Okay... evil-wire is more or less back up with cleanup work still to be done. Contact me if you want your account back online.
To whoever hacked the box: yes, I was lazy about updating the ssh exploit. No, it was not cool to delete user dirs like you did. Knock before you ask- odds are we would have just given you an account.
In completely different news, sequioa voting
is now the second electronic voting firm to raise doubts about the legitmacy of American elections...
And happy Halloween, Riana made front page of slashdot :)
One of the continuing problems in mining and making bets off of experimental data, particularly in the fields of finance, quantum mechanics, and to a certain degree inductive reasoning in genetics and proteomics, is evaluating probability based not just on a probability mass function that is event based, but also takes into account the belief of the certainty of the events.
So, when you are statistically describing a situation, you have to take into to account the validity of your instrumentation, context, and history....
In other words, the answer to the question: "What is the most important part of the message" is "The name of the messenger".
I've been evaluating belief and context based probabilities for the purposes of building a trust/evaluation network for my client - who of course promptly rejected it. More specifically, 2 statistical models have been interesting me:
Dempster Shafer belief networks
and
Contextual Probability Theory (CPT)
Both of these basically take bayesian propositions one step further, although bayesian is still deeply rooted in classical probability.
Getting back to trust networks, I put forward this slightly academic suggestion to my client for the purposes of building a more useful trust/FOAF network on their site, akin to tribe.net or friendster but actually possibly useful. In our revised friendster, you could follow chains of propositions about other people, and making evaluations not based on beleif of your friend, but also beleif ABOUT your friend :).
Aghh... The internet seems to be annoyed with me.
I'm having one of those periods where the electronic fungus that grows in the much ignore bit bucket starts to crawl out and GLITCH.
In the past days, I've had:
- A rooted evil-wire.org box
- Annoying accounting, non electronic records and dealing with taxation.
- a superior court and and anal DMV retentive dmv that really want to make you pay $$$ or spend long long hours, threatening to revoke my license on violations that occured on a car I didn't even own.
- code projects piling up and then dropping off (sorry Haywire!)
- and finally, perhaps the most casually bizarre, this blog gets spammed by a perl script: going through all the comments and posting ads for viagra. As much as I am annoyed by the suptid commercialism, I can't help but feel that perhaps the spammers got the same sense of joy that taggers get when they hit a freeway overpass or that hard to reach location.
So the blog spam originated from mother Russia. I suppose in all fairness, I can't even really critisize the poor dude getting payed 40 rubles an hour making the post.
Regardless, if anyone ever encounters the following people, please take a photo for me so I know the face of these viagra vendors who so enjoyed my site:
Domain ID:D2680942-LRMS
Domain Name:SOMEVIAGRA.INFO
Created On:21-May-2003 16:23:37 UTC
Last Updated On:16-Aug-2003 06:58:05 UTC
Expiration Date:21-May-2004 16:23:37 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:R152-LRMS
Status:ACTIVE
Status:OK
Registrant ID:C3204467-LRMS
Registrant Name:Dao Dzin
Registrant Organization:Podnebesnaya Co.
Registrant Street1:Vrata 5-15
Registrant City:Moscow
Registrant State/Province:RF
Registrant Postal Code:125466
Registrant Country:RU
Registrant Phone:+7.7095181892
Registrant Email:dao@dzin.ch
Admin ID:C3204467-LRMS
Admin Name:Dao Dzin
Admin Organization:Podnebesnaya Co.
Admin Street1:Vrata 5-15
Admin City:Moscow
Admin State/Province:RF
Admin Postal Code:125466
Admin Country:RU
Admin Phone:+7.7095181892
Admin Email:dao@dzin.ch
Billing ID:C3204467-LRMS
Billing Name:Dao Dzin
Billing Organization:Podnebesnaya Co.
Billing Street1:Vrata 5-15
Billing City:Moscow
Billing State/Province:RF
Billing Postal Code:125466
Billing Country:RU
Billing Phone:+7.7095181892
Billing Email:dao@dzin.ch
Tech ID:C3204467-LRMS
Tech Name:Dao Dzin
Tech Organization:Podnebesnaya Co.
Tech Street1:Vrata 5-15
Tech City:Moscow
Tech State/Province:RF
Tech Postal Code:125466
Tech Country:RU
Tech Phone:+7.7095181892
Tech Email:dao@dzin.ch
Name Server:NS9.AUSSIEHOSTS.COM
Name Server:NS10.AUSSIEHOSTS.COM
Today, I got a juicer. Juicy Jack Lollipop and I went through mass veggies in one swoop:
I am feeling a fantastic body high from feeling like I just drank an entire salad bar. Next on hand is: mustard greens, beets, onion sprouts, sea vegetables...
I will also be attempting again to quit smoking, if at least for a week. There are 2 major points of addiction for me with smoking: the feeling in my sinuses, and the fact that there is no other legal drug in our society that you can get an instant rush from within a few seconds. The closest I have found to this is vasopressin, which is really only a stimulant because of the nasal mist form that you take it in. I am contemplating making a substitute stimulant hit for my next stage of nicotine withdrawal. Here's what I'm thinking:
1) Get a bottle of primatim mist or other nasal spray.
