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Sex makes people healthy, cheerful, strong, beautiful and sleepy

Sex makes people healthy, cheerful, strong, beautiful and sleepy It is much easier for a woman to learn how to love herself, if she has a man, who desires and worships her It is generally believed that human beings have sex either for pleasure or reproduction. However, the number of people driven with these motivations has been reducing steadily during the recent years. The majority of humans use sex as the most pleasant and available remedy for a whole bouquet of problems. It is an open secret that a person gets into a cheerful mood during an act of love. In addition to purely psychological satisfaction, the human body produces endorphin – the hormone in charge of elevated spirits and positive perception of the environment. Researchers say that such inspiration comes from the activity of certain brain centers, which change the hormonal status of the body. Good quality sex produces a spiritually elevating effect on the chemical level, which does not require any additional efforts. Prior to the culminating moment of an act of love, orgasm, the brain emits a dose of oxytocin – the hormone of the posterior lobe of pituitary. Oxytocin results in the production of sedative endorphins – natural analogues of morphine. Sex spurs the production of estrogen with women – the substance, which eases premenstrual pains. Therefore, sex is the best painkiller. One may say that a bed is the best equipment for physical exercises that man has ever designed. The pulse rate of a sexually excited individual increases from 70 to 150 beats per minute, which is comparable to muscle efforts of a weight-lifter. Only one sexual intercourse burns off the same amount of calories that a person loses running on a treadmill for 15 minutes. Needless to say that the first option is much more pleasant than the second one. Thirty minutes of sex kill about 200 calories. In other words, daily sex can take away 500 grams of your weight in a week. Sex is a very good impetus for the strengthening of the immune system. It has been tentatively proved that those people, who have sex on a regular basis, are much more protected against various viral diseases than those, who prefer abstinence: healthy sex saturates blood with antibodies. Therefore, sexually active men and women suffer from widespread infectious diseases such a flu and cold less frequently. As for sexually transmitted diseases, the answer is obvious: a condom makes perfect. It may seem unreal, but it is a fact: regular sex enlarges women's breasts. Sexual excitement intensifies the bloodstream, which may add 25 percent to a woman's breast size. Furthermore, women can raise their IQ with every orgasm that they experience. American scientists, who continuingly study sexual possibilities of homo sapiens, discovered that the moment of orgasm gives a very powerful incentive to a large number of chemical reactions and physical procedures in the body. The speed of blood circulation reaches its maximum, whereas the oxygen-enriched blood reaches all internal organs, including brain, very quickly. Hypothalamus – the center for control of the hormonal system – also governs the work of learning and memorizing centers. It goes without saying that an act of love ends with the ultimate relaxation and sleep, especially if it occurs after a hard day at work. The raising level of oxytocin produces a strong tranquillizing effect. Sex can therefore be considered as a perfect natural soporific medication. Sex trains almost all groups of muscles, especially muscles of pelvis, buttocks, stomach and arms, which is an important factor for women. Regular love acts improve the bearing and exert a favorable influence on the musculoskeletal system. In addition, sex results in the production of collagen – the substance, which adds smoothness and glow to women's skin. Progesterone, another hormonal product of sex, helps a person fight acne. American scientists concluded as a result of their research that couples, who love each other at least three times a week, look two or three years younger than their coevals, who either abstain from sex or hardly ever enjoy it. Any long-legged beauty girl annoys you, especially if she looks younger and prettier. A photograph of a beautiful model wearing fancy designer clothes ruins your entire day. Only passionate sex can save you from this infirmity. When a man tells his woman that she is the most beautiful lady on Earth, a woman usually stops thinking about several centimeters of fat on her waist or the fading elasticity of her skin. Psychologists say that it is much easier for a woman to learn how to love herself, if she has a man, who desires and worships her.

Dietary supplements, Nutraceuticals, Functional foods, Health ingredients, Herbals

Analyzing genomic data across populations is key to understanding the role of genetic factors in health and disease. However, the outcome is only as good as the data people are willing to share.

Briton and interpreter kidnapped in Afghanistan

The Briton, who has not been named, was working for a foreign company building a road from the southern city of Kandahar to the western city of Herat. At least three policemen were killed when the convoy the two were travelling in was attacked yesterday in western Afghanistan. Major Andrew Elmes, a spokesman for a Nato-led peacekeeping force in the region, confirmed that a Briton had been abducted and said: "We are now standing by ready to give any assistance." He said Nato troops had set up checkpoints in the area and were searching for signs of the abducted pair. A Foreign Office spokeswoman said: "We are aware an incident has taken place in Afghanistan as a result of which a UK national is missing and we are urgently seeking further details from the Afghan authorities." The local police chief, Allah Uddin Noorzi, said a Filipino employee of the same company who escaped the attack had been found hiding under a bridge. The police chief blamed the Taliban for the man's disappearance but an interior ministry spokesman, Latfullah Mashal, said it was the work of a criminal gang. He said no contact had been made with the kidnappers and that a delegation from Kabul was hurrying to the area. The kidnappings come just weeks after a Lebanese engineer building another road in southern Afghanistan was abducted. He was released unhurt days later. Militants have stepped up attacks ahead of elections on September 18 and more than 1,100 people have been killed in the past six months.

In pictures: Picturing Israel's wall

A new art form Israel may be pulling out of Gaza, but it is continuing work on the controversial barrier in the West Bank. It argues the measure is necessary to prevent Palestinian suicide attacks, while Palestinians argue the barrier is a land grab. But as the wall's construction is debated, it has provided a ready canvas for artists. BBC News website reader Andrew Holbrook, a British volunteer worker, has photographed some of the works.

Groupware Bad

Groupware Bad © 2005 Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org> "How will this software get my users laid?" Stop. Please just stop quoting that. Staaaahhhhhp. Greetings, people of the future! This piece has gotten a lot of attention over the years. I have heard a lot of people saying that they had been "inspired" by it. I fear that what they meant was that they were inspired by the one pull-quote that people tend to quote from it, and ignored the rest. So if someone has linked you to this page, or if you've googled that pull-quote and ended up here, let me give you some context. I wrote this in 2005, which was more than a year before Facebook was open to the general public. The world was different then. When I hear people say that they were "inspired" by this, I fear that the result of such inspiration was most likely to cause them to participate in the construction of the Public-Private Surveillance Partnership. These people told themselves that they were building tools to "bring people together" when in fact what they were doing was constructing and enabling the information-broker business models used by companies like Facebook and Equifax, where people are not the customers but rather are the raw materials whose personal details are the product. I was talking about decentralization and empowerment of the individual. They went and build the exact opposite. It's not a great feeling to think that someone may have read your words and then gone on to construct the dystopian hellscape that we're now living in, where Twitter is the prime enabler of actual Nazis and Facebook's greatest accomplishment has been to put a racist rapist in the White House. If all the people who claimed to have been "inspired" by this piece hadn't been, and had just kept writing middleware for banks or whatever, the world might have been a slightly better place. I wish I had never published this. - jwz, 24-Nov-2017 15-Feb-2005 Today Nat announced this new calendar server project called Hula, and I've got a funny story about that. Nat was in town, and he stopped by to say hi and chat, and he said, "So we've got this big pile of code we're going to release, and we're going to build an open source groupware system! It's going to be awesome!" And I said, "Jesus Mother of Fuck, what are you thinking! Do not strap the 'Groupware' albatross around your neck! That's what killed Netscape, are you insane?" He looked at me like I'd just kicked his puppy. Groupware BAD See, there were essentially two things that killed Netscape (and the real answer is book length, so I'm simplifying greatly, but) The one that got most of the press was Microsoft's illegal use of their monopoly in one market (operating systems) to destroy an existing market (web browsers) by driving the market price for browsers to zero, instantaneously eliminating something like 60% of Netscape's revenue. Which was, you know, bad. But the other one is that Netscape 4 was a really crappy product. We had built this really nice entry-level mail reader in Netscape 2.0, and it was a smashing success. Our punishment for that success was that management saw this general-purpose mail reader and said, "since this mail reader is popular with normal people, we must now pimp it out to `The Enterprise', call it Groupware, and try to compete with Lotus Notes!" To do this, they bought a company called Collabra who had tried (and, mostly, failed) to do something similar to what we had accomplished. They bought this company and spliced 4 layers of management in above us. Somehow, Collabra managed to completely take control of Netscape: it was like Netscape had gotten acquired instead of the other way around. And then they went off into the weeds so badly that the Collabra-driven "3.0" release was obviously going to be so mind-blowingly late that "2.1" became "3.0" and "3.0" became "4.0". (So yeah, 3.0 didn't just seem like the bugfix patch-release for 2.0: it was.) Now the problem here is that the product's direction changed utterly. Our focus in the client group had always been to build products and features that people wanted to use. That we wanted to use. That our moms wanted to use. "Groupware" is all about things like "workflow", which means, "the chairman of the committee has emailed me this checklist, and I'm done with item 3, so I want to check off item 3, so this document must be sent back to my supervisor to approve the fact that item 3 is changing from `unchecked' to `checked', and once he does that, it can be directed back to committee for review." Nobody cares about that shit. Nobody you'd want to talk to, anyway. Users GOOD If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy. When words like "groupware" and "enterprise" start getting tossed around, you're doing the latter. You start adding features to satisfy line-items on some checklist that was constructed by interminable committee meetings among bureaucrats, and you're coding toward an externally-dictated product specification that maybe some company will want to buy a hundred "seats" of, but that nobody will ever love. With that kind of motivation, nobody will ever find it sexy. It won't make anyone happy. Ok, I said it was a funny story, but obviously that's not the funny part, unless sad is funny. Anyway, I babbled at Nat along these lines for a while, predicting that, while I was sure that anyone he talked to in a corporation would tell him, "free groupware, yes, awesome!", there was really no reason to even bother releasing something like that as open source, because there was going to be absolutely no buy-in from the "itch-scratching" crowd. With a product like that, there was going to be no teenager in his basement hacking on it just because it was cool, or because it doing so made his life easier. Maybe IBM would throw some bucks at a developer or two to help out with it, because it might be cheaper to pay someone to write software than to just buy it off the shelf. But with a groupware product, nobody would ever work on it unless they were getting paid to, because it's just fundamentally not interesting to individuals. So I said, narrow the focus. Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid? That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it's not only crude but insightful. "How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software). "Social software" is about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up. Calendars USEFUL I said, instead of trying to build some all-singing all-dancing "collaboration server" where you're going to throw in all kinds of ridiculous line items like bulletin boards and task tracking and other shit, let's suppose you narrow your focus to just calendars. The first thing you want to do is make it trivially easy for someone to publish their calendar, allowing other people to check their schedule (and, for example, know when our target user has classes, when he's planning on studying at a cafe, what nights he's thinking of going to a movie, and what concerts he intends on seeing). Right now people can do that by publishing .ics files, but it's not trivial to do so, and it's work on the part of other people to look at them. If it's not HTML hanging off our friend's home page that can be viewed in any browser on a public terminal in a library, the bar to entry is too high and it's useless. Then the next thing you want is an invitation manager like Evite but that doesn't suck. Evite sucks because they're spammers, and because it's more important to them to put advertising in front of your eyeballs than to be useful, so the mail they send out doesn't actually include any information, in a lame-assed attempt to drive hits to their web site. So what you want next is a free replacement for Evite -- but more to the point, one that doesn't require any kind of server running anywhere. And if it doesn't work with webmail, you've lost before you've even begun, so don't do something dumb like requiring a plugin. The trick you want to accomplish is that when one person is using your software, it suddenly provides value to that person and their entire circle of friends, without the friends having had to do anything at all. Then, later, you pull the friends into the fold: if one of them starts using the software, they become their own hub, and get the benefit they have already witnessed from a distance. And then Nat went back to whichever flyover state Novell is in, and a few days later he said to me, "wow, you really bummed me out, because the dozen other people I had talked to before you were all like, `a free groupware system, that's an awesome idea!' Then you depressed me, and I came back here and told the other guys what you had said, and they were all, `Oh, fuck. He's right.'" Wait, was there a funny part? Ok, maybe not. Nevermind.

Opinion | Waiting for a Leader

George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end. We will, of course, endure, and the city of New Orleans must come back. But looking at the pictures on television yesterday of a place abandoned to the forces of flood, fire and looting, it was hard not to wonder exactly how that is going to come to pass. Right now, hundreds of thousands of American refugees need our national concern and care. Thousands of people still need to be rescued from imminent peril. Public health threats must be controlled in New Orleans and throughout southern Mississippi. Drivers must be given confidence that gasoline will be available, and profiteering must be brought under control at a moment when television has been showing long lines at some pumps and spot prices approaching $4 a gallon have been reported. Sacrifices may be necessary to make sure that all these things happen in an orderly, efficient way. But this administration has never been one to counsel sacrifice. And nothing about the president's demeanor yesterday -- which seemed casual to the point of carelessness -- suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis. While our attention must now be on the Gulf Coast's most immediate needs, the nation will soon ask why New Orleans's levees remained so inadequate. Publications from the local newspaper to National Geographic have fulminated about the bad state of flood protection in this beloved city, which is below sea level. Why were developers permitted to destroy wetlands and barrier islands that could have held back the hurricane's surge? Why was Congress, before it wandered off to vacation, engaged in slashing the budget for correcting some of the gaping holes in the area's flood protection?

Google OS (??)

This image was lost some time after publication, but you can still view it here Not sure what you all are up to this fine afternoon, but I'm peeing my pants. GoogleOS? True? False? Wha? Why didn't I see this in July? Advertisement I mean this is probably just a KDE-based Linux hack/proof-of-concept thing, but it is quite hawt. [Thanks, Daniel] Primi screenshot per GoogleOS [Grooan] UPDATE - Simone offers a full translation. Looks like an embedded OS. A BIG FAKE! Not so much a fake as an homage. Oh well.

Category 4 Hurricane Determined to Strike U.S. -- Cont.

George W. Bush was once known as the C.E.O. President, a term his handlers eagerly coined in order to convey that the country would from now on be run like a business. That quickly evolved into the less flattering... then the War President... now it's looking like we can all finally settle on one. George W. Bush: the Disaster President. "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." He honestly said that. If that brings up more than a passing twinge of familiarity, being a more than remarkable restatement of Condi Rice's now-famous assertion to the Senate panel -- then I suppose we shouldn't be surprised. But it does bring up something that we joke about often, but apparently have never taken quite seriously enough: our President is an idiot. I don't mean an average, run-of-the-mill idiot. I mean an idiot who apparently, for the entire duration of his presidency, literally was paying absolutely no attention to even the most life-threateningly critical tasks of government. The administration specifically cut the funds to fix these specific levees, in order to specifically divert that Corps money to Iraq, despite urgent warnings and predictions of catastrophic disaster if the levees were breeched. The administration specifically cancelled the Clinton-backed flood control program to preserve and restore the wetlands between New Orleans and the gulf, instead specifically opening parts of that buffer zone for development. Nobody anticipated this disaster? It was identified by FEMA as one of the top three likeliest major disasters to strike America. (That link, one of countless stories, was from 2001, by the way.) It has been a major disaster scenario for years. Everybody anticipated it, which makes this single statement by George W. Bush possibly the most dishonest, lying, craptacularly false thing he has ever said in his presidency -- even surpassing his now-infamous State of the Union Address. Truly, this is President Bush's blue-dress moment. And yet, funneling the money into Iraq was more important. You better bet your crapulent, lying, one-track, drink-addled ass that's a political issue. He also said today: "I hope people don't play politics at this time of a natural disaster the likes of which this country has never seen." Oh, I'm touched. Utterly touched. After 9/11, the entire Republican Party went en masse to get Twin Towers ass tattoos. The Republican convention was a wholesale tribute to crass exploitation, the sets themselves designed to evoke the aftermath of the attack. Every domestic and international policy this administration -- no, this entire Republican government -- has produced has been heaved up before the public while waving the spectre of 9/11 as the catch-all vindication of every administration whim. Every tax cut, every civil rights issue, every budget cut, every budget expansion, no matter how tortured the logic must be, has some Republican senator standing on the Senate floor and proudly raping the corpses of that day as justification for their particular agenda item. Oh, we've seen politicization of disaster. Every Republican campaign for the last four years has revolved around the politicization of disaster. But Lord help us, George W. Bush is going to get the vapors if anyone asks him to explain his administration's active cuts of the very programs designed to keep New Orleans safe.

Breath of the dragon: ERS-2 and Envisat reveal impact of economic growth on China's air quality

Applications Breath of the dragon: ERS-2 and Envisat reveal impact of economic growth on China's air quality 01/09/2005 3440 views 0 likes China's spectacular economic growth during the last decade has brought many benefits – and some challenges. Global atmospheric mapping of nitrogen dioxide pollution performed by ERS-2's GOME and Envisat's SCIAMACHY reveals the world's largest amount of NO 2 hanging above Beijing and northeast China, as reported in Nature this week. As part of ESA's Dragon Programme, European and Chinese researchers are using results returned from the Global Ozone Mapping Experiment (GOME) on ERS-2 and the Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric Chartography (SCIAMACHY) on Envisat to monitor and forecast Chinese air quality. In this context, researchers at the University of Bremen, the Max-Planck Institute of Meteorology in Hamburg and France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) have been studying the retrieval of nitrogen dioxide variability from space and modelling its global behaviour. Average annual NO2 changes 1996-2002 The team have published an article in the 1 September 2005 edition of the science journal Nature about the global changes in nitrogen dioxide observed in the last decade from space and highlighted the dramatic changes over China. Nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ) is associated with nitrogen oxide (NO) in the atmosphere and the sum of the two is called NO X . This is released into the troposphere from power plants, heavy industry and road transport, along with biomass burning, lightning in the atmosphere and microbial activity in the soil. The emission of nitrogen oxides has increased about six-fold since pre-industrial times and in cities above a thousand times more NO X is present than in the pristine and remote marine boundary layer. Envisat optical view of China haze Exposure to nitrogen dioxide in large quantities is known to cause lung damage and respiratory problems, although little is known about the consequences of long term exposure to elevated atmospheric amounts. The presence of this gas is a significant driver of the production of low-level ozone, which, within the troposphere (the lowest part of the atmosphere, extending eight to 16 kilometres in height) is itself a harmful toxic pollutant, a major ingredient of photochemical smog. "While nitrogen dioxide vertical column concentrations above central and eastern Europe and parts of the East Coast of the United States have been either static or exhibiting a small decrease, there is a clear and significant increase over China," explains John Burrows of the University of Bremen's Institute of Environmental Physics, SCIAMACHY's Principal Investigator. Annual changes in nitrogen dioxide for selected areas "Before SCIAMACHY was flying we previously retrieved NO 2 data from its precursor instrument, GOME on ESA's ERS-2 mission. Although GOME had lower resolution, the article shows that China's nitrogen dioxide retrievals from the two instruments overlap seamlessly. "What the combined data show are that nitrogen dioxide levels have risen by around 50% since 1996, and this behaviour is continuing." Monthly averages over East Central China Space-based sensors are the only way to carry out effective global and regional monitoring of the atmosphere. While GOME demonstrated the first satellite sensitivity to tropospheric nitrogen dioxide, SCIAMACHY possesses superior performance, with a spatial resolution of 60 x 30 kilometres compared to 320 x 40 km for its predecessor. SCIAMACHY also observes the atmosphere in two different ways – downwards or nadir-sounding' as well as 'limb-sounding' along the direction of flight – and with a larger spectral range than its predecessor. The increase in nitrogen dioxide levels seen is an unfortunate side effect of economic success. China's industrial boom has seen it become the world's largest consumer of copper, aluminium and cement and the second bigger importer of oil. Car ownership within the country has been doubling every few years. "China's nitrogen dioxide concentration varies according to season," Burrows adds. "There is more in the winter as a result of differing emission patterns and meteorology. For example more fuel is burned for heating and nitrogen dioxide persists longer in the atmosphere at that less sunny time of year – lasting around a day rather than hours, as in the summer. Envisat - artist's impression "Meteorology also plays a role. There is a peak before Christmas: this is not because industrial activity, domestic heating or transportation is suddenly reduced after the holiday season but because there is an eastward outflow of air that was previously revolving around Asia. This is the same type of phenomenon that carries dust from the Gobi Desert across to the West Coast of the US." China is reliant on coal to meet 75% of its national energy needs, and that means high levels of another atmospheric pollutant called sulphur dioxide (SO 2 ) also detectable by SCIAMACHY. Large SO 2 sources over China that overlap with nitrogen dioxide plumes are linked to power plants. Further to the west there is also sulphur dioxide produced from smouldering underground coal seam fires. Nitrogen dioxide over Europe Burrows is the scientist who – supported by an international team – proposed both GOME and SCIAMACHY to national space agencies and ESA in the first place. He explained that the two instruments were originally chosen to fly because of their ability to measure stratospheric ozone, but were also selected in order to investigate the amount of useful information that could be retrieved from the troposphere. "The instruments are now being used to monitor a significant number of key tropospheric trace gases including formaldehyde, methane, sulphur dioxide and carbon monoxide and dioxide," Burrows remembers. "Back when we were starting out, many people thought it would be impossible to get any useful results out of the troposphere. There are many important issues to deal with, such as cloud cover and the highly variable reflectivity of the surface, as well as having the absorption or emission of stratospheric and upper atmospheric species situated between the troposphere and the instrument. "First with GOME and now much better with SCIAMACHY we are demonstrating it can be done. The success so far is an important step on the way to establishing an operational global observing system for the Earth's atmosphere. This is something we need as we enter the geological age of the Anthropocene, where the activities of mankind and its interactions with natural phenomena are the driving force in global climate change. "Next we are hoping for follow-up satellite missions, in particular from geostationary orbit to monitor atmospheric pollution, which has a strong diurnal variation and thereby determine objectively the changing atmospheric composition." SCIAMACHY: surveying the world in six days Nitrogen dioxide over the United States SCIAMACHY is a spectrometer, and it works by measuring sunlight – either transmitted, reflected or scattered by the Earth's atmosphere or surface in the ultraviolet, visible and near infrared regions. Mathematical inversion of these data yields the amounts and distribution of trace gases, ozone and related chemicals, clouds and dust particles throughout the atmosphere. With a 960-km swath and alternate limb and nadir observations, SCIAMACHY covers the entire world every six days at the equator and more often at high latitudes. This versatile instrument represents a national contribution to ESA's Envisat mission. It was funded by the German government through the German Aerospace Center (DLR), the Dutch government through the Netherlands Agency for Aerospace Programmes (NIVR) and also the Belgian government through the Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy (BIRA-IASB). SCIAMACHY is part of a family of atmospheric sounders that also includes GOME on ERS-2 and also the forthcoming GOME-2 instrument due to launch next year aboard ESA's and EUMETSAT's first MetOp spacecraft. About Dragon The Dragon Programme is a joint undertaking between ESA, the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of China and the National Remote Sensing Centre of China (NRSCC). Its purpose is to encourage increased exploitation of ESA space resources within China as well as stimulate increased scientific co-operation in the field of Earth Observation science and applications between China and Europe.

John Battelle's Search Blog Google Injects AdWords Into Magazine Market. Q: Why? A: Money.

This scoop from Cnet sure caught my eye: Google is expanding its lucrative Internet advertising network into the print world in a bold attempt to capture traditional ad dollars. The search king, which makes 99 percent of its revenue from Internet ads, is quietly testing the waters of print… This scoop from Cnet sure caught my eye: Google is expanding its lucrative Internet advertising network into the print world in a bold attempt to capture traditional ad dollars. The search king, which makes 99 percent of its revenue from Internet ads, is quietly testing the waters of print advertising sales, according to executives at several companies that have bought the ads. Google recently began buying ad pages in technology magazines, including PC Magazine and Maximum PC, and reselling those pages–cut into quarters or fifths–to small advertisers that already belong to its online ad network, dubbed AdWords. This certainly has nothing to do with search. An image of the ads is here. This feels like a revenue diversification play, to be sure – selling directories and marketplace ads is always the next step once a publisher exhausts the low hanging fruit of its core offerings – but I wonder what the real agenda is here. Does Google see an opportunity to, in essence, become the middleman for anywhere from one to ten pages of directory/marketplace ads in nearly every B2B and niche magazine in the world? Of course it does. And why not? It has the infrastructure in place (as I said in my previous excerpt, the most valuable asset it has after their tech is its network of advertisers). Let’s see. The Cnet piece said that the advertisers paid Google $1000 for their ads in PCMagazine. There were five of these advertisers – so $5K. The manufacturing/distribution cost of that page is probably no more than a grand, so that’s $4K in profit to split between Google and the publishers of PC Magazine. Let’s say the split is 70/30. That’s $1200 to Google, and $2800 to the publisher. As with the online world, this is free money for the publisher, and they probably love it. Now, $1200 a page, say an average of five pages per B2B magazine, at least 1500 viable B2B mags in the country (probably more, but….), so do the math, that’s $1200 times 5 times 1500, that’s, er, $9 million, and that’s one issue. Say the average B2B magazine comes out 18 times a year (some are monthly, some weekly, some biweekly etc.), that’s $162 million in revenue a year, the vast majority of that pure profit. And that’s just to start. Yeah, I see how that might be interesting to Google. And to publishers who, in the end, are never very good at monetizing the back of their book. For now, this feels like a test. But this sure as heck doesn’t feel like a groovy, engineering-driven, throw-it-against-the-wall kind of test. This is a test of a very real opportunity. Update: Google sent me a statement, thin soup, but here you go: Google is testing a program to place ads from our advertising network into U.S. print publications. This limited test is part of Google’s continuing effort to develop new ways to provide effective and useful advertising to advertisers, publishers and users.

Privilege of China's wealthiest: A 2nd child

Privilege of China's wealthiest: A 2nd child By Jun Wang (International Herald Leader/paci) Updated: 2005-09-02 10:04 Jaiwei Du's parents wanted two sons. But they did not have the chance to have another son before China's one-child policy began in 1978, four years after Du was born. Famous Chinese film director Chen Kaige (L) poses a family photo with his actress wife Chen Hong and their two sons in Shanghai. The star couple have at least one of their children born in the US. [baidu] According to the National Population and Family Planning Commission of China, families who can have two children are "at the two ends of the social scale." They are either so poor that the government never expects them to repay the fine, or so rich that the fine is meaningless. As China's economy and income skyrocket in recent years, the rich are finding it easy to evade the one-child policy. Peasants pregnant with their second or third child typically escape from their hometown to avoid forced abortion by the local population and family planning officers. The rich don't need to escape. Instead, they simply pay the fine. According to the International Herald Leader, a businessman in Zhejiang Province paid a 0.4 million RMB ($80,000) fine for his second child. High income also means more freedom to travel. Sometimes the wealthy deliver their children abroad so that the newborn children become foreign citizens, who are not covered by the Chinese one-child policy. Chinese film director Kaige Chen (Farewell my Concubine), an American permanent resident, and his actress wife have two sons, at least one was born in Los Angeles. "There are not many people in such high-income level, so such legal loopholes have little influence on population control," says Weixiong Li, a population officer of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. But Li admitted that it destroys the justice and equity of the one-child policy and other related laws. Among young white collar workers in metropolitan cities like Beijing and Guangzhou, people who want two children outnumber those who only want one child by 34.6 percent, according to a 2002 report from the National Population and Family Planning Commission of China. "The current relatively low birthrate is from the one-child policy," says Hao Zhou, a sociology professor from Nanjing University. People naturally want to have more than one child, he says. "Once there's opportunity, the birthrate would rebound. High income creates such an opportunity," he says.

The Other Road Ahead

September 2001 (This article explains why much of the next generation of software may be server-based, what that will mean for programmers, and why this new kind of software is a great opportunity for startups. It's derived from a talk at BBN Labs.) In the summer of 1995, my friend Robert Morris and I decided to start a startup. The PR campaign leading up to Netscape's IPO was running full blast then, and there was a lot of talk in the press about online commerce. At the time there might have been thirty actual stores on the Web, all made by hand. If there were going to be a lot of online stores, there would need to be software for making them, so we decided to write some. For the first week or so we intended to make this an ordinary desktop application. Then one day we had the idea of making the software run on our Web server, using the browser as an interface. We tried rewriting the software to work over the Web, and it was clear that this was the way to go. If we wrote our software to run on the server, it would be a lot easier for the users and for us as well. This turned out to be a good plan. Now, as Yahoo Store, this software is the most popular online store builder, with about 14,000 users. When we started Viaweb, hardly anyone understood what we meant when we said that the software ran on the server. It was not until Hotmail was launched a year later that people started to get it. Now everyone knows that this is a valid approach. There is a name now for what we were: an Application Service Provider, or ASP. I think that a lot of the next generation of software will be written on this model. Even Microsoft, who have the most to lose, seem to see the inevitablity of moving some things off the desktop. If software moves off the desktop and onto servers, it will mean a very different world for developers. This article describes the surprising things we saw, as some of the first visitors to this new world. To the extent software does move onto servers, what I'm describing here is the future. The Next Thing? When we look back on the desktop software era, I think we'll marvel at the inconveniences people put up with, just as we marvel now at what early car owners put up with. For the first twenty or thirty years, you had to be a car expert to own a car. But cars were such a big win that lots of people who weren't car experts wanted to have them as well. Computers are in this phase now. When you own a desktop computer, you end up learning a lot more than you wanted to know about what's happening inside it. But more than half the households in the US own one. My mother has a computer that she uses for email and for keeping accounts. About a year ago she was alarmed to receive a letter from Apple, offering her a discount on a new version of the operating system. There's something wrong when a sixty-five year old woman who wants to use a computer for email and accounts has to think about installing new operating systems. Ordinary users shouldn't even know the words "operating system," much less "device driver" or "patch." There is now another way to deliver software that will save users from becoming system administrators. Web-based applications are programs that run on Web servers and use Web pages as the user interface. For the average user this new kind of software will be easier, cheaper, more mobile, more reliable, and often more powerful than desktop software. With Web-based software, most users won't have to think about anything except the applications they use. All the messy, changing stuff will be sitting on a server somewhere, maintained by the kind of people who are good at that kind of thing. And so you won't ordinarily need a computer, per se, to use software. All you'll need will be something with a keyboard, a screen, and a Web browser. Maybe it will have wireless Internet access. Maybe it will also be your cell phone. Whatever it is, it will be consumer electronics: something that costs about $200, and that people choose mostly based on how the case looks. You'll pay more for Internet services than you do for the hardware, just as you do now with telephones. [1] It will take about a tenth of a second for a click to get to the server and back, so users of heavily interactive software, like Photoshop, will still want to have the computations happening on the desktop. But if you look at the kind of things most people use computers for, a tenth of a second latency would not be a problem. My mother doesn't really need a desktop computer, and there are a lot of people like her. The Win for Users Near my house there is a car with a bumper sticker that reads "death before inconvenience." Most people, most of the time, will take whatever choice requires least work. If Web-based software wins, it will be because it's more convenient. And it looks as if it will be, for users and developers both. To use a purely Web-based application, all you need is a browser connected to the Internet. So you can use a Web-based application anywhere. When you install software on your desktop computer, you can only use it on that computer. Worse still, your files are trapped on that computer. The inconvenience of this model becomes more and more evident as people get used to networks. The thin end of the wedge here was Web-based email. Millions of people now realize that you should have access to email messages no matter where you are. And if you can see your email, why not your calendar? If you can discuss a document with your colleagues, why can't you edit it? Why should any of your data be trapped on some computer sitting on a faraway desk? The whole idea of "your computer" is going away, and being replaced with "your data." You should be able to get at your data from any computer. Or rather, any client, and a client doesn't have to be a computer. Clients shouldn't store data; they should be like telephones. In fact they may become telephones, or vice versa. And as clients get smaller, you have another reason not to keep your data on them: something you carry around with you can be lost or stolen. Leaving your PDA in a taxi is like a disk crash, except that your data is handed to someone else instead of being vaporized. With purely Web-based software, neither your data nor the applications are kept on the client. So you don't have to install anything to use it. And when there's no installation, you don't have to worry about installation going wrong. There can't be incompatibilities between the application and your operating system, because the software doesn't run on your operating system. Because it needs no installation, it will be easy, and common, to try Web-based software before you "buy" it. You should expect to be able to test-drive any Web-based application for free, just by going to the site where it's offered. At Viaweb our whole site was like a big arrow pointing users to the test drive. After trying the demo, signing up for the service should require nothing more than filling out a brief form (the briefer the better). And that should be the last work the user has to do. With Web-based software, you should get new releases without paying extra, or doing any work, or possibly even knowing about it. Upgrades won't be the big shocks they are now. Over time applications will quietly grow more powerful. This will take some effort on the part of the developers. They will have to design software so that it can be updated without confusing the users. That's a new problem, but there are ways to solve it. With Web-based applications, everyone uses the same version, and bugs can be fixed as soon as they're discovered. So Web-based software should have far fewer bugs than desktop software. At Viaweb, I doubt we ever had ten known bugs at any one time. That's orders of magnitude better than desktop software. Web-based applications can be used by several people at the same time. This is an obvious win for collaborative applications, but I bet users will start to want this in most applications once they realize it's possible. It will often be useful to let two people edit the same document, for example. Viaweb let multiple users edit a site simultaneously, more because that was the right way to write the software than because we expected users to want to, but it turned out that many did. When you use a Web-based application, your data will be safer. Disk crashes won't be a thing of the past, but users won't hear about them anymore. They'll happen within server farms. And companies offering Web-based applications will actually do backups-- not only because they'll have real system administrators worrying about such things, but because an ASP that does lose people's data will be in big, big trouble. When people lose their own data in a disk crash, they can't get that mad, because they only have themselves to be mad at. When a company loses their data for them, they'll get a lot madder. Finally, Web-based software should be less vulnerable to viruses. If the client doesn't run anything except a browser, there's less chance of running viruses, and no data locally to damage. And a program that attacked the servers themselves should find them very well defended. [2] For users, Web-based software will be less stressful. I think if you looked inside the average Windows user you'd find a huge and pretty much untapped desire for software meeting that description. Unleashed, it could be a powerful force. City of Code To developers, the most conspicuous difference between Web-based and desktop software is that a Web-based application is not a single piece of code. It will be a collection of programs of different types rather than a single big binary. And so designing Web-based software is like desiging a city rather than a building: as well as buildings you need roads, street signs, utilities, police and fire departments, and plans for both growth and various kinds of disasters. At Viaweb, software included fairly big applications that users talked to directly, programs that those programs used, programs that ran constantly in the background looking for problems, programs that tried to restart things if they broke, programs that ran occasionally to compile statistics or build indexes for searches, programs we ran explicitly to garbage-collect resources or to move or restore data, programs that pretended to be users (to measure performance or expose bugs), programs for diagnosing network troubles, programs for doing backups, interfaces to outside services, software that drove an impressive collection of dials displaying real-time server statistics (a hit with visitors, but indispensable for us too), modifications (including bug fixes) to open-source software, and a great many configuration files and settings. Trevor Blackwell wrote a spectacular program for moving stores to new servers across the country, without shutting them down, after we were bought by Yahoo. Programs paged us, sent faxes and email to users, conducted transactions with credit card processors, and talked to one another through sockets, pipes, http requests, ssh, udp packets, shared memory, and files. Some of Viaweb even consisted of the absence of programs, since one of the keys to Unix security is not to run unnecessary utilities that people might use to break into your servers. It did not end with software. We spent a lot of time thinking about server configurations. We built the servers ourselves, from components-- partly to save money, and partly to get exactly what we wanted. We had to think about whether our upstream ISP had fast enough connections to all the backbones. We serially dated RAID suppliers. But hardware is not just something to worry about. When you control it you can do more for users. With a desktop application, you can specify certain minimum hardware, but you can't add more. If you administer the servers, you can in one step enable all your users to page people, or send faxes, or send commands by phone, or process credit cards, etc, just by installing the relevant hardware. We always looked for new ways to add features with hardware, not just because it pleased users, but also as a way to distinguish ourselves from competitors who (either because they sold desktop software, or resold Web-based applications through ISPs) didn't have direct control over the hardware. Because the software in a Web-based application will be a collection of programs rather than a single binary, it can be written in any number of different languages. When you're writing desktop software, you're practically forced to write the application in the same language as the underlying operating system-- meaning C and C++. And so these languages (especially among nontechnical people like managers and VCs) got to be considered as the languages for "serious" software development. But that was just an artifact of the way desktop software had to be delivered. For server-based software you can use any language you want. [3] Today a lot of the top hackers are using languages far removed from C and C++: Perl, Python, and even Lisp. With server-based software, no one can tell you what language to use, because you control the whole system, right down to the hardware. Different languages are good for different tasks. You can use whichever is best for each. And when you have competitors, "you can" means "you must" (we'll return to this later), because if you don't take advantage of this possibility, your competitors will. Most of our competitors used C and C++, and this made their software visibly inferior because (among other things), they had no way around the statelessness of CGI scripts. If you were going to change something, all the changes had to happen on one page, with an Update button at the bottom. As I've written elsewhere, by using Lisp, which many people still consider a research language, we could make the Viaweb editor behave more like desktop software. Releases One of the most important changes in this new world is the way you do releases. In the desktop software business, doing a release is a huge trauma, in which the whole company sweats and strains to push out a single, giant piece of code. Obvious comparisons suggest themselves, both to the process and the resulting product. With server-based software, you can make changes almost as you would in a program you were writing for yourself. You release software as a series of incremental changes instead of an occasional big explosion. A typical desktop software company might do one or two releases a year. At Viaweb we often did three to five releases a day. When you switch to this new model, you realize how much software development is affected by the way it is released. Many of the nastiest problems you see in the desktop software business are due to catastrophic nature of releases. When you release only one new version a year, you tend to deal with bugs wholesale. Some time before the release date you assemble a new version in which half the code has been torn out and replaced, introducing countless bugs. Then a squad of QA people step in and start counting them, and the programmers work down the list, fixing them. They do not generally get to the end of the list, and indeed, no one is sure where the end is. It's like fishing rubble out of a pond. You never really know what's happening inside the software. At best you end up with a statistical sort of correctness. With server-based software, most of the change is small and incremental. That in itself is less likely to introduce bugs. It also means you know what to test most carefully when you're about to release software: the last thing you changed. You end up with a much firmer grip on the code. As a general rule, you do know what's happening inside it. You don't have the source code memorized, of course, but when you read the source you do it like a pilot scanning the instrument panel, not like a detective trying to unravel some mystery. Desktop software breeds a certain fatalism about bugs. You know that you're shipping something loaded with bugs, and you've even set up mechanisms to compensate for it (e.g. patch releases). So why worry about a few more? Soon you're releasing whole features you know are broken. Apple did this earlier this year. They felt under pressure to release their new OS, whose release date had already slipped four times, but some of the software (support for CDs and DVDs) wasn't ready. The solution? They released the OS without the unfinished parts, and users will have to install them later. With Web-based software, you never have to release software before it works, and you can release it as soon as it does work. The industry veteran may be thinking, it's a fine-sounding idea to say that you never have to release software before it works, but what happens when you've promised to deliver a new version of your software by a certain date? With Web-based software, you wouldn't make such a promise, because there are no versions. Your software changes gradually and continuously. Some changes might be bigger than others, but the idea of versions just doesn't naturally fit onto Web-based software. If anyone remembers Viaweb this might sound odd, because we were always announcing new versions. This was done entirely for PR purposes. The trade press, we learned, thinks in version numbers. They will give you major coverage for a major release, meaning a new first digit on the version number, and generally a paragraph at most for a point release, meaning a new digit after the decimal point. Some of our competitors were offering desktop software and actually had version numbers. And for these releases, the mere fact of which seemed to us evidence of their backwardness, they would get all kinds of publicity. We didn't want to miss out, so we started giving version numbers to our software too. When we wanted some publicity, we'd make a list of all the features we'd added since the last "release," stick a new version number on the software, and issue a press release saying that the new version was available immediately. Amazingly, no one ever called us on it. By the time we were bought, we had done this three times, so we were on Version 4. Version 4.1 if I remember correctly. After Viaweb became Yahoo Store, there was no longer such a desperate need for publicity, so although the software continued to evolve, the whole idea of version numbers was quietly dropped. Bugs The other major technical advantage of Web-based software is that you can reproduce most bugs. You have the users' data right there on your disk. If someone breaks your software, you don't have to try to guess what's going on, as you would with desktop software: you should be able to reproduce the error while they're on the phone with you. You might even know about it already, if you have code for noticing errors built into your application. Web-based software gets used round the clock, so everything you do is immediately put through the wringer. Bugs turn up quickly. Software companies are sometimes accused of letting the users debug their software. And that is just what I'm advocating. For Web-based software it's actually a good plan, because the bugs are fewer and transient. When you release software gradually you get far fewer bugs to start with. And when you can reproduce errors and release changes instantly, you can find and fix most bugs as soon as they appear. We never had enough bugs at any one time to bother with a formal bug-tracking system. You should test changes before you release them, of course, so no major bugs should get released. Those few that inevitably slip through will involve borderline cases and will only affect the few users that encounter them before someone calls in to complain. As long as you fix bugs right away, the net effect, for the average user, is far fewer bugs. I doubt the average Viaweb user ever saw a bug. Fixing fresh bugs is easier than fixing old ones. It's usually fairly quick to find a bug in code you just wrote. When it turns up you often know what's wrong before you even look at the source, because you were already worrying about it subconsciously. Fixing a bug in something you wrote six months ago (the average case if you release once a year) is a lot more work. And since you don't understand the code as well, you're more likely to fix it in an ugly way, or even introduce more bugs. [4] When you catch bugs early, you also get fewer compound bugs. Compound bugs are two separate bugs that interact: you trip going downstairs, and when you reach for the handrail it comes off in your hand. In software this kind of bug is the hardest to find, and also tends to have the worst consequences. [5] The traditional "break everything and then filter out the bugs" approach inherently yields a lot of compound bugs. And software that's released in a series of small changes inherently tends not to. The floors are constantly being swept clean of any loose objects that might later get stuck in something. It helps if you use a technique called functional programming. Functional programming means avoiding side-effects. It's something you're more likely to see in research papers than commercial software, but for Web-based applications it turns out to be really useful. It's hard to write entire programs as purely functional code, but you can write substantial chunks this way. It makes those parts of your software easier to test, because they have no state, and that is very convenient in a situation where you are constantly making and testing small modifications. I wrote much of Viaweb's editor in this style, and we made our scripting language, RTML, a purely functional language. People from the desktop software business will find this hard to credit, but at Viaweb bugs became almost a game. Since most released bugs involved borderline cases, the users who encountered them were likely to be advanced users, pushing the envelope. Advanced users are more forgiving about bugs, especially since you probably introduced them in the course of adding some feature they were asking for. In fact, because bugs were rare and you had to be doing sophisticated things to see them, advanced users were often proud to catch one. They would call support in a spirit more of triumph than anger, as if they had scored points off us. Support When you can reproduce errors, it changes your approach to customer support. At most software companies, support is offered as a way to make customers feel better. They're either calling you about a known bug, or they're just doing something wrong and you have to figure out what. In either case there's not much you can learn from them. And so you tend to view support calls as a pain in the ass that you want to isolate from your developers as much as possible. This was not how things worked at Viaweb. At Viaweb, support was free, because we wanted to hear from customers. If someone had a problem, we wanted to know about it right away so that we could reproduce the error and release a fix. So at Viaweb the developers were always in close contact with support. The customer support people were about thirty feet away from the programmers, and knew that they could always interrupt anything with a report of a genuine bug. We would leave a board meeting to fix a serious bug. Our approach to support made everyone happier. The customers were delighted. Just imagine how it would feel to call a support line and be treated as someone bringing important news. The customer support people liked it because it meant they could help the users, instead of reading scripts to them. And the programmers liked it because they could reproduce bugs instead of just hearing vague second-hand reports about them. Our policy of fixing bugs on the fly changed the relationship between customer support people and hackers. At most software companies, support people are underpaid human shields, and hackers are little copies of God the Father, creators of the world. Whatever the procedure for reporting bugs, it is likely to be one-directional: support people who hear about bugs fill out some form that eventually gets passed on (possibly via QA) to programmers, who put it on their list of things to do. It was very different at Viaweb. Within a minute of hearing about a bug from a customer, the support people could be standing next to a programmer hearing him say "Shit, you're right, it's a bug." It delighted the support people to hear that "you're right" from the hackers. They used to bring us bugs with the same expectant air as a cat bringing you a mouse it has just killed. It also made them more careful in judging the seriousness of a bug, because now their honor was on the line. After we were bought by Yahoo, the customer support people were moved far away from the programmers. It was only then that we realized that they were effectively QA and to some extent marketing as well. In addition to catching bugs, they were the keepers of the knowledge of vaguer, buglike things, like features that confused users. [6] They were also a kind of proxy focus group; we could ask them which of two new features users wanted more, and they were always right. Morale Being able to release software immediately is a big motivator. Often as I was walking to work I would think of some change I wanted to make to the software, and do it that day. This worked for bigger features as well. Even if something was going to take two weeks to write (few projects took longer), I knew I could see the effect in the software as soon as it was done. If I'd had to wait a year for the next release, I would have shelved most of these ideas, for a while at least. The thing about ideas, though, is that they lead to more ideas. Have you ever noticed that when you sit down to write something, half the ideas that end up in it are ones you thought of while writing it? The same thing happens with software. Working to implement one idea gives you more ideas. So shelving an idea costs you not only that delay in implementing it, but also all the ideas that implementing it would have led to. In fact, shelving an idea probably even inhibits new ideas: as you start to think of some new feature, you catch sight of the shelf and think "but I already have a lot of new things I want to do for the next release." What big companies do instead of implementing features is plan them. At Viaweb we sometimes ran into trouble on this account. Investors and analysts would ask us what we had planned for the future. The truthful answer would have been, we didn't have any plans. We had general ideas about things we wanted to improve, but if we knew how we would have done it already. What were we going to do in the next six months? Whatever looked like the biggest win. I don't know if I ever dared give this answer, but that was the truth. Plans are just another word for ideas on the shelf. When we thought of good ideas, we implemented them. At Viaweb, as at many software companies, most code had one definite owner. But when you owned something you really owned it: no one except the owner of a piece of software had to approve (or even know about) a release. There was no protection against breakage except the fear of looking like an idiot to one's peers, and that was more than enough. I may have given the impression that we just blithely plowed forward writing code. We did go fast, but we thought very carefully before we released software onto those servers. And paying attention is more important to reliability than moving slowly. Because he pays close attention, a Navy pilot can land a 40,000 lb. aircraft at 140 miles per hour on a pitching carrier deck, at night, more safely than the average teenager can cut a bagel. This way of writing software is a double-edged sword of course. It works a lot better for a small team of good, trusted programmers than it would for a big company of mediocre ones, where bad ideas are caught by committees instead of the people that had them. Brooks in Reverse Fortunately, Web-based software does require fewer programmers. I once worked for a medium-sized desktop software company that had over 100 people working in engineering as a whole. Only 13 of these were in product development. All the rest were working on releases, ports, and so on. With Web-based software, all you need (at most) are the 13 people, because there are no releases, ports, and so on. Viaweb was written by just three people. [7] I was always under pressure to hire more, because we wanted to get bought, and we knew that buyers would have a hard time paying a high price for a company with only three programmers. (Solution: we hired more, but created new projects for them.) When you can write software with fewer programmers, it saves you more than money. As Fred Brooks pointed out in The Mythical Man-Month, adding people to a project tends to slow it down. The number of possible connections between developers grows exponentially with the size of the group. The larger the group, the more time they'll spend in meetings negotiating how their software will work together, and the more bugs they'll get from unforeseen interactions. Fortunately, this process also works in reverse: as groups get smaller, software development gets exponentially more efficient. I can't remember the programmers at Viaweb ever having an actual meeting. We never had more to say at any one time than we could say as we were walking to lunch. If there is a downside here, it is that all the programmers have to be to some degree system administrators as well. When you're hosting software, someone has to be watching the servers, and in practice the only people who can do this properly are the ones who wrote the software. At Viaweb our system had so many components and changed so frequently that there was no definite border between software and infrastructure. Arbitrarily declaring such a border would have constrained our design choices. And so although we were constantly hoping that one day ("in a couple months") everything would be stable enough that we could hire someone whose job was just to worry about the servers, it never happened. I don't think it could be any other way, as long as you're still actively developing the product. Web-based software is never going to be something you write, check in, and go home. It's a live thing, running on your servers right now. A bad bug might not just crash one user's process; it could crash them all. If a bug in your code corrupts some data on disk, you have to fix it. And so on. We found that you don't have to watch the servers every minute (after the first year or so), but you definitely want to keep an eye on things you've changed recently. You don't release code late at night and then go home. Watching Users With server-based software, you're in closer touch with your code. You can also be in closer touch with your users. Intuit is famous for introducing themselves to customers at retail stores and asking to follow them home. If you've ever watched someone use your software for the first time, you know what surprises must have awaited them. Software should do what users think it will. But you can't have any idea what users will be thinking, believe me, until you watch them. And server-based software gives you unprecedented information about their behavior. You're not limited to small, artificial focus groups. You can see every click made by every user. You have to consider carefully what you're going to look at, because you don't want to violate users' privacy, but even the most general statistical sampling can be very useful. When you have the users on your server, you don't have to rely on benchmarks, for example. Benchmarks are simulated users. With server-based software, you can watch actual users. To decide what to optimize, just log into a server and see what's consuming all the CPU. And you know when to stop optimizing too: we eventually got the Viaweb editor to the point where it was memory-bound rather than CPU-bound, and since there was nothing we could do to decrease the size of users' data (well, nothing easy), we knew we might as well stop there. Efficiency matters for server-based software, because you're paying for the hardware. The number of users you can support per server is the divisor of your capital cost, so if you can make your software very efficient you can undersell competitors and still make a profit. At Viaweb we got the capital cost per user down to about $5. It would be less now, probably less than the cost of sending them the first month's bill. Hardware is free now, if your software is reasonably efficient. Watching users can guide you in design as well as optimization. Viaweb had a scripting language called RTML that let advanced users define their own page styles. We found that RTML became a kind of suggestion box, because users only used it when the predefined page styles couldn't do what they wanted. Originally the editor put button bars across the page, for example, but after a number of users used RTML to put buttons down the left side, we made that an option (in fact the default) in the predefined page styles. Finally, by watching users you can often tell when they're in trouble. And since the customer is always right, that's a sign of something you need to fix. At Viaweb the key to getting users was the online test drive. It was not just a series of slides built by marketing people. In our test drive, users actually used the software. It took about five minutes, and at the end of it they had built a real, working store. The test drive was the way we got nearly all our new users. I think it will be the same for most Web-based applications. If users can get through a test drive successfully, they'll like the product. If they get confused or bored, they won't. So anything we could do to get more people through the test drive would increase our growth rate. I studied click trails of people taking the test drive and found that at a certain step they would get confused and click on the browser's Back button. (If you try writing Web-based applications, you'll find that the Back button becomes one of your most interesting philosophical problems.) So I added a message at that point, telling users that they were nearly finished, and reminding them not to click on the Back button. Another great thing about Web-based software is that you get instant feedback from changes: the number of people completing the test drive rose immediately from 60% to 90%. And since the number of new users was a function of the number of completed test drives, our revenue growth increased by 50%, just from that change. Money In the early 1990s I read an article in which someone said that software was a subscription business. At first this seemed a very cynical statement. But later I realized that it reflects reality: software development is an ongoing process. I think it's cleaner if you openly charge subscription fees, instead of forcing people to keep buying and installing new versions so that they'll keep paying you. And fortunately, subscriptions are the natural way to bill for Web-based applications. Hosting applications is an area where companies will play a role that is not likely to be filled by freeware. Hosting applications is a lot of stress, and has real expenses. No one is going to want to do it for free. For companies, Web-based applications are an ideal source of revenue. Instead of starting each quarter with a blank slate, you have a recurring revenue stream. Because your software evolves gradually, you don't have to worry that a new model will flop; there never need be a new model, per se, and if you do something to the software that users hate, you'll know right away. You have no trouble with uncollectable bills; if someone won't pay you can just turn off the service. And there is no possibility of piracy. That last "advantage" may turn out to be a problem. Some amount of piracy is to the advantage of software companies. If some user really would not have bought your software at any price, you haven't lost anything if he uses a pirated copy. In fact you gain, because he is one more user helping to make your software the standard-- or who might buy a copy later, when he graduates from high school. When they can, companies like to do something called price discrimination, which means charging each customer as much as they can afford. [8] Software is particularly suitable for price discrimination, because the marginal cost is close to zero. This is why some software costs more to run on Suns than on Intel boxes: a company that uses Suns is not interested in saving money and can safely be charged more. Piracy is effectively the lowest tier of price discrimination. I think that software companies understand this and deliberately turn a blind eye to some kinds of piracy. [9] With server-based software they are going to have to come up with some other solution. Web-based software sells well, especially in comparison to desktop software, because it's easy to buy. You might think that people decide to buy something, and then buy it, as two separate steps. That's what I thought before Viaweb, to the extent I thought about the question at all. In fact the second step can propagate back into the first: if something is hard to buy, people will change their mind about whether they wanted it. And vice versa: you'll sell more of something when it's easy to buy. I buy more books because Amazon exists. Web-based software is just about the easiest thing in the world to buy, especially if you have just done an online demo. Users should not have to do much more than enter a credit card number. (Make them do more at your peril.) Sometimes Web-based software is offered through ISPs acting as resellers. This is a bad idea. You have to be administering the servers, because you need to be constantly improving both hardware and software. If you give up direct control of the servers, you give up most of the advantages of developing Web-based applications. Several of our competitors shot themselves in the foot this way-- usually, I think, because they were overrun by suits who were excited about this huge potential channel, and didn't realize that it would ruin the product they hoped to sell through it. Selling Web-based software through ISPs is like selling sushi through vending machines. Customers Who will the customers be? At Viaweb they were initially individuals and smaller companies, and I think this will be the rule with Web-based applications. These are the users who are ready to try new things, partly because they're more flexible, and partly because they want the lower costs of new technology. Web-based applications will often be the best thing for big companies too (though they'll be slow to realize it). The best intranet is the Internet. If a company uses true Web-based applications, the software will work better, the servers will be better administered, and employees will have access to the system from anywhere. The argument against this approach usually hinges on security: if access is easier for employees, it will be for bad guys too. Some larger merchants were reluctant to use Viaweb because they thought customers' credit card information would be safer on their own servers. It was not easy to make this point diplomatically, but in fact the data was almost certainly safer in our hands than theirs. Who can hire better people to manage security, a technology startup whose whole business is running servers, or a clothing retailer? Not only did we have better people worrying about security, we worried more about it. If someone broke into the clothing retailer's servers, it would affect at most one merchant, could probably be hushed up, and in the worst case might get one person fired. If someone broke into ours, it could affect thousands of merchants, would probably end up as news on CNet, and could put us out of business. If you want to keep your money safe, do you keep it under your mattress at home, or put it in a bank? This argument applies to every aspect of server administration: not just security, but uptime, bandwidth, load management, backups, etc. Our existence depended on doing these things right. Server problems were the big no-no for us, like a dangerous toy would be for a toy maker, or a salmonella outbreak for a food processor. A big company that uses Web-based applications is to that extent outsourcing IT. Drastic as it sounds, I think this is generally a good idea. Companies are likely to get better service this way than they would from in-house system administrators. System administrators can become cranky and unresponsive because they're not directly exposed to competitive pressure: a salesman has to deal with customers, and a developer has to deal with competitors' software, but a system administrator, like an old bachelor, has few external forces to keep him in line. [10] At Viaweb we had external forces in plenty to keep us in line. The people calling us were customers, not just co-workers. If a server got wedged, we jumped; just thinking about it gives me a jolt of adrenaline, years later. So Web-based applications will ordinarily be the right answer for big companies too. They will be the last to realize it, however, just as they were with desktop computers. And partly for the same reason: it will be worth a lot of money to convince big companies that they need something more expensive. There is always a tendency for rich customers to buy expensive solutions, even when cheap solutions are better, because the people offering expensive solutions can spend more to sell them. At Viaweb we were always up against this. We lost several high-end merchants to Web consulting firms who convinced them they'd be better off if they paid half a million dollars for a custom-made online store on their own server. They were, as a rule, not better off, as more than one discovered when Christmas shopping season came around and loads rose on their server. Viaweb was a lot more sophisticated than what most of these merchants got, but we couldn't afford to tell them. At $300 a month, we couldn't afford to send a team of well-dressed and authoritative-sounding people to make presentations to customers. A large part of what big companies pay extra for is the cost of selling expensive things to them. (If the Defense Department pays a thousand dollars for toilet seats, it's partly because it costs a lot to sell toilet seats for a thousand dollars.) And this is one reason intranet software will continue to thrive, even though it is probably a bad idea. It's simply more expensive. There is nothing you can do about this conundrum, so the best plan is to go for the smaller customers first. The rest will come in time. Son of Server Running software on the server is nothing new. In fact it's the old model: mainframe applications are all server-based. If server-based software is such a good idea, why did it lose last time? Why did desktop computers eclipse mainframes? At first desktop computers didn't look like much of a threat. The first users were all hackers-- or hobbyists, as they were called then. They liked microcomputers because they were cheap. For the first time, you could have your own computer. The phrase "personal computer" is part of the language now, but when it was first used it had a deliberately audacious sound, like the phrase "personal satellite" would today. Why did desktop computers take over? I think it was because they had better software. And I think the reason microcomputer software was better was that it could be written by small companies. I don't think many people realize how fragile and tentative startups are in the earliest stage. Many startups begin almost by accident-- as a couple guys, either with day jobs or in school, writing a prototype of something that might, if it looks promising, turn into a company. At this larval stage, any significant obstacle will stop the startup dead in its tracks. Writing mainframe software required too much commitment up front. Development machines were expensive, and because the customers would be big companies, you'd need an impressive-looking sales force to sell it to them. Starting a startup to write mainframe software would be a much more serious undertaking than just hacking something together on your Apple II in the evenings. And so you didn't get a lot of startups writing mainframe applications. The arrival of desktop computers inspired a lot of new software, because writing applications for them seemed an attainable goal to larval startups. Development was cheap, and the customers would be individual people that you could reach through computer stores or even by mail-order. The application that pushed desktop computers out into the mainstream was VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet. It was written by two guys working in an attic, and yet did things no mainframe software could do. [11] VisiCalc was such an advance, in its time, that people bought Apple IIs just to run it. And this was the beginning of a trend: desktop computers won because startups wrote software for them. It looks as if server-based software will be good this time around, because startups will write it. Computers are so cheap now that you can get started, as we did, using a desktop computer as a server. Inexpensive processors have eaten the workstation market (you rarely even hear the word now) and are most of the way through the server market; Yahoo's servers, which deal with loads as high as any on the Internet, all have the same inexpensive Intel processors that you have in your desktop machine. And once you've written the software, all you need to sell it is a Web site. Nearly all our users came direct to our site through word of mouth and references in the press. [12] Viaweb was a typical larval startup. We were terrified of starting a company, and for the first few months comforted ourselves by treating the whole thing as an experiment that we might call off at any moment. Fortunately, there were few obstacles except technical ones. While we were writing the software, our Web server was the same desktop machine we used for development, connected to the outside world by a dialup line. Our only expenses in that phase were food and rent. There is all the more reason for startups to write Web-based software now, because writing desktop software has become a lot less fun. If you want to write desktop software now you do it on Microsoft's terms, calling their APIs and working around their buggy OS. And if you manage to write something that takes off, you may find that you were merely doing market research for Microsoft. If a company wants to make a platform that startups will build on, they have to make it something that hackers themselves will want to use. That means it has to be inexpensive and well-designed. The Mac was popular with hackers when it first came out, and a lot of them wrote software for it. [13] You see this less with Windows, because hackers don't use it. The kind of people who are good at writing software tend to be running Linux or FreeBSD now. I don't think we would have started a startup to write desktop software, because desktop software has to run on Windows, and before we could write software for Windows we'd have to use it. The Web let us do an end-run around Windows, and deliver software running on Unix direct to users through the browser. That is a liberating prospect, a lot like the arrival of PCs twenty-five years ago. Microsoft Back when desktop computers arrived, IBM was the giant that everyone was afraid of. It's hard to imagine now, but I remember the feeling very well. Now the frightening giant is Microsoft, and I don't think they are as blind to the threat facing them as IBM was. After all, Microsoft deliberately built their business in IBM's blind spot. I mentioned earlier that my mother doesn't really need a desktop computer. Most users probably don't. That's a problem for Microsoft, and they know it. If applications run on remote servers, no one needs Windows. What will Microsoft do? Will they be able to use their control of the desktop to prevent, or constrain, this new generation of software? My guess is that Microsoft will develop some kind of server/desktop hybrid, where the operating system works together with servers they control. At a minimum, files will be centrally available for users who want that. I don't expect Microsoft to go all the way to the extreme of doing the computations on the server, with only a browser for a client, if they can avoid it. If you only need a browser for a client, you don't need Microsoft on the client, and if Microsoft doesn't control the client, they can't push users towards their server-based applications. I think Microsoft will have a hard time keeping the genie in the bottle. There will be too many different types of clients for them to control them all. And if Microsoft's applications only work with some clients, competitors will be able to trump them by offering applications that work from any client. [14] In a world of Web-based applications, there is no automatic place for Microsoft. They may succeed in making themselves a place, but I don't think they'll dominate this new world as they did the world of desktop applications. It's not so much that a competitor will trip them up as that they will trip over themselves. With the rise of Web-based software, they will be facing not just technical problems but their own wishful thinking. What they need to do is cannibalize their existing business, and I can't see them facing that. The same single-mindedness that has brought them this far will now be working against them. IBM was in exactly the same situation, and they could not master it. IBM made a late and half-hearted entry into the microcomputer business because they were ambivalent about threatening their cash cow, mainframe computing. Microsoft will likewise be hampered by wanting to save the desktop. A cash cow can be a damned heavy monkey on your back. I'm not saying that no one will dominate server-based applications. Someone probably will eventually. But I think that there will be a good long period of cheerful chaos, just as there was in the early days of microcomputers. That was a good time for startups. Lots of small companies flourished, and did it by making cool things. Startups but More So The classic startup is fast and informal, with few people and little money. Those few people work very hard, and technology magnifies the effect of the decisions they make. If they win, they win big. In a startup writing Web-based applications, everything you associate with startups is taken to an extreme. You can write and launch a product with even fewer people and even less money. You have to be even faster, and you can get away with being more informal. You can literally launch your product as three guys sitting in the living room of an apartment, and a server collocated at an ISP. We did. Over time the teams have gotten smaller, faster, and more informal. In 1960, software development meant a roomful of men with horn rimmed glasses and narrow black neckties, industriously writing ten lines of code a day on IBM coding forms. In 1980, it was a team of eight to ten people wearing jeans to the office and typing into vt100s. Now it's a couple of guys sitting in a living room with laptops. (And jeans turn out not to be the last word in informality.) Startups are stressful, and this, unfortunately, is also taken to an extreme with Web-based applications. Many software companies, especially at the beginning, have periods where the developers slept under their desks and so on. The alarming thing about Web-based software is that there is nothing to prevent this becoming the default. The stories about sleeping under desks usually end: then at last we shipped it and we all went home and slept for a week. Web-based software never ships. You can work 16-hour days for as long as you want to. And because you can, and your competitors can, you tend to be forced to. You can, so you must. It's Parkinson's Law running in reverse. The worst thing is not the hours but the responsibility. Programmers and system administrators traditionally each have their own separate worries. Programmers have to worry about bugs, and system administrators have to worry about infrastructure. Programmers may spend a long day up to their elbows in source code, but at some point they get to go home and forget about it. System administrators never quite leave the job behind, but when they do get paged at 4:00 AM, they don't usually have to do anything very complicated. With Web-based applications, these two kinds of stress get combined. The programmers become system administrators, but without the sharply defined limits that ordinarily make the job bearable. At Viaweb we spent the first six months just writing software. We worked the usual long hours of an early startup. In a desktop software company, this would have been the part where we were working hard, but it felt like a vacation compared to the next phase, when we took users onto our server. The second biggest benefit of selling Viaweb to Yahoo (after the money) was to be able to dump ultimate responsibility for the whole thing onto the shoulders of a big company. Desktop software forces users to become system administrators. Web-based software forces programmers to. There is less stress in total, but more for the programmers. That's not necessarily bad news. If you're a startup competing with a big company, it's good news. [15] Web-based applications offer a straightforward way to outwork your competitors. No startup asks for more. Just Good Enough One thing that might deter you from writing Web-based applications is the lameness of Web pages as a UI. That is a problem, I admit. There were a few things we would have really liked to add to HTML and HTTP. What matters, though, is that Web pages are just good enough. There is a parallel here with the first microcomputers. The processors in those machines weren't actually intended to be the CPUs of computers. They were designed to be used in things like traffic lights. But guys like Ed Roberts, who designed the Altair, realized that they were just good enough. You could combine one of these chips with some memory (256 bytes in the first Altair), and front panel switches, and you'd have a working computer. Being able to have your own computer was so exciting that there were plenty of people who wanted to buy them, however limited. Web pages weren't designed to be a UI for applications, but they're just good enough. And for a significant number of users, software that you can use from any browser will be enough of a win in itself to outweigh any awkwardness in the UI. Maybe you can't write the best-looking spreadsheet using HTML, but you can write a spreadsheet that several people can use simultaneously from different locations without special client software, or that can incorporate live data feeds, or that can page you when certain conditions are triggered. More importantly, you can write new kinds of applications that don't even have names yet. VisiCalc was not merely a microcomputer version of a mainframe application, after all-- it was a new type of application. Of course, server-based applications don't have to be Web-based. You could have some other kind of client. But I'm pretty sure that's a bad idea. It would be very convenient if you could assume that everyone would install your client-- so convenient that you could easily convince yourself that they all would-- but if they don't, you're hosed. Because Web-based software assumes nothing about the client, it will work anywhere the Web works. That's a big advantage already, and the advantage will grow as new Web devices proliferate. Users will like you because your software just works, and your life will be easier because you won't have to tweak it for every new client. [16] I feel like I've watched the evolution of the Web as closely as anyone, and I can't predict what's going to happen with clients. Convergence is probably coming, but where? I can't pick a winner. One thing I can predict is conflict between AOL and Microsoft. Whatever Microsoft's .NET turns out to be, it will probably involve connecting the desktop to servers. Unless AOL fights back, they will either be pushed aside or turned into a pipe between Microsoft client and server software. If Microsoft and AOL get into a client war, the only thing sure to work on both will be browsing the Web, meaning Web-based applications will be the only kind that work everywhere. How will it all play out? I don't know. And you don't have to know if you bet on Web-based applications. No one can break that without breaking browsing. The Web may not be the only way to deliver software, but it's one that works now and will continue to work for a long time. Web-based applications are cheap to develop, and easy for even the smallest startup to deliver. They're a lot of work, and of a particularly stressful kind, but that only makes the odds better for startups. Why Not? E. B. White was amused to learn from a farmer friend that many electrified fences don't have any current running through them. The cows apparently learn to stay away from them, and after that you don't need the current. "Rise up, cows!" he wrote, "Take your liberty while despots snore!" If you're a hacker who has thought of one day starting a startup, there are probably two things keeping you from doing it. One is that you don't know anything about business. The other is that you're afraid of competition. Neither of these fences have any current in them. There are only two things you have to know about business: build something users love, and make more than you spend. If you get these two right, you'll be ahead of most startups. You can figure out the rest as you go. You may not at first make more than you spend, but as long as the gap is closing fast enough you'll be ok. If you start out underfunded, it will at least encourage a habit of frugality. The less you spend, the easier it is to make more than you spend. Fortunately, it can be very cheap to launch a Web-based application. We launched on under $10,000, and it would be even cheaper today. We had to spend thousands on a server, and thousands more to get SSL. (The only company selling SSL software at the time was Netscape.) Now you can rent a much more powerful server, with SSL included, for less than we paid for bandwidth alone. You could launch a Web-based application now for less than the cost of a fancy office chair. As for building something users love, here are some general tips. Start by making something clean and simple that you would want to use yourself. Get a version 1.0 out fast, then continue to improve the software, listening closely to the users as you do. The customer is always right, but different customers are right about different things; the least sophisticated users show you what you need to simplify and clarify, and the most sophisticated tell you what features you need to add. The best thing software can be is easy, but the way to do this is to get the defaults right, not to limit users' choices. Don't get complacent if your competitors' software is lame; the standard to compare your software to is what it could be, not what your current competitors happen to have. Use your software yourself, all the time. Viaweb was supposed to be an online store builder, but we used it to make our own site too. Don't listen to marketing people or designers or product managers just because of their job titles. If they have good ideas, use them, but it's up to you to decide; software has to be designed by hackers who understand design, not designers who know a little about software. If you can't design software as well as implement it, don't start a startup. Now let's talk about competition. What you're afraid of is not presumably groups of hackers like you, but actual companies, with offices and business plans and salesmen and so on, right? Well, they are more afraid of you than you are of them, and they're right. It's a lot easier for a couple of hackers to figure out how to rent office space or hire sales people than it is for a company of any size to get software written. I've been on both sides, and I know. When Viaweb was bought by Yahoo, I suddenly found myself working for a big company, and it was like trying to run through waist-deep water. I don't mean to disparage Yahoo. They had some good hackers, and the top management were real butt-kickers. For a big company, they were exceptional. But they were still only about a tenth as productive as a small startup. No big company can do much better than that. What's scary about Microsoft is that a company so big can develop software at all. They're like a mountain that can walk. Don't be intimidated. You can do as much that Microsoft can't as they can do that you can't. And no one can stop you. You don't have to ask anyone's permission to develop Web-based applications. You don't have to do licensing deals, or get shelf space in retail stores, or grovel to have your application bundled with the OS. You can deliver software right to the browser, and no one can get between you and potential users without preventing them from browsing the Web. You may not believe it, but I promise you, Microsoft is scared of you. The complacent middle managers may not be, but Bill is, because he was you once, back in 1975, the last time a new way of delivering software appeared. Notes [1] Realizing that much of the money is in the services, companies building lightweight clients have usually tried to combine the hardware with an online service. This approach has not worked well, partly because you need two different kinds of companies to build consumer electronics and to run an online service, and partly because users hate the idea. Giving away the razor and making money on the blades may work for Gillette, but a razor is much smaller commitment than a Web terminal. Cell phone handset makers are satisfied to sell hardware without trying to capture the service revenue as well. That should probably be the model for Internet clients too. If someone just sold a nice-looking little box with a Web browser that you could use to connect through any ISP, every technophobe in the country would buy one. [2] Security always depends more on not screwing up than any design decision, but the nature of server-based software will make developers pay more attention to not screwing up. Compromising a server could cause such damage that ASPs (that want to stay in business) are likely to be careful about security. [3] In 1995, when we started Viaweb, Java applets were supposed to be the technology everyone was going to use to develop server-based applications. Applets seemed to us an old-fashioned idea. Download programs to run on the client? Simpler just to go all the way and run the programs on the server. We wasted little time on applets, but countless other startups must have been lured into this tar pit. Few can have escaped alive, or Microsoft could not have gotten away with dropping Java in the most recent version of Explorer. [4] This point is due to Trevor Blackwell, who adds "the cost of writing software goes up more than linearly with its size. Perhaps this is mainly due to fixing old bugs, and the cost can be more linear if all bugs are found quickly." [5] The hardest kind of bug to find may be a variant of compound bug where one bug happens to compensate for another. When you fix one bug, the other becomes visible. But it will seem as if the fix is at fault, since that was the last thing you changed. [6] Within Viaweb we once had a contest to describe the worst thing about our software. Two customer support people tied for first prize with entries I still shiver to recall. We fixed both problems immediately. [7] Robert Morris wrote the ordering system, which shoppers used to place orders. Trevor Blackwell wrote the image generator and the manager, which merchants used to retrieve orders, view statistics, and configure domain names etc. I wrote the editor, which merchants used to build their sites. The ordering system and image generator were written in C and C++, the manager mostly in Perl, and the editor in Lisp. [8] Price discrimination is so pervasive (how often have you heard a retailer claim that their buying power meant lower prices for you?) that I was surprised to find it was outlawed in the U.S. by the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936. This law does not appear to be vigorously enforced. [9] In No Logo, Naomi Klein says that clothing brands favored by "urban youth" do not try too hard to prevent shoplifting because in their target market the shoplifters are also the fashion leaders. [10] Companies often wonder what to outsource and what not to. One possible answer: outsource any job that's not directly exposed to competitive pressure, because outsourcing it will thereby expose it to competitive pressure. [11] The two guys were Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston. Dan wrote a prototype in Basic in a couple days, then over the course of the next year they worked together (mostly at night) to make a more powerful version written in 6502 machine language. Dan was at Harvard Business School at the time and Bob nominally had a day job writing software. "There was no great risk in doing a business," Bob wrote, "If it failed it failed. No big deal." [12] It's not quite as easy as I make it sound. It took a painfully long time for word of mouth to get going, and we did not start to get a lot of press coverage until we hired a PR firm (admittedly the best in the business) for $16,000 per month. However, it was true that the only significant channel was our own Web site. [13] If the Mac was so great, why did it lose? Cost, again. Microsoft concentrated on the software business, and unleashed a swarm of cheap component suppliers on Apple hardware. It did not help, either, that suits took over during a critical period. [14] One thing that would help Web-based applications, and help keep the next generation of software from being overshadowed by Microsoft, would be a good open-source browser. Mozilla is open-source but seems to have suffered from having been corporate software for so long. A small, fast browser that was actively maintained would be a great thing in itself, and would probably also encourage companies to build little Web appliances. Among other things, a proper open-source browser would cause HTTP and HTML to continue to evolve (as e.g. Perl has). It would help Web-based applications greatly to be able to distinguish between selecting a link and following it; all you'd need to do this would be a trivial enhancement of HTTP, to allow multiple urls in a request. Cascading menus would also be good. If you want to change the world, write a new Mosaic. Think it's too late? In 1998 a lot of people thought it was too late to launch a new search engine, but Google proved them wrong. There is always room for something new if the current options suck enough. Make sure it works on all the free OSes first-- new things start with their users. [15] Trevor Blackwell, who probably knows more about this from personal experience than anyone, writes: "I would go farther in saying that because server-based software is so hard on the programmers, it causes a fundamental economic shift away from large companies. It requires the kind of intensity and dedication from programmers that they will only be willing to provide when it's their own company. Software companies can hire skilled people to work in a not-too-demanding environment, and can hire unskilled people to endure hardships, but they can't hire highly skilled people to bust their asses. Since capital is no longer needed, big companies have little to bring to the table." [16] In the original version of this essay, I advised avoiding Javascript. That was a good plan in 2001, but Javascript now works. Thanks to Sarah Harlin, Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris, Eric Raymond, Ken Anderson, and Dan Giffin for reading drafts of this paper; to Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston for information about VisiCalc; and again to Ken Anderson for inviting me to speak at BBN. You'll find this essay and 14 others in Hackers & Painters. Some Technical Details Japanese Translation Microsoft finally agrees Gates Email

