[caption id=”” align=”alignright” width=”320” caption=”Traffic on the GSP by Ted Kerwin”][/caption]

In my very occasional series of posts where I give ideas for PhD thesis topics (see the all time hit the students are fighting over, Fractal dimension as measurement of quality) I give you another path to your doctorate. That is if you are in the Operations Research field. Sorry biologists.

I am sure we all have wondered at the situation where you are driving along the interstate and then all of a sudden there is a traffic buildup. You expect that there must be an accident or some event that is causing it, but then, just like it started, it suddenly clears up with no evidence of why it was there. A number of years ago, I remember coming across an article that showed that congestion behaved like a wave (where the height of the wave is the density of the cars). These waves can move through the stream of traffic and long outlive the original cause of their creation. I can’t find the original article, but there has been quite a lot of reasearch in the area. See Density waves in traffic flow for an example.

This morning’s drive into work posed another question in a related light. As I pulled up to the light at the entrance to 199, I had a James City County Police officer in front of me. As we entered the highway, there were not nearly enough cars to prevent free flowing traffic, but we instead stayed all bunched up. Unlike non-law enforcement vehicles, which people are happy to move around and pass to spread out on the road, a police car introduces certain mental restrictions which prevent people from behaving how they naturally would. We are uncomfortable passing a police officer or driving very much faster at all even if we are past the point in the road where the police car is located. This results in a “blob” of traffic that is all stuck together that would not exist otherwise.

So, my topic for a budding Operations Research student is this. How do you model a traffic scenario where certain vehicles introduce more stringent constraints on the vehicles around them that are not purely limited to their physical place on the road?

Go on, you can thank me later.

Update: There is a good comment thread starting over at Hacker News here talking about how this could be used in traffic management. Interesting.

[caption id=”” align=”alignright” width=”240” caption=”William from the MET”][/caption]

I love museums. From a very young age my parents brought me to museums and I have very fond (if vague) memories of visiting the Peabody Museum of Natural History staring up at huge dinosaur skeletons. Being close enough to New York, I was really luck to have the American Museum of Natural History, the Bronx Zoo, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art to name just a few. I remember my awe and fascination with all things dinosaurs, the ancient temple rebuilt inside the MET, mummies, medieval arms and armory. I credit much of my personal curiosity about the world and science to being exposed to museums as a child.

The adventure didn’t stop as a I grew up. Moving to Virginia and Williamsburg in specific gave me access to a whole new range of museums; heck, I live almost inside one of the largest living museums in the United States, Colonial Williamsburg. Being 3 hours away from the wonders that are all the Smithsonian museums is a blessing.

Most recently Tiffany and I got to visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston with our friends Doug and Elif. A strange museum filled with wonders from all over the world captured as a moment in time through the will of the owner which prevents the museum from changing the layout or contents of the museum.

However, while going through the Gardner museum I thought “This couldn’t be constructed today.” There is no way the world would allow a single individual to collect these artifacts into one place. I realized that many if not most of the museums that I love and would never want to give up could not exist if not through the theft and pillaging of countries all around the world during the 20th century. The modern application of scientific rigor and cultural sensitivity and ownership to the historical record of countries around the world is absolutely the right way to do things. Stealing artifacts from other (usually poorer) countries to be displayed in the museums of the rich countries is really bad karma. Taking artifacts out of their historical environment destroys much of the value that can be gathered from the historical context. (See the recent controversy over the show American Diggers.)

But I am finding it hard to square the love I have for the classic museums of my childhood which are clearly full of items that have been removed from their places of origins in “less than ideal” circumstances with the great experiences I associate with those museums. I remember going through a section of the American Museum of Natural History full of Chinese artifacts and looking at the placards showing they had all been added to the museum in the 1920’s knowing that they had almost certainly been smuggled out of their home countries.

I have confidence modern scientists can bridge this divide but I hope that the modern designers of museums can maintain the atmosphere of wonder that an 8 year old kid can get from seeing such a broad array of artifacts from all over the world without having to travel all over the world to see them.

