Ben Slade

For those readers who ask me what they can do to help fight poverty, one option is to sit down at your computer and become a microfinancier.

That’s what I did recently. From my laptop in New York, I lent $25 each to the owner of a TV repair shop in Afghanistan, a baker in Afghanistan, and a single mother running a clothing shop in the Dominican Republic. I did this through www.kiva.org, a Web site that provides information about entrepreneurs in poor countries — their photos, loan proposals and credit history — and allows people to make direct loans to them.

"Bush stumped just about everyone seven years ago when he tapped the safe and solid Dick Cheney to be his running mate. But Bush didn't want any trouble. He didn't want a Vice President who preened before the cameras. He didn't want a policy sparring partner. And he didn't want someone who would check out after five years and run for President himself. And because Bush got exactly the kind of partner he wanted, he now faces the very problem he tried to avoid. Cheney has become the Administration's enemy within, the man whose single-minded pursuit of ideological goals, creaking political instincts and love of secrecy produced an independent operation inside the White House that has done more harm than good."

"...for all the personal shows of support, more Republicans with each passing week have acknowledged privately what is felt across Washington when it comes to the Vice President: his time has passed."

From Bernstein.com (PDF file):

The US current account deficit can no longer be safely ignored. By our estimate, this economic imbalance in our trade in goods and services (including financial assets) could reach $900 billion this year. No country has ever had a deficit even close to this figure. But as stunning as this amount is, it actually understates the true scale of the situation because it doesn’t capture American investors’ growing appetite for offshore assets.

Yearly international trade deficit

Although US investments abroad temporarily declined in 2005, that was largely the result of multinationals’ taking advantage of a one-time tax-induced repatriation of retained earnings in their offshore subsidiaries. The trend in US investment abroad is clearly upward, and it looks set to grow to $600 billion or more this year. That puts further pressure on crossborder savings because US investors have no organic source of foreign currency to finance their offshore investment ambitions. Combine these expatriated dollars with the US deficit, and citizens of the rest of the world will receive around 1.5 trillion US dollars in 2006—whether they want them or not.

The consequences could be profound for two reasons: first, because currency movements can overwhelm underlying investment returns; second, because the deficit could trigger a cycle of historic dimensions.

From an article by Robert J. Samuelson from the WashPost:

Does anybody remember how the conservatives went ballistic over the rumor of Kerry's 50 cent/gallon gas tax? It's hard to imagine people making sacrifices many times that large.

By "Found Technology" art I mean art made from technology that's not designed to make art.

For example, see the web page of Rosemarie Fiore:

where photographs with long exposures taken while playing video war games of the 80's created by Atari, Centuri and Taito. The photographs were shot from video game screens while playing the games. By recording each second of an entire game on one frame of film, complex patterns are captured not normally seen by the eye.  Rosemarie has also made a giant spirograph out of an amusement park ride.  See The Scrambler.

Another example of "Found Technology" art is Scanner Abuse, which is actually a pretty fun and simple to do with kids (providing you have a full bottle of Windex). Here are some examples

From the article Does the U.S. budget reflect the best investments for our future? in the San Francisco Chronicle:

This isn't meant to say that defense is not important. But it's a matter of balance.

From The New York Times article Why Dick Cheney Cracked Up (reposted on TruthOut.org):

In terms of the big issues, the question of who first leaked Ms. Wilson's identity (whether Mr. Libby, Richard Armitage, Ari Fleischer or Karl Rove) to which journalist (whether Mr. Woodward, Mr. Novak, Judith Miller or Matt Cooper) has always been a red herring. It's entirely possible that the White House has always been telling the truth when it says that no one intended to unmask a secret agent.

But if the administration is telling the truth on these narrow questions and had little to hide about the Wilson trip per se, its wild overreaction to the episode was an incriminating sign it was hiding something else. According to testimony in the Libby case, the White House went berserk when Mr. Wilson published his Op-Ed article in The Times in July 2003 about what he didn't find in Africa. Top officials gossiped incessantly about both Wilsons to anyone who would listen, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby conferred about them several times a day, and finally Mr. Libby, known as an exceptionally discreet White House courtier, became so sloppy that his alleged lying [in grand jury testimony] landed him with five felony counts.

The explanation for the hysteria has long been obvious. The White House was terrified about being found guilty of a far greater crime than outing a C.I.A. officer: lying to the nation to hype its case for war. When Mr. Wilson, an obscure retired diplomat, touched that raw nerve, all the president's men panicked because they knew Mr. Wilson's modest finding in Africa was the tip of a far larger iceberg. They knew that there was still far more damning evidence of the administration's W.M.D. lies lurking in the bowels of the bureaucracy

An article by Steve McConnell from IEEESoftware.com notes that, surprisingly, software development process maturity (ie., rigorous technical management procedures) doesn't seem to matter as much as "soft" factors like: seniority of personnel, good communication, motivation, analyst experience, etc.

The unstated implication is that the academics and big corporations concentrate too much on process maturity (eg. ISO 9001 & CMMI), because that's what's easy to study, and that's what's easy to refer to in a proposal.

From an article in The Washington Post, Sunday, December 10, 2006; Page B01, By David Rothkopf:

That impulse [to leave Iraq], while understandable, reflects the national narcissism that dogs much of U.S. foreign policy. We think Iraq is about us. We made it happen and we can undo it. But one-sided solutions for ending the Iraq war are as unrealistic as the one-sided impulses that started it. Even as we seek to remake history, it is remaking us.

The economic and political forces that drew the United States into Iraq -- quite different from the reasons the Bush administration gave for the invasion -- remain powerful, exerting a pull that will be hard to resist. Oil, of course, is foremost among them. But also important are the threats and tensions linked to oil: Washington's decades-old rivalry with Iran, the growing dangers posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the fear that the Middle East's simmering conflicts will erupt into a broader, bloodier and far more costly war.

(ACM's summary of an article from IDG News Service (01/02/07) by Gross, Grant)

ACM U.S. Policy Committee Chairman Eugene Spafford, executive director of the Purdue University Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security, says much work remains to ensure the accuracy and reliability of e-voting systems. Spafford says that all e-voting equipment should have independent audit capabilities such as paper printouts by the next election. "The goal should be to design systems carefully with the fault levels in mind and an appropriate way of using paper, if that's the mechanism," he says. "If you look at it as a design issue, there are many ways of using paper appropriately that don't have the disadvantages."

Spafford named optical scan machines as an appropriate use of paper ballots. While some ideas involving a cryptographic algorithm that outputs a cryptographic receipt have been put forth, he understands that most voters would not understand such technology and would have to take another person's word that their vote is both correct and confidential: "The method of having a paper record is a technology people can immediately grasp and understand. That's really important. We want not only to protect the vote, but we want people to feel comfortable that their vote matters."

Spafford also says that many officials do not understand that reliability is just as big of a problem as security. He notes the recent Florida House of Representatives race, in which around 18,000 voters who voted in other races did not vote, seems to be the result of poor design or a machine failure, not a security issue.