Yostivanich

“Last week British Home Sec­re­tary Alan John­son fired Uni­ver­sity of Bris­tol neu­ropsy­chophar­ma­col­o­gist David Nutt as chair­man the British Advi­sory Coun­cil on the Mis­use of Drugs for fail­ing to rec­og­nize that “his role is to advise rather than crit­i­cise.” Trans­la­tion: Nutt made the mis­take of pub­licly telling the truth about drugs. In par­tic­u­lar, he noted that the haz­ards posed by mar­i­juana pale beside those asso­ci­ated with cig­a­rettes and alco­hol, and he said the British government’s deci­sion to move mar­i­juana from Class C to Class B, which is asso­ci­ated with more severe penal­ties, was based on polit­i­cal rather than sci­en­tific considerations.”

“Against almost every expec­ta­tion, nearly half of all peo­ple watch­ing delayed shows are still slouch­ing on their couches watch­ing mes­sages about movies, cars and beer. Accord­ing to Nielsen, 46 per­cent of view­ers 18 to 49 years old for all four net­works taken together are watch­ing the com­mer­cials dur­ing play­back, up slightly from last year.”

“Fed­eral inves­ti­ga­tors reported Thurs­day that imported Chi­nese dry­wall that home­own­ers have linked to health prob­lems and odors had higher lev­els of some chem­i­cals than its domes­tic coun­ter­parts. The inves­ti­ga­tors, how­ever, were unable to link the chem­i­cals, sul­fur and stron­tium, to the health prob­lems and smells in thou­sands of homes built dur­ing the recent hous­ing boom, and said fur­ther test­ing was under way to deter­mine any pos­si­ble connection.”

“Yet, for some rea­son, Adobe feels they’re essen­tial to the new administration’s mis­sion of trans­par­ent and open gov­ern­ment. I on the other hand feel like pick­et­ing the event they’re hav­ing next week to sell their wares (hey hey! ho ho! your-binary-low-parsable-formats-for-government-data has got to go!) because in fact, they’re quite the oppo­site. Here at Sun­light we want the gov­ern­ment to STOP pub­lish­ing bills, and data in PDFs and Flash and start pub­lish them in open, machine read­able for­mats like XML and XSLT. What’s most frus­trat­ing is, Gov­ern­ment seems to trans­form doc­u­ments that are in XML into PDF to release them to the pub­lic, think­ing that that’s a good thing for cit­i­zens. Gov­ern­ment: We can turn XML into PDFs. We can’t turn PDFs into XML. This is non­sense. The fact is, stick­ing to open, stan­dards based tech­nolo­gies like HTML, XML, JSON and oth­ers are far more impor­tant and use­ful in get­ting your infor­ma­tion out to the pub­lic than the pro­pri­etary for­mats of Adobe.”

“Mari­copa County, Ari­zona, Sher­iff Joe Arpaio says his office doesn’t racially pro­file peo­ple while look­ing for ille­gal immi­grants. So how do they decide whom to ques­tion? “Cer­tain cri­te­ria,” said Arpaio. “No iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. Look like you just came from Mex­ico, and they admit it. That’s enough.” Jerry Sheri­dan, Arpaio’s direc­tor of cus­tody, explains, “I think you can tell peo­ple that are not from this coun­try. And I’m not talk­ing His­pan­ics. Maybe some­one from France looks a lit­tle dif­fer­ent than some­body from Europe or some­body from Eng­land looks a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent than we do.” ” I lit­er­ally can’t add any­thing else to this.

“The Demo­c­ra­tic brand is mar­ginal in about half the coun­try, but the Repub­li­can brand is radioac­tive in about two-thirds of it. You can actu­ally make the argu­ment — although maybe it’s not a good one — that Repub­li­cans should in fact find a way to pull a Black­wa­ter and switch their party ID when nobody is look­ing, from Repub­li­can to capital-C Con­ser­v­a­tive. This would prob­a­bly involve at least some degree of bona fide struc­tural change, and undoubt­edly some near-term trauma: an orches­trated chaos. But the ‘con­ser­v­a­tive’ brand is just as pow­er­ful as it ever was in Amer­ica, whereas the Repub­li­can brand is as weak as it has been.”

“IQ tests are very good at mea­sur­ing cer­tain men­tal fac­ul­ties, he says, includ­ing logic, abstract rea­son­ing, learn­ing abil­ity and working-memory capac­ity — how much infor­ma­tion you can hold in mind. But the tests fall down when it comes to mea­sur­ing those abil­i­ties cru­cial to mak­ing good judge­ments in real-life sit­u­a­tions. That’s because they are unable to assess things such as a person’s abil­ity to crit­i­cally weigh up infor­ma­tion, or whether an indi­vid­ual can over­ride the intu­itive cog­ni­tive biases that can lead us astray.”

