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More on the disaster at CBS News.

Some one took the original CBS documents and then opened Microsoft Word, and typed in the original text, using MS Word's default settings. The result was stunning: an exact match for all text characteristics, including font, font size, proportional character spacing, line spacing, superscripts, curved apostrophes, everything.

You can see the original document and the Microsoft Word output overlayed on top of each other at this web page.

I duplicated the experiment myself and found that this is true. (Unlike CBS, I do try to fact check what I post here. You may have noticed that I usually cite sources for what I write.)

According to ABC News, one of the people who CBS claims verified the authenticity of the documents says that CBS misled him and never showed him the documents but read them over the telephone.

One of the officers to whom an August 1973 memo was allegedly written, had, in fact, retired 16 months earlier. (Alternate link.)

The widow of the memo's author noted that her husband did not know how to type. As of the mid-1980s, when I created the word processor inside the long ago MS DOS integrated software package, PFS First Choice, we learned that only about 20% of adults could touch type. 14 years earlier, the percentage was undoubtedly much less than that. And the CBS documents contained zero typing errors - from a person who did not know how to type. Very unlikely.

One "expert" claims in this hilarious Boston Globe article that it could have written on an IBM Selectric Composer typewriter. He neglects to note that you had to type everything twice on this device, and set a manual control, for every line typed, as it was intended for use in typesetting applications, not everyday office typing!

There is a lot more that's wrong with these documents than I've described above. In the face of overwhelming evidence that CBS succumbed to a fraud, Dan Rather remains steadfast in his belief that the documents must be authentic. He offered a defense that was remarkably weak and neglected to answer the majority of questions identified about the documents. In fact, it is likely that even more documents related to these issues will turn out to be forgeries. Which ought to lead CBS on to an investigation of the hoaxes? Rather (bad pun) than accept the simple and obvious explanation that the documents were forged and that CBS News fell for a hoax, Dan Rather wants us to believe in an increasingly wide assortment of "conspiracy theories" to tie together all the pieces that no longer make any sense.

The bigger issues are that we learned how incredibly poorly "paid professional journalists" do fact checking. Their idea of fact checking seems to be little better than ask a few old friends what they think. CBS itself does no thinking of its own, perhaps because its staff members lack the brain power to do thinking.

Second, CBS has just learned how irrelevant it has become. Pompous and arrogant TV anchors like Dan Rather (or Bill O'rielly at Fox) have just been shredded by the people themselves, through the use of the Internet. In fact, Dan Rather is so threatened that he refuses to have a discussion with non-professional journalists on these issues. (Funny, its okay for him to interview non-professional journalists for a new story, but not the other way around?)

The Internet - and individuals - have successfully challenged the power held by big media. Dan Rather has just discovered that he can no longer just say anything he wants without doing real fact checking - because the people now have the power to do that fact checking for themselves. Dan Rather has become irrelevant.

To acknowledge his massive error, Dan Rather would be admitting that the Internet now outranks his media empire, an empire that is not just in decline, its now sinking beneath the waves off the East Coast. Another possibility is that CBS itself created the documents, and to allow further investigation would to reveal that CBS manufactures the news.

(My comments on this are intended as anti-media, and not pro/anti Bush or pro/anti Kerry.)
[Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology]
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Intel says Internet needs to change [Slashdot:]
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Serial ATA for Mini Hard Drives Planned [Slashdot:]
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National Geographic blasted for numerous factual errors, in this Washington Times article.
 
You can read about some of the errors I found here, and here (near bottom), and about their manipulated data here. A nice description of the effects of soot on snow and glacial melt may be found here and here.
[Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology]
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Intel To Add WiMAX to Handsets In 2007. Intel Corp. laid out more of its WiMAX roadmap on Tuesday, disclosing that the company has sampled its first "Rosedale" silicon to customers and tipping plans to add the technology to handsets in 2007. [Extremetech]

This is one of those future technologies that could, indeed, lead to significant new tech growth. WiMAX is sort of Wi-Fi/802.11 on steriods. Long range, high capacity, unlicensed technology at 5 Ghz. Intel foresees building this in to telephone handsets. Which means direct competition between WiMAX and 3G/4G cellular technologies that aim to accomplish similar goals.
[Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology]
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The ITAA, also known as the Information Technology Association of America will be releasing its "IT workforce" estimates, six months late this year. The report, normally released the first week of April, will, according to the Wall Street Journal, say that IT employers will fill only 230,000 jobs this year, down from a forecast of 500,000. Once again, the ITAA is off by more than 100% in its estimating ability. You'd think these idiots would get a clue and hire a better survey firm?

This year, they estimate (and their surveys are notoriously inaccurate and provably so), that the overall IT workforce increased by 2%, yet saw an overall decline in the western U.S.

The ITAA originally forecast hiring nearly 1.2 million new workers in 2003but since claimed only 500,000 jobs were created last year. (Once more, off by more than 100%!)  This years estimate of 230,000 jobs may itself not exist since that appears to fall within their margin of error of the estimate. Based on their statistics, the number of IT workers may even have gone down, not up.

According to the WSJ article, they interviewed 500 hiring managers in both tech and non-tech companies. The article does not provide enough data to definitively determine the confidence interval, but a reasonable (and calculated) estimate is + or - 2.2% for the overall sample of 500. Since the "2% increase" falls within the confidence interval, we can not draw any conclusions about whether there was an increase, decrease or hiring stayed the same. Basically, the result is too close to make a determination. There may have been a net loss of jobs.

