Will The Olympics Be On Time?

I'm quite interested about the timings for the 2012 Olympics.

The London Development Agency has sent out a document today entitled "Shaping the Olympic Park Legacy" which details progress regarding the planning process and how local communities can play an active part in the games.

The document is also available online here.

At the bottom of each page is a possible timeline for a day in the life of the local community during the Olympics. For example, the "day starts" on page one at 7.31am, on page 3 at 8.03am a delivery man tells us that "opening early was a good idea" and on page 5 at 8.47am "shoppers are coming from all over London". You get the idea.

However on page 10 at 11.59am "lots of the kids want to learn about starting their own business" and you turn over to page 12 where at 12.09am one of the children says "I've never seen tadpoles before, there's always something to do here".

Well I'm not surprised this child hasn't seen any tadpoles there at 9 minutes past midnight, it must be pitch black at that time of night. And what are their parents thinking about letting them out at that hour?

Of course not. As the next page goes to 1.04pm, it must simply be a mistake in someone forgetting 12am is midnight and 12pm in noon.

But then if you go to the back of this informative booklet (page 26-28) it gives you a summary of what these people should be doing throughout the day. This is where it gets really confusing.

At 11.59am the kids still want to learn about small business but at 1.04am we find out that the children have now spent nearly an hour now looking for tadpoles in the dead of night without any success.

And furthermore at 1.20am some office workers tell us that "sitting by the water is great when the sun's out, I used to have lunch at my desk". Although they don't tell us how often the sun is out at that time of night, I imagine they must be doing the nightshift to get a lunch break around then. :-/

If the LDA get their way, I am sure their legacy from the Olympics will be that they can honestly say that the times they are a changing.
-
(Image Source: Picture of London Development Agency's "Shaping the Olympic Park Legacy".)

With Barack Obama, Democrats Find Answer to the Paucity of Ideas

While the debate in the United States seems to center around whether with Barack Obama, there is any there there, it seems that in some places he is regarded as the Democratic answer to the much vaunted Republican idea machine. Alfredo Toro Hardy of Venezuela’s El Universal writes, ‘Confronted with the flood of proposals from their Republican counterparts, the fonts of Democratic thought seem to have dried up. … As if by magic, these past limitations seem to be disappearing due to the impact of the Obama phenomenon. He has been responsible with offering Democrats and his campaign a ‘vision’ which, combined with his oratory and charisma, offers a solid counterweight to the strong conservative tendency that characterizes the national mood.’

By Alfredo Toro Hardy

Translated By Barbara Howe

March 13, 2008

Venezuela - El Universal - Original Article (Spanish)

Democrats have begun confronting some serious limitations. Their lack of policy proposals and ideas has often played into the hands of Republicans - and at times when the Republicans have been particularly prolific in this regard. It's from the right-wing side of the political spectrum that the majority of the ideas which have fed the public life of that country have emerged over the past five years. Confronted with the flood of proposals from their Republican counterparts, the fonts of Democratic thought which in the past conceived “The New Deal," “The Great Society," The League of Nations and the United Nations, the Marshall Plan and "Doctrine of Containment," seem to have dried up. This lack of "vision" has placed them in a more reactive posture.

The country veered to the right with the ascendancy of conservative values. This not only left Liberals

A Trillion Here, a Trillion There

A publisher I knew once proposed a picture book, “They Must Know What They’re Doing or They Wouldn’t Be Where They Are,” to show the captain of the Titanic, the designers of the Edsel, LBJ running the War in Viet Nam and other overseers of spectacular 20th century blunders.

The Bush Administration now rates a sequel all its own for being in charge of two cataclysms, in the Middle East and here at home.

As Bear Stearns, the poster boy for Wall Street greed, gets gobbled up with the help of taxpayer money, Paul Krugman asks, “When the feds do bail out the financial system, what will they do to ensure that they aren't also bailing out the people who got us into this mess?”

Read the rest of this entry.

Erlang questions mailing list :: RE: System monitoring and logging

Author: Anonymous
Subject: System monitoring and logging
Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 3:28 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 3

On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 02:54:43PM +0100, Peter Mechlenborg wrote:
> Hi
>
> For the last 18 month or so I have been working on an interesting
> project written in Erlang. Over the last months it has become clear
> to me that we need a more structured way of monitoring our systems.
> Right now we basically just have a log file with lots of different
> information. I'm starting to realize that monitoring and visibility
> are important properties that should be an integrated part of our
> architecture; not an add-on. I also think this applies to almost all
> server systems, especially those with high demands on fault
> tolerance, so this issue must have been solved many times before in
> Erlang, or am I wrong here?
>
> We have started looking into SNMP, and this seems promising, even
> though it seem a bit old (I get the impression that SNMP where hot 10
> years ago, but is kind of phasing out right now. Is this correct?)

I think SNMP still has a place at many shops. Not sure it is going away anytime
soon.

> and rigid. I have not been able to find any alternatives to SNMP, do
> there exist any?
> I would really like some feedback on how you guys
> handle monitoring and logging on the systems you develop and operate,
> do you use SNMP, some other framework, nothing, or something home grown.

