douglass carmichael: technology

Sun, 21 Nov 2004 02:50:12 GMT

Thinking about the image of america and the power of american culture. Note the last lines in the last paragraph from the excerpt.

whole article at

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/movies/14HOLLYWOOD.html?oref=login&;position=&oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=

The day before "Shrek 2" was set to have its premiere at Cannes, DreamWorks's representatives placed large plastic bags full of green Shrek ears along the Croisette, the bustling beachfront walkway that dominates the action in Cannes. Even before the festival began, it was feared that protesting French workers would shut it down over a labor dispute. On this day, a group of hundreds gathered outside the Carlton Hotel to denounce the war in Iraq. They were chanting in French for about 45 minutes, until the police broke up the demonstration. Then, as the protesters dissipated into the throng on the Croisette, I watched them, one by one, put on the free Shrek ears. They were attracted, it seemed, by the ears' goofiness and sheer recognizability. Immediately, the crowd, once filled with political fervor, was transformed into a sea of cartoon characters.

I felt embarrassed: America seemed, at best, an absurd, vaguely comic place. ....

Part of the reason I find the globalization of American movies unsettling is that I can't remember a time when the dialogue at cocktail parties or between friends or in office meetings has been so lively and political. The shift in the national conversation is missing in our global film identity. For the most part, present-day politics may be too complicated a subject for Hollywood to handle -- at least in ambitious feature films.

Fri, 19 Nov 2004 01:57:57 GMT

Korea, Iran, Judges, Economy, flat tax, ake your pick. Some good things...

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 17 - Google Inc. plans to announce on Thursday that it is adding a new search service aimed at scientists and academic researchers.

Google Scholar, which was scheduled to go online Wednesday evening at scholar.google.com, is a result of the company's collaboration with a number of scientific and academic publishers and is intended as a first stop for researchers looking for scholarly literature like peer-reviewed papers, books, abstracts and technical reports.

Google executives declined to say how many additional documents and books had been indexed and made searchable through the service. While the great majority of recent scholarly papers and periodicals are indexed on the Web, many have not been easily accessible to the public.

The engineer who led the project, Anurag Acharya, said the company had received broad cooperation from academic, scientific and technical publishers like the Association of Computing Machinery, Nature, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Online Computer Library Center.

The new Google service, which includes a listing of scientific citations as well as ways to find materials at libraries that are not online, will not initially include the text advertisements that are shown on standard pages for Google search results.

Wed, 20 Oct 2004 04:32:01 GMT

testing

http://calacanis.weblogsinc.com/entry/4349135256845547/

Tue, 24 Aug 2004 05:49:44 GMT

Part of the problem of the overly graphic portrayal of sexiness is that we begin to lose the distinction between real people and the perception of their surface. We are then ripe for the introduction into our lives of various mechancial surrogates.

http://www.artificial-life.com/

Tue, 24 Aug 2004 05:44:36 GMT

Here is a link for Sterling's fascinating speech referenced yesterday

http://www.boingboing.net/images/blobjects.htm

Mon, 23 Aug 2004 16:52:35 GMT

From bruce sterling (site at http://blog.wired.com/sterling/ but not the text).

The shape of things today is condemning our world to steadily increasing poverty, degradation, and turmoil.

Four planets couldn't supply the material and energy to let the world live the so-called advanced world lives now.

We're pretty advanced, but we're nowhere near advanced enough.

This may sound a bit alarmist and theoretical, so let me phrase it to you in a way that holds your own feet to the fire.

Steve Jobs is a pioneer of personal computing and the head of Pixar. Apple is the biggest vendor here. It's hard to get any more SIGGRAPH than Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs has neuroendocrinal pancreatic cancer. That's because, like everybody else in the world, like you and like me, Steve Jobs is carrying a load of carcinogens in his flesh. Silicon Valley, as an industrial clean-up site, is rather well known for its mutagens.

The disturbing substances that are in the body of this captain of your industry, they should not be in there.

