Put that BlackBerry down!

Via JK On the Phone, here's a story that's close to my heart.

CANADIAN bureaucrats' use of BlackBerry mobile devices and similar gadgets has become so prevalent that their union today called for extra wages for workers connected 24/7 to their office.

"We have old clauses in our collective agreement that cover standby pay, but these clauses have to be updated because these devices have changed the definition of work and being called after-hours,'' said Ed Cashman, regional vice-president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC).

"If you have a BlackBerry, you are essentially available 24 hours, seven days per week,'' he said.

"If you want that degree of availability, you have to pay people for it.''

[...]

The federal government has told the union that "they're willing to talk to us about this issue,'' Mr Cashman said.

But pundits warned the union may get more than it bargained for, as workers could be expected to check their BlackBerry when they should be relaxing or spending time with family.

"These people are interrupting their lives,'' Carleton University professor Linda Duxbury told the Ottawa Citizen newspaper.

"I wouldn't want to legitimise it by (having employers) say, 'We are entitled to send them (staff) messages because they are being compensated for it.

"How can you compensate someone for their divorce, the fact that their kids hate them or don't know them?''

I suppose it's a matter of what the expectation is now. If such an employee puts the BlackBerry in his nightstand on Friday afternoon and ignores it till Monday morning, does he get dinged on his evaluation for not being sufficiently in sync with team goals or some similar nonsense? In other words, is it already a de facto expectation that regular email checking during off hours is a part of the job description? If it is, then you may as well make it official and be properly compensated for it. Or at least you can know what the job really entails and choose to avoid it because of that.

I'm a BlackBerry server admin in my civilian guise, so I do keep an eye on the handheld over the weekend and whatnot. I have a lot of customers in Asia, so a quick email check before bedtime can save a lot of time on certain correspondences. It's not particularly onerous for me, but I've received enough email at bizarre hours from other folks to know that it can be much worse. I don't know enough about the particulars here to offer advice to these Canadians, but I think in general it's something that depends a lot on the job, the corporate culture, and the boss. I'd review my situation very carefully before I made a decision.

Geothermal and solar

I've spent a lot of time cheering for the expansion of wind energy in Texas, but that's far from the only renewable energy source out there. There's other forms out there, and they deserve support as well. The HMNS blog tells us a little about geothermal energy. Some advantages of geothermal that the blog notes:

It's everywhere if you go deep enough into the earth.

It's continuous, unlike the wind which takes a break occasionally or the sun, which is often hidden. I did learn that a form of energy that is continuous is called a BASE LOAD RESOURCE, verses wind or solar energy which is dependent on the elements.

It doesn't have to be stored.

It has very little negative visual or environmental impart.

It has a small carbon footprint.

It won't run out, at least while the core of the earth is molten radioactive heat.

Cost is reasonable (4-8 cents a kWh) and cost competitive with other fuel. If there was a carbon tax to gas and coal, the cost of geothermal energy is even more viable.

There's also solar. My blogging colleague Refinish69 went to the Texas Solar Forum at the state Capitol a week ago, and filed this report.

I was intrigued to see Bob Manning, Director of Engineering for HEB, there. Bob brought home a lot of points about why Texas and a lot of Texas businesses are not jumping at the chance to use solar power. It is still cost prohibitive. A member of the audience asked what type of price would make it feasible and Mr. Manning said "It would have to pay for itself in 5 years. Currently, with no incentives from the state or local municipalities, the price was not one a company can absorb as they deal with higher prices and lower profits."

I know we have all seen the newspaper stories where companies such as Starbucks have started adding solar panels to their drive through windows to help save energy. Starbucks is based in California where the state does give huge incentives for for companies that go green.

This is where the Texas Legislature(and other states)and US Congress have to catch up.

Lots of good information there, so check it out. I don't really have a point to make here other than to say that I approve of all explorations of renewable, non-polluting energy resources. Maybe as the price of oil continues its relentless march upwards, we'll see some real advances in the marketplace for these options. All I can say is the sooner, the better.

No creationism degree

This is good news.

Saying that a belief in creationism -- the theory that God created the Earth in six literal days, as recounted in the Bible -- falls outside the realm of science, the state's commissioner for higher education has recommended that a Dallas-based organization not be authorized to offer a master's degree in science education.

A committee of the Higher Education Coordinating Board unanimously backed the recommendation by Commissioner Raymund Paredes on Wednesday. The full board votes today.

Paredes said his decision wasn't an attack on creationism or religion, but an attempt to defend science education.

"Religious belief is not science," he said. "Science and religious belief are surely reconcilable, but they are not the same thing."

Well said. It boggles my mind that we're fighting these stupid battles, but such is the state of things. Here's a statement from Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller:

"The issue before the Coordinating Board isn't about academic freedom or free speech. The issue is whether the state will sanction the teaching of religion as science. Committee members today recognized that doing so would be a disservice both to science and to faith.

Just as important, our state's leaders have said that they want our public schools to do a better job preparing students for college and the jobs of the 21st century. If we're serious about that goal, then we must be serious about how we train our teachers. Approving an advanced degree in science education from an institution that doesn't really teach science would represent a huge step backward."

I know this won't be the end of it, but I'm going to hope for that anyway. The Observer blog has more.

Technology Growth: Are We Preparing Today's Students?

There is a fascinating op-ed in today's Chron. It's about the exponential growth of technology and how that will impact future energy options (the example given is solar which is very encouraging), medicine, life expectancy and prosperity.

