Paleo specie

This is BB Billosaur, a ceramic piggy bank for paper currency. He is made by Le Mouton Noir & Co. Le Mouton Noir is located in New York City. I am not surprised (I miss it there).

The store owners describe their motivation:

For many years we have followed the heard like a flock of sheep. Working hard, learning and growing, we have never let go of our dream. The black sheep finally wakes up and steps forward to have some fun.

Billo-saurus!

BB Billo seems difficult to resist: A paper currency-only porcelain piggy with holes down his back emulating a Stegosaurus-like Mohawk, made by black sheep!

Account hijackers

If a message originates from a familiar name or email address, its likelihood of making it through spam filters is greater.

Google described their efforts to minimize harm to users due to email account hijacking:

"Our security team...saw a trend of spammers hijacking legitimate accounts to send their messages. [We developed] a system that uses 120+ signals to...detect whether a log-in is legitimate, beyond just a password."

Less than 1% of spam emails make it into a Gmail inbox.

Legitimate Gmail accounts blocked for sending spam versus time

The number of compromised accounts decreased by 99.7% since 2011. That's impressive, for a sustained reduction! How does Google avoid false positives? I am so curious about the specific details of their filtering rules!

The blog post was written in March 2013. It is remarkable that the same methods continue to be effective, as Gmail spam-attackers would perceive this as a new challenge to be overcome.

120 Signals

I suspect that Google's methods are analogous to those used by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services' Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in detecting medically unlikely edits (MUEs). MUEs can be accidental, due to claim coding or data entry errors. MUEs can also be deliberate, when there is fraudulent intent, e.g. by filing for more services, or for more expensive services. Regardless of intent, MUE identification reduces paid claims error rates.

How will the Affordable Care Act impact existing processes for detecting MUEs, and for setting benchmarks? CMS does not disclose its MUE criteria for the same reasons that Google will not reveal details about their 120 signals.

Continuous improvement is a part of life, for email-spam account hijackers, Google and the fraud detection team at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

I wrote a post about health care, with a much more Ellie-centric theme, a few years ago. That was when I worked as statistician for ACCCHS, Arizona's state-administered Medicaid/Medicare program, monitoring program performance and quality of care.

Performance improvement in state-funded healthcare for children

I noticed a job listing the other day, as "Director, Performance Improvement". It would likely be an intellectually satisfying and fulfilling employment opportunity. The job is a full-time, direct hire position with Health Services Advisory Group Inc. (which goes by the unfortunate acronym, HSAG and pronounced as H SAG), in Phoenix, Arizona.

My previous work in public health was with the Office for Children with Special Health Care Needs (OCSHCN), where I was an employee of the Department of Health Services of the State of Arizona (AZDHS).  My title was Statistical Research Chief, and I had a staff of two programmer analysts. 

OCSHCN and and its associated managed care program, the Childrens Rehabilitative Service (CRS), were in charge of most aspects of program management, including retroactive clinical assessments by nurses, as well as provider contracting decision-making. Arizona's Medicaid agency, the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS) provided billing support and auditor oversight.

In addition to performance evaluation and utilization management, I enjoyed a diverse range of duties that included epidemiological studies, PHI (Protected Health Information) security, pharma utilization, and provider payment (and beneficiary claim) fraud detection. However, the downside was that it was very difficult to work with the independence required to do performance and quality assessor for OCSHCN, while an employee of the program itself.

Programs funded by the U.S. HRSA Title V Block Grant for Women & Children

Compressed data for prayer, anagrams and digital rights management

I found an oddly contemporary-looking New York Times article that is in fact, quite vintage for the Internet. It begins with a review of a most peculiar e-commerce company:

doing business with Newprayer.com may require a leap of faith.

- Compressed Data: Beaming Prayers to God's Last Known Residence
via The New York Times Online, 31 August 1999.

