Popular Science:

This sound-amplifying scope, our 2009 Best of What’s New Grand Award winner, teams up with heart murmur-detecting software that can signal heart abnormalities or leaky valves. By allowing your everyday doc to better find murmurs, this scope could save $9.4 billion a year in unnecessary echocardiogram tests and cardiologist fees.

Check them all out here.

A tip to Justine Batemen: a little makeup goes a long way.

John Droz Jr. explains the limitations of using computers to predict anything, let along complicated climate projections.

…despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we aren’t really being run by pandering politicians, self-serving lobbyists, fanatical environmentalists, and greedy Wall Street manipulators. They are the illusion.

There is another even more powerful (but much less visible) agent behind all of these puppets.

The person behind the screen is the computer programmer. And, just like in the Wizard of OZ, they do not want you to look at this real controller.

I’ll probably have to turn in my membership card, but as a computer programmer (and physicist and environmental activist) I’m here to spill the beans about the Wiz.

…

My layperson explanation is that computer programming is all about making assumptions, and then converting these into mathematical equations.

The big picture question is this: Is it really possible to accurately convert complex real-world situations into ones and zeros? Hal may think so, but higher processing brains say no. Yet this is continuously attempted, with very limited success. Let’s pull the screen back a bit more.

We’ll start with an example about how such a model makes assumptions.

One of the computer programs I wrote was for debt collectors. A typical scenario was that a debtor was given a date to make a payment and the collection company didn’t receive it on time. What response is then appropriate?

In such a circumstance the computer program typically makes an automatic contact with the debtor. (Remember there are thousands of these debtors, and it would be prohibitively time consuming for an agency person to manually check into and follow up each case.)

So what to say in this correspondence to the debtor? Well, it comes down to the assumptions made by the computer programmer.

The programmer tries to simplify such situations into mathematical options. In this case they may decide that the question is: “Does the debtor have the money to make this payment: yes or no?” This relatively basic choice then leads to a Boolean progression within the program.

How does the programmer (model) decide on yes or no? Well, other indicators would be used (e.g., were prior payments made on time) to come up with a statistical probability.

Of course, any computer model is not one set of choices, but rather a whole series of yes/no (if/or) calculations that lead to a conclusion. In a complex situation (e.g., debt collection, climate change, or financial derivatives) there could easily be a hundred such choices to deal with.

To understand the implications of that, let’s just consider the case where there are ten such decision points — each with a “yes” or “no” answer. At the end of such a pipeline, that means that there are 2¹⁰ (i.e., 1024) possible results. That’s a lot of different potential conclusions.

Unfortunately, there are actually many more possibilities! The assumption that this debtor situation could be condensed down to a “yes” or “no” answer is not accurate. There are several other real situations that fall outside of “yes” or “no.”

For instance, what if the debtor never got a notice in the first place that the amount was due by the date the agency is monitoring? Or what if the debtor sent the money and it got lost in transition? Or what if the debtor made the payment to the original person they owed, rather than the collection agency? Or what if the debtor sent in the money on time, and the collection agency incorrectly didn’t credit the debtor for the payment? Etc., etc.

Read on.

This post is primarily for some poor soul Googling for a solution to a weird problem I had with Windows XP.

My Google searches turned up very little of value, so here is my contribution to the hive mind.

My problem was that all windows started scrolling erratically. For example, if I tried to scroll down this web page by dragging the scroll bar, the page would simply zip back to the top and stay there. Or sometimes it scrolled to the bottom and stayed there.

This happened in every application, even the shut-down dialog, rendering my computer nearly unusable.

The problem persisted for a couple of hours,  went away for a couple more, then returned. On the advice of a friend and computer tech, I scanned for trojans, viruses etc. A few were found, but removing them did not solve the problem.

I have a Microsoft wireless keyboard and mouse. Windows alerts me when battery levels are low, but I changed mouse batteries anyway. That didn’t fix it. I changed to a wired mouse. No luck. Reinstalled the mouse software. No luck.

Then I looked at the keyboard, picked it up and removed it from the room. Problem solved. I brought it back within range and the problem returned.

So the fix was simple: just replace the weak batteries in the wireless keyboard. Why Windows didn’t report the low batteries is a mystery.

