Position:

Principal Scientist

Address:

Computer Science Laboratory
333 Ravenswood Ave EL-243
Menlo Park California 94025-3493, USA

E-mail: Neumann@csl.sri.com

Webpage: http://www.csl.sri.com/neumann

Tel: 650/859-2375

(if you don't like voicemail, press "0" to speak with a real human being.)

This Web page (http://www.csl.sri.com/neumann) can also be reached from the primary CSL Web site (http://www.csl.sri.com) by clicking on "CSL Staff" and then "Neumann". (It differs from the default CSL page.) The following sections are included here, and can be moused directly if you do not want to read linearly.

Academic and R&D Background

The work for my two doctoral theses (Tony Oettinger was my Harvard advisor, and Alwin Walther my Darmstadt advisor) and various subsequent papers involved variable-length Huffman-like codes and later was extended to Huffman-style information-lossless sequential coding schemes with surprisingly strong self-resynchronization properties despite arbitrary fault modes and denial-of-service attacks, even in the presence of very low or minimum redundancy as in Huffman codes. These schemes provided the possibility of highly survivable communication systems in the presence of arbitrary temporary interference. Earlier, my undergraduate thesis in mathematics (1954) involved identifying five nomographic classes of motions based on elliptic integrals, establishing canonical transformations for each of those classes, and generating tables for them (using the Harvard Mark IV).

I had two reverse sabbaticals as Visiting Mackay Lecturer, during the spring quarter of 1964 at Stanford University in Electrical Engineering, and the academic year 1970-71 at U.C. Berkeley (teaching courses in hardware, operating systems, and coding theory, and co-leading two seminar courses). I also taught a course on survivable systems and networks at the University of Maryland in the fall of 1999, half in person, half by video teleconference; the course notes are indicated below.

My first computer job was in the summer of 1953, as a programmer on the IBM Card-Programmed Calculator, for the U.S. Naval Ordnance Lab in White Oak MD, a punched-card machine with four registers and ZERO memory. (The cards provided auxiliary memory!) Among other things, I wrote a nifty recursive complex matrix-inversion routine. The three-address instruction interpretation was done in the plugboard, which represented an early assembler! My boss was Cal Elgot, who later became director of the IBM mathematics group at IBM in its very early days at the Lamb Estate, before the research effort moved to the Watson Lab in Yorktown Heights, NY.

I had ten exciting years in the Computer Science Lab at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey (1960-70) -- including extensive involvement in Multics from 1965 to 1969. Beginning in 1965, Bob Daley (then at Project MAC at MIT) and I did the Multics file system design, which included directory hierarchies, access-control lists (ACLs), dynamic linking of symbolic names to cacheable descriptor-based addresses, and dynamically paged segments within a novel hardware-supported virtual memory concept. (It is nice to find dynamic linking again being ``rediscovered'' in Webware! Multics also had multiprogramming, multiprocessing, multiple protection domains, and other forms of multiplexing.) I had a minor role in the Multics input-output design, heavily influenced by Ken Thompson, Joe Ossanna, and Stan Dunten, with symbolic stream names (which Ken later transmogrified into Unix pipes) and device-independent I/O. After Vic Vyssotsky moved over to Whippany, I found myself the Bell Labs member of the Multics Triumvirate, coordinating with Fernando Corbató (Corby) at MIT and Charlie Clingen at Honeywell, and flying to MIT for a meeting almost every other week. There was some really beautiful innovation in Multics, and many wonderful people. For those of you who are young folks with little idea of Multics' contributions to computer history, check out Tom Van Vleck's Multicians website at http://www.multicians.org/, which (as of 19 Feb 2007) listed 1880 names of people who were associated with Multics! Particularly notable among those not already mentioned is Jerry Saltzer, although many others were important contributors as well.

Click here for a few selected bibliographic references and other items. A list of CSL-related .bib entries is available at the bottom of the official CSL Web site page for me .

Research Interests at SRI

Trustworthiness: Security

Incidentally, a significant effort is underway in Peter Denning's Great Principles project, which considers the importance of principles more broadly --- as common elements across system designs. He is in the process of writing a book on that effort.

The Provably Secure Operating System (PSOS) project began in 1973 and continued until 1983. The 1980 PSOS final report (noted in my partial reference list) has been scanned in and is online in PostScript form (over 300 pages). The report includes the system architecture and many of the basic hardware and operating system layers, plus some illustrative applications (all formal specified in the SPECIAL language of HDM, the Hierarchical Development Methodology). The Feiertag/Neumann paper summarizing the architecture as of 1979 is available in a retyped, more or less correct, hand-edited pdf form. A 2003 paper, PSOS Revisited by me and Rich Feiertag, was presented at ACSAC 2003 in Las Vegas in December 2003, as part of the Classic Papers track (which was initiated at ACSAC 2002 for the Karger-Schell paper on the Multics multilevel secure evaluation). Please read it if you are interested in capability architectures. The PSOS project continued from 1980 to 1983, supporting the Goguen-Meseguer papers and the Extended HDM effort that led to SRI's PVS system.

A 1996 report, Architectures and Formal Representations for Secure Systems, considers what formal methods can do for system security, and vice versa. It is available in PostScript form. and contains various references to earlier work, e.g., to our 1970s work on the formally specified capability-based object-oriented hierarchically-layered Provably Secure Operating System (PSOS), and the role of system structure and abstraction -- which has been a long-standing interest. A 1992 paper by Norm Proctor and me, Architectural Implications of Covert Channels from the 1992 Computer Security Conference, is available in html form. That paper develops the concept of multilevel-secure systems in which there are no end-user multilevel-secure workstations, and consequently no user-oriented covert channels. This paper is really a paper on how to build multilevel-secure systems and networks out of non-MLS end-user components and a few high-assurance trustworthy servers. It further pursues an approach begun by Rushby and Randell in their 1983 paper. The concept is also applicable to architectures of (single-level) networked systems in which trusworthiness is localized in certain critical servers. The Oracle thin-client network computer is ideally suited to such an architecture.

An extensive collection of information on our current efforts (EMERALD) and past work (IDES, NIDES) on analyzing systems and networks for the purposes of anomaly and misuse detection is available on our Website at http://www.csl.sri.com/intrusion.html, thanks to the efforts of my colleague Phil Porras. EMERALD significantly extends our earlier work, addressing not just host systems but also networks, servers, and hierarchically layered analysis. A 1997 paper is available in html form for browsing or in PostScript form for ftp-ing . A 1999 paper on Experience with EMERALD, jointly authored with Phil Porras, is available in PostScript and in html for the USENIX Workshop on Intrusion Detection and Network Management, 11-12 April 1999. (It won the best-paper award for the workshop!)

I helped organize a workshop on preventing, detecting, and responding to insider misuse, held in Santa Monica in August 1999. The final report and the slide materials for long and short briefings are available on our Web site at http://www2.csl.sri.com/insider-misuse/. My position paper for that workshop is also available on-line. A second workshop was held in Honolulu in July 2000.

