Day: October 5, 2002

The 2002 Ig Nobel Prizes

Winners of the Ig Nobel Prize were recently announced at a dinner held at Harvard. Some of the winners of this dubious prize.

PHYSICS
Arnd Leike of the University of Munich, for demonstrating that beer froth obeys the mathematical Law of Exponential Decay. [REFERENCE: “Demonstration of the Exponential Decay Law Using Beer Froth,” Arnd Leike, European Journal of Physics, vol. 23, January 2002, pp. 21-26.]

. . .

MATHEMATICS
K.P. Sreekumar and the late G. Nirmalan of Kerala Agricultural University, India, for their analytical report “Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants.” [REFERENCE: “Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants (Elephas maximus indicus),” K.P. Sreekumar and G. Nirmalan, Veterinary Research Communications, vol. 14, no. 1, 1990, pp. 5-17.]

…

[My Favorite:]
MEDICINE
Chris McManus of University College London, for his excruciatingly balanced report, “Scrotal Asymmetry in Man and in Ancient Sculpture.” [PUBLISHED IN: Nature, vol. 259, February 5, 1976, p. 426.]

The Ig Nobel past winners page is hilarious, especially since all of these are well-referenced, real studies or products.

Weblogging and Journalistic Standards

Yesterday I spent about 20 minutes on the phone with a reporter from the local Newhouse paper for a weblogging feature that I assume will appear sometime next week.

It was a pretty enjoyable experience, though to be honest I don’t do well in spontaneous interviews — there’s a reason I write a weblog rather than doing a radio show (which I also did for a couple years).

One of the issues we talked about were journalistic standards vs. that used by webloggers. I explained that, for the most part, I don’t see many webloggers trying to fill the shoes of reporters. Occasionally I see webloggers at universities reporting on events there, but most of what I read is commentary on items that appear in traditional media.

What I forgot to point out was that traditional media are occasionally (and sometimes it seems more frequently) duped by fake stories. Look at all of the American news outlets that fell for the “blondes are going extinct” hoax last week. Or this incident where New York Times columnist Paul Krugman pretty much lost what little credibility he still had by citing an e-mail allegedly sent by Secretary of Army Thomas White which now appears to be a likely hoax/forgery. And, of course, the Times also fell hook, line and sinker for the Kaycee weblog hoax.

What I find especially disturbing is Krugman’s explanation of why he cited the e-mail,

I didn’t press for validation because it was consistent with everything else.

But that is exactly when reporters/columnists should ask for validation. Such claims are like people selling Rolexes on the corner for a hundred bucks — things that appear too good to be true usually are. A quote from Caesar that just happens to fit the current situation, a story about blondes going extinct are just too pat to be taken at face value without corroborating evidence, or an e-mail from a Bush administration official that is essentially the admission of a crime are just too pat to accept without corroboration.

The people who take these things at face value are in the same league as the Detroit woman who embezelled millions of dollars and turned it over to the perpetrators of a 419 scheme. Krugman and Salon hav become so obssessed with attacking Bush that they didn’t perform due diligence to see if an e-mail offered by a reporter with numerous ethical problems was accurate. The e-mail fit their preconceived notions of the Bush administration in general and of White in particular, and so they ran with it.

This of course is a very human reaction, and it is one that afflicts traditional media as well as webloggers.

Groupwise Archive Conversion Solution

To its credit, my employer offers a number of different e-mail solutions but, unfortunately, the best option is still Groupwise. Several months ago an e-mail went around to the effect that some users had tens of thousands of messages stored on the e-mail servers which was beginning to be a problem.

But, while it is possible to create Groupwise archives that are stored locally, there isn’t any easy way to conver those archives into a form that is very useful. Apparently creating a utility that would convert Groupwise archives to something like Unix e-mail format would bankrupt Novell, so they don’t do it.

After spending a couple weeks looking for a decent solution, I stumbled across Nexic’s Personal Publisher which takes Groupwise archives and can convert them to a number of different formats. It is almost $60, but if you’re like me and you’ve got thousands of e-mail messages trapped in Groupwise archive format, Personal Publisher does get the job done.

60,000 Messages And Counting

Over the past few months I’ve noticed quite a few webloggers arguing that a weblog is sort of a replacement, and in some cases a response, to discussion forums where the signal-to-noise ratio is often very low. Many webloggers don’t even have any sort of online comments facility at all.

I take the opposite view — I don’t really spend much time participating on other discussion forums, but I think having a flexible, easy-to-use discussion system is essential for a web log or a web site.

I know, for example, that I am far from infallible and would prefer to give people a way to immediately point out any boneheaded errors I make.

So one of the main questions I had two-and-a-half years ago when I switched to Conversant was how well the software would scale with a large message base and relatively high traffic. And the answer is very well.

In just the past couple of weeks the total number of individual messages on this server passed the 60,000 mark, and on a given day about 40 to 80 new messages are posted.

As far as traffic, hundreds of people receive those messages via e-mail, and web traffic in recent days has been in the 16,000 to 18,000 page views per day. On most days this server is pumping out more than 200 megabytes of traffic, which is pretty large considering most of the content is relatively graphics-lite.

And even on days when the page view level jumps to 20,000+ I don’t notice any appreciable slow downs, which is a pretty darn neat trick considering everything is dynamically generated with conditional macros that can show about a dozen different version of some pages depending on user status, page type, etc.

The Idiocy of a Global Wealth Tax

At the World Summit on Sustainable Development in September, French president Jacques Chirac was on hand to support a variation of a global tax on wealth generated by globalization.

Reuters quoted an anonymous source as saying that this globalization tax,

It could be a tax on airplane tickets, on carbon dioxide, on health products sold in industrialized countries, and indeed on international financial transactions. . . . The idea of wanting to hold back a small share (of global wealth) to relieve poverty is not a mad idea at all.

The idea of a global wealth tax may not be mad but it is definitely stupid. When are these people going to realize that the problem is not that taxes are too low in the developed world, but rather are far to high in the developing world. Rampant corruption, undemocratic regimes, excessive militarism, lack of a free press — these are the factors that are currently taxing developing countries to death.

What the developing world needs is a way to repeal these taxes that are dragging down their economies. Do that, and the developing world won’t have to obsess over such bizarre schemes as a global wealth tax.

Source:

Chirac to back “globalization tax” talks. Reuters, September 2, 2002.