Text for Google: XP erratic scrolling wireless mouse keyboard solution

WSJ:

Ten years ago, at the height of the dot-com boom, America Online Inc. and Time Warner Inc. (TWX) cobbled together an audacious merger of two of the world’s foremost information giants, one old and one young.

But what was billed as a new-media monolith that could lead the dawn of the digital age rapidly proved to be standing on an extremely shaky foundation.

When AOL and Time Warner stunned the business world with their historic $160 billion mega-deal in early 2000, few were even aware that a 70-person startup called Google Inc. (GOOG) had set out to show small advertisements alongside Internet search results.

Just five years later, Google itself had become a heavyweight on the scene, and it purchased a 5% stake in AOL from Time Warner, at a price of $1 billion. Four years after that, however, Google sold the stake back to a chastened Time Warner for $283 million, while maintaining control of the inner workings of AOL’s search engine through a partnership.

So it has gone for AOL, which is poised to reemerge as an independent entity later this week, albeit in an online world that has passed it by.

Just think: a mere ten years ago, AOL for many people was the Internet.

Just think: suppose Bill Clinton and Al Gore had had their way and used government funds, government recruited experts and government committees to build the “information superhighway.”

Would the myriad innovations that exploded from thousands of entrepreneurs and technologists that comprise today’s rich, ever growing Internet have happened?

Or would today’s Internet resemble AOL Version 18.9 or some such?

Here’s the thing: we’d never know what we were missing.

Paul Graham:

I don’t think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process is broken. Or rather, I don’t think they realize how much it matters that it’s broken.

The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they’ve ever done. Their reputation with programmers used to be great. It used to be the most common complaint you heard about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically. The App Store has changed that. Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil.

How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that’s just so far. The App Store is an ongoing karma leak.

* * *

How did Apple get into this mess? Their fundamental problem is that they don’t understand software.

They treat iPhone apps the way they treat the music they sell through iTunes. Apple is the channel; they own the user; if you want to reach users, you do it on their terms. The record labels agreed, reluctantly. But this model doesn’t work for software. It doesn’t work for an intermediary to own the user. The software business learned that in the early 1980s, when companies like VisiCorp showed that although the words “software” and “publisher” fit together, the underlying concepts don’t. Software isn’t like music or books. It’s too complicated for a third party to act as an intermediary between developer and user. And yet that’s what Apple is trying to be with the App Store: a software publisher. And a particularly overreaching one at that, with fussy tastes and a rigidly enforced house style.

If software publishing didn’t work in 1980, it works even less now that software development has evolved from a small number of big releases to a constant stream of small ones. But Apple doesn’t understand that either. Their model of product development derives from hardware. They work on something till they think it’s finished, then they release it. You have to do that with hardware, but because software is so easy to change, its design can benefit from evolution. The standard way to develop applications now is to launch fast and iterate. Which means it’s a disaster to have long, random delays each time you release a new version.

Read it all.

I sent an image of a woman from a photo shoot to a friend. The lady’s hair reminded me of  Alice from Dilbert –the one with the triangular hairdo.  I gave the email a subject line of  “wedge head.”

20 minutes later, I got this from the mailer-daemon:

The message from with the subject of (wedge head) matches a profile the Internet community may consider spam. Please revise your message before resending.

For years, Apple has milked its image as a company for free thinkers. Its iconic 1984 Superbowl ad sums it up best.

Which is amusing because Apple has been the tyrant, not IBM nor the hundreds of companies that sprang up to build PCs. Windows computers are open source; Macs are not. (There is some benefit to Apple’s controlling ways.)

Apple gouged its customers with high profit margins. Apple operated with an iron fist. Apple could have been a huge winner if Steve Jobs had taken Bill Gates’s advice and licensed the Mac OS.

Apple still portrays Windows users as dorks and its customers as cool. Y’know, like Martin Luther King, Einstein and Gandhi. Think different and all that.

Now, they’re playing with fire.

Apple’s filed a patent on a design for a device that won’t let its owner use it unless that person demonstrates that she has complied with an advertiser’s demands by paying attention to an ad and taking some action indicating her dutiful attention.

