Household Charge Security Questions

The household charge website security questions pictured above are awful. This charge is a new tax the Irish government has created where most people with a house in Ireland are supposed to register online. These are questions you can use to prove your identity. But the ones they have chosen are really weak. There are three main methods to attack them.

Social Engineering: Ask someone, set up a website the user trusts "TrustyBank.com" and ask them this question again

Brute forcing or guessing via statistics: Murphy is a really common name guess that. Then Kelly, Smith, O'Sullivan, Walsh, Ryan, O'Brien, Byrne... you can guess someones surname most of the time in a low number of guesses.
Pets names are surprisingly guessable (low entropy). The names people use are not that unusual. This site has stats on the most popular ones. The most common entered place of birth will be Dublin. Similarly Companies are not based in many places. Dublin will be a correct guess in many cases. Next I'd guess America, Ireland, Home... again there are likely to be very common answers to this.

Looking at these questions I would predict 10 answers of each will cover 50% of the population.

Informed Guessing. Many of these questions can be answered by searching facebook as described in this paper Personal knowledge questions for fallback authentication: Security questions in the era of Facebook by Ariel Rabkin. Or follow the method described in the paper Messin' with Texas:Deriving Mother's Maiden Names Using Public Records by Virgil Gri th, Markus Jakobsson describes a technique for finding out the answer to this first question. These questions seem very susceptible to facebook and public record searches.

This site lists Examples of Security Questions these sorts of questions. In the Poor section they have

What is your mother's maiden name?
In what county where [sic] you born?
What is the city, state/province, and year of your birth?
What is your pet's name?

So all the questions except the where is your company based question are common and known to be poor. The questions on the household charge website are guessable, searchable and so common another website could ask you them without raising suspicions. They provide an obvious and well known vulnerability to the system.

What could I do instead of watching X factor

“Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads.”
― Clay Shirky

I like watching the X factor particularly combined with the mockery that goes on on twitter. Something nags at me about the waste of time the X Factor is. There is nothing particularly wasteful about this program but it will do as an example.

The program consists of 31 episodes with a Running time of 60–80 minutes according to wikipedia. Taking the program as 70 minutes that is about 36 hours. I thought the Saturday program was longer than 80 minutes but I could be wrong. 'Saturday's edition of The X Factor averaged 9.6 million viewers, a 38.5% share of the audience, between 7.45pm and 9.55pm'. So lets say a series of the x factor is 40 hours of your time. a season of American Idol takes at least as long.

So what could I do in this time?

Read a book

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy is 560,000 words. The average American adult reads prose text at 250 to 300 words per minute. So I could read that in about 31 hours reading. Great Expectations is 185000 words, about 12 hours. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust at 1,500,000 would be about two series of x factor.

These are famously big books the average fiction book is about 75000 words. Or about 5 hours of reading at 250wpm. So that is around 8 novels I could read instead of x factor.

Get Strong

The Starting strength program (described here) goes from someone who has never lifted before to quite strong in three months three days a week 45 minutes a day. Say an hour to shower and such. 3 times a week for 12 weeks is 36 hours similar to the x factor

Three months of this program wont make you wrestle a bear strong but it will make you useful when helping the bear move his fridge. Everyones progression will vary but this site Weightlifting Performance Standards says that after 3 months of training like this a man could expect to be able to pick up a weight of just under one and a half times bodyweight. A woman would be able to pick a weight of around her own bodyweight.

Most people fear that as soon as they touch weights they will end up with the Arnie condom filled with walnuts look. Besides they might not have the equipment. But if instead I went for doing pressups everyday? The Hundred Press up challenge says "this six week training program and you'll soon be on your way to completing 100 consecutive push ups!...about 30 minutes a week to achive this goal!" that is 3 hours. Double the time to 6 hours in case they are lying.

Run a Race

Couch to 5km plans are really popular. "Each session should take about 20 or 30 minutes, three times a week". the guide is 9 weeks but lets say it takes 12 weeks to get that fit. That is still at most 18 hours.

You won't outrun a bear after doing this you probably will outrun some of the other people the bear is chasing though. Besides you've helped the bear move his fridge so he probably won't chase you anyway. I could nearly train to run a race and do the starting strength program in the time I could spend watching x factor.



X factor is entertaining but so are books and many people after a while find exercise entertaining at least in retrospect. I have not included 'learn a language' in the list of other things you could do as few people actually find that entertaining.

That means I could train myself to run a 5km (18 hours), to do 100 pushups (6 hours) and read Great Expectations (12 hours) and still have some time left over. I probably wont do that but at least I know what I am feeling guilty about now. There is nothing particularly bad about X factor there are much worse ways I spend my time. I could watch 40 hours of youtubes finest cat videos.

The Serious Business of Children's Books

There is a bit of a literary fight today about a new book of a children's story written by James Joyce
'Joyce children's story published in Dublin to dismay in Zürich'

In a statement, the foundation said it “was left completely in the dark” about the Dublin publication and that “it never permitted, tolerated, condoned or connived in this publication, and it rigidly dissociates itself from it”.

It was “dismayed to learn that a copy of the letter to young Stephen Joyce of 1936 must have been used for its publication in book form. The foundation was never approached or informed, it was never asked for permission” and it had only just learned of the publication.

The book looks lovely. The issue reminds me of a bugbear I have where famous authors of adult literature's children's books are consigned to the trash heap of history.

For example I cannot find a new copy of
The Little Steamroller by Graham Greene

Virginia Woolf, The Widow and the Parrot

The Bed Book By Sylvia Plath


I love the Bed Book. The picture is of me reading it to my daughter. Yet many Plath fans do not even know of its existence.

Why is it that these books are not well known or in print? Could it be we do not like our serious authors to show their playful and family loving side? It could be there is no demand to pay for publishing these books. That Joyce's story needed to go out of copyright to get printed is evidence against this though.

A friend pointed out this great blog We Too Were Children 'a Compendium of Children’s Books by Twentieth Century “Adult” Authors Currently Out of Print'. Do you know of any more slightly hidden childrens books by 'serious' authors? Kafka's tale of the plucky mouse who rescues the circus or some such.

