It’s ethnic insensitivity week here at barillari.org

If you spend enough time looking at the census database, you’ll find some wonderful surnames. Favorites so far:

• Balls (15928d in frequency)
• Oshita (29879d)
• Peniston (50053d)
• Penister (50054d)
• Ohotnicky (50168d)
• Ohno (50169d)
• Takeshita (59819d)
• Dickus (64576d)
• Penison (69214d)

Update: Should anyone accuse me of being unsympathetic to people with unusual surnames, I will only note that I have heard just about every possible perversion of “Barillari” in my public-school days. No, I’m not going to repeat any of them here.

19:24 EST | permalink | /issues/census-taking

Another few hours of my all-too-short youth irretrievably lost

[Warning. Hardcore nerd post.]

In the process of writing a web application with mod_python, I had to restart my web server. A lot. Apparently, Apache 2 (the web server in question) doesn’t like this, and starts dying on boot with error messages along the lines of

[Mon Dec 12 02:23:17 2005] [emerg] (28)No space left on device: Couldn't create accept lock

…although the disk had plenty of free space and no shortage of inodes.

I Googled this quite a bit. A number of sites suggested looking for zombie semaphores with ipcs and deleting them with ipcrm. But when I ran ipcs, all I got was

$ ipcs

------ Shared Memory Segments --------
key        shmid      owner      perms      bytes      nattch     status      

------ Semaphore Arrays --------
key        semid      owner      perms      nsems     

------ Message Queues --------
key        msqid      owner      perms      used-bytes   messages    

It took me way too long to realize that ipcs was showing me the semaphores that I (user=jdb) owned, not the ones that the web server (user=www-data) owned. [Slaps forehead.]

Oh well. Live and learn.

So, to actually trash all of the unneeded semaphores (why is there a limit on these, anyway?), become root, stop apache, and type something along the lines of:

for i in `ipcs -s|grep www-data|tr ' ' '\t' |cut -f 2`; do ipcrm -s $i; done

02:30 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/web

Occupational hazards

In an extreme case, a federal district court ruled that a helicopter pilot could be required to convert to the Muslim religion in order to fly over certain areas of Saudi Arabia that are closed to non-Muslims. The court ruled that the requirement was a bona fide occupational qualification justified by safety considerations because Saudi Arabian law prohibited non-Muslims from entering Mecca, and non-Muslims who did so risked being beheaded if caught. [Kern v. Dunalectron Corp, 577 F.Supp. 1196 (N.D. Tex. 1983), aff’d 746 F.2d 810 (5th Cir. 1984).]

In Bagley & Dauchy., The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Law, 2nd ed.

14:21 EST | permalink | /world/saudi_arabia

You’d think this was a UNICEF food-drop

The U.S. has a long way to go to reach British levels of mob depravity, but this piece from South Flordia is a heartening indication that we won’t be left in their dust forever.

“Black Friday,” the traditional start of the holiday shopping season, began in South Florida early today with a 73-year-old woman being knocked down as a crowd at an electronics store rushed a metal security gate to get inside. The crowd of shoppers outside BrandsMart USA in Sawgrass Mills, angry at being forced to wait by security personnel, pushed their way under the security gate and down a hallway into the store, forcing dozens of people against the walls and trampling the woman.

This is the third or fourth (at least) consumer-riot that Drudge has linked to in the past few days.

16:36 EST | permalink | /issues/consumerism

Advice for New Americans

George Soros, the Hungarian financier who former Malaysian PM and noted judeophobe Mahathir bin Mohamad blamed for the Asian financial crisis, endowed the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, a fellowship for recent immigrants and children of immigrants. I’m not eligible. But I have some advice for people who are. In the first essay, you’re asked to describe “activities you have undertaken that might give evidence of creativity, accomplishment, and commitment to the values expressed in the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.” My suggestion? Before you write the essay, see as many trucker/biker movies as you possibly can. For starters, I recommend these classics:

• Black Dog – Mayhem and freight-hauling. A gold-star trucker gets coerced into running weapons to save his family. Features Patrick Swayze, Meat Loaf, and some of the most incredible 18-wheeler stunts I’ve ever seen.

• Stone Cold – Former Seattle Seahawks linebacker Brian Bosworth is an undercover cop/player/unbelievably ripped biker sent to infiltrate a white nationalist biker gang. Fight scenes are simply not to be missed, nor is the courthouse shootout at the end.

I can think of no more effective way to learn the applications of the Constitution than these films, which touch on everything from the second amendment to the Interstate Commerce Clause. They are particularly recommended for immigrants from the E.U., who are less likely to realize the need for constitutional protection of their fundamental rights.

(Interested in more advice like this? Contact HPME Consulting, care of yours truly, using the “Contact details” link at the top-left.)

15:38 EST | permalink | /arts/film

Did all the fact-checkers quit or something?

I’m reading “Buzzmarketing,” an overly glib 2005 business book by Mark Hughes. To its credit, the anecdotes are plentiful and entertaining, which is why I pulled it off the new-book shelf at Baker Library.

The trouble is that they don’t always ring true: on page 216, Hughes tells a Steve Jobs story. In February 1983, the Apple founder was inspecting a Macintosh factory and demanded that all of the computers be reboxed. The cardboard boxes they’d been using simply weren’t white enough to appeal to retailers. Moral: attention to detail pays (or something like that.)

I have no way of verifying this story. But there’s one thing I can verify:

Before any were shipped, Steve Jobs went to the plant to inspect the computers. Hard drives worked fine, cases looked fine, everything looked fine, except one thing.

Hard drives? Hard drives?! The original Macintosh, as any Apple geek will tell you, didn’t have a hard drive. No Macintosh shipped with an internal hard drive until 1987 – four years after Hughes’s anecdote. The industry was up in arms about the omission – writing in 1996, Intel CEO Andy Grove reminisced about his first impression of the Mac: “a ridiculous toy” which “didn’t have a hard disk (at the time, all PCs already had one).” (Only the Paranoid Survive, p.112)

Jobs personally killed plans to include a hard disk in the original Mac, spurring infighting and memo-scribbling at Apple. (see p. 191 of Steven Levy’s Insanely Great).

