Learning Aloud

Curious about how a hacker was able to access Gov. Palin’s email? The account hacked was a personal Yahoo account. This article from MacWorld explains how it was done.

Yahoo offers a method for users to recover a forgotten password. You may recognize the procedure from your own experience. When creating an account, users are allowed to select from a limited set of questions a question that must be answered before a forgotten password is revealed (in this case before access to change a password is allowed). If you know the answer to the question, you can gain access. If you select a question that is “researchable”, you are vulnerable. In considering some of the questions, it seemed that questions I felt most comfortable predicting I could answer consistently (e.g., mascot of my high school) would be the type of information someone else might be able to locate. I was a Kingsley-Pierson “Panther”.

I investigated my own Yahoo account (I don’t use Yahoo for email, but a Yahoo account is needed for Flickr). I agree with the security assessment – if you know the Yahoo ID and if you selected a question to protect your password requiring information that might be readily available, it would not be that difficult to hack. For example, it might be possible to determine the city in which I was born and it would be more likely if I was a political figure.

As you might guess, I did not use my high school mascot or city of birth as my security question.

You would know that your security had been breached (you might not be able to get back into your account because the password had been changed, you received an email sent to a second account indicating your password had been changed), but by that time any information you were hiding would be available to others.

EdWeek reports that candidates have commented on education in recent ads and speeches.

“Senator McCain … is interested in empowering families and speaking directly to the educational needs of Americans, as opposed to the system,” said Eugene W. Hickok, a former deputy secretary of education under President Bush who is advising the McCain campaign. “Whereas Obama, beyond his mantra of more money, more money, is really just supporting these traditional approaches to the system.”

My read of this article is that policy comments follow fairly typical party lines. Still, the article offers a nice summary and includes the recent television ads in case you have decided to watch movies until mid November.

I listen to audiobooks or podcasts while I work out. Lately, I have been listening to Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded. I can only “listen” while involved in another task that allows me to think so getting through 20+ hours of content will take many trips to the gym. 

I really like the way Friedman writes. The content flows easily and his approach combines interesting stories often based in personal experiences and well reasoned arguments supported with specific and annotated facts and statistics. It is the type of approach I can process and find convincing.

I have been thinking about the difference between this approach to persuasion and the present experience of trying to understand the rhetoric of the election – vague comments, spin, sarcasm, and irrelevant concerns. Consider the attention in the past few days to lipstick and pork (but not the undeserved windfall directed toward supporters).

Today, in Intro Psych, I was trying to make the point that trying to understand the work of researchrs can be valuable to those who have no interest in becoming psychologists or taking more psychology courses. What researchers have to do is “operationalize” the concepts they study in ways that allow measurement or manipulation. They cannot hide behind vague terms like motivation or intelligence most of us use in daily conversation, but must determine how they will measure these variables. Everyone could benefit from such a challenge. It is a great exercise in taking the vagueness out of topics. Tax and spend, liberal, etc. would be too imprecise to be useful. What do phrases such as these really mean. Should we really expect that it would be allowable to spend on something like a war and not take responsibility for raising the money to support such an effort. The reality of the present deficit would seem to argue some in power accept spend, but don’t tax. Perhaps sometimes to be responsible you have to tax. Critical thinking requires getting to a clearly defined position that can then be evaluated against well defined standards. Keeping the country in the black represents a possible standard.

I know that Friedman has his critics who contest his logics or his facts. However, in being precise at least you are willing to give your potential critics something specific to address and what is expected is the same level of specificity in counter claims.

Ignorant as we want to be (paraphrase of a Friedman comment). Friedman describes our tendency to find a way to accept a short term, self-serving solution while ignoring long-term and significant problems. Don’t look too closely at the facts or think an immediate solution through to the point of eventual consequences.  Perhaps we prefer our politics the same way. 

BTW – material related to Hot, flat and crowded is available online. This is serious stuff. Being ignorant,  even if you would rather be, is not acceptable.

Researchers investigate topics most of us don’t consider as questions. A recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald summarized human factors studies related to email use. I really don’t follow this paper but read a description of the article on Slashdot.

Email proves very distracting for some users who feel the need to constantly check email. According to the article, it takes approximately a minute to recover your “train of thought” AFTER checking your email. So, it is not just the time to process the email, but the added inefficiency once you return to your primary task.

Hmm, this explains a lot …

Now, what was I working on before I decided to check my bloglines and write this post? There are addictions worse than email.