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The Geography of Prejudice, maps of the world according to cultural or other sterotypical viewpoints. Absolutely brilliant!

The third Bob Howard Laundry Files novel is just the novel, but two shorts are available on Tor.Com (Down on the Farmand Overtime) and both of those are worth reading before tackling this. I’m not cognisant of the spy novels that form that structure of this one (by Anthony Price) but it’s a brilliant piece even without knowing that. Given Stross’ attention to detail I’m sure it’s a pretty good take on that style. In addition to lacking a finial short, this takes a darker turn again after the exuberence of the Jennifer Morgue. The Stars are “Coming Right” and Bob’s world is getting darker. Rather than contrast the horrors of real life and those of the Mythos, in this book they’re intertwined in what Stross himself describes as the scariest thing he’s ever written. It’s very dark, though the leavening of human prevents it from being unbearably so (I like my horror with a good leavening of black humour). A nice British variant on the Hellboy concept is thrown in for good measure, while Bob finds out more about the past, present and future of the Laundry, himself and the world (maybe even the universe).  Great stuff. I’m looking forward to The Apocalypse Codex (next but one book from Stross, IIRC) and hoping for at least one Laundry short in the meantime given his current resolution to write more short fiction this year.

Oh, and if you’re waiting for Stross to take on LeCarre, you’ll have an interminable wait. Not only does he thinkg it doesn’t fit with the Laundryverse, it’s also been done (Tim Power’s Declare, which I read last year on Stross’ recommendation).

Still not caught up on the book reviews, I’m afraid, despite today’s ist of entries. Intercontintental business trips mean I read but don’t write up. I’m catching up a bit, though, with four outstanding just now though of course I’m reading new stuff as well so that may go up again if I don’t get round to writing them up for a few days again, particularly as I’ll be off on another ICBT next week.

As with The Atrocity Archives, this is a novel and short combination. The novel features the eponymous Jennifer Morgue while the short Pimpf introduces Bob’s first subordinate. Bob’s middle names are introduced in the Jennifer Morgue but I must shamefully admit I didn’t get the joke until the title of thoe short and name of Bob’s subordinate hit me over the head with a mallet. Stross had clearly been planning that little joke from the start. It even works in-character since Bob is an acknowledged pseudonym for the memoir writer.

Having done Len Deighton for The Atrocity Archive, Stross takes on Fleming for the Jennifer Morgue. Well, actually it’s a bit more Broccoli than Fleming, for obvious in-story reasons. Stross isn’t content just to riff off Mr Bond, though. He take the Bond mythos well through its paces while subverting most of its tropes on the way through. This is a little more lighthearted than the Atrocity Archive, due mostly to the emulated style and approach. It’s still firmly embedded in the Chulthu Mythos as well, though.

Pimpf, in addition to the Travaglia pun, is a nice little tale of internal ambition and MMORPG danger in a world in which the right (or is that wrong) sort of computation is actually applied demonology. A nice little addition to the series.

This is a novel and a short story. The novel is called The Atrocity Archive and the short is called The Concrete Jungle. Having endured Gene Wolfe’s abysmal Cthulhu Mythos story and Jonathan Howard’s mediocre one, I felt like re-reading a better modern take on the Lovecraftian Oeuvre. Actually, I’m currently also working my way through “Necronomicon – the Best Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft” (which will take me a while being all his Mythos short stories and the short novels to boot in one beautiful edition, but I’d go mad if I tried to just read straight through it, I think). This is, I think, my favourite Stross book. I still rate Glasshouse as his best book, but this is my favourite. Its a wonderful blend of comedy and horror. It’s rather reminiscent of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in juxtaposing the horrors of real life (in this case the Kafka-esque horrors of working for the UK Civil Service) with the beasts from the outermost darkness. With his usual skill, Stross has added a consistent explanation for the ability of the Mythos creatures to do things like possess people’s minds. Things lurk at the bottom of the Mandelbrot Set and mathematics and computation are all that is needed for applied demonology. Combining the myths about Nazi obsessions with the occult (mostly false, but they make a good basis for fiction) with the droll tone of a Len Deighton spy novel, the Atrocity Archive is a dark but immensely funny tale.