They are wasted resources, they are systemic inefficiencies, they are externalities. We need ways to keep these substances organized and contained, and, eventually, designed out of the production system entirely. Steve is sick for physical reasons, for metabolic reasons. We may not know the exact chain of cause and effect, but there is one; he's not sick because some dark angel blew on his dice wrong. He has effluent, byproducts of industry, inside his body.

It's painful. But we need to understand that our bloodstreams are our dumping grounds. So are our lungs and our livers. If we could visualize that, if we knew and could prove what had gone wrong inside of ourselves, if we could put a digital medical imaging screen on our bellies, our lungs and our livers, and make those invisible problems visible, then everything would become different. If that knowledge was attached to every object in our possession, the objects that were killing us would vanish quickly.

That wouldn't be easy to do. But in the year 2004 it is no longer unimaginable. It could be done.

It's possible to live in a cleaner way. We live in debris and detritus because of our ignorance. That ignorance is no longer technically necessary.

Those who know, know. Instead, our problem is becoming obscurantism, which is a deliberate hiding of the facts by vested interests who know they are injuring us.

Such acts of evil must be combated. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Wanting to know, wanting to do it, that's half the struggle right there. Our capacities are tremendous.

Eventually, it is within our technical ability to create factories that clean the air as they work, cars that give off drinkable water, industry that creates parks instead of dumps, or even monitoring systems that allow nature to thrive in our cities, neighborhoods, lawns and homes. An industry that is not just "sustainable," but enhances the world.

The natural world should be better for our efforts and our ingenuity. It's not too much to ask.

You and I will never live to see a future world with those advanced characteristics. The people who will be living in it will pretty much take it for granted, anyway. But that is a worthy vision for today's technologists: because that is wise governance for a digitally conquered world. That is is not tyranny. That is legitimacy.

Without vision, the people perish. So we need our shimmering, prizes, goals to motivate ourselves, but the life is never in the prize. The living part, the fun part, is all in the wrangling. Those dark cliffs looming ahead == that is the height of your achievement.

We need to leap into another way of life.

The technical impetus is here. We are changing, but to what end? The question we must face is:

what do we want? We should want to abandon that which has no future. We should blow right through mere sustainability. We should desire a world of enhancement. That is what should come next. We should want to expand the options of those who will follow us.

We don't need more dead clutter to entomb in landfills.

We need more options.

Mon, 23 Aug 2004 16:45:22 GMT

The pace of technology continues. Is there a positive in it? The nature of all physical objects will change.

from http://stoprfid.org/rfid_overview.html

RFID: Tracking everything, everywhere
by Katherine Albrecht, CASPIAN

[Excerpted from: Albrecht, Katherine. "Supermarket Cards: The Tip of the Retail Surveillance Iceberg." Denver University Law Review, Volume 79, Issue 4, pp. 534-539 and 558-565.]

"In 5-10 years, whole new ways of doing things will emerge and gradually become commonplace. Expect big changes." ¹ - MIT's Auto-ID Center

Supermarket cards and retail surveillance devices are merely the opening volley of the marketers' war against consumers. If consumers fail to oppose these practices now, our long-term prospects may look like something from a dystopian science fiction novel.

A new consumer goods tracking system called Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is poised to enter all of our lives, with profound implications for consumer privacy. RFID couples radio frequency (RF) identification technology with highly miniaturized computers that enable products to be identified and tracked at any point along the supply chain. ²

The system could be applied to almost any physical item, from ballpoint pens to toothpaste, which would carry their own unique information in the form of an embedded chip. ³ The chip sends out an identification signal allowing it to communicate with reader devices and other products embedded with similar chips. ⁴

Analysts envision a time when the system will be used to identify and track every item produced on the planet. ⁵

A number for every item on the planet

RFID employs a numbering scheme called EPC (for "electronic product code") which can provide a unique ID for any physical object in the world. ⁶ The EPC is intended to replace the UPC bar code used on products today. ⁷

