Category Archives: awareness

CIA Reveals Identity of Bin Laden Hunter

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In the Atlantic Wire, Uri Friedman writes “Did the CIA Do Enough to Protect Bin Laden’s Hunter?” The angle Friedman chose quickly turns to outrage that John Young of Cryptome, paying close attention, was able to figure out from public statements made by the CIA, what the fellow looks like.

After you’re done being outraged, send thanks to John for calling attention to the issue.

The New York Observer story, “How a White House Flickr Fail Outed Bin Laden Hunter ‘CIA John’” is also quite interesting.

Map of Where Tourists Take Pictures

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Eric Fischer is doing work on comparing locals and tourists and where they photograph based on big Flickr data. It’s fascinating to try to identify cities from the thumbnails in his “Locals and Tourists” set. (I admit, I got very few right, either from “one at a time” or by looking for cities I know.)

Seattle Photographers

This reminds me a lot of Steve Coast’s work on Open Street Map, which I blogged about in “Map of London.” It’s fascinating to watch the implicit maps and the differences emerge from the location data in photos.

Via Data Mining blog and

You are being tracked

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In this instance, it’s for science, helping a friend do some work on analyzing web traffic. If you don’t like it, please install software that blocks these 1 pixel images from tracking you.

Edit: removed the web bug

76% Organic

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The back does explain that it’s 76% organic petite sirah, and 24% non-organic grapes. I just thought it was a pretty funny thing to put on the front label, and wonder which consumers are going to be more likely to buy it, knowing that it’s 76% organic.

Poker Faced?

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poker-cheat.jpgIn “An Unstoppable Force Meets…” Haseeb writes about “we have just witnessed a monumental event in the history of online poker – the entrance of Isildur into our world of online poker.” Huh? Really? The post is jargon packed, and I’m not a poker player, but apparently this Isildur character has slaughtered all the best online players in the world by being “hyperaggro:”

About a week later I was sitting at tables without any action when Isildur showed up at one of my 25/50 NL tables. I was bored and willing to play anything, so when he offered to play 6 tables (although usually I max out at 4), I decided to take him up on his offer and play a serious NLHE HU match for the first time in a long while. As the match progressed, all of what I’d heard about him being hyperaggro and barrelly checked out, but as I watched the lines he took to bluff, valuebet, and the way he reacted to my betting patterns, he seemed uncannily perceptive. Nevertheless, within the first hour or so I had won about 30k and was feeling pretty confident. He sat out on all of the tables and I assumed that the match was over and was about to check out. But about a minute later he said “brb,” and so I decided to wait for him and continue the match.

One idea, seems obvious to me, is that Isildur is collaborating with the servers to know what everyone’s cards are. Maybe the server operators are involved, maybe not.

Either way, the post is an entertaining read.

Untitled photo by allfangs and elbows

Happy Banned Books Week!

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banned-books.jpgQuoting Michael Zimmer:

[Yesterday was] the start of Banned Books Week 2009, the 28th annual celebration of the freedom to choose what we read, as well as the freedom to select from a full array of possibilities.

Hundreds of books are challenged in schools and libraries in the United States each year. Here’s a great map of challenges from 2007-2009, although I’m sure it under-represents the nature of the problem, as most challenges are never reported. (Note the West Bend library controversy is marked on the map.)

According to the American Library Association, there were 513 challenges reported to the Office of Intellectual Freedom in 2008.

I’m somewhat surprised by how many bluenoses dots there are in the northeast. Does anyone know of a good tutorial that would help me to re-map the data against population?

Make the Smart Choice: Ignore This Label

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He said the criteria used by the Smart Choices™ Program™ were seriously flawed, allowing less healthy products, like sweet cereals and heavily salted packaged meals, to win its seal of approval. “It’s a blatant failure of this system and it makes it, I’m afraid, not credible,” Mr. Willett said.

[...]
Eileen T. Kennedy, president of the Smart Choices™ board and the dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, said the program’s criteria were based on government dietary guidelines and widely accepted nutritional standards.

She said the program was also influenced by research into consumer behavior. That research showed that, while shoppers wanted more information, they did not want to hear negative messages or feel their choices were being dictated to them.
“The checkmark means the food item is a ‘better for you’ product, as opposed to having an x on it saying ‘Don’t eat this,’ ” Dr. Kennedy said. “Consumers are smart enough to deduce that if it doesn’t have the checkmark, by implication it’s not a ‘better for you’ product. They want to have a choice. They don’t want to be told ‘You must do this.’ ” (“For Your Health, Froot Loops™“)

Yes, every single one of these is a better choice than a petri dish full of salmonella. Guaranteed, or your money back.

I’ve added ™ marks where I think the New York Times™ should have included them.

Via JWZ.