Recently the IT Project Failures blog reported on a billion dollar project failure at the US Census Bureau. The idea was that the 2010 census would be taken with handheld devices rather than paper forms, and Harris Corp was awarded a $600 million contract to design the devices. The project is now $2 billion over budget, and the entire thing may have to be scrapped because it wasn’t built to GAO standards. ...
Emily Yoffe: Forget Juno. Out-of-wedlock births are a national catastrophe. Seeming fact-based defense of marriage. I don’t have strong opinions on this either way, but it certainly seems like marriage is to be encouraged for people who would be parents. The number that stands out to me is that only 4% of mothers who are college graduates are unwed. 10 Zen Monkeys: Can America Handle a Little Truth? Great essay on the Jeremiah Wright controversy. FP Passport: McCain’s wars. John McCain’s transformation into a neocon on foreign policy issues. New York Times review of Nicholson Baker’s pacifist argument against World War II, Human Smoke.
Exposure: Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris on the photographs from Abu Ghraib in the New Yorker. Morris has a new documentary on Abu Ghraib coming out on April 25 called Standard Operating Procedure. It's tough to believe that Donald Rumsfeld and George W Bush will never go to jail after reading this article. Marginal Revolution: Why have burglaries declined? Globalization has made manufactured goods so cheap that the incentive to steal them has been reduced. Compiler: New Wiki-Style Features Allow Anyone to Edit Google Maps. It’ll be interesting to see how this experiment works out. Edmunds.com: We Test the Tips. Edmunds tested a bunch of “better gas mileage” tips to determine which ones will actually improve your car’s fuel economy. Driving less aggressively seems to offer the biggest bang for the buck. Andrew Brown: The nerd is the enemy of civilisation. ELIZA creator on RMS and his friends at MIT in the 70s. furbo.org: Vote for virtualization. Not allowing virtualization puts OS X behind the times.
Roger L Kay: Apple’s Icarus Effect. Linked as a reminder to avoid anything written by Roger L Kay. Adam Sternbergh: Why White People Like ‘Stuff White People Like’. Surprisingly thoughtful analysis. WSJ.com: The Week That Shook Wall Street: Inside the Demise of Bear Stearns Elizabeth Spires in Slate: Why the Fed had to bail out Bear Stearns Wired Compiler on Eric Burke’s great cartoon about simplicity: Why No One Uses Your Application or Website TPMMuckraker: Obama Spends 3 Hours with Chicago Press to Chat about Rezko. Best resource so far on the Rezko scandal.
There’s been a ton of analysis of Barack Obama’s speech yesterday, so the whole thing isn’t worth reviewing. There is, however, one point that I have not seen made elsewhere that I wanted to bring up. This was, I think, the key sentence in Barack Obama’s speech yesterday. It was about his pastor, Jeremiah Wright: I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. A lot of people are still criticizing Obama because they can’t understand how he could continue to attend a church where the pastor believed the things that Jeremiah Wright professes to believe in his own sermons. Wright’s beliefs are not only hateful and divisive, but in some cases also downright ludicrous. This is a man who has said that he believes the US government created HIV as a tool for genocide in the inner cities. ...
The senselessness of war: A World War II German fighter pilot just learned that he shot down and killed his favorite author, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, who wrote The Little Prince. Dave Shea on Mediatyping. Presenting the right markup for the user’s device. John McCain seems to have run into the Shiite/Sunni confusion that plagues so many politicians. There’s not really much room for confusion here, and you’d think the senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services committee would have this down pat by now. This wasn’t a gaffe by the way, it betrayed a fundamental lack of understanding of the situation in Iraq and in the Middle East. I really want the person who gets “the call” at 3 a.m. to know that al-Qaeda is a group of radical Sunnis who are at war with the Shiite militias in Iraq that Iran supports. Heck, it would be nice if they knew that al-Qaeda in Iraq is not even formally affiliated with the al-Qaeda that attacked the United States on September 11, 2001.
My friend Stan Taylor is a QA guru at Borland, and has started a new blog to document his experiences with agile testing. I’m very much looking forward to his insights in this area, as Borland has been walking the walk on agile development for awhile now.
Paul Krugman: How close are we to a liquidity trap? google-collections is a Java library that builds on the Java collections framework. It’s listed as an alpha product but has apparently been in use in production systems at Google for years. My guess is that Josh Bloch is the creator. Turns out there’s an Acknowledgements page (see the comments on this post). Paul Kedrosky: U.S. Dollar Being Turned Away in Street Exchanges. Anecdotal but scary. Not Tony Soprano but John Adams on HBO - History News Network preview for John Adams. The New Yorker: The Divider - Review of HBO’s John Adams that provides essential historical context for the show.
The word is that the Fed is going to cut overnight interest rates by 100 basis points this week. That’s 1% to you and me. It would lower the rate to 2%. I’m wondering what effect this will have in terms of arresting the current economic crisis. The fed funds rate (which is explained in Wikipedia) governs the interest rates that banks charge one another on overnight loans. I won’t bother to go into more detail, but suffice it to say that the lower this rate is, the higher the incentive for banks (and thus, everyone else) to borrow money which can then in turn be lent to businesses, consumers, or other banks. The idea is that this borrowing is an engine for economic growth. ...
Nicholson Baker talks about The Charms of Wikipedia in the The New York Review of Books. Great weekend read. There are times when I think that the purpose of all human society up to this point was to enable the creation of Wikipedia. (I agree strongly with Baker’s inclusionist philosophy.) The chef at local restaurant Piedmont writes On The Use of Whole Animals to explain why they buy (and use) entire hogs purchased from a local farm.