Unlike the bar code, however, the EPC goes beyond identifying product categories--it actually assigns a unique number to every single item that rolls off a manufacturing line. ⁸ For example, each pack of cigarettes, individual can of soda, light bulb or package of razor blades produced would be uniquely identifiable through its own EPC number. ⁹

Once assigned, this number is transmitted by a radio frequency ID tag (RFID) in or on the product. ¹⁰ These tiny tags, predicted by some to cost less than 1 cent each by 2004, ¹¹ are "somewhere between the size of a grain of sand and a speck of dust." ¹² They are to be built directly into food, clothes, drugs, or auto-parts during the manufacturing process. ¹³

Sun, 25 Jul 2004 16:10:32 GMT

You have probably seen this but worth knowing if not. The presence of very large waves and their impact on shipping.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/25/1090693835341.html?oneclick=true

Rogue waves are believed to have sunk more than 200 supertankers and container ships over the past two decades.
Long thought to be a myth, freak waves as high as 10-storey buildings are far more common than previously thought, the European Space Agency has found.
Severe weather has been responsible for the sinking of more than 200 supertankers and container ships over the past two decades, and rogue waves are believed to be the main cause, the agency said.
Three weeks of imaging data by the agency's satellites from early 2001 showed more than 10 individual giant waves around the globe of more than 25 metres in height. Previously, scientists believed that such large waves occurred only once every 10,000 years.
"Having proved they exist in higher numbers than anyone expected, the next step is to analyse if they can be forecast," said Wolfgang Rosenthal, a scientist at the GKSS research centre in Geesthacht, Germany.
In February 1995, the QE2 encountered a 29-metre rogue wave in the North Atlantic that Captain Ronald Warwick described as "a great wall of water - it looked as if we were going into the White Cliffs of Dover", the agency said.
And in the week between February and March 2001, two tourist cruisers, the Bremen and the Caledonian Star, had their bridge windows smashed by 30-metre rogue waves in the South Atlantic. The Bremen was left drifting without navigation or propulsion for some hours.
Advertisement Advertisement
"The same phenomenon could have sunk many less lucky vessels. Two large ships sink every week, on average, but the cause is never studied in the same detail as an air crash. It simply gets put down to 'bad weather'," Dr Rosenthal said.

Why don't they reach the mainland?

Fri, 16 Jul 2004 00:03:58 GMT

from a review of the new film, I,Robot. People will often scoff when i say about how science is often in religious categories. The transformation of humanity for example. Note here the use of the word "salvation." The question is, how much of the science enterprise is embedded in relgious thinking, even if the traces appear to be faded beyond recognition? Books like Doug Noble's Religion and Science make a strong case for the depth of tradition

July 15, 2004

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/15/movies/15NOTE.html

But these opposing visions coexist. On the one hand is the Frankenstein plot, on the other the quest for salvation; on the one hand is the danger of technology, on the other its promise. "I, Robot" can't quite decide. But perhaps when it comes to robots, we are all hybrids.

Tue, 29 Jun 2004 18:18:14 GMT

The enlightenment. The conventional view is as follows

The Legacy of the Enlightenment

http://learning.berkeley.edu/robertholub/research/essays/Legacy_of_Enlightenment.pdf

Since Enlightenment thinkers promulgated a world view that undermined traditional values and doctrines, it was inevitable that they would provoke rejoinders and objections from those who felt threatened. Many of the most heralded figures in the Enlightenment engaged in debates with representatives of the ancien regime, whose ideas and ideals in politics, religion, aesthetics, and philosophy were suddenly called into question. Indeed, the history of the Enlightenment can be written as a series of conflicts between a new approach to nature and human endeavors, on the one hand, and the retrograde and futile attempts to counter this approach, on the other.

This is a false choice. It forces the humane and non discrete theorists to be idnetified with retrograde thinking. The real choice going forward is between a reductionistic mechanical digital approach vs a poetic, indeterminate world of infinite variation and uncalculability.