Yes, I realize that Hughes included that line because it was a nice transition. Yes, I realize that it’s a detail irrelevant to his anecdote. But it’s much harder take a book seriously if the author makes obvious screw-ups like this – and the editors miss them. I know no similar trivia about Rit dye, Mustang cars, Britney Spears, or Pepsi – but I can’t say I find those accounts terribly believable after seeing this.

As a special point of irony, I’m posting this just after reading Hughes’s cautionary chapter on irritating your customers, in which he describes the online revenge of two businessmen shafted by a DoubleTree hotel.

A bit of free advice to the Penguin P.R. machine, should they, by some chance, see this: hire more fact-checkers.

14:19 EST | permalink | /media

Yet another word I can’t stand to hear or read

“bio-break”

See also

15:23 EST | permalink | /language

Guns! Guns! Guns!

Good news: a Brazilian referendum to disarm law-abiding citizens was buried in a landslide. Better news: the anguished squealing of “anti-violence” natterers when the hippest country in Latin America voted square:

“The whole campaign (against the ban) was imported from the United States. They just translated a lot of material from the NRA,” said Jessica Galeria, a Californian who researches gun violence with the Viva Rio think tank, referring to the National Rifle Association. “Now, a lot of Brazilians are insisting on their right to bear arms, they don’t even have a pseudo right to bear arms. It’s not in their Constitution.”

The natives are demanding rights? Heaven forbid!

22:02 EST | permalink | /world/brazil

The 1918 flu virus plot

Two computer science pioneers have a column in the NY Times denouncing the publication of the genome of the virus responsible for the 1918 influenza epidemic. (Thanks, Instapundit.)

The pair imply a plot straight out a movie: al-Qaeda molecular biologists will manipulate the modern milquetoast flu virus to recreate the 1918 superbug. Epidemic. Horror. Panic in the streets. Megadeath. Film at eleven.

The authors, Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy, offer a non-solution solution:

The precise genome could potentially be shared with scientists with suitable security assurances.

It’s a non-solution because genome sequences are like software: anyone in the research lab — faculty, research assistants, graduate students, IT support staff — could steal it undetectably. If al-Qaeda has teams of biologists, pipettes a-glistening, just waiting for that genome, they assuredly can sneak someone onto the IT staff of an institution working with the virus.

I posit that embargoing the 1918 flu genome to “trusted” scientists would actually make us more vulnerable to the flu. Here’s why: much of the work in academic science is carried out by graduate and postdoctoral students — more and more of whom (especially in the sciences) come from abroad [1]. (For instance, 35% of MIT’s grad students are foreign.) If just looking at the genome requires a security clearance (not the quickest process, as or so I’ve been told), I imagine most virologists will choose to work on something with more funding and less bureaucracy.

To embargo the last really deadly flu genome because of a terrorist threat would be downright dangerous. The world faces a far more immediate threat from a deadly avian flu strain than it does from al-Qaeda virologists. Somehow, making flu research harder strikes me as a bad idea. K & J analogize viral genomes to atom bomb blueprints, glossing over the crucial difference: an atom-bomb blueprint won’t help you radiation-proof a human being. But a viral genome will help you devise a treatment.

Bruce Schneier noted that that terrorists “don’t do movie plots.” Angelo Codevilla observed that it would be dead easy (and would shut down the nation overnight) if terrorists coordinated synchronized Molotov-cocktail attacks on school buses across the country. Gasoline and glass bottles are a lot easier to come by than reagents, pipettes, and know-how.

Here’s how to reconstruct the 1918 virus on the cheap: go somewhere with cold soil and dig up a corpse. I saw it in a movie (“Virus Fugitivo”), so it must work. (Oops, did I just tell terrorists how to start an epidemic? My bad.)

09:51 EST | permalink | /issues/terrorism

Startup School

I’m liveblogging from Paul Graham’s Startup School, which is best described as a nerd revival meeting. Highlights so far:

• Paul Graham: Brought down the house with (and I paraphrase, not so well) A metaphor is like a function with the wrong arguments – so presumably your brain must support dynamic typing.

• Michael Mandel, Chief Economist, Business Week: “People who start companies and are willing to fail are doing God’s work.” Loud applause. Whooping. (I wish – wish! – someone had screamed “Preach it, brother!” I should have.)

• Woz: high-speed 30 minute speech on the design of the Apple I and Apple II. I was rapt – my notebook reads “Woz. Amazing.” – so was everyone else. He got a standing ovation. I’m glad I didn’t have to follow that act.

About 99.5% of the audience (which filled Science Center D, a 500-seat audtiorium) is male.

14:59 EST | permalink | /computers

Oh, so that explains it

Malcom Gladwell’s latest article on elite-school admissions is well worth a read:

If you let in only the brilliant, then you produced bookworms and bench scientists: you ended up as socially irrelevant as the University of Chicago (an institution Harvard officials looked upon and shuddered). “Above a reasonably good level of mental ability, above that indicated by a 550-600 level of S.A.T. score,” Bender went on, “the only thing that matters in terms of future impact on, or contribution to, society is the degree of personal inner force an individual has.”

In the nineteen-eighties, when Harvard was accused of enforcing a secret quota on Asian admissions, its defense was that once you adjusted for the preferences given to the children of alumni and for the preferences given to athletes, Asians really weren’t being discriminated against. But you could sense Harvard’s exasperation that the issue was being raised at all. If Harvard had too many Asians, it wouldn’t be Harvard, just as Harvard wouldn’t be Harvard with too many Jews or pansies or parlor pinks or shy types or short people with big ears.

10:42 EST | permalink | /academics/academic-excess

The Tyranny of History

How appropriate it was … that the symbol of their state [the People’s Republic of China] was the main gate of the palace of the Ming and Qing autocrats. It is as if the French revolutionaries had taken Versailles as the symbol of their republic.
—W.J.F. Jenner, The Tyranny of History

18:16 EST | permalink | /world/china

I wonder if Miss Manners has an entry on this

I just got a short email from a reader of the UN-Internet-takeover article. I tapped out a reply, only to get this message back:

I apologize for this automatic reply to your email.

