W. P. Carey MBA - Executive Program - Arizona State University

U.S. high schools are "obsolete"

It isn't clear what, exactly, he meant by "obsolete," by Microsoft chief Bill Gates wasn't paying a compliment to the high schools when he spoke at a recent Governor's conference on this topic:

"America's high schools are obsolete," Gates said. "By obsolete, I don't just mean that they're broken, flawed or underfunded, though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean our high schools _ even when they're working as designed _ cannot teach all our students what they need to know today."

Summit leaders have an ambitious agenda for every state: to raise the requirements of a high school diploma, improve information sharing between high schools and universities, and align graduation standards with the expectations of colleges and employers. Governors say they're in a position to unite the often splintered agendas of business leaders, educators and legislatures.

But such changes will take what Gates singled out as the biggest obstacle: political will.

Requiring tougher courses for all students, for example, could face opposition from parents and school officials, particularly if more rigor leads to lower test scores and costly training.

The conference was attended by at least 45 governors from the 50 states and 5 U.S. territories.  Their concern appears to be genuine.

The nation's governors offered an alarming account of the American high school Saturday, saying only drastic change will keep millions of students from falling short.

"We can't keep explaining to our nation's parents or business leaders or college faculties why these kids can't do the work," said Virginia Democratic Gov. Mark Warner, as the state leaders convened for the first National Education Summit aimed at rallying governors around high school reform.

It's all about O

What makes this ad so discussed?  Go here to see one analysis.

And the woman in the ad is as unique and interestinga she appears; here's the report on a recent phone interview:

The lovely Sabine Ehrenfeld (pronounced "Sa-BEAN-uh") was driving back from a snowboarding trip with her children, on her way to casting calls the following day. Still, she found time to chat in a delightful and disarming manner. I learned the following:

In addition to German and English, Sabine speaks French and Italian. She is proficient in basic tactical pistol skills, because she thought it would be a fun thing to learn. She also has a private pilot's license and 350 hours in the air. After reading the Richard Bach book Biplane, she was inspired to fly solo—in an old-style, aerobatic tailwheel plane—from California to Montana. With camping gear in the back so she could land along the route to sleep and refuel. I am not making this up.

It's generated more interest than the Oscar's broacast.

He's an artist, too

Ward Churchill made it from working as staff at the University of Colorado to full, tenured professor in one year, but his scholarship is now being challenged.  His ethnicity -- he formerly either claimed or implied that he was a Native American -- is disputed.  And now his art has received some criticism. 

At right are two pictures -- an original by the late artist Thomas Mails (copied here from a book) and an "original" called "Winter Attack" signed by Ward Churchill.  Some have noticed striking similarities.  It's possible that Prof. Churchill got his own independent artistic afflatus that just happened to be the mirror image of an existing creation.  But even then, a person knowledgeable of this area of art would be aware of the similarities and reference the earlier work.  Other explanations for the similarities are less respectful of Prof. Churchill.

A reporter tried to get an explanation from Prof. Churchill:

[The reporter, Mr. Chohan, asks:] "This is an artwork we've got called 'Winter Attack.' It looks like it was based on a Thomas Mails painting; it looks like you ripped it off. Can you tell us about that?" Chohan asked.

That prompted Churchill to take a swing at Chohan while he held a stack of papers in his hand.

The exchange continued:

Chohan: "Sir, that's assault, you can't do that. Can I ask you about this? It looks like you copied it."

Here's a video of the exchange.

His artwork, speeches and disputed ethnicity claims can't be adding much to the University of Colorado's reputation as an institution of higher learning.  Why don't they do something?

The Rocky Mountain News depicts the CU administration as practically paralyzed with fear at the possible retaliation Churchill could visit on them should they attempt to chastise him.

There is the possibility of an "early retirement package."

University of Colorado officials are considering offering Ward Churchill an   early retirement package that could end an increasingly uncomfortable standoff   with the controversial professor. ... David Lane, Churchill's attorney, said   he has not been contacted about a buyout offer. But, he said, while his   primary focus is on protecting Churchill's constitutional right to speak out,   he would be willing to listen to a university proposal. "If they offer   $10 million, I would think about it. If they offer him $10, I wouldn't,"   Lane said.

And herein is, unfortunately, a lesson in financial planning for anyone working at a large state institution of higher learning.  These institutions depend on their state legislatures for funding increases and the state legislators that vote for these funding increases must explain their votes to their voting constituencies.  Lengthy legal procedings played out over months or years in the press can be viewed negatively by the local public and, in turn, may lead to decreased motivation among legislators to support budget increases.  So "early retirement package" is often the weapon of choice when these universities must discipline one of their employees.  One way to get a better retirement package may be to create enough problems for the university that they are motivated to pay more to see you leave.  It is a safe bet that no other faculty at CU are having their lawyers talk about $10 million retirement packages (though here the statement appears to be hyperbolic, though maybe it is just setting the range where negotiations must start).

Great graphics

Check out this graphical representation of the most popular names over the past 10 decades -- colorful, dynamic (move the cursor over the graph or type a name) and informative.

The dark side

There is more "dark matter" in the universe than there is normal matter -- the baryonic matter of which planets and stars are made and that is visible.   Dark matter's presence can only be inferred by its influence on visible matter -- it can't be seen.  And a lot of it has just been discovered:

Astronomers have discovered an object that appears to be an invisible galaxy made almost entirely of dark matter.

The team, led by Cardiff University, UK, claims it is the first such object to be detected.

A dark galaxy is an area in the Universe containing a large amount of mass that rotates like a galaxy, but contains no stars.

The galaxy is so large that if it were an ordinary galaxy it would be easily visible with an amateur telescope.

Astronomers say the discovery marks an important breakthrough because, according to cosmological models, dark matter is five times more abundant than the baryonic matter.

