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- * Listing of Entries #1: Archived by Category: An extensive, sql alphabetized site grouping is available. Be patient and you will be rewarded. The listing is long!
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The making of Inside the Meltdown by Frontline Producer, Michael Kirk of WGBH, Boston.
Sample Postings: 6 of the most recent entries ordered by date
[ Thursday, June 30, 2005 15:56 PDT ]
Summer in D.C.: It is time to Get Out of Town
Section:
Politics
Summary:
While many are headed for the mountains or the beach, Bush and the G-8 heads of state are heading for Grayeagle in Perthshire Scotland. Golf and equestrian sports are not on the playlist that includes:
Main:
* Refocusing debt relief and disease control in subsaharan Africa.
* Coordination of joint efforts to prevent the spread of military nuclear technology
and the sponsorship of radical Islamic extremism.
* Global Immigration and Trade policy.
* Promoting the free flow of capital.
* Sharing the financial burden of regional defense.
* Managing international exchange rates.
* Reforming the management of aid for development, technology transfer, literacy, women’s rights and the rule of law.
* Prevention of race on race personal violence and property con
And then there is always the issue of selecting site of the 2012 Olympic Games. London? Paris? Moscow? Madrid? New York? Stay tuned, the Chinese and the Russia are preparing for a cooperative metal harvest in Bejing 2008.
More:
[ Wednesday, June 29, 2005 14:45 PDT ]
Ireland: Education, Business Climate and Quality of Life
Section:
Business
Summary:
Tom Friedman of the nytimes hits another one out of the park. The globalization of technology is about success stories in small hot spots: Ireland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Isreal, Silicon Valley, Bangalore and Finland are but representative examples. What common characteristics do they share?
Stategic locations close to markets; high priority for security, safety and good public education; reliable communication and trasportation infrastucture; efficient public services and effective civil servants; lean, business like, stable local and federal govenments.
Main:
Friedman could have entitled his piece, “The Real Greening of the Rainbow in Ireland”. The fact is that Dell Computer, Medtronics and many pharaceutical companies located major operations in Ireland long before Friedman began his voyages of discovery.
One company with a long history of success in Ireland is Apple Computer in Cork.
Apple appears to be on a roll with:
* Mactel
* The Mac G5s
* It has Berkeley DB rolled into Open LDAP on OX Server 10.4.1
* iTunes 4.9 is now managing podcasts in MP3, lessloss and ACC formats.
And you thought you had enough speed, memory and bandwidth.
* The iPod line is now Picture Perfect with color displays.
* Safari handles RSS and .xml.
* Spotlight is a hit worthy of an OS upgrade.
* FBI CyberCrime field agents are reported to be equipped with PowerBooks that can Triple Boot into OSX, Windows, or Linux.
.. and the list goes on for those who connect the dots.
Meanwhile, today the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has funded 43 global health research and development programs with $430 million. The first step in fighting poverty and providing a sound footing for education and internal develpment is to promote solid and sustainable public health practice and policy. Corruption, political instability and tribal conflict continue to be nagging problems.
More:
[ Monday, June 27, 2005 14:20 PDT ]
Highbrow Lowbrow Whiplash in the Heartland
Section:
Commentary
Summary:
Washington DC has been described as a mean town, New York City as a tough town, San Francisco as a tolerant town and Los Angeles an a collection of transplanted dream towns. In Yolo county, Dixon is cute, Winters is quirky, Woodland is—well—sniff— just there and Davis is a one company town that is also a refuge from that wild frontier town to the east, Sacramento.
Main:
Today we learned in the nytimes obituary that Fred Dutton a California native son turned attorney, Democratic Party veteran and lobbyist, lived a double life. In the first half of his profession life he became a key player in the California Kennedy political machine. In the second half he was a payed Washington D.C. “go to guy” for the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
That brings to mind a key differnce between personal vs and instutionalized resolution of binary ethical issues of the conflict of interest, conflict of loyalty and conflict of value variety. For example:
* see C.P. Snow and Two Cultures and the David Kennedy, Science editorial referernce. In academia the intellectual divides are many, deep and many ways unresolved. However, institutions have multiple escapes from the pressures of the fray. Tenure, titles,multiple outside sources of income, funding status, sabatticals, committees, lateral transfers, titles, captive graduate students and post doc fellows, a builtin support staff, and the list goes on.
* Most individuals, including attornys work in the best interest of their client, or they do not work at all. In the case of Fred Dutton, he apparently knew his clients and he served their interests.
The point is this: small communities with a fair representation of retired professionals are a facinating place to observe the process of personal conversion, preservation, and resolution of culture and values in conflict. One setting is clearly the choice of friends and associates following retirement, relocation, lose of a mate, or a change in heath status.
The recent public faces of L. Patrick Gray and Mark Fine are but two recent examples of a need to come out of the closet. One face is that of a bitter ex-submarine commander, the other is of a smiling, pragmatic attorney. Feel free to draw your own conclusions as to what that means.
In the words of a wise counsellor: ” It all depends on….”
