Abjuring Adjuration

In August 2003, Walden O’Dell, chief executive of Diebold, announced that he had been a top fund-raiser for President George W Bush and had sent a get-out-the-funds letter to Ohio Republicans.  In the letter he says he’s “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”  Although he clarified his statement as merely a poor choice of words, critics of Diebold and/or the Republican party interpreted this as, at minimum, indication of a conflict of interest; at worst, a risk to fair counting of ballots (in what was a close election).  O’Dell responded to critics by pointing out that the company’s election machines division is run out of Texas by a registered Democrat.  Nonetheless, he vowed to lower his political profile.  Avi Rubin, Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University and Technical Director of the Information Security Institute, analysed the source code used in these voting machines.  He reports that “this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts.”  In June 2005, Black Box Voting, a nonprofit election watchdog group, hired Finnish computer expert Harri Hursti to alter vote totals by replacing the memory card that stores voting results with one previously tampered with.  Although the machines are supposed to record changes to data stored in the system, they showed no record of tampering after the memory cards were swapped.  In response, a spokesperson for the Department of State said, “Information on a blog site is not credible.”  However, California responded differently: “Mr Hursti’s attack on the AV-OS is definitely real.  He was indeed able to change the election results by doing nothing more than modifying the contents of a memory card.  He needed no passwords, no cryptographic keys, and no access to any other part of the voting system.”  Think on this.

Steve Jobs was talented, driven, and creative, but could become profoundly focused on a single goal to the exclusion of just about everything else in his life.  This was obviously his nature.  Age might’ve mellowed him — but his time ran out.  Constant stress contributes to early maintenance-check failures — but without that stress, it’s unlikely Jobs’ life would’ve been nearly so productive.  In that case, most of us would never have known when he died.

The photo on the right isn’t a tribute except as an illustration of the way Apple has become embedded in the culture of today.

There have been many studies investigating the link between empathy and moral action which suggest that empathy is not a major player when it comes to moral motivation.  Its contribution is negligible in children, modest in adults, and nonexistent when costs are significant.  Empathy is a “fragile flower,” easily crushed by self-concern.  Some influences that we might think of as trivial, are stronger than empathy — such as a temporary burst of positive emotion.  In one experiment in the 1970s, researchers planted a dime in a phone booth.  87% of the people who found the dime offered to help a person who dropped some papers nearby compared with only 4% of those who didn’t find a dime.  Empathy doesn’t produce anything like this kind of effect.  Empathy often leads people astray.  It influences people to care more about cute victims than ugly victims.  It leads to nepotism.  It subverts justice; juries give lighter sentences to defendants that show sadness.  It leads us to react to shocking incidents like hurricanes, but not longstanding conditions like global hunger or preventable diseases.  It has become a way to experience the illusion of moral progress without having to do the nasty work of making moral judgements.  A sacred code isn’t just a set of rules.  It’s a source of identity.  It’s pursued with joy.  It arouses our strongest emotions and attachments.  Empathy is a sideshow.  If you want to make the world a better place, help people debate, understand, reform, revere and to better enact their own personal codes of honour.

• From Gareth Cook’s interview of Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker regarding Pinker’s new book, History and the Decline of Human Violence (which I’ve not yet read but intend to):

COOK: Is the general trend toward less violence going to continue in the future?
PINKER: It depends.  In the arena of custom and institutional practices, it’s a good bet.  I suspect that violence against women, the criminalization of homosexuality, the use of capital punishment, the callous treatment of animals on farms, corporal punishment of children, and other violent social practices will continue to decline, based on the fact that worldwide moralistic shaming movements in the past (such as those against slavery, whaling, piracy, and punitive torture) have been effective over long stretches of time.  I also don’t expect war between developed countries to make a comeback anytime soon.  But civil wars, terrorist acts, government repression, and genocides in backward parts of the world are simply too capricious to allow predictions.  With 6 billion people in the world, there’s no predicting what some cunning fanatic or narcissistic despot might do.  The mind focuses on current threats, and takes for granted the violent events that don’t happen but could easily have happened a few decades ago.  A sniper in Norway kills dozens of innocent people — and the population does not riot or lynch the perpetrator and his extended family, but holds candlelight vigils.  The Egyptian government falls — but the new one does not vow to push the Israelis into the sea.  North Korea sinks a South Korean ship, killing 45 sailors — but instead of escalating to war, the Koreans go back to life as usual.  Every day I notice the dogs that don’t bark.