I have updated and extended the 1999 paper in a new position paper, Combatting Insider Misuse, with Relevance to Integrity and Accountability in Elections and Other Applications, that I prepared for the Dagstuhl Workshop on Insider Threats, 20-25 July 2008 -- although I will be unable to attend. Just for kicks, let me mention my 1969 paper, The Role of Motherhood in the Pop Art of System Programming, from the 2nd Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, which has now been put on the Web courtesy of Olin Sibert and posted on Tom Van Vleck's Multicians website.

Trustworthiness: Survivable Systems and Networks

I taught a course ENPM 808s as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Maryland in the Fall of 1999 on material related to the Army Research Lab survivability study: http://www.csl.sri.com/neumann/umd808s.html. All of my UMd lecture materials (except for my RISKS book) are on-line as source-available open-course documents. (It is wonderful to see MIT's announcement of its OpenCourseWare in April 2001. That is a marvelous development.) My final set of Maryland lecture notes is also available in a 6-up PostScript form, that is, six slides to a printed page. Please let me know if you find the course materials interesting and/or useful. Similar courses were also taught at the University of Pennsylvania by Tony Barnes (I gave one of Tony's lectures), and at the University of Tennessee by Doug Birdwell (birdwell@hickory.engr.utk.edu) and Dave Icove (djicove@tva.gov) -- Electrical & Computer Engineering 599 -- using some of my lectures and lecture materials, and some of their own. Georgia Tech (Blaine Burnham) gave such a course in Winter 2000, and the Naval Postgraduate School (Cynthia Irvine) was contemplating such a course in the spring of 2000, according to an earlier discussion with Cynthia. Other universities have also expressed interest in piggypacking on the course materials.

Robust Open-Box Software

My two-page position paper for a panel on open-box software (e.g., open-source and free software, where you can actually get inside the box and change something, as opposed to black-box software where you cannot even see inside the box) at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy at Oakland CA, May 2000, is titled ``Robust Nonproprietary Software'' and is clickable (subject to IEEE copyright) in PostScript and pdf form.

A set of 28 slides for my keynote talk on the same general subject, titled ``The Potentials of Open-Box Source Code in Developing Robust Systems'' for an April 2000 NATO conference, on The Ruthless Pursuit of COTS is also available, in a variety of forms:
PostScript, 1 per page, 4 per page, 6 per page,
and pdf, 1 per page, 4 per page, 6 per page.
(I also handed out to the NATO audience a preprint of the IEEE-copyrighted position paper noted above: PostScript and pdf form.)

A 2001 set of slides on the pros and cons of open-box software, from a talk on 27 February 2001 is available in PostScript and pdf formats.

Open-box software is not a panacea -- it does not solve all the problems. It still requires all of the discipline in development and operation that we would like to see in proprietary closed-box software. But it has enormous potential, and needs to be pursued as a serious contender.

If you have an active interest in the development of robust nonproprietary open-box software, please contact me by e-mail about participating actively in a small newsgroup dedicated specifically to the challenges of robustifying open-box software.

Spam and E-Mail Risks

RISKS

The ever-growing document, Illustrative Risks to the Public in the Use of Computer Systems and Related Technology, summarizes as one-liners many of the most interesting cases over the past decades. It can be browsed. It is also available in more printer-friendly formats in pdf form and PostScript from ftp.sri.com or from csl.sri.com .

In 2006, I was once again asked to do a Classic Paper for ACSAC, this time revisiting the RISKS experience. The paper Risks of Untrustworthiness and the slides for the talk are online.

Various folks have taught and/or are teaching courses related to the RISKS material -- for example, Jerry Saltzer and others at MIT, Roy Maxion at CMU -- and Rebecca Mercuri when she was at Bryn Mawr.

In a related effort that is supported in part by the ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, Lauren Weinstein moderates the Privacy Forum Digest. He is providing a superb service for those of you who are deeply concerned about privacy issues. You may subscribe or request information via privacy-request@vortex.com . Check out the Privacy Forum on-line.

I am Associate Editor of the ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes (which I founded in 1976 and was Editor for its first 18 years before turning it over to Will Tracz) and Contributing Editor to the ACM (for the Inside Risks columns noted next). Excerpts from RISKS appear in each regular issue of ACM Software Engineering Notes.

I contribute to and edit a column in the Communications of the ACM, inside the back cover, called Inside Risks, the most recent columns of which are accessible on-line at http://www.csl.sri.com/neumann/insiderisks.html; reuse for commercial purposes is subject to CACM and author copyright policy. From July 1990 until June 2008, this was a monthly column that appeared inside the back cover of CACM. After 216 consecutive monthly appearances, the column is expected to appear less frequently in a newly revamped form of that journal.

I am very grateful to the members of the ACM CCPP, who have kept me and RISKS-related efforts on the straight and narrow over the past many years. CCPP includes Peter Denning, Sy Goodman, Jim Horning, Nancy Leveson, Dave Parnas, Jerry Saltzer, Barbara Simons, and Lauren Weinstein. (Rob Kling [deceased] was also a long-time member.) They have contributed nobly -- among other things, in guiding the authors of the monthly Inside Risks columns and acting as a review board when sensitive issues come up regarding RISKS submissions, and in some cases writing columns themselves.

One of the thornier issues relating to the lack of good software-engineering practice, particularly in the development of systems with critical requirements, is that of whether certification of programmers would help. A panel statement I wrote for the 2000 IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering is accessible in PostScript and pdf forms. I have deep concerns relating to certification and licensing. You should not read that position statement as an endorsement, but rather as a skeptical set of concerns. My keynote address slides are also available, PostScript.

Computer-Related Risks, The Book

The book has also been translated into Japanese and published by Addison-Wesley in 2000. ISBN 4-89471-141-9.

Computer-Related Elections

``Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.'' (attributed to Albert Einstein; thanks to Will Tracz for sending me this delightful quote, serendipitously relevant to problems with elections!)

My position paper for the CSTB workshop on Voter Registration Databases, December 29-30 2007, is online.

As noted above, the Illustrative Risks section on problems in past elections (click on Election Problems) is particularly timely in light of the the aftermath of the November 2000 Presidential election (fuzzy math? fuzzy aftermath?). I brought the section up to date on 15 Aug 2008 with respect to items in RISKS. The legend for the descriptors is at the beginning of the file. An excerpt of just the section on election problems (in a somewhat less readable format) is available as a 7-page pdf file.

Various columns relating to the use of computers in the voting process are included in the Inside Risks series in the Communications of the ACM:
Risks of E-Voting, Matt Bishop and David Wagner, November 2007
COTS and Other Electronic Voting Backdoors, Rebecca T. Mercuri, Vincent J. Lipsio, and Beth Feehan, November 2006
Evaluation of Voting Systems, Poorvi L. Vora, Benjamin Adida, Ren Bucholz, David Chaum, David L. Dill, David Jefferson, Douglas W. Jones, William Lattin, Aviel D. Rubin, Michael I. Shamos, and Moti Yung, November 2005
Security by Insecurity, Rebecca Mercuri and PGN, November 2003
Florida 2002: Sluggish Systems, Vanishing Votes, Rebecca Mercuri, November 2002
Uncommon Criteria, Rebecca Mercuri, January 2002
Vote Early, Vote Often, Rebecca Mercuri, November 2000
Corrupted Polling, Rebecca Mercuri, Nov 1993
Voting-Machine Risks, Rebecca Mercuri, Nov 1992
Risks in Computerized Elections, PGN, Nov 1990
and are particularly timely in light of the the aftermath of the November 2000 Presidential election (fuzzy math? fuzzy aftermath?) and various 2002 and 2004 problems.