EULA Be Sorry

Fan handcuffs himself to goalpost during Everton and Manchester City clash

A message on his T-shirt read: "Europe's greatest training robbers. Ryanair. Lowest wages guaranteed. Stop. Recruitment scamming our children."

If people really hate airlines there are much easier ways to harm their business than this. One way is to ask people to obey their terms and conditions.

Companies are still leaving themselves open to the being moved down search engine rankings as I described in Search Engine Deoptimization? The attack is to remove links to a website using the sites own Terms and Conditions.

1. Find if a company you are annoyed with has rule against linking to them in their Terms and Conditions. Something like 'links to this website without the prior written consent'.

2. Inform all the people who link to this website of this rule. Possibly implying you are from some sort of legal enforcement organisation.

Airlines and insurance companies love having these rules. The Idea I presume is to hinder price comparison websites.

If you do not want to go to the effort of building a spider to get the list of url's that link to a site you can google (or bing)

link:http://www.aerlingus.com

Where you replace http://www.aerlingus.com with the company website you want a list of linkers to.

The last example I used was Ryanair, mainly because so many people hate them. The following companies looked to have odd T&C from a quick read. I accept the irony of linking to people T&C that say you cannot link to their T&C.

Aer Lingus: 'to link to our site(s) only through our home page. Please do not link to other pages of our site(s) without obtaining prior written permission from Aer Lingus (such consent may be withdrawn at any time at Aer Lingus's sole discretion);'

Also World Food Program, Web Check in, Vishni capital, Glasgow 7s Rugby Team and NRMA insurance

For something like the only link to the main page rules you would need to modify the "link:" search and the scary email that tries to get the links removed.

It is easy to read the terms and conditions of competitors websites. Many competitors rankings would be harmed by removal of even a small percentage of quality links to their website. I think you could boost a client above a competitor with this technique. If I was asked to bump up an insurance companies websites search rankings I would be tempted to look at the terms and conditions of their competitors and do a "Link:" search on any of them who had these linking rules websites.

A quick google and sending some emails has to be easier than handcuffing yourself to a goalpost.

The Mickey Mouse Protection Act

The Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) of 1998 extended copyright terms in the United States by 20 years ,..., the Walt Disney Company (whose extensive lobbying efforts inspired the nickname "The Mickey Mouse Protection Act")..supported the act

Disney are very pro copyright. Here is Clay Shirky talking about how you can't let kids draw a picture of Mickey Mouse and put it on a cake without getting sued by Disney for copyright violation



They seem oddly pro remixing, homage and parody when it come to other peoples creative output. I am not talking here about the companies cartoons based on traditional folk tales but about their Joy Division T-Shirt.
Disney's description of the shirt:

Inspired by the iconic sleeve of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures album, this Waves Mickey Mouse Tee incorporates Mickey's image within the graphic of the pulse of a star. That's appropriate given few stars have made bigger waves than Mickey!

This is Disney's photo.

Hook confirmed that he had not given permission for Disney to use the image, adding that it was a legal grey area. "From a legal point of view, the image is in the public domain, as Disney know and, in a funny way, it's quite a compliment for a huge conglomerate like Disney to pick up on a poor little Manchester band that only existed for a couple of years, it's quite startling," he commented. "I'm amazed they're that hard up that they need to prey on little indie bands,
...
The bassist added that though he spends a chunk of his time "policing" Joy Division bootlegs, all he usually required was that wannabe bootleggers made a contribution to an Epilepsy charity in memory of Ian Curtis and called on Disney to do the same.

Joy Division do not get asked for permission nor do they or their charity make any money from this T-Shirt but Disney will sue a shop for printing children's pictures on a cake? If Disney like to control their creative work to such a huge extent why don't they obey the same rules for others work?



'I hope that [Disney] will be as understanding when we start doing Donald Duck shirts' said Hook


From Wesley Morgan Paraham here
*edit "A representative from Disney says, "As soon as we became aware there could be an issue, we pulled it from our shelves and our online store to review the situation further.""

Teach Yourself Synaesthesia

Can you teach yourself synaesthesia?

A form of synaesthesia in which people experience letters or numbers in colour may be trainable. The discovery could shed new light on how such traits develop.
Synaesthesia is thought to have a genetic component, but some people have reported synaesthetic experiences following hypnosis, so Olympia Colizoli at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and colleagues, wondered if it might also be possible to acquire synaesthesia through training.

To test the idea, they gave seven volunteers a novel to read in which certain letters were always written in red, green, blue or orange (see picture). Before and after reading the book, the volunteers took a "synaesthetic crowding" test, in which they identified the middle letter of a grid of black letters which were quickly flashed onto a screen. Synaesthetes perform better on the test when a letter they experience in colour is the target letter.

The volunteers performed significantly better on this test after training compared with people who read the novel in black and white.

The findings suggest that natural synaesthesia may develop as a result of childhood experiences as well as genetics, says Colizoli, who presented the findings at the Forum of European Neuroscience in Amsterdam last week.

I liked the idea of training myself to have Grapheme → color synesthesia. It is is a form of synesthesia in which an individual's perception of numbers and letters is associated with the experience of colors. Nabokov had this, he wrote in Speak Memory "Since a subtle interaction exists between sound and shape, I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl". Training yourself to be a poundland Nabokov sounded cool so I wrote a script to do that.

A quick look at stack overflow lead to this question "Changing color of every “r” in html document and I copied Boldewyn's answer. There is probably a better way to do it. If I find it I will post an update.

Warning the ColourChange script which I put here is a greasemonkey script that will make the web look like a geocities Christian site circa 1996

// ==UserScript==
// @name           ColourChange
// @namespace      http://localhost
// @description    change the colour of characters
// @include        *
// ==/UserScript==

  var body = document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0];
var html = body.innerHTML
               .replace(/(^|>[^<a]*)([a])/g, "$1<span style=\"color:red\">a</span>");

body.innerHTML = html;
   var html2 = body.innerHTML.replace(/(^|>[^<o]*)([o])/g, "$1<span style=\"color:violet\">o</span>");
   body.innerHTML = html2;

If people want me to and I remove any bugs I will stick the script up on userscripts to make it easier to install. If you survive the web via the medium of nyan cat let me know.