Questions grow over rescue chaos

And increasingly across the country, questions are being asked: "How could this happen?" "Why is help taking so long?" and "How can thousands of Americans be stranded?". It is hot and humid in the city's stadium and toilets are overflowing President George Bush was visiting some of the devastated areas of the south on Friday amid growing anger over the federal response to the disaster. Officials insist their response has been effective - rejecting widespread criticism that the administration was too slow to react to the crisis. There has also been criticism from opposition politicians and members of the public that spending on the war on Iraq diverted money away from flood-control projects. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has angrily accused Washington of not having a clue about what was going on. On Thursday, he issued what he called a "desperate SOS" for help for up to 20,000 refugees stuck in a convention centre in New Orleans which he said was "unsanitary and unsafe" and running out of supplies. I was in the tsunami region, and this response is incredibly more efficient, more effective and under the most difficult circumstances Michael D Brown Emergency response head On Friday, authorities in Louisiana were trying to crank up the rescue operation. Convoys of school buses were trying to ferry out the thousands of people sheltering in the convention centre and the nearby New Orleans Superdome amid the filth and the dead. The questions being asked focus on why it has taken so long to get those buses on the road - and why thousands of people sheltering in the places where they were told to take refuge are now going hungry and thirsty. Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco says she has asked for a "Berlin drop" of food and water. In an interview with Good Morning America on Friday, she said that they were finally starting to see the response from the federal authorities. The task on the ground has been complicated by the frustration and despair felt by survivors who have gone days without essential supplies. Much of the frustration has been directed at the national authority, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema). This is a national disgrace - we can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can't bail out the city of New Orleans Terry Ebbert "This is a national disgrace. Fema has been here three days, yet there is no command and control," Mr Ebbert said. "We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can't bail out the city of New Orleans." One man, George Turner, who was still waiting to be evacuated, summed up much of the anger felt by the refugees. "Why is it that the most powerful country on the face of the Earth takes so long to help so many sick and so many elderly people?" he asked. Tens of thousands of people are still waiting to be evacuated "Why? That's all I want to ask President Bush." And John Rhinehart, the administrator of a New Orleans hospital without power and water, said: "I'm beginning to wonder if the government is more concerned about the looting than people who are dying in these hospitals." There is widespread agreement among commentators that somewhere there has been a breakdown in the system. The Biloxi Sun Herald in Mississippi asked: "Why hasn't every able-bodied member of the armed forces in south Mississippi been pressed into service?" And on Friday the Washington Post wrote: "Though experts had long predicted that the city, which sits below sea level and is surrounded by water, would face unprecedented devastation after an immense hurricane, they said problems were worsened by a late evacuation order and insufficient emergency shelter for as many as 100,000 people." Volunteer effort The BBC's Jamie Coomarasamy in Baton Rouge says that on the ground in some areas, it is largely volunteers, including those from the Red Cross and other organisations, who are leading the relief efforts. But he said these efforts were fairly haphazard, with local radio and television stations putting out requests for people to do what they could. Fema head Michael D Brown has defended the federal response, saying that his agency had prepared for the storm, but that the widespread flooding had hampered the operation. Could more have been done? I would say every society in the world is not preparing adequately for catastrophic events Jan Egeland UN emergency relief co-ordinator "What the American people need to understand is that the full force of the federal government is bringing all of those supplies in, in an unprecedented effort that has not been seen even in the tsunami region," he said. "I was in the tsunami region, and this response is incredibly more efficient, more effective and under the most difficult circumstances." Jan Egeland, the UN emergency relief co-ordinator has written to US ambassador to the UN John Bolton offering help. "I understand people's frustration, but I also know from bitter experience that this, the fifth and the sixth and the seventh days are always among the worst, because it is before you reach, really, the largest amount of people," he told the BBC. "Could more have been done? I would say every society in the world is not preparing adequately for catastrophic events. Disaster prevention is something that we are campaigning for all over the world, and I would say no society is fully prepared for all eventualities."

Opinion | A Can't-Do Government

Before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America: a terrorist attack on New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane strike on New Orleans. "The New Orleans hurricane scenario," The Houston Chronicle wrote in December 2001, "may be the deadliest of all." It described a potential catastrophe very much like the one now happening. So why were New Orleans and the nation so unprepared? After 9/11, hard questions were deferred in the name of national unity, then buried under a thick coat of whitewash. This time, we need accountability. First question: Why have aid and security taken so long to arrive? Katrina hit five days ago -- and it was already clear by last Friday that Katrina could do immense damage along the Gulf Coast. Yet the response you'd expect from an advanced country never happened. Thousands of Americans are dead or dying, not because they refused to evacuate, but because they were too poor or too sick to get out without help -- and help wasn't provided. Many have yet to receive any help at all. There will and should be many questions about the response of state and local governments; in particular, couldn't they have done more to help the poor and sick escape? But the evidence points, above all, to a stunning lack of both preparation and urgency in the federal government's response.

Death penalty for corruption to remain for now

Death penalty for corruption to remain for now By Guan Xiaomeng (Chinadaily.com) Updated: 2005-09-02 17:25 Officials with the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC), China's top legislative body have denied discussions are under way to abolish the use of capital punishment for those involved in serious economic crimes. Punishments for such non-violent offenses have long been in the legal limelight in China with many speculating legislators would move to abolish the most serious punishment under the law - the death penalty - in the most egregious cases. The speculation, countered in statements by Premier Wen Jiabao, remains inconsistent with the current domestic criminal legislative and jurisdictional practices. It also does not reflect the current fundamental realities in the country, officials said, echoing Wen. A spokesman for the Supreme People's Court explained that though the death penalty will for the long term be preserved, application of the punishment is under tighter scrutiny than ever to reduce the number of death sentences. Courts are acting cautiously when conducting trials on those possibly facing the penalty.

Edge: WHY GORDIAN SOFTWARE HAS CONVINCED ME TO BELIEVE IN THE REALITY OF CATS AND APPLES

I've had a suspicion for a while that despite the astonishing success of the first generation of computer scientists like Shannon, Turing, von Neumann, and Wiener, somehow they didn't get a few important starting points quite right, and some things in the foundations of computer science are fundamentally askew. WHY GORDIAN SOFTWARE HAS CONVINCED ME TO BELIEVE IN THE REALITY OF CATS AND APPLES [11.19.03] A Talk with Jaron Lanier The Reality Club: Responses by Dylan Evans, Daniel C. Dennett, Steve Grand, Nicholas Humphrey,Clifford Pickover, Marvin Minsky, Lanier replies, George Dyson, Steven R. Quartz, Lee Smolin, Charles Simonyi, John Smart, Daniel C. Dennett, Dylan Evans Jaron Lanier Video DSL+ | Modem Introduction In September, 2000, Jaron Lanier, a pioneer in virtual reality, musician, and the lead scientist for the National Tele-Immersion Initiative, weighed forth on Edge against "cybernetic totalism". "For the last twenty years," he wrote, in his "Half a Manifesto" (Edge #74), "I have found myself on the inside of a revolution, but on the outside of its resplendent dogma. Now that the revolution has not only hit the mainstream, but bludgeoned it into submission by taking over the economy, it's probably time for me to cry out my dissent more loudly than I have before." In his manifesto, he took on those "who seem to not have been educated in the tradition of scientific skepticism. I understand why they are intoxicated. There is a compelling simple logic behind their thinking and elegance in thought is infectious." "There is a real chance," he continued, "that evolutionary psychology, artificial intelligence, Moore's Law fetishizing, and the rest of the package, will catch on in a big way, as big as Freud or Marx did in their times. Or bigger, since these ideas might end up essentially built into the software that runs our society and our lives. If that happens, the ideology of cybernetic totalist intellectuals will be amplified from novelty into a force that could cause suffering for millions of people." "Half a Manifesto" caused a stir, was one of Edge's most popular features, and has been widely reprinted. Lately, Lanier has been looking at trends in software, and he doesn't like what he sees, namely "a macabre parody of Moore's Law". In this feature, which began as a discussion at a downtown New York restaurant last year, he continues his challenge to the ideas of philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, and raises the ante by taking issue with the seminal work in information theory and computer science of Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, and Norbert Wiener. —JB JARON LANIER, a computer scientist and musician, is a pioneer of virtual reality, and founder and former CEO of VPL. He is currently the lead scientist for the National Tele-Immersion Initiative, and visiting scientist, SGI. Jaron Lanier's Edge Bio Page WHY GORDIAN SOFTWARE HAS CONVINCED ME TO BELIEVE IN THE REALITY OF CATS AND APPLES (JARON LANIER): There was a breathtaking moment at the birth of computer science and information theory in the mid-20th century when the whole field was small enough that it could be kept in one's head all at once. There also just happened to be an extraordinary generation of brilliant people who, in part because of the legacy of their importance to the military in World War II, were given a lot of latitude to play with these ideas. People like Shannon, Turing, von Neumann, Wiener, and a few others had an astonishing combination of breadth and depth that's humbling to us today-practically to the point of disorientation. It's almost inconceivable that people like Wiener and von Neumann could have written the books of philosophy that they did while at the same time achieving their technical heights. This is something that we can aspire to but will probably never achieve again. What's even more humbling, and in a way terrifying, is that despite this stellar beginning and the amazing virtuosity of these people, something hasn't gone right. We clearly have proven that we know how to make faster and faster computers (as described by Moore's Law), but that isn't the whole story, alas. Software remains disappointing as we try to make it grow to match the capability of hardware. If you look at trends in software, you see a macabre parody of Moore's Law. The expense of giant software projects, the rate at which they fall behind schedule as they expand, the rate at which large projects fail and must be abandoned, and the monetary losses due to unpredicted software problems are all increasing precipitously. Of all the things you can spend a lot of money on, the only things you expect to fail frequently are software and medicine. That's not a coincidence, since they are the two most complex technologies we try to make as a society. Still, the case of software seems somehow less forgivable, because intuitively it seems that as complicated as it's gotten lately, it still exists at a much lower order of tangledness than biology. Since we make it ourselves, we ought to be able to know how to engineer it so it doesn't get quite so confusing. I've had a suspicion for a while that despite the astonishing success of the first generation of computer scientists like Shannon, Turing, von Neumann, and Wiener, somehow they didn't get a few important starting points quite right, and some things in the foundations of computer science are fundamentally askew. In a way I have no right to say this and it would be more appropriate to say it once I've actually got something to take its place, so let me just emphasize that this is speculative. But where might things have gone wrong? The leaders of the first generation were influenced by the metaphor of the electrical communications devices that where in use in their lifetimes, all of which centered on the sending of signals down wires. This started, oddly enough, with predecessors of the fax machine, continuing in a much bigger way to the telegraph, which turned into the telephone, and then proceeded with devices that carry digital signals that were only machine readable. Similarly, radio and television signals were designed to be relayed to a single wire even if part of their passage was wireless. All of us are guided by our metaphors, and our metaphors are created by the world around us, so it's understandable that signals on wires would become the central metaphor of their day. If you model information theory on signals going down a wire, you simplify your task in that you only have one point being measured or modified at a time at each end. It's easier to talk about a single point in some ways, and in particular it's easier to come up with mathematical techniques to perform analytic tricks. At the same time, though, you pay by adding complexity at another level, since the only way to give meaning to a single point value in space is time. You end up with information structures spread out over time, which leads to a particular set of ideas about coding schemes in which the sender and receiver have agreed on a temporal syntactical layer in advance. If you go back to the original information theorists, everything was about wire communication. We see this, for example, in Shannon's work. The astonishing bridge that he created between information and thermodynamics was framed in terms of information on a wire between a sender and a receiver. This might not have been the best starting point. It's certainly not a wrong starting point, since there's technically nothing incorrect about it, but it might not have been the most convenient or cognitively appropriate starting point for human beings who wished to go on to build things. The world as our nervous systems know it is not based on single point measurements, but on surfaces. Put another way, our environment has not necessarily agreed with our bodies in advance on temporal syntax. Our body is a surface that contacts the world on a surface. For instance, our retina sees multiple points of light at once. We're so used to thinking about computers in the same light as was available at the inception of computer science that it's hard to imagine an alternative, but an alternative is available to us all the time in our own bodies. Indeed the branches of computer science that incorporated interactions with the physical world, such as robotics, probably wasted decades trying to pretend that reality could be treated as if it were housed in a syntax that could be conveniently encoded on a wire. Traditional robots converted the data from their sensors into a temporal stream of bits. Then the robot builders would attempt to find the algorithms that matched the inherent protocol of these bits. Progress was very, very slow. The latest better robots tend to come from people like Ron Fearing and his physiologist cohort Bob Full at Berkeley who describe their work as "biomimetic". They are building champion robots that in some cases could have been built decades ago were it not for the obsession with protocol-centric computer science. A biomimetic robot and its world meet on surfaces instead of at the end of a wire. Biomimetic robots even treat the pliability of their own building materials as an aspect of computation. That is, they are made internally of even more surfaces. With temporal protocols, you can have only one of point of information that can be measured in a system at a time. You have to set up a temporal hierarchy in which the bit you measure at a particular time is meaningful based on "when" in a hierarchy of contexts you happen to occupy when you read the bit. You stretch information out in time and have past bits give context to future bits in order to create a coding scheme. This is the preferred style of classical information theory from the mid-twentieth century. Note that this form of connection occurs not only between computers on the internet, but in a multitude of internal connections between parts of a program. When someone says a piece of software is "Object oriented", that means that the bits traveling on the many, many virtual wires inside the program are interpreted in a particular way. Roughly speaking, they are verb-like messages being sent to noun-like destinations, while the older idea was to send noun-like messages to verb-like destinations. But fundamentally the new and old ideas are similar in that they are simulations of vast tangles of telegraph wires. The alternative, in which you have a lot of measurements available at one time on a surface, is called pattern classification. In pattern classification a bit is given meaning at least in part by other bits measured at the same time. Natural neural systems seem to be mostly pattern recognition oriented and computers as we know them are mostly temporal protocol adherence-oriented. The distinction between protocols and patterns is not absolute-one can in theory convert between them. But it's an important distinction in practice, because the conversion is often beyond us, either because we don't yet know the right math to use to accomplish it, or because it would take humongous hypothetical computers to the job. In order to keep track of a protocol you have to devote huge memory and computational resources to representing the protocol rather than the stuff of ultimate interest. This kind of memory use is populated by software artifacts called data-structures, such as stacks, caches, hash tables, links and so on. They are the first objects in history to be purely syntactical. As soon as you shift to less temporally-dependent patterns on surfaces, you enter into a different world that has its own tradeoffs and expenses. You're trying to be an ever better guesser instead of a perfect decoder. You probably start to try to guess ahead, to predict what you are about to see, in order to get more confident about your guesses. You might even start to apply the guessing method between parts of your own guessing process. You rely on feedback to improve your guesses, and in that there's a process that displays at least the rudiments of evolutionary self-improvement. Since the first generation of computer scientists liked to anthropomorphize computers (something I dislike), they used the word "memory" to describe their stacks and pointers, but neurological memory is probably more like the type of internal state I have just described for pattern-sensitive machines. Computational neuroscientists sometimes argue about how to decide when to call such internal state a "model" of the world, but whether it's a model or not, it's different than the characteristic uses of memory for protocol-driven software. Pattern-guessing memory use tends to generate different kinds of errors, which is what's most important to notice. When you de-emphasize protocols and pay attention to patterns on surfaces, you enter into a world of approximation rather than perfection. With protocols you tend to be drawn into all-or-nothing high wire acts of perfect adherence in at least some aspects of your design. Pattern recognition, in contrast, assumes the constant minor presence of errors and doesn't mind them. My hypothesis is that this trade-off is what primarily leads to the quality I always like to call brittleness in existing computer software, which means that it breaks before it bends. Of course we try to build some error-tolerance into computer systems. For instance, the "TCP" part of TCP/IP is the part that re-sends bits if there's evidence a bit might not have made it over the net correctly. That's a way of trying to protect one small aspect of a digital design from the thermal reality it's trying to resist. But that's only the easiest case, where the code is assumed to be perfect, so that it's easy to tell if a transmission was faulty. If you're worried that the code itself might also be faulty (and in large programs it always is), then error correction can lead to infinite regresses, which are the least welcome sort of error when it comes to developing information systems. In the domain of multi-point surface sampling you have only a statistical predictability rather than an at least hypothetically perfect planability. I say "hypothetically", because for some reason computer scientists often seem unable to think about real computers as we observe them, rather than the ideal computers we wish we could observe. Evolution has shown us that approximate systems (living things, particularly those with nervous systems) can be coupled to feedback loops that improve their accuracy and reliability. They can become very good indeed. Wouldn't it be nicer to have a computer that's almost completely reliable almost all the time, as opposed to one that can be hypothetically perfectly accurate, in some hypothetical ideal world other than our own, but in reality is prone to sudden, unpredictable, and often catastrophic failure in actual use? The reason we're stuck on temporal protocols is probably that information systems do meet our expectations when they are small. They only start to degrade as they grow. So everyone's learning experience is with protocol-centric information systems that function properly and meet their design ideals. This was especially true of the second generation of computer scientists, who for the first time could start to write more pithy programs, even though those programs were still small enough not to cause trouble. Ivan Sutherland, the father of computer graphics, wrote a program in the mid 1960s called "Sketchpad" all by himself as a student. In it he demonstrated the first graphics, continuous interactivity, visual programming, and on and on. Most computer scientists regard Sketchpad as the most influential program ever written. Every sensitive younger computer scientist mourns the passing of the days when such a thing was possible. By the 1970s, Seymour Papert had even small children creating little programs with graphical outputs in his computer language "LOGO". The operative word is "little." The moment programs grow beyond smallness, their brittleness becomes the most prominent feature, and software engineering becomes Sisyphean. Computer scientists hate, hate thinking about the loss of idealness that comes with scale. But there it is. We've been able to tolerate the techniques developed at tiny scales to an extraordinary degree, given the costs, but at some future scale we'll be forced to re-think things. It's amazing how static the basic ideas of software have been since the period of late 1960s into the mid 1970s. We refuse to grow up, as it were. I must take a moment to rant about one thing. Rebellious young programmers today often devote their energies to recreating essentially old code (Unix components or Xerox PARC-style programs) in the context of the free software movement, and I don't dismiss that kind of idealism at all. But it isn't enough. An even more important kind of idealism is to question the nature of that very software, and in that regard the younger generations of computer scientists seem to me to be strangely complacent. Given how brittle our real-world computer systems get when they get big, there's an immediate motivation to explore any alternative that might make them more reliable. I've suggested that we call the alternative approach to software that I've outlined above "Phenotropic." Pheno- refers to outward manifestations, as in phenotype. -Tropic originally meant "Turning," but has come to mean "Interaction." So Phenotropic means "The interaction of surfaces." It's not necessarily biomimetic, but who's to say, since we don't understand the brain yet. My colleague Christoph von der Marsburg, a neuroscientist of vision, has founded a movement called "Biological Computing" which exists mostly in Europe, and is more explicitly biomimetic, but is essentially similar to what some of us are calling "Phenotropics" here in the States. There are two sides to Phenotropic investigation, one concerned with engineering and the other with scientific and philosophical explorations. I suppose that the software engineering side of Phenotropics might seem less lofty or interesting, but software engineering is the empirical foundation of computer science. You should always resist the illusory temptations of a purely theoretical science, of course. Computer science is more vulnerable to these illusions than other kinds of science, since it has been constrained by layers of brittle legacy code that preserve old ideas at the expense of new ones. My engineering concern is to try to think about how to build large systems out of modules that don't suffer as terribly from protocol breakdown as existing designs do. The goal is to have all of the components in the system connect to each other by recognizing and interpreting each other as patterns rather than as followers of a protocol that is vulnerable to catastrophic failures. One day I'd like to build large computers using pattern classification as the most fundamental binding principle, where the different modules of the computer are essentially looking at each other and recognizing states in each other, rather than adhering to codes in order to perfectly match up with each other. My fond hope, which remains to be tested, is that by building a system like this I can build bigger and more reliable programs than we know how to build otherwise. That's the picture from an engineering point of view. In the last few years I've been looking for specific problems that might yield to a phenotropic approach. I've always been interested in surgical simulations. Two decades ago I collaborated with Dr. Joe Rosen, then of Stanford, now of Dartmouth, and Scott Fisher, then of NASA, now at USC, on the first surgical Virtual Reality simulation. It's been delightful to see surgical simulation improve over the years. It's gotten to the point where it can demonstrably improve outcomes. But the usual problems of large software plague it, as one might expect. We can't write a big enough program of any kind to write the big programs we need to for future surgical simulations. One example of pattern recognition that I've found to be particularly inspiring came about via my colleague Christoph von der Marsburg, and some of his former students, especially Hartmut Neven. We all started to work together back when I was working with Tele-immersion and Internet2. I was interested in how to transfer the full three-dimensional facial features of someone from one city to another with low bandwidth in order to create the illusion (using fancy 3D displays) that the remote person was present in the same room. We used some visual pattern recognition techniques to derive points on a face, and tied these to a 3D avatar of the person on the other side. (An avatar is what a person looks like to others in Virtual Reality.) As luck would have it, a long time collaborator of mine named Young Harvil had been building fine quality avatar heads, so we could put this together fairly easily. It was super! You'd see this head that looked like a real person that also moved properly and conveyed expressions remarkably well. If you've seen the movie "Simone" you've seen a portrayal of a similar system. Anyway, the face tracking software works really well. But how does it work? You start with an image from a camera. Such an image is derived from the surface of a light-sensitive chip which makes a bunch of simultaneous adjacent measurements, just like a surface in a phenotropic system. The most common way to analyze this kind of surface information is to look at its spectrum. To do this, you make a virtual prism in software, using a mathematical technique first described two centuries ago by the great mathematician Fourier, and break the pattern into a virtual rainbow of spread-out subsignals of different colors or frequencies. But alas, that isn't enough to distinguish images. Even though a lot of images would break up into distinguishable rainbows because of the different distribution of colors present in them, you could easily be unlucky and have two different pictures that produced identical rainbows through a prism. So what to do? You have to do something more to get at the layout of an image in space, and the techniques that seem to work best are based on "Wavelets," which evolved out of Dennis Gabor's work when he invented Holograms in the 1940s. Imagine that instead of one big prism breaking an image into a rainbow, you looked at the image through a wall of glass bricks, each of which was like a little blip of a prism. Well, there would be a lot of different sizes of glass bricks, even though they'd all have the same shape. What would happen is some of the individual features of the image, like the corner of your left eye, would line up with particular glass bricks of particular sizes. You make a list of these coincidences. You've now broken the image apart into pieces that capture some information about the spatial structure. It turns out that the human visual system does something a little like this, starting in the retina and most probably continuing in the brain. But we're not done. How do you tell whether this list of glass bricks corresponds to a face? Well, of course what you do is build a collection of lists of bricks that you already know represent faces, or even faces of specific individuals, including how the features matching the bricks should be positioned relative to each other in space (so that you can rule out the possibility that the corner of your left eye could possibly occur at the end of your nose, for instance.) Once you have that collection, you can compare known glass brick breakdowns against new ones coming in from the camera and tell when you're looking at a face, or even a specific person's face. This turns out to work pretty well. Remember when I mentioned that once you start to think Phenotropically, you might want to try to predict what the pattern you think you've recognized is about to look like, to test your hypothesis? That's another reason I wanted to apply this technique to controlling avatar heads. If you find facial features using the above technique and use the results to re-animate a face using an avatar head, you ought to get back something that looks like what the camera originally saw. Beyond that, you ought to be able to use the motion of the head and features to predict what's about to happen-not perfectly, but reasonably well-because each element of the body has a momentum just like a car. And like a car, what happens next is constrained not only by the momentum, but also by things you can know about mechanical properties of the objects involved. So a realistic enough avatar can serve as a tool for making predictions, and you can use the errors you discover in your predictions to tune details in your software. As long as you set things up efficiently, so that you can choose only the most important details to tune in this way, you might get a tool that improves itself automatically. This idea is one we're still testing; we should know more about it within a couple of years. If I wanted to treat computers anthropomorphically, like so many of my colleagues, I'd call this "artificial imagination." Just as in the case of robotics, which I mentioned earlier, it's conceivable that workable techniques in machine vision could have appeared much earlier, but computer science was seduced by its protocol-centric culture into trying the wrong ideas again and again. It was hoped that a protocol existed out there in nature, and all you had to do was write the parser (an interpreter of typical hierarchical protocols) for it. There are famous stories of computer science graduate students in the 1960s being assigned projects of finding these magic parsers for things like natural language or vision. It was hoped that these would be quick single-person jobs, just like Sketchpad. Of course, the interpretation of reality turned out to require a completely different approach from the construction of small programs. The open question is what approach will work for large programs. A fully phenotropic giant software architecture might consist of modules with user interfaces that can be operated either by other modules or by people. The modules would be small and simple enough that they could be reliably made using traditional techniques. A user interface for a module would remain invisible unless a person wanted to see it. When one module connects to another, it would use the same techniques a biomimetic robot would use to get around in the messy, unpredictable physical world. Yes, a lot of computer power would go into such internal interfaces, but whether that should be thought of as wasteful or not will depend on whether the improvement I hope to see really does appear when phenotropic software gets gigantic. This experiment will take some years to conduct. Let's turn to some philosophical implications of these ideas. Just as computer science has been infatuated with the properties of tiny programs, so has philosophy been infatuated by the properties of early computer science. Back in the 1980s I used to get quite concerned with mind-body debates. One of the things that really bothered me at that time was that it seemed to me that there was an observer problem in computer science. Who's to say that a computer is present? To a Martian, wouldn't a Macintosh look like a lava lamp? It's a thing that puts out heat and makes funny patterns, but without some cultural context, how do you even know it's a computer? If you say that a brain and a computer are in the same ontological category, who is recognizing either of them? Some people argue that computers display certain kinds of order and predictability (because of their protocol-centricity) and could therefore be detected. But the techniques for doing this wouldn't work on a human brain, because it doesn't operate by relying on protocols. So how could they work on an arbitrary or alien computer? I pushed that question further and further. Some people might remember the "rain drops" argument. Sometimes it was a hailstorm, actually. The notion was to start with one of Daniel C. Dennett's thought experiments, where you replace all of your neurons one by one with software components until there are no neurons left to convert. At the end you have a computer program that has your whole brain recorded, and that's supposed to be the equivalent of you. Then, I proposed, why don't we just measure the trajectories of all of the rain drops in a rain storm, using some wonderful laser technology, and fill up a data base until we have as much data as it took to represent your brain. Then, conjure a gargantuan electronics shopping mall that has on hand every possible microprocessor up to some large number of gates. You start searching through them until you find all the chips that happen to accept the rain drop data as a legal running program of one sort or another. Then you go through all the chips which match up with the raindrop data as a program and look at the programs they run until you find one that just happens to be equivalent to the program that was derived from your brain. Have I made the raindrops conscious? That was my counter thought experiment. Both thought experiments relied on absurd excesses of scale. The chip store would be too large to fit in the universe and the brain would have taken a cosmologically long time to break down. The point I was trying to get across was that there's an epistemological problem. Another way I approached the same question was to say, if consciousness were missing from the universe, how would things be different? A range of answers is possible. The first is that nothing would be different, because consciousness wasn't there in the first place. This would be Dan Dennett's response (at least at that time), since he would get rid of ontology entirely. The second answer is that the whole universe would disappear because it needed consciousness. That idea was characteristic of followers of some of John Archibald Wheeler's earlier work, who seemed to believe that consciousness plays a role in keeping things afloat by taking the role of the observer in certain quantum-scale interactions. Another answer would be that the consciousness-free universe would be similar but not identical, because people would get a little duller. That would be the approach of certain cognitive scientists, suggesting that consciousness plays a specific, but limited practical function in the brain. And then there's another answer, which initially might sound like Dennett's: that if consciousness were not present, the trajectories of all particles would remain identical. Every measurement you could make in the universe would come out identically. However, there would be no "gross", or everyday objects. There would be neither apples nor houses, nor brains to perceive them. Neither would there be words or thoughts, though the electrons and chemical bonds that would otherwise comprise them would remain the just the same as before. There would only be the particles that make up everyday things, in exactly the same positions they would otherwise occupy. In other words, consciousness is an ontology that is overlaid on top of these particles. If there were no consciousness the universe would be perfectly described as being nothing but particles. Here's an even clearer example of this point of view: There's no reason for the present moment to exist except for consciousness. Why bother with it? Why can we talk about a present moment? What does it mean? It's just a marker of this subjectivity, this overlaid ontology. Even though we can't specify the present moment very well, because of the spatial distribution of the brain, general relativity, and so on, the fact that we can refer to it even approximately is rather weird. It must mean the universe, or at least some part of it, like a person, is "doing something" in order to distinguish the present moment from other moments, by being conscious or embracing non-determinism in some fundamental way. I went in that direction and became mystical about everyday objects. From this point of view, the extremes of scale are relatively pedestrian. Quantum mechanics is just a bunch of rules and values, while relativity and cosmology are just a big metric you live on, but the in-between zone is where things get weird. An apple is bizarre because there's no structure to make the apple be there; only the particles that comprise it should be present. Same for your brain. Where does the in-between, everyday scale come from? Why should it be possible to refer to it at all? As pattern recognition has started to work, this comfortable mysticism has been challenged, though perhaps not fatally. An algorithm can now recognize an apple. One part of the universe (and it's not even a brain) can now respond to another part in terms of everyday gross objects like apples. Or is it only mystical me who can interpret the interaction in that light? Is it still possible to say that fundamental particles simply move in their courses and there wasn't necessarily an apple or a computer or a recognition event? Of course, this question isn't easy to answer! Here's one way to think about it. Let's suppose we want to think of nature as an information system. The first question you'd ask is how it's wired together. One answer is that all parts are consistently wired to each other, or uniformly influential to all others. I've noticed a lot of my friends and colleagues have a bias to want to think this way. For instance, Stephen Wolfram's little worlds have consistent bandwidths between their parts. A very different example comes from Seth Lloyd and his "ultimate laptop," in which he thought of various pieces of physicality (including even a black hole) as if they were fundamentally doing computation and asked how powerful these purported computers might be. But let's go back to the example of the camera and the apple. Suppose poor old Shroedinger's Cat has survived all the quantum observation experiments but still has a taste for more brushes with death. We could oblige it by attaching the cat-killing box to our camera. So long as the camera can recognize an apple in front of it, the cat lives. What's interesting is that what's keeping this cat alive is a small amount of bandwidth. It's not the total number photons hitting the camera that might have bounced off the apple, or only the photons making it through the lens, or the number that hit the light sensor, or even the number of bits of the resulting digitized image. Referring to the metaphor I used before, it's the number of glass bricks in the list that represents how an apple is recognized. We could be talking about a few hundred numbers, maybe less, depending on how well we represent the apple. So there's a dramatic reduction in bandwidth between the apple and the cat. I always liked Bateson's definition of information: "A difference that makes a difference." It's because of that notion of information that we can talk about the number of bits in a computer in the way we usually do instead of the stupendously larger number of hypothetical measurements you could make of the material comprising the computer. It's also why we can talk about the small number of bits keeping the cat alive. Of course if you're a mystic when it comes to everyday-scale objects, you're still not convinced there ever was a cat or a computer. But it might be harder for a mystic to dismiss the evolution of the cat. One of the problems with, say, Wolfram's little worlds is that all the pieces stay uniformly connected. In evolution as we have been able to understand it, the situation is different. You have multiple agents that remain somewhat distinct from one another long enough to adapt and compete with one another. So if we want to think of nature as being made of computation, we ought to be able to think about how it could be divided into pieces that are somewhat causally isolated from one another. Since evolution has happened, it would seem our universe supports that sort of insulation. How often is the "causal bandwidth" between things limited, and by how much? This is starting to sound a little like a phenotropic question! One possibility is that when computer science matures, it's also going to be the physics of everyday-sized objects that influence each other via limited information flows. Of course, good old Newton might seem to have everyday-sized objects covered already, but not in the sense I'm proposing here. Every object in a Newtonian model enjoys consistent total bandwidth with every other object, to the dismay of people working on n-body problems. This is the famous kind of problem in which you try to predict the motions of a bunch of objects that are tugging on one another via gravity. It's a notoriously devilish problem, but from an information flow point of view all n of the bodies are part of one object, albeit a generally inscrutable one. They only become distinct (and more often predictable) when the bandwidth of causally relevant information flow between them is limited. N-body problems usually concern gravity, in which everything is equally connected to everything, while the atoms in an everyday object are for the most part held together by chemistry. The causal connections between such objects is often limited. They meet at surfaces, rather than as wholes, and they have interior portions that are somewhat immune to influence. There are a few basic ideas in physics that say something about how the universe is wired, and one of them is the Pauli exclusion principle, which demands that each fermion occupy a unique quantum niche. Fermions are the particles like electrons and protons that make up ordinary objects, and the Pauli rule forces them into structures. Whenever you mention the Pauli principle to a good physicist, you'll see that person get a misty, introspective look and then say something like, Yes, this is the truly fundamental, under-appreciated idea in physics. If you put a fermion somewhere, another fermion might be automatically whisked out of the way. THAT one might even push another one out of its way. Fermions live in a chess-like world, in which each change causes new structures to appear. Out of these structures we get the solidity of things. And limitations on causal connection between those things. A chemist reading my account of doubting whether everyday objects are anything other than the underlying particles might say, "The boundary of an everyday object is determined by the frontier of the region with the strong chemical bonds." I don't think that addresses the epistemological issue, but it does say something about information flow. Software is frustratingly non-Fermionic, by the way. When you put some information in memory, whatever might have been there before doesn't automatically scoot out of the way. This sad state of affairs is what software engineers spend most of their time on. There is a hidden tedium going on inside your computer right now in which subroutines are carefully shuttling bit patterns around to simulate something like a Pauli principle so that the information retains its structure. Pattern classification doesn't avoid this problem, but it does have a way to sneak partially around it. In classical protocol-based memory, you place syntax-governed bits into structures and then you have to search the structures to use the bits. If you're clever, you pre-search the structures like Google does to make things faster. The memory structures created by biomimetic pattern classification, like the glass brick list that represents the apple, work a little differently. You keep on fine tuning this list with use, so that it has been influenced by its past but doesn't exhaustively record everything that's happened to it. So it just sits there and improves and doesn't require as much bit shuttling. The Pauli principle has been joined quite recently by a haunting new idea about the fundamental bandwidth between things called "Holography," but this time the discovery came from studying cosmology and black holes instead of fundamental particles. Holography is an awkward name, since it is only metaphorically related to Gabor's holograms. The idea is that the two-dimensional surface area surrounding a portion of a universe limits the amount of causal information, or information that can possibly matter, that can be associated with the volume inside the surface. When an idea is about a limitation of a value, mathematicians call it a "bound", and "holography" is the name of the bound that would cover the ultimate quantum gravity version of the information surface bound we already know about for sure, which is called the Bekenstein Bound. In the last year an interesting variant has appeared called the Bousso Bound that seems to be even more general and spooky, but of course investigations of these bounds is limited by the state of quantum gravity theories (or maybe vice versa), so we have to wait to see how this will all play out. Even though these new ideas are still young and in flux, when you bring them up with a smart quantum cosmologist these days, you'll see the same glassy-eyed reverence that used to be reserved for the Pauli principle. As with the Pauli principle, holography tells you what the information flow rules are for hooking up pieces of reality, and as with Pauli exclusion, holography places limits on what can happen that end up making what does happen more interesting. These new bounds are initially quite disturbing. You'd think a volume would tell you how much information it could hold, and it's strange to get the answer instead from the area of the surface that surrounds it. (The amount of information is 1/4 the area in Planck units, by the way, which should sound familiar to people who have been following work on how to count entropy on the surfaces of black holes.) Everyone is spooked by what Holography means. It seems that a profoundly fundamental description of the cosmos might be in the terms of bandwidth-limiting surfaces. It's delightful to see cosmology taking on a vaguely phenotropic quality, though there isn't any indication as yet that holography will be relevant to information science on non-cosmological scales. What can we say, then, about the bandwidth between everyday objects? As in the case of the apple-recognizing camera that keeps the cat alive, there might be only a small number of bits of information flow that really matter, even though there might be an incalculably huge number of measurements that could be made of the objects that are involved in the interaction. A small variation in the temperature of a small portion of the surface of the apple will not matter, nor will a tiny spec of dirt on the lens of the camera, even though these would both be as important as any other measures of state in a fully-connected information system. Stuart Kauffman had an interesting idea that I find moving. He suggests that we think of a minimal life form as being a combination of a Carnot cycle and self-replication. I don't know if I necessarily agree with it, but it's wonderful. The Carnot cycle originally concerned the sequence in which temperature and pressure were managed in a steam engine to cause repeated motion. One portion of the engine is devoted to the task of getting the process to repeat- and this might be called the regulatory element. If you like, you can discern the presence of analogs to the parts of a Carnot cycle in all kinds of structures, not just in steam engines. They can be found in cells, for instance. The Carnot cycle is the basic building block of useful mechanisms in our thermal universe, including in living organisms. But here's what struck me. In my search to understand how to think about the bandwidths connecting everyday objects it occurred to me that if you thought of dividing the universe into Carnot cycles, you'd find the most causally important bandwidths in the couplings between some very specific places: the various regulatory elements. Even if two observers might dispute how to break things down into Carnot cycles, it would be harder to disagree about where these regulatory elements were. Why would that matter? Say you want to build a model of a cell. Many people have built beautiful, big, complicated models of cells in computers. But which functional elements do you care about? Where do you draw the line between elements? What's your ontology? There's never been any real principle. It's always just done according to taste. And indeed, if you have different people look at the same problem and make models, they'll generally come up with somewhat divergent ontologies based on their varying application needs, their biases, the type of software they're working with, and what comes most easily to them. The notions I've been exploring here might provide at least one potential opening for thinking objectively about ontology in a physical system. Such an approach might someday yield a generalized way to summarize causal systems- and this would fit in nicely with a phenotropic engineering strategy for creating simulations. It's this hope that has finally convinced me that I should perhaps start believing in everyday objects like cats and apples again.

Hurricanes

Hurricanes PBS Airdate: January 25, 2005 ROBERT KRULWICH : I wonder if I could have a hurricane, just a small one please. Thank you. Now, the thing about hurricanes is, if there's one in the neighborhood and you are, say, over here, the first thing you want to know is: "Is it coming at me?" Because, if you're in its path, you're going to want to leave. Thank you. But over the years, scientists have gotten pretty good at predicting the direction of a hurricanes but not so good at predicting a hurricane's intensity. Hurricanes...I'll need one again. Hurricanes, because of changes in terrain and in water temperature, and all kinds of things down below, can suddenly swell and then diminish and then swell again. And because scientists don't have the tools to read hurricanes that well, these changes are very, very hard to predict—until recently... Thank you. ...'cause now there's a new development, a kind of CAT scan for hurricanes. As our correspondent Peter Standring reports, predicting a hurricane's power may now get a little easier. PETER STANDRING (scienceNOW Correspondent): When most people think of New Orleans, they think of the French Quarter, Mardi Gras, jazz, gumbo. But according to federal officials one of the most dire threats facing the nation would be a massive hurricane striking New Orleans. They say that if a major storm had a direct hit here, the effect would be devastating. They're talking perhaps as many as 50,000 dead, up to a million homeless and a city under water. And that disaster nearly happened this past hurricane season. When hurricane Ivan barreled into the Gulf of Mexico, it was on a collision course with New Orleans, a city with a unique vulnerability to hurricanes. RAY NAGIN (Mayor, New Orleans, Lousiana): This is a very dangerous storm. Hurricane Ivan is approaching us. PETER STANDRING : Fearing the worst, the mayor called for an evacuation of the city. MAN : I've been through a couple of hurricanes but this one looks like a monster. I'm hoping it doesn't hit us directly. PETER STANDRING : Luckily for New Orleans, Ivan veered east at the eleventh hour, and the Big Easy dodged a bullet. To get a sense of the damage a hurricane like Ivan would have caused if it made a direct hit on the city of New Orleans, I met with emergency manager, Walter Maestri. What have we got here? WALTER MAESTRI : Well, this is a surveyor's rod. And this can extend up to 25 feet, and it shows us just how deep the water would be here if Ivan came through. PETER STANDRING : And you're getting pretty high there, Walter. WALTER MAESTRI : Notice we're probably about the second level, right? There we go now. Watch. We're getting close. We're there. PETER STANDRING : What are we at? WALTER MAESTRI : Twenty two feet is what they tell us could be right here in the French Quarter. PETER STANDRING : You're saying that this street, French Quarter, under 22 feet of water? WALTER MAESTRI : If Ivan made that direct hit, this is what we'd be looking at. We're swimming here. We're like fish, if we're alive. PETER STANDRING : Not good. WALTER MAESTRI : Not good. PETER STANDRING : Just 50 miles from Gulf of Mexico, New Orleans is at such great risk because most of the city lies below sea level. Settled in 1718, it's sandwiched between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. IVOR VAN HEERDEN (Louisiana State University): New Orleans was built on a swamp. And in order to build it, they had to put a wall, a levee, around the swamp, and then pump all the water out. As you pump the water out, you allow oxygen to then get into the soils, the oxygen breaks down the organic matter in the soils and they lose bulk and they sink. PETER STANDRING : To keep the river and lake from flooding this ever-deepening bowl, which is more than 12 feet below sea level in some places, hundreds of miles of giant levees like this one now surround New Orleans. To get rid of rainwater that collects in the bowl, 22 pump stations were installed throughout the city. These pumps are so powerful that they can suck up 29 billion gallons of water a day from the city and push it all back into the lake. Now, that's enough water to fill the stadium here in New Orleans, the Superdome, in about 35 minutes. But in a strong hurricane, these pumps would be overwhelmed and the very same levees that protect New Orleans from floods could be its demise. Hurricanes are whirling dynamos, generating enormous winds. These winds create a gigantic swell of water called a storm surge. And in New Orleans, a storm surge could deliver a fatal one-two punch. Approaching from the Gulf of Mexico, the storm surge would push water into Lake Pontchartrain and up the Mississippi River. As the water level rises, it would overflow the levees on the lake, inundating the city from the north. A strong enough hurricane would push water over the higher levees along the Mississippi River, flooding the city from the south. In this doomsday scenario, levees intended to keep water out trap it inside New Orleans. WALTER MAESTRI : If that bowl fills up, we have no way, necessarily, to get that water out of here; in essence, Lake Pontchartrain, which surrounds us, is transferred and becomes Lake New Orleans. PETER STANDRING : If anything, the situation is getting even more dangerous. That's because wetlands that provide a natural defense against storm surges are disappearing. To see how, University of New Orleans geologist Shea Penland takes me for a swamp buggy ride into the bayous just a few miles south of the city. Here, between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico, is the largest area of coastal wetlands anywhere in the United States. So, Shea, why did we stop here? SHEA PENLAND (University of New Orleans): We stopped here because this is an area that was solid land 50 years ago and today is open water. PETER STANDRING : Healthy wetlands weaken a hurricane by starving it of warm ocean water, its fuel. But in the last 70 years, nearly 2,000 square miles of this protective buffer have eroded due to manmade and natural causes. What does all this land loss mean to the city of New Orleans? SHEA PENLAND : The wetlands are our natural speed bump; they're our first line of defense. We have a slow disaster that's kind of eating its way towards the city, and all of a sudden, here comes the hurricane. And that major hurricane could be the one on the right track, the right trajectory that puts the storm right down in the city, people can't get out, and we have the ten thousand, twenty thousand, thirty thousand dead. And that's the worst case scenario; that's what we're gambling with right now. PETER STANDRING : With so many lives at risk, accurately predicting these killer storms is a high stakes endeavor. JEFFREY HALVERSON (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center): Forecasters do walk a tightrope when they make forecasts for landfall. You don't want to give people the wrong impression about every storm. You move them harmlessly out of the way and nothing hits, it is a cry wolf kind of syndrome. PETER STANDRING : ...just what happened in the wake of hurricane Ivan. With Ivan closing in on New Orleans, more than 600,000 people evacuated the city. New Orleans shut down. The storm veered off course, but the question remains: when another storm threatens the Louisiana coast, will people evacuate a second time? In recent years, forecasting the track of a hurricane has improved dramatically, but predicting its intensity, how strong it will be when it hits land, is still a difficult challenge. MARSHALL SHEPHERD : If you just grab your glasses there and I'll give you a test drive. PETER STANDRING : We're going to dive on into the storm? MARSHALL SHEPHERD : We are going to fly into the storm. PETER STANDRING : NASA is using satellites to understand hurricanes both inside and out. MARSHALL SHEPHERD : Twenty, thirty years ago, when we used a conventional view of a storm, we could really only see the cloud top. We could see how big the storm was, we could see the white mass which represented the clouds, and that was valuable, but that's all we could see. We were just touching the hood of the car. Now we can pop the hood and look inside the storm. PETER STANDRING : To do that, they're using a satellite equipped with weather radar, the only one of its kind. Much the way a CAT scan provides a three-dimensional picture of internal organs, the satellite's radar is producing stunning pictures of a hurricane's internal structure. And these unique images reveal something unexpected: extremely violent thunderstorms, called hot towers—seen here in red. These storms-within-a-storm can reach more than 10 miles into the sky. MARSHALL SHEPHERD: When we see these hot towers, we think that they are giving us a clue that the storm is releasing a lot of energy, and it's firing on all cylinders if you will. And that may be a sign that the storm is about to undergo intensification processes. PETER STANDRING : So you do think, preliminarily, that there's a link between the abundance of hot towers, and how strong and intense a storm is going to be? MARSHALL SHEPHERD : That's exactly where we are in the research. We don't have enough evidence to conclusively link the number of hot towers or how tall they are to intensity, but our hypothesis is that they might be a sign or a clue that this hurricane is about to enter an intensification phase. PETER STANDRING : And if this work pays off, forecasters will be able to predict more accurately not just where a storm will hit, but whether it will weaken or intensify just before landfall. WALTER MAESTRI : What really scares me to death is that we get a category 2 or 3 hurricane that rapidly intensifies to a category 4 or 5 storm. That's the one that could absolutely be catastrophic here because we wouldn't get people out. People wouldn't be moving early as they were for Ivan. They would all be here, in the community, and all of a sudden we'd get this wall, this massive wall of water, the double whammy. IVOR VAN HEERDEN : Every year that goes by, the probability of this killer storm occurring increases. JEFF HALVERSON : It's inevitable that at some point, probably in the next 10 to 15 years, there's going to be a tragedy somewhere along the U.S. coastline. It may not be New Orleans... some other high population center . Fairly likely scenario. PETER STANDRING : Gaining a deeper understanding of hurricanes is the best answer, but it won't happen overnight. Here on Bourbon Street, the good times continue to roll. But the party atmosphere masks a widespread concern about the threat of these killer storms. For this city, or any other place that's at risk, improvements in hurricane prediction can't come soon enough. ROBERT KRULWICH : Correspondent Peter Standring.

BOFH: Hell hath no fury...