To control spam, I now allow incoming messages only from senders I
have approved beforehand.

If you would like to be added to my list of approved senders, please
fill out the short request form (see link below). Once I approve you,
I will receive your original message in my inbox. You do not need to
resend your message. I apologize for this one-time inconvenience.

Click the link below to fill out the request:

https://webmail.pas.earthlink.net/wam/addme?a=(rest snipped)

If someone sends me email expecting a reply, they ought to add my address to that “approved” list. Any non-brain-dead email software would do that automatically. It looks like the writer used a feature provided by the mega-ISP Earthlink, a company that really should know better. (As an aside to my correspondent, my apologies if your ISP forced this on you.)

I don’t plan to click – it just encourages this sort of thing.

11:05 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/email

Emblematic

BDSM emblem. (source)	HST emblem. (source) (HST imprint is on the other side of the frisbee.)

Coincidence? I think not.

(One wonders what the New Pathway emblem looks like…)

02:06 EST | permalink | /academics/harvard

Time decay

Some uplifting thoughts on graduate study from Emanuel Derman’s My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance:

…[A]s a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford in 1976, I experienced a minor epiphany about ambition’s degradation. At age 16 or 17, I had wanted to be another Einstein; at 21, I would have been happy to be another Feynman; at 24, a future T.D. Lee would have sufficed. By 1976, sharing an office with other postdoctoral researchers at Oxford, I realized that I had reached the point where I merely envied the postdoc in the office next door because he had been invited to give a seminar in France. In much the same way, by a process options theorists call time decay, financial stock options lose their potential as they approach their own expiration.

23:22 EST | permalink | /academics

Zing!

William Easterly on aid to Africa:

Letting total aid money stand for accomplishment is like the Hollywood producers of Catwoman, recently voted the worst movie of 2004, bragging about their impressive accomplishment of spending $100 million on its production.

That reminds me of the wisdom of taking lines-of-code-written as a proxy for the usefulness of a piece of software.

20:42 EST | permalink | /issues/foreign-aid

Press hit

The article on how the UN wants to 0wn the Intarweb that Carlos and I wrote is posted.

13:08 EST | permalink | /computers/internet

Preventing genocide

The average Glenn Reynolds post is about 0.8 sentences long – which makes it all the more pleasant to see a piece like this.

00:41 EST | permalink | /issues/genocide

And you thought the debaters were nerdy

I used to think that my high-school resume made me a nerd. But I had nothing on these people:

Victoria JC, Nanyang Girls’ High win inter-school blogging contest

SINGAPORE : Victoria Junior College and Nanyang Girls’ High School have won the first National Inter-school Blogging Championship.

The event is jointly organised by SingTel and the Ministry of Education.

Victoria JC and Nanyang Girls’ High ‘outblogged’ 51 other Singapore schools to emerge champions in the ‘Junior College/Centralised Institute’ and ‘Secondary School’ categories respectively.

It’s even more interesting that a blogging contest would be held in a country so well-known for stomping on press freedom.

Update: Amit emailed to point out the web site of the blogging contest, which the Yahoo story hadn’t included.

22:01 EST | permalink | /world/singapore

Next time, take Econ 101 first

The background of MIT’s home page features a different “spotlight” group or event every day. Today’s is a promotion of “fair trade” coffee.

Now, I have no objection to people who voluntarily pay more than the going market rate for a commodity. (The bottled-water industry thanks the Lord every day for those people.) But this “fair trade” campaign is (of course) run by a group that also opposes “sweatshop” labor.

There’s a big honking picture of Noam Chomsky at the top of the group’s website, which should give you some idea of how much careful thought went into the “anti-sweatshop” campaign. Maybe this gang should consider reading up on what another MIT professor (who’s since moved to greener pastures ) has to say about the subject.

I’m tempted to launch a campaign to help create jobs for the third-world (and for the poor in America) by shopping only at Wal-Mart.

Update: David emailed to note that “fair-trade” coffee programs tend to ignore non-Latin American coffee growers–namely, the #2 exporter, Vietnam– so the “socially responsible” dollars miss a big segment of the downtrodden growers.

The MIT website doesn’t mention particular countries, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were strictly Latin American. Latin American socialists have historically enjoyed far better marketing than their counterparts in Asia. You can’t spend five minutes on a university thoroughfare without spotting a Che or two, but when was the last time you saw a Ho Chi Minh t-shirt? I blame the beefcake factor: why else would a fair-trade site have a muscular, shirtless Dominican spreading his legs on the front page? (If the site has changed, the original is here. ) WASP coeds of the feeling-guilty-about-Dad’s-money set go ga-ga over Latins – the North Vietnamese just don’t have the same sex appeal.

23:41 EST | permalink | /issues/economy

LKY interview

Belmont Club links to a translation of an interview with Lee Kuan Yew, in which the Singaporean leader speculates upon China’s long-term ambitions. Well worth a read.

19:53 EST | permalink | /world/singapore

Yet another word I can’t stand to hear or read

“stakeholders”

(See also: 1 2 3 )

16:31 EST | permalink | /issues/political-excess

You can’t make this stuff up

Mass backwards introduced me to the newest dead horse in the blog-world: 65 students at Timken High School (over 13% of the women in the class) are pregnant.

I have nothing to add, except to make note of Timken High School’s mascot:

See this page and this page, from which I pulled the logos.

Yes, that’s right. The Timken TROJANS.

May I suggest a different design for the mascot, reflecting the school’s hope for change?

21:26 EST | permalink | /issues/reproduction

Oh, great.

The U.S. Attorney’s office issued a warning regarding terrorists who disguise themselves as homeless people:

Homeless people easily blend into urban landscapes, the message said.

“This is particularly true of our mass transit systems, where homeless people tend to loiter unnoticed,” the e-mail said.

It referred to a recent incident in Somerville, Mass., in which a police officer became suspicious about someone dressed as a street person. The officer questioned the man, discovered he had a passport from a “country of interest” — typically a Middle Eastern or South Asian nation — and a checkbook with a questionable address, the e-mail said. The investigation is continuing, it said.

