Food goes bad eventually.  This is the urgent revelation they have to share with college students as schools across the country open up for the fall semester.  They offer valuable nuggets including the fact that even though raw chicken usually smells weird, it can smell worse.  If it smells worse than normal its probably gone bad.  They even open the article with the revelation that if you can see some mold on bread the whole loaf has gone bad.  Neglected are wider health issues facing college students, including the question of what over the counter pain reliever is safest when used to help with a hangover (its probably not acetaminophen) or how shower sandals help to prevent a more immediate health threat posed by fungus in community showers.

In a time where roughly one out of ten people in the United States actively seeking work don’t have it the ridiculous lawsuit has taken a new form.  If you have failed to find employment three months after graduating college this year, bringing a lawsuit against your alma mater is not likely to help with the job search.  Without having some form of employment lined up from a previous internship with a company, three months isn’t a time frame in which it would be abnormal to be still looking for a job in a better economy.  Even six months wouldn’t be that unusual.  A lot of schools even advertise their job placement rates based on how many graduates find work in their field within two years of graduation.  Receiving an education is only one part of getting ready for a particular career, and applying for jobs is only part of getting a job.  The other part is being the best applicant to fill a particular opening, provided that there is an opening to fill.  With less jobs in the economy there is a much larger pool of candidates to compete with for the few available.  I don’t know of a single school that offers a tuition refund based on increased competition for jobs due to a down economy or rising unemployment.  The way endowments drop for most schools during an economic slowdown I don’t imagine many schools would be in a position to honor such guarantees even if they were offered.  The problem with the graduate’s complaint is an assumption of a specific failing on the part of their school while the problem is a larger failing of many factors outside of influence of the school.

The controversy over the publication of the Rorschach test plates on Wikipedia entertained earlier in this post has now spread to the technology section of the New York Times.  The Times’ sensationalist ‘Has Wikipedia Created a Rorschach Cheat Sheet?’ opens for a fairly standard and not so sensationalist pro versus con consideration of the merits for the case to publish or remove the ten Rorschach image plates from Wikipedia.  The essence of the debate as considered by the Times is that on one hand there may still be some value to the research potential of the plates that may be preserved by keeping them protected under the general ethos of the psychologist to prevent amateur and lay exposure to test materials, while on the other hand there is nothing legally protecting the images on the plates which have already spread into the public domain and as evidenced by their appearance on Wikipedia into public circulation.

[Plate 6 from the Rorschach test]

Quotes were taken from interested parties on both sides of the debate with short segues and tied together some level of context for why the parties may have these positions as is typical for this sort of story in the Times.  One particular party in the article took a position which seems to be both patently unfounded and potentially dangerous.  Spokesperson for a publisher of the Rorschach test Trudy Finger of Hogrefe & Huber Publishing noted that the publisher is considering legal measures against Wikipedia as a result of the plate’s publication on the site.  Apart from the simple declaration that her employer was looking into maybe pursuing some form of legal action the following quote was feature:

“It is therefore unbelievably reckless and even cynical of Wikipedia,to on one hand point out the concerns and dangers voiced by recognized scientists and important professional associations and on the other hand — in the same article — publish the test material along with supposedly ‘expected responses.’ ”  Trudy Finger [from the New York Times]

Absent from her in the article is any legal reason for the restriction of the distribution of the test plate images.  Perhaps more concerning is her personification of Wikipedia as pointing out particular concerns while still publishing the images anyways, as though Wikipedia is conflicted on this matter and acting as a person who is “unbelievably reckless”.  A characterization which conflicts with actual nature of the article on Wikipedia as a collaborative effort of differing persons in which functional consensus is reached in an article in which differing contributors additions to the article are displayed together.  Simply on such a collaborative project it would be reckless to either display only the concerns or only the image while one faction locks out the other.

