|
 Wednesday, August 21, 2002
One major thing Bush could do to get the economy rolling again is to stop all this nonsense talk about invading Iraq. War means risk. Risk depletes expectations of future economic growth. It also radically reduces the willingness of people to make long-term investments necassary for productivity improvements, innovation, and wealth creation. Talk of war, particularly one with a slippery time line, is pure poison for an economy. Iraq isn't worth spending the next three years in the economic toilet. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
Okay, another political/economic link and then I am off to finish dinner. 6:11:49 PM 
|
|
Would 'race' disappear if the United States officially stopped measuring it?. What if the U.S. government stopped measuring race? Would the results be positive, negative, or indifferent? Under what conditions does the classification of people by race for the purpose of scientific inquiry promote racial division, and when does it aid in the achievement of justice and equality? American Sociological Association [EurekAlert - Biology]
The concept of race is also important because it has (and still does) restrict gene flow in many parts of the world. This still has important ramifications in so many areas of study. 6:10:42 PM
|
|
Researchers discover how herpes tricks the immune system. Herpes viruses enter the body and hide away in cells, often re-emerging later to cause illnesses such as shingles, genital herpes and cancer. How these viruses evade the immune system remains poorly understood, but researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis discovered that a mouse herpes virus uses molecules that mimic a cell's own proteins to help thwart an immune attack. NIH/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH/National Cancer Institute, Cancer Research Institute [EurekAlert - Biology]
The complement system is one of the underappreciated aspects of the immune system. A better understanding of its manifold effects will help with many investigations. 6:04:14 PM
|
|
The scientists at Woods Hole have some interesting info on their website. It is about the chance that global warming will likely unleash a mini Ice Age within the next 10 years. They (I wish these guys had a "mini Ice Age weblog" we could read in real time as they update things) predict the shift could happen extremely quickly once unleashed.
The mechanism for this is simple. The north pole's ice cap is melting quickly due to global warming. This has created an extremely large pool of fresh water near the ice cap. That pool of water will eventually drift southward. When it does, it will disrupt the gulf stream due a change in the density of the water. Without the gulf stream, the northeast US and Europe will quickly experience a 10 degree drop in temperatures.
This mini Ice Age would be similar to the one we experienced between 1300 and 1850. Remember that picture of Washington crossing the Delaware river? See the ice? That doesn't happen anymore. According to the Wood's Hole scientists, it will again. There is also an outside chance that disruption of the gulf stream could disrupt the entire ocean conveyor system which would impact the rest of the world.
 
[John Robb's Radio Weblog]
Wow. What if everything is wrong and it gets a whole lot colder? This is an interesting scenario. One thing that is coming out from researching the Greenland Ice is that these tempearture changes can happen very rapidly. So, maybe it is worth investing in some ski resorts. 6:02:38 PM
|
|
|
This is the central conflict we are seeing today in high tech. . Often the needs and wants of businesses and consumers are mutaully exclusive. How this conflict is resolved will define this age (particularly since the politcal problems we face are also derived some similar processes, at least in my opinion.) 5:54:38 PM
|
|
America's Date with Deflation?. America's Date with Deflation? Two years ago, at the peak of the late-1990s boom, the American economy was slightly overheated. As the unemployment rate fell to four percent and below, inflation began to creep upward, rising by between a quarter and half a percentage point each year. By late 2000 it was very clear that America's GDP was one to two percentage points above potential output--above that level at which aggregate demand balanced aggregate supply, at least in the sense... [Semi-Daily Journal]
Economists can be so scary when they talk about this stuff. Now, add in a war against Iraq and a few more corrupt CEOs and it becomes downright nightmarish for the average investor. Maybe I should just put all my money in a mattress? 5:40:06 PM
|
|
"plans were made to 'create' acts of terror in the US, and blame those on Cuba, in order to justify an invasion of the island" [Daypop Top 40]
This is the problem we may now be facing. Many people in the world believe that the US already does this sort of thing routinely. What would have happened if we had possessed an administration more amenable to the military leaders of the time? Planning to use the possible death of John Glenn to regain Cuba? Or killing some citizens for the same end? It was the sinking of the Maine all over again, only with real culpibility of the government if it had been carried out. I love that it was the outrageous antics shown in Stone's JFK that allowed these real antics to be revealed. 5:26:49 PM
|
|
Report focuses on the science and safety of genetically modified crops. A new report from the American Academy of Microbiology (AAM) looks at the case of a bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) and its use in agriculture in a careful examination of what we know--and what we need to know--about transgenic plants. [EurekAlert - Biology]
Bt has been used as an insecticide for a long time. The question is what effect it will have when it is produced by the plants themselves. It effects on humans in most likely benign but it will probably affect helpful insects as well as harmful.This could be more devastating than just spraying, since it would continuously kill any insect, not just during an infestation. 5:12:48 PM
|
|
Aristotle's law petition confounds blase Berkeley. But can the law be amended later?