The Concrete Jungle “explains” just why there are so many CCTV cameras in the UK (something I’ve struggled to do as part of my work). It’s all so obvious when explained by the story’s protagonist, Bob Howard. The infamous new town of Milton Keynes forms the backdrop to a great short addition to the memoirs of Landry Agent Bob Howard.

Billed on the cover as the “long-awaited sequel to Howl’s Moving Castle”, which is a bit bizarre given the much earlier existence of Castle in the Air, this is the third book set in the world of Howl’s Moving Castle. Like the earlier two the writing is highly accessible to adults and children alike, I think. As with Castle, Howl and Sophie appear but are not the primary characters. They are more in evidence in this one that in Castle, though. This has a little bit of a darker tone than the earlier two (Castle is slightly lighter than Howl, but this is darker than both, I think) and features both a nasty supernatural being and its horrible offspring (more horrible in some ways because they just about appear human). The main magical gimmick this time is the epnymous house which appears to have only two rooms but if one turns immediately upon entering the doorway between the two rooms, one ends up elsewhere. In fact almost all of the doors operate this way. Combined with various magical appurtenances for breakfast, morning coffee, lunch, afternoon tea and dinner, this makes life in the house interesting and potentially fattening. It has a wonderful library as well with a humorously twisted spell-book. Once more, highly recommended.

The sequel to Howl’s Moving Castle. In this one Jones riffs on Arab mythology with the whole genie-in-a-bottle thing, but mixed in with her own take on things magical and mundane. The characterisations are wonderful and once again I find no difficulty with the style which I would judge to be highly accessible to older children as well as teenagers (if anything, even more so than Howl’s Moving Castle). The magic carpet, the genie, the princess and the carpet-seller all provide a merry romp that is highly recommended.

I don’t read much juvenile (what’s often referred to a Young Adult these days, a term which I hate – Young Adult has a perfectly good natural meaning of “recently became an adult”, i.e. 18-21 or thereabouts; the use of it to refer to teenage or juvenile is pandering to a desire to claim a misleading description by teenagers, which should not be indulged – rant over) fiction. I can’t cope with the limited vocabular and simple sentence structure in much of it. However, Diana Wynne Jones (lovely lady that she was) manages not to trigger my issue in this and its sequels. I was mostly inspired to read this by the Miyazaki movie. It’s interesting comparing how closely the movie follows the book. The movie is a fairly free adaption, and misses out on a bunch of backstory as well as introducing some other material not in the book. THe apprentice in the book is a youth rather than a child, for example. I try, though, not to judge adapations on faithfullness but rather on quality in their media and the movie is generally very good as a movie with just a couple of bits (like Sophie’s mother, step-mother in the book) which don’t proparly make sense.

The book has a more complicated structure than the movie and gives a much more complete picture of the people and the world. Not surprising, as this is common in movies made from books. It’s hard to do even a juvenile book in a 90 minute or two hour movies in all its details.

This (series, not just this book) is one of my comfort reads, alongside things like Barry Hughart’s Master Li & No. Ten Ox books. Highly recommended, even if like me you don’t generally read juveniles. In particular the author’s knowledge of and twisting of the tropes of fantasy keeps things very interesting.

One of my current research projects (DESVALDO, funded by the CIGREF Foundation) involves surveying people about their use of digital data. While our primary target is non-expert computer users, expert users are also welcome to take it. This is the survey.

Ross Anderson, Cambridge

Deception: Would personalising payment pages reduce small scale fraud?

How is being watched by humans different to being watched by software?

Blackstone: The law is the long march from status to contract. Are we now towards the end of the long march from honour codes to ubiquitous technical surveillance?

Dave Clark, MIT
Reactions to Prior Talks

A lot of the stories we tell are move/counter-move systems? Why are we in an equilibrium and it’s not that one side won? Perhaps it’s just that if one side won, the question is not interesting.

The way to reduce crime is not to build perfect systems, but to make sure crime doesn’t pay.

Peter Robinson, Cambridge
The Eyes Have It

There is something that can be done with eye gaze in detecting speakers’ state of mind.

Identifying people who are cognitively overloaded (e,.g. while driving, to reduce interupptions from navigation systems or the like).

Peter Swire, Ohio State
Tour of Projects

Encryption and globalisation paper, particularly the attempts by China and India to repeat the US mistakes.