The life expectancy thing is interesting:

The point is this: Now that we can model, simulate and reprogram biology just like we can a computer, it will be subject to the law of accelerating returns, a doubling of capability in less than a year. These technologies will be more than a thousand times more capable in a decade, more than a million times more capable in two decades. We are adding three months every year to human life expectancy, but given the exponential growth of our ability to reprogram biology, this will soon go into high gear. According to my models, 15 years from now we'll be adding more than a year each year to our remaining life expectancy. This is not a guarantee of living forever, but it means the sands of time will start pouring in rather than only pouring out.

As is the stuff on prosperity:

What's more, this exponential progression of information technology will affect our prosperity as well. The World Bank has reported, for example, that poverty in Asia has been cut in half over the past decade due to information technologies and that at current rates it will be cut by another 90 percent over the next decade. That phenomenon will spread around the globe.

If, in the very near future, people world-wide will live longer and be more prosperous, what does that say for economic models, retirement, business, education, politics, the environment, etc., etc., etc.

We need some very smart people getting ready to deal with a fast changing world. In the meantime, fifth and eighth graders are getting ready to take the Science TAKS test on May 1st. Is this getting them ready to make wise decisions that will guide our future? Maybe. Those Science TEKS objectives sure force a more scientific thinking process model on science education. And, kids have to think conceptually to do well on the TAKS test. All is not lost with the accountability testing, but we need to do better, considering the world is not going to slow down and wait for us to figure out how to prepare students for fast technology growth.

(cross posted from musings)

That's a lot of carbon

As SciGuy put it, we're number one in carbon emissions here in Harris County.

The first-ever analysis of county-by-county carbon dioxide emissions in the United States found that Harris County, which emits 18.6 million tons of CO2 per year, narrowly edged Los Angeles for the top spot.

"Some regions will see this analysis as an excuse to point fingers, but I don't really view it that way," said Kevin Gurney, an assistant professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Purdue University who led the study. "This gives us an opportunity to improve the situation."

[...]

Harris County catapulted to the top of the carbon dioxide list, which tallied emissions from all fossil fuel consumption through the year 2002, because of its large industrial base.

Industry, including petroleum refining and chemical manufacturing, produced 54 percent of the emissions, according to the study. Motor vehicles were responsible for 26 percent; power plants 13.5 percent; and residential and commercial sources 6.5 percent.

In contrast, more than half of Los Angeles' CO2 output was emitted by cars and trucks.

"Somebody has to supply the country with its gasoline and petroleum needs, and Harris County and its surrounding areas have decided that it may as well be us," said John Nielsen-Gammon, the state climatologist and a professor of meteorology at Texas A&M University.

"The county's high emissions ranking also comes from being a large population center nearly self-contained inside a single large county."

The new analysis represents the first effort to break carbon dioxide emissions down on a county basis. Previous statewide analyses found that Texas emits more carbon dioxide than any other state, and if it were a country, would emit more than all but six nations in the world.

As a result, the county-by-county study didn't come as a big surprise to some analysts.

"In part, this is the cost of conducting the business we conduct in the Houston area," said Elena Marks, Mayor Bill White's health policy director.

Residents can do their part by installing energy-efficient CFL lightbulbs, better insulating their homes and using public transit or taking other actions to reduce personal CO2 emissions, Marks said.

"People shouldn't feel guilty about this," she said, "but they should pay attention to the data and realize that we all have a part to play in reducing our carbon footprint."

I think the attitudes expressed by Gurney and Marks here are perfectly reasonable. This is an opportunity for improvement, and we should try to take reasonable steps to do so. The more we do of that, and the less griping we do about it, the better off we'll be.

"It's the end of the world." "Again!?!"

What do you do when you think someone may bring about the ultimate destruction of the earth and possibly the universe as we know it? File suit and hope for the best.

More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can't afford their mortgages and in some places now they can't even afford rice.

None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth -- and maybe the universe.

Scientists say that is very unlikely -- though they have done some checking just to make sure.

The world's physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a "strangelet" that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called "strange matter." Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

I'm fascinated by the idea of an environmental impact statement for this project. Is there a section to fill out about the risk of creating a black hole? I have to admit, that would impact the environment.

Snark aside, it's an interesting story, and these plaintiffs have some history of pursuing similar injunctions. Read it and see what you think. Thanks to Melissa for the link.

The cancer research panel

Missed this over the weekend: The passage of Prop 15 last year meant the creation of an advisory board to determine how $3 billion in funds for cancer research will be spent. That board is being put together now and will start the real work soon.

Six members were named this week to the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute Oversight Committee, which will establish the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute and monitor the $300 million in tax dollars the institute will handle for 10 years straight. The last three committee members are expected to be named any day.

Rice University professor Malcolm Gillis, one of the appointees, envisions Texas becoming an international leader in rolling back a disease that this year will kill an estimated 566,000 Americans, including 38,000 Texans.

"Nobody has done what Texas is doing in cancer research," Gillis said. "Nothing could be more forward looking than good research. ... We need to identify the people who are doing really good research and try to fund it."

Gillis said the oversight committee's first meeting is still weeks away. He predicts the first order of business will be choosing a location and a director for the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute.

The institute would be in charge of divvying up the grants, which would be distributed beginning in 2009.

I'd guess the location will be here in Houston, though Dallas and San Antonio will probably make a pitch for it as well. After that, who knows? It'll be interesting to watch how this operates.

Our broken math curriculum

Nothing like an advisory panel report to brighten up the weekend.

