Coming soon: the Global Approximation System

Posted on by

From Good Morning Silicon Valley.

If the Air Force and its contractors don’t get their act together pretty quickly, in a couple of years your car’s navigation system may be giving you instructions like “In a mile or so, turn right” or “You have reached your destination, more or less.” The Air Force is responsible for maintaining and modernizing the network of satellites that provides GPS service, but according to a new Government Accountability Office report, technical problems, leadership lapses and contractor woes have combined to put things way behind schedule. “As a result,” said the report, “the current IIF satellite program has overrun its original cost estimate by about $870 million and the launch of its first satellite has been delayed to November 2009 — almost three years late.”

The problem is that the GPS system needs a constellation of at least 24 satellites to deliver complete coverage and accurate results, and some of the birds now flying have been up there almost 20 years. If they start to fail before replacements are up, GPS accuracy will start to deteriorate. As things stand, the report concluded, “it is uncertain whether the Air Force will be able to acquire new satellites in time to maintain current GPS service without interruption. If not, some military operations and some civilian users could be adversely affected.”

Bah! And just when I was getting to rely on it for getting to Norham Gardens.

More Celtic Donkey news

Posted on by

From the every-cloud-has-a-silver-lining department. This from the front page of today’s Irish Times.

In an unforgiving recession that has led to a collapse in demand for many trappings of the luxury lifestyle, Ireland’s best-known helicopter company has ceased its charter service.

Celtic Helicopters, controlled by businessman Ciarán Haughey, returned its air operations certificate to aviation regulators yesterday.

The firm now plans to focus on hangaring services for helicopter owners who are mothballing aircraft to curtail their day-to-day outgoings.

The firm offered business travel and aerial photography services, as well as pleasure trips, golf tours and transfers to race meetings.

Although helicopter trips became a symbol of spectacular wealth accumulation in the boom times, they are no longer in vogue. The chopper, for example, was a favoured mode of transportation among property developers. Now many members of that community are under considerable fiscal strain. Celtic is making five staff redundant as a result of the decision to halt charter services, but it will continue to employ another eight.

Knowledgeable readers will recall that Celtic’s owner is the son of Charlie Haughey, the disgraced gangster who was, for a time, Ireland’s Taoiseach (Prime Minister). Celtic Aviation prospered during his reign — and of course during the boom.

Who says Twitter is frivolous?

Posted on by

Heh! Here’s something to make the Twitter-deniers choke on their muesli. The Herschel-Planck space mission is now well on its way. Needless to say, it has a good website. The mission has launched two spacecraft. Herschel is the largest, most powerful infrared telescope ever flown in space. Planck is

Named after the German Nobel laureate Max Planck 1858-1947, ESA’s Planck mission will be the first European space observatory whose main goal is the study of the Cosmic Microwave Background – the relic radiation from the Big Bang.

Observing at microwave wavelengths, ESA’s Planck observatory is the third space mission of its kind. It will measure tiny fluctuations in the CMB with unprecedented accuracy, providing the sharpest picture ever of the young Universe — when it was only 380 000 years old — and zeroing-in on theories that describe its birth and evolution.

Planck will measure the fluctuations of the CMB with an accuracy set by fundamental astrophysical limits.

But now comes the really neat bit: Planck has a Twitter feed! It curently has 360 followers — and, understandably, isn’t following anyone. Probably has enough to do as it hurtles through space.

(Yeah, yeah, I know: the Tweets are done by some geek in ESA. But still… A friend of mine’s husband is one of the leading scientists behind the project. He was a bit miffed when she sent him a message this morning telling him that some complex manoeuvre had been successfully completed. She knew before he did, because she’s a Twitterer and he’s not).

Straw drops secret inquest plans

Posted on by

Hooray! According to BBC NEWS,

The government is dropping plans to hold secret inquests without juries, Justice Secretary Jack Straw has said.

In a Commons written statement, Mr Straw said the move did not command the necessary cross-party support, despite earlier government concessions.

It was included in the Coroners and Justice Bill earlier this year to cover cases involving sensitive information.

Civil liberties groups who feared cases like that of Jean Charles de Menezes would be affected, welcomed the move.

The government had argued that in some cases inquests should be held in private for national security, crime prevention or diplomatic reasons.

Financial epiphanies

Posted on by

From Nick Paumgarten’s piece on the decline of high finance in the current New Yorker…

A private-equity executive I talked to said that he sensed the jig was up when his cleaning woman — “from Nicaragua or El Salvador of wherever the fuck she’s from” — took out a subprime loan to buy a house in Virginia. She drove down with her husband every weekend from New York, six hours each way, to fix it up for resale. They cleared sixty-five thousand dollars on the deal, in a matter of months. To many, this would have been proof that America is a land of opportunity, but to him it signalled a fatal imbalance between obligation and means.

