Posts

A post from the Mind Hacks blog on stereotype threat is one of the most interesting and throught provoking things I’ve read in some time.

Adrian Holovaty has come out and admitted that he created chicagocrime.org, the Web site everyone is talking about.

I love sites that make publicly accessible data more usable. In the spirit of They Work For You comes chicagocrime.org, which features a number of cool features, including RSS everywhere and heavy use of Google Maps. Here’s an example of a specific crime that was reported. One of the coolest features is a dynamic map of Chicago (provided by Google Maps), which, using AJAX, can be used to show where various types of crimes occurred between specific dates. (So, for example, you can display all of the crimes committed at ATM machines last week on one zoomable map.) I’m not particularly interested in crime in Chicago, but the site is a monument to the types of things you can build by leveraging data and services that are freely available. ...

So yesterday the Surpeme Court ruled that if a state allows its wineries to ship wine to out of state customers, it must allow out-of-state wineries to ship wine in as well. This ruling turns out to be huge news for the little company I work for. As I have mentioned at various times over the past year or so, my job involves building and implementing a Web service. Well, that Web service enables companies to verify the age of their customer against public records. This is the same sort of service offered by ChoicePoint and LexisNexis, the important difference being that rather than offering access to people’s personal data, we return a simple up or down result to the customer. We also offer a similar service that enables people to do other kinds of identity verification to prevent identity theft, again by providing simple confirmation rather than data. Anyway, we don’t do porn, so online tobacco and alcohol sales are a huge part of our business, and this ruling is big news in our small part of the world. In fact, we’re offering wineries a free trial period to give our service a shot in light of this news. Needless to say, ever since the ChoicePoint identity theft scandal broke, I’ve been dying to comment, but have had to withhold comment because I work for a company that is enmeshed in this industry. Our company has been operating more or less in stealth mode since its outset, but I’ve been given the OK to blog about what we’re doing. I still won’t be commenting on the fellow members of our industry, but I am happy to talk about what we’re doing, mainly because I think that we’re taking on this problem with a less evil (and perhaps even non-evil) approach. Even though in my ideal world, companies would not have control of my personal data, the fact is that such databases do exist, and aren’t going away anytime soon. Figuring out ways to use that data to prevent identity theft without simultaneously abetting it is a pretty cool problem to try to solve. ...

Jack Shafer has a pretty good roundup of the mistakes Newsweek made in its report on desecration of the Koran. He also doubts that such desecration occurred in the first place, noting that claims of use of the Koran as toilet paper have some of the qualities of an urban legend. I hope he’s right. Update: CJR Daily also has a post on this that’s worth reading.

Could the new TimesSelect offering from the New York Times result in a steep decline in the influence of Tom Friedman? We can hope.

Andrew Brown, funny and insightful.

Mindjack has an interesting on article explaining how piracy helped Battlestar Galactica become the most popular program the Sci-Fi channel has ever aired.

Juan Cole reads Newsweek’s semi-retraction of its story about desecration of the Koran in the interrogation process at Guantanamo carefully. I have to admit, I never stopped thinking that this happened. I just have a hard time believing that people who beat and torture their prisoners would show extreme sensitivity toward a book that they themselves do not hold sacred. He also points out that plenty of detainees who have been released have reported the desecration of the Koran, the Pentagon spokesman says that claiming such things is a standard tactic among terrorists (ignoring the fact that the people who were released must not have been terrorists, given that they were set free without being tried for anything). Update: Here’s Newsweek’s apology. Note that the story was not retracted. Another update: The Pentagon has demanded that Newsweek retract the story and it has done so. For what it’s worth, I still believe that what the magazine reported was true, but if you’re going to publish something that explosive, you’d better have dotted your i’s and crossed your t’s. ...

Newsweek is backing off of its story reporting that interrogators at Guantanamo desecrated the Quran in the course of interrogating detainees.