July 2006
Monday, 31 July 2006
So Big and Healthy Grandpa Wouldn’t Even Know You
So Big and Healthy Grandpa Wouldn’t Even Know You: “To his astonishment, Dr. Almond found that the children of women who were pregnant during the influenza epidemic had more illness, especially diabetes, for which the incidence was 20 percent higher by age 61. They also got less education – they were 15 percent less likely to graduate from high school. The me’s incomes were 5 percent to 7 percent lower, and the families were more likely to receive public assistance.”
Sunday, 30 July 2006
Big brother wants a window into VoIP at any cost
Big brother wants a window into VoIP at any cost: “Given the government’s current preoccupation with ferreting out terrorists and stopping potential attacks in their planning stages, it’s interesting that terrorism doesn’t show up more frequently (it’s not even a category on the official chart). Obviously, this raises questions. Is the government truly doing few terrorism-related wiretaps? Or is such information being gained without judicial oversight?”
Thursday, 27 July 2006
Treasury study sees boost from tax cuts
Treasury study sees boost from tax cuts: “when the administration released its 2007 budget in February, it estimated the cost of its tax cut proposals over the next decade at $1.7 trillion”
Wednesday, 26 July 2006
The Fatal-Flaw Myth
The Fatal-Flaw Myth: “What much of the talk about the inherent weakness of Airbus ignores is that, just a few years ago, it was Boeing that looked fundamentally flawed, while Airbus was seen as the future of the industry.”
Thursday, 20 July 2006
Eighty percent of new malware defeats antivirus
Eighty percent of new malware defeats antivirus: “What is happening is that the bad guys, the criminals, are testing their malicious code against the antivirus products to make sure they are undetectable.”
Wednesday, 19 July 2006
million-dollar murray
million-dollar murray: “Power-law homelessness policy has to do the opposite of normal-distribution social policy. It should create dependency”
Tuesday, 18 July 2006
G.O.P. Senator Resisting Bush Over Detainees
G.O.P. Senator Resisting Bush Over Detainees: “The enemy has no rules. They don’t give people trials, they summarily execute them and they’re brutal, inhuman creatures. But when we capture one of them, what we do is about us, not about them.”
What Is This “Crime,” Really?
What Is This “Crime,” Really?: “We aren’t exactly on the squeaky clean side.”
Itanic shell game continues
Itanic shell game continues: “The competition can sum up the parts of the system and service, and as long as them make an average profit, they are in the right business. Intel has a chain where each step has to make money or they all fail. IBM is laughing all the way to the bank.”
Bush blocked eavesdropping program probe
Bush blocked eavesdropping program probe: “personally”
Saudi Arabia harshly criticizes Hezbollah for escalating Mideast crisis
Saudi Arabia harshly criticizes Hezbollah for escalating Mideast crisis: “The kingdom sees that it is time for those elements to alone shoulder the full responsibility for this irresponsible behavior and that the burden of ending the crisis falls on them alone.”
Transformation’s Toll
George Will: Transformation’s Toll: “Still, it is not perverse to wonder whether the spectacle of America, currently learning a lesson – one that conservatives should not have to learn on the job – about the limits of power to subdue an unruly world, has emboldened many enemies.”
Put Your 2.0 Where Your Mouth Is
Put Your 2.0 Where Your Mouth Is: “The point is that we’re about see the wisdom of crowds tested against the madness of the mob in real-time.”
Sunday, 16 July 2006
Stabbed in the Back!
Stabbed in the Back!: “What Nixon and a few of his contemporaries did for the right was to make culture war the permanent condition of American politics.”
Saturday, 15 July 2006
Headbutt heaven for the mashup brigade
Headbutt heaven for the mashup brigade
Friday, 14 July 2006
What will Democrats do in the wake of the Specter cave-in?
What will Democrats do in the wake of the Specter cave-in?: “Nobody who knows how to read could read that bill and think that. At this point, I believe they don’t even read the bill. It’s hard to see how they could read the bill and then write that article.”
An Object Lesson in the Importance of Standards
An Object Lesson in the Importance of Standards: “Obviously, not every soldier with a GED and an arrest record is going to be charged with committing an atrocity such as Mahmudiyah. But as Morris Janowitz and many others have shown, smarter soldiers make better soldiers. So too do soldiers without criminal backgrounds. They survive longer on the battlefield, and they make better decisions under fire.”
But she’s waiguoren!
But she’s waiguoren!: “My point is not that Chinese people can’t wrap our minds around the fact that a foreigner somehow cracked our secret code. It’s to show how frustratingly difficult is for the human mind to overcome preconcieved notions.”
Drowning in data - complexity’s threat to terror investigations
Drowning in data - complexity’s threat to terror investigations: “But the current technology-heavy approach to the threat doesn’t make a great deal of sense, because it produces very large numbers of suspects who are not and never will be a serious threat. Quantities of these suspects will nevertheless be found to be guilty of something, and along the way large amounts of investigative resource will have been expended to no useful purpose, aside from filling up 90 days.” (from Bruce Schneier)
Wednesday, 12 July 2006
The Internet is old news and boring.. Deal with it
The Internet is old news and boring.. Deal with it: “Have you noticed these days that its almost impossible to NOT buy a PC that is fast enough to run any application you want to run ? Do we even pay attention to how fast processors are any more?”
