Google TV going down?

It’s official: Google TV is a flop
[Via MacDailyNews]

“Google TV might be in a bit of a pickle if a Best Buy and Sony sale is any indication,” Matt Burns reports for TechCrunch. “The platform launched a few weeks ago with the Logitech Revue and Sony Internet TV. Both are loaded with the same system and so both are suffering the fate of Big Media’s blockade.”

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Little or no content does not make a nice system, especially since this costs several hundred dollars more than Apple TV. So now it does not cost as much as it used to. There still is a big roadblock happening here.

Apple sold over 250,000 Apple TV in the first 6 weeks. I don;t think Sony sold anywhere near that many of any of their Android-based devices.The Apple TV Black Friday special sold out.

I’m in the wrong business

Plagiarism and the mechanics of privilege
[Via Making Light]

Thesis: The primary way most Americans make money is the salary their job pays.

The primary mechanism of privilege in most Americans’ lives is that it enables those who have it to get jobs that are better and more lucrative than they could get on merit alone.

That said, here’s an utterly fascinating article by “Ed Dante” in The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Shadow Scholar: The man who writes your students’ papers tells his story. It begins with Jonathan Barkat’s editorial note:

Editor’s note: Ed Dante is a pseudonym for a writer who lives on the East Coast. Through a literary agent, he approached The Chronicle wanting to tell the story of how he makes a living writing papers for a custom-essay company and to describe the extent of student cheating he has observed. In the course of editing his article, The Chronicle reviewed correspondence Dante had with clients and some of the papers he had been paid to write. In the article published here, some details of the assignment he describes have been altered to protect the identity of the student.

That is: it’s real. The author does what he says he does. Onward.

“Ed Dante” now:

The request came in by e-mail around 2 in the afternoon. It was from a previous customer, and she had urgent business. I quote her message here verbatim (if I had to put up with it, so should you): “You did me business ethics propsal for me I need propsal got approved pls can you will write me paper?”

I’ve gotten pretty good at interpreting this kind of correspondence. The client had attached a document from her professor with details about the paper. She needed the first section in a week. Seventy-five pages.

I told her no problem.

It truly was no problem. In the past year, I’ve written roughly 5,000 pages of scholarly literature, most on very tight deadlines. But you won’t find my name on a single paper.

I’ve written toward a master’s degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I’ve worked on bachelor’s degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I’ve written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I’ve attended three dozen online universities. I’ve completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else. …

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He may make about $66,000 this year. And he is very, very good at what he does.

The company that supports this gets the other $1000. And during the busiest parts of the year, there are about 50 writers involved.

I wonder how this will be cured?

Best audio equiment review ever!

“We live underground. We speak with our hands.”
[Via Making Light]

Hilariously expensive speaker cables. ($6,800 “& eligible for free shipping with Amazon Prime.” Not a misprint–as the manufacturer assures us, “Dielectric Bias System (DBS) (US patent 7,126,055): Greatly improved performance is made possible by a constant 72 volt charge on all K2′s insulation. Similar to how the earth’s magnetic field makes all compasses point north, the AQ DBS system creates an electrostatic field which causes the molecules of the insulation to all point in the same direction. This minimizes the multiple nonlinear time-delays. Sound appears from a surprisingly black background with unexpected detail and dynamic contrast.” Uh, right.)

Inevitably: multiple brilliant Amazon reviews. Most recently, a concise work of short SF:

Somewhere in our brave new century, somebody actually pays nearly $1,000 a foot for speaker cable. And somewhere else, people toil anonymously to write things like that review. One can see the rough emerging outlines of Eloi and Morlocks–but not which is which.

(Thanks to Olga Nunes on Twitter.)

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I don’t usually include the whole post but this one needs to be.

I imagine groups of people writing all sorts of short science fiction tales amongst the reviews at Amazon. This one is really imaginative and very evocative.

And it convinced me not to but the cables.