In addition, a paper I wrote in 1993, Security Criteria for Electronic Voting, is also available. This paper was adapted for inclusion in Computer-Related Risks. Evidently, I have been a psephologist as well as a psephotechnologist -- for two decades. (Thanks to Doug Jones for pointing this out!)

A National Public Radio piece (just under 7 minutes) by Dan Charles featuring Rebecca Mercuri and me ran on 10 February 2003, and is available as audio from the NPR archives. An old LinkTV program excerpt (courtesy of Lauren Weinstein's editing) on voting is belatedly available online as an mp4 file. It is somewhat dated and chatty, but still generally relevant.

Ronnie Dugger's November 1988 article in The New Yorker is on my Web site. His long article in The Nation (August 16/23 2004) is also on-line (unfortunately, requiring nine downloads).

For the convenience of folks trying to uncover some of the earlier history prior to the year 2000 election problems, I have also placed some of the material on electronic voting in Computer-Related Risks, although that material is under Addison-Wesley copyright.

Finally, if this topic is of serious interest to you, check out Rebecca Mercuri's doctoral thesis on the subject; info at http://www.notablesoftware.com/evote.html. This is a remarkable thesis, and should be considered seriously by everyone involved in developing, evaluating, or using voting systems in future elections.

Furthermore, check out David Dill's Web site, http://verify.stanford.edu/evote.html, which has become a very valuable contribution to the cause of election integrity. Read his petition, and join hundreds of computer scientists and many other people as well in signing it. He has also summarized the proceedings currently ongoing in Santa Clara County, where he and I and (remotely) Rebecca Mercuri were involved in trying to get the county to include a voter-verified paper audit trail as a part of their efforts to rush into all-electronic voting machines. The county has been partially responsive, and has contracted for an upgrade path to that end. Subseqently, then California Secretary of State Shelley has mandated a VVPAT for all-electronic voting machines by 2006. Much more has happened since then, as evidenced by the current California Secretary of State Debra Bowen's Top-To-Bottom Review in 2007.

Also of topical interest are the first two items in Risks Forum issue vol 21 no 13, and also an article in the San Francisco Chronicle by Henry Norr on 4 December 2000, on the risks of touch-screen balloting (in PostScript form). Remarking on our efforts in February 2003 to get Santa Clara County to use voter-verified hardcopy ballot images in their ongoing procurement of touch-screen systems (for example, see David Dill's Web site noted above), a highly supportive article in the San Francisco Chronicle by Henry Norr on 3 March 2003. I greatly admire Henry's willingness to publicly change his mind when he discovered his earlier views were short-sighted -- as he has done in these two articles.

My position statement for a hearing of the California Assembly Committee on Elections Reapportionment and Constitutional Amendments on 17 Jan 2001 pdf and PostScript gives a one-page summary on the integrity of the election process plus two one-page items (the Inside Risks piece from January 2001 with Rebecca Mercuri, and an article in RISKS-21.14 by PGN, Rebecca Mercuri, and Lauren Weinstein). A statement for a subsequent hearing for the same committee on 15 Jun 2004 is also available: in pdf form. Testimony for the California Senate Elections Committee on 8 Feb 2006 is also available in pdf form, on The Relative Merits of Openness in Voting Systems, written for Debra Bowen when she was in the California Senate.

A remarkably forthright detailed analysis of the lack of trustworthiness and usability of voting machines used in California in 2007 was conducted over the summer of 2007 under the auspices of California Secretary of State Debra Bowen. in the Top-To-Bottom Review. That effort seems to have inspired several subsequent analyses, all of which have greatly increased the general awareness of the breadth and depth of problems with electronic voting systems.

PFIR: People For Internet Responsibility

URIICA: Union for Representative International Internet Cooperation and Analysis

Advisory Activities

I am one of the 11 authors of the June 1997 report (along with Hal Abelson, Ross Anderson, Steve Bellovin, Matt Blaze, Whit Diffie, John Gilmore, Ron Rivest, Jeff Schiller, and Bruce Schneier), The Risks of Key Recovery, Key Escrow, and Trusted Third-Party Encryption,. This report was reissued in June 1998, with a new preface that notes that little has improved in the intervening year. The report is available for web browsing, and from CDT. It is also available for direct ftp-ing from Matt Blaze in PostScript or ASCII.

My July 1997 written testimony on that report for the Senate Judiciary Committee, originally scheduled for a crypto key-recovery hearing for 25 June 1997, was delivered on 9 July 1997. It is available on-line: Security Risks in Key Recovery. As a follow-up to that hearing, Senator Hatch asked each panelist to respond to specific questions from Senators Thurmond, Grassley, Leahy, and Feinstein. My responses to those questions are also available on-line. The proceedings of the entire set of hearings are available as Security in Cyberspace, S. Hrg. 104-701, 1996, pp. 350-363. ISBN 0-16-053913-7, 1996.

Incidentally, I note that the surveillance issue is again before us, this time with respect to the Internet rather than telephony. The FBI's Carnivore monitoring system has been subjected to a review, and the draft IITRI Carnivore report is on-line on the DoJ site. At the request of the Department of Justice, I participated in a review of the IITRI report, with Matt Blaze, Steve Bellovin, Dave Farber, and Eugene Spafford. Our Carnivore review comments as submitted to DoJ are available here in html form. (As a result of widespread criticism relating to the choice of its seemingly predatory name, Carnivore has been renamed DCS1000, the Digital Collection System.)

My 25 June 1996 written testimony for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee is on-line: Security Risks in the Computer-Communication Infrastructure. The written testimony is included in Security in Cyberspace, Hearings, S. Hrg. 104-701, ISBN 0-16-053913-7, 1996, pp. 350-363; my oral testimony is transcribed on pages 106-111 of that volume.

My May 1998 follow-up written testimony for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee is on-line: Computer-Related Infrastructure Risks for Federal Agencies.

My 6 November 1997 written testimony for a hearing of the U.S. House Science Committee Subcommittee on Technology is also on-line: Computer-Related Risks and the National Infrastructures. (My responses to subsequent questions appear in the proceedings of the hearing, ISBN 0-16-056151-5.) On 15 April 1999, I was again testified for the House Science Committee subcommittee on technology, this time for a hearing on the Melissa Microsoft Outlook Word Macro propagating e-mail Trojan horse/virus; I did a differential analysis on my November 1997 testimony, and argue that Melissa is merely the tip of a very large iceberg. On 10 May 2000, I was asked to testify for the same House committee on the ILOVEYOU Microsoft Outlook propagating Trojan e-mail horse/virus, Risks in Our Information Infrastructures: The Tip of a Titanic Iceberg Is Still All That Is Visible. A further testimony for the House Committee on Government Reform, Subcommittee on Government Efficiency, Financial Management, and Intergovernmental Relations, August 2001, provides another update, Information Security Is Not Improving, Relative to the Risks. Relative to other events, computer-communication security appears to have regressed steadily in recent years, rather than progressed.

