Paying with your finger

HT: Marginal Revolution. Wrong finger unfortunately.

Teksi sapu meets the 21st century

Teksi sapu + Internet = UberX

I had been looking forward to this service coming to Malaysia especially Penang since public transportation there is virtually non-existent if you live in the Green Lane area. Even worse is the traffic which is comparable to being on the DC Beltway at rush hour except that in Penang it is everywhere during rush hour.

Unfortunately, like some jurisdictions in the US this is seen more as a threat to taxi companies than a way to alleviate congestion and perhaps even decrease pollution.

From the above link:

The Maryland Public Service Commission has labeled Uber a common carrier. It’s a move the company says could make it impossible for them to operate here in Maryland.

And from Malaysia:

Private vehicles offering a taxi-like service through the Uber mobile app are doing so illegally. 

They would face the full brunt of the law during a nationwide crackdown by the autho­rities from Oct 1, Road Transport Department (JPJ) director-general Datuk Seri Ismail Ahmad said yesterday. 

He said the service was akin to teksi sapu or kereta sapu as the vehicles were not licensed to carry fare-paying passengers.

On misreading "mending wall"

Possibly, the most famous line in the poem is "good fences make good neighbors".

How should it be interpreted or more generally is there a wrong interpretation? When trying to interpret a poem is there even a wrong interpretation? According to Andrew Sullivan, yes. In his post, Sullivan quotes a comment from one of his links:

The narrator of the poem is annoyed by his neighbor’s insistence that there has to be a fence between them. If only his neighbor would get beyond his father’s beliefs –originating in an old proverb –and reconsider his thinking.

Reading the poem, I actually don't detect any annoyance - puzzlement, perhaps, and even some mischievous questioning of why "good fences make good neighbors". Yet the speaker in the poem continues to participate in the annual ritual of rebuilding the wall.

An even more over the top critique of the positive interpretation of the phrase that good fences indeed make good neighbors is from Eleanor Barkhorn who appears not to have read the poem at all. She writes:

"Mending Wall" is a polemic against building walls that separate us from our neighbors—the poem opens with the line,"Something there is that doesn't love a wall" and goes on to describe the narrator's attempts to talk his neighbor out of putting one up.

Polemic? Hardly. Clever, yes. And the speaker never really tries to talk his neighbor out of rebuilding it. However barkborn has pointed out another often quoted line: "Something there that doesn't love a wall". Every year, the wall falls down - why? The cold New England winters and the frost buildup between the cracks as well as the expansion and contraction due to temperature changes is the something that doesn't love a wall. Yes, the speaker does seem to indicate that the natural state of the wall is for it to fall. There is a sense that the rebuilding of the wall is an annual ritual that he participates in despite his concerns - perhaps an acknowledgment that the wall is necessary - necessary for what?

Possibly this is the only time he sees his neighbor so the wall allows them to get together to rebuild it every year.  Possibly the wall delineates not only their property lines but also delineates each other's responsibility toward each other and the act of rebuilding the wall is one that reestablishes the unwritten responsibilities and rules.

There is no wrong way to interpret a poem although I don't really see Sullivan and Barkhorn arguing persuasively that good fences do not make good neighbors. Another comment comes from a defender of the humanities who says parenthetically:

In a like manner, how often has Frost’s “The Mending Wall” been quoted out of context in debates about immigration reform? “Good fences make good neighbors,” indeed.

His disdain for the line good fences make good neighbors is clear - yet he does not argue against it since that is not the point of his article. His argues why Dead Poets Society is such a bad movie because the students do not take part in careful reading or analysis of the texts that are in the movie. He writes:

In a hackneyed speech about resisting conformity that he seems to have delivered many times before, Keating invokes that oft-invoked but rarely understood chestnut, “The Road Not Taken”: “Robert Frost said, ‘Two roads diverged in a wood and I / I took the one less traveled by / And that has made all the difference.’” 

Wha—? Has Keating actually read the poem from which he so blithely samples? For Robert Frost said no such thing: a character in his poem says it. And we’re meant to learn, over the course of that poem, that he’s wrong—that he’s both congratulating and kidding himself. He chooses his road ostensibly because “it was grassy and wanted wear”; but this description is contradicted in the very next lines—“Though as for that, the passing there / Had worn them really about the same,” and—more incredibly still—“both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black.” He wants to claim to have taken the exceptional road, if not the spiritual high road; but he knows on some level that it’s a hollow boast. 

