Monthly Archives: October 2006

The Gulf Stream (contd.)

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My post about the possibility of the Gulf Stream switching off elicited two interesting emails.

Quentin pointed me to a letter in the Economist from Professor Carl Wunsch, an MIT oceanographer, which said, in part:

The Gulf Stream is a wind-driven phenomenon (as explained in a famous 1948 paper by Henry Stommel). It is part of a current system forced by the torque exerted on the ocean by the wind field. Heating and cooling affect its temperature and other properties, but not its basic existence or structure. As long as the sun heats the Earth and the Earth spins, so that we have winds, there will be a Gulf Stream (and a Kuroshio in the Pacific, an Agulhas in the Indian Ocean, etc).

Shut-off would imply repeal of the law of conservation of angular momentum. The primary mechanism of heat transport in the ocean is the wind-forcing of currents that tend to push warm water toward the poles, cold water toward the equator. Widely disseminated and grossly oversimplified pictures showing the ocean as a “conveyor belt” have misled people into thinking ocean circulation is driven by a sinking motion at high latitudes. A comprehensive literature shows that with no wind, heating and cooling could produce a weak flow, but one not at all resembling the observed circulation.

If the sinking motion at high latitudes were completely stopped, by covering that part of the ocean by sea ice for instance, there would still be a Gulf Stream to the south, and maybe an even more powerful one as the wind field would probably then become stronger. If the sinking were stopped by adding fresh water (a deus ex machina often invoked to change the climate), the Gulf Stream would hardly care except in so far as the wind system changed too. The amount of heat transported by the system would shift, but could not become zero.

Many writers, including scientists, toss around the words “Thermohaline Circulation” as though they constituted an explanation. In the ocean, most of the movement of heat and salt, the real Thermohaline Circulation, is driven directly and indirectly by the wind field. Thus the Gulf Stream, and hence the wind, rather than being minor features of oceanic climate are best regarded as the primary elements. Many real climate change effects exist and require urgent attention; focusing on near-impossible Gulf Stream failure is an unproductive distraction.

My son Brian wrote to point out the irony that GulfStream is the brand name of a very successful executive jet aircraft!

The donkey in the room

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Nice piece by Michael Kinsley about the November 7 elections in the US…

This year does seem to be different. You hear people say – though rarely as forthrightly as the Times – that they are voting for the party, not the person. Well, more accurately, they say they are voting against the party, not the person. The Republican candidate for the Senate or House may be saintlike in general, no worse than muddled on the war in Iraq, and good on stem-cell research. Meanwhile the Democrat may be a grotesque hack just inches from indictment, whose views on Iraq are equally muddled with less excuse (since loyalty to the president is not a factor). Nevertheless, many people are voting for the Democrat simply out of anger at or frustration with the Republican party.

[…]

Even under the American arrangement there is nothing ignoble about voting the party line. It is an efficient way to minimise your information costs. Voting is an irrational act: your vote does not matter unless it’s a tie. And even 2000 was not a tie. The more effort you put into learning about the candidates, the more irrational voting becomes, and the more likely you are not to bother. A candidate’s party affiliation doesn’t tell you everything you would like to know, but it tells you something. In fact it tells you a lot – enough so that it makes sense to vote for your party preference even when you know nothing else about a candidate. Or even to vote for a candidate that you actively dislike.

True, people might question your sanity if you were to declare that you were voting for the Democratic party agenda. The what? If there’s anything worse than ignoring that famous elephant in the room, it’s imagining a donkey that’s not in the room. Even so, a vote for the Democrat is a vote against the Republican. And voting “no” to a record of failure is more important to the functioning of democracy than voting “yes” to any number of promises about the future.

The Gulf Stream

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Global warming poses awful threats to many poor parts of the world (for example, Bangladesh). For Britain and Ireland, however, a more direct threat is the possibility that the Gulf Stream might switch off or reverse — something that could happen relatively quickly (and has happened before). In which case my beloved Kerry would start to resemble Sweden. So this report is scary.

Scientists have uncovered more evidence for a dramatic weakening in the vast ocean current that gives Britain its relatively balmy climate by dragging warm water northwards from the tropics. The slowdown, which climate modellers have predicted will follow global warming, has been confirmed by the most detailed study yet of ocean flow in the Atlantic.

Most alarmingly, the data reveal that a part of the current, which is usually 60 times more powerful than the Amazon river, came to a temporary halt during November 2004…

Firefox 2.0

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Technology Review describes it as “the Honda Civic of Web Browsers”, which is an interesting metaphor. Here’s what they mean by that:

Tapping once again into the collective talents of the open-source community, the new Firefox 2.0 Web browser is unambiguously a success. Released late Tuesday, the Mozilla Foundation’s latest Net-surfing tool is almost everything Web denizens have come to expect from the popular Internet Explorer alternative. Firefox 2.0 offers a handful of obvious improvements in searching and security and a couple of new features, and it largely keeps doing well what it has done well before.