In December 2000, I participated in a panel on emerging technology issues as part of a program that the Harvard JFK School of Government puts on every two years for newly elected members of Congress. See my handout page.

I was invited to speak at the 1997 Gore Commission Conference on Aviation Safety and Security. My position paper, Computer Security in Aviation: Vulnerabilities, Threats, and Risks, is browsable. Of particular relevance on that topic are some of the reports of Department of Transportation reports by Alex Blumenstiel that are cited in my paper, and a long series of GAO reports (click on airport security and on terrorism), all of which seem to have been almost completely ignored. [Written in 1997, this paper considers many topics that today seem less far out.]

Written testimony for the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on the Social Security Administration hearing on 6 May 1997 is available here ; there was no oral testimony on my part, although Marc Rotenberg and Keith Rhodes were there and alluded to my written testimony. A slightly extended subsequent version of that statement was presented as part of a Social Security Administration panel in San Jose CA on 28 May 1997. The SSA announced on 4 Sep 1997 that they would reinstate the PEBES database, but with considerably increased attention to security issues. I am pleased that their revised plans go a long way toward what is recommended in my position statement.

On 7 Jun 2007, I testified once again for a hearing of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on the Social Security Administration on the Employment Eligibility Verification System (EEVS). My written testimony is available in pdf form.. The entire hearing was webcast, and I was followed by Marc Rotenberg whose testimony is also of interest. I served on the IRS Commissioner's Advisory Group for 2.5 years ending in June 1996, primarily as an advocate for privacy and personal rights, and prevention of internal misuse, but also as a critic of the Tax Systems Modernization effort -- now scuttled to the tune of something like $4 billion. One of my first recommendations involved asking the IRS to remove Social Security Numbers from appearing visibly on the mailing labels. Perhaps I had an impact, although it is obviously hard to tell. (``Well, it works; there are no elephants.'') [Added note: I don't really think I had any effect, but when Peter Z. Ingerman saw my Web page, he noted that in 1994 he had filed a class-action lawsuit to that effect including every taxpayer -- although he could not afford to appeal to the Supremes when it was thrown out. Perhaps PZI's suit actually had an effect!] With Senators Glenn and Pryor, I then wound up on an IRS training tape on privacy risks, noting that privacy is something most people don't even realize they had until after they have lost it. Incidentally, I notice that insider misuse of IRS databases and SSNs is once again a hot topic.

I have been a member of the U.S. Government Accountability Office Executive Council on Information Management and Technology since November 1997. (The GAO -- prior to July 2004 known as the General Accounting Office -- is the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, and the nation's auditor.) Our meetings in the previous century were heavily concerned with the Y2K problem and the U.S. Government's initially slow reaction to it. We had briefings from President Clinton's Y2K czar John Koskinen, and from Senator Bennett and Congressman Stephen Horn (check out the Website for the Committee on Government Reform, Subcommittee on Government Management, Information, and Technology). More recently the GAO EXIMT has also been concerned with the software development situation, computer security more generally, and of course critical-infrastructure protection.

I am a member of the advisory committee for the California Office of Privacy Protection.

From April 2001 through June 2003, I was a member of the National Science Foundation Computer Information Science and Engineering Advisory Committee (NSF CISE AC, if you like acronyms). Research is absolutely fundamental to the future, and I was particularly concerned with issues relating to computer systems and networks, security, reliability, good software engineering, formal methods, and education, among other topics.

I am on the Advisory Board and now a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) -- run by Marc Rotenberg. EPIC is playing an extraordinary role in trying to defend our computer-related privacy.

I am nominally on technical advisory boards of several companies, although meetings have been increasingly scarce lately:
Cryptography Research Inc. (Paul Kocher, paul@cryptography.com), Counterpane (Bruce Schneier, Schneier@counterpane.com), Cigital (formerly Reliable Software Technologies, Gary McGraw, gem@cigital.com).

Honors and Awards

I am a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, and IEEE, and recipient of the ACM Outstanding Contribution Award in 1992, the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award in 1996, and the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Contribution Award in 1997. (I was an ACM National Lecturer for 16 months during 1969 and 1970.) I am greatly honored by being the 1997 recipient of the Norbert Wiener Award for excellence in promoting socially responsible use of computing technology, which I received on 4 Oct 1997 at the annual conference of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) -- of which I am a long-standing member. Notes from my Wiener-Winner acceptance speech are on-line, and include some truly prescient quotes from Wiener. I received the National Computer System Security Award (sponsored by NIST and NSA) in 2002, and the ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Contributions Award in 2005. I am also an SRI Fellow. On 29 October 2001, I became an Honorary CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional), awarded by the International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium -- (ISC)^2.

Mentors

My parents, J.B. Neumann [d] and Elsa Schmid Neumann [d], each of whom had an extraordinary influence in my life, and who constantly encouraged me in my pursuits of my varied interests. My father was a noted person in the art world from 1906 to 1961, and my mother was an artist and mosaicist from the 1920s until her death in 1970. (Biographical information on them is available on request.) I learned many wonderful things from my sons John [d] and Chris [d], and from my daughter Helen Krutina Neumann --- from whom I am still learning. In her forties, Hellie went back to school at the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine in San Diego, and now has dual practices in Vineyard Haven and Mashpee, Mass.

Malcolm Holmes [d], conductor, violinist, fine athlete. Through four of my five summers at Greenwood Music Camp near Tanglewood in the Berkshires (see below) and my freshman year at college, Mal was a true inspiration to me. As an avid reader of The New York Times since 1940, I was happy to share his copy of the paper after lunch each day (even if it came by mail and was a day late) and discuss many issues, which indeed was a wonderful experience for a teenager. His early death was a great loss to thousands of people whom he had similarly inspired.

Marsden V. Dillenbeck [d], my very literate high-school senior-year English teacher, who inspired my interest in language and languages. See my Epic Annotated Limerick homage to him, below. At my 50th high-school reunion in October 2000, it was clear that he had had a huge impact on other classmates as well, as his memory is often invoked.

Roger Nash Baldwin [d], humanist, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1919. Over much of my life, until he died at 97, we did many things together, discussions on all sorts of topics, four-hand piano, nature-walking, canoeing on New Year's Day one year in New Jersey and many summers in Martha's Vineyard, ... He was interested in everything and everyone, and had extraordinary life values.