Episode 26 It appears that the Boss isn't happy. For some reason the Online Electronic Document Storage project he inherited from his predecessor is somewhat behind schedule and all fingers seem to be pointing at the PFY and I as the source of the delay. I use the ruse of urgent lift maintenance as an excuse for the PFY and I to avoid the problem for a day, knowing full well that the Boss is never going to actually WALK up four flights to berate us. But it seems I was wrong. "So what I'd like to know is why the 'scanning into storage' task has taken so long?" the Boss asks, checking his Project gant chart. "I mean this project's been running for almost six months and as far as I can see you've not actually produced anything!" "We're still calibrating the equipment and formatting the document repository." "What does that mean?" the Boss snarls, letting a little more frustration creep into his voice. "It means that to ensure the system is reliable and robust we have to do benchmarking on various types of document and the impact that it has on the storage system. That way we can pick the best fit of document type to suit the needs of the users and the available space in the repository." "What does that mean?" the Boss repeats. "It means that we're scanning in multiple documents in multiple formats and running comparisons on readability, total size and ability to OCR text where necessary." "And what's taking so long?" "The age of the documents is a bit of a problem. Some of them are so old that the pages might suffer damage or just be stuck together." "Stuck together!? What documents are you using?" "For this stage of the Process, old Playboys," the PFY admits. "What?!" "Well they're ideal. They've got print, images, combinations of the above and the later ones are in colour!" "What the hell are you archiving them for!?" "Some of them are absolute classics. They need to be safely stored for future generations. And that's just the jokes pages!" the PFY says defensively. "Right, that's it, you're off the project," the Boss snaps. "I'll get a temp in to scan some documents for you. What skills am I going to want to look for?" "Blonde, blue eyes," the PFY says helpfully. "Perhaps someone like Miss April 19.." "I mean technical qualifications, like the ability to discern important metadata from the context of the content." I always feel vaguely uneasy when the Boss uses technical terms like metadata. It just seems wrong - he should stick to words he knows something about, like redundancy and lard. Whenever he uses large complicated words I always get the feeling he's been talking to someone behind our back. Almost like he's cheating on us with another technical person... Now I come to think about it, he has been coming in late a lot and making lame excuses like he missed the train or that he had to stay home late with the wife. We should have seen it coming but we just thought he was being slack bastard! I can see the same thoughts are running through the PFY's mind and that he's looking a bit hurt. The poor blighter's has such a sheltered upbringing and is not used to Bosses sneaking out for a bit of technical upskilling on the side... "You never used to use technical terms like that," the PFY says quietly. "Is there... someone else... giving you technical advice?" "I... No, of course not!" "I notice there's been a number of appointments with the presales marketing guy from the photocopier company..." I counter, browsing the Boss' online calendar via the wireless PDA. "What, you're going through my calendar now!?" "So you admit you've been seeing him?" The PFY asks. "Well, yes. Sure, he had a few ideas, we might have talked about some stuff but it meant nothing. It's still you guys I come to for the real idea of what we should be doing!" "I can't believe it," the PFY says. "How long has this been going on?" "A month. Two maybe." "And you thought we wouldn't find out?" "I..." "How did it get to this stage?" the PFY asks. "Look, it's not you, it's him," the Boss says, pointing at me. "Ah, isn't that supposed to be 'It's not you it's me'?" I ask. "No, it's you," the Boss says. "You're a megalomaniac control freak and I want.... more" "More?" the PFY asks. "I want to make my own technical decisions! I don't want to feel stymied by you two whenever I have a good idea!" "You two ? I thought you said it was just him?" the PFY says. "It doesn't matter. I need more. I'm not an idiot and I want a chance to prove that to everyone. I think perhaps I should.. maybe... create a head of research position." . . . "Well," the PFY says, as soon as the boss leaves. "You seem to be taking this calmly. You're not at all worried that he'll become technically competent and have no further use for us?" "Nah. I've seen it dozens of times - these things have a way of working themselves out. Push the 'Open 6' Button will you?" >Nggaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa< >thud< "What was that?" "That was the Boss using his newfound superior technical skills to step into an elevator shaft. Told you things had a way of working themselves out...." Hell hath no fury like an administrator scorned... ®

I Am Naive...

I really am naive. I did not expect this degree of unpreparedness and incompetence. I did not expect this even though I knew that the Bush administration is worse than you can imagine, even after having taken account of the fact that it is worse than you can imagine. Paul Krugman more than half expected this. Another sign that he's wiser and more reality-based than I am: Paul Krugman A Can't-Do Government - New York Times: Before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America: a terrorist attack on New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane strike on New Orleans.... So why were New Orleans and the nation so unprepared? After 9/11, hard questions were deferred in the name of national unity, then buried under a thick coat of whitewash.... Why have aid and security taken so long to arrive? Katrina hit five days ago - and it was already clear by last Friday that Katrina could do immense damage along the Gulf Coast.... [T]he evidence points, above all, to a stunning lack of both preparation and urgency in the federal government's response. Even military resources in the right place weren't ordered into action. "On Wednesday," said an editorial in The Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss., "reporters listening to horrific stories of death and survival at the Biloxi Junior High School shelter looked north across Irish Hill Road and saw Air Force personnel playing basketball and performing calisthenics."... Why wasn't more preventive action taken?... [T]he Army Corps of Engineers... "never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security - coming at the same time as federal tax cuts - was the reason for the strain." In 2002 the corps' chief resigned, reportedly under threat of being fired, after he criticized the administration's proposed cuts in the corps' budget, including flood-control spending.... Did the Bush administration destroy FEMA's effectiveness? The administration has, by all accounts, treated the emergency management agency like an unwanted stepchild.... Last year James Lee Witt, who won bipartisan praise for his leadership of the agency during the Clinton years, said at a Congressional hearing: "I am extremely concerned that the ability of our nation to prepare for and respond to disasters has been sharply eroded. I hear from emergency managers, local and state leaders, and first responders nearly every day that the FEMA they knew and worked well with has now disappeared." I don't think this is a simple tale of incompetence. The reason the military wasn't rushed in to help along the Gulf Coast is, I believe, the same reason nothing was done to stop looting after the fall of Baghdad. Flood control was neglected for the same reason our troops in Iraq didn't get adequate armor.... [O]ur current leaders just aren't serious about... the essential functions of government.... Yesterday Mr. Bush made an utterly fantastic claim: that nobody expected the breach of the levees. In fact, there had been repeated warnings about exactly that risk.... America... has a can't-do government that makes excuses instead of doing its job... Nor did I expect blame-the-victim to start so early, especially not from federal officials who did nothing to roll a single busload of refugees out of New Orleans before the hurricane hit. Tim Burke writes: Tim Burke: Michael Brown, director of FEMA, may or may not be incompetent in technical terms. But blaming people for not evacuating, and that's exactly what he's doing.... It's a kind of whining, an anti-leadership. What, he thinks it is not appropriate to talk now about why megamillions in contingency planning failed so grotesquely but it is appropriate right now to scapegoat people who mostly lacked the means to evacuate and were provisioned with no meaningful assistance in evacuating? Yes, some people just decided to stay, for a variety of reasons. However, look at the people we've been seeing on television: it's plain that many of them could not get out unless someone expressly helped them get out. There was no consistent provision of such assistance.... There's... the ability of political and bureaucratic leaders as well as pundits and ordinary folk to show a kind of common-sense decency in grappling with the situation, in understanding its meaning to us as human beings.... There are many leaders and observers and ordinary folk who are making me proud to be American. Michael Brown makes me feel the opposite. Jonah Goldberg, cracking cheap jokes about Waterworld and then making a non-apology apology that's almost worse, makes me feel the opposite. Whomever the deranged assholes are who are shooting at helicopters and threatening to loot hospitals make me feel the opposite. There are two tests here: can we do better as a society in understanding and solving major problems, and can we be decent, can we demonstrate character... And here we have FEMA head Michael Brown: WSJ.com - Katrina News Tracker: FEMA's Michael Brown tells Ted Koppel: "We were not prepared" for the thousands of people who did not evacuate the city despite calls to do so. "We move in when its safe to move in, we worked with the state." Jim Henley is polite in response: Unqualified Offerings: The Hurricane Pam exercise (discussed downblog) leaves no doubt that federal, state and local agencies recognized in advance that hundreds of thousands of people would remain behind because they were too poor to get out. The White House itself was briefed. So it's beyond unforgiveable for people like Brown and Chertoff to pepper their comments with "people who chose to stay behind"s. Kevin Drum is a little less polite: The Washington Monthly: EVACUATING THE POOR.... Why did so many people who lacked the means to evacuate New Orleans get left behind? Brian Wolshon, an engineering professor at Louisiana State University who served as a consultant on the state's evacuation plan, said little attention was paid to moving out New Orleans's "low-mobility" population -- the elderly, the infirm and the poor without cars or other means of fleeing the city, about 100,000 people. At disaster planning meetings, he said, "the answer was often silence." It's not that no one had thought of this problem. They just didn't consider it important enough to spend any time on. Patrick Nielsen Hayden cannot be polite any longer: Making Light: Another term for it would be "lying sack of shit": The director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Thursday those New Orleans residents who chose not to heed warnings to evacuate before Hurricane Katrina bear some responsibility for their fates. Michael Brown also agreed with other public officials that the death toll in the city could reach into the thousands. "Unfortunately, that's going to be attributable a lot to people who did not heed the advance warnings," Brown told CNN. "I don't make judgments about why people chose not to leave but, you know, there was a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans," he said.... Asked later on CNN how he could blame the victims, many of whom could not flee the storm because they had no transportation or were too frail to evacuate on their own, Brown said he was not blaming anyone. "Now is not the time to be blaming," Brown said. Summing up: If you didn't leave New Orleans before the storm, your problems are your own fault. Not that we "make judgements", of course. And remember, "now is not the time to be blaming." And the thought briefly, briefly penetrates Jonah Goldberg's lizard brain that he's on the side of the bad guys: Rising Hegemon: No longer such a joke is it?: Jonah Goldberg has something rare in today's Republican enablers...an attack of guilt. So the question is, would the money have been better spent if the Republicans hadn't gotten their way? And, though it sickens me to say so, that is at best an open question. I have the utmost faith in the kleptocratic and dysfunctional governments of New Orleans and Louisiana to waste and steal money. But, we were supposed to be preparing -- at the national level -- for a major terrorist attack for the last four years. I just don't see much evidence of that preparation. Congress re-assembled lickity-split to deal with Terri Schiavo -- a decision that didn't and does not bother me the way it bothers some. But however you define the issues involved in that case, in terms of real human suffering they are very hard to stack-up against what's happened in New Orleans. Congress should have convened yesterday and rescinded the highway bill. It should have broken-open the farm bill like a piñata and reallocated the monies therein. But the moment is brief. In the next paragraph all sign of intelligent thought vanishes: For supporters of the war, this spectacle is going to be particularly hard to accomodate because it is in the interests of the political classes to keep their pork and it is in the interests of the antiwar left to frame this as a choice between Baghdad and New Orleans... Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach him now.

The big disconnect on New Orleans

The big disconnect on New Orleans The official version; then there's the in-the-trenches version NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- Diverging views of a crumbling New Orleans emerged Thursday, with statements by some federal officials in contradiction with grittier, more desperate views from the streets. By late Friday response to those stranded in the city was more visible. But the conflicting views on Thursday came within hours, sometimes minutes of each of each other, as reflected in CNN's transcripts. The speakers include Michael Brown, chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, evacuee Raymond Cooper, CNN correspondents and others. Here's what they had to say: Conditions in the Convention Center FEMA chief Brown: We learned about that (Thursday), so I have directed that we have all available resources to get that convention center to make sure that they have the food and water and medical care that they need. (See video of Brown explaining how news reports alerted FEMA to convention center chaos. -- 2:11) Mayor Nagin: The convention center is unsanitary and unsafe, and we are running out of supplies for the 15,000 to 20,000 people. (Hear Nagin's angry demand for soldiers. 1:04) CNN Producer Kim Segal: It was chaos. There was nobody there, nobody in charge. And there was nobody giving even water. The children, you should see them, they're all just in tears. There are sick people. We saw... people who are dying in front of you. Evacuee Raymond Cooper: Sir, you've got about 3,000 people here in this -- in the Convention Center right now. They're hungry. Don't have any food. We were told two-and-a-half days ago to make our way to the Superdome or the Convention Center by our mayor. And which when we got here, was no one to tell us what to do, no one to direct us, no authority figure. Uncollected corpses Brown: That's not been reported to me, so I'm not going to comment. Until I actually get a report from my teams that say, "We have bodies located here or there," I'm just not going to speculate. Segal: We saw one body. A person is in a wheelchair and someone had pushed (her) off to the side and draped just like a blanket over this person in the wheelchair. And then there is another body next to that. There were others they were willing to show us. ( See CNN report, 'People are dying in front of us' -- 4:36 ) Evacuee Cooper: They had a couple of policemen out here, sir, about six or seven policemen told me directly, when I went to tell them, hey, man, you got bodies in there. You got two old ladies that just passed, just had died, people dragging the bodies into little corners. One guy -- that's how I found out. The guy had actually, hey, man, anybody sleeping over here? I'm like, no. He dragged two bodies in there. Now you just -- I just found out there was a lady and an old man, the lady went to nudge him. He's dead. Hospital evacuations Brown: I've just learned today that we ... are in the process of completing the evacuations of the hospitals, that those are going very well. CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta: It's gruesome. I guess that is the best word for it. If you think about a hospital, for example, the morgue is in the basement, and the basement is completely flooded. So you can just imagine the scene down there. But when patients die in the hospital, there is no place to put them, so they're in the stairwells. It is one of the most unbelievable situations I've seen as a doctor, certainly as a journalist as well. There is no electricity. There is no water. There's over 200 patients still here remaining. ...We found our way in through a chopper and had to land at a landing strip and then take a boat. And it is exactly ... where the boat was traveling where the snipers opened fire yesterday, halting all the evacuations. ( Watch the video report of corpses stacked in stairwells -- 4:45 ) Dr. Matthew Bellew, Charity Hospital: We still have 200 patients in this hospital, many of them needing care that they just can't get. The conditions are such that it's very dangerous for the patients. Just about all the patients in our services had fevers. Our toilets are overflowing. They are filled with stool and urine. And the smell, if you can imagine, is so bad, you know, many of us had gagging and some people even threw up. It's pretty rough.(Mayor's video: Armed addicts fighting for a fix -- 1:03) Violence and civil unrest Brown: I've had no reports of unrest, if the connotation of the word unrest means that people are beginning to riot, or you know, they're banging on walls and screaming and hollering or burning tires or whatever. I've had no reports of that. CNN's Chris Lawrence: From here and from talking to the police officers, they're losing control of the city. We're now standing on the roof of one of the police stations. The police officers came by and told us in very, very strong terms it wasn't safe to be out on the street. (Watch the video report on explosions and gunfire -- 2:12) The federal response: Brown: Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans, virtually a city that has been destroyed, things are going relatively well. Homeland Security Director Chertoff: Now, of course, a critical element of what we're doing is the process of evacuation and securing New Orleans and other areas that are afflicted. And here the Department of Defense has performed magnificently, as has the National Guard, in bringing enormous resources and capabilities to bear in the areas that are suffering. Crowd chanting outside the Convention Center: We want help. Nagin: They don't have a clue what's going on down there. Phyllis Petrich, a tourist stranded at the Ritz-Carlton: They are invisible. We have no idea where they are. We hear bits and pieces that the National Guard is around, but where? We have not seen them. We have not seen FEMA officials. We have seen no one. Security Brown: I actually think the security is pretty darn good. There's some really bad people out there that are causing some problems, and it seems to me that every time a bad person wants to scream of cause a problem, there's somebody there with a camera to stick it in their face. ( See Jack Cafferty's rant on the government's 'bungled' response -- 0:57) Chertoff: In addition to local law enforcement, we have 2,800 National Guard in New Orleans as we speak today. One thousand four hundred additional National Guard military police trained soldiers will be arriving every day: 1,400 today, 1,400 tomorrow and 1,400 the next day. Nagin: I continue to hear that troops are on the way, but we are still protecting the city with only 1,500 New Orleans police officers, an additional 300 law enforcement personnel, 250 National Guard troops, and other military personnel who are primarily focused on evacuation. Lawrence: The police are very, very tense right now. They're literally riding around, full assault weapons, full tactical gear, in pickup trucks. Five, six, seven, eight officers. It is a very tense situation here.

Taking the battle online

Microsoft has become the latest big technology company to make a move into telephony over the internet. The low cost of calls is attracting customers in ever-greater numbers and robbing traditional phone companies of business. How worried should they be? WHEN occasion permits, it is salutary to remind oneself how the conduct of business and leisure has changed since the advent of the internet. Gathering information, written contact (through e-mail) and other tasks have been speeded up immeasurably thanks to the forward march of technology. One is often pressed to remember how people got by before the internet became widespread. In fact, many of the tasks taken up by the web were conducted over the telephone. And if Voice over the Internet Protocol (VOIP), a new type of web-based telephony, continues to takes off, we may one day ask how we made phone calls before the internet took that strain too. Microsoft is the latest big technology firm to embrace VOIP. This week, the software giant announced that it had bought Teleo, an American VOIP-technology firm, for an undisclosed sum. Days earlier Google, a leading search engine, announced that it would launch Google Talk, an instant message and voice service, in competition with other leading web portals. In June, Yahoo! bought Dialpad, a firm offering the same sort of technology as Teleo. At the moment, the technology giants generally only allow computer-to-computer voice services. But they may soon extend their offerings to compete with the likes of Vonage, Skype, 8X8 and a host of other new firms that concentrate on providing VOIP services. These companies allow customers to plug their phone into a gadget connected to the internet. By offering this service they have shown they want to compete directly with traditional telecoms firms and the cable companies that have recently joined the fray. However, VOIP differs from the usual phone services in that it sends calls as digital packets of information over data networks rather than relying on a dedicated circuit-switched network. As a result, calls are charged at a much cheaper rate: long-distance and international calls can be made for the price of a local call and a home broadband-internet connection. Furthermore, a VOIP user can keep his old fixed-line phone number, which will work not only at home but anywhere in the world where he chooses to use the device (as long as a broadband connection is available). Not surprisingly, consumers have shown more than a little interest in the new technology. TeleGeography, a research firm, estimates that VOIP providers offering similar services to traditional telecoms firms in America had amassed over 1.8m subscribers by the first quarter of 2005. This number is set to grow to over 7m by the end of 2006 and 17.5m by 2010 (see chart). These figures do not take account of the growth of Skype, whose software permits free calls between computers. The Luxembourg-based firm says it already has 51m registered users and a further 2m that have signed up for paid services, such as voicemail and connections to landlines and mobile phones. Skype claims to carry 45% of all American VOIP traffic. Despite the relatively modest size of the market for VOIP at present, its quick advances and potential for growth have forced traditional phone companies and cable firms on to the defensive. Fixed-line operators in America have suffered a torrid few years as cable firms and mobile operators have eaten away at their business. Revenues at America's fixed-line local and long-distance carriers have fallen back since peaking in 2000, and forecasts suggest that revenues will slip further over the next few years partly as VOIP providers grab their business. The number of fixed lines in America has been declining as consumers switch to mobile telephony. One estimate suggests that revenues at fixed-line firms may fall by another 25% between now and 2010. The appearance of new VOIP providers in the past two years has come amid a battle for customers between traditional telecoms firms and cable operators. The latter have built fibre-optic networks across many countries and can offer not only telephones but broadband connections and television too. Many traditional telecoms firms are upgrading their lines to offer the same services and may also be in a position to add mobile telephony to the bundle. And both the telecoms firms and their cable rivals are aggressively, though somewhat reluctantly, offering VOIP telephony. Profits are slimmer for VOIP—the service yields up to $10 less monthly revenue per customer for traditional phone companies, according to some estimates. But telecoms firms reckon it is better to cannibalise revenues than to lose a customer altogether. It is too soon to sound the death knell for traditional telephony, but the coming of VOIP will provide cheaper calls for customers and help to keep fixed-line prices down Some analysts reckon that the inability of pure VOIP firms to offer the bundled services that telecoms and cable companies can provide (which include the all-important broadband link) may limit the appeal of internet telephony. Other problems also beset VOIP. America's Federal Communications Commission has insisted that some VOIP phones are made able to access America's emergency services. The expense of complying with this and the possible imposition of other regulations that govern traditional telecoms providers could add to the costs of VOIP firms and eat into their competitive advantage. And customers may balk at relying wholly on phones that are affected by power cuts, not to mention the viruses that trouble the internet. Despite these concerns, VOIP's rapid growth is set to continue for the foreseeable future. And mobile operators have as much to fear from it as fixed-line firms do, thanks to the roll-out of WiMax or other forms of wireless broadband delivered over the airwaves, which will offer mobile VOIP across many countries. As a result, the more established mobile operators, still trying to recoup the vast sums spent on third-generation (3G) licences, could see revenues fall. It is too soon to sound the death knell for traditional fixed-line telephones. The ability of wires to deliver a variety of services, and the drawbacks of VOIP, should keep fixed-line firms in business for some time. But the coming of VOIP will provide cheaper calls for customers and help to keep fixed-line prices down. The consumer with a far-flung network of friends or business contacts may soon wonder how he paid the bills before the internet brought the cost of calls crashing down.

AMERICAblog News: Lead religious right group promotes theory that God wiped out NOLA on purpose

Geez, this is from the American Family Association's propaganda organ AgapePress. It's one thing when some nutjob says this, it's another when the American Family Association, one of the LARGEST and most powerful groups of the radical right, gives those nutjobs air time. Rev. Bill Shanks, pastor of New Covenant Fellowship of New Orleans, also sees God's mercy in the aftermath of Katrina -- but in a different way. Shanks says the hurricane has wiped out much of the rampant sin common to the city. The pastor explains that for years he has warned people that unless Christians in New Orleans took a strong stand against such things as local abortion clinics, the yearly Mardi Gras celebrations, and the annual event known as "Southern Decadence" -- an annual six-day "gay pride" event scheduled to be hosted by the city this week -- God's judgment would be felt. “ New Orleans now is abortion free. New Orleans now is Mardi Gras free. New Orleans now is free of Southern Decadence and the sodomites, the witchcraft workers, false religion -- it's free of all of those things now," Shanks says. "God simply, I believe, in His mercy purged all of that stuff out of there -- and now we're going to start over again." The New Orleans pastor is adamant. Christians, he says, need to confront sin. "It's time for us to stand up against wickedness so that God won't have to deal with that wickedness," he says. Believers, he says, are God's "authorized representatives on the face of the Earth" and should say they "don't want unrighteous men in office," for example. In addition, he says Christians should not hesitate to voice their opinions about such things as abortion, prayer, and homosexual marriage. "We don't want a Supreme Court that is going to say it's all right to kill little boys and girls, ... it's all right to take prayer out of schools, and it's all right to legalize sodomy, opening the door for same-sex marriage and all of that.”

Government says storm may shut some US refineries for months

WASHINGTON, Sept 1 (Reuters) - The government warned on Thursday that some U.S. refineries shut by Hurricane Katrina may not resume processing oil for several months and a consumer group said such market conditions justified gasoline at $3 a gallon. "Some refineries likely (will be) able to restart their operations within the next 1 to 2 weeks, while others will likely be down for a more extended period, possibly several months," the Energy Information Administration said. The Energy Department's analytical arm said nine major oil refineries in Louisiana and Mississippi remained shut from the hurricane. Those refineries account for about 11 percent of total U.S. refining capacity. "Unlike 2004's Hurricane Ivan, which affected oil production facilities and had a lasting impact on crude oil production in the Gulf of Mexico, it appears that Hurricane Katrina may have a more lasting impact on refinery production and the distribution system," the EIA said in its most recent update on the effects of the hurricane on the energy sector. With less production of gasoline, motor fuel prices have jumped around the country to near or above $3 a gallon, with pump prices in Atlanta topping $5. President George W. Bush earlier Thursday urged Americans to conserve gasoline while supplies are disrupted, and promised the government would go after oil companies that gouged consumers at the pump with high prices. The Consumer Federation of America, which is normally a critic of Big Oil, said on Thursday that $3 gasoline was justified, given current market conditions. The group pointed out that with many refineries shut, major pipelines not working and gasoline demand up as drivers top off their tanks due to fears of supply shortages, higher prices should be expected. However, Mark Cooper, the group's research director, said the U.S. oil industry is controlled by a few big companies and the supply-and-demand forces that set fuel prices "are not very consumer-friendly." He said some retailers were likely using the hurricane to gouge consumers at the pump, but such cases would be difficult to prove. Two congressional committees will hold separate hearings next week on the jump in gasoline prices and the impact on oil refining capacity after the hurricane.

Criticism of Bush mounts as more than 10,000 feared dead

As thousands of people sat on the streets of New Orleans, having spent their fourth day waiting to be rescued, the city fell deeper into chaos, with gangs roaming the city and corpses rotting in the sun. Kathleen Blanco, the Democrat governor of Louisiana, threatened looters with a shoot-to-kill policy. "These troops are battle-tested. They have M16s and are locked and loaded," she said. "These troops know how to shoot and kill and I expect they will." Plumes of thick black smoke rose after an explosion rocked an industrial area hit hard by Katrina and an apartment complex in the city centre was also in flames. The explosion was later said to have taken place in a chemical storage facility. Stunned residents stumbled around bodies that lay rotting and untouched. Others trudged along flooded and debris-strewn streets toward the Superdome football stadium where they hoped to be bussed to safety. Calling for the immediate deployment of regular combat troops in New Orleans, David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican senator said: "My guess is that it [the death toll] will start at 10,000, but that is only a guess." He said this estimate was not based on any official death toll or body count. Even before he set off, Mr Bush was forced to admit that the relief effort had been inadequate: "The results are not acceptable," he said. Later he said: "I am not looking forward to this trip. It's as if the entire Gulf coast were obliterated by the worst kind of weapon you can imagine." An emergency military convoy of aid supplies arrived in New Orleans yesterday to help in the relief of tens of thousands of refugees made desperate in the aftermath of the hurricane. Live television broadcasts showed a queue of military vehicles loaded with crates making their way through the flooded streets. Troops with rifles rode in the convoy. In another sign of aid finally getting through, commercial aircraft carrying supplies were arriving at an increased rate of four per hour at New Orleans international airport, the department of transport said. The planes were evacuating displaced residents and would continue until evening. New Orleans has descended into anarchy since it was devastated by Katrina on Monday. Standing alongside the Republican governors of Alabama and Mississippi at his first stop in Mobile, Alabama, Mr Bush said: "We have a responsibility to clean up this mess. What is not working right, we're going to make it right." He then went on to Biloxi, Mississippi, where he spoke to victims before heading to New Orleans. Yesterday the US Congress broke away from its holiday to implement a $10.5bn (£5.6bn) aid package, while the Pentagon promised 1,400 national guardsmen a day to stop looting in the city. But these moves did little to quell the mounting anger of the hurricane's victims and local officials, particularly in New Orleans. At the increasingly unsanitary convention centre, the crowds swelled to about 25,000 as people sought food, water and attention, while dead bodies lay in wheelchairs or wrapped in sheets both inside and outside the centre. At the city's Charity hospital, the dead were stacked up on the stairways. New Orleans airport was transformed into a huge field hospital, with fleets of military and coastguard helicopters ferrying the sick for treatment. Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, broke down in tears on Thursday during an interview on local radio, saying that federal officials "don't have a clue what's going on". "I keep hearing that this is coming, that is coming," he said, referring to federal aid. "And my answer to that today is ... where is the beef? "Let's figure out the biggest crisis in the history of our country," he continued. After September 11, he said, the president had been given "unprecedented powers" to send aid to New York. The same response should be applied in this case, too, he said. "Get off your asses and let's do something." At a news conference in Washington yesterday, the Congressional Black Caucus criticised the rescue effort and the failure to assist many of the mostly poor and black victims. "I'm ashamed of America. I'm ashamed of our government," said a Democrat congresswoman, Carolyn Kilpatrick, from Michigan. "I'm outraged by the lack of response ..." The director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael Brown, defended his record, but said he understood the irritation. He said there was "a continuous flow of commodities", into the Superdome in New Orleans, where thousands of people are taking refuge in crowded conditions. Lieutenant General Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, said 2,600 further national guardsmen would be deployed by tonight, bringing the total number of troops in New Orleans to 7,000. "We understand the recovery is not going to be an overnight recovery," he said. "This is a catastrophe of enormous magnitude." The additional troops would be getting into areas that were previously inaccessible. Asked why the civil unrest continued, Gen Blum said: "There are not enough police and soldiers to be everywhere all the time." But as troops arrived yesterday they were told to point their guns downward, to avoid any comparison with Iraq. The movement of thousands of refugees from the Superdome to the Astrodome in Houston was halted late on Thursday, after it was feared that the Astrodome was becoming a fire hazard. They are being transported to other shelters in Houston.

John Battelle's Search Blog Ballmer Throws A Chair At “F*ing Google”

A reliable source has passed along a legal document in the ongoing lawsuit between Google and Microsoft over Google's hiring of Kai-Fu Lee. The document is the "Declaration of Mark Lucovsky" in the case. Lucovsky was a distinguished engineer at Microsoft who defected to Google in November of 2004…. A reliable source has passed along a legal document in the ongoing lawsuit between Google and Microsoft over Google’s hiring of Kai-Fu Lee. The document is the “Declaration of Mark Lucovsky” in the case. Lucovsky was a distinguished engineer at Microsoft who defected to Google in November of 2004. His statement makes for some pretty interesting reading, to say the least. The statement reads in part: Prior to joining Google, I set up a meeting on or about November 11, 2004 with Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer to discuss my planned departure….At some point in the conversation Mr. Ballmer said: “Just tell me it’s not Google.” I told him it was Google. At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office. Mr. Ballmer then said: “Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I’m going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to fucking kill Google.” …. Thereafter, Mr. Ballmer resumed trying to persuade me to stay….Among other things, Mr. Ballmer told me that “Google’s not a real company. It’s a house of cards.” UPDATE: This has hit the wires.

Washington Monthly

CHRONOLOGY….Here’s a timeline that outlines the fate of both FEMA and flood control projects in New Orleans under the Bush administration. Read it and weep: January 2001: Bush appoints Joe Allbaugh, a crony from Texas, as head of FEMA. Allbaugh has no previous experience in disaster management. April 2001: Budget Director Mitch Daniels announces the Bush administration’s goal of privatizing much of FEMA’s work. In May, Allbaugh confirms that FEMA will be downsized: “Many are concerned that federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program….” he said. “Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level.” 2001: FEMA designates a major hurricane hitting New Orleans as one of the three “likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this country.” December 2002: After less than two years at FEMA, Allbaugh announces he is leaving to start up a consulting firm that advises companies seeking to do business in Iraq. He is succeeded by his deputy and former college friend, Michael Brown, who has no previous experience in disaster management and was fired from his previous job for mismanagement. March 2003: FEMA is downgraded from a cabinet level position and folded into the Department of Homeland Security. Its mission is refocused on fighting acts of terrorism. 2003: Under its new organization chart within DHS, FEMA’s preparation and planning functions are reassigned to a new Office of Preparedness and Response. FEMA will henceforth focus only on response and recovery. Summer 2004: FEMA denies Louisiana’s pre-disaster mitigation funding requests. Says Jefferson Parish flood zone manager Tom Rodrigue: “You would think we would get maximum consideration….This is what the grant program called for. We were more than qualified for it.” June 2004: The Army Corps of Engineers budget for levee construction in New Orleans is slashed. Jefferson Parish emergency management chiefs Walter Maestri comments: “It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay.” June 2005: Funding for the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is cut by a record $71.2 million. One of the hardest-hit areas is the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, which was created after the May 1995 flood to improve drainage in Jefferson, Orleans and St. Tammany parishes. August 2005: While New Orleans is undergoing a slow motion catastrophe, Bush mugs for the cameras, cuts a cake for John McCain, plays the guitar for Mark Wills, delivers an address about V-J day, and continues with his vacation. When he finally gets around to acknowledging the scope of the unfolding disaster, he delivers only a photo op on Air Force One and a flat, defensive, laundry list speech in the Rose Garden. So: A crony with no relevant experience was installed as head of FEMA. Mitigation budgets for New Orleans were slashed even though it was known to be one of the top three risks in the country. FEMA was deliberately downsized as part of the Bush administration’s conservative agenda to reduce the role of government. After DHS was created, FEMA’s preparation and planning functions were taken away. Actions have consequences. No one could predict that a hurricane the size of Katrina would hit this year, but the slow federal response when it did happen was no accident. It was the result of four years of deliberate Republican policy and budget choices that favor ideology and partisan loyalty at the expense of operational competence. It’s the Bush administration in a nutshell.

STORM AND CRISIS: EYES ON AMERICA; Across U.S., Outrage at Response

But Mr. Williams added: "You cannot just blame the president, or any one person. Everyone is partly to blame. It's the whole system." It was the combination of specific and systemic failures that many of those interviewed -- experts and ordinary people alike -- echoed. Andrew Young, the former civil rights worker and mayor of Atlanta who was Jimmy Carter's ambassador to the United Nations, was born in New Orleans 73 years ago, walked on its levees as a boy and "was always assured by my father that the Army Corps of Engineers had done a masterful job." But, Mr. Young said, "they've been neglected for the last 20 years," along with other pillars of the nation's infrastructure, human and physical. "I was surprised and not surprised," he said of the failures and suffering of this week. "It's not just a lack of preparedness. I think the easy answer is to say that these are poor people and black people and so the government doesn't give a damn," he said. "That's O.K., and there might be some truth to that. But I think we've got to see this as a serious problem of the long-term neglect of an environmental system on which our nation depends. All the grain that's grown in Iowa and Illinois, and the huge industrial output of the Midwest has to come down the Mississippi River, and there has to be a port to handle it, to keep a functioning economy in the United States of America." Mr. Riley, the Charleston mayor, whose Police Department on Monday sent 55 officers to help keep order in Gulfport, Miss., said he had long advocated creating a special military entity -- perhaps under the Corps of Engineers -- that could respond immediately to disasters. "It's not the police function," he said. "It's that it's an entity that knows how to quickly restore infrastructure and the essentials of order." He said his own experience with the Federal Emergency Management Agency during Hurricane Hugo in 1989, when he had the National Guard on standby and then requested Army troops and marines, had convinced him that civilian bureaucracy was sometimes too caught up in the niceties. "With the eye of Hugo over my City Hall, literally, I said to a FEMA official, 'What's the main bit of advice you can give me?' and he said, 'You need to make sure you're accounting for all your expenses," Mayor Riley recalled. "The tragedy of these things is the unnecessary pain in those early days, the complete destruction of normalcy."

Mars Exploration Rover

Press Releases NASA's Durable Spirit Sends Intriguing New Images From Mars This mini-panorama was taken by Spirit on Aug. 23, 2005, just as the rover finally completed its intrepid climb up "Husband Hill." The summit appears to be a windswept plateau of scattered rocks, little sand dunes and small exposures of outcrop. View all Spirit images from this press release "When the images came down and we could see horizon all the way around, that was every bit as exhilarating as getting to the top of any mountain I've climbed on Earth," said Chris Leger, a rover planner at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. The summit sits 82 meters (269 feet) above the edge of the surrounding plains. It is 106 meters (348 feet) higher than the site where Spirit landed nearly 20 months ago. Spirit and twin rover, Opportunity, successfully completed their three-month prime missions in April 2004. They have inspected dozens of rocks and soil targets since then, continuing their pursuit of geological evidence about formerly wet conditions on Mars. "Spirit has climbed to the hilltop and looked over the other side, but NASA did not do this just to say we can do it. The Mars rovers are addressing fundamental questions about Martian history and planetary environments," said NASA's Mars Exploration Program Director Doug McCuistion. The crest of "Husband Hill" offers Spirit's views of possible routes into a basin to the south with apparently layered outcrops. Shortly after Spirit landed, it observed a cluster of seven hills about 3 kilometers (2 miles) east of its landing site. NASA proposed naming the range "Columbia Hills" in tribute to the last crew of Space Shuttle Columbia. The tallest of the hills commemorates Rick Husband, Columbia's commander. Volcanic rocks covering the plain Spirit crossed on its way to the hills bore evidence of only slight alteration by water. When Spirit reached the base of the hills five months after landing, it immediately began finding rocks with wetter histories. "This climb was motivated by science," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. Squyres is principal investigator for the rovers' science instruments. "Every time Spirit has gained altitude, we've found different rock types. Also, we're doing what any field geologist would do in an area like this: climbing to a good vantage point for plotting a route." Researchers are viewing possible routes south to apparently layered ledges and to a feature dubbed "home plate," which might be a plateau of older rock or a filled-in crater. The landing site and the Columbia Hills are within Gusev Crater, a bowl about 150 kilometers (95 miles) in diameter. The crater was selected as the landing site for the Spirit rover because the shape of the terrain suggests the crater once held a lake. Volcanic deposits appear to have covered any sign of ancient lakebed geology out on the plain, but scientists say the hills expose older layers that have been lifted and tipped by a meteorite impact or other event. "We're finding abundant evidence for alteration of rocks in a water environment," said Ray Arvidson of Washington University, St. Louis, Mo. Arvidson is deputy principal investigator for the rovers' science instruments. "What we want to do is figure out which layers were on top of which other layers. To do that it has been helpful to keep climbing for good views of how the layers are tilted to varying degrees. Understanding the sequence of layers is equivalent to having a deep drill core from drilling beneath the plains." Both Spirit and Opportunity have been extremely successful. Their solar panels are generating plenty of energy thanks to repeated dust-cleaning events. Spirit has driven 4,827 meters (3.00 miles), and Opportunity 5,737 meters (3.56 miles). JPL manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. For images and information about the rovers and their discoveries on the Web, visit: or For information about NASA and agency programs on the Internet, visit: Working atop a range of Martian hills, NASA's Spirit rover is rewarding researchers with tempting scenes filled with evidence of past planet environments."When the images came down and we could see horizon all the way around, that was every bit as exhilarating as getting to the top of any mountain I've climbed on Earth," said Chris Leger, a rover planner at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.The summit sits 82 meters (269 feet) above the edge of the surrounding plains. It is 106 meters (348 feet) higher than the site where Spirit landed nearly 20 months ago. Spirit and twin rover, Opportunity, successfully completed their three-month prime missions in April 2004. They have inspected dozens of rocks and soil targets since then, continuing their pursuit of geological evidence about formerly wet conditions on Mars."Spirit has climbed to the hilltop and looked over the other side, but NASA did not do this just to say we can do it. The Mars rovers are addressing fundamental questions about Martian history and planetary environments," said NASA's Mars Exploration Program Director Doug McCuistion.The crest of "Husband Hill" offers Spirit's views of possible routes into a basin to the south with apparently layered outcrops. Shortly after Spirit landed, it observed a cluster of seven hills about 3 kilometers (2 miles) east of its landing site. NASA proposed naming the range "Columbia Hills" in tribute to the last crew of Space Shuttle Columbia. The tallest of the hills commemorates Rick Husband, Columbia's commander.Volcanic rocks covering the plain Spirit crossed on its way to the hills bore evidence of only slight alteration by water. When Spirit reached the base of the hills five months after landing, it immediately began finding rocks with wetter histories."This climb was motivated by science," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. Squyres is principal investigator for the rovers' science instruments. "Every time Spirit has gained altitude, we've found different rock types. Also, we're doing what any field geologist would do in an area like this: climbing to a good vantage point for plotting a route."Researchers are viewing possible routes south to apparently layered ledges and to a feature dubbed "home plate," which might be a plateau of older rock or a filled-in crater.The landing site and the Columbia Hills are within Gusev Crater, a bowl about 150 kilometers (95 miles) in diameter. The crater was selected as the landing site for the Spirit rover because the shape of the terrain suggests the crater once held a lake. Volcanic deposits appear to have covered any sign of ancient lakebed geology out on the plain, but scientists say the hills expose older layers that have been lifted and tipped by a meteorite impact or other event."We're finding abundant evidence for alteration of rocks in a water environment," said Ray Arvidson of Washington University, St. Louis, Mo. Arvidson is deputy principal investigator for the rovers' science instruments. "What we want to do is figure out which layers were on top of which other layers. To do that it has been helpful to keep climbing for good views of how the layers are tilted to varying degrees. Understanding the sequence of layers is equivalent to having a deep drill core from drilling beneath the plains."Both Spirit and Opportunity have been extremely successful. Their solar panels are generating plenty of energy thanks to repeated dust-cleaning events. Spirit has driven 4,827 meters (3.00 miles), and Opportunity 5,737 meters (3.56 miles).JPL manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. For images and information about the rovers and their discoveries on the Web, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/mer_main.html or http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov For information about NASA and agency programs on the Internet, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/home/ ### Guy Webster (818) 354-6278/5011 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California Dolores Beasley (202) 358-1753 NASA Headquarters, Washington NEWS RELEASE: 2005-141

Red Cross Banned From Bringing Food and Supplies to Nola

Steve Rose at Daily Kos has more. Further confirmation was had on Larry King: Joining us now in Washington is Marty Evans, the President and CEO of the American Red Cross. She traveled with the president today. The Red Cross is not in New Orleans, why? MARTY EVANS, RED CROSS PRESIDENT AND CEO: Well, Larry, when the storm came our goal was prior to landfall to support the evacuation. It was unsafe to be in the city. We were asked by the city not to be there and the Superdome was made a shelter of last resorts and, quite frankly in retrospect, it was a good idea because otherwise those people would have had no shelter at all. We have our shelters north of the city. We're prepared as soon as they can be evacuated, we're prepared to receive them in Texas, in other states, but it was not safe to be in the city and it's not been safe to go back into the city. They were also concerned that if we located, relocated back into the city people wouldn't leave and they've got to leave.

One side can be wrong

It sounds so reasonable, doesn't it? Such a modest proposal. Why not teach "both sides" and let the children decide for themselves? As President Bush said, "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes." At first hearing, everything about the phrase "both sides" warms the hearts of educators like ourselves. One of us spent years as an Oxford tutor and it was his habit to choose controversial topics for the students' weekly essays. They were required to go to the library, read about both sides of an argument, give a fair account of both, and then come to a balanced judgment in their essay. The call for balance, by the way, was always tempered by the maxim, "When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong." As teachers, both of us have found that asking our students to analyse controversies is of enormous value to their education. What is wrong, then, with teaching both sides of the alleged controversy between evolution and creationism or "intelligent design" (ID)? And, by the way, don't be fooled by the disingenuous euphemism. There is nothing new about ID. It is simply creationism camouflaged with a new name to slip (with some success, thanks to loads of tax-free money and slick public-relations professionals) under the radar of the US Constitution's mandate for separation between church and state. Why, then, would two lifelong educators and passionate advocates of the "both sides" style of teaching join with essentially all biologists in making an exception of the alleged controversy between creation and evolution? What is wrong with the apparently sweet reasonableness of "it is only fair to teach both sides"? The answer is simple. This is not a scientific controversy at all. And it is a time-wasting distraction because evolutionary science, perhaps more than any other major science, is bountifully endowed with genuine controversy. Among the controversies that students of evolution commonly face, these are genuinely challenging and of great educational value: neutralism versus selectionism in molecular evolution; adaptationism; group selection; punctuated equilibrium; cladism; "evo-devo"; the "Cambrian Explosion"; mass extinctions; interspecies competition; sympatric speciation; sexual selection; the evolution of sex itself; evolutionary psychology; Darwinian medicine and so on. The point is that all these controversies, and many more, provide fodder for fascinating and lively argument, not just in essays but for student discussions late at night. Intelligent design is not an argument of the same character as these controversies. It is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class. In those cases, the demand for equal time for "both theories" would be ludicrous. Similarly, in a class on 20th-century European history, who would demand equal time for the theory that the Holocaust never happened? So, why are we so sure that intelligent design is not a real scientific theory, worthy of "both sides" treatment? Isn't that just our personal opinion? It is an opinion shared by the vast majority of professional biologists, but of course science does not proceed by majority vote among scientists. Why isn't creationism (or its incarnation as intelligent design) just another scientific controversy, as worthy of scientific debate as the dozen essay topics we listed above? Here's why. If ID really were a scientific theory, positive evidence for it, gathered through research, would fill peer-reviewed scientific journals. This doesn't happen. It isn't that editors refuse to publish ID research. There simply isn't any ID research to publish. Its advocates bypass normal scientific due process by appealing directly to the non-scientific public and - with great shrewdness - to the government officials they elect. The argument the ID advocates put, such as it is, is always of the same character. Never do they offer positive evidence in favour of intelligent design. All we ever get is a list of alleged deficiencies in evolution. We are told of "gaps" in the fossil record. Or organs are stated, by fiat and without supporting evidence, to be "irreducibly complex": too complex to have evolved by natural selection. In all cases there is a hidden (actually they scarcely even bother to hide it) "default" assumption that if Theory A has some difficulty in explaining Phenomenon X, we must automatically prefer Theory B without even asking whether Theory B (creationism in this case) is any better at explaining it. Note how unbalanced this is, and how it gives the lie to the apparent reasonableness of "let's teach both sides". One side is required to produce evidence, every step of the way. The other side is never required to produce one iota of evidence, but is deemed to have won automatically, the moment the first side encounters a difficulty - the sort of difficulty that all sciences encounter every day, and go to work to solve, with relish. What, after all, is a gap in the fossil record? It is simply the absence of a fossil which would otherwise have documented a particular evolutionary transition. The gap means that we lack a complete cinematic record of every step in the evolutionary process. But how incredibly presumptuous to demand a complete record, given that only a minuscule proportion of deaths result in a fossil anyway. The equivalent evidential demand of creationism would be a complete cinematic record of God's behaviour on the day that he went to work on, say, the mammalian ear bones or the bacterial flagellum - the small, hair-like organ that propels mobile bacteria. Not even the most ardent advocate of intelligent design claims that any such divine videotape will ever become available. Biologists, on the other hand, can confidently claim the equivalent "cinematic" sequence of fossils for a very large number of evolutionary transitions. Not all, but very many, including our own descent from the bipedal ape Australopithecus. And - far more telling - not a single authentic fossil has ever been found in the "wrong" place in the evolutionary sequence. Such an anachronistic fossil, if one were ever unearthed, would blow evolution out of the water. As the great biologist J B S Haldane growled, when asked what might disprove evolution: "Fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian." Evolution, like all good theories, makes itself vulnerable to disproof. Needless to say, it has always come through with flying colours. Similarly, the claim that something - say the bacterial flagellum - is too complex to have evolved by natural selection is alleged, by a lamentably common but false syllogism, to support the "rival" intelligent design theory by default. This kind of default reasoning leaves completely open the possibility that, if the bacterial flagellum is too complex to have evolved, it might also be too complex to have been created. And indeed, a moment's thought shows that any God capable of creating a bacterial flagellum (to say nothing of a universe) would have to be a far more complex, and therefore statistically improbable, entity than the bacterial flagellum (or universe) itself - even more in need of an explanation than the object he is alleged to have created. If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation. To do so would be to shoot yourself in the foot. You cannot have it both ways. Either ID belongs in the science classroom, in which case it must submit to the discipline required of a scientific hypothesis. Or it does not, in which case get it out of the science classroom and send it back into the church, where it belongs. In fact, the bacterial flagellum is certainly not too complex to have evolved, nor is any other living structure that has ever been carefully studied. Biologists have located plausible series of intermediates, using ingredients to be found elsewhere in living systems. But even if some particular case were found for which biologists could offer no ready explanation, the important point is that the "default" logic of the creationists remains thoroughly rotten. There is no evidence in favour of intelligent design: only alleged gaps in the completeness of the evolutionary account, coupled with the "default" fallacy we have identified. And, while it is inevitably true that there are incompletenesses in evolutionary science, the positive evidence for the fact of evolution is truly massive, made up of hundreds of thousands of mutually corroborating observations. These come from areas such as geology, paleontology, comparative anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, ethology, biogeography, embryology and - increasingly nowadays - molecular genetics. The weight of the evidence has become so heavy that opposition to the fact of evolution is laughable to all who are acquainted with even a fraction of the published data. Evolution is a fact: as much a fact as plate tectonics or the heliocentric solar system. Why, finally, does it matter whether these issues are discussed in science classes? There is a case for saying that it doesn't - that biologists shouldn't get so hot under the collar. Perhaps we should just accept the popular demand that we teach ID as well as evolution in science classes. It would, after all, take only about 10 minutes to exhaust the case for ID, then we could get back to teaching real science and genuine controversy. Tempting as this is, a serious worry remains. The seductive "let's teach the controversy" language still conveys the false, and highly pernicious, idea that there really are two sides. This would distract students from the genuinely important and interesting controversies that enliven evolutionary discourse. Worse, it would hand creationism the only victory it realistically aspires to. Without needing to make a single good point in any argument, it would have won the right for a form of supernaturalism to be recognised as an authentic part of science. And that would be the end of science education in America. Arguments worth having ... The "Cambrian Explosion" Although the fossil record shows that the first multicellular animals lived about 640m years ago, the diversity of species was low until about 530m years ago. At that time there was a sudden explosion of many diverse marine species, including the first appearance of molluscs, arthropods, echinoderms and vertebrates. "Sudden" here is used in the geological sense; the "explosion" occurred over a period of 10m to 30m years, which is, after all, comparable to the time taken to evolve most of the great radiations of mammals. This rapid diversification raises fascinating questions; explanations include the evolution of organisms with hard parts (which aid fossilisation), the evolutionary "discovery" of eyes, and the development of new genes that allowed parts of organisms to evolve independently. The evolutionary basis of human behaviour The field of evolutionary psychology (once called "sociobiology") maintains that many universal traits of human behaviour (especially sexual behaviour), as well as differences between individuals and between ethnic groups, have a genetic basis. These traits and differences are said to have evolved in our ancestors via natural selection. There is much controversy about these claims, largely because it is hard to reconstruct the evolutionary forces that acted on our ancestors, and it is unethical to do genetic experiments on modern humans. Sexual versus natural selection Although evolutionists agree that adaptations invariably result from natural selection, there are many traits, such as the elaborate plumage of male birds and size differences between the sexes in many species, that are better explained by "sexual selection": selection based on members of one sex (usually females) preferring to mate with members of the other sex that show certain desirable traits. Evolutionists debate how many features of animals have resulted from sexual as opposed to natural selection; some, like Darwin himself, feel that many physical features differentiating human "races" resulted from sexual selection. The target of natural selection Evolutionists agree that natural selection usually acts on genes in organisms - individuals carrying genes that give them a reproductive or survival advantage over others will leave more descendants, gradually changing the genetic composition of a species. This is called "individual selection". But some evolutionists have proposed that selection can act at higher levels as well: on populations (group selection), or even on species themselves (species selection). The relative importance of individual versus these higher order forms of selection is a topic of lively debate. Natural selection versus genetic drift Natural selection is a process that leads to the replacement of one gene by another in a predictable way. But there is also a "random" evolutionary process called genetic drift, which is the genetic equivalent of coin-tossing. Genetic drift leads to unpredictable changes in the frequencies of genes that don't make much difference to the adaptation of their carriers, and can cause evolution by changing the genetic composition of populations. Many features of DNA are said to have evolved by genetic drift. Evolutionary geneticists disagree about the importance of selection versus drift in explaining features of organisms and their DNA. All evolutionists agree that genetic drift can't explain adaptive evolution. But not all evolution is adaptive. Further reading www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc User-friendly guide to evolution www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/jacNR.pdf Critique of Intelligent Design movement, published in New Republic Climbing Mount Improbable Richard Dawkins (illustrations by Lalla Ward), Penguin 1997 Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design Barbara C Forrest and Paul R Gross, Oxford University Press, 2003 · Richard Dawkins is Charles Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford University, and Jerry Coyne is a professor in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago Richard Dawkins' book 'The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life' is published by Phoenix in paperback today priced £9.99.

The Dream Factory

Guitar in acrylic and aluminum inspired by the Flying V but designed and assembled by the author. Davies + Starr At the Squid Labs prototyping shop, a gang of engineers cranks out everything from one-of-a-kind shopping carts to plastic robots. From left: Corwin Hardham, Eric Wilhelm, Dan Goldwater, Ryan McKinley, Saul Griffith, Colin Bulthaup. Robyn Twomey To fabricate his custom guitar, the author created a basic design using eMachineShop software. Clive Thompson To fabricate his custom guitar, the author created a basic design and rendered it in 3-D. Clive Thompson He received the finished components and bought a few add-ons. Brian Berman He assembled the guitar. Brian Berman He took his new instrument for a spin. Brian Berman If you could make anything you wanted, what would it be? For me, that's not a rhetorical question, because right now I'm staring at my own personal fabricator. It's eMachineShop, an application that produces a physical 3-D copy of almost anything I draw. "You know the machine on Star Trek? The replicator? That's what I was aiming for," says Jim Lewis, the guy who created this tool. The concept is simple: Boot up your computer and design whatever object you can imagine, press a button to send the CAD file to Lewis' headquarters in New Jersey, and two or three weeks later he'll FedEx you the physical object. Lewis launched eMachineShop a year and a half ago, and customers are using his service to create engine-block parts for hot rods, gears for home-brew robots, telescope mounts - even special soles for tap dance shoes. "Designing stuff used to be just for experts," Lewis says. "We're bringing it to the masses." I'm going to test that claim. I have no experience in design and can barely draw a convincing stick figure. If I can manage to engineer a product, then he's right: Any idiot can do it. I launch eMachineShop's software and stare at the blank screen. What to make? I consider and discard several ideas. I'd love to create a tricked-out mobile phone, but after doing some research, I realize that installing the electronics are beyond my ken. A futuristic MP3 player would be easier - but too obvious. Then it hits me: Ever since I began playing electric guitar as a teen, I've wondered what it would be like to make my own instrument. I begin tentatively sketching shapes, using eMachineShop's box drawing tool to sketch some chunky outlines. Unfortunately, boxy edges make for a rather dorky-looking guitar; everything I'm producing seems like it was designed with a hatchet. I poke around for another hour, with equally ungainly results. Finally, I stumble upon a tool in the software that lets me draw swooping, Stradivarius-like curves. This is more like it! In a flurry of creativity, I dash off a dozen concepts, stunned at how easy it suddenly is. I remix various classic guitar designs by drawing the outlines of famous models, like the Fender Stratocaster and the Gibson Les Paul, then stretching and skewing their outlines to make my own mutations. As I finish each concept, I click a button and up pops a lifelike 3-D view of my design. I spin it around to view it from all angles. Seeing a virtual version of each creation floating in space is very cool. I quickly discover that amateur engineering gives me the same rush as playing a round of Halo. I even lose track of time, obsessively tweaking and refining my guitars until I look up and realize it's way past midnight. After a week of experimentation, I settle upon my favorite - a curvy, amoeba-like adaptation of a Flying V guitar. I had originally hoped to have it cut out of pine, like a normal guitar body, but when I explore the options for materials, I find that eMachineShop doesn't stock wood thick enough. The software offers me several possibilities, and each time I swap in a new material, it reprices the entire job, down to the penny. In the end, I opt to have a 3-D milling machine carve my design out of a single block of clear acrylic, with unbuffed raw aluminum for the faceplate. A guitar made of metal and Lucite: This is going to look like something beamed down from a UFO. It'll cost $880 for the two parts and take about a week to make them. Then all I have to do is snap them together and bolt on the neck, bridge, and a few electric components. At 2 in the morning on a Tuesday, I finally hit the Place Order button. My design shoots off to Lewis' farm of roboticized fabrication machines. I've just printed a guitar. MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld calls it the fab revolution - every bit as important as the invention of the personal computer, he says. Cyberspace and PCs made bits flexible; fabrication technology is doing the same thing to atoms. Eventually, he claims, you won't even need a middleman like eMachineShop, because every house will have its own personal fabricator. Every house? That's rather sci-fi. But Gershenfeld, director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, makes a reasonably good case and has already taken an important step: He has shrunk the personal fabricator down to a single room's worth of off-the-shelf tools, all of which are available right now. "You can make essentially anything," he tells me. Gershenfeld has developed a universal theory of fabrication, plus a shopping list of what you'll need. It goes like this: First, there are subtractive tools, devices that can cut through materials with computer-guided, down-to-the-micron accuracy.Gershenfeld opts for a $1,900 Roland CAMM-1 CX-24 sign cutter; it works like a dot matrix printer, except the head is a knife that can slice through thin sheets of materials like vinyl or copper and is thus suitable for chopping out precision circuit board elements and bendable plastic. For thicker materials, he suggests the $15,000 Epilog Legend 24TT laser cutter. It uses a 35-watt carbon dioxide laser to slice through wood and acrylic as thick as an eighth of an inch. Though the cutters sound complex, they're both guided by ordinary desktop drawing programs like CorelDraw, so "you can learn them in about an hour," Gershenfeld says. Anything you can sketch onscreen, the cutters can create, with tolerances as fine as one-thousandth of an inch. That's so exacting you can punch out 2-D shapes that simply press-fit together, like six panels to form a box. "And that's key, because it means you can move much, much faster when you're making something," he says. "In a few seconds, you can transform a two-dimensional sheet of acrylic into a three-dimensional object." To produce even more-complex 3-D shapes, like an engine-block part, you need a different sort of subtractive tool - something that can cut up entire chunks of metal, working the way a sculptor chisels a figure out of a block of marble. Gershenfeld has a $4,500 Roland Modela MDX-20, a milling machine that uses a computer-guided drill bit that can move in three dimensions. The MDX-20 is small enough to sit on your desk and can handle materials - from plastic to light metals like aluminum and brass - with precision of up to two-thousandths of an inch. Then there are the "additive" tools, machines that fab stuff from the ground up, the way a potter or bricklayer might do. The $18,000 Formech 660 vacuum-former can take any object and mold a quarter-inch-thick sheet of hot plastic around it, quickly producing shapes like bowls or computer mouses. For more exactitude, you have the $16,500 WASP injection-molding Mini-Jector #55, which melts plastic pellets and squeezes them into a metal mold - perfect for making things like cases for electronic devices. The final group of tools consists of circuits and chips to give your creation "intelligence." Atmel AVR microprocessors cost about a buck apiece, but they're robust enough to control sophisticated robotics and can be programmed using simple languages like Python, Basic, and Logo. Roland's CAMM-1 sign cutter and Modela milling machine can quickly produce circuit boards. Pop in the chips and you're ready to go. Using this lineup of machines, Gershenfeld has set up seven "fab labs" in towns around the world: Boston's South End; Takoradi, Ghana; Solvik Gérd, Norway; Pabal and Bithoor, India; Cartago, Costa Rica; and most recently Pretoria, South Africa. After each lab opened, locals swarmed to fab a spectacular variety of stuff. A Norwegian sheepherder built GPS-enabled tags to track his flock; an Indian businessman created an electrode-driven device that measures the fat content of milk (he wanted to make sure he wasn't being sold watered-down stock); and a Boston teen created a motion-detector security system to protect her diary. This, Gershenfeld says, is the peculiar genius of personal fabrication: It fills the gaps in the mass market, helping people build idiosyncratic one-offs that no company would bother with. "Fab is about making the things you can't find at Wal-Mart," he says. "It's stuff for a market of one." Still, can you really call fab a democratizing technology when laser cutters cost $15,000 and require special venting to remove the noxious fumes they generate while hacking through plastic? Predictably perhaps, Gershenfeld invokes Moore's law. He maintains that in two decades - maybe even one - the marketplace will produce a single, $1,000 device that sits on your desk and does everything one of his fab labs can. All you'll need to do is feed it raw materials, like wood, metal, and plastic. "Even microchips," he says, which are now a commodity akin to ink in a printer. In Gershenfeld's vision of the fab future, when you break the remote control to your fourth-generation TiVo, or the handle on your fridge, you won't go out and buy a new one. You'll just download the specs, put in your order, and have it fabbed at Kinko's or Home Depot. Eventually you'll just make one yourself at home. Toddlers today will grow up in a world where using 3-D engineering software to make a custom object will seem as routine as formatting a term paper in Microsoft Word or posting to a blog. They're already living that future in a small warehouse in Emeryville, California. It's the headquarters of Squid Labs, run by a gang of five MIT alums who by day create prototypes of new technologies for outside firms - and by night fabricate weird gizmos just for fun. "Everything I own is basically one of a kind," says a cheery Saul Griffith, one of the cofounders, as he crouches on the floor of his dust-covered workshop, rooting through an enormous bucket of metal brackets and bolts. A tall, shaggy Australian, he's wearing ragged flip-flops and a pair of cargo pants so stained with oil and grime that I can't determine their original color. Dozens of his group's inventions lie scattered about: a Frisbee embedded with microchip-driven LEDs, a set of robots precision-cut from plastic, a bunch of helmet-mounted laser-and-GPS sensors designed to help firefighters locate one another in a blazing house. Today, Griffith is building a "hybrid electric bicycle" with a hidden battery compartment inside the bike's 4-foot-long, chopper-style front forks. To hold the forks in place, he spent the morning designing a bracket, then cut out a flat template for it on Squid Labs' laser cutter. Now, with that template as a guide, he hacks the shape out of quarter-inch steel, using a terrifyingly loud metal cutter. "I'm really into this 'tractor' aesthetic, getting everything to look like industrial machinery!" he hollers over the cutter's shrieks, while a 3-foot cone of orange sparks flies up and ricochets off his face. Every few minutes, Griffith pauses to snap a photo of his progress. When done, he'll write up a comprehensive guide on how to build his project. This, he argues, is the next crucial step in fab culture: getting hobbyists to carefully document their plans and share them online. Squid Labs is hoping to kick-start such sharing this fall when it launches Instructables.com - an open database of interesting projects and fab techniques, "kind of like a Wikipedia for making stuff," Griffith explains. If people want to build his electric hybrid chopper bicycle, they'll be able to download the CorelDraw design of the bracket and send it someplace like eMachineShop to have their own copy printed. "We got inspired when we looked at all these guys who'd engineered these incredible, modded parts for their Harleys. They'd have amazing photos of them, but they'd never post the CAD image," Griffith says. "We were like, Why not go open source?" Later that day, I get a taste of how weirdly transformative this idea is. I'm hanging out with Dan Goldwater - another Squid Labs cofounder - and admiring one of his inventions. It's a pair of plastic gears that sit on a bike pedal and power a tiny generator. As you ride, you can run LED lights or a radio. I tell him I'd love to have a version of it myself. So a couple of Squid Labs guys go over to the laser cutter, pull up the design, and a few minutes later hand me exact copies of Goldwater's gears. Design once, print often. "Pretty cool, eh?" Goldwater grins. Griffith imagines that fab tools could produce new economic models for creators. Suppose a hobbyist made a cool plastic exterior for an MP3 player. Suppose she put the design online, and 700 people downloaded the file and had it printed at eMachineShop. "At what point," he asks, "would a manufacturer say, Hey, there's a market here - and offer to buy the design from her?" So, sure, soon we'll be able to build anything. But should we? "Let's say everyone suddenly can make their own hood ornaments. What if they actually do that? The real world would look like the Internet in 1996, when people started making their own Web sites." Griffith shudders. "Remember those hideous-looking psychedelic backgrounds and stupid animations? And blinking tags?" "Rainbow dividers," Goldwater adds. It's a good point - and it makes me anxious about my guitar. Sure, it looked fine onscreen. But what if it turns out to be a monstrosity in my hands? Recalling my decision to use clear acrylic for the body, I break into a nervous sweat. It's going to look like something from a mid-'80s, big-hair heavy-metal band! What the hell was I thinking? Griffith interrupts my panic to announce that his chopper is ready. He wheels it onto the street, all five Squid Labbers in tow. Eric Wilhelm, a lanky designer, offers to be the test pilot. He straps on a helmet and mounts the seat. "Does it have brakes?" he asks. "Sort of," Griffith says. "It's amazing how often brakes are an afterthought," Wilhelm sighs. Then he hits the electric starter and peels off. After a week of suspense, I get an email from Lewis at eMachineShop telling me my guitar body is ready. Too impatient to wait for FedEx, I drive out to his office in New Jersey and sit down with him at his desk, which is crowded with six computers and dozens of metal parts. Amid the mess, I notice a brass saxophone mouthpiece, a bunch of finely wrought metal blocks, and a thin strip of brass with incomprehensible hieroglyphics laser-cut into the surface. ("That? Oh, that's a headband for a robot," Lewis says.) He offers to show me how the guitar was fabbed. The eMachineShop software, he explains, includes artificial intelligence that operates like a "virtual machinist." In the background - invisible to the user - it runs a precise emulation of the real-world machines that fabricate parts, to determine whether the job is possible and how much it'll cost. He pulls up the image of my guitar and clicks a button to show me the hidden emulator. As I watch, an onscreen animation of the spinning bit on a 3-D milling machine approaches the guitar body slowly from the left side, pauses at the edge, and begins to roam diligently along the contours, adhering precisely to the curves I drew. "It makes several passes, cutting deeper each time until it gets to the specified depth," he explains. When the outer shape of the body is done, the robot grabs a smaller milling bit and deftly drills a constellation of holes in the body, where I'll be attaching the guitar neck and the electronics. Lewis points to the screen, where a timer shows that the fabrication would take 44 minutes. Now for the guitar's unveiling. Smiling uncertainly, I wait in a conference room while Lewis fetches it from storage. I'm still wondering whether I've produced a freakishly nasty aberration. Then the door opens and he lays it on the table. At first, I'm amazed that the damn thing even exists. I've seen it only as a virtual object, so there's something surreal about its abrupt teleportation from my imagination to reality. Then I realize with relief that it looks kind of cool. The clear acrylic gleams like an otherworldly brick, and the brushed aluminum has precisely the sort of industrial flavor I'd hoped for. When I lay the pickguard down on the body, every hole for the pickups and electronics is precisely where I'd specified. There's only one problem. "It's kind of heavy, isn't it?" Lewis asks delicately. He's right. Worried that the acrylic wouldn't be strong enough to sustain deep milling, I'd made the guitar body far thicker than I should have. When I pick it up, I realize with horror that it's much heavier than a conventional guitar. I'm going to give myself spinal damage trying to play this thing. I'm reminded of a stern lecture Griffith delivered about the dangers of designing solely on computers: When you're operating in a virtual realm, it's hard to feel any consequences. It really is too much like a videogame. "You learn a lot from actually holding your materials in your hands," he told me that day at Squid Labs. "That's when you have to grapple with your design." The computer screen is forgiving; the real world isn't. I push on and spend the weekend assembling the rest of the guitar. I remove the neck from a cheap $99 Fender Squier and bolt it onto my custom body. I solder in the electronics; since this thing is probably doomed to look like a guitar from an '80s metal band, I buy a Seymour Duncan Dimebucker pickup, which according to the manufacturer's description will produce the tone of a "searing, crushing, metal massacre." As the final pieces come together, I find I'm getting excited again. For all its imperfections, my creation looks surprisingly close to my original vision - less a straight-head guitar than a piece of mildly psychedelic Soviet machinery. When I attach the strap and sling it around my neck, it has the heft of a weapon. Maybe this is the ultimate appeal of the fab revolution: When you create something from scratch, even the flaws are charming. So I plug it in, turn on my amp, and start to rock. Clive Thompson (clive@clivethompson.net) wrote about farming genetically modified stem cells in issue 13.06.

