Gatekeepers

 

Can I Get A Witness

Can I get a witness? I want a witness
Witness, witness, witness, witness
Everybody knows, especially you girls
But love can be sad
But half of a love is twice as bad

But what is an EXPERT witness?

In Law, the Daubert test on expert witnesses is

1. Has the expert's theory ever been tested?
2. Has the expert's theory been reviewed by their peers?
3. Are there standards that control the theory's operation?
4. Does the theory have a known or potential rate of error?
5. Has the scientific community accepted the expert's theory?
6. Have the expert's findings ever been published?

While this works for a long-standing theory, it doesn’t work so well when the theory challenges the accepted scientific wisdom.  If the theory is true, but new, it probably has not yet been tested.  If the theory is new, it probably has not been reviewed by its peers, never mind that those “peers” probably do NOT accept that theory.  The third and fourth standards do speak to the proof of a theory:  What are the controls of the theory; and its rate of error.   The last two standards place an overemphasis on the scientific community which reviews and publishes the theory.

If Daubert had been used to qualify Copernicus or Kepler as an expert witnesses, they would have failed.  Galileo not only was not an expert according to Daubert, but he had to recant his observations on the movements of the moon of Jupiter or be excommunicated, and supposedly uttered under his breath “But yet it moves”.  Truth is the truth, regardless of what the conventional wisdom says. In the past accepted wisdom has been: The world is flat; The earth revolves around the sun; Space is full of luminiferous aether in which light moves; The earth is only 6000 years old, etc.  If Daubert is the Law, then Charles Dicken was right in his novel Oliver Twist. "The law is an ass—an idiot."

Deviation

 

Sticks And Stones

People talking, trying to break us up
Why don't they let us be
Sticks and stones may break my bones
But talk don't bother me

But even if they don’t break any bones, using the right word is better.

Deviation is a loaded word, and its use may do more harm than good.  Some common synonyms for deviation are perversion, anomaly, error, aberration, abnormality.  However, when the term is used in statistics it is not intended as a loaded term. It only means the amount by which a single measurement differs from a fixed value such as the mean.  In less contentious terms this might be  defined as  complexity.  If there was no standard deviation, as used in statistics, only one value would have a probability.  Thus a little complexity might be considered to be a good thing. While something that is very complex, e.g., a Rube Goldberg-ish contraption with unnecessary complexity, might incorrectly imply that a any value is correct.  A standard deviation of 1, in statistics, means that distribution is normal.  If the name is changed from standard deviation to complexity, it might be more easily understood.

The human body is composed of 60% water.  The human body is also complex, it consists of many different cells and organs.  A pail of water is 100% water.  It is not complex. Excluding the pail, it only consists of water.  It would be foolish to say that there is no difference between a human body and a pail of water because complexity, i.e., standard deviation, matters.  It is true in statistics that for a normal distribution if the mean grows, then the complexity also must grow for the distribution to still be normal and the probability at zero to also be zero.  A human body is more complex than a pail of water.  If you look at standard deviation compared to water, there is no standard deviation for the pail of water but there is a standard deviation with respect to water in the human body.  A more palatable term might be complexity, not deviation. Then sticks and stones, and words will not hurt.

Passwords

 

867-5309 / Jenny

Jenny, Jenny, who can I turn to
(Eight six seven five three oh nine)
For the price of a dime I can always turn to you
(Eight six seven five three oh nine) 

Having trouble remembering numbers or passwords? 

I have just been asked to reset my password to a 16-character code, which must change every 60 days! Passwords are getting harder and harder to remember, but being hard to remember is not a new phenomenon. I can readily remember only four phone numbers: 1) my late parent’s home, 2) my land-line phone, 3) my own cell phone, and 4) the Sheraton Reservation number. And the last is only because of the memorable jingle, 8 0 0-3 2 5-3 5 3 5. My parent’s phone, which was the number I grew up with, was WIlliams 1-6928. In the old days, phone numbers had exchanges. PEnnsylvania 6-5000 is a telephone number in New York City, written in the 2L+5N (two letters, five numbers) format that was common from about 1930 into the 1960s. The PEnnsylvania exchange served the area around Penn Station in New York City. 