A presidential panel Thursday said America's math education system is "broken" and called on schools to focus lessons to ensure children from preschool to middle school master key skills.

The National Mathematics Advisory Panel was convened by President Bush in April 2006 to address concerns that many of today's students lack the math know-how needed to become future engineers and scientists.

The 24-member panel of mathematicians and education experts announced recommendations to improve instruction and make better textbooks and even called on researchers to find ways to combat "mathematics anxiety."

Larry Faulkner, panel chairman and former president of the University of Texas at Austin, said the country needs to make changes to stay competitive in an increasingly global economy. He noted that many U.S. companies draw skilled workers from overseas, a pool he said is drying out as opportunities in other countries improve.

"The question is, are we going to be able to get the talent?" Faulkner said in a briefing before the report's release.

"And it's not just a question of economic competitiveness," he said. "In the end, it's a question of whether, as a nation, we have enough technical prowess to assure our own security."

The panel, which released its final report Thursday, examined ways to make sure students have a strong grasp of the building blocks they need to understand algebra, a gateway to higher math.

Students who complete algebra are more likely to attend college and graduate.

The panel found that the math curricula in elementary and middle schools cover too many topics without enough depth. It set out skills students need to know to have a strong foundation in math.

As someone who was born with a gift for numbers, it's hard for me to objectively judge this. My parents transferred me from the parochial school that the family had attended for generations to a new public intermediate school when I was in the sixth grade because I was so bored to tears with arithmetic, and the new school gave me a chance to learn algebra. That was certainly beneficial to me, and I see no reason why all kids can't be exposed to that by the time they enter high school. But again, I wasn't an average kid in that regard, so I don't want to extrapolate from my own experience.

You can read the panel's report and its ancillary documents here. I also found the Math Panel Watch blog, which has some interesting critiques of the panel's approach and conclusions. Check them out.

Death of the Internet predicted: Film at 11

It's been too long since I've seen one of these stories. It kind of takes me back.

For months there has been a rising chorus of alarm about the surging growth in the amount of data flying across the Internet. The threat, according to some industry groups, analysts and researchers, stems mainly from the increasing visual richness of online communications and entertainment -- video clips and movies, social networks and multiplayer games.

Moving images, far more than words or sounds, are hefty rivers of digital bits as they traverse the Internet's pipes and gateways, requiring, in industry parlance, more bandwidth. Last year, by one estimate, the video site YouTube, owned by Google, consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000.

In a report last November, a research firm projected user demand for the Internet could outpace network capacity by 2011. The title of a debate scheduled next month at a tech conference in Boston sums up the angst: "The End of the Internet?"

I'm thinking there's a song parody opportunity in that debate title. I remember the good old days, when the Internet's imminent demise was predicted roughly once a week. It's good in a way to get back to the basics.

Screwing up email the White House way

While the Harris County Sheriff's Office has shown itself to be quite proficient at inappropriately deleting emails, for a real lesson in how it's done you've got to turn to the White House.

For President Bush, who expresses disdain for e-mail, the White House system of electronic record-keeping is a good match.

Even if Bush used e-mail, it might get lost in the problem-plagued White House computer system.

"I don't want you reading my personal stuff," the president explained to newspaper editors three years ago on why he doesn't send electronic messages.

On Capitol Hill and in federal court, a congressional committee and two private groups are pushing for information on how the White House has handled its e-mail for the past six years and whether officials there complied with records-retention laws.

The picture emerging from testimony and court filings is one of disregard for fundamental principles that well-run private companies adhere to routinely. By one estimate, over 1,000 days of e-mail are missing from various White House offices.

"I would call this negligence," said Mark Epstein, director of technical services for Cataphora Inc., a California company that specializes in retrieval and analysis of electronic information.

The White House's first mistake, Epstein and other technical experts say, was moving to a new e-mail setup without first setting up an archiving system that would allow speedy, reliable searches and recovery of electronic messages.

"This is the first time I've personally run across this kind of process for archiving; the White House relied on human beings to do specific manual processes on a regular basis and I would not recommend it," said William Tolson, who has consulted on e-mail problems for hundreds of companies and state and local governments.

[...]

The White House e-mail troubles began in 2002 with a decision to upgrade electronic message capabilities and move from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange.

Prior to launching Microsoft Exchange for e-mail, there should have been full-scale testing of an archiving system, e-mail experts said. In addition, both the existing archiving system and a new one should have run at the same time until the new system was fully proven.

[...]

Lawyers say the shortcomings in the White House's system would have prompted major legal problems had the White House been operating in the private sector.

"The penalties for regulated companies that have failed to implement effective e-mail archive solutions have been quite severe, penalties often imposed by branches of the federal government," said James K. Wagner Jr., a lawyer and co-founder of DiscoverReady LLC, a firm that assists companies in gathering and reviewing electronic documents.

So a few things went wrong. Big deal, could have happened to anyone. I mean, sure, in the real world you'd get fired, and maybe sued or arrested, but this is the Bush administration. I figure there's a Presidential Medal of Freedom in it for someone.

Besides, it's not like there was anything important in those three years' worth of emails. Right?

In a sworn declaration, White House official Theresa Payton told the court on Jan. 16 that "substantially all" e-mails from 2003 to 2005 should be contained on back-up computer tapes.

However, at a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Feb. 26, the panel's Democrats released a White House document that called that claim into question.

