Sully Syed

Does more immigration equal less crime?

Here’s my ham-fisted approach to summarizing the article linked to below: New immigrants feel alienated from their surroundings and are thus inclined to watch their children like hawks. This keeps the first generation of immigrants in line, but we then trend back towards the mean afterwards as their children integrate better into the community.

The Walrus – Arrival of the Fittest

An international survey of public attitudes about immigration published in 2009 found that while Canadians have positive feelings overall about immigrants, more than half blame illegal migrants for driving up crime.

What few have bothered to ask is whether there’s any merit to this belief. There have certainly been signs that they should. In Arizona, where a new law makes the failure to carry immigration documents a crime and gives the police broad powers to detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally — an infraction sometimes called “walking while Hispanic” — crime levels have actually dropped with the concurrent influx of Mexicans.

In fact, the violence of Mexico’s drug war doesn’t seem to have travelled north with immigrants: crime rates in US towns along the country’s 3,200-kilometre southern border are down. In Canada, an overall drop in crime has paralleled the upsurge in non-European immigration since Pierre Trudeau championed multiculturalism in the 1970s. Half of Toronto’s population now consists of those born outside Canada; notably, the city’s crime rate has dropped by 50 percent since 1991, and is significantly lower than that of the country as a whole.

Could it be that immigrants are making us all safer?

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Sully Syed

How Microsoft avoided the IPO scam that LinkedIn just fell for

Anyone who’s current on technology or business news has seen an article this week like How Wall Street Hustled LinkedIn or Did Bankers Scam LinkedIn Out of Over $130 Million? which discuss the possibility that the LinkedIn IPO partners – Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and JPMorgan Chase – may have deliberately underpriced the stock in order to score a sweet deal on it for themselves and their favoured investors. Such is the way of Wall Street, it seems.

By chance, today I came across a reprint of Fortune magazine’s 1986 cover story about the tale of Microsoft’s IPO. It’s interesting in itself, but what’s particularly striking is how coolly and calmly Gates and his people negotiated with their IPO partner, Goldman Sachs, to ensure the same little scheme didn’t work on them.

Of course, I could be attributing malice to LinkedIn’s partner banks when the cause for the underpricing could simply be ignorance – how exactly does one justify valuing a social networking company at $9 billion with earnings of $15.4 million last year?

Fortune Magazine – Inside The Deal That Made Bill Gates $350,000,000

…

Gates thinks other entrepreneurs might learn from Microsoft’s (MSFT) experience in crafting what some analysts called ”the deal of the year,” so he invited FORTUNE along for a rare inside view of the arduous five-month process. Companies hardly ever allow such a close look at an offering because they fear that the Securities and Exchange Commission might charge them with touting their stock.

Answers emerged to a host of fascinating questions, from how a company picks investment bankers to how the offering price is set. One surprising fact stands out from Microsoft’s revelations: Instead of deferring to the priesthood of Wall Street underwriters, it took charge of the process from the start.

…

Gates asked Martin to leave while he conferred with Shirley and Gaudette. This was a different Gates from the one who two months before thought $20 too high. ”These guys who happen to be in good with Goldman and get some stock will make an instant profit of $4,” he said. ”Why are we handing millions of the company’s money to Goldman’s favorite clients?” Gaudette stressed that unless Microsoft left some money on the table the institutional investors would stay away. The three decided on a range of $21 to $22 a share, and Gaudette put in a conference call to Goldman and Alex. Brown.

Eric Dobkin, 43, the partner in charge of common stock offerings at Goldman Sachs, felt queasy about Microsoft’s counterproposal. For an hour he tussled with Gaudette, using every argument he could muster. Coming out $1 too high would drive off some high-quality investors. Just a few significant defections could lead other investors to think the offering was losing its luster. Dobkin raised the specter of Sun Microsystems, a maker of high-powered microcomputers for engineers that had gone public three days earlier in a deal co-managed by Alex. Brown. Because of overpricing and bad luck — competitors had recently announced new products — Sun’s shares had dropped from $16 at the offering to $14.50 on the market. Dobkin warned that the market for software stocks was turning iffy.

