Recently in Misc Category

I spent some time today listening to Michael Sandel's popular Justice course on iTunes U. The first two episodes are kind of a "greatest hits" of ethics hypos: he starts with the trolley problem (switching and fat man variants) and then moves onto the transplant problem. As usual, a lot of people are willing to switch the track, a lot fewer are willing to push the fat man, and practically nobody is willing to kill a healthy person to harvest his organs. There's all the usual flailing around as the students try to differentiate cases which are similar in body count but provoke radically different moral intuitions.

The organ transplant case is supposed to be a sort of reductio ad absurdum for consequentialists. Like the basic trolley case, it involves trading the death of one person to save five, but unlike the basic trolley cases, you're actually murdering the guy. Unsurprisingly, practically nobody is willing to sign on to that being morally acceptable, but since the math is the same, this suggests that there's something morally icky about consequentialism. Obviously, you can just embrace the cold (but allegedly logical) result, but in this particular case there's an alternative response within the framework of consequentialism: argue that sacrificing one unwilling donor to save five people isn't actually the right consequentialist choice. Obviously, if we're talking about this one case, then the cost/benefit analysis works out, but you need to think about the general equilibrium scenario. If innocent people regularly walk into the ER and coming out in pieces, then everyone is going to be a lot less likely to visit the doctor, which is not only bad for them, but also means that there won't be anyone to use as organ donors, in which case there won't be any recipients to trade off against donors anyway. (Note that the hypo here is that the doctor doesn't get caught, but if the base rate of going in healthy and coming out dead goes up a lot, this deters people from visiting doctors even if they think the causes of death are innocent).

Obviously, you can try to sharpen the case to remove this problem (it's a one-time thing for some reason, for instance). This is the philosopher's natural response, as evidenced when one student suggests waiting for one of the sick people to die and harvesting his organs instead; Sandel's response is that he's ruined the philosophical point; more on this in a second. But now you run into the objection that the scenario is basically so artificial that it doesn't tell you anything useful about day-to-day moral reasoning, which is of cours the generic objection to most of the philosophical ethics hypos. The nice thing about the organ donar hypo is that it does seem plausible at some level, the more you adjust it to sharpen it the less it works as an intuition pump.

On my way through Oslo Airport (OSL) on Sunday I found an interesting design flaw. The gate area I was supposed to depart from is shown schematically below.

The way things work here is that you disembark in some semi-controlled international zone but then some flights require you to go through passport control again. (I'm not actually sure why; an FA told me that it had something to do with Schengen versus non-Schengen but since I came in from Germany, which is in the Schengen area, it's not clear to me if one would be going through passport control to enter or leave some jurisdiction.) However, what's unusual is that the gate area is used for both European and International departures. If you're on an International flight, you enter through Door A; on a European flight you enter through Door B.

When I showed up, however, I didn't have a boarding pass, and there wasn't any obvious place to get one. I asked one of the not-so-helpful floating information people who told me to ask passport control. When I asked the woman staffing passport control she told me that I didn't go through passport control and I should just wait for the gate area to open. Now, I'd already tried and found it locked, but when I went back, another passenger was opening the door so I just walked in through door A. I asked the gate agent where I should go and she sent me over through some tunnel to gate 49, where I picked up a boarding pass and had a seat. When I looked over, though, the other set of doors (door B) were also open, allowing me—if I chose—to totally bypass passport control. At some point an FA came over and closed door B but they were simultaneously open for maybe 20 minutes.

Obviously, this isn't that great a design: The doors aren't interlocked in any way so it's easy to make a mistake and have them both open at once. People are moving back and forth between the two gate areas all the time, so it's really hard to keep control of the situation; even if you were able to guarantee that the doors were never open at once you still wouldn't be able to prevent unauthorized transit between the zones without also making sure everyone left the area in between having each door open.

So you work with a lot of confidential information and occasionally you print some out. Unfortunately, now you have a bunch of confidential pieces of paper and when you're done with them you need to dispose of them somehow. You could of course buy a shredder, but they kind of suck and instead a lot of companies engage a shredding service. The shredding service drops off a "console"; you put your documents in the console, and then periodically a shredding company rep comes by, takes the documents, and shreds them.

That's one way of putting it. Another way of putting it is that you carefully segregate all your most confidential documents from your ordinary boring business documents. You put those documents in a cheap particleboard box that locks with an easily picked disk lock. Then once every couple weeks some tattooed guy with a goatee and a ponytail and wearing a cotton t-shirt with a Shred-It logo comes by, opens the box, and takes all your confidential documents away with him and leaves you a helpful receipt.

Anyone know where I can get one of those Shred-It shirts?