Some things to ponder regarding the TSA scanners

by jurvetson

Molecular biologist on the dangers of pornoscanners
[Via Boing Boing]

Jason Bell, “a molecular biologist and biophysicist… a Ph.D. candidate in Steve Kowalczykowski’s lab at UC Davis,” has posted a detailed critique of the research on the safety of airport backscatter radiation scanners. His specialty is the “molecular mechanism of how mutations in the breast cancer susceptibility gene, BRCA2, result in cancer,” and he’s posted a detailed, lay-friendly explanation of the scientific concerns expressed by the UCSF team that believes that they are unsafe for use.

Which brings me to how the scanner works. Essentially, it appears that an X-ray beam is rastered across the body, which highlights the importance of one of the specific concerns raised by the UCSF scientists… what happens if the machine fails, or gets stuck, during a raster. How much radiation would a person’s eye, hand, testicle, stomach, etc be exposed to during such a failure. What is the failure rate of these machines? What is the failure rate in an operational environment? Who services the machine? What is the decay rate of the filter? What is the decay rate of the shielding material? What is the variability in the power of the X-ray source during the manufacturing process? This last question may seem trivial; however, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory noted significant differences in their test models, which were supposed to be precisely up to spec. Its also interesting to note that the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory criticized other reports from NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) and a group called Medical and Health Physics Consulting for testing the machine while one of the two X-ray sources was disabled (citations at the bottom of the page).

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The first is that the machines might be fine in a lab setting but what about in the real world, when hundred of these are in place around the US? This letter from Jason highlights some of my concerns also. Without a much better idea of how they actually work in the real world, I’d be cautious.

The second one is the Therac 25, a machine designed for radiation therapy. Due to poor software engineering, the machine gave lethal doses of radiation to several patients. Reading about their deaths makes one very concerned about any software driven machine and the possibility of very rare but very lethal combinations of systemic operations.

The machines had worked fine for hundred of patients but then, often due to an unfortunate set of circumstances involving software and human errors, would deliver much higher doses than expected.

There were also several elements of human error that contributed. These machines are under a lot of software control to provide the right dose. What happens when a bug occurs? With the Therac 25, an unusual combination of key strokes resulted in lethal doses.

And all the time, the company told people that it was not possible for the machine to overdose people.It also appears likely that they told operators this even after the company was aware of overdosing accidents.

Has the software been independently reviewed and sustained rigorous beta-testing to make sure lethal bugs are gone? Every piece of complex software has bugs. If these machines malfunctioned, what would the largest possible dosage a person could receive?

And what about training? The Therac 25 would display a malfunction warning when it was improperly used and the operators would just override the warning. And these were medical technicians with a lot of training. What sort of training does the TSA have?

The final thing is to remember that the TSA scanners use Windows XP for their operating system. Are there bugs associated with that OS that could cause a problem? These machines may be networked. Can someone hack into the system and disrupt the exposure control?

I’d like to know more about the development of the software being used. In my opinion, this software should be opened up for all to examine. The safety of American travelers should not be in the hands of proprietary software.

Let me end with a quote from an article about the Therac-25 accidents (my bold):

With information for this article taken from publicly available documents, we present a detailed accident investigation of the factors involved in the overdoses and the attempts by the users, manufacturers, and the US and Canadian governments to deal with them. Our goal is to help others learn from this experience, not to criticize the equipment’s manufacturer or anyone else. The mistakes that were made are not unique to this manufacturer but are, unfortunately, fairly common in other safety-critical systems. As Frank Houston of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said, “A significant amount of software for life-critical systems comes from small firms, especially in the medical device industry; firms that fit the profile of those resistant to or uninformed of the principles of either system safety or software engineering.”[2]

Furthermore, these problems are not limited to the medical industry. It is still a common belief that any good engineer can build software, regardless of whether he or she is trained in state-of-the-art software-engineering procedures. Many companies building safety-critical software are not using proper procedures from a software-engineering and safety-engineering perspective.

Most accidents are system accidents; that is, they stem from complex interactions between various components and activities. To attribute a single cause to an accident is usually a serious mistake. In this article, we hope to demonstrate the complex nature of accidents and the need to investigate all aspects of system development and operation to understand what has happened and to prevent future accidents.

The TSA scanners are part of a complex system comprising commercial entities and government bureaucracies overseeing underpaid workers operating potentially dangerous machines. I’d want a lot more information regarding many elements of this complex system than I have gotten so far.