Equation Numbers in OpenOffice

OpenOffice turns out to have a perfectly adequate equation editor. There’s no further need for a LaTeX add-in for equations.

Academics need three main functions for equation editors.

1. Format the text.
2. Assign sequential numbers.
3. Update references to Equation (2), whenever the number changes.

OpenOffice has all this built in. Neat! Read the wiki FAQs on OpenOffice Math or the concise, illustrated Getting Started with Math. The tricky part is to remember:

“fn” + F3

Full hearing: US Senate on Cyber War Readiness

Highlights from the US Senate panel on cybersecurity 23 February 2010.

Mary Ann Davidson, CSO (Oracle). Required reading! Ms. Davidson masters the subject in bright prose. This is an excellent indictment of the rush deploy smart grid technologies before we’ve had time to harden them from the types of attacks that routinely take computers off line. Thought experiment: what level of unplanned downtime would you be comfortable with for your house’s electrical power? water? energy? Would you try to save 10% on your electric bill if for a system that you couldn’t be sure would work more than 99.9% of the time?

Even better, Ms. Davidson points out a crucial flaw in education. Computer science is applied mathematics, and few departments teach young programmers how to write secure software. If university departments don’t teach secure programming, we will need professional certifications to substitute, as with medical residencies, CFA exams for financial analysts, and professional societies for engineers and architects.

Vice Admiral Mike McConnell (Booz Allen Hamilton). Sound byte: “If there were a cyber war today, the United States would lose.” Some excellent recommendations for training a new class of software engineers, security professionals, and managers. Don’t be distracted by the salacious and unwarranted assertion at the outset. The rest of the testimony is good, and nobody is better informed than the Admiral.

Dr. James A. Lewis (CSIS). A couple of interesting metaphors. He compares cyberspace to a condominium and to a shopping mall, meaning that the space is all privately owned, and that neighbors have a compelling interest in one another’s behavior. Therefore all should be willing to submit to greater regulation. I’m inclined to agree with Borg’s statement (below) that government regulations are unlikely to keep pace with the rate of innovation. Rather  than ask the government to certify that buildings are safe, wouldn’t we be better off with private certification of a standard of risk, as we currently do with automobiles, houses, and financial management? Computers and especially software are endlessly complicated, and don’t lend themselves well to the same type of governance as broadcast media and airplane safety.

Lewis also makes a crucial overstatement when he says that there are no rules on the Internet or that the Internet is a wild west. Actually many national and state authorities have control over Internet commerce, fraud, and even transborder crimes. At a more fundamental level, Lewis’ lawless vision of the Internet is fundamentally at odds with Internet governance over every layer of the Internet, from the development of hardware standards and Internet protocol, to the assignment of names and numbers, to the software that runs servers and home desktops. Re-read Lessig, and see if you can imagine the Internet truly without rules.

Scott Borg (US-CCU). Focuses on 3 central problems: (1) the conflict is already here; (2) cyber conflict threatens future American prosperity; (3) fixing markets is the key to improving cyber security. I agree with Borg, but then I’m biased.

Rear Admiral James Arden Barnett, Jr., Ret. (FCC). An interesting point of view. I don’t have any problem with DHS assisting the country with situational awareness, but the philosophy of defense is extremely centralized. The greatest specific policy errors of homeland security in the last ten years have been efforts to provide one-size-fits-all information and requirements from a central national office: the national threat level scale, vastly increased expenditures on passenger screening at airports, and advice on creating a safe room for chemical gas attacks inside your home. There are too many computers, and too many businesses to expect that federal marshals can secure their IT infrastructure for them. Effective homeland defense will require businesses and individuals to have cheap, effective, and secure choices to accomplish the things they already know how to do: run their businesses and their households.

Another failed attempt to resurrect deterrence for cyber war

Cyber war creates far more than its share of Maginot strategy. How is it that we can hope to make deterrence work without the three elements that supported it during the nuclear age? McConnell’s article dated this coming Sunday (2/28/10) [sic] outlines three conditions, and then claims that the failure of these conditions isn’t really a problem. It’s a giant problem. Future cyber warriors will not suffer from our empty threats to respond with catastrophic cyber or conventional weapons.

During the Cold War, deterrence was based on a few key elements: attribution (understanding who attacked us), location (knowing where a strike came from), response (being able to respond, even if attacked first) and transparency (the enemy’s knowledge of our capability and intent to counter with massive force).

All three of these conditions fail.

Equations in your dissertation

What do you use to edit equations for your dissertation? OpenOffice has a LaTeX equation editor plugin that takes latex input. You can enter in LaTeX equations, and then choose the resolution and file format in which you’d like a graphic inserted into your paper. Fantastic! Even better, its name is OOolatex. Who can resist enjoying that name?

What is the current MS Word solution to this problem? I’d be interested to know how others manage.

UPDATE (3/24/10): Please check out OpenOffice Math, which makes the LaTeX plugin largely obsolete. Most users will have everything they need in the way of math, from calculus to Greek letters to set operations to summations.

Visualizing Dyadic Trade Flows

I gave a talk at the Fletcher School today on my work on dyadic trade flows (slides).

In a nutshell, the talk argues that cartograms and dendrograms can give students and practitioners a better understanding of the patterns of trade among partner contries, both for teaching and for research. We have thousands of observations of dyadic relationships in panel datasets. Most often these datasets are presented as aggregates: total annual world trade, top exporters in world trade, top exporters, top exporters in an industry sector, top exporters to a political union (such as the EU), top exporters within a geographic area, etc. What these statistics ignore is the information in the dyadic trade flows: who trades with whom?

