FREE PASS!

I will be using the free pass that the glorious Queen Gloria, may she reign forever and true, gave me.

Thoughts on Discussion Last Class

I enjoyed our class discussion on Tuesday.  I think it was interesting how there became two clear opposing sides concerning the "tug of war" between individual privacy and public safety.  Some said that they would be willing to give up some level of privacy to ensure safety, while others said they would not.  I can understand the argument positing that if an individual has nothing to hide, why should he worry about allowing the government to monitor his activity.  However, I think this is a somewhat dangerous idea and a slippery slope.  More than anything, this issue is a matter of principle--it's not about whether an individual has anything to hide, or even whether a particular individual is willing to give up his or her "right" to privacy; rather, it's about what the government has the right to do and what the government does not have the right to do.  As technology improves in the future, there is no question that novel technologies will be developed that will allow government to monitor every aspect of individuals' lives, perhaps without their knowledge.  As this technology becomes available, it will become necessary for individuals in society to decide where to “draw the line in the sand” when it comes to government monitoring and invasion of privacy.  And as history, shows us, the term “slippery slope” is definitely applicable to this argument.  All we need to do is look back to the Red Scare to see an example of government monitoring run amok in our own country.  A witch hunt of sorts came about as the government initiated an investigation to find so-called “communists” in the U.S.  Individuals’ “right” to privacy was simply “thrown out the window” in many cases and uncovered information was taken out of context.  Reputations were wrongfully smeared and individuals were unfairly fired or even blacklisted.  And today, since 9/11, we are beginning to see a new type of witch hunt targeted at Muslim Americans.  Racial profiling in airports is something considered acceptable by some, as long as it is “in the name of safety.”  I think the question is not whether or not an individual is inconvenienced by certain “safety” measures, but whether the government has the right to profile, and whether it has the right to impose those measures on individuals, who may or may not be deemed “high risk.”

On the topic of the last class discussion I am strongly opposed to the "Big Brother" mentality of having my privacy be no more under cryptography and hacking as a guise of public safety. This gives unyielding and near absolute power to those who have little or no moral compass. I feel the ethical implications of cryptography are overlooked or swept under the rug by terroristic hoopla and groups of people creating mass hysteria over it. It is then easy to throw privacy into the wind with the exacerbated threat that anyone could be a terrorist when the truth is that most people aren't. The next extreme to listening in on people would be how to identify a terrorist. Like I said in class I hunt, if I look up guns and ammo on the internet that could be taken as a possible terrorist movement and next thing I know is that I disappear (Latin American History under the dictator Trujillo?). I don't like the invasion of privacy for safety, everyone becomes a terrorist at some point under this viewing.

As a class whole. I found it fun wrapping history, math, and ethics and their impact on culture.

On Claims by William Binney and NSA civilian spying.

I mentioned in class that NSA whistle blower, William Binney, claims that the NSA monitors phone calls and email traffic of every citizen of the United States. You can see what he has to say about it here. Now, I think it is safe to say they cannot monitor EVERY single email and phone call for reasons Will outlined in his post below. Still, it is unlikely that a significant percentage of the estimated 245 million internet users in the United States operate on anonymous browsing servers like TOR. So, with that many people one might laugh and say that the amount of data storage needed to do this kind of monitoring is outside of technological capabilities of a program like the NSA (i.e. Sophie's father's claim).

First we need to know a few things about the size and number of messages sent daily (right now I'll focus on email). Supposing that the 'average' email is 100KB and the 'average' user sends/receives 100 emails per day (i'm trying to provide an upper bound... so these numbers will seem a bit on the large end) that means the "average' person in the United States transmits (by sending or receiving  9.7 MB of emails per day totaling 2.2 petabytes (or over 2000 terabytes) per day!

Now it is unlikely the NSA would want to keep copies of every single email. Perhaps they cut out retail advertisements (sites like amazon.com definately spam my inbox). This will lower the data per user significantly as advertising emails are often much larger as they contain pictures among other formatting features that would increase the number of bytes the message takes up. Say that knocks down the total data per person to somewhere around 8 MB per person per day. That still 1.8 petabytes data per day to make copies of all the emails sent in the United States.

Meet the NSA's shiny new data center in Bluffdale, Utah. To summarize Wired.com's article on the NSA's new data mining center i'll just note the following points:

1. The construction of the building has a budget of ~2 billion dollars.
2. It's power requirements are estimated at 65 Megawatts (that is enough power to keep around 50-60 thousand homes running assuming they draw 1-1.2 kilowatts).
3. 100,000 square feet of servers which will push the Pentagon's Global information grid to around 1 yottabyte of data storage capabilities.

