Monday, May 29, 2006

Potty Training

Last Friday, my wife and I decided to try and potty train our 2-year old daughter.  She’s been showing quite a bit of interest in using the toilet for weeks now, after all, and we figured that we’d have 50% greater chance of success with a 3 day weekend than we would with just the standard 2-day weekend, so Saturday AM we dove into potty training.

And it went well until about 11 AM, when she started getting hungry and tired and decided that “NO! Bridget no need go peepee on the potty” and she had her first accident.  Well, we dealt pretty well and when we put her down for her daily Quiet Rest Time (which is most often neither quiet nor restful), she miraculously napped and woke up refreshed on the whole using the potty idea.

Yesterday, she slept in and didn’t nap.

And she still gave up on the idea of the potty at around noon.

I have decided that, if there is a hell, it is potty training an over-tired, cranky, 26-month old while she has megajoules of energy and you still have low energy because of the childhood disease that YOU caught and your cranky little girl did not.

So, today we try again.  And maybe today will work better.  She didn’t sleep in as late, and with a little help from the gods, she’ll actually nap, and there will be more like one accident instead of 30 (ok, so I exagerate a little, but it sure seemed that way).

Thursday, May 25, 2006

The Daily Mantra:  Comment Blacklists

It’s a very, very good day when you finally figure out how your comment spam blacklist system is supposed to work and the comment spam getting through to be manually deleted drops from 20/day to 2/day.

Friday, May 19, 2006

Telephony 101, aka Wiretapping is Easy if You’re the Phone Company

Today, NPR’s All Things Considered interviewed Carol Wilson, editor-at-large for Telephony Magazine.  In general, I felt that Ms. Wilson did a good job of explaining, in non-technical terms, how the phone network works.  But something that she said at the end of the interview would have left an impression that was just plain wrong.  So I emailed NPR a letter.  The interview is available here.

Toward the end of today’s interview of Carol Wilson, Editor at Large for Telephony Magazine, Melissa Block asked how the phone company performed wiretapping.  Ms. Wilson responded that colleting the content of the phone call was “dramatically different” and “a whole different technology” that was “implemented in a very different way” from how phone calls are logged for billing purposes.  While this is true, the emphasis Ms. Wilson put on her statement implied that wiretapping was technically difficult to perform.  As someone who designed telephony electronics for 6 years, I can say that is not the case.

The very same system that sets up a phone call from New York to Las Angeles can just as easily be set up to transmit the content to one, two, or a dozen different phone numbers simultaneously.  And because such wiretapping is performed by the phone company itself, there is no way to detect that the phone call was being listened to and/or recorded by the police, FBI, or NSA.  As Ms. Wilson says, such wiretapping is only supposed to be done under authority of a court order, but technologically, the only thing preventing the NSA, or a hacker even, from listening in on any conversation is the phone company’s network security.

Now, since I actually wanted my letter to be read on the air, I intentionally kept the detail to a minimum.  But I feel the need to explain a little better how the telephone network actually operates.

When you pick up your phone, you send a signal to a piece of electronics known as “access equipment.” Access equipment does exactly what you’d think - it provides the customers access to the telephone network via line cards that are designed to ring your phone, convert the incoming communications from bits into analog signals that the phone speaker makes into sound, and to convert the microphone-created analog signal into outgoing digital bits.

Most access equipment communicates to the main telephone network switch over a DS1 or T1 (T1 is the physical cabling while DS1 is the signalling protocol used over the T1 cable).  DS1s can carry up to 24 independent telephone connections simultaneously, and each connection is composed of 64 kbps voice data.  With a little overhead added to make sure the electronics stay synchronized to the network switch, the total bit rate of the T1 is 1.544 Mbps, going in both directions at the same time (aka “full duplex").

Now, the network switch is huge.  It’s designed to switch hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of phone calls simultaneously.  It does this with what’s called a “time slot interchanger.” Remember how I said that each DS1 had 24 channels?  Each channel is a “time slot,” and a time slot interchanger (TSI) moves the voice data from one time slot to another time slot.  When combined with a “crossbar switch” that can connect any one of hundreds of DS1s to any other DS1, the TSI connects your phone call through the network switch on its way from you to whomever you’re calling.  Switches know which DS1 to connect to by storing information about where each DS1 is going physically (DS1 #376-390 might go to Kansas City, for example).  [NOTE:  DS1s are ususally congregated by groups of 28 into DS3s within metropolitan areas, and DS3s are usually combined into OC-12, OC-48, or OC-192 links between major metropolitan areas, but we’re interested in what happens on a DS1 level for this discussion.]

