Risk-Limiting Audits
The new hotness in election integrity is Risk-Limiting Audits. I'm going to ramble a bit about them here because so far I've pretty much missed the point of what the "Risk-Limiting" phrase means. But...
Permalink & Comments
Clerk Life
I volunteered as a poll worker in the recent election; you can read my notes about it. Spoilers: I got a lapel pin, much snazzier than a mere "I Voted!" sticker; a bird flew into our polling place bu...
Permalink & Comments
I survived my day as a precinct poll clerk volunteer. Did civilization survive? I don't know, I mostly kept my phone off. ...
Permalink & Comments
If you're in the USA, #BeAVoter . Vote tomorrow if you haven't already. Even if you and I don't agree on things, I want you to vote. Seriously. I'd rather that you vote than that you give up on the ...
Permalink & Comments
If you live near SF and are interested in election machines and/or election security, you might want to visit the SF Poll Worker Practice Lab on Nov 4 where you can set up, tear down, and operat...
Permalink & Comments
San Francisco Voter Guides
Sparing you a google web search and rummaging around: SF Dept of Elections voter info, CA voter info. Candidate statements, arguments for & against propositions. SF League of Pissed-Off Voters....
Permalink & Comments
Californians, Don't vote for Mark Meuser
I'm researching the California election. There are two candidates for Secretary of State, the incumbent and the challenger. The challenger wants me to know that California elections are in sorry shap...
Permalink & Comments
I'm researching the California election. There are two candidates for Secretary of State, the incumbent and the challenger. The challenger wants me to know that California elections are in sorry shap...
Permalink & Comments
Book Report: October
A history of the months between the overthrow of the Tsar and the rise of Lenin, as told by China Miéville taking a break from writing science fiction long enough to untangle this mess such that one ...
Permalink & Comments
Book Report: Confessions of a Political Hitman
Autobiography of a guy who did political opposition research back when that meant travelling to county seats and looking at old voting records on microfilm or somesuch. He mostly worked for right-win...
Permalink & Comments
Today in 2017 Congress-calling history: I spoke to a live human. Not a voicemail, not a web form, a human. June seemed like a nice lady. She totally didn't make fun of me for hesitating while I waite...
Permalink & Comments
Link: Inside the Recount
Pretty interesting article about the 2016 Presidential Election recount efforts: New Republic | Inside the Recount https://newrepublic.com/article/140254/inside. The story as I understood it before r...
Permalink & Comments
Huh. Neither of my senators' voicemail boxes were full this morning. Maybe I should start leaving longer messages. ...
Permalink & Comments
Link: Obama's Lost Army
After Obama was elected, some of his campaign folks wanted to set up tools and organization to foster grassroots civic participation. The DNC saw this as competition and shut it down. If you wonder w...
Permalink & Comments
USA congress-callers, bills to support/oppose
Some more bills you might be for/against to keep in mind when you call your senators/reps for things which you already heard about on 5 Calls or One Thing You Can Do or wherever: HR. 804 "To a...
Permalink & Comments
USA congress-callers, interesting bills
If you're already calling your US senators and/or representatives, maybe nudge them to support: Senate bill 200 H.R. bill 669 These bills say that the President can't do a nuclear first strike on...
Permalink & Comments
USA congress-callers, you have other sites
If 5 Calls isn't working for you today, here's a similar site: The 65. It doesn't conveniently show you your senator/rep's phone # on the same screen as info about the issue… but you...
Permalink & Comments
CA congress-callers, you have 2 senators
I love reading tweets&posts from my friends calling their congress critters. The 5 Calls web site is pretty excellent for keeping track of issues to call about; and I see a lot of folks are using...
Permalink & Comments
I've been lurking on some right-wing websites, hoping to get a view outside my bubble. I was especially curious about voter fraud. There are some specific things that keep coming up—maybe the f...
