The death of Ann Mitchell, aged 97, was just announced in Edinburgh.
One of only 5 women accepted to read mathematics at Oxford in 1940, she finished her degree a year early and went on to play a key role in Hut 6 “Machine Room” at Bletchley Park.
Hut 6 dealt with the high priority German army and air force codes, most important of which was the “Red” code of the Luftwaffe. They wrote out some of the jumbled nonsense which had been received and underneath wrote a “crib” of the probable German text. Ann’s key role was the next step in breaking the code, composing a menu that showed links between the letters in the text received and the crib, with the more compact the menu, the better. As every code for every unit of the German forces was changed at midnight, each day the work began all over again to identify clues to the new day’s codes. It was an intense intellectual process, working against the clock, and the urgency provided a constant challenge. Ann and her colleagues in Hut 6, most of whom had degrees in economics, law or maths, worked around the clock in shifts, with one free day each week. As the war came to a close, the number of messages declined until there were no more. “I did go up to London for VE Day on 8 May 1945 but I remember very little about the celebrations,” she said. The codebreakers returned to normal life and, having signed the Official Secrets Act and sworn not to divulge any information about her work, Ann never told anyone, not even her husband, about her wartime role.
She led a life of great service delivered quietly — her groundbreaking WWII work in mathematics was not officially recognized until 2009.
Women, whose stories have been told far less widely than the men they worked with, reportedly made up three-quarters of the workforce at Bletchley Park.
Food for thought when you consider the origins of cyber security had such a high percentage of women, and yet in the latest surveys “women accounted for 10% of the cybersecurity workforce in the Asia-Pacific region, 9% in Africa, 8% in Latin America, 7% in Europe and 5% in the Middle East.”
Like many veterans after the war Ann contributed to other areas. She researched social impacts of divorce and made significant contributions to Scots family law, “which ensured that the needs of children were properly taken into account in a divorce settlement”.
I’ve read so many articles about the gun-toting American protesters entering a state capitol building that I’ve lost track of the number. It’s a hot news item for sure. What to do?
However, only very rarely have I seen any mention that the NRA position on this issue has been to ban guns. They backed Governor Ronald Reagan when he said it was a necessary law.
The display so frightened politicians—including California governor Ronald Reagan—that it helped to pass the Mulford Act, a state bill prohibiting the open carry of loaded firearms, along with an addendum prohibiting loaded firearms in the state Capitol. The 1967 bill took California down the path to having some of the strictest gun laws in America and helped jumpstart a surge of national gun control restrictions.
To be fair, Ronald Reagan was a bit of a racist exaggerator, so here’s the Snopes perspective on his rush to ban guns.
“The Black Panthers had invaded the legislative chambers in the Capitol with loaded shotguns and held these gentlemen under the muzzles of those guns for a couple of hours. Immediately after they left, Don Mulford introduced a bill to make it unlawful to bring a loaded gun into the Capitol Building. That’s the bill I signed. It was hardly restrictive gun control.”
[This recount by Ronald Reagan] wasn’t true, however, that the Black Panthers had held legislators “under the muzzles of guns” for hours. They were disarmed by the capitol police soon after entering the building, and, according to most contemporaneous accounts (including that of the Associated Press) were escorted out of the chambers 30 minutes later.
Source: Sacramento Bee
Of course the NRA we know today, as I’ve written elsewhere, remains very much the same organization with the same values as this period in time when it pushed for a ban on guns.
The logic of this huge enforcement action was simple, biometric data was collected disproportionate to need.
Employees of a company had to have their fingerprints scanned for attendance and time registration. After investigation, the Dutch Data Protection Authority concluded that the company should not have processed employee fingerprints. The company cannot rely on an exception ground for the processing of special personal data. The company will be fined 725,000 euros for this.
Humans were at put risk because privacy wasn’t being properly minded. Attendance and time authentication were not reasonable use-cases, as they have effective ID options that do not need collection of biometrics.
Exception for collection would be made if fingerprints were an appropriate control mechanism, such as in a system protecting the user’s data by verifying them by something they are.