It’s amazing how many of these vendors fail to understand Chekhov’s first law of narrative: “A gun on the mantelpiece in act one is bound to go off by act three.” That is, if you design a device that is intended to attack its user — by shutting her out of her own files and processes against her wishes and without her consent — someone will figure out how to use that device to attack its user.

Or as Mitch Kapor once quipped, “Architecture is politics.” Designing your device ecosystem for 1984 gives you…1984.

Cue Apple Fanboys who want us all to understand that the infallible and immortal Steve Jobs would only use this power to show us lovely, interesting, and informative messages that we’re happy to receive in 5… 4… 3… 2… 1….

From Wired, how a company called Demand Media mines search engine data to create how-to articles and videos guaranteed to turn a profit.

The stuff may be crap and those making it are earning Third World pay, but it is profitable.

Reese is a tall Texan who serves as Demand’s chief innovation officer and who created the idea-spawning algorithm that lies at the heart of Demand’s process. To determine what articles to assign, his formula analyzes three chunks of information.

First, to find out what terms users are searching for, it parses bulk data purchased from search engines, ISPs, and Internet marketing firms (as well as Demand’s own traffic logs). Then the algorithm crunches keyword rates to calculate how much advertisers will pay to appear on pages that include those terms. (A portion of Demand’s revenue comes from Google, which allows businesses to bid on phrases that they would like to advertise against.) Third, the formula checks to see how many Web pages already include those terms. It doesn’t make sense to commission an article that will be buried on the fifth page of Google results. Finally, the algorithm, like a drunken prophet, starts spitting out phrase after phrase: “butterfly cake,” “shin splints,” “Harley-Davidson belt buckles.”

But that’s just the start. Armed with those key words, another algorithm, called the Knowledge Engine, dives back into the data to figure out exactly what people want to know about the term. If the original algorithm divines “2009 Chevy Corvette” as a profitable title, the Knowledge Engine will return with “cost of 2009 Corvette”; for “shin splint” it might come back with “equine treatment shin splints.” The second algorithm also looks at how well past titles with similar words have performed in terms of ad revenue. Demand has learned, for instance, that “best” and “how to” bring in traffic or high clickthrough rates, while “history of” is ad poison. At the end of the process, the company has a topic and a dollar amount — the term’s “lifetime value,” or LTV — that Demand expects to generate from any resulting content.

Genius.

Plenty of other companies — About.com, Mahalo, Answers.com — have tried to corner the market in arcane online advice. But none has gone about it as aggressively, scientifically, and single-mindedly as Demand. Pieces are not dreamed up by trained editors nor commissioned based on submitted questions. Instead they are assigned by an algorithm, which mines nearly a terabyte of search data, Internet traffic patterns, and keyword rates to determine what users want to know and how much advertisers will pay to appear next to the answers.

The process is automatic, random, and endless, a Stirling engine fueled by the world’s unceasing desire to know how to grow avocado trees from pits or how to throw an Atlanta Braves-themed birthday party. It is a database of human needs, and if you haven’t stumbled on a Demand video or article yet, you soon will.

By next summer, according to founder and CEO Richard Rosenblatt, Demand will be publishing 1 million items a month, the equivalent of four English-language Wikipedias a year. Demand is already one of the largest suppliers of content to YouTube, where its 170,000 videos make up more than twice the content of CBS, the Associated Press, Al Jazeera English, Universal Music Group, CollegeHumor, and Soulja Boy combined. Demand also posts its material to its network of 45 B-list sites — ranging from eHow and Livestrong.com to the little-known doggy-photo site TheDailyPuppy.com — that manage to pull in more traffic than ESPN, NBC Universal, and Time Warner’s online properties (excluding AOL) put together. To appreciate the impact Demand is poised to have on the Web, imagine a classroom where one kid raises his hand after every question and screams out the answer. He may not be smart or even right, but he makes it difficult to hear anybody else.

The result is a factory stamping out moneymaking content. “I call them the Henry Ford of online video,” says Jordan Hoffner, director of content partnerships at YouTube. Media companies like The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, AOL, and USA Today have either hired Demand or studied its innovations. This year, the privately held Demand is expected to bring in about $200 million in revenue; its most recent round of financing by blue-chip investors valued the company at $1 billion.

A Windows 7 demo that didn’t follow the script. HT: Tom Bunzel.