“Some­time in the next few years (if it hasn’t hap­pened already) the world will reach a mile­stone: half of human­ity will be hav­ing only enough chil­dren to replace itself. That is, the fer­til­ity rate of half the world will be 2.1 or below. This is the “replace­ment level of fer­til­ity”, the magic num­ber that causes a country’s pop­u­la­tion to slow down and even­tu­ally to sta­bilise. Accord­ing to the United Nations pop­u­la­tion divi­sion, 2.9 bil­lion peo­ple out of a total of 6.5 bil­lion were liv­ing in coun­tries at or below this point in 2000-05. The num­ber will rise to 3.4 bil­lion out of 7 bil­lion in the early 2010s and to over 50% in the mid­dle of the next decade. The coun­tries include not only Rus­sia and Japan but Brazil, Indone­sia, China and even south India.”

“The health insur­ance indus­try likes to cite fig­ures show­ing that 87 cents of every dol­lar in pre­mi­ums is spent on med­ical claims. But a new Sen­ate analy­sis sug­gests that for-profit insur­ance com­pa­nies are spend­ing much less than that, espe­cially for poli­cies sold to indi­vid­u­als and small busi­nesses. Instead, as lit­tle as 66 cents of each dol­lar paid in pre­mi­ums goes toward doc­tor and hos­pi­tal bills, while the rest cov­ers admin­is­tra­tive expenses, mar­ket­ing and com­pany prof­its, accord­ing to the analysis.”

“Ear­lier this year, as part of a par­tial set­tle­ment in an ACLU law­suit involv­ing the right of women pris­on­ers to obtain timely, safe and legal abor­tions, Arpaio agreed to fol­low a 2005 court order pro­hibit­ing Mari­copa County cor­rec­tional facil­i­ties from requir­ing inmates to obtain a court order before an abor­tion. How­ever, in the course of set­tle­ment nego­ti­a­tions, Arpaio decided inmates must pre­pay trans­porta­tion and secu­rity costs asso­ci­ated with obtain­ing the pro­ce­dure. In his rul­ing today, Judge Robert H. Ober­billing of the Supe­rior Court of Ari­zona indi­cated that requir­ing inmates to pre­pay secu­rity and trans­porta­tion costs could be more oner­ous than the court order Sher­iff Arpaio pre­vi­ously required.”

“I think this says it all.”

“This is why, as engi­neers, we stick with some­thing that works for us. This is why the ancient likes of vi and Emacs con­tinue to flour­ish. Once we find a tool that works for us, once we’ve cho­sen that tool, it becomes ours and remains ours. It allows us to get foamy.”

“Mus­lim women in a dis­trict in Aceh Province will be for­bid­den to wear tight pants or jeans under a reg­u­la­tion that will go into effect in Jan­u­ary. Offi­cials in West Aceh dis­trict said the Shariah police, who are charged with enforc­ing Islamic law, will shred any offen­sive cloth­ing and require women in tight pants to change into government-issued skirts.”

“But never fear, Geocities-style sites remain alive and well in one cor­ner of the Inter­net: .gov! Check out the site of the Sen­ate Armed Ser­vices Com­mit­tee for a clas­sic example”

“I will agree that belief in demons is a sign that you’re deal­ing with a prim­i­tive reli­gion and superstition.”

“Is this sur­pris­ing? Not to an econ­o­mist. It is rel­a­tively easy to move around the tim­ing of when some­one pur­chases a durable good, but much harder to affect whether they buy a durable good or not.”

“Yep: after one of the biggest moves toward bud­get bal­ance in his­tory, a major­ity of Repub­li­cans, and a plu­ral­ity of all vot­ers, believed that deficits had increased.”

“Though many advances have been made in ren­der­ing on-screen typog­ra­phy, most have been aimed at treat­ing the symp­toms and not the dis­ease. Until every­one has a 200 PPI mon­i­tor sit­ting on their desk, it will be up to design­ers and devel­op­ers to use the proper tech­nolo­gies to ensure leg­i­bil­ity with­out degrad­ing the design of the typeface.”

“Mr. Fried­man, who had writ­ten a col­umn for News­day since 1996, quit last week over the paper’s deci­sion to require some read­ers to pay for access to its Web site.”

“A lit­tle late for Hal­loween, but still amus­ing” Jesus as a Venn Diagram.

“Wow — you’ve got­ten acquainted with javascript frame­works! In fact, it appears you’ve got­ten so good with the pop­u­lar javascript frame­works that you’re using mul­ti­ple in each of your client web­sites. I see jQuery, MooTools, and Dojo in the same page! Good idea — the more frame­works you add to the page, the more plu­g­ins you can add with­out need­ing to code any javascript your­self. Well thought-out. I also see that you’re adding javascript frame­works for sim­ple getEle­ment­ById() selec­tion — why not? I’m sure you’ll use more advanced javascript on your client’s web­site at some point, so best to include the libraries now.”