Image of the week: Fallows in Berlin

James Fallows visits a minor Berlin museum.

I definitely want to visit Berlin. Definitely a glass-half-empty and poisoned kind of place, which suits me of course.

Fallows took a photograph from one of the museum exhibits. I won't try to describe it, but it really must be seen. A thousand words indeed.

LinkedIn joins Google's open social networking

The great thing about a closed ecosystem taking the #1 position is that the best option for rivals is to collaborate around an open solution.

That's the best option, but it rarely happens. Usually rivals simply fight it out. Remember Sun and Netscape? In the 90s the two could have collaborated to fight Microsoft on the browser front, instead they fought bitterly. Netscape died, Sun was mortally wounded, and IE ruled (still does).

Google might be smarter with OpenSocial:

BBC NEWS | Technology | Google opens up social networking:

...Google said that around a dozen social network partners had signed up to the system, including business site LinkedIn, Friendster and Google's own social network Orkut...

I bolded LinkedIn because it's the social face for one's corporate self. A unique front with few challengers. I'd expect Google to invest in them if they haven't already.

Deja Vu: DeLong on Health Care Reform -- and Ira Magaziner

Bred DeLong cannot be on good terms with Ira Magaziner. Today he resurrects a 1997 book review including this paragraph:

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal:

... So those were his two maor flaws: a love of complexity, and the instincts of a consultant--no, three major flaws: his judgment was also very poor. Remember: this is a guy who, without knowing anything about nuclear physics, testifies before congress that America has no choice but to pour lots of money into research into Cold Fusion. This is a man who thinks at the end of the 1970s--a time of record high energy prices and rapidly-growing competition from new producing nations like Brazil and Korea--that what America really needs to do is to invest in more brand-new integrated steel factories. Combine Magaziner's flaws with the sense at the start of 1993 that possibilities were unbounded--that, as one (anonymous) senior White House aide put it, no one in the White House '...was thinking about the fact that Bill Clinton got only 43 percent of the votes. He was on top of the world. He was young, he was good-looking, he gave a good speech. The world was full of hope'--and you have the setting for a policy-planning disaster....

Clinton still hangs with Ira; one hopes he's changed over the years.

What I dimly remember of the Clinton plan, besides a level of media analysis far beyond anything any media corp would tackle today, was that it seemed dishonest.

The plan only made sense (to me) if there were quite a few limits on how money could be spent in the pursuit of "health", and, by implications, limits on what people could choose to do.

This is, of course, always true of any health care service. The main variation among them is whether wealthy people can opt out and take their money with them.

The catch was nobody was allowed to discuss this. We were all to pretend that we'd get universal coverage and nobody would lose anything they had. Even people who had no idea what the plan was smelled something fishy about that ...

PS. For the record, I think we should have no-frills healthcare guaranteed to every US citizen as a birthright. This does mean, however, that the non-wealthy have to wait for expensive stuff to get cheap, which generally takes 2-3 years post release. Those can be long years.

The coastal housing bubble collapse - in pictures

I missed this post when it came out, but caught it via DeLong. Paul Krugman illustrated the coastal housing bubble in pictures. It's sobering. I'd guess MN's prices were between Michigan and Florida -- so only a mild bubble here. We knowingly bought at the peak of the bubble and figured we were going to lose 10% of value within 1-2 years, that's about what happened.

So bad news for the economy, but on the other hand folks I know who follow housing are thinking "post-bubble investing opportunity". There's an unbelievable amount of money sloshing around America looking for a home -- if it pours into housing now we might see an unprecedented recovery as well. (That's easy for me to say, because I'm not predicting anything and don't have time to put my money anywhere anyway!)

Is Google winning the spam wars?

I've posted on Gmail and spam fairly often. A year ago things looked pretty bad, but then I realized that my email redirection was poisoning the domain reputation algorithms Gmail used back then.