[cropped screenshot of the ten plates as they appear on Wikipedia]

The dispute at its simplest is control versus freedom.  Psychologists at some level do need tests to which they can control availability and access in order to undertake quality research.  The general public though has a need for the free flow of information, and for the Rorschach test considering its age and the passing of its legal protection under copyright it is time that the test be able to assume its place in history.  Especially in light of its position as the original projective test in psychology, the Rorschach test has an even greater potential value for the culture as a whole than it might realize if it were to remain pigeonholed.  It is about time that this test be open to historical study.

With all of the common warning signage people come across finding a new warning symbol in an unexpected place can be a bit of a surprise. From the fairly benign admonition that coffee is served hot to the more pressing matter of bringing to your attention via a blinking light that your breaks might not be in suitable condition to reliably stop your car. Then there’s the generic caution tape. Well below is the most effective sign I believe I have encountered.

[link to announcement]

This new red triangle in the left corner of this screenshot has apparently been out in the world for a while hiding in places where the clearly unambiguous threat it represents resides. The message that you are near something so dangerously endowed with ionizing radiation that if you run away fast enough to escape death you will still glow noticeably in the dark. According to the International atomic energy agency this harbinger of doom has been out in circulation for a little more than two years now. As unambiguous as this sign is why is this sign not worked its way into popular culture yet? The biohazard sign and the old ambiguous radiation sign (which could alert you to an elevated risk of cancer should you not die from any other causes in the next three hundred years to a risk of immediate death with no option of merely glowing as depicted clearly in the new radiation sign) clearly mark the entrances to bedrooms of rebellious youth in many Hollywood films.

Well this symbol completely unabashed in its clarity is a copyrighted by the ISO and only available from the ISO or one of its member organizations. Or with the purchase of any device certified by the International Atomic Energy Agency as a category 1, 2, or 3 sealed source in the form of a sticker preaching its message to those thinking of unsealing said source of radiation. I imagine it would be completely fruitless to attempt swiping one of these off of the sealed source of radiation from radiology equipment on your next visit to the hospital, because someone’s kid probably already has the coolest and most elusive sticker in the whole world on their trapper keeper.* Still nearly 30 months after being unveiled to the world it has yet be gain any cool factor or even graze at the cultural mainstream like its ambiguous predecessor did so many years before when it became the most memorable thing to come out of Berkeley.

This symbol is so elusive that the firm which supplies radiation warning stickers to your neighborhood school and the leading site for hobbyist nuclear products do not carry this symbol in sticker or signage form. When third graders or a serial nuclear arsonist without the ability to learn from past mistakes creates a hazard requiring this signage and they couldn’t get it through their usual procurement channels** how will the International Standards Organization cope when an innocent bystander can not run away an glow to avoid death?

* I am neither condoning this behavior nor suggesting that this happened or actually will happen at any time, such an irresponsible breach of public safety would undoubtedly create a hazard as the next person to stumble upon the sealed source of radiation might open it up and fiddle around leading to their unavoidable death as they are deprived of the knowledge they can run away and glow brightly and escape their demise.

** In all fairness to legitimate nuclear hobbyists the Radioactive Boy Scout legitimate amateur nuclear supply firms.

So the images from the original Roschach test are now available online at Wikipedia, and their inclusion on the page is somewhat controversial. Arguments are made that exposure to these images in the general public may be detrimental to their scientific value as they are used for testing patient’s and study subject’s interpretation of these images. The problem is that the images used in the test have fallen into the public domain outside of copyright protection and they are now entirely free from legal protection for most any use, and they may be distributed readily without restriction and used in derivative works.

The first of the ten images I recall seeing in more than a few movies, and I think most reasonable people would not think too much of this particular image having its value further compromised through public exposure. A fair number of people in a clinical environment would when asked what they think of this image respond that they are being presented with an inkblot test.