One could find many similar stories from the UK ‘buy-to-let’ bubble. At the height of the bubble, British buy-to-let speculators didn’t really care whether they had tenants for their properties because the capital value was escalating so quickly that renting didn’t seem worth the hassle — or the agency fees.

WSJ’s new code of conduct for journalists

Posted on by

Partial list reads:

* Consult your editor before ‘connecting’ to or ‘friending’ any reporting contacts who may need to be treated as confidential sources. Openly ‘friending’ sources is akin to publicly publishing your Rolodex.

* Let our coverage speak for itself, and don’t detail how an article was reported, written or edited.

* Don’t discuss articles that haven’t been published, meetings you’ve attended or plan to attend with staff or sources, or interviews that you’ve conducted.

* Don’t disparage the work of colleagues or competitors or aggressively promote your coverage.

* Don’t engage in any impolite dialogue with those who may challenge your work — no matter how rude or provocative they may seem.

* Avoid giving highly-tailored, specific advice to any individual on Dow Jones sites. Phrases such as “Travel agents are saying the best deals are X and Y…” are acceptable while counseling a reader “You should choose X…” is not. Giving generalized advice is the best approach.

* All postings on Dow Jones sites that may be controversial or that deal with sensitive subjects need to be cleared with your editor before posting.

* Business and pleasure should not be mixed on services like Twitter. Common sense should prevail, but if you are in doubt about the appropriateness of a Tweet or posting, discuss it with your editor before sending.

So that’s the end of networked journalism, then.

[Source]

‘Honourable’ Members?

Posted on by

I’m temperamentally suspicious of the British press when it’s in self-righteous mode — as it is currently about MPs’ expenses. (I’m with Macaulay on that one. “We know no spectacle so ridiculous”, he wrote, “as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality”.) And I suspect that behind at least some of the apparently outrageous claims there is probably a sensible explanation.

But the thing that really bugs me is the incessant invocation of the mantra that any expense claimed, no matter how bizarre, was “within the rules”. We had the same thing a while back when a very senior Irish bank executive was shamed into resigning when it was revealed that he had been ‘warehousing’ huge personal loans for nearly a decade to keep them off his bank’s balance sheet at the end of each financial year. As he crashed in flames, he issued a statement saying that while his actions may have been ‘inappropriate’, nevertheless they were within the law.

What was missing in his case — and is clearly missing in some British MPs — is any sense of honourable behaviour. His actions were clearly designed to keep the truth of his financial dealings with the bank he ran from being known. Most of us who are lucky enough to be in employment are entitled to claim legitimate expenses. But most of us have a sense of what’s reasonable and what’s not. For example, if I go to London on university business it’s obviously reasonable to claim for any rail, tube and/or taxi fares needed to get me to and from my destination. But is it reasonable to claim for the Americano that I would have had anyway, travelling or not? Obviously not.

And the irony is that Parliamentary etiquette still insists that the shysters who have been exploiting the expenses system should be referred to as “Honourable Members”. Perhaps the best revenge would be to refer henceforth to the most blatant claimers as Dishonourable Members.

As ever, sunlight is the best disinfectant. When in doubt ask yourself: How would this look if it were presented in evidence in court? Or published in the report of a committee of inquiry? And then decide what to do.

The New New Deal

Posted on by

You’d need to be a psychiatrist to understand what’s going on in the heads of US Republican politicians at the moment. At the moment, for example, many of them are rewriting history to ‘prove’ that FDR’s New Deal was a ‘failure’. Russ Daggatt has a nice rant about this on Mark Anderson’s blog.

Former New York Senator and UN Ambassador, Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

Increasingly, it seems, Republicans are trying to create not only their own facts but their own reality. This is particularly problematic when the mainstream media treats every issue as some kind of polarized “Crossfire” debate, with “balanced” treatment of “both sides.” Hence, we can end up with mainstream media “debates” over things like evolution, global warming and even torture.

A few years back Paul Krugman commented on the media desire for “balance” over objectivity. As an example he said that if Bush proclaimed the world was flat, the headline in the New York Times the next day would be “Shape of The World, Views Differ.” Indeed, that would be a “balanced” portrayal of the “debate” over the shape of the Earth. But objectively, the world is spherical. Stating that fact is not “bias” (except to the extent reality is a bias). Even if a large group of people – like the entire remaining rump of the Republican Party – disputed that fact, the New York Times would be doing its readers a disservice to give the impression that there was any credible, objective basis for the dissenting view.