That last point probably means nothing to you, (as it did to me until I looked it up). One yottabyte is 1,073,741,824 PETABYTES! That means such a grid could potentially store copies of everyones non-spam email for 596,523,235 consecutive DAYS. For those of you keeping track at home, that's 1,634,310 years of emails at todays data transmission rate (based on what I think are upper end estimates). Note that it is impossible to imagine that the Pentagon is going to dedicate its global information network to just storing data on US citizens. However, if they allocate even 0.1% of this data storage capacity to such a task they could store 160 years of data. 

So, is it really that hard to imagine that the NSA could store copies of everyones online messaging data? 

Discussion on Cryptography

I found our discussion on cryptography very interesting and although I enjoy my freedom and privacy just as much as the next guy, I think the government's hand in monitoring our internet activity is a bit overplayed.  Due to the very size of our country it is simply improbable to go sifting through everyone's email with the hope of finding something bad.  It is safe to assume certain people are targeted by government organizations just as some of us have a more difficult time getting through airport security.  You can call it racism or stereotyping but this is a part of our nations security system.  When we can trust no one we make assumptions and weigh likelihood or probable cause.  I think it is also important to not jump to conclusions.  You may get stopped in the airport due to random scanning with no connection to your race, name, or physical appearance.  Furthermore, the very structure of the web allows organizations, not just the government, to track and monitor Internet activity and this will continue to be true regardless of policy or law.

I also want to point out a number of groups use the web anonymously and do so with ease.  Nearly 75% of the webs content is not visible through the browsers we use and there is always a way to go unnoticed.  The TOR network is an excellent example of this.  TOR (the onion router) enables anonymous browsing through the use of volunteer servers worldwide that allow for layers of encryption to disguise a users location and IP address.  Despite its initial intentions the TOR network is in many ways the dark side of the internet, allowing criminal organizations to thrive on the web.  It is used for black market sales, drug trafficking, and human trafficking.  If the entire web were to go anonymous imagine the potential damage that would follow.  I think people often forget they are accountable for their actions on the web.  I won't say I like the idea of someone looking at my personal information, regardless of legality, but at what point we will be able to demand the government takes a stand against the corruption of the web when all this time we argue for our privacy and freedom?

Space Flight: Like Driving a Car

Just a quick comic I found that made me think of class. Enjoy!

http://xkcd.com/1133/

Cryptography

The article "The Ethics of Cryptography" can essentially be summarized in the following sentences:  Cryptography in and of itself is not evil, but people can use it for bad purposes as well as good. Furthermore, cryptography should not be withheld from the public because it is necessary to preserve confidentiality, transfer data with integrity, and to authenticate the identity of the reader/sender. My first thought after finishing the article was... duh. The whole "cryptography is only as bad as the people who use it" stance the author takes seemed, to me, painfully obvious. But, as I continued to think about it/read through the other articles, I realized that this statement is probably not as obvious to someone who has has their email account hacked/phones lines tapped. Cryptography allows us to preserve our privacy through the use of check cards and computer passwords and facilitates secure communication, among other functions. All of these seem like wonderful things (we are Americans after all and we value out personal freedom), but what if you knew that a terrorist was using cryptographic techniques to plan an attack? Or a swindler was using cryptography to hide the evidence of his crimes? Is the government justified in using wire tapping with national safety as an excuse, or is personal liberty more important? Should we teach cryptography to foreign students who might then return to apply the techniques in their homelands?

Like many other issues facing the government today I don't think the debate over cryptography is an either/or issue, and I doubt any one side has it completely right. Although we all value "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," our opinions on cryptography and government wire tapping likely depends on whether we place more emphasis on the life or more emphasis on the liberty. There is no doubt in my mind that much, if not most, of the wire tapping that has been done by the Bush/Obama administrations has been unjustified. Yet, if this clear violation of our rights as Americans has prevented  even one act of violence or facilitated the capture of criminals, is it worth it? Assuming that these violations of human liberty have been beneficial, I am tempted to say that it is worth it until I am reminded of George Orwell's 1984. This issue would be much easier to debate if it were black and white, but unfortunately it is not and where to draw the line as "justified cryptography to preserve freedom and facilitate scientific development" and "a risk to national security" is unclear.

Feynman and the Challenger Commission

This is an excerpt from an excellent BBC biography of Richard Feynman.

What happens when safety isn't the number one priority...