On the other hand the first time I saw this image was probably on the Wikipedia article. To say the least, this one surpised me. I can’t help but wonder if the test’s trick is that half way through they switch to color on you. When I get some time later, I’ll post the rest of them. [From Slashdot (a few days ago)]

Went out and picked up the Chickenfoot CD today, 11 tracks of good hard rock. With all of the niches that most new rock seems to fall into, its great listening to a bunch of music legends get together and just rock out. Sammy Hagar, Joey Satriani, Micheal Anthony, and Chad Smith together play like an all star team of rock talent.

Having spent many a night thinking at the level of sheer stupidity and irresponsibility in actors creating, buying, and selling financial instruments a dramatic action must be undertaken to prevent the creation of the next collateralized debt obligation which will enrich a select few individuals before damning the population at large dependent on a stable economy for goods, services, and employment. The current economic crisis was not unavoidable, and could have been prevented if someone in a position to do something would have listened to the arguments against allowing the creation and trade in some of the horrible bastardized securities that imploded bringing down the rest of the financial markets, including the reduction of Iceland from a global financial powerhouse to competing with developing nations for relief from the International Monetary Fund.

It is my proposal that the SEC ought to create a division staffed by professional epistemologists to investigate novel and potentially bunk financial instruments, and that there should be a position held b a financial epistemologist that reports to the President and Congress on proposed changes to trading regulations. Our current economic crisis is rooted in poor treatment of information.

In approving mortgage applications FICO scores were given an ontological status above other relevant factors including borrow income and existing debts held by the borrower. Risk models were taken to have supremacy over factors as basic as a borrower’s ability to repay the mortgage, and this occurred because the banks creating these mortgages were able to quickly sell these mortgages to willing buyers before the lending bank had time to actually experience any risk from having created the mortgage in the first place. Brokers readily bought up and packaged these debts if they were not packaged by the bank already for various funds for which they received commissions for selling to investors, with the caveat that these securities may have been bought and repackaged many times over before reaching a final individual investor looking for a bond like investment promising steady returns over an extended period of time.

There were people who recognized this as a bad idea. Newsweek has a short piece on Senator Byron Dorgan’s opposition to legislation lowering the barriers between banks and brokerages back in 1994, the legislation passed. Very rarely though does anything in economics happen on a timeline of now, or even on a timeline of in the immediate future. In two recent articles the New York Times did postmortems on the problem in the risk management strategies at play before the financial collapse. The problems at work are indeed getting some attention after the fact.

What the core problem in the situation is one of information. The collection of information, the evaluation of information, and the preservation of information are where error may occur or even be systematized. A more sophisticated quantitative model may produce more reliable results in many cases, but a model used in practice can be no better than the information going into it. Someone needs to be evaluating the significance and the status of the information going into these systems. There are already many statisticians and other quant people working on these problems. If we are to make a sincere effort to avoid future mistakes though, we need people with solid training in the science of applied epistemology involved in the decision making process. Garbage in garbage out is a well known maxim in computer science. A prettier algorithm cannot compensate for a poor decision making process in deciding how to feed an algoritm, provided the algorithm is an accurate model of circumstances in the first place.

Today in an Op-ed column for the times David Brooks presented a supposed epitaph to the death of philosophy based on his understanding of contemporary ethics.* If our current crisis has taught us anything is that we need more philosophy and not less, if our society lacks a love of knowledge what other attitude are we going to take as a culture with regard to knowledge. What consequences would it hold for the decisions that must be considered as a society. Or worse what would become of a society with an open disdain and hostility towards knowledge and what crises would they lead themselves blind into.

*His case though neglects that the sort of ethics he criticised are very similar to those of Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, and have been and still are the subject of much debate. The sheer number of people in America who follow a command view of ethics for religious or other reasons alone is enough to dismiss his assumptions out of hand. If I were allowed to only make one prediction it would be that ethic and meta ethics will still be a lively fields one hundred years from now.

So the peanut recall has faded into the night, and pistachios are the new way to contract salmonella from casual foods. Sure new peanut products are still being recalled, but it seems that 2009 is the year that the nut looses its status as a safe food with zero prep time. It really challenges your ability to rely on assumptions in preparing safe food for yourself or others when more people are getting sick from otherwise vegetarian nuts than from consuming raw or undercooked pork products.

