| Thursday,
August 7 , 2003
Subject: The cutting edge of software outsourcing!
http://www.newtechusa.com/PPI/faq.asp
Cheers
Gordon
Indeed.
==============
Dr Pournelle,
Rewards of $15 million each have delivered Saddam's
sons to us and the $25 million on his head may well soon deliver up Saddam
himself, dead or alive.
Why do we not offer similar rewards for conclusive
evidence of the existence of WMD? If it works it would be cheap at the
price, and if it does not what have we lost?
Jim Mangles
Seems reasonable to me. Of course there's also
immunity since those who know about them probably were involved. But it's
my guess that there were none "ready", but plenty of potential
for making them if the regime was left undisturbed. I don't really care.
Saddam was deterred from using them against us in any event; the existence
or non-existence of WMD would not have been much of a factor in deciding
to go in if I were in charge. Saddam was a stable and ruthless dictator,
but he was no threat to the United States of America.
He was a convenient target for a hostile takeover
by another empire, any other empire, and if we needed a base in the Middle
East he was a convenient target for us. All these are rational imperial
considerations, and if one thinks imperial, he was the right one to take
out.
=================
Subject: DOS [adventure] games under windows
Dear Jerry,
You may be interested in a program called ScummVM
< http://scummvm.sourceforge.net/
>. Here's their own description of their program:
ScummVM is a 'virtual machine' for several classic
graphical point-and-click adventure games. It is designed to run Adventure
Soft's Simon the Sorcerer 1 and 2, Revolution's Beneath A Steel Sky, and
games based on LucasArts' S.C.U.M.M (Script Creation Utility for Maniac
Mansion) system. S.C.U.M.M is used for many games, including Monkey
Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max and more.
You can check here <http://scummvm.sourceforge.net/compatibility.php>
to see if the game you wish to run is supported. (I would check myself,
but I can't find the title on your site anymore).
-Dan
Conquest of the New World. I'll check. Thanks.
==============
I share your befuddlement at the content of most
spam. It is deeply discouraging to think there is a sufficiently large
population who respond to such offers to make it pay, regardless of how
widely spewed the spam and how cheap to send. Then there's the five to ten
a day which arrive in Chinese (down from 20 or more a year ago). One
becomes numb to it all, even if 99+% is filtered and you only see it
scrolling by on the log.
Then today, this one dropped into the spam bucket
which managed to make me exclaim "What are they thinking?" all
over again:
From email@mkt-expert.com Thu Aug 7 08:17:50 2003
From: "Cytokine Array" <email@mkt-expert.com> Subject:
ADV: 20% off our new Rat Cytokine Arrays
RayBiotech, Inc. The Protein Array Pioneer Company
www.raybiotech.com
Developer of Advanced Protein Array Products. With
our Patent Pending Technology , you can detect 79 human, 32 mouse, or 19
rat cytokines, chemokines, growth factors and angiogenic factors in one
experiment!
Enhanced Efficiency, Affordable, Reliable, Highly
Sensitive No Sophisticated Equipment Required, Any Lab Setting No Sample
Preparation Needed
20% off Rat Cytokine Array System 10% off all
Antibodies, Growth Factors, and Cytokines
Offer ends Aug 15, 2003
Please Visit www.raybiotech.com, email to info@raybiotech.com
or call 1-xxx-xxx-xxxx for detailed information.
RayBiotech, Inc.
Offer good for US customers only.
This email is sent on behalf of Raybiotech, Inc.,
Powered by mkt-expert.com
That's right, now they're marketing biological
laboratory equipment through spam. It only compounds the absurdity that
this offer, "good for US customers only" was spammed to my
address in the .ch (Switzerland) top-level domain.
I suppose we should be happy they aren't offering
"anthrax, botulinum cultures, ricin precursors...".
------- John Walker | Truth has a way of heaving up
through the cracks of | history. -- H. G. Wells
What makes you think they aren't? Stay
well.
=================
Subject: Exporting jobs
I've been following your posts on this, and I was
pretty sure I agreed with what you were saying.
But then I was sent this:
http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1282
and now I'm not so sure.
If you have any thoughts, and any time to put them
up, I'd be very interested.
Keep up the good work!
