Astonishing photograph of the NASA space shuttle Atlantis is seen in silhouette during solar transit, last Tuesday (May 12).
The photographer, Thierry Legault, made the image using a solar-filtered Takahashi 5-inch refracting telescope and a Canon 5D Mark II digital camera.
Thanks for Brian for spotting it.
(after co-founding Flickr, that is). Answer: Hunch.
My daughter needed to find out her National Insurance number — which, for reasons too tedious to relate but connected with her Dad’s failure to register for child benefit after her Mum’s death — had not been sent to her. I had made some telephone inquiries from which I learned that a number had indeed been allocated to her, but that she would need to attend an interview at the local JobCentre (to which she was to bring suitable forms of identification) before she could be given a number.
Last week she went by herself and was given the runaround by the staff — told to phone the national number, which told her that she didn;t have a number and would have to apply for it and that she needed to download the form, etc. etc. She came home rather dejected by this, so I arranged to go with her this morning.
It was the first time I’ve ever been inside a Job Centre. The clients present included a goodly number of people who looked as though life had dealt them a poor hand of cards. Some were badly dressed; a few looked miserable or confused or just depressed. The staff were professional in manner, but somewhat defensive in posture. Several burly security guards were very much in evidence. The atmosphere was one of watchful tension. And one can understand why: sometimes people turn up who are angry, confused, drunk, abusive or perhaps even psychologically disturbed. And they can lash out at an official who they see as the representative of an indifferent establishment.
The staff of the JobCentre have to tread a tightrope. On the one hand they have to help people who really need assistance from the state, and who are sometimes in really dire straits. On the other, they have to be watchful against benefit fraud, for perched on their shoulders like a vengeful parrot is the moralising, scolding Daily Mail.
It was an instructive moment to make my first visit to such an establishment. There I saw the front-line troops of the Welfare State, ever-vigilant to ensure that fraudsters don’t get benefits to which they are not entitled (and determined to crack down on them severely whenever they are detected). Meanwhile, over in the Mother of Parliaments, we have MPs who have been discovered conducting the most staggering kinds of ‘benefit’ fraud — and yet who seem to think that if they pay back their ill-gotten gains then everything will be all right.
As I stood waiting for my daughter to be interviewed for her NI number I fell to thinking about what would happen if someone who’d been caught over-claiming a state benefit in the JobCentre just shrugged his shoulders, reached into his wallet, and tried to hand over a sheaf of tenners to one of the officials behind the bullet-proof cubicle glass as atonement for his sins. You only have to do the thought-experiment to understand the rage that people feel about the MPs.
But of course the injustice is even worse in the case of bankers. At least MPs have had to endure some degree of personalised obloquoy. But, with the exception of a few named individuals like ‘Sir’ Fred Goodwin — most of the Savile-Row-suited non-execs who presided over the banking catastrophe have been bailed out without even having to endure the indignity of public exposure.
A worrying question is what will be the outcome of this public rage. It’s too profound to be bottled up. So it will be vented somewhere. Smashing the windows of the Goodwin mansion was just the opening salvo. My guess is that it will be vented in elections — first the upcoming European elections, and next year the UK general election. One opinion poll published at the weekend showed that currently 40% of the British electorate would vote for “none of the above” if an election were held tomorrow.
So what we might have is the kind of incoherent electoral chaos that occurred in Holland in the election after Pim Fortuyn was murdered — an election that returned to the Dutch Parliament a rag-bag collection of clowns and reduced Dutch governance to farcical levels for several years. Is this what lies ahead for us?
The New York Times staff photographers have a nice blog.
In a word, yes.
In research to be presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy this week, researchers from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University plan to show that the secret questions used to secure the password-reset functions of a variety of websites are woefully insecure. In a study involving 130 people, the researchers found that 28 percent of the people who knew and were trusted by the study’s participants could guess the correct answers to the participant’s secret questions. Even people not trusted by the participant still had a 17 percent chance of guessing the correct answer to a secret question.
“Secret questions alone are not as secure as we would like our backup authentication to be,” says Stuart Schechter, a researcher with software giant Microsoft and one of the authors of the paper. "Nor are they reliable enough that their use alone is sufficient to ensure users can recover their accounts when they forget their passwords.”
The least-secure questions are simple ones whose answers can be guessed with no existing knowledge of the subject, the researchers say. For example, the answers to the questions “What is your favorite town?” and “What is your favorite sports team?” were relatively easy for participants to guess. All told, 30 percent and 57 percent of the correct answers, respectively, appeared in the top-five list of guesses.
Marc Silber’s Photo Show with Ansel Adams’ son Michael from SilberStudios.Tv on Vimeo.
