Dan Jones

Previously: Martin Prince, the Queen of Summer.

The world owes a great deal to minor Simpsons characters, and I have taken it upon myself to periodically-yet-irregularly celebrate them as the spirit moves me. Today we honor Ralph Wiggum.

There is no place on the social structure for a second-grade boy who thinks rats are “pointy kitties” and calls his teacher “Mommy.” Kids can be misfits (Milhouse), or they can be brownnosers (Martin), or they can be troublemakers (Nelson), or they can be tattle-tales (Sherri and Terri), but being Ralph is simply not a taxonomically viable option.

Ralph is not a rule-follower like Lisa, nor a rule-breaker like Bart; Ralph does not observe the rules because he is almost completely unaware of them. More than any of the other students at Springfield Elementary, Ralph is a child. Bart and Lisa and Milhouse and Nelson and Janey are kids, and therein lies the difference. Ralph sees things that aren’t there (“Ralph, remember the time you said Snagglepuss was outside?” “He was going to the bathroom!”), eats paste, picks his nose, volunteers unprompted, nonsensical declarations (“My cat’s breath smells like cat food”) disguised as Zen koans. His character is sometimes written as dim-but-profound, sometimes borderline-psychotic, and occasionally developmentally disabled, but more than anything else, Ralph like what he is: a child who hasn’t yet aged into a kid, which is one of the most embarrassing things a child can be.

In Season Three’s “Lisa’s Pony,” Ralph makes one of his earliest speaking appearances, although his voice sounds entirely different and his character is nothing like what we will see in future episodes. Lisa gallops past a clutch of second-graders on Princess, and Ralph exclaims in upper-crust tones: “Yes, but what man can tame her?”

Later, in “Lisa the Beauty Queen,” Ralph plays half of a Pat-and-Mike routine that gets off one of the best lines in Simpsons history after watching Lisa totter by in her lightning-blackened Little Miss Springfield ensemble:

Blonde Boy: Love that chewing-gum walk!

Proto-Ralph: Ver-ry Wrigley!

It’s still nothing near the canonical Ralph who will go on to bend his Wookie and get too many nosebleeds, but it’s a scene I could watch on repeat for hours. Part of me wishes there was still a place in Springfield Elementary for two tiny, patter-talking Casanovas.

By Ralph’s first turn in the spotlight in “I Love Lisa,” his characterization is set: he’s not allowed to use scissors, not even the safety variety. Ms. Hoover — hardly a defender of the defenseless to begin with — tells him that “the other children are right to laugh.” And they do.

The other students start distributing Valentines to one another, and Ralph slowly realizes that no one — no one — is going to give him one. It’s one of the relatively few moments on the show where Ralph seems aware of how other people see him, that he’s friendless and weird and utterly unacceptable, and it’s absolutely heartbreaking.

Lisa can’t stand watching Ralph cry any more than we can, and she tosses him a hastily-signed card that reads “I Choo-Choo-Choose You,” and Ralph is utterly delighted. It’s a particularly lovely moment, not just because Lisa saves him from humiliation, but because it’s one of the rare moments when Ralph is in on the joke. How often does Ms. Hoover take the time to make sure Ralph understands what he’s reading? He spends all day in school, and Lisa’s the first person to ever take a second to teach him. The train goes choo-choo, and she choo-choo-chooses him.

He gets the joke, and for once the punchline isn’t him.

One of the most endearing parts of Ralph’s backstory is how supportive and warm his home life is. Anyone who fits in that badly at school deserves a loving set of parents. They don’t always get it.

His father, Chief Wiggum, is usually depicted as Ralph with a nightstick and a gun (which is part of what makes Chief Wiggum ridiculous while Ralph remains lovable; Ralph has no actual power to abuse), and regularly takes his son out on patrol with him. He’s happy to tolerate Ralph’s quirks (Wiggle Puppy — the character Ralph inhabits when he drops to all fours, runs around in a circle, and barks — comes foremost to mind) and quick to dispense fatherly advice when Ralph comes to him with girl problems. “A woman’s a lot like a nut, son,” Chief Wiggum says, before pulling out his gun and shooting a walnut open in frustration.

