Posts by Stephen Judd
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Nearly 15 years later it becomes clear that there is a growing body of evidence that done in the right way, media based interventions can work - certainly with respect to eating habits. I am quietly hoping that SPARC have adopted the same model. I could post at length on this, but would prefer to be asked to do so first and allowed some time to check a few facts and research first.
Please, please do.
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(By small I mean technical difficulty, not importance of course).
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How hard would it be to automatically produce braille voting papers, which the voter could punch with a stylus? They could be folded and placed in a ballot box just as well as ordinary papers. They would actually be harder to snoop than ordinary papers.
That seems like a much smaller problem to solve than implementing a full online vote system.
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Actually Matthew, America's Army is an interesting example. It is a very successful game as a game. But a cursory Google suggests that no one is even attempting to measure whether it has an impact on recruiting (an Army spokesman on Wikipedia is quoted as saying it would be impossible to tell). It also has goals in instilling particular values, but again there doesn't seem to be any attempt to measure its success as a propaganda tool.
(Of course maybe those things are military secrets).
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I'm with Danyl on the Mission On thing.
I had a look at the Mission On site and it seems to comprise quite a good educational tool, in the tradition of all those "Stephen, you are correct! Here is a picture of a happy banana!" things that I remember going back to Pilot in the 80s. But the question is whether it will lead to a measurable outcome of the sort SPARC is supposed to produce (increased activity, better diet).
(After all the violent video game worries, is anyone looking at whether Wii sports games are encouraging people to take up real life sport? If not, then this hasn't a hope.)
These words "researching and developing technology/popular media concepts which look at the best ways to encourage this age group to increase physical activity and make healthy nutrition choices" are weasel words. What does it mean to research a concept that looks at a way to encourage? I think it might mean that they're going to have a go and see if it works. I don't think that SPARC's mission is to research public health education techniques - I would have thought it would be to apply whatever ones there are that have a track record.
Having said that, from the letter published in the comments, it looks as though a lot of their money is being deployed where it should be.
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slarty: that stimulated me to realise what bothers me about these kinds of discussion.
People propose electronic or online voting systems and presume that security problems are just another technical issue that will be ironed out. The allure of automation persuades people to gloss over the difficulties, and turn to the practicalities of legislation, rolling out a new system, voter behaviour, and so on.
But all the evidence we have of how things have worked out in the real world is that security is not a problem like other problems, and is not easily solved. It's one of those things that's easy in theory -- Matthew could probably outline a secure scheme in a couple of paragraphs -- but hard in practise.
Whenever I hear these proposals, I think of the Simpsons "monorail" episode.
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Craig. Rove's classic "triumphs" are push-polling to tell voters that John McCain had an illegitimate black child (he had adopted a Bangladeshi girl from an orphanage), and paying law students to spread a rumour that an Alabama judge noted for his work with underprivileged children was actually a paedophile.
Given your frequently articulated disdain for moral equivalency I find your use of the word "Rovian"... surprising.
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I would vote for this guy.
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Amen, Matthew.
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"banks seem to manage"
The word "seem" is important there.
Banking systems actually fail or calculate incorrectly or drop transactions or duplicate them or create bogus new ones quite often.
If other parties notice a problem, and they point out the problem, sometimes a system gets fixed. Other times the bank refunds some money in case of problems, but keeps the system because the problems are simply a cost of doing business (credit card fraud is an example of this; the demonstrably insecure systems we all use for online banking are another).
We don't hear about this because generally things get sorted out at a customer level to everyone's satisfaction. Voting is not really a parallel proposition.
Matthew: the issue isn't security per se. The issue is how this is demonstrated.
For example, if source code is made public, that's neat, but how do you know that it's what's actually deployed? Once you've proven that, how do you know that nothing else is running on the system where it's deployed? Once you know that, how do you know that the endpoints are secure?
These problems aren't insoluble but they are expensive and difficult to get right. Most importantly, they are not transparent to the general public. "Bruce Schneier says it's ok" is reasonably persuasive to me, but I know who he is. Most people don't. And what if Matthew Poole says the system ok, and Stephen Judd disagrees? I might be quite wrong but still persuade the average person who doesn't have the technical background. Counting pieces of paper is easy to conceptualise; public key cyptography is not.
That's why I don't think the assurances that we can provide for an electronic system are nearly as transparent for the general public as the assurances in a scrutineered manual system. That's the rub for me - public faith in it.