Phoenix gets relief from drought

Three years ago, Arizona was in the midst of a drought and the reservoirs were at their lowest levels ever.  The rain of the last four months has changed the picture considerably:

Roosevelt's contents as of today - roughly 1.32 million acre-feet, or almost 81 percent of capacity - is historic because it's more water than the lake has ever held. SRP and the Bureau of Reclamation raised Roosevelt Dam by 77 feet in 1996, creating new space for storage, flood control and dam safety.

The lake has now begun to fill that new space, rising above its old capacity and, in the parlance of engineers, getting the concrete wet for the first time.

SRP has no doubts about the new structure, even though it's never been put to a real-life test. It was built to withstand the "probable maximum flood" - the worst flood conditions hydrologists could think of - as well as the "probable maximum earthquake."

"If you're going to build a dam above a metro area with 3 or 4 million people, you want to make sure it's a very safe dam," Ester said.

Epitaph: Last photos of the Thai tsunami

These are the last pictures taken by a vacationing couple in Thailand -- the one on the right (click to enlarge) is the fifth of six pictures that show the wave coming to shore.  The couple was caught in the wave and died.  Their digital camera was destroyed, but the photos on the memory card were preserved.

Librarians and Google

Some time ago someone suggested that Google was making the job market for research librarians a little thinner.  What do librarians think of Google and the digitizing of millions of books so that not only is the web searchable but so are many books?  Here are some comments from Michael Gorman, President-elect of the American Library Association:

[I] question the usefulness of Google digitizing millions of books and making bits of them available via its notoriously inefficient search engine. The Google phenomenon is a wonderfully modern manifestation of the triumph of hope and boosterism over reality. Hailed as the ultimate example of information retrieval, Google is, in fact, the device that gives you thousands of "hits" (which may or may not be relevant) in no very useful order.

Those characteristics are ignored and excused by those who think that Google is the creation of "God's mind," because it gives the searcher its heaps of irrelevance in nanoseconds. Speed is of the essence to the Google boosters, just as it is to consumers of fast "food," but, as with fast food, rubbish is rubbish, no matter how speedily it is delivered.

Feel aggressive in the kitchen?

This might not help; on the other hand, maybe this knife holder (click to enlarge!) will help you feel like you are dealing with the aggressions constructively.

InterfaceLIFT

Looking for a facelift for your interface?  There are many here for both MAC and Windows operating systems.  Take a look.

The business of selling the Oscar's ceremony

The Academy Awards were initiated as advertising -- movie attendance dropped off significantly in late winter and an awards ceremony would create "news" that advertised movies -- exactly what Daniel Boorstin termed a "pseudo event."  People might skip reading the movie advertisements but they couldn't miss reading the headlines.

In 1952, the Awards ceremony was out of money and was about to be cancelled.  At the last minute, RCA put up $100,000 to broadcast the event on their TV network, "NBC."

The stars thought this was a bit of bad taste -- TV was where the bad movies went "to die," according to Bob Hope.  It would be like a ceremony in a graveyard.  But movie buffs supported the idea because they didn't have to wait until the next morning's paper to find out how won.  They were there!

The movie stars soon realized how much bigger the "audience" was going to be, too, and as a result the  "drama" surrounding who won got a bit more dramatic, the wardrobes got a bit more outlandish, and, surprise, the acceptance speeches got longer.

And by 1960, the movie stars who got access to the stage were well aware that they were getting a rare opportunity:  a national (soon, international) audience to whom they could speak without being required to follow any script but the one they wrote for themselves.

Since then, the acceptance speeches have been a bit of a "pulpit" event with political causes chief among the  speech topics chosen by winners.

But the Oscar's are still really just advertising and getting people to watch by advertising the advertising is very much part of the pre-Oscar tradition.  Here is what passes for "news" during Oscar week:

L.A. Weekly has learned that [Chris] Rock has earmarked a segment of his standup to joke about George W. Bush.

Someone in Hollywood is going to make a political joke involving a U.S. President?  Yes -- the Award's ceremony is going to "blow up the status quo:"

at the Academy Awards this Sunday, you can count on the guy who may well be the funniest comedian working right now to break out of the mold of mediocrity that usually defines the broadcast’s opening monologue and blow up the status quo.

And it will be on TV.  That status quo changed in 1952, and the political commentary status quo blew up right after that.  The news appears to be that the Award's ceremony will be the same as it has been for the past half-century:  advertising cast as news.

 

Google movies

Just in time for the Oscar's, Google Movies.

New hope for depressives

Instead of using medicines or electric shock treatments, there is growing evidence that creating electro-magnetic fields that stimulate the brain improve the condition of those suffering from chronic depression:

the new treatment does not make use of a magnet, but uses an electric instrument, creating a magnetic field that stimulates the brain. For a decade, scientists have been investigating possible applications of this method in psychiatric treatment, and the findings show that it has positive effects in treating depression. For many patients it may replace the recommended treatment by electric shock. Already now magnetic treatment for depression is available in Israel, albeit only on a private basis.

Additional research is being conducted to see if this treatment may also aid drug addicts break their addiction.

An outstanding podcast

Go hear to listen (or download) a talk given by Dr. David Weinberger to the Library of Congress.

Corporate communications

It is virtually impossible for someone inside a large organization to speak informally and publicly for that organization if it includes comments about products or services or there are any "implied commitments."  If something is to be said for the organization, the press is directed to the organization's "spokesperson" or "media rep" and they  read (or quote) material that has been scrubbed by the lawyers.  If it has to do with advertising, there are very serious meetings internally, some people who spoke out of turn are chastised, the "branding" people talk like their own and run the organization and everyone knows that communication with the public in public terms is very serious indeed and is only conducted by those who have the right to do that and who have been tapped as the only mouthpieces for the organization.