Many musicians are Sound → color synesthestic Leonard Bernstein, Franz Liszt, Rimsky-Korsakov, Pharrell Williams and Stevie Wonder for example. Mnemonists with extraordinary powers seem to also associate sound with colours. like Solomon Shereshevskii in Luria's A Little Book About a Big (Vast) Memory. One of my favorite bands of last year was Colourmusic though so because of their name, their epic beards and mental videos here is one of their songs


I have set the synaesthesia script to colour a and o as these are letters I mix up. I also mix up p and b but I'll write a script for that if the vowel one helps. I was tested as a kid for dyslexia but they decided I was just stupid.

You could change it to match Dee Adams or Cassidy Curtis or whatever colours match up to letter for you. If you install the script using greasemonkey or you want to and need a hand doing that let me know.

The Irish Religious Copying that Saved Civilisation

Sweden Formally Recognizes File-Sharing as a Religion

The Church of Kopimism, whose principal tenent is the right to file-share, has been formally recognized as a religious organization in Sweden...
“For the Church of Kopimism, information is holy and copying is a sacrament,” it said in a statement.

This is a pretty good troll but more weirdly there is a history of religious copying in Ireland. One that we may have to thank for western civilisation.

How the Irish Saved Civilisation (on amazon for $8) ultimately argues that it was the Irish love of copying books that saved much of classical literature and combined with their spreading these copies as they set up new monasteries allowed an ember of literacy to be saved until the renaissance reignited it. During the dark ages after the Roman empire fell Irish monasteries with their book copying scriptoriums were one of the few bastions of literacy left in Europe.

This book is full of good anecdotes. For example that for her near contemporaries St Brigid's most famous miracle was performing an abortion.
"Brigid makes the fetus of a nun (whose womb had "through youthful desire of pleasure, .. swelled with child") magically disappear ("without the coming of birth, and without pain")"

I think the book places too much emphasis on St. Patrick and how he converted the Irish to Christianity. I always got the impression St Patrick was sort of a Arthur Guinness character. Used after his death by a giant corporation to try and sell their product to the locals. They both even have a celebration day. The Beer Nut has a great post "Interlude" that goes into the political machinations that went into the creation of the St. Patrick story.

It was a turf war: plain and simple. The independents had all been swallowed by the Big Three who were now each using the political influence they'd garnered along the way to try and crush the other two. The prize was total national dominance of the market, and a hefty slice of the action abroad where the product had been zealously pitched to a receptive customer base, building up a lucrative following among locals and ex-pats alike.

The thrust of the books argument about how the copying Irish rescued the western cannon comes from Columcille. He had a major brain erection for copying any books he came across.

On one occasion when he was at the monastery of Moville he came across Finian's book of the Psalms. Colum Cille decided to copy it secretly. He did, and when he was brought before King Diarmait who was to decide who was the rightful owner of it, Diarmait made his famous decision: “To every cow its calf and to every book its copy”. This might be regarded as the first copyright case in history! Later fighting broke out about the decision. After a battle for it Colum Cille got it back and it has since been known as the 'Cathach' or Battle Book. Colum Cille went into exile as penance and landed in the island of Iona in 563 and there he established his famous monastery

From here "he made one hundred fifty monks the cutoff number for the Iona community, and after they exceeded that, twelve and one monks would set off to establish another foundation in a new setting". These new monasteries would take copies of books with them and produce new analysis and in doing so spread literacy back into Europe. For example "More than half of all our biblical commentaries between 650 ad 850 were written by Irishmen".

I think its fascinating that Colum Cille's 150 monastery size number from the sixth century is the same as Dunbar's number. "Dunbar's number is suggested to be a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. ... No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar's number. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 230, with a commonly used value of 150". Colum Cille was obeying modern social network theory in his monastery rules.

Ultimately I think the dark ages are a rorschach test, we know so little about them that the flimsy evidence can be used to argue any point you want to make. For example 'How the Irish saved civilization? By blogging it.' is a blogpost that argues the point that what the book proves is that blogging and such intellectual mashups are what preserved the culture.

While on the subject of dark ages Irish Monasteries "The secret of Kells" is a great film on this era

How the Irish Saved Civilisation is an interesting quick read. I was not convinced that literacy and the classics would not have survived the dark ages without Ireland. But I do think the lesson that we should copy and distribute our really important information around if we want it to be preserved when the barbarians break through the gates is an important one. It is easy to laugh at the Swedish Kopimism party but remember that an Irish monk who was willing to ignore the courts, go to war, murder and got banished from his country to copy things may have saved civilisation.


*The Taoiseach mentions the effect of these monks in his speeches 'In the sixth century our monks 'colonised the minds of Europe', rescuing the continent from the Dark Ages.' but he doesn't mention they were banished partly due to copyright restrictions.

Peak Farmer

In what year will the most farmers ever be working? We reached peak baby in 1990 and peak manufacturing employee slightly later.

Mass employment in manufacturing just isn't coming back
'I estimate global manufacturing employment to have been between 150 million and 200 million workers in 2002, with those numbers reflecting a global decline of 20-30 million manufacturing employees in 2002 compared to 1995.'

You can never tell exactly what the future will hold but with the increasing use of robots points to reduced manufacturing jobs for example "Foxconn to rely more on robots; could use 1 million in 3 years". Agricultural employment as a percentage of total employment has been declining since the industrial revolution. The percentage of Americans employed in agriculture has dropped from over 90% at the time of the American revolution to around 2% now for example.

The UN says peak rural population will be sometime between 2020-2025. "However between 2020 and 2025, the total rural population will peak and then start to decline," and "Global rural populations will peak in the 2020s, leading to mass abandonment of rural lands.(Data Source: UN Dept. of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division)". Not all rural people are farmers and I think the proportion of farmers amongst rural dwellers is decreasing. If the figures of peak rural population being sometime 2020-2025 then that means the most farmers that will ever be living will occur sometime before 2020.