• Troy Davis was accused of fatally shooting an off-duty police officer and convicted on the basis of eyewitness testimony — but 7 of those eyewitnesses signed affidavits recanting some or all of their testimony.  There was no physical evidence linking Davis to the shooting and no gun was ever recovered.  Davis continually maintained his innocence.  But the Georgia Board of Pardons refused to grant clemency and he was executed.  On the other hand, Samuel Davis Crowe was accused of killing Joseph Pala, a former co-worker at Wickes Lumber Company in Douglasville, Georgia.  Crowe shot Pala, hit him with a paint can, poured paint on his face, and bludgeoned him with a crowbar.  Crowe confessed to the crime and pled guilty.  And yet the Georgia Board of Pardons granted Crowe clemency at the last minute.  Crowe is now serving a life sentence for his crime.  Davis was executed while Crowe had his sentenced changed to life in prison.  Capital punishment is disproportionately applied to minorities with blacks in particular being executed at a rate several times higher than whites for similar crimes.  This is the ultimate punishment requiring the ultimate in both fairness and certainty before being applied to anyone.  If that isn’t possible then it shouldn’t be used at all.  Killing a cop in most states means you will have less presumption of innocence (however illogical that might be).  Refusal to confess is a factor in not granting commutation of the sentence (again, not logical but still true).  And while forensic evidence (or lack of it) is logically more compelling, it requires a belief in science.

• The US Supreme Court may have some extreme characters, but none wants to be the person that says a man should be executed as a result of a mailing mistake… except perhaps Justice Antonin Scalia.  Most of the court seemed surprised at Alabama’s decision to deny a man the right to appeal his death sentence when, according to Justice Samuel Alito, the mix up occurred “through no fault of Maples’, but through a series of very unusual and unfortunate circumstances.”  Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor and Chief Justice John Roberts all questioned former US Solicitor General Gregory Garre on whether the clerk of the court should have known that Maples’ lawyer was no longer aiding him.  Scalia, on the other hand, could not get past the idea that Maples’ lawyer had no function in the case at all.  He argued the “Return to Sender” stamp did not mean Maples’ lawyer had abandoned him since it could have indicated the Alabama court had simply sent it to the wrong address.  Kagan, Roberts, and Justice Anthony Kennedy questioned whether the Alabama court should have been suspicious when Maples did not file his appeal since it is unusual for an inmate not to appeal a death penalty decision.  Even Alabama Solicitor General John Neiman, when prompted by Kagan, admitted that if he had been in the state’s position and had a letter sent back unopened from the missing lawyer, he “suspects that in those circumstances I might well personally do something else.”  Scalia, however, said nothing in the US Constitution or federal rules of procedure says an accused party has the right to judicial notice — even in capital punishment cases.  “Once you’re in court and you have a lawyer, it’s up to your lawyer to follow what goes on.”  What should Americans take away from this?  In the US court system, an accused party’s only lifeline is his attorney — whether that attorney is competent or not.  If a lawyer unceremoniously (and unprofessionally) drops you without notice, even when you’re facing lethal injection, well … that’s just tough.  (Your survivors can maybe sue.)

Even with millions of images on line, it’s amazing how often identical images are used by competitors.  The problem most commonly occurs when a royalty-free or microstock image is used because a competitor can purchase that same image.  Clients may rely on the image provider’s librarian to alert them to potential conflicts — but even with rights-managed images, mistakes happen.  Full control has always been available with exclusive licences, but the trend has been away from this, toward cheaper licencing models, many of which are a free-for-all with no control.  With royalty-free licences, you not only risk someone accidentally copying your publication or ad by mistake – they can do it deliberately.  With traditional rights-managed, you can get an exclusive or industry exclusive licence, or at least know if there are previous conflicting uses.  But nonexclusive rights to stock photos can cost as little as $1, whereas the cost of arranging a photo shoot to produce an original picture can easily run into 10s of 1,000s of dollars, given photographers’ fees ($1,000 to more than $10,000 a day), the cost of hiring a model, and hassle and expense of securing a location.  With so many images available, nonexclusive rights are generally a safe way to save money.  Now, Google’s new image search function should make it easier to find prior users of an image you want so as to generally avoid these situations in the future.  (In one election the NZ political party ACT used a royalty-free image of New Zealand scenery – later discovered to have been taken in Canada — but that’s a different sort of problem.)
 

• Kia Ora, Air New Zealand’s in-flight magazine, appeared February 2008.  Life and Leisure, a Fairfax Magazines publication, used the same cover (except not oversaturated) on their September/October 2009 issue.

To convey an image of concern, both MetLife Inc and Pfizer Inc’s Viagra used the same image of a middle-aged man in a stripped button-down shirt resting his chin on his hands.  And Bank of America and J P Morgan Chase & Co’s Chase Student Loans sites both used the same image of a collegiate-looking boy working on his laptop for their websites.

