Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Europe in the Driver's Seat

Today I woke up to wonderful news. CERN has discovered the Higgs Boson particle, the so called "God" particle and the EU parliament has voted against ACTA. This is a great day for science and for freedom of expression.

What do these mean? Well, the Higgs particle is supposed to be the particle that gives everything else mass. It is the actual building block that everything in our universe is supposedly built upon. Why do I say supposedly? Well, the discovery is with a 5 sigma confidence. This is a really good, but in many cases they like to have 9 sigma. What does that mean in layman's terms? So most testing is looking for a probability of less than 5% that this could happen by pure happenstance, or random error. This means that 95% of your data bear out the test your trying to answer. This happens around 2 sigma where sigma represents a standard deviation. Most products are made with safety specifications around 2 sigma, maybe three sigma (99.73%). The values that we're talking about are so high, that you're starting to get into the range of lottery winning (or plane accidents for that matter) likelihood for 5 or 9 sigma. With such high confidence you actually start to run into a greater likelihood of missing the actual signal than for it to not actually be there. You are being so strict on your data requirements that something that actually is the real signal is ignored by your data set.

Does this change my daily life? No not at all. We won't be able to do anything functional at this level for more than a century if ever. We're still working on the results of Einstein's theories and how to apply them. We haven't really gotten quantum computing working or any of the other cool things we're working on (teleporting light and particles for example). However, it does give us a greater understanding of how the universe works and we've had to develop a lot of new technologies to detect these particles. The technologies could be very useful in the future for completely unrelated applications.

ACTA is a very different story. I've talked about it in the past and mentioned how much of a risk it was to the openness of the internet and to our society as a whole. The largest political body in Europe has decided to reject ACTA. The vote wasn't even remotely close. Our hard work has paid off and the treaty is effectively dead. In the US it hasn't been ratified by the Legislative branch and is really only going to be between the US and Morocco, which really isn't going to be very effective. This is fantastic news and I'm extremely excited about this.

Unfortunately, we can't just take a break, we have to keep working on the main reason why these laws are even brought up for vote in the first place. The USTR is currently negotiating the TPP which is starting to be viewed in a similar fashion as ACTA. I believe that we're on the right path for stopping these types of legislation and treaties.

Way to go Europe in two major things.

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