Last known location of the divine is
easier to find than this website

Image provided courtesy of archive.is

The Internet Fraud Watch for the National Consumers League was deluged with complaints about fraud on the Net, having received 7,700 last year and 6,000 through the first six months of 1999.

If they only knew what was to follow, in less than ten short years.

MintChip denouement

The Royal Canadian Mint is the official mint of the Canadian government. In March 2012, the Royal Mint announced that it would discontinue all future production of penny coins. A week later, the Toronto Star ran a news story, in which the Royal Mint introduced the first national digital currency in North America, the MintChip.

A Royal Canadian Mint spokesman provided the following description:

MintChip doesn’t plan to link to a person’s bank account or credit card information. And unlike BitCoin, a peer-to-peer hosted digital currency with a fluctuating value, MintChip is simply a new way to exchange Canadian dollars. Plus, it’s backed by the Canadian government. 

The MintChip doesn't satisfy criteria for what I would consider a bona fide currency. Rather, it seems more like a type of electronic payment network for the Canadian Dollar.

Golden prize

A rather intriguing contest, MintChip Challenge was announced in the same Toronto Star article. MintChip Challenge was an app developer contest sponsored by the Royal Canadian Mint, with top prizes to include the equivalent of CAD 50,000 of gold bars and coins, in gold bullion, i.e. 99.99% gold.

The top comment on the Toronto Star article offered this suggestion:

Did you know that one of the leading proposals for how to use MintChip is for purchasing bitcoin? Because of the irreversibility of MintChip transactions, this would solve a lot of issues. See paragraph 6 of MintChip Misses the Point of Digital Currency via Forbes.

MintChip Challenge generated much excitement. The 500 entry spots were filled in merely four days! Prize winners were to be announced on 25 October 2012.

What's up with MintChip? 

The official website hasn't provided much information. I was curious. Erstwhile gAt0mAl0 was curious too:

So what happened with MintChip – Canada’s digital currency? It has disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle of digital currency holes – a news blackout. 

The denouement of MintChip Challenge was distinctly anticlimactic. gAt0mAl0 explains more about the Canadian MintChip, and Bitcoins too. Alternatively, you may prefer to explore gAt0's rather impressive Bitcoin Mind map chart, featured in his prior post, Bitcoin and Forex Trading which I enjoyed much more than the entire MintChip mess, from start to muted finish.

Curious Facebook related query

Observations from the hinterlands

Quora is a privately-held company and is located in Mountain View, California. It was founded by two former Facebook employees, Adam d'Angelo and Charlie Cheever.

Quora raised two rounds of private financing to-date. Peter Thiel and Jeff Hammerbacher (former Facebook database manager; now founder of a big data start-up, Cloudera) are investors, among others. TechCrunch's CrunchBase has some information regarding Quora's multiple funding rounds.

Why is this relevant?

Bret Taylor was the Chief Technology Officer of Facebook. He announced his intention to depart the company in mid-June 2012, approximately one month after the Facebook initial public offering on the NASDAQ in May 2012. 

As of June 20, 2012, Mr. Taylor was no longer listed on the Facebook website as a member of the management team, nor on the board of directors, nor anywhere else. There have been no subsequent announcements from Facebook regarding his status, although I have not done an EDGAR search to confirm.

At present, the position of Facebook CTO is vacant. Adam d'Angelo is the former Chief Technology Officer of Facebook. And THAT is why this is relevant. 

IT at Facebook?

Quora on campus recruiting at Stanford University in 2008

Craft work

This ornate butterfly is an anti-maccassar. It is one of many in a set of Lepidoptera-themed craft work. Clicking on the image will take you to the rest. It is not my work. I can knit. Poorly.

Crocheted butterfly

Although the image description says "crochet", I think this resembles embroidery or needlework, as it is so finely detailed. It is beautiful, especially those curled antennae.

Anti-maccassars are those little covers on the arms rests and backs of chairs. They aren't doilies. I tried to find a less arcane sounding word, to no avail. Alternative word suggestions are welcomed as comments!