E-mail was missing from a White House archive for the period of Sept. 30-Oct. 6, 2003 from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, the White House document states. The backup tape covering that seven-day period was not created until Oct. 21, 2003, raising the possibility that e-mail was missing from the earlier period. That time span was in the earliest days of the Justice Department's probe into whether anyone at the White House leaked the CIA identity of Valerie Plame. Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was eventually convicted by a jury of four felonies in the leak probe.

See? Nothing to see here, move along. I mean, if we can't trust our elected officials to take care of their secret communications, whom can we trust? AP link via FDL.

San Marcos balks at municipal WiFi

The city of San Marcos is having second thoughts about a citywide WiFi plan due to the potential cost.

Two years ago, San Marcos city leaders were eager to get a wireless network started. Like leaders of other cities, they expected that a private company would build the network at no cost to the city. Now, many of those city leaders -- faced with a new industry business model that asks cities to pay for network construction and to hire private companies to operate them -- are putting their wireless projects on hold or pulling back entirely.

On Tuesday, the San Marcos City Council decided to continue negotiations with two private companies. But the $2.5 million to $5 million cost for a wireless network to cover the city's 25 square miles is giving some leaders second thoughts.

"Four to 5 million dollars makes me itch a bit," Council Member Chris Jones said.

For comparison purposes, the somewhat-larger city of Houston voted to spend $2.5 million over five years back in April. One way or the other, that's really saying something about where this sort of project is these days.

San Marcos is pursuing different options with two companies, Maryland-based Solutrea and Austin-based Blue Moon Solutions. Solutrea is proposing a wireless network that follows the older business model in which a private company owns the network and charges the city to use it. Blue Moon Solutions is proposing to operate a network owned by the city.

Cooper said the latter proposal might be a better deal for the city because it results in a moneymaking asset. If San Marcos decides to pay to build the network itself, the city could need to find as much as $5 million in savings and new revenue over five years to break even on the project, Cooper said. At the same time, the wireless network could save San Marcos $2.2 million, he said. The city could earn another $4 million by "renting" space on the municipal wireless network to other companies and retail customers.

Other possible benefits of a municipal wireless network, such as lower crime rates, attracting businesses and forcing down rates charged by other Internet service providers, are harder to gauge, Cooper said. A municipal wireless network could help San Marcos brand itself as a "smart city, a digital city," he said, and attract some well-educated workers and high-tech businesses already drawn to Austin.

Council Member John Thomaides acknowledged the importance of attracting the "creative class" to San Marcos, but said, "Is this the best way to go about it?"

It's a little harder to argue for that now. I still think the basic idea is a good one, but it's clear there's a lot of bugs left to be worked out.

That's really dark

It's a known scientific fact that any article about science-y things that starts off with a quote from This Is Spinal Tap is worth reading.

A scientist at Rice University has created the darkest material known to man, a carpet of carbon nanotubes that reflects only 0.045 percent of all light shined upon it. That's four times darker than the previously darkest known substance, and more than 100 times darker than the paint on a black Corvette.

"The final numbers, when we measured how dark this material was, were more dramatic than we thought," said Pulickel M. Ajayan, a professor of engineering at Rice University who led the team that developed the substance.

The work was published last week in the journal Nano Letters.

[...]

Ajayan said his team has applied to Guiness World Records. Developing a dark material is an easier way to gain admittance to the book than, say, eating 36 cockroaches in a minute, which Ken Edwards of England did in the year 2001.

"For me, yes," Ajayan said. "But I can't speak for every person."

The new material has some potential applications.

As it absorbs nearly all light, Ajayan said it could be useful in the collection and storage of solar energy.

Also, as it minimizes the scatter of stray light, it could improve optical instruments such as telescopes.

But for Ajayan, the aim is purely one of scientific discovery.

"There's a fundamental joy in such a fascinating study," he said.

Awesome, dude.

The big tech stories of 2007

What were the big technology stories from last year? Dwight surveys his readers, while Houstonist looks at the local angle. I'd probably go with the iPhone followed by Windows Vista for the top story of the year, with the turmoil surrounding the citywide WiFi initiative as the big local news. What do you think?

Gulf "Dead Zone" grows with corn prices

The best thing about this problem is that there's a pretty clear solution, so dealing with it is hopefully just a matter of implementation:

Because of rising demand for ethanol, American farmers are growing more corn than at any time since the Depression. And sea life in the Gulf of Mexico is paying the price.

The nation's corn crop is fertilized with millions of pounds of nitrogen-based fertilizer. And when that nitrogen runs off fields in Corn Belt states, it makes its way to the Mississippi River and eventually pours into the Gulf, where it contributes to a growing "dead zone" -- a 7,900-square-mile patch so depleted of oxygen that fish, crabs and shrimp suffocate.

The dead zone was discovered in 1985 and has grown fairly steadily since then, forcing fishermen to venture farther and farther out to sea to find their catch. For decades, fertilizer has been considered the prime cause of the lifeless spot.

With demand for corn booming, some researchers fear the dead zone will expand rapidly, with devastating consequences.

"We might be coming close to a tipping point," said Matt Rota, director of the water resources program for the New Orleans-based Gulf Restoration Network, an environmental group. "The ecosystem might change or collapse as opposed to being just impacted."

Environmentalists had hoped to cut nitrogen runoff by encouraging farmers to apply less fertilizer and establish buffers along waterways. But the demand for the corn-based fuel additive ethanol has driven up the price for the crop, which is selling for about $4 per bushel, up from a little more than $2 in 2002.

