The perils of Google Translate

Teachers of foreign languages probably have a collection of unsatisfactory results from translation apps. Here’s one more.

A Latin motto on the cover of Sean Hannity’s latest weighty tome reads: “Vivamus vel libero perit Americae.” It is supposed to mean “Live free or America dies”– at least, that’s what putting the phrase into GT will yield as a Latin translation.

However, put the Latin phrase into the service and see what you get back in English: “Live free or dies Americans”, a somewhat nonsensical result.

An eagle-eyed student of Latin noticed the gaffe and and provided a cogent analysis on his blog. Apparently, Hannity (or his publisher) read the post and the book cover no longer sports the Latin phrase.

It might also come as a shock to some that the great Latin scholar Hannity would make this sort of mistake. On the plus side, we do have some keen students of the language, so maybe all is not lost.

Protecting against identity theft

howtogeek.com

In recent months, hackers have stolen (mostly) emails and passwords from Target, eBay, Sony and Home Depot. But now they are after far more: Last week, Anthem, the second largest health insurer in the US, reported that hackers had stolen the personal information of as many as 80 million current and former members and employees.

What sort of information?

Names, member ID numbers, dates of birth, Social Security Numbers or Health Care Identification Numbers, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses and employment information.

With this info, criminals can open credit card accounts and file tax returns in your name. Anthem has offered free credit monitoring and $1,000,000 in identity theft insurance to the victims. But how do you protect yourself against such attacks?

One option is to contact each of the three major credit bureaus–Equifax, Experian and Transunion–and place a freeze on your credit reports. By doing so, you will make sure that nobody can access the reports. Consequently, “credit card companies, banks, stores, apartments, and anybody else that usually requires it will be unable to pull your credit. Which means they can’t open an account in your name.” (howtogeek)

Other steps you can take include: Set up fraud alerts. Activate two-factor authentication. Keep an eye on the trash and spam folders in your email account. (cnet)

Falling crime rates, but more justifiable homicide by police

First, the good news.

Violent crime is falling. The estimated number of violent crimes in 2013 was 4.4 percent lower than in 2012. The estimated number of property crimes also fell, by 4.1 percent. (FBI Crime Statistics for 2013)

But the news on justifiable homicide by police, defined as killing of a felon by a law enforcement officer in the line of duty, is more troubling. In 2013, there were 461 such deaths, up from 397 in 2010. (FBI Crime in the United States 2013)

Justifiable Homicide by Weapon, Law Enforcement
2009–2013

Year	Total
2009	414
2010	397
2011	404
2012	426
2013	461

Frank Serpico, a NYPD detective, was the subject of a 1973 book, later made into a movie starring Al Pacino, about police corruption in New York. Serpico is back, this time with an essay in the Politico Magazine, arguing that the new scourge in city policing is the large number of deaths at the hands of police officers (“The Police Are Still Out of Control,” Oct. 23, 2014). According to Serpico, the police appear to…

just empty their guns and automatic weapons without thinking, in acts of callousness or racism. They act like they’re in shooting galleries. Today’s uncontrolled firepower, combined with a lack of good training and adequate screening of police academy candidates,  has led to a devastating drop in standards.

Serpico offers the following rules to improve the situation:

1. Strengthen the selection process and psychological screening process for police recruits. Police departments are simply a microcosm of the greater society. If your screening standards encourage corrupt and forceful tendencies, you will end up with a larger concentration of these types of individuals;

2. Provide ongoing, examples-based training and simulations. Not only telling but showing police officers how they are expected to behave and react is critical;

3. Require community involvement from police officers so they know the districts and the individuals they are policing. This will encourage empathy and understanding;

4. Enforce the laws against everyone, including police officers. When police officers do wrong, use those individuals as examples of what not to do – so that others know that this behavior will not be tolerated. And tell the police unions and detective endowment associations they need to keep their noses out of the justice system;

5. Support the good guys. Honest cops who tell the truth and behave in exemplary fashion should be honored, promoted and held up as strong positive examples of what it means to be a cop;

6. Last but not least, police cannot police themselves. Develop permanent, independent boards to review incidents of police corruption and brutality—and then fund them well and support them publicly. Only this can change a culture that has existed since the beginnings of the modern police department.

