| Monday
December 27, 2010
Merry Christmas from the Northeast of England! There's
crunchy snow on the ground and a nip in the air!
A particularly interesting datum
lurking in this report is that students from comprehensive schools do better
than students from fee-paying and grammar schools at these
universities--being able to game the admissions system does not guarantee
that the students will do well. <http://tinyurl.com/39xhgaw>
NHS facing serious problems: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12080056>
<http://tinyurl.com/2dfw997>
Inflation coming to the UK? <http://tinyurl.com/2b2bmwn>
<http://tinyurl.com/23rvmc6>
<http://tinyurl.com/36j3jhk>
I hadn't understood how much the
Tories in the current government despise the universities until I visited
London this last weekend and talked with a Tory politician. They'd like to
shut the lower tier and reduce the percentage of students going on to higher
education to about 20-25% of the population. Eye-opening. <http://tinyurl.com/2f8s9yo>
<http://tinyurl.com/267jxto>
The UK doesn't understand
American liberal arts degrees <http://tinyurl.com/27rh2am>.
Most Americans probably don't, either--the small American liberal arts
colleges focus on preparing students for masters and doctoral programmes.
UK Government embarrassed by
reports of the training it has provided to Bangladeshi death squads. <http://tinyurl.com/2brbnsy>
Police in most countries are not
known for their ability to foresee consequences. <http://tinyurl.com/32cvzbq>
<http://tinyurl.com/245gp6t>
I suspect Homo is one species,
broken into a series of chronospecies. <http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/denisovans/>
Web sites of human rights groups
under heavy attack <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12054774>.
(Disclaimer: I have provided advice on computer security to the Dahai Lama's
organisation.)
--
If we knew what it was we were
doing, it would not be called research, would it? (Albert Einstein)
Harry Erwin PhD
==
Leaked Memo about NHS Cuts
See <http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/
2010/dec/26/nhs-cuts-shortfall-report>.
They're now looking at
eliminating social care <http://tinyurl.com/2fddhut>
and cancer research to make up a £10B funding gap.
--
Harry Erwin, PhD
"If you can't be a good example,
then you'll just have to be a horrible warning." (Catherine Aird)
==================
Gordon Sollars sent you a
link that criticizes the salaries paid to stage hands at Carnegie Hall, and
you commented.
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/
view/2010/Q4/view654.html#Sunday
My question is 'Why should I care?'
How does it harm me if roadies organize to negotiate
their pay from entertainment producers? I view this as free enterprise. The
roadies are selling their labor at a premium, and the producer pays. The
producer in turn passes on the his costs to his costumers. If I want his
product, I pay his price. If I think his price too high, I don't buy the
ticket. What happens? The producers renegotiates with the roadies or moves
the performance to a less expensive venue. Or does not hold the performance
at all.
I applaud the roadies who have by effort or luck
gotten such lucrative positions.
By attacking their wages, I infer James Ahearn, the
NorthJersey.com writer of the piece, is saying, "Hey, these guys are doing
simple manual labor, and they shouldn't be paid big bucks. Top dollar should
be reserved for guys like me who do mental work." As politely as I can say
this, fuck Mr Ahearn and the horse he rode in on. If he don't like it, he
doesn't have to buy the damned tickets. Else let him organize a protest
among season ticket holders, overthrow the management of Carnegie Hall, fire
the union roadies he has, and hire non-union roadies. If he can.
Mr Ahearn has the right to speak his mind. I have the
right not to listen.
I suspect that many who give money to the Met --
we do, or rather we used to before the crash -- will wonder about the
wisdom of doing that given what the money is spent on
Jerry Pournelle
Chaos Manor
That's fine by me. It is your money to do with as
you please. If this bit of information inclines you to withhold money from
an opera house, well and good. Is not transparency a good thing?
We may be talking past each other. I had two
reasons for interest in the story. First, I was in fact surprised: having
been involved in community theater management (many years ago) and at one
point in the LA Opera League (well, my wife was on the board, so I got a
lot of lessons on finance and technical management) I have some awareness
of the complexities of the situation. I was not astonished that the
average stage hand is paid more than all but the lead singers, but I was
surprised by how much more.
My second reason was that I have long noted that
"non-profit" doesn't mean poverty: much of the expenditure of many
non-profits is on very high salaries and benefits for their executives.
Obviously there are exceptions like the Salvation Army, but many old
foundations have undergone a sea change over the years and are run as much
for the benefit of their executives as for any public benefit.
I don't suggest government action except to
repeal federal laws that favor one kind of worker over another,
particularly whe it comes to above six figure salaries. Indeed I didn't
intend any suggestions at all; illumination and transparency were what I
had in mind. I agree that it's not my business who makes how much, and the
remedy is, as you suggest, transparency.
As to why you should care, I never suspected that
everyone would. I operate this place in the hopes that what interests me
will interest many of my readers, but I have never deluded myself that all
readers will be interested in all topics. Thanks for being a long time
subscriber. Let's hope the other stuff in here is more to your interest.
And thanks for being a long time subscriber.