Meet Vladamir Komarov. He was the first cosmonaut to go into outer space multiple times. You can read a much better summary than what I could write by Robert Krulwich at:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmonaut-crashed-into-earth-crying-in-rage

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." - Feynman in his Appendix to the Rogers Commission Report on the Challenger Accident.

Predicting Failure is Hard

Shuttle launches are difficult I think, because of course, there is only one chance to get it right.  Reading these two articles made me realize how difficult it is to predict failure in any kind of engineering endeavor.  The only way to see if a shuttle has been built perfectly is to actually launch the the thing, but the engineers at NASA cannot do that. They can only predict failures beforehand the best they can.  Even though the individual parts of the Challenger has been tested for various conditions hundreds of times, the O-ring was still found faulty.  The excessive compression on the O-ring was only discovered in the post-accident tests.

This reminds me a lot of building and launching websites.  Unlike space shuttles, launching faulty websites do not result in death.  But there are significant dangers of poorly built websites such as identity theft or unintentionally exposing sensitive information.  Security holes and data bottlenecks must be predicted before launch, but it is extremely rare to predict all the flaws of your website.
If there are any problems with a popular website, it is found rather quickly after launch. The different combination of clicks and text submissions of millions of users expose all the flaws of the website.
There is no way to build a perfectly secure and perfectly scaled website without actually launching it, and predicting all of the problems is extremely difficult as it is hard to predict how users will use the website.

Just like websites, it must be extremely difficult for the engineers at NASA to have predicted all the factors for failure on launch day.  Engineering fields where faulty launches do not end in catastrophic results are fortunate as they can improve their product incrementally.

Assessing Risk

Dumar and Waring’s article discusses the recovery and investigation process that followed the Challenger launch accident.  It was interesting to read about the progress of the investigation, which quickly escalated into bold conclusions and finger pointing.  Although a faulty O-ring seemed to be the primary cause, poor communication and a demanding flight schedule where also outlined as flaws in the system.  What I found especially interesting in this article was the numerical risk assessment developed by Bell Labs and the Air Force that sought to aid decision-makers by providing probabilistic statements of risk.  This computer-aided system traced causes of potential malfunctions to identify the likelihood of failure in the various parts.  As stated by Will Willoughby, the head of the Agency’s quality office during Apollo, “Statistics don’t account for anything.  They have no place in engineering analysis anywhere.”  Could this be true?  The article goes on to say, “NASA engineers were uncomfortable with probabilistic thinking and argued that meaningful risk numbers could not be assigned to something as complicated and subject to changing stresses as the Space Shuttle.”

Rather than assigning probability estimates to parts, NASA chose to use failure mode analysis that attempted to identify worst-case problems.  Not surprisingly, statistical analysis tends to introduce political debate.  This is seen by the projected probabilities of the Shuttle’s boosters failing.  The Space Shuttle Range Safety Ad Hoc Committee claimed that the Shuttle’s boosters were likely to fail on 1 of 10,000 flights.  Feynman found that the engineers expected failure was in 1 of every 200 or 300 launches while the managers expected failure was in 1 of every 100,000 flights.  Feynman was thus justified in concluding the manager’s grossly miscalculated as a result of “fantastic faith in machinery.”  This further highlights the lack of communication at the time.  From my understanding those involved in the investigation where extremely dedicated to the launch program and worked relentlessly to understand exactly what went wrong and how it could have been prevented.  Although risk management is effective in a number of situations I think you could argue certain situations have to many unknowns, which hinder the proper calculation of probable chance.

At the same time, as seen in Cornell and Fischbeck’s article, risk management is often a useful tool.  This article highlights how taking into account the probability of different events can be used to account for the likelihood of risk in the primary event and how to adapt accordingly.  This illustrates how evaluation of risk can be an effective management tool.  It is truly amazing what can be known based on probable chance and how variations influence risk.  As humans I find it interesting how we put to use probability.  Even if the occurrence of something is 1 in 1,000 we still can’t help but think of the chance it could happen.  Relating it back to the Shuttle launch, could there have existed to many unknowns for statistical data to be useful in decision-making?  I believe probability can play an influential role in almost anything, especially when calculations can be made on smaller components and other influential factors surrounding the event.  This brings to question how we interpret probability. What is an acceptable amount of risk and how does this probability relate to the value of a human life?  Obviously we willing face risk everyday but at what point do we say it is just not worth it and how does possible outcome factor into this calculation? 

Reforming Our Nations Generosity

I am of the opinion, that when it comes to circumstances involving such an extraordinary influx of fiscal generosity that private funding for victims should be up to the discretion of the privately owned charity, while the federal compensation programs that provide victims with money should use solid percentages of aid, based on a generalized set of conditions that each individuals circumstances fall into. 