But Ralph is more than Chief Wiggum minus power. Ralph’s goodness is not the absence of malice. Ralph’s goodness is pure and unself-conscious. “Was President Lincoln okay?” he asks Ms. Hoover worriedly after learning of the Ford Theater assassination. It’s the last day of school, and everyone else has already left for the summer. Ralph’s not leaving until he makes sure that President Lincoln is doing all right.

Ms. Hoover does the only thing. “He was fine.”

Ralph can go home after that. No one will suffer alone as long as Ralph is around.

Unfortunately for Lisa, Ralph does not know how to love by halves. It would be easy to mistake Ralph for an early version of the Dogged Nice Guy, who can’t take no for an answer, but that’s not the case at all here. Lisa’s too nice to tell him that while she feels sorry for him, she doesn’t actually want to be around him; she’s kind enough not to let him get hurt, but not so kind she’ll be friends with someone who calls Superintendent Chalmers “Super Nintendo Chalmers.”

He thinks she’s his girlfriend, but she’s not even really his friend. He doesn’t know any better. Ralph never does.

Lisa finally snaps when Ralph announces they’re boyfriend and girlfriend at the Krusty special — “I don’t like you, I never liked you,” she says.

“You can actually pinpoint the second when his heart rips in half,” Bart says later, watching the rejection on tape, then gleefully rewinding it.

I love that Lisa has a little bow in her hair and a larger strand of pearls, and that Ralph is wearing a coat and tie. That’s exactly how two little kids dressed up by their parents for a formal event would look; it makes his heartbreak look all the more adult.

One of the funniest, most poignant moments in the episode come when Ralph delivers a bravura performance as George Washington in the school play (“But couldn’t we just give in to the British?” “NEVER!“) and Patty, overwhelmed, sinks into her seat and mutters, “Now there’s a real man.” Ralph is full of hidden surprises.

What I love most about the ending to “I Love Lisa” is that it puts Lisa and Ralph back on equal footing. He’s revealed a surprising depth of character — she’s made her feelings explicit with a new Valentine’s Day card (“Let’s BEE friends!”) — and they swing under the watchful gaze of Chief Wiggum, who turns off the radio after reports of a robbery in progress. He’s not the Chief of Police tonight. He’s just a dad.

This moment in “Lisa’s Rival” is the quintessence of Ralph; his life is equal parts charmed and cursed. He’s won the diorama fair that both Lisa and Allison have half-killed themselves for by bringing in a box of Star Wars figurines in their original wrappings…which he trips and falls over before uttering the now-famous line, “I bent my Wookie.”

When Lisa and Allison invite Ralph to come over and play anagrams with them, they find a way to challenge without hurting each other. It’s clear that the field is not level — has never been level — and the object becomes no longer to win but simply to play.

Lisa: Hey Ralph, want to come with me and Alison to play “Anagrams”?

Alison: We take proper names and rearrange the letters to form a description of that person.

Ralph: My cat’s breath smells like cat food.

Ralph’s answer isn’t right, but he’s telling the truth.

Let us pause in a moment of silence for Milhouse, whose hopeless affection for Lisa will never be returned; even in her worst fears for the future, the worst thing she can imagine (“Lisa the Simpson,” Season 9) is being married to Ralph. Being married to Milhouse is not even an option in her worst nightmares.

Ralph is so memorable in part because he is the most real of all the Simpsons characters; as outlandish as his behavior can sometimes seem, he’s as real as a cartoon boy gets. He’s covered in chocolate. His toys are sticky. He gets stuck in Chinese Finger traps, and his mom has to arrange playdates for him.

Look at what happens to the two students who “obviously had no help from their parents” during the school pageant in “$pringfield”:

Even Lisa, one of the smartest kids in school, can’t do better than Homer’s thrown-together foam-rubber number. And Ralph? He’s Idaho. Everyone can tell he’s Idaho.

“I’m Idaho!” Ralph announces.

“Yes, of course you are,” Principal Skinner says, and he’s right.

In “Lisa The Greek,” Ralph gives a report about “the happiest day of his life” to the rest of Miss Hoover’s class. It was the day the doctor told him “[he] didn’t have worms anymore.” The children laugh at him, and maybe, as usual, they’re right to — it’s a bit too personal, a little ridiculous, a little childish, especially compared to Lisa’s subsequent ode to professional sports — but if you were just eight years old, and you had worms, and the doctor got rid of them for you, well, that might be the happiest day of your life, too.