• The ad from Key Bank portrays a heart-warming family moment: a dad pointing out something on his laptop to his smiling young daughter as she leans over his shoulder.  In fact, the scene may have been a little too charming.  The same image appears in a recent marketing brochure from Bank of America.  Both banks say they bought the image from a photo agency that deals in stock pictures, not realising the other was making the same selection.  “We try not to use the same images as other competitors … if it happened, it happened,” says the marketing services director for Cleveland-based KeyCorp.

• The house in the background of the photo used to supposedly depict a Kiwi family fot the Labour party is the photographer’s house in Lake Stevens, Washington state.  The family are friends of his whom he photographs for stock images that are posted on the iStockphoto website and have been used across the US.  The photo had already been used by the Australian government to portray fair dinkum Aussies’ affordable housing policy.

• Gateway computers may have hated it when they used some of the same stock images in their back-to-school campaign that their biggest competitor was using.  Like, if you’re Gateway and then Dell uses the same model from the same photoshoot, that would really bite.  Good thing these guys are professionals and wouldn’t let something like that happen.  (You might like to know that Dell backed down first.)
• This young lady going back to college appears to have a bit of trouble deciding whether she wants a Gateway or a Dell PC.  Either that, or her parents have each separately decided to buy her a PC — and while Mum favours Gateway, Dad favours Dell.  No wonder she has such a happy expression on her face!  She can sell one of the machines and buy something really useful!

For its business website’s home page, MasterCard used an image of a man in a beige shirt holding his glasses to his mouth that also appears on the website for Bank of America’s Business Visa Card.

• This is the original photo.  I don’t think it was an ad for iBook, even though it is one.  I think it was meant as a general back-to-school stock image.

An image of a smiling Asian woman appears in a pamphlet from Washington Mutual Inc and on Dell Inc’s help-with-purchase website.  And a picture of an African-American couple sitting on a beige couch figuring out their finances appears in a marketing brochure for both Bank of America’s home-equity program and on Citigroup Inc’s Citibank website.  Besides being embarrassing for advertisers, such duplications can make it difficult for consumers to tell brands apart.

• The Asus Eee PC ad (used on their Asus press release CD for the CeBIT show in March 2009) is a bit darker and cropped a bit more than I would have done, but it isn’t, overall, too bad.  But the MSI ad (the MSI Wind picture was published in a promotional photo series in May 2008) is pathetic.  The computer seems to defy gravity and you can see a bit of the original iBook underneath.  Fail.

As brands start to embrace new media campaigns and devote larger portions of their budget to the web, industry executives expect companies to put more emphasis on exclusive pictures.  “People don’t always read an ad, but they can’t help but see the picture.  They are getting impressions of the brand all the time,” says head of brand and advertising at Deutsche Telekom AG’s T-Mobile USA.  “It’s just too dangerous, you never want to go two steps back on that.”

• Arrow squid range from surface depths to 500 metres in coastal shelf waters around NZ.  They have colouration that can flash iridescent red or green when excited, but fades to a pale brown/grey upon death.  Squid jigging is done at night using specialised boats.  Powerful lights shine on the water to attract squid.  Lures are set through a pulley arrangement and automatically jigged up and down in the light beams.  When the machine controlling the line senses a squid has grabbed the lure, the line is hauled in.  Lure hooks are barbless, so that as lures are pulled in over a set of end rollers, the squid fall off into collecting areas.
• New Zealand’s commercial fishery comprises over 80 high-value species.  From a list of 26 of those fish, pick out your favourite.  This opens a page with a photograph, and that species’ availability, legal status, and succulence.  From there, all the other fish pages are available.
• The Alfonsino are red fish that inhabit deep offshore reefs, found around the North Island and the northern part of the South Island over rough ground or near reefs at depths between 200 and 800 metres.  This species is not abundant.  During the day, they appear to school near the seabed, dispersing upwards to feed on plankton at dusk.  Alfonsino have a maximum recorded age of 17 years.  Females grow faster than males.  Spawning grounds are not known but may be in tropical waters to the north.  They are caught year-round by mid-water trawling off the east coast of New Zealand and the Chatham Islands.”  [I hope trawlers can only operate during the day and have to stop long before dusk.]