Andrew Duffin
Well, the von Mises Institute will certainly
present the best possible absolute laissez faire argument, being that's
the entire purpose of the outfit, and usually they are fair in doing it;
but note:
1. People are not the economic units of economic
models. They are for the most part rational and make economic decisions in
line with economic utility, but not always. Human "utility
curves" are not precisely contiguous with the money return of a
decision, and finding the true utility functions is expensive. In other
words, people aren't easily modeled. Quel surprise.
2. I note that this guy says the US was only
"relatively" well off after WW II and that according to Murray a
great number were in poverty. Poverty is a very relative, not absolute,
term. Most people in "poverty" in the US would have been
considered absolutely wealthy through most of history.
3. The notion that a good economy floats all
boats may not be true when there is enough concentration of income.
4. The US education system isn't what it used to
be. Now I am among the first to say that reform of education is the most
needed action to prevent job export. That takes a long time. We need
things we can do now to alleviate some of our problems including loss of
manufacturing jobs. That doesn't mean you apply a patch like a tariff and
then do nothing else.
5. None of this addresses the issue of revenue.
Tariff for revenue was important to the US for a very long time.
Substituting tariff for some of the income and capital taxes seems
reasonable, and a dynamic analysis takes that into consideration, but most
Free Trade arguments ignore that entirely.
I could say more but I have a novel to write.
This article says nothing new, but the arguments may be new to some.
Libertarianism is persuasive, and as a vector it's a direction I want to
see us going in; but I am not persuaded that Free Trade in the absence of
other libertarian measures -- lower taxes, far fewer regulations, far less
federalization, far less federal control of education, more freedom in
education -- makes sense. Example: suppose I apply environmental and
worker safety regulations that double the cost of manufacture of a widget,
then ask American companies to compete with overseas widget makers. Can
you predict the outcome?
And saying "Well, dump the regulation"
is a bit like Will Rogers telling the Navy to boil the Atlantic Ocean to
meet the submarine threat. It might work but we don't know precisely how
to do it.
Economists and libertarian theorists do not seem
to deal well with the real world we actually live in. The real world faces
us with many bad choices, some worst than others.
Of course there's the bumper sticker "Vote
for Cthulhu. Why settle for a lesser evil."
=========================
On Medical Journals: (See
above)
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
I've tried to give the subject a bit more
reflection, if you think this is something that you can use you're more
than welcome to do so.
The PLoS (Public Library of Science) is not the
solution to the really important problems of Medical Publishing today --
as I have discussed below. For medical libraries having limited funds, it
may perhaps some time in the future alleviate financial problems in
subscribing to some outrageously expensive Journals. Also it might help
the general public and M.D.'s in not-so-well-off countries have access to
more of the published literature.
If an online journal like PLoS Medicine as suggested
by Dr. Varmus's group might replace the less prestigious (but expensive)
journals, it would be well and good. However, I would not (and I think
this applies to most of my colleagues) submit a paper to the PLoS unless
it had been rejected by prestigious journals with good circulation -- and
these typically are not the expensive ones. Moreover, the best journals --
at least in my field -- make their contents fully available on the web
after some period. And if the M.D. in China or Argentina has to wait 6
months to a year after publication to download the full text the full text
for free --- well, the period from results to publication is typically
longer than this. Shortening these times is desirable, but not a really
big factor except in special circumstances like the recent SARS outbreak.
However, the real problem is over-publishing in the
Medical Sciences. This problem is caused not by the amount of valuable
science actually produced, but because of the pressure on individuals and
institutions to roll out a certain number -- the higher the better -- of
publications each year. Much of this stuff finds its way into the less
prestigious (but often more expensive journals) with limited circulation.
In these journals, the peer review is done to less exacting -- and often
inadequate -- standards. Unfortunately, after about 15 years of reviewing
for Stroke and other journals, I cannot help feeling that there has been a
downward trend in the quality of scientific writing and, even more
alarmingly, in the understanding of the scientific method. I suspect that
the professors and the experienced staff do not devote adequate time and
effort to supervise and teach the younger colleagues who do most of the
work.
The peer review system in the top journals is not
perfect, but in my experience it functions adequately (like democracy in
Switzerland). While there are examples of papers being rejected because of
conflicting interests; this is not the rule (I've had a paper published in
Stroke where a very influential scientist on the Editorial Board was so
opposed to Methods and Results that he wrote an Editorial rebutting the
study -- fortunately our work has been confirmed later). Also, some bad
science and poorly composed papers get through, -- even in these
prestigious Journals, but again this is not the rule (yet).
Yes, I know of examples like you wrote: Scientist B
starts another Journal (in a recent case with an expensive publisher).
