Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

[Nice article about the complexities of real-world algorithm design. Good read for anyone who’s curious about (some parts of) what professional programming is like. -Egg]

When Bob Santilli, a senior project manager at UPS, was invited in 2009 to his daughter’s fifth grade class on Career Day, he struggled with how to describe exactly what he did for a living. Eventually, he decided he would show the class a travel optimization problem of the kind he worked on, and impress them with how fun and complex it was. The challenge was to choose the most efficient route among six different stops, in a typical suburban-errands itinerary. The class devised their respective routes, then began picking them over. But one girl thought past the question of efficiency.  “She says, my mom would never go to the store and buy perishable things—she didn’t use the word perishable, I did—and leave it in the car the whole day at work,” Santilli tells me.

Her comment reflects a basic truth about the math that runs underneath the surface of nearly every modern transportation system, from bike-share rebalancing to airline crew scheduling to grocery delivery services. Modeling a simplified version of a transportation problem presents one set of challenges (and they can be significant). But modeling the real world, with constraints like melting ice cream and idiosyncratic human behavior, is often where the real challenge lies. As mathematicians, operations research specialists, and corporate executives set out to mathematize and optimize the transportation networks that interconnect our modern world, they are re-discovering some of our most human quirks and capabilities. They are finding that their job is as much to discover the world, as it is to change it.

via Unhappy Truckers and Other Algorithmic Problems – Issue 3: In Transit – Nautilus.

Crime in Estonia has fallen precipitously. Since 1995, the country’s murder rate has dropped by 70%, and robbery and car theft have fallen almost as far. Even as the country entered a deep recession in 2009, which pushed unemployment up to 19%, the crime rate kept falling. But though the magnitude of this trend sets post-Soviet Estonia apart, its direction does not. Across the developed world, the crime wave that began in the 1950s is in broad retreat (see chart 1).

Both police records (which underestimate some types of crime) and surveys of victims (which should not, but are not as regularly available a source of data) show crime against the person and against property falling over the past ten years in most rich countries. In America the fall began around 1991; in Britain it began around 1995, though the murder rate followed only in the mid-2000s. In France, property crime rose until 2001—but it has fallen by a third since. Some crimes are all but disappearing. In 1997, some 400,000 cars were reported stolen in England and Wales: in 2012, just 86,000.

Cities have seen the greatest progress. The number of violent crimes has fallen by 32% since 1990 across America as a whole; in the biggest cities, it has fallen by 64%. In New York, the area around Times Square on 42nd Street, where pornographers once mingled with muggers, is now a family oriented tourist trap. On London’s housing estates, children play in concrete corridors once used by heroin addicts to shoot up. In Tallinn you can walk home from the theatre unmolested as late as you like.

What is behind this spectacular and widespread improvement?

via Falling crime: Where have all the burglars gone? | The Economist.

[Funny new short story from Bruce Sterling. -egg]

Bruce Sterling: “From Beyond the Coming Age of Networked Matter,” a short story – Boing Boing
http://boingboing.net/2013/07/16/bruce-sterling-from-beyond.html

[Well, this is fascinating. -egg]

On October 10, 2011, researchers from the University of Minnesota found that women who took supplemental multivitamins died at rates higher than those who didn’t. Two days later, researchers from the Cleveland Clinic found that men who took vitamin E had an increased risk of prostate cancer. “It’s been a tough week for vitamins,” said Carrie Gann of ABC News.

These findings weren’t new. Seven previous studies had already shown that vitamins increased the risk of cancer and heart disease and shortened lives. Still, in 2012, more than half of all Americans took some form of vitamin supplements. What few people realize, however, is that their fascination with vitamins can be traced back to one man. A man who was so spectacularly right that he won two Nobel Prizes and so spectacularly wrong that he was arguably the world’s greatest quack.

via The Vitamin Myth: Why We Think We Need Supplements – Atlantic Mobile.

[Yum. -egg]

Tyrone Stoddart’s “Boxed” is a design for a desk, chair and desklamp that collapse down into a small briefcase. What appears, at first, to be a case-worth of sticks and assorted oddments transforms into furniture with a remarkably few steps:

via Briefcase transforms into table, stool and lamp – Boing Boing.