“Mass transit” in Somerville presumably means Porter or Davis on the Red Line.

Cute.

Addendum: I thought I’d see if someone in the Yahoo forums for the article had a link to the “State Department report that was issued last week” that the letter referenced. Big mistake:

19:37 EST | permalink | /issues/terrorism

The State Department is teeming with Finns!

While writing one of those you-know-it’ll-never-get-read-but-you-feel-obligated-anyway letters to the State Department (attached below), I noticed something funny in the address bar:

A Linux penguin! Finnish interests have penetrated the State Department!

A simple check confirms:

$ telnet contact-us.state.gov 80
Trying 131.193.154.145...
Connected to contact-us.state.gov.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2005 02:19:39 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.20 (Linux/SuSE)    <--- !!!!
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

Connection closed by foreign host.

Letter, for those still tuning in. (See also this related post )

Subject: Constitutional negotiations in Iraq

21 August 2005

Dear Madam Secretary,

As a U.S. citizen, I would like to register my concern with recent
news regarding constitutional negotiations in Iraq. An A.P. wire story
yesterday indicated that U.S. diplomats had "conceded ground to
Islamists on the role of religion in Iraq." I hope that the United
States continues to push for a constitution enshrining democratic
values, with legislation subject to the will of the people, not to "a
religious test," as the A.P. indicated.

Cordially,

Joseph Barillari
Boston, MA

23:11 EST | permalink | /world/iraq

Tafted

I have not been following the fiasco-in-progress in Ohio (it has something to do with Gov. Taft and a coin dealer, I believe), but today, it made the front page of Yahoo!.

A few months ago, Gov. Taft opined on the importance of avoiding impropriety before a group at Xavier University:

“Public employees can enjoy entertainment, such as golf or dining out, with persons working for a regulated company, or one doing business with the state, ONLY if they fully pay their own way.”

But just today:

Gov. Bob Taft was charged with four ethics violations Wednesday for failing to report dozens of gifts that included dinners, golf games and professional hockey tickets, deepening a scandal that has rocked Ohio’s Republican Party.

Naturally, I have no idea as to the veracity of these charges, which may well be politically motivated. But it wouldn’t surprise me if they were reasonable, either.

Several years ago, Gov. Taft came to my high school. The event was telecast to a few other high schools (I think the event had something to do with showing off the fancy videoconferencing equipment). I remember very little about the speech except for one item: I was seated at a table perpendicular to the governor’s seat. While speaking, the governor pulled his feet under his chair and pawed at the carpet with the tips of his shoes. This struck me as very odd.

21:10 EST | permalink | /issues/corruption

“Did you get the memo?”

I’m still floored that people who lament the lack of majors/women/minorities/non-nerds/funding in academic computer science continue to use the terms “computer science” and “information technology” interchangably.

As I mentioned a few weeks back, corporate “information technology” embodies everything that’s repelling people from the field. Computer science is what people do in research labs and academic departments. Corporate “information technology” is what people do in Douglas Copeland’s Microserfs, for instance:

“…reworking old code for something like the Norwegian Macintosh version of Word 5.8.”

16:32 EST | permalink | /computers/compsci

Men in computing

The Geomblog carried a link to a commentary on the Bill Gates-Maria Klawe talk held in Redmond a few weeks back.

Professor Klawe worries aloud about the CS funding crunch and the dearth of women in computing. Again, I can’t say much about the former, but the most elequent answer to the latter came ten years ago (a veritable eternity in this field) from Philip Greenspun:

Intelligent people with PhDs are working as C programmers; The average engineering career lasts seven years, pays average, and doesn’t justify an MIT education that costs $120,000; anyone smart enough to make it as a computer scientist can make it with less work and risk as an MD, MBA, or JD; there has been so little progress in programming environments, systems, and computer languages in the last three decades that programmers in India and other Third World countries are perfectly capable of taking over the majority of American computer science jobs.

Your January issue [of Communications of the ACM] asks “Why are there so few women in computing?” Maybe you should do another issue asking “Why are there so many men?”

12:20 EST | permalink | /computers/compsci

Holy crap! We’re all screwed!

Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 22:51:11 -0500
From: Adoh Fadduq
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help
Subject: Possible security issue with Emacs?

Insha Allah, I am now trying to choose an editor for my software
development and typesetting work. I have closely considered Emacs,
which fits my needs in some respects. I do, however, feel that there is
a big security issue with it for me and my brethren: Emacs was largely
developed by Jews and for Jews. Considering how cunning the Jews are,
I would not be surprised to find that they have hidden special bugs
and booby traps inside emacs, in order to spy on and disrupt work of my
Allah believing brethren. Are my concerns justified?

Link thanks to clisp

15:29 EST | permalink | /computers/security

Non-sequitur of the day

(I suggest skipping this if you’re easily offended.)

A while back, Alex pointed me to one of the most tasteless asides I’ve ever seen (I’d missed it completely while looking at the same material.)

Read this Jack Chick comic. Notice anything unusual? Look carefully at the right-hand panel of the tenth row (this one).

What does the airport have to do with the story?

Jack Chick is apparently a good deal more tasteless than his detractors will admit.

12:59 EST | permalink | /issues/terrorism

Computer science enrollments collapse! Carpet of toads seen in Berkeley! Locusts descend upon MIT!

Prof. Felten’s latest blog post discusses the ‘computer science malaise’, a winter of grant contractions and declining enrollments. I can’t speak to the grant situation, but I can spout a few numbers on the enrollment situation.

Below is a table of a few key figures relating to CS enrollment at Princeton. (The registrar’s office supplied the data with the exception of the thesis information, which I pulled from the Princeton senior thesis catalog.

For reference, Princeton grants two degrees: the AB (what everyone else calls a BA) and the BSE (BS in Engineering). Computer Science is the only department that offers both degrees. Senior theses are required of all AB majors and are completed by some CS BSEs. “EE,” “MechE,” and “all eng” are the number of electrical engineering degrees, mechanical/aerospace engineering degrees, and all engineering degrees granted that year.

* The registrar calls this “1995-1995”, assumed to be a typo. Number of BSE-CS majors this year seems too small — can anyone comment?

