Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

Please print a QR code for a page where the manual can be donwloaded, on the manual itself.

Thank you.

In my misspent youth I spent about a year as a visiting scholar researching wavelets under Raphy Coifman’s supervision at Yale’s small but excellent Mathematics Department. Professor Coifman was head of a department that also featured Benoît Mandelbrot (of fractals fame), the late Walter Feit (as in the Feit-Thompson theorem), and Fields medalist Gregory Margulis. He was kind enough to credit me on a published paper, even though he did all the work, reverse delegation in action. That paper had modest success and was cited, so I can claim (not with a straight face) to be a published mathematician.

While perusing my blog’s web analytics referrer report, I was surprised to find out my article on the Nikon D70’s not-so-raw RAW format is actually cited in a serious scientific paper on human vision. We keep hearing about students getting flunking grades for citing Wikipedia, are blogs really considered more authoritative?

The citation uses the old URL for the blog entry, </mylos/weblog/2004/05/02-1.html>. When I migrated to WordPress at the end of 2009, I took great pains to provide redirects whenever possible and avoid broken links. Many bloggers don’t have the time or expertise to do this, and simply leave dangling permalinks around. If quoting blogs is to become standard practice, authors should probably provide some sort of fallback mechanism like linking to Archive.org, but dead-tree journals do not have this capability. Absent that, linkrot may spread to an entire new category of documents, scientific papers.

Update (2011-07-18):

Here’s another paper (PDF) referencing the same article. What’s next, CiteSeer?

While cleaning out my spam folders, I noticed a disturbing trend: a number of the spam were sent to vendor-specific email addresses I had set up to communicate with Parallels, Joyent and Shoeboxed. As a security measure, I do not give my personal email address to vendors, only aliases. The email address I used in the past for Dell was dell@majid.fm, for instance (I now use a different domain). A few years back, I started receiving pornographic spam at that address, which led me to think either Dell had secretly adopted a radically new diversification plan, or that their customer database had been compromised. Needless to say, this did not reflect well on Dell. I canceled that alias and stopped dealing with Dell.

I contacted the support for the three vendors. Joyent got back to me, and said:

We have traced this back to a third-party provider that was used to distribute service notifications. We have been in contact with this service provider, and they have determined that subscriber email addresses of their clients were compromised. They have launched their own investigation, which is ongoing, and have also reached out to their local FBI office.

After some digging, I found some interesting posts. Some email marketing company called iContact, that I had never heard about before, was the source of the compromise. They claim to be SAS-70 compliant, but of course like most bureaucratic certifications, SAS-70 is mostly security theater that makes sysadmins’ life miserable for no meaningful security benefit (SAS-70 auditors, on the other hand, profit handsomely).

Just another example of how outsourcing critical functions to outside vendors can backfire spectacularly and take down your own reputation in the process.

As a foreigner living in San Francisco for the last ten years, I never cease to be baffled by US voters’ tendency to vote for candidates who are clearly class warriors on the side of the rich and other influential special interests. Political scientists have long wondered why people vote against their own best interests, e.g. Americans voting for candidates beholden to health “care” provider lobbies and who hew to the status quo, saddling the US with grotesquely overpriced yet substandard health care. Another example would be the repulsive coddling of an increasingly brazen Wall Street kleptocracy.

Ideology cannot explain it all. Certainly, some people will put principle ahead of their pocketbook and vote for candidates that uphold their idea of moral values even if they simultaneously vote for economic measures that hurt their electorate. That said, there is nothing preventing a political candidate from adopting simultaneously socially conservative positions and economic policies that favor a safety net, what in Europe would be called Christian Democrats.

Media propaganda and brainwashing cannot explain it either, to believe so, as do conspiracy theorists on both right and left of the US political spectrum, is to seriously underestimate the intelligence (and cynicism) of the electorate. In a mostly democratic country like the United States, special interests can only prevail when the general population is apathetic, or at least consents to the status quo.

I believe the answer lies in loss aversion, the mental bias that causes people to fear a loss far more than they desire a gain. Our brains did not evolve in a way that favors strict rationality. Most people’s intuition about probability and statistics is unreliable and misleading—we tend to overestimate the frequency of rare events. The middle class, which holds a majority of votes, will tend to oppose measures that expose it to the risk of being pulled down by lower classes even if the same measures would allow them upward mobility into the upper classes. The upper class exploits this asymmetry to maintain its privileges, be they obscene taxpayer-funded bonuses for bankers who bankrupted their banks, or oligopoly rent-seeking by the medical profession.