That's why this event is so significant:

Three years ago, it was next to inconceivable that a mere Microsoft employee -- and by "mere" I mean one not drilled in the Key Point dunning techniques of Corporate "Communications" -- would someday speak publicly and positively about a competing company or product. But that day has come, and that "mere employee," now magically transmogrified into an actual human being is Robert Scoble.

As he took a little friendly fire in my previous post, I want to reproduce here -- in full, links and all -- what he posted about an hour later...

Congrats to Firefox on 25M downloads

Hi Blake Ross (and Asa and others on the Firefox team): Congrats on hitting 25,000,000 downloads of Firefox. You did what few people have done: you changed the world and got people to download and install your application.

At Demo yesterday I saw Firefox all over the place. I saw far far far more Firefox icons than I saw Linux or Macintosh icons.

In just a few months your app has become one of the most used Windows applications in the world. My hat's off to you!

And a few minutes earlier than that one, he wrote:

Hey, did anyone notice the 400 comments left over on the IE Blog yesterday?

Nah, don't start a conversation. Why would someone want to do that? Heh!

The big story here is not another browser war (not that I have anything against one; as I said yesterday, what fun!), but rather the conversation that has finally started between people inside companies and people outside those companies. The net made this inevitable, as the cluetrain manifesto predicted in 1999.

What happened?  Firefox, the new browser out this year, just hit 25 million downloads.  It is now a leading competitor of Microsoft's Internet Explorer.  And a blogger from Microsoft, with Microsoft's ok, is allowed to have his own blog and in it he congratulates Firefox for their achievement.  Can you imagine that happening at your organization?  A key competitor is successful with a product?  That calls for counterstrike, re-imaging, "aggressive" or "edgy" advertising that is confrontational and generates buzz.

The cluetrain manifesto predicted more civil and personal interactions as the internet grew.  The authors (one of whom posted the story above) weren't sure if it would ever come about but this event made them think that it might.

The point is not the process, though. It's the product. And the product in this case is neither Firefox nor Internet Explorer. The "product" is the conversation itself. People talking to people. Just us chickens here, boss!

You may want to read the whole thing (don't be misled by the pictures -- it is an analogy).

Even rental cars support podcasting

An earlier post here had a link to the Diner, a podcast of some old radio drama and music and some commentary in-between.  You can download podcasts, too, and because of the variety available, you'll likely be able to find some that you really enjoy.

It isn't just for web-heads, any more, as this exchange shows:

I got so hooked on listening to podcasts in rental cars with mp3 CD players that I went to a car audio shop yesterday to see what the aftermarket had to offer. When I told them I'd want a unit that allowed fast-forwarding and rewinding within selections (the players in the Ford Foci I've been renting only jump from file to file), the salesguy showed me a bunch of Alpine units that do exactly that. Some also support the customer's choice of Sirius and/or XM satellite radio, rather than just one or the other (imagine a radio today sold with AM or FM, but not both), which is nice.

But dig what happened when I brought up the reason I need fast-forward/rewind:

"I listen to a lot of —"

"Podcasts?" he said. Yeah, they're the hot new thing. All the makers are starting to pay attention to podcasting.

Advertising

That's 3M security glass and that is real money on the inside of it and the whole thing is sitting out on a sidewalk unattended.

This probably wouldn't be an ad for a recommended use of the product, but it does convey confidence in its ability to perform as advertised.

Understanding craigslist.com

While much of the discussion about the influence of blogs on mainstream media has centered around reporting and politics and fact-checking, there is another aspect of mainstream media and newspapers in particular that is of critical importance but that has escaped extended commentary on the web.  That is the fundamentals of how newspapers make money.  They make it from advertising and one aspect of advertising that is very valuable is that of want ads and public notices.  Newspapers sell space for these notices by the word.

Craigslist provides an alternative to posting your want ad or public notice or event notice in the local newspaper.  It started out as a small posting service to some of his friends:

craigslist started as a small email list for a group of friends in Northern California. Ten years later, it's a global phenomenon. In a ChangeThis exclusive, Craig Newmark talks about the values that got his business from there to here.

A recent analysis of the economic impact of craigslist estimated that it had removed approximately $2.5 billion in revenues from local newspapers over the full period of time it has been in operation.  That is truly influential.

Now you can read about what makes craigslist work, explained by Craig himself.

No longer in question

This post detailed how Ward Churchill made tenure at the University of Colorado based on a single year of teaching as an adjunct.  His quick tenure was based on CU's desire to enhance diversity by keeping a Native American.  The decision, though about an academic appointment, didn't have anything to do with academics.

Then, it turned out that there was some uncertainty about his ethnicity.  Though he had presented himself in a way that made people assume he was a Native American, AIM voiced some doubts.

There are no more doubts: 

Churchill did address the issue of his ethnicity, admitting that he is not Native American. . . . 'Let's cut to the chase; I am not,' he said.  [via here]

Oops.  It's one thing to find out someone lied on their resume about publishing an article -- you can fire them pretty cleanly by saying that was relevant to the hiring and it turned out to be false.  In this case, his supposed ethnicity was not an explicit reason for giving him a tenured academic position; it's hard to now make it a reason for firing him -- it would be discrimination to fire someone solely because of their ethnicity.

UPDATE:  It's back in play.  Is it that hard to trace geneology?

Ignoring recursion in logic

Here's an interesting proposition (in "Fact Finders" by Jonathan Chait of The New Republic):  one political party is a collection of empiricists who follow the evidence where ever it leads them.  The other party is a collection of dogmatists and ideologues who cling to principles even as the facts mount against them.

While the ideologues have the benefit of coherence in making arguments, they do so only by abandoning dealing with real data.  Empiricists, on the other hand, must admit lack of coherence and certainty about anything, but this is a good thing, according to this proposer:

Incoherence is simply a natural byproduct of a philosophy rooted in experimentation and a rejection of ideological certainty.

