Graham Perrin's List: 2013-11-16

• Cambridge university refuses to censor student's thesis on chip-and-PIN vulnerabilities
• Cory Doctorow
• Dec 25, 2010
• UK banking trade association wrote to Cambridge university to have a student's master's thesis censored
• Cambridge's Ross Anderson sent an extremely stiff note in reply
• What will support public confidence in the payments system is evidence that the banks are frank and honest in admitting its weaknesses when they are exposed, and diligent in effecting the necessary remedies.
• member banks do their lamentable best to deprecate the work of those outside their cosy club, and indeed to censor it.
• Thank you Cambridge University for standing up to censorship, for standing up to Corporate bullying and supporting intellectual integrity

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• Dr Gillian McKeith PhD?
• What’s wrong with
• February 18th, 2007
• Ben Goldacre
• The Guardian
• Advertising Standards Authority, complaining about her using the title “doctor”
• menace to the public understanding of science
• not nuances, but the most basic aspects of biology
• The ridiculousness is endless.
• referenciness
• Delicious, Creative Living, Healthy Eating, and my favourite, Spiritual Nutrition and the Rainbow Diet
• rather than proper academic journals
• cargo cult science
• abuse, on a scale that would have any doctor struck off: making people cry for the television cameras, I assume deliberately, and using fear and bullying to get them to change their lifestyles
• scare campaigns tend not to get people changing their behaviour in the long term

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• The last cargo cult
• one of the world's strangest religious ceremonies
• an example of one of the strangest and most exotic phenomena to be observed in traditional cultures: the cargo cult
• full swing during the 1950s
• imitation radio masts out of bamboo
• Chinese whispers
• reinterpreted by different prophets and constantly trimmed to fit the nature of the religion as it developed
• compulsory attendance at the Presbyterian church was universally ignored
• locals walked solemnly into the white-owned trading post and carefully removed every price label
• shift colonial tactics from bullying
• belated attempt at education
• locals were underwhelmed, and the build-up to Judgement Day accelerated
• John Frum 'cultists' began to destroy all their Western possessions, throwing their hard-earned money into the sea
• flag-raising which still forms the ceremonial centrepiece to John Frum Day
• a mystery what actually goes on in there - though an English traveller I spoke to claimed to have had a glimpse inside and seen the elders clustered round a video and TV, running off the village solar panel and playing Knights of the Round Table with French subtitles
• next generation of anthropologists began to interpret it as a response to a broader struggle
• history of white contact had been, for the Tannese, unremittingly grim: murderous explorers and adventurers followed by slavers and sandalwood traders, followed in turn by "blackbirders" who kidnapped the islanders for indentured labour in the Queensland cane-fields, and Presbyterian missionaries who forbade dancing, kava, traditional dress and ritual, enforcing their prohibitions with a rod of iron which gradually developed into colonial administration
• David Attenborough, visiting Sulphur Bay in 1960 for his Quest in Paradise TV series, could dismiss John Frum as a "sinister cult", "pathetically childish", and no more than an "act of defiance towards the mission"
• assuring outsiders that the reasons for it aren't politically serious
• hard to get anyone to talk about the split
• doctrinal, a question of spiritual emphasis, perhaps just a case of one prophet too many
• politeness clearly conceals a profound rivalry, the fault-line of which can be guessed at from the occasional throwaway comment
• the Last Cargo Cult is far from on its last legs, and that it will continue to dance to the beat of its own unique drum.
• 2002 Mike Jay

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• And then I was incompetently libelled by a litigious millionaire
• Ben Goldacre
• 19 July 2010
• The Guardian
• Gillian McKeith – or to give her full medical title, “Gillian McKeith”
• “lies”
• almost always impossible
• show that they

  deliberately distorted the truth
• mistaken, after all. Or sloppy. Or stupid.
• a simple correction, with the same prominence as the initial libel
• don’t call investigative journalists liars
• account of the incompetent and integrity-torpedoing attempts to cover up
• legal blog JackOfKent
• jackofkent.blogspot.com/2010/07/integrity-and-honesty-of-gillianmckeith.html
• I contacted Gillian McKeith last week to ask when she was posting the correction on Twitter. She has not yet replied.
• here and here
• full story of Gillian McKeith’s legal threats

