From Clay Shirky’s “The Siren Song of Luddism” (Britannica Blog: 19 June 2007):
…any technology that fixes a problem … threatens the people who profit from the previous inefficiency. However, Gorman omits mentioning the Luddite response: an attempt to halt the spread of mechanical looms which, though beneficial to the general populace, threatened the livelihoods of [...]
Posted on November 27th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, business, history, on writing | No Comments »
From Declan McCullagh’s “E-voting predicament: Not-so-secret ballots” (CNET News: 20 August 2007):
Two Ohio activists have discovered that e-voting machines made by Election Systems and Software and used across the country produce time-stamped paper trails that permit the reconstruction of an election’s results — including allowing voter names to be matched to their actual votes.
…
Ohio [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, politics, security | No Comments »
From Malcolm Gladwell’s “A gift or hard graft?” (The Guardian: 15 November 2008):
This idea - that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice - surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: [...]
Posted on November 15th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, education, science | No Comments »
From Bruce Sterling’s “Viridian Note 00459: Emerging Technology 2006” (The Viridian Design Movement: March 2006):
When it comes to remote technical eventualities, you don’t want to freeze the language too early. Instead, you need some empirical evidence on the ground, some working prototypes, something commercial, governmental, academic or military…. Otherwise you are trying to freeze an [...]
Posted on December 10th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, Wash U: tech in changing society, business, security, technology | Comments Off
From Peter Norvig’s “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years” (2001):
Researchers ([John R. Hayes, Complete Problem Solver (Lawrence Erlbaum) 1989.], [Benjamin Bloom (ed.), Developing Talent in Young People (Ballantine) 1985.]) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, painting, piano playing, [...]
Posted on September 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, commonplace book, education, teaching, technology | Comments Off
From Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Imagining Abrupt Climate Change : Terraforming Earth” (Amazon Shorts: 31 July 2005):
This view, by the way, was in keeping with a larger and older paradigm called gradualism, the result of a dramatic and controversial paradigm shift of its own from the nineteenth century, one that is still a contested part of [...]
Posted on July 28th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, religion, science, technology | Comments Off
From Paul Graham’s “Hiring is Obsolete” (May 2005):
Have you ever noticed that when animals are let out of cages, they don’t always realize at first that the door’s open? Often they have to be poked with a stick to get them out. Something similar happened with blogs. People could have been publishing online in 1995, [...]
Posted on July 7th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, Wash U: tech in changing society, business, history, technology | Comments Off
From Feds Hack Wireless Network in 3 Minutes (Slashdot: 5 April 2005):
At a recent ISSA (Information Systems Security Association) meeting in Los Angeles, a team of FBI agents demonstrated current WEP-cracking techniques and broke a 128 bit WEP key in about three minutes.
Related posts
The NSA and threats to privacy
Quick ‘n dirty explanation of onion routing
Lots [...]
Posted on June 14th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Webster U: infosec management, security, technology | Comments Off
From Stuart Staniford, David Moore, Vern Paxson, & Nicholas Weaver’s “The Top Speed of Flash Worms” [PDF] (29 October 2004):
Flash worms follow a precomputed spread tree using prior knowledge of all systems vulnerable to the worm’s exploit. In previous work we suggested that a flash worm could saturate one million vulnerable hosts on the Internet [...]
Posted on June 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, science, security, technology | Comments Off
From Stuart Staniford, Gary Grim, & Roelof Jonkman’s “Flash Worms: Thirty Seconds to Infect the Internet” (Silicon Defense: 16 August 2001):
In a recent very ingenious analysis, Nick Weaver at UC Berkeley proposed the possibility of a Warhol Worm that could spread across the Internet and infect all vulnerable servers in less than 15 minutes (much [...]
Posted on June 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, security | Comments Off
From AP’s “Borrowed books returned to museum — 92 years later” (CNN: 6 November 2000):
The Field Museum of Natural History recently returned 10 volumes to the American Museum of Natural History in New York — 92 years late.
It seems a researcher from the New York museum took the books with him when he accepted a [...]
Posted on June 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, history | Comments Off
From Brian Montopoli’s “The Queue Crew: Waiting in line for a living” (Legal Affairs: January/February 2004):
ON CAPITOL HILL, a placeholder is someone paid by the hour to wait in line. When legislative committees hold hearings, they reserve seats for Congressional staffers, for the press, and for the general public. The general-public seats are the only [...]
Posted on May 31st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, law, politics, weird, writing ideas | Comments Off
From F. John Reh’s “How the 80/20 rule can help you be more effective” (About.com):
In 1906, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto created a mathematical formula to describe the unequal distribution of wealth in his country, observing that twenty percent of the people owned eighty percent of the wealth. In the late 1940s, Dr. Joseph M. Juran [...]
Posted on May 22nd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, commonplace book | Comments Off
From Jessica Sachs’s “Expiration Date” (Legal Affairs: March/April 2004):
More than two centuries of earnest scientific research have tried to forge better clocks based on rigor, algor, and livor mortis - the progressive phenomena of postmortem muscle stiffening, body cooling, and blood pooling. But instead of honing time-of-death estimates, this research has revealed their vagaries. Two [...]
Posted on May 21st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: law, science, technology | Comments Off
From Noam Eppel’s “Security Absurdity: The Complete, Unquestionable, And Total Failure of Information Security“:
On Dec. 27, 2005 a Windows Metafile (.WMF) flaw was discovered affecting fully patched versions of XP and Windows 2003 Web Server. Simply by viewing an image on a web site or in an email or sent via instant messenger, code can [...]
Posted on May 12th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Webster U: infosec management, security, technology | Comments Off
From Noam Eppel’s “Security Absurdity: The Complete, Unquestionable, And Total Failure of Information Security“:
The security company Scanit recently conducted a survey which tracked three web browsers (MSIE, Firefox, Opera) in 2004 and counted which days they were “known unsafe.” Their definition of “known unsafe”: a remotely exploitable security vulnerability had been publicly announced and no [...]
Posted on May 12th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Webster U: infosec management, security, technology | Comments Off
From Noam Eppel’s “Security Absurdity: The Complete, Unquestionable, And Total Failure of Information Security“:
In 2001, the infamous Code Red Worm was infecting a remarkable 2,000 new hosts each minute. Nick Weaver at UC Berkeley proposed the possibility of a “Flash Worm” which could spread across the Internet and infect all vulnerable servers in less [...]
Posted on May 12th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Webster U: infosec management, security, technology | Comments Off
From Paul Graham’s “The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn“:
We take it for granted most of the time, but human life is fairly miraculous. It is also palpably short. You’re given this marvellous thing, and then poof, it’s taken away. You can see why people invent gods to explain it. But even to people who [...]
Posted on May 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book | Comments Off
From Technology Review’s “The Fading Memory of the State“:
Tom Hawk, general manager for enterprise storage at IBM, says that in the next three years, humanity will generate more data–from websites to digital photos and video–than it generated in the previous 1,000 years. … In 1996, companies spent 11 percent of their IT budgets on storage, [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, politics, technology | Comments Off
From The Telegraph’s “Skeleton woman’ dead in front of TV for years“:
A woman’s skeleton was discovered in her flat three years after she is believed to have died, it emerged today.
Joyce Vincent was surrounded by Christmas presents and the television and heating in her bedsit were still on.
The 40-year-old’s body was so decomposed that the [...]
Posted on April 15th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, true stories | Comments Off