The proposition is put forth by the empiricist party, claiming that they alone represent realism and the true struggle for the common good.  The other party is engaged in self-delusion in the sense that they ignore data that conflicts with their ideology.

If it is incoherent and uncertain, of course, then empiricism as it is presented in this proposition is characterized primarily in terms of its  skepticism of ideological certainty.  Empiricists can predict little because they have to wait until experimentation leads them there; this makes them very skeptical of those who put a lot of weight on reason and coherence and believe that some forecasts can be made with certainty. 

The empiricists' certainty that skeptical empiricism is the path to the common good reminds me of the comment that Pascal had for skeptics:  he had a hard time in ultimately taking their argument seriously because their skepticism does not extend to being skeptical about skepticism as a productive mode of thought.  At that most fundamental level, they are not skeptics at all but ideologues -- certain, as they are, that skepticism is the tool for finding truth.

The semantics in this article by Chait make the argument a little hard to follow.  Often propositions like this one are really just clever ways of congratulating yourself for being right (if incoherent) and abusing others for being wrong (though perhaps coherent).  By in large, they aren't very helpful in understanding either group.

Bullying cultural development

When Viacom started a new TV network called Spike TV, Spike Lee sued them because he said it was adding traffic to their business by trading on his reputation through the use of his name.  Though there was no link to Spike Lee and there have been many other uses of the word spike in history, he won an out-of-court settlement that cost Viacom, they say, about $17 million.

This isn't an isolated incident, and if Brand Name Bullies get their way in privatizing virtually every aspect of technical and social production, the cultural impacts will be significant, says the book's author.  He claims we would not have achieved as much as we have if this approach had been taken in the past:

Imagine if today's far-reaching laws on copyright and trademark were sent back in time to the days of William Shakespeare. On the opening day of Romeo and Juliet, the heirs of first-century Roman poet Ovid would surely have filed the case of Estate of Ovid v. William Shakespeare, alleging that the Bard had made unauthorized use of Ovid's Metamorphoses, which is also based on two lovers from warring families. The legal conflict would have scared off theaters, and the play would have dropped into obscurity.

It might seem ridiculous, but David Bollier, author of Brand Name Bullies, says this scenario is common under today's copyright and trademark law, which he calls "replete with tales of the bizarre and hilarious." 

Bollier is co-founder of Public Knowledge, a non-profit group that aims to defend the "information commons." In Brand Name Bullies, he argues that creativity and free speech are being shut down as entertainment conglomerates and other companies push intellectual-property law to unprecedented extremes.

The result is a sweeping privatization of culture and knowledge with the connivance of Congress and the courts. It is a dangerous development, Bollier suggests, because science and creativity are built upon what others have done before us.

At the heart of his book are dozens of real-life stories he says show how silly things have gotten. In one case, Warner Bros. threatened young fans of the Harry Potter movies with legal action after they created Web sites to celebrate and discuss Potter.

America's industrial leadership

The foundation for leadership in science, technology, engineering and mathematics is not poured in graduate school.  Or even in high school.  It is set in the upper levels of gradeschool and junior high.  But the lack of a foundation is showing up, according to National Science Foundation data, as fewer U.S. students getting college degrees in the sciences or engineering.  The U.S. is well behind much of the industralized world in this area:

Consider this situation at the college level (National Science Foundation data):

        Among persons 24 years old who hold a B.S. or B.A. degree (in 2001)

Country            Percent Bachelor's degrees in engineering
U.S.                                    5%
China                               39%
South Korea                     27%
Taiwan                            23%
Japan                              19%

In the past, it has been the technical human talent that has driven the U.S.'s success in industry, manufacturing and the creation of intellectual property (IP).   Over 50% of the CEO's of Fortune 100 companies have a technical education background.  And there is a high correlation between technical innovations that drive new industrial markets and the presence of PhD-level capabilities in the physical sciences and engineering.

But U.S.-based capabilities at the graduate level in the physical sciences are shrinking while they are on the rise in much of the rest of the industrialized world.

Why aren't U.S. students taking science as a major in college?  Because, for many if not most of them, they can't.  They gave up that option in grade school and high school.  They don't have the basic skills that allow them to even attempt most science classes, let alone succeed in them.

Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) from the year 2000 shows that 2% of U.S. 12th graders are rated at the "advanced" capability level in science.  Worse, only 16 percent are rated even "proficient."  About half of 12th graders in the U.S. are rated as "below partial proficiency" in the sciences.

Unfortunately, this is not a global trend.  The International Math and Science Study shows how U.S. students' skills compare to those of students in other countries.  As an example, U.S. 12th graders were in the 10th percentile, globally, in terms of their science skills -- 90% of the world's 12th-grade students were stronger in the sciences than U.S. 12th graders.

U.S. students, as a group, do well in international comparisons at the 4th-grade level, mediocre in the 8th grade and poor in the 12th grade.

Robert Herbold is a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and he is head of a subcommittee called Workforce/Education.  This subcommittee is studying why U.S. students are so weak in science and engineering.  One reason, according to this committee, is that K-12 science teachers are not themselves competent in science -- over 50% of the people teaching science didn't major or minor in science in the college of education, let alone the real college science majors.  Worse, the teachers who DO have training in science apparently don't actually teach science very much because, in 2003, 93% of K-12 students who took science were taught by teachers who had not themselves taken much science.  It's hard for these teachers to even teach the topics, let alone get students to be excited about it.  Fewer than 1/3 of 9th graders who take a "science track" at school are still in that track at graduation from high school.

If the teaching is weak, it is no surprise that the curricula are weak, too.  In 2003, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) rated less than 10% of middle school and high school math books in the U.S. to be "acceptable" and no science books.  It is recommended that high schools require three years of math and two years of science -- less than half require that much math and less than a fourth of high schools require that much science.

