If you don’t have anything nice to say about anyone, come sit by me.
– Dorothy Parker (as repeated by Truman Capote)
Archives for 2014
Hells to the yes
Those who know my stuff know that Susie Madrak speaks for me here.
I get really pissed when armchair prognosticators “explain” to me that it doesn’t matter, the GOP has gerrymandered away any chance of victory. Horse hockey: Gerrymandering only works when Dems have their usual tepid turnout. If we turn out, we win.
And here’s the simplest way to do it: Call every Democrat you know the weekend before the election, and remind them how important it is to vote. Then call and remind them the night before.
A wise man might have once said that there are two kinds of people in the world: people who think there are two kinds of people in the world and people who don’t. In the reactions to my earlier thoughts about shame and persuasion in politics many who resisted the most also seemed more likely to see ‘them’ as an undifferentiated mass neither worth the effort nor likely to respond to it. I disagree. Why does that matter? It matters to me because I think that believing the game is fixed, that people are fixed, makes an excellent excuse to check out and snipe from the margins (common synonym: blogging).
It takes effort to get your friends registered and voting, to call your Congressperson and write your local paper and perhaps most of all to talk with a supposed political ‘enemy’ on their level without antagonism, shaming or cheap shots. Sure some districts will never turn blue and some people have a head of reinforced concrete. If you want to believe that describes them all or even a significant plurality then go ahead and check out.
For everyone else I will point out the one thing in the Ferguson protests that freaked FOX News most of all: a table registering voters.
Got the car, got the AM radio on
I often find driving stressful, because either I’m running late or I’m lost or the driving conditions are bad. Sometimes I feel like a coked-out Ray Liotta, running from the helicopters with “Monkey Man” and “Jump Into The Fire” (what I didn’t know until this day is that that’s Harry Nilsson) playing. Other times, when I’m in a better mood I imagine I’m Bruce Willis singing along with “Flowers on the Wall” (and hitting that big bass note in “kangaroo”).
Unlike many of you hip young gunslingers, I just listen to reg’lar radio in my car, no Sirius or Spotify. I like when Maggie Strickland of WLGZ says, after “I Wish” fades out, “I wish I was still on vacation” or whatever.
What’s your favorite scene from a movie that involves music and driving? Bonus points if the music is on the radio in the scene, though I’m not sure that was the case with Goodfellas.
Also too: what’s your favorite song that mentions listening to the radio in the car?
Update. And what’s your favorite experience of listening to the radio in the car? I guess mine are one day hearing “Papa Was A Rolling Stone” (with that great intro) while I was stuck in traffic near the Verrazano Narrows bridge and another day hearing a Warren Zevon block (“Carmelita”, “Poor Pitiful Me”, and I forget what else) while heading out for vacation on I-90 near Rochester.
Cole, Don’t Be Such A Prude
The "don't take naked pics if you don't want them online" argument is the "she was wearing a short skirt" of the web. Ugh.
— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) September 1, 2014
Unlike Cole, I think this is pretty close to right. These celebrities who had their cloud data leaked were young people in long-distance relationships. I was young once, and I was in a LDR, and if we had smartphones, you’d be damn sure that we’d have been sending naked pictures back and forth. As far as I’m concerned, that’s natural and expected behavior for people in those kinds of relationships.
So, I’m not looking at this as some failure of self-control, but rather a failure of security at Apple, and a general failure of the cloud providers to give users a clear picture of what they’re storing online from their phones.
This breach appears different from other recent celebrity “hacks” in that it used a near-zero-day vulnerability in an Apple cloud interface. Instead of using social engineering or some low-tech research to gain control of the victims’ cloud accounts, the attacker basically bashed in the front door—and Apple didn’t find out until the attack was over. While an unusual, long, convoluted password may have prevented the attack from being successful, the only real defense against this assault was never to put photos in Apple’s cloud in the first place. Even Apple’s two-factor authentication would not have helped, if the attack was the one now being investigated.
Because Apple and other devices automatically upload so much to the cloud, by default—including full phone backups, which, if an account is compromised, could be downloaded by an attacker onto another device—these personal cloud services are particularly dangerous. Their usability in terms of content management is poor at best—does anybody really know what’s sitting in Apple’s or Google’s data stores from their phones? This, combined with ongoing threats like carefully-crafted phishing attacks and large-volume password cracking, makes it especially hard to protect mobile data in a world where everything on your phone is already on the Internet, protected only by your login credentials.
I have a Google device, and the rest of my family has Apple devices. Apple pushes cloud backup harder than Google, and from what I can tell, Apple’s cloud backup is less predictable than Google’s, but both of them don’t have a real clear way to opt certain pictures or videos out of the cloud. Google has an “incognito mode” on its Chrome browser – what’s needed here is an “incognito mode” for pictures and videos. Images taken in this mode would stay only on the device, and only be sent to places the phone owner sends them. If some jilted lover releases a picture to the Internet, we can blame the judgment of the person who sent the picture to an undeserving asshole. But when some hacker can get at pictures that were never meant to be anywhere other than someone’s personal device, then the blame for that should rest squarely with Apple.
Ordering in Swahili at a French restaurant in Seoul
Bill Gardner at the Incidental Economist laments the state of electronic medical records today and contrasts it to a vertically integrated data exchange system that he used last week.
the car has been worked on at several dealerships in several cities. And of course, I have no clear memory of what I’ve gotten done when.
