Gray Watson's Blog -- October 2006

I've found that blogging is a useful way for me to record my thoughts and digital travels every so often.

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October 31, 2006   

• For those Software Engineers out there like myself, here's an excellent piece by Reginald Braithwaite entitled What I've Learned from Failure. There are some very salient points in there and only a few that I have minor disagreements with. From the start it reminded me a lot of Joel Spolsky's work which later in the document he quotes and links to.

  [T]he four things which matter most are:

  1. The quality of the people doing the development
  2. The expected value of the product to its stakeholders
  3. The fitness of the proposed solution
  4. The quality of project management and expectations communication.
• Couple of links of new about Enron. Let's see. Former CEO of Enron, Jeffrey Skilling was sentenced to 24 years. Unfortunately, I found out that after Ken Lay died, they abated his conviction meaning that civil trials have a harder time to recoup losses since he technically is not guilty. Also, I stumbled onto this cool search engine collection of all the enron email online searchable, clickable, and categorized. Very cool. From what little I've seen of the corporate world, I get the feeling that Enron's type of behavior, fancy accounting to hide and disguise the truth, happen a lot. I have witnessed instances or heard 1st hand reports of many questionable accounting at my various forays into the corporate landscape. The practice of "realizing" profits before any money is actually delivered is one of my favorites. I think that corporations should have 2 sets of public books. They can keep the funny books they have now but should add another set which plainly lists their assets and liabilities easily identified and confirmed by auditors -- bank accounts, equipment/property at true value, 3rd party assessments of IP and other virtual property. Like that's ever going to happen.

  Skilling was found to have orchestrated a series of loss-making deals and financial schemes to try to hide debts from investors. "Crimes of this magnitude deserve severe punishment," US District Court Judge Sim Lake told Skilling before sentencing him to 24 years and four months in jail.

  "In terms of remorse your honour, I can't imagine more remorse," Skilling told the court before he was sentenced. "That being said your honour, I am innocent of these charges."

October 30, 2006   

• Researchers at the Bronx Zoo have determined that at least some elephants are self aware. They painted 2 marks on the elephant "Happy" -- one visible and one only visible in black light. The elephant then used its trunk to touch it's forehead to examine the visible mark on its head. Similar research in monkeys and dolphins but few other species show that they are able to be aware of their own body.

  In a 2005 experiment, Happy faced her reflection in an 8-by-8-foot mirror and repeatedly used her trunk to touch an "X" painted above her eye. The elephant could not have seen the mark except in her reflection. Furthermore, Happy ignored a similar mark, made on the opposite side of her head in paint of an identical smell and texture, that was invisible unless seen under black light.

  ... Maxine, for instance, used the tip of her trunk to probe the inside of her mouth while facing the mirror. She also used her trunk to slowly pull one ear toward the mirror, as if she were using the reflection to investigate herself. The researchers reported not seeing that type of behavior at any other time.

October 22, 2006   

• My correlation alarms are going off but this Cornell study found relationships between TV watching and Autism (study site). This doesn't prove causality but should be a warning to all parents of a possible connection. Austism rates have skyrocketed from 1-in-2500 in 1970 to 1-in-166 today (a 15x increase) with many factors being blamed including heavy metals and other factors. If I'm reading these cancer statistics correctly, Autism is more likely than cancer (1-in-180).

  The Cornell study looks at county-by-county growth in cable television access and autism rates in California and Pennsylvania from 1972 to 1989. The researchers find an overall rise in both cable-TV access and autism, but autism diagnoses rose more rapidly in counties where a high percentage of households received cable than in counties with a low percentage of cable-TV homes. Waldman and Nicholson employ statistical controls to factor out the possibility that the two patterns were simply unrelated events happening simultaneously. (For instance, petroleum use also rose during the period but is unrelated to autism.) Waldman and Nicholson conclude that "roughly 17 percent of the growth in autism in California and Pennsylvania during the 1970s and 1980s was due to the growth in cable television."

October 19, 2006   

• Here's an example of "science" confusing correlation with causality. The article says that short sleep duration "predicted" obesity which implies to the reader a causal relationship but it is only a correlation. It is at least as likely that obesity itself is causing the sleep problems or that a third entity (lack of exercise or improper parenting) leads to both less sleep and obesity. Children that are not active during the day are not as tired at night and don't burn off enough calories. Families that do not know about how important sleep is to children also do not know about high fat foods and healthy diets. To even imply that if children got more sleep they would be less obese is misleading.