The first time in human history since the agricultural revolution that most people were not employed as farmers would have been some time before urban population passed rural population. The World Population Becomes More Urban Than Rural in around 2007 so we are not long past the majority of people being farmers. 'Agriculture still accounts for about 45 per cent of the world’s labour force, or about 1.3 billion people' according to this 2007 report. Until recently most people were farmers.

The world continues to urbainse, farms continue to mechanise and population continues to rise slower than it used to. All this means that sometime before 2020 farming will become globally a declining employer. If total farming and manufacturing jobs are declining and transport jobs could do the same soon that means we will have to find new things for people to do.

This prediction of declining numbers of farmers globally sometime around 2020 is one that someone with better google foo could disprove quickly, if you can please correct me in the comments.

Most Popular Posts of the Year

Thanks to everyone who read and commented this year. The most popular posts this year were

Search Engine Deoptimization 16,000 Pageviews. Many people seem to dislike Ryanair and weird legal rules.

Eurovision Voting Fraud 5,500 Pageviews. A rather glib post from 2010 about human rights abuse that got popular when Azerbaijan won the Eurovision.

My favorite posts were

The Dead Zoo Dodo Get Anto the Dodo back to the public. Anto has set up a twitter account

The Kilbrittain Whale. This tourist attraction is brilliantly unhinged.

My favorite books read in 2011

Books really are kind of magic aren't they? Here is the ones I read this year that changed the way I think and turned me into a different person at the end. All for ten euro and a few hours of my time.

My favorite book was Moonwalking with Einstein. Without memory what would we be? This is a great diverse book on a really interesting topic.


Don't sleep, there are snakes. There is so much in this book from Language to God to child rearing to self sufficiency. It is just fascinating to read about people who see the world completely different to us.


The rational optimist nearly everything is getting better. This book left profoundly optimistic about the future. This is the book I have tried most to persuade my friends to read most this year.

Selfish reasons to have more kids. This book goes through the evidence that once your not an awful parent (one who would be refused an adoption for example) you really don't make much difference to your kids. It is actually a profoundly optimistic argument as this means you don't need to spend your time doing things you dislike to shape your childs path as by the time they are 18 they will end up where they would have anyway. It uses evidence from identical twin adoption studies to show how little parents need to worry about religion, education and all the other things they break their hearts worrying about.


The Great Stagnation By Tyler Cowen. We should have dinner in a pill, Optimus Prime, hover boards and lasers that turn dolls into women by now. Why don't we and what can we do about it?



Next year I plan to read mainly fiction. This year In cold blood by Capote was the one piece of fiction I read that I am sure will stay with me. Everyone says it is great and everyone ain't wrong.

Close but not in my very favorite books were fever by Shah, Adapt by Hardford, What technology wants by Kevin Kelly, Red Plenty by Francis Spufford, Gutenberg, race against the machine, good omens, the unbearable lightness of being, How the irish save civilisation and Launching The Innovation Renaissance by Alex Tabarrok, popular crime by Bill James

How much would a driverless taxi cost?

This is a post where I do a back of the envelope estimate of when we'll see driverless cars, what will they do to taxi costs and what will that do to unemployment.

There are several estimates to when driverless cars will arrive. The New York time estimates 2020.

Self-Driving Cars
By 2030, Sebastian Thrun predicts, more people will use self-driving cars in their daily commute than manually driven cars.
Submitted by Sebastian Thrun, developer of Google’s self-driving car.
Our readers predict this will occur around 2020, having moved this date 1381 times.

Many similar bets of Driverless cars being regular enough in 2020 and ubiquitous in 2030 exist for example here,

By 2020 - Driverless cars are commercially-available and street-legal somewhere in the United States.
By 2027 - New driverless cars outnumber new cars requiring at least some human control, in the US market.

and here

By 2019, it has begun spreading to public roads, with significant numbers of driverless trucks appearing.

and here

In my post last week, my commentors took me to task on my prediction that cars will drive us in ten years. Some thought Americans would wise up and learn to love mass transit. They don't know Americans.

Others thought the hardware cost would even in ten years remain out of reach. Google did not build an autonomous car by creating the hardware but by harnessing and training good machine learning algorithms. No amount of hardware would have given you a car able to navigate the streets of San Francisco five years ago.

What effect will these cars have? There are all sorts of ideas about how they will alter parking and car ownership. I'm going to try do a back of the envelope here on how much Taxi fares will cost if you don't have to pay the driver.

Taxis cost about 120 cent for a kilometer

For each additional 1/6th of a kilometre or time 28 seconds)

(a) Day time 8am to 10pm €0.15
(b) Night time 10pm to 8am €0.20
(c) Sundays, Public Holidays, Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve €0.20

Ignoring the pick up costs of about 3.40.

The AA says it costs around 25 cent per kilometer to drive a car in Ireland. About 25 pence per mile in the UK. Taxis charge 1.20 so the majority of the cost looks like the driver. You would have extra costs on top of a normal car with a commercial vehicle. But given the pick up costs a driverless taxi could be about a quarter the cost of a taxi with a driver.
The price elasticity of demand should allow an estimate of how this will alter taxi usage. This paper "Estimation of Price Elasticity for Taxi Services in Hassel" gives a PED of -2.644. Though others such as Schaller at -.22 and here of -.6 shorter term. Taxis that cost a quarter the current price with a PED of -2.6 would mean about ten times the number of taxi journeys. The long term viability of public transport should take this possibility into account. If by 2030 people will be taking ten times the number of taxi journeys would enough people be using Metro North to make it cost effective?

Transport employs nearly one hundred thousand people in Ireland. Which is about 1 in 20 people who have a job here. Or about a third of the number of unemployed. I doubt everyone who works in transport will lose their jobs overnight. But taxis provide an example of how economic effects could provide a huge incentive to move to driverless cars. So far technological progress has always eventually resulted in new jobs to replace old lost ones. The money people save getting into town for a night now could end up being spent in town and require more employment in restaurants and bars for example.