From Sept 1996 through July 2007 Gmail's spam filtering was doing pretty well, but in July they had a serious screwup. Mercifully by August it was under control and the results have been great for three months.

It seems Google's Gmail team has also noticed things are going well, today they declared light at the end of the tunnel. Google OS followed up with a bit more detail:

... Many Google teams provide pieces of the spam-protection puzzle, from distributed computing to language detection. For example, we use optical character recognition (OCR) developed by the Google Book Search team to protect Gmail users from image spam. And machine-learning algorithms developed to merge and rank large sets of Google search results allow us to combine hundreds of factors to classify spam," explains Google. "Gmail supports multiple authentication systems, including SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DomainKeys, and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), so we can be more certain that your mail is from who it says it's from. Also, unlike many other providers that automatically let through all mail from certain senders, making it possible for their messages to bypass spam filters, Gmail puts all senders through the same rigorous checks...

For years I've written that the way to defeat spam was through differential filtering based on the managed reputation of the authenticated sending service. This little blurb is consistent with Google implementing that approach.

Today about 70% of Google's incoming mail is spam -- but that's an improvement! It used to be closer to 80%. Excluding a weird 2004 bump this is the most prolonged drop in three years.

My inbox is looking pretty good, and I hardly ever find anything in the spambox now (though I only scan about 20% of what I delete, I get a huge amount of spam).

Gee. I have something nice to say about Google!

The aviation "near miss" problem

Flaming airplane collisions are a relatively blunt instrument for aviation safety measurement.

Airlines can cut a lot of corners, stress the aviation system considerably, and still go years without a big newsworthy wreck. So the wrecks will happen faster than they ought to, but probably not fast enough to perturb the public.

It might be better to detect gross problems sooner. Which is why this AP story on NASA's suppression of aviation risk data got a brief bit of attention ...

The Associated Press: NASA Chief Regrets Agency's Statement

...Among other results, the pilots reported at least twice as many bird strikes, near mid-air collisions and runway incursions as other government monitoring systems show, according to a person familiar with the results who was not authorized to discuss them publicly.

The revelations this week prompted the House Science and Technology Committee to launch an investigation into NASA's decisions, with a public hearing scheduled for next Wednesday...

I gather all the near misses are not being reported. Perhaps airlines don't like their pilots relaying bad news, so they find ways to discourage it. We need the study results to understand the problem.

Of course the Bush administration hates bad news too, and they hate the thought of government having a job to do. So it's understandable that a NASA administrator might prefer to bury this report

Which brings me to the motivation for this post. Yesterday my wife's NWA small jet flight from Dallas got within about 25 feet of the runway at MSP before making a rather steep climb to cruising altitude.

Seems something was on the runway that shouldn't have been.

I wonder if that near miss was reported.

Oh well, the collapse in aviation safety is probably one of the lesser sins of the GOP. Eventually the market will sort things out.

Any resemblance to problems with childhood toys and the human and canine food supplies are completely coincidental.

Petraeus team plays the propaganda game

Glenn Greenwald reviews a bizarre correspondence with a military member of Petraeus staff.

There are two take aways. The first is Petraeus has some dim bulbs on this team. More importantly the correspondence shows us that the US military is playing the same propaganda game with US media that it plays in the Iraqi theater.

I recall this US-directed propaganda initiative was originally a Rumsfeld proposal; I'm not surprised it's continuing.

Proof that we can't trust what Petraeus says. We need other, more trustworthy, sources.

Some relevant old links from similar operations:

• 3/05: Bush use of fake news.
• 2/05: Bush payola operations
• 2/05: Goebbels on propaganda
  

Web 2.0, AJAX and the thin client iPhone: all overrated

Most of the time, I am quite fond of Gmail. Which is to say, the AJAX technologies that Microsoft gave us [1] were a nice improvement on what we used to call DHTML (JavaScript drive dynamic HTML). Reliable JavaScript [2] and AJAX are the technical foundations of what's still sometimes called Web 2.0 .

