Four short links: 3 November 2009

Electoral Cryptography, Dataless Airport Security, Visualising Transport Data, Mathematically Insecure Social Asymmetry

1. First Test for Election Cryptography (MIT Technology Review) -- The first government election to use a new cryptographic scheme that lets both voters and auditors check that votes were cast and recorded accurately will be held tomorrow in Takoma Park, MD. Founder of the company behind the technology is David Chaum, who ran the first electronic currency company in the 90s. That was ahead of its time (Internet faced a credibility problem, not a convenience problem), but his timing for this seems spot-on. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
2. Do I Have The Right To Refuse This Search? -- a former police officer questions the efficacy of TSA screenings and is doubly worried by by the lack of data collected. For years in policing, we relied on random patrols to curb crime. We relied upon this “strategy” until someone went out and captured some data, and did a study that demonstrated conclusively that random patrols do not work (Kansas City Study). As police have employed other types of “random” interventions, as in DWI checkpoints, they have had to develop policies, procedures and training to ensure that the “random” nature of these intrusions is truly random. Whether every car gets checked, or every tenth car, police must demonstrate that they have attempted to eliminate the effects of active and passive discrimination when using “random” strategies. No such accountability currently exists at TSA. Trend I see lately is a return to quantitative decision making, reality-based data-directed system interventions. (via BoingBoing)
3. Visualising Transport Data -- It can be hard to make meaningful information from huge amounts of data, a graph and a table doesn't always communicate all it should do. We have been working hard on technology to visualise big datasets into compelling stories that humans can understand. We were really pleased with what we came up with in just one and a half days. Like many places, the UK data.gov ran a dev camp to jumpstart people using their data. These appear to be successful, but I'm not aware of studies into the longterm effects nor the "value" of different types of developers.
4. Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do -- there's a numerical optical illusion at work here: count your friends, then ask them to count their friends. If you average the friend counts of your peers, it'll probably be higher than your friend count. The reason for this is also why (on average!) your sexual partners seem to have had more sexual partners than you, and why previous generations seem more fecund than current generations. It's because connectors (with large numbers of friends) distort the average, so unless you're the connector (and if you're reading this, you might well be!) the average will be bigger than a normal person's friend count. Left unmentioned is what kind of person would count the number of friends they have, then ask their friends for their counts .... (via Hacker News)

Mapping The Scenarios: Geo Resources For The Election

If you're like me you'll be looking at maps and polls and news sites all day long on November 4th. As the polls close and some states go red vs. blue you'll be updating your mental map of the country. Below are some tools and data sources for simulating scenarios online.

New York Times - The Grey Lady has invested in a lot of great visualization tools. The map above shows the electoral importance of each state and their leanings. Their maps also let you create your own scenarios. So if you believe that Missouri will go Red change it and see how that effects the totals. If you want to reminisce check out their debate visualizations.

GeoCommons - An online geo-database and mapping tool has many pertinent data sets available including Early Voting Data and Active Registered Virginia Voters.

FiveThirtyEight - Nate Silver and his fellow bloggers have been doing a great job of reading the polls. They've called it for Obama, but this is based on their math not their affiliation. As states are tallied I am sure they'll be updating their simulations.

Electoral-Vote - Very similar to FiveThirtyEight, this site also aggregates polls, but applies a different algorithm. They even have a Data Galore section with CSV's of all data used on the site.

Twitter Vote Report - As mentioned yesterday this site will be collecting vote reports from people on the ground.

Google - If you want to see recent voting patterns, Google has made the US election since 1980 available. They've also released a number of other maps and an election portal. And of course don't forget Google Hot Trends.

Video Galore - If you want to watch the election news online Silicon Alley Insider and LifeHacker have collected the available streams.

If you'd rather not think about the election, SNL has a great skit with Weekend Update's Giant Mega-Pixel Touch-Map.

Report Your Vote via Twitter & iPhone

Have you voted? Are you having problems voting? Are the lines at your polling station short or long? Let your fellow voters know via Twitter Vote Report. The site will aggregate all tagged tweets (use #votereport) and share the results publicly.

The tweets are being analyzed and displayed on maps. Waiting times are also being plotted and analyzed.

You need to have #votereport for your tweet to be picked up. If you want to add more information include:

• #[zip code] to indicate the zip code where you’re voting; ex., “#12345″ L:[address or city] to drill down to your exact location; ex. “L:1600 Pennsylvania Avenue DC”
• #machine for machine problems; ex., “#machine broken, using prov. ballot”
• #reg for registration troubles; ex., “#reg I wasn’t on the rolls”
• #wait:[minutes] for long lines; ex., “#wait:120 and I’m coming back later”
• #early if you’re voting before November 4th
• #good or #bad to give a quick sense of your overall experience
• #EP[your state] if you have a serious problem and need help from the Election Protection coalition ex.,#EPOH

If you or a friend aren't Twitter users there is a slick iPhone app. The free app will let you rate the polling station, leave an audio report, and share the waiting time. Surprisingly the app does not submit your location; it only shares the location that you type in.

The project was initiated by David Troy (Twittervision) and Andrew Turner (FortiusOne). With almost 500 tweets collected so far, they should serve as a great early-warning system for voting problems. After the election is over, they'll have created one of the best sets of voting condition data.

Why I Support Barack Obama

In my talks this year, I have been outlining some of the world's great problems, highlighting some of the things that are being done by technology innovators to solve them, and urging my listeners to "work on stuff that matters."

We are in unprecedented times. And folks, I'm sorry to say that the current financial meltdown is not the worst of it. Political instability around the world, wars over access to resources, and yes, terrorists, are all in our future. Scientists who've studied global warming agree that we're heading towards decades of extreme environmental stress, leading to even more severe economic disruptions than we have seen to date. Meanwhile, we have an aging population with ballooning healthcare costs, an unfair economy in which some people receive outsized gains while others fall behind, an educational system that is not preparing children for the future, and deficits that require an increasing percentage of our tax dollars to service debt to other countries. Even if there is a short term recovery, huge problems loom in the years ahead, problems we can no longer pass off to our children and grandchildren.

Faced with these problems, we need a president who can harness the best and brightest our country has to offer, a president who is conversant with, and comfortable with, the power of technology to assist in solving these problems, a president who is good at listening, studying, and devising solutions based on the best insight available, rather than on narrow ideology. We need a president who can forge consensus, not just among the partisans in our own fractured democracy but around the world. We need a president who can inspire our citizens and our global partners to forgo narrow self interest and embrace the possibilities that we can achieve if we work together to build a better future.

I believe Barack Obama is that president. He is a man of intelligence, but also a man whose character and temperament seem suited to the problems of our age: unflappable, optimistic even in the face of adversity, willing to speak the truth about subjects that have long been taboo (I'm thinking of his speech on race, and his speech on fatherhood) and with unscripted reactions that show his fundamental decency (I'm thinking of his reaction to those who wanted to make a campaign issue of Sarah Palin's daughter's unplanned pregnancy.)

Because this is a tech blog, not a political blog, though, I primarily want to address the subject of why members of the technical community should join me in supporting Barack Obama. (The New York Times has made a compelling case based on the broader issues, as has Colin Powell.) I outline four principal reasons:

1. Connected, Transparent Government
2. The Financial Crisis
3. Climate Change
4. Net Neutrality

I will also discuss some important additional considerations, personal and political, that I hope Radar readers who don't want to see politics in these pages, will forgive.

I want to be clear that this is my personal endorsement, and not an endorsement by O'Reilly Media. I'd like O'Reilly to be a company where people of all political persuasions are welcomed and supported, and feel free to express their personal opinions, as I have here.

(continue reading)