Patio chairs and a satellite dish (lower left) mark one home as claimed in a new suburban development in Shenyang.  The Chinese government estimates that the country is adding 5-6 billion square feet of floor space to its residential and commercial building stock every year.  Curious about why China has done so well, an IMF research team recently examined the sources of that nation’s growth and arrived at a surprising conclusion.  Capital accumulation — the growth in the country’s stock of capital assets, such as new factories, manufacturing machinery, and communications systems — was important.  So were the number of Chinese workers.  But a sharp, sustained increase in productivity (that is, increased worker efficiency) was the driving force behind the economic boom.  During 1979-94 period, productivity gains accounted for more than 42% of China’s growth.  By the early 1990s, this had overtaken capital as the most significant source of growth.  This marks a departure from the traditional view of development in which capital investment takes the lead.  This jump in productivity originated in the economic reforms begun in 1978.

A recent piece in The Atlantic noted that US student debt has grown by 511% since 1999.  At that time, only $90 billion in student loans were outstanding — but by the second quarter of 2011, that balance was up to $550 billion, according to the New York Fed.  And the Department of Education estimates that outstanding loans total closer to $805 billion — and that number will pass $1 trillion soon.  As student loans rise, so has delinquency: 11.2% (and rising) are more than 90 days past due.  Only credit cards have a higher rate of delinquency — 12.2%.  No surprises — young workers especially are struggling in the current economy.  Workers 20-24 years old have a 14.6% unemployment rate compared to the national average of 9.1%.  The average borrower graduating from a 4-year college leaves school with a $24,000 debt, despite the grim statistic that — according to a Rutgers University study — only 56% of 2010 graduates were able to find work following completion of their studies.  A decline in the type of union manufacturing jobs that used to allow workers to be comfortably middle-class without a college degree, has caused working-class families to take on debt to send their kids to college, which they are told will help those kids make more money.  It doesn’t always work.  Default on a student loan and there’s nothing to repossess.  Instead, you’ll face a drop in your credit rating and constant pressure from collection agencies who can garnish your wages.  Even if you declare bankruptcy, your student loans don’t go away.  Miss a payment and your interest rate goes up, creating a punitive spiral of debt from which there is no escape.

RealFlow is a tool for creating large-scale and small-scale fluid and dynamics simulations.  It also has a dynamics solver that can handle thousands of objects.  They say, “With RealFlow, you don’t need to be a software programmer to set up a fantastic sim – just choose your settings and you’re ready to go!”  True?  Dunno — I haven’t tried it.  But I have to say that I’m hugely impressed with their 2011 Siggraph Showreel.  All that for only US$4k.  I want one.
 
Other things that might interest you:

• Hybrid fractals are fractals on steroids.  There are a couple of YouTube videos to watch, and you can also download the software for free if you want to do it yourself.  A single screen grab just does not do it justice.  (One of the comments: “Something in my brain just popped.”)
• Nokia Maps — You have to install a plug-in and it only works for certain major cities (NYC is one, Hong Kong another).  But wow!  It makes Google Earth look primitive.

• Namibia October 2005 — sand dunes at sunrise in Namib Naukluft, Sossusvlei, South Africa.
• Switzerland — from the series Gravel and Coal.
• France, August 2007 — a sea of clouds above the Alps in the Bauges Range, on the track to the Colombier Mount.  In the background is the valley of Chambéry and Grenoble.

Table Mountain is a flat-topped mountain forming a prominent landmark overlooking the city of Cape Town in South Africa. It is featured in the flag of Cape Town and other local government insignia and is a significant tourist attraction, with many visitors using the cableway or hiking to the top.  The mountain forms part of the Table Mountain National Park.  The flat top of the mountain is often covered by orographic clouds, formed when a southeasterly wind is directed up the mountain’s slopes into colder air, where the moisture condenses to form the so-called “tablecloth” of cloud.  Legend attributes this phenomenon to a smoking contest between the Devil and a local pirate called Van Hunks.  When the tablecloth is seen, it symbolises the contest.

The right-most picture above is actually in Tanzania, part of the Great Rift Valley volcanic system.  And the bottom photo was taken in Wellington at 6pm 3 February 2010.  Wolf and I were atop Mt Victoria looking across Evans Bay to toward Wainuiomata. I thought this (cloud? fog?) was beautiful oozing down the Rimutakas.  Wolf had his camera with him and took several photos.  I don’t know if it’s rare or common there.

• When the earth was young, it had a big moon, the one you see now, and a smaller “companion moon” orbiting above, some astronomers now theorise.  The companion moon was 4% of the lunar mass.  This collision likely happened about 4 billion years ago.  This depicts the likely 4 stages of the collision.
• An artist’s rendering of what the immediate aftermath may have looked like.
• Astronomers have found the tiniest full-fledged star known, an object just 16% bigger than Jupiter.  It’s smaller than some known planets that orbit other stars.  The star is a companion to a sun-like star toward the centre of our Milky Way Galaxy.  This discovery helps astronomers better understand a gray area of definition between stars and planets.  Between these, there exist objects called brown dwarfs, often referred to as failed stars, because they don’t have enough mass to trigger the thermonuclear fusion that powers successful stars.

