Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

Recent Items
 
Neighborhood Cats
 
The Unreliability of Election Systems is Not Technological
 
Teens on Privacy, Blogging, and First Amendment Rights - And Adult Confusion
 
Good-Enough Stategies for Agile Courses into an Uncertain Future
 
Symbol of Individual Rights
 
TRUST 3: Hacking the Papal Election
 
The Rise of Anti-Social Networking
 
From Data Hoarding to Information Sharing
 
Foretelling Our Technological Decline & Fall?
 
Situated in CyberSpace: orcmid, Scoble, and those other guys.

Neighborhood Cats

I've wanted to do a Friday cat picture since I first heard lamentations about the practice.  Here's my first offering (though I missed the curfew -- it seems like Friday to me still).  These aren't the pictures that I had been thinking of using, so there's more to come, some day.  Did you hear the one about old duffer who got a three-gotcha handicap from the club pro?  This is number one.  Gotcha!

Having three black cats leads to our noticing how many other black cats there are in our neighborhood, and how many pass through our yard.  I'm sure it is partly the yellow-Volkswagen phenomenon: It is noticeable for us because we have black cats in the house.  All the same, I don't remember seeing many black cats when I was growing up, and now it is not an unusual occurrence.  I can remember wanting to see a truly-black-all-over cat because I'd heard all of the stories about them, including the role we give them in Halloween, but it was a long time before I encountered a genuine black cat.

Our cats are of the nondescript breed known as "Bombay," and I am not sure how the blackness is accounted for.  The two litter-mate "kids" of our pride have a tiny pure-bread Burmese mom, Cleopatra, who's never told who her first fling was with in Mountain View, California.  Cleo's genes are expressed in the sable reflection that you can see sometimes in the kids' coat, and also in their golden eyes.  Her daughter is also tiny like mom.  Our senior cat, Askani, was born in the Baltimore area and we have no clue to her lineage.

When black cats stroll by in the neighborhood, it can be startling to see.  We often wonder whether one of our cats has jumped out a window and is exploring the yard.  This leads to a hurried census of the household, especially if we don't get a close look at the outdoor critter.  In many cases, the visitor resembles Askani, who has been a hefty cat, as many of our outdoor passers-by are.  I can also recognize Askani, our couch commander, in the postings about Dorothea Salo's cat, Didi, right down to the few light hairs on her chest.

The appearance of a black shmoo is a pose that Askani has perfected too, one also affected by the well-fed neighborhood Bombays.

My home office is in the basement level of the house, and I have a wide, low single-pane window that gives me a ground-level view out the side of the house.  Seated at my computer lab I feel a little like the commander of the spherical lunar craft depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Since I finally removed the insulating plastic film from the interior of the window (it had come loose and was sagging down after two years in place), I now must raise the blinds every morning to prevent our cats from bending and mutilating them as they climb through to see outside the window and walk along the narrow sill.  I've been trained.  Now the cats take turns sitting atop the tower of my desktop system where they have an unobstructed view of the passing scene, especially squirrels and birds and intruder cats.

They have never seen a cat wander by this window, because there would be a certain memorable mayhem in such an event.  But when I am working quietly in my office, I often see a neighborhood scout stroll past.  They are usually startled to see me there, and are often not so nonchalant about it.  My March visitor had been examining something in the plantings off to the side of the window when I noticed.  I managed to reach my camera and work to the opposite edge of the window for a snapshot.  It was unexpected for the cat to remain in one place so long, and I was able to focus the camera, more-or-less, and get a picture through the angle of the window.

I think the cat heard the shutter mechanism and noticed my movement, because it slumped down in a kind of timid wariness. My second snapshot was quite enough and the animal scuttled off under the corner rhododendrons and out of site. Similarly, our Askani was a timid indoor-outdoor cat when she first joined our household in 1995. She retains some of that furtively alert quality ten years later, although she seems completely at ease most of the time.

