Interesting NYT piece today:

“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And I’m not kidding.”

The rising stature of statisticians, who can earn $125,000 at top companies in their first year after getting a doctorate, is a byproduct of the recent explosion of digital data. In field after field, computing and the Web are creating new realms of data to explore — sensor signals, surveillance tapes, social network chatter, public records and more. And the digital data surge only promises to accelerate, rising fivefold by 2012, according to a projection by IDC, a research firm.

Yet data is merely the raw material of knowledge. “We’re rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Digital Business. “But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data.”
The new breed of statisticians tackle that problem. They use powerful computers and sophisticated mathematical models to hunt for meaningful patterns and insights in vast troves of data. The applications are as diverse as improving Internet search and online advertising, culling gene sequencing information for cancer research and analyzing sensor and location data to optimize the handling of food shipments.

Hmmm…. Must tell my statistician colleagues. They’ve been rather depressed lately.

… in 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, instantly killing an estimated 66,000 people in the first use of a nuclear weapon in warfare.

… in 1963, the US, Britain and the Soviet Union signed a treaty in Moscow banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere, outer space and underwater.

This is interesting (from The Register):

A series of emails and phone calls were not sufficient to establish a contract, the Court of Appeal has ruled. The communications did not contain enough information or the formal qualities necessary for a contract to have been made, it said.

Language school the European Language Center (ELC) used to use vacant summer accommodation and teaching space at the University of Plymouth for its courses. The University told ELC in 2005 that it would have less space available in 2006.

ELC later claimed that emails and phone calls in which the University told it that it would have less space available and which contained estimates that it might have 200 beds available constituted a contract to provide that amount of space.

Plymouth County Court ruled that the communications represented a contract, but the Court of Appeal disagreed…

This doesn’t mean that you can’t do contractual business by email, but the four elements needed for a legal contract (at least in England and Wales) must be present. They are, according to their Lordships:

“an unconditional offer, an unconditional acceptance, a consideration and an intention by both parties to create a legally binding relationship.”

Ah, that lovely word: consideration.

… in 1914, Britain declared war on Germany.

Thoughtful article by Jeremy Reimer about how the world has changed since Microsoft Word first appeared.  It originated from Bravo, the word-processor designed by Charles Simonyi at Xerox Parc and was first released for the IBM PC in October 1983.  I was a user from the beginning and was entranced by the DOS version, especially by the way it used style sheets.  Word for Windows always seemed to me to be a step backwards from that original, Linux-type idea.  But for years I stuck with it, partly because of the lack of an alternative with equivalent functionality, but mainly because of the network effects: it had become the de-facto standard for office work, and my colleagues built elaborate peer-review systems around Word’s commenting and track-changes facilities.

In the last few years, though, I’ve noticed that I use Word less and less — and only for ‘work’-based activities.  Among the reasons for the change are: I like an uncluttered writing environment; I don’t want to be distracted by the endless temptations of sophisticated formatting options; I like to use outliners when I’m trying to think things through. 

But mainly the reason I’ve gone off Word is that it’s a program designed to help people compose paper documents, and increasingly — like Jeremy Reiner — I write for the web.

So I wind up using web-authoring tools like VoodooPad, blogging tools like WordPress and ScribeFire, sophisticated text-editing tools like TextWrangler and even Apple’s Pages (especially using its nice full-screen view which shows only a white sheet and a live word-count).  Word has been reduced to the tool I use only when a colleague sends me a draft with Track Changes enabled.

Footnote: Quentin and I were talking about this today, but neither of knew the other would blog it. Great minds etc.