Friday Fraud News You Can Use

Cover via Amazon

Ed Dickson, writing as his blog Fraud, Phishing and Financial Misdeeds, has a great overview of identity theft and national security:

"insecure our borders really are. It also shows the more severe consequences of allowing identity theft to run rampant in our society.

Now that the election is over, perhaps it's time for our politicians to stop ignoring the problem. We are a nation of immigrants, and in the end, very few of us are against hard-working people trying to better themselves.

The problem is that the way we currently approach the problem enables criminals (and potentially terrorists) to operate and profit at the expense of society."

Dr. Vaughan Bell, writing at Mind Hacks, summarizes:

"dangerous psychology studies where researchers have risked life and limb to carry out some of the more extreme experiments in psychology."

If you haven't read Mind Hacks, you should check it out.  It is more than the usualy blog about a book.  Also, you have to like someone who has this in their creative commons license:

"I'm hardly going to get lawyers involved if you do rip off my stuff, so if you don't have the courtesy to acknowledge where the article came from, fine, you're rude. I'll just take it as a rather ill-conceived complement."

Finally, Tom Vanderbilt, writing at his blog How We Drive, points out a critical difference between the safety culture amongst pilots versus doctors, and drivers.

"We tend to emphasize the random, "accidental" nature of car crashes, something that would be unacceptable in the commercial aviation industry (which hasn't had a fatality in the last two years).

Protocols are set, rules are followed, training is essential, and pilots are encouraged to avoid overconfidence and respond to input from other staff.

In his forthcoming book Why We Make Mistakes, Joseph T. Hallinan quotes a study showing when pilots and doctors were asked the question, "even when fatigued, I perform effectively during critical times," 70% of doctors said yes, compared to only 26% of pilots (I'd like to see this question asked to drivers).

Hallinan notes the human body is more complicated than aviation; but still, culture matters."