Chief Justice Rehnquist has died

» Current justices | Chief justice duties | Court appointments | Special Chief Justice Rehnquist has died SPECIAL REPORT YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS Supreme Court William H. Rehnquist or or Create Your Own WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who quietly advanced the conservative ideology of the Supreme Court under his leadership, died Saturday evening. He was 80. The justice, diagnosed with thyroid cancer, had a tracheotomy and received chemotherapy and radiation as part of his treatment. Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said Rehnquist had "continued to perform his duties on the Court until a precipitous decline in his health the last couple of days." Then with his three children beside him, the justice died at his suburban Virginia home, a court spokeswoman said. Rehnquist had become increasingly frail after his cancer diagnosis last October, but his office had refused to characterize the seriousness of his illness. Meanwhile, he'd worked from home for several months and missed oral arguments in a number of cases. President Bush learned of the death shortly before 11 p.m. ET Saturday, the White House said. "The president and Mrs. Bush are deeply saddened by the passing of the chief justice," according to a written statement. It said Bush planned to make a statement Sunday morning. End of term, end of speculation Rehnquist adjourned the court in late June and ended speculation about his resignation. Hours after leaving the hospital in July following treatment for fever, he made a decree: "I want to put to rest the speculation and unfounded rumors of my imminent retirement," he said in a written statement. "I am not about to announce my retirement. I will continue to perform my duties as chief justice as long as my health permits." He went to work the next day. Four months earlier, when Rehnquist joined the other justices for the first time after a break, he showed no emotion, paid sharp attention to arguments and asked eight or nine technical questions. Despite the tracheotomy tube in his throat to help him breathe, his voice was fairly strong. A junior justice President Nixon appointed Rehnquist to the Supreme Court in 1972, and in 1986, President Reagan tapped him as chief justice to replace Warren Burger. In that role, he led the closed-door conferences where justices discuss and vote on cases; assigned who wrote the majority rulings; managed the docket; controlled open court arguments; and supervised the 300 or so court employees, including clerks, secretaries, police and support staff. Rehnquist, who belonged to a loose, 5-4 conservative majority, was the second-oldest man to preside over the nation's highest court. Early in his tenure, he often was the lone dissenter, despite the presence of two other Republican appointees. David Yalof, a constitutional law professor at the University of Connecticut, credited Rehnquist with moving the court in a consistent, conservative direction. "He was able, over time, to gather colleagues together cordially, manage tension, build a majority and turn them over to his point of view," Yalof said. Rehnquist followed the legal philosophy of judicial restraint, which interprets the U.S. Constitution narrowly. He believed the only rights the Constitution protects are those the document names specifically, and justices should consider the framers' original intent when making rulings. Shortly after Nixon named him as an associate justice, Rehnquist and Justice Byron White were the only dissenters in the landmark Roe v. Wade case (1973), which established that a woman's right to an abortion was protected under a woman's right to privacy. "To reach its result, the court necessarily has had to find within the scope of the 14th Amendment a right that was apparently completely unknown to the drafters of the amendment," Rehnquist wrote in his dissent. Making a mark In 1999, Rehnquist became the second chief justice in U.S. history to preside over a presidential impeachment -- that of President Bill Clinton, who was acquitted. Having already sat on the court for 14 years, Rehnquist quickly matured in the role of chief justice. He cut the number of cases the court agreed to hear, streamlined conferences and sought clearer, strongly reasoned opinions. Jay Jorgensen, a former clerk for the chief justice, said it was the little things Rehnquist did that built personal trust, loyalty and respect among justices who were often sharply divided ideologically. "He set up a system during conferences where every justice, one by one, in order of seniority, is allowed to weigh in on a case," Jorgensen said. "There is no free-for-all debate, the chief justice does not allow bickering." Saturday night, Ruth Wedgwood, a constitutional lawyer and close friend of Rehnquist, said, "He was an interesting man. He had an interesting life. Over time, I think he became a much more unifying figure in the court." His death, she said, puts a "great burden" on the Senate, which will be responsible for confirming a replacement. Home Page Get up-to-the minute news from CNN CNN.com gives you the latest stories and video from the around the world, with in-depth coverage of U.S. news, politics, entertainment, health, crime, tech and more. Home Page Get up-to-the minute news from CNN CNN.com gives you the latest stories and video from the around the world, with in-depth coverage of U.S. news, politics, entertainment, health, crime, tech and more. 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Opinion | The Bursting Point

As Ross Douthat observed on his blog, The American Scene, Katrina was the anti-9/11. On Sept. 11, Rudy Giuliani took control. The government response was quick and decisive. The rich and poor suffered alike. Americans had been hit, but felt united and strong. Public confidence in institutions surged. Last week in New Orleans, by contrast, nobody took control. Authority was diffuse and action was ineffective. The rich escaped while the poor were abandoned. Leaders spun while looters rampaged. Partisans squabbled while the nation was ashamed. The first rule of the social fabric -- that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable -- was trampled. Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield. No wonder confidence in civic institutions is plummeting. And the key fact to understanding why this is such a huge cultural moment is this: Last week's national humiliation comes at the end of a string of confidence-shaking institutional failures that have cumulatively changed the nation's psyche.

Instapundit

DRIVING TOWARDS UTOPIA, SKIDDING ON ICE: Unfortunately, if you want to get a policy changed, it’s not enough to persuade governments that it will have a net negative impact on the country. You also have to convince that them there is a policy that will also meet their aims—here it’s reducing carbon emissions—to compensate them for having to abandon their destructive approach. In this case there is an alternative policy. It is to improve the efficiency of the internal combustion engine so that it releases fewer carbon emissions into the atmosphere. It’s a very simple and practical approach to solving a difficult problem. It does not require the building of any infrastructure, let alone a massive one, in order to work effectively. For that and other reasons, it doesn’t constitute a heavy increase in expenditures by governments and consumers. It’s already being accomplished by the research departments of automobile companies which have transformed conventional cars to an astounding extent since the 1960s. How effective might this approach be in reducing carbon emissions? Professor Kalghatgi estimates that a 5 percent reduction in fuel consumption by ICE vehicles would obtain a larger reduction in carbon emissions than the massive switch to electric cars with all its attendant infrastructure costs. That alone would be a massive prize. But he also believes that a reduction much larger than 5 percent in fuel consumption by ICEVs could be obtained through such methods as “better combustion, control and after-treatment systems along with partial electrification and reductions in weight.” The snag is that though these innovations are being pursued now, how long is that likely to continue if the U.K. government instructs car manufacturers that they must stop selling their product in ten years? What incentive is there for companies to maintain large R&D expenditures when they are officially told that these innovations, even if successful, will reduce carbon emissions and make other improvements in their automobiles for only a short period before production is halted altogether?

Chertoff: Katrina scenario did not exist

Chertoff: Katrina scenario did not exist However, experts for years had warned of threat to New Orleans WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Defending the U.S. government's response to Hurricane Katrina, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff argued Saturday that government planners did not predict such a disaster ever could occur. But in fact, government officials, scientists and journalists have warned of such a scenario for years. Chertoff, fielding questions from reporters, said government officials did not expect both a powerful hurricane and a breach of levees that would flood the city of New Orleans. (See the video on a local paper's prophetic warning -- 3:30 ) "That 'perfect storm' of a combination of catastrophes exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody's foresight," Chertoff said. He called the disaster "breathtaking in its surprise." But engineers say the levees preventing this below-sea-level city from being turned into a swamp were built to withstand only Category 3 hurricanes. And officials have warned for years that a Category 4 could cause the levees to fail. (See video of why the levee's breech was devastating -- 1:53) Katrina was a Category 4 hurricane when it struck the Gulf Coast on August 29. Last week, Michael Brown, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told CNN his agency had recently planned for a Category 5 hurricane hitting New Orleans. Speaking to "Larry King Live" on August 31, in the wake of Katrina, Brown said, "That Category 4 hurricane caused the same kind of damage that we anticipated. So we planned for it two years ago. Last year, we exercised it. And unfortunately this year, we're implementing it." Brown suggested FEMA -- part of the Department of Homeland Security -- was carrying out a prepared plan, rather than having to suddenly create a new one. Chertoff argued that authorities actually had assumed that "there would be overflow from the levee, maybe a small break in the levee. The collapse of a significant portion of the levee leading to the very fast flooding of the city was not envisioned." He added: "There will be plenty of time to go back and say we should hypothesize evermore apocalyptic combinations of catastrophes. Be that as it may, I'm telling you this is what the planners had in front of them. They were confronted with a second wave that they did not have built into the plan, but using the tools they had, we have to move forward and adapt." But New Orleans, state and federal officials have long painted a very different picture. "We certainly understood the potential impact of a Category 4 or 5 hurricane" on New Orleans, Lt. General Carl Strock, chief of engineers for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said Thursday, Cox News Service reported. Reuters reported that in 2004, more than 40 state, local and volunteer organizations practiced a scenario in which a massive hurricane struck and levees were breached, allowing water to flood New Orleans. Under the simulation, called "Hurricane Pam," the officials "had to deal with an imaginary storm that destroyed more than half a million buildings in New Orleans and forced the evacuation of a million residents," the Reuters report said. In 2002 the New Orleans Times-Picayune ran a five-part series exploring the vulnerability of the city. The newspaper, and other news media as well, specifically addressed the possibility of massive floods drowning residents, destroying homes and releasing toxic chemicals throughout the city. (Read: "Times-Picayune" Special Report: Washing away ) Scientists long have discussed this possibility as a sort of doomsday scenario. On Sunday, a day before Hurricane Katrina made landfall, Ivor van Heerden, director of the Louisiana State University Public Health Research Center in Baton Rouge, said, "This is what we've been saying has been going to happen for years." "Unfortunately, it's coming true," he said, adding that New Orleans "is definitely going to flood." Also on Sunday, Placquemines Parish Sheriff Jeff Hingle referred back to Hurricane Betsy -- a Category 2 hurricane that struck in 1965 -- and said, "After Betsy these levees were designed for a Category 3." He added, "These levees will not hold the water back." But Chertoff seemed unaware of all the warnings. "This is really one which I think was breathtaking in its surprise," Chertoff said. "There has been, over the last few years, some specific planning for the possibility of a significant hurricane in New Orleans with a lot of rainfall, with water rising in the levees and water overflowing the levees," he told reporters Saturday. That alone would be "a very catastrophic scenario," Chertoff said. "And although the planning was not complete, a lot of work had been done. But there were two problems here. First of all, it's as if someone took that plan and dropped an atomic bomb simply to make it more difficult. We didn't merely have the overflow, we actually had the break in the wall. And I will tell you that, really, that perfect storm of combination of catastrophes exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody's foresight." Chertoff also argued that authorities did not have much notice that the storm would be so powerful and could make a direct hit on New Orleans. "It wasn't until comparatively late, shortly before -- a day, maybe a day and a half, before landfall -- that it became clear that this was going to be a Category 4 or 5 hurricane headed for the New Orleans area." As far back as Friday, August 26, the National Hurricane Center was predicting the storm could be a Category 4 hurricane at landfall, with New Orleans directly in its path. Still, storms do change paths, so the possibility existed that it might not hit the city. But the National Weather Service prediction proved almost perfect. Katrina made landfall on Monday, August 29. Tens of thousands of people in New Orleans who did not or could not heed the mandatory evacuation orders issued the day before the storm made landfall were left in dire straits. "I think we have discovered over the last few days that with all the tremendous effort using the existing resources and the traditional frameworks of the National Guard, the unusual set of challenges of conducting a massive evacuation in the context of a still dangerous flood requires us to basically break the traditional model and create a new model -- one for what you might call kind of an ultracatastrophe," Chertoff said. He vowed that the United States "is going to move heaven and earth" to rescue those in need.

Viewpoint: New Orleans crisis shames US

By Matt Wells Los Angeles Flood victims were left virtually to their own devices for days The only difference between the chaos of New Orleans and a Third World disaster operation, he said, was that a foreign dictator would have responded better. It has been a profoundly shocking experience for many across this vast country who, for the large part, believe the home-spun myth about the invulnerability of the American Dream. The party in power in Washington is always happy to convey the impression of 50 states moving forward together in social and economic harmony towards a bigger and better America. That is what presidential campaigning is all about. But what the devastating consequences of Katrina have shown - along with the response to it - is that for too long now, the fabric of this complex and overstretched country, especially in states like Louisiana and Mississippi, has been neglected and ignored. Borrowed time The fitting metaphors relating to the New Orleans debacle are almost too numerous to mention. First there was an extraordinary complacency, mixed together with what seemed like over-reaction, before the storm. The city's hurricane shelters grew increasingly filthy and crime-ridden A genuinely heroic mayor orders a total evacuation of the city the day before Katrina arrives, knowing that for decades now, New Orleans has been living on borrowed time. The National Guard and federal emergency personnel stay tucked up at home. The havoc of Katrina had been predicted countless times on a local and federal level - even to the point where it was acknowledged that tens of thousands of the poorest residents would not be able to leave the city in advance. No official plan was ever put in place for them. Abandoned to the elements The famous levees that were breached could have been strengthened and raised at what now seems like a trifling cost of a few million dollars. The Bush administration, together with Congress, cut the budgets for flood protection and army engineers, while local politicians failed to generate any enthusiasm for local tax increases. Too often in the so-called "New South", they still look positively 19th Century New Orleans partied-on just hoping for the best, abandoned by anyone in national authority who could have put the money into really protecting the city. Meanwhile, the poorest were similarly abandoned, as the horrifying images and stories from the Superdome and Convention Center prove. The truth was simple and apparent to all. If journalists were there with cameras beaming the suffering live across America, where were the officers and troops? The neglect that meant it took five days to get water, food, and medical care to thousands of mainly orderly African-American citizens desperately sheltering in huge downtown buildings of their native city, has been going on historically, for as long as the inadequate levees have been there. Divided city I should make a confession at this point: I have been to New Orleans on assignment three times in as many years, and I was smitten by the Big Easy, with its unique charms and temperament. But behind the elegant intoxicants of the French Quarter, it was clearly a city grotesquely divided on several levels. It has twice the national average poverty rate. The government approach to such deprivation looked more like thoughtless containment than anything else. It will be many weeks before the flood waters are cleared The nightly shootings and drugs-related homicides of recent years pointed to a small but vicious culture of largely black-on-black crime that everyone knew existed, but no-one seemed to have any real answers for. Again, no-one wanted to pick up the bill or deal with the realities of race relations in the 21st Century. Too often in the so-called "New South", they still look positively 19th Century. "Shoot the looters" is good rhetoric, but no lasting solution. Uneasy paradox It is astonishing to me that so many Americans seem shocked by the existence of such concentrated poverty and social neglect in their own country. In the workout room of the condo where I am currently staying in the affluent LA neighbourhood of Santa Monica, an executive and his personal trainer ignored the anguished television reports blaring above their heads on Friday evening. Either they did not care, or it was somehow too painful to discuss. When President Bush told "Good Morning America" on Thursday morning that nobody could have "anticipated" the breach of the New Orleans levees, it pointed to not only a remote leader in denial, but a whole political class. The uneasy paradox which so many live with in this country - of being first-and-foremost rugged individuals, out to plunder what they can and paying as little tax as they can get away with, while at the same time believing that America is a robust, model society - has reached a crisis point this week. Will there be real investment, or just more buck-passing between federal agencies and states? The country has to choose whether it wants to rebuild the levees and destroyed communities, with no expense spared for the future - or once again brush off that responsibility, and blame the other guy. Do you agree or disagree, send your comments on the story using the form below. It disgusts me to think that my 'brother and sisters' in New Orleans have been ignored and discarded by the US government like so much trash that no line the streets of this once beautiful city. I am embarrassed it took so long to get help to people only eight hours away. Lara Tosh, Nashville, Tennessee I don't blame anyone for the tragedies of nature David Augustine, Mendham, NJ I completely agree with the article. What has been going through my mind this past week is that the crisis did seem political, racial, and I am disgusted. It's unconscionable that after an entire coastline was just destroyed, while New Orleans began to drown, the President was making fundraising speeches in California on Tuesday. As president, elected to serve the people of this country, why didn't he stop everything and call out the help those people needed immediately? Lori Thoma, Reno, Nevada My sympathy to fellow Americans sufferings from this natural disaster. The most advanced nation on earth and unable to response soon. A political disaster too. Mr Bush: time to wake up and cut red tape. More action and less talk. D Sharma, Antwerp, Belgium Shame on anyone that makes this tragedy political, socio-economic or racial. The US Government, both Federal and local; and individuals, failed both before and after the storm to react in a timely organised manner. We need to fix it and we need to help the survivors, but we are not going to build a wall around coastal US to prevent a category five storm surge from causing damage. And in the land of opportunity and personal responsibility the individual is ultimately accountable. Robert Buckley, Decatur, USA This disaster did not have to happen Howard Goldsmith, New York I agree the article, but what most people from other countries don't realise about America is that for all the great things we do we do some really horrendous ones too. Most Americans don't realize that we have a lower class, despite it being so blatantly obvious. The tragedy of this Gulf State disaster is that it is has exposed just how poor those states are and how much they've needed help for decades. Riley Gelwicks, Gainesville (Florida), USA As a proud southern American your article is so far from the truth I don't even now where to begin. What I read is a liberal, European, elitist view of this absolute tragedy. Americans will help each other regardless of colour or social level. As for aid from other nations, I for one say leave it. We can and will rebuild the ravaged areas ourselves. Tracie Dixon, Sand Springs, Oklahoma The people of New Orleans deserve much better - but the responsibility begins with who they choose as their local representatives. Representatives that can get things done - not just blame others for a lack of progress. Local emergency planning is the responsibility of local authorities. Their job does not end with making sure the bars are open for the tourists. Kendall Walsh, Port Washington, NY I agree with all the comments made in the above article. I wonder what the response would have been if a similar problem had happened in "Miami Beach" America should ashamed Enid Jewell, Ontario.Canada I think one should not only blame G W Bush for having neglected so dramatically some States of the South, but also all former Presidents of the US. But as was said many years ago by a famous American economist: it's hard to try to produce at the same time guns and butter. Robert Deossart, Wervicq Sud, France I fully agree with this article. For the self proclaimed "most advanced nation on earth" to build a city below sea level, in an area subject to hurricane activity, and not make absolutely certain that the levees would not fail is massively irresponsible. Roger Gamwell, Dubai, UAE I think now America and Americans in general will learn to appreciate the problems of the 'developing world' they so easily dismiss disparagingly. Even so-called weak nations like Sri Lanka and India manage to routinely respond to natural calamities of similar and greater intensity. It is time America shook off its complacency and check how strong are its credentials as a free, equitable and prosperous country. Haripriya, Delhi, India Name Your E-mail address Town & Country Comments

August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web (Ftrain.com)

A work of fiction. A Semantic Web scenario. A short feature from a business magazine published in 2009. Please note that this story was written in 2002. It's hard to believe Google - which is now the world's largest single online marketplace - came on the scene only a little more than 8 years ago, back in the days when Amazon and Ebay reigned supreme. So how did Google become the world's single largest marketplace? Well, the short answer is “the Semantic Web” (whatever that is - more in a moment). While Amazon and Ebay continue to have average quarterly profits of $1 billion and $1.8 billion, respectively, and are successes by any measure, the $17 billion per annum Google Marketplace is clearly the most impressive success story of what used to be called, pre-crash, “The New Economy.” Amazon and Ebay both worked as virtual marketplaces: they outsourced as much inventory as possible (in Ebay's case, of course, that was all the inventory, but Amazon also kept as little stock on hand as it could). Then, through a variety of methods, each brought together buyers and sellers, taking a cut of every transaction. For Amazon, that meant selling new items, or allowing thousands of users to sell them used. For Ebay, it meant bringing together auctioneers and auction buyers. Once you got everything started, this approach was extremely profitable. It was fast. It was managed by phone calls, emails, and database applications. It worked. Enter Google. By 2002, it was the search engine, and its ad sales were picking up. At the same time, the concept of the “Semantic Web,” which had been around since 1998 or so, was gaining a little traction, and the attention of an increasing circle of people. So what's the Semantic Web? At its heart, it's just a way to describe things in a way that a computer can “understand.” Of course, what's going on is not understanding, but logic, like you learn in high school: If A is a friend of B, then B is a friend of A. Jim has a friend named Paul. Therefore, Paul has a friend named Jim. Jim has a friend named Paul. Therefore, Paul has a friend named Jim. Using a markup language called RDF (an acronym that's here to stay, so you might as well learn it - it stands for Resource Description Framework), you could put logical statements like these on the Internet, “spiders” could collect them, and the statements could be searched, analyzed, and processed. What makes this different than regular search is that the statements can be combined. So if I find a statement on Jim's web site that says “Jim is a friend of Paul” and someone does a search for Paul's friends, even if Paul's web site doesn't have a mention of Jim on it, we know Jim's considers himself a friend of Paul. Other things we might know for sure? That Car Seller A is selling Miatas for 10% less than Car Seller B. That Jan Hammer played keyboards on the Mahavishnu Orchestra's albums in the 1970s. That dogs have paws. That your specific model of computer requires a new motherboard and a faster bus before it can be upgraded to a Pentium 18. The Semantic Web isn't about pages and links, it's about relationships between things - whether one thing is a part of another, or how much a thing costs, or when it happened. The Semweb was originally supposed to give the web the “smarts” it lacked - and much of the early work on it was in things like calendaring and scheduling, and in expressing relationships between people. By late 2003, when Google began to seriously experiment with the Semweb (after two years of experiments at their research labs), it was still a slow-growing technology that almost no one understood and very few people used, except for academics with backgrounds in logic, computer science, or artificial intelligence. The learning curve was as steep as a cliff, and there wasn't a great incentive for new coders to climb it and survey the world from their new vantage. The Semweb, it was promised, would make it much easier to schedule dentist's appointment, update your computer, check the train schedule, and coordinate shipments of car parts. It would make searching for things easier. All great stuff, stuff to make millions of dollars from, perhaps. But not exactly sexy to the people who write the checks, especially after they'd been burnt 95 times over by the dot-com bust. All they saw was the web - the same web that had lined a few pockets and emptied a few million - with the word “semantic” in front of it. . . . . . Semantics vs. Syntax, Fight at 9 The semantics of something is the meaning of it. Nebulous stuff, but in the world of AI, the goal has long been getting semantics out of syntax. See, the trillion dollar question is, when you have a whole lot of stuff arranged syntactically, in a given structure that the computer can chew up, how do you then get meaning out of it? How does syntax become semantics? Human brains are really good at this, but computers, are dreadful. They're whizzes at syntax. You can tell them anything, if you tell it in a structured way, but they can't make sense of it, they keep deciding that “The flesh is willing but the spirit is weak” in English translates to “The meat is full of stars but the vodka is made of pinking shears” or suchlike in Russian. So the guess has always been that you need a whole lot of syntactically stable statements in order to come up with anything interesting. In fact, you need a whole brain's worth - millions. Now, no one has proved this approach works at all, and the #1 advocate for this approach was a man named Doug Lenat of the CYC corporation, who somehow ended up on President Ashcroft's post-coup blacklist as a dangerous intellectual and hasn't been seen since. But the basic, overarching idea with the Semweb was - and still is, really - to throw together so much syntax from so many people that there's a chance to generate meaning out of it all. As you know, computers still aren't listening to us as well as we'd like, but in the meantime the Semweb technology matured, and all of a sudden centralized databases - and Amazon and Ebay were prime examples of centralized databases with millions of items each - could suddenly be spread out through the entire web. Everyone could own their little piece of the database, their own part of the puzzle. It was easy to publish the stuff. But the problem was that there was no good way to bring it all together. And it was hard to create RDF files, even for some programmers - so we're back to that steep learning curve. That all changed - suprisingly slowly - in late 2004, when with little fanfare, Google introduced three services, Google Marketplace Search, Google Personal Agent, and Google Verification Manager, and a software product, Google Marketplace Manager. . . . . . Google Marketplace Search Marketplace Search is a search feature built on top of the Google Semantic Search feature, and it's likely nearly everyone reading will have used it at least once. You simply enter: sell:martin guitar to see a list of people buying Martin-brand acoustic guitars, and buy:martin guitar to see a list of sellers. Google asked for, and remembered, your postal code, and you could use easy sort controls inside the page to organize the resulting list of guitars by price, condition, model number, new/used, and proximity. The pages drew from Google's “classic,” non-Semantic-Web search tools, long considered the best on the Web, to link to information on Martin models and buyer's guides, as well as from Google's Usenet News archive. Links to sites like Epinions filled in the gaps. So where did Google Marketplace Search get its information? The same way Google got all of its information - by crawling through the entire web and indexing what it found. Except now it was looking for RDDL files, which pointed to RDF files, which contained logical statements like these: (Scott Rahin) lives in Zip Code (11231). (Scott Rahin) has the email address (ford@ftrain.com). (Scott Rahin) has a (Martin Guitar). [Scott's] (Martin Guitar) is a model (245). [Scott's] (Martin Guitar) can be seen at (http://ftrain.com/picture/martin.jpg). [Scott's] (Martin Guitar) costs ($900). [Scott's] (Martin Guitar) is in condition (Good). [Scott's] (Martin Guitar) can be described as “Well cared for, and played rarely (sadly!). Beautiful, mellow sound and a spare set of strings. I'll be glad to show it to anyone who wants to stop by, or deliver it anywhere within the NYC area.” What's important to understand is that the things in parentheses and brackets above are not just words, they're pointers. (Scott Rahin) is a pointer to http://ftrain.com/people/Scott. (Martin Acoustic Guitar) is a pointer to a URL that in turn refers to a special knowledge database that has other logical statements, like these: (Martin Guitar) is an (Acoustic Guitar). (Acoustic Guitar) is a (Guitar). (Guitar) is an (Instrument). Which means that if someone searches for guitar, or acoustic guitar, all Martin Guitars can be included in the search. And that means that Scott can simply say he has a Martin, or a Martin guitar, and the computers figure the rest out for him. Actually, I just lied to you - it doesn't work exactly that way, and there's a lot of trickery with the pointers, and even the verb phrases are pointers, but rather than spout out a few dozen ugly terms like namespaces, URIs, prefixes, serialization, PURLs, and the like, we'll skip that part and just focus on the essential fact: everything on the Semantic Web describes something that has a URL. Or a URI. Or something like that. What that really means is that RDF is data about web data - or metadata. Sometimes RDF describes other RDF. So do you see how you take all those syntactic statements and hope to build a semantic web, one that can figure things out for itself? Combining the statements like that? Do you? Come on now, really? Yeah, well no one does. So Google connects everyone by spidering RDF and indexing it. Of course, connecting anonymous buyers and sellers isn't enough. There needs to be accountability. Enter the “Web Accountability and Rating Framework.” There were a lot of various frameworks for accountability, but this one was certified, finally, by the World Wide Web Consortium, before the nuclear accident at MIT, and ECMA, and it's now the standard. How does it work? Well: On Kara Dobbs's site, we find this statement: [Kara Dobbs] says (Scott Rahin) is (Trustworthy). On James Drevin's site, we find this statement: [James Drevin] says (Scott Rahin) is (Trustworthy). And so forth. Fine - but how do you know how to trust any of these people in the first place? Stay with me: On Citibank's site: [Citibank] says (Scott Rahin) is (Trustworthy). On Mastercard's site: [Mastercard] says (Scott Rahin) is (Trustworthy). And inside Google: [Google Verification Service] says (Scott Rahin) is (Trustworthy). and if [Citibank] says (Kara Dobbs, etc) is (Trustworthy). then you start to see how it can all fit together, and you can actually get a pretty good sense of whether someone is the least bit dishonest or not. Now, this raises a billion problems about accountability and the nature of truth and human behavior and so forth, but we don't have the requisite 30 trillion pages, so just accept that it works for now. And that a lot of other stuff in this ilk is coming down the pike, like: [The United States Social Security Administration] says (Pete Jefferson) was born in (1992). Which means that Pete Jefferson can download smutty videos and “adult” video games from the Internet, since he's 19 and has a Social Security number. That's what the Safe Access for Minors bill says should happen, anyway. And don't forget the civil liberty ramifications of statements like these: [The Sherriff's Department of Dallas, Texas] says (Martin Chalbarinstik) is a (Repeat Sexual Offender). [The Sherriff's Department of Dallas, Texas] says (Dave Trebuchet) has (Bounced Checks). [The Green Party, USA] says (Susan Petershaw) is a (Member). Databases are powerful, and as much as they bring together data, they can intrude on privacy, but rather than giving the author permission to become a frothing mess lamenting the total destruction of our civil liberties at the hand of cruel machines, let's move on. Anyway, when you think about it, you can see why Google was a natural to put it all together. Google already searched the entire Web. Google already had a distributed framework with thousands of independent machines. Google already looked for the links between pages, the way they fit together, in order to build its index. Google's search engine solved equations with millions of variables. Semantic Web content, in RDF, was just another search problem, another set of equations. The major problem was getting the information in the first place. And figuring out what to do with it. And making a profit from all that work. And keeping it updated.... . . . . . Google Marketplace Manager Well, first you need the information. Asking people to simply throw it on a server seemed like chaos - so enter Google Marketplace Manager, a small piece of software for Windows, Unix, and Macintosh (this is before Apple bought Spain and renamed it the Different-thinking Capitalist Republic of Information). The Marketplace Manager, or MM, looked like a regular spreadsheet and allowed you to list information about yourself, what you wanted to sell, what you wanted to buy, and so forth. MM was essentially an “logical statement editor,” disguised as a spreadsheet. People entered their names, addresses, and other relevant information about themselves, then they entered what they were selling, and MM saved RDF-formatted files to the server of their choice - and sent a “ping” to Google which told the search engine to update their index. When it came out, the MM was a little bit magical. Let's say you wanted to sell a book. You entered “Book” in the category and MM queried the Open Product Taxonomy, then came back and asked you to identify whether it was a hardcover book, softcover, used, new, collectible, and so forth. The Open Product Taxonomy is a structured thesaurus, essentially, of product types, and it's quickly becoming the absolute standard for representing products for sale. Then you enter an ISBN number from the back of the book, hit return, and the MM automatically fills in the author, copyright, number of pages, and a field for notes - it just queries a server for the RDF, gets it, chews it up, and gives it to you. If you were a small publishing house, you could list your catalog. If you had a first edition Grapes of Wrath you could describe it and give it a lowest acceptable price, and it'd appear in Google Auctions. Most of the smarts in the MM were actually on the server, as Google interpreted what was entered and adapted the spreadsheet around it. If you entered car, it asked for color. If you entered wine, it asked for vintage, vineyard, number of bottles. Then, when someone searched for 1998 Merlot, your bottle was high on the list. You could also buy advertisements on Google right through the Manager for high-volume or big ticket items, and track how those advertisements were doing; it all updated and refreshed in a nice table. You could see the same data on the Web at any time, but the MM was sweet and fast and optimized. When you bought something, it was listed in your “purchases” column, organized by type of purchase - easy to print out for your accountant, nice for your records. So, as we've said, Google allowed you to search for buyers and sellers, and then, using a service shamelessly copied from the then-ubiquitous PayPal, handled the transaction for a 1.75% charge. Sure, people could send checks or contact one another and avoid the 1.75%, but for most items that was your best bet - fast and cheap. 1.75% plus advertising and a global reach, and you can count on millions flowing smoothly through your accounts. Amazon and Ebay - remember them? - doubtless saw the new product and realized they were in a bind. They would have to “cannibalize their own business” in order to go the Google path - give up their databases to the vagaries of the Web. So, in classic big-company style, they hedged their bets and did nothing. Despite their inaction, before long all manner of competing services popped up, spidering the same data as Google and offering a cheaper transaction rate. But Google had the brand and the trust, and the profits. It took 2 years for over a million individuals to accept and begin using the new, Semweb-based shopping. During that time, Google had about $300 million in volume - for a net of $4.5 million on transactions. But, just as Ebay and Amazon had once compelled consumers to bring their business to the web, the word-of-mouth began to work its magic. Since it was easy to search for things to buy, and easy to download the MM and get started, the number of people actively looking through Google Marketplace grew to 10 million by 2006. . . . . . Google Personal Agent Now, search is not enough. You need service. You need the computer to help you. So Google also rolled out the Personal Agent - a small piece of software that, in essence, simply queried Google on a regular basis and sent you email when it found what you were looking for on the Semweb. Want cheap phone rates? Ask the agent. Want to know when Wholand, the Who-based theme park, opens outside of London? Ask the agent. Or when your wife updates her web-based calendar, or when the price of MSFT goes up three bucks, or when stories about Ghanaian politics hit the wire. You could even program it to negotiate for you - if it found a first-edition Paterson in good condition for less than $2000, offer $500 below the asking price and work up from there. It's between you and the seller, anonymously, perhaps even tax-free if you have the right account number, no one takes a cut. Not using it to buy items began to be considered backwards. Just as the regular Google search negotiated the logical propositions of the Semweb, the Personal Agent did the same - it just did it every few minutes, and on its own, according to pre-set rules. . . . . . Google Verification Service Finally, Google realized they could grab a cut on the “Web of Trust” idea by offering their own verification and rating service, $15 a year to answer a questionnaire, have your credit checked, and fill in some bank account information. But people signed up, because Google was the marketplace; the Google seal of approval meant more than the government's. . . . . . A Jury of Your Peer-to-Peers Since all the information was already in RDF format, Google's own strategy came back to bite it. Free clones of Google Marketplace Manager began to appear, and other search engines began to aggregate without the 1.75% cut, trying to find other revenue models. The Peer-to-Peer model, long the favorite of MP3 and OGG traders, came back to include real-time sales data aggregation, spread over hundreds of thousands of volunteer machines - the same model used by Google, but decentralized among individuals. Amazon and Ebay began automatically including RDF-spidered data on their sites, fitting it right in with existing auctions and items for sale, taking whatever cuts they could find or force out of the situation. In 2006, Citibank introduced Drop Box Accounts for $100/month, then $30, then $15, and $5/month for checking account holders. The Drop Box account is identified by a single number, and can only receive deposits, which can then be transferred into a checking or savings account. They were even URL-addressable, and hosted using the Finance Transfer Protocol. Simply point your browser to account://382882-2838292-29-1939 and enter the amount you want to deposit. There's no risk in giving out a secure drop box number, and no fee for deposits. Banks held the account information of depositors in federally supervised escrow accounts. Suddenly everyone could simply publish their bank account number and sell their goods without any middleman at all. Feeling the pressure, and concerned, just as the music companies had been ears before, that their lead would slip to the peer-to-peer market, Google dropped its fees to 1%, allowed MM users to use Drop Box accounts, and began to charge $25 a year for the MM software and service for sellers, while still making it free for users. After a nervous few months, Google found that the majority of users who sold more than 10 items per year - the volume users - were glad to buy a working product with a brand name behind it; the peer-to-peer networks were considered less trustworthy, and the connection to Google advertising. Google also realized that they could also offer Drop Box accounts, and tie them to stock and money-market trading accounts, which opened a can of worms that we'll skip over here. If you're interested, you can read The Dragon in the Chicken Coop, by Tom Rawley. Google's financials can, of course, be automatically inserted into your MM stock ticker; right now they're trading at 25,000 times earnings, heralding news of the “New New New New Economy.” You'll get no such heralding here; while they've pulled it off once, the competition is fierce. Google was the dream company for a little less than the last decade, but they're finally slowing down, and it's high time for a new batch of graduate students too itchy to finish their Ph.D.'s to get on the ball. And I'm sure they will. . . . . . A Semantically Terrifying Future? The cultural future of the Semantic Web is a tricky one. Privacy is a huge concern, but too much privacy is unnerving. Remember those taxonomies? Well, a group of people out of the Cayman Islands came up with a “ghost taxonomy” - a thesaurus that seemed to be a listing of interconnected yacht parts for a specific brand of yacht, but in truth the yacht-building company never existed except on paper - it was a front for a money-laundering organization with ties to arms and drug smuggling. When someone said “rigging” they meant high powered automatic rifles. Sailcloth was cocaine. And an engine was weapons-grade plutonium. So, you're a small African republic in the midst of a revolution with a megalomaniac leader, an expatriate Russian scientist in your employ, and 6 billion in heroin profits in your bank account, and you need to buy some weapons-grade plutonium. Who does it for you? Google Personal Agent, your web-based pal, ostensibly buying a new engine for your yacht, a little pricey for $18 million, sure. But you're selling aluminum coffeemakers through the Home Products Unlimited (Barbados) Ghost Taxonomy - or nearly pure heroin, you might say - so you'll make up the difference. Suddenly one of the biggest problems of being a criminal mastermind - finding a seller who won't sell you out - is gone. With so many sellers, you can even bargain. Selling plutonium is as smooth and easy and anonymous (now that you can get Free Republic of Christian Ghana Drop Boxes) as selling that Martin guitar. Couldn't happen? Some people say it can, which explains the Mandatory Metadata Review bill on its way through Congress right now, where all RDF must be referenced to a public taxonomy approved by a special review board. Like the people say, may you live in interesting times. Which people? Look it up on Google. . . . . . See also: Robot Exclusion Protocol, Google Search, 12:35 AM, Internet Culture Review, and Speculation: ReichOS, in which Hitler learns about computers. Links to elsewhere: inks_sub_ Google, inks_sub_ Semantic_ Web. 1 A bit of commentary on Google and the Semantic Web In response, ya see. Sunday, July 28, 2002

The digital home - Science fiction?

RECENTLY, at one of the fast-proliferating conferences devoted to the “digital home”, John Burke, an executive at Motorola, a maker of mobile phones and digital gadgets, showed a video that presented his company's version of this vision. In the clip, a youngish man wakes up to a rock video that automatically starts playing on a screen next to his bed. He gets up to have breakfast and the rock video follows him to a screen in the kitchen. He moves into the living room and up pops the rock video on yet another screen. When he leaves his flat and gets into his car, the video starts playing on a screen in the steering wheel. To ordinary humans this sort of thing must seem like silly—or downright frightening—marketing claptrap. In fact, even Mr Burke's audience of self-selected technophiles seemed sceptical. “Did you notice that the guy was a bachelor,” said Tim Dowling, the boss of Pure Networks, a software firm in Seattle that helps users to set up and troubleshoot home-computer networks. “That alone tells you that they're out of touch. I thought: How dumb.” Real people do not want to be hounded through their home and their life by some video stream, he argues; they just want help with basic headaches, such as getting the kids' laptop, mom's Apple Macintosh and dad's Windows machine to share the family's printer. Whether or not computer, software, consumer-electronics, telecoms, cable and internet companies are in fact out of touch with consumers may be the biggest question facing these industries today. That is because the “digital home”, a concept and category hugely hyped in executive circles but still rarely heard in discussions among consumers, represents their greatest hope for revenue growth. Demand from corporate buyers of technology has barely recovered from the dotcom bust and is widely expected to be unimpressive for years. By contrast, the homes of consumers appear to technology vendors as a barely tamed analogue wilderness. Darcy Travlos, an analyst at CreditSights, a research firm, estimates the market opportunity of the digital home at $250 billion in America alone and $1 trillion worldwide in three to seven years. “We view the digital home as critically important,” says Craig Mundie, one of three chief technology officers at Microsoft, the world's largest software company. “The home is much more exciting than the workplace.” Computers have already led to small revolutions in boosting productivity in the office and helping people to communicate and to be creative, he says, so “we're pretty confident” that computers will have a similar effect on the way people consume entertainment. Intel, the world's largest semiconductor maker, recently reorganised itself into new business divisions including, prominently, one called “digital home”. Last week it formally launched Viiv, a bundle of chips intended for use in digital-home PCs. Consumer-electronics firms such as Sony, computer-makers such as Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Apple, telecoms giants such as Verizon or SBC, cable companies such as Comcast, internet firms such as Yahoo!, networking-equipment companies such as Cisco—all agree that the digital home is where the action will be and are investing furiously to make sure they have a good chance of playing a leading role. Their first challenge in stimulating any sort of consumer interest is the difficulty of merely explaining what the digital home is supposed to be. You might think, for instance, that the term refers to the long-established trend away from analogue and towards digital media. In music, most people have completed their migration from vinyl records and tapes to digital CDs. In films, the trend from videotapes to DVDs is not far behind. In photography, traditional film is fast being replaced by digital cameras and pictures. TV and radio broadcasters are also shifting to digital transmissions, with Britain leading the way. Confusingly, however, that is not what vendors mean when they talk about the digital home. Instead, they invariably mean a home in which all sorts of electronic devices—from the personal computer (PC) to the TV set-top box, the stereo, the game console and, in some versions, even the garage door and refrigerator—are connected, both to one another and to the internet. Hence the Motorola marketing video that Mr Burke was showing. Its purpose was to illustrate what Motorola, like Microsoft, calls “seamlessness”, as digital content hops automatically between various devices and screens. The excitement, therefore, is not so much about content being digital, but about its delivery switching from physical things (such as CDs) to photons (such as wireless downloads or streaming), because this requires consumers to buy new gadgets. Believers in this future point to encouraging statistics. Parks Associates, a research firm in Texas that specialises in the digital home (and which organised the conference at which Mr Burke gave his keynote address) surveyed a group of internet users and found that 84% of them use their PCs to store digital photos, 59% to store music, 36% for video clips and 26% for personal videos. If one includes devices other than PCs—such as TiVo, a popular digital video recorder—17% also store movies and TV shows. In theory, these people could soon avail themselves of new wireless-networking technologies, such as an emerging standard called “ultrawideband”, to pipe all this content from their collections to electronic picture frames, screens and portable devices. Joined-up thinking That is not at all what they want to do today, however. Another study by Parks Associates found that 89% of people with a home-computer network felt that the relatively modest goal of sharing internet access is its most important function, with printer-sharing the second priority. Worse, 27% of people who bought network gear said that they ran into problems during configuration, leading many to call the help desk of their internet service provider (who may or may not be responsible for the problem) at an estimated annual cost of $1.4 billion to that industry. Even downloading entertainment, as opposed to buying it on discs, appears over-hyped. According to a study by the OECD, there were over 230 websites offering 1m tracks in America and Europe at the end of 2004. But these online sales accounted for less than 2% of total music revenues; even with fast growth, they are projected to rise only by 5-10% by 2008. All this points to a huge problem with the digital-home vision: the lack, among most consumers, of any sense of crisis about the status quo in entertainment. “We don't think many folks are looking for an electronic nerve centre in their homes,” says Pip Coburn, who runs Coburn Ventures, a technology-consulting and investment firm. After all, popping in a DVD, say, is so easy and works so well. By contrast, getting a digital home up and running promises several lost weekends of fiddling with manuals and settings, and hefty expenses in new gear. According to Mr Coburn's formula for evaluating new technologies, whereby adoption is a function of the users' sense of crisis (ie, motivation to change) outweighing their perceived pain of switching, the digital home ranks as a clear “loser”. This miscalculation—if that is what it is—by the large vendors stems from their history of catering to companies rather than people, says Pure Networks' Mr Dowling (who used to be at Intel and who hired some 40 of his 60 employees from Microsoft). During the information-technology boom, the industry sold its wares mostly to chief information officers or chief technology officers with big budgets. These are customers who tend to be receptive toward buying “solutions” rather than products, and often hire consultants such as IBM Global Services to pull together hardware and software from various vendors. But “consumers don't buy as an IT manager does,” says Mr Dowling. “They buy spur-of-the-moment and hodge podge; they buy things, not systems.” To the extent that the digital home is not a thing but a solution, he thinks, “the vendors are all fooling themselves.” The vendors, naturally, disagree vehemently. “When you ask customers what they want, they will never tell you. You have to show them first,” says Microsoft's Mr Mundie. That is why Microsoft has, since 1994, had an impressive (or, to some people, intimidating) mock digital home on its campus in Redmond, Washington State, which it updates with the latest gadgets. Intel, NETGEAR, HP and most other self-respecting technology firms have similar mock-ups for display. There is, argues Motorola's Mr Burke, a huge “need to educate consumers about the value of a connected home and lifestyle.” Talking the same language Outside the controlled environment of a mock home or conference demonstration, however, educating consumers tends to backfire. That is because real-world digital homes usually do not work very well. The premise of the entire vision, remember, is that heterogeneous devices talk to one another and readily transfer content to wherever the consumer wants to access it. This requires compatibility—“interoperability” in the jargon—among vendors involved in two technological categories. The first is file formats and codecs (short for coder-decoders), which encode digital information—such as a picture, song or film—compress it for transmission and storage, and decompress it again for viewing and listening. The second is digital-rights management software, or DRM, which protects such content against piracy and unauthorised copying. DRM allows the copyright holders of content—film studios and record companies, in essence—to define such parameters as when a film or song that is downloaded “expires”, or how many times it can be copied to another device, such as a portable player. The trouble starts here, with a bewildering list of acronyms that no ordinary consumer should ever have to know, but currently needs to know, to set up a digital home. The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) is an industry body that defines widely used codecs such as MPEG-2 for video and MP3 for audio. But the big vendors prefer their own codecs—Microsoft its WM9 (short for Windows-Media-9), Apple, the market leader in online music sales, its AAC, and so on. In DRM, the situation is even more chaotic. Microsoft pushes its Windows DRM; RealNetworks, which makes rival media software, has Helix; Sony has OpenMG; Apple likes FairPlay, and so on. The upshot is that consumers cannot mix online services, gadgets and software from different vendors and be sure that the content they have paid for actually works. Music bought online from Microsoft's MSN or Yahoo!, for instance, does not work on Apple's iTunes or iPod, and vice versa. This challenge is daunting because DRM technologies should not only be compatible today, but for all eternity. Otherwise, consumers will be afraid to pay for content, and will stick with CDs and DVDs, which seem painless and safe by comparison. “If consumers even know there's a DRM, what it is, and how it works, we've already failed,” says Peter Lee, an executive at Disney. The same goes for codecs. “The user shouldn't know or care what format they're using,” says James Poder, an engineer at Comcast, America's largest cable company and broadband internet service provider, because “consumers don't want to be IT administrators for their own home.” Prisoner's dilemma It may seem ironic, therefore, that vendors are refusing to make their technologies interoperable, thus potentially killing their own vision. On the other hand, it makes sense for each to try to make its own proprietary technology the winner, in order later to grab a disproportionate share of the market. The starting point of cable and telecoms companies, for instance, is as providers of broadband pipes into the home. So they are investing in IPTV (internet-protocol television), a vision in which content resides on the network and is pulled into the home on demand. Thus, says Cyrus Mewawalla, an analyst at Westhall Capital, a broker in London, America's Verizon and SBC and others are investing hugely in laying fibre-optic cables to homes (at a cost of about $1,000 per household), hoping that IPTV and the necessary set-top box could “evolve into the primary gateway to the digital home.” By controlling this gateway, they could offer a bundle of telephony, internet and entertainment, in effect “owning” the customer. This would at the same time help them to parry their biggest threat: Microsoft. Microsoft has itself invested in IPTV, ostensibly in partnership with telecoms and cable companies. Like its loss-making investment in game consoles (called Xbox), however, Microsoft intends this as a purely defensive hedge, says Matt Rosoff, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, an independent research outfit near Seattle. Instead, thinks Mr Rosoff, Microsoft's strategy is to establish the Windows-run PC as the uncontested hub of the digital home. Hence its all-out push to establish its codecs and DRM as the standard. This would allow Microsoft to keep selling Windows upgrades and to earn royalties from hardware and from consumer-electronics companies that make “spokes” for the Windows hub, such as portable music and video players, screens and online services. Microsoft's most explicit attempt so far is a version of its current operating system called Windows Media Centre Edition (MCE), which puts a simplified menu on top of the desktop screen for use with a remote control from the sofa. The MCE was first launched in October 2002, and has been upgraded several times since, but it has so far been mostly a dud, running fewer than 1% of all PCs sold last year. Microsoft now hopes to make MCE more relevant by selling “extenders”, little devices that can hook on to a TV set or stereo and communicate with the PC over a wireless network. Its biggest hope, however, is for Vista (previously known by the code name of Longhorn), the next version of Windows, which is due to be released late next year (after several delays). According to Microsoft's Mr Mundie, there is no question that the Windows PC will win this fight to become the central repository for all digital content, for a simple reason. The cable and telecoms companies, he says, are hampered by their business model, in which the set-top boxes sit on their own balance sheet and are leased, at subsidised rates, to consumers. This means that their incentive will always be to make the boxes cheaper. By contrast, Microsoft's incentive is to make its operating system more sophisticated, in everything from parental controls to usability. By the same logic, Microsoft will beat the consumer-electronics companies (such as Sony and Samsung). Their business model relies on selling devices rather than on recurring licence revenues. This leads to clutter in the home, without organisation of the content. Tom Berquist, an industry analyst at Citigroup, broadly agrees that the PC is likely to win. The on-demand world on offer from, say, Comcast, is simply not portable enough, he thinks. By contrast, he says, moving content to PCs potentially “liberates you from proprietary technology and lets you use content on any device.” In this sense, the only real competition to Microsoft is Apple, whose Macintosh operating system is widely considered to be more elegant and user-friendly than Windows, and which has a considerable headstart with the huge popularity of its iTunes music service and iPod player. Apple's problem, however, is that it has only 2.6% of the world market for PCs, whereas Windows runs on almost all the rest. Apple also differs from Microsoft in that it simultaneously wants to be the main portable-device maker. It is, in other words, a software, hardware and consumer-electronics company all at once, and that does not leave much room for alliances with other industries to manufacture spokes for an Apple hub. There are signs that Apple is becoming more agnostic in order to compete with Microsoft. It has a deal with HP, traditionally a Microsoft ally (HP was, for instance, the first computer maker to ship Windows Media Centre Edition), under which HP bundles Apple's iTunes software on to PCs running Microsoft Windows. In a surprising announcement in June, Apple also said that it would start using microprocessors from Intel, another traditional Microsoft ally. Winner takes all? For the foreseeable future, the only certainty is that all these mighty companies will continue to preach interoperability while pursuing proprietary hegemony. This could lead to several scenarios. One is that one company, or camp, wins. The digital home, unified by the winner's standards, might then become a reality in the mass market. For this to happen, however, several companies and industries would first have to make huge strategic mistakes, and consumers would have to accede, in effect, to a repeat of the “Wintel” (Windows and Intel) near monopoly in the PC industry today. Another possibility is that the technology wars end with a truce, perhaps brokered by industry consortia that push open standards. This would be infinitely preferable for consumers and would probably make the digital home a reality much sooner, since it would mean that consumers could shop incrementally for new gadgets, all of which will fit with the others. The catch for providers is that this is much less exciting for their own bottom lines. There is a third possibility. This is that the wars continue, but consumers continue not to care. As John Barrett, research director at Parks Associates, says, “it seems that we've concocted a new variant of the ‘paperless' office.” This, you recall, was the consensus a decade or so ago among technophiles (but almost nobody else), that computer technology would save our forests by freeing us from having to read and write on paper. Today's variant, says Mr Barrett, is “no more tapes, CDs, DVDs, discs.” In other words, expect them to be around for a very long time to come.

Cheat Sheet Roundup - Over 30 Cheatsheets for developers

Lets face it, unless you have a photographic memory, no developer can remember all the different functions, options, tags, etc. that exist. Documentation can be cumbersome at times, thats why I like cheat sheets. They are quick references that feature the most commonly forgotten things on a specific topic. You can print them out and hang them on your wall, or just keep them handy in your bookmarks for quick reference. I have rounded up over 30 cheatsheets that developers might find useful. Web Development Cheat Sheets Databases / SQL Cheat Sheets Language Cheat Sheets Version Control Cheat Sheets Other Commercially Printed CheatSheets Visibone - javascript, browsers, colors, fonts, html. TechnoChallenged - web dev, programming, os, software Am I missing any good ones? Feel free to post any others in the comments. Updates:

Survivors reveal Superdome horror

Families who lost everything lived in filth and fear for days Tired, hungry and traumatised by days spent under the damaged roof of a once-gleaming football stadium, the refugees of New Orleans have spoken of a nightmarish week living among the crazed and the desperate. Stories of rape, murder and suicide have emerged. Medical teams delivered babies in filthy conditions, with human faeces never far away and fresh water in short supply. At least three were reported to have died. Amid the filth and the crime, some snapped. "One guy jumped off a balcony," said Charles Womack, a 30-year-old roofer who was beaten and injured during his time at the Superdome. "I saw him do it. He was talking to a lady about it. He said it reminded him of the war and he couldn't leave." Deadly night-time Fear ratcheted up the tension, with disturbing reports of mistaken identity emerging from the chaos. Police and national guardsmen were accused of killing innocent people. "They killed a man here last night," Steve Banka, 28, told the Reuters news agency before he left on Sunday. Death was everywhere, both inside and outside the Superdome "And the sounds of her screaming got to this man and so he ran out into the street to get help from troops, to try to flag down a passing truck of them. "He jumped up on the truck's windscreen and they shot him dead," Mr Banka said. Another man died in mysterious circumstances on Friday as a police car passed the New Orleans Convention Center, where equally squalid conditions forced many to sleep outside among streets full of rubbish. More than 24 hours later, his body, like so many others, had not been moved. "Right where he fell," Larry Martin told the Los Angeles Times. "Like roadkill." On Saturday morning Africa Brumfield, 32, sat with relatives near the corpse of a young man in streets around the convention centre. He had died on Friday night as he walked in the street. "There is rapes going on here. Women cannot go to the bathroom without men. They are raping them and slitting their throats," she told Reuters. Rotting Inside the Superdome, a National Guard soldier charged with keeping order confirmed the brutal reality of life after Katrina. "We found a young girl raped and killed in the bathroom. Then the crowd got the man and they beat him to death." National Guardsmen arrested those suspected of causing trouble "It's been a long time coming," Derek Dabon, 29, said as he queued for a security check. Hillary Snowton, 40, sat with a white sheet wrapped around his face to shield himself from the smell of a dead body that lay, untouched, just metres away. He had watched the body lie there for the past four days, decomposing in the sultry Louisiana climate. He didn't see the point in moving away from the corpse, he told the Associated Press. "It stinks everywhere."