In addition to weak teaching skills in the sciences and weak curricula, there is the problem of how education budgets are spent:  the Dept of Education says that only 53% of education funding actually gets spent on activities related to instruction.

Our son and daughter think they are doing pretty well in school and we keep telling them that may be because they aren't seeing the real competition.  Maybe the real competition isn't in their class or in their school or even in their country. 

But Microsoft and Nokia and IBM and other large technology-based firms know where the talent is.  Microsoft, for example, just opened a recruiting office across from IIT, the Indian Institute of Technology, in India, and they hire as many of IIT's graduates as are interested in working for Microsoft.  They don't have similar recruiting plans at many U.S. colleges.  Our son and daughter don't see the students in India and Viet Nam and China working evenings and weekends on technical homework and they assume that everyone in the world is working about the same as they are.  One consequence of this complacency in science in the lower grades is that when U.S. students get to college, the vast majority of them  decide that they won't go into a technical field.  And this reduces one of the major contributors to technical innovation and the development of intellectual property in the U.S. and contributes to moving that activity elsewhere.

Links for the information that is listed above and for more discussion:
Main link
National Science Foundation and NAEP
National Science Foundation links

The Diner is open again

If you have time, you may enjoy dropping by the Diner, hear some conversation and some old radio dramas.  It's partly visiting, partly radio history, and the start of some on-going personal dramas.

Try it -- it's friendly.

Moving to the other side of the table

The purchase of the Arizona Diamondbacks by a partnership headed by Jeff Moorad has been approved by Major League Baseball:

Commissioner Bud Selig granted approval to former super agent Jeff Moorad to join the Diamondbacks ownership group. An official announcement from the commissioner’s office is expected shortly, possibly as early as today.

“I'm happy to have this process behind us,” Moorad said. “And I'm appreciative of the commissioner’s effort as well as his staffs' effort, working through a long process, but one that ended in the right way.”

There's some ironic justice in this in that he now has to find ways to pay some of the salaries that he previously negotiated.

Kofi Annan defends the U.N.

The head of the U.N. defended the United Nations and his own work in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal yesterday (subscription only).  In it he describes the U.N.'s role in aiding the tsunami victims in Southeast Asia and forecasts that the coming Volcker report detailing abuses of the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food program that saw billions of dollars skimmed from the Iraqi people will explain that oversight in a way that exonerates the U.N.

He ignored completely recent charges of U.N. abuse coming from inside the U.N. itself, including these recently recounted issues:

The U.N.'s top refugee advocate resigned Sunday amid a festering controversy over allegations that he sexually harassed several female employees at the U.N. refugee agency. . . .

U.N. diplomats said Lubbers had become a political liability for an organization already striving to demonstrate its willingness to hold senior officials accountable after damaging scandals involving corruption in a U.N. humanitarian program in Iraq and sexual misconduct by U.N. peacekeepers in Congo.

And this:

The UN has since admitted that some of its peacekeepers regularly raped, abused and prostituted children in their care.

Besides [U.N. diplomat] Bourguet, the UN has collected information about two peacekeepers in Congo who gave young girls jars of mayonnaise and jam in exchange for sex.

In another case, a 14-year-old girl has told UN investigators that she had sex with a UN peacekeeper in exchange for two eggs; her family was starving.

Another girl, also 14, took food from an apparently friendly peacekeeper on four occasions. On the fifth, he asked for sex. She agreed, in exchange for $US2 ($A2.50), bread and chocolate.

The UN has known about these abuses for some time but is only now scrambling to respond to the charges.

Roger Simon believes that tolerating this type of behavior from the U.N. and its leadership may doom the prospects of any type of global governance organization in the future because of the cynicism it creates in the young people who read it here and the young people who experience it in other countries.

More on higher education

The discussion about Prof. Ward Churchill's sudden rise to a tenured position after teaching for a single year as an adjunct faculty member without a doctorate indicates that sometimes getting to the top can be pretty easy.  On the other hand, Larry Summers, President of Harvard, gave some reasons why it appears to be hard for women to get to top positions in the sciences.  He was criticized broadly and publicly for these comments, there were calls for removing him, and several new committees have been set up at Harvard to investigate what has happened in the past and hot to make things better in the future.

Here is a comment from a woman (Megan McArdle) quoting a commenter at a site run by a graduate from Harvard:

Incidentally, having read Larry Summers' remarks now, I think it's pretty embarassing for academia that this scandal got as far as it did. A commenter at Matthew Yglesias' nailed it:

. . . if the university maintains that tenure is intended to foster a climate of free debate of a wide range of unpopular hypotheses, then it seems hypocritical for the tenured faculty to demand multiple apologies from Summers and threaten his job because he offered a hypothesis that certainly should be open to scientific verification.

To the outside observer it makes Harvards faculty look like a bunch of immature people unwilling to entertain ideas that conflict with their narrow view of the world.

Larry Summers made some suggestions about the causes of female underrepresentation in the "hard" sciences. They were based on research, more than adequately caveated, and eloquently put. The hysterical reaction to his remarks by women at the conference, followed by the indignant bluster of Mr Summers' colleagues, make Harvard, and academia, look more than a little bit silly.

Many comments on this comment can be found if you follow the link.

More on intelligent design

Following an op-ed piece in the New York Times a week ago on intelligent design, a new article entitled "unintelligent design" by Jim Holt argues that what we see in the universe around us is pretty flawed and what does that say about the designer?

What can we tell about the designer from the design? While there is much that is marvelous in nature, there is also much that is flawed, sloppy and downright bizarre. Some nonfunctional oddities, like the peacock's tail or the human male's nipples, might be attributed to a sense of whimsy on the part of the designer. Others just seem grossly inefficient. In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.