Just stumbled on this fascinating interview with Michael Adams, Ansel’s son, recorded at Glacier Point in Yosemite. It brought back lots of memories. Sue and I once spent a magical day in Yosemite in July 1990. The strange thing was that while I had, as usual, brought a camera with me, I found myself unable to take any pictures. The reason was that I felt that nothing I could do would ever be adequate because Ansel Adams had ‘done’ Yosemite. So, in the end, the camera stayed in the bag. But I did strip off and swam in the Merced river while Sue sat on the bank in the sunshine and wondered whether photographer’s block was a recognised medical condition.
From the Sun’s website. (Yes, it does have one.)
A MIRACLE new smart-bra that BOOSTS a woman’s cleavage when she feels sexy is being tested by lingerie designers.
The magic bra detects changes in body temperature brought on by sexual arousement and squeezes boobs together to create a bigger cleavage.
Then when things cool off again the bra’s built-in memory relaxes the fabric and the wearer’s bust returns to normal, say its Slovenian inventors.
(Upper case in original, btw.)
Thanks to Jack Schofield, from whom nothing is hidden, for the link.
“He has sadly become part of the problem. It is time for him to go”
Jo Swinson, Liberal Democrat MP, on the Speaker of the House of Commons. Quoted in today’s Observer.
Presumably s/he meant to say “Sadly, he has become part of the problem.”
Bah!
I must be getting old: I find myself agreeing with Steve Ballmer. There’s a terrific interview with him in today’s NYT. I particularly like this bit:
Q. What’s it like to be in a meeting run by Steve Ballmer?
A. I’ve changed that, really in the last couple years. The mode of Microsoft meetings used to be: You come with something we haven’t seen in a slide deck or presentation. You deliver the presentation. You probably take what I will call “the long and winding road.” You take the listener through your path of discovery and exploration, and you arrive at a conclusion.
That’s kind of the way I used to like to do it, and the way Bill [Gates] used to kind of like to do it. And it seemed like the best way to do it, because if you went to the conclusion first, you’d get: “What about this? Have you thought about this?” So people naturally tried to tell you all the things that supported the decision, and then tell you the decision.
I decided that’s not what I want to do anymore. I don’t think it’s productive. I don’t think it’s efficient. I get impatient. So most meetings nowadays, you send me the materials and I read them in advance. And I can come in and say: “I’ve got the following four questions. Please don’t present the deck.” That lets us go, whether they’ve organized it that way or not, to the recommendation. And if I have questions about the long and winding road and the data and the supporting evidence, I can ask them. But it gives us greater focus.
I’d go further. When I’m Supreme Leader all the chairs will be removed from committee meeting rooms.
The serious point behind Ballmer’s Meetings 2.0 is not so much that it’s efficient (which it is) but that it means that each meeting adds value or moves things on. And, in a way, that’s the whole point of our networked information ecosystem. One can often assume nowadays that anyone who’s prepared to put in a little effort can be as well informed as you are. So the question then becomes: how can s/he or we add value and move us on?
I tried to make this point in my seminar last week at the Reuters Institute in Oxford. I said I was sick and tired of seeing an expensive TV journalist being filmed outside the door of 10 Downing Street telling me stuff that I already know. I want him or her to move the story on, not waste airtime and bandwidth in useless summary or colourful waffle.
The other really interesting point to emerge from the Ballmer interview is that his favourite ‘management’ book is Bill Collins ‘Built to Last’
This morning’s Observer column.
As newspapers fold, the hunt is on for a workable business model for online news. Lots of things are being tried, but none of them provides the revenue growth needed to offset the income siphoned off by changes in media consumption patterns and the diversion of advertising revenues to the web.
Things have got so bad that Rupert Murdoch has tasked a team with finding a way of charging for News Corp content. This is the “make the bastards pay” school of thought. Another group of fantasists speculate about ways of extorting money from Google, which they portray as a parasitic feeder on their hallowed produce. And recently a few desperadoes have made the pilgrimage to Capitol Hill seeking legislative assistance and/or federal bailouts for newspapers.
It’s difficult to keep one's head when all about one people are losing theirs, but let us have a go…
Coincidentally, there have been (at least) two other pieces on this general theme this week — an uncharacteristically Daily Mail-type rant by Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times, and an excellent, balanced article in the Economist.
And I’ve been Slashdotted! In the old days, that would mean that the Observer’s servers would fall over.
Later: This is probably all due to Cory blogging the column in BoingBoing. And the biggest irony is that the piece didn’t appear in today’s paper edition of the Observer. No idea why, but I suspect a glitch in the paper’s content management system.