BTW: We note an irony. The site of the Pentagon was selected personally by FDR and was dedicated on September 11, 1941. 6.5 million sq.ft of space was created for 40,000 Department of War personel in 16 months.
It is SAD that a fragile minority fringe is now deluged with a stream of alternative conspiratorial theories proporting to revial the “truth” and the untold story behind the terrorist takeover of American Airlines flight 77 and the crash bombing of the Pentagon Building. The Kennedy assasinations spawned two generations of writers on the subject. 911 is just one episode in a epic tale. Perhaps some recall Jefferson and his long experience with Barbary Coast “Pirate” negotiations.
Allegations of conspiracy and coverup predate the media, the printing press, and the written word. What is different today is the scope, economy, speed and reach of opinion in the digital information age. The good news is that there is a well informed army of fact checkers to counterbalance fanciful fiction. Plus, most are more interested in “whats for lunch”, “how are the kids doing”, and “who won the Masters.”
Meanwhile, the positive and healthy Senors of Davis are walking, talking, basking in the sun and having fun watching the kids at play in the village parks and pools.
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[ Friday, June 24, 2005 10:06 PDT ]
Technology in the Obituary
Section:
Vital Stats: birth, wed, obits
Summary:
Articles on the lives of Keeling, Kilby and Stead were featured in the Science, Business and Medlcine sections of the nytimes this week. All three are examples of excellence from the American Heartland.
Main:
was the chemist who collected and supplied the atmospheric C02 data that is displayed in the famous “Keeling Curve” the foundation of the Green House Gas theory of human and fossil fuel caused Global Warming. His mentor at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography was Roger Revell who later introduced young Al Gore than a Harvard undergraduate to the global perils of population proliferation. Senator Al Gore later put his name on a best selling book, Earth in the Balance. Keeling received one footnote. Tim Wirth and Revell made star power appearances before a Gore Chained Senate enviromental committee.
* Jack S. Kilby of Texas Instruments
was the CO-inventor, with Robert Noyce of Fairchild, of the microcircuit and the handheld calculator, the forerunner of the expanded integrated circuit and the microchip for modern computing.
was a pioneering medical practitioner, educator and researcher long associated with the Duke School of Medicine. One of his legacies is today call Evidence Based Medicine. Much of his evidence came from classic cardiac physiology, bedside observation and the research laboratory. Statistical association, for him and others in clinical medicine, was not and is not sufficent to make the case for cause and effect for the diagnosis and treatment of any one patient.
And then there is the issue privacy v freedom of information in the Global digital world of IT. We note that Senators H. Rodham Clinton and W.Frist, MD have announce they are cosponsoring umbrella federal guidelines on sharing patient medical information electronically.
More:
Science and Technology: • Social Sciences: • Demography: • (0) Comments: • (0) Trackbacks: • Permalink:
[ Sunday, June 19, 2005 12:44 PDT ]
Dad’s Day in Davis
Section:
Sons and Daughters
Summary:
The Dads and Grads are out and about this weekend in the Heartland. Speeches were made, awards were given, sheepskins were awarded, tears were shed, hugs were exchanged and there was many a trip down nostalgia lane.
Main:
Of note were the following:
* Dispite the pending tweaks in the University of California admissions mechanism, including the proposed decertification of the PSAT as the standard for awarding National Merit Scholarships, Asian-Americans students continue to orient to the UC magnet. In the science and engineering they perform curve bending work. Their visiting multigeneration families are taking pictures, strolling the campus, riding the rented stretch limos and Unitrans double-decker London buses.
* Meanwhile, two Dads in the company of three daughters were hosted to breakfast at the Putah Creek Cafe in Winters. The ride west across producing farmland and cloudless skys recently scrubbed by showers was fun and the down home food was filling. The diners were not of the fussy variety.
* After a light DAM workout, it was time to prepare for a flying bike visitor from San Francisco. We are beginning to think son Damon likes Davis.
* Steve Jobs of Apple was among the speakers in California.
* Cybercrime with Microsoft’s Scott Charney is next week starting on Wednesday, 22 June.
* BTW, NCBI Training starts next month at the UC Davis General Library.
More:
[ Sunday, June 12, 2005 14:04 PDT ]
Eating our own dog food
Section:
Essays
Summary:
Today, pmachine is rolling out a long delayed Expression Engine CMS feature, an integrated discussion module. Entry editing, spell checking, and display have receiving early rave reviews. The details of the Admin CP (Control Panel) and module documentation remain to be revealed.
Main:
The company, now located in Bend Oregon, appears to be in the process of updating its Website using EE, and preparing to test an upgrade and bug fix that has had bearishly long gestation time. Things some times take a bit longer to bloom in the Pacific Northwest than south of the Siskiyous.
Now that the Mac-tel announcement has been made, hopefully design, development, documentation and deployment of a wide variety of consumer oriented, user friendly, webbased ,LAMP products will continue to appear and thrive.
In the meantime, Central Oregon continues to attract mobile professional who are life style conscious and family oriented.
All the best to pmachine, Rick, his family and his associates and their transition. Let use hope that it not a lesson in humility that have long be experienced by some less sophisticated guinea pigs.
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