Winston warns of stem cell 'hype'

By Jonathan Amos BBC News science reporter, Dublin Lord Winston is the current president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science He fears a backlash if science fails to deliver on some of the "hype" around the cells - as he believes may happen. He says the notion that a host of cures for serious, degenerative disorders are just around the corner is fanciful. However, a Cambridge University stem cell researcher said he was certain the work would lead to clinical benefits. Lord Winston believes some of the uncertainties need to be emphasised. "Both in Britain and America, huge publicity has been given to stem cells, particularly embryonic stem cells, and the potential they offer," he said in his presidential address to the British Association's Festival Science in Dublin, Ireland, on Monday. "Of course, the study of stem cells is one of the most exciting areas in biology but I think it is unlikely that embryonic stem cells are likely to be useful in healthcare for a long time." Embryonic doubts Stem cells are the body's "master cells" and have the ability to produce all manner of tissues - which has led science to investigate their potential to be used to replace the failed cells responsible for many conditions, such as heart disease and diabetes. I was concerned that parliamentarians have been convinced that it was just a matter of a few years before we would be able to transplant stem cells and cure a lot of neurological disorders Lord Winston, BA president Science community reaction "I was concerned that parliamentarians - particularly in the House of Commons - have been convinced that it was just a matter of a few years before we would be able to transplant stem cells and cure a lot of neurological disorders, like Alzheimer's disease, for which I think it is going to be a hugely difficult problem and probably completely insoluble by stem cells." Lord Winston said from his own lab's work he could see there were many problems associated with embryonic stem cells that would need to be understood and resolved before they could have clinical applications. Cancer gain He points to their low cell-cycle time, leading to slow replication in culture and the fact there might be selective pressure for the faster growing, but possibly abnormal cells, to dominate a culture system. Will there be a clinical impact? Yes, there will be; I'm absolutely certain of it Roger Pederson, Cambridge Stem Cell Initiative These and other issues, unless resolved, he says, will result in unsuccessful therapies. Lord Winston does not doubt that study in this area will lead to remarkable and fundamental insights into the workings of the biological cell - and that this should have a huge knock-on effect for medicine with perhaps cancer treatments among the first to benefit. But he says he does view "the current wave of optimism" about embryonic stem cells and their use in transplant treatments with "growing scepticism". Wide view Commenting on Lord Winston's remarks, Roger Pederson, a professor of regenerative medicine and convenor of the Cambridge Stem Cell Initiative, said it was difficult to be specific about future outcomes given the youthfulness of stem cell study. However, he told the BBC News website he was confident great gains would be made from the research. "[Lord Winston's] concerns about the slow pace of the field or the potential downside risks are not at all surprising to somebody actually working in the field. We all think about these questions all the time," he said. "If you want to know when there will be a clinical impact on the field of diabetes, let's say, I can't answer that question; but I can answer the question, 'will there be a clinical impact?' Yes, there will be; I'm absolutely certain of it - but when exactly and what field that will be in is much harder to speculate about." Professor Pederson said it was important to consider benefits beyond just transplant therapies. He said he expected, for example, drug development to make big strides by allowing pharma companies to test novel compounds on specific tissue types derived from stem cells.

Editorial blasts federal response

Editorial blasts federal response NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- The Times-Picayune of New Orleans printed this editorial in its Sunday edition, criticizing the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina and calling on every FEMA official to be fired: An open letter to the President Dear Mr. President: We heard you loud and clear Friday when you visited our devastated city and the Gulf Coast and said, "What is not working, we're going to make it right." Please forgive us if we wait to see proof of your promise before believing you. But we have good reason for our skepticism. Bienville built New Orleans where he built it for one main reason: It's accessible. The city between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain was easy to reach in 1718. How much easier it is to access in 2005 now that there are interstates and bridges, airports and helipads, cruise ships, barges, buses and diesel-powered trucks. Despite the city's multiple points of entry, our nation's bureaucrats spent days after last week's hurricane wringing their hands, lamenting the fact that they could neither rescue the city's stranded victims nor bring them food, water and medical supplies. Meanwhile there were journalists, including some who work for The Times-Picayune, going in and out of the city via the Crescent City Connection. On Thursday morning, that crew saw a caravan of 13 Wal-Mart tractor trailers headed into town to bring food, water and supplies to a dying city. Television reporters were doing live reports from downtown New Orleans streets. Harry Connick Jr. brought in some aid Thursday, and his efforts were the focus of a "Today" show story Friday morning. Yet, the people trained to protect our nation, the people whose job it is to quickly bring in aid were absent. Those who should have been deploying troops were singing a sad song about how our city was impossible to reach. We're angry, Mr. President, and we'll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That's to the government's shame. Mayor Ray Nagin did the right thing Sunday when he allowed those with no other alternative to seek shelter from the storm inside the Louisiana Superdome. We still don't know what the death toll is, but one thing is certain: Had the Superdome not been opened, the city's death toll would have been higher. The toll may even have been exponentially higher. It was clear to us by late morning Monday that many people inside the Superdome would not be returning home. It should have been clear to our government, Mr. President. So why weren't they evacuated out of the city immediately? We learned seven years ago, when Hurricane Georges threatened, that the Dome isn't suitable as a long-term shelter. So what did state and national officials think would happen to tens of thousands of people trapped inside with no air conditioning, overflowing toilets and dwindling amounts of food, water and other essentials? State Rep. Karen Carter was right Friday when she said the city didn't have but two urgent needs: "Buses! And gas!" Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially. In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn't known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, "We've provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they've gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day." Lies don't get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President. Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, "You're doing a heck of a job." That's unbelievable. There were thousands of people at the Convention Center because the riverfront is high ground. The fact that so many people had reached there on foot is proof that rescue vehicles could have gotten there, too. We, who are from New Orleans, are no less American than those who live on the Great Plains or along the Atlantic Seaboard. We're no less important than those from the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia. Our people deserved to be rescued. No expense should have been spared. No excuses should have been voiced. Especially not one as preposterous as the claim that New Orleans couldn't be reached. Mr. President, we sincerely hope you fulfill your promise to make our beloved communities work right once again. When you do, we will be the first to applaud.

Worms to help combat allergies

By Jonathan Amos BBC News science reporter, Dublin Dr Padraic Fallon, from Trinity College Dublin, and colleagues have already managed to cure asthma in lab mice by infecting them with the tiny creatures. The team now has to explain how the parasites achieve this feat at a molecular level. If they can do that, they should then be able to synthesise a new drug compound to treat asthma in people. On the rise Asthma and other allergies have increased almost threefold over the last 30 years in many developed countries, including Ireland and the UK. We believe that this research will lead us to develop a new ways of preventing and treating asthma Dr Fallon, Trinity College Dublin The thinking behind this theory is that people living in modern industrialised societies are no longer exposed to the pathogens, such as viruses and bacteria, they would have been in the past, and so their bodies react to other, more minor threats. "In Africa, for example, the immune system is too busy chasing after worms to bother going after house dust mites," explained Dr Fallon. "In a developed society, the immune system is looking for things to respond to. "It's evolved to see worms and suddenly there are no worms there. So suddenly house mites, peanuts - whatever the allergies are - occupy the immune system and it responds and causes disease," he told the British Association's Festival of Science in Dublin. In a study in Gabon, Africa, schoolchildren that were infected with worms had lower allergic responses to house dust mites than children with no worms. When the children had their worms removed by drugs they then developed increased allergic responses. Red blood cells The particular worm in question, the schistosome, is the cause of bilharzias, or schistosomiasis. As the worms feed on red blood cells and dissolved nutrients such as sugars and amino acids, they can cause anaemia and fatigue, and in some cases the victim passes red urine, tinted by blood lost through the damaged kidneys. It is thought that around 250 million people are infected with bilharzia in the tropics. Dr Fallon says the worm has clearly evolved a way to control the human immune system, raising and lowering inflammation in its host to just the right level to ensure its parasitic lifestyle can be maintained. The trick now, he says, is to learn how the worm does this so that the knowledge can be applied to allergic diseases. "We believe that this research will lead us to develop a new ways of preventing and treating asthma and anaphylaxis, which can then be extended to treat inflammatory bowel disease and arthritis," Dr Fallon said.

Viewpoint: Has Katrina saved US media?

By Matt Wells Los Angeles As President Bush scurries back to the Gulf Coast, it is clear that this is the greatest challenge to politics-as-usual in America since the fall of Richard Nixon in the 1970s. Mr Bush's famed "folksy" style has failed to impress in this crisis But unlike Watergate, "Katrinagate" was public service journalism ruthlessly exposing the truth on a live and continuous basis. Instead of secretive "Deep Throat" meetings in car-parks, cameras captured the immediate reality of what was happening at the New Orleans Convention Center, making a mockery of the stalling and excuses being put forward by those in power. Amidst the horror, American broadcast journalism just might have grown its spine back, thanks to Katrina. National politics reporters and anchors here come largely from the same race and class as the people they are supposed to be holding to account. They live in the same suburbs, go to the same parties, and they are in debt to the same huge business interests. Giant corporations own the networks, and Washington politicians rely on them and their executives to fund their re-election campaigns across the 50 states. It is a perfect recipe for a timid and self-censoring journalistic culture that is no match for the masterfully aggressive spin-surgeons of the Bush administration. 'Lies or ignorance' But last week the complacency stopped, and the moral indignation against inadequate government began to flow, from slick anchors who spend most of their time glued to desks in New York and Washington. Images of the military in a US city have shocked many Americans This highly successful Murdoch-owned station sets itself up in opposition to the "mainstream liberal media elite". But with the sick and the dying forced to sit in their own excrement behind him in New Orleans, its early-evening anchor Shepard Smith declared civil war against the studio-driven notion that the biggest problem was still stopping the looters. On other networks like NBC, CNN and ABC it was the authority figures, who are so used to an easy ride at press conferences, that felt the full force of reporters finally determined to ditch the deference. As the heads of the Homeland Security department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) appeared for network interviews, their defensive remarks about where aid was arriving to, and when, were exposed immediately as either downright lies or breath-taking ignorance. And you did not need a degree in journalism to know it either. Just watching TV for the previous few hours would have sufficed. Iraq concern When the back-slapping president told the Fema boss on Friday morning that he was doing "a heck of a job" and spent most of his first live news conference in the stricken area praising all the politicians and chiefs who had failed so clearly, it beggared belief. The president looked affronted when a reporter covering his Mississippi walkabout had the temerity to suggest that having a third of the National Guard from the affected states on duty in Iraq might be a factor. Thousands were forced to wait days for food and shelter And it is not only on TV and radio where the gloves have come off. The most artful supporter of the administration on the staff of the New York Times, columnist David Brooks, has also had enough. He and others are calling the debacle the "anti 9-11": "The first rule of the social fabric - that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled," he wrote on Sunday. "Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield." Media emboldened It is way too early to tell whether this really will become "Katrinagate" for President Bush, but how he and his huge retinue of politically-appointed bureaucrats react in the weeks ahead will be decisive. Government has been thrown into disrepute, and many Americans have realised, for the first time, that the collapsed, rotten flood defences of New Orleans are a symbol of failed infrastructure across the nation. Blaming the state and city officials, as the president is already trying to do over Katrina, will not wash. Black America will not forget the government failures, and nor will the Gulf Coast region Viewpoint: US shamed The dithering and incompetence that will be exposed will not spare the commander-in-chief, or the sunny, faith-based propaganda that he was still spouting as he left New Orleans airport last Friday, saying it was all going to turn out fine. People were still trapped, hungry and dying on his watch, less than a mile away. Black America will not forget the government failures, nor will the Gulf Coast region. Tens of thousands of voters whose lives have been so devastated will cast their mid-term ballots in Texas next year - the president's adopted home state. The final word belongs to the historic newspaper at the centre of the hurricane - The New Orleans Times-Picayune. At the weekend, this now-homeless institution published an open letter: "We're angry, Mr President, and we'll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. "Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been, were not. That's to the government's shame."

Hurricane prompts awkward questions

By Elinor Shields BBC News Many of those stranded did not have the resources to flee The plight of those stranded amid the filth and the dead has highlighted a side of the city most tourists did not see - one in which two-thirds of its residents are black and more than a quarter live in poverty. Anger is mounting among African-American leaders that this section was left behind when others fled. Some say the chaos in Katrina's aftermath has exposed deep divisions in both the city and US society. "We cannot allow it to be said by history that the difference between those who lived and... died... was nothing more than poverty, age or skin colour," Congressman Elijah Cummings said. 'Paycheck to paycheck' Correspondents say New Orleans' glamorous reputation has always concealed a high level of deprivation. NEW ORLEANS 485,000 residents 10 times national murder rate 21% of households without access to a car The city famous for its jazz clubs and horse-drawn carriage rides was also a place in which about one in three children lived in poverty, in one of the poorest states in the country. Observers say this group was particularly vulnerable in the face of a hurricane. Many of those trapped by Katrina's floodwaters lived in dilapidated neighbourhoods that were long known to be exposed to disaster if the levees failed. And a large number would have had no means to flee the region as the storm loomed - a recent US census found that one-fifth of the city's residents had no access to a car. "We don't have transportation," one resident told WHBF-TV. "We're living paycheck to paycheck, it's not like we're just able to get up and leave." A former leader of the black caucus in the House of Representatives agrees. "It is one thing to receive a warning to get out - it's something else to have the ability to get out," Congressman James Clyburn said. Uneasy questions Black members of Congress have also criticised the pace of relief efforts. Some say the response was slow because those most affected are poor. I'm ashamed of America. I'm ashamed of our government Congresswoman Carolyn Kilpatrick "I'm ashamed of America. I'm ashamed of our government," Congresswoman Carolyn Kilpatrick said. "George Bush doesn't care about black people," rapper Kanye West told viewers of an NBC benefit concert for hurricane victims. Other commentators object to the media's handling of the crisis. "Television is creating a sympathetic image of white people fleeing, and black people caught up in a shoplifting orgy," Lawrence Aaron wrote in New Jersey's Record. But some hope that the aftermath of the hurricane will force people to confront the issue of inequality. "Most cities have a hidden, or not always talked about, poor population, black and white, and most of the time we look past them," Spencer Crew, the chief of a Cincinnati civil rights centre, told the New York Times. "This is a moment in time when we can't look past them. Their plight is coming to the forefront now," he said.

Schneier on Security

Trusted Computing Best Practices The Trusted Computing Group (TCG) is an industry consortium that is trying to build more secure computers. They have a lot of members, although the board of directors consists of Microsoft, Sony, AMD, Intel, IBM, SUN, HP, and two smaller companies who are voted on in a rotating basis. The basic idea is that you build a computer from the ground up securely, with a core hardware “root of trust” called a Trusted Platform Module (TPM). Applications can run securely on the computer, can communicate with other applications and their owners securely, and can be sure that no untrusted applications have access to their data or code. This sounds great, but it’s a double-edged sword. The same system that prevents worms and viruses from running on your computer might also stop you from using any legitimate software that your hardware or operating system vendor simply doesn’t like. The same system that protects spyware from accessing your data files might also stop you from copying audio and video files. The same system that ensures that all the patches you download are legitimate might also prevent you from, well, doing pretty much anything. (Ross Anderson has an excellent FAQ on the topic. I wrote about it back when Microsoft called it Palladium.) In May, the Trusted Computing Group published a best practices document: “Design, Implementation, and Usage Principles for TPM-Based Platforms.” Written for users and implementers of TCG technology, the document tries to draw a line between good uses and bad uses of this technology. The principles that TCG believes underlie the effective, useful, and acceptable design, implementation, and use of TCG technologies are the following: Security: TCG-enabled components should achieve controlled access to designated critical secured data and should reliably measure and report the system’s security properties. The reporting mechanism should be fully under the owner’s control. Privacy: TCG-enabled components should be designed and implemented with privacy in mind and adhere to the letter and spirit of all relevant guidelines, laws, and regulations. This includes, but is not limited to, the OECD Guidelines, the Fair Information Practices, and the European Union Data Protection Directive (95/46/EC). Interoperability: Implementations and deployments of TCG specifications should facilitate interoperability. Furthermore, implementations and deployments of TCG specifications should not introduce any new interoperability obstacles that are not for the purpose of security. Portability of data: Deployment should support established principles and practices of data ownership. Controllability: Each owner should have effective choice and control over the use and operation of the TCG-enabled capabilities that belong to them; their participation must be opt-in. Subsequently, any user should be able to reliably disable the TCG functionality in a way that does not violate the owner’s policy. Ease-of-use: The nontechnical user should find the TCG-enabled capabilities comprehensible and usable. It’s basically a good document, although there are some valid criticisms. I like that the document clearly states that coercive use of the technology — forcing people to use digital rights management systems, for example, are inappropriate: The use of coercion to effectively force the use of the TPM capabilities is not an appropriate use of the TCG technology. I like that the document tries to protect user privacy: All implementations of TCG-enabled components should ensure that the TCG technology is not inappropriately used for data aggregation of personal information/ I wish that interoperability were more strongly enforced. The language has too much wiggle room for companies to break interoperability under the guise of security: Furthermore, implementations and deployments of TCG specifications should not introduce any new interoperability obstacles that are not for the purpose of security. That sounds good, but what does “security” mean in that context? Security of the user against malicious code? Security of big media against people copying music and videos? Security of software vendors against competition? The big problem with TCG technology is that it can be used to further all three of these “security” goals, and this document is where “security” should be better defined. Complaints aside, it’s a good document and we should all hope that companies follow it. Compliance is totally voluntary, but it’s the kind of document that governments and large corporations can point to and demand that vendors follow. But there’s something fishy going on. Microsoft is doing its best to stall the document, and to ensure that it doesn’t apply to Vista (formerly known as Longhorn), Microsoft’s next-generation operating system. The document was first written in the fall of 2003, and went through the standard review process in early 2004. Microsoft delayed the adoption and publication of the document, demanding more review. Eventually the document was published in June of this year (with a May date on the cover). Meanwhile, the TCG built a purely software version of the specification: Trusted Network Connect (TNC). Basically, it’s a TCG system without a TPM. The best practices document doesn’t apply to TNC, because Microsoft (as a member of the TCG board of directors) blocked it. The excuse is that the document hadn’t been written with software-only applications in mind, so it shouldn’t apply to software-only TCG systems. This is absurd. The document outlines best practices for how the system is used. There’s nothing in it about how the system works internally. There’s nothing unique to hardware-based systems, nothing that would be different for software-only systems. You can go through the document yourself and replace all references to “TPM” or “hardware” with “software” (or, better yet, “hardware or software”) in five minutes. There are about a dozen changes, and none of them make any meaningful difference. The only reason I can think of for all this Machiavellian maneuvering is that the TCG board of directors is making sure that the document doesn’t apply to Vista. If the document isn’t published until after Vista is released, then obviously it doesn’t apply. Near as I can tell, no one is following this story. No one is asking why TCG best practices apply to hardware-based systems if they’re writing software-only specifications. No one is asking why the document doesn’t apply to all TCG systems, since it’s obviously written without any particular technology in mind. And no one is asking why the TCG is delaying the adoption of any software best practices. I believe the reason is Microsoft and Vista, but clearly there’s some investigative reporting to be done. (A version of this essay previously appeared on CNet’s News.com and ZDNet.) EDITED TO ADD: This comment completely misses my point. Which is odd; I thought I was pretty clear. EDITED TO ADD: There is a thread on Slashdot on the topic. EDITED TO ADD: The Sydney Morning Herald republished this essay. Also “The Age.” Posted on August 31, 2005 at 8:27 AM • 57 Comments

Jabbor Gibson

When you’re right, you’re right. Radley Balko has noticed a hunger for good news, and this would seem to qualify: Eighteen-year-old Jabbor Gibson jumped aboard the bus as it sat abandoned on a street in New Orleans and took control. “I just took the bus and drove all the way here…seven hours straight,’ Gibson admitted. “I hadn’t ever drove a bus.” The teen packed it full of complete strangers and drove to Houston. He beat thousands of evacuees slated to arrive there. “I t’s better than being in New Orleans,” said fellow passenger Albert McClaud, “we want to be somewhere where we’re safe.”

Vodacom Specials, Telkom ADSL Prices, Uncapped ADSL, Cellphone specials, Cell C Specials, MTN Specials, Cellphone Specifications, and more

Telkom’s move to wireless hits elderly hard - Sat 12 Oct, 2019 Peter Herlihy, 82, is partially deaf and lives alone in a complex estate in Margate. Herlihy considers himself old school and still uses a cradle telephone, but for the last month it has been quiet because there has been no networ... Read more Telkom slashes mobile data prices - Wed 02 Oct, 2019 Telkom has launched new Sim-only mobile data plans for �on-the-go customers� that dramatically undercut the prices charged by its rivals. The new plans include a 20GB option (plus 20GB of �night surfer� data for use between midnig... Read more Telkom entirely unable to compete in fibre market - Tue 04 Jun, 2019 Telkom financial results for the year ended 31 March 2019 revealed a massive decline in fixed broadband subscribers – down from 981,176 in March 2018 to 847,650 in March 2019.... 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Your insurer may refuse to pay out if your phone gets stolen - Tue 21 May, 2019 If you changed your cellphone number, your insurer may refuse to pay out when your phone is later damaged or stolen. This proviso is contained in most cellphone insurance policy documents, but many consumers don’t pick up on it ... Read more Why Telkom will not yet invest in 5G - Mon 06 May, 2019 Telkom, the country’s fourth-largest mobile operator, believes 5G data connections for cellphones will cost considerably more than 4G – and it has no immediate plans to add the much-vaunted technology to its network.... Read more Mobile subscriber numbers in South Africa - Fri 10 May, 2019 MTN has published its quarterly trading update for the period ended 31 March 2019, outlining its subscriber number changes since the beginning of 2019. The mobile operator saw a service revenue increase of 5.6% year-over-year in S... Read more MTN launches 1MB auto-renewing data bundle - Fri 10 May, 2019 MTN has launched an auto-renewing data bundle similar to Vodacom’s Data Refill service. The mobile network operator has sent a message to subscribers to inform them that they will be automatically subscribed to the service next ... Read more Vodacom keeps changing the reason it claims to be SA’s best network - Thu 09 May, 2019 Vodacom is still breaking advertising rules by claiming to be "SA's best network", the appeals committee of the Advertising Regulatory Board (ARB) says – and it is not covering itself in glory by doing so.... Read more Cell C in deep financial trouble – Drastic measures considered - Mon 25 Mar, 2019 Cell C is in deep financial trouble and the company and its shareholders are now considering drastic measures to save the mobile operator. This is according to well-placed industry sources who told MyBroadband that Cell C continue... Read more Load shedding will hit data prices, cellphone companies warn - Wed 20 Mar, 2019 South African cellular providers warn that continued load shedding will limit their ability to cut data prices. This as operators spend millions on emergency power supplies and security for cellular towers across the country. R... Read more Telkom accused of deliberately stalling number porting - Mon 18 Mar, 2019 South Africa launched number portability in 2006 with the ability of mobile users to port their telephone numbers between cellular networks. This facility aimed at boosting competition within the country’s historically-uncompeti... Read more 'My Telkom fraud nightmare' - clients desperate to cancel are easy victims - Fri 01 Mar, 2019 Desperation makes you vulnerable to being scammed - and that is what's been happening to some Telkom customers who have spent months trying to cancel their contracts. Opportunistic fraudsters have been preying on those who have go... 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the Google-Dr. Lee/Microsoft Litigation

I guess you've heard that Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer, has been quoted in a declaration filed in the Microsoft v. Google/Google v. Microsoft dueling lawsuits, as saying he will blankety blank kill Google and "bury" its CEO, Eric Schmidt. Here's the report, and excuse his language: Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer vowed to "kill" internet search leader Google Inc. in an obscenity-laced tirade, and Google chased a prized Microsoft executive "like wolves," according to documents filed in an increasingly bitter legal battle between the rivals. The allegations, filed in a Washington state court, represent the latest salvos in a showdown triggered by Google's July hiring of former Microsoft executive Kai Fu-Lee to oversee a research and development centre that Google plans to open in China. . . . Ballmer's threat last November was recounted in a sworn declaration by a former Microsoft engineer, Mark Lucovsky, who said he met with Microsoft's chief executive 10 months ago to discuss his decision to leave the company after six years. After learning Lucovsky was leaving to take a job at Google, Ballmer picked up his chair and hurled it across his office, according to the declaration. Ballmer then pejoratively berated Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Lucovsky recalled. "I'm going to f---ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again," the declaration quotes Ballmer. "I'm going to f---ing kill Google." I await with eager anticipation the cries of moral outrage from Rob Enderle and Laura Didio and Darl McBride and everyone else who has accused the FOSS community of verbal extremism. That may be quite a wait, so let me be the first to call on the proprietary software community to condemn in no uncertain terms such violent speech coming from their community. Death threats are never acceptable, don't you agree? Such threats coming from the CEO of the largest software company in the world are far more serious than they would be coming from some teenage Slashdotter, because Ballmer surely has the means to follow through, does he not, should he actually mean it? If you were Mr. Schmidt, how safe would you be feeling today? It was a metaphor, you say. Likely it was, but are you positive? And let's say you answer yes, it was a metaphor. Is it all right for a convicted monopolist to threaten to "kill" a competing company? Ballmer now denies he ever made such threats. That is possible. It's also possible the Microsoft lawyers turned pale upon learning of the statement and insisted on a public denial. He sort of has to deny it, since antitrust issues leap into our minds otherwise, and that is one of the things Google is complaining about in its litigation, not to mention that should Mr. Schmidt from this day forward have so much as a headache, the whole world will blame Mr. Ballmer. Should he actually die, an investigation is certain to at least be considered, I would think. If I were as rich as Mr. Schmidt, I'd probably hire bodyguards, if we assume that Mr. McBride needed them on far less provocation. All this made me decide to look into what would have Mr. Ballmer allegedly throwing a chair at the wall and making such threats. For the record, and so that Mr. Ballmer doesn't sue me or, gasp, decide to "bury" me, too, here's what he says about it: In a statement, Ballmer described Mark Lucovsky's recollection as a "gross exaggeration. Mark's decision to leave was disappointing and I urged him strongly to change his mind. But his characterization of that meeting is not accurate." It's not true, the man says. OK. But it *feels* true, doesn't it? At least it does to me. So, appropriately inspired, I set out to find out what this was all about. And here you go, everything I could find on the Google-Microsoft battle so far. Note that there are some documents missing, because some state courts don't make filings as fully available as District Courts, but this is what I've learned and the significant documents that are available. Unfortunately, the one document we most want to see, the one that tells about Ballmer allegedly throwing a chair across the room and threatening Google's life and limb, isn't available yet. I'll explain the documents we do have, but remember that it's just my impression, I don't have all of them, and I'm not giving it the fine-grained analysis I do in the SCO litigation, so feel free to read the documents themselves and draw your own conclusions. This is more for fun. Microsoft v. Google and Google v. Microsoft First, there are two lawsuits filed. Microsoft filed first in Washington State and a few days later, Google filed in California. Google's was then assigned to a US District judge. It's a dispute about Google hiring a Microsoft employee out from under them, Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, and it centers on a non-competition agreement which he signed in 2000. Microsoft filed first, so it has that advantage, and it got a temporary restraining order [PDF] until a hearing on September 6 on whether or not to extend it until the trial. Frankly, getting to trial is likely to take longer than a year, which is all the non-compete clause covers, so we'll see what the judge does, but it seems likely that the court will extend the restraining order. As I will explain, that doesn't mean Microsoft will win in the end, just that the judge wants to prevent unfixable damage. But the first question is: which court will be the one that decides this dispute? The parties are fighting hard over that issue. The Fight Over Jurisdiction Where this gets heard is huge. As it happens, California tends to toss non-compete's overboard, so Google wants California to take the case long enough to do just that. They have a motion for summary judgment [PDF] filed, asking that the agreement be declared invalid and unenforceable and against public policy in California. Let's pick up the narrative by looking at the various court filings. Because I only have access to most of the Google v. Microsoft filings and only a few of the Microsoft v. Google filings, there could be gaps here or there, but a number of the Microsoft v. Google documents are filed in the Google v. Microsoft case as exhibits, including the Complaint, so we can get a pretty good picture. Google and Dr. Kai-Fu Lee filed their action on July 21. It's Case No. CV-05-03095 RMW. Why not just file an answer to Microsoft's complaint and bring counterclaims? To get it out of Washington and into California, silly. It might not work, but it's certainly worth a try. Dr. Lee, in his Declaration [PDF] in support of their Motion for Summary Judgment, which has the non-competition agreement [PDF] attached as Exhibit A, tells us that it was he who approached Google, asking for a job, and they ultimately offered him one that he officially accepted on July 19. The Declaration says he told his Microsoft boss he quit on July 18, and immediately thereafter, Microsoft served a complaint [PDF] on him, the one filed with the state's Superior Court of the State of Washington. The case is No. 05-2-23561-6 SEA, Microsoft Corporation v. Kai-Fu Lee and Google Inc., for those of you wanting to track it down at the courthouse to get the rest of the filings. Here are documents in the case that you can read without a Pacer account. They don't seem to make filings in general available on their website, however, just the rulings. Microsoft has already begun filing sealed documents, which isn't a shock, because this is a case about secrets and because it's Microsoft, and there's an order [PDF] on how to handle such sealed documents already. They have also demanded redactions from Google, notably a quotation from Bill Gates, something that Google said he said about Dr. Lee. Going to the court is about the only way to get the rest of the court filings for that case, I think, unless I'm just missing them somehow, which is always possible (the declaration by Lucovsky was reportedly just filed on Friday, and so it wouldn't be available on Pacer yet anyway). For that matter, the Google v. Microsoft complaint isn't available either, because it was filed in state court, and when the case was reassigned to US District Court, it wasn't sent over. They only have on Pacer what happened after that point. I guess I should explain that in the US, states often call their lowest courts by high-sounding names like Superior Court or Supreme Court. By that, they mean in contrast to things like city courts, like traffic court, not suggesting in any way that they are the ultimate court. The US Supreme Court is the ultimate. So here, the Superior Court is the first step, the trial court, in the chain of courts that might ultimately hear a case. OK. So Microsoft got the first bite. Why were they in such a hurry? I am only guessing, but I believe it is likely because Google has its offices in California, and that is where Dr. Lee was headed. California has a strong public policy of not allowing non-competition agreements to interfere with a man's employment opportunities. Washington State does not. So, naturally, since Microsoft's position is that the agreement blocks Dr. Lee from working for Google for a year on anything that is remotely the same as what he was doing for them, they'd prefer to avoid California. The Non-Compete Agreement In Microsoft's Motion for Temporary Restraining Order and Order to Show Cause [PDF], they tell us their reasons for concern: Dr. Kai-Fu Lee -- with Google's encouragement -- is blatantly violating his non-competition promises to Microsoft. He is doing so by defecting Microsoft for Google, a direct competitor in markets as to which Dr. Lee holds Microsoft's most sensitive technical and strategic information. The non-compete provisions Microsoft seeks to enforce are narrowly drawn and were agreed to by Dr. Lee as a condition of his return to Redmond as a Microsoft Vice President, a position for which he was paid over a million dollars last year alone. For the past five years, Dr. Lee has held leadership positions with respect to Microsoft's efforts to develop new and improved search engine technologies. Microsoft is engaged in intense competition with Google in the market for these products. By virtue of his leadership roles, Dr. Lee learned Microsoft's most sensitive technical and strategic business secrets about search technologies. Throughout this time he was also deeply involved in Microsoft's efforts to expand its business in China and learned Microsoft's confidential strategic plans regarding that crucial new market. Dr. Lee decided to defect Microsoft for Google in order to lead Google's new China operation developing search technology. This places him in direct competition with Microsoft on two issues -- search engines and China strategy -- where Dr. Lee holds Microsoft's most proprietary, confidential, and competitively sensitive information. This is a clear violation of the non-compete provisions of Dr. Lee's Employment Agreement. Microsoft is therefore compelled to seek a Temporary Restraining Order to prevent the actual and substantial injury that will result if Dr. Lee is allowed to violate his non-competition promises. They call it narrowly drawn for a reason. No court in the world will say a man can't work at all in his chosen field ever again. It's obvious that at a certain level, you really couldn't work anywhere ever again, if an agreement were allowed to be written broadly enough. So Microsoft here is stressing that they aren't asking for more than the law allows. The standard in Washington, according to Microsoft, is this: [A] noncompete agreement will be enforced so long as it is reasonably necessary to protect the employer's business, does not impose on the employee any greater restraint than is reasonably necessary for that protection, and is not contrary to the public interest. Dr. Lee has limited options, given his area of speciality and how few search engine companies there are, so the court has to weigh his interest in staying employed against his former employer's interest in keeping their secrets secret from a competitor. The agreement had confidentiality clauses also, they tell us. That is significant, because there is no time limit on them. He agreed, they claim, to *never* reveal confidential matters or *ever* to solicit Microsoft employees to leave the company for a job elsewhere. The non-compete clause is considerably easier to justify. Clause 9 reads like this: 9. Non-Competition and Non-Solicitation . While employed at Microsoft and for a period of one year thereafter, I will not (a) accept employment or engage in activities competitive with products, services or projects (including actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development) on which I worked or about which I learned confidential or proprietary information or trade secrets while employed at Microsoft; (b) render services to any client or customer of Microsoft for which I performed services during the twelve months prior to leaving Microsoft's employ; (c) induce, attempt to induce, or assist another to induce or attempt to induce any person to terminate his employment with Microsoft or to work for me of for any other person or entity. If during or after my employment with Microsoft I seek work elsewhere, I will provide a copy of this Agreement to any persons or entities by whom I am seeking to be hired before accepting employment with or engagement by them. Personally, I'd just stick to an agreement if I'd signed it, but that's just me. I'd stick to an agreement if I simply *said* I would, let alone signing anything. [UPDATE: I have gotten two more documents from the Microsoft v. Google litigation, and they definitely clarify the situation considerably: Microsoft's Motion for Preliminary Injunction [PDF] Public Version of Google Inc.'s Opposition to Microsoft's Motion for Preliminary Injunction [With Redactions Demanded by Microsoft] [PDF] It turns out that Dr. Kai-Fu Lee and Google unilaterally stipulated that pending trial Dr. Lee will not work on any technical areas listed by Microsoft in its proposed preliminary injunction, but that wasn't enough for Microsoft to drop its motion. According to Google, Microsoft is claiming that they have confidential methods of hiring people and Dr. Lee shouldn't be allowed to do that either, ever. Here's a segment from Google's opposition to Microsoft's Motion for Preliminary Injunction, and you'll note the redaction at the very beginning, apparently demanded by Microsoft: To address Microsoft's purported concerns about Dr. Lee's knowledge of "confidential" Microsoft information, Defendants have stipulated that, pending trial to determine what technical or strategic information Dr. Lee actually worked on or knew, and whether it could be put to competitive use for Google, Dr. Lee will not work or consult in any of the technical areas identified in Microsoft's proposed preliminary injunction. Rather, pending trial, he will open a product development center in China, and staff it with non-Microsoft personnel. But Microsoft wants far more. It interprets its standard non-compete agreement to ban Dr. Lee from doing any work for Google -- or for any other software company -- in China, or anywhere else, that falls within the range of all of Microsoft's business globally. Microsoft brought this preliminary injunction motion not out of concern for any confidential information, which Google and Lee have stipulated to protect, but out of a desire to delay Google's entry into China, and make an example of Dr. Lee for other Microsoft employees who might have the audacity to "defect" from Microsoft. See Microsoft TRO Mtn. at 1. Microsoft has no legal right, contractual or otherwise, to prevent Dr. Lee from utilizing his charismatic, personal qualities and general skills to start up a facility and hire from China's universities, and from companies other than Microsoft. Microsoft's claim that its non-compete covers recruiting is contrary to the terms of the non-compete covenant itself, which applies only to "products, services and projects," such as research, for which Dr. Lee was responsible, and not to the general activities Dr. Lee engaged in as a vice president, such as interviewing prospective executive hires. . . . Microsoft has not identified any confidential recruiting information or relations, and Dr. Lee knows of none, that could be put to competitive use for Google. Every aspect of what Microsoft has alleged is its "confidential" recruiting information and relations -- has been publicly disclosed on Microsoft's website and in public presentations by its management, besides being generally known. II. STATEMENT OF FACTS A. Google hired Dr. Lee to start and staff its product development center in China because of his reputation in China, and with Chinese students, not to obtain Microsoft information Google hired Dr. Lee to help it start up a China development center because of his stature in China, his integrity, his leadership and managerial skills, his technical credentials, and his commitment to and connection with Chinese students. Every Google executive deposed in this case has so testified. . . . Google did not hire Dr. Lee to obtain Microsoft information. Google is admittedly ahead of Microsoft in search technology. . . . B. Dr. Lee's unique personal skills belong to him -- not Microsoft. The unique skills and qualities that make Dr. Lee an ideal recruiter for Google are personal to him -- Microsoft does not own them and cannot prevent Dr. Lee from using them on behalf of Google. As you can see, there have already been depositions. This litigation is moving a lot faster than SCO v. IBM, wouldn't you say? It shows what can be done when your object is actually resolution of the issues and not just delay. This makes it clearer that Google isn't even asking to get out of the noncompete agreement, only to clarify at trial exactly what is covered by it. Personally, I'm very relieved to see that. This also impacts on my analysis, so keep that in mind as you read on. I gave Microsoft too much of the benefit of every doubt, I realize, on reading the newly acquired filings. [End Update.] But there is a line that the law recognizes. If there is, in any contract, parties that are not evenly matched, shall we say, then the law scrutinizes such an agreement more carefully, and the weaker party may not be bound by what can be viewed as overreaching terms. You see the issue come up regularly in pre-nuptial agreements, if the man has more education and money than the wife, particularly if she had no attorney of her own. To give a more extreme example, if a mobster holds a gun to your head and tells you to sign over your business to him or else something might happen to you, the courts aren't going to hold you to your "word". They will figure the "bargain" wasn't fairly entered into because you weren't in a position to negotiate equitable terms, and they won't uphold the deal. Precisely where that line is between a hard bargain between equals and an unconscionable agreement varies from state to state, case to case. But Microsoft makes a reasonable point when it points out that it relied upon Dr. Lee's promises and that it never would have hired him or given him access to confidential information at such a high level without those promises. In any contract, if one side relied on the promises of the other side, it reinforces the validity of the contract, so that is why they are saying that. It's also probably true that without the agreement, they would have kept him from confidential materials, but at a certain point, you can't do your job unless they reveal what you need to function, so it's true only to a point. Microsoft says he sat in on high level meetings regarding plans for China up until May of 2005. Dr. Lee, they tell the court, managed technical teams working on MSN Search technology. At one point he was "even in charge of Microsoft's overall business efforts for MSN Search." The tech he managed includes improvements in "natural language processing" and speech research to improve the ability to search for audio and video files, and "highly confidential new and innovative search technologies using machine learning concepts." He therefore knows the "software architecture, source code, and algorithmic structure for the current MSN search engine" as well as Windows Desktop Search, and he is familiar with Microsoft's strategies for the future to "market and monetize" search products, according to Microsoft. You can almost hear them throwing up at the very thought of Dr. Lee defecting to Google with all that inside his head. (Dear Dr. Lee: Please don't ever donate anything to Linux, okay? We have enough trouble.) An interesting detail is that Microsoft says it has a Google competition "playbook". It's funny to me how all these corporations think in sports terms. It must be a guy thing. Dr. Lee went to a meeting at which top executives were briefed on "The Google Challenge" in March. So he knows precisely how Microsoft plans to compete against Google in the search engine marketplace, Microsoft complains. Both the product line and the geographical market "directly overlap." You can understand this from their standpoint if you think of a worst-case scenario: your competitor secretly sends someone over to you to seek employment. He doesn't say he is from your competition. You hire him and teach him a bucket of stuff, and then he quits and goes back to your competitor with all your information. In the cutthroat business world, which is more like war than sports, except for the actual killing part (one hopes), no doubt someone would try it or has, and that is what non-competition agreements are supposed to prevent. Here, though, Microsoft has one problem. This agreement is worldwide. Usually they are geographically limited, and Microsoft here realizes this could be a problem, so it says that a non-compete can be as broad in scope as the business you're in. Microsoft's business is worldwide. But that is the same as saying that Dr. Lee can't work for anyone anywhere for a year. Well. He can sling hash, I suppose. Microsoft says he can work for any competitor as long as he takes a position that isn't directly competitive. But what would that be at Google? I did hear they are looking for a chef, but that isn't Dr. Lee's field of expertise. With his training and experience, what really can he do for Google that wouldn't compete with some aspect of Microsoft's business interests? Microsoft also argues that there is no public impact on Dr. Lee cooling his heels for a year, but I can think of a public interest, although I doubt the court will view it as anything to shake a stick at: we have an interest in search engines that work well, so innovation in that field is to our benefit. If Dr. Lee were to die, for example, before he gets to build his vision of what a search engine can do, we will be the losers. Well, he wasn't personally threatened with burial, so I guess that is remote. But personally, if Microsoft did "kill" Google, the whole world would be bereft. Dr. Lee's Side of the Story Dr. Lee, in his Declaration, tells us that he moved to California on the 19th, then registered to vote in California, got telephones in his name there, including a new cell phone, got a new driver's license in California, giving up the one he had in Washington State, and is now paying payroll taxes and income taxes to California. No doubt Google expected Microsoft might sue, and we can assume that because Dr. Lee negotiated, as part of his package, that Google would pay his legal bills, should such a lawsuit ensue. Microsoft in its Motion for a temporary restraining order points out that Dr. Lee still has a residence in Washington State. I'm guessing that is just because he hasn't found a buyer yet. All of this is to prove to the court that Dr. Lee is a California resident now, with plans to stay there for the foreseeable future, so that the court will be inclined to accept the case and rule in his favor on the non-compete issue. And that is what their Motion for Summary Judgment is about. They ask the court to rule as a matter of law that the agreement is against public policy, is invalid and unenforceable and shouldn't be upheld. They also say in their complaint that Microsoft's efforts to enforce the agreement violates California law and is an unlawful business practice, illegal restraint of trade. Why Microsoft is suing Google too is a puzzlement to me. Maybe they did it because when you are working very fast, and their lawyers were, you throw in anything you think you might need, so you are covered. But as Google points out in their response [PDF] to Microsoft's Notice of Pendency, they are being sued essentially for offering a man a job, which is not an illegal activity. They are not parties to the agreement in question. Lee's supervisor was Eric Rudder, we learn from Microsoft's Answer and Affirmative Defenses [PDF], filed in answer to Google's California Complaint, and we learn that Dr. Lee submitted his resignation by letter. Microsoft's Motion for the TRO fills in a detail. It seems Dr. Lee told his boss on July 5 that he was considering going to Google. Rudder talked him out of it, urging him to wait and "explore opportunities for a Microsoft position in China." That explains how the lawyers were able to work so fast and serve Dr. Lee immediately after his meeting with Rudder on the 19th, when he handed in his letter of resignation. They were ready for him, just in case, apparently. Several Microsoft executives met with Dr. Lee to try to get him to change his mind. But Microsoft says Google offered Dr. Lee the opportunity to "build and lead its China office 'end to end.'" I've heard that is how Google gets folks on board -- they offer you the opportunity to make your vision, whatever it is, come true. You have to admit, that is irresistible to anyone with a vision. I'm further guessing that Microsoft has templates from earlier defections on hand to work from. If I were Microsoft, with all the money in the world, and lawyers to burn, metaphorically speaking, I'd ask them to prepare and keep up-to-date every possible type of complaint, just in case. Their claim in the Washington lawsuit is that in addition to Dr. Lee being in violation of the agreement, the "conduct of Google and Dr. Lee constitutes threatened misappropriation of trade secrets" and that Google's conduct "constitutes or threatens tortious interference with contractual relations." Constitutes or *theatens*? Well. OK. Call that a placeholder. They want to do discovery, I guess, and naming Google too makes that amply possible. No doubt they want to know exactly how much has been revealed to Google already, they want to prevent any further leaks, and they want it to cost Google an arm and a leg, metaphorically speaking, part of the I'll-blankety-blank-kill-you threat's fulfillment, perhaps. Microsoft's Temporary Restraining Order Microsoft was easily able to get a temporary restraining order [PDF] from the state court. I say it was easy, because the nature of the claim makes it very hard for any court to deny such a request. The bar will be higher, though, when it comes to getting a restraining order lasting until trial. But with so much at stake, I frankly can't see how a court will say no. The reason is that if they don't restrain him, the damage will be done and irreversible. Microsoft will be left without a remedy, even if it wins the case. By the time it goes to trial, the non-compete clause is likely to have run out, so without a restraining order, they could win at trial, but have it be too late to do them any good. Mere money won't make them whole, even if there existed a way to quantify their loss accurately. Dr. Lee would have benefitted from the bargain, they point out, getting the Microsoft job and the salary, but then he flies off without keeping his side of the bargain, so Microsoft gets no benefit at all from the agreement. If they do restrain him until trial, and Google and Dr. Lee prevail, the damage to Dr. Lee is minimal, by comparison. Microsoft had to post a million-dollar security to pay costs and damages in the event that the defendants are found to have been wrongfully enjoined, but you can't put secrets back into secrecy, once they are let free. The damage to Google is real, but they did know about the agreement going in, and they were willing to hire him anyway. If I were the judge, that's how I'd see it, anyhow. But a decision like that isn't an indication of which side the judge thinks has the strongest case. He's balancing the equities, trying to figure out how to keep both sides reasonably whole no matter which way it ultimately goes, since there really is no way to know who is right this early in the game. So, now you know what it means when you hear about forum shopping. That is step number one in major litigation, and no good lawyer would not think about it. Where you file matters. This case shows why. An non-competition clause is the heart of the case. Dr. Lee did sign the document, and now he would like to say clarification of exactly what it covers. He has other arguments too; for example, it is his position that what he will be doing for Google isn't the same as what he did for Microsoft, so the agreement doesn't apply in the situation, and that he can't do anything like the work he did for Microsoft for over a year anyway, since Google has no center built in China yet, but the quickest and easiest solution, from his standpoint, is to get the agreement tossed out, so he can get to work immediately, without worrying about all this. He was hired, he tells us, to help Google open and establish a new research and development center in China. "The exact business plans and focus of this new project research and development center have yet to be fully determined," he says, "It is intended, however, that the new center will develop products to be used throughout the numerous markets that Google serves. I was expected to oversee recruiting and facilities construction in China for the new research and development center beginning in late 2005." Then, he adds, he'll be moving to China for a couple of years on a temporary basis, but retaining his California residence and continuing to pay taxes there. This is to say, in legalese, as I understand it, that the agreement not to compete can't be said to apply to what he'll be doing, because no one even knows yet precisely what he will be doing so making a claim that it is the same as what he promised not to do has to fail, and he can't start doing it until the center is built and running, and that is sure to take a year anyway, and since the non-compete clause is only for a year, this is all a fuss about nothing. That is his argument, but I'm sure Microsoft will view that with a cynical eye and point out that he isn't being hired for his human resources or building construction skills. His resume tells you what he will likely be doing, and he knows too much about Microsoft's secrets; they accuse him of already sending confidential documents to Google, which Google denies. You can read Google's specific explanation of what Dr. Lee sent in their Public Version of Google Inc.'s Opposition to Microsoft's Motion for Preliminary Injunction. It was all public information, they say. The TRO says he can't hire away any of Microsoft's employees either, so that seems to be a real concern of Microsoft's. Google's announcement of his joining the company said that he will serve as President of the company's Chinese operations and that the new center will strengthen Google's search efforts, as well as focusing on "developing new innovative technologies and projects," Microsoft points out, and they flat out say that he was hired to work on search and to do so immediately. That is in direct competition with Microsoft, hence covered by the agreement. He was, they tell us, "one of the main architects of Microsoft's business strategies in China." No doubt that worries them plenty too. And that is an area that is bound to get serious, because of some eternal confidentiality clauses in the agreement. In their Answer, Microsoft denies that their "limited non-competition provision" violates California public policy or is invalid or unenforceable under California law, and Microsoft doesn't think the agreement is governed by California law anyway. It says troubles will be aired out in Washington. They also don't think they are guilty of illegal restraint of trade, which Google has alleged. Dr. Lee was the initial employee of Microsoft Research Asia in China in 1998. It wasn't until he went to work in Redmond, Washington in 2000 that he signed the agreement. This could end up mattering, depending on what he will be doing for Google in China and what he did for Microsoft since 2000. If what Dr. Lee will be doing for Google is similar to what he did for Microsoft in China but not what he did later in Redmond, Microsoft could be up a creek without a paddle. That is the kind of detail that lawyers need and depend on the client to provide, so if you are ever in litigation, be sure to tell your lawyer everything you can think of. Your lawyer will know which detail, like this one, might matter under the law. You might not, so just tell everything, and when you see your attorney's eyes light up, you'll know it matters. From Microsoft's Answer, we also learn that Dr. Lee was on sabbatical from Microsoft as of June of 2005. We learned already that he approached Google in May, and quit in July, so the timing seems, well, pointedly helpful, should a person want to house hunt, let's say, or register to vote in a new state. Microsoft, in a footnote, say that Microsoft's sabbatical policy is that you can't use it to job hunt and then not return. Dr. Lee "confirmed" the policy in writing and orally, they say. Sheesh. Maybe Microsoft should look to its policies. That kind of regimentation must make some yearn to escape the bird cage, I would think. And, as we see, people act like people anyway, so what's the point? UPDATE: In Google's Public Version of Google Inc.'s Opposition to Microsoft's Motion for Preliminary Injunction, they answer this allegation: Microsoft has accused Dr. Lee of breaching a formal, written policy, allegedly set forth in a document he signed, requiring him to return after his sabbatical term ended. Senior Microsoft VP Eric Rudder, who declared to those facts under oath, has now admitted, also under oath, that no such written policy is set forth in the documents signed by Lee. Rudder was Dr. Lee's boss, remember. Are we starting to get a feel for why Dr. Lee was unhappy working for Microsoft? [End update] The agreement, Microsoft points out, provides that it be governed by the laws of the State of Washington and that exclusive venue for any action lies in state or federal court located in King County, Washington. Personally, I wouldn't want to sign any agreement with Microsoft with such a provision. I think we can assume a home court advantage in a state that likely rakes in mucho dinero in taxes and political contributions from Microsoft. Then there is the golf course schmooze factor. California has no stake here, Microsoft argues, on one additional ground: the agreement was entered into in Washington State between two Washington residents. (Here they are using the corporate entity as a "person" residing in that state.) Dr. Lee agreed to the terms of the agreement, and it should stand. Google and Dr. Lee's request for declaratory relief should at least be stayed or the California court should abstain from hearing the case at all, Microsoft asserts, "in favor of the first-filed, ongoing, and more advanced Washington State court action." "More advanced" is a bit of a stretch, when you consider that the two complaints were filed within days of each other in mid-July and their Answer is dated August 11, but a lawyer's job is to advance every possible argument. Microsoft really doesn't want this heard in California, and you can't blame them. I wouldn't either. But their argument is that they got a temporary restraining order already in Washington State, so Google and Dr. Lee can't ask for summary judgment in California, that they are barred by collateral estoppel and/or res judicata. That is a bit of a stretch too, but hey. Microsoft requests that the California complaint be dismissed and that they get their legal fees regarding the matter paid, as per the agreement, which has a clause that loser pays. The Confidentiality Promises By my reading, the non-compete issue is the least of Dr. Lee's worries. That only lasts one year. It's the rest, the confidentiality promises, that last for the rest of his life. It reads in part like this: During my employment and at all times thereafter, I will not disclose to anyone outside MICROSOFT nor use for my purpose other than my work for MICROSOFT: a) any MICROSOFT confidential or proprietary information or trade secrets; or b) any information MICROSOFT has received from others that it is obligated to treat as confidential or proprietary. There's more, but that is enough to give you the flavor. But think about this man's skills and experience. They are suing him in advance of any known violation. Where can he work now, for the rest of his life? Doing what? Whether a court, even in Washington, will uphold such a timeframe in a field as narrow as this seems doubtful to me, and I have to wonder at Microsoft's nerve in even asking an employee to sign such a document. On the other hand, nerve has never been in short supply in Redmond. So you can get the taste of the litigation, without having to lift a finger even to click on a PDF, here is Google's and Dr. Lee's RESPONSE TO MICROSOFT CORPORATION'S NOTICE OF PENDENCY OF OTHER ACTION, as text. ************************* STEPHEN E. TAYLOR (SBN 58452) JAN J. KLOHONATZ (SBN 111718) STACEY L. WEXLER (SBN 184466) [address, phone, fax, emails] Attorneys for Plaintiffs GOOGLE INC. and KAI-FU LEE IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT NORTHERN DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA SAN JOSE DIVISION GOOGLE INC. and KAI-FU LEE, Plaintiffs, v. MICROSOFT CORPORATION, Defendant. __________________________ Case No.: C 05-03095(RMW) GOOGLE INC.'S AND KAI-FU LEE'S RESPONSE TO MICROSOFT CORPORATION'S NOTICE OF PENDENCY OF OTHER ACTION (PURSUANT TO CIVIL L.R. 3-13) Pursuant to Civil Local Rule 3-13(c), plaintiffs Google Inc. ("Google") and Kai-Fu Lee ("Dr. Lee") responds as follows to defendant Microsoft Corporation's ("Microsoft") Notice of Pendency of Other Action. I. RELATIONSHIP OF THE ACTIONS In the case pending before this Court, Google and its employee, Dr. Lee, seek a declaration that the covenant not to compete contained in Dr. Lee's employee agreement with his former employer, Microsoft, is an unlawful restraint of trade, and thus is invalid and unenforceable pursuant to well-established California law and public policy. Google and Dr. Lee filed their complaint in this action in the Superior Court of the State of California for the County of Santa Clara on July 21, 2005. Microsoft thereafter removed the case to this Court on the basis of diversity jurisdiction on July 29, 2005, acknowledging that Dr. Lee is a California citizen. From August 2000 through mid-July 2005, Dr. Lee, a computer scientist, worked for Microsoft in the State of Washington. Prior to that time, Dr. Lee had been employed by two California companies, and from late 1998 until approximately August 2000, by an affiliate of Microsoft in China. Dr. Lee signed the Microsoft employment contract at issue in this lawsuit upon his return to Washington from China in August 2000. The covenant not to compete contained in that agreement provides, in pertinent part, as follows: While employed at Microsoft and for a period of one year thereafter, I will not: (a) accept employment or engage in activities competitive with products, services or projects (including actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development) on which I worked or about which I learned confidential or proprietary information or trade secrets while employed at Microsoft . . . . See Microsoft's Notice of Pendency of Action, Exh. A, at p. 5:1-4. On or about July 5, 2005, while on sabbatical, Dr. Lee informed Microsoft he intended to resign his position at Microsoft and was considering employment with California-based Google. On his last day of employment with Microsoft, July 18, 2005, Microsoft served Dr. Lee with a complaint filed in the Superior Court of the State of Washington for King County. That action is entitled Microsoft Corporation v. Kai-Fu Lee and Google Inc. , Civil Case No. 05-23561-6. The complaint in 1. the Washington action alleges that Dr. Lee violated the terms of his employment agreement with Microsoft by accepting employment with Google, that Dr. Lee's conduct "threatens to disclose" or Dr. Lee "inevitably will disclose" Microsoft's trade secrets to Google, and that Google tortiously interfered with Microsoft's contract with Dr. Lee by offering him a job. See Microsoft's Notice of Pendency of Other Action, Exh. A, at pp. 8:13-10:7. On July 19, 2005, Dr. Lee moved to California to begin his employment at Google. He is a citizen of the United States and is currently living in California. While he is expected to spend time in China as part of his job responsibilities for Google, traveling to and from California during the course of his overseas assignment, Dr. Lee will at the same time report to and remain in ongoing contact with senior management and other employees with whom he will be working at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California. Dr. Lee intends to maintain permanent residency in California while he is on overseas assignment in China. Dr. Lee's employment agreement with Google provides that he is not to disclose any confidential or trade secret information of his former employer to Google. II. FURTHER PROCEEDINGS Microsoft contends that the Court should dismiss this action or stay the proceedings pending the outcome of the Washington state court action. The Washington action is currently scheduled for trial on January 9, 2006, with a preliminary injunction hearing set for September 6, 2005. The Washington state court entered a Temporary Restraining Order against Google and Dr. Lee on July 28, 2005. . . . According to Microsoft, this Court should defer to the Washington state court to "avoid conflicting judgments." Contrary to Microsoft's request, the California Supreme Court has held in similar circumstances that parallel proceedings in different courts should go forward. See Medtronic, Inc. v. Advanced Bionics Corp. , 29 Cal. 4th 697 (2002). In Medtronic , the Supreme Court reversed an antisuit injunction that prohibited the parties from litigating the enforceabilty of the same non-compete provision in Minnesota, while a parallel California action was allowed to proceed. Although the Supreme Court did not prohibit the litigants from continuing Minnesota case, the Court found that the pendency of the Minnesota action did not divest California of jurisdiction. See id. at 708. 2. This California-based action similarly must be allowed to proceed independently to promote fundamental public policy in California. Since 1872, with the enactment of the predecessor statute to Business and Professions Code section 16600 ("Section 16600"), California has had a well-established public policy of ensuring free movement of employees unencumbered by post-employment restrictions. Section 16600 provides, in pertinent part, that "every contract by which anyone is restrained from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business of any kind is to that extent void." California's public policy in favor of competition and "freedom of movement of persons whom California-based employers . . . wish to employ," and against contracts in restraint of trade, is deeply rooted. See Application Group, Inc. v. Hunter Group, Inc. , 61 Cal. App. 4th 881, 900-01 (1998). California's policy is intended to ensure that its employers remain competitive, and has been held by California courts to outweigh the interest that out-of-state employers may have in enforcing anti-competitive covenants -- even covenants allowed under the laws of other states. See id. "[T]he interests of the employee in his own mobility and betterment are deemed paramount to the competitive business interests of the [former] employer. . . ." Id . at 900 (quoting Diodes, Inc. v. Franzen , 260 Cal. App. 2d 244, 255 (1968)). California steadfastly adheres to its fundamental public policy, notwithstanding that other states hold a differing view. See Hill Med. Corp. v. Wycoff , 86 Cal App. 4th 895, 900-01 (2001). 3. Google and Dr. Lee submit that this action thus must proceed to resolve the present case under the law of California. This Court's ruling on the pure question of law that Google and Dr. Lee present in their declaratory relief action need not await the outcome of the lengthy and fact-based proceedings mandated by Washington law regarding the enforceability of covenants not to compete. Put simply, Google's principal place of business is in California and Dr. Lee is a California resident. This Court is uniquely situated to determine as expeditiously as possible the rights of the parties under California law. Respectfully submitted, TAYLOR & COMPANY LAW OFFICES, INC. Dated: August 15, 2005 By:___[signature]___ Stephen E. Taylor Attorneys for Plaintiffs GOOGLE INC. and KAI-FU LEE 4.

Hi-tech no panacea for ID theft woes

Attempts to thwart identity theft and fraud through technology advances are likely to prove counterproductive, a British academic warns. Dr Emily Finch, of the University of East Anglia, said the introduction of Chip and PIN on credit cards and UK government plans to introduce identity card schemes will only encourage crooks to become more imaginative. She said there was no substitute for individual vigilance. "There is a worrying assumption that advances in technology will provide the solution to identity theft whereas it is possible that they may actually aggravate the problem," Finch told the British Association science conference, Reuters reports. Finch (something of the Clarice Starling of the Fens, it would seem) bases her warning on her interviews with convicted fraudsters on the likely impact of technology advances on criminal behaviour. "Studying the way that individuals disclose sensitive information would be far more valuable in preventing identity fraud than the evolution of technologically advanced but ultimately fallible measures to prevent misuse of personal information after it has been obtained," she added. The conclusions Finch reaches parallel those of some security experts who warn government attempts to sell identity cards as a means to combat ID theft are misguided. These and other objections to the UK government's ID card plans were outlined in a London School of Economics' study involving more than 100 academics published in March. ®

Northern Command isn’t happy

Northern Command isn’t happy Because Northern Command oversees all active-duty military operations inside the United States, it’s also responsible for organizing the relief operations on the Gulf Coast. There are early indications, however, that NorthCom officials aren’t entirely pleased with the orders they’ve received of late from the president. There’s an interesting BBC World News report (brought to my attention by my friend Darrell) in which NorthCom Lt. Commander Sean Kelly explained the military’s efforts which, in addition to military support, include distribution of medical supplies, search and rescue operations, distributing food and water, and meeting transportation needs. (Note: the server hosting the video seems to be overwhelmed. This is a direct .mpg link, which is also slow right now, but keep trying.) When the BBC noted the criticism of the government’s slow response, Lt. Commander Kelly explained that NorthCom was ready to go well in advance of Katrina making landfall, but suggested the president didn’t make the right call at the right time. “Northcom started planning before the storm even hit. We were ready when it hit Florida, because, as you remember, it hit the bottom part of Florida, and then we were planning once it was pointed towards the Gulf Coast. “So, what we did, we activated what we call ‘defense coordinating officers’ to work with the states to say, ‘OK, what do you think you will need?’ And we set up staging bases that could be started. “We had the USS Bataan sailing almost behind the hurricane so once the hurricane made landfall, its search and rescue helicopters could be available almost immediately So, we had things ready. “The only caveat is: we have to wait until the president authorizes us to do so. The laws of the United States say that the military can’t just act in this fashion; we have to wait for the president to give us permission.” Apparently, that permission could have been given right away, but it wasn’t. Bush was on vacation, sharing some cake with John McCain, and pretending to play some guitar. This seems like it could be a fairly big deal. There’s been some frustration on the part of military officials about bureaucracy and FEMA’s ineffectiveness, but Kelly’s remarks to the BCC sounded like a fairly direct challenge to the president’s leadership — they wanted to leap into action, but the White House never made the call. Considering that there are already questions about who was in charge last week, can someone please ask the White House who first gave the order to NorthCom and when? Update: If you have trouble with the link to the BBC video, here’s a direct link. Second Update: Lt. Commander Kelly emailed Kevin Drum to shed some additional light on the subject: USNORTHCOM was prepositioned for response to the hurricane, but as per the National Response Plan, we support the lead federal agency in disaster relief — in this case, FEMA. The simple description of the process is the state requests federal assistance from FEMA which in turn may request assistance from the military upon approval by the president or Secretary of Defense. Having worked the hurricanes from last year as well as Dennis this year, we knew that FEMA would make requests of the military — primarily in the areas of transportation, communications, logistics, and medicine. Thus we began staging such assets and waited for the storm to hit. The biggest hurdles to responding to the storm were the storm itself — couldn’t begin really helping until it passed — and damage assessment — figuring out which roads were passable, where communications and power were out, etc. Military helos began damage assessment and SAR on Tuesday. Thus we had permission to operate as soon as it was possible. We even brought in night SAR helos to continue the mission on Tuesday night. The President and Secretary of Defense did authorize us to act right away and are not to blame on this end. Yes, we have to wait for authorization, but it was given in a timely manner. That’s good to hear, but it strikes a different tone than what Kelly told the BBC. If the authorization was timely, and was given when it should have been, then the process worked far better than the BBC report suggested.