However, this is not necessarily because the Scientist-to-become-Editor
disagreed with Editor A, who would not publish work done by B’s group.
An equally likely motivation for B is the prestige of being
Editor-in-Chief (and founder) of a Medical Journal. In addition, there is
the financial aspect, in particular for the Publisher.
By the way, the medical publishing process is
expensive, not only for libraries. When we were to publish the abstracts
of a recent conference in a supplement to a non-prestigious Journal, we
would have had to come up with about $40,000 for a supplement of about 80
pages. That was more than the conference could afford (the medical
industry has gotten much less generous with support over the recent
years). Of course we had it all on our website in good advance (www.neurosonology.org
-- hosted on your recommendation by pair.com). I felt that was sufficient,
but the President of the Society strongly felt that we had to have paper
copy also, and to have it officially published so that the abstracts could
'count' as a publication (nonsense in my opinion).
So a compromise was found, we spent some nights
doing the entire formatting/layout and editing ourselves -- Word2k is
quite good actually, even the Editor-in-Chief admitted that he could not
see significant differences from the normal Publishers issues. A local
shop did the printing and binding, the covers were the only part edited
and printed by the Publisher. We distributed it to the conference
participants and sent a batch of 500 to the Publisher who distributed it
to his subscribers -- saved us about $30,000.
Yes, I would welcome the initiative to have quick
access to Medical Literature directly on the Internet, and, moreover, I
would be willing to pay for it, but not the outrageous prices being
charged by some Publishers today. If the effect (and maybe this was the
intention) of the initiative of PLoS would be to bring down the cost of
access to other Medical Journals on-line, it is fine. However, it is not a
real solution to improve the problems of over-publishing in the Medical
Sciences.
Best Wishes, Rune Aaslid PhD
[To see a list of publications of any significant
paper in Medicine goto :
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi
and type in the name of the author/or medical
subject -- the abstracts freely available will tell you at least 90% of
the story]
In previous conversation I gather that Dr. Aaslid
thinks there are too many lower quality journals, and those tend to be
both private and expensive, and are one of the reasons for the high costs.
I append that first discussion here. It caused me
to ask for clarification.
Dear Jerry, ABOUT PUBLISHING IN MEDICAL SCIENCE
Just a perspective from a medical scientist's
viewpoint.
You write:
"The problem here is that the research
is paid for by the public, but the publication -- which involves a lot
more than just putting it out on the web -- isn't. There is the whole peer
review process, for example. "
Fact is:
For peer reviews (almost a hundred of them done for
the American Heart Association [AHA] ) I've not been paid a cent so far.
My colleagues and myself do these reviews as a payback for support we've
enjoyed from the taxpayers in founding our research. Hopefully also -- we
do it to help the new generation of researchers to be objective and
educated in the scientific method.
Furthermore, you write:
"Medical Journals -- most science
journals -- are expensive propositions, in part because of editorial
costs. I said when CD ROM was invented that this would be an enormous boon
for the distribution of scientific knowledge, and it was, but the fact
remains that editorial costs are higher than I had suspected, and much
higher than production costs."
Fact is:
For the AHA the subscription cost are very
reasonable, and after a short time (6-12months) anyone have access to the
full text of the article free online. In addition, the paper copy is being
sent to not only the medical libraries but also to most individual
cardiologists, neurologists etc who subscribe.
In cardiovascular medicine, the AHA journals are the
ones where most of us submit as a first choice --- US institution or
non-US. However, only a relatively small percentage of papers get accepted
(my percentage of recommendations for rejection was more than 90% the last
3 years and the Editor-in-Chief was even more restrictive).
So here is the chance for Elsevier, and Karger; and
the other publishers of sorry-to-say second-rate Medical Journals (I've
been guilty of publishing in these also, albeit not a lot). They can't
make the big subscriber number from individuals, so they have get their
bounty out of the Medical Libraries -- and every reputable Medical School
has to pay up for tons of second-rate medical "research" which
should not have been published anyway . Oh well --
Best Wishes,
Rune Aaslid PhD
I may be out of my depth here. I'm in favor of
publications counter to the established views, but I am also very much
concerned with truth in advertising and proper labeling. This isn't always
easy to do.
And I note in today's paper that the first public
announcement of the cloning of a horse was in Nature, and it's been in the
pipeline about 6 months, Nature being rabid on the subject on not leaking
what they're going to publish. Is that good?
