Brandy

Reflections on identity, as recorded by Looking Glass

There’s a port on a western bay
And it serves a hundred ships a day
Lonely sailors pass the time away
And talk about their homes

And there’s a girl, in this harbor town
And she works, laying whiskey down
They say “Brandy, fetch another round”
She serves them whiskey and wine

The sailors say “Brandy, you’re a fine girl
What a good wife you would be
Yeah your eyes could steal a sailor
From the sea.”

Brandy, wears a braided chain
Made of finest silver from the north of Spain
A locket, that bears the name
Of a man that Brandy loved

He came, on a summer’s day
Bringing gifts, from far away
But he made it clear, he couldn’t stay
No harbor was his home

The sailors said “Brandy, you’re a fine girl
What a good wife you would be
But my life, my lover, my lady
Is the sea.”

Yeah Brandy used to watch his eyes when he told his sailor’s story
She could feel the ocean fall and rise, she saw it’s raging glory
But he had always told the truth, Lord he was an honest man
And Brandy does her best to understand

At night, when the bars close down
Brandy walks through a silent town
And loves a man, who’s not around
She still can hear him say, she hears him say

“Brandy, you’re a fine girl
What a good wife you would be
But my life, my lover, my lady
Is the sea”

Is Brandy married, or not?

American Football and Risk

There are so many angles to investigate when it comes to risk and American Football, that I could probably write a whole book. I will never forget when a professor one asked me to analyze the sport in terms of the industrial revolution (repeatable programs with failure analysis, along the lines of the Shewart Cycle).

Anyway, I have found interesting the discussion related to head-injuries and the percentage of retired players suffering from serious forms of dementia.

NFL and union officials say the correlation between NFL players and Alzheimer’s is anecdotal rather than scientific, and experts in the field agree.

But the heightened interest in the subject follows the death of Andre Waters, who committed suicide last November at 44. Reports concluded he had brain damage that resulted from multiple concussions during 12 years as an NFL safety. In addition, The Boston Globe and The New York Times reported in February that 34-year-old Ted Johnson, who spent 10 years as a linebacker with the New England Patriots, shows early signs of Alzheimer’s.

[…]

Those involved with the program say they can’t demonstrate clearly that dementia among football players correlates with football.

“I’ll leave it for the doctors to decide that,” Upshaw says. “A lot of the guys we’re talking about are pretty much up in age, so it’s hard to know why they have the problem.”

Barkan agrees but notes: “Just from what doctors tell us, there is a strong correlation from multiple concussions and the onset of problems.”

Correlation does not imply causation. But I think it odd to say there is no mutual relation between playing football and dementia. Seriously, if someone is subjected to a high risk of head injuries then what amount of evidence is required to convince the “experts in the field” that helmets should be worn while playing, and that the helmets must provide a measurable level of protection?

Global Peace Index and Hacking Tools

Goodbye Big Mac cost-of-living indicators, hello Peace Index:

The Economist Intelligence Unit measured countries’ peacefulness based on wide range of indicators – 24 in all – including ease of access to “weapons of minor destruction” (guns, small explosives), military expenditure, local corruption, and the level of respect for human rights.

[…]

The main findings of the Global Peace Index are:

— Peace is correlated to indicators such as income, schooling and the level of regional integration
— Peaceful countries often shared high levels of transparency of government and low corruption
— Small, stable countries which are part of regional blocs are most likely to get a higher ranking

Lack of corruption? Education? Regional blocs? Ouch. It is like the index was created just to make countries like the US, Israel, Russia and Nigeria look bad.

The US comes in at 96th place, but I am certain someone will try and point out that the top 95 owe their spot to the bad-cop behavior of America. There is no proof of that, of course, any more than a bully in school creates peace in the yard. The underlying problem is one of defining fair governance and representation rather than right by might.

Hard to avoid noticing where Japan and Germany are on the list…near the top.

Speaking of governance and regulation, it appears Germany has just tried to ban “hacking tools”:

On Friday night the German Bundestag – the lower chamber of Germany’s federal parliament – passed without amendment a controversial government bill designed to facilitate criminal prosecution of computer crimes. Only the Left Party voted against it. At a hearing in March security experts and representatives of IT companies raised many objections all of which have been turned down.

It becomes an offence to create, sell, distribute or even aquire so called Hacker Tools that are built to conduct criminal acts like aquiring illegal access to protected data. It is feared by many that this might keep administrators and security experts from doing their job – i.e. from properly testing applications or networks to enhance security while on the other hand the blackhats don’t really care that their choosen tool has been made illegal now. Interestingly a similar clause in the Police and Justice Act amendments to the UK Computer Misuse Act has recently been suspended pending amendment for this very reason.

Another new offence is the unauthorized access of secured data by means that require the disabling or circumventing of security measures. This echoes the circumvention clause of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is still highly controversial after almost a decade and has been used in ways not anticipated by its creators to stifle legitimate security reaearch.

I’d like to get a copy of that bill…

Ongoing Ameritrade Breach Issues

Slashdot has the scoop on the latest Ameritrade customer concerns:

So it’s pretty clear that some attacker has access to the AmeriTrade customer database on an ongoing basis, and the February 2005 tape theft probably had nothing to do with it.

AmeriTrade says that California law required them to notify their California customers of a potential security breach after the tapes were stolen, and that they went further and notified all of their customers anyway. Since there is now proof that their database is more or less perpetually open to some outside attacker, will they send out another notification letter to customers?

Some say a breach has no effect on consumer confidence. Having been invited to work on several investigations that looked at consumer response and complaints, I disagree. I think that many, although perhaps not yet the majority of, consumers are definitely sensitive to breach notification. They might have reacted warmly in the past, but times are quickly changing and the costs are more abruptly apparent now.

The frog doesn’t jump when the temperature changes slowly, but if they perceive water as suddenly hot, they jump.