But I think it is worth considering the possibility that fairly soon we could have nearly a hundred thousand people who earn a decent wage at the moment becoming unemployed in a short period of time. Construction lost 160 thousand people in three years. Transport jobs do not pay as well as construction did. But if the construction change caused most of our current economic issues it would be unwise to ignore a large sudden future change in transport employment.

To put some skin in the game, I am predicting that in 2025 in a period of three years we will see structural unemployment of about 5% of the workforce, half of those that work in transport.

Eradication Game Theory

Can you crowdsource disease eradictaion?

I mentioned in this post on 2030 that I expect Polio and Guinea worm to be eradicated by then. It becomes a tricky issue when a disease gets really uncommon how you find and treat the last few cases? So far only smallpox and rinderpest have been eradicated. Eradication is great because once its done its done. You would not have to immunise every child for polio any more. Every polio vaccine has a small cost and risk and once thats gone you can go spend the money on something better


India has tried an interesting tack 'Cash awards for info on diseases'

Alert the government on the occurrence of new cases of certain ailments and you may get a cash award! The government has targeted vaccine preventable diseases such as diphtheria, pertussis, measles, tetanus, and leprosy for elimination by 2016. India is also on the verge of being declared polio-free.
District medical and health officer Dr G. Srinivasulu explains that even after being declared polio-free, there should not be a single new case for 14 consecutive months in the country. This is where the reward comes in. “If anybody succeeds in detecting a new polio case meanwhile, the government will give a cash award. Even in case of detection of new leprosy cases, ASHA health workers are given Rs 150-Rs 200,” he said.

There was a competition last year from DARPA to encourage new ways to pool information held my many people.
'MIT wins $40,000 prize in nationwide balloon-hunt contest'

A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won $40,000 in a high-tech scavenger hunt on Saturday by discovering the location of 10 red weather balloons.

"We're giving $2,000 per balloon to the first person to send us the correct coordinates, but that's not all -- we're also giving $1,000 to the person who invited them. Then we're giving $500 whoever invited the inviter, and $250 to whoever invited them, and so on..." it said.

Some similar system that set up a chain of reward could be really useful in disease eradication. Many security protocols rely on a sort of iterative proof of trustworthiness. Something similar could be used to allow steps toward eradication without fear some other country is going to stop efforts.

Assurance contracts are another approach. It is possible that some regions are scared that once a disease is eradicated to their area they will lose funds. Some way to guarantee that funding will not reduce or to reward successful eradication might help here. Something like Dominant assurance contracts might help to change incentives to encourage eradication.



How about a guarantee fund for each of the remaining countries with polio and guinea worm that when who declares them free they get some cash bonus. You could imagine a kickstarter project that gave the minister of health in Nigeria money when polio was declared eradicated from the country.

Another good plan is not to have fake immunisation drives against polio

The juice of the carrot, the smile of the parrot
A little drop of claret - anything that rocks
Elvis and Scotty, days when I ain't spotty,
Sitting on the potty - curing smallpox

We want to discourage deliberately being lax about a disease so you have to be clever about incentives. Anyone have any good idea for how you could bribe people and governments to further incentivise disease eradication?

A Rose Named 20175 Does Not Smell as Sweet

Would we get more or less innovation without patents? The rose that holds patent no 20175 tells us how little we need patents. The plants have been patentable in America since 1930. 16% of Rose varieties are now patented but this increase in protection to rose growers has not increased the variety of rose varieties.

Launching The Innovation Renaissance by Alex Tabarrok is a short €2 book I read on the bus into work. It details as well as the perils of rose patents other hindrences that block wider innovation

The argument against patents is that they give too much protection to innovators. That in covering too much that is too easily thought of they actually hinder people coming up with new products. I have not seen a coherent argument that (non pharmaceutical) patents have too little protection. Tabarrok does a moderate anti patent argument forward in a clear convincing way though.

Next Tabarrok argues we should have more prizes for innovation. I have a major brain erection for kaggle and science innovation prizes in general. Tabarrok makes a clear case that prizes should be used when new ideas are needed.

Many of the faults in education are also well laid out. "the value of a permanent 25-point increase in scores ...would be 80 trillion" ..."A 25 point increase would bring the united states from about the level of mathematics education in Ireland and Spain to the level in Germany and Australia" How are we in Ireland worse at maths than Australia? Australia is mainly populated with Irish people, and the ones with an unhealthily active interest in sports at that. We have no excuse for the Aussies beating us in Maths. The education section gives several good pieces of advise for Ireland. Pay teachers based on their subject. Pay them on results not just years served. Sponsor college courses that result in more innovation that increases the standard of living more than some of the liberal arts that don't. While on the subject there is a very good blog on Irish education from the teachers side at anseo.

Immigration of high skilled immigrants is discussed next. Again like patents a reasonable achievable change is suggested rather than fully free immigration. I think Ireland should go moneyball on this. Find undervalued players in the market and buy them for our team (this would mean letting persecuted people live here, but it is an argument for another time).

The main thrust of the book is that innovation matters. Instead of a welfare state dividing a pie it might be worth thinking of an innovation state that constantly tried to make things better and increase the size of the pie. This would involve fighting entrenched interests "Few people lobby for innovation because almost by definition, innovation creates present losers and future winners and the present winners are by far the more politically powerful".

The optimistic view that we have in our power to create new and amazing things infuses this book. It is about fixes rather than showing how bad the innovation problem is as Cowen's The Great Stagnation does. None of the suggestions are on the extreme side and all are clearly explained. Because of this I think this book is likely to provide a blueprint for many improvements in the near future.

The Irish times has an interview with Tabarrok here

Should Science Bloggers Have a Session?

I think it would be really cool if loads of science bloggers talked about the same thing on the same day. Beer bloggers have a monthly "session"

"The Session, a.k.a. Beer Blogging Friday, is an opportunity once a month for beer bloggers from around the world to get together and write from their own unique perspective on a single topic". The beer blogging community really get around the session and seem to delight in sharing stories around one topic. Something similar for science bloggers would be cool, it might already exist but I cannot find it.