In some instances this sort of anti-Enlightenment critique seeks to recognize dimensions of human activity that are left unilluminated by enlightened thought, thus demonstrating that light has been shed on only a portion of human existence, and that the human being in his entirety has been ignored.

Thu, 24 Jun 2004 20:58:51 GMT

social networking

Wanted: New Friend, Must Have Bluetooth

Wed Jun 23, 2004 12:31 PM ET

<http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Student Gracinia Lim has made new friends thanks to mobile phone software that alerts her to compatible people nearby.

She is an early customer of a service in Singapore called BEDD that uses Bluetooth wireless communications to scan strangers' phones for their personal profiles.

The application joins a swelling number of Internet and mobile phone based services that offer to widen people's social networks.

Users download the BEDD software into a compatible phone, complete a short profile of themselves and include a description of who they want to befriend, or an item they want to buy or sell.

The software automatically searches for and exchanges profiles with other phones that come within a 20-meter (65 ft) radius. Matched users are given each other's contact details.

"I've become close with people that I've never known before, built up a close clique of friends whom I chill out with, sleep over at their homes and go for late suppers with," said Lim, 19.

Wed, 23 Jun 2004 20:04:44 GMT

This is interesting and it had not occurred to me (I love these little doses of humilation) that animals don't "hear" what we hear.

-----Original Message-----
From: NHNE [mailto:nhne@nhne.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 2004 12:13 AM
To: *News List
Subject: [nhnenews] Early Hominid Ears Primed for Speech

EARLY HOMINID EARS PRIMED FOR SPEECH

By Bob Holmes and Shaoni Bhattacharya

New Scientist

June 22, 2004

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996053

Early humans evolved the anatomy needed to hear each other talk at least

350,000 years ago. This suggests rudimentary form of speech developed early

on in our evolution.

The conclusion comes from studies of fossilised skulls discovered in the

mountains of Spain. A team of Spanish and US researchers used CT scans to

measure the bones and spaces in the outer and middle ears of five specimens,

thought to belong to Homo heidelbergensis. This species is thought to be a

relative of the ancestral line leading to neanderthals.

The team worked out how well the hearing apparatus they found could respond

to sounds of various frequencies.

The hominids' ears would have been sensitive to frequencies between two to

four kilohertz, the range most important for understanding human speech.

Chimpanzees' ears are relatively insensitive at those frequencies. Their

ears are most strongly attuned to sounds peaking at either one kHz or eight

kHz.

Thu, 10 Jun 2004 21:22:37 GMT

New Ice age, global climate picture

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99995094

As long as humans do not mess it up, the Earth's climate is set at fair for the next 15,000 years. That is according to information extracted from the oldest ice core ever drilled.

The Antarctic core is the first to reach as far back as a warm period with characteristics similar to our own interglacial. So it should help make more accurate predictions about when to expect the next deep freeze.

The ice core, drilled from a feature in central Antarctica called Dome C, is around 3 kilometres long and 10 centimetres wide. Changes in the relative proportions of hydrogen isotopes in the ice layers allow scientists to compile a complete record of Antarctic temperatures going back 740,000 years.

The core shows the waxing and waning of eight ice ages. Most critically for making predictions about our climate, it is the first core to record a period known as Termination V, around 430,000 years ago.

Getting warming and cooling accurate, and seeing the hurrying or delaying effects of either, will be a driver of society, probably for the rest of humanity's life. The problems I see are two

1. paying attention tends to support technocratic centralist governance. Are we really ready for star trek?

2. it tends to support precluding other directions. For example, to understand that the earth has a cycle supports business, because business thrives on change and providing tech solutions to material issues. We could have opted for other directions, for example, a society focused on the deep understanding of poetry, so that all children memorized, structures were known, and the history fussed over.

Humanity should be flexible enough, but may not be, to chose its path wisely. This does not mean pretending that climate change isn't real, but it does imply a shifted interest. After all, which is more real, poetry, or that the sun will eventually go out?