I learned more about the Dead Zone (with fun graphics!) here, and like I said, the best thing about it is how easy it would be to stop this process. Unfortunately, we're hearing things like this:

"I think you have to try to be a good steward of the land," said Jerry Peckumn, who farms corn and soybeans on about 2,000 acres he owns or leases near the Iowa community of Jefferson. "But on the other hand, you can't ignore the price of corn."

I'd love to see lawmakers take the initiative and work to regulate when and how fertilizers are used and to create buffer zones to keep the dangerous runoff out of the Gulf, like the article suggests. It would be ridiculous to let this problem get out of hand. I think I might have a letter or two to write to my representatives.

Setting the record straight on stem cells

Last week, the Chron published a characteristic piece of tripe from Charles Krauthammer, in which he claimed that the recent breakthrough by American scientist James A. Thomson and his Japanese colleague Shinya Yamanaka on an embryo-free way to produce genetically matched stem cells vindicated President Bush's policies that forbid embryonic stem cell research in the US. Now Thomson has joined with Alan I. Leshner, the chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and executive publisher of the journal Science, to print a rebuttal to Krauthammer's foolishness.

Far from vindicating the current U.S. policy of withholding federal funds from many of those working to develop potentially lifesaving embryonic stem cells, recent papers in the journals Science and Cell described a breakthrough achieved despite political restrictions. In fact, work by both the U.S. and Japanese teams that reprogrammed skin cells depended entirely on previous embryonic stem cell research.

At a time when nearly 60 percent of Americans support human embryonic stem cell research, U.S. stem cell policy runs counter to both scientific and public opinion. President Bush's repeated veto of the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act, which has twice passed the House and Senate with votes from Republicans and Democrats alike, further ignores the will of the American people.

Efforts to harness the versatility of embryonic stem cells, and alleviate suffering among people with an array of debilitating disorders, began less than 10 years ago. Since then, scientists have continued to pursue embryonic stem cells because of their ability to transform into blood, bone, skin or any other type of cell. The eventual goal is to replace diseased or dysfunctional cells to help people with spinal cord injuries, neurodegenerative disorders, cancer, diabetes, heart disease and other conditions.

Since 1998, many strategies for addressing sanctity-of-life concerns have been pursued. While commendable, these efforts remain preliminary, and none so far has suggested a magic bullet. In the same way, the recent tandem advances in the United States and by Shinya Yamanaka's team in Japan are far from being a Holy Grail, as Charles Krauthammer inaccurately described them. Though potential landmarks, these studies are only a first step on the long road toward eventual therapies.

Krauthammer's central argument -- that the president's misgivings about embryonic stem cell research inspired innovative alternatives -- is fundamentally flawed, too. Yamanaka was of course working in Japan, and scientists around the world are pursuing the full spectrum of options, in many cases faster than researchers in the United States.

One hopes that having published Krauthammer's fantasies, the Chron will see fit to follow it up with the facts. One would think they owe their readers that much.

Houston WiFi, the next stage

So we know that EarthLink is basically abandoning the municipal WiFi market, and we know that the original deal the city had with EarthLink is more or less kaput, in spirit if not yet in legal terms. Where do we stand now? Unclear.

[The City will] use part of the $5 million penalty fee that EarthLink paid in September to finance a "digital inclusion" program intended to help students and the elderly in low-income neighborhoods access the Internet.

"One of the goals of the WiFi plan was to bridge the digital divide, and because of the city's good contract, we have substantial money to invest in that," Mayor Bill White said Tuesday.

EarthLink paid the $5 million penalty for missing a deadline to begin building the project earlier this year.

Under plans being drawn up by the city, $3.5 million of that penalty fee would go toward creating free, WiFi hotspots in 10 neighborhoods and helping residents there acquire equipment and training to use the Internet, said Richard Lewis, the city's director of information technology.

Those neighborhoods have not been chosen, he said, but the first should see access nodes by March. He said he hoped corporations will come forward with money or equipment to supplement city funds.

The remaining $1.5 million will go toward other city wireless projects, including public safety, Lewis said.

EarthLink officials admitted in September they were not ready to start building the network in Houston, which was supposed to span the city's 640 square miles.

The $5 million penalty bought the company another nine months to decide whether to continue the project.

Because the company does not face any further penalties, there is wide speculation that it will drop or alter the $50 million Houston project. White said he had doubts about whether EarthLink will follow through on the contract.

[...]

Unlike some other cities where EarthLink has wireless plans, the city of Houston has agreed to serve as the company's anchor tenant, paying $2.5 million over five years to use the network.

But since the subscriber model has yet to prove it is financially viable, even Houston's anchor tenancy may not be enough for EarthLink to make money here.

Let's assume that EarthLink ultimately decides to bail on Houston. What are the city's options at that point?

1. Find another provider, perhaps a local consortium like the one that lost the original bid to EarthLink. As I noted before, there's still a lot of political support for the citywide WiFi idea. The main question here is whether there is another vendor to be found. It's not clear yet whether the entire concept of citywide WiFi is being abandoned by the industry, or if it's just not at a point of viability yet, but if EarthLink won't do this, I'm not sure who will.

2. Scale it back to something smaller, cheaper, and less ambitious. Maybe just make downtown a WiFi zone, as Austin did, with some "digital inclusion" hot spots in low income neighborhoods as described here. Or just do the neighborhood hot spots. This would accomplish something, and would put some infrastructure in place in the event that a citywide extension becomes feasible again, and would likely be cheap enough to be provided by the city for free, thus making up a bit of the sting for scaling the big vision down.

