| Thursday,
July 7m 2005
Due to my trip to Sussex -- and I am glad I wasn't
there for the current round of attacks on the English transport system -- I
missed this important note:
Subject: Greenland Temperatures (the Medieval Warm
Period and the Little Ice Age)
From: Testimony to the Senate Committee on Commerce,
Science and Transportation
William Curry Ocean and Climage Change Institute
Director Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution May 6, 2004
http://www.whoi.edu/institutes/occi/currenttopics/abruptclimate_curry_testim_en4.html
<http://www.whoi.edu/institutes/occi/currenttopics/abruptclimate_curry_testim_en4.html>
Emacs! (R.B. Alley, from The Two-Mile Time Machine,
2000)
Figure 3. The history of air temperature over
Greenland during the last 20,000 years. Several abrupt climate events
occurred during this interval, including an abrupt cooling 13,000 years ago
known as the Younger Dryas event and another cooling event 8,200 years ago.
Each of these events was associated with an increase in freshwater delivery
to the North Atlantic and with widespread cooling and drying throughout the
northern hemisphere. A smaller event several hundred years ago, called the
"Little Ice Age," was also associated with freshening of the North Atlantic
Ocean. (Illustration by Jayne Doucette, WHOI)
Or was it caused by the sun?
http://www.whoi.edu/institutes/occi/currenttopics/abruptclimate_15misconceptions.html#ocean_6
<http://www.whoi.edu/institutes/occi/currenttopics/abruptclimate_15misconceptions.html#ocean_6>
The "Little Ice Age" refers to a historical period of colder climate that
occurred from about 1300 AD to about 1800 AD, well within the present
interglacial period. During this Little Ice Age, widespread cooling was
observed throughout the North Atlantic region, winters were more severe in
Europe and eastern North America and mountain glaciers advanced throughout
Europe. The changes in climate at this time caused much hardship and famine.
The cold winters associated with The Little Ice Age drove Viking settlements
out of Greenland and North America and affected historical events like the
American Revolution (remember Washington's troops attacking the Hessians at
Trenton, in 1775 and the cold winter endured by his troops at Valley Forge
in 1777-78).
The causes of the Little Ice Age are still unclear,
but may have been triggered by changes in the amount of solar energy
received by the earth from the Sun. The coldest interval of The Little Ice
Age occurred during a period of reduced solar activity called the Maunder
Minimum, when the Sun was observed to have fewer sunspots. Climate models
suggest that changes in the Sun's energy output may have caused a small
cooling at that time, but it is still unclear how these small changes in
solar activity may have triggered such a widespread cooling.
-Joe Hennessey
The point being that we don't know, and
most climate models haven't a clue; and before we spend a lot of money on
"remedies" it may be well to understand what the heck is happening.
================
Subject: Programming Majors
So, should parents encourage their children to major
in computer science? Apparently not, or not at least until the US realizes
that shipping all of our vital commerce overseas leaves the nation's
security at major risk.
Sue
http://www.syracuse.com/newsflash/regional/index.ssf?/base/national-0/1119179090232660.xml&storylist=national
Programming jobs losing luster in U.S.
6/19/2005, 7:21 a.m. ET By RACHEL KONRAD The Associated Press
STANFORD, Calif. (AP) — As an eager freshman in
the fall of 2001, Andrew Mo's career trajectory seemed preordained: He'd
learn C++ and Java languages while earning a computer science degree at
Stanford University, then land a Silicon Valley technology job.
The 22-year-old Shanghai native graduated this
month with a major in computer science and a minor in economics. But he no
longer plans to write code for a living, or even work at a tech company.
Mo begins work in the fall as a management
consultant with The Boston Consulting Group, helping to lead projects at
multinational companies. Consulting, he says, will insulate him from the
offshore outsourcing that's sending thousands of once-desirable computer
programming jobs overseas.
More important, Mo believes his consulting gig
is more lucrative, rewarding and imaginative than a traditional tech job. He
characterized his summer programming internships as "too focused or
localized, even meaningless."
"A consulting job injects you into companies at
a higher level," he said. "You don't feel like you're doing basic stuff."
Mo's decision to reboot his nascent career
reflects a subtle but potentially significant industry shift. As tens of
thousands of engineering jobs migrate to developing countries, many new
entrants into the U.S. work force see info tech jobs as monotonous,
uncreative and easily farmed out — the equivalent of 1980s manufacturing
jobs.