Sat, 05 Jun 2004 18:50:53 GMT

The technocratic runs on a myth of bits, bytes and bricks: that the world is an ensemble of things, and so are you and I.

"Three billion bases can be put on a single compact disc (CD), and one will be able to pull a CD out of one's pocket and say, 'Here's a human being; it's me!'"

Walter Gilbert, "A Vision of the Grail," in The Code of Codes (ed.DJ Kevles and L. Hood, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992), p. 96.

referenced in http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~consbio/Cons/Historical2003.pdf

Fri, 14 May 2004 01:01:34 GMT

On technology and vulnerability

New flaw takes Wi-Fi off the air

By Patrick Gray, Security Focus (drew.cullen@theregister.co.uk)

Published Thursday 13th May 2004 21:29 GMT

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/13/wifi_security_flaw/>

A newly-discovered vulnerability in the 802.11 wireless standard allows attackers to jam wireless networks within a radius of one kilometre using off-the-shelf equipment.

Affecting various hardware implementations of the IEEE 802.11 wireless networking standard - including widely used 802.11b devices - the flaw was found in the collision avoidance routines used to prevent multiple devices from transmitting at the same moment."When under attack, the device behaves as if the channel is always busy, preventing the transmission of any data over the wireless network," a security advisory (http://www.auscert.org.au/render.html?it=4091) released by AusCERT reads.

The weakness allows miscreants to take down networks within five seconds, according to researchers at Australia's Queensland University of Technology's Information Security Research Centre (ISRC), which discovered the vulnerability.

Thu, 13 May 2004 23:55:21 GMT

Why, if mutations got us here, are they a bad thing? Study says mutations from pollution transmit across generations (of course, this implication of the theory rarely drawn). So the question, why worry? Doesn't selection work? The obvious answer is that in modern society, we deal with bad genes by speciial medical and educational sustainers. So evolution can't work? What more?

Thu, 22 Apr 2004 16:53:18 GMT

On Japanese science and tech priorities

http://www.atip.org/public/atip.reports.04/atip04.016.pdf

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 21:31:39 GMT

Oil future..

Oman's Oil Yield Long in Decline, Shell Data Show
By JEFF GERTH and STEPHEN LABATON
Published: April 8, 2004

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/08/business/08OIL.html?hp

The Royal Dutch/Shell Group's oil production in Oman has been declining for years, belying the company's optimistic reports and raising doubts about a vital question in the Middle East: whether new technology can extend the life of huge but mature oil fields.
Internal company documents and technical papers show that the Yibal field, Oman's largest, began to decline rapidly in 1997. Yet Sir Philip Watts, Shell's former chairman, said in an upbeat public report in 2000 that "major advances in drilling" were enabling the company "to extract more from such mature fields." The internal Shell documents suggest that the figure for proven oil reserves in Oman was mistakenly increased in 2000, resulting in a 40 percent overstatement.

Sun, 04 Apr 2004 23:35:45 GMT

This should be read for the details.

How the Department of Homeland Security is becoming a big man on campus

htt.Tv//www lawppklv pnm/ink/nrintme.Dhp?eid=52335

Only the Manhattan Project or America's space program can compare to the commitment of federal resources and political will that have been lavished on the Department of Homeland Security, .... all, if nine rural Minnesota fire departments could receive $600,517 in grants from a DHS division and the Little League World Series land $250,000 from the Pennsylvania Commonwealth's own homelandsecurity office, why shouldn't higher education get a little of the runoff? Not surprisingly, then, nearly every college today offers some homeland-security and terror-themed courses, while many major universities have established homeland-security departments — DC Berkeley's Lawrence Laboratory has a homeland-security office; UCLA's Extension school offers homeland-security courses; and there are homeland sub-departments at Johns Hopkins, MIT and Ohio State University. Likewise, high-profile conferences and symposia on homeland-security issues have become staples for public-policy institutes, strategic-studies think tanks and engineering schools. .... Even if George W. Bush were to be turned out of office in November the Department of Homeland Security is here to stay. It is already too big and too self-perpetuating to go away, and every day its presence on American campuses grows. The Cold War showed how even hardscience research is affected by political climate, and, of course, the Bush White House has displayed a whimsical attitude in selecting which science is "real" and which is "pagan" when it comes to matters like global warming and birth control. The impulse to return to the time before 9/11 is natural, but ....