3. Give up completely and reallocate all dedicated resources elsewhere, as Cory suggests. This is obviously the cheapest solution, and as with #2 still allows for the possibility of trying again if conditions become more favorable.

I'd guess #1 is the preferred option for the city. If it's not possible, look for some form of option 2. I can't see a complete abandonment happening, given that the amount of public money involved is fairly small and the lack of any organized opposition to the citywide WiFi initiative. What do you think?

Philly Wi-Fi network hits a snag

From last week, more signs from EarthLink that they are done with the municipal WiFi business.

Three years after Mayor John Street announced that Philadelphia would be the first major U.S. city to have its own wireless Internet network, the project has been beset by delays and cost overruns.

It's also been set back by a restructuring at EarthLink Inc., the Atlanta-based Internet service provider that won a 10-year contract to set up and manage the network.

The project took another hit on Friday as EarthLink said it was considering "strategic alternatives" for its municipal Wi-Fi business -- corporate jargon that could mean a sale.

Shares of EarthLink rose by 13 cents, or 2 percent, to $7.27 amid heavy volume on Friday.

Terry Phillis, Philadelphia's chief information officer, said EarthLink is still committed to completing the Wi-Fi network in the city but it's less clear who will own it afterward. Philadelphia could take the network over and find another company to operate it.

[...]

EarthLink paid Houston $5 million for missing the starting deadline for the city's Wi-Fi project and had been mulling whether to walk away. The company's announcement on Friday puts the investment in limbo. Richard Lewis, the city's chief information officer, said EarthLink's investment was estimated at $40 million to $50 million.

"We will not devote any new capital to the old municipal Wi-Fi model that has us taking all the risks," Rolla Huff, EarthLink's chief executive, told analysts in August. "In my judgment, that model is simply unworkable."

Doesn't sound good, does it? The question is what it means for the cities that currently have deals with EarthLink. Via WiFiNetNews, the Philly consortium that had bid against EarthLink for that contract offers its interpretatation of what it all means.

I propose that the statements by EarthLink's CEO actually send two messages; In addition to the classified ad above, which might have the effect of soliciting parties who want to get in on a fire-sale, it also opens the door for cities where EarthLink has agreements and performance obligations to renegotiate terms - the most meaningful of which would relate to anchor tenancy - as a way to avoid less desirable outcomes under an Assignment.

I don't think the idea of city WiFi is dead. I think it's got enough merit and enough support to survive EarthLink's change of heart. The question is what model will take the place of the current one. Thanks to Dwight for the links.

Why were you printing them in the first place?

I just have one question regarding this article about the hip, trendy, environmentally-conscious email sig making the rounds these days:

Stephanie Fessler doesn't drive a hybrid car, compost her orange peels or bring her own reusable cloth bags to the supermarket.

But two months ago, Fessler joined countless other business people in doing one environmental good deed daily. At the bottom of every e-mail she sends, she includes this message: "Save Trees. Print only when necessary."

"This is something I can contribute in my crazy busy life," said Fessler, 29, who works for a Los Angeles public relations company. "It reminds other people about environmental awareness and reminds me on a daily basis."

The trend took off last March, when the environmental Web site www.TreeHugger.com encouraged readers to add the don't-print plea to their automatic e-mail signatures.

Since then, the message has spread beyond the granola-and-Birkenstock crowd to the cubicle armies of corporate America. Architects, airline employees and even button-down accountants have gotten in on the act, as have companies such as media giant News Corp.

The parent of Fox Television offers employees a catchy admonition that riffs on the company's "Cool Change" environmental initiative: "Be cool, consider the environment. Please don't print this e-mail unless you really need to."

My question is why were any of these people in the habit of printing emails in the first place? Seriously, what purpose does that serve? I understand there may be job functions that require printing emails for legal or other business reasons, but as this campaign is clearly aimed at those who choose to print emails, I have to ask, why in the world are you doing that? I truly don't understand.

Look, I've had corporate email in one form or another for almost 15 years. I think in all that time, I've printed maybe 100 or so of them. Mostly it's stuff related to travel - confirmation emails for conferences, classes, hotels, flights, that sort of thing. Once in awhile I get directions from someone, and I print those to bring in the car with me. The very occasional receipt for expense accounting. Beyond that sort of thing, I've never felt the urge to print, and can't imagine why anyone else would.

So please, help me understand. Why do you print emails? What purpose does it serve? Or is it just an old habit you've not broken? Might this campaign have an effect on you? Help me to get it, because I just don't. Thanks.

Fall back report

So, how did you and your supposedly auto-adjusting timepieces do with the later-than-before end to Daylight Savings Time this weekend? Here's my report:

1. Spiffy new alarm clock, which supposedly tracks DST information: Did not auto-adjust. So I figure either its DST feature is just for show, or it couldn't handle the change. At least resetting the clock was easy enough to do.

2. Cellphone: Did not auto-adjust, at least right away. When I checked it a little after 7 AM (which in context represented sleeping in - with small children, you don't get an extra hour of sleep at this time of year, you get an extra hour of day), it was showing the DST time. I checked it again three hours later, and it had corrected itself. Why AT&T would be so slow on the uptake, I couldn't say, but at least they got it right before I had to try and figure out how to fix it myself.

3. BlackBerry: Adjusted just fine. That patch we rolled out in February to deal with the front end of the DST change also worked for the back end.

4. Computer: Adjusted just fine, though one older PC I have at work that isn't used for network logons (and thus doesn't get logon scripts run on it) fell back last week. No biggie.