Next, the ITAA surveyors split the sample of 500 into smaller samples by geographic region (and probably also by tech versus non-tech employers). Since the article mentions "northeast" as a distinct region, they probably divided the sample into 5 or more subsets, which raises the standard error to about + or - 5%.

The end result is that it is likely that absolutely nothing can be determined from ITAA's survey results. (Again, note that we do not have the specifics of the survey. The above calculations are determined by making reasonable guesses about the survey and the survey results.)

If you've read my past reports, you'll know that the ITAA misrepresents the data significantly. Back when they forecast that there would 1.6 million new IT jobs, a forecast that could not even past the giggle test, they also forecast a loss of 1.2 million IT jobs, a point completely missed by the clueless media. Thus in the best year ever, there were 400,000 new jobs (not replacements).

This ITAA survey, like the rest, is likely to be both useless and wrong - again.

ITAA's Harris Miller described the survey results as "disappointing", this because it makes their arguments for importing more temporary foreign workers more difficult. They have asked Congress to exempt anyone with a U.S. university earned Masters or PhD from the H-1B visa limits. This would de facto have the effect, of course, of making the Masters the degree the entry level degree into the computer field.

Stop Press! Here is the actual ITAA press release on the above. At the very end, they note that the "margin of error" is + or - 4.4%, which renders moot virtually all of their conclusions! Clueless media people still do not get it, even when it is spelled out in the press release. Thus, based on the ITAA survey, total IT employment may have GONE DOWN THIS PAST YEAR since 4.4% of 10.5 million is 426,000, larger there than their estimated increase in employment. Not one media "journalist" (is that a 4-letter word yet?) has noted this discrepancy.
[Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology]
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Ultra-Wideband Leaps Forward at IDF. Ulta-wideband over Wireless USB interoperability was demoed Wednesday at the Intel Developer Forum, UWB promised to hit the streets in 2005. [eWEEK Technology News] [Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology]
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More on "UFOs". After watching the NASA Sample Return Capsule return to earth, it becomes incredibly apparent that a LARGE number of past "UFO sightings" were, in fact, seeing the same kind of re-entry vehicles.

Take a look here, here, here, and definitely here.

Then, note the incredible similarity to NASA's SRC. They are essentially identical.

Today we know that spy satellites were routinely sending back film to earth, using similar mechanisms, and especially during the time that these photos were taken, from the early 1960s to the late 1980s.

I suspect there is much more than meets the eye with regards to NASA. Much of their technology may come jointly, or sort of hand me down, from spy agenices. The Hubble Space Telescope has been described as remarkably similar to the National Reconnaisance Office (NRO) spy satellites, which were basically a Hubble pointed at earth. NASA's TDRS (Telemetry and Data Relay Satellite system) was constructed at cost of nearly half a billion dollars supposedly for the purpose of supporting space shuttle flight communications. Its capabilities, however, imply otherwise, as the data network capacity provides about 10 times more downlink capacity than uplink (to space) capacity, and each satellite is capable of tracking about two dozen other satellites, simultaneously. Perfect for relaying spy satellite data (which includes both images and communications intercepts).

I have no problem with these applications, especially considering the current state of the world. But it does suggest that NASA's missions might be more closely related to public and secret military and spy agency applications than we generally realize.

The good news is that, in a strange way, we may now have learned why the government really did not want us to know too much about alleged UFO sightings. They really were not "flying saucers" but probably returning payloads filled with national security intelligence data. To admit that might have provided an opportunity for someone to fetch the payloads before the government did (which is why they almost always tried to capture them in mid-air).

---

Photos of NASA's return capsule, before and after crashing.

UFO Lands in Utah

.

[Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology]
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CBS News accused of manufacturing the news, based on forged documents. The mistakes are pretty funny! They fell for a grand hoax.

The document (pdf) alleged to have been written in 1972, includes a superscripted "th", which was not available on ordinary typewriters of the time, as well as many other unusual properties, even the zip code and use of a P O Box (with modern 34-567 using last two digits of zip as prefix) for a military address. Looks to have been written on a word processor. The widow of the memo's alleged author notes that her husband did not type :-) Does not seem to pass the common sense test. Apparently CBS has egg on its face but refuses, yet, to admit they fell for a good one. (All documents involved). Would be interesting to see CBS 60 Minutes do one of its in your face, on camera interviews with its own staff and its own "experts" - just as they do towards everyone else. Simple question for Dan Rather, who remains in total denial "How were the documents created in 1972 and 1973? What explains the numerous discrepancies?"

(IF you are reading this on a Macintosh, it will appear in American Typewriter font or Courier New font on Windows XP. As a joke, since I actually wrote all this in 1972.)

Update: CBS says the memos are real, they won't look any deeper, so there. Refuses to site name of the typewriter used, the manufacturer, the font name, sources of information, generally attributes everything to "sources" without naming them, and does not acknowledge that they could be forged easily. Blames Internet people for referring to "copies" of the documents (as if digital copying results in degradation - one of my links above is to CBS's own copy!)

And Dan Rather cannot explain how one of the memo's names an officer who is applying pressure, but, in fact, left the Air Guard more than a year before the note was written, and was stationed somewhere else when he was in charge (free subscription required for access to Mercury News). Sigh. Dan Rather has his head in some dark place, doesn't he? CBS is now spinning elaborate conspiracy theories to explain the discrepancies, rather than accepting the rather simple and obvious explanation - the memos are a hoax.

Take a look at what the Selectric.org web site says.

Can TV news stoop any lower? Yeah, probably!
[Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology]
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