July 25, 2010

Did you know that each successive generation of German high-speed trains has had air-conditioning plant built for higher temperatures? The trains from the early 90s handle a temperature range from -20 to +32 degrees Celsius. Those from the mid-90s, -20 to +32, but if necessary they can exceed that. The ICE Type 3 handles temperatures…

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Via Bruce Schneier’s, an interesting paper in PNAS on false positives and looking for terrorists. Even if the assumptions of profiling are valid, and the target-group really is more likely to be terrorists, it still isn’t a good policy. Because the inter-group difference in the proportion of terrorists is small relative to the absolute scarcity…

Read More three links about false positives

I think everyone’s linked to this excellent piece on building a campaign against the cuts already, but I’d like to seize on this bit: The more we can build up a modern ‘doomsday book’ of the effect of the cuts, the more we can help people to make the second stage of that journey when…

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