Boxed from Tyrone Stoddart on Vimeo.

[Looks like an absolutely fascinating documentary. -egg]

[…]twilight sleep was probably the most interesting discovery of the project. Twilight sleep is a moment in the teens where internationally, wealthy women began traveling to Germany to a clinic where there’s a drug protocol given to laboring women, an almost homeopathic dose of morphine that doesn’t really take the pain away in any significant way, coupled with scopolamine which induces amnesia. So the experience of laboring in twilight sleep may be intensely painful, but the women forget it as they’re experiencing it. The interesting thing historically about twilight sleep is that it became a real activist cause in the U.S., and the activists who were supporting and trying to bring it to the U.S. were all feminists and suffragettes. So the early 20th century history of women being really strong advocates for medicalized childbirth, for hospital birth, for drugs, for anesthesia, is an interesting forgotten history.

What was the position for advocating twilight sleep? Was it for equality, mainly?

That the pain of labor is an abject experience of very intense pain. The language that’s used in these books and articles that feminists wrote advocating twilight sleep is basically human-rights discourse: Society has the obligation to give us women this thing that will take away this devastating pain that we experience. It’s a human-rights discourse of equality for women in the form of pain relief. Which is incredibly interesting set next to ­today’s feminist conversation which is all about natural unmedicated childbirth being the correct, feminist way of giving birth. For me that was a discovery.

via The Birth of Motherhood – The New Inquiry.

It is quite likely this is the coolest desk in the world!

The Pipe Organ Desk has been in the works for more than 3 years. It is entirely made from solid wood down to the last screw. It features an octave of functional wooden organ pipes. Should you play the correct sequence of notes or tune, a secret compartment opens up.

When you push in a drawer on the desk the air is directed to one of the organ pipes at the front of the desk, sounding a note. Some of the air is also directed into a pneumatic logic board. The logic board within the desk actually keeps track of the notes played. When it picks up the correct tune it unlocks a very special secret compartment. The logic board, can be reprogrammed to pick up any tune, so at any time the song may be changed to a new tune. It is powered entirely by air, and it is made entirely from solid wood.

via Pipe Organ desk.

Clayton Seymour, a Navy vet, was outraged to discover that his Freedom of Information Act request to the NSA to see his file was rejected because telling him what information they’d gathered in secret would expose their secret information-gathering techniques. Obama’s 2009 Executive Order 13526 requires all government agencies to make all records public, other than in exceptional circumstances. The NSA has effectively crammed all of its information into an exceptional circumstance because to disclose anything would lead to disclosure of its methods. This is the basis on which it is rejecting all FOIA requests.

via NSA’s catch-22: we can’t tell you anything, because everything we do is a secret – Boing Boing.

[Really in-depth looks at a bunch of the most famous murder ballads. Although, dammit, where’s The Twa Sisters? -egg]

So, why murder ballads? First and foremost, I think its because theyre essentially a form of journalism. Most of the songs youll find discussed here were written very soon after the real-life crimes they describe, and sold in the streets within hours of the killers capture or execution. Cheerfully vulgar, revelling in gore, and always with an eye on the main chance, these songs were tabloid newspapers set to music, carrying news of all the latest orrible murders to an insatiable public.

Then theres the fact that murder ballads never stop mutating, morphing to suit local place names as they cross and re-cross the Atlantic, and changing with the times as they move down the decades to fascinate each generations biggest musical stars. Victims are bludgeoned, stabbed or shot in every verse and killers are often hanged, but the songs themselves never die.

For all this mutability, the core facts of the story in each song are surprisingly persistent, and give us just enough information to follow a trail through the clippings library to the real individuals whose short lives and brutal deaths have become an indelible part of popular culture. No-ones going to care how you or I met our ends 100 years from now, but theyll still be singing Billy Lyons tale and recalling his fatal encounter with that bad man Stagger Lee.

via Murder Ballads | Paul Slade – Journalist.