  Computers, mobile phones, TVs and other gadgets should all be banned from children's bedrooms to enable them to get a good nights sleep, he asserts in Archives of Disease in Childhood.

  Even two or three nights of shortened sleep can have quite significant effects, he says, disrupting the normal hormonal balance and making more likely a series of long-term consequences, including obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

  Dr Taheri does not claim that poor sleep is the only cause of obesity, but he says that its effects should be taken seriously, on the basis both of experiments and epidemiological evidence.

• Good article from the NY Times on wind power's new technology. I went out to Hull the other day to visit their new wind turbine built on the town landfill. It is a Vestas V80 1.8 megawatt turbine and is very impressive. Also, for posterity, here's the case study of the Hull Wind One turbine.

  "The efficiency of the turbines has gone up about 5 percent every year," said Philipp Andres, a vice president for business development at Vestas American Wind Technology, a subsidiary of the world's largest manufacturer of wind turbines. Referring to the rule of thumb for the steady doubling of the power of microchips, he added, "That's not quite as dramatic an increase as Moore's Law, but it is certainly significant."

  Utilities and independent developers are nonetheless moving ahead with plans to increase the generating capacity of older installations and establish new wind farms. Michael O'Sullivan, a senior vice president at FPL Energy, the biggest domestic operator of wind farms, said that 2003 ''will probably be the second-biggest year in the industry's history, in terms of adding capacity,'' exceeded only by 2001.

October 18, 2006   

• So Bush signed the new Military Commissions Act which in effect gives the White House and the DOD sweeping powers to avoid habeas corpus (the right to challenge unlawful imprisonment), defines torture loosely, and allows coerced evidence at trials. Although you might [mistakenly] trust the current administration, does this hold true for all administrations you've ever known? This is all for "enemy combatants" but we will see how quickly this label is applied to US citizens. I saw this story this morning that this road rage incident is being is being treated as a "terrorist act". So our government can charge anyone deemed an "enemy combatant" with committing a "terrorist act" , can hold them forever without legal review, and can extract testimony using questionable methods, and try folks in military courts outside the realm of federal courts. Are we really so ready to give up these rights to feel more secure? Are we really more secure with this law enacted? More sources: Interrogators Beware, sfgate.com, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor.

October 11, 2006   

• Researchers are reporting that in 2004 12% of all US births are premature -- a 50% increase since 1989. In addition, prematurity accounts for 34% of all infant mortality cases. 1 in 8 children born in the US are born early and of those, 1 in 5 have long term disabilities as a result. A report from the Institute of Medicine says that US$26 billion was spent in 2005 on preterm babies. I bet if the federal government took leadership on reducing pregnant women smoking, drinking, and drugging that it would save many more lives then the "war on terror". Other sources: CBC
• A friend was asking about the High Voltage DC that is used in the long distance transmission lines. The idea is to use very high voltage instead of current which is attenuated by the transmission lines. One example is the Baltic Cable which interconnects the electric power grids of Germany and Sweden. It uses 450 kilovolt (sic) and has a rated capacity of 600 megawatts. Wow.

October 10, 2006   

• Just surfing this cool homebrew wind turbine site with detailed pictures on their 20' blade turbine. Pretty impressive. It's a 2-3 kilowatt turbine that took ~$2k to build with a ~$3k tower although he had a lot of help from friends.

October 2, 2006   

• A new GPS 2R-15 satellite launched from Florida last week. The current satellites have long surpassed their expect life spans and the "Plane A, Slot 2" satellite which this new one is replacing is showing internal clock failures -- sort of important with the GPS protocol. I also wonder what new support they have for disabling or encrypting the GPS signal for military or policy "backouts" of war areas.

  The $75 million satellite launched Monday is the second with modernized features that will transmit additional signals for military and civilian users, promising greater accuracy, added resistance to interference and enhanced performance.

  The advancements will provide the military with a more robust jam-resistant signal and enable better targeting of GPS-guided weapons in hostile environments. The new civilian signal removes navigation errors caused by the Earth's ionosphere.

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