Sure, there's life and the complexity of the human genome and the intricate web of ecosystems, but what about those nipples?  Or that laryngeal nerve?  This seems similar to the arguments when I was young about the appendix being a useless vistigial organ or the tail bone being something we didn't need but have been slow in losing.  There is in these a seeming sub-text that "things are pretty great here with life and all, but if I were the designer of it all, I would have done a bit better and I would have maybe started with that laryngeal nerve." 

Read the whole article to find out how things would have been designed better if Jim Holt had been the designer.

Getting away from the rat race

A current popular song lists some of the daily challenges of life (work, neighborhood, health) and after each includes a chorus celebrating the idea that there's a beach somewhere, sun' shining, things are right.

Someone actually followed through on this idea some time back.  His home can be seen at right (click to enlarge).

This is the home of the late Tom Neale. It's on the atoll of Suwarrow, one of the northern Cook Island. In the '60s, Neale was the sole inhabitant of Suwarrow. His ghostwritten book (based on his journals), An Island to Oneself, is an amazing read. It's available on Amazon or you can download it for free.  Many Suwarrow pictures here.

An update: "the free download of his etext copy of An Island to Oneself by Tom Neale has been updated with new color photos." 

Which country uses the internet the most?

A recent survey shows that Israel has more internet users per capita than any other country in the world:

Israel had the highest percentage of Internet surfers in 2004 compared to Europe and the U.S, according to a survey by financial analyst Business Data Israel Ltd.

More than 50 percent of Israel's 940,000 households have high-speed connections, compared to just 10% in Europe and 22% in the U.S, according to BDI, which provides business information on some 300,000 Israeli companies, as well as market surveys and sector analyses.

Signage fonts

Here is a collection of signs with interesting fonts.  Click to enlarge the images at the right.

Note the interesting use of quotation marks:  a restaurant with family "prices."  I can see putting "family" in quotes, perhaps, or even "family prices" in quotes.  But "prices?"

There is the old story about E. B. White arguing with the New Yorker's editor Harold Ross about the proper use of quotation marks.  Ross said they were used to emphasize a word.  White said they were to call attention to the fact the word was being used to mean something other than its literal meaning.  Neither would budge.  The argument was finally settled when White said that he would follow Ross's guideline for the use of quotation marks and in the next issue's Talk of the Town he would report that he had seen editor Harold Ross leaving a movie earlier that week with his "wife."  Just to emphasize that Ross was, in fact, with his wife.  Ross conceded the point.

Crisis in newspaper business model?

The Washington Post highlights some of the growing concerns of the newspaper industry:

Papers are conducting exhaustive surveys to find out what readers want. They are launching new sections, beefing up Web sites and spinning off free community papers and commuter giveaways in hopes of widening their audience. They even are trying to change the very language of the industry, asking advertisers and investors to dwell less on "circulation" -- how many papers are sold -- and more on "readership," or the number of people exposed to a paper's journalism wherever it appears, in print, on the Web or over the air.

The changes come as circulation totals have eroded steadily for nearly two decades and as newspapers no longer play the central role in daily life they once did. Newspaper executives argue that an emphasis on readership better reflects what newspaper companies are becoming -- multidimensional media conglomerates with growing Internet sites and stakes in television, radio, magazines and other businesses.

The gathering of newspaper executives didn't get much encouragement about the future from the sports industry, which, in some ways, has been a leader in developing customer-friendly modes of communication.

"Print is dead," Sports Illustrated President John Squires told a room full of newspaper and magazine circulation executives at a conference in Toronto in November. His advice? "Get over it," meaning publishers should stop trying to save their ink-on-paper product and focus on electronic delivery of their journalism.

Read the whole interesting article.

UPDATE:  Bill Keller, Executive Editor of the New York Times, gave a talk at Columbia on journalism that included these comments about the state of the newspaper business:

Keller’s speech focused on the struggle of print journalism to maintain its relevance in the face of constant cable news updates, increased blogging, and failures in credibility.

He noted that, according to a recent opinion poll, the public’s trust in journalists is at its lowest point in decades. He attributed this in part to the increasingly polarized nature of the American public, who look to the press for support of their viewpoints.

“At the moment,” he said, “the major press is under attack from ideologues on the right and left.”

Keller also sees “blogging,” or online writing that blurs news and commentary, as a mixed blessing. While he celebrated the blogger’s ability to uncover breaking news, he noted that a blog’s inherent bias might be detrimental to the reader. “A blog is still a view of the world through a pinhole,” he said

He seems to make two points:  one is that journalists are held in low esteem by the public because the public is wanting to be stroked for the (the "increasingly polarized") positions they hold, and journalists have resisted the temptation to stroke the public, instead staying to the high road of good, objective reporting and, as a result, the public doesn't trust them.  So, the problem seems, really, to be the public, not journalism.  And, two, blogs have some value:  it is the value of viewing the world through a pinhole.

The continuing impact of the tsunami on Thai tourism

Much of the tourism sites along the southern shores of Thailand are either open again or are in a frenzy to get open.  The reason there is such concern about getting back to business quickly is that the high tourism season is just about the end; the tsunami carved out a portion of Thailand's high tourist season.

Should there be blame placed for this catastrophe to both life and economics?  Opinions differ:

Thai people here generally do not blame their government for failing to install a Tsunami warning system, as they were warned to do over 10 years ago by then Chief Meteorologist Samith Dharmasaroja. He was accused of scaring away tourists and harming business, and eventually was pushed to retire.

Last week, Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra fired his current chief meteorologist and recalled Dharmasaroja. "It's part of the Buddhist mentality not to assign blame when a catastrophe occurs, but to sigh and look to the future," an Israeli who often travels to these parts said.