Albert Einstein [d] who made a wonderful cameo appearance in my life on the morning of 8 November 1952. I had the enormous privilege of a more than two-hour visit with him, with a discussion that ranged over complexity and apparent simplicity in mathematics, science, and -- at great length -- music (among many other topics). In this context, I became presumably just one of the many people who heard him say, ``Everything should be made as simple as possible but no simpler.'' (I recall seeing a simpler version of that quote when I was in High School, in the Readers' Digest, without reference, omitting the word ``made'', although that makes less sense.) That entire conversation made a huge impact on my subsequent approach to computer systems (and my life, and as noted below in some musical compositions). It undoubtedly inspired a life-long fascination with hierarchical and other forms of abstraction -- which recurs in much of my writings and system designs (e.g., Multics, PSOS, SeaView, and the CHATS report on composable systems) and complexity in computer systems. Einstein was someone I felt I knew before I met him because of looking at my mother's remarkable 1944 mosaic portrait of him in our home during my teenage years. In 1998 I donated the portrait to Boston University, where a U.S. manifestation of the Einstein Papers Project was centered. My mother's mosaic portrait of Albert Einstein is now in the reference reading room in the main library at B.U. Here is my translation from the original German of the main text of Einstein's letter to my mother (known professionally as Elsa Schmid, and long ago Elsa Schmid-Krutina) after he saw her mosaic. His letter (dated 19 February 1945) gives some idea of the power of the portrait and why it had such a strong impact on me personally:

``The viewing of your mosaic portrait has been an artistic experience for me that I shall never forget. I am happy that through my very existence I have been the inspiration for the origin of such a work. In this portrait is perfectly expressed exactly that which is so completely missing in modern man -- inwardness and contemplation, detachment from the here and now. It is a riddle to me how it is possible to achieve such a delicate and strong expression with this inflexible material.'' (signed A. Einstein)

[Incidentally, there are two more wonderful large mosaic portraits also done by my mother in the mid-1940s -- of Abraham Lincoln, based on two original Matthew Brady daguerreotypes lent to her from the Frederick Hill Meserve collection. The full-face portrait has found a permanent home in the Boston University Library, along with her Einstein portrait and the newly acquired Matthew Brady collection of daguerreotypes of Lincoln. The profile portrait has been donated to the University of Illinois at Springfield, which has a curriculum that includes various tributes to Lincoln. A few of her other mosaic portraits are in museum collections: Martin D'Arcy in the Museum of Modern Art in NY, John Dewey in the Newark Museum, and Dikran Kelekian in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.]

Philippe LeCorbeiller [d], Professor at Harvard for many years, and my informal undergraduate thesis advisor in 1954 (motions depending on elliptic integrals). He was a wonderfully caring human being. (Joe Walsh in the Math Dept was my formal advisor.)

Tony Oettinger, Harvard Professor, and my PhD advisor, still working full bore even after his delightful 70th birthday party in March 1999 (noted below). Tony and I have always had many similar interests. I was a guinea pig in 1953 for his doctoral thesis on translation of Russian into English.

Alwin Walther [d], 6 May 1898 -- 4 January 1967, Technische Hochschule Darmstadt Professor and department director for many years. His enthusiasm and encouragement during my wonderful two-year Fulbright stint led me to teach a course, write a second doctoral thesis, play in the student orchestra, represent him on committees, and travel around Europe. Many thanks to Prof. Dr.-Ing. Winfried Goerke (Karlsruhe) for sending me the 100th birthday commemorative publication, Alwin Walther: Pionier des Wissenschaftlichen Rechnens, Kolloquium zum 100. Geburtstag, volume 75 of the Technical University Darmstadt Schriftenreihe Wissenschaft und Technik, ISBN-3-88607-120-0.

David Huffman [d], Professor at MIT and Santa Cruz, who invited me to visit Stanford for the spring quarter of 1964 while he himself was visiting at Stanford for the year -- and also an ongoing consultant in what is now the Computer Science Lab at SRI. His interest in my 1964 paper on self-synchronizing information-lossless sequential machines (itself inspired by his 1959 paper) began a long friendship. The diversity of his work is remarkable, from Huffman codes and asynchronous sequential machines to his little-known paper on graphical representations of error-correcting codes. His later work on zero-curvature surfaces is extraordinary, and where it led him is even more remarkable -- some of the most beautiful artistic creations I have ever seen, while at the same time based on his mathematical theory of continuous deformations without tearing or cutting: truly amazing. See David A. Huffman, Curvatures and Creases: A Primer on Paper, IEEE Transactions on Computers C-25, 10, pp. 1010-1019, October 1975. (A hint of the variety of some of the astounding and artistically beautiful ``foldings'' he achieved can be found at www.sgi.com/grafica/huffman. A photographic record of these works is being planned in his memory. See also an article in The New York Times by Margaret Wertheim, ``Cones, Curves, Shells, Towers: He Made Paper Jump to Life,'' June 22, 2004, National Edition, page D2, with a correction on June 25, 2004, page A2. See also a more recent Web item, Curved Crease Origami, from The Institute for Figuring.) All in all, Dave had an incredible ability to provide elegant solutions to complex problems, and often with visual simplicity -- as in his delightful representation of the seven-bit Hamming code: Draw a three-circle Venn diagram; label as 1,2, and 4 the regions that are included in only one circle; label each other region as the appropriate sum of 1,2, and/or 4 depending on which circles the region encompasses; the center is thus 7. Regions 3,5,6,7 represent the four information digits; regions 1,2,4 represent the even-parity-check digits; the three circles represent the parity checksums. Voila! The Hamming code. For any single-bit error, it is immediately obvious which bit it must have been from the three parity checks. Now you can explain a complex mechanism very simply through a picture! Dave's death on 7 October 1999 was a great loss to me and many others.

Fernando Corbató, Professor at MIT (now emeritus), father of time-sharing, and leader of the development of both CTSS and Multics. Corby was the best man at my wedding in 1997. He has been a wonderful colleague and friend since 1965, and is still very much involved with computer technology. His wife Emily is a fine concert pianist, photographess, and wit. I delight in visiting with them both.

E.L. (Ted) Glaser [d], a man of many careers, whom I knew best during the Multics days. He taught me many things -- including how to communicate effectively adapting to the needs of the listener, but also to appreciate the critical need for basic principles in any development effort. (He and I coauthored the first declaration of Multics principles!) Despite his blindness, he had the most extraordinary vision and insights. He had an uncanny practical sense and wisdom. He had the ability to hear and understand multiple conversations simultaneously, to listen to speech at many times its normal speed, and to correlate information across multiple disciplines. He was superb at spotting security flaws long before anyone else. I particularly remember one day in May 1965 when we were working out the early Multics design in a room with three walls of blackboards. Late in the afternoon when we had moved to the end of the third blackboard, someone had made a particular suggestion. Ted pointed to an item that was still on the blackboard from the early morning (most everything else around it having been erased and overwritten several times), and noted that this suggestion contradicted what we had agreed on earlier. Not just a great memory, but an amazing perception of how things appeared to the sighted. He was also a marvelous organist. He also had a delightful sense of humor. For example, a modular system is ``one that falls apart easily.''

Herbert Blomstedt, conductor of the San Francisco Symphony for ten years, mid-1980s to mid-1990s (and Conductor Laureate since 1995). I audited his conducting course at Loma Linda University in the summer of 1985, and attend as many of his SFS rehearsals as I can manage (although in his emeritus role, he now usually visits San Francisco for only two weeks each year). He inspired a rebirth of my musical existence in 1984 that is still ongoing. He is an extraordinarily wise person, and has thought deeply about many musical issues. Conversations with him are truly enlightening.

Martin and Emily Lee, dedicated Tai Chi teachers in Palo Alto, themselves mentored by Kuo Lien-Ying and Yu Pen-Shi. See their book, Ride the Tiger to the Mountain, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-18077-4. Martin is also a SLAC physicist. The teaching of Martin and Emily has contributed a wonderful inner peace and balance to my life.