Gaudette loved it. ”They’re in pain!” he crowed to Shirley. ”They’re used to dictating, but they’re not running the show now and they can’t stand it.” Getting back on the phone, Gaudette crooned: ”Eric, I don’t mean to upset you, but I can’t deny what’s in my head. I keep thinking of all that pent-up demand from individual investors, which you haven’t factored in. And I keep thinking we may never see you again, but you go back to the institutional investors all the time. They’re your customers. I don’t know whose interests you’re trying to serve, but if you’re playing both sides of the street, then we’ve just become adversaries.”

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Sully Syed

Creating a patch file for a single commit using Git

One important workflow to attempt to standardize is the method in which an organization rolls out updates to its production webservers. If you’re making heavy use of Git (and GitHub) in your development environment, it only makes sense to bundle your updates into patch files that can safely be applied and rolled back by someone with no working knowledge of the source code.

To create a patch file out of a Git commit, you’ll first want to retrieve the commit ID that your patch will retrieve data from. The git log command below retrieves information regarding the last 3 commits made:

$ git log -3
commit b29d8f2a0e6ad5595330f62f60b978fbc5696bcb
Author: Sully Syed <[email protected]>
Date:   Fri May 13 15:41:05 2011 -0400

    The Feed Importer module will hook into Drupal's cron scheduler script and retrieve new 
    featured articles automatically.

commit 65abfeeea27311effb21a547af99b3427126601f
Author: Sully Syed <[email protected]>
Date:   Fri May 13 15:36:01 2011 -0400

    Add the Google logo image to the footer directory.

commit 33764e5d9ccd0222ad3d38cc1e77eb8242fb120d
Author: Sully Syed <[email protected]>
Date:   Wed May 11 15:45:41 2011 -0400

    Fixed the typo that would have made Skynet sentient.
$ git format-patch --help

The git format-patch command allows us to select a range of commit IDs to bundle into a patch. For our example, the range will consist of begin and end with the same commit ID to limit the patch to the one commit:

$ git format-patch -M -C b29d8f2a0e6ad5595330f62f60b978fbc5696bcb~1..b29d8f2a0e6ad5595330f62f60b978fbc5696bcb
0001-The-Feed-Importer-module-will-hook-into-Drupal-s-cron-.patch

The patch file created takes the name 0001-The-Feed-Importer-module-will-hook-into-the-Drupal-s-cron-.patch, which can then be e-mailed or sent by other means to the production staff who will apply it.

Reference: Blogging the Monkey: git format-patch for specific commit-ids

Sully Syed

What we know so far about cell phones and brain cancer

Via @longreads on Twitter, a summation of what we know about the relationship between cell phones and brain cancer from Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee of Columbia University.

New York Times Magazine: Do Cellphones Cause Brain Cancer?

…

The crudest method to capture a carcinogen’s imprint in a real human population is a large-scale population survey. If a cancer-causing agent increases the incidence of a particular cancer in a population, say tobacco smoking and lung cancer, then the overall incidence of that cancer will rise. That statement sounds simple enough — to find a carcinogen’s shadow, follow the trend in cancer incidence — but there are some fundamental factors that make the task complicated.

The most important of these is life expectancy, which is growing almost everywhere. The average life expectancy of Americans has increased — from 49 in 1900 to 78 in 2011. Several cancers are strongly, often exponentially, age-dependent. An aging population will seem more cancer-afflicted, even if the real cancer incidence has not changed.

But what if we make an “age adjustment” for the population and shrink or expand the cancer incidence to match the changes in age structure? To ask whether cellphones increase the risk of brain cancer, then, we might begin by turning to this question: Has the age-adjusted incidence of brain cancer increased in the recent past?

The quick answer is no. Brain cancer is rare: only about 7 cases are diagnosed per 100,000 men and women in America per year, and a striking increase, following the introduction of a potent carcinogen, should be evident. From 1990 to 2002 — the 12-year period during which cellphone users grew to 135 million from 4 million — the age-adjusted incidence rate for overall brain cancer remained nearly flat. If anything, it decreased slightly, from 7 cases for every 100,000 persons to 6.5 cases (the reasons for the decrease are unknown).

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Sully Syed

Court: Employees have a right to privacy, even on their employer-provided BlackBerry/laptop

Didn’t seem this coming, but it appears to be an entirely sensible decision. Personal use of workplace-provided devices is bound to creep in, and privacy laws should take that into consideration.

