Lying about Global Warming

This week the Wall Street Journal had a commentary about the reduced number of hurricanes in the last few years. On-line articles are blaming global warming for a reduced number of storms and droughts in Asia. The theory is that warming of the oceans means a smaller difference in temperature between the land mass and the ocean water. Several articles today predict this reduction of storms to continue Philippines Prepare Contingency Plan For Impending Drought In a seeming response to the Wall Street Journal article numerous articles appeared today about how hurricanes are increasing. Global Warming Causing More Atlantic Hurricanes, Study Finds So who is right Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal. Actually they are both right. However the article in Bloomberg uses a deceptive statistical practice used by some financial institutions. If they have an above average year they compare a short recent period to a long period to amplify the results (Bloomberg). In contrast if they have a bad year they only show a long period so that the previous years below average performance is averaged out. If they only have bad years then they show the industry average. The Wall Street Journal showed long term averages. They also showed a second average that removed extreme years both high and low. These numbers show a decline in hurricanes during the recorded history of weather. So overall statistically hurricane frequency is declining. However this period is too short to accurately forecast the future. If abnormally high years occur more regularly they could cancel out low hurricane years like 2006. But what we can know is that you can not blame both lower and higher hurricanes activity on global warming at the same time. The Wall Street Journal article did not blame global warming and instead concentrated on the misleading statistics in other articles. Global warming is probably a cause and possibly a major facture. But articles are saying there are going to be droughts because of lower storm activity while others say the opposite. Both are theories and need to be represented as such. Because one of them is wrong and if Murphy has a say then they are both wrong.

Google and Microsoft Team Up?

Microsoft again announced a software shift to the internet Microsoft Offers a Web-Based Strategy and Microsoft Describes Technology Behind Software Plus Services . The problem is that they are keeping their current strategy including their barriers to on-line development. Their main effort to stop software development on the web is the reduction of script memory in Microsoft Explorer. They recently lowered memory yet again. Microsoft Explorer has a flaw that makes reducing the memory even worse. The browser can not reclaim memory and will eventually freeze up. It takes a lot of script to cause it to freeze but relatively little to cause lag. Microsoft is building a massive server farm to store data on a server system instead of the browser. Google also has one of these billion dollar server farms. So this appears to be a move to limit browser software from any company with less than a billion dollars. The problem with this type of artificial limitation is that it only prevents traditional software development. If a start-up develops an architecture that is memory lean it can skip the billions in cost while enjoying little competition.

Why buy bulk?

Think twice before hoarding 'forever' stamps you might never use points out a reason not to buy in bulk is because it ties up your money that could otherwise be earning interest. If interest returns on bank accounts were greater than inflation this might make sense. If yours are I would like to know what bank. Inflation is running about 6% officially and as high as 15% on some common household items. Most banks or short term investments do not earn this. There is also the cost of multiple trips to the store. I have my neighbor pick up milk for me on their trips and I do the same for them in between and now go half as often. When buying in bulk make sure it is a good deal. Make sure you are going to use it. And make sure you need it and have a place for it. For example find out what kind of toilet paper you like. Then price an individual package compared to the giant package. Buy the best deal to last six months. You make money because of inflation. You save gasoline from fewer trips to the store. You help the environment by reducing pollution and traffic congestion. Be careful not to buy in bulk an unknown product. You could end up with too much of something you don’t like. It can be a great comfort during the next snow or ice storm knowing you are not going to run out of toilet paper. It can also be beneficial to not wait until you run out. Buy replacement toilet paper when you have used half your supply. This gives you more than one chance to stock back up without having a bathroom emergency. If you do limit your trips to the store don’t be surprised if neighbors ask to borrow things.