Berkeley, the first city to ban Styrofoam and wood-fired pizza ovens, could become the first to enact Aristotle's ancient law of logic -- that every entity is equal to itself.
In a philosophical effort to come up with a city law that no one could ever break, conceptual artist Jonathon Keats wants Berkeley to legally acknowledge Aristotle's law, commonly expressed as A=A. [Ron Lusk's Radio Weblog]
I love Berkeley. It is good that in these times of economic devastation, corruption and terrorism, some people can keep focussed on the really important things. 4:54:05 PM
|
|
Music body presses anti-piracy case. The Recording Industry Association of America asks a federal court for help in tracing an alleged peer-to-peer pirate. [CNET News.com]
Let's start prosecuting the people that actually show interest in the music. Many traders are young people with lots of time and lots of bandwidth. They show the most passion for new music. Why not find a way to harness this passion rather than send them to prison. Pissing off your customers is not a good business model. 4:51:22 PM
|
|
News.Com: "The president of media giant News Corp warns that the Internet has become a 'moral-free zone,' with the medium's future threatened by pornography, spam and rampant piracy." [Scripting News]
The old media and the new media. Seems a lot like TV and Hollywood in the 1950s. 4:26:43 PM
|
|
Peer to Peer Piracy Bill—A License to Ransack?. Peer to Peer Piracy Bill—A License to Ransack?
There's an important post about Coble's role in the Peer to Peer Piracy bill at Ed Cone's blog. He quotes an email from Fred von Lohmann, Senior Intellectual Property Attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Under the bill, "...a copyright owner *can* invade your computer if it has your "authorization." When would you ever authorize such a thing? When it's hidden in a "clickwrap" license agreement! If the bill passed, there's nothing to stop PressPlay, Microsoft, or any other copyright owners, from putting a "pre-authorization" into their service agreements.
The worst thing about the bill is that it entitles copyright owners to ignore *any law*, so long as they stay within the (murky) bounds of the statute...Copyright owners are saying that, unlike the rest of us, they should be above the law. This is a power that we as a society don't give to anyone, even to the FBI."
This is why all of us need to contact everyone we can think of and let them know that passing the "Peer to Peer Piracy" bill is a seriously bad idea. You might also suggest that they read Ed Cone's column at the News - Record, and this editorial as well.
[Instructional Technology] [Ron Lusk's Radio Weblog]
We not only have to watch out for the government. We have to be careful of Microsoft invading our privacy. 4:16:20 PM
|
|
Courtesy of
MIT Technology Review: Firewall Follies. Simson Garfinkel. They don't make business systems significantly more secure. And by focusing attention on defending the perimeter, rather than on defending information assets within an organization, firewalls foster lax internal security practices that magnify the damage that insiders can inflict. [Tomalak's Realm]
(see also the following paragraph...)
What firewalls do accomplish, however, is this: they make the Internet more cumbersome to use. I recently visited a friend[base ']s firm in New York and wanted to check my e-mail, so I plugged my laptop into a network jack in an unused office. Access denied: my PC wasn[base ']t set up to work with the company[base ']s firewall. So instead of reading my e-mail, I occupied myself by sniffing the traffic on the office network and probing for a way out. (Had I been inclined, I could have read everybody else[base ']s e-mail[~]or done real damage.)
I was working at a client once, with a programmer seeking to develop a program that would send e-mail when a customer ordered literature. I was looking for an SMTP server, and so used nslookup to list the computers in the domain, looking for something called "FOOSMTP" or "MAILSERVER" or the like. (No such luck—this client, a heavy IBM user for years, had nearly meaningless strings for server names, PC names, usernames, etc.)
In any case, I had warned the programmer that trying to find an open port would probably alert network security. In a few moments, he got a call: his PC had initiated a dump of the DNS database; did he have a good explanation for what happened? [Ron Lusk's Radio Weblog]
Security usually provides little real security against pros. They can find a way in and it gets the normal users into bad habits. I loved these stories. 4:09:53 PM
|
|
The Swarming Organization: Military might meets commercial F500 challenges. While I've never heard a company call it this, SWARMING is the key theme that many are talking about specific to enterprise collaboration. It's grounded in providing frameworks to support self-forming teams optimized to embrace an opportunity, or fight a threat...
[Michael Helfrich's Radio Weblog] [Ron Lusk's Radio Weblog]
This is exactly what Immunex was. It had all 4 arenas:Highlt-decentralized; dynamic; nonlinear and adaptive; knowledge creation at the edge. I really need to figure out how get more biotech companies to realize this 3:53:46 PM
|
|
Anthrax exposed and killed [Nature Science Update]
Phage therapy was used in Russia but this is a great use of recombinant technology to use a natural toxin against a bacteria. This could be much better to use than an antibiotic. Antibiotics tend to inhibit enzymatic processes. If the enzyme mutates, the antibiotic is no longer effective. But toxins that target the bacterial membrane are harder to mutate around, since the membrane components are not proteins but other molecules such as fatty acids.3:42:25 PM
|
|
|
|
|