PEnnsylvania 6‑5000 was the name of a Glen Miller Song, and also the number of the Hotel Pennsylvania which, claimed it to be the oldest continuously used telephone number in New York City.  It was eventually converted to 736. WIlliams 1 eventually became 941. In fact, most land line numbers were converted from telephone exchanges because those exchanges were easier to remember. My home landline has a 339 exchange after the area code, which means that at one time it would have been EDgewood 9. 

I find that rather than series of meaningless numbers, letters, and punctuation marks, a line from a song, a punchline from a joke, etc. makes a better password that I can actually remember. There is a reason that the Hilton number has stuck in my memory for so long because the jingle is an earworm. But my IT mangers need not worry. My new password is not a series of that or 867-5309😁.

Cures

 

Good Lovin’

Honey, please squeeze me tight (squeeze me tight)
Don't you want your baby to be all right? (be all right)
I said baby (baby), "Now it's for sure (it's for sure)
I got the fever, yeah, and you got the cure

Just as long as the cure is not worse than the fever.

I have previously blogged that risk is the product of two things: likelihood and consequences.  The cost of a cure should be less than the cost times the risk of getting the disease. Some anecdotes if I may:

When I was a senior in High School, and I had gym class, I used to store my notebooks and books for my next class in a common area outside of the gym (because they would not fit in my gym locker.)  One day my notebooks and books were not in that common area after gym class. My reaction was, “so it goes”.  In my next class, I got a call to go to the principal’s office.  He had taken my notebooks and books to teach me a lesson that my possessions could be stolen.  I replied that before the Principal did, no one had ever stolen them.  In fact, I now realize that we both saw the likelihood the same, but he valued  the consequences of losing my possession much more than I did.  The cost of learning my lesson was that I did not use the common area any more for gym. An inconvenience, but not a big cost.

Before the Tylenol murders, the likelihood of getting a tainted product was no different than the likelihood after.  But the consequences of getting a tainted product was not acceptable.  Nothing could be done about the consequences, but the risk could be lowered if the likelihood was lowered.  Tamper Proof packing does nothing to change the consequences, but it does decrease the likelihood, which decreases the risk.  The cost of shrink wrapping, and tamper proof caps, is small compared to the consequences.

When the liquid bomber tried to blow up an airplane, I had just traveled by plane the previous week. When I tried to fly home after, TSA confiscated all of the liquids in my carry-on bag.  This confiscation and ban did nothing to change the consequences of a plane explosion, but they reduced the likelihood of the plane explosion.  The cost of confiscating, and banning, my (and other passengers) liquids was considered less than the cost of a plane explosion.

Macros are small pieces of code within computer files.  In most cases they are benign, especially if you wrote them yourself.  But if they are malicious and you did not insert them, then they can have dire consequences.  Microsoft's and my firm’s IT department's solution is not to trust anything on a network because you don’t know where it came from, even if you put it there.  The consequences may be dire but reducing the likelihood also means that the cure is that macros can longer be inserted in network files and files with existing macros are no longer trusted.  IMHO, the cure, which is no more macros, is worse than the risk times the cost of the risk.

Since people get risk confused with likelihood, consequently the costs of the cure and the costs of the disease can also be expected to be confused. And that may be why God allows evil in the world. The cost of eliminating evil may be greater than the cost of the evil, at least that is what the Christian Gospels say.

The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field.  But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away.  When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared.

 The owner’s servants came to him and said, “Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?’’

 “An enemy did this’’,  he replied. The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’’

 “No’’ he answered, “because while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them.  Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn”

 

Trinities

 

One Is the Loneliest Number

One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do
Two can be as bad as one
It's the loneliest number since the number one

How about THREE?

Three seems to be a common number.

• There are three states of matter: solid, liquid and gas. (Yes there is often a fourth state, plasma, that is defined, but let’s consider plasma to be a special case of matter being completely converted into its component energy.) 

• There are three elemental signs of the zodiac and alchemy: earth, air, and water. (Where the fire signs are proposed to be treated like plasma). 

• Christians worship the Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 

• Many mythologies include three principal gods, e.g., the Greek gods Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, who respectively governed the sky, sea, and underworld. 

• An English sentence has three essential parts: a subject, an object, and a verb. 

• In physics there are three major classes of subatomic particles; electrons, protons, and neutrons, where protons and neutrons are, in turn, each composed of three quarks.   
  