Global Air Conditioner

Average temperatures have increased over the last hundred years across the US. Most temperature readings that have historical data going back one hundred years are in major cities. These major cities produce much more heat than they did one hundred years ago. This heat is generated by everything from restaurants, air conditioners and automobiles. The areas outside these cities do not produce heat from these sources but overall are not represented in the temperature readings. The rural areas need to be included to establish an average temperature. Air conditioning is powered by electricity and generating that electricity adds heat at the point of generation. The heat from buildings is moved outside. Temperature readings in cities do not measure the average temperature of the city (including inside the buildings). They measure the temperature of the city, plus the heat that has been moved outside, plus any heat that has come into the city from power generation, while not subtracting the temperature difference in buildings. Obviously cities do produce more heat than they did in the past. Scientists need to determine how much heat is moved and how much is actually produced and then average in the rural areas. Even if air conditioning is only a small difference, it shows that global temperature readings are no longer accurate since they no longer measure the average temperature. The same thing happened with national surveys. In the past few years many middle and upper class individuals have switched to unlisted numbers or screen phone calls with caller id. Phone surveys no longer could reach this group of people. They have such a margin of error to make them almost useless.

Energy Crazy

A neighbor near my house has put up a sign “Stop urban gas drilling”. The sign is in response to the huge natural gas find in Texas. This begs many questions. The first is why they continue to use urban natural gas. Second, where should we get the natural gas, national wildlife reserves in Alaska? Third, even if they turn off their urban natural gas where do they think their electricity comes from. Some of it comes from nuclear, but the extra requirements for summer usage come from where? Is that their air conditioner I hear running? Should I put up a sign “Help turn off my neighbor’s urban gas air conditioner”?

Not so Easy

Easy Bake Toy Ovens Recalled Again How much research and engineering was actually done? It appears that product testing was done mainly through use. There is nothing like a lot of people using something to find its flaws. I have yet to work on a software project where gathering or using this information is part of the project. I have seen it used indirectly. In the beginning of my career my software was not web based and could not be easily updated. Testing and debugging after finishing the coding added another one-third to the project time-line. With web projects that is down to less then a tenth. I have seen products go out with no testing. Users find and report bugs in what is called a beta release. Users are expected to take the effort to make sure the developers fix these bugs. The bugs get fixed, but little effort is made to collect and implement change based on the user’s experience. There are sometimes questionnaires that users are asked to fill out. But they all seem to ask “did we build what we told you we were going to build so we can tell our bosses we did?” If negatives like bugs come out during beta use then there must also be positives. So should we consider a web based software release only two thirds of the project?

100% Taxes

There have been a few Wall Street Journal articles about the minimum tax issue The ABCs of Dealing With the AMT . If you make income above a certain level you lose the ability to claim deductions. Thus for a range of income above that level you pay 100% tax. Since that level is above 200k most Americans are not worried. I read an article yesterday about the cost of future government obligations. These range from the generous city fire fighter and police retirement benefits to the possible trillions of dollars for prescription drug benefits. Who Do We Owe and How Much? What worries me when I look at these numbers is that some estimates actually range beyond 100% of what the government can tax. Based on the obligations the government is spending twice as much as they take in. Estimates put total government tax at about 55% (total tax is everything from the tax added to gasoline to those penny taxes for this and that on your phone bill and everything in between). If you double 55% then we are actually racking up tax liabilities at more than 100% of what everyone makes. This total varies widely based on how you compute government spending, obligations and GNP. Is everyone in a 100% tax bracket?

Honey Bees being Killed by a Parasite

Scientists are attributing the mass die out of honey bees to a parasite from Asia. http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/43163/story.htm It was interesting to see all the completely unscientific theories such as the cell phones stories, one of which even made to the headline story on Yahoo. Now cell phone phobias will have to find another unexplained mystery to blame on cell phones. Genetic crops and the new pesticides were thrown around as a possible cause. But as usually with mysteries like this the solution is simple and logical.

Blizzard visits Sam's

Sixty million might have been a low estimate. WOW patch 2.05 - A lesson in failure Blizzard, according to this blog is pulling in over a billion dollars (US) a year from World of Warcraft (WOW). Blizzard appears to be having a lot of problems with a patch. I know they have had some developers defect because of poor compensation. The question is where is all the money going? And how much did their new on-line game engine really cost that they have to pull out all the stops? May be like a visit to Sam's and looking for a twenty in your wallet before they ring it up when what you need is a hundred.

