Voting System Proposal

It seems that there is a recent emphasis on “character” in the election. Unfortunately, character can be faked with some acting and campaign management. To understand how the candidates will perform in office we need to look at their past accomplishments and failures. Public records show the vote history for the candidates and all it takes is a little bit of research to see how the candidates have voted.

But people aren’t interested in looking at data; they are more interested in how much candidates spend on their haircut or who looks more “confident.” I imagine that before radio or television existed and the only news source was the newspaper, candidates would have stood on their issues alone. The vast majority of the population would not have seen the candidates in person and would have to have focused on the issues each candidate presented. Maybe it’s time we go back to those days with a ballot only containing issues.

In addition, why not throw in an intelligence test geared towards the issues and use the score to weigh the vote. If companies can use intelligence in their hiring decisions, why can’t the government use it in the voting process? The impact of a wrong decision is much greater.

Posted in Musings, Politics | View Comments

TV Commercials

It may be my memory but it seems that TV commericals have been getting longer and longer as compared to a decade ago. It would be very interesting to see a plot of the length of the average commercial break over the past few decades – I think we’ll see that the length of the average commercial break has drastically increased.

In addition, it seems as if there are no commerical breaks between consecutive TV shows anymore. Clearly this is a way to keep us from turning off the TV and doing something productive with our lives.

Does anyone have any thoughts?

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Internet Passwords: Some Advice

After my previous post on the lack of privacy, I feel obligated to give some advice regarding internet passwords in order to maintain the privacy that we do have.

1. Use different passwords for different sites

You should have at least 3 different passwords:

1. E-mail Account

This account controls all your other accounts so protect it as much as you can. All other accounts can be accessed or reset if someone has access to your email.

2. Bank/Financial Accounts

These control your money so use a different password for these than for the rest of your accounts. In addition, you may want to keep your credit card account passwords separate from your bank accounts.

3. “Fun” Account

These may not be vital to your survival (unless you are a facebook addict) so a password compromise here may not affect you too much. In addition, these sites may not store your password as securely as the bank accounts so you don’t want this password being the same as the other accounts.

A good way to generate passwords is to contain some sort of “base” and add some prefixes or suffixes to it in order to come up with the password for the various sites. For example, I can have my base password be “orange”. For financial sites my password will be “orangeFIN22″, for my email it will be “orangeE33″, etc. Then you don’t have to remember an entirely different set of passwords yet they are distinct enough to avoid compromising all your accounts with a stolen password.

2. Don’t trust web sites that are able to send you your password over email

If a website is able to tell you what your password is, it means it is storing it in the database as either the password itself or through a transformation that is reversible (a becomes b, b becomes c, ..). This means that the site knows what your password is and can be easily accessed by employees of the site or anyone that has access to the database.

The proper way to handle user passwords is to hash it (one way map) immediately to some obfuscated characters and store those in the database along with an additional field that ensures each row is hashed differently. Then when a user logs in, the site will do this one way map and compare the result against the value in the database; omly if they match is the user logged in.

If you are interested in hashing, take a look at http://bretm.home.comcast.net/~bretm/hash/

Posted in General, Privacy | View Comments

Privacy in the Digital Age

With so many people joining social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, it’s becoming harder and harder to protect your personal information. If one of your friends happens to add a host of different facebook apps, those apps will have access to his friends’ (your) information. There is nothing you can do to stop this unless you either remove all your friends or create very limited profiles.

In addition, people have come to expect to be able to add you as a friend after they’ve met you and rejecting them may be construed as anti-social. Imagine a recruiter not being able to look at your information on LinkedIn or a potential date not being able to look at your interests or photos on facebook – you will be missing out on opportunities.

How is one supposed to play this game where you want your information both hidden and shared? My solution is to embrace this lack of privacy: integrate yourself into as many social networks as you can, start a blog, post on various forums, publish your photos on Flickr, and so forth. By being famous (if only on the internet) you will eliminate a lot of the adverse effects of having your information public. You will have enough of a community to support you in case anything goes wrong and you can stop worrying about your information being shared.

How often does Bill Gates worry about his identity being stolen?

Posted in Musings, Privacy, Technology | View Comments

Interesting Perl Behavior

I ran into this problem a while back and wanted to share it. It was a bit unintuitive but documentd so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by the results. Hopefully this will help someone else avoid this pitfall.

