Reboot that car!

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Hmmm… Knowing that I am a Prius owner, Dave Hill kindly sent me this link!

Since its launch, the Toyota Prius has become the most popular gas-electric hybrid automobile. Drawn to its excellent gas mileage, consumers have been so eager to get their hands on the car that they have been willing to pay US$1,000-2,000 over list price for used models.

Some 2004 and 2005 models have fallen victim to a software bug that causes the cars to stall on the highway. In some cases, the cars can be restarted immediately, but other instances have required a call to AAA for a tow into the dealership to get the problem fixed. A Toyota spokesperson blames a “programming error” for the situation and says owners of affected vehicles have been sent letters asking them to bring their cars into the dealership for what is described as an hour-long software update. Overall, it appears that fewer than 30 cars have been affected by the problem.

Phew! But don’t you just love the idea of having your car logged in for a firmware upgrade!

Quote of the day

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We could really speed up the whole process of drug improvement if we did not have all the rules on human experimentation. If companies were allowed to use clinical trials in Third World countries, paying a lot of poor people to take risks that you wouldn’t take in a developed country, we could speed up technology quickly. But because of the Holocaust —

Francis Fukuyama, quoted in yesterday’s Washington Post. The quote tails off as I’ve set it out.

I’m reminded of Larry Summers’s idea that pollution should be moved to poor countries because life is cheaper there. How do these screwballs acquire reputations as major public intellectuals?

It was this big, Mum!

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Today is Sue’s birthday. If she had lived, she would be 51. One of those days with bitter-sweet memories. I love this picture of her feigning astonishment at one of Tom’s tall stories.

Reboot, reboot I say!

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Passing through Cambridge station the other day, Alan Jackson of AidWorld noticed an interesting malfunction.

Normally, it’s the central monitor that is displaying the Blue Screen of Death. This time it was the left-hand screen, displaying a prompt well known to those aged 50 and over! Ah, the days of booting from floppies… Don’t think my kids have ever used one.

Specialist schools: the new suckers

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Here’s a neat little sca…, er scheme. The UK government, in its laudable attempt to raise school standards, has a ‘specialist school’ programme. The aim is to encourage schools to aspire to excellence in a particular field, and to reward such aspirations and efforts. All very right and proper, not to say admirable. As I understand it, if a school gets specialist status, then the government offers it additional funding (~£100k) provided the school can match that by raising £50k itself from companies and sponsors.

So far, so good. Schools in affluent areas can generally raise the necessary £50k, but their counterparts in poorer areas have great difficulty in raising the dosh.

Enter, stage right, a friendly US monopolist which offers to provide the sponsorship needed to tip the school over the threshold.

Hooray! Microsoft is generously donating £50k to every needy, aspirational school! What a turn-up for the books!

Er, no. In the words of the hapless Specialist Schools Trust,

Microsoft has offered to support a further 65 aspiring specialist schools. Support is for schools applying in the October 2005 bidding round only and will be in the form of a software licence entitling schools to Microsoft software titles, upgrades and support over the initial four-year development period.

Neat, isn’t it. The cost to Microsoft is precisely zilch. But the result is 65 more hapless schools being locked into a software and hardware ecology that none of them can sustain or support. It’s a bit like a re-run of those Imperialist narratives where African tribesmen sign away their natural resources for a handful of baubles. And what’s funny is that the Specialist Schools Trust professes itself “delighted” by the wheeze. That’s probably because the Trust’s worthies know as little about software as the aforementioned tribesmen knew about Uranium 235.

Microsoft understands the value of W.C. Fields’s famous adage: never give a sucker an even break.

On not believing everything you read on the Web

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Last week, George Monbiot wrote a fascinating column in the Guardian. It opened thus:

On April 16, New Scientist published a letter from the famous botanist David Bellamy. Many of the world’s glaciers, he claimed, “are not shrinking but in fact are growing … 555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980”. His letter was instantly taken up by climate change deniers. And it began to worry me. What if Bellamy was right?

So he telephoned the World Glacier Monitoring Service and read out Bellamy’s letter to them.

I don’t think the response would have been published in Nature, but it had the scientific virtue of clarity: “This is complete bullshit.” A few hours later, they sent me an email: “Despite his scientific reputation, he makes all the mistakes that are possible.” He had cited data that was simply false, he had failed to provide references, he had completely misunderstood the scientific context and neglected current scientific literature. The latest studies show unequivocally that most of the world’s glaciers are retreating.

So where had Bellamy got his numbers from? Read George’s article for the grisly details, but the answer, in a nutshell, is that they came from websites published by a number of fruitcakes who are into denial about global warming. The article is a salutary warning to anyone who believes something on the grounds that they saw it on the Net. It should be required reading for every teacher who tells pupils to “look it up on the Web”.