A Single Person Could Swing an Election By Zachary A. Goldfarb, Special to The Washington Post

To determine what it would take to hack a U.S. election, a team of cybersecurity experts turned to a fictional battleground state called Pennasota and a fictional gubernatorial race between Tom Jefferson and Johnny Adams. It’s the year 2007, and the state uses electronic voting machines.

Jefferson was forecast to win the race by about 80,000 votes, or 2.3 percent of the vote. Adams’s conspirators thought, “How easily can we manipulate the election results?”

The experts thought about all the ways to do it. And they concluded in a report issued yesterday that it would take only one person, with a sophisticated technical knowledge and timely access to the software that runs the voting machines, to change the outcome.

The report, which was unveiled at a Capitol Hill news conference by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice and billed as the most authoritative to date, tackles some of the most contentious questions about the security of electronic voting.

The report concluded that the three major electronic voting systems in use have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities. …

Voting machine vendors have dismissed many of the concerns, saying they are theoretical and do not reflect the real-life experience of running elections, such as how machines are kept in a secure environment. …

“This report is based on speculation rather than an examination of the record. To date, voting systems have not been successfully attacked in a live election,” said Bob Cohen, a spokesman for the Election Technology Council, a voting machine vendors’ trade group. …

“It’s not a question of ‘if,’ it’s a question of ‘when,’ ” [Thomas M. Davis III (Va.), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee] said of an attempt to manipulate election results. [mjh: Like Ohio in 2004?]

When I read about neurobiologist Ben Barres, I was reminded of Teiresias (though I could not remember his/her name and spent a long time figuring it out — read on). I suppose our debates are more lofty than the Greeks, though I think we are still willing to put out the eyes of some with whom we disagree. mjh

Male Scientist Writes of Life as Female Scientist By Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post Staff Writer

Neurobiologist Ben Barres has a unique perspective on former Harvard president Lawrence Summers’s assertion that innate differences between the sexes might explain why many fewer women than men reach the highest echelons of science.

That’s because Barres used to be a woman himself. …

After he underwent a sex change nine years ago at the age of 42, Barres recalled, another scientist who was unaware of it was heard to say, “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister’s.”

And as a female undergraduate at MIT, Barres once solved a difficult math problem that stumped many male classmates, only to be told by a professor: “Your boyfriend must have solved it for you.” …

While there are men and women on both sides of the argument, the debate has exposed fissures along gender lines, which is what makes Barres so unusual. Barres said he has realized from personal experience that many men are unconscious of the privileges that come with being male, which leaves them unable to countenance talk of glass ceilings and discrimination. …

“Does anyone doubt if you study harder you will do better on a test?” Barres asked. “The mere existence of an IQ difference does not say it is innate. . . . Why do Asian girls do better on math tests than American boys? No one thinks they are innately better.”

In her debate with Pinker last year, Spelke said arguments about innate differences as explanations for disparities become absurd if applied to previous eras. “You won’t see a Chinese face or an Indian face in 19th-century science,” she said. “It would have been tempting to apply this same pattern of statistical reasoning and say, there must be something about European genes that give rise to greater mathematical talent than Asian genes.”

“I think we want to step back and ask, why is it that almost all Nobel Prize winners are men today?” she concluded. “The answer to that question may be the same reason why all the great scientists in Florence were Christian.”

The Wrath of Heaven

According to the more popular version by Hesiod and Ovid, the young Teiresias was out in the country, at the foot of Mount Cithaeron, when he came upon two snakes mating. With his staff, he killed the female snake, which caused him to transform into a young woman. For seven years, he lived his life as a woman. Then he came upon the same snakes and was transformed back into a man.

Zeus and Hera were having an argument over who has the most pleasure in a sexual intercourse, a man or a woman. Zeus teased Hera, by saying that the woman had more pleasure than a man did. Hera had the opposite view.

To prove their point, they went to see Teiresias, who had sex as a man and a woman. Teiresias told them that a woman had more pleasure during intercourse than a man. Comparing to a scale of ten, woman enjoy sex nine out of ten, compare that of man with one out ten.

When she lost the argument, she had also her temper, so she was swift with her punishment. Hera struck Teiresias blind. Zeus taking pity on the young blind man, gave Teiresias the gift of second sight and extended his life, longer than most mortals (seven generations from the time of Cadmus to that of the Epigoni).