Many sides of this argument revolve around the fairness involved with who gets money and who deserves more for what reasons.  I would argue that nothing is fair when it comes to an attack of this nature and no one person is entitled to more charitable fiscal assistance than another.  It should be up to the individual philanthropy groups, charity programs, and privet donors to determine who deserves or is in need of the most aid.   If a foundation for NYC firefighters raises more money than another foundation for NYC police officers; that is just the way it is and the NYC firefighters are privately distributed more fiscal assistance.  No one person, group, or government should be in control of who gets what.  The person who is the one donating money towards a cause should be the one deciding where it goes and what it is used for.   

The fact of the matter is that as a society we need to rethink the ways in which we are charitable by re-engineering the systems by which we are charitable.  To many times have individual groups taken advantage of this nation’s generosity by forming fake assist programs under the illusion that our donations are being given/used for a just cause.  Charity for disasters on the scale of the devastation witnessed on 9/11 should be regulated by a publicly funded program that not only accepts donations but also regulates charitable groups, organizations, and foundations for instances of fraud.   This publicly funded program or federal burial could allow those choosing to donate for victims of tragedies like the 9/11 attacks to have trust in that what they donated is going to a just cause.   This program could also allow for donators the ability to decide who/what they would like to see their money put towards illuminating the (who deserves, what percentage, for what reason) problem that the current system of charities has encountered.  This program can also be set up to take donations for general use, implying that people/things that are less remembered by donors get the funding and support that they need.    

The government on the other hand (outside of the money guaranteed to its federal workers) should not be bias in its assistance involved with disaster relief.  The federal funding of disasters should be an act that we as tax payers accept and even embrace.  However, it should not be up to the government to determine the what sum of use tax payers money should is deserved for individual circumstances such as a family’s earnings, an individual’s role on that day, or any other outside biases.     This being said I feel that a system involving brackets (regarding the extent that they were affected) should be set up in determining who gets what.   For example those who lost loved ones should all get the same amount and those who lost apartments should be given the same amount ( …etcetera), without bias towards for the income of the family member or the price of the apartment etc.   Federal money should be split among each of these ‘generalized’ (not specific) brackets with respect to the brackets average need of assistance.  Each individual circumstance once generalized into a bracket should be paid out the same amount of money that all others in similar generalized circumstances are given.  This allows for an evenly distributed victim relief that in general (not case by case) gives more aid to those who are most in need and less to those who are less in need of it.       

 
            All three of these papers were eyebrow raising for me.  Previously I never really thought much about the fiscal nature or the economic structure that relief programs can encounter during large scale disasters such as the attacks on 9/11.  It was very interesting and enlightening to read about the problems that generosity has the potential to create.   Who do you think is most entitled to compensation from tragedies such as the attacks on September 11? Should the government do a better job at regulating victim relief programs?  If so what can be done?  Given the 582 million that the American Red Cross accumulated from donations, how would you go about giving out relief?  

Compensation Determination Exacerbation Information

So.... calculating 9/11 loss compensation.... how bout that. ..
Tough stuff. Touchy subject. Very relative and ambiguous; very hard to quantify - I do not envy Kenneth Feinberg.
But even so I mean it was a pretty straightforward reading, right? One article about the vast intricacies of developing some sort of mathematical model to take it all into account, and two articles discussing the general public's ethical critique of the results. Actually, the way I see it, there's really only two things that would even be worth discussing - I could either critique and scrutinize Feinberg's method of calculating loss (like the examples from the other articles), or we could take a look at the ethics of the compensation altogether... .. what to choose, what to choose.. why not both?

I'm gonna say right off the bat that, in going over the final report of the "Special Master's" 9/11 victim compensation fund.... I mean we see in the other articles several issues brought up by people like how to address the issues of the varying incomes of victims or how to address their potential earnings and losses and.. I've gotta say it's pretty astonishing how well this dude was able to quantify this situation. Granted, it was a long reading with enough dry legalspeak that I might have glossed over the specifics of several of the presumed methodologies, but even down to the compensation of non-economic [emotional] loss, I find I cannot but agree with pretty much all of his methodology; moreover, after going through such heavily detailed aspects, I find I have no sympathy for the victims who complain that their situation was treated unfairly. Feinberg clearly busted his @*$ to account for every aspect as fairly as possible and, given the circumstances, I think his methods - which constantly gave the victims the benefit of the doubt - were more than reasonable.
If there is any criticizable issue with his presumed methodology, I feel that it could only be the fact that, in determining these compensations according to the standard method of calculating how much the victim would have earned otherwise, the final calculated government compensations (which apparently come out of the taxpayers' wallets) were just too high. In the end it totaled some $7 billion and each victim was compensated with upwards of ~$900,000 if dead and ~$100,000 if injured; I mean that is a lot and yeah sure that's what the Special Master calculated I guess [although I might take issue with the fact that 250k+ was given for emotional trauma unless.. no even accounting for therapy sessions that's just too much there is no way to quantitatively justify that kind of cash], but when you're shelling out that kind of dough for one national tragedy, victims of other national tragedies are like "What the hell? I survived Oklahoma city and all I got was this lousy t-shirt - where's my hundreds of thousands?" which is exemplary of the long-term issues mentioned by the other articles I mean if they valued a human life at ~$900,000 once why not do that for all future tragedies? Problem, right there.

