This is pure photogeekery but there’s a useful post explaining how to turn on colour profile support in Firefox.
Thanks to Brian for spotting it.
On this day…
… in 1993, a bomb exploded in the garage of New York’s World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000 others. Turned out to be just a dry-run for the main event.
Quote of the day
“I will not spend a single penny for the purpose of rewarding a single Wall Street executive, but I will do whatever it takes to help the small business that can’t pay its workers or the family that has saved and still can’t get a mortgage.”
Barack Obama, addressing the US Congress yesterday. Wouldn’t it be nice to hear something as unequivocal from Broonie?
Giving up
It’s the first day of Lent. I thought of giving up work but decided that I can’t afford it.
Aw shucks…
Poor little Harvard. According to a NYT report its endowment (which pays for a third of its operating costs)
is on the verge of posting its biggest loss in 40 years. With much of its money tied up for the long term, it is scrambling to meet some obligations.
Harvard has frozen salaries for faculty and nonunion staff members, and offered early retirement to 1,600 employees. The divinity school has warned it may not be able to cover tuition for all its students with need, the school of arts and sciences is cutting its billion-dollar budget roughly 10 percent, and the university president said this week than the unprecedented drop in the endowment was causing it to delay its planned expansion, starting with a $1 billion science center, into the Allston neighborhood of Boston.
The school has even added to its debt by issuing $1.5 billion in new bonds, its largest such offering ever.
It seems that the endowment, the largest of any university in the world, has shrunk by at least $8 billion, to $29 billion, since July. Couldn’t happen to a nicer university.
Interesting footnote. The article says that part of Harvard’s current problem is that it became highly ‘leveraged’ on the advice of Larry Summers, its former president.
The endowment was squeezed partly because it had invested more than its assets, a leveraging strategy that can magnify results, both good and bad. It also had invested heavily in private equity and related deals, which not only lock up existing cash but require investors to put up more capital over time.
What’s interesting about that? Er, Larry Summers is now one of Obama’s leading economic advisers!
Openness is a feature, not a bug
Today’s Observer column.
Openness is what makes the internet what it is. It enabled Tim Berners-Lee to dream up the web and release it on an unsuspecting world without seeking anyone’s permission. It’s also what enabled the guys who invented Skype to use the network as a carrier for voice communications, again without seeking administrative approval. But the same openness is what enabled Sean Fanning to launch peer-to-peer file sharing on the music industry. And of course it’s what enabled the sinister Eastern European crooks of Markoff’s nightmares to unleash the Conficker.B worm, with who knows what consequences.
So we’re stuck with the trade-off between the creativity, innovation – and, yes, insecurity – that comes with openness; and the security – and stagnation – that comes with a tightly-controlled network. Which do we prefer? You only have to look at the data traffic for web pages and file sharing to know the answer.
Crocus snapper
Some people will do anything for a picture. Spotted and photographed by Fiona on Saturday afternoon.
Did Google Earth find Atlantis?
Sadly no.
“It’s true that many amazing discoveries have been made in Google Earth, including a pristine forest in Mozambique that is home to previously unknown species and the remains of an ancient Roman villa,” a statement from Google read. “In this case, however, what users are seeing is an artifact of the data collection process. Bathymetric (or sea floor terrain) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the sea floor. The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data.”
Quack, quack
BBC2’s Newsnight had an interesting item last night about the strange case of ‘Sir’ Allen Stanford, the flamboyant custodian of $8 billion of other people’s money. At one point they had a former SEC lawyer and a financial blogger on the programme. The presenter asked them both essentially the same question — why hadn’t Stanford been rumbled earlier? (That’s getting to be quite a popular question at the moment.)
The answers revealed something interesting about the role of the blogosphere. The SEC is staffed mainly by lawyers who — being lawyers — are looking for (a) infringement of US laws and (b) certainty — or at any rate cases that will stand up in court. The core of Allen’s operation was based in Antigua, which is not US territory, so it seems that the SEC’s lawyers felt obliged to turn a blind eye to the curious goings-on there.
In contrast, financial bloggers like Alex Dalmady are free to look at whatever piques their curiosity. And Mr Dalmady was most intrigued by what was going on in Stanford’s bank. And, unlike lawyers, bloggers don’t need certainty. They can follow their noses — which is exactly what Mr Dalmady did. His “Duck Tales” (in which he aired his suspicions about Stanford and now available as a pdf download) is a little masterpiece. The title comes from the old adage that “if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it is a duck”.
En passant: it’s always irritating to hear journalists unctuously using the ludicrous handles of ‘Sir’ and ‘Lord’. But it’s even more nauseating when they’re applied to cretins like Stanford and Jeffrey Archer. When I’m supreme ruler this practice will be abolished.
Portrait of the blogger as bookworm
Photographed by Fiona in Donegal. I was deep in a book I’d discovered in the Four Masters Bookshop across the road. It’s a new book of essays about Douglas Gageby, who was an inspirational editor of the Irish Times when I was an undergraduate and the man who first awakened my interest in journalism.