IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

License Plate Obliteration - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

From the following URL of July of last year:

https://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/475-22/transcript-mayor-eric-adams-crackdown-vehicles-illegal-license-plates

We extract the following image at the head of a lengthy interview transcript:

The vehicle below was seen in the parking lot of a local grocery store. It was an immaculately clean and well cared for vehicle with a smeared out cover totally blocking anyone from reading any license plate number.

The underlying plate could not be read even when standing right up close. I could not even be certain that there was actually a license plate even present within that plastic shroud.

I have seen many similarly treated vehicles being driven at extreme speeds, committing moving violations of many kinds and to all powers of observation, getting away with it.

Blocked vehicle identifications is a topic that has been written about before. From more than ten years ago, please see:

http://licn.typepad.com/my_weblog/2012/08/license-plate-blockages-john-dunn-consultant-ambertec-pe-pc.html

For all this past decade and for many years before, this issue has been well known, well recognized well acknowledged and well ignored. Hidden and/or obscured and/or forged and/or fake and/or etc., etc. automobile registrations have been observed seemingly everywhere you look with little or no attempted intervention by supposed authorities.

This is not a matter of new discovery. This is a matter of long standing neglect and of extended law enforcement malfeasance, not just in New York City, but in other communities as well including my own.

Drivers of vehicles with non-discernible registrations seem free to violate as they choose pretty much any traffic law at any time. This means speeding, red-light violations, stop sign violations, one-way violations and more, all of which have led to fatalities.

In other words, because of this, some people are dead.

New York City was worthy of praise for at least starting to address the situation, but most other municipalities seem stuck in their head-in-the-sand modes. I'd hate to think that in such places, human lives are considered expendable.

Fake Caller - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

One day, we got bogus telephone calls from an apparent robocaller posing as NYU Langone, a local medical institution. When a second call came in shortly after a first call with the same Caller ID display, I let its recorded message play through to see what would happen.

Look at this:

After I let a recorded message play through once, there was maybe twenty seconds of silence followed by the recorded message being played again. At that point, I pressed the "Speaker" button on my telephone console and placed the handset in its cradle which kept the caller still connected without my having to physically hold anything. The recorded message was then played over and over again for an entire hour!!!

It was their nickel paying for the phone time and I was doing other things so I didn't care. It was actually intriguing to observe. Also, while the bogus caller was tied up on my line, other would be victims were for a little while at least not geting calls placed to themselves.

When I finally needed to use my phone, I raised the handset and lowered it again to disconnect the bogus caller.  (Bye-bye.)

In retrospect, the female voice in the recording sounded just like the recorded female voice in the legitimate messages we now and then receive from various legitimate institutions. Maybe that's the result of speech synthesis. I don't know.

The take away lesson: Eternal vigilance is an absolute must.

Keeping A Long Memory - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Consider the excerpt below taken from twelve years ago:

https://licn.typepad.com/my_weblog/2011/06/two-interviews-john-dunn-consultant-ambertec-pe-pc.html

I got an e-mail the other day with reference to a possible client who was experiencing a difficulty for which they were seeking a consultant to devise a remedy. I was told that one idea that had been offered was rejected by the would-be client because it "can't" be done. (No reason was stipulated for that.) A second idea that was offered was also rejected by the would-be client because it would be "too costly".

It looked to me like one of those situations where the goal was "Fix it but don't change anything." However, the moment of epiphany came when I looked at the name of the potential client. It was the same company that I had written about back on June 25, 2011.

Was this going to be something with the same managerial staff of a dozen years ago? I don't know, but I wasn't interested in finding out.

A Thought About Estates - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I am well into septuagenarianhood and grateful for the fact. I have survived several life threatening episodes which as a result of good medical care, have left me a still functional man, still able to accompany my wife of several decades in daily activities and still able to play with my three young grandsons.

None the less, I am very much aware of the possibility of impending mortality and I am further aware that my wife and/or my two grown sons will have to deal with many issues of estate once I have passed away. When my mother-in-law passed away roughly ten years ago, I found myself in that very position plus having to deal with the inappropriate behavior of one close relative which resulted in needless delays (two years) plus lawyer fees to bring those estate affairs to conclusion.

Matters of estate are and will remain complex enough on their own, even when everything happens smoothly. I do not intend to add any further level of complexity with which my family will have to contend upon my passing.

My wife and I are donating supporters of various entities. Among them are National Public Radio, The Nature Conservancy, various museums, various public arboretums and parks and so forth. These entities often ask their supporters to set up automated, periodic donations of whatever amount one might choose, but to me, doing so is unthinkable.

Post mortem, my executor(s) will have many issues to address. I do not intend to add any further entity issues to that list. I do not intend to have my executor(s) further burdened than they already will be with having to close any such automated arrangements. They will have more than enough things to do in addition to running their own lives and tending to living family needs.

Live long and prosper!!

Twit Squad - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I tried to attend a recent Zoom meeting whose topic was of some importance. I opened Zoom, signed in and got ready to listen. The first thing I heard was a cacophony of voices chattering away very loudly. Now and then I could actually discern a spoken word such as "lawyer" and "deductable" and "majority" and so forth and so on.

The meeting was slated to begin at 3:30 PM and just around that time, the moderator tried to call things to order, but it was a fruitless endeavor. Despite repeated requests for order, despite repeated requests for silence, despite repeated requests for attendees to mute their microphones, a whole gaggle of the attendees kept on talking with their microphones on and they simply would NOT mute themselves and they would NOT shut up! This went on and on for an hour and ten minutes during which the moderator was unable do a universal mute, apparently not knowing how to do it.

Some of the frustrated commentary that appeared in the "Chat" box was noteworthy.

Repeated calls for quiet were ignored. No verbal discussions were possible.

At the start, there had been three-hundred participants. By the time this debacle was ended, the number had declined to 111, all the time chattering away seemingly oblivious to the harm they had done and were continuing to do. I thought then about what the likelihood was of getting all of the participants to pipe down.

If the likelihood of getting one person to comply were say 98%, we would have a numerical likelihood of 0.98. Following that, if there were two persons of individual likelihoods of 0.98 each, the combined likelihood would be 0.98² = 0.98^2 = 0.9604 or a 96.04% chance of compliance.

Similarly, three persons would come to 0.98^3 or 94.12%, ten persons would come to 0.98^10 or 81.71% and so forth. In aforementioned situation, there were three hundred participants for which 0.98^300 comes to .00233 or 0.233% which I would call negligibly small.

Graphically, for three different single-person likelihoods, the probabilities of successful muting of everyone would look like this:

Messy, isn't it!

A follow-up e-mail came in the following day as:  "......members were unable to join virtually due to technological difficulties. We apologize to those who had difficulty joining the meeting. We want to assure you that you did not miss out on any new information about......"

There's going to be another Zoom attempt next month. I can't wait.