So far, so good.

Alas, that's as far as it goes. An infinite amount of money can't make Google Docs anything more than a pale imitation of the desktop office products of 1990. The very, very best web-based applications for creating web pages have about 2% of the power, functionality and performance of FrontPage 98. As in 1998.

Jobs much vaunted [3] iPhone web apps don't work when you're in an airplane, a tunnel, inside the bowels of an office building, in an elevator, in a remote cabin, outside the US or anywhere else that AT&T's network isn't performing at full speed and top quality.

Stop it.

Just stop it.

Give me thick client applications written in Pascal [4], C, assembler, FORTRAN, C#, Python ... even Java ... any day. I don't care how painful it is to code those suckers, that's why I pay money for the products.

Ok. I feel better now.

[1] The primary challenge to Microsoft's dominance of the desktop came from ... Microsoft. They weren't unique, but IE did set the standard.

[2] More irony. Microsoft's war with Netscape had, as a side-effect, the establishment of a standardized open JavaScript.

[3] I can only pray these are a delaying tactic to allow a true SDK to come to market -- which Jobs has sort-of promised us.

[4] I've never seen software that performed as reliably and as efficiently as the Mac Classic applications written in Pascal. I think they were even relatively immune to typical hacking measures. Just saying.

Amazon's eBook program: online and print

Amazon is now doing something similar to O'Reilly's Safari Books Online - but it's not just technical books and it's one book at a time:

How to Solve It: Modern Heuristics: Books: Zbigniew Michalewicz, David B. Fogel

Upgrade this book for $11.99 more, and you can read, search, and annotate every page online...

They've done this rather quietly. A book I ordered a year ago is now available for me to upgrade today.

I suspect it would be of most value for technical references - like this one. The advantage over O'Reilly's program is you can do it for just one book.

It's an interesting advantage to buying through Amazon, since it's only available for books on one's personal account.

Huckabee and Gail Collins

The other day I actually tried to defend something Gail Collins of the NYT wrote, even comparing her to Molly Ivins.

Today DeLong persuaded me that I was making a mistake:

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal

...The bottom line is that a woman is dead... because Huckabee went along with crackpot anti-Clinton conspiracy nuts and released someone with a significant history of violence and sexual assault...

Collins completely missed the back story of Hucakbee's pardon of a man who went on to murder a woman. It wasn't some act of reasoned compassion, it was a bizarre side-effect of the right's insane hatred of Bill Clinton.

That is one heck of a blunder; one that would have passed without notice in the days before blogs.

I'm sorry Molly, I won't do that again.

The Wellstone memorial and the path not taken

The family was wandering the Iron Range, exiled by yet another "school release day", when we came upon the Wellstone memorial.

We hadn't known it existed. The memorial brought back bitter memories.

It's been five years since Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone's plane crashed as he flew north to attend the funeral of a friend. The 2002 election was only a week away.

Wellstone, his wife, his daughter, several friends and two pilots died in the crash. The pilot and copilot had made several errors, it was later determined that they were not qualified to fly the plane.

In October of 2002 America's future was balanced on the edge of a precipice. From much of 2000 to 2002 the Senate had been evenly balanced, but before the election a rational Republican had defected and the Senate went Democrat.

Wellstone's death pushed America over the edge. Minnesota and national talk radio hosts used a impolitic memorial service and the Rove playbook to bring GOP Norm Coleman to power.

Minnesota traded a Senator famed for his integrity for one of the most craven politicians ever to spring from Rove's foundry. The GOP had a one seat majority in the Senate. From 2002 through 2006 the GOP controlled the Supreme Court, the House, the Senate and the Presidency.

Everything that was to follow sprang from that poisoned moment.

On May 1, 2003 the US led an invasion of Iraq and by 2004 the name Abu Ghraib had come to symbolize the worst of America. An American era that began with the abolition of slavery and peaked with the 1947 Marshall plan ended in government approved torture and ideologically mandated incompetence.

