Daily Archives: December 18, 2014

While the reception to President Obamas announcement that the United States would move to normalize relations with Cuba has overall been quite positive, some lawmakers, pundits, and The Washington Posts editorial pagehave questioned the wisdom of opening up relations with a regime that tramples its citizens most basic human rights. It is of course true that the Cuban regime engages in human rights violations. Yet, as Dan Drezner points out, thats true too for many other states that the United States has diplomatic and trade relations with.

So how bad are Cubas human rights violations in comparison with that of other countries? It is notoriously difficult to measure just how badly a government abuses the rights of its citizens in any given year. Yet, there are academics and NGOs who try, each using slightly different concepts, information, and metrics. In a recent article inthe American Political Science Review, Penn State political scientistChristopher J. Farissdevelops a smart measurement model that captures the common component among different measures of physical integrity rights. Moreover, this model generates measures that are comparable over time.

The graph above uses this data. Cuba is clearly in the bottom half of the distribution but its record has improved somewhat over the past two decades. The graph also highlights two Communist countries with whom the United States has had troublesome relations. Critics of the policy change highlight North Korea, which has a much worse record than Cuba, which has gotten even more atrocious in recent years. Vietnam, emphasized by President Obamain his speech, is a better comparison. Indeed, the two countries have a nearly identical human rights record according to this measure (it may be different if we would focus on other rights than physical integrity rights, which include torture, political imprisonment, government killing and other forms of repression).

While the Post editorial is correct that Vietnams record has not improved since theUnited States has established economic relations with it, I am not sure this is the best way to think about the issue. By the Fariss measure, Cuba ranks 62nd out of 197 on the list of the worst human rights abusers in 2010 (the last year for which data is available). There may be little reason to believe that opening relations will dramatically improve this record but there is even less reason to think that seeking to isolate one third of the worlds countries for the way they treat their citizens is a sensible foreign policy.

Erik Voeten is the Peter F. Krogh Associate Professor of Geopolitics and Justice in World Affairs at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Department of Government.

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Monkey Cage: Putting Cuban human rights violations in some context

Human error was the culprit for a November outage of the Microsoft Azure cloud storage service. The company is hoping that recent updates that automate formerly manual processes will help prevent similar outages in the future.

"Microsoft Azure had clear operating guidelines but there was a gap in the deployment tooling that relied on human decisions and protocol," wrote Jason Zander, Microsoft vice president for Azure, in a blog post Wednesday detailing the outage. "With the tooling updates the policy is now enforced by the deployment platform itself."

This is not the first time Azure has been bedeviled by human failure.

In February 2013, a lapsed security certificate led to a major Azure outage.

Both cases show how even small errors can have a huge impact in a service as large as Azure, and seem to have reinforced for Microsoft the importance of automating manual processes as thoroughly as possible.

This latest Azure outage happened late in the evening of Nov. 18, Pacific Standard Time (Nov. 19 Coordinated Universal Time), due to intermittent failure from some of the company's storage services.

Other Azure services that relied on the storage service also went offline, most notably the Azure Virtual Machines.

The outage stemmed from a change in the configuration of the storage service, one that was made to improve the performance of the service.

Typically, Microsoft, like most other cloud providers, will test a proposed change to its cloud services on a handful of servers. This way, if there is a problem with the configuration change, engineers can spot it early before a large number of customers are impacted. If the change works as expected, the company will then roll the change out to larger numbers of servers in successive waves, until the entire system is updated.

In the case of this particular change, however, an engineer assumed that the update had already been tested in a number of waves (or "flights" in Microsoft parlance), and so went ahead and applied the change across the rest of the system.

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Human error root cause of November Microsoft Azure outage

Piltdown Man: the skull of a human and the jawbone of an orang utan

Since the publication of Darwins On the Origin of Species in 1859, scientists had been desperate to find the missing link that would prove that humans evolved from an ape-like ancestor

Then, in 1912, someone claimed to have found it in a gravel pit in Sussex.

Charles Dawson, a local solicitor and amateur fossil hunter, wrote to Arthur Smith Woodward at the Natural History Museum saying he had found pieces of a human-like skull. Smith Woodward rushed south, and joined the hunt. Soon, Dawson uncovered fragments of a jawbone. Smith Woodward used all the pieces to come up with a reconstruction of the skull , which combined an ape-like skull and jaw with teeth that looked decidedly human.

And so, on 18 December, Smith Woodward announced the discovery to a meeting of the Geological Society. He claimed eoanthropus dawsoni as he dubbed it was a 500,000 year-old predecessor of modern humans. The announcement caused a sensation.

But as time went on, more human fossils were found in other areas of the world, and none were quite like the Piltdown find. Scientists began to doubt their authenticity.

In the late 1940s tests were performed on the teeth; they were found to be no more than 50,000 years old.

Then, the skull and jaw were investigated more thoroughly, and found to come from two different animals one a human, and the other an orang utan. They also determined that the finds had been artificially aged.

In 1953, Piltdown Man was officially declared a fake a fake that had fooled scientists for 40 years. Nobody quite knows how did it or why. There are a few people in the frame, but the fact that no further evidence of the finds came after Charles Dawsons death in 1916, casts him firmly in the role of prime suspect.

That and his long record of scientific hoaxes.

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18 December 1912: Piltdown Man claimed as evolutions missing link