[Hey, here’s an awesome short story about what intelligence professionals can achieve with metadata and the internet. Written in response to the new NSA revelations. -egg]

Nothing to Fear » Cyborgology.

Flood waters surround a pool in Germany.

via riotclitshave, Flood waters surround a pool in Germany..

[If you only read one essay about the NSA revelations, make it this one. Really insightful. -egg]

The frameworks of “innocent until proven guilty” and “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” are really really important to civil liberties, even if they mean that some criminals get away. These frameworks put the burden on the powerful entity to prove that someone has done something wrong. Because it’s actually pretty easy to generate suspicion, even when someone is wholly innocent. And still, even with this protection, innocent people are sentenced to jail and even given the death penalty. Because if someone has a vested interest in you being guilty, it’s not impossible to paint that portrait, especially if you have enough data.

via danah boyd | apophenia » where “nothing to hide” fails as logic.

One problem with the nothing-to-hide argument is that it assumes innocent people will be exonerated certainly and effortlessly. That is, it assumes that there are no errors, or if there are, they are resolved quickly and easily.

Suppose the probability of a correctly analyzing an email or phone call is not 100% but 99.99%. In other words, there’s one chance in 10,000 of an innocent message being incriminating. Imagine authorities analyzing one message each from 300,000,000 people, roughly the population of the United States. Then around 30,000 innocent people will have some ‘splaining to do. They will have to interrupt their dinner to answer questions from an agent knocking on their door, or maybe they’ll spend a few weeks in custody. If the legal system is 99.99% reliable, then three of them will go to prison.

Now suppose false positives are really rare, one in a million. If you analyze 100 messages from each person rather than just one, you’re approximately back to the scenario above.

Scientists call indiscriminately looking through large amounts of data “a fishing expedition” or “data dredging.” One way to mitigate the problem of massive false positives from data dredging is to demand a hypothesis: before you look through the data, say what you’re hoping to prove and why you think it’s plausible.

The legal analog of a plausible hypothesis is a search warrant. In statistical terms, “probable cause” is a judge’s estimation that the prior probability of a hypothesis is moderately high. Requiring scientists to have a hypothesis and requiring law enforcement to have a search warrant both dramatically reduce the number of false positives.

Related: You do too have something to hide

via A statistical problem with “nothing to hide” | The Endeavour.

[Good article on the current state of the sharing economy. -egg]

What’s new is that the sharing economy is deepening and spreading. Thousands of new businesses now sell access rather than ownership. For the young, hip and urban, collaborative consumption is a way to live light, waste less, to protect the environment, to create and associate with a community of like-minded people. But it’s not just a phenomenon of the hip. For everyone, it’s a way to de-clutter and save money.

via It’s Not Just Nice to Share, It’s the Future – NYTimes.com.

[Brave dude. -egg]

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.

The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong,” he said.

Snowden will go down in history as one of America’s most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning. He is responsible for handing over material from one of the world’s most secretive organisations – the NSA.

In a note accompanying the first set of documents he provided, he wrote: “I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions,” but “I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.”

via Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations.

[Trust no one ever -egg]

One way to make healthful meals more economical is to incorporate canned fruits and vegetables, which are often cheaper and more convenient than fresh produce. But does that mean sacrificing nutrients?

Thankfully, it does not. Studies show that like frozen produce, canned produce – provided it is free of added salt and sugars – has a nutrient value that is often as good as, if not better than, that of fresh produce.

via Really? The Claim: Fresh Produce Has More Nutrients Than Canned – NYTimes.com.

[Gaaah it’s all too confusing I’m just never eating again. -egg]

Nutrition experts argue that people need only the recommended daily allowance — the amount of vitamins found in a routine diet. Vitamin manufacturers argue that a regular diet doesn’t contain enough vitamins, and that more is better. Most people assume that, at the very least, excess vitamins can’t do any harm. It turns out, however, that scientists have known for years that large quantities of supplemental vitamins can be quite harmful indeed.

In a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1994, 29,000 Finnish men, all smokers, had been given daily vitamin E, beta carotene, both or a placebo. The study found that those who had taken beta carotene for five to eight years were more likely to die from lung cancer or heart disease.

Two years later the same journal published another study on vitamin supplements. In it, 18,000 people who were at an increased risk of lung cancer because of asbestos exposure or smoking received a combination of vitamin A and beta carotene, or a placebo. Investigators stopped the study when they found that the risk of death from lung cancer for those who took the vitamins was 46 percent higher.

Then, in 2004, a review of 14 randomized trials for the Cochrane Database found that the supplemental vitamins A, C, E and beta carotene, and a mineral, selenium, taken to prevent intestinal cancers, actually increased mortality.

Another review, published in 2005 in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that in 19 trials of nearly 136,000 people, supplemental vitamin E increased mortality. Also that year, a study of people with vascular disease or diabetes found that vitamin E increased the risk of heart failure. And in 2011, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association tied vitamin E supplements to an increased risk of prostate cancer.

Finally, last year, a Cochrane review found that “beta carotene and vitamin E seem to increase mortality, and so may higher doses of vitamin A.”

What explains this connection between supplemental vitamins and increased rates of cancer and mortality? The key word is antioxidants.

via Don’t Take Your Vitamins – NYTimes.com.

[Really loving all the recent dialogue around google maps and google image search. -egg]

Maps are always political. Most maps show us something that we already believe, so its difficult to see what is being reinforced and what is systematically ignored. Even the most mundane AAA maps of highways and state borders are doing political work by recognizing the sovereignty of individual states and the obduracy of highways and roads. The near-infinite number of things, qualities, measurements, and people that have spatial characteristics (seriously, just think of all of it: temperatures, ancestral lands, endemic species, isobars, places to buy smoothies, locations of hidden treasure, and so on, and so on…_) mean that map makers must always select what is relevant and what is not. This selection process—a human endeavor—is inherently social and deeply political. Google, a company that has taken upon itself to reject that selection process and “organize all the world’s information,” wants to provide a single map and, instead of deciding what is relevant in any given map, will personalize it based on information it has about you and your friends. Evgeny Morozov, writing in Slate,[1] is rightfully concerned that Google doesn’t quite know what they’re dealing with when they say they want to organize public spaces in their databases right next to email and photos of cats. He is concerned that–unlike books or weather forecasts—Google doesn’t “acknowledge the vital role that disorder, chaos, and novelty play in shaping the urban experience.” I completely agree that unpredictability is necessary for good urban space, but the biggest threat Google poses to public space isn’t that its maps are “profoundly utilitarian, even selfish in character.” Rather, Google hasn’t done enough to personalize maps in such a way that they become part of everyday social (and Social) life.

via Google Maps Can’t Kill Public Space (A Belated Reply to Evgeny Morozov) » Cyborgology.

MPHJ Technology Investments allegedly made plenty of money last year using a rather interesting business model. First, according to a lawsuit filed by the State of Vermont, it bought patents of dubious validity that could theoretically cover basic technologies, such as the scanning of documents. Next, it and its subsidiaries sent threatening letters, with various misstatements of fact, to businesses and nonprofits around the country, alleging patent infringement and demanding payment. MPHJ never went to court; it is said to have just collected settlements, asking for a thousand dollars per employee of the targeted firm. It didn’t invent anything. It didn’t create anything. It just took advantage of our patent laws to leech money from companies that do.

It is time to declare total war on patent trolls. The federal government, and the states, should do everything they can to exterminate them and to make anyone regret getting into such crooked work. The existence of trolls is entirely a product of government: they abuse a government program (the patent law), and continue to exist only thanks to government inaction.

via How to Make War on Patent Trolls : The New Yorker.