If some neglected interesting topic was blogged about once a month that could be really fun. To see the many angles bloggers can take on a subject.

Here is a suggestion World Leprosy day is January 30th.

How about we all write a blog about leprosy for that day?

Off the top of my head here are some possible angles

1. Epidemiology
How is leprosy spread
Where is it common
Can it be eradicated? An irish leprosy charity The Leprosy Mission is here

2. Microbiology
Why can't leprosy be diagnosed until you have symptoms
Why is the Leprosy bacteria so hard to culture
Why do some people take decades to develop symptoms
Why are most people genetically immune from the disease
The reviled drug Thalidamide has a role in modern leprosy treatment why

3. History
Why is leprosy one of the oldest known infectious diseases. How can you tell a mummy has leprosy
How has treatment changed through the ages
How has leprosy effected history? From the king in Braveheart to the Gospels leprosy has been important in history.
Leopardstown I have heard was a 'leper colony'. Was it and what did it look like?

4. Sociology
Why is there such a taboo against leprosy? What can we do to ease this?

5. Medicine
What are the symptoms of Leprosy and why do they occur?

6. Zoology
Armadillos can spread leprosy to humans. Other animals have also been implicated. What does it mean for the animal to carry this disease? How can infection from these animals be minimised?


Thats just a few ideas. None of which I know enough about to be able to write up. But you or someone you know might. It is a neglected disease. I have heard it small pox described as the disease that is gone but not forgotten and leprosy as the disease that is not gone but is forgotten. How about a session for science bloggers on leprosy on January 30th? If you have any ideas or comments or will commit to writing a post please comment below.

Lithium in the water supply

There is an interesting proposal in the Irish Times

Psychiatrist calls for lithium to be added to water

A consultant psychiatrist last night called on Government to add lithium salts to the public water supply in a bid to lower the suicide rate and depression among the general population.

At a mental health forum on “Depression in Rural Ireland” in Ennistymon, Co Clare, Dr Moosajee Bhamjee said that “there is growing scientific evidence that adding trace amounts of the drug lithium to a water supply can lower rates of suicide and depression”.

I would like to see what this scientific evidence is. The studies I have seen are from Japan where the lithium is naturally occuring. And one from Texas that seems a bit dodgy

Drinking water which contains the element lithium may reduce the risk of suicide, a Japanese study suggests.
Researchers examined levels of lithium in drinking water and suicide rates in the prefecture of Oita, which has a population of more than one million. The suicide rate was significantly lower in those areas with the highest levels of the element, they wrote in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

So taking about 1/1000 of what someone who need treatment takes could reduce suicide? There is an interesting correlation/causation problem with this study. Is it that the lithium in the water is reducing the suicide rate or could the same thing that reduces suicide increases the lithium amounts? One explanation I have heard is that places where it does not rain much water hangs around longer and rubs off rocks picking up lithium. In places where it rains a lot the lithium levels might be naturally lower as the water does not get a chance to pick up much lithium. The kicker here is that places where it rains all the time might be depressing and that could explain the increased suicide rate.

A quick check of this theory throws up some problems. Oita is in the south of Japan. Oita has 94 days of rain per year . It has Average rainfall of 1677mm

Tokyo where people top themselves at the rate of depressed lemmings at a Leonard Cohen concert also has 94 days of rain per year. 'The city of Hiroshima, in western Honshu, averages a sizeable 1,603 mm (63.1 in) of rain each year. Tokyo, further east near the Pacific, receives an annual average rainfall of 1,460 mm (57.5 in). The city of Sapporo, on Hokkaido, averages 1,158 mm (45.6 in) of precipitation per year. The southern end of the Kii Peninsula is known for a heavy annual rainfall exceeding 4,000 mm (157.5 in).'

A quick back of the envelope is not enough to discout the "rain means less lithium but also more depression" explanation. But I still don't think it is time to put lithium in the drinking water.

Takeshi Terao, a coauthor of the paper and a professor at Oita University.
"I do not think [cities should start adding lithium to the water supply], because our study is a preliminary one and further studies are required to establish evidence."
"Lithium does have its negative side effects as well. Some are mild: people often feel thirsty when taking lithium. Other side effects can be more severe, like weight-gain and diabetes and kidney problems. Lithium in the water supply could increase these side effects as well, although Terao's study didn't examine this possibility. Since the dosages are so much smaller, presumably the side effects would be as well, although more research is needed to prove that."

While on the topic of Lithium 7up used to contain lithium

The product, originally named "Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda", was launched two weeks before the Wall Street Crash of 1929.[49] It contained the mood stabiliser lithium citrate and was one of a number of patent medicine products popular in the late-19th and early-20th centuries.[50] Its name was soon changed to 7 Up; all American beverage makers were forced to remove lithium in 1948.

Syrian Parade

I've always hated fireworks. They are a boring waste of gunpowder and sky. But I love parades. Particularly crap ones with donkeys and trucks that break down and a collective shambolic happiness. The best parade I was ever at was in the Syrian town of Hama. In Hama stayed in a hostel with a parrot for a receptionist who could say "Welcome. Please wait in the tv room" in one of 6 languages depending on where he thought you were from.


Hama has a weird atmosphere. There is the contrast of really old norias on the river with the rest of the town. These ancient water wheels are in stark contrast to the rest of the city that is just 1980s concrete block apartments. Out in the countryside everything gets old again. They even have beehive huts like in Ireland

Its only when I got back did I read about the Hama Massacre

The Hama massacre (Arabic: مجزرة حماة‎) occurred in February 1982, when the Syrian army, under the orders of the President of Syria Hafez al-Assad, conducted a scorched earth policy against the town of Hama in order to quell a revolt by the Sunni Muslim community against the regime of al-Assad...
Initial diplomatic reports from western countries stated that 1,000 were killed. Subsequent estimates vary, with the lower estimates claiming that at least 10,000 Syrian citizens were killed,[4] the majority civilians, while others put the number at 20,000 (Robert Fisk), or 40,000 (Syrian Human Rights Committee).

