what we talk about when we talk about voting

Via Slashdot:

ClarkEvans writes “The NY Times has a great editorial today calling out the League of Women Voters for their counter-productive lobbying against verified voting. The article states that Diebold voting systems has given lots of dough to these opposition groups.” There’s an AP story about the issue as well.

Consider this paragraph from the AP story:

In a January special election for a Florida state house seat, 134 people using paperless voting terminals in Broward County failed to cast votes for any candidate. The race was decided by a margin of 12 votes. It’s unclear why some voters didn’t select candidates; and without a paper trail, poll workers couldn’t figure out voters’ intentions.

Kathleen wrote a relevant entry last March:

[T]he most frightening bit of recent policy that Miller pointed to was the Help America Vote Act, which mandates touchscreen voting.  Much has been written in the blogosphere about the scandal surrounding Diebold’s knowledge of the unreliability of such systems.  What hasn’t gotten much press is that the main venture capitalist backing both Diebold and ES&S, the two primary manufacturers of computerized voting machines, is Howard Ahmanson, a Christian Reconstructionist who has said openly that he has the goal of imposing Biblical law on the US.

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a half century since alan turing died

Via Slashdot:

erroneous writes “Today is the 50th anniversary of the death of Alan Turing: mathematician, code breaker, and computer pioneer. He was today commemorated in his home city of Manchester, UK.” Here are stories at the BBC and at The Register.

This comment in the Slashdot discussion is especially funny. I wrote about the Turing memorial when I was in Manchester a year ago this week.

Update: Kieran Healy takes notice of the anniversary, too.

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repurposing the cicadas

I’ve given voices (mp3, 2.2M) to Matt’s cicadas . This sound file is licensed under a Creative Commons license.

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the future of the page

Jason J. provides links to some interesting readings for a summer seminar titled “The Future of the Page.”

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