Entries from March 2007 ↓

The American Red Cross could finance itself for decades by selling your DNA information.

This evil idea comes as a cautionary, evil notion.  The plan is sound.  The plan breaks no laws, but breaks the social conventions.

Consider that the American Red Cross (ARC)  now requires positive identification before donating blood.  There isn’t really any explanation outside “keeping the blood supply safe”.  Consider the reasons why the ARC might want to permanently keep a sample from every blood donation tagged with the positive identification.  For example, a “Really Nasty Syndrome”  could cause a national health epidemic severe enough to go through the records of all blood donors to track the spread of this disease and identify the carriers.  The American Red Cross could defend the practice of keeping the blood samples, and keeping the practice secret until such an epidemic.

Now as time goes on, more information about hereditary diseases can be gleaned from a DNA sample.  It will become profitable for an insurance company to use a DNA sample to gauge risks before insuring individuals.  If an insurance company found out about this freely given repository of DNA., it would happily make large donations to the Red Cross to access it.  Nothing illegal would take place.

Hopefully, this evil idea will never come to pass.

Problem:  Health care quality varies widely, especially in psychology.

Solution:  Secret Shopppers on a regular basis.

The world of psychological care is an odd one.  Years ago, the Rosenhan Experiment showed that voluntary psychological evaluations for someone who was fine outside of hearing the word ‘thud’ in their ears were committed.  Later, this was repeated and the experimenter was prescribed psychoactive drugs.   I personally went to several care people, all of which pushed drugs.

Imagine you are an HMO, charged with keeping health care costs managed for a set of the population.  It would be in your best interest to hire a couple of people to go for initial evaluations.  They could even keep the classic symptom, “thud” once per day.  If drugs are offered and prescribed, this tells you that the psychologist is taking the incorrect path, and one that is more expensive to boot.  By removing these incompetent professionals from your pool, you lower your average health costs.

It could be harder to do in other cases.  Sending a person with a real problem to a dozen different doctors may yield information, but it is work to standardize the process.

Problem:  People tailgate me.

Solution:  I can file complaints with rear mounted tail cameras.

I live in a congested area with a constant inflow of new drivers.  Many have not figured out this concept of following distance, and I often have large cars following me by less than ten feet.  If I brake, they have about a quarter second to brake with me or hit me.

How about making rear mounted tail cameras.  I press a button, the current speed, the license plate, the driver, and enough general road in the back to handle excuses.  Playing the wave form and printouts of GPS would confirm the speed, make the timestamp and location stick.  They tailgated.  I have a camera.    I can file a complaint.

This works.  The right people are caught.  If our law system were good enough, it would be an excellent idea.

“A New Way to Look at Networking” by Van Jacobson

This is great video on the history of voice and TCP/IP networking. Van Jacobson shows the telephone network solved the problems of its day and framed out thinking. He then shows how TCP/IP packet switching solved more problems and framed our thinking again. He then suggests we should be thinking about a data centric view of networking, and that our problems warrant another generation of networking. Then the talk falls down.

[00:00]

Van Jacobson’s resume is impressive: he solved many of the Internet congestion problems, worked on the MBONE, wrote early whiteboard software, and generally knows his packets.

[07:00] History of Telecommunications, the Phone System

The telephone system, Ma Bell, emphasized wires and connecting wires to each other. A telephone number is just a program for which wires to connect to build a path, committing each segment before the next segment is parsed. Reliability was enforced by a centralized architecture with extremely reliable components. The pipes were smart because the end points were dumb. This view of the world really did work for phone conversations and got wires pulled everywhere.

[17:20] History of Telecommunications, the Packet Generation

In about 1964, Paul Baran and Don Davies publiched a paper on breaking data into small packets and passing them from link to link in a communications system that could be less than fully interconnected. The paper was denounced by all, and the ARPANet was built anyway. At first, this looked like an inefficient way to use the wires already in place courtesy of the telephone generation. With practice, it proved useful.

[24:53] CateNet and TCP/IP (1971 paper, 1977 demo) improve the Packet Generation

ARPANet worked, and by the early 1970’s there were a dozen incompatible packet switched networks. Vint Cerf and Bob ? from Stanford took the viewpoint that only the endpoints mattered, not the topology of the networks. A common encapsulation and addressing scheme suffice to concatenate networks using the encapsulation and addressing only at thenetwork edges. They demonstrated moving bits from packet radio, through satelites, telephone lines, and other networks. Bits were bits, and reliability *increases* exponentially with system size. No path set-ups, no scheduling issues; just an address.