======================
Jerry,
Given the topic, please withhold my name this one
time. Thanks!
I'm in the midst of my tri-annual career review and
would be interested in your thoughts on some emerging IT trends. Currently
I'm a Senior System Architect with a Fortune 50 corporation, working
primarily on back office automation applications and infrastructure - not
exactly a growth area.
I've been doing a lot of reading and research on the
IT outsourcing trend, as well as some others. I'm coming to the conclusion
that the long-term viability of an IT career is in doubt - especially the
back office/business apps area that I've been focused on. I don't think
that there really will be an IT turnaround this time - it's more of a
fundamental change than a downturn . I expect that in the absence on tariffs
on Software, the outsourcing trend will continue to expand. Ultimately, I
believe most of the back-office/line of business applications will be
outsourced completely (and likely overseas).
So that means that I'm debating my future - I don't
want to get caught unemployed and unemployable. Long term (10 years), I'm
leaning towards exiting IT completely. Mid-term (2-5 years) I'm thinking
about moving into Security (which straddles IT and provides a more gradual
transition), and Six-Sigma. Thoughts on those? How about others?
If you've got time, I'd really be interested in
hearing your thoughts on this . Thanks!
Cheers,
All good questions. But if I don't get to work on
the novel I'll be out sourced...
Comments solicited.
===========================
And a radical centrist on the California madness:
Jerry,
I am encouraged that both Arnold and Arianna are
running for governor. They are both smart cookies.
Of course, they may be ineffective if they do not
know "where the bodies are buried" and, like the current White
House occupant, have to rely on "professional" advisors with
less than pristine backgrounds.
I seem to recall that for all his technical and
organizational acumen, it really was his political naiveté that undid
Ross Perot, and so chose Stockbridge (?) for his VP, and then let himself
be undone by various dirty tricks.
In fact it would not surprise me if the neo-cons
tried to undermine Arnold. He is too-- well, you know-- European.
"European", a code word for
"intellectual"? Do you think that Arnold would stand still for
the cuts in the education budget while boosting prison construction? I
somehow think he is smarter than that.
Arnold's announcement reminds me of a graduation
talk I heard by Tom Clancy a couple of years ago where he counseled his
young audience to get into politics in order to do the most good, but
first to become independently wealthy so as to be un-buyable.
I have high hopes for both Arianna and Arnold. Of
course I would have voted for Riordan against Davis, and I suspect that
there are many "liberals" who would have also. Oh well, you can
count on Davis for a dirty campaign now too.
So if Davis does his usual number, but this time
against Arnold, the stronger candidate....
The interesting thing about this recall is that it's
not a 50% + to be elected. It's a real wildcard situation, and if Arianna
can get it together, we could have a really fun administration. That in
itself could create a political re-alignment, especially if the Republican
crazies splinter the vote and the liberals and Greens back Arianna.
But if Arianna gets elected, the whole country will
be up for grabs once again, like it was with Perot, only different. But
then y'know, us anarchists like to have fun.
I kind of favor Arianna because she is Greek and
Orthodox and not so much liberal but, I like to think, "middle-ist"
like myself.
If she runs, it COULD be an interesting campaign.
dunc
Well, this is California. Heck, I miss Jerry
Brown. And at this point anything can happen.
Thing about Davis is that even if his friends
have their roads, they want more. So "keep that guy; he's got his
road," doesn't apply here.
I wonder how life is in Tennessee where I came
from? Or if I could be a Texan... But I like it here.
=======================
Subject: The juxtaposition is truly ironic.
Happy Birthday, sir, and many happy returns . . .
The juxtaposition is truly ironic:
http://iconoclast.typepad.com/iconoclasm/
2003/08/by_way_of_an_op.html
Roland Dobbins
Indeed. Ironic indeed. Thanks.
Subject: Dark energy confirmed?
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/dark_energy_030805.html
(But note question mark
and see below)
Two pages, well worth reading:
http://comment.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020505,39115479,00.htm
and
http://comment.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020505,39115479-2,00.htm
Subject: Aubrey de Gray interview
http://www.speculist.com/archives/000056.html
------- Roland Dobbins
TOP
CURRENT
VIEW |
CLICK HERE for
a Special Request. 
Jim Woosley forwards the latest development in the SCO situation:
And a rather important debate, which I suspect will move from here to its
own page. How should publicly supported scientific research be reported
and published and accessed?