This said, it breaks little genuinely new ground.That’s not a criticism, particularly given that the Web has long since become as mainstream as microwave ovens. Indeed, developers say their goal for the new browser was decidedly evolutionary, despite high hopes for a few advanced features that didn’t make the final cut.

“We wanted to continue the evolution that started with Firefox 1.0,” says Mike Beltzner, the Mozilla Foundation’s “phenomenologist.” “We wanted to make sure users still have full control over the browser and the full ability to customize it, and make sure they can actually understand those options.”

This continued focus on simplicity and extensibility makes Firefox 2.0 an extremely solid product, with a few flashes of brilliance. It’s suitable for anyone from novice Web surfers to hard-core coders. But this time around, its pathway into the market isn’t quite as clear…

Don’t you just love the idea of an organisation that employs a phenomenologist!

I see that Quentin has downloaded the new version. His view seems to coincide with Tech Review’s.

Open source = cheap input?

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Nicholas Carr, commenting on Larry Ellison’s raid on Red Hat…

It’s always been clear that the [Open Source production] system, however you view it, imposes an economic vulnerability on the profit-making companies that engage in it. Those companies have to pay labor costs for developing a free good, a public good that that they have no proprietary control over. Their rivals can reap the fruits of that labor without having to pay for it. That creates, in theory, a dangerous asymmetry in competition.

But what hasn’t been clear is whether that vulnerability actually matters, whether the danger that exists in theory also exists in reality. Are there economic or other barriers that prevent competitors from capitalizing on the investments of the open-source companies?

We’re about to get a lot closer to an answer to that question, thanks to that great clarifying force in the technology business, Larry Ellison. Yesterday, Ellison announced that his company, Oracle, fully intends to eat the fruits of the labor of Red Hat, the leading for-profit supplier of the open-source Linux operating system. Oracle is taking the version of Linux developed by Red Hat and distributing it under its own brand, as “Unbreakable Linux.” And, in a stab at Red Hat’s very heart, Ellison claims that Oracle will substantially undercut the open-source firm’s prices for supporting the software.

It seems like a claim that shouldn’t be hard to fulfill. After all, Oracle doesn’t have to pay those labor costs.

Once open source became a business, rather than a movement, the rules changed. Larry Ellison, whos’s nothing if not a non-sentimentalist, understands that, and he doesn’t particularly care what “the community” thinks. His attack on Red Hat would never be called neighborly, but it is, as Business Week’s Steve Hamm puts it, “a ruthless and brilliant act of capitalism.”

It’s also something more. It illuminates a much broader and deeper tension in the digital world, a fault line that runs not only through the software industry but through every industry whose products or services exist, or can exist, as software. The tension is between social production and the profit motive. Volunteer labor means something very different in the context of a community than it does in the context of a business. In the context of a community, it’s an expression of fellowship, of the communal value of sharing. But in the context of a business, as Ellison’s move illustrates, it’s nothing more than a cheap input. Many of the most eloquent advocates of social production would prefer it if this tension didn’t exist. But it does, and it’s important.

This one will run and run. Carr is unduly impressed by the Ellison ploy, I think. There are subtle penalties for bad behaviour which the Oracle boss, being a corporate bully, is unlikely to understand. It’s worth remembering that when IBM, itself no slouch at the deployment of brute corporate force, decided that it would put Open Source products at the heart of its own offerings, it explicitly decided that good behaviour would be key to success. And IBM has, by and large, been a good neighbour in the Open Source community. It has also prospered mightily from it.

So what do we need journalists for?

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Juan Antonio Giner has some admirably sarcastic answers…

To re-package the same news from the same sources?

To attend the same boring press conferences?

To publish today the same news that our readers knew YESTERDAY?

To produce pages and pages of commodity information with no value added?

To edit pages and pages of listings that could go directly to our web site?

To attend long and badly planned news meetings?

To expend hours and hours in front of our computers?

To work with not real feed-back from your editors?

To work with no time to think?

The real challenge in our industry is not how many people do we need, but to know how to change the rules and traditions of a newsroom management system that does not work anymore.

First fix the newsroom management system, and then let´s discuss how many people do we need. And then we will not have any problem to keep or find the best talent. Today´s problem is the opposite: newspapers are loosing or not attracting talented people because our newsrooms are not creative places to work, to discuss, and to dream.

I am not worried about the people that leave (many of them with great early retirement packages) but about the people that stay in our newsrooms to work under the same conditions.

Amen, brother.