As Ms. Wilson said, the network switch (also known as a “central office switch") also is responsible for setting up a link into the long-distance provider’s billing network.  As you dial the phone number, that number is sent to the billing computers and they keep track of the duration of the call, the called number, and the calling number (ie who gets the bill).  That billing network is just complex enough to ensure that the phone companies bill the right people, so its technology is pretty wimpy.  Nowhere near powerful enough to tap into the content of the phone conversation itself.

But the TSI in the central office (CO) switch is more than capable of performing that wiretap.  As we all know from the music downloading problems, digital data is easily copied.  That is just as true with a phone conversation as it is with a song.  CO switches can be configured by the phone company to copy the data from a phone conversation to multiple time slots on multiple DS1s.  Which means that the 64 kpbs voice data you’re creating as you talk into your phone can be copied to your local police department, FBI headquarters, the local NSA listening post, and the cell phones in the surveillance van up the street.  Literally, any phone conversation can be copied and transmitted to any other phone number on the planet, and because it’s been tapped by the phone company, there won’t be any tell-tale clicks (like you used to hear when your younger sibling picked up the phone to eavesdrop on your phone calls) to reveal that the phone has been tapped.

As Ms. Wilson said, it’s a totally different technology, but unlike she implied, it’s a matter of a simple set of commands transmitted by a telephone technician.  Sure, it’s supposed to be done only under a court order, but it’s so simple to do that a hacker could do it without any trouble at all.  CO switches do, however, have a LOT of network security built into them to prevent hackers from doing exactly what I described, but a national security letter from the Bush Administration gets around all that security pretty fast, and shazam! you’ve got yourself warrantless wiretapping.

Modern access equipment designed for corporations, however, often have multiple DS1s or even a DS3 connection to the CO switch.  These kinds of systems have TSIs and small crossbar switches built into them as well, and they are usually remotely configurable using the Web.  Not all access equipment is programmed to permit wiretapping at a local level, but it’s often a simple matter of a software upgrade from the equipment’s manufacturer to get that feature.  And with a web interface for configuration, well, we all know how secure some webpages aren’t.

That’s it for Telephony 101.  Class dismissed.

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Nanotech Update

There has been all kinds of neat developments in nanotech recently.

In the medical field, the Boston Globe had an article about nanoparticles that heat up when exposed to magnetic fields being used to destroy animal cancer cells.  Another story, this one from Fox News, describes how carbon nanotubes might be used to build the scaffolding for joint and bone reconstruction.  Now, I thought that similar technologies already existed and at a fraction of the cost of nanotubes, but this fact isn’t discussed in the Fox story, unfortunately.  And finally, the UCSF student newspaper the Synapse has this article about how specially designed nanoparticles were able to deliver chemotherapy drugs to cancer cells almost exclusively, allowing for a far greater effective dosage to be applied with fewer side effects, at least in mice.

In the world of electronics, Nanotechnology Now has a story about how carbon nanotubes are being used as wires to make organic LEDs truly flexible (imagine wrapping a screen around your finger).  But as cool as that is, it pales in comparison to the idea that it might be possible to make displays that emit light out of both sides using carbon nanotube wires and electrodes, simply because the nanotubes are so smal as to be effectively transparent.

There’s also a new field of carbon research popping up that is related to carbon nanotubes - graphene.  Graphenes are places of carbon atoms one atom thick - effectively a single thickness of graphite.  Well, as with carbon nanotubes, this stuff has some neat and very useful properties when it’s a single atom thick.  Check out these links for more information:  Graphene - The Magic Carpet Made of Carbon, Nanotubes Unfolded, Forget the Nanotubes, and Carbon-Based Electronics: Researchers Develop Foundation for Circuitry and Devices Based on Graphite.

