… Mr. Bush said Mr. Kerry had been rated “the most liberal member of the United States Senate.”
“And he chose a fellow lawyer who is the fourth-most liberal member of the United States Senate,” Mr. Bush went on. …
– New York Times
Piffle!
This illustration shows one dot for each senator in the current Senate. [...]
“Groupthink” appeared a lot in the coverage of the recent congresional commission reports. I hadn’t heard that term for 20 years; which sent me off to see from whence it came. Irving Janis’s work on fiascos and decision making apparently. Why did it fall out of common usage? Why’s [...]
Joe’s privacy erodes when two or more parties conspire to merge their model of him together. To frustrate this we have a design principle: avoid handing out a unique identifier. If the library and the video store both index their records by my national id number then the only barrier to [...]
As outlined in this model one way to look at the identity problem is that information about a user flows out from their activities and then is passed - behind their back so to speak - to third parties that then aggregate models of the user. Those third parties then sell those heuristically built [...]
Often when I encounter tech-savvy folks and I mention that I spend a lot of my time working on the identity problem they mention FOAF. FOAF, or Friend of a Friend, for those unfamiliar is a spec for how to write down a mess of information about a person. It uses XML, [...]
The simple business model for all businesses in the identity space:
The identity business resides inside the cloud labeled “magic happens.” Identity business fulfill demand that comes from web sites. They only indirectly serve users. The thrives if it can generate sufficient magic to satisfy the web site owner. He, [...]
The marvelously clueful Jon Udell writes about the return of hailstorm like systems. One line caught my eye.
“Re-entering the basic facts each time perpetuates an illusion of privacy. Yet the reality, for many of us, is that these facts are public.”
Yes! “The illusion of privacy.” Very nice.
But .. four additional things too.
1. [...]
I learned years and years ago that you absolutely must clear the bytes in a file block before saving it to disk. If you don’t then sooner or later you’ll have a customer complain that your application revealed company secrets! This happens because they deleted the file with the salesmen bonuses in it [...]
Some people pick a question, usually in graduate school, and then spend the rest of their life puzzling out an answer to that question. Lately I’ve been reading some of Irving Janis‘ work on decesion making. The question he seems to have asked early on was “How did these smart people [...]
I’m am so excited to discover that the Victoria and Albert collections are moving online. These photos of the collection are just wonderful!
Ivory, silk ribbon, printed paper and grease (mutton fat and tallow). This is a device 1850-1860 used by women to keep score in archery.
Grease in the acorn helped the fingers slide [...]
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