A personal announcement

I will be entering the PhD program in Computational Social Science (with certificates in InfoSec and Economic Systems Design) at George Mason University, Fairfax VA, starting in the Fall of 2010.

How to Get Started In Information Security, the New School Way

There have been a spate of articles lately with titles like “The First Steps to a Career in Information Security” and “How young upstarts can get their big security break in 6 steps.” Now, neither Bill Brenner nor Marisa Fagan are dumb, but both of their articles miss the very first step. And it’s important [...]

Lies, Damned Lies and Inappropriate Baselines

Thomas Ricks wrote a blog on Foreign Policy titled “Another reason to support Obamacare.” In it, he cited a Stars & Stripes report that one of out five veterans under the age of 24 is out of work. However, Stars and Stripes compares total unemployment to 18-24 male vet unemployment. It took me less than [...]

Failure to Notify Leads to Liability in Germany

…a Bad Homburg business man won millions in damages in a suit against the [Liechtenstein] bank for failing to reveal that his information was stolen along with hundreds of other account holders and sold to German authorities for a criminal investigation. He argued that if the bank had informed those on the list that their [...]

Source, Data or Methodology: Pick at least one

In the “things you don’t want said of your work” department, Ars Technica finds these gems in a GAO report: This estimate was contained in a 2002 FBI press release, but FBI officials told us that it has no record of source data or methodology for generating the estimate and that it cannot be corroborated…when [...]

Friday Visualization: Wal-mart edition

I’ve seen some cool Walmart visualizations before, and this one at FlowingData is no exception. The one thing I wondered about as I watched was if it captured store closings–despite the seemingly inevitable march in the visualization, there have been more than a few.

On Uncertain Security

One of the reasons I like climate studies is because the world of the climate scientist is not dissimilar to ours.  Their data is frought with uncertainty, it has gaps, and it might be kind of important (regardless of your stance of anthropomorphic global warming, I think we can all agree that when the climate [...]

Finally, A Quantitative Measurement of Leadership

For you football fans, from Advanced NFL Stats we get the equation for  Surplus Coach Value! That couldn’t be more brilliant if it tried.