Bear Flag Republic Radio Weblog

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Cnet: Microsoft revamps its plans for Longhorn. As expected, the company on Friday announced a new road map for Longhorn, its revision to Windows XP. The changes--removing some features and altering others--are designed to let the company have a test version of the software next year and a final release for desktops and notebooks by 2006. A server release is planned for 2007.

The full upgrade, then, will be at least a year later than the alleged delivery date of 2006 for the bowdlerized version. Surprised? You shouldn't be. Microsoft has a long history of announcing things it delivers extremely late, if at all.

Not that it matters much in the real world. Microsoft's monopoly will keep cranking out the profits even without the new OS. The advantages of market domination... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
comments < 8:27:54 PM        >

The story behind Mark Thatcher's arrest is stranger than fiction.  Mercenaries, a coup attempt, a wonga list, the son of a conservative Prime Minister, oil, money, a medieval dictator, and Texas.  EQUATORIAL Guinea, with a population smaller than that of Edinburgh, was until recently one of the poorest countries on earth. But now, following discoveries of vast offshore oil and gas fields, it has the world's fastest growing economy. Dallas-based Triton Energy, which has close ties to President George Bush, Exxon Mobil and Chevron Texaco have together invested more than US$5billion in Equatorial Guinea's burgeoning oil production, predicted soon to provide five percent of US oil needs.  [John Robb's Weblog]
comments < 10:00:31 AM        >

More on National Geographic Magazine article on "global warming": See below for details of a common error in trend spotting.

Also, as noted below, the magazine begins with a cover picture of a forest fire and attributes this to an effect of global warming, which it is not. The story then begins by noting specific retreating glaciers and cites this as proof of global warming.

There are two big problems with their glacier references. One is that Dr. James Hansen of NASA has found that soot accumulation on glaciers accounts for two effects. One is that soot accelerates the melting of glaciers and snow, without any change in temperature. This is because darker materials absorb more heat than does light colored snow and ice. The soot, in turn, changes temperatures by decreasing the amoung of light (and heat) reflected back upwards. (Other issues that effect glacier size include the amount of snow fall that provides input to the glacier.) Soot can come from diesel exhaust, forest fires, dust, and other forms of air pollution. The soot effect is also likely to be pronounced in certain areas of the world, such as Europe, or even in the Himalays (India and China).

A second problem is that no one actually knows why some glaciers are retreating while others are growing. "It's too early to say if glacier melting is accelerating worldwide" compared to U.N. forecasts in 2001, Jeffrey Kargel of the U.S. Geological Survey told a seminar on glaciers in Oslo. "In some areas it is, but the picture is mixed."" In 2002, the same scientist then reported a breathtaking and alarming increase in glacier melting. While, a bit later in 2002, another NASA scientist said about whether glaciers are increasing or decreasing, "``Very simply, we do not know,'' said Jay Zwally, the mission's project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. ``Not only do we not know what is happening today, we don't know what is going to happen in the future.''" For that reason, NASA launched a new satellite known as IceSat to help measure glaciers.

With the sort of consensus described in the above article (and with one scientist contradicting himself - probably because of new evidence), at a minimum, the Geographic must present the level of uncertainties associated with their assertions.

The biggest problem with global warming news reports is often not the scientists, but the "journalists" who selectively report on the topic and leave out the caveats and warnings in scientific reports. "Old news" often sticks around a long time in the mind of reporters, and unlike the perspective of scientist Jeffrey Kargel, above, does not change when new information becomes available.
[Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology]
comments < 9:59:09 AM        >

More fun with statistics! Number of adults with high blood pressure increases by 30% over a 12 year period.

Very misleading! The number of persons estimated to have high blood pressure increased by 30%, says the article. The Wall Street Journal (no link since its a paid subscription), however, got the story correct: "The survey estimates that 31.3% of Americans have high blood pressure, up from 28.9% in the previous national health report from 1988-94."

That is not a 30% increase! So where does the 30% increase come from? Numerically, the estimate went from 50 million to 65 million, because the population of the U.S. increased by 37 million (Source: US Census). About half of our population growth is due to births, and just over half to immigration. Over that span of time, a fair guess is that there may have been around 24 million new adults added to the U.S. population.

About 30% of all adults already have high blood pressure: 30% of 24 million new people is just over 8 million (not all 37 million are adults, plus some children became adults during the 12 year study period). Which means that half of the increase was due to population growth (about 8 million of the 15 million, give or take the age distribution) and 7 million was due to other factors (or an overall increase of 2.4% of the population). The other factor may have been the changing average age of the population, or due to the non-randomness of the sample of adults used in the study, or an increase in obesity.

