Category: Interesting Reads

The unattractive more likely to turn to crime?

I would love to see more commentary on this study.

Mocan and Tekin analyzed data from a federally sponsored survey of 15,000 high-schoolers who were interviewed in 1994 and again in 1996 and 2002. One question asked interviewers to rate the physical appearance of the student on a five-point scale ranging from “very attractive” to “very unattractive.”

These economists found that the long-term consequences of being young and ugly were small but consistent. Cute guys were uniformly less likely than averages would indicate to have committed seven crimes including burglary and selling drugs, while the unhandsome were consistently more likely to have broken the law.

Very attractive high school girls were less likely to commit six of the seven crimes, while those rated unattractive were more likely to have done six of seven, controlling for personal and family characteristics known to be associated with criminal behavior.

I haven’t seen anything like this before, and hope to read more from other reasearchers about this. (via BoingBoing)

[tags]Ugly people, Crime statistics[/tags]

Suppose Gore had shot someone?

I don’t know all the details about Cheney’s hunting incident.  I’ve known enough hunters to know that accidents happen – sometimes with disasterous results.  Because of that, I don’t see what the big deal is about this particular incident.  But Dan Gillmor has an interesting view on how this might have played out had it happened to someone on the other end of the political spectrum.

Suppose Al Gore, back in 1998, had shot someone in the face and chest in a Tennessee hunting accident. Suppose, further, that he had…

[tags]Gore, Cheney, Hunting incident[/tags]

You’re better off drinking the toilet water

This is rather disturbing, especially as I rarely order anything other than water when eating out. The title of the article is “Student finds toilet water cleaner than ice at fast food restaurants.”

Jasmine Roberts, 7th-grade student:
“My hypothesis was that the fast food restaurants’ ice would contain more bacteria that the fast food restaurants’ toilet water.”

I’ll jump to the punch line for you. Roberts was right. Ow.

EDIT: The Consumerist has a brief write-up showing what a moron I was for posting this story and commenting the way I did.  Humor included.

[tags]Fast food, water, bacteria[/tags]

I heart Cory Doctorow pt. 2

Another excellent write-up by Cory.  This one questions Google’s serving up video in a way more favorable to Hollywood instead of Google users.  I haven’t finished reading this one, but I will when I get a little quiet time to focus on it.

With the introduction of its new copy-restriction video service, Google has diverged from its corporate ethos. For the first time in the company’s history, it has released a product that is designed to fill the needs of someone other than Google’s users.

Google Video is a new video-search and video-sales tool, through which users can download videos that have been uploaded by their creators or by others who have the rights to them, either because the videos are in the public domain, or because they are used in a way that satisfies the “fair use” defense in US copyright law.

[tags]Google video, Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing[/tags]

I heart Cory Doctorow

His writing is always excellent (to my easily impressed eyes, at least).  Recently on boing boing, Cory wrote a lengthy piece on why book publishers should be eager to hop in to bed with Google over the book scanning project instead of suing to stop it.

Here’s how GBS works: Google works with libraries to scan in millions of books, most (more than 75 percent) of them out-of-print, some out-of-copyright and some in-print/in-copyright. Google scans these books, converts the scanned images of the pages into text, and indexes the text.

This index will be exposed to the public, who will be able to search the full text of tens of millions of books — eventually this index could comprise the majority of books ever published — and get results back reporting on which books contain their search-terms.

For public domain books, the search-results will contain a link to the whole text of the book. These out-of-copyright works are our collective human property — or no one’s property at all — and Google is perfectly within its rights to distribute copies of any public-domain book that matches a search-request. As an author, I would love to be able to get the full-text of books that matched my search-queries.

For other books — the books that are in copyright — Google will show a brief excerpt: a single sentence with one or two sentences from either side of the the match. In some cases, publishers or other copyright holders have granted Google permission to show more than this — a couple pages — and Google will show you this, too.

The full article is about 20 times longer.

[tags]Cory Doctorow, Google Book Scanning project, Google, Boing Boing[/tags]

Interview with VMWare’s Raghu Raghuram

Here is a very cool writeup from an interview with Raghu Raghuram, vice president of datacenter and desktop products for VMWare.  The discussion covers the company’s releasing GSX server and VMWare player as free software, plans for server virtualization management, future software updates, and competing products (We’re mainly looking at you, Xen).

The future looks bright for VMware. On tap for this year are the vendor’s VirtualCenter 2 and ESX Server 3 products. New features will include the long-awaited support for 4 CPUs in a box and up to 16 Gbytes of memory rather than the current 2 CPUs and 4 GBytes per VM. ESX 2.x will add support for IP-based storage, including NAS and iSCSI, in addition to traditional SANs.

[tags]VMWare, virtualization, Xen[/tags]

The upside to ADD in the tech-world

I’ve never been formally diagnosed with ADD, but I think anyone who knows me will tell you it’s a safe bet to assume I have it. This article on the benefits of ADD in terms of working as a techie sounds about right to me.

7. Stimulus Seeking Brain.

A perfect match for the wired world, an under stimulated brain and an over stimulated virtual environment. Being an info junkie can be a good thing. Well, not always:)

[tags]ADD, techie[/tags]

Microsoft loses big name Linux developer

News from ZDNet is Daniel Robbins has left Microsoft after only 8 months. Robbins felt he was not able to work to his full potential, so he left.

“I didn’t make the decision to leave Microsoft due to concerns about the company as a whole — Microsoft has just had a string of very successful product launches and I anticipate that it will continue to enjoy great success,” he said.

“The reason I decided to leave had to do with my specific experiences working in Microsoft’s Linux Lab. Although I believe that the concept behind Microsoft’s Linux Lab is a good one, I wasn’t able to work at my full level of technical ability and I found this frustrating,” he said.

[tags]Microsoft, Linux, Gentoo, Open Source, Daniel Robbins[/tags]

Bill would require web sites to delete personal information

I wanted to label this post “Proposed law would require web site operators to delete all unnecessary personal information” or something like that.  But the title is already long enough as it is, so I snipped a bit, and put the longer title in the body.  And now that you’ve read the overlong explanation of that useless information, head over to the full article.  Of course, the real question is, can our government actually make reasonable rules on what is and is not appropriate for web site operators to keep for business purposes?  Or something like that.

[tags]Web, personal information[/tags]

DRM (Digital Rights Management) helps honest users

Again with an Ars Technica link.  Here is a wonderful write-up by Caesar about the MPAAs claims that DRM is good for honest users.  I’m going to steal this great quote off the Ars page, too:

“Content owners use DRMs because it provides casual, honest users with guidelines for using and consuming content based on the usage rights that were acquired. Without the use of DRMs, honest consumers would have no guidelines and might eventually come to totally disregard copyright and therefore become a pirate, resulting in great harm to content creators,” he said.

In other words, people can’t be trusted to not steal, so we’re going to make stealing impossible.  Of course, DRM fails to do that.  But the people who weren’t going to steal in the first place, and therefore don’t need restrictions put on their media, aren’t going to be able to accidentally steal content.

[tags]DRM, MPAA, piracy[/tags]