Opinion | Killed by Contempt

Correction Appended Each day since Katrina brings more evidence of the lethal ineptitude of federal officials. I'm not letting state and local officials off the hook, but federal officials had access to resources that could have made all the difference, but were never mobilized. Here's one of many examples: The Chicago Tribune reports that the U.S.S. Bataan, equipped with six operating rooms, hundreds of hospital beds and the ability to produce 100,000 gallons of fresh water a day, has been sitting off the Gulf Coast since last Monday -- without patients. Experts say that the first 72 hours after a natural disaster are the crucial window during which prompt action can save many lives. Yet action after Katrina was anything but prompt. Newsweek reports that a "strange paralysis" set in among Bush administration officials, who debated lines of authority while thousands died. What caused that paralysis? President Bush certainly failed his test. After 9/11, all the country really needed from him was a speech. This time it needed action -- and he didn't deliver.

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New Orleans's Hurricane Evacuation "Plan"

Jeebus H. Christ!! In storm, N.O. wants no one left behind; Number of people without cars makes evacuation difficult By Bruce Nolan, Staff writer, New Orleans Times-Picayne, July 24, 2005: City, state and federal emergency officials are preparing to give the poorest of New Orleans' poor a historically blunt message: In the event of a major hurricane, you're on your own. In scripted appearances being recorded now, officials such as Mayor Ray Nagin, local Red Cross Executive Director Kay Wilkins and City Council President Oliver Thomas drive home the word that the city does not have the resources to move out of harm's way an estimated 134,000 people without transportation. In the video, made by the anti-poverty agency Total Community Action, they urge those people to make arrangements now by finding their own ways to leave the city in the event of an evacuation. "You're responsible for your safety, and you should be responsible for the person next to you," Wilkins said in an interview. "If you have some room to get that person out of town, the Red Cross will have a space for that person outside the area. We can help you. "But we don't have the transportation." Officials are recording the evacuation message even as recent research by the University of New Orleans indicated that as many as 60 percent of the residents of most southeast Louisiana parishes would remain in their homes in the event of a Category 3 hurricane. Their message will be distributed on hundreds of DVDs across the city. The DVDs' basic get-out-of-town message applies to all audiences, but the it is especially targeted to scores of churches and other groups heavily concentrated in Central City and other vulnerable, low-income neighborhoods, said the Rev. Marshall Truehill, head of Total Community Action. "The primary message is that eachperson is primarilyresponsibleforthemselves, for their own family and friends," Truehill said. In addition to the plea from Nagin, Thomas and Wilkins, video exhortations to make evacuation plans come from representatives of State Police and the National Weather Service, and from local officials such as Sen. Ann Duplessis, D-New Orleans, and State Rep. Arthur Morrell, D-New Orleans, said Allan Katz, whose advertising company is coordinating officials' scripts and doing the recording. The speakers explain what to bring and what to leave behind. They advise viewers to bring personal medicines and critical legal documents, and tell them how to create a family communication plan. Even a representative of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals weighs in with a message on how to make the best arrangements for pets left behind. Production likely will continue through August. Officials want to get the DVDs into the hands of pastors and community leaders as hurricane season reaches its height in September, Katz said. Believing that the low-lying city is too dangerous a place to shelter refugees, the Red Cross positioned its storm shelters on higher ground north of Interstate 10 several years ago. It dropped plans to care for storm victims in schools or other institutions in town. Truehill, Wilkins and others said emergency preparedness officials still plan to deploy some Regional Transit Authority buses, school buses and perhaps even Amtrak trains to move some people before a storm. An RTA emergency plan dedicates 64 buses and 10 lift vans to move people somewhere; whether that means out of town or to local shelters of last resort would depend on emergency planners' decision at that moment, RTA spokeswoman Rosalind Cook said. But even the larger buses hold only about 60 people each, a rescue capacity that is dwarfed by the unmet need. In an interview at the opening of this year's hurricane season, New Orleans Emergency Preparedness Director Joseph Matthews acknowledged that the city is overmatched. "It's important to emphasize that we just don't have the resources to take everybody out," he said in a interview in late May. In the absence of public transportation resources, Total Community Action and the Red Cross have been developing a private initiative called Operation Brother's Keeper that, fully formed, would enlist churches in a vast, decentralized effort to make space for the poor and the infirm in church members' cars when they evacuate. However, the program is only in the first year of a three-year experiment and involves only four local churches so far. The Red Cross and Total Community Action are trying to invent a program that would show churches how to inventory their members, match those with space in their cars with those needing a ride, and put all the information in a useful framework, Wilkins said. But the complexities so far are daunting, she said. The inventories go only at the pace of the volunteers doing them. Where churches recruit partner churches out of the storm area to shelter them, volunteers in both places need to be trained in running shelters, she said. People also have to think carefully about what makes good evacuation matches. Wilkins said that when ride arrangements are made, the volunteers must be sure to tell their passengers where their planned destination is if they are evacuated. Moreover, although the Archdiocese of New Orleans has endorsed the project in principle, it doesn't want its 142 parishes to participate until insurance problems have been solved with new legislation that reduces liability risks, Wilkins said. At the end of three years, organizers of Operation Brother's Keeper hope to have trained 90 congregations how to develop evacuation plans for their own members. Meanwhile, some churches appear to have moved on their own to create evacuation plans that assist members without cars. Since the Hurricane Ivan evacuation of 2004, Mormon churches have begun matching members who have empty seats in cars with those needing seats, said Scott Conlin, president of the church's local stake. Eleven local congregations of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints share a common evacuation plan, and many church members have three-day emergency kits packed and ready to go, he said. Mormon churches in Jackson, Miss., Hattiesburg, Miss., and Alexandria, La., have arranged to receive evacuees. The denomination also maintains a toll-free telephone number that functions as a central information drop, where members on the road can leave information about their whereabouts that church leaders can pick up and relay as necessary, Conlin said. Bruce Nolan can be reached at bnolan@timespicayune.com

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Game's over for these software innovators

It's all fun and games, till somebody loses a lawsuit. That's what has happened to the creators of a piece of gaming software called BnetD, and their defeat suggests hard times ahead for well-meaning technology innovators who go too far. (Full article: 923 words) This article is available in our archives: Globe Subscribers FREE for subscribers Subscribers to the Boston Globe get unlimited access to our archives. Not a subscriber? Non-Subscribers Purchase an electronic copy of the full article. Learn More $9.95 1 month archives pass 1 month archives pass $24.95 3 months archives pass 3 months archives pass $74.95 1 year archives pass

US cops swoop on Star Wars stormtrooper

Forget Jedi Knights and distant, computer-generated worlds - the new frontline in the battle against the Empire is Wisconsin, where fearless law enforcement operatives have been purging the streets of shifty-looking Galactic Stormtroopers bearing laser rifles. Yup, the good burghers of Janesville can tonight sleep sounder in their beds after locals alerted officers to a possible armed robbery at the Ramada Inn. The suspected armed perp was kitted out in full stormtrooper uniform and, as Sergeant Kay Nikolaus of the Janesville Police Department put it: "Apparently some people who saw him felt there was a threat." What they hadn't seen, however, was the marquee outside the Ramada Hotel which carried a banner announcing the JVL-CON science fiction convention - a bit of a give-away. Event organiser Joann Lewandowski told the Janesville Gazette : "It was kind of silly but kind of understandable." Officers duly advised the stormtrooper to "leave the plastic laser gun inside". Reports that they later busted Darth Vader for acting suspiciously with a light sabre in a local convenience store are unconfirmed. ®

Why does the US need our money?

WHO, WHAT, WHY? The Magazine answers... Adverts are in British newspapers asking for cash donations The world's only superpower has been forced to turn to aid agencies to speed up the humanitarian effort in the wake of Katrina. Seemingly unable to draw on its wealth at short notice to immediately respond to the disaster, charities in other countries, such as the British Red Cross, are now launching appeals to raise money. In addition half a million military ration packs worth an estimated £3m have been flown out from the UK and more are expected to follow. The public in many countries are accustomed to providing aid to poverty stricken developing nations, but the need to provide assistance to the most opulent country in the world may leave many perplexed. Sympathy It is not a position the US is used to being in either. President George W Bush seemed to initially dismiss suggestions of receiving foreign assistance. WHO, WHAT, WHY? A new feature to the BBC News Magazine - aiming to answer some of the questions behind the headlines Ask a question Later, US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, said "no offers of assistance will be refused''. The gross national income of the US is $37,870 per capita, according to the World Bank. It is just $810 for tsunami-hit Indonesia and $200 for poverty-stricken Niger. And, national wealth aside, Americans have a strong track record of generosity concerning disasters on their own soil. They gave $2bn following the 11 September attacks. 'Unprecedented' The British Red Cross says the appeal is about getting money quickly to speed up the aid effort, but admits it does raise questions about measures the US Government has in place to deal with large-scale domestic disasters. There are broader political questions about the response of the richest country in the world to such a disaster on its own soil Red Cross "But there are broader political questions about the response of the richest country in the world to such a disaster on its own soil. Hopefully they will be addressed in the fullness of time and lessons will be learned." No country has enough rations to deal with such an immediate need and so an appeal for outside help is inevitable, say experts. The Ministry of Defence's director of logistics operations, Brigadier Chris Steirn, who co-ordinates the distribution of all military supplies, says: "You don't have billions of rations stacked up in one place and so they are quite often traded between nations." The American Red Cross has mobilised its biggest-ever aid effort Cathy Pharoah, a researcher at the Charities Aid Foundation, points out that it is difficult to predict how people will react because such devastation in such an affluent country is unprecedented in recent times. But she believes harrowing images depicting "human suffering" in the media will loosen British purse strings. "People wanted to see that the government of a highly developed western country were putting the money in, but when human need stories begin to emerge, people will respond." Credit card donations can be made to the Hurricane Katrina Appeal by calling 08450 53 53 53, by going to www.redcross.org.uk/katrina, or by sending cheques to Hurricane Katrina Appeal, British Red Cross, Freepost LON18968, Sheffield, S98 1ZA. Donations in US dollars can be made directly to the American Red Cross at www.redcross.org This may be the richest Country, but the poor exist here. If any light can be found from this tragedy, it is that the faces of the poor are being seen. The Country we live in has been concerned about bending over for business, in return the poor are lost. Those who will recover have the resources, those who won't, need the help. Indra Rose, Los Angeles USA I will not be giving to this appeal. The United States is the richest country in the history of the modern world. They should be diverting their wealth into domestic social care programs not into imposing their economic will on the rest of the world. Maybe this will be the wake up call that the people of the US need. Alan, Herefordshire As a British citizen who has lived in the US for over 20 years and as someone who has witnessed the outpouring of help and aid, both financial and material, that this country has always given to those in need whereever they are. I am disgusted and appalled that reciprocal aid to us would even be questioned. Unless you are here in the US you cannot begin to comprehend the enormity of this disaster. The American public has already donated millions and millions of dollars as well as their time, their homes and their cities to the refugees. Dee Branigan, Cumming, Georgia, USA Of cause people gladley gave after the tsunami, that is understadable. But surely there are enough people in USA that can charitable donations. Should the US government not spend it's own money helping these people? Even if it ment selling gold reserves. To ask other nations for help, and then retaining wealth makes my skin crawl. What % of the American defense budget is needed for aid I ask? gareth bruce, warwick I can understand that aid agencies, such as the British Red Cross, can provide the physical help in terms of food parcels and staff on the ground. But why does this need to be paid for via charitable donations? Surely the US Government can transfer money to these agencies easily enough, rather than it needing to be raised by charitable donations. James Wilson, London, UK Your article raises a good question. Although the U.S. may be the wealthiest nation, we have been shown to be the least organized and least prepared. It is a shame and a sin that the aftermath of Katrina was so harshly felt by so many who were otherwise powerless in its wake. We are furious that our government has been so unresponsive to the needs of its citizens. Thank you to those around the world that helped, we needed it but shouldn't have. Linda Thornton, Sierra Madre, CA, USA A quick staw poll of people in my office shows up a feeling of disgust that the US can't free up enough funds. I don't think anyone here is planning on giving... Brian Cooper, London, UK They don't need our aid. If they don't put their full backing to G8, how should they expect us to help? Although, we should help our 'across the pond' cousins need our help in this crisis. We would do the same...maybe they will give more generously next time. Tyron, Kent I agree that no one country can have in place all the necessary food packs, bedding, water, medicines etc. at one time and that international aid is necessary - and recriprocal Jenny Bradbury, Canterbury, Kent, U.K. I think the fact that america is accepting aid from other poorer countries is very wrong & proves that the US & other developed countries i.e the UK use & abuse charity appeals i believe that the money donated to america will only be used to soften the blow as they have enough $$ to sort this mess out Bush just doesn't want to spend that money! I for one will not be donating Luke, England West sussex Southwater I think the immediate need is to help the poor people. Donating to the Red Cross is helping the poor people. The median income in the US may be high, but the people in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama do not necessarily share in this wealth. Pat Barsalou, Sault Ste Marie, ON Canada Yes we should help. The area devastated is the size of the UK, no government could possibly help all of those people without aid, regardless of being a superpower or not! Andy, Wales Your article makes it sound as if all of us are well off when in fact due to our cost of living a large portion of us are just getting by. We have a large number on assistance as well. Do not compare our supposed income with third world nations - due to the imbalance of the cost of living. You sound shocked that we need your (the world) help. When any other country has had a problem we have been there. Our resources are stretched a bit thin now, so we ask for your help. Think of it as a parent who has always been there for you and now needs your help to get by. Americans have been very generous in the past in time of need, even when we did not have much, we still gave. To not return the favor would be bad manners as well as the next time you need help we might be able to be there for you. We remember those who help us and those who do not. Samantha, NYC, NY USA This is a disgrace. I am shocked by what happened to the people of New Orleans and surrounding area but To give to a country that obviously went to war for other motives and spent millions on this. A country that is the richest in the world and has the most resources. I will not be helping - Considering the country is reluctant to help the truly needy countries eradicate poverty. Trevor Kingdon, Forest of Dean The US has shown amazing generosity in the past both in humanitarian and military help. It is really rather pathetic that some people seem to almost be rejocing at the fact the US needs help not withstanding the fact that any other country in the world would be far less capable of dealing with a disaster of this scale. We should remember the help offered by the US over the last century and dig deep now. steve, manchester I don't think this is an unreasonable request to make. As for "woulda" shoulda" coulda" - don't worry, we as Americans will be the first to question our country's slow response to this catastrophe. Hannah Henry, Little Rock, Arkansas USA Some people are confusing International and Domestic Aid agencies with the US Government. The US Government has not asked for any help, while also stating that no offer will be refused. The Red Cross and Salvation Army are asking EVERYONE for donations so that they can provide immediate food and shelter to the people affected by this tragedy. Don't let your hatred of the current administration blind you to the plight of your fellow man. Richard Gantes, Yuba City, California, US Seeing these comments I'm outraged at the reason people deciding not to give donations to this horrendous tragedy. When you deal with natural disasters politics should be set aside. The U.S. even sent aid to the victims of the earthquake in Iran in 2003. Venezuela and Cuba have offered help, and the U.S. are not in best terms with either country. LEAVE POLITICS ASIDE, AND HELP THESE VICTIMS!! Jerome Melgar, Farmersville, CA, U.S Everyone always asks of the US for help. I find it amazing people find it a disgrace that the US are receiving aid. Surely, "treat people how you expect to be treated" still applies ? It's plain manners and humility. Vincent, Nottingham Thank you for your comments - this debate is now closed.

Hiring a President

Hiring a President Skills for the Job There are many books on leadership; one I like is Warren Bennis' On Becoming a Leader. Bennis cites four competencies that a leader must have: "Engage others by creating shared meaning" "Have a distinctive voice" "Integrity" "The one competence that I now realize is absolutely essential for leaders -- the key competence -- is adaptive capacity" For (1) and (2), you can make up your own mind; to get this far, both candidates have shown an ability to connect with their supporters. For (3), I believe both candidates are motivated by public service, have a deep desire to do the right thing, and are driven by ethical and religous convictions. Kerry is a long-time regular church-goer. Bush is not, but makes a point of his born-again conversion. (I should note that other critics are less charitable; many Democrats and Republicans believe that the other party's candidate lacks integrity, and many Greens and Libertarians think they're both bums.) The big difference between the two candidates, frankly, is that Kerry is trying to view the world as it is, and to choose the best action based on reality. Bush's campaign is centered around denying reality and choosing actions despite reality. In other words, Bush does poorly on the integrity test because he deliberately misleads the American people, and he scores lower on adaptive capacity than anyone I've ever witnessed. You might think that each candidate would be clamoring to show how adaptive he is. In fact, the opposite is true -- Bush highlights his "resolve", while Kerry combats charges that he "waffles". It was only in the first debate that Kerry raised the obvious point that "you can be certain and be wrong." Bush, it seems, prefers to be certain, because he can not believe he could be wrong. This is the opposite of adaptive capacity, and it is a dangerous thing to have in a leader at any level, but especially in the president. A 10/17/04 NY Times article by Ron Suskind quotes Republican policy advisor Bruce Bartlett says that Bush "dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts" because "He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence." In a CNN interview, Bush supporter Pat Robertson described his meeting with Bush on the eve of the Iraq war: "I warned him about the war. I had deep misgivings about this war, deep misgivings. And I was trying to say, `Mr. President, you had better prepare the American people for casualties.'" Robertson said that Bush told him "Oh no, we're not going to have any casualties." Similarly (according to the Suskind article), Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) warned Bush about growing problems of winning the peace a few months before the war, but Bush was unconcerned. Biden finally said "How can you be so sure when you don't know the facts?" and Bush replied "My instincts." Suskind describes a White House senior advisor explaining all this by pointing out that relying on facts and an analysis of the world is for the "reality-based community", which the president has gone beyond. He is part of a new reality-creating community: if he doesn't like the facts, he can ignore them, change them, or create a new reality. This is an astonishing way to do politics, but a disasterous approach to leading the world. I have to say that I started out with higher hopes for Bush's adaptive capacity. One of his first major decisions was on stem cell research. I initially applauded his decision, which seemed like a reasonable compromise. Over time, however, we learned from Christopher Reeve, Ron and Nancy Reagan, and a majority of scientists that it was in fact a highly-restrictive decision. And it was one of the last times we saw a compromise from Bush. Not that compromises are always the best solution of course, but the problem with Bush is that he doesn't consider the facts long enough to arrive at a good solution. Bush has enjoyed good success with his strategy of ignoring reality -- at least with his supporters. On a wide variety of issues, his supporters hold incorrect views, either because they believe what Bush has told them, or because they would have to give up their support for Bush if they didn't believe them. A report by the Program on International Policy at the Univ. of Maryland polled Bush and Kerry supporters on the following issues; percentage of support for each statement is shown for Bush and Kerry supporters: Bush Kerry Statement Fact 72% 26% Iraq had WMD before the war False (Duelfer report) 75% 30% Iraq provided substantial support to al Qaeda pre-9/11 False (9/11 commission) 63% 15% Clear evidence for Iraq WMD was found False (no evidence) 58% 92% War would have been wrong if Iraq had no WMD, was not supporting al Qaeda Matter of opinion 61% 17% Bush would not have gone to war under those circumstances Matter of opinion; probably false 31% 74% Majority of world opposes US war in Iraq 38 of 38 countries oppose the war (Gallup poll) 9% 69% Majority of world favors Kerry victory 30 of 35 countries favor Kerry (GlobeScan/PIPA poll) 51% 21% Islamic world favors US-led efforts to fight terrorism 11 of 13 countries oppose US efforts (people-press.org) This shows that Bush supporters are extremely ill-informed, or that Bush has successfully mislead them on these issues. The PIPA study goes on to see how accurately supporters view their candidate on policy issues. Here we show the percentage of Bush or Kerry supporters who think their candidate holds each viewpoint: Bush Kerry Viewpoint Fact 69% 77% Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Bush no; Kerry yes 72% 79% Treaty banning land mines Bush no; Kerry yes 51% 74% Kyoto treaty on climate Bush no; Kerry yes 53% 65% US in Intenational Criminal Court Bush no; Kerry yes 74% 81% Favor labor and environmental standards in trade Bush no; Kerry yes In each case, Bush supporters tend to agree with Kerry's viewpoint (numbers not shown here) but falsely believe that Bush agrees with them. In each case Kerry supporters are accurate in assessing Kerry. Bush is in a difficult position. If he admits his mistakes, he stands no chance of re-election. His only hope is to deny reality and hope his supporters don't notice. So far his strategy has kept the race very close, although he still has less than a 50% approval rating. But the strategy of ignoring reality doesn't make reality go away. On 10/26/04 we see reports from the Iraqi interim government that "major neglect" by the US military has led to the assassination of 49 Iraqi army recruits. Earlier, on 10/25/04, we saw that 380 tons of high explosives are missing, again due to neglect. Expert Reports The most surprising endorsement to me was the American Conservative magazine's endorsement of Kerry. It is old news when left-wing extremists claim that Bush is a far-right radical, but here one of the leading Conservative magazines is saying that Kerry is closer to traditional conservative ideals than Bush is, stating that "Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is supposed to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations." and that "few have paid attention to how much the Bush presidency has degraded the image of the United States in the world. Of course there has always been anti-Americanism. ... But Bush has somehow managed to take all these sentiments and turbo-charge them. ... The poll numbers are shocking. In countries like Norway, Germany, France, and Spain, Bush is liked by about seven percent of the populace. In Egypt, recipient of huge piles of American aid in the past two decades, some 98 percent have an unfavorable view of the United States. It's the same throughout the Middle East." The American Conservative goes on to say "The hatred Bush has generated has helped immeasurably those trying to recruit anti-American terroristbsindeed his policies are the gift to terrorism that keeps on giving, as the sons and brothers of slain Iraqis think how they may eventually take their own revenge. Only the seriously deluded could fail to see that a policy so central to America's survival as a free country as getting hold of loose nuclear materials and controlling nuclear proliferation requires the willingness of foreign countries to provide full, 100 percent co-operation. Making yourself into the world's most hated country is not an obvious way to secure that help." and concludes that " George W. Bush has come to embody a politics that is antithetical to almost any kind of thoughtful conservatism." The conservative Financial Times also endorsed Kerry, saying "Mr Bush's flaw is his stubborn reluctance to admit mistakes and to adjust personnel and policy." There are many other endorsements and criticisms. For example, 48 Nobel Laureates Endorse John Kerry because "Unlike previous administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, the Bush administration has ignored unbiased scientific advice in the policy-making that is so important to our collective welfare." Again, this points out that Bush lacks adaptive capacity, and is uninterested in considering facts. Nobel Economist George Akerlof has called the Bush administration "the worst ever". Then there are the books: An anonymous former CIA member's Imperial Hubris shows how Bush is losing the war on terror. Nixon staffer John Dean's Worse than Watergate claims that the secrecy with which Bush and Dick Cheney govern is not merely a preferred system of management but an obsessive strategy meant to conceal a deeply troubling agenda of corporate favoritism and a dramatic growth in unchecked power for the executive branch that put at risk the lives of American citizens, civil liberties, and the Constitution. Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty chronicles former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill 's dealing with the Bush administration. O'Neill finds a world out of kilter, in which the president is an uncurious puppet of larger forces. O'Neill asserts that Saddam Hussein was targeted for removal as soon as Bush took office. Five-term presidential advisor Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies points out that Bush ignored the challenge of terrorism before 9/11, and is still not doing what is necessary to make America safe. Clarke is one of the most knowledgeable people in the world on the subject and was the nation's crisis manager on 9/11. Perhaps most important of all are the comments by military leaders: Colin Powell says in a Newsweek article (11/1/04) that the insurgents are winning in Iraq. says in a Newsweek article (11/1/04) that the insurgents are winning in Iraq. Former president George H. W. Bush wrote in his book A World Transformed that stopping the first Gulf War short of Baghdad was the right decision because ". We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under the circumstances, there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically differentb and perhaps barrenb outcome." wrote in his book that stopping the first Gulf War short of Baghdad was the right decision because ". We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under the circumstances, there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically differentb and perhaps barrenb outcome." Former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki was forced into retirement when he called for "several hundred thousand" troops, contradicting Rumsfield's lowball number. was forced into retirement when he called for "several hundred thousand" troops, contradicting Rumsfield's lowball number. Gen. Tony McPeak , Air Force chief of staff in the first Gulf War, calls Bush's term "a national disaster". , Air Force chief of staff in the first Gulf War, calls Bush's term "a national disaster". Gen. Anthony Zinni said "the former commander of the U.S. Central Command. "Anyone could know the problems they were going to see. How could they not?". said "the former commander of the U.S. Central Command. "Anyone could know the problems they were going to see. How could they not?". Former U.S. Administrator in Iraq Paul Bremer said that the Bush administration never had enough troops on the ground. said that the Bush administration never had enough troops on the ground. A NY Times series of articles by Michael Gordon details many of the errors in planning and execution. One of the pieces points out that the Jan. 2003 report by the National Intelligence Council prepared a 38-page assessment of post-war Iraq and mentions the risk of an insurgency only in the last paragraph. This seems to be an indication of a systemic failure of imagination -- to me it goes right to the top. Reporter Judd Legum, in The Nation lists 100 facts that point out major mistakes by the Bush administration. lists 100 facts that point out major mistakes by the Bush administration. 60 Minutes (10/31/04) reported that the US forces in Iraq are improperly armored; "the humvees don't have armor because the DOD did not plan for a long war in Iraq." The astounding thing is how well Bush's "reality-creating" approach has stood up to this criticism. With any president in my lifetime (with the possible exception of Reagan), any one of these thoughtful criticisms would be enough to cause serious questioning of the president's competency. But Bush seems to be skilled at deflecting the criticism by pretending it doesn't exist. On the other side, the Republicans can point to Democrat Zell Miller as a Bush supporter. The Swift Boat Veterans claim Kerry is Unfit for Command, and they should have their say, but it now seems clear that they are not providing first-hand knowledge of Kerry. Conclusion

Workplace Prof Blog

Thursday, September 1, 2005 The Intergenerational Effect of Worker Displacement by Philip Oreopoulos, Marianne Page, Ann Huff Stevens Abstract: This paper uses variation induced by firm closures to explore the intergenerational effects of worker displacement. Using a Canadian panel of administrative data that follows almost 60,000 father-child pairs from 1978 to 1999 and includes detailed information about the firms at which the father worked, we construct narrow treatment and control groups whose fathers had the same level of permanent income prior to 1982 when some of the fathers were displaced. We demonstrate that job loss leads to large permanent reductions in family income. Comparing outcomes among individuals whose fathers experienced an employment shock to outcomes among individuals whose fathers did not, we find that children whose fathers were displaced have annual earnings about 9% lower than similar children whose fathers did not experience an employment shock. They are also more likely to receive unemployment insurance and social assistance. The estimates are driven by the experiences of children whose family income was at the bottom of the income distribution, and are robust to a number of specification checks. https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/laborprof_blog/2005/09/nber_report_on_.html

Complexity and Intelligent Design

Sept. 4, 2005 — -- The theory of intelligent design, the purportedly more scientific descendant of creation science, rejects Darwin's theory of evolution as being unable to explain the complexity of life. How, ask supporters of intelligent design, can biological phenomena like the clotting of blood have arisen just by chance? A key supporter of intelligent design likens what he terms the "irreducible complexity" of such phenomena to the irreducible complexity of a mousetrap. If just one of the trap's pieces is missing -- whether it be the spring, the metal platform, or the board -- the trap is useless. The implicit suggestion is that all the parts of a mousetrap would have had to come into being at once, an impossibility unless there were an intelligent designer. Design proponents argue that what's true for the mousetrap is all the more true for vastly more complex biological phenomena. If any of the 20 or so proteins involved in blood clotting is absent, clotting doesn't occur, and so, the creationist argument goes, these proteins must have all been brought into being at once by a designer. But the theory of evolution does explain the evolution of complex biological organisms and phenomena, and the above argument from design, which dates from the 18th century, has been decisively refuted. Rehashing the latter explanation and refutation is not my goal, however. Those who reject evolution are usually immune to such arguments anyway. Rather, my intention here is to develop some loose analogies between these biological issues and related economic ones and to show that these analogies point to a surprising crossing of political lines. The Complexity of the Modern Economy How is it that modern free market economies are as complex as they are, boasting amazingly elaborate production, distribution, and communication systems? Go into almost any drug store and you can find your favorite candy bar. Every supermarket has your brand of spaghetti sauce, or the store down the block does. Your size and style of jeans are in every neighborhood. And what's true at the personal level is true at the industrial level. Somehow there are enough ball bearings and computer chips in just the right places in factories all over the country. The physical infrastructure and communication networks are also marvels of integrated complexity. Oil and gas supplies are, by and large, where they're needed. Your e-mail reaches you in Miami as well as in Milwaukee, not to mention Barcelona and Bangkok. The natural question, discussed first by Adam Smith and later by Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper among others, is who designed this marvel of complexity? Which commissar decreed the number of packets of dental floss for each retail outlet? The answer, of course, is that no economic god designed this system. It emerged and grew by itself, a stunningly obvious example of spontaneously evolving order. No one argues that all the components of the candy bar distribution system must have been put into place at once, or else there would be no Snickers at the corner store. Different Reactions to Spontaneous Order in Biology and Economics So far, so good. What is more than a bit odd, however, is that some of the most ardent opponents of Darwinian evolution -- for example, many fundamentalist Christians -- are among the most ardent supporters of the free market. These people accept the natural complexity of the market without qualm, yet they insist that the natural complexity of biological phenomena requires a designer. They would reject the idea that there is or should be central planning in the economy. They would rightly point out that simple economic exchanges that are beneficial to people become entrenched and then gradually modified as they become part of larger systems of exchange, while those that are not beneficial die out. They accept that Adam Smith's invisible hand brings about the spontaneous order of the modern economy. Yet, as noted, some of these same people refuse to believe that natural selection and "blind processes" can lead to similar biological order arising spontaneously. These ideas are not new. As mentioned, Smith, Hayek, Popper, and others have made them more or less explicitly. Recently, there have appeared several more mathematical echoes of these analogies invoking network, complexity, and systems theory. These include an essay by Kelley L. Ross as well as briefer comments by Mark Kleiman and Jim Lindgren. Two Questions There are, of course, quite significant differences and disanalogies between biological systems and economic ones (one being that biology is a much more substantive science than economics), but these shouldn't blind us to their similarities nor mask the obvious analogies. These analogies prompt two final questions. What would you think of someone who studied economic entities and their interactions in a modern free market economy and insisted that they were, despite a perfectly reasonable and empirically supported account of their development, the consequence of some all-powerful, detail-obsessed economic law-giver? You might deem such a person a conspiracy theorist. And what would you think of someone who studied biological processes and organisms and insisted that they were, despite a perfectly reasonable and empirically supported Darwinian account of their development, the consequence of some all-powerful, detail-obsessed biological law-giver? -- Professor of mathematics at Temple University, John Allen Paulos is the author of best-selling books, including "Innumeracy" and "A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market." His "Who's Counting?" column on ABCNews.com appears the first weekend of every month.

Links to essays in "Best Software Writing I"

Joel Spolsky has compiled a book of essays on software, which he calls The Best Software Writing I. The essays all came from online sources, but when Spolsky released the chapter listing, I didn’t see anywhere online where he posted links to the originals. So here they are. Caveat: The print edition may have any number of improvements over the online versions. Nevertheless, as long as some version of the essays exist online, I don’t see a reason not to link to them. Readers who would like to have the authoritative version, with a rather attractive cover, should go buy the book. I do not have anything to do with Joel Spolsky other than reading his blog occasionally. I am not the rightsholder for any of the offsite content I link to below. (As of June 2005, I haven’t even read most of this, yet.) some pages that appear to be the original sources for The Best Software Writing I Joel Spolsky - Introduction How I did it Spolsky released the chapter listing in June 2005, and I noticed that a lot of them were blog posts that I’d read before. I wondered how much of the book was taken from online content. A few minutes of hacking later, and a programmed equivalent of Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” had found most every single chapter, or a page that was one degree of separation away.

World press berates US over Katrina

Newspapers around the world are critical of the US government's response to Hurricane Katrina, and its foreign and environmental policies more generally. Links are made to regional concerns, with Asian papers recalling last December's tsunami and African commentators highlighting the racial issue. But some sympathy comes from Indonesia, and an Afghan newspaper takes pride in President Karzai's offer of assistance. China's Renmin Wang If the US could shift part of its astronomical military spending to counter-terrorism, guarding against natural disasters, epidemic disease control and other aspects, then the 9/11 attack, Hurricane Katrina, the spread of Aids and other tragedies could be avoided or mitigated. Malaysia's Berita Harian When the tsunami hit Asia last December, Bush succeeded in showing off his abilities by offering appropriate and well-organised humanitarian aid, but it seems he has been unresponsive, disorganised and discriminatory in dealing with the Katrina disaster. Indonesia's Suara Merdeka People may hate the selfish US stance. They may also condemn its military invasion of Iraq or criticise Washington's threats to Iran, Syria and North Korea. But, it is inhuman to be grateful for the American people's disaster. Indonesia, in particular, must not forget the services of the US military when the tsunami devastated Aceh. Singapore's The Straits Times The dead are only beginning to be gathered up. In Aceh and Thailand's beach resorts, those killed by the tsunami last December received the due respect of swift recovery, followed by identification. New Orleans people will not let Mr Bush forget this. Australia's The Age President Bush is increasingly seen as out of touch with ordinary people and with reality on the ground - in New Orleans and Iraq - and also on issues such as climate change. The president and, by association, Republicans are highly vulnerable for the first time in years. How the Administration responds has broader implications, too - a deeply unpopular, lame duck president could alter the balance of global leadership. Afghanistan's Eslah President Karzai has pledged 100,000 dollars for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. America has helped Afghanistan in various ways. Even if the assistance promised to the victims of Hurricane Katrina seems a symbolic act, it nevertheless shows that our country has credibility and authority in the international community. Nahum Barnea in Israel's Yediot Aharonot Just as 11 September 2001 changed the American agenda from internal matters to foreign policy and the war on terror, so Katrina is liable to take America back to its internal agenda: dealing with the environment, society, and the gaps between whites and blacks and between rich and poor. Adli Sadiq in the Palestinian Al-Hayat al-Jadidah After Hurricane Katrina, a new section of the American public is waking up to the wretchedness of the administration's policies and to the disasters that have hit Americans as a result. Today's Iraq is worse than yesterday's, and there are not enough helicopters to tackle the hurricane. Bush and his administration will be judged by history. Iran's Resalat Katrina was a natural catastrophe, but many experts believe America's policies have deepened the roots of the disaster. America had allocated the budgets for these areas to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nick Reimer in Germany's die tageszeitung New Orleans has already become a symbol: never before in human history has a natural disaster been predicted in such exact detail. Despite this, the prediction had no effect. It's as if mankind has lost the power to correct its own mistakes: In New Orleans, it slid into catastrophe submissively and with eyes wide open. Climate change has already arrived. Russia's Komsomolskaya Pravda [Russian] Emergencies Ministry planes have been under starter's orders for several days. But the go-ahead from the other side of the ocean never came. It leads you to think: Is Washington afraid of having US citizens rescued by people who are not flying the stars and stripes? Are they trying to preserve the prestige of a state that does not take easily to accepting aid from a "third-world" country? But isn't the saving of human life more important than PR or ideological considerations? South Africa's Star The death and destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina also revealed the racial fissures in American society. Most of the hapless survivors who filled New Orleans' Superdome were black. Bush's other weaknesses are his poor environment record and his management of the US economy. Zimbabwe's Herald The fact that New Orleans is a southern town predominantly populated by African-Americans explains why President George W. Bush did not see the need to cut short his holiday. All that Bush has done so far is to issue threats against the victims, and deploying trigger-happy American troops - fresh from abusing Iraqi prisoners - to go and "restore order". BBC Monitoring selects and translates news from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages. It is based in Caversham, UK, and has several bureaus abroad.

ongoing by Tim Bray · Inequality and Risk

That’s the title of a recent piece by Paul Graham, who’s often pointed-to here and who I think is one of our greatest living essayists, and since ongoing’s full name is ongoing fragmented essay, that’s a strong claim. Inequality and Risk, and this is a compliment, is deeply wrong, but made me stop thinking about all the other things I was thinking for quite some time about because I had to think about it. Herewith remarks on Inequality and Public Policy; but first, go read Paul’s essay. He makes two big mistakes. First, he postulates someone who “wants to get rid of economic inequality”, and argues against that position. Second, his arguments go off the rails when he tries to transition from generalities to mathematics. Ending Inequality? · So who, exactly, wants to end inequality? Well, I used to, back when I was 18 years old and briefly an actual card-carrying Communist, until I found out they really meant that scary bullshit about supporting the Soviet Union and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Old-line Marxists used to fantasize about the end-game: “To each according to his needs, from each according to his ability”. Well, it’s not like that because people aren’t like that, and while the Marxists had some pretty useful critiques of where capitalism can go awry, none of their ideas about What Comes Next turned out to be any good at all. So, I don’t know anyone who believes for a second that you could end inequality, or even that it’s worth trying. It’s simpler than that; we want to minimize poverty. Ye have the poor always with you said Jesus (Matt 26:11) but we can hope he was wrong. It doesn’t really need justification: poverty which need not exist is profoundly immoral and unaesthetic and suboptimal and should be corrected. But if you want justification, here it is: some people seem to deserve their poverty, having brought it on themselves; but their children don’t. Once you clear away this bullshit about wanting to end inequality, you can have a useful argument about reducing poverty. I’m enough of a realist to acknowledge that one of the best ways of doing that is to encourage a vibrant, free, open, unobstructed marketplace. But I also think that progressive taxation is, in moderation, good macroeconomics and good policy. Proportionality · And here’s where Paul really goes off the rails. Search forward for “applies proportionately”, and you encounter this astounding assertion: Growth This argument applies proportionately. It’s not just that if you eliminate economic inequality, you get no startups. To the extent you reduce economic inequality, you decrease the number of startups. [4] Increase taxes, and willingness to take risks decreases in proportion. Oh, really? There’s a smooth mathematical relationship extending off to infinity in both directions? That’s what “proportionately” means, last math course I took. Let’s grant that economic inequality is a useful driver to creativity, hard work, and the creation of wealth that everyone gets to share in. But let’s not kid ourselves that this—or really much of anything in the social sciences—looks like a smooth O(N) curve. Yeah, give people a chance to get ahead and they will. But if they already have a Lexus and a 2-story lodge in Aspen, will the chance at a Maybach and a 3-story lodge really drive them to go through all the startup bullshit again? Well, yes, it will; but only for those people who live for that startup adrenaline and for doing deals; but those people would be doing it anyhow, because that’s the kind of people they are. Call me old-fashioned, but here in Vancouver the streets are stuffed (on the pavement) with Mercedes and BMWs and Porsches and, and on the sidewalk, there are street people begging for their bread, and kids dropping out of high school to take care of their siblings because their parents aren’t making it. I want to help those people on the sidewalk, and if a bit more progressive taxation will help, that’s OK by me. What we don’t need is pseudoquantitative assertions that can be used by the Dubyas of the world to justify slashing taxes on the the top 1%, and then doing it again and again. People aren’t that simple, which means that politics isn’t either. [Disclosure: I’ve also tried pretty hard to get rich, and not done as well as Paul Graham, but OK.]

The Democrat's Diary: Democracy and the rule of law: the Iraqi alternative to US occupation

Whatever opinion they hold of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, most people in the UK and the US at least claim to want to see that country governed by democracy and the rule of law, and free from sectarian and ethnic division. To judge the value of those claims, witness the sheer indifference politicians and the media in those two countries have shown to an independent Iraqi initiative created to achieve those very goals: the Iraqi National Foundation Conference.The INFC describes itself as an umbrella group "composed of academics, professionals, community leaders, religious scholars and veteran moderate Arab-nationalist politicians. It straddles sectarian and ethnic divides, and attempts to formulate the widest platform possible". In the face of growing societal division, it has revived inter-communal prayers, the hallmark of the 1920 revolution against British colonial rule. Membership is open to anyone who will subscribe to its minimum points of unity: withdrawal of the occupying forces troops and opposition to any division of Iraq on an ethnic or sectarian basis. The INFC does not enjoy the publicity enjoyed by the Indian Congress Party before independence, or the African National Congress during apartheid. But when people who oppose the occupation are asked what they would favour instead, the INFC may well provide some of the answers. Certainly the anti-war movement in the US and the UK should see building substantive links with the group as an urgent and immediate priority.Two high-level representatives of the INFC - Media Coordinator, Saad Jawad and General Secretary, Sheikh Jawad Al Khalisi - visited the UK this week. On Wednesday 5 September they spoke to a group of anti-war activists about the desperate situation in Iraq, and the solutions that their group was proposing. Since the western political classes have conducted a long debate over the past few years on what is best for the future of Iraq without substantially involving any actual Iraqis in those discussions, the rest of this article will simply relate the words of the INFC representatives at the London meeting.Saad Jawad said that the occupation was effecting the "demolition" of Iraq. He said that before the war, western journalists had asked him why he thought the US wanted to invade. He would offer two reasons: oil and enhancing Israel's security. The journalists would laugh and say that there was a lot more to it than that, for example democracy, human rights and so forth, which gave Saad Jawad his turn to laugh. Now, he feels that the position they took at the time has been demonstrated to be the more accurate.Saad Jawad said that the US has consistently interfered in the workings of the new government. It stood in the way of that government's formation for three months after the election, and then gave it just three months to draft a permanent constitution under its supervision. In addition, we have heard Hilary Clinton saying that Ibrahim al-Jaafari can not be accepted as Prime Minister and George Bush saying that there will be no Islamic state in Iraq, so one can see clearly that any "democratic" choices that Iraqis make are assessed strictly in terms of what is acceptable to Washington.Saad Jawad also alleged that oil exports from Iraq are not being recorded, that the counters at oil drilling stations are turned off, and that in effect, the country's natural resources are being plundered.Sheikh Jawad Al Khalisi began by saying that the western media ought to be covering this independent project for Iraq's future. For him, the phrase "the new Iraq" is a misnomer. Freedom, democracy and human rights do not exist in this "new Iraq". Even Iraq's new government understands that it is the occupier that pulls the strings. The occupation works by division, along sectarian and ethnic lines, for example through the Transitional Administrative Law imposed by the US, or through the effects of US military actions. Since divisions preclude a unified Iraqi response to occupation, one can say that there is essentially no Iraqi state or government in existence. Furthermore, the new constitution does not reflect the interests of Iraqis. It is devised to entrench and exacerbate division, and as such could well pave the way to civil war. The referendum on the constitution is not internationally organised or monitored, and thus is illegitimate. It is also illegitimate because it comes as the result of the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq.Iraq is without democracy and human rights. But it is also without even the most fundamental necessities required for a basic standard of life to exist; things Iraqis once took for granted, such as sanitation and security. To overcome the present situation Iraq must return to legality; a legality arising from the will of Iraqis. The UN has recognised this, but the US does not. There are great dangers in continuing with the occupation because of the divisions it imposes on Iraq: dangers to the country, and dangers to the wider region. The INFC's solution is an independent, pan-Iraqi plan for the nation's future, in accordance with international law and under UN auspices.The Sheikh told the group a story that might offer some hope for the future, as talk of civil war continues to grow. Last week, several hundred Shia pilgrims in Baghdad were killed in a stampede sparked by rumours of a suicide bomber in their midst. The worst of the carnage occurred on a bridge over the river Tigris between Sunni and Shia districts. A railing broke and many people fell into the river and drowned. An Iraqi champion swimmer - a Sunni - was on the scene and managed to save six people who had fallen from the bridge. He then saw a seventh, a Shia woman, but was unable to save her, and they drowned together. This, the Sheikh said, was already becoming a symbol for Iraqis, who want societal divisions to be overcome at this critical and violent time. Many people from Falluja gave blood to help the victims of the stampede, so hope for enduring Iraqi unity can be drawn from this story.The INFC representatives were asked why the constitution could not be accepted as it is and the principle of legal precedent used to build upon it. Saad Jawad's response was twofold. First, why should we Iraqis, who gave the very concept of written laws to the world, adopt a constitution that was essentially written for us by the US? To impress them? To show that we are civilised? Secondly, is it advisable for us to use legal precedent to build on a foundation, the current draft constitution, that is itself fundamentally flawed? Sheikh Jawad Al Khalisi underlined this point. He said that as he understood it, a precedent is a legal step taken in the absence of a specific law. But the constitution is based upon illegality, and sound legal precedents cannot be made upon such a basis. The UN Secretary General has said that the invasion of Iraq was illegal. The legality of the war has been questioned by a great many international lawyers, many of them British. The constitution is not only based on illegality, but flows from political power, and is designed to serve those ends.The INFC representatives were asked what steps had been taken to work with the UN. Sheikh Jawad Al Khalisi said that the INFC has been in contact with the United Nations since June 2004, before the so-called "transfer of sovereignty" from the occupiers to the interim Iraqi government. At the time, the INFC put it to the UN that it should be the UN that controls and administers the transitional process. Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN representative in charge of drawing together the interim administration at the time, agreed with the INFC proposals, but he was removed from the scene and the US instead dictated the course of events. Iyad Allawi was imposed as interim Prime Minister by the US, against Brahimi's wishes. Before the January 2005 elections, the INFC told the UN that, in order for it to participate, the elections should be held within the context of an international legal framework and under international observation. Failure to meet these basic conditions made the elections illegitimate, and this applies to the forthcoming constitutional referendum and the subsequent parliamentary elections as well.Sheikh Jawad Al Khalisi said that the INFC welcomes the support of those in the UK who oppose the war and occupation. He also welcomed the growing anti-war sentiment in the United States, as people there are awaken to the reality of the situation in Iraq. He said that the INFC has handed to the US detailed, formal requests for the withdrawal of its armed forces. Any negotiations or discussion between the US and the INFC must be accompanied by a strict timetable for ending the occupation.When asked what we in the UK could do to help, Saad Jawad asked that people continue to bring pressure to bear on the UK government, particularly regarding the illegality of the war. A large anti-war demonstration in Central London has been planned for 24 September 2004 and an international peace conference, bringing together US, British and Iraqi groups, will be held at the end of the year. Saad Jawad said that he and the Sheikh would be happy to attend the peace conference, "if we survive".

Opinion | Magic Marker Strategy

It was the climax of George W. Bush's video introduction at the Republican convention: the moment at Yankee Stadium during the 2001 World Series when he threw a pitch all the way to home plate. The video ended, and the conventioneers cheered as Mr. Bush strode onto a stage shaped like a pitcher's mound. Well, live by the pitch, die by the pitch. When you campaign as the man on the mound, the great leader whose arm rescues Americans in their moment of need, they expect you to deal with a hurricane, too. Mr. Bush made a lot of mistakes last week, but most of his critics are making an even bigger one now by obsessing about what he said and did. We can learn more by listening to men like Jim Judkins, particularly when he explains the Magic Marker method of disaster preparedness. Mr. Judkins is one of the officials in charge of evacuating the Hampton Roads region around Newport News, Va. These coastal communities, unlike New Orleans, are not below sea level, but they're much better prepared for a hurricane. Officials have plans to run school buses and borrow other buses to evacuate those without cars, and they keep registries of the people who need special help.

Opinion | The Larger Shame

"No, you misunderstand," he said firmly. "These looters weren't Japanese. They were foreigners." The reasons for this are complex and partly cultural, but one reason is that Japan has tried hard to stitch all Japanese together into the nation's social fabric. In contrast, the U.S. -- particularly under the Bush administration -- has systematically cut people out of the social fabric by redistributing wealth from the most vulnerable Americans to the most affluent. It's not just that funds may have gone to Iraq rather than to the levees in New Orleans; it's also that money went to tax cuts for the wealthiest rather than vaccinations for children. None of this is to suggest that there are easy solutions for American poverty. As Ronald Reagan once said, "We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won." But we don't need to be that pessimistic -- in the late 1990's, we made real headway. A ray of hope is beautifully presented in one of the best books ever written on American poverty, "American Dream," by my Times colleague Jason DeParle. So the best monument to the catastrophe in New Orleans would be a serious national effort to address the poverty that afflicts the entire country. And in our shock and guilt, that may be politically feasible. Rich Lowry of The National Review, in defending Mr. Bush, offered an excellent suggestion: "a grand right-left bargain that includes greater attention to out-of-wedlock births from the Left in exchange for the Right's support for more urban spending." That would be the best legacy possible for Katrina. Otherwise, long after the horrors have left TV screens, about 50 of the 77 babies who die each day, on average, will die needlessly, because of poverty. That's the larger hurricane of poverty that shames our land. Op-Ed Columnist E-mail: nicholas@nytimes.com

New Orleans will force evacuations

New Orleans will force evacuations Superdome, refuge for thousands, may be torn down NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- New Orleans' mayor ordered law enforcement agencies Tuesday night to remove everyone from the city who is not involved in cleaning up after Hurricane Katrina, whether they want to go or not. Mayor Ray Nagin instructed all public safety officers "to compel the evacuation of all persons ... regardless of whether such persons are on private property or do not desire to leave," according to a written statement from his office. The order did not apply to people in Algiers on the West Bank side of Orleans Parish. Many residents have refused to leave New Orleans despite a mandatory evacuation and warnings from government officials that staying in the flooded city represents a health risk. In Washington, White House and congressional sources said Tuesday that the Bush administration plans to ask Congress for $30 billion to $50 billion to aid in the next phase of the recovery effort. (Watch a report on the storm's political fallout -- 2:09) The request, which would add to the $10.5 billion already approved, will be made as early as Wednesday, they said. House hearings examining the government's response to Katrina were canceled by Republican leaders who instead want a still unspecified "congressional review" by a joint House and Senate panel, Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Texas Republican, said late Tuesday. That development followed a busy day in the capital, with lawmakers from both parties criticizing the governmental response and vowing to investigate. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairwoman Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, told reporters that "governments at all levels failed." President Bush met with his Cabinet to discuss the relief efforts, saying he would be leading an inquiry and would be sending Vice President Dick Cheney to the region. (Full story) Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters that the military had 58,000 troops in the region by Tuesday, including 41,000 from the National Guard and 17,000 active-duty personnel. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the deployment would not hamper the military's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. "We have the forces, the capabilities and the intention to fully prosecute the global war on terror while responding to this unprecedented humanitarian crisis here at home," he told reporters. Holding out Rescue workers say many holdouts have insisted on staying in their homes or makeshift residences rather than obey the mandatory evacuation order Nagin first put into effect on August 28, the day before Katrina crashed ashore. (See video on people who refuse to leave -- 2:51) Some said they were concerned about their property being looted, while others were unaware of disaster's full extent, worried about their pets or concerned that conditions would be even worse in shelters. The standing water in New Orleans is contaminated with E. coli bacteria, a highly placed official in the New Orleans mayor's office told CNN on Tuesday. U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona said conditions in the city are "really unsafe at this point." (Full story) The city's deputy police chief, Warren Riley, said Monday the holdouts numbered in the thousands. Nagin told reporters Tuesday he wanted everyone out of the city "because it's a health risk." "These citizens will have to be removed for their own good," Police Superintendent Eddie Compass told CNN. The mayor also fiercely denied rumors that he had ordered relief workers to stop delivering water to those who refused to evacuate. The toxic nature of the water is evident from the smell of garbage, human waste and rotting corpses, and the slick sheen of oil, gasoline and other chemicals on the surface. "I understand wanting to stay in their homes, not wanting to give up on New Orleans," Nagin said. "But we have a very volatile situation. There's lots of oil on the water, gas leaks where it's bubbling up, and there's fire on top." Nagin said he wanted to reassure the holdouts that it was "OK" to evacuate. "Leave for a little while. Let us get you to a better place, and let us clean it up," he said. Nagin said most of the survivors that rescuers are finding now are elderly and in desperate need of emergency medical care. Aftermath widespread The disaster area left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina covers the Gulf Coast from southeast Louisiana to Mobile, Alabama -- and at least 150 miles inland. The storm crushed houses, leaving some towns little more than wood piles. The storm surge along the Mississippi coast reached more than 20 feet in some areas and knocked out power for most of the state as a diminishing Katrina continued its destructive trail northward last week. Tuesday, more than 350,000 customers were still without electricity. All but one of Mississippi's major highways have reopened. Other states were shouldering some of the burden by taking in evacuees and sending crews to help in search-and-recovery, cleanup or shelter operations. The Louisiana Superdome was so heavily damaged during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath that it likely will have to be torn down, a disaster official working with the governor's office told CNN. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the initial assessment of the famed dome indicated the damage is "more significant than initially thought." Katrina sheared away much of the roof's covering, and rainwater began leaking into the stadium when it was being used as a shelter of last resort for thousands of residents stranded by the storm. The Superdome is the home of the New Orleans Saints professional football team. The NFL season begins this weekend, and it is not clear where the Saints will play. Slow drain Two operational pumping stations are lowering the water levels, Nagin said, but water still covers about 60 percent of the city. "I saw water levels drop significantly in certain areas of the city," the mayor said Tuesday after a flyover. "I'm starting to see rays of light all throughout what we are doing," he said. "We are starting to accumulate accomplishments." The Army Corps of Engineers estimated it would take between 24 and 80 days to pump floodwater out of New Orleans and its surrounding parishes, much of which are below sea level. Even with all that water, firefighting was difficult. Fire Chief Charles Parent said the city was being hit with "several large fires a day," including four Tuesday. Water to fight fires comes from helicopters snagging bucket-loads from lakes and canals, and also from the West Bank of the Mississippi River, where the hydrant system still works. There, firefighters fill giant tankers and drive them to the fires. (Watch video of aerial water drops -- 3:49) "Fires are getting a good head start on us because of delays in detection," Parent said. "There's nobody out there to call 911, and once somebody does see it there's no 911 system." Nagin said Tuesday that officials hoped to give the city running water again "in a day or so," but cautioned that it would have to be boiled. Meanwhile, search-and-rescue teams encountered the living and the dead out on the fetid waters. Jennings Ewing, the leader of a team from the Texas General Land Office, told CNN that many of the "stragglers" who want to stay in the city think the water will "go down in two or three days." Electricity is slowly coming back online, said Entergy New Orleans executive Dan Pack. Other developments Public schools in New Orleans and neighboring St. Bernard Parish may be shut down for the entire school year due to damage from Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana's Superintendent of Education Cecil Picard said Tuesday. Many students whose families evacuated have begun to register for schools in other states or other parts of Louisiana, he said. With the National Flood Insurance Program expected to pay out billions of dollars in claims to cover the flood damage in Louisiana and other hard-hit states, homeowners that are suddenly interested in the extra protection may be forced to pay more for coverage. (Full story)

What is Consulting?

Computing Thoughts What is Consulting? by Bruce Eckel August 4, 2005 Summary A few years ago, close on the heels of the dot-com bust, Rational basically imploded. IBM felt that there was still value in what was left of the company, and paid an exorbitant amount for the remains. Advertisement The company made money by consulting and by selling a software product (Rose) that was supposed to help you create UML and thus good programs. They had produced a series of books on the "Rational Unified Process" (RUP) which generally seemed to have reasonable advice. But advice that appears to be rational does not necessarily solve real design problems, as we saw in the "structured design" movement of the 70's. This seems to happen over and over in our industry -- it's easy to focus on one aspect that seems to be "the solution" and miss the big picture, and to produce unintended consequences that eliminate the benefit of what may seem so clear in isolation. Jon Hopkins created the original Rose program which seemed reasonably good. This was purchased by Rational, rather than being created within the company. How is it that a company that purported to teach you how to create good software ended up creating a product (Rose) that was so universally reviled? Is Rose what eventually destroyed the company, when potential customers asked that same question? Is it even possible to scale a consulting operation, without turning it into a body shop? Andersen Consulting is another example. Yes, they provided bodies and I've talked to some of those bodies who got great value out of the process, but how much value did the client companies get -- or did they just get reasonably competent, medium-term temporary workers? This isn't to say that such a service isn't a valuable one, but is it consulting, or does it just assume that name to justify higher fees? Lots of people that call themselves consultants do things that I would not personally consider consulting. I think consulting is when you have some kind of special expertise -- come by through hard struggle and learning -- that you transfer to a group of people, in a relatively short period of time, and in a way that is unique for that group. I also think that consulting involves addressing particular issues faced by that group. If it was easy to transfer to someone else, then a client could acquire that expertise without a custom consulting session (it could be turned into a seminar, for example). Ironically, many consulting firms feel the pressure to grow and make more money, and end up ignoring this principal fact. Instead, they succumb to simple arithmetic and decide that they need to "scale up" by adding more bodies, pretending that each of these bodies can be imprinted with the experience and hard-learned lessons of the principal consultants. It becomes clear within the consulting firm that this isn't so, and so the firm, as it grows, must change its perspective about the meaning of the word "consulting." And under certain economic conditions (rampant growth in the industry) the service provided by this reinvented consulting firm is still valuable. But it is a far cry from what the original firm offered, although that firm is still charging fees as if each client was getting the services of a principal consultant. And if the economy turns, as the computer economy has done many times, the consulting firms are the first to fall, as they are the easiest way to cut costs. It's tempting to make the analogy to a ponzi scheme, but it's not that bad. Both forms of a consulting firm (first-class consultants only vs. high-tech body shop) have value. The problem is the temptation to present the second form as the first, in order to apply the same high fees of the first-class consultant to each additional body added to the shop. The goal of the company becomes "how do we transfer the aura of authority from the high-image consultant(s) to anyone who works for us, so that we can charge the highest fees possible?" Or to simplify, at some point the bean-counter mentality takes over and the mission statement of the company goes from "how do we provide the greatest value to the customer?" to "how do we charge the highest fees possible?" (You can argue that this is the fundamental shift that any publicly-held company goes through. After all, a public company is legally beholden to maximize shareholder value, so how could it be otherwise?) Perhaps the problem comes down to this: consulting (what I consider consulting, anyway) doesn't scale. For me, it involves a lot of study and struggle, and occasionally I go out and transfer some of what I've learned to a client. Because I need to pay for the time I spend on my own while struggling with these ideas, I must charge a premium when I visit a client. Money, however, isn't the most important form of payment. An energizing experience is worth a lot more than a high fee. An interesting project -- especially one using Python -- is always tempting. Just like the folks who used to work for Andersen Consulting, I often learn a lot by working on a client's problem, so it would be tempting to say that I could continue learning and make more money by spending more time on the road, and that may be true to a point but it won't scale that far. You have to spend some amount of time recharging your mental batteries. Gerald Weinberg said that you can only spend three days a week on average doing actual consulting. You must spend one day a week on marketing, and one day acquiring new knowledge, so that you continue to update the value that you provide. If you work for yourself or within a small, privately-held group, you can make the decisions that maintain this balance, but as soon as the idea of scaling intrudes (or perhaps "scaling with the primary objective of amplifying the cash flow of the company"), I think the eventual fate of the consulting company is sealed. Consulting is first and foremost a human activity, and I believe that the primary motivation must be in improving the quality of the client's experience. One reason that the consulting fee must be relatively high is that this experience is a rare thing, both for the consultant and for the client, and the consultant is being paid for the unpaid time that he or she invests. But this form of consulting doesn't scale, not even on an individual level. A consultant who spends all his time on the road is not allowing the time for reading, communicating and reflection that I consider essential to maintain quality. Installing the same techniques in the same way from company to company is something, and it may have value, but it isn't what I would call consulting. One of the ironies of consulting is that the goal of the consultant must be to make him or herself obsolete. You must so effectively transfer your knowledge and solve the client's problem that they don't need you anymore. But when a consulting firm scales up, their primary objective shifts away from providing value to the client towards providing consistent cash flow for the company. This pushes towards making the customer dependent upon the consulting firm. One of the things that makes a good consultant unusual is the counter-tendency of not wanting to drift into anything that looks like an employee relationship, despite the promise of consistent cash flow. What makes me happiest is to see people understand what I give them, put it to work, and show me that they no longer need me. Here are some articles that have been suggested by readers that relate to this topic: Joel Spolsky wrote about consulting firms just moments before the dot-com bust, while his company was still consulting to generate money for product development. Talk Back! Have an opinion? Readers have already posted 35 comments about this weblog entry. Why not add yours? RSS Feed If you'd like to be notified whenever Bruce Eckel adds a new entry to his weblog, subscribe to his RSS feed. About the Blogger Bruce Eckel (www.BruceEckel.com) provides development assistance in Python with user interfaces in Flex. He is the author of Thinking in Java (Prentice-Hall, 1998, 2nd Edition, 2000, 3rd Edition, 2003, 4th Edition, 2005), the Hands-On Java Seminar CD ROM (available on the Web site), Thinking in C++ (PH 1995; 2nd edition 2000, Volume 2 with Chuck Allison, 2003), C++ Inside & Out (Osborne/McGraw-Hill 1993), among others. He's given hundreds of presentations throughout the world, published over 150 articles in numerous magazines, was a founding member of the ANSI/ISO C++ committee and speaks regularly at conferences. This weblog entry is Copyright © 2005 Bruce Eckel. All rights reserved.