The research firm Gartner Inc. predicts that up
to 15 percent of tech workers will drop out of the profession by 2010, not
including those who retire or die. Most will leave because they can't get
jobs or can get more money or job satisfaction elsewhere. Within the same
period, worldwide demand for technology developers — a job category ranging
from programmers people who maintain everything from mainframes to employee
laptops — is forecast to shrink by 30 percent. <snip>
But see below
================
Another item I missed, on
grade inflation:
Subject: Caltech Honors
It's not terribly important but your correspondent "bc"
should know that the Honors designation is given at Caltech (there's no such
thing as CalTech, by the way) to all who graduate with a GPA greater than
3.0. Given the substantial number of students who never graduate, I would
not take it as "prima facie" proof of grade inflation that about half of
those who do manage a B average. I can't say anything about Penn.
The shame is that grades should matter at all. As a
despised Caltech premed (class of 1976), I had to care about what grades I
got, and I knew that if I didn't game the system for all I was worth to get
something over 3.5 I could forget about any good medical school even looking
at me. Call it my first experience of credentialism -- what I learned was
far less important than what I scored. Only if I exceeded a rather high
threshold did it matter in whose lab I'd had my real training. So be it. As
Joel Norris noted, for the really good jobs (and even medical school these
days) the quality of the student matters more than the quality of his
transcript.
Regards, Tim Herbst
I have never quite understood the subtle
difference between Caltech and CalTech, but I will try to remember; I note
that Word Spellcheck flags CalTech but not Caltech. Credentialism is largely
due to affirmative action: the only way to prove you made the right choice
is through "objective" evidence which is to say credentials. That leads to
absurdities like interns with A's from King/Drew (a disastrous teaching
hospital) being rated higher than interns from USC/County when it comes to
applications for admissions to further graduate work. Of course the
evaluators know that King/Drew is a place that the police refuse to be taken
if injured on the job, so the manipulations they go through are interesting.
(Not that King/Drew cannot produce people who know what they are doing, but
it's not so likely, is it?)
=====================
Following may be important.
Microsoft Gator
Hi Jerry,
Here's a followup story about the potential Microsoft
Claria/Gator acquisition. The Microsoft Anti-spyware tool is no longer
flagging it as adware/spyware.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1834607,00.asp
I guess the fox did get into the henhouse. Given this
situation, it makes even more important to run more than one tool - I use
Spybot S&D (www.security.kolla.de), Ad-Aware (www.lavasoft.de) and Spy
Sweeper (www.webroot.com).
Regards,
Doug
--
doug[@]douglhotka[.]com
"Do something you like. Forget about the pay, for
Christ's sakes. Regulate your style of living to fit your income. Just have
fun in your job, that's the main thing." ~ General Chuck Yeager
Followups appreciated. This is intriguing.
Microsoft Downgrades Claria Adware Detections
<http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1834607,00.asp>
Interesting, particularly in light of recent reports
that Microsoft is buying Claria. And still more evidence that anyone who
trusts Microsoft Antispyware is nuts. I wonder how much longer it'll be
until MS ASW doesn't even bother to report that a system is infected with
Claria scumware.
If I were still running Windows, I'd sure delete MS
ASW and install Spybot and AdAware instead.
-- Robert Bruce Thompson thompson@ttgnet.com http://www.ttgnet.com/thisweek.html
http://forums.ttgnet.com/ikonboard.cgi
I never uninstalled mine.
=====================
To explore is human
We, not robots, know what we need from
our travels, discoveries.
By Michael Griffin
Within the lifetime of a baby born this Fourth
of July ‹ the day NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft collided with the comet
Tempel 1 (late on July 3 in the western USA), and also the 1,705th
consecutive day of human occupancy onboard the International Space Station ‹
human pioneers will build outposts on the moon and Mars, extract minerals
from large asteroids and construct huge space telescopes to map the details
of continents on distant planets.
This is the space program NASA will pursue,
based on the premise that a robust program of human and robotic space
exploration will help fuel American creativity, innovation, technology
development and leadership.
If history demonstrates anything, it is that
those nations that make a commitment to exploration invariably benefit.
Because of Britain's centuries-long primacy in the maritime arts, variations
on British systems of culture and government thrive across the globe. I
believe that America, through its mastery of human spaceflight, can shape
the cultures and societies of the future, in space and here on Earth, as the
great nations of the past have shaped the cultures of today. This future is
being purchased for the 15 cents per day that the average taxpayer currently
provides for space exploration.