Ralph knows how to be happy. You don’t have to be happy for him. He’ll be happy enough for himself.

A bug can turn you into a vegetarian, or at least make you swear off red meat. Doctors across the U.S. are seeing a surge of sudden meat allergies in people bitten by a certain kind of tick, and one allergist on Long Island says she's seen 200 cases.

This bizarre problem was only discovered a few years ago but is growing as the ticks spread from the Southwest and the East to more parts of the United States. In some cases, eating a burger or a steak has landed people in the hospital with severe allergic reactions.

Few patients seem aware of the risk, and even doctors are slow to recognize it. As the Long Island allergist said, "Why would someone think they're allergic to meat when they've been eating it their whole life?"

Ticks Spreading West on Long Island

Health officials say some disease-carrying ticks that used to be found only around the Montauk area are now showing up in western Suffolk County. Greg Cergol reports.

The culprit is the Lone Star tick, named for Texas, a state famous for meaty barbecues. The tick is now found throughout the South and the eastern half of the United States.

Researchers think some other types of ticks also might cause meat allergies; cases have been reported in Australia, France, Germany, Sweden, Spain, Japan and Korea.

Weird News Photos: Macabre Display

The bugs harbor a sugar that humans don't have, called alpha-gal. The sugar is also found in red meat — beef, pork, venison, rabbit — and some dairy products. It's usually fine when people encounter it through food that gets digested.

But a tick bite triggers an immune system response, and in that high-alert state, the body perceives the sugar the tick transmitted to the victim's bloodstream and skin as a foreign substance, and makes antibodies to it. That sets the stage for an allergic reaction the next time the person eats red meat and encounters the sugar.

Louise Danzig, a 63-year-old retired nurse from Montauk, experienced it last summer.

Hours after eating a burger, "I woke up with very swollen hands that were on fire with itching," she said. As she headed downstairs, "I could feel my lips and tongue were getting swollen," and by the time she made a phone call for help, "I was losing my ability to speak and my airway was closing."

She had had recent tick bites, and a blood test confirmed the meat allergy.

"I'll never have another hamburger, I'm sure," Danzig said. "I definitely do not want to have that happen to me again."

In Mount Juliet near Nashville, Tennessee, 71-year-old Georgette Simmons went to a steakhouse on June 1 for a friend's birthday and had a steak.

"About 4:30 in the morning I woke up and my body was on fire. I was itching all over and I broke out in hives. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before," she said.

A few weeks later, for a brother's birthday, she ordered another steak. Hours later she woke "almost hysterical" with a constricted throat in addition to hives and a burning sensation. She, too, recalled tick bites.

Dr. Robert Valet at Vanderbilt University said Simmons was one of two patients he diagnosed with the meat allergy that day. He warned her it could be worse next time.

"I never did eat a lot of red meat anyway but when I go out I like a nice filet. Right now I wouldn't even eat hamburger meat," Simmons said.

At the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, "I see two to three new cases every week," said Dr. Scott Commins, who with a colleague, Dr. Thomas Platts-Mills, published the first paper tying the tick to the illness in 2011.

One of the first cases they saw was a bow hunter who had eaten meat all his life but landed in the emergency department several times with allergic reactions after eating meat. More cases kept turning up in people who were outdoors a lot.

"It seemed something geographical. We thought at first it might be a squirrel parasite," Commins said. "It took us a while to sort of put everything together" and finger the tick, he said.

Dr. Erin McGintee, an allergy specialist on eastern Long Island, an area with many ticks, has seen nearly 200 cases over the last three years. At least 30 involved children, and the youngest was 4 or 5. She is keeping a database to study the illness with other researchers.

"It is bizarre," she said. "It goes against almost anything I've ever learned as an allergist."

McGintee said the symptoms can occur as long as eight hours after eating meat, rather than immediately, and the culprit is a sugar — a type of carbohydrate — whereas most food allergies are caused by proteins.

