Follow this link to the article in The New York Times. RichardH just posted the link in comment on this blog.
This article explains numerous ways in which we can be misled by measurements.
When these types of measurement results are the subject of media stories, it leads to another example of Greenberg’s Law Of The Media.
Follow this link to information you’d rather not know about how vulnerable your computer may be. Warning: this article may require some computer expertise to understand (or maybe not).
The Matousec researchers found that common software tools, including Norton Internet Security 2010, McAfee Total Protection 2010, and Trend Micro Internet Security Pro all had flaws that allowed attackers to bypass the protections that these programs offer. The malicious software can do this without even having to run as an Administrator.
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.The researchers found exploitable versions of this vulnerability in every program they tested, including products from McAfee, Trend Micro, and Kaspersky. In fact, the researchers said that the only reason that they found exploits in only 34 products was that they only had time to test 34 products (Microsoft, for its part, believes that its security software is not affected, but is still investigating the issue). Many others may be vulnerable too. They also developed a toolkit dubbed KHOBE (“kernel hook bypassing engine”) to allow the rapid detection and exploitation of such flaws.
As far as I can tell, if your computer does not have a multicore CPU, then it is unlikely that this flaw can be exploited.
Maybe I have good reason for not updating my machine. And to think how often I have complained that I let the salesperson talk me out of buying a dual core machine the last time I upgraded.
Sobering thoughts for us techno-geeks.
On 13 May 2010, Marc Ambinder (The Atlantic) wrote The Fires This Time–Joe Flood on Managing New York City”, interviewing Joe Flood on NYC’s 1970’s fetish on efficiency and “how its overreliance on smart guys and computer formulas turned out be a disaster, especially when it came to the withdrawal of fire protection from poorer neighborhoods” with an abundance of fires.
One of the big appeals of using numbers to understand complex problems is getting counterintuitive results, which by definition go against common sense. After all, why spend all the time and money on a study that will only tell you what you already suspected? (…) Those are the kind of results the city hired RAND to produce, and that’s what they got.
Quoting Bill James in Michael Lewis’s Moneyball,
“Any new metric should tell you 80% what you already knew, and 20% what you didn’t. Less than 20% and it’s not very useful, more than 20% and there’s probably something wrong with the numbers.”
Perhaps Governor Deval Patrick and the Massachusetts supporters of subsides for casinos should read Joe Flood’s forthcoming book, The Fires: How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City-and Determined the Future of Cities.
-RichardH