Spaceflight is a continuation of the ancient
human imperative to explore, discover and understand; to settle new
territory and to develop new ways to live and work. We need both robotic
pathfinders and people in our space journeys. As capable as our robots are,
a human explorer can move over new territory far more quickly than a robot,
assess and interpret the local environment, and make unexpected discoveries.
In all other human activities, we complement, but do not supplant, ourselves
with our machines. Why should it be any different in space?
As with all pioneering journeys into the
unknown, spaceflight is risky. Next week, if all goes well, we will launch
seven courageous astronauts on the Space Shuttle Discovery. A successful
mission would give us greater confidence we can fly the shuttle safely
through its planned 2010 retirement, then move on into a new era of
exploration.
It is inconceivable to me that this nation will
ever abandon space exploration, either human or robotic. If this is so, then
the proper debate in a world of limited resources is over which goals to
pursue. I have little doubt that the huge majority of Americans would prefer
to invest their 15 cents per day in the exciting, outward-focused,
destination-oriented program we are pursuing.
Michael Griffin is NASA administrator.
From USA TODAY
==
"Within the lifetime of a baby born this Fourth of
July … human pioneers will build outposts on the moon and Mars, extract
minerals from large asteroids and construct huge space telescopes to map the
details of continents on distant planets."
I used to hope we'd start doing those things in MY
lifetime… But THIS time, NASA's 19000 civil servants and 40000 contractors
and grantees - every one of them essential, by the way - will do it right,
and not waste another 25 years going nowhere. They mean it. Really. Just
trust them.
Tom Craver Chandler, AZ
===============
Subject: Faux Programming
(see above)
“As an eager freshman in the fall of 2001, Andrew Mo's
career trajectory seemed preordained: He'd learn C++ and Java languages
while earning a computer science degree at Stanford University, then land a
Silicon Valley technology job.”
And so?
Maybe if Mo had learned something real – COBOL, REXX,
SQL, CICS, and (dare I say it here?) C, instead of OO-gobbledygook
“languages” like C++ and Java, he could find a job.
I’ve been a mainframe developer for twenty-eight
years, and, except for a year and a half of semi-voluntary unemployment (I
didn’t choose to be sick, but I chose not to be sick and working at the same
time), I’ve always had a job. At my current client, there are about 9,000
people in systems on-site, and probably a couple of thousand off-site,
mostly but not entirely off-shore (i.e., in India). One thing that I’ve
noted is that the monotonous, low-skill grunt work – run a job, look up the
error messages in a manual, apply mechanical corrections; lather, rinse,
repeat – does go off-shore. OTOH, I’m on-shore, writing the tools that make
that possible – and earning a pretty nice chunk of change doing it.
Java was the pseudo-language of the dot-com bubble.
When the bubble burst, the jobs went away. As in the previous few years, MIS
departments had also burned up their budgets, and then some, preparing for
Y2K (whether it was never a problem, or we got almost everything fixed at
the eleventh hour, is not the point at issue; the money was spent, how much
or how little good it did), the subsequent few years saw a pretty sluggish
IT market (9/11 didn’t help either; I know programmers thrown out of work as
a direct consequence who are still out of work).
Our views on the American job market, protectionism,
etc., are close, but there are some differences; I don’t see any value in
hashing those differences out here and now. I will note, however, that no
policy will long protect anyone who chooses to learn to engrave arabesques
on pet rocks – which is essentially what Mo chose to do.
John W. Braue, III
<braue@ratsnest.win.net>
http://coldfury.com
"Be not as those who serve in hopes of a reward, but
rather as those who serve whether or no there be a reward." - Antigonos of
Sokho
====================
Stipulating that the story as told
is true, it's frightening. If somebody with this guy's track record can get
placed onto the watchlist with no recourse, then the rest of us are even
more vulnerable.
David Klaus
"Who's Watching the Watch List?" by John Graham Posted on AlterNet on
July 7, 2005
<http://www.alternet.org/story/23362/>
Heading for Oakland from Seattle to see my
grandkids last week, the Alaska Airlines check-in machine refused to give me
a boarding pass. Directed to the ticket counter, I gave the agent my
driver's license and watched her punch keys at her computer.
Frowning, she told me that my name was on the
national terrorist No Fly Watch List and that I had to be specially cleared
to board a plane. Any plane. Then she disappeared with my license for ten
minutes, returning with a boarding pass and a written notice from the
Transportation Security Administration (TSA) confirming that my name was on
a list of persons "who posed, or were suspected of posing, a threat to civil
aviation or national security."
No one could tell me more than that. The
computer was certain.
