Tools for Rules: A Demo

[09.30.06 Update]
The system failure in class turned out to be very fortuitous. It allowed us to *debug* the system on the fly. It turns out an older version of the Lemur tool kit was being used. This caused the data source to be corrupted when two users tried to access the data at the same time. We managed to get a work arounf in place and ran, with some glitches, three great sessions with a total of about 30 federal agency officals. The result was that the tool (what we call Tool 2 in the demo) got an overwhelming endorsement, while Tool 3 was declared not ready for prime time. We did learn important things and we made mental breakthroughs about how Tool 3 would need to be altered (hint: think dynamic, user-seeded ontologies with mini language models for each search).

There is now a unified demo page for our tools.

[Original Post]
We are testing our eRulemaking tools with three groups of federal agency officials this Friday in Washington DC. I invite you to take a look at, and experiment with, these tools.

Information Search Tool

Near Uplicate Detection Tool

E-Voting Concerns Revisited

Following on the discussion in the previous post, it appears that concerns about the use of E-Voting machines is now quite widespread. The Sunday New York Times has a prominent piece that opens:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 — A growing number of state and local officials are getting cold feet about electronic voting technology, and many are making last-minute efforts to limit or reverse the rollout of new machines in the November elections.

The new concerns stem from a 2005 National Research Council report that argues, a little bit ominously, that questions raised by academics “should not be discouraged or suppressed.”

How to Use IT to Steal the Vote

Since we are talking about e-democracy this week, I thought it would make sense to get one of the more disturbing studies on the table. Researchers in the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton report that it takes under one minute to plant malicious software on Diebold voting machines. There full study is available online, along with a chilling if antiseptic video titled “Security Demonstration: Diebold AccuVote-TS Electronic Voting Machine.” From the Executive Summary, the four main conclusions are:

1. Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss. We have constructed demonstration software that carries out this vote-stealing attack.
2. Anyone who has physical access to a voting machine, or to a memory card that will later be inserted into a machine, can install said malicious software using a simple method that takes as little as one minute. In practice, poll workers and others often have unsupervised access to the machines.
3. AccuVote-TS machines are susceptible to voting-machine viruses — computer viruses that can spread malicious software automatically and invisibly from machine to machine during normal pre- and post-election activity. We have constructed a demonstration virus that spreads in this way, installing our demonstration vote-stealing program on every machine it infects.
4. While some of these problems can be eliminated by improving Diebold’s software, others cannot be remedied without replacing the machines’ hardware. Changes to election procedures would also be required to ensure security.

We will be watching the full video in class this Thursday.

“Blog the Vote”

The left-leaning PBS show NOW has a new piece called “Blog the Vote” that says it:

visited with Montana blogger Jay Stevens, who’s doing his best locally to help [Democratic Senate hopeful] Tester. “I’m a middle-aged guy with two kids, a mortgage, and a car. I think that’s what most bloggers are like,” says Stevens. He rejects the stereotype that bloggers are a bunch of radical, left-wing crazies. “The question shouldn’t be, ‘Why are there so many radical bloggers?’ The question really should be ‘Why are there so many angry people blogging?’”

The piece then adroitly turns to quote an archetypal left wing blogger from, you guessed it, Daily Kos.

Demystifying the CPU

TheTechnopeasants hit a home run with this inaugural fluency lab. By taking apart and rebuilding three CPUs and a laptop, we learned that some expensive trips to the shop can be avoided by learning about the fairly basic way critical components, such as memory, can be removed, upgraded and re-installed.

WYSIWYGS September 7 Lab Link

The WYSIWYGS would like everyone to have access to:

http://www.ifi.ntnu.no/~dags/pip.html

This looks like another “ah hah” moment to me!

Digital Divide Persists

A story today published in the Boston Globe reports this sobering disparity:

A total of 54 percent of white students use the Internet at home, compared with 26 percent of Hispanic and 27 percent of black children. Limited access can erode a student’s research on assignments or college scholarships.

Watching my own kids thrive on supervised access to a range of late model lap tops that float around our house, the impact of this disparity is clear. My four year old can click around pre-K alphabet or other skill-building software with relative ease and he has a sense, albeit perhaps a bit disturbing, that successful professionals are joined at the hip to the wirelessly connected laptops.

The press release leading to this story resulted in over 200 new articles. Perhaps early claims for the end of the digital divide were pre-mature.

My New Fluency Blog

Looks like I am back in the blogging business. After an inaugural round of Digital Governance blogging and an encore spring 06 Qualitative Fluency blog, I am excited to launch a new blog on WORDPRESS.