The same data, with a few columns removed for clarity:

(The y axis shows the number of degrees (or theses) granted in a given year. Thanks to GC for pointing out the ambiguity. Update: Graph really fixed. Thanks, GC. Mea culpa. )

Certainly, the number of majors is down 23% from its peak in 2001 at 47. Certainly, this is a limited dataset. Certainly, students have to decide where they want to major years before graduating (although switching from CS to operations research and financial engineering, a popular major for pre-Wall Street types, is presumably not difficult if one took a few ORFE prerequisites). But, fortunately, Princeton has not seen the same 60% decline claimed by the study Prof. Felten mentions.

Regarding that study: the Aug. 2005 Communications of the ACM editorial by Profs. Chazelle and Arora cites a CNET News article about declining freshman interest in CS. The article cites a report claiming that interest in CS among frosh dropped 60%. I quote:

The percentage of incoming undergraduates indicating that they would major in CS declined by over 60 percent between the Fall of 2000 and 2004, and is now 70 percent lower than its peak in the early 1980s.

(There’s a huge spike in interest centered around 1982 – can anyone speculate on what prompted that?)

A study by the same author indicates that actual degree granting rates have remained steady but warns of the ominous trend in interest figures and enrollments.

“Interest” figures are less interesting than actual graduation figures – they depend on the phrasing of the question, the news heading up to the time of the survey, the circumstances under which it was administered, and a variety of other factors. To make matters fuzzier, people believe a lot of strange things at 18. (Case in point: when I was a freshman, I voted for Al Gore.) Enrollment figures are also fuzzy: different schools require declaration at different times; some make it harder to switch than others.

Back to Chazelle and Arora’s “Viewpoint: Is the thrill gone?”:

While computing technology is thriving and extending its reach further into our everyday lives, computer science is facing a crisis in the U.S., including falling undergraduate enrollment and reduced research funding.

My 2¢? I know too little to speak about funding. As to student enrollment, with all due respect to Profs. Chazelle, Arora, and Felten, I’m not particularly worried. CS will always attract the students who will advance the state of the art: those who genuinely enjoy the field. As to those who, spurred by the dot-com gold rush, swelled the ranks in the late-00s, I wish them the best of luck, but I don’t think their departure for greener pastures (Econ? ORFE?) imperils the study of computer science.

P.S.: I’m a bit puzzled by Chazelle and Arora’s use of language:

Many ongoing efforts aim to develop new high school and college curricula that would help lead to an IT-literate work force. While supporting them, we wish to raise another enrollment issue critical to the field: attracting bright high school students and undergraduates who represent the next generation of IT researchers and educators.

IT? I’ve always used IT as a shorthand for “corporate information systems,” or “the stuff that a nerd wouldn’t voluntarily touch with a ten-foot pole”. ‘IT’ means ‘TPS reports.’ ‘IT’ means ‘9-to-5, Monday through Friday.’ I’m surprised that a pair of CS profs would lament the lack of “IT researchers and educators” — isn’t more CS researchers and educators what they want? If we’re to point fingers, it was corporate IT that sucked the ‘thrill’ out of computer science’s reputation among undergrads. (That, or Scott Adams. )If there’s anything truly opposed to the “hacker” philosophy that makes CS thrilling, it’s the reputation of corporate information technology.

(Apologies for the non-link; ACM keeps its content in a walled garden.)

Update: Mihai pointed me to an article in the PAW that shows a massive drop in CS enrollment from the class of ‘06 to the class of ‘07. The article is really about Dean Nancy Malkiel’s latest edu-engineering effort to push students out of popular departments and into unpopular ones. As an aside, I haven’t decided if I think this is a good idea. (The drop in CS enrollment might also be due to other factors – Shirley Tilghman’s Green Hair Initiative, for instance.) I’ll hold off on drawing real conclusions until ‘07 graduates — enrollment jumps around, especially when people shift between different parts of the engineering school, but graduation is permanent.

09:22 EST | permalink | /computers/compsci

Get your cheap tickets…while they last!

Established bus lines (Peter Pan, for instance) are clamoring for an investigation of their ultra-low-fare rivals’ apparent refusal to serve the handicapped:

Not fare! Disabled rip discount bus company after being denied access

Bus battle heats up as business rival files suit

AG targets Fung Wah bus line: Carrier accused of discrimination

Hm, what’s next? Will the AG demand buses that don’t catch fire?

11:22 EST | permalink | /issues/handicapped-access

One stddev above the usual blog-post threshhold

The delightful Boston-area gun-nuts at mASS BACKWARDS pointed out a story in the Herald: to reassure the public of the safety of the subway system, Gov. Mitt Romney rode the Red Line from Park Street to Downtown Crossing. (For those who’ve never had the pleasure, those two (adjacent) stops are about 200 meters apart – there’s even an underground pedestrian walkway connecting them, for those who’d rather not wait for a train.)

In the midst of the journey of two thousand decimeters, he bumbled the price of a ride ($1.25) and managed to get harassed by a cat house owner – this despite his employment of a $350k/yr team to prep him for public appearances.

Of course, you could have read that in the article and on mASS BACKWARDS. I just wanted to note that Michael Bloomberg rides the subway to work daily.

Update: Oops. That was Gov. Romney, not Mayor Menino. Even worse.

00:59 EST | permalink | /issues/political-excess

That’s not the most obvious revenue model that the name would suggest

Capitalism Magazine survives on donations.

(By contrast, Communist Voice is $2 per issue.)

00:36 EST | permalink | /media

Wonderful juxtaposition

Gare de l’Est, Paris, 8 June 2005

13:51 EST | permalink | /media/advertising

Eupocalypse! Four horsemen spotted near Brussels! Film at eleven.

21:15 EST | permalink | /world/eu

Backlog finished

Finally finished processing all of the photos from the eutrip, plus some others from June and July. They’re posted here.

(Apologies for the server outage last month – I think it was a DHCP issue.)