A person can only imagine what George Washington Carver would do if he saw what has become of the nut industry in America that he worked so hard to build. Now the eighth amendment would likely prohibit this from being handed down as a criminal penalty, but would it be too much to suggest that the persons making the decisions leading to the national gastrointestinal disaster be made to lick lizards until they contract salmonella the conventional way. Maybe that could be worked into a civil penalty by means of a class action settlement. I have an opened jar of peanut butter in my cabinet from the pre-salmonella age of crushed nut products. The problem may arise that a lawyer probably won’t accept watching a bunch of executives lick lizards until they begin to vomit and experience diarrhea.

If more common foods keep getting recalled, it may actually make some sense to run any food through a deep fryer minutes before its intended consumption.

Anyone who has followed technology news these past few weeks is aware that on April first computers infected with the Conficker worm will receive instructions, after which they will do something. What exactly they will do is a mystery at this point. Most speculation revolves around them doing something like harvesting bank account information or sending lots of spam. If I wake up on April Fools day and notice a few extra spam messages in my inbox, big whoop, I delete them and go about my day.

What if there is some signifigance to them choosing April fools day though? What kind of prank would someone with a few million zombies be capable of accomplishing?

Here’s five ideas:

5. Brute forcing the password on Steve Jobs email account, and using it to send spam to people about winning some sort of iLotto. To claim the the prize you need simply wire $9000 to Steve Jobs most trusted lawyer in Accra Ghanna.

4. Pull a denial of service atack on Google. Given how Google has massive data centers spread all over the world this seems unlikely, especially in light of the massive traffic Google already handles fairly well. Maybe if they flood Google with requests Google isn’t ready to parse, they might get somewhere. It would probably be easier to try to just deface the main page though.

3. Suprise infected users with a polite greeting and thorough guidance on practicing proper computer security.

2. Start running a social networking site that is a clone of what facebook was like four years ago. Some brave current facebook users try out the site and wonder what’s the point. Then the go outside and are impressed by sunlight and trees. They wonder why they wasted so much time on site that started off as a place to practice data entry and shameless self promotion.

1. Skynet. Arnold issues a warrant in the state of California for John Connor. Obama is revealed to be a terminator robot. World gracefully accepts computers as our masters. Republican strategists just mumble about how they just knew Obama was too good at the internet.

As a side note reading this CBS news story I found the comments to be dishearteningly naive. It seemed to have devolved into a Macs and Linux are immune to viruses versus no they aren’t debate of the sort that makes you want to hit your inbox up and just start reading spam. There are three leading causes of getting your stuff ruined on a computer.

1. Social engineering: You can give your banking details to a phisher on any computing platform connected to a network. Even OpenBSD and SELinux can’t prevent poor judgment.

2. Lazy: Not running updates and not running any security software leaves your system open to attacks. And yes, antiviruses for Mac OS and Linux exist. They exist because viruses exist for those platforms. Its not just the operating system you need to worry about either, just as a web browser can pick up some malicious code, so can your enterprise database software or content management system.

3. Expectation of invulnerability: Thinking something can’t happen to you is not a preventative measure against something happening to you. If Chris Hansen can reliably net truckloads of sickos who think they can’t be caught, people who want to separate you from your money can and will compromise your online security if you don’t work to stop them.

I remember a time back when I started getting good at math. Then during my second year of college, math broke. I became overwhelmed with the problems of assumption, and in selection of axioms. Suddenly symbol manipulation lost its appeal. It was a dark time. It was when I first became a compulsive breaker of logical systems. Oh, how much I want to break string theory.

From the principle of explosion everything follows. Lately pragmatic instrumentalism and warranted assertability have been changing my outlook, I’ve been more up beat. It allows me to be constructive and take breaks from constantly hunting systems to explode.