Environmental Cancer and the Web

It's June and the Palm Beach County television stations have been reporting on a high number of cancer cases in children in a small-ish agricultural/residential area.

After a week of reporting increasing numbers of people, a local mortician spoke up and said he mentioned to a county commissioner that it looked suspicious. The county commissioner didn't do anything we know of.

Why didn't the county health officials have GIS mapping with a historic database? The property appraiser has it, the fire department has it. The property appraiser makes money for the County. The firemen don't want people to die if hazardous chemicals are released by accident.

Sure high mobility communities would be poorly represented, but it would be better than nothing. It isn't rocket science.

Google Fusion Tables

Google Fusion Tables extend data sharing and manipulation in the browser.

Browser based speed is goning to be a lot faster very soon. Take a look at the AMAZING speed of Bespin.

Twitter in the Classroom

Skeptic's Guide to the Universe had an interview with Professor Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire who had just used Twitter for an investigaiton of "remote viewing," a psychic theory that claims people can see something at a distance from the subject that would ordinarily be obscured by intervening distance or obstacle.

Since this is about Twitter in the classroom and not about the eighteen million Google returns you get if you use it as a search term, I will dismiss remote viewing and urge my reader to do the same.

Wiseman is using Twitter as a quiz engine for remote voting using handheld devices.

If this reminds you of the now ubiquitous "clicker" for embedded evaluation in the classroom, it should! What we need to do is take the twitter stream consisting of a question or series of teacher tweets and a series of student response tweets, parse it, evaluate it, and display it.

Why Paul Ormerod is Still Cool

My buddy Richard sent me this link today (6-18-2009) Tech Dirt analysis of a Yahoo analyst's analysis of a shambles.

Problem! "Systematic risk" is mischaracterizing risk by generalizing it, not to mention misquoting the phrase "systemic risk" which is what Duncan Watts actually said. The journalists are having a fantasy. The system *is* transparent enough to see what is happening, but it is obscured by distance and not-giving-a-shit.

The issue is understanding systems, in particular how several nonlinear variables that act together produce a solution. If you read Why Most Things Fail which is about cause and prediction and then The Black Swan which is about economic prediction specifically you can see what my point is. Ormerod is an economist and is sometimes on the outs with some of the community. They were in the middle of a pout when the bomb went off.

Measuring risk in a limited area of the economic system is a trivial part of the problem. Journalists are talking about risk and banks but the real problem is risk and the financial system. Libertarian economists say an individual institution should be allowed to fail. Techdirt is saying that there are individual institutions that are so large that toppling one will bring widespread harm. I don't know about that but I suspect that interlinking risk between institutions is what would be the big problem. I don't see people making any distinction between the individual elephant and the herd of elephants.

Which brings me to the issue I pointed out. Inventing a new tool to spread risk in an attractive way that makes it appear palatable may have contributed to the problem.

Watts' article in the Globe points out that institutions shouldn't be allowed to extend in certain ways. My way of saying it would be that if a system can't be predicted, it should be dismantled into components that can be predicted. Then we should create an institutional memory that explains why they can't be allowed to do a repeat performance.

Fear and Loathing in Alaska

Dumbass Wulf Blitzer asked Sarah Palin to explain the economics of the recovery. Then I muted her.

She stook there squinting into the camera spouting her soccer-mom-brand passive-aggressive fear and hate.

Which reminds me that with the centerists becomming less tolerant of creepy attitudes, the nutcases are feeling the pressure of marginalization more than ever before.

Sarah Palin is their representative-in-chief.

The Summer Job Market Looks Grim

The Summer Job Market Looks Grim for people in Broward County where Fort Lauderdale is located.

This morning, May 28, 2009, the Channel Ten news anchors announced a job fair giving the location, time, and the names of several participating companies.

The outlook is indeed grim if the news report is indicative. We can work for:

Avon
Family Dollar Stores
The Check Cashing Store

A multilevel marketing company that makes money from economic incest, the lowest priced retailer in the universe, or a company that charges outrageous fees for cashing paychecks, taking advantage of ignorance.

Mirable dictu! Horribili visu!

When to Use a Different Search Engine

On May 21st Deep Web Technologies announced browser plugins for searching the data they have helped make available using federation technique that finds, merges, and presents things Google et al don't give you. What they do involved taking lots of time to understand how data is stored at many different locations and creating a way to reorganize ontologies into a common format in order that *apples can be compared with apples* so to speak.

It's easy to use. Instructions:

Users can easily add any of these portals to their browser's search engine box by going to http://www.deepwebtech.com/open-search.html and clicking on a portal to automatically add it to their search box.

This post however is about *how* and *when* you make the choice.

The browser plugin makes a huge step forward in usability because it brings federated search into one click range for the user.

Unfortunately ALL search choices are conscious while searches tend to make unconscious assumptions. Changing these unconscious assumptions is a process of education and I wonder which markets outside of academic research will have penetration first. Deep Web Technologies obviously has an idea and a plan but users do unexpected things so this will be exciting to watch. If you like watching NASCAR for a week straight.

Break out the beer!

Conservative Pundits and Cognitive Dissonance

Although every nation has ratified Children Rights as recommended by the United Naitons, only the U. S. and Somalia haven't. That's the background.

Here's the rhetoric: Rep. Hoekstra on the O'Reilly Factor.

Evidently Hoekstra and O'Reilly are proud of the following bit of mental gymnasitcs:

The basis of conservative insistence on stopping abortion is the rights of the community protecting members who are voiceless. Community rights versus individual rights. Period.

Strangely, the basis of the United Nations push to grant rights to children in law is the same.

So what's the difference? In one case Hoekstra and O'Reilly like community rights and in the other, they like individual rights better.

I don't understand and I suspect, neither do they.