  
• There are three families of quantum particles: each with their own neutrino; the electron, muon and tau neutrinos. 

• There are three fundamental forces in the Unified Theory of Physics: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force.  The Unified Theory is not able to include gravity, but this may be because gravity is an apparent force defined by a Euclidean frame reference and not a fundamental force.

• In engineering, the strongest polygon is a triangle.

• In wood working, the minimum number of legs for a stable stool or table is three.

• Newton proposed three Laws of Motion.

• There are three Laws of Thermodynamics.

• There are three forms of geometry: depending on whether the curvature of a plane is positive, zero, or negative.  The curvature is defined by the sum of the three angles in a triangle, where a sum is greater than 180 degrees (positive curvature, spherical); equal to 180 degrees (zero curvature, flat or Euclidean); or less than 180 degrees (negative curvature, hyperbolic).

• In political science it is common to speak of two parties, but the government is controlled by one of those two parties depending on how well they form a coalition with, are supported by, independents, an unofficial implied third "party".

Three certainly does not sound like a lonely number.

 

Queen Elizabeth II

 

Her Majesty

Her Majesty is a pretty nice girl
But she doesn't have a lot to say
Her Majesty is a pretty nice girl
But she changes from day to day
I wanna tell her that I love her a lot
But I gotta get a belly full of wine
Her Majesty is a pretty nice girl
Someday I'm gonna make her mine, oh yeah
Someday I'm gonna make her mine

Thank you Your Majesty.  Rest In Peace

Great Britain has had three exceptional Queens, Elizabeth I, Victoria, and Elizabeth II. The late Elizbeth II was such a great sovereign because she thought of herself, not as a ruler, but as a servant of her subjects.  Let us hope that Charles realizes that he is a servant, just same as his mother. The Queen is Dead. Long live the King.

Impulse Control

 

Think

People walking around everyday
Playing games, taking score
Trying to make other people lose their minds
Ah, be careful you don't lose yours, oh

Look before you leap.

In 1992, I was appointed by Massachusetts Republican Governor William Weld to be the Director of the Bureau of Transportation Planning and Development of the Massachusetts Highway Department.  Mass Highway is now part of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation.  At the time before reorganization, it was only loosely affiliated with the Executive Office of Transportation and Construction, EOTC. The Bureau was on “loan” to EOTC.  My secretaries had two phones, one of which they answered, “Mass Highway” and the other of which they answered, “Executive Office of Transportation”.  My superiors were in the Executive Office and not surprisingly were also Republican appointees. To me, conservatives are believers in the republican form of government outlined in the US Constitution, but have differences from liberals in the size and role of that government.  They believe that since power corrupts, the government should be as small as possible.  They also believe in unintended consequences, that haste makes waste, and looking before leaping. Thus, aversion to power and impulse control.

Authoritarians who are rINOs are seekers of power for themselves and have no impulse control.  I have characterized them as lower case "r" because they do NOT believe in the republican form of government defined by the US Constitution and are thus "republicans In Name Only". Because I was appointed by a Republican, was a white male, was a graduate of Ivy League schools, and had a surname that sounded very much like Republican former President Reagan, rINOs assumed that I was one of them. 

I would like to offer an anecdote highlighting the lack of impulse control of one of my rINO superiors.  One of my managers did something to offend my superior.  She (and this is not a gender characterization.  My superior could just as easily been a male and my conclusion would be the same) demanded that the manager be fired.  I pointed out that the manager had Civil Service status, and his Civil Service position actually had a higher salary than his position as a manager.  If he was “fired as a manager’, then he would revert to his Civil Service status and be transferred at higher pay within Mass Highway.  I pointed this out to my superior, and she realized that her impulse to fire would actually benefit her target.  Instead, she directed me to tell that manager that, as punishment, he was NOT going to be fired and he had to keep working at his current position.  I was delighted to convey this Yogi Berra message, “No one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded”.

If this sounds familiar to you, it probably reminds you of Gov. DeSantis and the Florida Republican state legislature cancelling the Reedy Creek Improvement District to punish the Disney Company, only to find out that the state and local governments would then be liable for the bonds issued by the District and for all future costs.  It probably felt good to have the “power” to “punish” Disney, but the impulse came back to bite them.