I suppose in my case a combination of all of the above.

Regarding SNMP though, I haven't worked with it in some time. You might want to
check out the snmp(3) man page, and the mnesia(3) man page where the 'snmp'
configurable is documented:

* {snmp, SnmpStruct}. See mnesia:snmp_open_table/2 for a
description of SnmpStruct. If this attribute is present in
the ArgList to mnesia:create_table/2, the table is immedi-
ately accessible by means of the Simple Network Management
Protocol (SNMP). This means that applications which use SNMP
to manipulate and control the system can be designed easily,
since Mnesia provides a direct mapping between the logical
tables that make up an SNMP control application and the
physical data which makes up a Mnesia table.

I haven't worked with this myself, but it seems others have:

Making a Mnesia Table SNMP Accessible
http://www.drxyzzy.org/mnesia-snmp/index.html

Seems SNMP could be used as another means of having SNMP-enabled C/C++/Java/etc
components talk to erlang (i.e. besides ei and J-interface) , but I haven't
experimented with that, either.

-Rick
_______________________________________________
erlang-questions mailing list
erlang-questions@erlang.org
http://www.erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
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Erlang questions mailing list :: RE: Unexpected behaviour of timer:sleep

Author: Anonymous
Subject: Unexpected behaviour of timer:sleep
Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 2:54 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 9

"James Hague" <james.hague@gmail.com> writes:

> On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 8:14 AM, Bengt Kleberg
> <bengt.kleberg@ericsson.com> wrote:
> >
> > Have you tested
> >
> > receive
> > after 1 -> ok
> > end.
> >
> > It might be more accurate.
>
> Not under OS X it isn't. I started a thread about this last year:
> there's no way to sleep with a granularity of less than 10-15
> milliseconds. The group discussion pinned this on the underlying
> operating system, which I'm not sure I buy. Rather horribly, I
> resorted to a busy wait loop that continually calls now/0, which works
> perfectly, but sure causes the fan on my MacBook to spin up.

On Mac OS 10.4.11:

1> timer:tc(timer, sleep, [1]).
{10085,ok}

On Mac OS 10.5.2:

1> timer:tc(timer, sleep, [1]).
{1295,ok}

I remember reading somewhere in Apple's documentation that select() had
a minimum sleeping time of 10 ms in Tiger, but it was changed in Leopard.

/Bjorn
--
Bj

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Hooray for America's Trade Deficit (by Don Boudreaux)

The Financial Times published this letter of mine yesterday:

From Mr Donald J. Boudreaux.

Sir, Pat Buchanan's hostility to free trade (Letters, March 5) reflects his misunderstanding of fundamental concepts. He complains that "since Nafta . . . we have run $5,000bn in trade deficits". For Mr Buchanan, this fact is clear evidence of the dangers of freer trade. But let us reword his complaint: "Since Nafta, we have run $5,000bn in investment surpluses." Putting it like this - which is simply another way of reporting the fact that Mr Buchanan finds so troubling - reveals that, since Nafta, $5,000bn worth of capital has flowed into the US.

This capital helped to create and modernise many US companies, to fund research and development, to train workers, and to ease the burden imposed on Americans by Uncle Sam's profligacy. Does Mr Buchanan really lament this capital inflow?

It is worth pointing out, too, that this inflow of capital is precisely the opposite of what Ross "Giant Sucking Sound" Perot predicted would happen if Nafta were passed.

Donald J. Boudreaux,
Chairman,
Department of Economics,
George Mason University,
Fairfax, VA 22030, US

If I Were A Shill for Industry.... (by Don Boudreaux)

In this recent blog-post at "Notes," I and my fellow GMU bloggers such as Bryan Caplan, Tyler Cowen, Arnold Kling, Alex Tabarrok, and, of course, Russ Roberts were said to "seem to be shills for industry."  Actually, I really like the full quotation, so here it is:

If we were to judge by the internet, then the most influential economists in the world are the George Mason economists of Marginal Revolution, Cafe Hayek, and Econlog. These guys seem to be everywhere. I don't like them much -- they seem to be shills for industry, and just plain lazy. (Consider Kling's offhand comment that dogs impose more of a burden on the environment than SUVs, without any research.) They aren't exactly mainstream, either, but their views are fairly stereotypical.

This accusation of seeming to be a "shill" for industry prompted me to write this column, published today in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.  Here's a key paragraph:

If I were a shill for industry...I would oppose free markets. Free markets, after all, are markets open to competition that invariably keeps the profits of existing firms from remaining excessive and, often, even bankrupts firms once thought to be invincible industry leaders. Existing firms almost all deplore competition in their industries. They seek government regulations that hamstring rivals and potential rivals. And, of course, firms are forever pleading for "protection" from foreign competition.

I just wrote a book ("Globalization") in which I make a strong and principled case for completely free trade - not free trade sometimes, for some firms, under some circumstances, with some qualifications, but free trade always, for all firms, under all circumstances, and with no qualifications.

