The costs and benefits of school closings

Making the decision to close schools for bad weather, as many regions in the US did last Tuesday due to the bitterly cold freeze, is not easy. The prime considerations of course are the temperature and snow and ice levels. As to the first, it is not the predicted daytime high temperature that should be used as a gauge, since that is usually reached only by the mid afternoon when students and workers are returning home in daylight and people have had time to do some clean up, but the low temperatures of the previous night, since that is closer to the temperature in the early morning when children are headed off to school. Last Tuesday, that temperature in Cleveland was -8oF (–22oC), which is pretty cold. [Read more…]

Busted

Rodd Scheinerman put some chicken nuggets in the toaster oven, turned it on, and left the room with the camera running. Why did he do this? A roast had disappeared out of the oven a few weeks earlier and while he had suspicions about who was responsible, he needed proof and so he set up a sting operation to catch the culprit in the act. [Read more…]

Living for the attaboy

David Simon is a successful screenwriter of political dramas and in a blog post he writes what I too have felt all along, that even under the remote chance that New Jersey governor Chris Christie did not explicitly and personally order the closing of the lanes to the George Washington Bridge in September, thus massively tying up traffic for four days right at the beginning of the school year, now that we know that its was deliberately ordered by his close political aides as an act of retribution for whatever reason, the nature of the political relationships within the coterie of people close to major political figures strongly suggests that Christie would have been informed immediately afterwards, thus making a lie of his claim that he did not know anything about this until the story of the emails broke on Wednesday. [Read more…]

Backlash by security companies against US government spying

I wrote recently about services like Wickr and Silent Circle that have systems that prevent (or at least highly hinder) the ability of the NSA and other US government agencies to spy on their members’ communications. Nico Sell is the head of Wickr and in an article Max Eddy has Sell explain how their operating model prevents them from being complicit with the government in snooping. [Read more…]