Public health types are always stressing how important hand washing is for preventing the spread of disease. Somewhat surprisingly, it seems to have other benefits as well. I somehow missed it but in 2006, Zhong and Liljenquist reported that handwashing seems to act as a counter to feelings of moral wrongness

Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing Chen-Bo Zhong1* and Katie Liljenquist2

Physical cleansing has been a focal element in religious ceremonies for thousands of years. The prevalence of this practice suggests a psychological association between bodily purity and moral purity. In three studies, we explored what we call the "Macbeth effect"--that is, a threat to one's moral purity induces the need to cleanse oneself. This effect revealed itself through an increased mental accessibility of cleansing-related concepts, a greater desire for cleansing products, and a greater likelihood of taking antiseptic wipes. Furthermore, we showed that physical cleansing alleviates the upsetting consequences of unethical behavior and reduces threats to one's moral self-image. Daily hygiene routines such as washing hands, as simple and benign as they might seem, can deliver a powerful antidote to threatened morality, enabling people to truly wash away their sins.

In a recent issue of Science, Lee and Schwarz report that handwashing after choice tasks reduces post-choice assessments of differences between the choices:

After choosing between two alternatives, people perceive the chosen alternative as more attractive and the rejected alternative as less attractive. This postdecisional dissonance effect was eliminated by cleaning one's hands. Going beyond prior purification effects in the moral domain, physical cleansing seems to more generally remove past concerns, resulting in a metaphorical "clean slate" effect.

The first of these studies seems straightforward but the second less so. As I read it, Lee and Schwarz's interpretation of the results is that people asked to select one of two alternatives when they are less indifferent feel the need to adjust their preferences to justify the choice. Handwashing reduces that reasessment process:

These findings indicate that the psychological impact of physical cleansing extends beyond the moral domain. Much as washing can cleanse us from traces of past immoral behavior, it can also cleanse us from traces of past decisions, reducing the need to justify them. This observation is not captured by the purity-morality metaphor and highlights the need for a better understanding of the processes that mediate the psychological impact of physical cleansing. To further constrain the range of plausible candidate explanations, future research may test whether the observed "clean slate" effect is limited to past acts that may threaten one's self-view (e.g., moral transgressions and potentially poor choices) or also extends to past behaviors with positive implications.

Even more future research might ask whether handwashing impacts other non self-image type issues. E.g., what's the impact on memory, reliability of past assessments, etc.? I also noticed that in the second paper, the initial variance between the two choices (pre-washing) was larger, so I wonder if this might have had an impact somehow. Regardless, I'll be stocking up on hand soap.

As I previously mentioned, my friend Terence bought this, uh, artwork, which sells itself on eBay. Well, Terence has hit the big time with an article in the NYT magazine.

Spies, who is the chief technology officer at Voltage Security in Palo Alto, Calif., describes himself as a collector of "baffling contemporary art." (He mentions the almost monochrome panels of Anne Appleby and Molly Springfield's meticulous drawings of photocopies.) He says another collector once advised him to buy art that "people have a reaction to - good or bad." And "A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter" has elicited reactions ranging from "You're really crazy" to "You're slightly crazy." He's O.K. with that. It "sets people off," he continues, "because it's not even clear what you own."

...

The new opening minimum bid is calculated to cover shipping and other overhead, so the seller won't lose money, but this setup also limits how much the seller can make should the piece appreciate in value over time. And of course it's possible Spies can own the piece indefinitely - if it fails to become more valuable. "It was totally not an investment," he says, cheerfully. That's good, because as of this writing, "A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter," priced at $6,858, has attracted no bidders.

For reference, a full-page ad in the Times Magazine runs $90k.

Part of the Democratic immigration plan is to require every American worker to have some kind of biometric identification [*].

The proposal is one of the biggest differences between the newest immigration reform proposal and legislation crafted by late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

The national ID program would be titled the Believe System, an acronym for Biometric Enrollment, Locally stored Information and Electronic Verification of Employment.

It would require all workers across the nation to carry a card with a digital encryption key that would have to match work authorization databases.

"The cardholder's identity will be verified by matching the biometric identifier stored within the microprocessing chip on the card to the identifier provided by the cardholder that shall be read by the scanner used by the employer," states the Democratic legislative proposal.

...

"The biometric identification card is a critical element here," Durbin said. "For a long time it was resisted by many groups, but now we live in a world where we take off our shoes at the airport and pull out our identification.

The usual privacy groups are upset about this. I'm not sure how thrilled I am about it either, but that angle seems played out. Right now, I'm more interested in the security issues.

