Williams College: a word of praise

A combination of unearned good fortune and inspiration born of desperation allowed me to spend a half-year at Williams College playing liberal arts student. The academics were much less work than what I was accustomed to, and the teaching was superb. Best of all, my real undergrad institution paid the whole thing -- room, board, travel and tuition. (Actually the best est part was a I got academic credit for having fun. [1])

I have a soft spot for Williams, but it's fantastically expensive for people who have to pay. So I credit them for enabling some students who are very smart, and perhaps only somewhat poor, to go there ...

I am very pleased to announce that, in consultation with the Board of Trustees, the College has decided to eliminate loans from all financial aid packages and replace them with grants....

This move is the latest in a series of steps the College has taken in recent years to ensure that a Williams education is affordable...

Previous steps had reduced the amount of loans we expected financial aid students to take. For students from families with the lowest incomes that expectation has in recent years been zero. But other financial aid students had been expected, depending on income, to borrow cumulatively over their four years $3,800, $7,800, or 13,800.

This move also comes at a time when the College has succeeded in increasing the socio-economic diversity of entering classes. In fact, the Class of 2011 is the first in history to have more than half its members qualify for Williams-based aid. Even more have won scholarships outside the College..

I don't think this would help much kids like mine though -- it's state school for them. (They've got their share of advantages anyway.)

If you're on the edge of middle class or below, however, and a good student, I would encourage a look at Williams. Even back in the day there were enough non-rich students there to offset the weird experience of studying next to the ultra-rich.

[1] Of course for me learning is fun, so it's not like I wasn't goofing off completely.

Perfect commentary on the million terrorist watch list

Last week more stories appeared about the dysfunctional "watch list" maintained by the FBI's unchecked civilian contractors.

I've written about this many times. Anyone who's ever sat through a med school course on positive predictive value knows what this sucker is worth.

The good news is that the list has gotten so large that even the world's dimmest investigative agency must be starting to suspect something has gone wrong.

The bad news is that when we get rid of it, the Bush administration will replace it with something at least equally stupid.

The other good news is that the situation is perfect for Morford's patented "over the top" prose:

Behold! The Bliss Watch List / To hell with the FBI's million-strong Terrorist Watch List. Here is your killer alternative

.... In fact, if my rough estimates are accurate, at the current ridiculous rate of growth, the terrorist watch list will hold roughly 87 billion names by, say, your next birthday. It will soon list every single person on the face of the planet, along with all dead people, the unborn three generations out, and (strangely) many plants. It is just that insidious. It is just that absurd and obscene and just that much of a hint of the nasty surveillance state we are quietly, viciously becoming.

Great read. Humor is good.

Islamofascism; the greatest threat ever

I can't add anything to Krugman's comments here:

Fearing Fear Itself - Krugman New York Times

... "And Mike Huckabee, whom reporters like to portray as a nice, reasonable guy, says that if Hillary Clinton is elected, “I’m not sure we’ll have the courage and the will and the resolve to fight the greatest threat this country’s ever faced in Islamofascism.” Yep, a bunch of lightly armed terrorists and a fourth-rate military power — which aren’t even allies — pose a greater danger than Hitler’s panzers or the Soviet nuclear arsenal ever did...

The Party of Bozo indeed.

iPhone progress: pretty darned slow

My crummy Palm Tungsten T/2 is failing fast -- the power switch has died (a known design flaw) and the LiOn battery is good for about 3 hours (died within a year of purchase). It crashes frequently and is, really, an awful thing. Palm deserves to die.

The Palm world is pretty awful, but I hate my RAZR more.

Wouldn't it be nice if I could replace both of 'em, and not have to carry an iPod around too? What a great idea!

Yeah. The iPhone. Gee, I almost forgot about that #$&^@# thing.

Problem is, the iPhone is making very slow progress on my "most have" and "nice to have" iPhone demands. Let's check the list (updates in bold):

Non-negotiable:

1. Copy, Cut, Paste: No progress
   
2. Search: No progress
3. Tasks at least comparable to the 1994 PalmPilot tasks: No progress. Task sync was supposed to be in 10.5 but was dropped.
   
4. Synchronization with Outlook at least comparable to the modern Palm OS (in other words, flawed, but useable). A 256 character limit on contact comments is not acceptable. No progress.
5. Run FileMaker RemoteL No progress, except a rumor that FileMaker is abandoning FM Remote completely.
   
6. Synchronize notes. : No progress. Dropped from 10.5
   
7. Multi select and process for email. : No progress.
8. Apple needs to fix the "international problem". It's ridiculously easy to run up a $1000 phone bill unintentionally when outside the US. The phone needs to provides a permission-only control over non-US EDGE access. Fixed.
9. Enable iPhone Bluetooth tethering, so a computer can use it to go online. (added in honor of Boingo). No progress.

Wishes, not demands:

1. A real calculator. No progress.
2. Flatten the recessed headphone socket. No progress.
3. Site-selective synchronization - so can sync at both work and home, but not send home data to a work machine. No progress.
4. Support for a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. No progress.
5. Video out - so I can use a larger display. No progress.
6. Encrypted data stores. No progress.
7. Third party app support (signed is ok). There's a promise of some kind of development environment, but it's not clear it's Cocoa based. Apple is adding data storage and more UI power to WebKit, but that doesn't help me much if the app can't work with tasks, calendar items, etc.
   
8. Flash support, but not from Adobe. No progress.
9. GPS No progress.
10. Custom ring and alert tones: Available now.
    
11. Allow file storage on the iPhone. No progress.

Of the nine critical items, only one has been addressed so far and one (FM Mobile) has had a big regression. It's plausible of course that Apple will add the task/note synchronization to 10.5.1 or 10.5.2 by next February.

Of the 11 "nice to have" items there's resolution of one and we might see something on another some day.

The iPhone I am willing to buy probably won't be available before spring 2008.

Deep sigh.

So what about the Blackberry and Windows Mobile?

The geeks I read tell me that Windows Mobile is even worse than the Palm world. Hard to believe, but I trust 'em.

So that leaves Blackberry, but I'm an OS X fan. BB is basically an Outlook extension. I'd prefer not to be tied to Outlook forever.

I think I'm going to have to buy another crappy Palm device. I'll buy exactly what I have now to reduce the pain.

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.