Yesterday, I read how the business school had a security breach with 197,000 files were exposed to the attacker. I didn’t think much of it, as never being attached to the business school, and thought it was a bit of poetic justice to the entity that seems to act a bit more than cocky.
Then, this morning, I get the e-mail below. Apparently, they have my social security number in some of their files because I took a couple of non-major courses within the school.
I think I should get a brandon.kraft@ba02.im.better.than.you.mccombs.utexas.edu e-mail address for this.

From: President William Powers Jr.
Subject: McCombs School of Business security breach
Date: April 25, 2006
A serious breach of security has been discovered in the primary
administrative information system at the McCombs School of Business at
The University of Texas at Austin. This system contains 197,000
individual records, and many but not all, contain Social Security
numbers. Among those in the system are Business School alumni, students
(including students who have taken a few courses or one course at
McCombs), admissions applicants, present and former faculty and staff,
and corporate recruiters. I write to inform you that your record is
contained in the breached McCombs system.
At least 106,000 individual records containing names and Social Security
numbers were accessed (downloaded) by the intruder. If you are a current
McCombs faculty or staff member, initial analysis indicates you are
included in this number. If you are a current McCombs student or
alumnus, there is a very high probability you are included. We are less
certain about the risk to others affiliated with McCombs.
Rather than wait for additional analysis to determine the extent of your
risk, we advise you today to take precautions immediately to protect
your credit. The University strongly recommends that you place a “fraud
alert” on your file with the three major credit bureaus. Instructions
for placing the no-charge fraud alerts, and other information about the
security breach can be found on the special Web site,

You will be receiving additional communication from the University that
clarifies which, if any, information about you was obtained by the
intruder. Please do not wait for our follow-up communication to take
action.
If you have questions or concerns not covered in the above Web site,
please contact the University via email to datatheft@mccombs.utexas.edu
or by calling 475-9020 (local Austin number) or 866-657-9400
(toll-free). Our help desk is open 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through
Friday.
Please know that the University is committed to doing everything it can
to ensure the security of any personal information received from you,
and to working vigorously with law enforcement authorities to identify
and prosecute those responsible for this intrusion.

Everyone close to campus remembers the crazy mob of people who visited The University of Texas following our football National Championship win at the Rose Bowl. The Tower was lit with a 1 in the “Athletic Championship” configuation. Everyone acted like they had never seen it. Without checking on the minor sports, baseball has won it all twice since I stepped foot on campus.
Well, tonight, everyone should go crazy and drive to campus to take a mindless number of pictures of the Tower.
Our Women’s Track and Field team won the NCAA Championships, held March 10-11. If you missed the Tower lit for football, go tonight and take a picture with it. It’ll look exactly the same tonight as it did after the Rose Bowl so you can fake it for football with no one being the wiser.
I love football as much as the next guy, but let’s go crazy for our other sports as well. Good job Lady Longhorns. Hook ‘Em

The use of tokens in the early Mespoptamian region as a precussor to the written symbol is a plausible and interesting idea.
It makes the transition from speech to writing easier to find. For example, the early cave paintings found in France told us that our prehistorical brothers and sisters attempted to record events in their lives. There was little developed after that in that region in terms of writing.
In the Middle East, the use of tokens as an economic tool gives it a very practical existence. First, these tokens were needed to help understand their economic situation. Of course, carrying around a bag full of tokens could lead to problems so why not translate those pieces of clay and stone into symbols that looked like them, then inscribe them onto tablets?
Writing is born as an economic tool.
However, tokens were also found in some burial locations. Does this change anything to do with the economic theory? No. Throughout history, individuals are buried with certain things that describe them in this life. A weathly shepherd may be buried with some tokens representing the success he had with raising animals. Likewise, sacrifice is sometihng that is common throughout history and prehistory. These tokens may be represented of the animals that were sacrificed on the deceased person’s behalf.
The use of tokens to describe what was sacrificed for someone or something could be seen as the first “Spiritual Bouquet”, using Catholic terminology..

It is funny to think how much we take Turing and his work for granted today.
My roommate is an electrical engineer and I’ve tinkered in programming since 1990 (I still miss BASIC). For me, this concept is a given. A computer using a simple binary system for everything. It is either X or O, 0 or 1, open or closed. Logically, almost everything can be described like this- or at least we would like everything to be described like this.
This concept, however, still has a lot of work needed on it. Computers can’t yet write poetry or even translate between languages that well yet. How can we better define the rules to the game? Can we develop a broaded way of operating on those rules? What about X, O and L instead of just X and O?
Calculus killed me so I can’t begin to postulate on something like this, but what’s next?
Computers continue to become faster and able to do more calculations per second, but how and when are we going to transform the way which they do calculations?

We all remember the butterfly ballot that led to so much talk about the validity of the 2000 Election. This is a very good example of poor information design.
A redesign would be extremely simple.
Assuming the same machine functions the same way and is the same size, I would design something based on the following.

• No “butterfly effect”
• Use strong (bold) text for the main party candidates, by the definition used to determine the major parties that recieve federal funding
• Alternate colors between rows. Either white and yellow or white and green
• On the left side, list the party name with the symbol of the party
• On the right side, list the candidates for that party, with a picture of each candidate
• The “write-in” section would remain at the bottom

By losing the “butterfly effect”, you lose most of the reason for confusion. Adding stronger text for the major parties help to people to recall the major candidates, avoiding giving a third-party candidate his highest single-county results. Alternative colors help people verify which names correspond with what punch hole. Splitting the data with the punch hole between further reduces possible conflicts on where to punch. The use of the party symbols is to aid non-English speaking voters.