Benlog

Deborah Peel, a well-known patient privacy advocate, and EPIC have joined forces to ask Google some questions about Google Flu Trends. Google is analyzing its search logs to detect flu outbreaks by region, which is super nifty.
Peel and EPIC ask:

There are, however, privacy concerns surrounding this new tool.
[...]
In the aggregate, the data reveals useful trends [...]

I gave a short talk on RDFa at Interlab 2008, a gathering of DOE labs on web technology. Good group, fun interactions, and a panel discussion with Ben Ward and Ryan King from the microformats effort. Good discussion, an agreement that microformats and RDFa are complementary, and no street fight. Thanks to Joseph Lewis for [...]

I grew up in France, so it’s fascinating to see what’s going on on the other side of the Atlantic now that Obama has been elected and, just as importantly, now that Obama has chosen Rahm Emmanuel as his Chief of Staff. It’s amazing how a number of Europeans are projecting their own biases and [...]

My friend and colleague Arjun apparently watches Kathie Lee on television. He points me to this fantastic clip:

Did I hear that right?

It is weird, when you show up at the polling place and they stuff your vote in an envelope… you wonder where it goes!

Exactly. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could trace it like [...]

I’m remembering more after a few hours of sleep.
An elderly Russian man brought in his vote by mail envelope. “Dropping off your vote-by-mail envelope, sir?” I ask. “No! I vote here in person!” It took a few rounds to explain, and then he added “what, you didn’t check my ID? Why not?” “Well, sir, your [...]

Obama wins solidly, and I am incredibly proud of my country today. More on that in a later post.
Meanwhile, I am ashamed of my new State, California. It looks like Prop 8 has passed, against my every expectation. Prop 8 modifies the State Constitution to redefine marriage according to strict religious beliefs, rather than equality [...]

I don’t know how Avi Rubin has enough energy to recount his poll-working day. But I’ll try, at least in brief form.
Woke up at 4:50am to make it to the poll by 6am. I was the Precinct Inspector, i.e. the California term for what Bostonians call “Precinct Captain.” I had a great team of Poll [...]

I’ve said this before, but not as explicitly or as eloquently as Avi Rubin recently did:

I’m very concerned about the impact a high turnout will have on an already stressed voting system. In Maryland, for example, we use touchscreen DRE machines. Precincts only have a handful of these machines, and they create a tight bottleneck [...]