Sun, 04 Apr 2004 18:04:06 GMT

This is just beautiful. Feynman was active at caltech when i was an undergrad, and he had a major influence on my life, hinting that science was a commited way of seeeing the world,for its intrinsic beauty, , not a career.

Which end is nearer to God, if I may use a religious metaphor, beauty and hope, or the fundamental laws? I think that the right way, of course, is to say that what we have to look at is the whole structural interconnection of the thing; and that all the sciences, and not just the sciences but all the efforts of intellectual kinds, are an endeavor to see the connections of the hierarchies, to connect beauty to history, to connect history to man's psychology, man's psychology to the working of the brain, the brain to the neural impulse, the neural impulse to the chemistry, and so forth, up and down, both ways. And today we cannot, and it is no use making believe that we can, draw carefully a line all the way from one end of this thing to the other, because we have only just begun to see that there is this relative hierarchy.
And I do not think either end is nearer to God. To stand at either end, and to walk off that end of the pier only, hoping that out in that direction is the complete understanding, is a mistake. And to stand with evil and beauty and hope, or to stand with the fundamental laws, hoping that way to get a deep understanding of the whole world, with that aspect alone, is a mistake. It is not sensible for the ones who specialize at the other end, to have such disregard for each other. (They don't actually, but people say they do.) The great mass of workers in between, connecting one step to another, are improving all the time our understanding of the world, both from working at the ends and working in the middle, and in that way we are gradually understanding this tremendous world of interconnecting hierarchies.

http://www.southerncrossreview.org/33/feynman.htm

Mon, 29 Mar 2004 21:30:28 GMT

Tech controlled by market, not by wisdom, nor any toehr social process,if it can be built, some will come.

http://www.gizmo.com.au/public/News/news.asp?articleid=2750

Scubadoo is an underwater motorcycle which lets even inexperienced divers bop around under the waves. An integrated tank fills the dome with air, letting the driver breathe (and drink beer) normally while cruising at speeds of up to 2.5 knots. Initial price is recommended to be around $13,000, with the first units available in May. As a scuba diver, I'm torn: in the hands of an unconscientious pilot, the Scubadoo could cause a lot of damage to delicate marine habitats, yet I really want to ride around in the world's first underwater biker gang punching sharks.

Mon, 29 Mar 2004 21:26:55 GMT

Technology can cause problems..

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/29/technology/29nano.html?ex=1081141200&;en=16276286ce5a855c&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE

Buckyballs, the spherical carbon molecules important to many current nanotechology projects (and much of your future gadgetry), has been found to cause brain damage and affect liver cells in fish. While the doctor running the toxicity experiment cautioned that the discovery was "a yellow light, not a red one," the information does rekindle awareness of the potential dangers in creating new molecular structures that interact with our own tissue. Because even if buckyballs and carbon nanotubes lead to discoveries that make us a species of immortal superhumans, what kind of eternal utopia would it be if all the fish were retarded? Not one I'll be levitating cupcakes with my mind in, for sure

What will the impact of the Internet be on what we say?

Sat, 27 Mar 2004 20:10:14 GMT

The internet can can bring distant events into your neighborhood. This in less than a day, from Billmon

www.billmon.org

Book Reports

I am equally troubled that someone would sell a book, trading on their former service as a government insider with access to our nation's most valuable intelligence...

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist
Remarks on the Senate Floor
March 26, 2004

Caveat: Realism, Reagan and Foreign Policy
by Alexander M. Haig
MacMillan Publishing Company; 1984

Less and less time passes between the moment our high officials leave office and the publication of their memoirs. General Haig's appear only twenty-one months after his dismissal ... Reading it, one does not know what to admire less, the mind of the author or the workings of the Reagan administration, which he describes and condemns.