The Globe And Mail – Computer ruling seen as landmark workplace decision

In what is being called a landmark decision, a Ontario court this week ruled that employees have a right to privacy for material contained on a work computer.

The judgment from the Ontario Court of Appeal … agreed with a trial judge that by giving tech devices to employees, along with permission to take them home on evenings and vacations, the employer gave “explicit permission to use the laptops for personal use.”

The ruling has significant implications for workers who use electronic devices including cell phones for personal purposes – “which is pretty well everyone” – as well as employers who might like to keep tabs on employee use of tech devices, said Frank Addario, of Sack, Goldblatt, Mitchell LLP, who argued the appeal for defendant Richard Cole.

“A big issue here is the tradeoff that employers expect employees to make,” Mr. Addario said. “If they want their employees to be available 24/7 and are giving them BlackBerrys and PCs to contact them outside of business hours, it is inevitable that people are going to use those devices on their personal time as well as business time. That’s an inevitable consequence of asking people to be on call beyond eight hours a day,” he said.

“That means artifacts of personal, private life are going to get left on the electronic devices, regardless of who paid for them,” Mr. Addario said. And the court is saying that employers are going to have to respect that these are the employee’s private property, he said.

…

“I would call the court of appeal finding a seismic shift in the way privacy rights are dealt with in the workplace,” said Daniel Lublin, a lawyer with Whitten & Lublin LLP in Toronto.

“Until now most people generally assumed there was no reasonable expectation of privacy in work computers, and that would extend to work e-mail and Internet use,” he noted. “The court has now resoundingly said that there is a reasonable expectation of privacy in work technology that leaves the office.”

Sully Syed

Fix: My DD-WRT router drops all connections when it renews a DHCP lease

I’m one of a surprisingly large amount of people that have loaded third-party firmware onto their wireless network router at home. One long standing flaw of the DD-WRT flavour of firmware has been a pair of issues that lead to a momentary loss of connectivity when one’s DHCP server provided IP lease requires renewal.

There are three causes of this issue, and most people will need to address both to solve their connectivity problems:

  1. A popular and recommended version of the DD-WRT firmware – v24-sp2 (10/10/09) micro – build 13064, to be specific – has a flaw in it that leads to a dump of the UPnP mapping list when a DHCP lease renewal ACK is received.
  2. The SPI Firewall, if enabled, blocks DHCP renewal responses by default.
  3. If the DMZ is enabled, DHCP renewals are mistakenly sent there instead of to the router.

Let’s address these issues in order. First up: The firmware.

While the official DD-WRT website lists the 2009-10-10 firmware as its recommendation for my Linksys WRT54G v5 router, the forum dedicated to Linksys (Broadcom) routers surprisingly lists this as a build to explicitly avoid. Their alternative solution: Build 14929. (Make sure to take a quick glance at the upgrade procedure before attempting the update.)

Once you’ve logged back into the interface of your freshly flashed router (you should now be running v24-sp2 (08/12/10) micro – build 14929), we can tackle the issue number two. To allow the DHCP renewal messages to be received by your router, you have one of two options: You can disable the SPI Firewall feature completely (Security > Firewall > SPI Firewall), or you can add a rule to specifically allow those messages. Do this by navigating within your router’s interface to Administration > Commands, and entering the following into the Commands fields:

iptables -I INPUT -p udp --sport 67 --dport 68 -j ACCEPT

Press the Save Firewall button to save the rule to be executed whenever the router is restarted.

Finally, you’ll need to disable the DMZ option in DD-WRT by going to NAT / QoS > Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) > Use DMZ and setting it to Disable.

For me, the combination of these three items led to my first uneventful DHCP lease renewal in months. Some of the members of the DD-WRT forums have reported that the second issue was only solved by completely disabling their SPI firewall, so give that a try if the preferred option of adding a rule doesn’t work out.

References:

Sully Syed

The 7 greatest stories in the history of Esquire Magazine

I’m not sure how I ended up on the page, but I just spent the last ten minutes reading Esquire’s self-selected greatest story ever, the 1966 piece Frank Sinatra Has a Cold by Gay Talese. Esquire has another six greats available via this page, where you have to click through the slideshow to get the links to each article.