‘I just bought your hard drive’
‘I just bought your hard drive’: “‘The allegations are very disturbing, as they are inconsistent with our standard procedures for disposing used hard drives,’ the company said in a statement said. ‘The allegations, if true, would be intolerable. … We are vigorously investigating.’ That vigorous investigation, however, apparently didn’t begin in February when Gerbus said he called Best Buy to complain.” (from Bob Sullivan by way of Guy Sherr)
Tuesday, 11 July 2006
.Mac’s Missed Opportunities
.Mac’s Missed Opportunities: “It can’t just be poor design - it has to be some form of idiocy.”
Monday, 10 July 2006
Memo to the Public Relations Department
Memo to the Public Relations Department.: “When we hold up Erlenmeyer flasks to eye level to see the future of research in them, which we try not to do too often because we usually don’t want to know, rarely is this accompanied by an eerie red light coming from the general direction of our pockets. It’s a bad sign when that happens, actually.”
AOL Said, ‘If You Leave Me I’ll Do Something Crazy’
AOL Said, ‘If You Leave Me I’ll Do Something Crazy’: “If we generously assume the shorter time, then the three million members who dropped AOL in the 12 months through March had to make an involuntary investment equivalent to 250 work-years in order to wriggle free.” - more here
Sunday, 9 July 2006
The Immigration Equation - New York Times
The Immigration Equation: “The puzzle is this: how is the U.S. able to absorb its immigrants so easily? After all, 21 million immigrants, about 15 percent of the labor force, hold jobs in the U.S., but the country has nothing close to that many unemployed. (The actual number is only seven million.) So the majority of immigrants can’t literally have ‘taken’ jobs; they must be doing jobs that wouldn’t have existed had the immigrants not been here.”
The trend to “best available”
Seth Godin: The trend to “best available”: “Why? Because expensive Zales jewelry is neither good enough nor the best available. It was in a horrible middle ground.”
Friday, 7 July 2006
Indiana Man Takes Corn Underground
Indiana Man Takes Corn Underground: “In this on demand environment, they can control the temperature and length of daylight. They don’t need pesticides because there are no insects and no crop diseases.”
Western Union Blocks Arab Cash Transfers
Western Union Blocks Arab Cash Transfers: “They say Treasury guidelines are sending more people to informal money transfer networks called ‘hundis’ or ‘hawalas’ that have been used by gangsters and terrorists because they circumvent such scrutiny.”
Thursday, 6 July 2006
Economics and Giant Eagle
Christopher Briem has questions about Giant Eagle’s Fuelperks program.
This reminds me to comment on G’Eagle’s Personal Shopper system. We ran into this the last time we went into the grocery store: it extends the self-service check-out system to a wand that you carry around the store with you. Scan items as you pick them up, bag them in your cart, and when it’s time to leave the system already knows your total and all you have to do is pay.
It’s a nice idea, but I see a few flaws:
- You have to go through a rather tedious process to get the wand at the beginning (onerously tedious if it’s your first time).
- If you shop with your spouse/s.o./roommates you now have multiple people running around trying to find the person with the wand.
- Bagging on the fly is dramatically less efficient than bagging at check-out (when you have a sense of what else needs to fit in the bag).
- Most shoppers probably aren’t as efficient at bagging as people who do this for a living.
- The main benefit to the consumer seems to be that of cutting down the wait at the checkout counter. It appears to do this by making the rest of the trip slower.
On the plus side, it removes the annoying “place item in bagging area” loop in the self-service checkout systems.
Wednesday, 5 July 2006
Identity Thief Finds Easy Money Hard to Resist
Identity Thief Finds Easy Money Hard to Resist: “I pretty much stuck with AOL because I knew AOL is most likely people new to the Internet” (by way of Jason Hong)
Tylenol Effect On Liver Greater, Higher Toxicity Levels Noted In Approved Doses, But Not Deemed Harmful
Tylenol Effect On Liver Greater, Higher Toxicity Levels Noted In Approved Doses, But Not Deemed Harmful: “‘If Tylenol were a new drug in development and they found what we found in this two-week healthy volunteer study, that would be the end of this drug,’ he says. ‘We are learning that these tests are not as useful as we thought they were for drug development.’”
Monday, 3 July 2006
Meet Hollywood’s Latest Genius
Meet Hollywood’s Latest Genius: “Academic research provides an alternate theory of Lansing’s rise and fall: It was just plain luck.”
Sunday, 2 July 2006
CRUD is not the only user interaction metaphor, thank you
CRUD is not the only user interaction metaphor, thank you: “Why is this a good idea? So a single HTTP transaction can be replaced with two? Because the POST verb just doesn’t get enough love these days?”