Blizzard Jumps

One of the most successful home computer games is Blizzard’s Diablo II. It is the game engine that was re-written to become the most popular on-line game, World of Warcraft. Diablo 3 cometh? Gamers have heard rumors of a sequel for years. Diablo represents a significant intellectual property for Blizzard on par with the movie industry’s “Star Wars”. Rumors are that Blizzard as of last year had spent $60 million (US) funding a European development team to build a generic on-line game engine. Last year Blizzard said they would first launch an original or less valuable title. This appeared to be a move to make sure people liked the game engine, before applying it to a more valuable game title. This game engine is a generic set of tools to support a subscription based game that can be used for many different on-line games. This recent move to possibly by-pass a less significant title indicates that Blizzard may be facing what many software development firms have learned. You only really have a choice if you can abandon the method. Since Blizzard must spend additional money to apply the game engine to Diablo they may have come to the realization that regardless of how the game engine is received they no longer have the money to go back to the drawing board. It is much like do you leap into cold water or slowly ease in. Blizzard realized they were already in mid air.

Is this the Beginning of Internet Radio?

There has been a lot of press on the new radio internet tax that is going into effect retroactively to the beginning of last year. Sunday, The Beginning of the End for Internet Radio It is going to have a big impact on radio broadcast on the Internet and may make it difficult to impossible to support a radio internet site on just ad revenue. So over the next few days we should see the second major wave of internet radio stations closings. It is another attempt by the music industry to maintain control of the distribution of music. I think that in the long term this tax could actually be good for Internet radio and have unexpected consequences for the old distribution method. Internet sites can avoid the tax if they negotiate their own agreements with musicians. Until now it was not economical for individual web sites to negotiate directly. The music industry model of distribution is so cost effective and monopolized that without a tax of this nature it would be hard for individual web sites to justify the cost of trying to replace it. Will the old monopoly be replaced with a new monopoly or will the industry splinter? This should be good for musicians as competition heats up for their services.

If Apple had a game console would it be a Wii?

Sony has reduced the price of the PlayStation 3 Sony's PS3 price war giveaways while at the same time Microsoft is struggling with a recall of the Xbox 360 Do Xbox 360s Scratch Discs? . Both of these game consoles aimed to improve performance and graphic quality of game play. I think overall they achieved the goals, but are too expensive to appeal to as broad an audience as the Wii. The Wii has an innovative user interface that makes up for the lower graphic quality and the price is exactly what consumers want to pay. Apple has repeatedly been able to find the right mix of style, price and usability. Apple is not the first company to make a MP3 player. They did find the right mix of options, a stylish player, price range, and captured most of the market. They have done it again with the iPhone. I have always thought, “Build it and they will come”. But Apple has taught us it also needs to be easy to use, look good, and be the right price.

Butterflies and Moths

I received a comment from a friend on the butterflies. Natural selection through breeding can be considered survival of the fittest, which would be evolution. This is a great point. What I was concerned about was applying such a broad label with so many unknowns. Did the butterflies lose some characteristics by breeding with such a small gene pool? Thus did they de-evolve? Do these butterflies periodically go through this process? In which case it would not be evolving or de-evolving, but a normal part of their long-term life cycle. Thinking about butterflies; Dallas was emendated with web worms this year. Some trees were stripped nearly bare of leafs. Breeding conditions were ideal with the abnormally cool and wet weather we have had the last few months. A few days ago they all disappeared. Yesterday two white moths found each others on the inside of my back door. Looking on the web Species Hyphantria cunea - Fall Webworm Moth these webworm pictures of the moth match what was in my house. If all of the webworms turn into white moths at the same time we should have a spectacular show.

Evolution or Selective Breeding?