Permalink & Comments
Hoo boy, political argument at the big family Thanksgiving dinner. We just couldn’t agree on what the worst thing about Trump is. ...
Permalink & Comments
Walking around my neighborhood today, I see 100% grim faces. It reminds me of hallways in companies facing multiple layoffs. ...
Permalink & Comments
San Francisco peeps who haven't already voted: Hoodline's Election Guide is a darned handy collection of slates. ...
Permalink & Comments
It's a double do-gooder shirt sticker day. (#IVoted a couple of weeks ago, but waited until today to affix the sticker.) ...
Permalink & Comments
SF folks, what excellent voter recommendations/endorsements am I overlooking? I'm looking for such that explain their thinking, not just say Yes on this, No on that. Here's the stuff I'm slogging thr...
Permalink & Comments
Comic Report: The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye
This comic is funny. I say that right away because when I tell you the premise, you'll be tempted to click away thinking "oh that is some fauxlitical artsy-fartsy bullroar to be purchased by earnest ...
Permalink & Comments
Ever since that convention kerfuffle, I've been trying to remember this cold-war era movie quote: Student Journalist: As your party's leading presidential candidate, you are a staunch advocate of n...
Permalink & Comments
Book Report: Lean In
I heard a bunch of bad things about this book. I read it so that I could make fun of it. But now that I've read the book, the bad things I've heard seem like they were about a strawman version. I'll ...
Permalink & Comments
Book Report: Give and Take
This book makes the case that you can behave nicely and still get ahead in business. Is this surprising? Does this need saying? Maybe; the author says that many folks don't think they can give others...
Permalink & Comments
Link: Law Offices of Lowell Finley
If you're into election technology, a new blog to follow: Law Offices of Lowell Finley. Remember when California was reporting folks trying to sell us so-bleeding-edge-it-aint-really-working-right-ye...
Permalink & Comments
Book Report: Dataclysm
The OKCupid blog is pretty amazing. Way back when, it caused a stir talking about trends in USA interracial dating. Plenty of USA folks say they don't care about race. But when the OKCupid folks look...
Permalink & Comments
This evening's Adventure Design Group was the San Francisco Institute of Possibility. This was about as far from puzzlehunts as you can get—they run events that might be described as awesome pa...
Permalink & Comments
Book Report: Everything is Bullshit
The Priceonomics blog wrote a book with a rude name. It's pretty interesting; a lot of it was stuff that I'd already read. (I wasn't subscribed to the blog, but other folks kept forwarding links&hell...
Permalink & Comments
Book Report: A Fighting Chance
It's an autobiography by politician Elizabeth Warren. Before she w19as a politician, she was an academic. She studied bankruptcy. When she started, there was received wisdom around bankruptcy: people...
Permalink & Comments
Link: MAY ONE
Who doesn't want anyone to study climate change? Wyoming's governor, that's who. Wyoming mines a lot of coal. If your re-election money comes from coal, you imagine a federal "war on coal." Most peop...
Permalink & Comments
If you lost count of the recent NSA citizen-snooping outrages but figure there are enough to justify nudging your legislators, The Day We Fight Back is a web site to guide you through that. ...
Permalink & Comments
Book Report: Griftopia
We've had a chance to reflect on the financial disasters and bailouts of 2008. What have we learned? We learned that America's most successful bankers aren't those who are best at computing loan risk...
Permalink & Comments
I listened to the "Famine Game Reaping" snoutcast and then posted a question in the form of a personal failure of imagination: What if you were a GC running an application process and you wanted some...
Permalink & Comments
A day late, I figured out my Hallowe'en costume. On me, it's pretty scary. On someone of your sterling judgement, dear reader, it would be less so. ...
Permalink & Comments
Book Report: Broken Ballots
A few people want to steal elections. A few billion people want fair elections. How do you make an election un-stealable? It's not easy. Elections do't run themselves; we need election officials. Fol...