23:27 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/web

Verizon Peak Minutes Hack

After an unpleasantly large Verizon Wireless bill arrived this morning, I decided to write a program to let me know if I’m burning too many peak minutes in a given month. If you run this script daily (as a cron job, for instance) it will let you know if you’ve gone over a preset threshhold, either by email, or by writing a message to a file (my RSS reader, feedonfeeds is hacked to display the contents of that file), or both.

If you wanted to, you could even set the email address to your vtext.com address, so the program would send you an SMS message if you went over. (You might want to run the program less often in that case, because SMS messages are billable.)

This sort of thing would be trivially easy to build into the phone, but that would interfere with the business models of cell phone carriers – don’t hold your breath.

08:46 EST | permalink | /computers/programming/hacks

Cliffs Notes for The Organization Kid

David Brooks compresses his 2001 article into a single page.

02:37 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton

Not good

I keep getting Zhao Ziyang confused with Zhang Ziyi.

21:37 EST | permalink | /world/china

More impressions from Reunions 2005

Still just as hideous: The tables on the third floor of Frist still have those dehumanizing battleship-gray full-length lamps. You can’t see the face of person across from you. You can’t see the faces of the people at the other tables. You can only see their heads and their bodies. You are aware of the presence of a person, but not who they are. They belong in a French science fiction film.

16:08 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble

Is David Brooks slowly turning into John Waters?

Will he someday start making movies? The title of this piece is suggestive:

Haley, 12, is a Travel Team Girl, who spends her weekends playing midfield against similarly pony-tailed, strongly calved soccer marvels. Cody, 10, is a Buzz Cut Boy, whose naturally blond hair has been cut to a lawn-like stubble and dyed an almost phosphorescent white. Cody’s wardrobe is entirely derivative of fashions he has seen watching the X-Games. In his vision, Patio Man can see the kids enjoying their child-safe lawn darts with a gaggle of their cul de sac friends, a happy gathering of Haleys and Codys and Corys and Britneys. It’s a brightly colored scene: Abercrombie & Fitch pink spaghetti-strap tops on the girls and ankle length canvas shorts and laceless Nikes on the boys.

(Incidentally, these were exactly the brand of children I mentioned in the last entry, except that the hair was longer.)

16:03 EST | permalink | /issues/lurking_horror

Early impressions of Reunions 2005

I just noticed that this blog wasn’t negative enough. That’s easily fixed.

Reliving another private Princeton tradition: while hacking on a broken program, struck with overwhelming urge to sleep. Something about the sub-three-hours last night probably had something to do with it. Threw coat over head, set alarm on phone, collapsed onto Frist couch. Spent very little time wondering what the older alums would think.

Now I know what Gordon Zellaby felt: while elbowing my way through a crowd of septuagenarian alums and their silent, blank-staring, flaxen-haired grandchildren. Thankful that whatever the admissions office means by “diversity” in a given year, it never means more of these people.

Another miserable failure of the Chimpoid administration: the marriage initiative. Many of the older married alums are displaying tumor-like beer guts. Can there be anything worse than an institution that apparently encourages this? Maybe marriages, like laws, should require periodic reaffirmations to remain in effect. (I can’t imagine that this crowd sees much divorce; there’s too much money involved.) Whatever the social cost, it would force more people into the gym.

15:35 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble/reunions

A good time to be a petty criminal

Sampan, a freebie paper in Boston, carried this comic on May 6:

…which followed a string of purse-snatchings and other delightful urban foibles in Chinatown. (Documented here and here)

What does a law-abiding citizen do when the police are unable to be everywhere at once? I’m reminded of what happened during the L.A. riots of 1992:

As she watched, the news featured vivid images of Korean shopkeepers defending their stores with shotguns and pistols.
“I thought, ‘Where are the police? Why are these store owners having to protect their own property with guns?’ ” she recalls.

There may be a lesson for the law-abiding denizens of Boston in this — but probably not. If you’re a permanent resident, rather than a citizen (as I’d imagine many Chinatown residents are), it’s completely illegal to carry so much as a can of pepper spray in Massachusetts. (You have to be a citizen to get the appropriate permit.)

05:04 EST | permalink | /issues/crime

Here’s how to _not_ sell me

I need some self-storage for a month. Google Maps named 10 places in the 02138 zip code:

• Cambridge Self Storage: no price information online. Plonk.

• Precision Self Storage – actually an auction site.

• Yellowbrick Self-storage Online prices – Yes!

• C-Free Self-Storage - Also has prices online – Yes! Low prices, but the smallest unit is bigger than I need.

• Planet Self-Storage. No prices. Plonk.

• Brighton Self-Storage – Prices: Yes!

• Storage Bunker. For the e-commerce section, they want to order their customers to use a specific web browser: “Invalid Web Browser. Sorry, you need Internet Explorer 5.5 or greater to use this site. You can download it HERE.” Genius. PLONK

• “Patriot Self-Storage” - No website.

• “Morgan Self Storage” - No website.

• “Self Storage Delivered” - Pickup/delivery included. Not what I want. Gratuitious use of flash. Retch.

15:45 EST | permalink | /issues/commerce

Nifty Python Graph Library

If you need to do any graph-wrangling, I highly recommend NetworkX, a handy graph library written in Python. (This is for graphs in the nodes-and-edges sense, not graphs in the bars-and-charts sense. For the latter, I’d use Ploticus or Gnuplot.)

16:14 EST | permalink | /computers/compsci

Dale Carnegie could take lessons from Yahoo

From: Yahoo!Shopping <rate-merchant@store.yahoo.com>
To: joseph barillari
Subject: Yahoo! Shopping Merchant Review for ArtCity.com - order#
    artcity-com-26790
Dear joseph barillari,

Thank you for your recent purchase on Yahoo! Shopping.
Our records indicate you recently made a purchase from ArtCity.com.

Please take a moment to rate and review this merchant. By rating and
reviewing merchants, you can help other customers find merchants and
provide those merchants with feedback. It's easy - just rate the
merchant and add any helpful comments.

Before you start, review our Merchant Review Guidelines at this URL:

http://shopping.yahoo.com/merchrating/general_info.html

Yahoo! reserves the right to refuse or remove any review that does not
comply with these Guidelines or the Yahoo! Terms of Service and
terminate your Yahoo! account (including email) for a
violation. Yahoo! is not responsible or liable in+any way for ratings
and reviews posted by its users.

