Monthly Archives: March 2012

Security

Faith in the GE Garage

Leave a comment

GE has started a marketing campaign in America that is based on power-tools made accessible to the public. Note the quote on safety caught by Mashable Business.

Despite obvious liability issues involved in letting the public operate your power tools, GE global director of communications Linda Boff assures us there’s no need to worry about lost fingers.

“We have a lot of faith in people,” Boff says. “And the tools will be well supervised.”

What would you make in the GE Garage? Tell us in the comments.

What would I make in a garage that has faith-based power tool safety? Can I be Anonymous? Kidding. (I was just having a conversation with Joshua Corman about Anonymous attacks after he called them a “mirror to our neglect”)

Here’s a sobering data point: table saws are involved in 30,000 incidents per year in the US alone. That’s a lot of lost fingers. As a result there are some really smart safety innovations going on (obviously outside of GE’s faith-based Garage) such as SawStop.

That’s the kind of innovation I would like to see come out of a GE project with power-tools. Tools that allow people to be more productive with less risk is what spurs wider and more frequent innovation. Simply providing access to tools is great but the macro view is that risk plays a major factor. GE should know that faith just doesn’t cut it (pun not intended).

Food, History, Security

Breaking the Law with Corn Syrup: 1910 Edition

Leave a comment

A tip by one of my readers has uncovered a fascinating report from 1910 in the Journal of the American Medical Association

One of the first breaches made in the defenses raised in the interest of the public by the passage of the national Food and Drugs Act, was that secured by the manufacturers of glucose. While the pure food law demands that the label shall tell the truth, the makers of glucose protested that they should be permitted to call their product by the more euphemistic term “corn syrup.” Permission to do this was granted, though the reason for such a liberal interpretation of the law in favor of the manufacturer and so evidently against the interests of the consumer, is not known.

Fortunately for the consumer, however, some of the states are not so accommodating to special interests. The state of Wisconsin, for instance, has a pure food law which requires that the label shall contain the naked truth rather than the skilfully adorned euphemism.

Speaking of compliance and consumer interests, today I presented an abridged history of meat packing plants and the Food and Drugs Act to one of the largest cloud providers. Now I am contemplating turning it into a full-blown presentation. Not sure if anyone else sees the connection, though, between VLANs and ground beef.

An ABC News investigation has found that 70 percent of ground beef sold in the U.S. contains “pink slime,” a meat filler that was once used only in cooking oil and dog food.

Yuck. And no, VLANs will never be sufficient on their own.

Speaking of history, in 1910 Wisconsin was influenced heavily by German political thought. It not only passed a pure food law but also elected the first Socialist mayor of any major US city, Emil Seidel. Called a “sewer socialist” for a preoccupation with keeping the city clean, he used regulations to close down brothels and casinos while creating parks, public works and a fire and police commission.

He left office after just two years when the Democrats and Republicans combined their votes into a single candidate and campaign effort. Milwaukee’s infrastructure improvements lived on but the moderate socialists and a pure food law that banned corn syrup are just a distant memory.

History, Security

Kandel on Memory and Identity

Leave a comment

The NYT gives an interesting example of how identity fits with memory in an interview of Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Dr. Kandel:

So what’s the biggest problem in psychoanalysis? It’s memory!

What does he mean? Take his own memory as an example. His Nazi neighbours in Austria forced him to change his identity as a young boy.

I was 8 ½. Immediately, we saw that our lives were in danger. We were completely abandoned by our non-Jewish friends and neighbors. No one spoke to me in school. One boy walked up to me and said, “My father said I’m not to speak to you anymore.” When we went to the park, we were roughed up. Then, on Nov. 9, 1938, Kristallnacht, we were booted out of our apartment, which was looted. We knew we had to get out.

Then, when awarded a Nobel prize, his childhood memories blocked him from accepting Austrian efforts to give his identity back (or to claim his prize as their own).

Their newspaper people said, “Oh, wonderful, another Austrian Nobel Prize!” I said: “You’ve got this wrong. This is an American, an American Jewish Nobel Prize.” The president of Austria wrote me a note: “What can we do to recognize you?” I said, “I do not need any more recognition, but it would it be nice to have a symposium at the University of Vienna on the response of Austria to National Socialism.” He said, “That’s fine.” I’m very close to Fritz Stern, the historian, and he helped me put the symposium together. Ultimately, a book came out of it. It had a modest impact.

Insertion of memories is apparently easier than removal. Yet at the end of it all he indicates he does not approve of removing bad memories.

To go into your head and pluck out a memory of an unfortunate love experience, that’s a bad idea. You know, in the end, we are who we are. We’re all part of what we’ve experienced. Would I have liked to have had the Viennese experience removed from me? No! And it was horrible. But it shapes you.

Poetry, Security

“Unfollow” Nokia N9 Ad with Fan Bingbing

Leave a comment

Here’s an advertisement from China, which emphasises individual freedom and innovation, based on my current favourite phone, the linux-based N9 “swipe” made by Nokia:

You may think I’m crazy
As I think everyone else is too ordinary…

I found this video as I noticed an unlocked black 64GB model can now be purchased new in the US for $500.

Nokia also has launched an “augmented reality” site, which emphasises simplicity in design and allows you to use your webcam to interact with an N9 simulation.