Permalink & Comments
Book Report: All the President's Men
I didn't think I'd learn anything from this book, but I was wrong. I thought everybody knows the story of All the President's Men: Plucky reporters Woodward and Bernstein investigate Watergate; they ...
Permalink & Comments
Book Report: Republic, Lost
When Solyndra was falling apart, Republicans were screaming: these green companies were just boondoggles, false fronts to scoop up government money. It's easy to dismiss their complaints as a bunch o...
Permalink & Comments
Book Report: The Evolution of Cooperation
It's a book by Robert Axelrod, who set up some groundbreaking game theory experiment/contests back in the day. He set up a computer program that would run other computer programs. Specifically, it ra...
Permalink & Comments
The Wooly Pig Cafe is better than Ike's
(Sorry, out of towners, this blog post is only of interest to San Franciscans.) The best sandwich place in my neighborhood is the Wooly Pig Cafe. They put together some awesome sandwiches from ingre...
Permalink & Comments
Book Report: Too Big to Know
We know a lot, and nowadays we know that we know a lot. I read a lot of books. But I read only a teeny-tiny fraction of the books that get published. And books are, in turn, just a teeny-tiny fractio...
Permalink & Comments
Book Report: Super Crunchers
It's a book about working with Big Data. Considering some of the projects I've worked on, you think I'd be pretty excited. But my experience made me kind of picky about the details. At first, this bo...
Permalink & Comments
Book Report: Waltzing with Bears
This book's subtitle is "Managing Risk on Software Projects" and it's written by the Peopleware guys. OK, nobody's reading this blog post anymore; the non-computer folks have clicked away to find som...
Permalink & Comments
Book Report: Priceless
Yesterday, I dodged Black Friday, but didn't quite make it through Buy Nothing Day. I bought a streetcar ride and then a train ride down the peninsula. How much were those worth? I don't know. I k...
Permalink & Comments
Book Report: Predictably Irrational
A series of musings about how people really behave. Or, rather, how they misbehave. Describes experiments about placebos, cheating, and other circumstances in which people lie to themselves and to o...
Permalink & Comments
Zine Report: Giant Robot #57
The Obama posters say "HOPE", but when Obama himself picks people... well, he undercuts hope. It's like he scraped my old book reports, looking for books about USA politics with villains and chose th...
Permalink & Comments
Book Report: Sources of Power
This book came out ten years ago. It discusses how people make decisions. Not necessarily how people ought to make decisions--but how they do. It does have some advice on how people can make bette...
Permalink & Comments
Book Report: Pirate Freedom
If you travel through time, are you free? Or are you hemmed in by predestination? (Postdestination? What do you call destiny when time travel is involved?) That's a complicated question, and fort...
Permalink & Comments
Book Report: How to Rig an Election
This morning, I'm munching my breakfast, reading Slashdot's feed and I see a name I recognize. The strange part: the name is that of a politico, not a computer programmer. The Slashdot post is point...
Permalink & Comments
Book Report: Gaming the Vote
I know what I can say about BANG 19 preparations. It's necessarily vague, in the name of seekricy, but it's heartfelt. Thank you you past Game Control folks who have shared advice, "war stories", a...
Permalink & Comments
Book Report: Deliver the Vote
Deliver the Vote is a history of crooked elections in the U.S. of A. It doesn't try to describe all crooked elections. Just some good stories, just enough to fill up a few hundred pages. George Wa...
Permalink & Comments
Book Report: The Wisdom of Crowds
Ron and Sua were in town on Friday. That's why I was stuck on a train. I'd had dinner with them on the peninsula, caught the train back, blammo. But it was good to see Ron, good to see Sua. This ...
Permalink & Comments
Book Report: What's the Matter With Kansas?
Thomas Frank, a member of the liberal intellectual elite wrote this book for other members of the liberal intellectual elite to tell them that the formerly-liberal working class is tired of liberal ...
Permalink & Comments