How did your electronic gizmos handle the new reality?

The Daylight Savings Time shuffle

Is one of your timekeeping gadgets off by an hour this week? If so, you're not alone.

It might be silly to talk about the duplicitous hands of time or tick-tock treachery. But the fact remains that at least some folks, who trusted their alarm clocks to wake them up on time this week, found themselves running an hour behind.

Blame it on daylight saving time, whose slippery "spring forward -- fall back" formula is enough to confound all but the most mathematically astute. This week's problem arose when daylight saving time, which traditionally ends on the last Sunday in October, was extended to the first Sunday in November.

[...]

Unless PC owners installed patches provided by Microsoft or Apple, their machines, like the clueless clocks, would have registered the wrong time.

Some Houston computer stores e-mailed their customers to remind them of the delay in the resumption of Standard Time.

The change in the time switch came this year as part of the Energy Conservation Act designed to give Americans a bit more daylight -- and energy savings.

President Bush signed the law in 2005.

The law also affected the beginning of daylight saving time, moving it to the second Sunday in March from the first Sunday in April.

And there were many problems with that earlier start to DST. At least from a BlackBerry perspective, the patch that was rolled out in haste back in February also fixed the issue at this end. So professionally speaking, it's all good for me.

As it happens, I'm using a spiffy new alarm clock these days that has a DST auto-adjust feature built in. Since it did not fall back this weekend, I assume it was already hip to the new DST endpoints. I'm putting my BlackBerry on my nightstand this Saturday anyway, just in case. We'll see what happens.

Citywide WiFi

Interesting article from CNet on the current state of citywide WiFi projects.

Despite the recent onslaught of bad press, citywide and regional Wi-Fi networks are not dead.

In fact, cities, such as Corpus Christi, Texas; Minneapolis, Minn.; and Philadelphia, are actually seeing early signs of success. And lessons learned from these deployments if applied properly could help save bigger and more, ambitious projects such as Silicon Valley's regional wireless network.

Two of the biggest lessons that other cities can take away from projects currently under way are having a clear mission and use case for building these networks and also defining a business model for building and sustaining the network.

"Cities that have seen early success have been able to articulate very clearly to politicians and citizens how the network will be used and how it will benefit people," said Craig Settles, an independent wireless consultant. "And they've also had clear business plans for paying for the networks."

In the very earliest days of citywide Wi-Fi, this appeared to be the case. Cities, such as Corpus Christi, looked into Wi-Fi to solve a particular problem. The city wanted to allow its utility workers to read water and gas meters remotely. Wi-Fi seemed like a perfect solution.

The city soon expanded the scope of its network to also enable building inspectors, code enforcers, police, firefighters and emergency medical technicians to communicate wirelessly with each other. And now Wi-Fi is also used to keep tabs on city property such as vehicles and provide remote surveillance in certain parts of the city. Earlier this year, Corpus Christi sold its network to EarthLink, which will not only provide the wireless service to several city agencies, but also sell consumer broadband services to residents for $20 a month.

[...]

Philadelphia, which started building its network more than a year ago, took a different tack. The city saw Wi-Fi as a way to bridge the gap between rich and poor by providing low-cost broadband service to disadvantaged citizens.

EarthLink, which saw citywide Wi-Fi as an opportunity to own its own network infrastructure, won the contract to build and run the network. In addition to paying for the network, EarthLink also committed to providing some funding for the city's nonprofit group Wireless Philadelphia, which subsidizes Internet service for Philadelphia's low-income households and helps provide training and equipment.

Subscriber numbers in Philadelphia have not been released, but Greg Goldman, CEO of the nonprofit group Wireless Philadelphia, said that thousands of retail customers and dozens of nonprofit groups have already begun using the network, which is still not fully deployed. One of the biggest boosts in usage came when Drexel University, which owns and operates one of the largest wireless networks in the country, added the Wireless Philadelphia service to its array of services that it offers to students and faculty.

"There's no question the ground is shifting," Goldman said. "But wireless technology isn't going away. And it provides a much needed service for low-income people. We've been very clear from the beginning of that focus. And we believe it creates an enormous market for broadband."

I see Houston's effort as a combination of Corpus Christi and Philly. It's not clear yet what will happen now that EarthLink is balking at the terms of the original contract - they may ultimately go forward, possibly under different terms, or they may pay a penalty and get out. It seems clear that there's still the political will to go forward with the project - to the best of my recollection, every Council candidate I interviewed expressed support of pursuing citywide WiFi with or without EarthLink - it's just a matter of getting the vendor sorted out. Maybe that local coalition that lost to EarthLink in the bidding can be revived if all else fails. Thanks to Matt Stiles for the link.

The phantom vibration menace

When I read this story, I had to check to make sure I wasn't reading The Onion.

Many mobile phone addicts and BlackBerry junkies report feeling vibrations when there are none, or feeling as if they're wearing a cell phone when they're not.

The first time it happened to Jonathan Zaback, a manager at the public relations company Burson-Marsteller, he was out with friends and showing off his new BlackBerry Curve.

"While they were looking at it, I felt this vibration on my side. I reached down to grab it and realized there was no BlackBerry there."

Zaback, who said he keeps his BlackBerry by his bed while he sleeps, checks it if he gets up in the night and wakes to an alarm on the BlackBerry each day, said this didn't worry him.

"As long as it doesn't mean a tumor is growing on my leg because of my BlackBerry, I'm fine with it," he said. "Some people have biological clocks. I might have a biological BlackBerry."

