewart. Both showed positive and negative displacement at times, and Soal continued his ESP work using Shackleton and Steward as his subjects.

The results of experiments conducted with Shackleton between 1941 and 1943 were extremely impressive and were taken up by parapsychologists as evidence of the existence of ESP. But 20 years later Mrs. Gretl Albert, who had been involved in the tests as an am agent, claimed she had several times seen Soal altering the figures. A recent re-examination of the Soal statistics suggests that this is exactly what he did. In order to ensure that the cards used in the experiments were picked at random, Soal used the standard laboratory technique of referring to Chamber’s logarithmic tables and Tippett’s random number tables (although he did not indicate exactly how he used them). What has been discovered is that the random lists Soal used in his experiments do not match the standard ones. A study by Betty Markwick, published in 1978, has revealed that certain long sequences of numbers are repeated many times. This need only mean that Soal was using a small pool of random numbers and would not be necessarily affect the validity of the experiment. However, Miss Markwick has discovered that the long repeated sequences are in fact not identical; they are sometimes interrupted by extra numbers, and that these, where they occur, show a remarkable correspondence with the ESP ‘hits’ recorded by Soal. Remove them and the scores fall to chance levels. Summing up this evidence, Miss Markwick states that ‘all the experimental series in card-guessing carried out by Dr. Soal must, as the evidence stands, be discredited.’

See: Betty Marwick, "The Soal-Goldney Experiments with Basil Shackleton: New Evidence of Manipulation," Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 56, 211.

Conference at UCL entitled, Trust and Triviality: Where is the Internet Going

Date: 2004-11-12

General

Medium doesn’t matter (i trust the other person i am speaking to I don’t worry about the telephone). RP: what about e-voting.

Trade-off between safety and access to information. First it must be acknowledge that there is a trade-off. This trade-off can be improved but will always remain. Example of schools.

Quality, truth, trust and elitism.

• Regulation central stuff from the ex-ITV guy. Duty of truth??
• Top-down allows control and regulation.
• Bottom up allows for free speech - but he claims a very dubious free speech.
• does internet narrow or widen points of view?
• Craig’s list.
• Comment on wikipedia. Democratization of production of information but is it reliable.
• RP: What scares me is this assumption (made by e.g. ITV guy) that the internet is uncontrollable. Unfortunately it is all too censorable.

Ed Richards, Senior Partner OfCom, Strategy and Market Developments

• In next debate over communications act will need to have public debate.
• (!!) Need effective DRM to create trust in the online world
• (!!) Bad: 4.7 million UK users have knowingly downloaded illegal content
• Mentioned EUCD etc. No particular emphasis but simply as a fact of life
• User don’t want to be criminalized they want to use iTunes ….
• Young generation need to be focused on to address this idea that music should be free. This culture of freeness is pervasive among the younger generation.
• KellersInformationSphere.com
• Twin track: creative commons along side a DRM commercial IPR environment. Creative Commons embraced.
• What could undermine this: spam, child protection issues,

Questions

• RP: wonderful to hear this support and interest in a creative commons [ed: as concept and as group]. One thing I am very interested in is a direct participation by the Government in nurturing this Commons - a role they have obviously long taken in the traditional academic and artistic spheres.

  • In response: we might want to ask that if content is generated by the govt why should it NOT be released in a creative commons manner. Now I can see there might be issues with this approach, for example if content is sourced from independent producers, but still I think you start from a position of why not.
  • raised issue of sustainability
  • RP: didn’t really know about non-commercial licenses

• Guy from Internet Watchdog: We don’t want to close down the internet or regulate it formally but we want the US to see the internet is not the Wild West and that something nees to be done

• Red-headed women: Lessig + issues with very strong IP protection. Aren’t there major problems with over-strong IP.

• ‘For my money the DMCA goes far too far’ … ‘It makes neither economic and cultural sense’ … ‘
• RP: they all know about Lessig
• DRM and stopping consumers thinking they should get stuff for free

Earl of Selbourne: Cyber Trust and Information Security

RP: Data Collection in Government: * Value of information and collection costs. * Data acquisition costs often not evaluated. * If information not reliable what value is it.

Own Thoughts:

• Brands
  • As what? Are they are certification or more than that.
  • Clearly more than that. Often not about information at all but about creating an image
• For me there is no silver bullet to solve the trust and reliability problem. Particularly as this can be in direct tension with a desire to have a very open/free approach to dissemination.
• The recursion argument. Suppose I receive piece of information X. How do I know that this piece of information is reliable/true/correct. Have following options:
  1. I have my own knowledge that allows me to check validity.
  2. Find an expert who I already trust who can tell me validity or not. But how did i find and verify the expert. At this point have to recurse. Verification knowledge may be of two kinds:
  3. Direct verification. I actually know the area and can judge from my own direct knowledge.
  4. I know something about the characeteristic of the information provider (e.g. they provide footnotes, they have a prestigious reputation for honesty, they have a right of reply that is administered honestly). This is indirect verification.

Relation to information bandwidth. Can often work out that an article is for or against a particular information with minimal processing. Levels of processing. Can take principal components approach (e.g. presence of footnotes) as a way of reducing the amount of information to process.

Can consider reliability of information in a social/truth sense as similar to information reliability issues in traditional information theory. I receive a signal. problem is the simple statistical mechanisms for analysing corruption of signals over nosiy channels are not appropriate to that relating to social reliability (are there facts true or not)

Are chinese whispers statistically like degradation of signals in traditional IT areas?