Louis Menand’s article, Live and Learn - why we have college is great and you should read the whole article, but I wanted to point out one paragraph that struck me as a defender of the liberal arts education.

The most interesting finding is that students majoring in liberal-arts fields-sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities-do better on the C.L.A., and show greater improvement, than students majoring in non-liberal-arts fields such as business, education and social work, communications, engineering and computer science, and health. There are a number of explanations. Liberal-arts students are more likely to take courses with substantial amounts of reading and writing; they are more likely to attend selective colleges, and institutional selectivity correlates positively with learning; and they are better prepared academically for college, which makes them more likely to improve. The students who score the lowest and improve the least are the business majors.

That last sentence is particularly scary to me as these are the people who in theory, are being trained to run the companies I work for.

Some might think that I have taken this position just to confuse people. Jeremy, rabid proponent of free speech, lover of the Supreme Court, obviously would be in favor of a bill requiring that all court cases be televised.

[tweet https://twitter.com/#!/gothmog/status/168065058017001472]

I think I suprised people a bit. The bill, Senate bill 1945, proposes amending Chapter 45 of title 28, United States Code to say:

The Supreme Court shall permit television coverage of all open sessions of the Court unless the Court decides, by a vote of the majority of justices, that allowing such coverage in a particular case would constitute a violation of the due process rights of 1 or more of the parties before the Court. On the surface it may seem odd that I have taken a position opposed to allowing simple viewing access to an institution I have wanted to visit for years. However, my respect for the institution of the Supreme Court is largely due to the fact that it is slightly removed from the general operation of our government. More specifically, it is somewhat removed from the realm of politics. That is in no way to say that the Supreme Court is immune to politics, but the formal nature of the proceedings and the interaction between the lawyers and the Justices is a more intimate one than say, a Congressional hearing. And I believe this is a great strength.

I believe that by inserting the possibility of a live broadcast of hearings into the system, it will change the dynamics and motivations of the lawyers trying cases. They will no longer be speaking (primarily) to the Justices themselves, but will be also presenting their case to the broader audience. I also have the concern that the Justices will experience a chilling effect in that their questions will be scrutinized and challenged far more easily in a political light. Obviously, all of these things can happen in today’s system; transcripts and audio of cases are already released from the court, but there is a slightly higher bar to overcome that prevents most of the stupid, inane criticisms. I don’t believe that in the current system the lawyers and Justices are looking to drop the pithy sound bite that can be shown ad nauseam on Fox or CNN.

To play off the comments of supporter Arlen Specter; “Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” I agree in general, however, too much sunlight gives you skin cancer.

You can share your opinion on Open Congress - S.1945.

[caption id=”” align=”alignright” width=”240” caption=”A break from work by J. Paxon Reyes, on Flickr”][/caption]

Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size. The sentiment of this quote, attributed to Bernard of Chartres by John of Salisbury is probably familiar to most people and almost certainly taken for granted as being true. The rise of modern society and learning, whether it is technology, science, or cultural understanding is founded on this principle; that each scientist does not have to “reinvent the wheel” before they can discover something new.

But in a great conversation I had with Terry Brock a few weeks ago, I noticed a difference in how literally this sentiment can be applied to different disciplines. We both attended a colloquium talk given by William and Mary physics professor Marc Sher (who was my freshman adviser) on the topic of the Higgs Boson. By way of background, I have a BS in Physics and Terry is working on his PhD in Anthropology. While this would imply I was better prepared for this talk, Terry is the son of Chip Brock, Distinguished Professor of Physics at Michigan State University, so I think Terry gets extra physics points by osmosis. The talk was geared towards late physics undergraduate to physics graduate student audiences.

Needless to say, the talk was wonderful and both Terry and I came out of it feeling very stupid.

As the evening wore on, Terry and I spent some time discussing his research work on the process of emancipation for slaves and their transformation into a free people. Very cool work that fascinates me. (If you are interested, I would recommend the talk he gave and recorded entitled Space, Place, and Emancipation.)