Keating hasn’t actually read “The Road Not Taken” in any meaningful sense; rather, he’s adopted it, adapted it, made it his own—made it say what he wants it to say. His use of those closing lines, wrenched from their context, isn’t just wrong—it’s completely wrong, and Keating uses them to point a moral entirely different from that of Frost’s poem. (In a like manner, how often has Frost’s “The Mending Wall” been quoted out of context in debates about immigration reform? “Good fences make good neighbors,” indeed.)

As a student of poetry should know - sometimes there can be multiple interpretations of a poem each just as valid as he shows in his analysis of The Road Not Taken. Yes, Keating was wrong in that Frost didn't literally mean what he said. On the point that while the speaker of the poem may not have said something - it doesn't mean that the poet isn't the speaker of the poem - nor is the poem always about what it seems to say it is about.

In the end the all article really ends up showing is that the author decided to interpret it one way:  "He wants to claim to have taken the exceptional road, if not the spiritual high road; but he knows on some level that it’s a hollow boast." Although there are different interpretations as well:

"So the point of the poem is that everyone wants to look back and think that their choices matter. But in reality, s--t just happens the way that it happens, and it doesn’t matter."

In the end, both the author and Dead Poets Society are about equal in their defense of the humanities.

So much for open source, crowd source, and all other sources

The programming mistake that resulted in Heartbleed:

“I was working on improving OpenSSL and submitted numerous bug fixes and added new features…In one of the new features, unfortunately, I missed validating a variable containing a length.”
After he submitted the code, a reviewer “apparently also didn’t notice the missing validation,”  Seggelmann said, “so the error made its way from the development branch into the released version.”
Dr Seggelmann said the error he introduced was “quite trivial,” but acknowledged that its impact was “severe.”

The model relies on crowds except when crowds are sparse (oxymoron?) and quick reaction. This model applies to Wikipedia and financial markets as well. It relies even more strongly on so-called "self-correcting" mechanisms since crowds can also act like herds.

Apparently, mistakes such as Seggelmann’s aren’t rare. Programmers on Reddit sympathized with him and swapped stories of their own coding errors.
“Really, the only reason that most of us haven’t caused such a massive f—up is that we’ve never been given the opportunity,” one wrote.
So if errors like these are easy to make and have potentially disastrous consequences, why isn’t something being done?
“It would be better if more people helped improving [OpenSSL],” Seggelmann told Mashable via e-mail. “The more people look at it, the less likely errors like this occur.”

Apparently not a conspiracy either:

Seggelmann, who lives in Münster, Germany, told the Herald he didn’t insert the error on purpose, as some conspiracy theorists have suggested.
“It was a simple programming error in a new feature, which unfortunately occurred in a security relevant area,” he said. ”It was not intended at all, especially since I have previously fixed OpenSSL bugs myself, and was trying to contribute to the project.”

But what if some agency hypnotized him to make the mistake? Conspiracies can never die - they just take on a different form.

Huh?

Headline in WaPo:

Harvard journal says “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” is ancient, not a modern forgery

So does this mean it's an ancient forgery?

Guess the missing word

Woolley believes this is because the iPod material made______ more effective teachers. They had professional videos illustrating their lessons, and language support. “You’re not substituting the technology for face to face conversations,” he said. “You’re using technology as an adjunct, to better make a point.” Woolley felt that the technology, instead of distracting _______, inspired them. “It gave them more enthusiasm,” he said, “because it had more success and they were having more fun.”

The word is: missionaries.

Or perhaps more aptly, this is what colleges and MOOCs can learn from the the CoLDS.

From: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/the-facebook-of-mormon/283467/

Glitch

From the NYT opinion page on the failure of the Obamacare website on October 22, 2013 - the title of the piece was:

How to Fix the Glitches

The launch was reported on October 12 as follows (emphasis mine):

From the Start, Signs of Trouble at Health Portal

...

Even some supporters of the Affordable Care Act worry that the flaws in the system, if not quickly fixed, could threaten the fiscal health of the insurance initiative, which depends on throngs of customers to spread the risk and keep prices low. 

“These are not glitches,” said an insurance executive who has participated in many conference calls on the federal exchange. Like many people interviewed for this article, the executive spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he did not wish to alienate the federal officials with whom he works. “The extent of the problems is pretty enormous. At the end of our calls, people say, ‘It’s awful, just awful.' ”