 Lastly, I wanted to take a look at compensation in general. Reportedly, the article talked about how the compensation is basically a bribe, or, in legal terms, a settlement, wherein they accept a sum of money in return for refraining from suing the government. Now I don't care enough to know very much of politics and the legal process, but overall it seems to me that the whole point of these kinds of legal disputes is to identify fault/responsibility and call for a recompensory solution. If the government is offering financial compensation, it's almost implying an admission of fault, like "We're sorry we let 9/11 happen now shut up and take our money." So I think it's kinda odd that they chose that terminology, since [barring conspiracy theories] the government was not officially responsible for it, and, as such, shouldn't technically be "compensating" these victims for anything.
Accordingly, I will then assume that these compensations are better classified as support and aid for those who bore the tragedy; as such, the primary focus of the money is not one of required reparation [i.e. because 9/11 happened, the victims deserve financial stability], but rather a simple attempt by our Big Brother to help out those who experienced the worst of it. Make no mistake, I empathize greatly with the victims' losses and I agree wholeheartedly with extending monetary aid and support, but I just don't think they are entitled to any form of recompense from the government. That being said, I don't think there is any reason why the governmental financial aid ought necessarily to be calculated to provide for all of each victim's losses in terms of how much income they might have had in the future. But, like I said, I do think it would be nice to lend some form of aid.

Unfortunately, I'm having a tough time thinking of a solution to that problem... if the compensation/aid is not determined based primarily around individuals' incomes, how else could the government's aid effectively help the survivors of the individual? Discuss.

Risk Management

When asked to put a monetary value on life, we are inclined to assert that life is priceless and that no amount of money can compensate for a life.  However, when life and death becomes impersonal and more statistical, looking at the big picture, monetary values can be put on life.  Life insurance companies, for example, thrive by doing just that.  They are able to use probability models to calculate expected payouts and assign premiums accordingly.  Feldman’s discussion of Broome’s paradox challenged these models, reminding me of what we have been talking about regarding game theory and the cold war.  Feldman brings up the example of building a tunnel that will socially benefit people living in the area.  However, the construction of the tunnel is bound to put some of the construction workers’ lives at risk.   The government evaluates this risk, and generates a figure representing the “life cost” of this project. They then take these figures to a contractor and work out a contract that compensates for these potential risks.  The government then proceeds with the project, asserting that this “life cost” is less than the overall social benefit that will be gained in completion of the project.  However, as Broome suggests, this model falls apart when we know ahead of time which workers will die in the process.  If these people who were expected to die were then asked to assess how much money it would take for them to compensate for certain death, this figure would become exceedingly high, perhaps infinite. In this case, the “life cost” will no doubt exceed the project’s net social benefit.  Applying this same concept to war, we run into similar problems.  War-related decisions are typically evaluated based on the big picture.  These decisions tend to ignore the value of individual lives, and instead look instead toward net social benefit.   Game theory works the same way.  When applying game theory, we are asked to find the best option overall, looking for a point of equilibrium. However, in either of these cases, the individual value of life tends to be underestimated.  If infinite value was given to each individual life, we likely would not see the number of casualties that we do. How might our lives have been changed if mathematic models did somehow incorporate the value of individual lives? 

Along those same lines, we are all aware of the existence of terrorism, but it is interesting to consider how much of what we know has already been filtered by risk analysts.  Fischoff explains how experts can choose to magnify risks in order to motivate citizens, or they can trivialize real risks in order to limit the worries of the citizens.  In this way, Fischoff also shows how the individual person is not necessarily considered in risk analysis.  Instead, risk analysts tend to look at the big picture.  Sure, only five people died from anthrax.  This is relatively insignificant considering the population of the United States far exceeds this figure.  However, to each of those five families, the threat of anthrax is not something that should be trivialized.  How much of what we know about terrorism today is either exaggerated or down played in these ways?  Is this a problem?  What, if anything, should be done about it? Is there any way to both mathematically evaluate risk and consider each person’s value individually? 