Mmm, now there’s nothing like threats to make me want to waste five minutes of my life reviewing a web merchant…

05:03 EST | permalink | /computers/internet

Good old days

Do you think grad school is too hard? Oh, for the glorious fifties:

[snip]

I arrived with my wife, Helene, in August 1951 from the University of Alberta, to try for a Ph.D. in chemistry. The Butler Tract was filled with veterans from WWII, so we had to seek housing elsewhere. Our first room was with a family on Ewing Street and later with another family on Princeton-Hightstown Road. My assistantship paid $1,200 from which $700 was deducted for tuition. Health care? Dental care? Never heard of them.

Helene is a nurse and worked at the Princeton Hospital for $120 per month, meals included. We had to buy an ancient Buick so that we could get from our quarters to work - thank goodness insurance was not required!

And the Castle on the Hill - after about a year or so I heard of it but never during my three years was I so much as invited to share a meal, let alone to be immersed in a Princeton experience. I did have many rewarding experiences with undergraduates in my laboratory classes.

We had our first child in 1952 and got a discount from the hospital because Helene worked up to her final day, and walked down the hall to deliver. A kind obstetrician also gave a discount. Helene continued on the night shift while our daughter and I burned the midnight oil.

[snip]

G. William Goward *54

Clinton, Conn.

19:01 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble

Jasper Johns this ain’t

Tucked away in the back of the Wiesner Art Gallery in the student center at MIT is an absolutely delightful exhibit:

(Foreground: American flag, ripped. Reflective lettering on surface: “ALLIES OF EVIL.” Background: American flag. Reflective lettering on surface: “BIN LADEN FOR PRESIDENT.”)

Even better is the artist’s statement:

Protest Flags
These were the confluence of two separate plans - one to dye flags black, in order to convey a very different and unfamiliar visual impression of these well-known icons, and the other to use ‘sacred cloth’ as a medium for other messages, in order to attract more attention. Fortunately, September 11 2001 provided an almost limitless supply of these banners on every street corner, and subsequent manipulation of these events to commit further mass murder for political gain provided a moral imperative to protest. Unfortunately, many variants of the flags did not receive the dye well; I therefore saved the well-dyed ones for their naked visual impact, and applied lettering to the fainter ones. I made several slogans, wearing and carrying them in protests in New York and Boston. My goal was to attract strong initial attention from the visual effect of the lettered flag, but then to act as a challenge by having the slogans be slightly ambiguous and more than slightly provocative, forcing viewers (protester and protested alike) to pause and query whether or not they truly understood and agreed or disagreed with what was being expressed.

(emphasis mine)

The aforementioned dye-dunked flag is here. I couldn’t find the artist’s name anywhere, but I wonder if it’s the same person who was responsible for this high-minded postering campaign:

The text at the bottom reads “Only fascist apologists for war crimes have the instinct to tear down this poster.” (Zoom in to see it.)

Or maybe the artist was behind this campaign, which presumably has something to do with the MIT flag debacle:

In case you missed the punch line, it’s “Flags are a one-way message of hatred.” And, in case you didn’t know, “Flags promote the common misconception that US citizens have the right to free speech.”

(N.B.: I suspect that the second poster was in jest. I’m not so sure about the first. And as to the flags – well, if that’s irony, it’s certainly over my head.)

15:50 EST | permalink | /academics/mit

Puts a whole new spin on “pot-head”, no?

I’m not normally this macabre, but I hope you will forgive one post along those lines. From an April 11 article in ABC News:

Court documents said the suspect allegedly talked of using the man’s head as a bong or a pipe for smoking marijuana.

Damned stoners. Maybe he intended to sell it to a head shop?

01:55 EST | permalink | /issues/drugs

Econoart

Forget the writing. The real reason I read The Economist is for the op-art:

12:47 EST | permalink | /media

The Hot One Hundred and Ten

Update: There are mistakes in this list which I have yet to fix (namely, some people have advised theses indicated in the catalog but not in this dataset). I plan to fix this at some point. Mea culpa.

The thesis catalog is quite spotty about advisors; well over 30,000 of the 53,820 records do not have advisors entered. Of those that do, I now present the Hot 110; the advisors with at least 20 theses to their names. They are sorted by number of theses, with ties broken arbitrarily.