 

Slavery not good, says the Economist

The Economist has been forced to acknowledge that slavery was a bad thing (Sept. 4, 2014):

“Slavery was an evil system, in which the great majority of victims were blacks, and the great majority of whites involved in slavery were willing participants and beneficiaries of that evil.”

This remarkable admission came following a hail of opprobrium about their book review of “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism” by Edward Baptist. The Economist’s reviewer had claimed that “Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains.”

In a recent column (The Guardian, Sept. 7, 2014) Mr Baptist writes about the unwillingness of white people to believe reports from blacks themselves about how they are treated. This sort of thing has been going on for a long time:

In 1845, Frederick Douglass, a fugitive from slavery, joined dozens of white passengers on the British ship Cambria in New York harbor. Somewhere out on the Atlantic, the other passengers discovered that the African American activist in their midst had just published a sensational autobiography. They convinced the captain to host a sort of salon, wherein Douglass would tell them his life story. But when the young black man stood up to talk, a group of Southern slaveholders, on their way to Britain for vacation or business or both, confronted him. Every time Douglass said something about what it was like to be enslaved, they shouted him down: Lies! Lies! Slaves were treated well, insisted the slaveholders; after all, they said, the masters remained financially interested in the health of their human “property”.

 

Eating rice? Watch out for the arsenic (or cadmium)

Source: Mars

Here’s the bad news: Rice contains inorganic arsenic (the most toxic form). Brown rice contains more of it, because “elements like arsenic accumulate in bran and husk, which are polished off in the processing of white rice.” (Blum, “The Trouble With Rice,” NYT, Apr 18, 2014)

Turns out that rice grown in water-logged paddy fields tends to pull up arsenic from the soil. Rice grown in India and Bangladesh contain the highest concentrations of arsenic.

But even if you reduce the amount of water in the rice fields, another menace lurks. Cadmium. The rice plant tends to absorb cadmium, a toxic metal associated with bone fractures.

So efforts are on to breed rice plants with less fondness for arsenic and cadmium.

In 2013 the FDA released a study of arsenic in 1300 samples of rice and rice products. They found “average levels of inorganic arsenic for the various rice and rice products of 0.1 to 7.2 micrograms of inorganic arsenic per serving.” But these results “do not tell us what long-term health effect, if any, these levels may have, nor do they tell us what can be done to reduce these levels.”

Their recommendation: Eat a well-balanced diet. Don’t eat too much of  any one food.

Product Category	Product Subcategory	Average Inorganic Arsenic mcg/serving	Number of Samples
Rice	Basmati	3.5	53
Rice	Brown	7.2	99
Rice	Instant	2.6	14
Rice	Jasmine	3.9	13
Rice	Other (incl wild rice5, carnaroli, mixed types)	5.6	6
Rice	Parboiled	5.1	39
Rice	White, long grain	4.6	149
Rice	White, medium grain	3.6	91
Rice	White, short grain	3.5	23

Source: http://www.fda.gov/Food/FoodborneIllnessContaminants/Metals/ucm319870.htm

 

Holy cow: Is this any way to treat a bishop?

Source: BBC News

BBC News–that fount of yellow journalism!–reports that Germany’s “bishop of bling” has been forced to resign (Mar 26, 2014). And all because he renovated his official residence!

Let’s list the poor man’s sins.

He put in a bath (doesn’t a man need to unwind at the end of a busy day?), bought a conference table (how else can you hold a conference?), and installed a private chapel (better to communicate with God, no?) He is also said to have visited India’s poor by flying there first-class. (He probably had a peanut allergy–and you know what they serve in coach these days.)