No problem. The car has a VIN number. Dealerships are independent enterprises, but Toyota has an international database that has all the service records from all the dealerships. The service manager and I are looking at the records in seconds and we quickly make a decision about the needed service.
This is interesting only because I can’t do this for my body….
The engineering and legal work required to make electronic health records interconnect is harder than the engineering required to connect Toyota dealerships. Nevertheless, it is seriously stupid
I was able to speak with a medical informatics person for a while about this post and what she said was that right now most electronic medical record (EMR)systems are pretty good within their own silo. If you, as a patient, stay within one EMR ecosystem, the results are pretty decent. Providers can see trends, they can see case notes, they can see allergies, and they can see any idiosyncracies about your medical history fairly easily. Too many of the systems are still mainly focused on data management and not provider-patient interaction or even provider-computer interactions so too many appointments have the doc looking at a screen too much. However, the back-end of any individual system on the market that has more than a couple major hospital groups using it is reasonably solid.
The problem arises when you as a patient switch between environments. If your primary care provider uses System 1 and your cardiologist just got bought out by a hospital group that uses its own in-house EMR system, the odds that those two systems will talk well with each other is slightly better than a Swahili speaking customer getting a perfect coq au vin in Seoul. It is possible, just highly unlikely, that the righ set of crosswalks and translation protocol will be in place between the two systems. Some of the larger systems will have rough translation protocols in place between systems, and there are developmental efforts to put a translation layer above a variety of EMR bases, but those systems are not widely deployed.
The big problem is simple for Toyota. They keep everything vertically integrated and they make it a requirement that all the dealers in their network buy the same piece of software with the same protocols, the same data dictionaries, and the same agreed upon sets of meaning. From here, it is just a nasty database management problem, and realistically, it is not too nasty as there is a unique key (the VIN) that already has external meaning. EMRs in this country don’t have shared meaning, they don’t have shared data dictionaries, they don’t have shared formatting (for example,how do you write a date, as I can think of at least seven valid ways, three of which produce major screwups in other format systems), and they don’t share the same protocol.
The VA gets around this problem because they are effectively in the same boat as Toyota. Kaiser gets around this problem as they are a mini-NHS segregated from most of the US medical system. Big players that own their own hospitals, doctors and insurance companies get around this problem as they can keep most of their patients in the same environment. But crossing networks and getting the systems to talk to each other is an ugly problem.
Ordering in Swahili at a French restaurant in SeoulPost + Comments (73)
DC-Area Meet-Up, TODAY (Tuesday 2 September)
From commentor Elizabelle:
Don’t be nude. Murphy’s could have a problem with that. Shirt and shoes, at a minimum.
DC Area Balloon Juice meetup: Tuesday, Sept. 2nd
Please come drink and maybe dine with us at Murphy’s Irish Pub in Old Town Alexandria, in honor of the visiting Siubhan Duinne.** 7:00 to whenever.
Murphy’s Alexandria • 713 King Street, Alexandria, VA 22314 • 703.548-1717
** Major benefit of the Tuesday meetup: you might learn Ms. Duinne’s real life name, which I am assured is much more pronounceable.
RE Transport: car is good; plenty of on-street free parking after 6 or 7 p. (Check the meters.) FYI, Murphy’s is pretty close to Christ Church; you can park behind it and walk to Murphy’s …
Accessible via King Street Metro station (blue and yellow? line; there’s a shuttle bus OR you can hoof it, if you’re so inclined.)
Come imbibe, meet Ms. Duinne, and maybe we can do the next meetup in a pub more accessible to our DC and Baltimore buds.
DC-Area Meet-Up, TODAY (Tuesday 2 September)Post + Comments (37)
Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Carry It On
Via commentor Trollhattan, from the Sacramento Bee:
McDonald’s, Wendy’s and other fast-food restaurants are expected to be targeted with acts of civil disobedience that could lead to arrests Thursday as labor organizers escalate their campaign to unionize the industry’s workers.
Kendall Fells, an organizing director for Fast Food Forward, said workers in a couple of dozen cities were trained to peacefully engage in civil disobedience ahead of this week’s planned protests…
Here’s a story by Steven Greenhouse in the Boston Globe:
The next round of strikes by fast-food workers demanding higher wages is scheduled for Thursday, and this time, labor organizers plan to increase the pressure by staging widespread civil disobe- dience & having thousands of home-care workers join the protests.
The organizers say fast-food workers, who are seeking a $15 hourly wage, will go on strike at restaurants in more than 100 cities and engage in sit-ins in more than a dozen cities. But by having home- care workers join, workers and union leaders hope to expand their campaign into a broader movement.
“On Thursday, we are prepared to take arrests to show our commit- ment to the growing fight for $15,” said Terrence Hays, a Burger King employee in Kansas City, Mo., and a member of the fast-food workers’ national organizing committee. At a convention that was held outside Chicago in July, about 1,300 fast-food workers unanimously approved a resolution calling for civil disobedience as a way to step up pressure on the fast-food chains.
The SEIU, which represents hundreds of thousands of health care workers and janitors, is encouraging home-care aides to march alongside the fast-food strikers. The union hopes that if thousands of the nation’s approximately 2 million home-care aides join in it would put more pressure on cities and states to raise their minimum wage.
“They want to join,” Henry said. “They think their jobs should be valued at $15.”
SEIU officials are encouraging home-care aides to join protests in six cities: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Seattle. Union leaders say the hope is to expand to more cities in future strikes…
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Apart from keeping the flame alive, what’s on the agenda for the day?
Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Carry It OnPost + Comments (51)