To be fair, no Asian country issued a warning for the December 26 tsunami, which so far has left a death toll of over 287,000 in its wake. In Thailand's case, a warning could have provided more than an hour's notice and saved many of the 7,000 lives lost in the disaster.

Most Westerners in Phuket are less sympathetic to Shinawatra's government. Sam-Erik Ruttmann, a career hotel manager from Finland, and who now manages one of the most luxurious hotels on the southern island of Phuket, disagrees with the Thai people's propensity not to lay blame.

Ruttmann places the blame squarely on the Thai government, saying they should not have ignored Dharmasaroja's warnings. "This is not my country, so I don't really care that much. But I can say that it was not high on their list of priorities. Maintaining the lucrative flow of tourists was a priority. They clearly made a very big mistake."

What worries Ruttmann, and most others in the tourism industry in Phuket, is the immediate future, as high season ends mid-April.

The tourism areas are now a "surreal" mixture of busy tourist sites amid vast stretches of empty hotels.  Eighty percent of Phuket's 600,000 population are either directly or indirectly engaged in tourism work.

Hotel managers and tourism officials are asking just how long the island's many hotel cleaners, tour guides, waitresses and even independent stall owners can survive here without a return to the pre-tsunami occupancy rates at most of the hotels on the island.

"This is definitely our most difficult period," hotel manager Ruttmann says. "I have not fired anyone at the hotel. We have a policy not to do that. I've asked some of the staff to go on paid holiday at half a month's salary. I hope that in a few months things will get better. Bookings for April are looking good," he said.

This article gives some feel for the desparation that is being felt in Phuket and other tourist locations in Thailand and other parts of Indonesia impacted by the tsunami.

Something from the past: a newspaper war

Check this for the city you live in:  chances are you have a single large daily newspaper.  There may be some smaller players on the fringes, but most cities now have just one daily and it is delivered in the morning.  There are virtually no metropolitan areas with an afternoon paper.

As a result, newspaper wars for readership are a thing of the past almost everywhere but New York City:

Once upon a time, the newspaper war was as common a ritual of civic combat as the mayoral election or the crosstown high school football game. The inexorable decline of newspaper reading has left even most big U.S. cities with a single daily. The glaring exception is New York City, home to four of the 15 largest papers. The huge circulation gain logged of late by the oldest of them -- the New York Post -- has escalated its archrivalry with the Daily News into the sort of apocalyptic struggle not seen since William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer locked egos a century ago.

The Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, is small relative to the size of the organization (see here), but it is big in terms of its meaning to News Corp:

With $22 billion in revenues, News Corp. is so big that the Post's budget amounts to a rounding error. Even so, the tabloid looms large in Murdoch's calculations as News Corp.'s print megaphone in the media industry's capital city and as a proving ground for his son and heir apparent, Lachlan K. Murdoch, the Post's 33-year-old publisher.

And the Post is making headway, which has surprised a lot of newspaper veterans:

Lachlan struggled in some of his earlier News Corp. postings, but at the Post he has engineered a rise in readership of a magnitude that few thought possible in the Internet Age. In the five years ended on Sept. 30, the Post boosted its average weekday sale by 49%, to 686,207 papers. Meanwhile, the Daily News saw its circulation fall slightly, to 715,052. Leave off bulk sales to schools, retailers, and the like, and the News's lead of some 29,000 papers shrinks to 6,000.

However, on Sunday -- payday for most papers -- the News retains a commanding lead of 786,952 to the Post's 452,871. What is more, the Post has not been nearly as successful in attracting advertisers as readers. The 753,116 column inches of display advertising the Post ran in 2004 amounts to just 45% of the linage of the Daily News and 18% of Newsday's, the metro area's third major tabloid, according to TMS Median Intelligence CMR.

How did the Post, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton, become America's fastest-growing weekday newspaper in the 21st century? The 25 cents price had a lot to do with it, but no more than did a new $250 million printing plant that greatly enhanced the paper's look and kept ink on the page -- instead of readers' hands. In 2001, Murdoch installed a new editor, Col Allen, a famously brash News Corp. veteran steeped in the cutthroat London newspaper market. "I took the view that the paper was ponderous and needed to be made edgier," says Allen, who cut story lengths, doubled story counts, devoted more space to photos (especially color ones), and upped the Post's daily quota of sex, celebrity, and scandal.

It's an interesting contest to watch.  The BusinessWeek article provides some details on how these types of battles are fought.

How to build a marketing web site that creates buzz

Or rather, how not to.  Here is a post from the blogger from Microsoft providing "constructive feedback" about a new Microsoft site that is supposed to create buzz but isn't.  You can see this is personal with him.  An excerpt:

Yesterday I ripped the head off of a coworker. He works in marketing on a major Microsoft product. I'm not going to identify it or him.

He called me yesterday and said:

"Hey, Scoble, we've done a fun site but no one is linking to it."

My first question?

"Do you have an RSS feed?"

"No, this site is for non geeks."

At that point I just lost it. I think I swore a bit. I am so mad 20 hours later that I can't even remember what I said.

That demonstrates an utter cluelessness about how hype gets generated. If you don't have RSS, how will anyone who is a connector build a relationship with your site?

"Why don't you get your non-geek friends to link to it then?"

I think he had heard that lots of press was reading blogs and wanted to get Walt Mossberg or Steven Levy to talk about this marketing site and figured he'd use me to drive traffic.

Sorry, if you do a marketing site and you don't have an RSS feed today you should be fired.

I'll say it again. You should be fired if you do a marketing site without an RSS feed.

Saying that RSS is only for geeks today is like saying in 1998 that the Web was only for geeks.

It got worse.

This site, which probably cost $100,000 (ahh, that's where our towel money went) has great graphic design. Lots of streaming video.

But it's fake. All of it is actors. No real people. No real point.

Aaaaaaaggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh.

Oh, but it gets even worse. "Can I download the videos?"

"No, the whole point of the site is to get people to visit and stick around."

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE:  Here's a great post on RSS feeds, how you can use them, and some useful links for those who are interested.

Portable digital media now have even more memory

100 GB of memory.  Archos' AV4100 can play both music and video media.  And now it has 100 GB of memory to use.

The devices can play back MP3, WMA or WAV files. Consumers will be able to schedule shows to be recorded by picking a time and channel or by synchronizing online with Yahoo TV Guide to get a lineup of shows to choose from. The device also displays digital images.

The AV4100 will come with a cradle that connects to a video source, such as a television or set-top box, over a USB 2.0 cable.

Broadcasting from your iPod

You'll soon be able to broadcast more easily from your iPod.

[An] interview with Nedelcou[at Motorola]  reveals that consumers will soon be able to listen to music wirelessly from their iPod through their car speakers. The upcoming wireless-capable iPod is expected to include Bluetooth technology.

Apple has also incorporated Bluetooth technology into its iBooks and PowerBooks.

Update: One user points us to this patent from Apple which was filed in April 2003 which describes a "wireless media player system that includes a hand held media player capable of transmitting information over a wireless connection and one or more media devices capable of receiving information over the wireless connection".

Update 2: Image from patent (shown at right; click to enlarge) depicting the wireless iPod.

You can already broadcast using bluetooth from your CD  or MP3 player -- the small FM-frequency transmitter plugs into the earphone jack and sends the signal to your FM receiver in your car.  I don't have a CD/MP3 player in my vehicle, so I use this broadcaster ($30 at most stores) and it works great.  You can record your favorite music in MP3 format to increase the storage on a single CD and still play it on any audio system that has an FM receiver.

Free municipal Wi-Fi

It seems like a good idea and a number of cities around the world are working their way toward total WiFi coverage (Amsterdam, Tel Aviv, San Francisco, to name only a few of them).

It looks like there may not be any in Texas if current proposed legislation is passed.  The idea behind the legislation seems to be that providing WiFi coverage is a business enterprise and that means providing some sort of protection for the business having the appropriate licensing for providing the service -- something like getting licensed to provide bus service or taxis or sewer; these endeavors aren't open to free-lancers and WiFi shouldn't be, either.  Communication technology is part of the regulated industries that States oversee and license, so WiFi would naturally fall into that category, too, argues Texas' legislature.

Read some of the discussion here and here.

Hunter Thompson

The "gonzo journalist" died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.  Here is an article (with links) reviewing his life and work.

The internet as community

One of the earliest and most constant web diarists has quit posting. 

For 11 years, Justin Hall was dedicated to documenting his life online. Composing more than 4,800 pages from nearly a decade of constant writing, which he posted on his site, www.links.net, Hall became a pioneer among online diarists and Web loggers.

For Hall, nothing seemed to be too embarrassing or too personal to write about  --  with photos and links. From romantic relationships to his father's suicide to a bad case of shingles, he shared himself with a fairly substantial audience. Thousands of people read his site every day.

His abrupt stop is as personal as his posting every was:

in mid-January, he made a short film called "Dark Night'' and released it on the Internet. He replaced his ever-changing home page with a fixed red heart filled with question marks.

And like that, his Web site moved from the present to the past tense. He left a search bar next to the questioning hearts, letting readers sift through the archives.

[...]

In a style reminiscent of the films "The Blair Witch Project" and "Tarnation," Hall speaks directly into the camera. He is visibly upset, crying at several points.

"What if intimacy happens in quiet moments?" he said. "I think the Web makes me not alone and I feed it my intimacies, and the Web is my constant connection to something larger than myself ... but what if something you do, something you practice like religion as a dialogue with the divine, drives people away from you?"

His "retirement" is keenly felt by the larger community of diarists because of his stature as "the founding father of personal blogging," a title given him by the New York Times.

Cell jammers

The ability to talk on the phone anywhere has reduced the ability for people to sit in silence anywhere.  And there are places where it is especially annoying that people are talking: close public areas like buses or subways or planes; religious services; speeches or other public presentations.  One of the problems in these settings is that getting to the person three rows back in the auditorium or who is across 10 or 20 travelers in the subway car to ask that they be quiet is impossible.

No more.  For anywhere from $250 to $2000 you can pick up a jammer -- an electronic device that jams cell phone reception.  One click and everyone within 50 feet of you stops talking and starts staring at their cell phone.

Jammers come in a variety of shapes and sizes, from portable handhelds that look like cellphones to larger, fixed models as big as suitcases.

Their sole goal is to zip inconsiderate lips. The smaller gadgets emit radio frequencies that block signals anywhere from a 50- to 200-foot radius. They range in price from $250 to $2,000.

But don't expect to find jammers at the local Radio Shack — they're against Federal Communications Commission regulations because they interfere with emergency calls and the public airwaves. They are illegal to buy, sell, use, import or advertise.

A violation means an $11,000 fine, but the FCC's Enforcement Bureau has yet to bust one person anywhere in the country.

"This is not a crime that they're going after," said Rob Bernstein, deputy editor at New York City-based Sync magazine.

He said jammers are here, and their use is multiplying.

"Right now, there's a growing curiosity about jammers in the United States and New York," Bernstein said. "There's no better way to shut up a loudmouth on the phone, so people definitely want them and are finding ways to get them."

Star?

To get tenure at most universities, one teaches and does research for six years and then the combination of teaching reviews, research publications and service to the community and university are evaluated by scholars at the faculty member's department level, then at the college level, then at the university level and finally by the president of the university.  It is one of the most laborious processes in academic employment and many do not make it.

That's why it is surprising how easily Ward Churchill, the professor at University of Colorado that referred to those killed in the