The most puzzling part of this is that each gender claimed the *OTHER* enjoyed sex more and Hera was furious that women might enjoy sex more. How far we have come. mjh

Senate Committee Acts To Restore Protection For Whistle-Blowers By Stephen Barr

In a breakthrough for advocates of whistle-blower rights, the Senate has approved an amendment that would tighten up protections for federal employees who expose waste, fraud, abuse and threats to public safety. …

Numerous federal whistle-blowers have complained in recent years that agencies fail to handle their cases in a confidential manner and to ensure they do not suffer reprisals from their superiors.

The Akaka amendment would permit federal employees to claim whistle-blower protection for “any” disclosure they make of wrongdoing. According to Akaka, the amendment would restore and clarify congressional intent as to what type of whistle-blowing is protected and where it may take place. …

But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled that federal employees have no protection for disclosures made to immediate supervisors or co-workers, for statements made in connection with their normal employment duties, or for statements of publicly known facts.

Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that public employees cannot seek First Amendment protection in sounding an alarm but must rely on federal and state laws to protect them from reprisals.

My submissions to the Alibi’s Ridiculously Short Fiction Contest. I suggest you close your eyes or look away after each one to clear your palette.

Don’t Be So Linear, Dude

Ladies and gentleman, I thank you for this great honor you have given to me. I am also grateful to the disruption in the Space-Time Continuum that resulted in me receiving this award before anyone saw my work.

Coulda Been

In a small town in Texas, a failed oilman turned rancher sat alone in a bar, a hint of coke beneath one nostril. “I coulda been somebody,” he said to no one in particular. “If only I hadn’t lost that magic lamp!” On the TV behind the bar, President Hinton smiled from the Oval Office, the lamp gleaming on one corner of his desk. The loser snorted, “I’m telling you, that guy is the worst president imaginable.”

Postcard from Albuquerque

Dear friends,

Greetings from New Mexico! This is the 40th straight day of rain here. It’s been raining so hard we haven’t been able to spend time at the beach or even to ride the paddlewheel up to Taos. The Rio Puerco washed away the Interstate yesterday. Lake Rio Rancho is close to overflowing. My hair is completely frizzy from the 100% humidity and mildew keeps forming on my suitcase. I can’t wait to get home to the desert around sunny Seattle.

In a parallel universe, I’m the one reading your story and wondering how the hell it got into print. mjh

My 2004 submissions: mjh’s blog — Ridiculously Short Fiction

It’s time again for the Alibi’s Ridiculously Short Fiction Contest (108 words max including title, if any). The deadline is Monday, 6/5 at 5pm (how could it not be 06/06/06 at 6pm?); write steve@alibi.com (no attachments). I’ll show you my entries soon. In the meantime, below are links to 2005 and 2004. mjh

alibi . june 16 – 22, 2005
How ‘Bout a Quickie?
The winners of the Alibi’s Ridiculously Short Fiction Contest
By Steven Robert Allen

mjh’s blog — Ridiculously Short Fiction (2004)

Bird flu quickens pace in Indonesia By MARGIE MASON, The Associated Press

Indonesia averaged one human bird flu death every 2 1/2 days in May, putting it on pace to soon surpass Vietnam as the world’s hardest-hit country. …

Indonesia has logged at least 36 human deaths in the past year – 25 since January – and is expected to soon eclipse Vietnam’s 42 fatalities. The two countries make up the bulk of the world’s 127 total deaths since the virus began spreading in Asian poultry stocks in late 2003.

Bird Flu Kills Indonesian Girl

Local tests showed a 7-year-old girl has died of bird flu, a health official said Friday, the latest in a series of cases that are putting Indonesia on pace to become the world’s hardest-hit country.

The World Health Organization has yet to confirm the death, which would bring the country’s official death toll from the H5N1 virus to 37.
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See news aggregator at BirdFluBreakingNews

Debating the Bugs of High-Tech Voting By Zachary A. Goldfarb, Special to The Washington Post

The latest dispute [in the debate over high-tech voting machines] occurred several weeks ago after it was discovered at a test in Utah that someone with a reasonable knowledge of computer code could gain access to and tamper with the system software on a popular brand of voting machine manufactured by Diebold Election Systems. The developments prompted California and Pennsylvania to send urgent warnings to counties that use Diebold’s touch-screen voting systems to take additional steps to secure them.