Saturday, September 10, 2005

Flooding Puts Universities in a Bind Regarding Tuition. Tulane University has to decide what to do with the millions in tuition it has collected for fall classes that are now canceled. By SAM DILLON and KAREN W. ARENSON. [NYT > Education] 6:14:24 PM    comment []

Get Fireant: Find and Watch Video on the Web. Brand new public beta versions of Fireant released for Mac and PC! Fireant is an RSS video aggregator and media player. Subscribe to any RSS 2.0 channel and automatically download fresh media content to watch and listen to. Get Fireant and prepare to get addicted. [unmediated] 12:22:00 PM    comment []

Search Engine of Free, GNU FDL, Creative Commons Images. I'm always wary of search engines for free/public domain images -- I'm always worried you're going to find something useful that's not as free/GNU FDL/PubDom/Creative Common'd as it's supposed to be. But I was reading an interview with the owner of Yotophoto, and when he said, "We have contacted all the sites we index, and all the feedback has all been very positive." I felt a little better... Yotophoto ( http://www.yotophoto.com ) has indexed over 100,000 images that are licensed under Creative Commons, GNU FDL, are public domain, or various other flavors of free. I did a search for 28 results. Results show thumbnails of the content, the site from which the image is indexed, the size, and the license under which the image is available. In some cases there's also a link to view the license. Clicking on the thumbnail takes you straight to the page. Yotophoto also has an advanced search that allows you to narrow your search by both size and license. In this case searching for public domain images of hummingbird gave only three results. [ResearchBuzz] 12:20:21 PM    comment []

More of Beth's Homeowners Association developments: I Feel "Violated" Too. I have frequently used my blog to complain about hoas who go to great lengths to hassle their own neighbors by constantly issuing violation notices for minor infractions.  In fact, the chief reason I've volunteered to work for my own hoa is that I want to live in a place that operates differently.  IMO, there's no point in "violating" people who basically do a good job of maintaining their homes.  Violation letters, if sent at all, should be reserved for those homes where owners really let things fall apart over long periods of time.  Otherwise, the letters can destroy the positive neighborhood feeling that a good hoa should try to create. [Now that some of my neighbors have learned about my blog, I feel compelled to emphasize that I am speaking for myself here, not the hoa board.] I make no secret of my hoa philosophy.  I have even, in a recent series of since-deleted posts, bragged about my hoa philosophy.  In fact, I've received my share of grief for this philosophy, including an actual death threat a few months ago that was inspired by someone's overgrown lawn.  No joke. So you can imagine my feelings when I came home from work to a management report thick with a list of violation letters that have already been sent out.  With errors in them.  To my neighbors.  Who are already angry at me about the color of my house. I don't even know what emoticon to use here. Had I known about these letters in advance, I would have stopped them (or at least tried to stop them--I only have one vote) from being sent, for several reasons: My neighbors' homes look good. At least two of the neighbors who received "You need to paint" letters have already told me they are planning to paint.  Another guy who got a "repair your lawn" letter had already told me he was concerned about his lawn.  Why send violation letters to people who are already planning to fix up their homes?  That just angers people.  Witness my own reaction to the petition my husband and I received recently. The violation letters appear to be retaliation, when in actuality, they were solely motivated by the desire of the property manager to do a good job.  (Many communities delegate this responsibility entirely to the property manager.  I thought our board had made it clear that we wished to follow a "no letters to be sent w/o prior board approval" policy, even though such a policy is not common practice, but apparently we have not made it clear enough.) I'll be taking up the violations issue w/the board at the next meeting, but in the meantime, I'm not sure what to do about my neighbors who received the letters.  Ordinarily, I'd seek them out f2f and apologize, but the hostility on my block has been high enough that I don't think I have the courage anymore.  Plus, it seems (from the recent petition and subsequent conversations) that some of my neighbors want the hoa board to be issuing MORE violations rather than less, so I'm not certain that explaining my "build good feeling" philosophy and promising to redouble my efforts in that direction would make them feel any better.  Plus, I don't think they are inclined to believe me. Any advice for me, Gentle Readers? Interestingly, my in-laws rec'd two violation letters (one for a minor infraction, the other simply confusing).  My husband and I will of course be doing the prescribed chores at their house, so we haven't escaped that particular burden.  Actually, I shouldn't say "my husband and I" will be doing those chores because I will probably just ask him to take care of it. [iBeth] 12:19:51 PM    comment []