First, the American system of personal identification is far weaker than would be required to really support this strong a system of identification. The only real personal identification most US citizens have is a birth certificate (if they can find it; I don't know where mine is) and a driver's license. This is reflected in the proof of right to work requirements: All that's required to get a US passport (sufficient for proof to work in the US) is a birth certificate and some form of personal identification (e.g., a driver's license). And at least in California all you need to get a driver's license is a birth certificate, so basically all you need is a birth certificate. Similarly, a social security card (trivially forgeable) and a driver's license are sufficient to establish the right to work. Any new identification system like the one proposed here would need to be based on the same shakey foundation. It's not clear that there's a lot of point in requiring this strong a piece of identification (fingerprints, etc.) when we have this weak a notion of people's identity to start with.

Second, the system as described seems incredibly inconvenient, given that it effectively mandates that every employer in the country have some new scanner that can be used to verify the user's fingerprint.¹ That seems like it's going to have a huge scalability problem. It's not clear how this is going to work in practice, either: is the scanner going to actually check the user's fingerprint (lots of opportunities for false rejects here), display the fingerprint and require employers to check it (you've gotta be kidding me, right?), or send the fingerprint back to Washington where it can be checked centrally. This last seems like the most practical option.

Regardless, I have two simpler approaches: the first preserves the personal identity check but with much less infrastructure. We replace social security cards and SSNs with a new, longer, identifier (18 digits should be plenty long).² These numbers are effectively unguessable, but the US government maintains a central database that matches them to pictures (this database can be generated the same way as we were planning to establish the system described above). When you go to hire a new employee, you ask for their card (actually the number is enough) and type their number and your own TIN into https://www.identitycheck.gov/. The site shows their picture and you just compare it against the person in front of you. This creates a record in the database of the check, which establishes that you have done the check and provides a secure mechanism for delivering the (customary) biometric without the need for any new technical infrastructure at the vast majority of employers.

Really, though, we could probably dispense with the biometric entirely. As long as we have an entry in some national database of everyone who is allegedly working [keyed by SSN] and what job they hold (including when they started and stopped and some limited information about what hours they work) it should be possible to data mine the database for multiple SSNs and catch most cases of people not authorized to work, since each will have to present some legitimate number, and most numbers which can be used already are in use by other people working other jobs.

So, I'm not sure why this seems like a good idea to Durbin et al. Rather, it just seems like the more general misplaced faith that people seem to have in positive identification as panacea.

^1. And what's with the microchip? All you need here is a digital signature, which doesn't require any kind of chipcard. If Congress wants a system like this, they should probably let professionals design it rather than trying to specify every detail.
^2. The idea behind the longer identifier is to make it prohibitive to try random identifiers and get people's actual data. We just need a long enough identifier that most random values are invalid. If we capture the requester's TIN, then any significant number of bogus identifier requests points directly to this kind of fishing expedition. Really 18 digits is probably too long, but since 9 digit SSNs are already too small, we might as well buy ourselves some room.

I eventually did buy a new motorcycle (background here), which means a trip to AAA to do the title transfer (sane people avoided the CA DMV, even before the furloughs made them grumpy and short staffed). Two trips, actually, because the seller had lost the title and apparently in its absence you need not only form REG-227 (Application for Duplicate Title), but also REG-262 (the odometer mileage statement). I only had REG-227 so I got to pay for the transfer but had to go back to the seller for REG-262. I finally got it from them and went back last week to finish the transaction.

Anyway, I get there and the AAA clerk types for a while, looks baffled, and then types some more and finally tells me that I have a $153 overpayment. We still don't know what this was for, but she doesn't look happy when she says this, which is my first clue something is wrong. She then proceeded to explain that AAA can only arrange for a refund of up to $99 and if I want all of it I have to go to the DMV. I could immediately see where this was going and you probably can too, but I figured I might as well try, so I asked if maybe I could apply this to next year's DMV fees, or my wife's car or something. Anyway, the answer was no, so I finally gave up and said what I knew I would have to say all along "Can you just cut the refund down to $99." It took me a while to get this point across, but eventually she got it and spent the next 10-20 minutes trying to figure out what combination of fees would get me below the magic $99 threshold. I still have no idea what got tacked on but eventually she says "I can do $98". That sounded good for me (I've now spent almost as much time as I would have at the DMV) so I took my registration sticker and made a break for it. Apparently I get my refund in 4-6 weeks, or whenever they get around to sending it.

A persistent problem at races is long lines for the portapotties. I've actually missed the start of races because I was waiting in line. I've often wished that races would sell some sort of premier access where you would pay a little extra on your race fee and get to use special portapotties. (This is effectively Odzlyko's Paris Metro Pricing idea applied to a different kind of uh, resource.) Actually, what I would probably prefer would be a guarantee that the race would have an extra premier toilet for each X racers that paid for premier access.

Anyway, the New Orleans Rock and Roll Marathon seems to have implemented a more elaborate version of this:

To get your race off to the best possible start, we'll have comfortable, climate-controlled restroom trailers set up at the starting line. Running water, flushing toilets, and some Run Happy® surprises await.