Gladwell on why focus groups suck – Noise Between Stations

Malcolm Gladwell recently gave the keynote at the American Association of Advertising Agencies’ Account Planning conference in Chicago. It’s excerpted on Advertising Age ($). If you’ve worked in design or product development (or read “Blink”) you know the drawbacks of focus groups. But what Gladwell does here is describe the solutions as ones of management. Not surprisingly, I agree. Here’s the ending… Now think about the Aeron chair. [The focus group participants] say they don’t like the chair, of course they don’t. The chair is nothing they’ve ever seen before, but that was the whole plan in designing the chair. But that’s what’s wonderful about it, that’s why this chair will make billions of dollars for Herman Miller, but it’s also what dooms that chair in the focus group, because people don’t have the language. Market research, when it is observational or when it is interpretative, is profoundly useful. But those are two critical things. They require the intervention of the person conducting the research. They require the findings that are gathered are considered, and thought about, and processed and interpreted. Back in the 1950s, most of the major advertising agencies on Madison Avenue employed Freudian psychoanalysts for this precise reason, and you don’t see that anymore. I think that’s a big mistake. This understanding about what’s so terrible about focus groups ought to pave the way that we manage people. First and foremost, it’s very important for management to trust the creative talent. The second thing is patience. The more breakthrough, the more revolutionary and the more innovative an idea is, the longer it will take for people to come to appreciate it. The third thing is it requires people in management to tolerate uncertainty. The thing that’s driving all this focus-group and market-research data is the desire of people with the management power to make every decision as methodical and thought out and certain as possible.

Mark Bernstein: What Ended

What Ended What ended this week in New Orleans was not a city. The city will be rebuilt. What ended this week was not dream. Martin's dream still lives -- not least in the outrage expressed throughout the country, from the redneck forests to the Berkeley waters, over the shabby negligence with which the victims of storm and flood were treated. And the big dream's still there, too. Somewhere in the Astrodome tonight, there's a little boy or girl who is tired and hungry and frightened, and who will grow up to be president. You can bet on it. What ended this week was not a war, though its destined end in ignominy and failure is now assured. What ended this week a was not a presidency, though Katrina made George W. Bush, overnight, a lame duck. What ended this week is the illusion that words can substitute for real work and real knowledge. This was the last, spectacular failure of the internet bubble, the final burnout of paper businesses that had no business and paper politicians who had no cause and paper experts whose expertise lay in their bogus credentials or in the wealth of their pals. We'll know the details in time. We'll have years of investigations. We already know the answer. We filled key roles at the top with lawyers and promoters and press agents and cronies, and when we needed them to do their job, they held press conferences instead. And we filled key roles on the line -- police and fire and public safety -- with too many people who weren't up to the job, or whose leaders weren't up to the job. Frightened by snipers and rumors, they sacrificed the lives of men and women and children in danger, lives entrusted to them, to save their own. They turned in their badges or grounded their choppers. Their duty was hard; they did not do it. What ended, too, was the illusion that history is over, and the academic illusion that whatever clever argument we can make is equally good. In the last decade, arguing specious positions has been a route to funding and fame. You could argue that we didn't need better flood control in New Orleans. People did argue it -- just like they argue still for teaching intelligent design to our kids, just like they argue that global warming needs more study, that maybe the environment will take care of itself. That's what ended. We know, now, that sometimes we need experts in jobs that require expertise. We need scholars in jobs that require scholarship. In jobs that require doing your job -- even in the face of discomfort and danger -- we need people on whom we can depend. Most of all, we need to take responsibility to weigh the evidence, decide, and bear the weight of decision. No excuses. No press conference. No spin, because there is no need for spin. What ended is the illusion that we can believe anything, however absurd, and make it true by insisting on it, by believing that such a nice man or such a committed woman will do a great job at FEMA or wherever. Or, if not a great job, one we can call "great".

Google Watch – Eine weitere WordPress-Website

Warum dieser Top-Fondsmanager denkt, dass Bitcoin bereit ist, höher zu „explodieren Der anhaltende Anstieg des Aktienmarktes ist beispiellos und scheint in vielerlei Hinsicht den Blasen …

In Baton Rouge, a Tingeof Evacuee Backlash

Like many people in and near Baton Rouge, Mrs. Smallwood, her 1,700-square-foot house now sheltering 14 people, is trying to balance the need for compassion with the vertigo of a changed city. And so while she wishes all the evacuees well, she said she feared an influx of people from the housing projects of New Orleans, places, she has heard, where people walk around in T-shirts that read, "Kill the cops." "Or so the story has it," she said. "Those aren't neighborhoods I go to." She was so rattled, she said, she told her daughter she might have to move. On reflection, she said, there is little chance of that. Instead, she is hoping for the best. "People are, what's the word? Not frustrated, not scared, it's more like their lives are on hold, everything's changed and we're trying to figure out what the new normal is going to be," Mrs. Smallwood said. Many relief workers and volunteers say the worries over crime reflect more wholesale stereotyping of people fleeing a catastrophe than anything based in fact, but safety is a major issue. At the height of the post-storm panic last week, people waited in line for three and a half hours at Jim's Firearms, a giant gun and sporting goods store. Many were people from New Orleans with their own safety issues. But many were local residents jumpy about the newcomers from New Orleans and stocking up on Glock and Smith & Wesson handguns. Jim Siegmund, a salesman at Jim's recently returned from military service in Iraq, said he did not think there was anything to worry about. Still, holding a cellphone in his hand and comparing it to a 9-millimeter handgun he said: "When push comes to shove, this won't protect you, but a Glock 9 will." Joel Phillips, a 38-year-old contractor, said he had never owned a gun in his life, but after watching an angry argument at a gas station, he stood in line for three hours at Jim's to buy a 9-millimeter Ruger handgun and then went with a friend to a firing range over the weekend to learn how to use it. "I have two daughters, I sometimes have to work in bad neighborhoods," Mr. Phillips said. "I probably don't need it, but I'll feel better knowing that I have some protection."

As China changes, so does its image of US

As President Hu Jintao prepares to visit the US next week for the first time as China's leader, he represents a country whose popular understanding of America has become more diverse, yet whose negative impression of the US as a "bully" and "rival" continues to deepen, particularly among young people. The US is seen by urban Chinese through a complex love-hate relationship, and through a lens shaped both by official propaganda and a greater number of personal impressions. In recent years, views on the US have intensified as many Chinese feel more pride about the rise of their nation, say experts and ordinary people. Many Chinese still feel a century-old sense that America is young and flexible, a "sunshine society," a place of wealth and generosity where laws are made to protect people, as one Beijing scholar here puts it. At the same time, more Chinese describe the US as trying to keep China poor, say it is trying to block China's rise as a world power since the US is weakening, and argue that the US media is more critical of China and Chinese leaders than it is to its own society and leaders. "Most Americans are very kind," says Luo, a philosophy student whose comments were typical. "But now [after 9/11], the Americans don't care about the rest of the world, what is happening in other places, except when it concerns their own lives." "What I hear is, 'I want my kids to go to school in the US, I want to go there on vacation,' " says a Western diplomat. "But at the same time [Chinese say] America is acting like China's enemy." For college student Li Zhao, America is the California coast that actor Dustin Hoffman drives in "The Graduate," her favorite US film. For engineer Wang Yue, it is a grinning, gun-toting soldier wearing desert camouflage. For Yi, the US is a picket-fence neighborhood with lots of dogs, where "everyone says hello in the morning." Such views tumble out at the "English Corner," a weekly gabfest of English students from all over Beijing at People's University. Across the street, "War of the Worlds" is playing at one of the biggest film theaters in Beijing. This is mostly a sympathetic crowd. They are interested in US lifestyles, sports, films, food: bowling, foos ball (a new rage), pizza, wealth. They speak of the US role in defeating Japan in World War II, of helping Beijing get the 2008 Olympics, and American concern over the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. Ms. Li leads an explication of the song "Scarborough Fair." One enterprising Chinese working for a joint venture compared the maturing Chinese view of America to the popularity of name-brand restaurants. Currently, Pizza Hut is the hottest restaurant in China, with long lines in the evenings. "Pizza Hut is the McDonald's of 10 years ago," she says. "We used to think the US was McDonald's. Now we think it is a grownup restaurant, where you use knives and forks. People go because despite what you hear, the West is still cool in our minds." Yet even at English Corner, deep suspicions are articulated about the US. "Anti-Americanism is building, and getting bigger," says a graduate student who did not give his name. "This feeling used to be due to propaganda. But now so many Chinese feel it, that no propaganda is needed." Perhaps propaganda is not needed. But it is not as if Chinese have a choice. State-run media in China is an arm of the central propaganda department, and no paper dares to run material on US-China relations that is unapproved. The Chinese "unofficial" position is constantly mixed with the view that America is constantly undermining China. An American college student in Beijing recently read a Chinese textbook stating that Martin Luther King Jr. never had the sympathy or help of white Americans, and that blacks in the south are hated by whites. "It wasn't even entirely true in the 1950s civil rights movement period," commented the student, who hails from Atlanta, Ga. However, different positions are constantly being tailored and tested in elite circles in Beijing. Last week before Hu was to go to Washington, for example, a line went out that while the American war in Iraq was a disaster, it still showed that Americans really cared about democracy. If the war had been only about oil, as was thought in oil-hungry China last year, then the Americans would not still be sacrificing blood and treasure to bring about new politics in Baghdad. Current popular anti-American sentiments are almost a complete reverse of feelings in the 1980s, scholars say, when US-China relations were warming. "We thought the US was our future," says one. This friendly sense peaked after the Tiananmen massacre of June 4, when, in the words of one European diplomat, "The general sense of the Chinese people was that the US government was more a friend to them than their own government was." Chinese leaders were so concerned about this sentiment that an aggressive propaganda policy was pursued to reverse it. Yet after the Asian monetary crisis; the US accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo war; after the downing of a US spy plane in 2001; the war in Iraq; and as the US has currently intensified relations with Japan - America is perceived in China as pursuing "a pattern of aggressive policies." A recent public poll of Chinese in five cities found that Chinese who see the US as "a friendly country, a model of imitation and a cooperation partner," were 10.4 percent, 11.7 percent, and 25.6 percent respectively. Some 57 percent felt the US was "containing China," according to the poll, overseen by an American studies institute at the China Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing and the Global Times. At the English Corner, some older Chinese argue that the pursuit of objective knowledge of America has given way by younger Chinese to the issue of whether America is treating China equally, as a great power. The official teaching of America in schoolbook texts in China has evolved from the 1949 term "imperialist," to the current term, "hegemonic," adopted in the 1980s. Yet in a society with 395 million TV owners, with 93 million Chinese on the Internet, and as most urban Chinese usually know someone who has visited the US, the picture of America is highly diverse. "We all have our official view, and our unofficial view," states a Chinese scholar in Beijing. Under President Hu, a new official view of the US is replacing what is seen as the more sentimental view of Jiang Zemin, Hu's predecessor. In the new view, China and the US may never be friends, but can be good partners. The current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine contains an airing of this view, by Wang Jisi, head of the Central Party School: "The Chinese-US relationship remains beset by more profound differences than any other bilateral relationship between major powers in the world today. It is an extremely complex and highly paradoxical unity of opposites.... fundamental differences between their political systems and ideology have prevented the United States from viewing China as a peer," Mr. Wang writes. "In terms of state-to-state affairs, China and the United States cannot hope to establish truly friendly relations. Yet the countries should be able to build friendly ties on nongovernmental and individual levels." In the US, Hu will join other world leaders at the UN. He comes as Sino-US relations are being described as the most important in coming decades, but which are now strained enough to worry some in Beijing. Hu's advisers here are saying that Hu is eager to affirm to Americans that China has no problem with a US presence in Asia, that the two nations can be cooperative not confronting, and that China is not a threat.

Astrodome victims 'underprivileged anyway'

Hurricane Katrina victims in Houston, Texas, were "underprivileged anyway" and life in the Astrodome sports arena is "working very well for them," former first lady Barbara Bush said. The comments by the mother of President George W Bush have fueled the ire of some Americans, who see the Bush family as out-of-touch patricians. "Almost everyone I've talked to says 'we're going to move to Houston,"' Bush said in a radio interview after visiting evacuees at the Astrodome with her husband, former president George Bush.

Right city, wrong state

Right city, wrong state FEMA accused of flying evacuees to wrong Charleston YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) or or Create Your Own (CNN) -- Add geography to the growing list of FEMA fumbles. A South Carolina health official said his colleagues scrambled Tuesday when FEMA gave only a half-hour notice to prepare for the arrival of a plane carrying as many as 180 evacuees to Charleston. But the plane, instead, landed in Charleston, West Virginia, 400 miles away. It was not known whether arrangements have been made to care for the evacuees or transport them to the correct destination. A call seeking comment from FEMA was not immediately returned. "We called in all the available resources," said Dr. John Simkovich, director of public health for the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control. "They responded within 30 minutes, which is phenomenal, to meet the needs of the citizens coming in from Louisiana," he said. Simkovich said that the agency had described some of the evacuees as needing "some minor treatment ... possibly some major treatment." "Unfortunately, the plane did not come in," Simkovich said. "There was a mistake in the system, coming out through FEMA, that we did not receive the aircraft this afternoon. It went to Charleston, West Virginia." A line of buses and ambulances idled behind him at Charleston International Airport as he described what happened. "This is a 'no event' for today," Simkovich said.

Wikipedia eclipses CIA

Wikipedia is fast becoming the number-one online resource for web surfers hungry for context about breaking news, in what must be a sad comment on the ability for traditional news media to keep its audiences well-informed. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia assembled in realtime, has reportedly experienced a 154 per cent hike in traffic during the last year, according to internet traffic watchers at Hitwise. The Wiki-fiddlers' big-book o' facts appears to be benefiting from a happy coincidence of a lot of big-headline news combined with the apparent inability of so-called traditional news channels - both online and off-line - to satiate surfers' need for reference material. A high ranking in Google, boosted by the replication of the Wikipedia material, hasn't harmed the project either. Wikipedia attracted 22.3 per cent of users searching for information about the Gaza Strip as Israeli troops closed down settlements and withdrew from the region. Wikipedia's market share numbers meant it drew five times more traffic than Google News, Yahoo News or the BBC and tied with CIA World Factbook for information on the strip. Wikipedia tied as the second most visited site among US web users eager for details about Pope Benedict XVI, Pope John Paul II's successor. The top destination was Newadvent.org, the old-school Catholic encyclopedia that has resisted the temptation to go Wikipedia-style. The service has also eclipsed Dictionary.com is the internet's number-one reference site. Hitwise failed to make more information on Wikipedia traffic, specifically the number of page views, publically available.®

Saddam 'confesses' says Iraq head

If found guilty, Saddam Hussein could face the death penalty Mr Talabani, who has a record of opposing the death penalty, told Iraqi state TV a judge "was able to extract confessions" from the ousted leader. "Saddam deserves a death sentence 20 times a day because he tried to assassinate me 20 times," he said. Saddam Hussein's trial will start on 19 October, the Iraqi government has said. Several of the ex-president's closest aides will also face trial with him, on charges relating to the massacre of 143 Shias in a town north of Baghdad. The killings in Dujail in 1982 followed an attempt on Saddam Hussein's life. Saddam Hussein could face capital punishment if found guilty in the case. '100 reasons' Mr Talabani told Iraqiya TV that some of the alleged confessions referred to crimes "such as executions" during Saddam Hussein's rule. The president said the confessions involved cases currently under investigation without giving any further details. "There are 100 reasons to sentence Saddam to death," said Mr Talabani, a former Kurdish rebel leader. However, the president - who has voiced public opposition to the death penalty - confirmed he would not sign any execution warrant himself. Saddam Hussein's lawyers have greeted Mr Talabani's comments with scepticism and have warned the allegations risk prejudicing the trial. The legal team is trying to delay next month's proceedings arguing it has not been given sufficient time to prepare. Mr Talabani's intervention will also increase the widely-held suspicion among Iraqi's Sunni community that the legal process is subject to political interference, the BBC's Jon Brain in Baghdad says. Saddam Hussein and some of his former aides will also face separate trials on other charges. But some government officials have suggested that if he is convicted for the Dujail killings, subsequent trials for other crimes might be shelved to open the way for sentence to be carried out quickly.

Nation to join EU in pension project

Nation to join EU in pension project By Li Jing (China Daily) Updated: 2005-09-07 05:37 In the face of increasing internal migration, China will join with the European Union in a pilot "mobile pension" project early next year, an EU commissioner said yesterday in Beijing. The 40-million-euro (US$50 million) project is the first co-operation in social security between China and the 25-member EU under a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed on Monday at the 8th China-EU summit. Vladimir Spidla, EU commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities, said that the project calls for a team of experts from the EU to provide assistance and know-how in implementing mobile pensions, which are aimed at ensuring that migrants get their pensions wherever they are. "This memorandum is a good start and provides mutual learning opportunities for both sides," said Spidla, a former prime minister of the Czech Republic. "China is a rapidly emerging economy and major player in international trade. It is time for a policy dialogue between the EU and China on employment and social affairs issues." Spidla said the EU encourages free labourer movement and has gained some experience in how to guarantee that migrants get social welfare. "For instance, a Czech person lived and worked in his mother country, Germany and France in his first 60 years, and now is spending his later years in Spain. Page: 1 2

After Rehnquist

William Rehnquist, the chief justice of America’s Supreme Court, has died, and President George Bush has nominated John Roberts to replace him. Since Mr Roberts had already been picked to replace another justice on the court, this means that a second high-court seat is now available. It is an opportunity conservatives have dreamed of, but it comes as Mr Bush’s political capital is at an all-time low EVEN his ideological opponents agreed that William Rehnquist was an honest and fair-minded man who ran a tight ship as the top judge on America's Supreme Court. His death on Saturday September 3rd was, in the overused phrase, the end of an era. As chief justice for nearly 20 years, the conservative Mr Rehnquist pulled the court slowly but surely to the right, and power in America firmly away from the federal government and towards the states. How his legacy is judged is a question for future historians, but that it is significant is beyond doubt. But even as his body lies in state in the Supreme Court building, thoughts are inevitably turning already to the future. President George Bush has nominated John Roberts to succeed Mr Rehnquist. Mr Roberts had already been nominated to an associate judgeship on the court on the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor, a conservative who nonetheless earned a reputation as the swing voter on social matters. Mr Roberts's confirmation hearings in the Senate had been expected to begin early this week. But that was before the latest turmoil. Not only has Hurricane Katrina shaken America (see article), causing Mr Bush to postpone, among other things, a visit by China's president. Mr Rehnquist's death means that there are now two Supreme Court vacancies, and the president's decision to nominate Mr Roberts as chief justice changes the picture further still. It was announced on Monday that his confirmation would be postponed until later this week or early next. The chief justice has no more weight in voting than his eight colleagues. But he is the court's chief administrator, and among his more important duties is assigning opinions for his fellow justices to write. This is no small power, since the different judges have both differing politics and styles. The chief's position is important enough that Mr Rehnquist had to go through a fairly bruising confirmation hearing in 1986, even though he had already been an associate judge on the court for 15 years. So even though Mr Roberts was widely expected to be confirmed as an associate justice, his nomination to the top spot will make activists and senators give him yet another close look. So far, they have failed to come up with anything embarrassing after combing through virtually everything he has ever written. Moreover, he is a likeable man with a formidable intellect, and is said to be more devoted to the law in the abstract than to pushing his personal conservatism. Conservative he certainly is. He was a clerk to Mr Rehnquist in the early 1980s, and shows it. The two men shared a fondness for the tenth amendment to the constitution, and a corresponding wariness of the “commerce clause”. The tenth amendment says that all powers not explicitly given to the federal government in the constitution are reserved for the states or “the people”. Conservatives consider it the most widely, and sadly, ignored part of the entire document. In particular, those who would arrogate powers to Washington have taken advantage of the clause that allows Congress to regulate “interstate commerce”. This has been the legal basis for federal intervention in all kinds of matters not obviously related to commerce. The Rehnquist court has fought back. Mr Rehnquist opposed a federal law banning guns from a certain radius around public schools, on the ground that Congress had no constitutional power to do this (guns and schools having no obvious connection to interstate commerce). Mr Roberts used the same reasoning to oppose a law protecting a species of toad native to California. Liberals worry that turning the tide against the federal government will weaken its ability to protect the environment, civil rights, abortion rights and a host of other causes dear to them. In particular, they worry about Mr Roberts's stance on Roe v Wade, the 1973 decision that found a right to “privacy” in the constitution and thereby guaranteed legal abortion across the country. Mr Roberts has not said directly whether he would vote to overturn Roe, and probably won't in his confirmation hearings. But Mr Rehnquist was against Roe already. Barring surprises, Mr Roberts will take the same stance as his former boss on this and a host of other issues. The succession is thus unlikely to change the court much in the short term. And since Mr Roberts is only 50 years old, it is likely to ensure a powerful seat for many of Mr Rehnquist's ideas for decades to come. Caught between falling approval ratings and a conservative base threatening to revolt, the president is likely to find nominating a replacement for Ms O'Connor a difficult test of his political touch Hence all the attention turning to the question of who will replace Ms O'Connor, the swing vote. She was known for her pragmatic approach to cases, supporting some forms of affirmative action but not others, and some shows of public religion but not others. Though conservative, she was nothing like her colleagues Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, who bring dogmatic, even radical, conservative arguments to bear on cases. Whom will Mr Bush pick? Having just selected Mr Roberts in July, his shortlist is still close at hand. There is pressure on him to nominate someone who is not both white and male—especially in light of the racial divisions exposed by Hurricane Katrina (most of those too poor to leave New Orleans were black). Having rejected a “women-only” seat by replacing Ms O'Connor with Mr Roberts, to conservatives' delight, Mr Bush might now win points on the other side by choosing either a woman or a non-white this time. There are several possibilities. Edith Clement, who seems to be rather moderate, was rumoured to be in the running for the nomination Mr Roberts eventually got. Mr Bush might appoint his close friend, the attorney-general Alberto Gonzales—but religious conservatives consider him flaky, particularly on abortion, and would cry foul. Emilio Garza, currently a federal appeals-court judge, would be a more reliably conservative Latino. Or Mr Bush could drop a bomb by nominating Janice Rogers Brown, a black woman, but also one of the most controversial conservatives on the bench. Opponents see her as an extremist ready to overturn long-established social-protection legislation—she has written that Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal “marks the triumph of our own socialist revolution”. Anyone perceived as an extremist would face the threat of a filibuster—as few as 40 of the 100 Senate members can prevent a vote by debating endlessly. The Republicans are five seats short of the 60 needed to overturn such a ruse. In May, the two sides made a deal over a batch of Mr Bush's lower-court nominees (including Ms Rogers Brown), saying that the filibuster against judicial nominees could be preserved in the Senate rules if the minority agreed to use it only under “extreme” circumstances. But the agreement is fragile and could easily unravel from either side. That said, the president's political capital is at an all-time low—thanks to violence in Iraq, spiralling petrol prices and the botched response to Katrina—and he may feel this is no time for a big fight. Caught between falling approval ratings and a conservative base threatening to revolt, he is likely to find nominating a replacement for Ms O'Connor a difficult test of his political touch. How he handles it could set the tone for much of his second term.

Michael DeWayne Brown: Facing Blame in a Disaster

Senator Mary L. Landrieu offered a devastating critique on Friday in Baton Rouge. "I have been telling him from the moment he arrived about the urgency of the situation," she said. "I just have to tell you that he had a difficult time understanding the enormity of the task before us." Since then, the news for Mr. Brown has not gotten better. The Times-Picayune, Louisiana's largest newspaper, asked Mr. Bush in an open letter to clean house at FEMA, calling "especially" for the ouster of Mr. Brown. On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff placed the Coast Guard's chief of staff, Vice Admiral Thad W. Allen, in charge of the New Orleans relief effort, clearly a move to beef up management where the problems have been most severe. And on Tuesday, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, in calling for FEMA to be made a separate cabinet-level agency, said its director should have emergency management experience. Mr. Brown's friends say they have cringed watching the criticism of a man they describe as compassionate and dedicated to difficult work. Mary Ann Karns, who worked as city attorney in Edmond, Okla., in the 1970's when Mr. Brown was her assistant, said, "He was interested in politics not for glory and not for power, but because he wanted to make things better for people." Michael DeWayne Brown was born on Nov. 11, 1954 in Guymon, Okla. He and his wife, Tamara, have two grown children, Jared and Amy. His friends say he is an admirer of Theodore Roosevelt, an avid hiker and fly fisherman, and a collector of antique maps of the West. In addition to his brief experience as a city official, Mr. Brown has practiced law, worked for the Oklahoma State Senate and served as counsel to an insurance company. He lost a race for Congress in 1988. But the job he did for a decade before joining FEMA is curiously omitted from his online agency résumé. From 1991 to 2001, as commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association, Mr. Brown enforced the rules administered by judges at the association's 300 annual horse shows. His decisions provoked a number of lawsuits, including one from David Boggs, a trainer whom Mr. Brown accused of having cosmetic surgery performed on horses.

APIs Dashboard

One of the most complex topics, especially for organizations that are new to the API economy, is the concept of an API ecosystem. This whitepaper was written to help you demystify what an ecosystem is and its role in your overall API strategy. This is the second of our ongoing series of whitepapers.

Iraq Body Count

Iraq Body Count maintains the world’s largest public database of violent civilian deaths since the 2003 invasion, as well as separate running total which includes combatants. IBC's data is drawn from cross-checked media reports, hospital, morgue, NGO and official figures or records (see About IBC). You can contribute to IBC's work in several ways, including with a donation.

Daring Fireball: The Location Field Is the New Command Line

The Location Field Is the New Command Line When you publish your opinions on a regular basis, it’s hard to resist the urge to gloat after you’ve been proven correct. (For example, I’ll be I-told-you-so-ing with regard to the iPod mini for the next couple of years.) It’s also rather easy to ignore the times when you’ve been proven wrong. It’s a good thing I wasn’t publishing Daring Fireball back in the mid-to-late ’90s, because if I had been, I’d currently be eating an awful lot of crow with regard to what I would have written about the web’s potential as an application platform. At that time, at the peak of the Netscape-Microsoft browser war, the conventional wisdom was that the web was the future of application development. The technology certainly didn’t yet exist, but the idea was that Netscape’s web browser posed a serious threat to Microsoft’s Windows monopoly — that at some point in the future, user applications would be written to run within the browser. Thus, Microsoft’s incredible change of course, going from more or less ignoring the Internet to completely dominating it within the course of a few years. The idea was that Microsoft killed Netscape because Microsoft saw them as a threat to Windows. Me, however, I just didn’t buy it. I completely saw the potential of the Web as a publishing medium, but I just didn’t see how the Web was ever going to serve as a high-quality application development environment. The way I saw it, Microsoft killed Netscape not because it was a threat to Windows, but simply because they (Microsoft) wanted control over this new publishing medium. I simply couldn’t have been more wrong. The conventional wisdom was in fact correct — the web has turned into a popular application development environment. Where I’d gone wrong was in getting hung up on the idea of it needing to be high-quality before it could become popular. I was thinking in terms of the apps that I used every day, circa 1996: BBEdit, QuarkXPress, Photoshop, Eudora. There was simply no way that a “web app” could ever provide the same quality experience as the “real” apps I was already using. And I was right about that — the user experience of any app running in a web browser is crippled. What I’d overlooked is that most people don’t use advanced text editors or desktop publishing software; and more importantly, most people simply don’t care about the quality of an app’s user experience. Not at all. They just want it to work, and to be “easy”. My saying that web apps would never become popular was like a theater critic in the early 1950s dismissing television. The user experience limitations of a web app are glaringly obvious. They simply don’t look or act like normal desktop apps. The browser in which they’re running — that’s a normal app. But the web apps running within the browser aren’t. They don’t have menu bars or keyboard shortcuts. (The browser itself does.) This isn’t about being “Mac-like” — it applies equally to Windows and open source desktop platforms. Instead of looking and feeling like real Mac/Windows/Linux desktop apps, web apps look and feel like web pages. The persnickety little UI details I obsess over — these are nothing compared to the massive deficiencies of even the best web app. But most people don’t care, because web apps are just so damned easy to use. What’s interesting is that web apps are “easy” despite their glaring user experience limitations. What they’ve got going for them in the ease-of-use department is that they don’t need to be installed, and they free you from worrying about where and how your data is stored. Exhibit A: web-based email apps. In terms of features, especially comfort features such as a polished UI, drag-and-drop, and a rich set of keyboard shortcuts, web-based email clients just can’t compare to desktop email clients. But. With web-based email, you can get your email from any browser on any computer on the Internet. “Installation” consists of typing a URL into the browser’s location field. The location field is the new command line. Google’s Gmail has turned the competition up a notch by providing a few features that actually do compare well against desktop email clients — fast, accurate search (of course), and a very nice threaded display for discussions. Gmail also offers a bunch of keyboard shortcuts, implemented in JavaScript, but as Mark Pilgrim described them in his Gmail review, they [appear] to have been designed by vi users ( j moves down, k moves up, and we are expected to memorize multi-key sequences for navigation). Gmail’s threading and searching are indeed nice, but its overall look-and-feel is far inferior to that of a real desktop mail client. What it has going for it is what all webmail apps have — zero installation, zero maintenance, access from any computer, anywhere (including from work, a major factor for personal email). Gmail is simply better than the other major web-based mail apps; but Yahoo and Hotmail and the others are still ragingly popular. What I missed when I dismissed them a decade ago is that web apps don’t need to beat desktop apps on the same terms. What’s happened is that they’re beating them on an entirely different set of terms. It’s all about the fact that you just type the URL and there’s your email. Who Loses As Web Apps Win? What got me thinking about this was Joel Spolsky’s “How Microsoft Lost the API War”, a terrific essay published last week. The gist of Spolsky’s argument is that Microsoft’s crown jewel is the Win32 API — the set of programming interfaces that developers use to write desktop Windows software — and that web app development is gaining momentum, at the direct expense of Win32 development. The reason the Win32 API is so important to Microsoft’s Windows monopoly is dependence: if your company relies on Win32 software, then it also relies on Windows. And conversely, as a developer, writing against the Win32 APIs allows your software to run on over 90 percent of the computers in the world. That’s the cycle that built a $50 billion pile of cash — customers use Windows because that’s where the software is, and developers write Windows software because that’s where the customers are. Switching to, say, Mac OS X is an expensive proposition for a large corporation. Not only do you need all-new hardware, but you also need all-new software. And we’re not just talking about buying new licenses — for large corporations, we’re also talking about custom apps written in-house (what do you think all those Visual Basic developers have been writing all these years?). Switching to open source desktops — KDE or Gnome or what have you — is also expensive. No, you don’t need new hardware, but you still run into the same situation with regard to software. (Yes, I know — you can run Win32 apps on Linux using the WINE Win32 emulator, or with Virtual PC for Macs, but these are second-class Win32 environments. I’m not saying it can’t be done, just that it’s unappealing.) Switching to web applications, however — well, that’s different. It can be done gradually, because you can switch one app at a time while still running Windows, and thus, still running all your other Win32 software. It’s not so much that switching to web apps is cheap, as that it’s easy. In fact, in many ways, switching your employees to web apps is even easier than upgrading the Win32 apps they’re already using. I.e. it’s easier for corporations to migrate to web apps than it is for them to stay Windows-only. Web apps are easier to deploy. No need to install software on each client machine; there’s just one instance of the app, on a web server. Every user gets the latest version of the software, automatically. Custom web apps are easier to develop than custom desktop apps. That’s not to say it’s easy to make a web app that looks and feels like a desktop app — that’s not really even possible. But it’s easy to write a web app that looks and feels like a web page, which is apparently good enough for most purposes, especially data-entry and data-retrieval apps that tie into server-hosted SQL databases. And if you think the 90-percent market share of computers that can run Win32 software is huge — how many computers do you think run a typical web app? Most email web apps (e.g. Gmail and Yahoo Mail) run on any computer with IE, Safari, or any Mozilla-derived browser. Most weblog web apps (e.g. Blogger, Movable Type, WordPress, and Textpattern) run in every browser I’ve ever tried. These apps are effectively usable from any Internet-connected computer in the world. I’ve been thinking about the rise of the web as an application platform for a while. But what hadn’t occurred to me until I read Spolsky’s essay last week is this, which I think is quite remarkable: Microsoft totally fucked up when they took aim at Netscape. It wasn’t Netscape that was a threat to Windows as an application platform, it was the web itself. They spent all that time, money, and development effort on IE, building a browser monopoly and crushing Netscape — but to what avail? Here we are, and the web is still gaining developer mindshare at the expense of Win32. There are certainly exceptions — banking sites come to mind — but for the most part, web apps are being built to run in any modern browser, not just IE. I think Spolsky is very much correct that Microsoft is losing the API war. But what’s ironic is that they’re losing this war despite the fact that they won the browser war. Winning the browser war — destroying Netscape — was supposed to prevent there ever even being an API war.

Medical Records Say Arafat Died From a Stroke

Correction Appended JERUSALEM, Sept. 7 - The medical records of Yasir Arafat, which have been kept secret since his unexplained death last year at a French military hospital, show that he died from a stroke that resulted from a bleeding disorder caused by an unidentified infection. The first independent review of the records, obtained by The New York Times, suggests that poisoning was highly unlikely and dispels a rumor that he may have died of AIDS. Nonetheless, the records show that despite extensive testing, his doctors could not determine the underlying infection. Arafat seemed frail in his final months but not, by anyone's account, at death's door when he suddenly fell ill last October. After more than two weeks without improvement, he was airlifted to a French hospital, where he died on Nov. 11. The cause of death was never announced and speculation has remained rife. The records indicate that Arafat did not receive antibiotics until Oct. 27, 15 days after the onset of his illness, which was originally diagnosed as "a flu." That was only two days before he was transferred to the Percy Army Teaching Hospital in Clamart, outside Paris, and it was probably too late to save him, according to Israeli and American experts consulted by The Times, who agreed to review the records on condition they not be named.

Level of Bacteria Is Found Unsafe

WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 - Tests of water covering New Orleans showed excessive levels of E. coli bacteria and lead, federal officials said Wednesday, providing the first confirmation that the floodwaters caused by Hurricane Katrina are posing health risks for emergency response workers and residents who have remained in the city. While neither substance has been blamed for any deaths, a spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said state and local officials had reported three deaths in Mississippi and one in Texas from exposure to Vibrio vulnificus, a choleralike bacteria found in saltwater that poses special risks for people with chronic liver problems. The centers' spokesman, Tom Skinner, said a fifth case involving the bacteria was under investigation. The water tests, conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency at laboratories in Houston and Lafayette, La., sought to identify the more than 100 chemical and bacterial pollutants in two water samples from six sites in largely residential areas over four days, starting Saturday.

Creating Passionate Users: You can out-spend or out-teach

« Conversational writing kicks formal writing's ass | Main | Blow your mind in Z-space » You can out-spend or out-teach Imagine you're trying to launch a new software product, book, web service, church, small business, social cause, consulting practice, school, podcast channel, rock band, whatever. The most important skill you need today is not fund-raising, financial management, or marketing. It's not knowledge management, IT, or human resources. It's not product design, usability, or just-in-time inventory. The most important skill today is... teaching. Whatever it is you're launching is probably not in short supply, and there's always someone who's doing it better, faster, and cheaper (or will be within weeks). Most of us authors, non-profit evangelists, indie software developers, small start-ups (the soon-to-be Fortune 5,000,000) can barely afford broadband let alone a "marketing/ad campaign". We can't hire a publicist. We aren't going to be on Oprah. But you're not interested in using deception and bulls*** to manipulate someone into buying a product, membership, or idea that you don't believe in yourself. And that's your big advantage over even the biggest and best-funded competitors: your belief. Because what you believe in, you can teach. And teaching is the "killer app" for a newer, more ethical approach to marketing. While in the past, those who out-spent (on ads, and big promotions) would often win, that's becoming less and less true today for a lot of things--especially the things designed for a younger, more-likely-to-be-online user community. Kind of a markets-are-classrooms notion. Those who teach stand the best chance of getting people to become passionate. And those with the most passionate users don't need an ad campaign when they've got user evangelists doing what evangelists do... talking about their passion. But passion requires real learning. Nobody is passionate about skiing on their first day. Nobody is passionate about programming in Java on their first day. Or week. It's virtually impossible to become passionate about something until you're somewhere up the skill/knowledge curve, where there are challenges that you believe are worth it, and that you perceive you can do. Nobody becomes passionate until they've reached the stage where they want to grow in a way they deem meaningful. Whether it's getting better at a game or helping to save the world, there must be a goal (ideally, a continuously progressive goal) and a clear path to getting there. It's our job, if we're trying to encourage others to become passionate, to enable it. And the only way to do that is by teaching. I've talked about all this before, but I wanted to consolidate the links and the "story" in one place: 1) The importance of learning/teaching your users: Upgrade your users, not just your product Kicking ass is more fun (The better your users are at something, the more likely they are to become passionate.) What software can learn from kung fu (the Next Level is extremely motivating) 2) Teaching techniques: Crafting a User Experience (It's all about flow... balancing challenge and skill) Keeping users engaged Learning doesn't happen in the middle (Have lots of beginnings and endings) Just-in-time vs. just-in-case learning (If you don't provide the "why", they may not listen to the "what" and "how") Is your message memorable?" (You have to get past the brain's crap filter) Getting what you expect is boring. (The "oh shit/oh cool" technique) The users's journey (take your user on a modified hero's journey) The case for easter eggs (and other clever user treats) (let the user discover "surprises") Many of us would be better off if we ditched our marketing budget (hah! like we have one...) and put it all toward something that helps the user kick ass, have more fun, and want to learn more. And to be honest with myself here, part of the point is that people who want to learn more are more likely to want more of your tools, services, community, and "tribe/pride items" around whatever it is they're learning.(So make sure you and your wake can support that.) There's no way I can ski as well on my $100 skis as I can on my $600 skis. That's a fact, not a marketing manipulation or my imagination. That I wouldn't have known the difference (or needed the difference) had I not learned to ski better is an important point, but even if the ski maker had been responsible for teaching me to improve to the point where I needed their more expensive skis, it makes me happy to ski better. I'm grateful that I've improved enough to benefit from better skis (and thankful I was able to get them). To use the lamest cliche--it really is a win/win. I can process graphics and video much more quickly on my iMac G5 than I could on my old iBook G4. Thanks to Nikon's free online training, I now can take much more interesting photgraphs with my Nikon 5700 than I could with my old point-and-shoot digital Nikon. Nikon taught me to appreciate aperture control, something the clueless recreational snapshot taker I was before wouldn't have wanted and wouldn't have paid for until Nikon gave me a reason. It's not a b.s. reason. It's not a fluffy "coolness" reason. It's about me taking better pictures--something I don't need, but really really enjoy. (And no, it certainly didn't hurt Nikon either ; ) I'll say it again -- if you're marketing-through-teaching, and helping your users kick ass, and in the process teaching them to appreciate your higher-end products or services, this is not a bad thing. I do respect that old-school marketing has done plenty of evil and horrifically damaging things to people and communities (even whole countries). But we are not those who pushed products without a conscience. We will be mindful, and we will not promote that which we don't believe in. This is about creating passionate users, and that can happen only if we help our users learn and grow and spend more time in flow. These moments of flow you can help enable are some of the happiest moments in a person's life. And yes, this applies not just to hobbies and games and sports but even to work. After all, a big part of the success and passion around Getting Things Done, 43 folders, and 37 Signals software is about people being in flow... just getting their daily work done. So, who can you help find flow today? [Footnote: I'm leaving for the Parelli conference tomorrow morning, and internet access will be very limited (it's basically a cowboy ranch). I won't be back until Tuesday night, so if there aren't any more posts until next week, that's why. Matt Galloway and Shaded, you're in charge of comments while I'm gone (I'll make it up to you, I promise ; ) No food fights.] [Update: gulliver left a wonderful, important comment for this post, and as a result I added a few more links into this post. But you really must read the whole comment. Thanks gulliver!] Posted by Kathy on September 7, 2005 | Permalink TrackBack TrackBack URL for this entry: https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83451b44369e200d8342413ed53ef Listed below are links to weblogs that reference You can out-spend or out-teach: » Passion + community + teaching = success profit from Panasonic Youth Kathy has had a great run of posts on building passion, marketing through teaching, and inspiring passion. Her latest entry talks about how teaching is the number one way to create passionate users (and by extension, profit): people who want ... [Read More] Tracked on Sep 8, 2005 1:05:08 AM » Any old preacher could have told you that from Just.in What you believe in, you can teach. And teaching is the killer app for a newer, more ethical approach to marketing. - Kathy Sierra, of Creating Passionate Users ... [Read More] Tracked on Sep 8, 2005 1:32:17 AM » Markets Are Classrooms from URBANintelligence Brilliant treatise by Kathy Sierra this morning about how teaching is the killer app for marketing. Those who teach stand the best chance of getting people to become passionate. And those with the most passionate users don't need an ad... [Read More] Tracked on Sep 8, 2005 8:08:36 AM » Outspend or out-teach from elearnspace Outspend or out-teach: "The most important skill today is... teaching." Comment: I disagree with this statement. In fact this particular attitude has created the ineffective education system to which we subject our learners. I agree with the author's v... [Read More] Tracked on Sep 8, 2005 9:29:04 AM » Teaching: the new Marketing from Inside Conversation Kathy Sierra posted a great essay on a better way to market: TEACH. If you teach your customers as opposed to forcing information down their throats, they are more likely to become advocates for you and your product. You know [Read More] Tracked on Sep 8, 2005 9:36:21 AM » More Teaching vs. Less Spending from Dig Tank Creating Passionate Users: You can out-spend or out-teach Amazing post over at Creating Passionate Users. An Excerpt... "But you're not... [Read More] Tracked on Sep 8, 2005 5:56:27 PM » More Teaching and Less Spending from Dig Tank Creating Passionate Users: You can out-spend or out-teach Amazing post over at Creating Passionate Users. An Excerpt... "But you're not... [Read More] Tracked on Sep 8, 2005 5:57:29 PM » El Viejo Marketing, y el Marketing Que La Rompe from nuhuati Hace tiempo me encontré con un artículo realmente llamativo, en el blog llamado Creating passionate users... En una palabra impresionante, los contenidos tienen un solo cometido, el cambiar la concepción y acción en el branding. La autora [Read More] Tracked on Sep 9, 2005 2:41:42 PM » "Teaching is the new killer app" from achievable ends There are some blogs I'd be willing to pay to read. (This is not a model I'm recommending, however.) Creating Passionate Users is one of them. You Can Out-Spend or Out-Teach is a university course in a post. The irreplaceable [Read More] Tracked on Sep 9, 2005 6:12:12 PM » Out-spending is Cheaper from одй: weblog Teaching is hard. Spending is easy. [Read More] Tracked on Sep 9, 2005 8:26:13 PM » Out-spend or out-teach from www.weiterbildungsblog.de Man kann diesen Artikel als zeitgemäßen Versuch lesen, Marketing und Bildung zu verbinden ("marketing-through-teaching"). "And teaching is the "killer app" for a newer, more ethical approach to marketing." (Etwas nüchterner ist ja auch hierzulande immer häufige... [Read More] Tracked on Sep 13, 2005 3:26:30 PM » More unmarketing marketing from The Journal Blog I guess today is the day for it. Further brilliance from Kathy Sierra of Headrush on teaching as marketing ... great stuff for the marketing-makes-me-wretch crowd. The gist is that anything you really believe in, you can teach. The really... [Read More] Tracked on Sep 13, 2005 3:33:41 PM » Out-spend or out-teach from www.weiterbildungsblog.de Man kann diesen Artikel als zeitgemäßen Versuch lesen, Marketing und Bildung zu verbinden ("marketing-through-teaching"). "And teaching is the "killer app" for a newer, more ethical approach to marketing." (Etwas nüchterner ist ja auch hierzulande immer häufige... [Read More] Tracked on Sep 14, 2005 12:40:28 AM » More unmarketing marketing from The Journal Blog I guess today is the day for it. Further brilliance from Kathy Sierra of Headrush on teaching as marketing ... great stuff for the marketing-makes-me-retch crowd. The gist is that anything you really believe in, you can teach. The really... [Read More] Tracked on Sep 16, 2005 6:51:07 AM » On Jeff Jones, IBM AR, and rewriting Powerpoint from James Governor's MonkChips Jeff Jones is an IBM AR guy that has a deep grasp of the underlying technologies he works on.He is also great at building and sustaining relationships and has ideas like this: "I would rewrite PowerPoint to allow no more... [Read More] Tracked on Sep 27, 2005 10:11:28 AM » degree and Creating Passionate Users: You can out-spend or out-teach from online degree Professors bring podcasting to campus - Sacbee - . it more, said tamara burrowes, who will complete her bachelor s degree at udc in december . instant messenger) windows open, browsing online and listening to their ipods, jackson. [Read More] Tracked on Sep 28, 2005 7:36:28 AM » Out-spend or out-teach from www.weiterbildungsblog.de Man kann diesen Artikel als zeitgemäßen Versuch lesen, Marketing und Bildung zu verbinden ("marketing-through-teaching"). "And teaching is the "killer app" for a newer, more ethical approach to marketing." (Etwas nüchterner ist ja auch hierzulande immer häufige... [Read More] Tracked on Sep 30, 2005 4:01:30 AM » A Learning Blog from Huff's Blog I was surfing through some of the sites listed on Technorati and came across Passionate under the Business tag search. This blog looks pretty interesting to me. The site is devoted to teaching others how to create passionate users. The [Read More] Tracked on Jan 17, 2006 3:19:09 PM » A Learning Blog from Tech Ramblings I was surfing through some of the sites listed on Technorati and came across Passionate under the Business tag search. This blog looks pretty interesting to me. The site is devoted to teaching others how to create passionate users. The [Read More] Tracked on Feb 11, 2006 11:36:37 AM » Don't Market to your Customers - Teach Them from Decisive Flow What I love about things like blogging and Word of Mouth Marketing is how you win customers honestly - by being inspirational. I hate some of those famous marketing campaign successes, like cigarette companies who had women march down the street [Read More] Tracked on May 16, 2006 4:05:24 PM Comments With the wealth of really good stuff hidden(?) in the links of your entry, it's perhaps better suited to a minibook than a blog post. I'm saving it all for a re-read offline. Only slightly churlishly (and entirely constructively) I have - well, I don't really... just couldn't resist the opportunity - to take slight issue with the line about 'teaching' - even when more softly expressed as 'creating passionate users... can happen only if we help our users learn'. At risk of over-simplifying things - we simply need to engage them. To get their genuine attention. Quoting the eminently sensible John Peterman - 'People want things that are hard to find. Things that have romance, but a factual romance, about them'. My chosen method is more gonzo - 'let's make it a [expletive deleted] adventure'. Is language like 'a voyage of exploration and discovery' suited to commercial relationships? Dunno. Your call. My ship left harbor eons ago. The better vendor/client relationships are *exactly* that - a relationship. Most instances of the sale process aren't - they're just 'hits'... brief encounters of no greater durability than the morning mist. Rather than a pleasurable collaboration, they're often an arduous - and sometimes tortuous - process. To me, and I suspect others (certainly Tom Peters who wrote the book from whence I swiped this bit), 'good collaboration is like romance - it can't be routine and predictable'. Any hint of 'process' and 'procedure' is the kiss-of-death. It has to be openly authentic - entirely genuine... 'I'm me, you're you - let's dance'. Perhaps paraphrasing unfairly, I suggest Godin-et-al get it wrong when talking of 'telling a story'. Sure, amid the permadross which is much of marketing, that'll gain immediate ground - but the foreign land which is 'enhanced sustainability' demands an entirely different currency... truth. Open. Honest. Authenticity. 'Turn up. Tell the truth. Smile.' I'm suggesting relationships be founded upon a genuine personal connection - at least as best as can be achieved in the confines of one person trying to sell something to another. This is not a 'doorstep deal with the Avon lady' scenario. Why not fewer and deeper commercial associations than the usual weak, mediocre, superficial and compromised dross that so many accept? If that seems unfairly harsh, I urge you to think again... and consider just how many associations end in grief - perhaps not having been that good to begin with. This implication here is 'special'. And I want 'special'. How's about you? The prize for those whose language is 'teach and learn' is the buyer's mind. My quest is more complex - and extends beyond the old 'heartstrings pull pursestrings' adage... simply, I want your soul. 'Often have I wondered how deep the visitor has looked; how carefully have they listened? Did anyone catch that? Do I but amuse myself?'... is, in an age in which 'we're all too busy', something which probably applies to us all... how best to present ourselves in an honest accurate manner and foster mutally beneficial collaboratation with those who 'aren't too busy'? Sadly, the one-line statement-of-benefit which opens nigh every damn commercial site seems to be held in great esteem. Sadly? Sure - and wrongly. Whilst an absolute boon to snaring those 'super busy perpetua-motion got-a-meeting-at-eleven' types, it misses many - notably those who 'demand' a more spohisticated process in which they're allowed/ encouraged/enabled/assisted to discover at their own pace. Harking back to the days before we all ventured online, the real-world parallel is the salesperson who immediately leaps upon those venturing into their auto lot/clothes store. Please, lay out your offer and allow me to wander. To roam. Trust me to choose wisely. And not. Please be aware that, if I 'don't bother' to take time and make effort to 'receive the message', then we weren't really suited anyway. Sure, we may have shared a toothbrush in the morn - but we'd never have stuck it out to the point of choosing bedlinen and gifts for the children. In trying to circumvent the 'exploration process'- that path upon which 'know more' often (naturally and ultimately beneficially) becomes 'no more' - we use a plethora of gambits/tactics... 'tricks' to nudge the prospect our way and succumb to the cold kiss of commerce 'you've got product' message and 'buy!' impulse as our skeletal hand reaches round and removes the visa card from their back pocket. Pity. We could have had a great time together. Instead, you tried to sell me something. Personally entirely disinterested in deals where someone has to be persuaded, convinced and sold... why can't we 'the menu here is wholly different' allow things to be less contrived and more natural. This, I posit, is entirely in accord with 'you're not interested in using deception and bulls*** to manipulate someone into buying a product, membership, or idea that you don't believe in yourself'. So... 'teach'... 'learn'...? maybe. How's about 'discover'? Posted by: gulliver | Sep 8, 2005 3:01:18 AM Gulliver: wow, what a fabulous comment and a ton to think about it and do. I'm running out the door for my trip, but you did motivate me to at least stick a few more links in the post to things that address "surprise", "discovery" and "the user's journey". I hope to talk about this more with you when I return. Thanks so much! FYI: elearnspace makes a key point in their trackback that it should be "learning", not "teaching", and I think that's right. I was (mistakenly) associating teaching with learning, and that's not always the case. So you'll have to do a mental search and replace that when I say "we must out-teach", the long version of that is really "we must do whatever it takes to help our users 'learn'". I hope I've made the exact point over and over in other posts on this blog, but sometimes I use a shorthand to make something concise. When I say teach, I mean teach in a way that causes learning. You have to read the whole entry to make sense of it, and I'm hoping "elearnspace" won't take the headline completely out of context... and appreciate that I mean exactly what they're saying--it's about learning. But "enabling learning" is more, well, unwieldy. So I'm not sure that substituting the word "teaching" is such a bad thing if we take the time to back it up. Posted by: Kathy Sierra | Sep 8, 2005 9:41:46 AM And I'm about to learn what I'd actually do with the keys to Kathy's blog. Hmmmmm...... Kathy your chair seems warm, as if emanating power. Oh thats right you were just using it. I like the Mac, by the way. I think I have Mac envy, mine is only a mini. But they say its not the size of your.... cliche... Oh look! Its a folder entitled "Unbelievably brilliant ideas!" Kathy HOW did you know Matt and I were the only ones you could trust enough not to spill the beans early? ... never mind... enjoy your trip... We've got reading to do. Posted by: shaded | Sep 8, 2005 10:46:22 AM I don't know if this theory really clicks for me. Is Apple successful because they taught?? Maybe they could point to their theater workshops. What about Mark Ecko and his successful products - where's the teaching there? Or a craze like Designer Toys. I hear what you're saying but I don;t think it's ONLY the most important thing. Posted by: Piers Fawkes | Sep 8, 2005 12:59:59 PM Teaching - there's a concept! Posted by: RMT | Sep 8, 2005 1:17:19 PM Hi Kathy, I'm a passionate and regular reader of your blog. With your last update, I've come to the conclusion that it's really time that you bring all this intelligent stuff in a book that I will be so happy to read. I'm living in France near Geneva, Switzerland. If you have the opportunity to give a conference here please let us know. Best regards, Lionel Posted by: Lionel | Sep 8, 2005 1:30:44 PM Wow, what a great post and an equally interesting response from gulliver. I don't recall one more sesquipedalian. First off, some house keeping – gulliver & lionel, you both mentioned a book and it's my understanding that this blog has been Kathy's Creating Passionate Users book prototype so we're all anxiously awaiting this in book form. But no word yet on when we can expect it as far as I know. Although, I don't recall a post where Kathy has organized previous posts to support a larger concept on this scale. I can just see the mind map developing on the white board. I'm taking this as a sign - we might be getting close. I've read and reread gulliver's comments. I even went to his web site – which is equally opaque. To be honest, I'm not sure I get him but at the same time I really, really want to. To me this is almost as interesting as his comments or Kathy's original post. I keep thinking about Kathy's "next level" and the idea of helping users get to where they want to be. In this regard, gulliver's language suggests that he doesn't want people to get to the next (his?) level - instead he seems to wants to elevate himself above the crowd by using language that is difficult for average folks to digest. Well, at least difficult for me to digest. Don't get me wrong – I was rivoted by his commentary, enchanted with his vocabulary, it was almost like reading Shakespeare – which, in my opinion, is really, really hard. Okay gulliver, I get it, you are really, really smart – now what are you trying to say? (I too couldn't resist and mean this entirely constructively.) (As best I can tell) One of gulliver's main themes is that the notion that interactions designed to stimulate real learning are capable of catalyzing passion is valid, however, it is but a small subset of the general goal which is engagement – to get genuine attention. Furthermore, (and more generally) any specific strategies, tactics, gambits designed to inspire passion are by their very nature insincere as they are transparently fueled by the ultimate goal of closing deals – and, by extension, are implicitly not fueled by the desire to help customers kick ass. Back to square one, you're still a marketing jackass. gulliver's alternative (if I read correctly) is to build a genuine, deep, personal, less contrived and more natural individual connection with each and every customer sans strategy or gambit, pretense or forethought... presumably to close the deal. Am I the only one that doesn't see a difference here? As I see it, we have a Catch-22 here beyond the Rubicon. "What Rubicon?" you ask. The one we crossed when we decided we wanted to provide a product, idea, service, whatever to someone else. Transactions don't exist in a vacuum. We typically think of the vendor-client relationship as a downward flow, but it ain't – it's bidirectional and (should be) symbiotic. The client/customer/user has an agenda too – they want, need or desire something. Take our relationship with Kathy for example – she wants to spread (and validate?) her brilliant ideas about passion, we want to drink them up – to learn, to be part of the community, to validate our own ideas. But in addition to that Kathy wants to sell books (to pay for skateboards, iPods, Vokyll skis, Icelandic horses, and her daughter's non-college vegetarian education), we want to figure out how to inspire passion... presumably to close more deals... so we can each meet our personal and professional goals. True altruism is a myth. This is the Catch-22 - in order to help others we must ensure our own needs are met. Ah there's the rub – whether 'tis nobler in the heart to suffer the slings and arrows of miserable product failure or to take arms against a sea of gulliver's rhetoric and by opposing, successfully market a product, service, idea that we believe will truly help people kick ass. Not quite perfect iamb, but poetic nonetheless. Hmmmm. Enough with the contrarian folderol – gulliver makes some cogent points. Namely, the bit about "enhanced sustainability" demanding truth - Open. Honest. Authenticity. This bit, of course, is dead on. My take is that there is a growing wave of authenticity in the world and it is changing everything. There is lots to explore here, but the part that is relevant to this conversation is that authenticity is the difference between legitimately inspiring passion and evil subversive marketing. As Kathy wrote a while back – everyone is a marketer. The question is motive – is it selfish or symbiotic. If the answer is symbiotic, passion will ensue. No matter the method – learning, teaching, engaging, discovering – whatever. Even the dreaded storytelling of Godin lore can be used for the forces of good. If you want to talk authenticity, let's focus on motive - not methodology. Mr. gulliver, I really enjoyed your thoughts and ideas. I hope you take my entirely constructive comments in the spirit in which they are intended. Both you and Kathy challenged me today and you helped me kick ass. Well done. Oh, BTW Mr. gulliver – your domain name is set to expire in 9 days. This has been really fun – although I'm fairly certain Kathy will never invite me back. -Matt, One of the Guys Left in Charge of Comments Posted by: Matt Galloway | Sep 8, 2005 10:17:24 PM Piers, I talk with lots of folks about the whole Passionate User thing and somebody always throws out negative examples – how do you create passionate toothpaste users? While I'm sure everybody that reads Kathy could think of some ways to try to create passionate toothpaste users, the reality is that nobody's ever really going to try. I think that companies have a choice – do I want to go for the whole passionate user thing or just do I want do something else. There's lots of something elses. Some will even work – with some metrics better than the passion route. That said, I'm not sure the designer toy industry is after Passion in the Kathy Sierra sense. I think Apple 'teaches' in the sense that they lower the barriers to getting to the next level. They are particularly good at doing this from ground zero. The iPod was actually kind of late to the portable MP3 player game – now they have 75% of the market. Why? Partially because they taught us (the general public) how to download and manage music easily. Through their silhouette ad campaign they taught us that digital music is easy, fun and relevant. By working really hard on the human-machine interface they make the experience intuitive – this too is teaching. This is the thing with Apple – they are so good at this we take it for granted. If Rio, iRiver, Creative Labs or Sony did more teaching and less featuritis marketing, I suspect things would be different. BTW, I love PSFK – you kids rock. -Matt Posted by: Matt Galloway | Sep 8, 2005 10:58:46 PM This brings to mind one of my own personal hot, hot, hot button issues. The corollary of "what you believe in, you can teach" is that our teachers should believe in their subjects. By this I'm talking about our school teachers. The ones we send our kids off to everyday. Passionate belief in your subject is the MOST IMPORTANT quality for a teacher. Think of all the great teachers you ever had in school. Each one had their own style, unique to them. Some may have been disciplined and formal, some wildly creative and unpredictable. But they really cared about science, latin, english, whatever is what they were teaching you. This is why the last decade or so of educational reform politics is so utterly frustrating to me. The straight jacket of high-stakes standardized testing that is being imposed across the country. It is insanity. It threatens Americas greatest cultural advantage -- our creativity, our passion. By the way, when is "Head First 9th Grade Biology" coming out? My daughter needs it... -Charlie Posted by: Charlie Evett | Sep 9, 2005 8:56:34 AM Thank You I am a camara operator if you are Camara ready. The property I live on is owned by my partner PRODUCER/ACTOR TED JESSUP http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/filmography.html?p_id=202137 . Ted is the producer of the Al Franken Show on the Sundance channel http://www.ofrankenfactor.com/ We are located on Royce Road in Bethel, New York scene of the 1969 Woodstock Festival. http://www.woodstock69.com/ Love ya brother daniel Posted by: Daniel Eggink | Sep 9, 2005 10:55:17 AM Lovely thoughts. Yes, products can be replicated, ideas can be stolen (or bought!!), speed-to-market can take the thunder out of marketing campaigns but the most rare commodity is passionate users. Software companies have learnt this art quite well! 1. Microsoft has Microsoft Certified Professionals! A course taught and evangelized by Microsoft. 2. Novell has certified Network engineers! 3. Oracle has certified DBAs No wonder, there are monopolies and open software networks. Linux is again a great example of how passionate users continually upgrade the product! Finally, employees also have to be taught. Selling a product passionately is one thing but executing it with same vigor is difficult. Only passion can drive consistent behaviour across any organization. Posted by: Sivaraman Swaminathan | Sep 11, 2005 10:44:43 AM Charlie - interesting point. I don't think passion is absolutely neccessary for a teacher to be competent, but I do think it helps. Furthermore, I do think passion is required for teachers to be truely remarkable, inspirational and life changing. An intersting aside kind of along these lines - I'm currently in the market for a new car. I'm looking at lots of options (I tend to get obsessive about purchases like this). I looked at lots of websites. Volkswagon has a particularly good website that has some great examples of passion building - community stuff, VW clothing, informal writing style - and learning. They have some cool animated videos that show the difference between gas and disel engines. I spent about 2 hours on the site and was excited about test driving a particular car - a Jetta Wagon disel. After all - Drivers Wanted! After wallowing in this post, I have been on the lookout for examples of teaching as marketing and the VW site is really excellent. Then, I went to the only VW dealership in my area. The salesperson I spoke with was rude, uninspiring, disinterested and summarily dismished what I told him I had seen on the VW website 20 minutes earlier as being wrong. Because of that experience, I am no longer considering VW. (I'm getting a Scion xB - and I'm well on my way to being passionate about them, but that's a different post.) The point is, VW did everything right to inspire passion for 99.9% of the process - but the sales guy - the last .1 % - was an ass, the polar opposite of passionate and not surprisingly, I'm buying a competitor's product. If you are looking for a low cost, reliable, fuel efficient and uber-cool ride - check out the Scion line. Posted by: Matt Galloway | Sep 12, 2005 12:08:53 AM At risk of being seen to hog the posting space, in the 'serial killers often revisit the scene of the crime' tradition I want to clear a couple potential misunderstandings with Matt. And , if the initial post seemed overlong and confused, this'll likely be moreso. If someone'll sit down and help write 'zen and the art of marketing' perhaps we can cover this in a manner which does good and pays the rent. 'til then though, more unpaid blog input... >gulliver's language suggests that he doesn't want people to get to the next (his?) level - instead he seems to wants to elevate himself above the crowd by using language that is difficult for average folks to digest. 'More Hank Miller than WSJ', my 'too much Kerouac and not enough Drucker' is something which I hope makes things easier to grasp. A simple guy 'yearning for the good old days', I don't understand much of the marketingese that's thrown around so casually. Sometimes, as Dylan might have said, 'You just have to sing the song rather than analyze the lyrics'. The point here is simply: I don't actually think there is a next level - just a single plane we all share and upon which EVERYTHING is played out. I'll borrow from Carl Sagan - speaking on the view of earth from 3.7 billion miles away as a pale blue dot: ----------- Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home, That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. ----------- On a much much much less grandiose scale... we have 'marketing' - and its parent, 'commerce'. (The founding father 'enterprise' has long since left the building in disgust at the untoward antics of its offspring.) It's in 'differentiating ourselves' that the problems arise. So, an enthusisatic 'yay' to those who rightly see it as 'we're all in this together' and a resounding 'nay' to the others who see it as a 'them and us' game of gambit and manoeuver toward 'competitive advantage'. Simply, we're all 'the crowd' - so let's please switch the pseudo perspective of the eagle for the viewpoint of the frog and 'get in there together'. Or, put another way - ' I have stuff you may wanna buy - please take a look and let me know; either way it's ok'. Movin' on... >gulliver's alternative (if I read correctly) is to build a genuine, deep, personal, less contrived and more natural individual connection with each and every customer sans strategy or gambit, pretense or forethought... presumably to close the deal. Phew! My cigar collection remains intact... M, you're right - up to the word 'customer'. Simply, I just want to build a genuine, deep, personal, less contrived and more natural individual connection with each and everyONE - unless they're total frickin' idiots in which case let's nuke the f****** now. To me, and I suspect at least a few others, marketing/commerce should be natural parts of our lives. Not 'extensions of' and certainly not ' just something we do monday through friday, 9-5'. If this is a little - or a lot - too much 'grow an organic beard and recycle your own sandals' oregon-commune philosophy then... well, life's like this sometimes. The prevalent 'Dude, where's my deal?' mentality will be the undoing of us all. As long as someone's trying to sell something to the other one there'll always be unease and impediments to the natural flow (rather than forced encounter) which should be commerce. 'Folk'll ultimately do what they want anyway...' why should we even try to influence their decision making? Lay out your stall, grab their attention and then stand back. If your stuff's good, enough will buy and you'll get to pass 'go' and collect the $200 enough times to cover rent and put the kids through college. And, if it's not, then 'play your funky music elsewhere' get out of the market. Seriously, the parallel here is the archer - who can do little about the arrow after it's left the bow. 'Go to archery class, buy good equipment, be aware of the wind, select target'... our focus should be on getting the presentation correct - and not the aforementioned 'gambit and manoeuver toward competitive advantage' tango in which we all indulge. Bluntly: 'Do your stuff - well. Forget the deal. if you 'win' so be it. Should you 'lose' so be it.' M, you're absolutely right on 'vendor-client relationship...(should be) symbiotic'. And entirely wrong on 'True altruism is a myth - in order to help others we must ensure our own needs are met.' We could simply help others regardless of the cost/benefit to ourselves. Symbiosis should occur naturally - and if it doesn't it cannot be co-erced or forced.' Entirely practically... we can focus on meeting our own needs - that's commerce. And concentrate on 'help others' - that's charity/whatever. Or, big 'or'... we can detach from the outcome in a genuine 'I've done my stuff well so if they buy then fine and if they don't that's fine too' and in so doing we aid (read: not impede) the process. The move toward 'authenticity' is excellent. Long overdue. That said, too much of it is in the vein of 'meet the new boss, same as the old boss'... a thinly-veiled and lacking-heart and substance ploy. And that, is the root of my 'work'. The target. Simply, let's be real - and natural. Whatever that is and wherever they may lead. So then, see ya on the other side... Oh yeah - almost forgot... >Mr. gulliver, I really enjoyed your thoughts and ideas. I hope you take my entirely constructive comments in the spirit in which they are intended. Both you and Kathy challenged me today and you helped me kick ass. Well done. Thanks, M. They're received well. And, 'semantics again'... I struggle with 'kick ass'. Seems an unnecessarily 'imply superiority' belligerent term - smacks of ballgame coaches and drill sergeants. But perhaps that's just me in my 'favor hoedown to showdown - rather shake you by the hand than throat' approach in which we all genuinely 'live together as brothers or perish together as fools'. Y'see, in the end, it wasn't 'them or us' - it is 'you and I'. Posted by: gulliver | Sep 14, 2005 3:48:52 AM Thanks gulliver. Sorry about the gender thing - I had assumed that you were male - simply because it's statistically more likely. Incidentally, I had originally thought you were arrogant, now I find you interesting. Funny how perceptions change. All of your points are well made and, for the record, I truly enjoy reading you. I stand by my 'altruism is a myth' assertion though. We do nothing in a vacuum and all actions are necessarily motivated by self interest - even if that interest is martyrdom. In the end the sacrifice is for something in which the martyr believes. We are charitable because it makes us feel good to reduce the suffering of others, to believe that our effort can make a difference or to relieve guilt. There's nothing wrong with this, it's just the way it is. I think the difference is the societal perception of the value of the transaction. Money, happiness, attention, self-worth, and chickens are all currency. In this regard, 'altruism' happens when half of the transaction is paid with currency which may not be perceptible to anyone but the recipient. This doesn't, however, make it any less noble. Gulliver thanks again for a very enjoyable and thought provoking exchange. Kathy, sorry for running amok. If you squint hard enough, I'm sure this somehow relates to learning or whatever we were talking about. -Matt Posted by: Matt Galloway | Sep 14, 2005 9:59:09 AM The comments to this entry are closed.