There are many others as well, including (among many others) good friends and colleagues Edsger Dijkstra [d, 6 August 2002], Dave Parnas, Nancy Leveson, Marc Rotenberg, and and Whit Diffie. Mae Churchill [d] (creator of Election Watch, in the early 1980s if not sooner) convinced me long ago to become more involved in the never-ending battle for integrity in elections, and particularly those that are computerized. I had a wonderful long visit with her in Los Angeles in December 1988. Mae was an enormous inspiration to me, Rebecca Mercuri, and other early advocates for election integrity. What a blessing to have such wonderful influences.

At Harvard, I just missed getting Tom Lehrer for Math 1 in 1950 (which might have changed my entire life?). But I did have a wonderful bunch of professors in the 1950s, including Edward Purcell (a Nobelist in physics), Leonard Nash (who did marvelous explosions in chemistry class), Hartley Rogers (in a scintillating probability course), Fred Mosteller (a statistical wizard, later famous for his classes on public television), a General Education English lecturer named Martin Swerdlow; he was categorized as an Academic Roué in the Crimson Confidential's annual faculty evaluations; he espoused what Marsden Dillenbeck had instilled in me -- the love of writing), John Finley, Thornton Wilder, Ernest Hooton (with raunchy anthropology-related jokes), Willard Van Orman Quine [d] (mathematical logic titan, who died at 92 on Christmas Day 2000; he considered state lotteries as ``a public subsidy of intelligence'' on the grounds that ``it yields public income that is calculated to lighten the tax burden of us prudent abstainers at the expense of the beknighted masses of wishful thinkers.''), Howard Aiken [d], Ken Iverson, Bob Minnick -- among others. They all provided lots of inspiration, as did some of my graduate-school colleagues -- Bob Ashenhurst, Albert Hopkins, Fred Brooks, Peter Calingaert, Robin Esch, Rick Gould [d 1958], Marty Cohn, Jim Lincoln, Ramon Alonso, and Willard (Bill) Eastman, to name just a few.

Incidentally, in a typically imaginative effort, Bob Ashenhurst played a marvelous trick on my then office-mate Rick Gould. What was perhaps the gnarliest convoluted page in Rick's 1957 Harvard PhD thesis had to do with properties of two-terminal graphs representing bridge-network relay switching function implementations where current could go in either direction through the bridge elements (as distinct from the one-way direction in a relay tree). Bob rewrote one page in the thesis to refer to two-terrible giraffes and subgiraffes (with other creative msipelingz as well) and placed it in the copy that went to Aiken. Having been tipped off by Bob, Aiken (who was well-known for his irascibility) charged in and demanded that Rick explain the meaning of this outrage, pointing to the altered page. [Tragically, Rick died in an ice-climbing accident, falling into a crevasse on Dent Blanc in the spring of 1958 together with another climber.]

Reflecting on the deaths of my sons John and Chris, I am deeply moved by an excerpt from a letter that Ambassador Joseph Kennedy wrote in 1958 to a close friend whose son had died:
``When one of your loved ones goes out of your life, you think of what he might have done for a few more years, and you wonder what you are going to do with the rest of yours. Then one day, because there is a world to be lived in, you find yourself a part of it, trying to accomplish something -- something he did not have time to do. And, perhaps, that is the reason for it all. I hope so.''

Mentoring

Music

Long ago, my musical endeavors were many and varied. As an undergraduate, I did Gilbert and Sullivan operettas (for example, Allan David Miller and the late Barry Morley were the other Lords in Winthrop House's Iolanthe in 1953, and I conducted performances of Pirates a few weeks later in a production directed by Barry), sang in the Harvard Glee Club (including many symphony concerts with the Boston Symphony under Charles Munch, the then-definitive recording of Berlioz Damnation of Faust, and a performance of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex under William Steinberg and the Buffalo Philharmonic), and in my freshman year played in the orchestra (including an LP record of Shostakovich's 5th). My theatrical debut (apart from playing Peter Pan in the 3rd grade) was as a policeman in a very dumb musical skit Sally Rand (a then-well-known ecdysiast) had written for our 1950 Freshman Smoker. It was basically silly, but segued into Sally pulling a 7-page political manuscript out of her bodice and greatly disappointing the audience by reading it verbatim. (This was the early years of Senator Joseph McCarthy.) With ambitions as a nonprofessional musician, I spent the summer of 1954 at Tanglewood, as Assistant Registrar of the Berkshire Music Center, hobnobbing with students, composers, and symphony players, and attending every concert. In graduate school, there was more: (1) Joint work in 1954-55 with Fred Brooks, Bill Wright, and Albert Hopkins for Tony Oettinger's seminars on computational linguistics, in which Al and I used Fred and Bill's Markov analysis of 37 common-meter hymn tunes to compose generate over 600 "new" hymn tunes based on Markoff chain lengths from 0 to 7 eighth notes, all of which were statistically consistent with the sample space. The 0-order tunes sounded rather random, while the 7-th order tunes were more or less indistinguishable from the chosen 37 hymns -- but all recognizably different (See the first item in my abridged reference list.) (2) Bob Ashenhurst, Albert Hopkins, and I used to sing Gilbert and Sullivan trios in the basement of the old Computation Lab (subsequently renamed the Aiken Lab, and now torn down and replaced with a new building); (3) In February 1956, I sang the part of the Man in the Moon in what I believe to be the world's first science-fiction opera, Joel Mandelbaum's The Man in the Man-Made Moon, in which the Man in the Moon becomes quite jealous of the Man in the Man-Made Moon and threatens celestial war, whereupon the Scientist who created the Man in the Man-Made Moon performs an operation whereby the Man-Made Man in the Man-Made Moon is transformed into the Man-Made Maid in the Man-Made Moon, leading to a Happy Ending. It is a wonderful opera. (In case you had not guessed, it was written post-Christine Jorgenson, but pre-Sputnik -- and, for that matter, before mooning became popular.) I managed to contact Joel for the first time in 45 years, and he sent me an audio tape! What a delight! Apparently, he is now contemplating reviving the opera, and plans a performance of the overture in a concert in New York in November 2007. (4) I did and still do Tom Lehrer interpretations. How many of you have heard his apparently unpublished and unrecorded wonderfully cynical song about something he observed while riding the Boston MTA in his graduate-school days? (I presume it is copyrighted, so I don't want to put it on the Net.) I still revel in the Tom Lehrer title for which he never wrote the song -- because it would have been an anticlimax: ``If I had it to do all over again, I'd do it all over you.'' And then there was the Boston subway song, to the tune of Mother, on the stations at the time (Harvard, Central, Kendall, Charles, Park, Washington) -- which ends with the aggregate pronounciation, HCKC PW.