Risk Management

Fischhoff’s article was about how humans are able to make decisions especially looking at decisions that involve great risk.  As we have been talking about in class virtually every decision we make and everything that we do involves some sort of risk. He is looking at how we actually make these choices and how we will respond. He says that in order to know how humans will react we need to understand human behaviors; he brings up the point of behaviorally unrealistic plans. In order to understand these behaviors we almost need to assume that humans have three different types of literacy. These three types are numeracy, language and scientific literacy. Each type allows an individual to understand a different aspect of a risk; if one is without one of these they may have a limited understanding of the risk. If we could put value to the different types of literacy which one do you believe would be most important? Do you think that you could make decisions about risk aspects without these?

Fischhoff also ties in how emotions can affect ones ability to react to risk. For some extreme emotions can either propel people into action of restrict them. This made me think about war and how if you allow yourself to think through the deaths of innocent citizens and the massive destruction is war still worth it? Do these innocent citizens have value to your life? Is it ethical to look over their value of life? Feldman’s article looks at the value of ones life and different ways of trying to measure and measure the value of ones life. He started with looking at how much individuals would pay to avoid the risk of harm. Then he added in how ones fear of death played into how much they would pay to avoid harm. These equations and variables weren’t the clearest for me; I would be lacking numeracy literacy if I was asked to calculate risk. I thought it was interesting how they were both taking into account emotions and the large affect that it has on making decisions. Both of these articles also address the role that these emotions play into events that we have never experienced. For example we make assumptions and tie certain emotions to death. When no one who has personally experienced death can talk about his or her experience. What also came to mind when I was thinking about this was our discussion of talking about presidents deciding about war. How in today’s times our presidents haven’t experienced war but are making decisions on them. What are ways that your emotions tie into your decision-making processes? Do you think in today’s society that we over look the importance of emotions? How do we take into account how easily emotions can be controlled?

Eigenfaces anyone?

I was on /r/math (for all you redditors out there) and someone had posted a really interesting article on the use of mathematics to do facial recognition. The animations for constructing the "eigenfaces" and deconstructing a face using a linear combination of eigenfaces is really something else!

http://jeremykun.wordpress.com/2011/07/27/eigenfaces/

How I learned to love the bomb

Here's just a quick summary of the plot line from IMDB: "An insane general starts a process to nuclear holocaust that a war room of politicians and generals frantically try to stop." There were several things that really stood out to me and screamed GAME THEORY! Here is a little list I made while I was watching the movie of things that YOU should keep an eye for!

-Take note of the react of the plane crew when they get the code for attack plan R. Also, take note of the difference of the tone of the propaganda and the demeanor of the flight crew before they receive the code. What kind of things are they doing on the plane?

-What is plan R and what are the implications as far as game theory? Why was plan R set into place and what does R stand for?

-Take note in the difference between the General's tone and the President's tone. How do they differ and why do you think they differ in this way while they are talking in the war room.

                -What kind of communication are in place during plan R? Why are they like this?

                -Pay close attention to the "list" that the general spouts off during the first war room                        scene.

-What was the reason that General Jack Ripper initiated code R in the first place? What does this tell you about the rational of the cold war in general? 

-Besides the comedic value, what implication do the contents of the plane survival kit tell us about the mood surrounding the arms race and possible outcomes?

-Pay close attention to the mood and tone of the phone call between Dimitry and the President. What is Dimitry doing at the beginning of the phone call and what does this imply about the evil Russians?

-Pay close attention to Dr. Strangelove when he explains the doomsday device. Why does he say that its an "essential device" and that it doesn't work if its kept a secret?

These are just a few things that I thought were interesting and hopefully they give you some direction before we watch it as a class tomorrow! Enjoy!

Time lapse video

This is a time lapse video of every nuclear explosion since 1945. I know it is kind of long in the beginning, but it does start to get really interesting. It provides a total count of all explosions along with tracking each country's explosions.

Somehow seemed relevant and weird.