What I offer is a way to crunch down the total number of country dyads into manageable graphics that can appear on a single slide. We can look directly at the dyadic patterns of trade using hierarchic clustering (dendrograms). We can compare partner trade flows across countries and time periods using cartograms. The techniques are not new; what is new is the presentation of rich international trade datasets in relatively complete format that can be digested by inspection, rather than with complex and poorly understood statistical techniques. Complete annual sets of cartograms and dendrograms give scholars the power to explore the distribution of dyadic trade and discover hypotheses that are worth testing more carefully, either with quantitative or qualitative methods.

One of the reasons trade courses have focused so much on models, theorems, and policy of international trade is that it is hard to describe trade patterns in any meaningful and comparable terms. My slides suggest how to do exactly that: present changes to global trade patterns in a succinct, visual format that enables rich comparisons across time and space.

Coding Qualitative Data: Web Solution

Professor Stuart Schulman of University of Massachusetts (formerly University of Pittsburgh) designed a web server to provide qualitative data analysis (QDA) via web for social science datasets. The solution is called QDAP, currently housed at UMass but also at Pitt.

Bravo! Free, multi-user, qualitative data analysis for anyone with a web browser. They have clearly stated data warehouse privacy disclosures as part of the user agreement, and a tutorial for new users.

Thank you, Dr. Shulman.

From the About Us page:

The original QDAP lab was founded in the fall of 2005 by Dr. Stuart Shulman at the University of Pittsburgh. QDAP-UMass, founded in September of 2008 when Dr. Shulman moved to the Department of Political Science at UMass Amherst, trains and employs personnel able to code text from a wide variety of sources. Original material for content analysis might include in-depth interviews, open-ended survey answers, field notes, transcripts from focus groups or Web logs (blogs), e-mails, Web site content, results from database searches (such as LexisNexis™), congressional testimony or other historical texts, and a host of other unstructured but digitized text data sets. QDAP-UMass employs both UMass Amherst and University of Pittsburgh students, as well as professional staff trained in using ATLAS.ti (www.atlasti.com) as well as the Coding Analysis Toolkit, invented by Dr. Shulman. QDAP-UMass will continue to develop and make available online tools to improve the accuracy, reliability, and validity of coding projects.

Where do spam statistics come from?

Microsoft’s Security Intelligence Report seems to be the source of commonly quoted statistics about spam’s share of internet traffic. The ominous 97% figure is the fraction of email messages that are blocked by automated spam filters.

The point of the statistic is not that spammers have overwhelmed the Internet’s fragile bandwidth; but rather that using email without enterprise-class spam filters is all but impossible. Spam is generated in huge volumes to overwhelm spam filters, and it coevolves with spam filtering software.

According to a recent Cisco report, email and Web traffic account for somewhat less than 1/3 of total IP traffic. (That report includes projections out to 2013 and annualized growth forecasts.) So spammers aren’t going to break the Internet; rather, the aggressive growth of video, gaming, mobile data usage, and file sharing are changing the way network administrators monitor and shape traffic.

Two caveats to the Microsoft 97% spam statistic:

1. It is published by a vendor.
2. Other spam filters are not included in the survey.

For more on the description of the filters and the methods, you can visit the site and download the whole report. http://www.microsoft.com/security/portal/Threat/SIR.aspx

Also Telegeography has excellent free resources on international bandwidth and data traffic.

Transcriber for DIY interview transcription

Some day we’ll all have grants big enough to outsource our transcription needs.

I have to say I was pleased with the performace of the free and open source Transcriber software. No need for new hardware (read, foot pedals) or mouse clicks while transcribing. The software loads an audio clip and provides simple keystrokes for all major functions:

• dividing the audio track into chunks of text,
• marking the points where the speaker changes, and
• identifying the new speaker.

James Drisko’s excellent site at Smith College gives a fantastic overview of the choices you’ll make regarding software, solutions, and methodology.

Honorable mention: F4 transcription software.

Does anyone remember opting into Google Web History?

Turns out you can delete it, though.

Google caught my attention earlier this year when they cluttered up the web interface with extra buttons to promote/demote search hits.

Now Google tracks your web history by default when you sign in. Remember when we thought it was a big deal that the servers might surrepetitously install tracking cookies? Now it appears that Google assumes you’ve consented to pervasive web tracking just by signing in to Gmail, or Google Docs, or Google News, or any of the other rich data mining grounds web services they offer.

Even more interesting: it’s not mentioned on the privacy page.

Coding Qualitative Data

A friend of mine recently pointed me towards MAXQDA for coding and parsing qualitative research. Too bad I just wrote a post on how garden-variety relational databases could be hornswoggled for the task. I was so proud of my handwritten beta, too….

A couple of quick web searches turned up NVivo and XSight, by QSR, QDA Miner by Provalis, and Atlas.ti. TAMS for Mac OSX may be the most honestly titleds: text analysis markup system.

And sure enough someone has been on the free and open source (FOSS) track. Weft QDA. Dexter. Transana.

• UPDATE: The CDC (United States) publishes AnSWR at zero cost.

And a review site or two for multi-methods CAQDAS research tools. Clearly I have some reading to do.

• UPDATE: There are a multitude of review sites, often hosted at university social science departments (e.g., sociology, ethnography, psychology), too many to list here and I’m not sure how to categorize them.

Please comment if you have worked with these packages and can recommend a way of organizing them by functionality and quality. There does not seem to be a single standard for what the packages ought to do, and how to do it well.