Paul Graham:

Now that the term “ramen profitable” has become widespread, I ought to explain precisely what the idea entails.

Ramen profitable means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders’ living expenses. This is a different form of profitability than startups have traditionally aimed for. Traditional profitability means a big bet is finally paying off, whereas the main importance of ramen profitability is that it buys you time. [1]

In the past, a startup would usually become profitable only after raising and spending quite a lot of money. A company making computer hardware might not become profitable for 5 years, during which they spent $50 million. But when they did they might have revenues of $50 million a year. This kind of profitability means the startup has succeeded.

Ramen profitability is the other extreme: a startup that becomes profitable after 2 months, even though its revenues are only $3000 a month, because the only employees are a couple 25 year old founders who can live on practically nothing. Revenues of $3000 a month do not mean the company has succeeded. But it does share something with the one that’s profitable in the traditional way: they don’t need to raise money to survive.

Ramen profitability is an unfamiliar idea to most people because it only recently became feasible. It’s still not feasible for a lot of startups; it would not be for most biotech startups, for example; but it is for many software startups because they’re now so cheap. For many, the only real cost is the founders’ living expenses.

The main significance of this type of profitability is that you’re no longer at the mercy of investors. If you’re still losing money, then eventually you’ll either have to raise more or shut down. Once you’re ramen profitable this painful choice goes away. You can still raise money, but you don’t have to do it now.

A 75 year old woman from Karlstad in central Sweden has been thrust into the IT history books – with the world’s fastest internet connection.

Sigbritt Löthberg’s home has been supplied with a blistering 40 Gigabits per second connection, many thousands of times faster than the average residential link and the first time ever that a home user has experienced such a high speed.

But Sigbritt, who had never had a computer until now, is no ordinary 75 year old. She is the mother of Swedish internet legend Peter Löthberg who, along with Karlstad Stadsnät, the local council’s network arm, has arranged the connection.

“This is more than just a demonstration,” said network boss Hafsteinn Jonsson.

“As a network owner we’re trying to persuade internet operators to invest in faster connections. And Peter Löthberg wanted to show how you can build a low price, high capacity line over long distances,” he told The Local.

Sigbritt will now be able to enjoy 1,500 high definition HDTV channels simultaneously. Or, if there is nothing worth watching there, she will be able to download a full high definition DVD in just two seconds.

That’s a lot of TVs to hook and quite a feat of multitasking to watch them.

Little things mean a lot.

When BayNewser heard that someone from the State Department had emailed Twitter to ask them to delay maintenance to allow Iranians to continue tweeting, we pictured some fusty old guy at Foggy Bottom in a rumpled Brooks Brothers suit and wayward spectacles.

Imagine our surprise, then, when we learned that, instead, it was a 27-year-old whiz kid whose job is to advise the State Department on how to use social media to promote U.S. interests the Middle East.

And imagine our further surprise when we learned this young gentleman wasn’t one of Barack Obama’s social media geniuses, but instead was a Condi Rice pick hired specifically to advise the State Department on young people in the Middle East and how to “counter-radicalize” them.

According to the New York Times, it was Jared Cohen, a member of the Policy Planning Staff, who contacted Twitter on Monday, inquiring about their plan to perform maintenance in what would be the middle of the day, Iran time. Following that contact, Twitter decided to postpone their maintenance so that it would take place in the middle of the night Iran-time, even though that meant it would be the middle of the day U.S. time.

The Times noted that the move marked “the recognition by the United States government that an Internet blogging service that did not exist four years ago has the potential to change history in an ancient Islamic country.”

So we wondered, who was this young guy with this remarkable insight?

Cohen was only 24 when he was hired into the Policy Planning Staff back in 2006. He’d received an undergraduate degree from Stanford and a master’s degree from Oxford, where he’d been on a Rhodes Scholarship. Oh, and he’d also talked his way into a visa for Iran (according to a December 2007 New Yorker profile), where he met young people his own age who threw underground house parties and made alcohol in bathtubs.

“Iranian young people are one of the most pro-American populations in the Middle East,” Cohen told the New Yorker. “They just don’t know who to gravitate around, so young people gravitate around each other.”