What struck me as we talked was that the talk by Marc Sher we had seen and the conversation I was having with Terry both centered around cutting edge research in each of their disciplines. So why was it that I, even with a strong background in physics, was completely lost for the meat of the presentation on the Higgs Boson, yet was able to have what I hope was an interesting, engaging, and possibly even enlightening for Terry conversation on his work?

The simple, stock, bigoted scientist answer to that questions is “Well, physics is harder than anthropology.” That is too easy and full of crap. Knowing Terry and having dated an anthropology major through college, I know that the amount of effort they put into their work and the intellectual rigor of their research is just as challenging as that of any hard science discipline. Given his reading collection, it is clear that Terry’s work relies upon insights, facts, and information gathered by many experts in his field just as my undergraduate work in physics relied upon learning the works of Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein. However, I think it is very true to say that anthropology and other social sciences are much more accessible to the non-expert.

I think the difference comes down to how literally one takes interprets the analogy of “standing on the shoulders of giants.” In the “hard” sciences, I visualize a very tall and thin tower of ideas standing on top of each other. For a layman on the group, the top of the tower is obscured by the clouds; in order to reach the top of the tower (and by analogy understand them), one must climb the whole tower from the ground up. And it is very unlikely for an non-expert to have familiarity with the exact prerequisites of knowledge needed to get to the top.

However, in the social sciences, I visualize it as a much larger building, but broader. The ideas and theories at the cutting edge have required a much broader base of knowledge to get right, but are not so removed from the everyday experiences of others. While it would be necessary for a non-expert to learn just as much to fully understand the experts work, it is sufficient to know only a little to be able to understand the basic concepts.

I think this one of the strengths of the social sciences and challenges that the hard sciences have to overcome. It is much easier to convince someone of the importance of scientific work that they can understand and possibly see applications to in their everyday lives. Explaining why we should do research to back up the existence of the non-zero vacuum expectation spontaneously breaks electroweak gauge symmetry which then gives rise to the Higgs mechanism is a bit harder.

[caption id=”” align=”alignright” width=”240” caption=”Bombe detail by Garrettc, on Flickr”][/caption]

CNET and others have been running stories lately regarding a new feature of a product called Passware Kit Forensic 11.3 which has the ability to now recover the encryption keys from Apple’s FileVault 2 Full Hard Drive Encryption software. While the articles themselves have done a balanced job of describing the risks, it frustrates me that novices reading the headlines may misunderstand the risks.

• FileVault 2 easily decrypted, warns Passware
• Mac FileVault 2’s full disk encryption can be broken in less than 40 minutes
• Apple FileVault 2 Encryption Cracked By Forensic Software
• Passware: Filevault can be brute force cracked during the span of a lunchbreak No security product is magic. Each tool is designed to protect your data under certain circumstances and given certain constraints. Full Hard Drive Encryption is a great tool, but you have to understand its limitations. It only protects your data when your computer is powered down. When you are using your computer, your data is accessible, as it obviously must be, since you are using it.

Full Hard Drive Encryption, when used properly, is extremely effective at protecting your data. Research has shown that it is becoming a challenge for law enforcement (Research team finds disk encryption foils law enforcement efforts) and that the only avenue to recover data is by compelling the owner to divulge their encryption key. This is becoming an area of law in the United States with regards to 5th Amendment Protections. (Prosecutors Demand Laptop Password in Violation of Fifth Amendment, Take the 5th? Not With Encrypted Hard Drives, Says Fed Judge, and Does the Fifth Amendment Protect Your Encryption Key? provide some information on the topic.) This will be an interesting intersection of technology and law in the coming years. You can see the beginnings of this showing up in the recent Supreme Court case United States v. Jones I talked about recently.

Back to Full Hard Drive Encryption. Memory attacks like those used by the Passware software are nothing new. Firewire is designed to allow direct memory access. I doubt the authors imagined it being used in this way, but the “Law of unintended consequences” certainly applies here. More information on this topic can be found in this very informative article: Physical memory attacks via Firewire/DMA - Part 1: Overview and Mitigation.