============
Coldest December in Sweden in
110 years
Another obviously incorrect measurement. The winters
can't be getting colder.
http://www.thelocal.se/31072/20101226/
<http://www.thelocal.se/31072/20101226/>
John Harlow, President BravePoint
Well, weather is not climate. The question is,
what is averaged with what to create the average that is said to be rising
uncontrollably (it is almost certainly rising, in the sense that it has
been getting warmer all over the Earth since 1789; the question is, has
the CO2 increased the rate of warming, and if so by how much, and I don't
believe we have the data to know that).
Let me repeat something I have been saying for
decades: when faced with expensive alternatives and considerable
uncertainty, Bayesian analysis indicates that it's usually -- I'd say
nearly always -- more cost effective to spend money reducing the
uncertainties, rather than rushing to spend on palliatives. Be sure what
you're preparing for is likely. I have never advocated reducing the
amounts spent on climate studies. I do think we spend enough that some of
that can be allocated to better data collection, since computer modeling
can absorb arbitrary amounts and still ask for more. Better data would I
think make for more confidence in the models.
==
Global average temperature
You may be interested in this article:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/26
/things-we-dont-know-about-climate/
The short answer is that "We don't know".
"...driving toward the basic conclusion that what we
know about global warming is pretty much nothing: we’ve no baseline, so
don’t know if it’s happening; we’ve no cost/benefit evaluation so don’t know
whether it would be net positive or net negative; if it is happening we
don’t understand its causation and if it isn’t we don’t understand why not;
and really the only thing we’re pretty sure of is that the people jumping up
and down screaming that they have the answers are either deluded or
charlatans."
++PLS
I am not sure I'd go that far. We certainly have
evidence that the Earth has been warming since the Revolutionary War. We
don't, I think, have accurate enough data to compare how much it warmed
from 1785 to 1885 as compared to 1885 to 1985. I am old enough to remember
the "The Ice Is Coming!" and "The Genesis Strategy" of Margaret Meade and
friends; indeed I was more or less in agreement that it was a matter of
concern. The fear of runaway warming is more recent, but I am not
convinced that it is based on reliable evidence. Comparing climate trends
today to those of a hundred years ago is a matter of many assumptions, all
of them defensible, about what the climate was a hundred years ago. But
defensible assumptions doesn't mean high confidence in 0.1 degree
accuracies in estimating temperatures in 1885 and certainly not in those
of 1785. Indeed, I question whether we can have great confidence in 0.1
degree accuracies for world wide averages today.
==
'New archaeological discoveries show that Iceland was
inhabited around AD 800 – nearly 70 years before the traditional dating of
its Viking settlement.'
<http://www.unreportedheritagenews.com/
2010/12/did-scots-visit-iceland-new-research.html>
-- Roland Dobbins
It was warmer back then. And Greenland was green
-- at least parts of it were. There were dairy farms. They are emerging
from the ice now.
==============
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/
europe/russia/8225794/Russias-biggest-spy-
agencies-at-war.html>
---- Roland Dobbins
Sooprise!
==========
Man makes a living by suing
spammers
Jerry:
Here we have the case of a man who has quit his job,
gone to law school, and now makes his living suing spammers in small claims
court.
<http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_anti_spam_crusader>
.............Karl
Hurrah!
============
“Everybody was too scared.”
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/15/
business/global/15chinawind.html?&pagewanted=all>
-- Roland Dobbins
=============
'The intelligence community is so vast that more
people have “top secret” clearance than live in Washington, D.C.'
<http://www.nytimes.com/
2010/12/26/opinion/26kristof.html>
--- Roland Dobbins
==============
Do we really need a DEA that does all these things?
Note that this report is based upon U.S. Department of
State cable traffic obtained by WikiLeaks:
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/
world/26wikidrugs.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all>
-- Roland Dobbins
Most software today is very much like an Egyptian
pyramid, with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no
structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
-- Alan Kay
============
Life on the internet Superhighway
Jerry
Just some idle musing at the close of 2010.
Some of what I knew as science fiction in my youth is
now becoming reality. I am not sure I like it all or even understand it as a
cultural phenomena.
Life on the internet Superhighway. I think I am stuck
on the off ramp.
Maybe it is a generational thing. 24/7 communication
and data overload. I am a 61 year old man, retired, physics & chemistry
degrees, and technology/ science literate. On that last, at least I thought
I was tech literate, but I am beginning to wonder.
Much of all the hype and noise in tech these days are
remote devices iOS & Android. I don't even have such a device and it is all
a bit bewildering. And the social network apps are equally bizarre to me as
well.
MySpace, Facebook, FourSquare, Tumblr, Twitter, Flickr,
Gowalla, Tweeter, I don't pretend to understand much of it at all. It is all
alphabet soup. And expanding. Smartphones, iTouch/iPhones,iPads, all these
make it easier to do all this. With OnStar even your car can be turned off
remotely.
I even wonder about the prospect of embedded devices
in your body, like RFID technology. Is that just around the corner for all
at birth?
WIth GPS, Wi-Fi, & cellular networks, it seem many
want to know 24/7 where everyone is, and many seem to equally want to
automatically wirelessly announce their location and everything they are
doing to all listening on all social networks.
A twenty-something person built a network utilizing
these kinds of technologies and is a billionaire now.
I would guess Big Brother (aka George Orwell's 1984)
loves it.
If privacy is really gone (as it seems to be rapidly
becoming and endangered species) I would not be surprised to see our
Congresscritters outlaw stones because we all now live in glass houses.
MIke J
=================d
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