Finally, last week was one of the annual nanotechnology industry and academic conferences, Nanotech 2006.  While you can’t get a lot more than brief synopses of the papers that were presented, the list of sponsors, companies, universities, and the sheer number of presentations being made is very impressive.  Check the site out if for no other reason than to see how many people are taking nanotech seriously.

Monday, May 15, 2006

The Micro Pundit:  Sen. Voinovich & Voodoo Economics

Today, David Broder of the Washington Post (my new favorite source of editorials now that the NYTimes won’t let me read Friedman and Kristof without paying first) wrote a commentary called A Lonely Warning on Debt. In it, he quotes an unlikely source as coming out publically and speaking politically uncomfortable truths - Ohio Republican Senator George Voinovich.  Allow me to quote Mr. Broder’s quotes of Sen. Voinovich’s statements:

Some members believe that the solution is to grow the economy out of the problem, that by cutting taxes permanently, the economy will eventually raise enough revenue to offset any current losses to the U.S. Treasury. I respectfully disagree with that assertion....

Instead of making the tax cuts permanent, we should be leveling with the American people about the fiscally shaky ground we are on....

I have to say this, and I know it is controversial, but if you look at the extraordinary costs that we had with the war and homeland security and Katrina, the logical thing that one would think about is to ask for a temporary tax increase to pay for them. Did you hear that? Ask for a temporary tax to pay for it, instead of saying we will let our kids take care of it; we will let our grandchildren take care of it.

No, we are not doing it. The people who are sacrificing today in this country are the ones who have lost men and women in our wars. The people who have sacrificed today are the ones who have come back without their arms and legs—thousands of them. They are making the sacrifice.

The question I ask is, what sacrifice are we making? Anyone in the know who is watching us has to wonder about our character, our intellectual honesty, our concern about our national security, our nation’s competitiveness in the global marketplace now and in the future, and, last but not least, our don’t-give-a-darn attitude about the standard of living and quality of life of our children and grandchildren.

The question is, are we willing to be honest with ourselves and the American people and make these tough decisions?

It is so rare these days to hear a politician of any stripe say that we need to temporarily raise taxes, even though the need is painfully obvious.  And to see a sitting senator pointing out that the average American has been asked to sacrifice NOTHING in this “War on Terror” is amazing.

Thank you, Mr. Broder, for bringing Sen. Voinovich’s honesty in this regard to my attention.  And thank you, Sen. Voinovich, for having the guts to say what needed to be said.  I only wish that more of your fellow senators had actually listened to you and done their duties to the country instead of following the Repugnican leadership’s bullshit position on taxes.

And for additional reading on the whole tax cut thing, another Washington Post commentary, this one by Sebastian Mallaby, also came out today.  Check it out too, especially if you’re a believer in tax cuts paying for themselves.

Sunday, May 14, 2006

A Correction and the Daily Mantra

First, before today’s Daily Mantra, a quick correction regarding my last blog.  A reader took some umbrage to a comment I’d intended as a generally meaningless albiet snide comment, specifically this comment:  “...since I don’t really like being an unknowing human test subject.” I don’t truly believe that the cosmetics and pharmaceutical industries are performing Mengele-style human experiments on people without their knowledge, since this kind of behavior is roundly, and correctly, considered unethical and often outright illegal.

According to various websites I went hunting through, there is indication that in-vitro testing of chemicals may in fact be as accurate or even more accurage as animal testing.  Given that in-vitro testing uses cultured human skin cells (among other things), this type of testing could in fact generate better results than testing compounds and products on mice that have been genetically engineered with human DNA.  But it still makes me nervous, and will until I’ve been convinced that it works as good or better than animal testing.  I don’t know the regulations, and my life right now is too crazy for me to devote the kind of time I’d need to in order to make heads or tails of cosmetics regulations, but as the reader pointed out, you can grab a lot of that information from The FDA website, and there are LOTS of industry and non-profit groups that exist to enable us citizens to dive into this issue should we choose to do so.

My main point about the “not tested on animals” claim, that the product may rely on ingredients that are tested on animals or that were tested on animals and that the claim as worded was essentially marketing bullshit, is confirmed by the FDA at this link here.

Now for the Daily Mantra:

You know you’re lucky and have a weird child when the child prefers zuccini and yellow squash to not just broiled cod, but to cheesecake too.