The lesson to be learned here is that when using security software (or any security product) it is critical that you understand the security tool and what it can and most importantly can’t protect against.

Find lines of attack that could goad Mr. Gingrich into angry responses and rally mainstream Republicans. Swarm Gingrich campaign events to rattle him. Have Mr. Romney drop his above-the-fray persona and carry the fight directly to his opponent, especially in two critical debates scheduled for the week.[1. Facing Second Loss to Gingrich, Romney Went on Warpath] Sentiments like this, hardly unique to the Romney campaign or to the Repuublican party, are stark evidence that the primary contests are reinforcing characteristics in our elected officials which really are not the skills our leaders need when (or if) they get elected. Leadership at the national executive level requires many qualities, but I think it is safe to say that politeness, diplomacy, and tact are among them. Does going around calling each other liars really show the skills that are needed to run our country?

I don’t really know whom to blame for this trend? The obvious answer is the politicians themselves, but frankly they are just giving us what we want. When you look at the candidates who might qualify as reserved, thoughtful, balanced (Jon Hunstman for example), they don’t get much traction in the media. So maybe the media is to blame? They are certainly a favorite target, even by the candidates themselves[2. GOP candidate Newt Gingrich criticizes CNN during South Carolina debate]. But again, they are driven by revenues and ratings are driven by viewers, and viewers like conflict. And conflict is easier to sustain and show with pithy, blunt, angry soundbites.

People are motivated by how they are rewarded. And I think that we, as voters, are rewarding the wrong skills. Regardless of what your political views are, I think everyone can agree that we want our leaders to be able to execute those views in the best way if they win their elections.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. [3. Albert Einstein] Clearly, we are not happy with most of our politicians[4. NBC/WSJ poll: Majority would vote out every member of Congress]. So why are we still voting for them and people who act like them?

Side Note: While I am using the Republicans to make my point here, I only do so because they are the only party having a meaningful primary this election cycle. I 100% believe that the same thing would happen with the Democrats. A pox on both our houses.

The Supreme Court just ruled in United States v. Jones that the placement of a GPS tracking device on an individuals automobile without a warrant is a violation of the 4th Amendment. The New York Times does a good job with an overview of the case here: Justices Say GPS Tracker Violated Privacy Rights.

I am quite pleased with the result, but I found the opinion itself to be particularly interesting. First is that while the Opinion of the Court was only joined by 5 of the 9 justices (Justices Scalia, Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, and Sotomayor), the other 4 (Justices Alito, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan) concurred in the judgement, but differed in reasoning. So the Judgement was decided unanimously, which I think is a positive sign for future privacy cases.

Specifically I think this section from Justice Sotomayor’s concussing opinion is worth reading (emphasis mine).

More fundamentally, it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties. E.g., Smith, 442 U. S., at 742; United States v. Miller, 425 U. S. 435, 443 (1976). This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks. People disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellu- lar providers; the URLs that they visit and the e-mail addresses with which they correspond to their Internet service providers; and the books, groceries, and medi- cations they purchase to online retailers. Perhaps, as JUSTICE ALITO notes, some people may find the “tradeoff” of privacy for convenience “worthwhile,” or come to acceptthis “diminution of privacy” as “inevitable,” post, at 10, and perhaps not. I for one doubt that people would accept without complaint the warrantless disclosure to the Government of a list of every Web site they had visited in the last week, or month, or year. But whatever the societal expectations, they can attain constitutionally protectedstatus only if our Fourth Amendment jurisprudence ceases to treat secrecy as a prerequisite for privacy. I would not assume that all information voluntarily disclosed to some member of the public for a limited purpose is, for that reason alone, disentitled to Fourth Amendment protection. See Smith, 442 U. S., at 749 (Marshall, J., dissenting) (“Privacy is not a discrete commodity, possessed absolutely or not at all. Those who disclose certain facts to a bank or phone company for a limited business purpose need not assume that this information will be released to other persons for other purposes”); see also Katz, 389 U. S., at 351-352 (“[W]hat [a person] seeks to preserve as private,even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected”). This is quite a good thing in my opinion.

