The Cornell note-taking system

What every student should know.

Explanation here. Thanks to Ben for link.

Unstoppable eBay

Text version of my Observer column about eBay is here.

Google mail

I’ve been using Gmail for nearly a fortnight, and am very impressed at the slickness of the interface and the speed with which it works. Webmail used to be like wading through treacle. Gmail changes that. Jon Udell has done some poking under the bonnet/hood and come up with this informative account of how it’s done.

Be nice to the Yanks

Europeans’ detestation of George Bush is leading many of them to forget their manners. Visiting Americans report increasing (and IMHO unforgiveable) hostility directed at them personally — as if somehow they were individually responsible for the excesses of the Bush-Cheney regime. For any Briton disposed to take such a view I suggest the following thought-experiment. Just imagine how you’d have felt if you had been held personally responsible for Margaret Thatcher during her interminable and repressive reign.

What kind of democracy, exactly, is Dubya proposing to export?

The US has an electoral system which looks increasingly corrupt and rickety. On the corruption front, just look at the relationship between campaign funding and legislators’ behaviour — e.g. on copyright law — not to mention the way in which electoral districts for the House of Representatives are comprehensively gerrymandered to ensure that there is a real contest in only a minority of seats. (See the Economist‘s piece “How to Rig an Election” for details.) On the rickety front, see this NYT editorial. It reads, in part,:

“In Florida, voter registrations are being thrown out on pointless technicalities. Missouri is telling soldiers to send nonsecret ballots by e-mail through a Pentagon contractor with a troubling past. Nationwide, eligible voters are being removed from the rolls by flawed felon purges. And nearly a third of this year’s votes will be cast on highly questionable electronic voting machines. No wonder a large percentage of Americans doubt that their votes will count. The election system is crying out for reform.”

Through a glass, lightly

Photographed in a London basement today.

Counting beads

A headline in today’s Daily Telegraph reads “Rosary is not just a fashion item, explains church”. Accompanying it is a photograph of footballer David Beckham wearing not one, not two but four sets of rosary beads around his neck. “The soaring popularity of rosary beads among the fashion conscious”, explains the Telegraph, “has provoked the Roman Catholic Church to issue a leaflet stressing their religious significance”.

That loud whirring sound you hear is that of my late mother (a fanatical Catholic who said the rosary every day of her life) rotating at 5,500 rpm in her grave.

Google tells me that Beckham appeared on the front of Vanity Fair wearing his, er, religious kit — thus.

Custer’s Last (profitable) stand

Following on the discovery of the missing billions in ‘reconstruction’ funds for Iraq, here’s the latest instalment of the farce, as reported by the NYT:

“Managers of a security firm that won large contracts in Iraq warned their bosses in February of what they called a pattern of fraudulent billing practices, internal company memorandums suggest.

The memorandums, written primarily by two company managers, charged that the security firm, Custer Battles, repeatedly billed the occupation authorities for nonexistent services or at grossly inflated prices.

The company, which quickly grew to garner security contracts worth $100 million in little more than a year, denies the charges. It argues that the managers confused sincere attempts to document jobs done in a hurry, in a war zone, with deliberate deception and that the company provided all contracted services for the agreed-upon price.

The memos and a lawsuit filed by former employees cite several specific instances, including billing the Coalition Provisional Authority $157,000 for a helicopter pad that in fact cost $95,000, and repainting forklifts abandoned by Baghdad Airways and then charging the authority thousands of dollars a month, claiming that the forklifts were leased.

One of the managers was later fired by the company and is part of a lawsuit charging Custer Battles with defrauding the federal government of tens of millions of dollars. The other manager, who has since been appointed to a high-level position with the company, recently declared that after further research, he believed that any questionable practices were the fault of a few individuals and had not been condoned by the owners.

On Sept. 30, the Pentagon, concerned by the allegations raised by the employees, barred Custer Battles from receiving further military contracts, and it has withheld at least $10 million in payments to the company. The company is appealing the ban.”

Just fancy that!

This week’s Economist has an engaging little piece about the travails of Sainsbury, the failing supermarket chain, which is suffering from the calamitous effects of the reign of its ousted Chief Exec, the portly Sir Peter Davis.

One of his blunders — according to the Economist — was “a fancy new IT system run by Accenture, a business-services firm. But that didn’t work either: Mr King [Sainsbury’s new Chief Exec] said that the new computer system had failed to deliver, and that the contract with Accenture would be re-negotiated. Being associated with such a high-profile failure might be expected to damage one’s reputation. Certainly Sir Peter’s looks tarnished. Happily, this fate seems to have escaped Ian Watmore, the man responsible for running Accenture’s IT consultancy business at the time. He has just been appointed to head up the e-Government unit in Whitehall, where he will oversee the government’s notoriously calamitous IT projects.”

Verily, you couldn’t make this stuff up.

Broken Windows in Las Vegas

Link.