Who Killed the Virtual Case File? By Harry Goldstein. In the early 1990s, Russian mobsters partnered with Italian Mafia families in Newark, N.J., to skim millions of dollars in federal and New Jersey state gasoline and diesel taxes. Special Agent Larry Depew set up an undercover sting operation under the direction of Robert J. Chiaradio, a supervisor at the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Washington, D.C., headquarters. Depew collected reams of evidence from wiretaps, interviews, and financial transactions over the course of two and a half years. Unfortunately, the FBI couldn't provide him with a database program that would help organize the information, so Depew wrote one himself. He used it to trace relationships between telephone calls, meetings, surveillance, and interviews, but he could not import information from other investigations that might shed light on his own. So it wasn't until Depew mentioned the name of a suspect to a colleague that he obtained a briefcase that his friend had been holding since 1989. When I opened it up, it was a treasure trove of information about who's involved in the conspiracy, including the Gambino family, the Genovese family, and the Russian components. It listed percentages of who got what, when people were supposed to pay, the number of gallons. It became a central piece of evidence, Depew recalled during an interview at the FBI's New Jersey Regional Computer Forensic Laboratory, in Hamilton, where he is the director. Had I not just picked up the phone and called that agent, I never would have gotten it. A decade later, Depew's need to share information combined with his do-it-yourself database skills and connection to his old supervisor, Chiaradio, would land him a job managing his first IT project - the FBI's Virtual Case File. Depew's appointment to the FBI's VCF team was an auspicious start to what would become the most highly publicized software failure in history. The VCF was supposed to automate the FBI's paper-based work environment, allow agents and intelligence analysts to share vital investigative information, and replace the obsolete Automated Case Support (ACS) system. Instead, the FBI claims, the VCF's contractor, Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), in San Diego, delivered 700 000 lines of code so bug-ridden and functionally off target that this past April, the bureau had to scrap the US $170 million project, including $105 million worth of unusable code. However, various government and independent reports show that the FBI - lacking IT management and technical expertise—shares the blame for the project's failure. In a devastating 81-page audit, released in 2005, Glenn A. Fine, the U.S. Department of Justice's inspector general, described eight factors that contributed to the VCF's failure. Among them: poorly defined and slowly evolving design requirements; overly ambitious schedules; and the lack of a plan to guide hardware purchases, network deployments, and software development for the bureau. Fine concluded that four years after terrorists crashed jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the FBI, which had been criticized for not "connecting the dots" in time to prevent the attacks, still did not have the software necessary to connect any new dots that might come along. And won't for years to come. The archaic Automated Case Support system - which some agents have avoided using - is cumbersome, inefficient, and limited in its capabilities, and does not manage, link, research, analyze, and share information as effectively or timely as needed, Fine wrote. [T]he continued delays in developing the VCF affect the FBI's ability to carry out its critical missions. 11:49:26 AM    comment []