It has the same weird cult of personality photos of Assad everywhere that the rest of Syria has. And the same bird like men that are the security agents everywhere in the world

The parade was in the town when I was there. It was something like a Saint Patricks Day Parade 30 years ago and with better weather.

What has always stuck in my mind for some reason was one group of kids form a karate club who happily marched through the town happily waving coloured flags.

I see the the news footage now from Syria of the protests and the Assad regime violent response. I worry about those kids I saw years ago. Those kids would be the perfect age now to be angry protesting. I'm scared to think what has happened to them. They are having a march in Syria right now and its not nearly as happy as the one I saw.

Predictions for 2030

I have no idea what will happen to the euro in the next month. And whatever happens will have big consequences. Yet I was willing to make predictions for 2030 about lbr, driverless cars, solar power and education in my last post.

The thing is I think I am cheating with technology predictions. Theres a wildly unpopular branch of Marxism that argues for technological determinism. Marx can be interpreted as saying that our technology is inevitable and will change us in unavoidable ways. "The windmill gives you society with the feudal lord: the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist"

After reading "What technology wants" by Kevin Kelly I am a convinced technological determinist. There is a podcast from Kelly on technology at econtalk

The book makes a compelling case that

1. You cannot shut yourself off form technological change. The Japanese tried it and failed. The Amish dont try it, they stay about 50 years behind on average but they do not avoid new technology forever.

2. No technology ever dies out.

3. Each new technology is an inevitable consequence of the last. No one person of country can cause or prevent a new technology, though they can shape its exact form.

Almost all patents of significant technologies have multiple very similar independant patents lodged at nearly the same time. Airplanes, radio, transisters, computers, television whatever you can think of about three guys thought of it and implemented it independantly within a few months of each other. This suggests that once the right prior technologies exist the next one is inevitable.

Kevin Kelly: What Technology Wants

Keynes wrote about 2030 in 1930 in the article “The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” which has been surprisingly on accurate for the last eight decades. So I am betting it will continue to be for the next two. He made brought claims about future growth rates that have been accurate. I will make similar claims now. Given that I dont think non technological predictions can be made I am going to try anyway
1. Grinding poverty will be gone. This is a low bar of 365 dollars a year in 1990 dollars. Thats really bad. Much worse than medieval England but it is one I think we can reach.

2. Polio and guinea worm will be eradicated.

3. World population will be slightly lower than the medium UN estimate of 8321380. The high is 8776486 and the low is 7867332. So I will guess 8250000.

This is just a few predictions based on the world continuing to go the way it has for the last two hundred years. But like I said I cannot predict what will happen to the cash in my pocket over the next two months so two decades away is being ambitious. If you have any predictions for 2030 please put them in the comments. It might be fun for the floating brains in a jar to laugh at them at the time.

Technology of the Year

Loads of brilliant technologies went mainstream this year. Some new technologies were created but I don't know enough about any of them to make claims for their future. I'm going to describe what I think these old but newly well known technologies mean in reference to the world when my new daughter is 18 in 2030.

Learning by reading
Watson came along from IBM and answered quiz questions really well. Siri did something similar with peoples requests.


This might not seem like a big deal. Not many of us make a living answering quiz questions. But how many of us have jobs that involve finding the right page based on some search and parsing out the right bit of text? A surprising amount of medicine, lawyering, general office power point monkeying involves this. What happens when a cockroach knows everything? Watson is the answer to that as that is about the actual intelligence level it has. What happens when in 2030 the cockroach is a thousand times smarter? I have no idea.

Depressingly most of these systems seem to be owned by big companies like apple, Google and IBM. Most of the data used and the tools that analyse it are open source. It will be a really cool project when someone makes an opensource wikipedia based answering bot.

"if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves." Aristotle wrote in Politics which says that smarter machines will free us from servitude. So far this has been the case but will that continue?.

Driverless cars

Will my daughter ever drive for non fun reasons? People will always drive the same way people still ride horses. Just now they do it for fun rather than transport. Two trends are making it less likely that my daughter will ever have a drivers licence. The increasing sophistication of driverless cars and our decreasing acceptance of the idiocy of youth.

If Ferris Bueller had a day off now, would he spend it on Facebook? Because cars are relatively more expensive and relatively less exciting teenagers are less inclined to drive now. Facebook and youtube provide entertainment for free so you are less inclined to work thousands of hours so you can afford a mildly entertaining car. Cars are now only mildly entertaining as safety nazis have turned them all into a homogenous look that cannot even be modded easily. If you cannot put a spoiler and underlights on your Clio your just not going to look cool as a 17 year old.

Combined with cars being less attractive to teenagers there is increasing control placed over them. New drink drive limits for learners have been imposed here. I have heard talk of curfews for young drivers. We are less inclined to accept the god given right to load a car with 7 of their mates and wrap it around a tree at 4 in the morning. In 2030 well have so many constraints on teenagers to prevent them killing themselves as to remove much of the attraction from driving.

The technology element of this is the driverless car

Hanson wrote

So a huge upcoming policy question is: when will what big cities manage to coordinate to change road law to achieve these huge auto-auto economic gains? Thirty years from now we may look back and lament that big city politics was so broken that no big cities could manage it. Or perhaps history will celebrate how the first big city to do it dramatically increased its importance on the world scene

Cowen said

The typical American spends an average of roughly 100 hours a year in traffic; imagine using that time in better ways — by working or just having fun. The irksome burden of commuting might be lessened considerably. Furthermore, computer-driven cars could allow for tighter packing of vehicles on the road, which would speed traffic times and allow a given road or city to handle more cars

These technologies will come in gradually drive train technology, lane assist, parking assist, crash avoidance are all present in next years s-class Mercedes. Probably legal hangups will delay driverless cars. If I was to guess it will be the old that get them pushed through. The old are increasing in numbers and will continue to vote. The baby boomers won't accept the loss of independence that goes with not being able to drive currently. Legal changes to allow driverless cars could be a vote winner. I'm willing to bet that by 2030 a combination of our scardy-cat nature about risk, the grey vote and improved technology will mean that my daughter may never have to drive.