At the Future in Review Conference in San Diego last year, Harvard professor James McCarthy, former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was asked how many of the world’s top 1000 climate experts would disagree with the basic scientific consensus that the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations over the last 50 years to levels not seen in 650,000 years is primarily anthropogenic. He replied, “Five.” (He also told an amusing anecdote about a colleague being asked the same question at a conference and answering, “Ten.” McCarthy went up to him later and asked how he got to ten. The guy replied that he could only think of five – the same five as McCarthy – but doubled the number to provide a margin of error.) That is about as solid a scientific consensus as you are ever likely to get for such a complex set of phenomena. Yet it is almost an article of faith in Republican circles these days that the threat from global warming is at best greatly exaggerated and at worst a “hoax.”

I’m not even going to waste time with evolution. If you think there is a legitimate debate over evolution, don’t even bother to read further…

Russ’s piece has two interesting graphs. One shows that GDP rose steadily through FDR’s time in office. The other graph is of US national debt as a percentage of GDP.

Rather puts Obama’s measures in context, doesn’t it?

WolframAlpha: correction

Posted on by

Hmmm… Seems that I was wrong. WolframAlpha isn’t really a competitor to Google, or indeed a search engine in the normal sense of the term. Or so the NYT maintains.

WolframAlpha, a powerful new service that can answer a broad range of queries, has become one of the most anticipated Web products of the year. But its creator, Stephen Wolfram, wants to make something clear: Despite the online chatter comparing it to Google, his service is not intended to dethrone the king of search engines.

“I am not keen on the hype,” said Mr. Wolfram, a well-known scientist and entrepreneur and the founder of Wolfram Research, a company in Champaign, Ill., that has been quietly developing WolframAlpha.

Mr. Wolfram’s service does not search through Web pages, and it will not help with movie times or camera shopping. Instead it computes the answers to queries using enormous collections of data the company has amassed. It can quickly spit out facts like the average body mass index of a 40-year-old male, whether the Eiffel Tower is taller than Seattle’s Space Needle, and whether it is high tide in Miami right now.

WolframAlpha, which is expected to be available to the public at wolframalpha.com in the next week, is not a finished product. It is an early working version of a project that has been years in the making and will continue to evolve over years, if not decades. As such, there is much it cannot answer now.

Cory’s inner geek

Posted on by

Cory Doctorow is one of the most interesting people I know. He’s just written a fascinating essay in Locus Online detailing three geeky spinoffs from his creative work. The first is a system for matching (i) institutions that would like a free copy of one of his books with (ii) donors who are willing to give one away. The second is his adaptation of Twitter hashtagging to extract more value from the text files in which he makes research notes when he’s working on a book. The third is an adaptation of the version-control systems commonplace in software development to track the evolution of his books through successive drafts. Here’s how he formulates the problem for which this is a solution:

I know a lot of archivists and one of their most common laments is the disappearance of the distinct draft manuscript in the digital age. Pre-digital, authors would create a series of drafts for their work, often bearing hand-written notations tracking the thinking behind each revision. By comparing these drafts, archivists and scholars could glean insights into the author’s mental state and creative process.

But in the digital era, many authors work from a single file, modifying it incrementally for each revision. There are no distinct, individual drafts, merely an eternally changing scroll that is forever in flux. When the book is finished, all the intermediate steps that the manuscript went through disappear.

It occurred to Cory that there was no rational reason why this had to be so. After all, computers are terrific at remembering insane amounts of trivial information. So he wrote to a programmer friend of his, Thomas Gideon.

Thomas loved the idea and ran with it, creating a script that made use of the free and open-source control system “Git” (the system used to maintain the Linux kernel), checking in my prose at 15-minute intervals, noting, with each check-in, the current time-zone on my system clock (where am I?), the weather there, as fetched from Google (what’s it like?) and the headlines from my last three Boing Boing posts (what am I thinking?). Future versions will support plug-ins to capture even richer metadata — say, the last three tweets I twittered, and the last three songs my music player played for me.

He called it “Flashbake”, a neologism from my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I was honored.

It’s an incredibly rich — even narcissistic — amount of detail to capture about the writing process, but there’s no reason not to capture it. It doesn’t cost any more to capture all this stuff every 15 minutes than it would to capture a daily file-change snapshot at midnight without any additional detail. And since Git — and other source repositories — is designed to let you summarize many changes at a time (say, all the changes between version 1 and version 2 of a product), it’s easy to ignore the metadata if it’s getting in the way.

Wonderful stuff. I don’t think Cory has ever written a boring piece in his entire life.