1. (70 theses) Bhatt, Swati
2. (57 theses) Danielson, Michael
3. (56 theses) Liu, Bede
4. (53 theses) Cherkes, Martin
5. (53 theses) Cadden, Michael
6. (47 theses) George, Robert
7. (46 theses) Comer, Ronald J
8. (45 theses) Herbst, Jeffrey
9. (43 theses) Wheeler,John A
10. (40 theses) Kornhauser, Alain L
11. (40 theses) Goldman, Michael
12. (38 theses) Katz, Stanley
13. (37 theses) Wolf, Wayne
14. (37 theses) Sandberg, Robert
15. (37 theses) Mulvey, John M
16. (37 theses) DiBattista, Maria
17. (35 theses) Bonini, William E
18. (33 theses) Rosen, Lawrence
19. (32 theses) Vanderbei, Robert J
20. (32 theses) Kulkarni, Sanjeev
21. (31 theses) Garvey, Gerald
22. (31 theses) Danspeckgruber, Wolfgang
23. (31 theses) Calder, Kent
24. (30 theses) Kuhn, Harold W
25. (30 theses) Danson, Lawrence
26. (30 theses) Cooper, Joel
27. (30 theses) Cook, Perry
28. (29 theses) Wolpert, Julian
29. (29 theses) Wilmerding, John
30. (29 theses) Kateb, George
31. (29 theses) Jolly, Alison
32. (29 theses) Gleason, William
33. (28 theses) Wood, Michael
34. (28 theses) Wagner, Sigurd
35. (28 theses) Trotter,Hale F
36. (28 theses) Cadava, Eduardo
37. (28 theses) Billington, David P
38. (27 theses) Richardson, James
39. (27 theses) Mendelberg, Tali
40. (27 theses) Forment, Carlos
41. (27 theses) Fischle, Mark
42. (26 theses) Woolfolk, Robert
43. (26 theses) Wilder, Gita
44. (26 theses) Silver, Lee
45. (26 theses) Ramadge, Peter
46. (26 theses) Poor, H Vincent
47. (26 theses) Kornhauser, Alain
48. (26 theses) Hammoudi, Abdellah
49. (26 theses) Fuss, Diana
50. (26 theses) Crerar, David A
51. (25 theses) Weigert, Martin
52. (25 theses) Tilghman, Shirley
53. (25 theses) Smith, James A
54. (25 theses) Schor, Esther
55. (25 theses) Littman, Michael
56. (24 theses) Suppe, John
57. (24 theses) Roche, Thomas P Jr
58. (24 theses) Powell, Warren B
59. (24 theses) Nunokawa, Jeff
60. (24 theses) Naquin, Susan
61. (24 theses) McPherson, James M
62. (24 theses) Maxwell, Robert
63. (24 theses) Littman, Michael G
64. (24 theses) Levine, Arnold
65. (24 theses) Fernandez, Kelly Patricia
66. (24 theses) Enquist, Lynn
67. (24 theses) Deodatis, George
68. (24 theses) Ashenfelter, Orley
69. (23 theses) White, Lynn
70. (23 theses) Ullman, Richard
71. (23 theses) Sigmund, Paul
72. (23 theses) Faulk, Patricia
73. (23 theses) Doig, Jameson
74. (23 theses) Dobson, Andrew P
75. (23 theses) Billington, David
76. (22 theses) Wolfson, Susan
77. (22 theses) Seleny, Anna
78. (22 theses) Schwartz, Jeffrey
79. (22 theses) Nelson,Edward
80. (22 theses) Knoepflmacher, Ulrich
81. (22 theses) Judson, S Sheldon
82. (22 theses) Goedde, Petra
83. (21 theses) Suleiman, Ezra
84. (21 theses) Sturm, James C
85. (21 theses) Soboyejo, Winston
86. (21 theses) Shapiro, Harold
87. (21 theses) Scovronick, Nathan
88. (21 theses) Calaprice,Frank
89. (21 theses) Jamieson, Beth
90. (21 theses) Gould, James L
91. (21 theses) Flint, Jane
92. (21 theses) Emerson, Caryl
93. (21 theses) Drakeman, Donald
94. (21 theses) Colomina, Beatriz
95. (21 theses) Adelman, Jeremy
96. (20 theses) Wolf, Wayne H
97. (20 theses) Shenk, Thomas
98. (20 theses) Rubenstein, Dan
99. (20 theses) Prucnal, Paul R
100. (20 theses) Prakash, Gyan
101. (20 theses) Reynolds,George T
102. (20 theses) Lyon, Stephen
103. (20 theses) Lizzeri, Alessandro
104. (20 theses) Kobayashi, Hisashi
105. (20 theses) Jones, Maitland Jr
106. (20 theses) Hollocher, Hope
107. (20 theses) Hollister, Lincoln S
108. (20 theses) Durbin, Enoch
109. (20 theses) Curtiss, H C Jr
110. (20 theses) Bogan, Elizabeth
111. (20 theses) Arnold, Oliver

18:23 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton

I don’t need a hobby. I need fewer hobbies.

This is a catalog of the most popular words and phrases in Princeton senior thesis titles from 1926 to 2004.

An update, inspired by this classic Prince column:

21:58 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton

Full disclosure works

Timeline (I think this is everything important):

19:03 EST | permalink | /computers/internet

Nothing new under the sun

The Old Grey Lady has just noticed the Anscombe Society, a newly-formed Princeton student group dedicated to promoting chastity.

Whatever. Back when I was there, the school also had a chastity-promoting club. We just didn’t have a pretentious brit-fop name for it: we called it the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

See also this post from 2003.

14:45 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble

Trivia question of the day

What famous, outspoken Republican politican is frequently spotted in Cambridge, where 87% of voters turned out for John Kerry in 2004?

(Click for answer.)

20:56 EST | permalink | /issues/partisanship

Gah! Capital One enables revolutionary new “phishing” feature

A phisher just sent me an email claiming to be from Capital One, inviting me to enter my account information at his website. Unusually, Capital One is actually faciliating this scam: they provide an unchecked redirect feature on their website, so the URL actually starts with http://www.capitalone.com. Captial One then redirects the user to the phisher’s site!

If this link still redirects to Wikipedia, then the problem hasn’t been fixed yet:

http://www.capitalone.com/redirect.html?linkid=SECURITY+VALIDATION&dest=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing

From: "Capital One Representative:  Kristina Barker " <Kristina.Barker@capitalone.com>
To: 2bslashdot@barillari.org
Subject: Error: Your Capital One Account Tue, 12 Apr 2005 22:25:00 -0800
X-Spam-Score: 10.407
X-Spam-Flag: YES
X-Spam-Level: ********** (10.407)

Capital One is committed to maintaining a safe environment for its
community of buyers and sellers. To protect the security of your account,
Capital One Bank employs some of the most advanced security systems in the world
and our anti-fraud teams regularly screen the Capital One Bank system for
unusual activity.

We recently have determined that different computers have logged onto your
Capital One Banking account, and multiple password failures were present before the
logons. We now need you to re-confirm your account information to us. If this is
not completed by April 14, 2006, we will be forced to suspend your account
indefinitely, as it may have been used for fraudulent purposes. We thank you for
your cooperation in this manner.

In order to confirm your Online Bank records, we may require some specific
information from you.


Click below to verify your account

http://www.capitalone.com/redirect.html?linkid=SECURITY+VALIDATION&dest=http://24.232.117.142/bin/capitalone.com/


Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter. Please understand that this is
a security measure meant to help protect you and your account.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

If you choose to ignore our request, you leave us no choice but to temporaly suspend
your account.

Thank you for using Capital One Bank!




----- End forwarded message -----

01:53 EST | permalink | /computers/internet

Another word I can’t stand to hear or read

“nutraceuticals”

01:20 EST | permalink | /science/medicine