The New York Times account includes this…

The episode demonstrates the extent to which the administration views social networking as a new arrow in its diplomatic quiver. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton talks regularly about the power of e-diplomacy, particularly in places where the mass media are repressed.

…without noting that Condi Rice hired Cohen.

Iran has real mobs. LA has flashmob doing the Hammer.

Story here.

A robotic runway model.

NYT:

Walk around the floor of Lightfair International, the lighting industry’s annual trade show at the Javits Center in New York last week, and you would be forgiven for thinking that lamps based on light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, had already filled our homes and workplaces.

LED bulbs and fixtures dominated nearly every booth on the show floor.

Now all the world has to do is catch up. Most people think of LEDs as the lights blinking from inside electronic devices. They are being used increasingly to light rooms, though few people have ever bought them.

“In the U.S., 78 percent of the public is completely unaware that traditional light bulbs will be phased out in 2012,” said Charles F. Jerabek, president and chief executive of Osram Sylvania, a unit of Siemens. By law, bulbs must be 30 percent more efficient than current incandescent versions beginning that year.

While the current crop of compact fluorescents could do the job, the industry is rallying around LED lamps for many applications. They say LEDs last longer than current bulbs and compact fluorescent ones and their energy consumption could eventually be less than fluorescent lights’. They can also be made in many shapes and sizes, which was evident at the trade show. Unlike compact fluorescents bulbs, they contain no mercury and they work well in cold weather. They provide a more pleasing light than fluorescents.

Manufacturers displayed LEDs incorporated into large warehouse, garage and street-lighting fixtures, flexible light ribbons, and replacements for the halogen reflector lamps used in kitchens and offices. Strips of flexible LEDs from Osram Sylvania put light in places where it could not otherwise fit. Later this year, the company will market tiny LED chandelier lights that use 6 watts instead of the 15 watts typical of an incandescent version. It says they will last 25,000 hours instead of 1,500 for an incandescent bulb. Also this fall, Osram, Lighting Science and Philips will introduce 25,000-hour LED lamps that look like traditional bulbs but use just 8 watts of electricity to produce the same amount of light as a 40-watt bulb.

Much of the industry’s effort is aimed at making LED lamps that emit as much light as a 60- or 75-watt incandescent bulb. Cree, a leading maker of LEDs, showed a new version of its LED ceiling fixture that uses 6.5 watts, compared with 11 watts for last year’s model, to create the light of a standard 65-watt lamp.

UPDATE: This is not true — it’s a prank. Snopes has the scoop.
HT: Susan Gertson

Gary Hamel in the WSJ:

The experience of growing up online will profoundly shape the workplace expectations of “Generation F” – the Facebook Generation. At a minimum, they’ll expect the social environment of work to reflect the social context of the Web, rather than as is currently the case, a mid-20th-century Weberian bureaucracy.

If your company hopes to attract the most creative and energetic members of Gen F, it will need to understand these Internet-derived expectations, and then reinvent its management practices accordingly. Sure, it’s a buyer’s market for talent right now, but that won’t always be the case—and in the future, any company that lacks a vital core of Gen F employees will soon find itself stuck in the mud.

With that in mind, I compiled a list of 12 work-relevant characteristics of online life. These are the post-bureaucratic realities that tomorrow’s employees will use as yardsticks in determining whether your company is “with it” or “past it.” In assembling this short list, I haven’t tried to catalog every salient feature of the Web’s social milieu, only those that are most at odds with the legacy practices found in large companies.

1. All ideas compete on an equal footing.
On the Web, every idea has the chance to gain a following—or not, and no one has the power to kill off a subversive idea or squelch an embarrassing debate. Ideas gain traction based on their perceived merits, rather than on the political power of their sponsors.

2. Contribution counts for more than credentials.
When you post a video to YouTube, no one asks you if you went to film school. When you write a blog, no one cares whether you have a journalism degree. Position, title, and academic degrees—none of the usual status differentiators carry much weight online. On the Web, what counts is not your resume, but what you can contribute.

3. Hierarchies are natural, not prescribed.
In any Web forum there are some individuals who command more respect and attention than others—and have more influence as a consequence. Critically, though, these individuals haven’t been appointed by some superior authority. Instead, their clout reflects the freely given approbation of their peers. On the Web, authority trickles up, not down.

