Pfc. Bradley Manning … political prisoner?

Posted on August 22, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Is Private Bradley Manning, who was just sentenced to 35 years in prison for disclosing military secrets, now the US’s youngest political prisoner?

prior probability thinks so. Manning’s pre-trial detention was inhumane, and he was tried and convicted by a military court for disclosing evidence of military misconduct that otherwise would have been withheld from the public. Here is Private Manning’s full post-sentencing statement.

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Ballet bribery

Posted on August 22, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

One of prior probability‘s favorite social science papers is The Standing Ovation Problem by John Miller and Scott Page. (Here is a good summary of Miller & Page’s model.)  So what happens when some members of an audience are paid off by the performers on stage to applause?

For example, check out this story by Ellen Barry in the Sunday Times about Roman Abramov, who is paid to create fake ovations at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. Here is an excerpt from Ms Barry’s expose:

“Watching over all this is Mr. Abramov himself, his dark, intelligent eyes scanning the lobby. His job is to engineer applause and ovations, on the basis of secret agreements with dancers, using associates planted in the audience. These collaborations — part passion, part commerce — can go on for years; they can also occasionally sour into nasty, revengeful dramas.”

prior probability is fascinated by the pervasiveness of deception in human affairs, especially when we did not expect to observe deception of this magnitude at the ballet

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Al Jazeera America bets on an American audience for serious journalism

Posted on August 21, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Will this bet pay off?

In any case, prior probability is reblogging this post since we are big fans of Al Jazeera … P.S. we really like AJ’s full-page in the Times:

al jazeera america launch

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/20/al-jazeera-america-launch-day-full-page-ad_n_3784800.html

Alex's avatardigiphile

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I’m watching the launch of Al Jazeera America here in DC, on Channel 107*. (No HD in this media market, from what I can tell.) It’s the biggest launch in broadcast media since Fox News, in 1996, and in media since Politico, in 2007.

Goodbye Current TV, hello Al Jazeera America.

It remains to be seen whether Americans will tune into to a 24-hour news channel that is, like Brian Stelter notes in his piece on Al Jazeera America’s approach to the news, something akin to a journalism professor’s dream, with 14 hours of news daily, documentaries and an aspiration to cover all of the U.S.A. Andrew Beaujon wrote a good primer on the Al Jazeera America launch over at Poynter, from its hiring to its talent to the big question about whether people want straight news.

At launch, I’m optimistic about Al Jazeera America’s programming, at least based…

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A book that changed me

Posted on August 21, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

prior probability is reblogging this post … this recommended book will go on our late summer reading list, along with The Recursive Universe by William Poundstone

Jie Yi See's avatarBook of words

The ElementThe inspiration for this blog post came from the Guardian site which encourages readers to contribute short blurbs about books that left them with a lasting impression.

For me, my choice would be non-fiction book “The Element” by educationalist Ken Robinson. I bought it during a long transit at London’s Heathrow airport to kill time but it turned out to be the right book, ‘speaking’ to me at a point in my life where I was standing at a crossroad after completing my undergraduate degree.

For many of us, graduation is a milestone in our lives where we are being thrust with the responsibility to decide how we are going to take our first steps into the real world. I thought long and hard, even when I was traveling, about various considerations mentioned in the book such as money, career and passion.

And I regretted. I started re-thinking about my…

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Elections are a public good

Posted on August 21, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

When we think of “public goods,” we often think of such things as roads, water works, and other public projects. But perhaps the most important public good are clean, non-fraudulent elections, since the legitimacy of our political system depends in large part on the integrity of the method in which our representatives are elected.

On this note, Angel Gonzalez Roman, the Dean at the Law School of the Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico, where prior probability used to teach (1998 to 2009), has just been confirmed as the new Chairman of the Puerto Rico State Elections Commission (or Comision Estatal de Elecciones, as it is known on the Island). In our view, he is now the most important public official in Puerto Rico, since the P.R. State Elections Commission is responsible for the integrity and fairness of the electoral process in Puerto Rico and it has thus far done an excellent job of maintaining clean and free elections on the Island. Although Puerto Rico has many social problems, including a high crime rate and abysmal public education system, in the spirit of Albert O. Hirschman, we wish to emphasize the positive in this post: the fact that Puerto Rico has had free and fair elections with minimal levels of fraud for several decades, a scarce public good in most developing countries …

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Is David Miranda a terrorist?