Which is why the Wellstone Memorial is a genuinely historic site. For the moment it's is not terribly well marked and is little known outside of the area. On Google's maps it's near here -- give or take a kilometer.

When we arrived, on a cold wet Sunday morning, we were alone. During a visit limited by our children's limited patience two other cars arrived. I think the site gets regular visitors.

From The Iron Range

(click on the pictures to see larger versions, you can download a full res image from the associated album)

It is a very beautiful site, one of the loveliest memorials I've seen anywhere. Certainly it has the sweetest air and finest scents of any I've known.



The Wellstone family and friends are memorialized by ancient stones ...







In 2006 another historic Senate election turned on the the survival of another midwestern Democratic senator, Tim Johnson of South Dakota. This time the balance tipped the other way, Johnson survived his ruptured aneurysm and the Democrats took the Senate.

Now we have no choice but to hope that the worst is over. We can't go back to the days before waterboarding became a national sport, but maybe we'll start a new path.

A new American enlightenment. There's not much choice, really.

The nuclear apocalypses that should have happened

I've read of most of these before, but DI has a complete collection of publicly known nuclear attack false alarms like this one:

Damn Interesting » The Apocalypses That Might Have Been

.... Unlike the previous alerts, this event wasn't an error in the early-detection system, this missile was confirmed as real. Fearing the worst, the Russian military prepared to launch a full-scale counterattack against the United States. Planes were readied, and missiles sat waiting to launch a nuclear volley on selected targets in the United States at a moment's notice. Tensions were running so high within the Russian leadership that Russian President Boris Yeltsin activated his nuclear briefcase, enabling him to communicate with his top military advisers and review the situation online. This was the first time he had ever done so. Amidst this uncertainty, as many fingers nervously hovered over death-bringing buttons, word was received from Soviet military observers: the missile, while real, was not en route to Russia. It was a harmless research rocket headed for space...

Basically if soldiers had followed their orders properly you wouldn't be reading this and I wouldn't be writing it. In the unlikely event we were alive today, we'd be foraging for food. There certainly wouldn't be an Internet.

I really don't understand why human civilization is still around. I share the opinion of Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project physicists -- there's no evidence to suggest that humans are capable of living with nuclear weapons.

Still. We're here. Apparently.

Odd.

Rat plagues wipe out indigenous rats

We know that European human plagues depopulated most of the Americas, and allowed the Puritans to scavenge from dead Amerindians.

I've speculated that European dog diseases (Distemper?) wiped out the indigenous new world dog (true Indian dogs became extinct long ago).

So it's interesting to read that European rats wiped out native Island rats -- or rather, their infections did:

Damn Interesting » The Crabs of Christmas:

... the [Christmas Island] rats were identified as another endemic species, the Maclear's rat. It seems that in the late 19th century, these rats were as numerous as the red crabs are today. Like the crabs they were scavenging creatures that lived in burrows on the forest floor, but the exact role they played in the ecology of the island will forever remain a mystery– for by 1903 the species was extinct, wiped out by an epidemic of trypanosome parasites introduced by ship-borne black rats...

Europe's dense urban populations cooked up lethal bioweapons, carried around the world by European animals.

The US does NOT have a problem with science education

It may have a problem with science related employment however ....

The Science Education Myth (Business Week, Vivek Wadhwa)

Political leaders, tech executives, and academics often claim that the U.S. is falling behind in math and science education. They cite poor test results, declining international rankings, and decreasing enrollment in the hard sciences. They urge us to improve our education system and to graduate more engineers and scientists to keep pace with countries such as India and China.

Yet a new report by the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, tells a different story. The report disproves many confident pronouncements about the alleged weaknesses and failures of the U.S. education system. This data will certainly be examined by both sides in the debate over highly skilled workers and immigration (BusinessWeek.com, 10/10/07). The argument by Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG), Intel (INTC), and others is that there are not enough tech workers in the U.S.