But the critics were out to get Bishop Tebartz-van Elst. They said he had engaged in lavish spending. The media gleefully described the cost of the items: bath–$21,000, table–$35,000, chapel–$4 million. The renovation, initially thought to cost $8 million, ended up costing $34 million.

What is $26 million among friends–and, in any case, isn’t that what the Pentagon spends on a toilet seat?

True love is a Rolex paid for by someone else

Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch

When Mrs McDonnell went shopping with an astonishingly generous friend, she did not forget to ask him to buy her husband a watch. Not just any watch, but a Rolex. She even got it engraved ’71st Governor of Virginia’.

And people say love is dead.

Unfortunately for the romantic (and desperate to be well-dressed) couple, the course of true love may lead to prison. They were “indicted in a federal court on Tuesday on federal corruption charges for allegedly illegally accepting dozens of expensive gifts and donations from a wealthy friend. The indictment alleges that the McDonnells used the governor’s position to try to help Jonnie Williams, the CEO of dietary supplement company Star Scientific, in exchange for lavish gifts and donations” (ABC News, Jan 21, 2014).

What is the world coming to? If you can’t parlay your governor’s position to get a Rolex, what’s the use of it all?

Tax evader? How to escape jail time

tothetick.com

If you are Ty Warner, billionaire founder of Beanie Babies, and don’t want to pay taxes, what do you do? You hide your money in Swiss bank accounts. And what happens when you get caught and are brought up in court? Answer:

A federal judge rejected calls from prosecutors for a prison sentence of at least a year and Tuesday sentenced billionaire Beanie Babies founder Ty Warner to two years of probation for failing to pay income taxes on millions of dollars he hid for years in Swiss bank accounts. (Chicago Tribune)

So Ty doesn’t even have to spend one year in jail! How did he do it? Turns out that the judge looked upon rather indulgently on a few things that Ty did, and these mitigating circumstances meant that he got off scot-free.

Here is a guide to very rich people who don’t want to pay taxes and don’t like the idea of going to prison:

1. Open an offshore account.

Ty had Swiss bank accounts. He claimed that he was misled by foreign bankers who said he didn’t have to pay taxes to the U.S. government on his foreign income. This tactic seems to be quite effective, especially if you can show that are really ignorant about basic financial stuff. Ty didn’t have a will, apparently, so how could he know that he was supposed to pay taxes on his Swiss income?

2. Give money to charity.

Ty donated money to the Andre Agassi Foundation for Education (Agassi? Who knew about his keen interest in education?) He also gave $2 million for tsunami efforts in Japan. Note to rich people: Keep your eyes open for a good natural disaster.

3. Say you are really, really sorry. And also that you are ashamed and embarrassed.

Ty did this.

So there you have it. The Rich Man’s Guide to Not Going to Jail for Tax Evasion.

Economics is bad, but management is worse?

In December 2012, Richard Horton, editor of the British medical review The Lancet, sent out tweets saying really bad things about economists in general and health economists in particular. The first tweet:

Economics, second only to “management”, may just be the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the world.

Despite years of joyless training that have largely made us immune to blistering criticism of this sort, economists are prone to feeling the occasional pang. And so it was that Horton’s tweet collection elicited a riposte from a group of wounded economists. Read about the kerfuffle in the Atlantic (Nov. 6, 2013).

CryptoLocker: Installing malware for money

Worried about “ransomware?” Criminals now install malware on your computer, encrypt your files, then ask for money within a specified time. If you pay up, they will decrypt your files, allowing you access to your files again. If you don’t pay up, you will not be able to decrypt your files. All your infected files–Word, Excel, JPGs, PDFs–all sitting on your hard drive, but out of reach.

To read about the malevolent CryptoLocker, go to bleepingcomputer.com. It describes how to protect yourself against it and what to do in case you see the dreaded CryptoLocker payment screen.