Going Dark v. the Golden Access of Surveillance.

USvJones.com: Help judges by suggesting usable doctrine.

Are Hackers Inefficient?

The Right to Data Portability

Pretty Good De-identification

The Second Wave of Global Privacy Protection (Ohio State, Nov 2012) conference

Rahul Telang, Carnegie Mellon
Competition and Security

Does (can) competition increase security and/or privacy?

Hospitals are under incrasing pressure to invest in patient security and privacy.

In a more competitive healthcare market, there is evidence of more data breaches.

On most other measures, more competition increases quality.

Alma Whitten, Google
When is the Future?

The future is at most ten years from now. Meaningfully, five or ten years from now is the future, because things move so fast.

Technologists have a fair amount of power to build the future. But technologists are often taking their subtle direction from artists: particularly from science fiction.

Shows the “Expo” sequence from Iron Man 2. “I really want that interface”.

Some questions: Where are the boundaries? Who maintains it? Who pays for it?

Easy answers in the fiction (an eccentric techno-genius billionnaire), but if we want those tools for everyone these questions become more difficult to answer.

William Burns, Decision Research, CSUSM
Resilience in the Face of Terrorism: Risk Communication as Inoculation

Ratio of behavioural component of response to terrorist events (mostly incorrect) compared to the actual direct impact is approx 15:1. So while reducing loss of life is a good goal, minimisation of the over-reaction in the aftermath is also very important. Pre-emptive risk communication is the sensible approach.

A sensible risk message (terrorists aim to succeed in making you afraid, don’t let them win) has a significant impact on people’s responses to terrorist activity.

Chris Hoofnagle, UC Berkeley
Mobile Payments : Consumer Benefits & New Privacy Concerns

On Teror: I am terrified of motivational speakers, flying coach class on United and children’s products from China.

In a credit card, no party to the transaction has a complete view of the sale.  Merchants know what was bought but not exactly who you are. The CC issuer knows where and how much you spent, but does not know what you spent. This drives loyalty cards.

Mobile payments means that everyone in the chain can see all of the information.

Richard John, USC
Games Terrorists Play

Talking today about the non-rational terrorist.

Stackelberg competition game model.

Defender (leader) chooses counter-measures; attacker (follower) chooses attack.

Can we benefit from the irrationality of our adversaries? Terrorists often do not maximise their expected value – they follow irrational strategies which do not lead to their apparent goals. Reference: Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. We can do better than a strong Stackelberg equilibirum if we understand our opponents’ irrationality.

Persuading protection forces to act rationally and use these random approaches is a hard problem in itself.

Steven LeBlanc, Harvard
Constant Battles

The myth of the peaceful, Noble Savage. Humans have always had warfare and high death rates. There is a tendency to wish away prehistoric warfare by calling it something else or pretending it never existed. THe evolutionary pressures on surviving warfare are significant in the human genome?

Where data is good 15-25% of males die from warfare and 5% of females.

Death rates decrease with incrased social complexity. You are safer if you pay taxes. The more taxes you pay, the safer you are.

Mark Levine, Exeter
The Psychology of Violence Prevention

How to enroll the support of collective psychology to suppress violent action.

The action of third parties is seen in traditional psychology is seen as mostly negative: mob violence, mass hysteria, peer group pressure.

Looking at CCTV records of third party interventions (or lack of intervention) in violence.

Larger groups are less violent. How do third parties coordinate successfully.

Identity and eye-gaze: 52 participants, asked to view the same video with different priming questions about their identification with the subjects.

Ingroup bias: men look more at the men, women look more at the women. Men look more at the “perpetrator”, women look less at the “perpetrator”.

When people are primed in terms of their gender identity, they look at the third parties more than just the participants in the violence.

When primed to think of themselves are part of the group rather than as an individual, the women look more widely, whereas the men look more focussed. When primed as individuals, men and women look equally focussed/broadly.

John Mueller, OSU
Terrorism Since 9/11 – the American Cases

Only one occurrence in the US since 9/11 where a muslim terrorist killed anyone in the US, and almost no injuries. Hal of the cases appear to have been partly instigated by agent provocateurs of the government and all of the attemtped terrorists have been incompetent and mostly highly unbalanced.