Four Benton Headlines: MEDIA MOGULS, NOT LOOTERS, KILLED KATRINA'S TRUTH TELLERS [Commentary] For the first 120 hours after Hurricane Katrina, TV journalists were let off their leashes by their mogul owners, the result of a rare conjoining of flawless timing (summer^?s biggest vacation week) and foulest tragedy (America^?s worst natural disaster). The depth of their reporting, unashamed to show their outrage, bested almost anything written by the most talented and experienced newspaper reporters. And the rawness of that televised despair spurred a still-new generation of Internet blogs and Web magazines to abandon their potty-mouthed snarking for long enough to start snarling at the proliferation of government lies and lying liars who tell them. All of a sudden, broadcasters, and the Web media who shadow them, narrated disturbing images of the poor, the minority, the aged, the sick and the dead, and discussed complex issues like poverty, race, class, infirmity and ecology, that never make it on the air ^? in this Swift Boat/gay marriage/Michael Jackson media-sideshow era. But the truth telling soon turned to backslapping. Lost amid all the self-congratulation by broadcasters once the crisis point had been passed was the fact that TV journalists went back to business-as-usual by the weekend. Their choke chains had been yanked by no-longer-inattentive parent-company bosses who, fearful of any FCC regulatory fallout from fingering FEMA and the Bush Administration, decided yet again to sacrifice community need for corporate greed. Now comes the real test of pathos vs. profit: whether the TV newscasters will spend the fresh reservoir of truth and trust earned with the public to challenge FEMA^?s attempt to perpetrate a campaign of mass deception. [SOURCE: LA Weekly, AUTHOR: Nikke Finke] OFFICIAL BLOCKS RADIO STATION FOR HURRICANE EVACUEES A low-power radio station for evacuees from Hurricane Katrina that was prepared to launch Wednesday at the Houston Astrodome likely will not go on the air because of a denial by the "incident commander" at the stadium, radio volunteers said. The station was granted a temporary FCC license and had support from the Texas governor's office, as well as city officials. But R.W. Royall, incident commander of the joint information committee responsible for emergency operations at the Astrodome complex, denied the radio volunteers' efforts to launch the station. Because Royall's denial did not specify reasons, "I can only speculate as to what they found particularly worrisome," said Jim Ellinger, who heads Austin Airwaves, a nonprofit community radio group in Austin, Texas, involved in the project. Gloria Roemer, another emergency official at the center, said the Astrodome could not the spare the electricity. Ellinger said he could operate the station on battery power, but Roemer insisted that the denial is final. According to Ellinger, Roemer said, "Only [Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael] Brown or President Bush can override" Royall's decision. [SOURCE: Technology Daily, AUTHOR: Drew Clark] PLANS BY 13 NATIONS URGES OPEN TECHNOLOGY STANDARDS In a report to be presented at the World Bank today, a group that includes senior government officials from 13 countries will urge nations to adopt open-information technology standards as a vital step to accelerate economic growth, efficiency and innovation. The 33-page report is a road map for creating national policies on open technology standards, and comes at a time when several countries -- and some state governments -- are pursuing plans to reduce their dependence on proprietary software makers, notably Microsoft, by using more free, open-source software. The project, begun by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School, gathered government officials from China, India, Thailand, Denmark, Jordan, Brazil and elsewhere at a three-day meeting in Silicon Valley in February to discuss technology standards and economic development. The meeting was followed by e-mail exchanges, conference calls and postings on a shared Web site. The group defines an open standard as technology that is not owned by a single company and is openly published. Still, there is a huge debate in industry and among policy makers about how far openness should go. The report makes clear that government policy should "mandate technology choice, not software development models." [SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Steve Lohr] Intellectual Property: Improvements Needed to Better Manage Patent Office Automation and Address Workforce Challenges Testimony by Anu K. Mittal, director, science and technology issues, and Linda D. Koontz, director, information management issues, before the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property, House Committee on the Judiciary. GAO-05-1008T [SOURCE: Government Accountability Office, AUTHOR: Anu K. Mittal & Linda D. Koontz] Highlights - http://www.gao.gov/highlights/d051008thigh.pdf 7:48:35 AM    comment []

Inescapable Accountability, by E. J. Dionne, Jr., in the Washington Post, analyzes White House PR strategy in the wake of Katrina. The Bush White House must have run the phrases "blame game" and "finger-pointing" through its focus groups. In his Wednesday briefing, White House press secretary Scott McClellan used variations on those formulations eight times each. McClellan neatly rolled them into a single sentence when he told off a reporter who had the nerve to ask whether the president had confidence in those who oversaw the federal relief effort. "If you want to continue to engage in finger-pointing and blame-gaming, that's fine," McClellan harrumphed. Nice job, Scott. McClellan must have been unaware that the White House had been organizing a finger-pointing, blame-gaming project of its own. . . . . . . . The White House is aghast because it is pulling levers that once worked, and nothing is happening. To borrow one of O'Reilly's favorite phrases, New Orleans was a "No Spin Zone." Good, smart, tough and compassionate reporters gave Americans a direct view of the disaster and kept asking, with increasing urgency, why New Orleans was such a mess. You can tell the White House knows how much trouble it is in -- that's no doubt why Bush had another news conference yesterday -- by following the Frank Theorem. "It's a rule in American politics," said Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), "that whichever side denounces the other for politicizing the issue is losing the argument." Bingo. Once, the White House could use its surrogates to intimidate critics. Especially after Sept. 11, Democrats were concerned -- for both patriotic and opportunistic reasons -- that certain criticisms of Bush might be seen as "giving aid and comfort to the enemy." You can't be accused of giving aid and comfort to a hurricane. . . . Bush's critics aren't backing off, because they've been here before. Former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, who cooperated with Bush in the days after Sept. 11 but lost his South Dakota seat after a long, White House-inspired campaign accusing him of being "obstructionist," speaks from experience. "Democrats to this day remain outraged at the blatant efforts that Republicans, especially in the administration, made to undermine the perception of our patriotism and our motivations," Daschle said in an interview. This time around, Democrats won't be waved off by right-wing commentators or by contrived and insincere appeals to national unity. "I don't think we should pay a whit of attention to administration criticisms," Daschle said. "Democrats need to ask the hard questions and ignore the political attacks that are destined to come when we ask them." The sounds of contention you are hearing are the sounds of accountability in a free republic. The president may not like it, but it is a refreshing sound. 7:48:29 AM    comment []