[31:10] The Success Catastrophe of TCP/IP Packet Generation.

The TCP/IP data model works for conversations between computers and has made a world rich in devices, connections, and information. The challenges of firewalls, VPNs, ad-hoc synchronization, and NATs are symptoms of the success and of changing problems. The Internet is binary; you are connected with a global address that lasts in the minutes or hours or you are not. We now face problems with many machines per devices, and those devices are moving between networks quickly.

[38:25] The Data Generation; a coming generation based on finding and replicating data.

Almost all requests today are for named blocks of data. Downstream switches are often processing many copies of the same video stream. Radio based networks target individual receivers by broadcasting the same data to all and having most ignore it. The TCP/IP protocols are based on one-to-one conversations between computers; we should research fetching and caching data.

New data chunks would include validation hashes, providence hashes, sequence information, and a degree of permanance. Every cachable device would be a vehicle for data.

[44:53] The descent into unorganized ideas.

That said, the talk descends into unorganized ideas. There is a short thought demonstration of fetching the NYTimes headline with validation and providence hashes. There are complaints about lack of multicasting; good things to say about BitTorrent and SnakeBite; ideas of moving QoS to the endpoints and progating back to the core; requests for fast set up times and for alternatives to DSL; wishes to have cached repositories in the local area; instant PKI and webs of trust beating certificate authorities; and a host of complaints about our current infrastructure.

Most of these ideas about data centric networking are not well thought out, which may the point of the talk.

So my son has cool shoes. For the elite among us, meaning those under six years of age, the option exists of purchasing shoes that *flash*. Walking in twilight, these shoes thrust moving red lights into the eyes of distracted drivers. They enliven play with light.

Today’s idea is simple. Let me be four year old. Or at least buy the shoes.

On the easy side, use the simple piezo generator, capacitor, and LED arrangement common in the shoes today. Flash the word “SEXY” or “PLAYA” or whatever on the shoes. On the more complex side, how about giving me a better LED array? Let me spell out words with my shoes.

The first way would invovle cute tricks with motion detectors and persistence of vision. I could wear a jacket that spelled out messages when I waved my arm quickly. An alternative to yelling across a crowded theatre. I could have gesture specific messages. For example, my shoes could light up “TIGER” when I bounce, “SEXY” when I do my pretty girl dance, or maybe something not standard.

Ah, for products to buy.

Lightning Talk on my Google Summer of Code by Rok Zendler

Rok Zendler describes his summer internship project:  creating automated unit tests of Drupal. Drupal is a PHP based, LAMP architecture, content manager used by non-profits and various other websites. Rok created a web interface for submitting a patch set to some Drupal project. His system then creates a new Drupal site, applies the submitted patches, runs unit tests, and provides a report. This provides a sanity check to submitted patches.

Rok could be a better speaker, could use fonts that are readable and large, and be a more ambitious.

 Advanced Python (or Understanding Python) by Thomas Wouters

Thomas Wouters speaks with a great signal to noise ratio. He guides by groking both Python and which bits of Python confuse learners. An advanced programmer will love his short code snippets. An intermediate Python programmer will appreciate the clarity in which he covers topics. A beginner will also appreciate the ‘Understanding Python’ section.

You may want to use this video more as reference than a single experience.

‘Understanding Python’ explains the cohesive and consistent rules covering all the scoping rules, modules, definitions, and object rules. Much of the rest of lecture covers a variety of topics, mostly related to special classes. I find this a good reference lecture to get the two minute overview of a particular topic.

“Get you program, can’t tell your decorator from your generator without a program.”
0:00; ‘Understanding Python’
0:17; Details about object lifecycle and implementation.
0:27, Iterators and Generators.
0:33, Decorators
0:40 Special Class Hooks, including New-style 2.2 classes (0:38); Descriptors (0:40), Properties (0:41), Classmethods, staticmethod (0:43), __slots__ (0:47), __new__ actual constructor (0:48).
0:51 Metaclasses
1:01 Multiple Inheritance
1:05 Unicode

Keep this link in your reference folder.
Have an excellent day! — Charles Merriam