It looks as if declaring a variable with the “my” statement but then guarded with an “if” statement causes the scope of the variable to be global – note that the “use strict ‘vars’;” pragma does not give an error in this case.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict ‘vars’;

sub foo{
my $val = 0 if (0);
$val = 1 unless defined($val);
print “Val: $val\n”;
$val = 2;
}

foo();
foo();

The output of this call gives:
Val: 1
Val: 2

Although the expected result would seem to be:
Val: 1
Val: 1

Using Google, I found the following nugget from perlsyn:

NOTE: The behaviour of a my statement modified with a statement modifier conditional or loop construct (e.g. my $x if … ) is undefined. The value of the my variable may be undef, any previously assigned value, or possibly anything else. Don’t rely on it. Future versions of perl might do something different from the version of perl you try it out on. Here be dragons.
http://perldoc.perl.org/perlsyn.html#Statement-Modifiers

Posted in Perl, Programming | View Comments

Don’t Judge Words by their Author

A common idiom is “Don’t judge a book by its cover” but I think that in this modern age this needs to rehashed into “Don’t judge words by their author.”

How often do we look at the author before we read an article or blog post? And how does this impact the way we absorb it? Studies have been done[1] to show that the same words coming from two different people, one a professor and one an average Joe, are interpreted differently: the professor is trusted while the average Joe is not. This can be expanded to any source of information, anything from a book to a YouTube video. In the past, these sources of information were concentrated – not everyone could write a book, but now anyone can start a blog to spread their thoughts and opinions.

In such a world, it’s becoming increasingly important to come up with our own opinions and facts and applying a “trusted” filter may just be the shortcut we developed to not actually have to think about what we read. We need to be aware that knowing who the author is exposes the author’s biases but it also creates biases in the reader.

Try reading something before looking at who wrote it and see if changes how you read. If you can control yourself, don’t even look for the author after reading the piece.

[1] I’ll try to look these up and update the post.

Posted in General, Musings | View Comments

Not in New York Anymore

A nice change of scenery for the long weekend. It’s amazing how quiet the nights are when you are not in the city.

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Blog is moving!

So I am porting this blog over from wordpress.com to my own local hosting. Please bear with me and I’ll hopefully have more things to read soon.

Edit: I did a rough job changing the dates in the database so the posts should all have the actual post date now.

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Brainteasers and Interviews

I’ve recently been reading some articles opposing the use of brainteasers during interviews on the grounds that they are unfair and some people have difficulty thinking on the spot. You can make the same argument for any part of the interview process and I feel that brainteasers may even attract intelligent employees.

I can come up with a few good reasons to use brainteasers during an interview. One, you are able to determine how well the interviewee thinks as well as their problem solving ability. In addition, if the interviewee does end up getting a job offer, he or she may be more likely to accept it since it was a challenging interview and getting the job feels like an accomplishment – feels better when you have to earn something than when it falls into your lap. The fact that you even asked a brain teaser shows intelligence on your part and you want to attract people who want to work with other smart people, instead of being the big fish in a small pond.

Ideally, you would want to find some brainteasers that have multiple ways of solution so you are able to identify how each of the interviewees thinks but I think a variety of brain teasers can achieve the same effect. Below are few good questions/brainteasers I enjoy.

1. What was the last book you’ve read? What’s your favorite book? (Not a brainteaser but I believe a good question nonetheless)
2. You have a lighter and 2 ropes that are non-uniform. It takes a rope 1 hour to burn from one end to the other end. How do you measure 45 minutes?
3. You have 3 pairs of (x,y) points that determine a triangle. How can you determine if this triangle contains the origin? (http://projecteuler.net/)
4. Which is larger, 48736^95934 or 44390^96771? (http://projecteuler.net/)
5. How do you split a cake of nonuniform size between 2 people? Can you expand this to any number of people?

Feel free to comment or email me if you are unsure how to solve a particular problem.

Posted in General, Interview | View Comments

Printers no longer come with cables?

Since when did printers stop coming with the cables? Does this have anything to do with printers being available in USB form and the manufacturers suddenly assuming that everyone already has USB cables? Or is it some agreement that they have with merchants that requires me to pay $20 for a 6′ cable. Some quick price look ups do show that the standard printer cables cost around the same as USB cables so if they were able to afford to bundle printer cables before USB, they should be able to bundle USB cables now.

Does anyone else find this ridiculous?

Edit: My father tells me that they never came with cables and that I am misinformed. He’s probably right since I wouldn’t trust my childish memory with regard to such things. In any case, printers should come with cables.

Posted in Business, Musings | View Comments