Short Storage Story

Napkin Story: How sMash works

Via The IBM Curiosity Shop, CC/by-nc/2.0/

This is so sweet! I don't know what sMash (SMASH?) is. As a first guess, I would infer it to be a storage protocol rather than database-type software. Perhaps it is a new way to organize data, an alternative to DB2, CICS and IMS. Each use different block sizes and partition types, among other things.

I will try to get a definitive answer, and return¹ with an update.

I hope to see new items in The IBM Curiosity Shop set, Napkin Stories on Flickr. It doesn't seem likely though. This friendly drawing was uploaded on 22 December 2010, yet no others have joined it in the interim.

¹ Flickr-to-Blogger did not offer the option of "publish to draft", else I would have prepared this post more thoroughly.

Statistical analysis of science fiction authors and fans

The classic science-fiction related excerpt that follows after the jump is neither up to-date nor analytically robust. I tidied it a bit, but to do a decent job would require re-running the data, not to mention collecting data with a more recent vintage. But it is entertaining, and the concept may be of use to others. To whom? Well, I have spent a fair amount of time on Stack Exchange sites recently. Let me tell you all about it.

What is Stack Exchange?

Question and answer websites are popular. Stack Exchange is a free, mostly user-run Q&A site. It was co-founded and managed by Jeff Atwood a.k.a. @Coding Horror and Joel Spolsky. EDIT: Joel now runs Stack Exchange, as The Coding Horror has departed.

The prototype version of the site was known as Stack Overflow, and continues to thrive. There are many stacks on Stack Exchange. Most are computing or analytically-themed e.g. programming, systems administration, website design, mobile applications development, mathematics and quantitative finance. Others are more eclectic, and thus of a more experimental nature. They are labelled as such, by a beta designation, and guided along by the whimsically named Area51 Stack Exchange site. Now that you've been enlightened by that tangential aside, I'll get to the point. I was thinking of Literature Stack Exchange in particular.

The problem at hand

Literature Stack Exchange was initially overrun by book-recommendation inquiries. This was unfortunate. Why? Because suggestions about subjective matters are nearly impossible to provide to friends and relatives, let alone on an online forum. Fortunately, the issue has resolved itself for the time being, through better site administration.

Update - The issue has resolved itself permanently, because the site was closed due to a general lack of interest in early May of this year. Stack Exchange does have a thriving Science Fiction community, which enjoys a great deal of activity! So let us continue, along the same, still relevant theme.

Perhaps the following approach might provide inspiration for those seeking reading material recommendations.

Via io9:

Politics has not only reared its ugly head, but pushed much of its slimy body into the world of science fiction.

A Political-Scientific Mapping

Correlation between sci-fi sub-genres 
by author and reader political viewpoint

Continue...

Especially useful curation

A list of uncommonly useful links and news items by an uncommonly astute person, Greg Linden (formerly of Amazon search in the early days) follows below. This is the best of all worlds: Having access to someone who has superior insights due to field of expertise, is articulate, and is willing to share without ulterior motive or bias.

I first heard of Greg Linden back in my days of using Google Buzz. At first, I thought he was a Linden of Second Life's Linden Lab! This isn't to say that he is my online friend or contact or anything like that. I miss Google Buzz. It was my introduction to Web 2.0 type online interaction, and was very positive, genuine.

Okay, that's enough pre-ambling from me. Have a look at those links and annotations.

Geeking with Greg: More quick links:

What has caught my attention recently: $1B for Instagram was silly and caused by fear, but it is impressive ...

This would be worth paying for, if Greg Linden were to want to sell a subscription newsletter for technology investing. That does not seem likely.

I stopped wondering "Why does he do this?!" awhile ago. Now I am quietly appreciative. I often forget entirely about visiting his weblog, for months at a time, as it is such a low-key and pleasantly ad-free corner of the internet!