You can tell it’s the start of the busiest term in the academic year.
The town is plastered with notices of concerts, drama productions, debates, readings, recitals, meetings. There’s nothing quite like a big university.
Powell endorses Obama
At last, a real grown-up. Video here if the embedded version doesn’t work.
Politics, US-style
From FiveThirtyEight.com…
So a canvasser goes to a woman’s door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she’s planning to vote for. She isn’t sure, has to ask her husband who she’s voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, “We’re votin’ for the n***er!”
Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: “We’re voting for the n***er.”
Don’t drink and email
Hah! NYTimes piece about Mail Goggles — a new service available only to Gmail users,
The experimental program requires any user who enables the function to perform five simple math problems in 60 seconds before sending e-mails between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. on weekends. That time frame apparently corresponds to the gap between cocktail No. 1 and cocktail No. 4, when tapping out an e-mail message to an ex or a co-worker can seem like the equivalent of bungee jumping without a cord.
Told you so!
Some time ago I picked up on a terrific LRB article on ‘Cityphilia’ by John Lanchester. Well, now he’s written the companion piece, ‘Cityphobia’. Here’s how it opens:
Byron wrote that ‘I think it great affectation not to quote oneself.’ On that basis, I’d like to quote what I wrote in a piece about the City of London, in the aftermath of the Northern Rock fiasco: ‘If our laws are not extended to control the new kinds of super-powerful, super-complex and potentially super-risky investment vehicles, they will one day cause a financial disaster of global-systemic proportions.’
Lovely stuff.
Tackling bankers’ bonuses
Typically astute column by Simon Caulkin…
As Martin Wolf wrote in that well-known socialist organ the Financial Times, ‘either banking should be treated as a utility, with regulated returns, or it should be viewed as a profit-seeking industry that operates in accordance with the laws of the market, including, if necessary, mass redundancies’. Since the latter is unacceptable, he concluded, we have to move towards the former – and regulation must include pay above all.
In this context, the dire warnings from the free-market champions about the perils of interfering with today’s pay-setting methods take on a surreal air. If companies and shareholders really are ‘better at setting salaries than bureaucrats’, as The Economist affirms, given that ‘better’ has resulted in the almost complete meltdown of the global financial system, what, please, would ‘worse’ look like?
I’m glad he picked up the absurdity of the Economist’s frantic attempt to straddle the chasm between admitting the colossal screw-up that the banks have managed and avoiding the inescapable conclusions to be drawn from it.
The blog as literary genre
This morning’s Observer column…
Initially, blogging had a bad press, at least in the press. Editors derided it as vanity publishing by egomaniacs. Who did these oiks think they were, imagining people would be interested in their views? Working journalists – incredulous that people would write for no financial reward – ridiculed blogging as self-indulgent insanity.
It turned out that this was an epic misjudgment, but it took a few high-profile casualties to bring home the message. In 2002 the Republican majority leader in the US Senate, Trent Lott, was brought down by a story that was ignored by the mainstream media but kept alive within the blogosphere. Then in 2005 the career of Dan Rather, the celebrated American TV network anchorman, was unceremoniously terminated when he (and his colleagues) casually dismissed bloggers’ criticism of the evidence used in a 60 Minutes documentary about George W Bush’s national service…
100k in St Louis
Barack Obama in St Louis. From the Huffington Post.
Netbooks on the rise
From Register Hardware
First Gartner and now IDC has highlighted the rise of the Small, Cheap Computer as one of key product categories keeping the European PC market afloat.
Laptops too are helping keep vendors’ heads above water, and together with the SCCs helped shipments of all types of personal computer grow 27 per cent year on year during Q3, IDC said.
Notebook shipments were up 52 per cent when comparing Q3 2008 with Q3 2007. SCC shipment growth can’t really be considered since the first one, the Eee PC 701, didn’t go on sale until Q4 2007, and up to that point the only alternative, the UMPC, didn’t really trouble the score-keeper.
We can say that European netbook shipments went from zero in Q3 2007 to over 2m in Q3 2008, a figure that’s just under ten per cent of the 27.9m PCs shipped into Europe in Q3 this year.
This is a good illustration of the Law of Unintended Consequences. All of this NetBook activity dates from the appearance of the OLPC.
BBC view of open source
Interesting insight into a corporate mindset provided by its rules for developers. They include:
# The software must have no or negligible commercial application or value, and is unlikely, if licensed, to bring revenue back to the BBC.
# The software is ‘non-mission critical’, and there are not likely to be any competitive uses of the software which might enable a third party to profit from the BBC’s investment.
# The BBC intends to re-use the software and it is therefore of direct benefit to the BBC to have it examined and tested by the wider population.
# Internal feedback from use of the software solely within the BBC is not as beneficial to the BBC as external feedback.
# There has been full internal testing of the software and the BBC is satisfied that the risk of damage arising from the use of the software by third parties is negligible.