Whether my book's case for unalloyed free trade is correct or not, it is surely not the sort of book that causes the heads of many corporate CEOs to nod in eager agreement. The typical reaction of business people whenever they hear or read me make my case for genuinely free trade is to say something like, "Professor Boudreaux, you don't understand the peculiarities of my industry." And then each executive launches into a laundry list of excuses for why Congress should protect his industry from foreign rivals.

If I were an industry shill ...

• I'd express agreement with these self-serving claims and do my best in my writings and speeches to make a case for "fair trade," or "balanced trade," or "trade that's in our national interest" -- but never for free trade.

Google Health – What’s Different?

Hard on the heels of the announcement of Microsoft Vault we have the following announcement at the HIMSS conference. Google CEO unveils Google Health 28 Feb 2008 The veil came off the world's worst-kept secret in healthcare IT Thursday, as Google chairman and chief executive Eric Schmidt announced the beta release of Google Health at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) annual conference in Orlando, Florida. For now, the product is limited to the US market, though Alfred Spector, Google vice president of research and special initiatives said the California-based company has "started making contacts" with health authorities and potential business partners in unspecified international markets. Google are not commenting publicly on potential business partners, but Schmidt addressed the issue in a press conference following his keynote address to the HIMSS conference. "One of my regrets is we're launching a US-only product, and the decision is a legal...

This is the initial part of the post - read more by clicking on the title of the article. David.

SA HealthConnect – Can They Get It Right This Time?

From HealthClix for March, 2008 we learn the following. "2008 promises to be an exciting year at HealthConnect SA, with all of our e-Health projects now well underway. A major initiative for HealthConnect SA has been, and will continue to be, the development of an electronic care planning system. It is also an important initiative from a government perspective, as an effective electronic care planning system will help to address one of the government's key health challenges, the growing burden of chronic disease. I am very pleased to announce that Pen Computer Systems Pty Ltd have been contracted to develop Stage 1 of the e-Health Care Planning System (formally the South Australian Care Planning System). The name change reflects the need to identify this care planning system as an e-Health initiative, and to distinguish it from other care planning work being undertaken within South Australia. We know from the findings of the Care Planning and Communication Trial...

This is the initial part of the post - read more by clicking on the title of the article. David.

Pen Computer and The College of GPs Develop their Partnership

The following press release hit the inbox this afternoon. MEDIA RELEASE RACGP AND PEN COMPUTER SYSTEMS ADVANCE GENERAL PRACTICE E-HEALTH 5 March 2008 The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) is pleased to announce an agreement with Pen Computer Systems Pty Ltd (PCS), a primary health informatics company, to enhance the utilisation of computers in general practice for clinical record keeping, quality management and electronic clinical decision support. "The RACGP has had a long–standing interest and commitment to ensuring that general practitioners have access to e-health tools to improve patient care and business efficiency," said Dr Vasantha Preetham, RACGP President. "Our members expect us to provide support, advice, advocacy and services on key issues that affect their working lives and that impact on the health care of all Australians. The agreement with Pen Computer Systems allows us to build tools that will help doctors to more easily offer...

This is the initial part of the post - read more by clicking on the title of the article. David.

Mamet on government and markets (by Russell Roberts)

David Mamet has written an extraordinary confessional for the Village Voice (I've edited this link, ht: Drudge) where he describes his philosophical change of heart from being an anti-American, anti-market believer in man's perfectibility to something different. An excerpt:

What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.

But if the government is not to intervene, how will we, mere human beings, work it all out?

I wondered and read, and it occurred to me that I knew the answer, and here it is: We just seem to. How do I know? From experience. I referred to my own—take away the director from the staged play and what do you get? Usually a diminution of strife, a shorter rehearsal period, and a better production.

And then Mamet shows an understanding of public choice theory applied to theater:

The director, generally, does not cause strife, but his or her presence impels the actors to direct (and manufacture) claims designed to appeal to Authority—that is, to set aside the original goal (staging a play for the audience) and indulge in politics, the purpose of which may be to gain status and influence outside the ostensible goal of the endeavor.

He goes on to say he's been reading Sowell and Friedman (and Paul Johnson and Shelby Steele). Sounds like he would like some Hayek if he hasn't tried him already.

Read the whole thing, although the site is slow right now from the raft of comments (190 and rising rapidly) and Drudge's link.

And if anyone out there knows Mr. Mamet or someone who knows him, I sure would like to invite him to be a guest on EconTalk.

Markets and Community (by Russell Roberts)

The latest EconTalk is Stephen Marglin talking about his new book, The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community. He and I have a very different view of how markets change the world but interestingly, we both have a deep respect for Hayek's insights into knowledge.

Lowly Origin

Herto Man

Herto Man hunted and lived in what is now Ethiopia some 160,000 years ago. Fossil skulls recently found lend credence to the African Origin and subsequent disipersal of Homo sapiens throughout the rest of the world. I found an article through following an answer at Ask A Biologist. I highly recommend The Bradshaw Foundation’s illustrations, lectures and presentations if you wish to gain a picture of the flow of human origins and migrations. (more…)

evolution darwin creation science

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