The WSJ contains another interesting quote, saying "Jeffrey Cutler, senior scientific adviser at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, said that between 1980 and 1990 the prevalence of high blood pressure was decreasing, but that was before the obesity surge of the late 1980s." Another explanation is that the next generation was numerically smaller than the preceding generation (according to the US Census) - which means the average age increased rapidly. As I have shown here in the past, during the 1990s, the number of people aged 20 to 29 was about 18% less than during the 1980s (when the baby-boom peak moved through that age group); this in turn resulted in lowered unemployment since there were fewer young people looking for work, and young people are far more likely to be unemployed than older workers. This dramatic demographic change alone may result in the change in estimated number of people with hypertension.

In the end, the 30% increase in the estimated number turns out to be an exaggerated description. In fact, amongst the overall population the increase was 2.4 percentile points (which also happens to be equivalent to a 7 million increase in the overall population). 30% is good for drug companies to promote since most would like to see tens of millions more people taking their prescription meds. High blood pressure is a serious medical problem; resorting to misleading the public about it is also serious and may result in people not taking these folks seriously. Remember the story of the boy who cried "Wolf?" a little too often?

The original story comes entirely from the press release issued by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. They are the ones who call it a 30% increase, when it is not since at least half of the increase came solely from an increasing population and represents no change in blood pressure. The actual press release does, at least, note that it was an 8% increase but still uses the 30% "in terms of absolute numbers". They could have written that the leading cause of this increase in blood pressure was an increase in population but the do not; instead, they blame aging, obesity and other factors - leaving out the leading cause. They are committing a sleight of hand that borders on the fraudulent.

Then again, this article may explain the whole deal: "Windows SP2 bad for blood pressure?"   Could it be that the rise in blood pressure can be blamed on Windows system crashes?
[Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology]
comments < 9:58:48 AM        >

NASA: DOS Glitch Nearly Killed Mars Rover. A software glitch that paralyzed the Mars "Spirit" rover earlier this year was caused by an unanticipated characteristic of a DOS file system, a NASA scientist said Monday. [Extremetech] [Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology]
comments < 9:58:03 AM        >

Ceragon Debuts 60 GHz System. In the previous entry, I suggested that the time was ripe for a high-capacity, long range 60 GHz. Ceragon Networks' new FibeAir 10060 is a "mere" 1.25 Gbps, with range unstated. But, considering the pedigree of the company, it will do. [Broadband Wireless] (I recently discovered Steve Stroh's weblog. Steve is an old friend, also a ham radio operator, and writes a good bit on broadband wireless.... Ed, KF7VY. There is a little known unlicensed band of spectrum at 60 Ghz that is a whopper. While signals do not go far, its so wide that its not too hard to build very wide bandwidth data systems.)
[Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology]
comments < 9:57:44 AM        >

Sep 2004 National Geographic says, in a picture caption at the back of the magazine, that the Maldives, islands in the Indian Ocean, will be flooded over due to "global warming". The Geographic - again, or by now, as is typical of shoddy reporting - neglects to present contrary information to this assertion.

So I will instead.

Read "Sea Level Changes: The Maldives Project" (PDF, but short, abstract) from Geophysical Research Abstracts, Vol. 5., 2003 (so we know that the Geographic had access to this a year earlier too). A similar paper (with a nice chart showing sea levels over time) was also presented at the Coastal Environmental Change conference in Italy, in 2003. Here is a news report on that research project, where the lead author notes that sea levels have actually gone down during the preceding 30 years around the Maldives.

Finally, go this web site describing research on sea levels in the Maldives which is sort of a personal web site associated with the authors of the article, above. Look at captioned photo number two down the page and note the various sea levels indicated by the geological record, versus the present.

When looking at predictions of future sea levels of Maldives, there is lots of gloom and doom coming from the late 1980s into the 1990s. However, a little more research shows that prior to the year 2000, very little was known about sea levels, over time, at the Maldives.

So far, I have only looked into three items described in the Geographic articles. And each item I looked out demonstrated shoddy reporting by the Geographic that borders on that of a middle school student learning to write reports, or outright fraud. The Geographic fails to report the enormous uncertainties associated with this topic, and uses information selectively without presenting contrary research (which indicates that definitive answers are far from known at this point).
[Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology]
comments < 9:57:12 AM        >

Press perpetuates another myth: MSNBC says "More Americans visit doctor as nation ages". The reporter obviously read the press release but not the report (PDF file). Figure 1 shows that everyone visits the doctor more often, when comparing the same ages in the past to the same ages in later years. Its not because people are aging; its because everyone visits the doctor more often. Does this mean everyone's health is better? Other studies say there is no difference in overall health versus 20 years ago. US Census data also reveal that the out of pocket monthly expenses for healthcare (including patient-paid insurance share, co-pays, deductibles, non-covered care or drugs) actually declined from the 1960s to 1999, when it ticked slightly upward. Not surprisingly, as the price actually paid by the end consumer went down, consumers consumed more. As consumers consumed more, providers can raise prices - which are typically not paid by the end consumer.


[Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology]
comments < 9:56:50 AM        >