Thanks to Roy Greenslade for the link.

980 journalists!!!!!!

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Roy Greenslade on Why cutbacks in US papers may not be all bad…

I admire Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post’s media commentator because his articles are almost always on the button. But I am not so certain about the message in his latest piece. He points to the staff cutbacks at many US papers, citing the redundancy announcements at the Dallas Morning News (19%), the Cleveland Plain Dealer (17%), the Philadelphia Inquirer (15% already, with more to follow), the Washington Post (8%) and the Los Angeles Times (10%). He also notes that TV networks are pruning news staff too. Then he records some of American journalism’s successes in rooting out important stories. You can probably see where this is going. His conclusion? If too many journalists disappear it means “fewer bodies to pore over records at city hall, the statehouse or federal agencies.”

Well, it does, and it doesn’t. Without wishing to be unduly rude about US journalists, seen from the British perspective, it appears that there are far too many of them being far too unproductive. The LA Times has 980 journalists at present, a huge staff compared to any serious British national paper. Yet we manage to hold our government to account. Ask Tony Blair is he can get away with anything without being scrutinised…

The implications of Clearchannel’s retreat

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Nice, uncompromising post by Jeff Jarvis…

It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of assholes*. Clear Channel, the radio monster, is looking to sell itself to go private, according to the Times. Why? Because the radio business sucks.

This is why I have not feared media consolidation. Clear Channel, the poster child for evil media conglomerates, bought up stations and sucked cash out of them but now there’s not much left to suck. Consolidation is the act of a dying industry. Well, broadcast won’t die. But it sure as hell won’t grow…

Don’t ever start at the beginning

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Horse-sense on Creating a compelling presentation, book, article…

You are in a dimly lit room. You are alone on a stage before an audience of 1,000. 10 minutes into your presentation, your hands no longer shake or sweat. This is going well, you think. But just then you notice a vaguely familiar sound–tap, tap, clickety-clack–which in one horrifying moment you recognize–it’s your audience. IMing, checking email, live blogging (“wifi sucks at this hotel and OMFG this is the most boring speaker ever”)

What went wrong? How did you lose them in the first 10 minutes? How can you get their attention?

Follow the link for some useful ideas on how to do better.

After failure in Iraq – what?

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Interesting OpenDemocracy column by Paul Rogers…

The open discussion of possible military failure in Iraq can no longer be concealed (see Leslie Gelb, “Would defeat in Iraq be so bad?” Time, 15 October 2006). In this context, it is worth recalling that the wider purposes of US involvement in Iraq make a substantive withdrawal from the region unlikely in the extreme.

The last column in this series pointed to the aspiration that underlay the 2003 invasion – a free-market client state in Iraq, obedient to Washington’s interests and with a sufficient American presence at four permanent bases to maintain US influence and ensure the survival of an Iraqi government (see “New frontiers: from Iraq to outer space”, 19 October 2006).

This outcome in Iraq was considered all the more desirable because of the uncertainty surrounding the stability of the House of Saud and the presence of that notorious rogue state – Iran – across the Persian Gulf. Indeed, the fundamental importance of Gulf oil over the next three decades or more meant that securing Iraq (in view of its location between Saudi Arabia and Iran as well its own oil) was the key to US policy success in the region. The fact that nearly two-thirds of the world’s oil can be sourced to the Gulf area, and with China destined to be almost as thirsty as the United States for its oil in the coming period, made American military dominance in the region utterly essential.

From this starting-point, a situation in which Iraq went its own violent way (either as a new jihadi base or as effectively a client of Tehran) was, and is, unthinkable. It follows that with all the talk of diverse options, there are really only two choices for the United States in Iraq – and a fallback “plan C” possibility if catastrophe should ensue.

The first choice is to continue the present campaign, perhaps reinforcing US troops if resources permit, in the hope that the insurgency will eventually wither away. All the indications are that this hope will not be realised, and that the United States will pay a high cost in waiting for it to do so.

The second choice is to abandon Iraq’s cities and consolidate US forces in a handful of heavily fortified military bases. The assumption would be that some kind of political accommodation will emerge in Iraq – possibly involving an autocratic regime – which would be obliged to accept long-term US influence based on sheer military power.

In some Washington circles this may seem an attractive second-best strategy, even if a permanent US presence in Iraq would be a target of jihadi paramilitaries and al-Qaida leaders. But in any case it may not prove tenable, and this would put the third possibility on the table: wholesale US withdrawal.

In terms of the fundamental need to maintain control in the Persian Gulf region this would be a foreign policy and security disaster for the United States greater in scale than Vietnam. This does not affect the near-certainty that people in the inner reaches of the Pentagon are thinking hard about the US’s options after a retreat from Iraq.