2) buy some liquid DMSO
3) pick some fresh gingko bilboa and juice.
4) add DMSO and gingko extract in spray bottle.
5) when feeling the urge for an ultra rapid pick-me-up, simply insert and snort.
There are, of course, a multitude of other stimulants (such as caffeine) that one could mix in... Although I'd be worried about the safety of it all. Then again, there appear to be people who do caffeine enemas so...
For the longest time in my life, I have consistenly voted third party. My vote has always gone traditionally to the Green or Liberatarian party (anybody but the 2 dominant parties). More and more, I am disgruntled, and particularly after the bush-gore elections I am forced to concede, that with exceptions, generally a vote for the third party, particularly in this day and age of rampant vote fraud, is a vote for the republicans. That's a bummer.
So who should I vote for this election? Camejo the green? Or should I place a vote against Arnie by swallowing all my radical beleifs and voting for Bustamante?
Along side with my disillusionment has paradoxically come revelations about my, and quite a few people's idea about the mathetmatics of representative democracy which may one day overcome my skepticism that consensual politics works: Everything you know about the vote is wrong.
I'm going to take this time to back a small but growing movement for Preferential Voting.
What is Preferential Voting (a variant endorsed by Camejo called Instant Runoff Voting was just voted into place in San Francisco)? Let's take the last presidential election, with 3 candidates in our current system:
- Bush
- Gore
- Nader
Let's say the majority of your voting populace- 60% - is progressive in nature. Your organic crusty weekend hippy crusty self and likeminded signifant other have convinced yourselves that living under a demagouge like Nader is better than the other 2 bastards. Your progressive neighbors, however is terrified of bush, and is willing to live some major compromises in life. A vote split has occured. Republicans, being christian or sellouts, are stupid. Stupidity, in the form of republican/christian dogma has one thing going for it, which is that they are UNIFIED. They are so willing to follow the party line, that they make DAMN sure a vote split doesn't occur on their side. So we have the following outcome:
- Bush: 40%
- Gore: 30%
- Nader: 30%
OOPS Bush won, even though a majority of people don't want him in!! And that is exactly what will probably get arnie and his anti-immigrant, pro-prison, anti-small business, native american treaty breaking ass into into office tomorrow (I'm hoping that by the day AFTER tomorrow I get to retract all my statements about this.
There are only 2 solutions to this.
1) Vote split the other side(s). Ross Perot did this in the 92 presidential elections. To split the vote, you need to set up another dummy candidate that will appeal to the walmart going masses. Since the "right" seems to like status quo, I would guess someone who has a common man bible belt kind of appeal to siphon off votes from the republican favorite. Under the current American electoral landscape, this seems to be the ONLY way the progressive vote will win.
2) throw out our election system. In comes preferential voting. This time, when you go to the ballots, you see the following:
Rank order the candidates with 1 being the most favored, and
3 being the least favored.
- Bush
- Gore
- Nader
Well, this is an easy choice:
- Bush (3)
- Gore (2)
- Nader (1)
Your more conservative neighbor who still detests republicans may vote:
- Bush (3)
- Gore(1)
- Nader (2)
Now when the votes are tallied, instead of a purely addtive tally, we get a matrix of preferential combinations. At this point, there are actually many methods of tallying the matrix. If we were to follow my personal favortie, pairwise selection, we would compare every candidate against each other and do a global rank order.
What this means for the end user of the voting system, that even if they want Nader to win, their vote won't be wasted and will be effectively transfered to Gore if Bush starts winning.
Indeed, there has been research indicating that current voting system is basically mathematically guaranteed at best to elect in the most mediocre candidate, and at worst vote in the least preferred candidate overall.
Why hasn't this been used before in democracy? Unless we have computers, the matrix tallying becomes too computationally intense to do by hand, and it wasn't until recently that we have the capability to make such decisions.
FairVote and AccurateDemocracy are 2 great resources uncovering a fascinating amount of information about the mathematics and social systems behind electoral politics and consensus making.
So what does this mean to you and I? It will take a long time for governments to adopt. However, we as actors inside of our own organizations can start beating our own deadlocks by the use of Pref Voting, Condercet, and IRV tools. Debian is currently deploying devotee - a preferentially voting system for their own internal politics. Rob Lamphier published his own overhaul of the voting system in perl.
The next step is to put Diebold and their Unamerican ass out of business. We as a digital community need to get the crypto and security, and as importantly, the deployment and adoption of the voting alternatives developed and out there! I'm putting on long list of "to do" long term project for a voting system for shareholder meetings and activst groups possibly based off of devotee if anyone has any input or wants to join in reinventing consensus.
I've finally expanded the collection of Brazilian Hip Hop, with help from Tropikao. Download and share! Finding these tracks in the Northern Hemisphere is rare!
The culture of the Brazilian favelas (slum cities), is a rich one. Jennifer Roth Gordon wrote a great and accessible dissertation (although academic ;) on the Slang of Rio. Her writing gives an interesting outsider's snapshot into daily life in the favelas as an incident.
If all of this piques your interest, and you feel like watching the Brazilian equivalent of Boyz 'n the hood, I highly reccomend going out and finding a pirated version of Cidade De Deus- a fast and intensely produced movie based on a true story of Rio Drug Clan wars....