Posted on August 20, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

David Miranda has only two degrees of separation between himself and Edward Snowden, since he is the lover of Glenn Greenwald, who in turn is the journalist who revealed Snowden’s secrets.

According to The Guardian, Mr Miranda was detained and questioned by security officials at London Heathrow Airport under Schedule 7 of the UK Terrorism Act. These security officials (most likely at the behest of the US government, though they deny this) then held Mr Miranda incommunicado for almost nine hours and confiscated (i.e. stole) his mobile phone, laptop computer, camera, and memory sticks. So much for the rule of law.

In the words of Nick Cohen, a columnist for the conservative weekly The Spectator: “The next time [the authorities] try to tell you that the secrecy and attempts to silence legitimate debate are ‘in the public interest,’ do not forget what they did to David Miranda, because they can do it to you, too.” Remember these apt words the next time you wait in line at an airport security checkpoint.

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Mark Zuckerburg is a douche

Posted on August 20, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Facebook has very Coasian bounty program for security researchers (i.e. hackers) who find bugs and other “vulnerabilities” on Facebook: it pays people a minimum of $500 USD to report such bugs to Facebook instead of using them or selling them on the black market. But when Khalil Shreateh, a security researcher from Palestine, found a major flaw in Facebook (a bug that let him post stuff to other people’s Walls) and reported it to Facebook (twice), he was completely ignored by Facebook.

Because he was ignored, Mr Shreateh then used the newly-discovered bug to post a message directly to Mark Zuckerburg‘s Wall. In response, Mr Zuckerburg not only suspended Mr Shreateh’s Facebook account; Zuckerburg also refused to pay him the bounty on the pretext that Mr Shreateh violated Facebook’s terms of service.

Come on, Zuck, give the man his bounty. He earned it.

Facebook flaw -- Zuckerberg wall post

(Here is one version of this story, and for you geeks, here is Mr Shreateh’s technical explanation of the bug he discovered.)

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Detail from The Temptation of St. Anthony

Posted on August 20, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

prior probability is reblogging this detail from “The Temptation of St. Anthony” by Hieronymus Bosch to remind ourselves about the importance of imagination and that literature and the arts often have more to say about the human condition than science does

Biblioklept's avatarBiblioklept

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Mickey Mouse Bets

Posted on August 20, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Via the Volokh Conspiracy (perhaps the best academic blog on matter of legal theory), prior probability overheard the following proposition from Prof. Glynn Lunney:

“Anyone interested in starting a pool on whether Congress extends copyright for another 20 years by 2018? Or will the Mickey Mouse of Steamboat Willie actually fall out of copyright, though not necessarily into the public domain?”

So, would you take this bet?

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Who benefits when state secrets are revealed?

Posted on August 19, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

According to Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who revealed Snowden’s secrets, it’s you. Here is the essence of Mr Greenwald’s argument:

“Please just spend a moment considering the options available to someone with access to numerous Top Secret documents. * * * [i] They could easily enrich themselves by selling those documents for huge sums of money to foreign intelligence services. [ii] They could seek to harm the US government by acting at the direction of a foreign adversary and covertly pass those secrets to them. [iii] They could gratuitously expose the identity of covert agents. * * * None of the whistleblowers persecuted by the Obama administration as part of its unprecedented attack on whistleblowers [such as Private Manning or Edward Snowden] has done any of that: not one of them. * * * They did not act with any self-interest in mind. The opposite is true: they undertook great personal risk and sacrifice for one overarching reason: to make their fellow citizens aware of what their government is doing in the dark.”

prior probability asks, is this just an ex post justification of Snowden and Manning’s disclosures, or does Mr Greenwald have a point?

Hat Tip: Dave Tufte at voluntaryXchange

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