Ben Slade

From the EE Times (07/19/06) Leopold, George

Eugene Spafford, chairman of Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM's) Committee on Public Policy, told a joint House hearing Wednesday that ACM has concerns about the federal qualification process for computerized voting technology. U.S. standards for voting equipment are voluntary, but application of the federal specs has been inconsistent, according to a recent report from the Government Accounting Office.

Meanwhile, critics of electronic voting machines say they can be hacked into to compromise elections. "New federal standards and a certification process hold promise for addressing some of these problems, but more must be done to ensure the integrity of our elections in the face of software and hardware errors as well as the possibility of undetectable tampering," said Spafford.

A great analysis of the political motivations for Israel going to war against Hezbollah, by Aluf Benn in Salon.com:

"Olmert's decision to fight back was in part a result of his political weakness: Israel's new Cabinet, sworn in on May 4, is led by a freshman team lacking battlefield experience and hangs on a loose coalition. It is a byword of Israeli politics that weak governments tend to hit harder. A former war hero like Ariel Sharon, Yitzhak Rabin or Ehud Barak, "Mr. Security" at the top, could afford politically to be more flexible. But Olmert, who was smeared by his right-wing adversary Benjamin Netanyahu as a leftist weakling, could not. Along with the new defense minister, Amir Peretz, Olmert had to show the weary public and the military leaders that he had balls."

An article (signup required) by Paul Krugman is yet another pithy and informed analysis of how the conservatives' economic policies have benefited only "people who were already in the economic stratosphere".

Some great quotes from the article:

• "this dialogue of the deaf [of economic conservatives denial] reflects Upton Sinclair’s principle: it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
• "the full story of what happened in 2004 has only just become available,... growth in the economy as a whole is mainly benefiting a small elite, while bypassing most families."

By Tim Grieve from Salon.com:

..While the Democrats also have access to voter databases, Wallsten and Hamburger say the GOP's "Voter Vault" database is much more powerful; it includes data from "retailers, magazine subscription services, even auto dealers" and gives the Republicans a way not just to identify sympathetic voters in a last-minute rush but also to find "previously unaffiliated voters or even wavering Democrats" they can court more methodically with carefully crafted messages.

The take-away lesson? "That even in the face of Republican scandals, sour approval ratings, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and growing public rejection of President Bush's policies in Iraq, the Republican Party still holds the lead in the art and science of obtaining power -- and keeping it."

In an article in TomPaine.com Robert Reich argues that there can't be inflation pressures if wages aren't rising. What's more, the excess world production capacity could portend just the opposite, deflation. From the article:

Each generation responds to its own traumatic memory. Ben Bernanke and his Federal Reserve remember the double-digit inflation of the 1970s and are determined to mount a pre-emptive strike. That’s why they’re poised on raising interest rates yet again. Bernanke and company don’t have a direct memory of the trauma that haunted the previous generation, the depression of the 1930s.

In a online forum on software development, Michael Feathers asked the question:

"What is the role of academic research in software engineering? Should it happen at all?... it is pretty easy for many practitioners to feel that, well, often academic research doesn't have much relevance for us out in the field."

My response was as follows:

I think you're heading towards the area of Industrial Psychology. My understanding of that field is that it's concerned with the human interactions underlying the manufacturing process.

I think this gets to the point that true "computer science" is a very specific field that concerns proveable algorithms, while the larger discipline of software development is (should be) much closer to industrial psychology.

A specific example: the successful design of a Java development/runtime framework depends largely on how well people can understand it and modify software produced in that framework, not on the ability to verify requirements against produced code (although this is important too).

At a measurable level, this comes down to something close to the old minimizing of hand-eye movements in a manufacturing environment.

How many computer science theorems mention minimizing hand eye movements?

One of those articles which makes doing the right thing sound reasonable and not that hard to do. By Steven Hill from TomPaine.com:

"Heading into the 2006 congressional and state elections, fair election advocates need to remain vigilant, particularly in the handful of close races where a swing of a small number of votes could change an election outcome. Longer term, activists must turn their efforts to a more visionary agenda that will ensure fair and secure elections in the 21st century. Here are the reforms necessary for modernizing our elections and making sure that every vote is counted."

The article recommends the following actions:

1. Nonpartisan election officials.
2. Professionalization and training of election officials.
3. National elections commission and national standards.
4. Develop “public interest” voting equipment.

From an article in Salon.com by Helena Cobban:

But President Bush's decision to invade Iraq was never just about Iraq, anyway. The intellectual authors of the decision -- Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and his civilian aides in the Pentagon, and the powerful neoconservatives outside government -- intended the invasion of Iraq to send powerful messages throughout the Middle East and the world. For these men, the invasion was a high-stakes roll of the dice in a strategic game of global proportions. In the arenas of the broader Persian Gulf, the Israeli-Arab theater, the campaign against terrorism, and the worldwide relationship with other existing and emerging powers, the invasion of Iraq was intended to decisively reverse what the neocons had seen as a worrying erosion of U.S. power and influence.

From OMBWatch.org:

Whether you care about safe workplaces or farmers' markets, public parks or domestic abuse shelters, the programs that you care about are at risk from a bill that would create a backdoor for their elimination. Without you or your representatives' say, programs and even whole agencies could be killed or restructured to the point of making their work impossible.

A threat is now building in the House of Representatives: some lawmakers are pushing legislation that would force all federal programs--from Head Start to Even Start; from EPA to OSHA; and from urban development to rural healthcare--to defend themselves before an unelected commission. This one "sunset commission" would make recommendations to kill, consolidate, or "realign" all programs (with rare exception), and would have the power to force its recommendations through Congress, limiting your representatives' ability to save important programs from the chopping block.

From Center for American Progress' Progress Report:

More than three years after the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration refuses to budget for ongoing costs, instead insisting on funding the war through "emergency" supplemental spending bills. The tactic, which is under attack by members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, makes fiscal responsibility all but impossible. None of the "emergency" money for Iraq expected to be requested is "counted in the budget deficit estimates that the administration routinely releases." Also, the funding is not "counted against any budget caps that Congress has set for itself to abide by throughout the year."

Since March 2003, "Congress has approved about $250 billion in supplemental spending for the mission." Now, the administration wants more than $90 billion more to pay for operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and rebuilding on the Gulf Coast. The Senate is set to consider an even more bloated version of the request this week. In March, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, lamented, "The administration is running two sets of books here. ... There are two sets of books, and one is not subject to the budget controls." Rep. David Obey (D-WI), the ranking member on the House Appropriations Committee, echoed Gregg's concerns, arguing that emergency spending measures are "a good idea if you want to hide the cost of the war. It's a bad idea if you want to be able to offer an accounting of what our war costs are."