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Sunday, October 17, 2004 |
JFP Preliminary Analysis.
Here is some analysis of how the jobs in the October 2004 JFP break down. This is obviously a preliminary analysis of what’s available this season, because we still have to see the November numbers, but I think it’s of some interest. I’ll mostly post the numbers here, analysis will wait. But I can’t help but note that the numbers for logic and philosophy of science are very low, with many open jobs being some compensation for this. [Thoughts Arguments and Rants]
10:22:28 PM 
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US political parties ramp up the databases.
Both American major political parties are running vast databases of voter information. The Democrats have fired up Demzilla from Plus Three, while the Republicans enjoy the Vault, built offshore.
The more data the parties have, and the more ways they search, collate, cross-reference and puree them, using data-mining kung fu perfected by generations of direct marketers, the more precisely they can tailor their pitches to individual voters. Undecided black housewives under 35 will get very different phone calls from the Kerry campaign than Hispanic CEOs over 60. Data mining also helps the parties find, and sway, those all-important swing voters. (thanks to Peter Rothman)
[Smart Mobs]
10:19:00 PM
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STUDY WHAT WE DO.
"In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"
--Ron Suskind, "Without a Doubt", New York Times Magazine
[Gibson Blog]
10:12:49 PM
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Adam Curry: "A lot of people have been questioning the use of licensed music in Podcasts and I too feel that the time has come to face any legal ramifications of this audio wave we're riding now, and not let it take us by surprise." [Scripting News]
10:12:27 PM
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Total Recall: a Personal Information Management System.
The aim for the Total Recall project is to design and develop a personal information management system which will securely collect, store, and disseminate data from a variety of personal sensors. It will also allow customizable searching, analysis, and querying of this data, in a secure manner. Numerous applications of such systems will play an important role in improving people's quality of life.
via Tripp, who has written up some pretty good notes from the CARPE conference: "The First ACM Workshop on Continuous Archival and Retrieval of Personal Experiences". wish i were there....
[unmediated]
10:06:32 PM
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West Virginia's Global Grid Exchange.
West Virginia is to launch its Global Grid Exchange this fall,which is "open public infrastructure that will bring together idle or unused computer processing power throughout the state,"Federal Computer Week reports."The grid is funded through the state's Economic Development Authority, and developed under the West Virginia High Technology Consortium Foundation.Participants hope that bringing together unused computing resources via the Internet will create a grid that provides a common and inexpensive infrastructure for government, academia and industry.According to state officials, the Global Grid Exchange will be the largest public computing grid in the world,"the article states.
West Virginia to start grid [Smart Mobs]
10:01:22 AM
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Reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson's covering a Super Bowl game by rapping out the lede to next year's Super Bowl story:
In Retrospect
Howdy, November 3rd. This is October 15th speaking...
I'm interested in how retrospective knowledge colors our interpretation of events. Once the election outcome is known, we'll be able to go back and assign things their proper significance. We'll "know", for example, whether Kerry was really as convincing in the debates as he seemed at the time -- or whether it was another case of winning the debates but not the affection of voters.
If he loses, Kerry will be remembered as a disappointing candidate who squandered the opportunity to defeat a president weakened by blunders and misstatements. But if he prevails, he'll be thought of as a surprising, resourceful candidate who faced a tough challenge -- beating an incumbent commander-in-chief during wartime -- and rose to the occasion.
Two imaginary wrap-ups:
"Kerry hammered away at Bush's blunders in Iraq and the dislocation and despair caused by economic turmoil, but was unable to provide a convincing alternative -- he articulated the problems well, but his proposals were half-baked. Voters may have become disenchanted with Bush, but they didn't buy the idea that Kerry could do a better job, and in the end they decided to go with the devil they knew."
"Bush tried every trick in the book, from smear campaigns to strategically-timed terror alerts; he deployed well-tested Republican mantras and his signature 'folksy' charm, but in the end his failures caught up with him. Kerry successfully challenged him in the area where most people gave Bush the advantage -- national security -- and looked more presidential during the debates, while Bush seemed to have caught Al Gore's multiple personality disorder. Kerry's job was to offer voters a believable alternative to an incumbent president, and he got the job done."
I'm writing these down so I can check back on them in 2 1/2 weeks. Both sound plausible. Which one will have turned out to be true in hindsight? [Global Suburb]
9:57:43 AM
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