Obviously this is not the last time electronic information and privacy will be making its way to the Supreme Court, but I am hopeful based on the opinion of the Court that some of the Justices will look at the larger implications.

As a side note, I find it amusing that, as a self-declared originalist uses the Katz v. United States decision so prominently in the opinion as that case greatly expanded the reach of 4th Amendment protections, aruably beyond the original meaning.

My friend Terry posted a talk, Place, Space, and the Process of Emancipation on a 19th Century Plantation in St. Mary’s City, Maryland, he did for the Society for Historical Archaeology 45th annual Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology where he talked about the transition from slavery to freedom in St. Mary’s City in Maryland. I will not paraphrase his talk because Terry is smarter than I am and I would not do it justice; you should watch it.

One of the central themes he discussed was the distinction between space, which he defined as a “geographical area” and place, an “area with cultural or social meanings for certain groups.”

This spawned a short twitter conversation (twit-versation?)

[tweet https://twitter.com/#!/gothmog/status/159720437520138242]

[tweet https://twitter.com/#!/brockter/status/159721159124987904]

While people may metaphorically refer to modern day workplaces as “slavery” which it most certainly is not, I think that the modern workplace does offer a certain analogy to slaves and their quarters. Workers are in an environment which is owned by another entity who has a certain level of power over them. The employer to a large degree controls the environment, from building to furniture to temperature. The employer also can impose rules on the employees as to how they may make their work spaces “there own.”

I have long been a proponent in the technology field for small group offices (2-3 people). While there are clearly benefits in solitude and camaraderie in such a space, I never contemplated until now that offices also allow for the opportunity to most easily customize a workers area to make it much more of a space rather than just a place. Modern office theory for technology workers has shifted from the standard office through the awful stage of cubicals to the newest idea of having “open workspaces.” This seems to lower the opportunity for an individual space although it has been counterbalanced by the loosening of rules of what is appropriate when personalizing your workspace.

How this balances out is a personal matter; I know for me, I prefer the solitude of offices and would prefer that to the open culture where the only solitude you can get is between headphones. I have found that spending the time to make my office more personal through pictures, artwork, desk toys helps me be more relaxed than I would be in a more sterile environment.

[tweet https://twitter.com/#!/gothmog/status/159722663324041216]

I think it is a logical conclusion to draw that the more an individual is able to identify their workspace as a personal space, the happier they will be. It also seems logical to conclude that a happier worker is a more productive worker. Obviously happy involves more than just ones workspace, but it is a factor.

I don’t have any empirical evidence of this theory, but if anyone wants to get a PhD on this topic, I will gladly accept a small footnote thanking me for the idea.

I think everyone who reads this knows that I am a bit of a security wonk, so I read with interest an article about the latest breaches to corporate security and loss of customer data: Even Big Companies Cannot Protect Their Data.

“It’s disturbing,” Ms. Scott said in an interview on Monday. “Companies have to do a better job protecting our privacy. You would think companies like eBay and Amazon have the financial backing and wherewithal to take the proper security measures.” But the article seems to take the question to be “why can’t the companies do better.” I think that is the wrong question. The question is “why_ won’t_ the companies do better.” And I will modestly put forward what I think is the simple answer.

There is no monetary incentive to do so. (yet)

The parenthetical is my optimism that at some point it will be worth it to do it. I am not saying that there are not egregious technical lapses in many pieces of software, but solving the technical problems behind securing data is possible. How expensive it will be is unknown at this point, but I think it is absolutely true that at this moment it is cheaper for the companies to not fix it right now.

Security is a balancing act between risk and reward. In today’s market, the risks (and associated PR flak and monetary costs) are not large enough that the merchants are interested in investing more money to fix the problems. This is partly a result of the current system that the costs associated with most fraud is absorbed by the credit card companies or possibly the insurance companies if they are large enough.

Until those organizations say “enough is enough” and force merchants to invest (which will then filter down to the software companies), the merchants don’t have an incentive to do better.