Dr. Strangelove

Dr. Strangelove is a satire on the nuclear scare and Cold War politics that contains many sexual images and innuendos that make connections between war and gender stereotypes, and also situations/concepts that relate to material we have studied in class.  It is revealed to the war room that the Soviet Union has created a doomsday machine in response to a notion that the United States was working on a similar machine.  Dr. Strangelove, one of the president’s advisors, believes the doomsday machine would not be a “practical deterrent.”  All throughout the film, we see posters and banners that read “Peace is Our Profession” and a binder in the war room that reads “World Targets in Megadeaths.”  After the strike is called, the booming voice on the intercom states that the “commie has no regard for human life.”  Similar impressions have been instilled in Americans when a conflict with various other nations occurs; American society often promotes our society as superior and humane while the other is backwards and vicious.  General Turgidson later states that America can recall the attack, but if that doesn’t work the only other option is total commitment and gives two ultimatums to post-war environment.  The first being that merely 20,000,000 people are killed, the second, 150,000,000 people killed.  He also lays out six options or paths they can take in this nuclear scare with option number five being the path where the Americans catch the Russians “with their pants down.”  These choices and predictions relate to concepts in game theory we have been studying and mirror the attempts to predict outcomes of war.  When questioned about the doomsday machine, Dr. Strangelove states that “deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy the fear to attack, and so, because of the automated and irrevocable decision making process which rules out human mettling, the doomsday machine is terrifying, simple to understand, and completely credible and convincing.”  Another crucial statement in the movie is Dr. Strangelove’s assertion that the “whole point of a doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret.”  In the conclusion of the film, Dr. Strangelove presents an idea that relates to the reading by Kahn that was assigned earlier and is also discussed in the Kaplan reading on the film.  His method of preserving the human race also reinforces the ideas on sex and gender portrayed in the movie and brings up the ethical issues of using technology and mathematical reasoning to decide what will be most beneficial for the survival of the human race.

Demon Core vs John Cusack

The severity of nuclear research and weapons,
The Demon Core 1945

Starring: The Demon Core as The Demon Core
              John Cusack as Harry Daghlian

Yes it did glow.
No Harry (John) didn't make it (acute radiation poisoning, 25 days later).
Neither did the other(s) (Leukemia, all others present, decades later).

Schelling and Madness

When I read Schelling's "Strategy of Conflict" one particular example that he used stood out to me. It was the story of two armies, one slightly weaker on the run from the other. The smaller army comes to a river which can only be crossed at key points by a small number of bridges. They blow/destroy all the bridges but do not cross the river. The larger army is still approaching their position but the smaller army now has nowhere to run.

Initially this seems crazy. Why cut yourself off? The logic behind this is (as understood by the generals and not the soldiers of course) is that with no escape you will face your 40/60 odds instead of continuing to run while the odds of your victory continue to decline. By giving your army a dead end you there's a fight or die imperative. There is no running and because of this you may actually increase your odds of winning. A secondary implication is the fact that the opposing army might understand that and seek negotiations, wanting to avoid a pyrrhic victory.

So in a seemingly irrational situation there is a logic, and a logical reason to behave irrationally.

I think logical irrationality may be more common than we think, and that we may use it in our everyday lives. I know that after reading Schelling's book I noticed certain irrational ploys on my part to get what I wanted in my personal relationships (nothing terrible, just trying to get the last piece of cake or something). Have you noticed yourself using irrationality as a logical strategy? 

LITERALLY a tie.

http://what-if.xkcd.com/

Why I'm an Economics Major...

Game theory is one of my favorite concepts I have learned in Economics and the reason I chose to write about this topic this week.  We talked in class about "A Beautiful Mind" which is what my high school economics teacher used to explain game theory to us.  This is when I fell in love with econ.  This was the first class that I felt I could really use random theories or concepts from class for real life.  And that feeling continues until this day.

After reading these readings, the one I enjoyed the most was about "Classical Game Theory and the Missile Crisis."  I enjoyed this article because it was a new way at looking at game theory.  I have usually seen examples with producers gaining money, vigilantes getting a criminal sentence, or countries worrying about their GDP.  I thought it was interesting to see how they placed values on withdrawing of their missiles or maintenance of their missiles.  Furthermore, I thought the Chicken idea was a good way to look at this too.  The fact that they said that these decisions are not made at the same time was something that I agreed with, but always just assumed that they have to make it because that's how Game Theory worked.  I like how they took that decision making into account.  Finally, I thought that the Theory of Moves was a little more interesting because it calculated different outcomes rather than just what game theory showed.  The analysis of the numerous of cases just made me think a lot more about how game theory could be changed or pushed to new directions.