Back home in Seattle, I called the TSA's 800
number, where I rode a merry-go-round of pleasant recorded voices until I
gave up. Turning to the TSA web site <http://www.tsa.gov/public/>, I
downloaded a Passenger Identity Verification form that would assist the TSA
in "assessing" my situation if I sent it in with a package of certified
documents attesting to who I was.
I collected all this stuff and sent it in.
Another 20 minutes on the phone to the TSA uncovered no live human being at
all, let alone one who would tell me what I'd presumably done to get on The
List. Searching my mind for possible reasons, I've been more and more
puzzled. I used to work on national security issues for the State Department
and I know how dangerous our country's opponents can be. To the dismay of
many of my more progressive friends, I've given the feds the benefit of the
doubt on homeland security. I tend to dismiss conspiracy theories as
nonsense and I take my shoes off for the airport screeners with a smile.
I'm embarrassed that it took my own ox being
gored for me to see the threat posed by the Administration's current
restricting of civil liberties. I'm being accused of a serious -- even
treasonous -- criminal intent by a faceless bureaucracy, with no opportunity
(that I can find) to refute any errors or false charges. My ability to earn
a living is threatened; I speak on civic action and leadership all over the
world, including recently at the U. S. Air Force Academy. Plane travel is
key to my livelihood. <snip>
According to a recent MS-NBC piece, thousands
of Americans are having similar experiences. And this is not Chile under
Pinochet. It's America. My country and yours.
I know what I will do. If my name is not
removed completely from the Watch List in 45 days I will use every resource
I've got to challenge the government of a country that I love and have
served. In all the press about identity theft, I find myself railing at
having my identity as a patriot stolen -- by my own government. This must
not stand.
******
John Graham is the author of "STICK YOUR NECK
OUT: A Street-Smart Guide to Creating Change in Your Community and Beyond"
<http://www.bkconnection.com/ProdDetails.asp?ID=1576753042&PG=1&Type=BL&PCS=BKP>
(San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2005). He is also president of the Giraffe
Heroes Project <http://www.giraffe.org/> and a former U. S. diplomat.
Feeling safer already. But we were born free.
===============
This guy is obviously a psychotic. It's a psychosis of
degree, though -- probably millions of American blacks daily fantasize about
doing what he did. The widespread hatred and loathing borne by American
blacks for American whites is one of the great unmentionables here, though
it jumps out at you at once if you arrive in the U.S. as an adult.
Jared Taylor told me that in his (suprisingly many)
radio & TV face-offs with black "community leaders," he makes a point of
asking them: "Do you think all white people should be killed?" The answer
(he says) is almost always along the lines of: "No, I don't. But I know
people that do."
John
http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/49701.htm
'SHE HAD TO DIE' FOR BEING WHITE By KATE MURRAY
and ANDY GELLER NEW YORK POST, 7/6/05
A racist ex-con confessed that he fatally
stabbed a beloved mother of two at a White Plains mall because he wanted "to
kill a white person."
"She was not innocent. She was white,"
convicted rapist Phillip Grant confessed in a chilling videotaped statement
to cops that was played in White Plains City Court yesterday - the same day
victim Concetta Russo Carriero was laid to rest.
The 43-year-old homeless man told cops he had
never laid eyes on Russo Carriero, 56, before he stabbed her in the chest
twice last Wednesday on the seventh level of the Galleria mall garage.
"All I knew was she had blond hair and blue
eyes, and she had to die . . . I didn't care, as long as she was white," he
said.
"I wanted to kill someone who represented the
white lifestyle."
Grant said he became a racist after his July
2003 release from Sing Sing, where he spent 24 years for three Bronx rapes
and for attacking another inmate with a pitchfork. <snip>
============
From another
conference:
I'm rather dubious about the whole business of libel,
since I don't understand how you could "own" your reputation. I might
contract with you not to say things about me that are not up to a certain
level of verifiability and clarity, but I can't force parties C and D to do
the same.
What is ultimately needed is to develop one's own
sense of the reliability of information. The current headmaster of my high
school thinks that the ability to distinguish good from bogus information on
the Internet will be the singly most valuable skill to have in the world of
2025, and he is right.
Frank
I agree completely. In a sense this place
is a running experiment in trying to get things, if not right, at least not
egregiously wrong. Sifting out fact from opinion, and reasoned opinion from
prejudice, and prejudice based on previously thought out reasoned positions
from sheer superstition (see Life Without Prejudice for more if this puzzles
you) is a lifelong task, and it will become more important as time goes on.
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