Solar Power


The exponential improvement in solar power became news this year.

Averaged over 30 years, the trend is for an annual 7 percent reduction in the dollars per watt of solar photovoltaic cells...10 years later, in 2030, solar electricity is likely to cost half what coal electricity does today

This article started a great big argument about why solar is not replacing fracking and such. Including why environmentalists are still worried about co2. What will happen in 2030? I dont think we'll be using enough less energy to prevent climate change that way. I think well still be using fossil fuels to fly planes. New electricity generation methods take decades to become part of the grid, but I am still optimistic about solar.

Education
Education has not changed much in a long time. This is partly due to Baumol's cost disease where a teacher now can only teach the same number of kids as one in 1900. Since that time manufacturing jobs can produce vastly more than they used to. But education is one of those human centric industries that has not changed much.

Since videos came out it has been possible to watch lectures at home. Just giving kids computers does not improve education. If you look at the list here of the best educational strategies Tutorial instruction, Reinforcement, Corrective feedback, Cues and explanation are now part of online educational programs.

Stanford this year ran three computer courses where anyone can sign up for free, get homework graded by computer and do exams at the end. This is a graduate level course in one of the worlds best universities for free. The Khan academy has been around for a while but this year it moved from just a list of videos to include problems. The site is now using machine learning and gamification techniques to improve these problems and thus student learning. They are also using statistical tests to improve the website layout and which version of a explanation gets used. These computer assisted techniques are even being used by humans to get better at Jeopardy as the video below describes.


Interestingly the same guys who got learning by reading and driverless cars to their current state are also important in these changes to education Sebastian Thrun, Andrew Ng and Peter Norvig.
This year technologies became mainstream that finally turn computers into the amazing educational tools they have always promised to be.

Comparison
How did these areas change from when I was born till I was 18?

Cars became safer and drink driving became mildly uncool. The main change here was removing lead from petrol though. The recent drop in crime and increase in IQ may be largely due to removal of leaded petrol. I think driverless cars are important but not as important as this.

Power generation changed a bit, Chernobyl made nuclear uncool but it was probably never economical anyway.

Education did not change much. I did example questions from the year I was born to practice for the leaving cert. Corporal punishment still existed in my time but mainly for nostalgia rather than because they got true joy battering children. I was born after the education system demilitarized. I predict education will change more in my daughters childhood than mine.

Computers did not really visibly exist for people when I was born. By the time I was 18 it was obvious they were going to change the world even if they had not fully done that yet. I think the change from no computers to some was bigger than useful computers to really useful ones that I predict will happen.

Here is the prediction in 2030 for the technologies that became public this year. Many of the cars will be driverless. The world will get a most of its new generational electrical capacity from solar. Education has already changed massively this year just people have not realised it yet. We will each have an assistant that knows everything. I don't know how that will effect employment, my guess is she will end up working in a job that does not exist at the moment.

Memorising Books

"All of us have photographic memories, but spend a lifetime learning how to block off the things that are really in there." Granger in Fahrenheit 451. In Fahrenheit 451 there is a group of men who memorise books because they want to preserve them if all the physical copies are burned.

This was the natural state of books before the printing press. The Iliad, the Táin Bó Cúailnge and other epic poems were designed to be memorised and recited rather than read. But what books do people memorize now? I have included the text file size to give some idea of how long the book is.

The Bible 4.2 MB
I have never heard of anyone who memorized the bible but it does seem oddly popular. A Plan For Memorizing The New Testament In 5 Years. The New testament is 996 kB in size. I have never met anyone who has memorised the bible. How many people have?

Milton: Paradise Lost John Basinger did this in his 70's. 12 books, 10565 lines and 60,000 words in 8 years. The filesize is about 495 kB.

The Qu'ran 1.1 MB People who have memorised this have a special name of Hafidh. 'The total number of hafidh and hafidhas currently alive in the world has been estimated in the tens of millions.'

'But becoming a hafiz is also believed to bring rewards in the hereafter, guaranteeing the person entrance to heaven, along with 10 other people of his choosing, provided he does not forget the verses and continues to practice Islam.'

'The children, ages 7 to 14, are full-time students, in class 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, even in the summer. But they are not studying math, science or English. Instead, they are memorizing all 6,200 verses in the Koran, a task that usually takes two to three years.'

that is three years of full time work? Over 5000 hours or over half way to Gladwell's 10000 hours theory. Presumably once you spend 5000 hours memorising the Qur'an you would spend a considerable amount of time thinking and discussing it. Which means there are millions of near genius level experts in the Qur'an in the world.

I can think of things I would rather be an expert in but it is worth considering what it is about the Qu'ran that devotes this level of commitment to it.

Mao: The Little Red Book 273kb

One of the most read books ever. It still seems remarkably popular given it was written by the man who killed the most people ever.

'Acknowledging that she had never memorized Mao's quotations, Chen Di said the indoctrination of Mao, which was still inscribed on a few school walls today, was impressed in her mind as a primary school girl.' I cannot find a figure on how many people memorized all of this book but at 900 million copies 'sold' and many of them expected to memorise large passages it must be in the millions.

The Torah: Memorizing the Jewish holy book seems to have an important place in the religion but I cannot get any figures on how many people today have done this.

Can you think of any others? Dr Seuss' 'Cat in the Hat' has probably been memorised by many adults just from reading it to their kids a thousand times.

Books designed to be memorised, like the iliad, have tricks involving characters, meter, rhyme and rhythm. I have gotten two books recommended by Josh Foer, The Book of Memory and Memory in Oral Traditions that examine these methods. So hopefully I will blog about these tricks again.

The effort people must go to to memorize a book is incredible. We can now buy books for the cost of a few hours work. Or a kindle that we can get thousands of books on gutenberg for under sixty euro. Books are 0.2% of the average Americans spending. To think that we have such a low cost per hour worked on a physical or digital book now but people will still spend thousands of hours memorizing one is amazing.