Global coronavirus death toll could be 60% higher than reported: Mortality statistics show 122,000 deaths in excess of normal levels across 14 countries analysed by the FT
Source: FT
This kind of comparison of current deaths against historic averages seems an extremely wise way to estimate severity of COVID-19 right now for several reasons:
First: COVID-19 autopsies have confirmed the early signs that the virus kills people in novel ways.
We already heard that EMT crews couldn’t keep defibrillator batteries charged during a single shift because cardiac arrest calls during the pandemic suddenly tripled or higher.
The cardiac arrests are the hardest calls right now. More than once, we have been present at the moment of capture and yet were unable to save the patient. In the past, if a patient goes into cardiac arrest and we witness it or are there within three minutes, we can often save them. We use a defibrillator to shock them and restart their hearts. But for COVID-19 patients, this is not happening. We are not getting any of them back — and now the Department of Health doesn’t want us to bring dead patients to the hospital, so we are pronouncing them dead in the field and turning the bodies over to the police who have to wait for a coroner.
Second: CDC has started to release reports that even early February deaths in California homes were from COVID-19
Officials say they originally thought that the first COVID-19 death in the [Santa Clara] county was on March 9. Autopsies were performed on two people who died on February 6 and February 17. The CDC received tissue samples from the coroner and were able to confirm that both cases were positive for SARS-CoV-2. The third individual who died on March 6 was also confirmed to have been positive for COVID-19.
That death at the start of February was a woman who had a “burst heart”, further proving the point above about novel ways of COVID-19 killing people.
County health officials have said if they knew at the time the woman had coronavirus, they might have issued shelter in place orders earlier. […] “There’s an indication the heart was weakened.” [Dr. Judy Melinek, a Bay Area forensic pathologist who reviewed the autopsy report] said “The immune system was attacking the virus and in attacking the virus it damaged the heart and then the heart basically burst.” Dowd’s husband, citing his wife’s strong exercise habits and overall good health before falling ill, had requested an autopsy.
NYC still maintains that March 11 was their first date of death for a confirmed death, which obviously will need to be changed.
Given how a healthy American abruptly died February 6th from the virus, consider also how the White House was operating at that time. Just Security provides a detailed timeline:
February 10-March 2, 2020 … five rallies across the United States, each attracting thousands of attendees in confined spaces. The rallies take place in New Hampshire (2/10), Arizona (2/19), Colorado (2/20), Nevada (2/21), South Carolina (2/28), and North Carolina (3/2).
These rallies, like a death cult gathering, will most certainly be a cause of fatalities in America.
Third: Low numbers are controversial. I’ve been tracking death rates from the NYC Department of Health since the first cases reported (tragically unreported in the JHU dashboard, as I wrote about March 3rd).
When I posted this following chart the other day, for example, I immediately heard backlash from people with family in NYC. They complained deaths were known to be very high so there was no possible way my graph could have such low numbers showing a decline let alone tapering off.
Red is death, Grey is hospitalization.
It’s true, while the actual death rate is high, it likely is even higher than what these official NYC Department of Health numbers show. Confirmed COVID-19 test results increasingly looks like a subset of deaths far above normal trends compared to death rates of prior years.
I’m not saying the low count graph I made is wrong in terms of a trend. That trend is real and does reflect the case load on NYC services. The numbers definitely are in decline and pressure is considerably lower on EMT.
What’s surely low confidence is the daily count. When I can find the data and the time, I will add in a low/high estimate to show actual deaths daily and not just the shape of the pandemic curve.
One final thought. Often when I post a visualization of deaths some middle-aged white man invariably will come forward and say a per capita rate is the only thing that matters. Imagine a close relative dying and some random guy says to you “don’t worry, your sister’s death per capita is insignificant, given how siblings overall in this region are doing just fine”
Having to care about others drives some people to minimize human life through “per capita” models. Leaving off the per capita calculation tends to reveal callous and selfish thinking by viewers.
Per capita still has a place. Experts are good at finding ways to make different population numbers relevant (to measure likelihood or severity) yet that shouldn’t be turned by just anyone into a license to dismiss every human life as a percentages game.
The better model is vision zero, which says 40,000 American traffic deaths per year is 40,000 too many.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
