Wednesday, January 25, 2006

See, I Told You So I told you a few weeks back that all companies take turns being beaten up for following the laws in China. This week it's Google. Now you won't catch me defending Google very often, because I basically think that they're evil -- and especially evil and deceitful when it comes to privacy. But in this case, I will come to their defense, for all the reasons I defended MSN. We do not want a world where companies decide which laws they will and will not follow in diferent countries around the globe. No company has the moral authority to do that. If we don't like the laws, then we talk to the lawmakers and the diplomats. We live in a world where companies, trade, and economies are gobal. That is just reality. Companies need to act differently in different parts of the world, based upon the local laws and customs. That is also reality. A few weeks back, the Economist had a graph showing relative freedom of speech in countries around the globe. Surprisingly, the US did not top the list. I will try to dig it up and add a link. 6:33:07 PM    comment []

Lots of recent IT workforce news There's lots of updates on the IT workforce statistics front. Last month, the Department of Labor updated their projections for job outlook over the next decade (they do this every other year). CRA has a summary, and a link to the DOL full report. Bottom line: 1 million new IT jobs in the next decade. On the salary front, the news is mixed. Here's an article from eWeek with a rather inflammatory headline, discussing a recently released report. Mostly this article confuses me, because I'm not sure the numbers add up and in some places their conclusions don't fit their data. Example: Compensation for all positions surveyed, ranging from CIO to entry-level jobs, remained relatively flat during the final quarter of 2005, as it has for the last several quarters, with the mean compensation level increasing slightly to $74,636 at year's end, compared with a figure of $69,579 in the last quarter of 2004. Hello? That's over $5000, and increase of around 8% -- far outstripping inflation. And that's certainly not "relatively flat." But lots of other things in here, like breakouts in salaries for various positions, and stats about the percentage of IT workers who get company-paid health insurance. Here's a BusinessWeek article, confirming that companies are hiring tech workers. 6:22:27 PM    comment []

101 Dumbest Moments in Business Hot off the presses: 101 Dumbest Moments in Business of 2005. 5:37:54 PM    comment []

Specter Takes On Gonzalez Senator Arlen Specter sent a letter to Attorney General Gonzalez, with specific requests for what he would like Gonzalez to discuss in his opening statement. A strongly worded letter, from one Republican to another. This might turn out to be fun to watch. 5:33:24 PM    comment []

The Politics of Research Here's an interesting twist. Grad students at Oregon State University submit a paper to a peer-reviewed scientific journal on the effects of logging after a forest fire. The paper gets accepted. However, several faculty members at OSU have issues with the quality of the paper and are trying to stop publication. Of course, there's politics and conflict of interest involved too. Some of the faculty have made a career out of taking the opposite stand from what the paper in question's conclusion. So who should trump: the faculty at the students' school, or the peer-review panel of the journal? My vote: the peer-review panel. While peer review panels certainly make mistakes, it's the gold standard in the scientific community and the foundation upon which everything else is built. And by the way, in this particular case all of the faculty who are objecting would be unable to peer-review the work; they all would be required to recuse themselves for having at least one conflict of interest (same institution as the author) and possibly two (funding tied to a particular the research results).   5:30:23 PM    comment []

Changing the World, One Swimmer at a Time Here's a really cool article about how computer science students at George Washington University have been creating software to help the US Swim Team. Thanks to Chris Stephenson at the CSTA for the link. 5:20:13 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2006 Kevin Schofield. Last update: 2/1/2006; 11:05:10 PM.