Game Theory

I found the articles on Game Theory rather fun to see the outcomes. It seems to me the natural flow of a Game and its termination rules, what the Brams article called Alternative, would be a natural assessment of how rational beings would play Game Theory. In the same article it also addresses that Kennedy and his advisers, as well as the Soviets, acted as rational players for the Cuban Missile Crisis. This is obvious since we did not attack with nukes and the Soviet players did not set up us the bomb  during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

One of the articles I believe addressed this by reporting that the U.S. advising committee for the crisis evaluated all possible out come with Game Theory and all possible avenues, effectively creating what Nash called a Game Tree. In the two by two schematics that the articles proposed the Nash equilibrium occurred when both sides had an equal ordinal value. Nash equilibria of the Cuban Missile Crissis occurred when both sides stood down, a compromise, or when nuclear war happened. Then if one were to take into account how the world views the actions one would change the dynamic of Game Theory into Alternative Theory. This involves even more rationality on both sides to show a dynamic flow of what choice will result to.

But suppose that neither side was rational, and that instead of nuclear warfare you have two prisoners. If both were rational beings and both are being interrogated for a crime they are suspects for then the rational outcome would be both "ratting" out the other. Both would get a reduced sentence but neither would be ultimately free. If both withheld snitching then both would walk away scott-free. The other 2 possibilities are one rats but the other doesn't. In 3 out of the 4 outcomes someone admits to the crime so the other, rational person, would opt for also admitting. This is all fun and games (theory) but what happens if humans aren't rational?

 In the post I made prior to this I referenced a web article on a Scientific American addressing the uncertainty of irrational people. It comes from a phenomena in real life situations of the prisoner's dilemma that there is a significant non-zero occurrence of both parties not snitching on the other party. Classical (rational) thought says this to be the least probable occurrence yet the article states it to happen about 40% of the time. That leaves the other 60% to be split up among 3 other options resulting in the phenomena opposing that of the classical thought. While Game and Alternative Theory are great tools to appraise an ordinal relation (to steal a term coined by Nash) between two cases there is a certain uncertainty due to human actions that it fails to encompass.

Which begs the question; was the game theory used during the Cuban Missile Crisis a lucky fluke? Or were so many lives and variables on the line that both sides were forced to be the most rational beings possible to make game theory work? Or is there a deeper side to game theory that has yet to be found/refined?

Somebody set up us the bomb...

Uncertainty in the Prisoners Dilemma

This is kind of a long read but still good. If some people don't have time to read the entire article a quick synopsis would be to read the last section entitled, "Critique of Pure (Classical) Reason."

http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2012/11/06/humans-think-like-quantum-particles-scientific-american/

I will probably reference this in my following post on game theory.

Post election thought

My thoughts on the election

The election had a surprising outcome.  Jared won the popular vote, while Gloria won both the pair-wise elimination vote and the vote for which we ranked the three candidates.  I think Gloria received more points than Jared and Nate in the two votes she won because she didn't set herself in opposition to either of them.  So, when it came to ranking candidates, supporters of Nate likely assigned Jared a value of 1, and supporters of Jared, likely assigned Nate a value of 1, but both supporters of Nate and supporters of Jared likely assigned Gloria a value of 2.  So Gloria, in effect, received some support from both supporters of Nate and supporters of Jared, and also complete support from supporters of her campaign.
In the pairwise elimination, supporters of Nate likely selected Gloria when choosing between Jared and Gloria, and supporters of Jared likely selected Gloria when choosing between Nate and Gloria.  The opposition set between Nate and Jared allowed for opponents of either campaign to, in effect, vote against their candidates opponent.

Dictatorship shenanigans

Last Thursdays election class was preceded by two days of what I can only say was shenanigans. Even though they were pretty good shenanigans it reminded me of how ridiculous election time is with all of the shameless self promotion and taking down of opponents by cold logical rebuttals. The only person that I thought composed themselves well was Gloria, but part of her campaign committee did place an absurd assumption based on a loose interpretation of an article.

Besides all of the tomfoolery, it was interesting that Gloria won, Jared got the popular votes, and Nathan lost. It really didn't surprise me that Gloria won due to partial the large population of women in the class and also do to her passive standing in the election. It is amusing, and kind of shocking, that Jared won the popular vote when all he did was inflate himself with no real solid stand point. His campaign was all "feel good" images and false promises (like politics!). Lastly, I thought it was strange that Nathan got dead last in two of the ways to tally votes and second in another because I thought his tactic for Dictator was quite logical. But that assumes humans are logical which has been proven time and time again to not be the case.

On the topic of voting systems I was kind of taken aback to on how small of a margin of difference in actual votes there was but how different the systems tallied and predicted different winners. This does beg the question can there be a basis for tallying votes? It seems that the question is no because is dependent on what the voting system favors.