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Thursday, December 16, 2004 |
KERIK / SOLDERBLOB.
And then there are those episodes of history that unravel with the breathtaking and utterly unexpected abruptness of a cashmere miniskirt catching on a chainlink fence... The ever-burgeoning subterranean history of Mr. Kerik being one of those, now.
How refreshing -- post-election reality having seemed nothing so much as soldering in space.
So does/did the White House know there was/wasn't a nanny?
[Gibson Blog]
11:29:58 PM 
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Not in my Radio news reader, so no special, last-an-extra-extra-extra-long-time hyperlink, so the link will expire (or, if you're a Webster student, you can still get it using Nexis at the Emerson Library's site):
Defense Missile for U.S. System Fails to Launch, By DAVID STOUT and JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr.
After a rocket carrying a mock warhead as a target was launched from Kodiak, Alaska, the interceptor, which was intended to go aloft 16 minutes later and home in on the target 100 miles over the earth, automatically shut down because of "an unknown anomaly," according to the Missile Defense Agency of the Defense Department.
The launching had been planned as the first full test in two years of this element of the Bush administration's effort to deploy a multilayered missile defense shield.
The setback threatened to delay further the initial step of activating a basic missile defense, which had once been planned for September but slipped into next year after a series of canceled tests and developmental difficulties.
The launching had been delayed several times because of bad weather or problems with equipment at the Pacific test range on Kwajalein Atoll, where officials must now try to determine what went wrong on Wednesday.
The last test of the interceptor, on Dec. 12, 2002, was also a failure, as the interceptor failed to separate from its booster rocket, missed its target by hundreds of miles and burned up in the atmosphere.
But shortly after that, President Bush ordered the Pentagon to proceed with initial deployment of a limited system, a goal that he campaigned on in the election this year.
Um, something he asserted in the 2000 campaign he would have accomplished by now (hence, the September target previously announced).
Here at A blog doesn't need a clever name, I am shocked, schocked to find that Star Wars/Strategic Defense Initiative/Missile Shield has failed. I've only been blogging about why pursuing a strategic defense, missile shield, Star Wars thingamabob is a bad idea for a few years.
Also, from earlier this year, and from two and three years ago.
5:27:35 AM
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Title 17 v. Reality (Donna Wentworth).
Frank Field, whom I miss dearly living out on this coast, is at Freedom v. Control, Rights Management in the Digital Age, where Jonathan Zittrain, Wendy Seltzer, Hal Abelson, and Siva Vaidhyanathan are speaking today. He's blogging as much of it as he can, and captures a few nice bits from Jonathan right off the bat:
"[In] the language of current copyright debate, libraries are bastions of organized piracy -- an organized conspiracy to share a book, rather than buy one; note that this [concept] runs up against yesterday’s Google search announcement in libraries."
"[We have] two copyright regimes - title 17 and reality - collision between these two regimes continues to shape everything that goes on in this."
[Copyfight]
Elsewhere, Siva notes:
Resources for my MIT Talk
Frank Field has Posted my PowerPoint Slides. You can get them here.
And a reminder that Frank is blogging the entire conference on Furdlog. Hal Abelson is doing his fabulous show right now.
And here is a PDF file of the uncorrected proofs of a paper that relates to my presentation. It's not final. You can find the final version of it in the latest issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political Science.
Please send me comments on the paper.
5:14:26 AM
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Social Structure and Opinion Formation.
Research paper about the fragility of opinions and the importance of highly connected individuals in opinion formation.
"We present a dynamical theory of opinion formation that takes explicitly into account the structure of the social network in which in- dividuals are embedded. The theory predicts the evolution of a set of opinions through the social network and establishes the existence of a martingale property, i.e. that the expected weighted fraction of the population that holds a given opinion is constant in time. Most importantly, this weighted fraction is not either zero or one, but corresponds to a non-trivial distribution of opinions in the long time limit. This co-existence of opinions within a social network is in agreement with the often observed locality effect, in which an opinion or a fad is localized to given groups without infecting the whole society. We verified these predictions, as well as those concerning the fragility of opinions and the importance of highly connected individuals in opinion formation, by performing computer experiments on a number of social networks. [unmediated]
5:12:51 AM
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New York feels lilke home.
Is it only me or anyone who loves the urban life in Tehran, happens to feel like home in New York? Never thought that the art of crossing the street as a pedestrian while the light is red for you would be useful anywhere else. You need to know about the body language of the cars and it's not a simple thing to learn.