New York Review of Books

Under Fire: An American Story
By Oliver North and William Novak
21st Century Press; 1991

Written in secret as if it were a covert operation, then suddenly released, this is unquestionably the "event" book of the year. Here, finally, we might expect to get answers to our questions about what became known as "Iran-contra." ... North writes that Reagan "knew everything" about Iran-contra's covert operations. So too did Vice President Bush.

Library Journal

Fighting for Peace: Seven Critical Years in the Pentagon
By Caspar Weinberger
Warner Books; 1990

He believes the president made only one major mistake, which Weinberger refers to as "the Iranian hostage activity." In his chapter on the Iran- contra scandal he identifies former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane as a primary villain in the affair, characterizing him as a man lacking in intellect, moral principle or historical understanding.

Publishers Weekly

Special Trust
By Robert C. MacFarlane
Cadell & Davies; 1994

In this absorbing personal memoir, former National Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane ... provides a riveting account of behind-the-scenes White House maneuvering and how personal agendas and the misuse of power have affected global politics and led to declining trust in elected officials.

Amazon

Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State
by George P. Shultz
Scribner's; 1993

The former Secretary of State recounts his years in that position, discussing Reagan's foreign policy, the power struggle between the State Department and the NSC, George Bush's involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal, and more.

Germany Unified and Europe Transformed
By Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice
Harvard University Press, 1995

Written by two former members of George Bush's National Security Council staff, this book is an exhaustive investigation into the delicate diplomatic maneuvering that led to the creation of a unified Germany in 1989-90 ... The result is a detailed and fascinating account of behind-the-scenes discussions and deliberations.

Gilmore on investment in silicon valley

Sun, 14 Mar 2004 22:27:57 GMT

The fuutre of the US depends on those who think it has a future. Of course, it must, but what kind? Emrabraing high tech and entreprenurial acgtivity, or environmentalism - just to pick one axis. Here is one take.

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/columnists/dan_gillmor/8184128.htm

Can Silicon Valley compete in a true global economy? Once, this would have seemed like a foolish question. No more.

The valley, and America as a whole, had enormous competitive advantages for decades. But conditions have changed in dramatic ways -- such as the composition of the global workforce and emerging entrepreneurialism in other places....

Robot race

Sun, 14 Mar 2004 01:00:22 GMT

Now

Robot race ends without a winner

$1 million prize goes unclaimed

BARSTOW, California (AP) -- A $1 million race across the Mojave Desert by driverless robots ended Saturday after all 15 entries either broke down or withdrew, a race official said.

Two of the entries covered about seven miles of the roughly 150-mile course while eight failed to make it to the one-mile mark. Others crashed seconds after starting.

The race ended just before 11 a.m. after the final four competitors were disabled, said Col. Jose Negron, race program manager.

Competitors suffered a variety of problems that included stuck brakes, broken axles, rollovers and malfunctioning satellite navigation equipment.

One six-wheeled robot built by a Louisiana team was disqualified after it became entangled in barbed wire.

"It's a tough challenge -- it's a grand challenge -- you can always bet that it's not doable. But if you don't push the limits, you can't learn,"

said Ensco Inc. engineer Venkatesh Vasudevan, shortly after his company's entry rolled onto its side several hundred yards from the starting gate.

The Pentagon's research and development agency planned to award $1 million to the first team whose microcircuit-and-sensor-studded vehicle could cover the roughly 150-mile course in less than 10 hours.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was sponsoring the Grand Challenge to foster development of autonomous vehicles that could be used in combat.

Defense officials foresee using the driverless, remote control-free robots to ferry supplies in war zones.

Find this article at:

<http://edition.cnn.com/2004/TECH/ptech/03/13/darpa.race.ap/index.html>

I love the effort for its creativity, but the idea that they would be used to ferry supplies rather than say bombs? Too naive.