Esquire – Frank Sinatra Has A Cold

Frank Sinatra does things personally. At Christmas time, he will personally pick dozens of presents for his close friends and family, remembering the type of jewelry they like, their favorite colors, the sizes of their shirts and dresses. When a musician friend’s house was destroyed and his wife was killed in a Los Angeles mud slide a little more than a year ago, Sinatra personally came to his aid, finding the musician a new home, paying whatever hospital bills were left unpaid by the insurance, then personally supervising the furnishing of the new home down to the replacing of the silverware, the linen, the purchase of new clothing.

The same Sinatra who did this can, within the same hour, explode in a towering rage of intolerance should a small thing be incorrectly done for him by one of his paisanos. For example, when one of his men brought him a frankfurter with catsup on it, which Sinatra apparently abhors, he angrily threw the bottle at the man, splattering catsup all over him. Most of the men who work around Sinatra are big. But this never seems to intimidate Sinatra nor curb his impetuous behavior with them when he is mad. They will never take a swing back at him. He is Il Padrone.

Sully Syed

Influencing value judgments

This is a brilliant bit of sneakiness that I wanted to preserve for use myself someday.

UXmatters – Designing with Behavioral Economics

Particularly in unfamiliar situations, people make value judgments based on the information available, but they do not treat information equally. Dan Ariely provided a great example from The Economist, which offered three types of 1-year subscriptions, as follows:

  • a Web subscription to Economist.com, for $59
  • a print subscription, for $125
  • a print and Web subscription, for $125

Why offer a print subscription on its own at all? People can be very bad at judging the value of things, particularly things they buy infrequently. They rely on contextual information to understand when they are getting a good deal. Ariely conducted an experiment in which he presented these three options to a group of 100 MBAs, and 84% chose the print and Web subscription, with all others choosing the Web‑only option.

He then conducted a second study with a different group of 100 MBAs, presenting only two options:

  • a Web subscription to Economist.com, for $59
  • a print and Web subscription, for $125

Now, only 32% chose the print and Web subscription. With three options available, people anchored on the print subscription, which made the print and Web subscription look much, much better by comparison. They didn’t know whether $59 for a subscription to Economist.com was a good deal, but choosing between just two options was easy!

UX designers frequently hear variations on this: But we have smart users! They may be smart, but the basic wiring of people’s brains is always the same. People make judgments based on the information available to them, and UX designers control the information that a Web form presents.

Sully Syed

Is your hacked, XBMC-enabled Apple TV 2G resetting every couple of minutes?

Coming home today to watch some content on Giant Bomb via my hacked Apple TV 2G, I found that the device was resetting itself after running for only a couple of minutes. At /var/log/syslog, I found:

Mar  9 19:16:34 Apple-TV /Applications/AppleTV.app/AppleTV[406]: VERS: comparing OS 4.2.1 with 4.1
Mar  9 19:16:34 Apple-TV /Applications/AppleTV.app/AppleTV[406]: VERS: comparing OS build 8C154 with 8M90z
Mar  9 19:16:34 Apple-TV /Applications/AppleTV.app/AppleTV[406]: T:[0xae15000] SWU: Attempt to back/no-rev from 4.2.1/8C154 to 4.1/8M90z rejected.
Mar  9 19:16:34 Apple-TV /Applications/AppleTV.app/AppleTV[406]: VERS: comparing OS 4.2.1 with 4.2.1
Mar  9 19:16:34 Apple-TV /Applications/AppleTV.app/AppleTV[406]: VERS: comparing OS build 8C154 with 8C154
Mar  9 19:16:34 Apple-TV /Applications/AppleTV.app/AppleTV[406]: VERS: comparing OS 4.2.1 with 4.3
Mar  9 19:16:34 Apple-TV /Applications/AppleTV.app/AppleTV[406]: VERS: comparing OS build 8C154 with 8F191m
Mar  9 19:19:33 Apple-TV ReportCrash[426]: Formulating crash report for process AppleTV[406]

I knew that I had disabled Apple TV updates via a setting in the NitoTV menu, but the check still seemed to be occurring. On the XBMC Forums I found the solution: Checks were being made against the server mesu.apple.com, which NitoTV looped back to 127.0.0.1 by editing /etc/hosts – but that loopback somehow was not in effect. Removing the extra carriage return in /etc/hosts after the entry for menu.apple.com did the trick.

If you’d like to simply download and replace your hosts file, I’ve put mine up for download here – enjoy.