“Paul Wolfowitz has a deep understanding of developmental issues and economic and political reform.”
President George W. Bush, March 16 2005.
Monthly Archives: March 2005
Caligula’s horse back in business
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.
Summers censured by Harvard academics
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.
Jury thinks Bernie did understand accounting after all
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.
The doomsday plan: useful checklist for terrorists
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.
Steam coming out of your subroutines?
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.
Moral blackmail
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,
AOL thinks again about AIM Terms of Service
According to eWeek (where do they get these names from?), AOL has been taken aback by the storm of protest raised by its plans to change the terms of service under which people use AIM.
“We’re not making any policy changes. We’re making some linguistic changes to clarify certain things and explain it a little better to our users,” AOL spokesperson Andrew Weinstein told eWEEK.com.
The modifications will use similar language from the AIM privacy policy to “make it clear that AOL does not read private user-to-user communications,” Weinstein said.
“We’ll be adding that to the beginning of the section to make it clear that the privacy rights discussed in that section only refer to content posted to public areas of the AIM service.”
More importantly, Weinstein said a blunt and inelegant line that reads “You waive any right to privacy” will be deleted altogether.
“That’s a phrase that should not have been in that section in the first place. It clearly caused confusion, with good reason,” Weinstein conceded.
Over the last weekend, AOL representatives moved to quell public criticism of the terms of service after the issue was first flagged on Weblogs and discussion forums.
[Thanks to Dave and Quentin for the update.]
Software patents — the reality
If you wondered how Bill Gates topped the Forbes rich list for the 11th year with a personal fortune of US$46.5 billion ($63 billion), look no further than the New Zealand Intellectual Property Office.
Patent 525484, accepted by the office and now open for objections until the end of May, says Microsoft invented and owns the process whereby a word-processing document stored in a single XML file may be manipulated by applications that understand XML.
It is one of a raft of patent applications Microsoft has dumped on the overworked staff of the office, and on patent offices worldwide.
Larry Summers in his own words
The President of Harvard has been in hot water over remarks he made about why so few women figure in the top ranks of certain professions and specialisms. I’ve heard so many selective quotes from his talk that I went looking for the approved text. It’s an interesting read. This passage — on the hypothesis that socialisation has something to do with it — struck me:
So, I think, while I would prefer to believe otherwise, I guess my experience with my two and a half year old twin daughters who were not given dolls and who were given trucks, and found themselves saying to each other, look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck, tells me something. And I think it’s just something that you probably have to recognize.
Mr Summers is famously bumptious in a you-won’t-like-this-but-I’m-gonna-tell-you-because-you-need-to-know-it way. Here’s an extract from a celebrated leaked memo he wrote while he was Chief Economist at the World Bank.
‘Dirty’ Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:
1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.
2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I’ve always though that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.
3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.
After the memo became public in February 1992, Brazil’s then-Secretary of the Environment Jose Lutzenburger wrote back to Summers:
Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane… Your thoughts [provide] a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional ‘economists’ concerning the nature of the world we live in… If the World Bank keeps you as vice president it will lose all credibility. To me it would confirm what I often said… the best thing that could happen would be for the Bank to disappear.
If, as widely rumoured, Dubya carries out his intention of appointing either Paul Wolfowitz or Carly Fiorina to the Presidency of the Bank, Mr. Lutzenburger may find that his wish has been granted!