Read on…

Gosh, is there anything President Obama can’t do? Yesterday, he claimed that the United States had “fallen behind other countries in science” and it was time to catch up.

“I am here today to set this goal: we will devote more than 3 percent of our gross domestic product to research and development,” Obama told the National Academy of Sciences.

Obama set forth a wish list including solar cells as cheap as paint; green buildings that produce all the energy they consume; learning software as effective as a personal tutor; and prosthetics so advanced that someone could play the piano again.

That 3 percent – which would amount to about $420 billion – would exceed the level of spending during the height of the space race, he said.

So, who is “we”? Private or public sector? What do you think?

Obama would have private funds taxed into public hands in Washington, where teams of government experts will decide how to invest them.

Taxpayers wealthy enough to cough up that much money already invest in science and technology. Except they do it through a vast network of venture capitalists, investment bankers etc. whose business is to calculate risk, understand markets and evaluate talent. They all have skin in the game, unlike bureaucrats.

They already are looking for solar technologies, great software and so on. All without the interference of Obama and his smarty pants team.

Funds Obama would tax from private hands would shift economic decision making from the broad, “Wisdom of Crowds” marketplace to central planners. Hope! Change!

Bill Clinton had similar aspirations when first in office. He and Al Gore planned to assemble some of the smartest minds in America in order to build the “information superhighway.” But then the marketplace jumped ‘em and built the modern Internet. It was chaotic and wasteful (the tech bubble) but it created an amazing resource in virtually no time.

Just imagine if Bill and Al had gotten their way. Suppose they’d sucked up enough taxes to starve the market of investment dollars and the Internet was a government-run project? Can you imagine the Google guys pitching their idea to the InternetCrats? They’d tell em to get lost because we already have Alta Vista, Yahoo, Lycos and Excite.

Would we have eBay? Amazon? Wikipedia? Social networking? Youtube?

No. If the government had built the Internet, it would resemble something like AOL circa 1996. It would be a boring curiosity. And we’d never know what we were missing.

That’s the tragedy of Obama’s arrogance: he think he’s smarter than the crowd.

The Clinton Justice Department spent millions trying to break up Microsoft because they thought Gates, et al, controlled too much of the marketplace. But it was the marketplace that humbled Microsoft, not the government.

How ironic it is that many tech people fawn over Obama when Obama’s policies essentially make the government into Microsoft for everything. Meanwhile, conservatives and libertarians promote an open-source model of the economy.

Popular Science:

In its report to Congress last year, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission called Chinese cyber-espionage a major threat to U.S. technology. “China is aggressively pursuing cyber warfare capabilities that may provide it with an asymmetric advantage against the United States,” the commission warned.

As everything from health-care services to credit-card records to classified military information moves into a networked age, the risk that our digital systems could be crippled by outside attackers — or worse, pillaged for sensitive information — is very real. The commission report cited vulnerable American targets such as the electric grid and the municipal-waste, air-traffic-control, banking and Social Security systems. Before leaving office in January, President Bush authorized the creation of a National Cyber Security Center under the Department of Homeland Security, and in February, President Obama’s budget proposal called for giving the department $355 million to secure private- and public-sector cyber-infrastructure.

But there’s reason to believe that a damaging attack won’t originate in some dedicated Chinese government bureau. In previous testimony before the commission, James C. Mulvenon, director of the defense think tank the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, said he was more immediately concerned with independent, civilian-led “patriotic hacking.”

James Andrew Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which helped develop cybersecurity policy recommendations for the Obama administration, shares that concern. “The U.S. government had a number of serious computer incidents in 2007, most of which were attributed to China,” he says. “The focus in Washington is on what appear to be state-sponsored activities. That, of course, is only a part of what’s going on in China.”

From China, where I’ve lived for four years, this assessment looks spot-on. Hackers are pervasive, their imprint inescapable. There are hacker magazines, hacker clubs and hacker online serials. A 2005 Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences survey equates hackers and rock stars, with nearly 43 percent of elementary-school students saying they “adore” China’s hackers. One third say they want to be one. This culture thrives on a viral, Internet-driven nationalism. The post-Tiananmen generation has known little hardship, so rather than pushing for democracy, many young people define themselves in opposition to the West. China’s Internet patriots, who call themselves “red hackers,” may not be acting on direct behalf of their government, but the effect is much the same.