More recently, (5) I had a ten-year stint on the Board of Greenwood Music Camp in Cummington, Massachusetts (1992-2001), where I was a camper from 1946 to 1950. The camp still thrives as a superb summer experience for youngsters; a new performance structure was completed in the summer of 2000. (6) In March 1999 I was in Cambridge to help Tony Oettinger celebrate his 70th birthday; Bob Ashenhurst wrote an adaptation of the Gilbert and Sullivan ``I am so proud" from the Mikado [see item (2) above], which came out as ``He is so wise'', sung by Bob, Jim Adams, and myself. (As noted above, Tony was my PhD thesis advisor "many years ago" -- which happens to be the lead line of another G&S song.)

Both of Liz's sons are also enjoying their own music. Her older son Mark Luntzel plays guitar in his spare time, and is completing a degree in computer science. Her younger son, New York City bassist Tim Luntzel, in 2006 released a wonderful CD with his group, Brooklyn Boogaloo Blowout: Who Burnt The Bacon? The CD is ``outrageous good'' (as Tim might say). As a bonus for us, Liz plays tuba on two cuts, and I'm doing some backup vocals for Norah Jones and Richard Julian. Check out a sample of the CD on the BBB website, with a link to MySpace, and see a review by John Book. Tim also plays with Jesse Harris and the Ferdinandos, and has played with Bright Eyes and many others. See his his bio page.

Statistical Metalinguistics and Zipf/Pareto/Mandelbrot

There is no surprise at all in the Zipf/Pareto/Mandelbrot theories once you understand that each formula can be derived mathematically. In 1959, my old Russo-Belgian friend Vitold Belevitch [2 Mar 1921--*26 Dec 1999] (see On the Statistical Laws of Linguistic Distribution, Ann. Soc. Sci. Bruxelles 73, III, 1959, 310-326) considered a wide class of more or less well-behaved statistical distributions (normal or whatever), and performed a functional rearrangement that represents the frequency as a function of rank-ordered decreasing frequency, and then did a Taylor expansion of the resulting formula.

Belevitch's lovely result is that "Zipf's Law" follows directly as the first-order truncation of the Taylor series. Furthermore, "Pareto's Law" and "Mandelbrot's Law" (which seem even more curious and mysterious to most people) follow immediately as second- and third-order truncations. There is nothing magical or mystical about it! And yet very few people know of his wonderful paper, and tend to overendow the amazingness of one of the various "Laws", oblivious to this remarkably simple result. (I referred long ago to Belevitch's article in a paper based on my PhD work, Efficient Error-Limiting Variable-Length Codes, I.R.E. [precursor to the IEEE] Transactions on Information Theory IT-8, July 1962, 292-304.)

[NOTE: The so-called 80-20 rule is discussed in Linked, Albert-László Barabási (Plume, 2003), which Paul Concus recently shared with me. (The book subtitle is ``How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life'' -- which is very relevant.) Linked has a few errors that strike home: (1) p.147 mentions Paul Baran at the 1967 symposium in Gatlinburg, Texas. It was of course 1968, the first ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. (ALB must have been thinking of the Texas Steak House in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.) (2) p.149: ``e-mail was born when an adventurous hacker, Rag Tomlinson ...'' Well, e-mail was born on CTSS at MIT by Tom Van Vleck and Noel Morris in the early 1960s, contemporaneous with a similar effort at Dartmouth. ARPANET e-mail was 1969. (3) p.151 cites the first Internet (NO, ARPANET) node at UCLA, and the first e-mail having been sent from UCLA to Stanford. NO NO NO. It was UCLA to SRI. The second site on the ARPANET was SRI, then Stanford Research Institute. But Linked is an excellent read despite slips such as these.]

With respect to everything being linked, one of my favorite quotes is from Bob Morris (erstwhile college classmate, Bell Labs colleague, and former chief scientist of the National Computer Security Center): ``To a first approximation, every computer in the world is connected with every other computer.'' (19 September 1988, in a briefing for the National Research Council Computer Science and Technology Board in Washington DC) (This was of course about 6 weeks before the Internet Worm!)

Some Quasi-Literary Pursuits

Peter Neumann's Multiply-Mixed Metaphor Mania

* Pandora's cat is out of the barn, and the genie won't go back in the closet. [This polymorphic statement can be variously applied to cryptography, export controls, viruses, spam, terrorism, outsourcing, and many other issues.]

* It's like shooting a straw herring in midstream. [Straw men have a difficult time catching red herrings!] An alternative version that I have used is ``It's like flogging a straw herring in the foot.''

* In an article by John Schwartz in The New York Times, 30 Mar 2001, on Internet technologies in business, reflecting on the acceleration being a double-edged sword, I was quoted as saying, ``Many of the swords have more than two edges -- sort of a Swiss Army Knife with the blades in upside down, so that you keep cutting yourself on some of the implements whenever you try to take one out.'' Tad Simmons of *Presentations* (June 2001) cited this, and added ``Without saying a single word directly about the economy, Neumann was able to convey the idea that business propositions in the Internet age are complex, multi-faceted, and often painful.'' * Giving the camel an inch leads to a foot over the dam. [The camel's nose under the tent and a foot in the door together cause water on the knee over the dam. Don't cry over camel's milk. But this one is probably still a work in progress.]

[* In September 2004, I happened to stumble onto this one from Molly Ivins for the first time, even though it is an oldie (1991): ``Legislators do not merely mix metaphors: they are the Waring blenders of metaphors, the Cuisinarts of the field. By the time you let the head of the camel into the tent, opening a loophole big enough to drive a truck through, you may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater by putting a Band-Aid on an open wound, and then you have to turn over the first rock in order to find a sacred cow.'' Molly Ivins, *The New York Times Magazine* (quoted in *Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? Vintage Books, 1991). Her presence is sorely missed.]

An Epic Annotated Limerick

In 1973 I wrote an Epic Annotated Limerick in honor of my literary mentor, Marsden V. Dillenbeck (noted above). His passing was one that left me de-ment(or)ed. WARNING: This should probably be read only by folks who enjoy crypto-pseudoliterary puns (some multilingual), alliteration, poetic meters, cryptic puzzles, and other linguistic weirdnesses.

A Large-System Glossary for EWD

For Edsger Dijkstra's 60th birthday in 1990, I wrote a chapter called "Beauty and the Beast of Software Complexity -- Elegance versus Elephants", which appeared in Beauty is Our Business, A Birthday Salute to Edsger W. Dijkstra, edited by W.H.J. Feijen, A.J.M. van Gasteren, D. Gries, J. Misra, Springer-Verlag, 1990. My appendix to the chapter included this bit of doggerel:

* Elephantine equations: Large-system requirements for which there may be a multiplicity of integral solutions.

* Pachydermatitis: A breakdown in the outermost layer of a very large system (e.g., manifesting itself as a flaky user interface). (Ichthyosis scales up inefficiently.)

* Behemotherhood. In very large systems, motherhood that has a high likelihood of running amok.

* Hippodromederriere. An awkward race down the back stretch to write the last half-million lines of code before the system self-destructs in an evolutionary backwater.

Writing Style and Grammar

* Hyphen-related ambiguity: You might be interested in a few items I wrote for a would-be book on English language usage. One section, referred to as the Hyphen(h)ater's Handbook, appeared in RISKS, vol 17, issue 95, discussing the deeper implications of ``email'' versus ``e-mail'' and related ambiguities.