If only Tehran was not so much polluted and you could still live in downtown. And if only it wasn't under the tasteless Hezbollahis with their small, rural and under-developed state of mind.
[Editor: Myself (English)]
5:12:29 AM
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December 16, 2004.
“When you're setting a price, you're sending a signal. If your competitor's software ranges in price from about $100 to about $500, and you decide, heck, my product is about in the middle of the road, so I'll sell it for $300, well, what message do you think you're sending to your customers? You're telling them that you think your software is ‘eh.’ I have a better idea: charge $1350. Now your customers will think, ‘oh, man, that stuff has to be the cat's whiskers since they're charging mad coin for it!’”
Camels and Rubber Duckies [Joel on Software]
5:05:27 AM
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Best undergrad college regardless of price?.
I know a high school senior with 1600 on his SATs. His parents were not sufficiently loving to change their last name to "Rodriguez" so he is not a shoo-in affirmative action candidate at America's most elite colleges. Nonetheless with his perfect SAT scores he ought to get into some pretty good schools. The question is where should he apply and attend?
After observing the behavior of MIT and Harvard faculty compared to professors at small town liberal arts schools I'm beginning to wonder if the biggest name schools represent a good choice even for a kid with infinite money. In the old days you had to worry about whether faculty at research universities would pay attention to undergrads amidst the distractions of applying for grants and supervising graduate students and postdocs to perform on those grants. Nothing has changed there except that competition for grants has become ever more fierce, forcing the professors to spend a bit more time applying and writing up results. For an undergrad who actually wants to see and do research it might make sense to choose a school like MIT where there are substantial opportunities for undergrads to get into labs. The professors might ignore the undergrads in the classes that they teach but they won't ignore the motivated undergrads helping with their funded research.
The big change compared to the 1960s and 1970s is the affordability of housing close to the campuses of some of the top research schools. A Harvard or MIT professor who wants to live in a family-sized house will either need to spend two hours per day commuting from the exurbs or two days per week consulting to pay for the $1.5 million house in Cambridge. In the old days a junior professor hurried from the classroom to the lab. Today she hurries from the classroom to the lab and then tries to depart the campus by 4 pm to beat the traffic out to the exurbs. She won't spend the evening taking her students out for dinner; if she is socializing it will be with folks unrelated to the university who live near her house.
For personal attention from the faculty it would seem that one should restrict one's college search to schools in areas where real estate is still cheap enough that professors live close to campus. Brown would be good. Harvard would be bad. Some schools are near cheap housing but are still bad due to the fact that they are in crime-ridden ghettos (Yale and Penn?). Amherst and Williams should be good.
What else should matter to the young male applicant? How about girls? The 17-year-old boy with 1600s on his SATs probably hasn't had time to become captain of the football team and do the other things that appeal to high school babes. Why then subject oneself to four more years of rejection and frustration by attending a college where girls are in short supply? Fifty-seven percent of bachelor's degrees are awarded to women in the U.S. Why not choose a school where women are at least 57 percent of the students? Remember that if 40 girls pair up with 40 boys that leaves 17 single girls for every 3 single guys!
Finally I guess we should tell the kid that if he and his parents don't have infinite money he should go wherever is cheap. A motivated student can learn at most of the better colleges in the U.S. A friend of mine was a brilliant high school student. She went to Tulane in New Orleans as an undergrad where they gave scholarships for smart kids and where she could have a good time. She went to MIT and got a PhD in physical science. People sometimes do ask where she did her PhD work. No potential employer would care where she was an undergrad. For any field in which a graduate degree will be required it doesn't make sense to spend family $$ on a fancy undergrad degree that nobody will care about (not even the grad school; they always ask "was this your best student in the last 10 years?" and no honest teacher at a top school is going to be able to say "yes" because being smart is so cheap at a place such as Harvard or MIT).
So... where do we tell young John Q. Nerdly to apply? He has the good test scores and public high school grades. He is considering majoring in Biology (smart kid!). He likes to climb rocks. He hasn't been doing that great with the ladies as far as I can tell (the best vehicle that he can generally muster is a dented 10-year-old Ford Taurus station wagon, which might explain some of this lack of success). His parents could suck it up to pay for an Ivy League no-merit-scholarship cartel university but they'd rather not. [Philip Greenspun Weblog]
5:04:50 AM
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