Holman Jenkins:

…One Arizona sheriff recently proved you could get elected by opposing speed cameras. Meanwhile, the state legislature is considering bills to dismantle the system created by Gov. Janet Napolitano when she faced a gaping budget deficit, before she escaped to the Obama Department of Homeland Security. Petitioners in Arizona are also gathering signatures to put the question directly before voters — speed cameras have never won when submitted to voters.

Even the Scottsdale City Council recently voted not to oppose the anti-camera bills in the state legislature.

Why is this important? Because Arizona, specifically Scottsdale, is home to the two biggest companies, American Traffic Solutions and Redflex Traffic Systems, in the incestuous world of promoting and operating traffic cameras for revenue-hungry governments.

Laid to rest long ago should have been the pretense that the goal is “safety,” not chasing cash. New York State, sinking under budget shortfalls, last week authorized a batch of new red-light cameras around the state. A recent investigation by the Detroit News showed that even conventional ticket-writing is driven by revenue needs. Said one cop: “When you’re being told how many tickets you need to write, to me that’s a quota.”

Consider: Red-light running and speeding, the two main uses of traffic cameras, are implicated in fewer than 8% of accidents. A far more prevalent cause of nondrunken accidents is driver inattention — one study estimated, in a typical case the driver’s eyes are diverted from the road for a full three seconds or more, fidgeting with a cellphone, disciplining the kids in the back seat, snoozing, blotting up spilled coffee, etc.

What’s more, if not for the idiotic diversion of research dollars to fuel economy, the most highly touted auto-industry breakthroughs today would be exactly in this area. Available now or coming soon are devices that warn a driver when he’s wandering out of his lane or when another car is in his blind spot, even applying the brakes to prevent a collision.

Stop-light cameras are especially pernicious. Where red-light running is a problem, the solution is usually a longer yellow — at least three seconds is the recommended minimum for a 25-mph intersection. Drivers do not blast through red lights on purpose. Even the federal government encourages the use of engineering solutions before installing a red-light camera.

Yet as the late and lamented Rocky Mountain News found when Denver was sizing up intersections for cameras a year ago, many of those deemed accident-prone had yellows timed at the state minimum of three seconds or even less. Citizen groups around the country have more than once raised suspicions of authorities shortening yellows to ring up more tickets. Half a dozen Georgia towns just cancelled their camera contracts after a state law mandating the addition of an extra second to the yellow made them unprofitable.

Paul Graham:

Recently I realized I’d been holding two ideas in my head that would explode if combined.

The first is that startups may represent a new economic phase, on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. I’m not sure of this, but there seems a decent chance it’s true. People are dramatically more productive as founders or early employees of startups—imagine how much less Larry and Sergey would have achieved if they’d gone to work for a big company—and that scale of improvement can change social customs.

The second idea is that startups are a type of business that flourishes in certain places that specialize in it—that Silicon Valley specializes in startups in the same way Los Angeles specializes in movies, or New York in finance. [1]

What if both are true? What if startups are both a new economic phase and also a type of business that only flourishes in certain centers?

If so, this revolution is going to be particularly revolutionary. All previous revolutions have spread. Agriculture, cities, and industrialization all spread widely. If startups end up being like the movie business, with just a handful of centers and one dominant one, that’s going to have novel consequences.

There are already signs that startups may not spread particularly well. The spread of startups seems to be proceeding slower than the spread of the Industrial Revolution, despite the fact that communication is so much faster now.

Within a few decades of the founding of Boulton & Watt there were steam engines scattered over northern Europe and North America. Industrialization didn’t spread much beyond those regions for a while. It only spread to places where there was a strong middle class—countries where a private citizen could make a fortune without having it confiscated. Otherwise it wasn’t worth investing in factories. But in a country with a strong middle class it was easy for industrial techniques to take root. An individual mine or factory owner could decide to install a steam engine, and within a few years he could probably find someone local to make him one. So steam engines spread fast. And they spread widely, because the locations of mines and factories were determined by features like rivers, harbors, and sources of raw materials. [2]

Read it all.

