“If you see something, say something!”
I see it at the airport, at the bus terminal, at the train station. It is painted on the bus (yes, I’ve seen a full-wrap bus ad for it). The DHS tweets it.
Only you can prevent terror attacks!
My fundamental problem with this campaign is that it encourages us to be suspicious of our neighbors. Even if the authors intend them to simply encourage alertness, these messages prime us to view the world through the lens of suspicion.
Daniel Lemire wrote a good article on how big-O notation is a great teaching tool but not the end of the story.
One example from a previous project I worked on: bubble sort. Bubble sort is conceptually simple but analytically troublesome. It is O(n^2); its analysis, while not difficult, is not as straightforward other sorts; and worst for practice, its worst-case scenarios are are common (unlike quicksort).
It does, however, have excellent constants (due to its simplicity), great cache locality (in part due to being in-place), and near-linear runtime on almost-sorted data.
I was working on a 3D graphics project and, to render alpha-blending, I needed to draw my faces in sorted order by depth. I started using the STL’s generic sorting algorithm (a hybrid merge/insertion sort), but my redraw was slow. However, as the user rotated and moved the object, the faces wouldn’t get very far out of sort from frame to frame.
But what’s particularly infuriating here is that, if they had evidence that Long has done anything wrong, they easily could have arrested him at any point over the last ten weeks when he was in the US. The reality is that they could have arrested him at any time over the last decade because he has lived in three countries with highly US-loyal autocracies: Egypt, the UAE and Qatar. But he was never arrested, never charged with anything - just denied the basic right to travel.
— US Air Force veteran, finally allowed to fly into US, is now banned from flying back home.
We also conclude that allowing officers to conduct a border search of an electronic device without reasonable suspicion would be harmful to civil rights/civil liberties without concomitant national security benefits.
There, DHS. FTFY. For the original, see the Executive Summary of the of DHS review of border search policies. And Wired’s article. And finally, the ACLU has a disturbing map of the regions of the U.S. in which the 4th amendment is suspended. It includes almost all major population centers.
Over here in the department of punditry, we deal with a lot of hard issues, ones on which the evidence is mixed and the options are all bad. But the immigration issue is a blessed relief. On immigration, the evidence is overwhelming; the best way forward is clear.
The forlorn pundit doesn’t even have to make the humanitarian case that immigration reform would be a great victory for human dignity. The cold economic case by itself is so strong.
— The Easy Problem — David Brooks on the urgent, and blindingly obvious, need for immigration reform.