Allergic reactions can be treated with antihistamines to ease itching, and more severe ones with epinephrine. Some people with the allergy now carry epinephrine shots in case they are stricken again.

Doctors don't know if the allergy is permanent. Some patients show signs of declining antibodies over time, although those with severe reactions are understandably reluctant to risk eating meat again. Even poultry products such as turkey sausage sometimes contain meat byproducts and can trigger the allergy.
___

Online:

Where ticks live: http://www.cdc.gov/ticks/maps/lone_star_tick.html

Tick info and advice: http://tinyurl.com/md7y78g

Copyright Associated Press / NBC New York

I got this in my email, from Amazon: http://www.readersunited.com/

it's not about emacs, but about policies and future of ebooks. In short, there's a dispute between Amazon and another big company. Amazon, claims to want to lower price of ebooks, but the publisher refuse.

If you have any interest in policies in society and books, check it out.

For civic policy wonks and anyone interested in open data, New York City’s taxi trip logs are a fascinating specimen – over 20 gigabytes worth of trip and fare data comprising more than 173 million individual rides. And that’s just from 2013.

The data, obtained via freedom of information request, was anonymized to protect the identities of the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission’s drivers. Or so the people who released the data set thought. The reality is, it didn’t take long before a software developer found that, with a bit of code, those identities were actually quite easy to ascertain.

“This anonymization is so poor that anyone could, with less then 2 hours work, figure which driver drove every single trip in this entire data set,” wrote Vijay Pandurangan, a former Google engineer and founder and CEO of a company called Mitro. “It would even be easy to calculate drivers’ gross income, or infer where they live.”

This isn’t the first time this has happened, that big data sets full of personal information – supposedly obscured, or de-identified, as the process is called – have been reverse engineered to reveal some or even all of the identities contained within. It makes you wonder: Is there really such a thing as a truly anonymous data set in the age of big data?

That’s a question privacy advocates and researchers have been fighting over, for, well, years. On the one hand, some argue that you can never really anonymize a data set – that, with enough secondary information, it’s not difficult to corroborate, cross-reference, and thus re-identify at least some of the people catalogued within. On the other, Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian, along with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation’s senior analyst Daniel Castro, published a report last month attempting to put this “myth” to rest. “Setting the record straight,” the report was titled. “De-identification *does* work.”

That might sound like a bore, but think about it this way: there’s more than taxi cab data at stake here. Pretty much everything you do on the Internet these days is a potential data set. And data has value. The posts you like on Facebook, your spending habits as tracked by Mint, the searches you make on Google – the argument goes that the social, economic and academic potential of sharing these immensely detailed so-called “high dimensional” data sets with third parties is too great to ignore.

If that’s the case, you better hope there’s a pretty surefire way to scrub data sets of our personal information before release. Cavoukian and Castro worry that we’ll be so scared off by incidents where data has been poorly de-identified – and mistake those scenarios for examples of why de-identification doesn’t work – that we’ll decide not to share our data at all.

De-identification techniques recommended by a European advisory body on data protection and privacy include the randomization or removal of direct identifiers – name, address and the like – normalizing data by removing outlying values, adding noise to the data to obscure exact values, and generalizing data by, say, only including a person’s birth month, but not the day, or the province a person lives in but not the city. When combined, these techniques are said to give identifying data a high degree of anonymity. But not everyone believes they work.

University of Colorado Law School associate professor Paul Ohm’s 2009 paper on the topic made the bold claim that “data can be either useful or perfectly anonymous but never both.” To prove his point, Ohm cited three well-known data sets that had supposedly been de-identified – a set of AOL search queries, a Netflix viewing habits data study and a data set of ZIP codes, gender and birth date. In each case, when researchers correlated the data with another data set, they found that some identities could still be revealed.

A similar situation was cited by Princeton University researchers Arvind Narayanan and Edward W. Felten in a recent response to Cavoukian and Castro. The pair wrote that, in one data set where location data had supposedly been anonymized, it was still possible in 95 per cent of test cases to re-identify users “given four random spatio-temporal points” – and 50 per cent if the researchers only had two. In other words, de-identifying location data is moot if you know where a target lives, where they work and have two other co-ordinates they visit with regularity.