…for HDMI, the cabling system for high definition TV, Blu-Ray etc.

Buy the cable at a store and you’ll get gouged for $85 or worse. Amazon has them for under $10.

Now you can have wireless HDMI for just shy of a grand.

Sounds like a solution in search of a problem.

Charles Euchner in The American:

Late last year, a student at the American University of Paris sent a request to a company called Writerboard. “I have another paper to write,” he wrote in an email. “It’s another art history paper. It should be around 3–5 pages. It is the same course than [sic] the last two. It should therefore be written with the same approach.” He added: “I have attached the professor’s guideline as well as the other two essays you have written for me.”

The papers Justin (not his real name) attached use dramatically different styles. The first, speaking of a Paul Cézanne critic, states: “While his artistic critical eye seems accurate if not always reliable, the pagan frisson of his Freudian approach is perhaps overly compelling for him.” (The term “pagan frisson” later provoked gallows laughter among art history faculty at the university.) The second paper used a simpler style: “The buildings are cast in various shades of dour gray, structures that rise over 50 feet above the street.”

For his new assignment, Justin asked Writerboard to produce an analysis of a single work of art from two different critical perspectives. Not long after Justin placed his order for a new paper, Professor Anna Russakoff obtained emails that documented her student’s cheating.

Preparing to confront the student, Russakoff asked her department chair and dean for advice. Before Russakoff could confront him, Justin sought help for yet another assignment, this time an analysis of art at the Louvre. After being informed of Justin’s new request for an outside writer—his fourth documented case of at least attempting to cheat—Russakoff lamented in an email: “And wouldn’t you think that if you came to Paris to study art history you might actually WANT to go to the Louvre to look at art…????”

In the following weeks, Russakoff got mixed signals from the university’s administrators. Her department chair agreed that the evidence of cheating was strong, but the dean would not go so far.

When Russakoff confronted the student, he denied any cheating. When he could not define words in the paper such as “eschew” and “obtuse,” he explained that his sister helped him edit the paper. At the suggestion of the dean, the student supplied what he claimed were printouts of emails with his sister. Russakoff is sure Justin produced the materials after the fact, since she possesses his time-stamped emails that show he hired Writerboard to write four papers.

After reading the university’s official policies for dealing with cheating cases—which put the onus on the professor to see any case through—Russakoff decided to give Justin an F for the Cézanne paper and a C-minus for the course. The C-minus meant that Justin would not have to repeat the class, which is required for art history majors. And so Russakoff does not have to teach him again. “It’s probably cowardly,” she says, “but it would have been a lot to deal with.… I’m not even a full-time faculty.”

Justin’s case underscores a growing problem at educational institutions around the world. Technology has created new threats to academic learning and honor. And while Justin was caught in the act, countless students outwit their teachers.

Donald McCabe of Rutgers University, the leading researcher on student cheating, says that the portion of American students who admit to cheating off the Internet—either habitually or occasionally—increased from 10 percent to 40 percent from 1999 to 2004. Students can contract out for papers, download papers from databases, or just cut and paste passages from the Web. In 2007 alone, cheating scandals at Duke, the Air Force Academy, Indiana University, and Ohio University produced national headlines because of the large numbers of students involved.

Via Google Earth. Go here: http://earth.google.com/rome/

Tip: click on one of the yellow building icons. You’ll get a pop-up that directs you to download the buildings.

Google and General Electric have announced a partnership aimed at upgrading the United States electric power grid and pushing forward the development of renewable energy. The companies plan to conduct a joint lobbying effort in Washington to encourage the government to invest in developing a “smart grid,” and will also work together on projects like geothermal energy systems and integrating plug-in electric cars into the grid. The deal combines each company’s strengths: GE will make the hardware — from wind turbines to metering switches, and Google will make the software — applying network technologies to the grid [Portfolio].

The announcement follows a speech given two weeks ago by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in which he laid out a blueprint for how the United States could switch over to generating 100 percent of its electricity from renewable energy by 2030, while also eliminating half of the gasoline-powered cars from the roads. While Google hasn’t offered to follow through on that comprehensive proposal, which carried the hefty price tag of $2.7 billion, the partnership with GE seems to indicate that Google wants to put many of its suggestions into practice.