Tag: safety_fetish

Boston Panic

The discovery of suspicious objects on bridges, near a medical center, underneath an interstate, and in other crowded public places has ignited fears across Boston, snarling traffic and sending state and local police scrambling across the city.

this is what happens if headless chickens run the news.
2007-02-09: Do you have what it takes to save Boston from the Lite Bright menace?
2007-03-01:

if it’s not an american flag, it’s probably a bomb.

heh. i wonder what happens if someone wraps a bomb in a flag? will they declare a war on flags? that would actually be neat.
2013-03-31: reminds me of their war against things with LEDs from a few years back. among their bumbling peers, boston pd are the most incompetent. so funny.

Boston Punk Zombies Are Watching You! The Boston police go undercover on the Internet to stop the city’s most dreaded scourge: DIY indie-rock shows.

Pointless Satellite censorship

I’ve been told off (politely) via email for showing terrorist readers of Ogle Earth how to get to the imagery that used to be in Google Earth by publicizing the Google Maps API tile comparison tool in my previous post. The argument was that these things may be easy for me, but not for the average Iraqi, and that what I did was akin to posting information on how to pick locks. I only partly agree. I think my previous post was more like pointing out that there is no door to lock. 10 minutes ago I gave myself the task of getting hold of recent imagery of Basra without access to Google Earth or the Google Maps API. I got what I was looking for on the first try. Tell me if what I just did is not accessible to anyone with dial-up internet, a point to prove, and a positive IQ.

debunking the ‘OMG terrorists’ nonsense

Media Innumeracy

Certain types of news — for example dramatic disasters and terrorist actions — are massively over-reported, others — such as scientific progress and meaningful statistical surveys of the state of the world — massively under-reported.

2013-08-25: Media reporting

2021-02-22: Vaccine effectiveness is a great example of media innumeracy:

It is imperative to dispel any ambiguity about how vaccine efficacy shown in trials translates into protecting individuals and populations. The mRNA-based Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were shown to have 94–95% efficacy in preventing symptomatic COVID-19, calculated as 100 × (1 minus the attack rate with vaccine divided by the attack rate with placebo). It means that in a population such as the one enrolled in the trials, with a cumulated COVID-19 attack rate over a period of 3 months of ~1% without a vaccine, we would expect 0.05% of vaccinated people would get diseased.

Uninsurable

Another way to look at it is that better ability to predict risks allows us to avoid many of them. If insurers can tell which houses in an earthquake zone will fall, they can raise the price on insuring that house. This produces a more efficient market outcome that seems to be independantly desireable: fewer people will build houses that are likely to be crushed by earthquakes. Even genetic risks have controllable environmental factors; those at risk for heart disease can adopt low-fat diets, excercise, and take statins; those likely to develop diabetes can go easy on dessert. Even carriers of the infamous BRCA genes generally opt to reduce their risk, through the drastic step of removing their breasts, and often their ovaries. They do this, not to avoid high insurance costs, but to extend their lives. But what about the poor? It is hard to see any reason why insurance companies should subsidize them. If society thinks that poor families should have insurance, then society should pay for it through the tax code, not slap regulations on insurance companies to keep information from reaching the market.

the good and bad of increased actuarial fidelity

Intrusive Canada

So … they promptly sent me off to secondary inspection and did a full search of my hard-drive for all images. All 19k of them, as it turned out, including family pictures and presentation silliness, but was mostly program images, clip art from Word, temp file detritus, etc. Who knew there was so much junk? But why the bug hunt? As most readers will have now surmised, which I didn’t straight away in my sleep-deprived state, they were looking for illicit pictures. In the digital age, laptops are apparently the new cross-border smuggling mules.

border control checking all pictures on a laptop. bizarre, and a losing proposition. i had no idea that the mullahs had come to canada, too.