Cavoukian and Castro argue in their paper that many of these supposed successful re-identification attacks – including the ones mentioned by Ohm, Narayanan and Felten – are actually based on data sets that were poorly de-identified in the first place (and in the case of the location data studio, question how easy it would be to actually get “four random spatio-temporal points"). Case in point: the New York City taxi data set wasn’t actually anonymous data, but pseudonymous data. All the people preparing the data did was replace the drivers’ identities – a direct identifier – with anonymous values that were trivial for Pandurangan to reverse engineer. The creators didn’t add any noise to the dataset, and didn’t make any values more vague. The basic tenants of de-identification just weren’t there.

“Could the NYC taxi dataset have been de-identified reliably?” asked Narayanan and Felten. “Nobody knows.” Cavoukian and Castro still think the answer is clear, but so much for setting the record straight.

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Passengers have publicly pined for a ban on in-flight cell-phone calls, and they may soon get their wish: The Transportation Department announced last week it plans to make the skies a no-call zone.

But the airline industry is pushing back, with carriers saying they deserve the right to set their own phone policies, particularly now that federal authorities say phones won't interfere with planes' instruments.

And in setting those policies, airlines could be on the verge of a cash cow: Given the freedom to find their own solutions, some airlines say they might look at options like phone booths or quiet zones similar to what some railroads currently offer. JetBlue, for instance, is considering a separate area for passengers who want to use their phones.

Other airlines have considered sections similar to the "quiet cars" offered on trains. It's not hard to imagine airlines pitching themselves as "call-free" or "always connected"—with an added charge for each.

Say you need to make an emergency call mid-flight (the DOT's plan will still allow you to connect to the outside world with texting and data). You might have to make your way to another section of the plane, wait in line, and then pay to access a calling area.

Or perhaps you're on an airline that offers unrestricted calling and just don't want to be bothered. For a convenience charge, you can pay in advance for a quiet seat—and hope your neighbors observe the rules.

These charges are all hypothetical at the moment, but some passengers have already said they'd pay up. Holiday travelers told National Journal last year they'd be willing to pay upwards of hundreds of dollars to use their phones—or avoid those who do. One flier said he'd pay $300 to avoid sitting next to mobile chatterboxes. Other business travelers said they'd pay to stay connected in the air.

"If the current airline environment has taught us anything, it's that airlines are not afraid to charge a fee for everything," said Erik Hansen of the U.S. Travel Association, a network of travel and tourism companies. "It's not out of the realm of possibility."

Corey Caldwell, a spokeswoman for the Association of Flight Attendants, agreed. "The ancillary revenue stream is very important in the finances of our aviation industry," she said. "It's not surprising that airlines are trying to think of ways to help boost revenue, and I think that's just one of them."

Fees or not, airline defenders say it's an overstep to ban calls just because they're annoying. "There's no good reason to ban it from a technological perspective," said Tim Farrar, a consultant who monitors the issue. "It's sort of pandering—we can do something that passengers appear to want."

The Federal Communications Commission overturned its long-standing ban in December, saying interference concerns were no longer an issue. "We are not the Federal Courtesy Commission," Chairman Tom Wheeler said at the time, while noting DOT could still issue a ban of its own.

Hansen says it's more than a courtesy issue. "There are some serious safety concerns over whether in-flight calls could provoke cabin rage," he said. "What we can't do is just reflexively allow calls to happen on planes and think that there will be no unintended consequences."

And passengers won't be the only ones who suffer, added Caldwell. "When there is an issue at 35,000 feet, there's only a certain amount of things that flight attendants can do to de-escalate a situation and contain it," she said. "When people are talking on their cell phones and creating a disturbance in the cabin, flight attendants are then distracted from their role as first responder."

Farrar thinks these fears are overblown. Airlines would have to rework plane infrastructure to make calls happen in the first place, and no carrier would allow calls for long if customers took their business elsewhere. "Airlines will find their own solutions and passengers will choose based on what matters to them," he said.

He also expressed concern that international flights, on which calls are allowed, could face confusion when entering U.S. airspace. Texting and data, which are not included in the ban, could also get mixed up in the issue if standards are unclear.

A pair of airline advocacy groups did not respond to requests for comment.

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