National Geographic has an article about male butterflies on the Samoan islands that have been decimated by bacteria. They have evolved to become resistant and have made a comeback. Butterfly Evolves Leg Up on Male-Killing Parasite I have a Pug dog on my lap and it is amazing to think she was breed from a wolf. Has nature been breeding all along? Some of the butterflies were already resistant to the bacteria and obviously being the only surviving males they then passed on this characteristic to their offspring. I dislike articles like this that are about selective breeding and label it evolution. It is like the word evolution has to be dropped at every chance. I guess the Pug on my lap is a new evolution and not a breed of dog. Before you post a comment about whether or not there is evolution, think about the real question here. Is the use of the word evolving proper for a case of natural breeding of an existing characteristic? If the answer is yes then why do we call it breeding a dog and not evolving a dog?

eBay is Hiring?

Some economic writers BLS "Phantom" Workers Now Account for 56% of Payroll Increase are wondering where are all the new jobs that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is adding. I wonder how the government is counting all the new “internet jobs” like blogging. There are a few success stories of top bloggers making two-hundred thousand a month. TechCrunch Blogger Michael Arrington Can Generate Buzz ... and Cash But I doubt that most blogs make much of anything (me). The revenue is reported to the IRS and even if you are making nearly nothing it may show up as employment. Then there are all the other mini-business/hobbies that can make money on the internet. Most do not pay for the expense of the computer. But is the government counting these as jobs? And are they double counting people who do blogs and have a paying job? Are you becoming a phantom worker every time you sell something on eBay?

Do We Need CSS for Database Tables?

For the last few years there has been a push to stop using HTML style and table tags and instead use style sheets (CSS). Style sheets allow centralized control of font styles and page layout and can reduce the size of pages and thus save considerable bandwidth. The main advantage is that you can say less and do more. Yet for databases nothing much has changed in my career. Oracle has come out with yet another release to improve the tools for the relational database model. Can Oracle's Database 11g Deliver? In many ways this is like continuing to support HTML table and style tags without style sheets. The demands for data and the time requirements added to web development continues to increase. Oracle has had a lot of success because the tools they built in the past have made it much easier to use databases. But the advantages from better tools have reached a threshold that means they may actually reduce efficiency because of the learning expense. I remember my company upgrading its Oracle servers in 2002 and suddenly all my web pages doubled in speed. The timing was perfect. Now if Oracle can help me with my SQL, like the statement that I just finished in two weeks, which should have taken three days.

Is Sprint broken?

Sprint dropped its phone subscribers that call customer service 50 times more a month than the average customer.
As Sprint's move shows, some customers aren't worth the hassle Sprint will save a lot of money not supporting these endless calls by an extremely small minority of customers? Won’t they? As a designer of web sites I sometimes have the opportunity to provide customer service. I can relate with Sprint. Out of all the users of one of the sites I supported, the same three people called. One day I receive a call about the servers being down from one of the three. It was an interesting problem because technically the servers were not down. They were running but bogged down to the point they were timing out before sending any web pages. Because the servers had not crashed none of the expensive software to notify the administrators was triggered. I call the administrators and they did not believe me. If the servers for a Fortune 500 company were down they would be getting thousands of calls not to mention all the server software that should be triggered. I finally get them to pull up one of the web sites on their browser. How could hundreds of web sites be down and I be the only one on the phone calling them? In the move to reduce cost and eliminate trivial calls groups like server administrators have insolated themselves so much that nobody can call. As trivial as the things these three users came up with they always seemed to be legitimate. So is the Sprint network down? I am not calling them.

Nielsen-NetRatings Tries Change

The speed at which technology changes can quickly spell the doom of the products made by entrenched companies. Nielsen-NetRatings is changing their rating system of web pages to include the time spent on the page in addition to how many times it is viewed. Nielsen adds time spent on sites to Web rankings But they failed to adapt fast enough to stay in the rating business for movie box office data. This Google Techtalk by a developer at Rentrack. Is your RDBMS letting you down? Applications of TV Viewing Behavior mentions how Rentrack introduced faster and greater detail for movie box offices and in one year had taken the rating business of all but one major studio from Nielsen. I am reminded of the movie Antitrust (2001) with Tim Robbins where he says that anyone in their garage can come up with a product and put him out of business. Rentrack’s product was not built in a garage, but it was a small scale project that led to a major improvement in technology.