• A brown dwarf is typically several times the mass of Jupiter, but the exact size or mass required to go beyond and all the way to ignition is unknown.  This new star may represent the smallest size that can shine normally.  It is less than 1/10th the mass of the sun.  Though only slightly larger than Jupiter, its mass is 95 times as great — in fact, it is more than 50 times as dense as the sun.  The star is named OGLE-TR-122b; it orbits the larger star once every 7.3 days.
• Compared to the Big Dogs, our own sun can look pretty wimpish.
• In proportion: Uranus, Neptune, Earth, Sirius, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Moon Pluto, Haumea.

The Nikon International Small World Competition first began in 1974 as a means to recognise and applaud efforts of those involved with photography through a light microscope.  Since then, Nikon’s Small World contest has become a showcase for photomicrographers from the a wide array of scientific disciplines.  The competition is open to anyone with an interest in photography through the microscope.  Winners have included both professionals and hobbyists.  The subject matter is unrestricted and any type of light microscopy technique is acceptable, including phase contrast, polarized light, fluorescence, interference contrast, darkfield, confocal, deconvolution, and mixed techniques.  First prize is $3,000 toward the purchase of Nikon equipment.  Winners page.

1. Disorganised perinuclear actin cap stress fibres in mouse embryonic fibroblast, magnified 60 times; fluorescence microscopy.
2. No, not a zipper.  It’s the tip of a butterfly’s tongue magnified 720 times; polarized light, brightfield.
3. Whole Drosophila sp. (fruit fly) ovary, magnified 20 times; confocal.
4. The intercellular bridge connecting two newly formed daughter cells at the end of cytokinesis, maginfied 63 times; structured illumination microscopy.
5. Natural formed frost crystal.  Grew overnight on a fence in -15ºC, magnified 5 times,; no special technoque.
6. Neurons growing over astrocytes in a human stem cell embryo body, magnified 20 times; confocal.

• I think Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II recreated her pose from 62 years earlier much more accurately than did Prince Philip.  It looks like she’s even wearing the same brooch and pearl necklace.  It’s that attention to detail that has made her such a good monarch.
• Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip are leaving after “The Queen’s Party of Thanks” at the Ritz Hotel November 2002 in London.  The Queen hosted the party for close friends and family, thanking them for making her Jubilee year a success.  The event was held on Prince Charles’s 54th birthday.  I think it’s a lovely photo of them both.  (It certainly highlights Prince Philip’s bushy eyebrows.)

• The pelican equivalent of driving a hummer?  Note this photographer detail: Taken on: 2008/02/12 16:19:57; Exposure: 0.003s (1/320); Focal Length: 40.00mm; F/Stop: f/9.000; Uploaded 6 June 2008.
• In attempting to verify the first photo’s source, I instead realised it was clearly a Photoshopped montage when I found this photo: Darwin, Northern Territory, which was taken 13 February 2008.  Why give someone else’s photographic details?  Inaccurately?  (Possibly because the photo with bird has exponentially more links to it than to the original?)
• Orang Asli, Malaysia.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa or simply the Tower of Pisa is the campanile, or freestanding bell tower, of the cathedral of the Italian city of Pisa.  It is situated behind the cathedral and is the 3rd oldest structure in Pisa’s Cathedral Square after the cathedral and the baptistry.  Its weight is estimated at 14,500 metric tonnes.  Prior to restoration work performed between 1990 and 2001, the tower leaned at an angle of 5.5° but now leans at about 3.99°.  This means that the top of the tower is displaced horizontally 3.9 metres (12 feet 10 inches) from where it would be if the structure were perfectly vertical.  A popular tourist activity is to pose for photographs pretending to “hold up” the leaning tower, preventing it from falling.  The illusion is created through the principle of forced perspective.

Christopher Boffoli lives in Seattle and drives a convertible.  Perhaps that accounts for his quirky sense of humour regarding food?  Where does he get so many tiny figures?  (More.)

• Even though he knew the likelihood of shark encounters was low, Eric still had anxiety about the dive.
• Hard to dig in this frozen ground!
• Drying-in can begin soon.  (I see this one is by Barcelona-based photographer Oscar Ciutat, so I guess there’s competition in the tiny people photography department.)