To access this pre-race luxury, you'll need to snag a Brooks VIP Porta Potty pass in one of two easy ways:

1. Head to Varsity Sports between 2/1 and 2/27 and purchase $50 in Brooks or Moving Comfort apparel or Brooks shoes. Offer valid at both Varsity Sports locations.

OR

2. Come to the Rock 'n' Roll Mardi Gras Marathon™ & 1/2 Marathon Health and Fitness Expo on Friday 2/26, or Saturday 2/27, and purchase $150 in official Rock 'n' Roll Marathon merchandise, Brooks apparel or shoes, or Moving Comfort apparel.

Either way, you'll receive a sticker for your race bib. The sticker is your race-day pass to Brooks' VIP Porta Potty, to be expertly staffed by Varsity Sports volunteers and Brooks employees,

It's hard to figure out how much this really costs: I don't wear Brooks shoes, but presumably I could find some Brooks gear that would be comfortable, so figure like 20% of the amount you're expected to spend, which isn't so bad. Anyway, I've got no objection to emptying my bladder in comfort, of course—and the portapotties at races can get pretty bad—but really my priority is being able to go without having to wait. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who was at this event and used this service how long the line was.

I recently had occasion to rent a car from Enterprise (long story). As I picked up the car and prepared to drive away, I noticed that the tank was only half full. I pointed this out to the customer service guy and he informed me that this was part of their new "half full/half empty policy", i.e., ordinarily you get the car full and you bring it back full. Here, they give it to you half full and you bring it back half full. I couldn't quite tell if this was what Enterprise always does now or just something they sometimes do, but while it seems superficially the same as the original policy, it's actually quite a bit worse for the renter.

With the old policy, life was simple: you found a gas station close to the car return, filled up the tank, maybe grabbed a receipt, and dropped the car off. By contrast, what happens here is that you drive around, filling up the tank if necessary, and at some point you need to return the car. If you're over 1/2 full then you just end up gifting the remainder to Enterprise (who can just fill up the tank completely and require the next customer to return it full). (What, you were going to drive the car around until you had burned up the gas? Or maybe you were going to siphon it out into some empty Gatorade bottles...) You could, of course, never fill the tank above 1/2 way, but this is a huge pain. Even if you're lucky enough to be at less than 1/2 full when you need to return the car, you're unlikely to be exactly at 1/2, in which case you need to put some gas in. You're reasonably likely to overshoot (again, taking gas out of the tank isn't easy.), in which case Enterprise again gets some free gas.

Either way, this is likely to be a win for Enterprise and a lose for you.

My friend Terence just got written up in the Stranger as the first purchaser of Caleb Larsen's A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter (hereafter ATtDaS). Briefly, ATtDaS is a black cube with some electronics inside that, when connected to the Internet, attempts to sell itself on eBay. (Current auction here). The purchaser is (allegedly) required to provide an Internet connection (semi-absurd EULA can be found at the auction site. sample quote: "Any failure to follow these terms without prior consent of Artist will forfeit the status of the Artwork as a legitimate work of art. The item will no longer be considered a genuine work by the Artist and any value associated with it will be reduced to its value as a material object and not a work of art.") and has to kick back 15% of the profits from the sale to Larsen.

Terence paid a stupefying $6400 for the privilege of not-really owning this object. Here's what he has to say for himself:

It sort of uniformly falls into two categories: either, That's an enormously appealing, thought-provoking piece of art, or the other thing is, That's the most foolish thing I've ever seen. They're really defensive about it.

I hang out with a bunch of computer security people because I'm a computer security person myself, so they want to know, are you going to hack the box? Is there some way to put it behind a firewall to slow it down so it can't sell itself? Which really adds a whole other dimension because you buy the box and the box immediately starts trying to escape from you. So part of the impulse is, is there a way I can subvert the process of it trying to escape from me? By doing that, you'd in some ways be removing the reason it's interesting.

I'm (of course) one of the people who suggested that it be firewalled off. Obviously, just firewalling it off would be cheating and arguably violate the license agreement (not that I'm convinced it's actually binding). But the natural security guy reaction is to try to find some way to stop ATtDaS from selling itself in some way that complies with the agreement. My suggestion was to firewall off eBay alone, or just forge TCP RST packets. This seems to me the qualify with the relevant term:

Collector agrees that the Artwork will remain connected to a live Internet connection at all times, with disconnections allowed only for the transportation of the work from one venue to another.

Option 2 seems to be to "transport" it from its current venue in Seattle to a venue somewhere in the Himalayas via yak, Sherpa, or the like.

I tried to explain to Terence that this wasn't removing the interesting part but rather going taking an allegedly subversive piece and going meta-subversive, but he didn't bite. Some people just don't appreciate art.