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• Suicides of bullied gay kids in other states jolt Colorado educators to action
• Karen Auge
• 10/12/201
• wake-up call to school administrators, parents, political leaders and media
• this problem has been going on for some time
• Latino
• severe suicide problem amongst LGBT youth
• gather students to talk, confidentially, about what's going on
• cyberbullying
• much more manipulative and mean
• not like it used to be
• technology kids can now employ to torment
• gay, lesbian and transgender kids between the ages of 11 and 22
• 54 percent had experienced some form of cyberbullying in the past three months
• 26 percent, suicidal thoughts
• anti-bullying programs, and anti-suicide programs and anti-sexual-violence programs and anti-gang programs
• overwhelms schools
• different strands of the same cloth
• bullying, violence and suicide
• rewarding the good

• Doubly isolated

   

  Colorado has long struggled with one of the highest suicide rates
• doesn't track why
• if there is a common theme, it is isolation
• really admire those strong enough to stand up and say 'Stop.'

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• March 9, 2010
• Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal
• Steve Jobs threatened to sue me
• Project Looking Glass
• called my office to let me know the graphical effects were “stepping all over Apple’s IP.”
• Keynote looks identical to Concurrence – do you own that IP?
• Steve had used Concurrence for years, and as Apple built their own presentation tool, it was obvious where they’d found inspiration
• that was the last I heard
• the last thing enterprises wanted was a new desktop
• Steve’s threat didn’t figure into our decision
• we should’ve been asking developers, not CIO’s
• As in life, bluster and threat are commonplace in business – especially the technology business
• Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer
• Bill skipped the small talk
• “Microsoft owns the office productivity market, and our patents read all over OpenOffice.”
• pay us a royalty for every download” – the digital version of a protection racket
• Microsoft is no stranger to imitating
• .NET, and you’re trampling all over a huge number of Java patents. So what will you pay us for every copy of Windows?
• it was a short meeting
• value of patents – offensively and, more importantly, for defensive purposes
• internet’s most valuable patents
• Sun had a treasure trove
• going on offense with software patents seems like an act of desperation
• Kodak had acquired a patent from a defunct computer maker (Wang) for the exclusive purpose of suing Sun over an esoteric technology

• something I could never say as Sun’s CEO.

   

  I prefer SmugMug.

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• Destabilizing the bullying power structure
• writing here about emotional bullying
• Bullying persists when bureaucracies and hierarchies permit it to continue.
• assembly (organized and run by students and volunteers) was created around weirdness, fear and most of all, "owning it."
• kids talked about physical and mental disabilities, lifestyle choices and the things that made them sing
• we are all weird
• When there isn't a race to fit in the most, bullying those that don't fit in loses much of its power
• weirder than we'd like the world to know
• February 19, 2013

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• Bullying is theft
• Bullying costs far more than laptop theft
• frightens away some of your best employees
• they can most easily find another place
• silences the eager and the earnest, the people with great ideas who are now too intimidated to bother sharing
• intentionally using power to cause physical or emotional distress with the purpose of dominating the other person
• chooses not to engage in conversation or discussion, or to use legitimate authority or suasion
• pressure in the moment to demean and disrespect
• undermining not just their ideas, but their very presence and legitimacy

• does senior management see the cost? Do they understand that tolerating and excusing bullying behavior is precisely what permits it to flourish?

   
• irrevocable principle. An organization that is built on ideas and connection can't thrive when there's a bully in the room.

• Most bullies aren't sociopaths, immune to correction. They are opportunists, using the tools that have often worked for them in the past.

   
• chance to help a bully get his life straightened
• November 14, 2013

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• All Bullies Are Narcissists
• Nov 14 2013
• Joseph Burgo
• Schoolyard bullies
• vicious rumors
• recruiting followers in order to persecute
• This type of bullying first becomes a serious issue when young people emerge from the relatively sheltered environment of elementary school into a much larger world rife with insecurities about social status
• we can best understand what unconsciously drives bullies by understanding the ways they make their victims feel
• For the bully, the victim is what he fears that he himself might be: a loser.

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