The authors of the report, the Urban Institute's Hal Salzman and Georgetown University professor Lindsay Lowell, show that math, science, and reading test scores at the primary and secondary level have increased over the past two decades, and U.S. students are now close to the top of international rankings. Perhaps just as surprising, the report finds that our education system actually produces more science and engineering graduates than the market demands....

... As far as our workforce is concerned, the new report showed that from 1985 to 2000 about 435,000 U.S. citizens and permanent residents a year graduated with bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in science and engineering. Over the same period, there were about 150,000 jobs added annually to the science and engineering workforce. These numbers don't include those retiring or leaving a profession but do indicate the size of the available talent pool. It seems that nearly two-thirds of bachelor's graduates and about a third of master's graduates take jobs in fields other than science and engineering...

So the data suggests we actually graduate more scientists and engineers than we have jobs for. Encouraging science education isn't going to make more scientists, any more than encouraging farming education will make more American farmers.

There's better paid work for smart American students in other domains.

Which brings us back to the farming analogy. The US is a post-agricultural nation that dose agriculture as an expensive hobby. Are we a post-science nation too?

BTW, I'm so pleased someone has done the research on this. I love to have my intuitions confirmed ...

On saving the world - Shtetl-Optimized

I've had a post bouncing around my head for a while. It's about saving the human world. (The rest of the world will do just fine - eventually. As my 8 yo says, history just keeps happening.)

I'm going to write that post - eventually. I'll try to write the main risks down (US-China conflicts, WMDs, cost of havoc, rapid environmental collapse and resulting socioeconomic disruptions, artificial minds [1], etc) and what a geek can do about them in the age of O'Reilly.

In the meantime, a post by Scott Aaronson (yes, two t, two a)...

Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » Procrastinating on the sidelines of history

... So, Al Gore. Look, I don’t think it reflects any credit on him to have joined such distinguished pacifists as Henry Kissinger and Yasser Arafat. I think it reflects credit on the prize itself. This is one of the most inspired choices a Nobel Peace Prize committee ever made, even though ironically it has nothing directly to do with peace.

With the release of An Inconvenient Truth and The Assault on Reason, it’s become increasingly apparent that Gore is the tragic hero of our age: a Lisa among Cletuses, a Jeffersonian rationalist in the age of Coulter and O’Reilly. If I haven’t said so more often on this blog, it’s simply because the mention of Gore brings up such painful memories for me.

In the weeks leading up to the 2000 US election, I could almost feel the multiverse splitting into two branches of roughly equal amplitude that would never again interact. In both branches, our civilization would continue racing into an abyss, the difference being that in one branch we’d be tapping the brakes while in the other we’d be slamming the accelerator. I knew that the election would come down to Florida and one or two other swing states, that the margin in those states would be razor-thin (of course no one could’ve predicted how thin), and that, in contrast to every other election I’d lived through, in this one every horseshoe and butterfly would make a difference. I knew that if Bush got in, I’d carry a burden of guilt the rest of my life for not having done more to prevent it.

The question was, what could a 19-year-old grad student at Berkeley do with that knowledge? How could I round up tens of thousands of extra Gore votes, and thereby seize what might be my only chance in life to change the course of history? I quickly ruled out trying to convince Bush voters, assuming them beyond persuasion. (I later found out I was wrong, when I met people who’d voted for Bush in 2000 but said they now regretted their decision. To me, it was as if they’d just noticed the blueness of the sky.)...

...In the end, though, the Nadertrading movement simply failed to reach enough of its target audience. The websites put up by me and others apparently induced at least 1,400 Nader supporters in Florida to vote for Gore — but 97,000 Floridians still voted for Nader. And as we know, Bush ended up “winning” the state by 537 votes...

Ah yes. Nader. There are no words.

But. We're not alone. Not completely.

[1] Even I wince when I write that. It's just so geeky. Tough.