There was a black Bombay kitten that visited our back porch last Fall, and Vicki would put water out for her.  I wonder if this is that little one, grown and wiser in the ways of the street life of cats.  There's no collar and we don't know if there's a household haven nearby.  She seems clean and well-fed enough to be someone's outdoor cat.

posted by orcmid at 4/23/2005 12:40:00 AM

The Unreliability of Election Systems is Not Technological

ACM News Service: Carter-Baker Commission Weighs U.S. Voting Changes.  It is interesting to learn of these seemingly high-minded approaches for adding trustworthiness to the election process, living in a state where the 2004 gubernatorial election remains in dispute and is slowly wending its way through the courts.  What's clear here in King County, Washington, where we have optical mark-sense ballots, is that the logistics, human processes, and failures to preserve auditability put the benefits of a paper-record optical ballot as in doubt as any other choice.  It is also a problem in that, at least during recounts, election workers will "enhance" ballots that are marked too faintly and sometimes too ambiguously so they will pass in the scanner.  The handling of absentee and provisional ballots failed badly, to the point that one begins to wonder how going to an all-mail ballot system will work at all.

A critical aspect of the situation here is that all of the fact finding and research work, with persistent and determined use of FOI requests, has been conducted by citizens in response to the election office's lame observation that they are not responsible to assure the integrity of voting, the citizens must do that (e.g., challenge the eligibility of voters, find the ballots cast for the still-registered deceased, etc.).  And we are in an era where citizens can do just that.  Those who don't like the prospective outcome denigrate the partisan zealotry that accompanies this effort, forgetting that in our system it is difficult for an uninjured party to claim attention of the courts, let alone have any self-interest in so doing.  So it has to be adversarial.

I think the triumph here is another for citizen activism and the redistribution of authority that weblogs are providing, especially when it takes the kind of determination and painstaking research that print journalists are not prepared to invest, for whatever reason.  I also think that resolution of this particular election is going to provide the kind of serious case study that will be used as the basis for serious reform elsewhere.  It could also inspire measures to make this kind of failure more difficult to recognize and counter-act.  Let's keep watching.

Laurence Arnold's 2005-04-18 (updated) Bloomberg article reports on a number of national-election recommendations that would certainly be valuable here.  What's missing, based on our experience in Washington State, is an appreciation for the corruptibility of the processes that occur away from the polling place.  A wider system-level perspective seems important in these debates, which tend to fall into the solution space without identifying the overall problem space and what it takes to ensure the integrity of election systems all the way through reliable determination of a verifiable outcome.

[updated 2005-04-21T19:09Z because even I could not stand some of the fractured prose here [;<)]

posted by orcmid at 4/21/2005 12:09:00 PM

Teens on Privacy, Blogging, and First Amendment Rights - And Adult Confusion

ACM News Service: Next Gen Weighs a 'Secure' Future.  Kim Zetter's 2005-04-18 Wired News article gives new meaning to sophistication.  The edited transcription provides a sense of the delight that these young people brought to the session.

The kids' view of RFID tagging of students and of school-imposed filtering and blocking are worth digesting.  It took no thought at all for the kids to figure out how to game the system.  They also point out that the filters don't work, not only because it is possible for kids to work around them, but because they also filter valuable, relevant material.  The suppression of blog access and IM access in schools was also discussed more in the session.

In the audience, I heard repeated observations that these were not your ordinary teen-agers.  I think we should look at this a little differently.  Suppose these are ordinary teen-agers; if we don't see this quality in those around us, maybe it's about the quality of our relationship and not about our ordinary teens.

I think Dana Boyd had a lot to do with having the kids be at ease and open.  I was taken by the respectful way she interacted with them.  I had the sense that she worked with them enough to know what to ask before they paraded to the podium.

---

I didn't know about this event until Danah blogged about coming to Seattle to lead the panel.  That was enough to discover that Bruce Schneier was the luncheon speaker that day and I could register for the one day.  It was a day playing hookey from my dissertation project, and I needed it [;<).

posted by orcmid at 4/21/2005 10:12:33 AM