According to the EFF, California will require that any e-voting technologies use a paper printout for verification and auditing. This is a good thing.
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Through the Wire
"Hey, I'm just happy to be here…"
November 23rd, 2003
World’s Smartest Cookbook?
As a programmer and someone who likes food and cooking, I’ve often daydreamed about a variety of possible side projects using technology to manage recipes. This week, the conversation came up on Les Orchard’s weblog (see Building the Recipe Web). Of course, Les and I aren’t the only people who’ve ever thought [...]
November 20th, 2003
Music: Listening to a Human Mind
Found on the RandomChaos blog, a pointer to a Boston Globe article responding to an article in the July issue of Nature Neuroscience…
From the Globe Article:
Neither idea is right, according to David Schwartz and colleagues. Human musical preferences are fundamentally shaped not by elegant algorithms or ratios but by the messy sounds of real life, [...]
November 19th, 2003
It’s the Racism, Stupid
According to the findings, the more biased people are, the more their brain power is taxed by contact with someone of another race, as they struggle not to say or do anything offensive. The effect is so strong, the team found, that even a five-minute conversation with a black person left some of the white [...]
November 17th, 2003
Accumulo Ualeo Vulgo Aliquis
No, the title of this post wasn’t generated by the Lipsum Generator …
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
A prank Web site aimed at ridiculing management’s penchant for rebranding
old firms with “nonsense” names such as Accenture and Avaya has backfired
on its creators after several of its spoof names were registered by real
companies. The What Brand [...]
November 17th, 2003
Aussie e-Voting
Another relatively late “democracy” citation: Wired News ran a story, Aussies Do It Right: E-Voting. The “right” part is using completely open-source software for the process. Of course, there’s no mention of how one insures that the software which runs on the polling machines is the same as that which has its source [...]
November 15th, 2003
The Filesystem as Database
Around the time that file storage moved from floppy disks to hard drives, people have had to struggle to find specific files, and as hard drives get even larger, the problem only grows. Search tools have kept up reasonably well, allowing users to search on some metadata, like creation or modification date, and [...]
November 7th, 2003
Sufferin’ Suffrage
I suppose when you finally catch up on news feeds after several weeks off that include the big recall to-do in California as well as a regular election day, one will find more commentary than usual about the democratic process. So at the risk of appearing to have a one track mind, here’s one [...]
November 7th, 2003
Design for Democracy
A bit late, I’ve come across another source of ideas about how to improve our democratic process; in this case, a Slate.com article:
Wanted: A Legible Voting Ballot
, in which the California government is called to task for giving the task of designing ballots to bureaucrats instead of professionals. The article includes three alternative designs.
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November 1st, 2003
Secure Mail in Panther
With the release of Panther, I started to make the switch to use Apple’s Mail.app after years of being a Eudora user. My main motivations were junk mail filtering (no longer free in Eudora 6) and threaded email (a must for someone who subscribes to a lot of mailing lists).
I must admit that I’m [...]