Creating Passionate Users: Conversational writing kicks formal writing's ass

« Reference vs. Learning: pick ONE | Main | You can out-spend or out-teach » Conversational writing kicks formal writing's ass If you want people to learn and remember what you write, say it conversationally. This isn't just for short informal blog entries and articles, either. We're talking books. Assuming they're meant for learning, and not reference, books written in a conversational style are more likely to be retained and recalled than a book on the same topics written in a more formal tone. Most of us know this intuitively, but there are some studies to prove it. Your sixth grade English teacher warned you against writing the way you talk, but she was wrong. Partly wrong, anyway. Then again, we aren't talking about writing the way you talked when you were 12. Or even the way you talk when you're rambling. What most people mean when they say "write the way you talk" is something like, "the way you talk when you're explaining something to a friend, filtering out the 'um', 'you know', and 'er' parts, and editing for the way you wish you'd said it." So why aren't more technical books or articles written this way? One computer book author (who hates my books) sent me an email saying, "With your books, you want people to have fun" (he said it like that was a bad thing, but that's a different issue). "But with my books, I have a reputation as a consultant to think about, and I want people to have the impression of, 'listen carefully, because I'm only going to say this once.'" Whatever. I've talked about the danger of writing a book from the perspective of what it will do for you vs. what it means for the user in How to write a non-fiction bestseller. Unless the book is a reference book, where precision matters over understanding, and the writing is meant to be referred to not read and learned from, there are almost NO good reasons for a tech book to be written in a formal (i.e. non-conversational) style. Much of the time, it's an indication that the author is thinking way too much about himself, and how he will be perceived. (Or she, of course, but to be perfectly sexist here--this does seem to be more of a guy thing--the "I'm more technically serious than thou" phenomenon.) Sometimes it's simply because so many technical books are written that way, and it's just conventional inertia ("if the other books are written like that, and they sell, this must be the way it's done"). Other times, it's the author's of way of showing respect for both the topic and the reader--a valid goal, but an ineffective (and unneeded) approach. And now we know that it's usually wrong, and users/readers are starting to fight back against painfully dry books, no matter how technically pure the content. A study from the Journal of Educational Psychology, issue 93 (from 2000), looked at the difference in effectiveness between formal vs. informal style in learning. In their studies, the researchers (Roxana Moreno and Richard Mayer) looked at computer-based education on botany and lightning formation and "compared versions in which the words were in formal style with versions in which the words were in conversational style." Their conclusion was: "In five out of five studies, students who learned with personalized text performed better on subsequent transfer tests than students who learned with formal text. Overall, participants in the personalized group produced between 20 to 46 percent more solutions to transfer problems than the formal group." They mention other related, complimentary studies including: "... people read a story differently and remember different elements when the author writes in the first person (from the "I/we" point of view) than when the author writes in the third person (he, she, it, or they). (Graesser, Bowers, Olde, and Pomeroy, 1999). Research summarized by Reeves and Nass (1996) shows that, under the right circumstances, people "treat computers like real people." So one of the theories on why speaking directly to the user is more effective than a more formal lecture tone is that the user's brain thinks it's in a conversation, and therefore has to pay more attention to hold up its end! Sure, your brain intellectually knows it isn't having a face-to-face conversation, but at some level, your brain wakes up when its being talked with as opposed to talked at. And the word "you" can sometimes make all the difference. One striking part of the Moreno/Mayer study is how similar the actual content was. Here's the before and after example from the beginning of the lesson they studied: Formal "This program is about what type of plants survive on different planets. For each planet, a plant will be designed. The goal is to learn what type of roots, stem, and leaves allow the plant to survive in each environment. Some hints are provided throughout the program." Conversational "You are about to start a journey where you will be visiting different planets. For each planet, you will need to design a plant. Your mission is to learn what type of roots, stem, and leaves will allow your plant to survive in each environment. I will be guiding you through by giving out some hints." And from another perspective, consider what former Wired editor Constance Hale wrote in Sin and Syntax: "The second-person pronoun (you) lets the author hook the reader as if in conversation. Call it cozy. Call it confiding. You is a favorite of the Plain English folks, who view it as an antidote to the stiff impersonality of legalese and urge bureaucrats to write as if speaking to the public... " She goes on to give a pile of great examples. We believe one of the biggest mistakes is to dismiss the things that work in teaching younger people by saying that they somehow don't work for adults. That's wrong. At the highest level, anyway. Obviously the implementation of a kid's learning book and one for adults will be different, and different subjects often require dramatically different approaches, but at the core, virtually all brains learn the same way--through emotional response (which in turn triggers the brain to pay more attention and possibly record to long-term storage). And engaging in a conversation has the potential to turn up the emotional gain much more than a dry, lifeless text or lecture. If your brain had a bumper sticker, it would say: I heart conversation. Posted by Kathy on September 6, 2005 | Permalink TrackBack TrackBack URL for this entry: https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83451b44369e200d8345978dc69e2 Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Conversational writing kicks formal writing's ass: » Write as you talk from Bruno Unna Kathy Sierra, acute and accurate as she always is, writes about the importance of well-writing, through the attention to the way one talks. This reminds me of a guy selling a course to write books in a fast, very fast manner (at least that is his cl... [Read More] Tracked on Sep 6, 2005 5:07:24 PM » Technical books need this from Paul Explains Nothing Creating Passionate Users has an interesting post titled Conversational writing kicks formal writing's ass. Sounds about right to me. Yesterday I mentioned my initial thoughts about the book Agile Web Development with Rails. I stated simply that I like... [Read More] Tracked on Sep 6, 2005 5:19:46 PM » How to write? from fuzzyLizard Well, she has done it again. Another very interesting post, this time it is about how to write. More specifically, how to write a book in order to teach the reader. The article is entitled: Conversational writing kicks formal writings ass. If ... [Read More] Tracked on Sep 6, 2005 8:19:25 PM » Yeah - What she said! from Mel Riffe, another voice... Here's a tip: talk to your end-users like they were important and they'll like it! talk to them like they were children and they won't like it. Seems obvious, huh? Well, I guess not obvious enough. Came across this article that descibes what a colle [Read More] Tracked on Sep 6, 2005 8:49:55 PM » Conversational writing vs Formal writing from lifehack.org Kathy Sierra looked into both formal and conversational style of writing and how does it affects ones learning and retaining the knowledge. She suggested books written in conversational style of writing are more likely to be retained and recalled. The... [Read More] Tracked on Sep 7, 2005 7:13:32 AM » Your Writing Style from GBGames' Blog Conversational Writing Kicks Formal Writing's Ass is another insightful post on Creating Passionate Users that say that formal writing, as nice and professional as it is, is less effective at teaching than conversational writing is. Conversational wr... [Read More] Tracked on Sep 7, 2005 11:11:32 AM » Writing a wrong -or- the wrong way to write from Todays Blogger For me, I find myself writing like I'm supposed to. It is a dry style and not very exciting. I also consider myself a grammar snob, although my grammar isn't the best. I guess I could lighten up a bit... [Read More] Tracked on Sep 7, 2005 2:23:37 PM » Writing a wrong -or- the wrong way to write from Todays Blogger For me, I find myself writing like I'm supposed to. It is a dry style and not very exciting. I also consider myself a grammar snob, although my grammar isn't the best. I guess I could lighten up a bit... [Read More] Tracked on Sep 7, 2005 2:42:49 PM » Conversational Writing Rules! from Lifehacker Kathy Sierra, of the great blog Creating Passionate Users, says it well when she says: If you want people to learn and remember what you write, say it conversationally. This isn't just for short informal blog entries and articles, either.... [Read More] Tracked on Sep 7, 2005 3:02:31 PM » Writing good copy - the search marketer problem from Brian's Internet Business blog Mike Grehan, in his Search Engine Book commented on how search engines were looking to create a figure like a little old lady librarian, who could tell exactly what you needed most, with the least amount of information you told... [Read More] Tracked on Sep 7, 2005 3:30:03 PM » Writing good copy - the search marketer problem from Brian's Internet Business blog Mike Grehan, in his Search Engine Book commented on how search engines were looking to create a figure like a little old lady librarian, who could tell exactly what you needed most, with the least amount of information you told... [Read More] Tracked on Sep 7, 2005 3:31:44 PM » I know too many people who talk like they write from Strong Copy Builds Brands All the way back to the days of "Plain Talk" car insurance policies (a concept devised at Sentry Insurance by my favorite ex-husband, Mike Dry), this thing of good voice in writing, particularly business or ad writing, has been proven... [Read More] Tracked on Sep 12, 2005 2:16:03 PM » I know too many people who talk like they write from Strong Copy Builds Brands All the way back to the days of "Plain Talk" car insurance policies (a concept devised at Sentry Insurance by my favorite ex-husband, Mike Dry), this thing of good voice in writing, particularly business or ad writing, has been proven... [Read More] Tracked on Sep 12, 2005 2:17:40 PM » Author Tip: Conversational Writing from The Average Joe: A Book Publisher Blog Take a few minutes to read a wonderful authoring tip on Kathy Sierra’s blog. For better or worse, I’ve been in this business long enough to remember when a stiff, formal style was the only way to write a computer [Read More] Tracked on Sep 17, 2005 8:44:39 PM » Ecrire comme on parle, c'est mieux! from le blog de davidtouvet.com Kathy Sierra en est en tout cas persuadée dans son article "Conversational writing kicks formal writing's ass" (via "Conseils pour écrire sur le web"). Quelques morceaux choisis à garder sous la main: Unless the book is a reference book, wher... [Read More] Tracked on Nov 24, 2005 6:02:13 AM » Conversational Writing is Better than Formal Writing from Will at Work Learning Research has shown that a conversational writing style is generally more effective at producing learning results than more formal writing. See a blog blurb by Kathy Sierra to learn more. She did a nice job of writing a review of [Read More] Tracked on Dec 1, 2005 2:31:43 PM » Conversational Writing from Dorai's Techlog Here is a nice post on why Conversational writing kicks Formal Writings As. It makes sense. So why dont I do it? I never really thought much about my writing style. I think my writing style was heavily influenced by what I read which is... [Read More] Tracked on Jan 9, 2006 7:50:22 AM » A stylistic change from pleinasme Reviewing my posts thus far I find I'm running afoul favorite pair of writing difficulties: It's too long, son! What do you need all those words for anyway? This weekend's Buffy entry really drove the problem home. That is, the fifty times I've looked... [Read More] Tracked on Feb 16, 2006 8:49:01 PM » Cool Blog: Creating Passionate Users from Geek! Wandering through some blogs and ran across Kathy Sierra's Creating Passionate Users blog, about which I can't say enough nice things. She hits a number of my favorite issues, such as: Link: Creating Passionate Users: Ultra-fast release cycles and the [Read More] Tracked on Jul 9, 2006 4:08:50 PM Comments So true. I don't have a reference but there was a study at least 25 years ago that took some college level textbooks in various courses and rewrote them to target young kids (grade school / junior high, IIRC). The books were used and the kids were tested on their knowledge of the material and it compared to the results of the college students. I recall a conversation I had with a teaching guru at the time and one of the hurdles that came up with this was that the publishers didn't think that they could continue charging the outrageous amounts that they do for such "easy" textbooks (both in terms of their greed and because people wouldn't be as willing to part with as much money as for the convoluted, formal versions) and that authors resisted that suggestion because if it wasn't formal enough then they wouldn't e.g., get the same recognition from their bosses/peers (in the academic publish-or-perish world). Posted by: John D. Mitchell | Sep 6, 2005 5:00:16 PM I couldn't agree more with your post. Thanks for making this necessary point! Could the reason we prefer a more conversational style is because it's more authentic than using nothing but $.50 words, in addition to all your other excellent points? That's my take anyway. Posted by: Phil Gerbyshak | Sep 6, 2005 9:12:30 PM Maybe that's why so many people don't feel somehow quite *trained* in a thing unless they've gone on some horribly expensive 3 day plus course, and had a teacher there engaging them in conversation about the subject? Even if they've read and worked through the tutorial books, bought the reference manuals, and even done some genuine work with the technology, until they've had a full-on session of a number of days conversing with (hopefully) an expert in the subject while doing the thing at the same time, it's not quite sunk in. Posted by: Matt Moran | Sep 6, 2005 11:13:15 PM Well we do and engage in conversations through out the day. I've attended courses where formal talk made it suck so bad that I forgot it all. Infact I wanted to leave right away. But I'm seeing (Lemme remember aahh yeah read a book last week about Google AdSense) and this guy was doing so much of conversation that I began to wonder if he had anything *special* to tell. Well as I reached the last page I realized that he didn't. That sucked too. It's hard to train people / write books when you're a "stuck up formal" story teller BUT beware of "I don't know my stuff so I'll just kid". What I personally do(when I teach/train) and expect from new-age writers is simple: o Make sure we're ALL having fun o Don't forget to put people to work o Keep it in "WorkShop" mode ( I gave a little English lesson to a local school a few months back, it was a sort of a marathon and was 10:30 in the night, the kids were so excited, so was I! I hear parents still talk about it) o Keep it fun but also exciting help watch everyone(when I mean everyone it also includes you) grow/learn new things o In IT related courses DON'T just show examples, but exersizes and be able to demostrate stuff. Bottom line is you have to address to all parts of Human Brain. Not too boring and not too much fun. I personally prefer to keep my style a little unpredictable this way I can play on the general mood that the class has (I had to learn it the hard way when I taught/trained staff on board ships regarding safety/fire drills/boat drills, and the staff knew exactly what to expect). That way I can slowly work on making them get interested. Posted by: Tarry Singh | Sep 7, 2005 2:02:25 AM Nice article...articulated exactly the way I feel about some of the best science books ever written. If you haven't already, spend some time with the Feynman Lectures on Physics. Richard Feynman, in addition to having been an academic genius, was one of the finest communicators science has seen. And almost all of it has been transcribed and edited from speech, or looks a lot like it. Posted by: Derwin McGeary | Sep 7, 2005 5:46:28 AM You are brilliant. Posted by: Tom Best | Sep 7, 2005 6:20:10 AM Have you seen this guys work? http://poignantguide.net/ruby/ I think he takes this concept to the extreme. At times you think he may have done a little too much LSD, but it really does keep you interested. His wacky antics make you want to keep reading to see what he'll say next. Posted by: Rich | Sep 7, 2005 7:48:05 AM To be honest, I was totally against your argument when I read the first two sentences. I changed my mind when I realized there was a difference between good conversational writing and the rambling, unfocused blogs and forum posts I often encounter. I totally agreed with you by the time you got to the planets example. From my own life, I am currently reading Sophie's World and I find the conversational style makes an introduction to philosophy much more palatable. Posted by: Joe | Sep 7, 2005 8:26:08 AM Matt: "Maybe that's why so many people don't feel somehow quite *trained* in a thing unless they've gone on some horribly expensive 3 day plus course, and had a teacher there engaging them in conversation about the subject?" IME, there's a couple of key facets to that. A big one is that people learn by experience. The in-person training tends to give more chances for real experience to take place. Another facet is that having an "expert" available to talk with changes how people perceive the information. This is part of the "you get out what you put in" sentiment. I.e., for some people, putting out the time/effort and money to go to an expensive class ups (at least slightly :-) their level of commitment/intensity and that changes what they are able to get out of the experience. On the more skeptical side, I find that people carry a lot of conscious and unconscious expectations about what "training" has to look and act like. I.e., if it doesn't look "formal" enough, it can't be serious, educational, etc. So, people look for those psuedo-signals to distinguish and select e.g. training even though we know those signals aren't trustworthy and those training styles aren't nearly as effective in terms of the students' actually learning. Posted by: John D. Mitchell | Sep 7, 2005 9:25:33 AM "Much of the time, it's an indication that the author is thinking way too much about himself, and how he will be perceived." Grady Booch, in a nutshell. Ugh. His name has become a byword among my programmer friends for pompous, unreadable deskweights. It reads like your most full-of-himself professor only _dreamed_ of sounding like. And after you spend the time to decode a few paragraphs, you cry "Is THAT all you meant to say!?" So many words, so little content. You can tell that he's thinking about his image every time he sits down to write. Posted by: Tom Biggs | Sep 7, 2005 9:27:46 AM This ties in nicely with your previous post....Often it's the editors that impose the formal style. My first book for Wiley (The Notes and Domino Programming Bible) was done in the personal style (eg. "you should always remember that you have to ack before you oof....."). For my second book (The XML Programming Bible), the editor decided that the personal style was too informal and wrong, a battle I fought but did not win. So was forced to rewrite the text to formal ("developers should always remember that they have to ack before they oof.....") was my compromise. Later, after I submitted my final draft, it was apparently decided that the personal style was OK, and the text was rewritten to the personal style. Unfortunately, the twits who did the rewriting didn't proofread their obvious 2-minute global search and replace. The result: unreadable sentences like "you should always remember that they have to ack before they oof....."). For anyone who had to suffer thouygh these sentences you have my sympathy, but it wasn't my fault..... Posted by: Brian Benz | Sep 7, 2005 10:20:02 AM I think I'm in agreement with the psychology, but not the rejection of formal forms. Normally things are formalized so that a process is complete. You need to prove mathematical statements. You need to argue your politics with rigour, avoiding staw men, and so forth. But I'd agree with making the process human, being direct, introducing anecdotes, and a pinch of humour, to make the process more memorable. I actually found the "botany learning scenario" clearer in the formal format. The second one focussed too much on the game, and when it introduced a mission, in terms of the gameplay it was a pointless mission. If the mission had been to educate future colonists, then learning would be implicit and would have made more sense. But it was not really a mission within the game at all. I've read that people follow documentation better if it is task oriented, The task was clear in the formal version. I think one can introduce directness, mnemonics etc without losing rigour. But then, I don't think you are advocating rejection of rigor: the structure of the entry has a clear {beginning, middle, end} and there's lots of citations in it. And well-structured writing is also based on how the brain works: it is to get around the fact that brains are pretty sloppy at this sort of thing most of the time. Posted by: hgs | Sep 7, 2005 11:06:18 AM Another great article. I have applied a lot of the info found on these pages in helping me write my tutorials and blog posts. Thank you so much! Posted by: Jennifer Apple | Sep 7, 2005 11:10:47 AM A colleague pointed this article out because he knows I detest the use of 'you' in technical documentation. I am still not persuaded. The use of 'you' is always redundant in technical documents. A guide or manual is always directing someone to do an action. In conversation, one never says, "You do this. Now, you do that." They might say, "You should do this." Then I would argue that the use of 'should' is not appropriate either. Either 'do' or 'don't do' or 'consider before doing'. I'll agree that a less formal style may be more effective at engaging a reader's interest, but I do not believe the notion that 'friendly' documentation is a trend to follow. I don't go to Morton's to get hamburger, and I won't write technical documentation aimed at a 6th grader (unless it's for the Marketing side of the house, and then all bets are off). Posted by: Brian Marquez | Sep 7, 2005 12:22:42 PM Excellent article! A great book on this very topic is "If You Can Talk, You Can Write" by Joel Saltzman, I cannot recommend it highly enough. - Posted by: Gerard Morentzy | Sep 7, 2005 4:51:43 PM I couldn't agree more. I have a long way to go though. Posted by: Ben Askins | Sep 8, 2005 7:17:18 AM The next step: comics! After that? Children's picture book. Well, why not, they are so easy to understand. I'm so lucky I was never born! Posted by: Peter | Sep 8, 2005 11:29:55 AM Thanks for this. I noted the articles on the side bar for later reference. Having just changed from a more formal style on one web site, I am looking forward to seeing the results. Posted by: wildmist | Sep 8, 2005 4:08:14 PM Another datum; I read as far as you "whatever" in that article, and moved on. Looks like I'm not your target audience. Posted by: Aidan Kehoe | Sep 9, 2005 1:49:56 AM You have hit the nail on the head -- this is a fantastic post and I will be blogging it. For years I have coached our consultants and concept developers to develop a conversational in their XPLANATiONs. I was not aware that there was research to support it but I am not surprised. This is a wonderful blog. I have not been blogging for long but as I become familiar with this world, lately it seems that all roads lead to O'Reilly. Keep it up! Posted by: Dave Gray | Sep 9, 2005 8:01:34 PM The Moreno and Mayer study had psychology students as the subject population, and most certainly cannot be generalised beyond that population. Furthermore, many universities enforce psych studencts to be part of 'subject pools' for the first year or two, so the population may well be very junior students. Ccombine this with the fact that the expansion of student numbers over recent years has been so great that many of these students may not have even got into university a few years ago. The relevance of this? It's quite possible that the population studied could have been people who had never even read whole books before (Frank Furedi's good on this). It could be that the reason a conversational style was more effective for them was just that they were not particularly accustomed to or skilled at self-directed reading for study purposes (also, if you look at the original study, the effects were only slightly significant for reading as opposed to listening). My (untested) hypothesis: skilled, active readers use critical self-talk all the time when reading and don't need to be patronised by the writer. It's all about the specific audience you're writing for. Posted by: noisyjazzman | Sep 10, 2005 7:25:38 AM I do think it's *very* dependent on the audience, true. And I did make the point (perhaps not clearly enough, given your comment) that the *implementation* of a book for an adult is going to look and feel different from a book geared toward someone younger (and vary with the topic as well). But wow -- "conversational" does not necessarily mean "patronizing"! And while I doubt this was your intention (and you do bring up a valid point about the study), your comment comes close to insulting the nearly quarter-million programmers who are choosing our books. Our readers *are* software engineers, or at the least -- computer programmers with an interest in applying reusable patterns to solve complex problems. Our readers are indeed "skilled, active readers" and quite capable of learning from a more traditional academic text--they simply choose *not* to, when given a choice. Our readers kick ass : ) Posted by: Kathy Sierra | Sep 10, 2005 7:31:58 PM I certainly didn't mean to insult your readers or books. A conversational tone is often entirely appropriate (even for intelligent adults!), and a formal one often unnecessarily stuffy. But academics, for example, are constantly being leaned on these days by bureaucrats to make their content 'relevant' for the sake of 'inclusion', where what they actually mean is that they want the content dumbed-down in order to ensure students/customers are not challenged. It is simply true to the nature of many types of content that they *should* try to challenge readers, and one means for this sometimes is to use complex language, as distanced as possible from the corporate/populist culture de jour. All I really am saying is that studies such as this don't imply that much marvellous writing (often 'formal' compared to corporate writing) ought to be changed in any way. If they *are* so taken (and you just have to see the explosion in crappy Powerpoint to see that it is likely to happen!) then it may amount to condescension. Horses for courses, and all that. Posted by: noisyjazzman | Sep 10, 2005 11:12:49 PM To Kathy's point (in comments two above this one) - I think people that have the Head First Patterns book probably have the hard bound original GoF title as well. They probably had the GoF book first. Now, for those of you who don't know the GoF Patters book (GoF = gang of four - the cute name everyone has come up with to refer to the four authors) is a hard bound, very academic and somewhat inaccessible tome. It's brilliant and people struggle through it because it's brilliant. But it's kind of like reading Chaucer or Beowolf - it's a lot of work just to get to the message, then you have to digest the message. The Head First treatment presents the patterns as the Gof book but it makes it fun and easier. In a comment to another post a reader said that they wanted a Head First Biology book for their daughter. I think this is a good example - image Head First Differential Equations, Linera Algebra, Quantum Physics, Statistical Analysis. This would change everything. It's not that readers of Head First can't learn the other way - we're just bright enough and open minded enough to realize that other ways might be more efficient. If you read Head Fisrt (really read, not flip through) and feel patronized then you might have some bigger issues. -Matt Posted by: Matt Galloway | Sep 12, 2005 8:08:39 AM I probably will never read the books as I no longer work in IT nor do much programming these days. But I'm quite happy to take your word for it that they're find and appropriate. There are many beautifully-written books of effortless simplicity. But I would say that anyone who finds the GoF books hard to read has a problem! 'Education' isn't about efficiently stuffing knowledge into a brain for instrumental purposes. It's about availing oneself of the best of our civilisation. Anyone of normal who has made the attempt to do so would be able to read the GoF books without problems. Posted by: noisyjazzman | Sep 12, 2005 2:56:34 PM The comments to this entry are closed.

Arctic shrubs join global warming effort

Global warming could be accelerated by an increase of plant cover in the arctic region, according to research published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Biogeosciences. The arctic region is already warming more quickly than anywhere else on Earth, and higher temperatures have stimulated winter plant growth on the tundra. This additional vegetation could increase the amount of solar energy absorbed in the region (snow reflects much of this energy straight back into space) by as much as 70 per cent, the researchers say. The study, carried out by US Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory and at Colorado State University, looked at how an increase in plant cover in high latitudes, particularly in Alaska, impacts the Earth's albedo - a measure of how much sunlight is reflected from the planet's surface. "Basically, if tundra is converted to shrubland, more solar energy will be absorbed in the winter than before," says Matthew Sturm, lead author of the study. He notes that the regional warming, and the subsequent increase in plant cover will quickly form a positive feedback loop. This could accelerate increases in the shrubs' range and size over the four million square kilometer tundra, and cause significant changes in the region. The researchers studied five sites in subarctic Alaska, each with a different kind of plant cover - ranging from full forest canopy, through to barren tundra. They measured the mid-winter albedo of each site and found that melting began sooner in areas covered in shrubs than on the snowy plains. Conversely, the shrubby areas had more shade, so the rate of melting was slower overall. The thaw in all five regions finished at approximately the same time, the researchers found. Sturm concludes that the changes would undoubtedly affect the carbon budget in the region, but added that scientists don't yet understand exactly how. One thing he is sure of is that with an estimated 40 per cent of the world's carbon currently holed up in arctic soils, any change to the arctic's carbon balance would certainly have a knock on effect on the global climate. ®

Student flogs pixels to fund education

A UK student is flogging pixels on a web page to help raise $1m to fund his way through university. Alex Tew, 21, who will be reading Business Management, says people can buy the pixels to display an ad or a logo on his Million Dollar Homepage which in turn can create a link to their website. The pixels are sold in squares of 100 to create a tiddly icon. Larger groupings can also be bought to make logos stand out. Tew told El Reg that the scheme was all "legit and completely above board". "I think this will mostly appeal to businesses and perhaps larger companies will buy up lots of pixels to have a more prominent position on the site," he said. Faced with the spiralling cost of tuition fees and beer, Tew said he would rather "not to be riddled with debt when I graduate, so I decided to think of a way to make money before I start". And if he ends up with any extra cash left after his studies he plans to plough that money into a business. So far Tew has sold more than a 1,000 pixels, including 100 to a dating network, 100 to a marketing firm and 400 to his brother's go-karting business. Sheesh - what some people will do to raise a bit of cash. Last year Bristol University student Rosie Reid raised £8,400 by auctioning her virginity online to help fund her education. And there are plenty of people prepared to have logos tattooed on their bodies for some dosh, mostly from GoldenPalace.com. ®

Macabre Reminder: The Corpse on Union Street

Maybe the slow acquiescence to the ghastly here -- not in Baghdad, not in Rwanda, here -- is rooted in the intensive news coverage of the hurricane's aftermath: floating bodies and obliterated towns equal old news. Maybe the concerns of the living far outweigh the dignity of a corpse on Union Street. Or maybe the nation is numb with post-traumatic shock. Wandering New Orleans this week, away from news conferences and search-and-rescue squads, has granted haunting glimpses of the past, present and future, with the rare comfort found in, say, the white sheet that flaps, not in surrender but as a vow, at the corner of Poydras Street and St. Charles Avenue. "We Shall Survive," it says, as though wishing past the battalions of bulldozers that will one day come to knock down water-corrupted neighborhoods and rearrange the Louisiana mud for the infrastructure of an altogether different New Orleans. Here, then, the New Orleans of today, where open fire hydrants gush the last thing needed on these streets; where one of the many gag-inducing smells -- that of rancid meat -- is better than MapQuest in pinpointing the presence of a market; and where images of irony beg to be noticed. The Mardi Gras beads imbedded in mud by a soldier's boot print. The "take-away" signs outside restaurants taken away. The corner kiosk shouting the Aug. 28 headline of New Orleans's Times-Picayune: "Katrina Takes Aim." Rush hour in downtown now means pickups carrying gun-carrying men in sunglasses, S.U.V.'s loaded with out-of-town reporters hungry for action, and the occasional tank. About the only ones commuting by bus are dull-eyed suspects shuffling two-by-two from the bus-and-train terminal, which is now a makeshift jail. Maybe some of them had helped to kick in the portal to the Williams Super Market in the once-desirable Garden District. And who could blame them if all they wanted was food in those first desperate days? The interlopers took the water, beer, cigarettes and snack food. They did not take the wine or the New Orleans postcards.

Opinion | Bring Out Your Pork

Hurricane Katrina cries out to Congress for something other than business as usual. Imagine what would happen if each member of Congress announced that he or she would give up a prize slab of bacon so the government would be able to use the money to shelter hurricane victims and rebuild New Orleans. The public would -- for once -- have proof that politicians are capable of setting priorities and showing respect for the concept of a budget. Surely Representative Don Young, the Alaska Republican who is chairman of the transportation committee, might put off that $223 million "bridge to nowhere" in his state's outback. It's redundant now -- Louisiana suddenly has several bridges to nowhere. Likewise, Speaker Dennis Hastert could defer his prized Prairie Parkway, a $200-million-plus project dismissed as a behemoth Sprawlway by hometown critics, and use the money to repair the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. The Democratic minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, could afford to donate back some multimillion-dollar plums -- just one bike and pedestrian overpass, perhaps, or a ferry terminal. Another Democratic standout, James Oberstar of Minnesota, would have a hard time choosing from his cornucopia, but that $2.7 million for what is already described as the nation's longest paved recreational trail looks ripe. The list is long. Such a gesture by the Capitol's patronage first responders would encourage a sense of shared sacrifice in the nation. Members might actually be surprised to see how many of their own constituents are prepared to think of other people's needs before themselves. This page has been a longtime supporter of a freight tunnel between New Jersey and New York -- which, we should point out, is actually a tunnel to somewhere. But we'd applaud a delay in the $100 million for freight-tunnel design studies that was included in the highway bill if it was part of a larger reordering of priorities. It's time to put New Orleans first.

marumushi.com

Update: Jan 20, 2012 My appologies for not updating this site lately. Flipboard has been keeping me a little busy. I'll try to work something out here soon, but in the meantime, you might want to say hello on Twitter, browse through a few photos here or peek into what it is like designing Flipboard.

Sharia move in Canada draws anger

Canada has a thriving Muslim population centred in Ontario Islamic law could be used to settle civil and marital disputes under a proposal made by former Ontario Attorney General Marion Boyd. Roman Catholic and Jewish arbitration tribunals already operate Ontario. Opponents of Sharia law say allowing Islamic tribunals could lead to discrimination against women. A protest march is scheduled for Thursday in Toronto, which is the capital of Canada's most populous and multi-cultural province. Other Canadian marches are due in Ottawa, Waterloo, Montreal and Victoria, while in Europe there will be rallies in Amsterdam, Dusseldorf, Stockholm, Goteborg, London and Paris. 'Unbelievable' Michele Vianes, president of the Paris-based group Regards de Femmes, says political Islam does not recognise secular law. "For all Europeans, women particularly, we think Canada is a country where women's rights are very strong," she said. "For us, it is unbelievable that Sharia institutes are possible in Canada." Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty has been examining the Sharia recommendation since December and has only promised that the government will take a decision "in keeping with the values of Ontarians and Canadians". Ms Boyd argues that if Sharia is not allowed, all religious arbitration bodies could be abolished.

Gaza and the Israeli Settlers

WorldWatch First appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC By Orson Scott Card August 21, 2005 Gaza and the Israeli Settlers It's got to be one of the most miserably unimportant places in the world, the Gaza Strip. A bone dry desert by nature, packed with people in the Muslim cities, here and there dotted with patches of green where irrigation has brought relief, it lacks any resources that should make it important to anyone, anywhere. Except, of course, to the people who live there. So why has it been in the news? Why are weeping people being forced to evacuate their homes? The Gaza Strip matters because its people are mostly Muslim -- and once the evacuation of the Jewish settlements is completed, it will be completely Muslim. From one point of view, the Gaza Strip is a dagger pointed at the heart of a fragile Israel. From another point of view, it is tiny, powerless land being crushed under the weight of mighty Israel. How Gaza Is Exploited Before the June War of 1967, when Gaza was administered by Egypt, it really was a dagger that put Egyptian weapons within seemingly easy reach of Israel's major cities. Since then -- especially after Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin brought peace between Egypt and Israel -- Gaza has been powerless. Now and then terrorists based there succeed in killing somebody -- often visitors from outside trying to bring some of the benefits of civilization to the people of the Gaza Strip, like the American diplomats who were murdered there a couple of years ago. But in terms of posing any kind of danger to Israel, Gaza's only weapon that has meant anything for many years is this: Propaganda value. Nowhere are Muslim Palestinians more packed-in, poor, and miserable-looking. They look great on camera -- if you want to illustrate the suffering of the Palestinians under the rule of the Israeli oppressors. Never mind that the reason the borders closed and Gazans lost their jobs was because their jobs were in Israel, and Israel had to close the borders to protect themselves from murderous terrorists who crossed the border along with innocent Gazans going to work. The sadder the lot of the people of Gaza, the worse Israel could be made to look elsewhere in the world -- in Europe and America, for instance, where people are generally unaware that the obvious misery of the people of Gaza isn't actually that different. The truth is that the Palestinian people have been kept isolated and poor from the beginning -- by fellow Muslims. The refugees from the 1948 war could have been assimilated into the countries that took them in -- but they were forced to stay in camps, where their poverty could be used as propaganda against Israel. Give Me Land, Lots of Land Ironically, it was Israel's conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip that opened the door to the existence of an independent Palestinian state. By cutting these territories off from Jordan and Egypt, Israel allowed them to create a separate national identity in a clearly identifiable territory. The trouble was that to some Israelis, the conquest of these territories was not just about establishing defensible boundaries to avoid further attempts by Arab Muslim states to conquer Israel. They saw these territories as an integral and permanent part of Israel, where Israelis should be able to buy (or take) land and establish settlements. Some saw it as the will of God, restoring to Israel much of the inheritance bestowed by God in Torah. Others saw it as Israel's right, by long-established international law and custom, to regard territory conquered in a defensive war as its own property, paid for in blood. It was about religion for some, about land for others -- but regardless of the motive, there were Israelis eager to establish Jewish settlements on land that Palestinians saw as their own. (Never mind that many Palestinians see all of Israel as "their own.") There were far more Israelis who did not actually join the settlements, but supported them politically. As Palestinians raised an increasing hue and cry internationally against Israeli settlements, within Israel there was such a powerful movement in support of the settlements that it became politically impossible for anyone to block the settlement movement, let alone roll it back. When Israeli governments tried moratoria or limits on settlements, there would be settlers -- squatters, really -- eager to defy the law and settle when and where they were forbidden. And even the lawbreakers had substantial political support. So Why Are Settlements Being Evacuated? The pro-settlement folks aren't the only people in Israel. A much larger group is sick of war, tired of the anti-Israeli propaganda throughout the world, and eager to trade land for peace. The idea is that if a fully demilitarized Palestine came into existence, then Arabs could misgovern each other to their hearts' content. If they started to build up a dangerous army, the Israeli military would move in and destroy it. But as long as they kept their noses clean, the Palestinians could have their independent state. Most Israelis understand that many Palestinians are just as sick of war as they are. They hoped -- or wished -- that once Israeli occupation ended, then so would the Intifadeh. Yasser Arafat -- the worst enemy the Palestinian people ever had -- turned down a chance to get most of the Palestinian land and instead launched a pointless war of murder in order to get ... What? Nobody knows. So the Palestinians -- or at least Hamas and other terrorist organizations -- continue a war whose goal is either genocide against Israel or ... or no discernible goal at all, since they could easily have political independence now if they'd just stop killing Jews. The Israeli government, then, has to deal with the fact that peaceful Palestinians are unable to control their murderous brethren (for the obvious reason that if a Palestinian openly opposes the murder campaign he'll be murdered). So if Israel is to have any kind of peace or security in the long term, they not only have to seal off the border between them and their would-be killers, but they also need to immunize themselves against international opprobrium. In other words, they need to fight the propaganda war, as well as the on-the-ground physical war against their enemies. Sharon's Gamble Ariel Sharon understands this, and he's making a bold play to defuse the anti-Jewish, anti-Israel hatred that has swept through "intellectual" Europe and America in recent years. By removing Jewish settlements from Gaza, Sharon is proving that Israel will act in good faith to restore Palestinian territory. Analyzed one way, it's a no-lose proposition. Either the Palestinians will grow up and govern themselves sanely, no longer allowing Gaza to be a staging area for murderous attacks on Israel ... or they won't. If they do maintain the peace, then Israel's trade was a good one. They would then have a sound basis for trading more land for peace on the West Bank. But if -- as everyone expects -- Hamas and other murderers persist in using Gaza as a staging area for missile attacks and terrorist assaults against Israel, then Israel has proof that nothing they concede to the Palestinians will lead to any good end. Therefore Israel can hold onto rational world opinion, having seized the high ground and proven that the Palestinians are not ready to abide by international law. On the other hand, to the Palestinian diehards, Sharon's action will doubtless be seen as a sign of weakness, and the murderers will tell each other that if they just keep killing Jews, they can get it all back. But that attitude -- and those actions -- will play into Israel's hands. Because nobody with any moral sense would expect Israel to concede another inch of territory when it clearly does not lead to peace. It's a demonstration, then. And those pictures of weeping Israeli settlers being forced from their homes are every bit as good a propaganda tool for Israel as those poor suffering Palestinians have long been for the other side. It wouldn't really have been half so effective if all the settlers had left peacefully. The world needed to see Israeli troops forcing the settlers to leave. They needed to show how much pain was involved. How much it cost. How serious the Israeli government was about sacrificing for peace. That's why Sharon took the enormous political risk of alienating his own core supporters by dismantling settlements. He's playing longball here, hitting for the fence instead of bunting. He may lose his position at the head of Likud. But he knows that whoever his successor is will not be able to roll back this change and reestablish the settlements. Sharon is willing to risk ending his own career for real and important benefits to Israel over the long term. That's how I define "Statesman." Copyright © 2005 by Orson Scott Card.

Is Islam compatible with the West?

As extremists increasingly claim it is not, and attack Western values not only through rhetoric but acts of violence, many Muslims find themselves being forced to respond by re-examining their values. Here two Britons, both born into the Muslim faith, explain why they have ended up following different paths as far as their religion is concerned. Nagina Shah Nagina Shah, who walked away from her faith and family 14 years ago after a forced marriage, believes that traditional Islam and modern Western life do not mix. Nagina's story Aftab Malik Aftab Malik, who has discovered a new-found passion for Islam as an adult, says that traditional Islamic values can themselves help overcome extremism. Aftab's story NAGINA SHAH I was born into a strict Pakistani Muslim background but, when I was 19, I decided to break away from my family. My parents chose a husband for me - I was engaged at 14 and forced into marriage at 17 I have three brothers and three sisters, and am the youngest in the family. I'm the only one born in England, in 1972, a few years after my parents had emigrated from Pakistan. My upbringing was very strict, even by Asian community standards. My family were Sunnis [the majority branch of Islam] and our faith and religion were largely influenced by - and intertwined with - our culture. But it was backward, strict and suffocating. I was not allowed to go out on my own or even travel on buses. I went to an all-girls school, although my father believed girls should not really be educated. Instead, all attention was focused on my brothers, who were expected to become doctors or lawyers. My father preached one thing but did something else in practice. He said we needed to be pure and pious but was himself quite volatile. In contrast, my mother would never say boo to a goose. The double standards really struck me. I always felt suppressed and suffocated by my father and brothers, who ran the household. I was never able to accept or understand why my brothers were treated better than me. They were allowed to go out, mix with women, drive, go to college, have an opinion. I was allowed to do none of these things. Turning point My parents chose a husband for me. I was engaged to him at 14 and forced into marriage at 17. when I was 19, I had had enough and I decided to run away from home. On 8 August 1991, I packed my bags and went. I have since put myself through college and university and now consider myself as an independent career woman. At the time, I left with hardly anything. And having lived in a sheltered, reclusive environment, I suddenly had to face up to real life for the first time. I now want to help other British Muslims who face a similar situation to me I moved away from Leeds and lived in a hostel for a while. I worked at the same time as going to college where I studied for my GCSEs and then A levels. I later went on to read engineering at university. When I was staying in the hostel, I met many other young Asian girls like me. It was tragic because they wanted to break away from their families but they kept on going home and getting into a total mess. There must be lots of other men and women who want to break away from their culture. I now want to help other British Muslims who face a similar situation to me. Torn identity I went through the most enormous life-changing experience. I must have been numb and in shock for about two years. I became a totally different person, and found I was also quite spiritual and could relate to many religions at different levels. THE ISLAM DEBATE BBC Four, Wednesday, 14 September Nagina Shah and Aftab Malik are on panel It will address issues raised in BBC Two's Battle for Islam, which screened on Monday Have your say and join the debate Since leaving home I have not been in touch with my family. I would not be able to live my life the way I choose if my family have anything to do with it. I do not blame my parents for not seeing my point of view. They both come from a very different culture. There is a cultural clash between my parents' generation and mine. The Eastern and Western cultures are so extremely different that it is difficult to find middle ground. I believe my parents were so strict because they did not want to lose their identity, their Pakistani roots. But by doing this they did not allow me my own identity. The danger of organised religion is that they all teach exclusivity and preach that theirs is the one true faith. To have one true faith means that all other faiths are wrong, hence the fighting we see around the world. I believe the only way we will achieve peace and mutual respect on this planet is if we are all willing to change our beliefs. I am not saying we should completely throw away our belief systems but what we need to do is let go of the beliefs that no longer work and keep the ones that do. AFTAB MALIK It was not until university that I began to think about what it meant to be a Muslim. Until then, life was pretty much plain sailing. I prayed and would fast in the month of Ramadan, but only half-heartedly. Rather than architects of destruction, traditional Muslims were builders of a magnificent civilization synonymous with life Experiences at the mosque taught me that Islam was something that came from the sub-continent: backward and ritualistic. But my perception and understanding of Islam changed as I soon discovered that Islam had an intellectual and spiritual tradition. Little did I know that I'd become part of an increasing number of Muslims in the West who, in the past decade or so, have been seeking the revivification of an authentic, traditional wisdom; one that rises above sectarian divisions and discredits the angry rhetoric of the orphans of modernity. Rather than being architects of destruction, traditional Muslims were builders of a magnificent civilization synonymous with life, celebration, purity and knowledge. Some Muslims today, in their rhetoric or by their actions, portray a faith whose adherents want a religion to die for, as opposed to live for. These Muslims are replacing the legacy of that civilization with anger and hatred. Confusion rife Unfortunately, despite the huge upsurge of interest in Islam, there remains much confusion as to what it's really about. A twisted and mutated offspring is wreaking havoc in the name of Islam While "the war on terrorism" has shifted relations between Islam and the West in tectonic proportions, the responses by Muslims have been different. Some argue that 9/11 signalled the ultimate showdown between Islam and the West; others reactively repeat the mantra "Islam is a religion of peace". And another segment of the community has decided it is time for some serious and critical reflection. These messages have been mixed and confuse many people, who cannot understand why so many Muslims are angry. Despite the immense suffering in the Muslim world, nothing can justify the heinous actions that result in the spilling of innocent blood. Devoid of the necessary skills and tools to decipher the religious texts, minions of chaos have side-stepped over 1,000 years of scholasticism and Koranic exegesis [critical explanation of a text] to create their own deluded Sharia - a new law couched in Islamic terminology established solely to be the antithesis of the West. Under this law, there is only hatred and rejection. Under this law, Muslims and non-Muslims alike are its victims. Classical traditions For the integrity of Islam, these individuals and their organisations need to be seen as they are: marginal and heretical. Traditional Islam can help calm the frantic nature so prevalent in Muslim psyche today So far are they from classical notions of ethics and morality, manifestations of this extreme reading of Islam are more in line with "Islamicised" Marxist-Leninist notions of revolution and anti-imperialist struggle than with anything derived from the Koran and the Sunna through a classical legal tradition. Muslim reformers who dismantled and undermined the Islamic tradition with its legal philosophy, an apparatus of law and system of spirituality during the 19th and 20th Centuries, paved the way for a twisted and mutated offspring that is wreaking havoc on the Earth in the name of Islam. So what is traditional Islam? It really means orthodoxy, consisting of the four Sunni legal schools of thought (madhahibs), two schools of doctrine (aqida) and the science of ihsan (excellence or perfection), otherwise known as tasawwuf. Traditional Islam teaches how to view tribulation and oppression through prophetic eyes and not how to contribute to it. By restoring the equilibrium between the heart and soul, the intellect and creation, traditional Islam can help calm the frantic nature so prevalent in Muslim psyche today and, once again, marginalise and eject extremism from the Muslim discourse. Nagina Shah and Aftab Malik were panellists on Debate: Battle for Islam, shown on BBC Four on Wednesday, 14 September. The programme examined issues raised by BBC Two's Battle for Islam, which was shown on Monday 5 September. E-mail this to a friend Printable version

Patrick J. Buchanan, Author at Antiwar.com Original

When a Wall Street Journal editorial warned this week against any precipitous U.S. withdrawal that might imperil our gains in Afghanistan, an exasperated President Trump shot back: "Could someone please explain to them that we have been there for 19 years. … and except at the beginning, we never really fought to win." Is that … Continue reading “What Does Winning Mean in a Forever War?”

日本でも大ヒットする？ 米国で絶大な人気を誇るChromebook特集

2014年度からついに日本に上陸したChromebook。すでに米国では着実にシェアを広げており、その勢いは日本にも迫ろうとしている。 Chromebookとは一体何か。そしてそれがなぜ日本でも注目されているのか。ここではChromebookの概要をおさえつつ、注目が集まる原因について見ていこう。 Chromebookとは？ Chromebookとは、Googleが開発したLinuxベースの独自OS「Chrome OS」を搭載したノートパソコンのこと。「Chrome OS」がWindows OSやMac OSと大きく異なるのは、それがブラウザベースで動作するOSであるという点だ。 例えばWindowsやMac では、データは通常ローカルドライブに保存するのが一般的だが、「Chrome OS」ではデータはクラウド上に保存するのが基本となっている。 アプリケーションはブラウザ上で動作するものを使うため、ローカルドライブにインストールすることはない。 また、「Chrome OS」の場合、常に最新のOSに無料で自動更新されるようになっている。Windows OSのように最新のOSを購入するコストはかからず、Mac OSのように手動でOSをバージョンアップする手間もかからない。 Chromebookの魅力とは？ 米国でChromebookが人気となったのは、アップルのiPadよりも安い価格設定にあったと言えるだろう。アップルのiPadが500ドル程度で販売されているのに対してChromebookは200〜300ドル程度で販売されている。 また、最新のOSに切り替えるときにかかる費用が必要かからないことを考えると、低価格のWindows OSを搭載したノートパソコンと比べても割安な感がある。 さらにChromebookの場合、アプリケーションはブラウザベースのものを無料でインストールできる。そのため、WindowsやMacのようにアプリケーションを有料で購入するコストが一切かからない。特にセキュリティ対策として導入するコストを浮かすことができることは、企業や教育機関では大きなメリットとなるだろう。 Chromebookの魅力は、本体価格だけではなく、OSやアプリケーションのコストがかからないところにあると言えそうだ。 関連サイト セキュリティソフトの最新版を様々な角度から徹底的に比較したランキング。パソコン初心者のためのピッタリ診断ほか口コミやキャンペーン情報も！

China Just Weeks From Second Manned Spaceflight

First Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei waves as the capsule door was opened after landing on the Inner Mongolian grasslands of northern China Thursday, Oct. 16, 2003. China isparing down the list of astronauts to fly aboard its second manned spaceflight,a two-person mission set to launch within weeks, state news reports saidWednesday. Severaltwo-astronaut teams have been selected from a candidate field of 14 formerfighter pilots, though the final decision will depend on how they perform inupcoming tests, Zhang Qingwei, president of the China Aerospace Science andTechnology Corp., told the Shanghai Morning Post. The state run XinhuaNews Agency later reported the announcement. "The launchof Shenzhou 6 spacecraft could be in September or October," Zhang told theShanghai Morning Post, adding that a flag for the 2010 World Expo in Shanghaiwill be included on the flight. Accordingto earlier reports,a Long March2F rocket is slated to launch two Chinese astronauts, also known as"taikonauts," on a five-day to six-day mission to conduct experiments aboardShenzhou 6. One such experiment will apparently study the effects ofmicrogravity and space radiation on pig sperm, Xinhua reported. The two-personflight will follow the Oct. 15, 2003 launchof Shenzhou 5, which carried astronaut Yang Liwei into orbit and made China oneof only three countries to independently launch a human into space. Russia andthe U.S. are the others. Tuckedinside his Shenzhou 5 capsule, which is based on Russia's Soyuz spacecraft butextensively modernized, Yang orbited Earth 14 times during his 21 1/2-hourspaceflight before returning safely. Chinesespace officials have said in the past that the Shenzhou flights will testtechnologies that will lead toward docking and, ultimately, space stationhardware. The Chinese National Aerospace Administration hopes to land a probeon the moon by 2010, according to past reports. Preparingfor the future As Chinacounts down to its second manned Shenzhou flight, plans are already underwayfor an extended human spaceflight program. InShanghai, construction began Tuesday on a new $160-million space center to bedevoted to researching, testing and producing rockets, manned spacecraft anddefense satellites, the Shanghai Space Bureau told Xinhua. Five researchinstitutes will be based at the new center's 183-acre site, the report stated. Meanwhile,China has also begun training its first group of female astronauts this year. Accordingto Xinhua reports, 35 women between the ages of 17 and 20-years-old wererecruited for the country's female astronaut program. At least fouryears of university courses, as well as flight and science training, will berequired before any of the candidates fly, though Chinese space officials hopeto launch their first female astronauts by 2010. "They willembark on a space mission no later than 2010, working as flight commanders oron-board engineers," Hu Shixiang, deputy chief of commander of China's mannedspace program, told China Daily during the announcement.

Universities - How Europe fails its young

THOSE Europeans who are tempted, in the light of the dismal scenes in New Orleans this fortnight, to downgrade the American challenge should meditate on one word: universities. Five years ago in Lisbon European officials proclaimed their intention to become the world's premier “knowledge economy” by 2010. The thinking behind this grand declaration made sense of a sort: Europe's only chance of preserving its living standards lies in working smarter than its competitors rather than harder or cheaper. But Europe's failing higher-education system poses a lethal threat to this ambition. Europe created the modern university. Scholars were gathering in Paris and Bologna before America was on the map. Oxford and Cambridge invented the residential university: the idea of a community of scholars living together to pursue higher learning. Germany created the research university. A century ago European universities were a magnet for scholars and a model for academic administrators the world over. But, as our survey of higher education explains, since the second world war Europe has progressively surrendered its lead in higher education to the United States. America boasts 17 of the world's top 20 universities, according to a widely used global ranking by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. American universities currently employ 70% of the world's Nobel prize-winners, 30% of the world's output of articles on science and engineering, and 44% of the most frequently cited articles. No wonder developing countries now look to America rather than Europe for a model for higher education. Why have European universities declined so precipitously in recent decades? And what can be done to restore them to their former glory? The answer to the first question lies in the role of the state. American universities get their funding from a variety of different sources, not just government but also philanthropists, businesses and, of course, the students themselves. European ones are largely state-funded. The constraints on state funding mean that European governments force universities to “process” more and more students without giving them the necessary cash—and respond to the universities' complaints by trying to micromanage them. Inevitably, quality has eroded. Yet, as the American model shows, people are prepared to pay for good higher education, because they know they will benefit from it: that's why America spends twice as much of its GDP on higher education as Europe does. The answer to the second question is to set universities free from the state. Free universities to run their internal affairs: how can French universities, for example, compete for talent with their American rivals when professors are civil servants? And free them to charge fees for their services—including, most importantly, student fees. Asia's learning The standard European retort is that if people have to pay for higher education, it will become the monopoly of the rich. But spending on higher education in Europe is highly regressive (more middle-class students go to university than working-class ones). And higher education is hardly a monopoly of the rich in America: a third of undergraduates come from racial minorities, and about a quarter come from families with incomes below the poverty line. The government certainly has a responsibility to help students to borrow against their future incomes. But student fees offer the best chance of pumping more resources into higher education. They also offer the best chance of combining equity with excellence. Europe still boasts some of the world's best universities, and there are some signs that policymakers have realised that their system is failing. Britain, the pacemaker in university reform in Europe, is raising fees. The Germans are trying to create a Teutonic Ivy League. European universities are aggressively wooing foreign students. Pan-European plans are encouraging student mobility and forcing the more eccentric European countries (notably Germany) to reform their degree structures. But the reforms have been too tentative. America is not the only competition Europe faces in the knowledge economy. Emerging countries have cottoned on to the idea of working smarter as well as harder. Singapore is determined to turn itself into a “knowledge island”. India is sprucing up its institutes of technology. In the past decade China has doubled the size of its student population while pouring vast resources into elite universities. Forget about catching up with America; unless Europeans reform their universities, they will soon be left in the dust by Asia as well.