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

The Micro-Pundit:  Weasel Language

Bath and Body Works has a product line called “True Blue SPA.” When you look at the back of the bottles, they say “It’s true:  our finished products are never tested on animals.” Great!  That means that there was no animal testing, right?

BZZZZT!  Wrong answer.

What that statement means is that the finished product was not tested on animals, but any number of the component ingredients almost certainly were tested on animals.  Now, for all we know the animal testing could have taken place in 1940 rather than last year, but if there had never been animal testing of any of the ingredients, then the words “finished products” wouldn’t have been necessary in the first place.  Instead, the statement would have read “It’s true:  no part of our products have ever been tested on animals.” Or something similar.

Now, personally, I’m more likely to use soaps and other similar products that have been tested on animals, since I don’t really like being an unknowing human test subject.  But I realize that many people don’t like the idea of animal testing.  But carefully chosen language like this makes the True Blue SPA line seem more animal friendly than it probably is.

There are lies, damn lies, statistics, and then there is marketing.  And this falls firmly in the last category.

Sunday, May 07, 2006

The Daily Mantra:  Swallowing Air

If you don’t like belching up 2/3rds of your last meal or writhing in intestinal discomfort due to gas pains, don’t swallow massive quantites of air.

Thursday, May 04, 2006

The Micro Pundit:  Emergency Contraception and School Vending

Today I came across a couple of things that I found interesting and/or frustrating in my local paper, The Denver Post.

First, the Democratic state legislature gave up trying to get an emergency contraception bill through this year, choosing to focus instead on getting Democratic governor candidate Bill Ritter elected.  It’s a good tactical move, since pressuring the current Republican governor, Bill Owens, to sign a bill he’s already vetoed once (based on, IMO, an argument that is complete and utter bullshit, namely that he didn’t want teenage girls using emergency contraception as their preferred form of birth control) would have cost a lot of money that could be better used getting a governor in November who will actually sign the legislation next year.  But because of my personal belief that emergency contraception is an excellent way to counter the social ultra-conservative and Repugnican Culture of Victimhood (aka the Culture of Life), I’m still very disappointed.  Not as disappointed as I was when Gov. Owens vetoed a bill that required pharmacists and doctors at religious hospitals to discuss, prescribe, and dispense emergency contraception, but disappointed nonetheless.

Second, I read about how the three big soda makers agreed to strict limits on what they can sell in public schools.  Several years ago, I had the opportunity to sit through a staff meeting at a middle school where the school district’s food coordinator was forced to defend the district’s vending machine policy.  Her response pretty much came down to this:  “A lot of your budget comes from these vending machines, so either figure out how to teach 100 kids without textbooks and class handouts or sit down and shut up.” The tone was less confrontational, of course, but that was definitely the message I got out of it from my “unaffected observer” standpoint.  And I understand that approach, since hooking kids on Mountain Dew (as I was in high school – 1-2 Dews a day, every day, for about 3 years), Coke, etc. makes a LOT of money.  But it would be a lot healthier if the kids paid that money to the school for healthy food instead.  And no, unlike that same coordinator, I don’t believe that a doughnut “fortified” with soy protein qualifies in any way, shape, or form as a “healthy” alternative to a Mountain Dew.  Unfortunately, the agreement doesn’t do anything to replace the “fortified” doughnuts with whole grain toast and low-sugar jam.

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

The Clean and Safe Energy Coalition

Last month, I blogged about whether I wanted to join the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, a non-profit group funded by the Nuclear Energy Institute with the stated goal of increasing the number of nuclear plants in the U.S. as an alternative to coal, oil, or natural gas power plants.  I wasn’t sure if I wanted to join or not.

Today I did.

Which isn’t to say that the group is perfect.  There is a lot of information on the group’s website that could be generously described as “spin.” Information that is not technically wrong, but is so significantly oversimplified that critics of nuclear energy can use the website itself to criticize the group’s position.  Not a good thing.

And the website is very sparse on some of the very details that I think are vital to make nuclear energy viable in the states.  But I’m optimistic that will not always be the case.  Enough so that I wanted to include my name as a supporter.

And if that should change, I can always email them back and ask them to remove my name from their lists.