* The misplaced `only': Another section of that would-be treatise, Only His Only Grammarian Can Only Say Only What Only He Only Means, discusses the risks of the misplaced ``only'' --- in particular, the ambiguity that can result.

* The missing `than': A more recent addition discusses the ambiguities that arise from Incomplete Comparisons: The Missing ``than'' in ``more than''.

* Commas and More In Lynne Truss's book ``Eats, Shoots & Leaves'' (which, without the comma, is what a Panda does), the author notes the wonderful ambiguity between ``Those old things over there are my husbands'.'' and ``Those old things over there are my husbands.'' to illustrate the importance of apostrophes -- which are so frequently misused (e.g., its vs it's). The book's subtitle is The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, and should be of interest to anyone who has read thus far through my Web site. Gotham Books, April 2004. Now I guess I don't need to write the rest of the book of which the Hyphen(-H)aters Handbook was somewhat facetiously conceived to be a part!

* Acronyms: Although we introduced ACLs in Multics in 1965 (as noted above), I would now like to introduce something we might call Role-Name Groups (RNGs), so that we can compare ACLs and RNGs! [The previous sentence is actually a test to see whether, in reading, you pronounce acronyms (a) as if they are words (ackle), or (b) sequences of letters (R-N-G), or (c) expansions based on what is referred to by each letter. I know people who fairly consistently go one way or the other. In the case of my example, ACLs and RNGs are of course intended to be treated as case (a) and (b), respectively -- as in "ackles and are-en-gees". In particular, I am interested in discovering what personal charactistics are involved in this choice. For example, it makes a big difference in whether we might write (a or b) "an HTML document" or (c) "a HTML document", respectively, and this is truly an ambiguity in writing correct English around acronyms.] Some day, perhaps I will write a treatise on acronyms, especially recursive acronyms such as GNU (which stands for GNU's Not Unix).

* Quotes and Periods: I have had many battles with old-think editors who insist on putting terminating punctuation (e.g., periods) inside of quotes even when those periods are not part of the quoted text or literal string (as in ``string.''). It is refreshing that new-school editors allow a quoted string not to include the ``period''. My rule is fairly simple: never put a period inside the quotes unless that period is part of what you are ``quoting''. This makes perfect sense logically.

* Apostrophe mistakes: The most common apostrophic misuse seems to arise in the popular confusion between it's and its. It's easy to know its proper use if you think about a little grammar -- the difference between a contraction (ambiguously, for either it is or it has) and a possessive (its x-ness is precisely the x-ness of it, where x-ness is, for example, some sort of attribute), respectively.

The possessive apostrophe-s following a word that ends in s is a little trickier. Proper names generally get an extra s, because the final s in the name is not a plural being apostrophesized, as in ``Parnas's''. But no extra s is generally needed when a nonProper word is already plural, as in ``The dogs' blankets are wet.''

An article by Sarah Lyall in The New York Times (16 June 2001) noted John Richards (a retired newspaper copy editor and reporter living in Boston, England), who has founded the Apostrophe Protection Society. Richards -- pictured in front of ``Sweeney Todd, the Modern Mans Barber Shop'' -- is vigorously trying to protect against misuse of the Queen's English such as todays menue's and Nigels special pudding's.

Geoff Kuenning noted this one from the Oxford University Press, Edpress News: ``It's is not, it isn't ain't, and it's it's, not its, if you mean it is. If you don't, it's its. Then too, it's hers. It isn't her's. It isn't our's either. It's ours, and likewise yours and theirs.'' * Old-style grammatical rules don't rule anymore: It may have begun with California English, such as ``Her and me are going.'' Objectively unsubjective? Or subjectively unobjective! And now we have things like ``My bad.'' Well, if any noun can be verbed, then perhaps any adjective can be nouned, and so on -- with a tendency toward totally interchangeable parts of speech. Is this also happening in much more strongly typed languages such as German and Russian? It is certainly somewhat more difficult.

Pronunciation

* ``Nuclear'': Could there be possible ideological or other noticeable cultural differences between people who pronounce the word ``nuclear'' correctly, and those who pronounce it as ``nuke-yu-ler''? This question needs some further psychosocial exploration, because I know some seemingly thoughtful and open-minded people who consistently pronounce the word incorrectly (perhaps because their colleagues do?), but also many folks with seriously closed minds who are incapable of realizing that they are wrong. Or are they? A few publishers of dictionaries seem to think that this mispronunciation is now acceptable!

* ``Neumann'': After many questions regarding the pronunciation of my name, and many mispronunciations, I thought it might be appropriate to dust off an old piece of doggerel written on 22 November 1976, in response to a query:

On Peter Noimann

While hoi polloi enjoy the ``new'',
The cognoscenti are the few
Who use the ``noi'' that he as boy
Had always managed to employ,
And which he somehow still does use.
While that it's ``noi'' may come as news,
The use of ``new'' never annoys --
Although it sometimes sounds as noise.

On 23 September 1992, I ran into an SRI mail delivery person, whom I had not seen in many years. This was the exchange:

``Mr. Newmann, I'm presumin'?''

PGN:

``No. Mr. Noymann, 'cuz it's Joyman.''

(Well, Germanic, but actually Dad was born in 1887 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.)

* Other poetry: A few pieces of poetry are published in various places, including some in my Harvard class reunion books. One of my favorites is a work of abstract poetry that I did long ago with my poet friend Emmett Williams, an homage to Guillaume Apollinaire on the 50th anniversary of his untimely death. It was exhibited as a huge banner at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1968 spelling out his name. It appears on pages 348-359 of Emmett's book, Selected Shorter Poems, 1950-1970, Edition Hansjörg Mayer, Stuttgart, 1974, and published in the U.S. by New Directions Publishing Corporartion. The work is a graphical representation of Apollinaire's utterance of hopes for the future: ``O mouths, mankind is in search of a new form of speech, with which no grammarians of any language will be able to talk. We want new sounds.'' These words are embedded into a diamond shape out of which the large-font letters of his name are formed. Reading across within the large letters gives all sorts of ``new sounds'' ...

Other Odds and Ends

Many years before, I was playing right field, with a runner on second. The second-baseman lost a popup in the sun and it bounced directly off his head to me on the fly. The runner on second had taken off, so I was able to double him off at second, and had both putouts in a rather unusual if not historically unique 4-9-9 double play.

I recently stumbled onto a somewhat discolored copy of Herb Caen's column in the San Francisco Chronicle from Feb 4 1976, which included the following squib that I would like to record for posterity before I toss it: "Down at Stanford Research Institute yesterday morning, computer programmer Peter Neumann was thinking about having breakfast, glanced out the window toward the cafeteria, saw two trucks parked in front of it -- Menlo Park Garbage, Dean's Animal Feeds -- and changed his mind." I really miss Herb's trenchant humor. (One of my favorites was Herb's puzzlement when he saw a license plate "ICECAR", until he realized that it represented "Datsunicecar". In 2008, Don Hudson read that item on my website, and reported that he had seen a license plate in Vancouver BC "NFUGUE"; it was (of course) a Honda Prelude, evidently honoring J.S. Bach. And then there is my musical doormat, ``Bach Later; Offenbach Sooner''.

End

.