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Monday, February 10, 2003 |
NPR on Voting. Here's a link to where you can listen to NPR's computer voting segment, as promised.
[Eschaton]
I heard this on the way to the city this morning. If you think that electonic voting is a solution to the types of debacles we had in Florida in 2000, then you're sadly mistaken. Give this a listen and be afraid.
10:00:45 PM Permalink
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The American Paradox
The Two Faces of America
This list of "bests" and "worsts" is based on a variety of sources—including statistics from the United Nations, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and a number of other groups and experts—but the basic criteria are consistent. Among advanced democracies, America had to rank in the top three for a category to be listed under "bests" and in the bottom three for a category to be listed under "worsts." (Where applicable, all rankings were determined on a rate basis or as a percentage of population.)
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| Bests |
Worsts |
| Gross domestic product |
Poverty |
| Productivity |
Economic inequality |
| Business start-ups |
Carbon-dioxide emissions |
| Long-term unemployment |
Life expectancy |
| Expenditure on education |
Infant mortality |
| University graduates |
Homicide |
| R&D expenditure |
Health-care coverage |
| High-tech exports |
HIV infection |
| Movies exported |
Teen pregnancy |
| Breadth of stock ownership |
Personal savings |
| Volunteerism |
Voter participation |
| Charitable giving |
Obesity | |
Must reading; an important article. It states that it's time for a new social contract:
To fit the post-industrial age it must be able to reconcile the competing demands of flexibility and fairness. In a time characterized by constant job mobility, a proliferation of consumer choices, just-in-time production, and—perhaps most of all—increased uncertainty, individuals, firms, and governments all need unprecedented flexibility. Fairness, meanwhile, springs from the commitments to meritocracy and shared prosperity that have inspired our nation since its inception. A social contract that simultaneously enhances both flexibility and fairness will require new roles and responsibilities for all three parties to the contract: government, business, and the citizenry.
9:16:20 PM Permalink
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'I'm Home!' For Astronauts, Words Defy Translation. Even in the best of circumstances, landing a space shuttle is never routine: A retired astronaut's first-person account of re-entry. By Norman E. Thagard, M.d.. [New York Times: Science]
Riding that shuttle down must be amazing. This author has done it several times. I think I'd go up tomorrow if someone asked me. Well, maybe in a month or two.
8:51:52 PM Permalink
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XSLT Intro
Five Quick Tips for Using XSLT. Like so many acronyms before it, XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) comes across as YAOT--Yet Another Obfuscated Technology. But it doesn't have to be that way. XSLT promises many advantages when applied to the right problems. All you need is a quick guide on using the XSLT basics. In this article, Dan Frumin gets you started with this powerful language. [O'Reilly Network Articles]
This is a nice little piece, which answers a couple of things I haven't been able to figure out -- notably the literals inside the parens, which was something I struggled with the other day. It gets me by a hurdle. If you know something about XML, and are curious about XSLT, I recommend this. I've looked at a bunch of books, but the one I had the most luck with has been New Riders' Inside XSLT by Steven Holzner. It did a good job for me, and though its two chapers on XSLT-FO were less than I'd like, they gave me a good leg up. Come to think of it, I've liked most all the New Riders books I've read.
I spent a lot of last week and today writing XSLT to transform some XML into FO, for formatting objects, to transfrom collections of JPGs, and some database data into PDFs. I think I need to put a couple more days into the project before I'm done. There are a lot of really interesting things about it, not the least of which is managing 16,000+ JPG, totalling some 15 Gigs of disk space, which I need to turn into 3,000+ PDFs. I've found that using FO to create the PDFs is, so far, easier than the Perl modules I've tried, though it gives me a little less control (which I didn't really want anyway).
One thing that was hard to understand about XSLT is what tools to use to run the scripts. I've been using Instant Saxon, which was really easy to install and get going under Windows. There are some features of Xalan, notably the ability to talk to databases with JDBC that sound really interesting, but I haven't spent much time trying to get it to run yet.
7:23:55 PM Permalink
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Andrew Sullivan Says Paul Krugman Was Right All the Time.... If Paul Krugman had written this, I would have said that it is a little harsh and over-the-top. But it's from Andrew Sullivan, who has finally woken up to the fact that Paul Krugman has been right all the time in his harsh judgments of Bush Administration economic policy:
www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish: ...BUSH'S ACHILLES HEEL: It's the economy, smarty-pants... the explosive rate of current government spending... the president's utter insouciance about how to pay for it... his latest budget removes any [excuse for giving him the benefit of the doubt]... worse than Reagan... ratcheting up discretionary spending... no signs whatever of adjusting to meet the hole he and the Republican Congress are putting in the national debt... illiterate flimflam.... But as the tables in the budget also showed, the tax cuts have also contributed significantly to the deficit - and they've barely taken effect yet... staggered that the budget does not contain any mention of the looming war. I guess you could make a semantic point about its not being inevitable - but not even as a possible contingency? Is that how an ordinary citizen plans his own budget?... an awful legacy in the making. In the first three years of Bush's presidency, Chapman notes, non-defense discretionary government spending will have gone up an inflation-adjusted 18 percent.... But what really bugs me is that the president doesn't seem to give a damn... he told us last year that deficits would be temporary... this year... well he didn't say anything... Even after the last two years of budget-busting recklessness, he's still proposing spending increases far higher than the rate of inflation.... DEBT BE DAMNED: Then again, he might say: I'm deliberately creating new deficits because they're the only long-term way to keep domestic spending under control. But what this amounts to is saying I'm going to spend your hard-earned money now in order to persuade other people to stop spending your hard-earned money later. What other people? You're the government, Mr President. And your party controls all of Congress. There's no way you can pass the buck for plunging the next generation into debt... while blaming someone else... So why the flim-flam?... [Semi-Daily Journal]
Whew! Sullivan has been such a Bush supporter, this is really amazing.
3:43:17 PM Permalink
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New Chapter In The Tale Of The Booksellers. Generally speaking, it seems unwise to get into a price war online when it comes to products that are identical. Amazon.com has done a good job over the years selling the entire "experience" of buying from Amazon, such that some book buyers (clearly, not all) feel more comfortable buying there, even if it isn't the lowest price. Now, Overstock.com (a former Amazon.com partner) has decided to compete directly with Amazon.com in the book category by promising that they'll undercut Amazon's prices by 20% (though, they don't offer free shipping). Overstock is becoming increasingly aggessive in the e-commerce world as I guess they've realized that the supply of leftover products from out-of-business dot coms was drying up.
[Techdirt]
Isn't overstock.com Mike Doonesbury's company?
3:39:29 PM Permalink
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Hey Blair
We're still good for Wednesday.
Your email box is full, so messages to you are being bounced back. If you're home tonight give me a call (I won't be at my Mac until then) and we can figure out how to deal with it.
12:48:54 PM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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