BBC NEWS | Bush backs US hawk for World Bank
President George W Bush has nominated US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz as the next head of the World Bank, a key development agency.
Just as I feared.
Note for non-Classicists: Caligula was the deranged Roman Emperor who appointed (or planned to appoint — depends on who you read) his horse as a Consul.
From The Harvard Crimson Online
In a sharp and unexpected rebuke of University President Lawrence H. Summers, members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) voted yesterday that they lack confidence in his leadership.
Voting by secret ballot in a Faculty meeting at the Loeb Drama Center, 218 faculty members affirmed a motion … stating that “the Faculty lacks confidence in the leadership of Lawrence H. Summers.” One hundred eighty-five voted against and 18 abstained from the motion, which was tantamount to a vote of no confidence.
A second motion, expressing regret for Summers’ Jan. 14 remarks on women in science and certain “aspects of the President’s managerial approach,” also passed the Faculty.
The two motions, allegedly unique in Harvard’s history, are largely symbolic gestures. Only the Harvard Corporation, the University’s governing body, can force Summers to step down, and I can’t see them giving him the push.
The New York Times | Worldcom verdict
Bernard J. Ebbers, the former chief executive of WorldCom, was found guilty yesterday in federal court of orchestrating a record $11 billion fraud that came to symbolize the telecommunications bubble of the 1990’s and the excesses that were uncovered in its aftermath.
Mr. Ebbers was convicted of securities fraud, conspiracy and seven counts of filing false reports with regulators. Each count carries a sentence of 5 or 10 years.
Mr. Ebbers and WorldCom, through the acquisition of dozens of phone companies, helped to create the rush for telecommunications stocks in the 1990’s. They were at the center of a swirl of scandals that cast doubt on corporate accounting methods, the role of Wall Street analysts, and investment bankers who sold stocks and bonds to investors.
Note: during the trial, Bernie maintained that he didn’t understand all the accounting mumbo-jumbo. He was, it seems, just a regular guy at the mercy of sharp-witted accountants.
According to today’s New York Times, the US Department of Homeland Security has identified a dozen possible strikes it views as most plausible or devastating, including detonation of a nuclear device in a major city, release of sarin nerve agent in office buildings and a truck bombing of a sports arena. The document, known simply as the National Planning Scenarios, reads more like a doomsday plan, offering estimates of the probable deaths and economic damage caused by each type of attack.
They include blowing up a chlorine tank, killing 17,500 people and injuring more than 100,000; spreading pneumonic plague in the bathrooms of an airport, sports arena and train station, killing 2,500 and sickening 8,000 worldwide; and infecting cattle with foot-and-mouth disease at several sites, costing hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.
The agency’s objective is not to scare the public, officials said, and they have no credible intelligence that such attacks are planned. The department did not intend to release the document publicly, but a draft of it was inadvertently posted on a Hawaii state government Web site.
Interesting paper by Nancy Leveson on “High-Pressure Steam Engines and Computer Software” which argues that we can learn useful lessons for software engineering from the history of high-pressure steam engines.
Risk induced by technological innovation existed long before computers; this is not the first time that humans have come up with an extremely useful new technology that is potentially dangerous. We can learn from the past before we repeat the same mistakes. In particular, parallels exist between the early development of high-pressure steam engines and software engineering that we can apply to the use of computers in complex systems.
Here’s something strangely repulsive. Quentin pointed me towards a site run by a man who claims to have found an injured, young rabbit under a porch one day, and then nursed it back to health. He then named the rabbit Toby. This individual swears that he will have Toby butchered and served for dinner on June 30, 2005, unless he is able to raise $50,000 in donations or merchandise sales. If he is able to raise the money, he promises that Toby will have the life of Riley until he dies a natural death. The site provides the story of the bunny’s rescue, photos (one of which shows Toby sitting in a cooking pot), possible recipes and answers to questions (some dealing with the legality of the website and the underlying idea). Rob Parsons has written an interesting commentary on this ingenious attempt to part animal lovers from their cash. Apparently he’s raised $18,000 already. But PayPal have cancelled his account after protests from a rabbit sanctuary,