[...]

"Even when I don't have the BlackBerry physically on my person, I do find myself adjusting my posture when I sit to accommodate it," said Dawn Mena, an independent technology consultant based in Thousand oaks, Calif. "I also laugh at myself as I reach to unclip it -- I swear it's there -- and find out I don't even have it on."

Theories abound about the phenomenon, termed "ringxiety" or "fauxcellarm."

Anecdotal evidence suggests "people feel the phone is part of them" and "they're not whole" without their phones, since the phones connect them to the world, said B.J. Fogg, director of research and design at Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab.

"We'd rather make a mistake than miss a call," he said. "Our brain is going to be scanning and scanning and scanning to see if we have to respond socially to someone."

In certain circles, phantom vibrations are a point of pride.

"Of course I get them," said Fred Wilson, a managing partner of Union Square Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm based in New York. "I've been getting them for over 10 years since I started with the pager-style BlackBerry."

Snark is failing me, so I'm just going to point you to an actual Onion article about BlackBerries and leave it at that.

How to avoid computer viruses in one easy lesson

Step one: If you receive an email claiming to have nekkid pictures of famous women contained within, do not open it, and for God's sake do not click on any links or open any attachments. Just delete it unread.

Step two: Repeat Step One.

There. That wasn't so hard, was it?

Mammoth DNA

Cool.

Researchers report in Friday's edition of the journal Science, however, that mammoth hair seems to be an excellent source of well-preserved DNA.

"It is important to understand the genetic makeup of an organism before it went extinct," explained lead researcher Stephan C. Schuster of Penn State University.

They try to the understand relationships between different groups of animals, especially ones that are highly endangered, to learn whether those might face a similar fate, said Schuster, an associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology.

"We want to use this to sequence, (the DNA from) museum specimens ... to understand the evolution of species by using museum collections that date back several hundred years," Schuster said.

Indeed, the technique could be used to measure the DNA from specimens collected by such naturalists as Charles Darwin, Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Linnaeus.

The DNA collected from the hair is much cleaner and much less damaged than that from other parts of the mammoths, he said, so it is more economic to sequence it.

Schuster explained that keratin, the hard covering of hair, could protect the DNA. Hair also can more easily be cleaned of contaminants such as bacteria.

"When people thought of sequencing DNA from hair, the usual assumption was that the material must come from the hair root, which contains recognizable cells, because the hair shaft appears to be dead," co-author Webb Miller, also at Penn State, said in a statement.

"However, we now know that a hair shaft consists essentially of DNA encased in a kind of biological plastic," said biology professor Miller.

Like I said, cool. I look forward to reading about the results.

And since I know you're thinking about it:

Learning the DNA sequence does not mean that the ancient animal can be cloned or somehow resurrected, Schuster said, adding "this is science fiction."

Not that that will stop anyone from writing Pliocene Park if there's a buck to be made off of it, but at least we can all be more skeptical this time around.

When A Meter Is A Natural Disaster

In a 100 years (give or take), oceans are expected to rise one meter (39 inches) and will wipe out the Jamestown settlement area, the lauch pad in Florida that sent man to the moon, Bush's Kennebunkport home, John Edwards new North Carolina spread, and many of the beaches in Texas and Florida.

This is not an "if", it's "when" and a "what are we going to save" situation:

Few of the more than two dozen climate experts interviewed disagree with the one-meter projection. Some believe it could happen in 50 years, others say 100, and still others say 150.

Sea level rise is "the thing that I'm most concerned about as a scientist," says Benjamin Santer, a climate physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

"We're going to get a meter and there's nothing we can do about it," said University of Victoria climatologist Andrew Weaver, a lead author of the February report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Paris. "It's going to happen no matter what -- the question is when."

Sea level rise "has consequences about where people live and what they care about," said Donald Boesch, a University of Maryland scientist who has studied the issue. "We're going to be into this big national debate about what we protect and at what cost."

This week, beginning with a meeting at the United Nations on Monday, world leaders will convene to talk about fighting global warming. At week's end, leaders will gather in Washington with President Bush.

Experts say that protecting America's coastlines would run well into the billions and not all spots could be saved.

[---]

Even John Christy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a scientist often quoted by global warming skeptics, said he figures the seas will rise at least 16 inches by the end of the century. But he tells people to prepare for a rise of about three feet just in case.

It sounds like all sorts of policy and economic decisions will revolve around rising sea levels. Will people move away from the coasts in the next decades? What happens to tourism? Farmland near the coast? Transportation? Whole communities?

Apparently, we are past talking about stopping global warming in any sense of near-term effects. We are headed into an economic and, no doubt, geo-political crisis.

NASA's Urban Legend Problem

No doubt NASA administrator Mike Griffin wishes that the tale of a diaper-wearing astronaut who drove to Florida with black gloves, a wig, a BB pistol and ammunition, pepper spray, a 2-pound drilling hammer, rubber tubing, plastic garbage bags, an eight-inch folding knife and other items, in order to "confront" the other woman in an astronaut love triangle, was the stuff of "urban legends."

Instead, in a recent press conference, Griffin called the report of alcohol abuse by astronauts just prior to flight, by an independent review panel that Griffin commissioned, the stuff of urban legends.

The head of that commission, Col Richard Bauchmann, Jr., called b.s on that this week when he testified to the House Science and Technology subcommittee (Nick Lampson chairs that). His concern is my concern. In its review of the alcohol incidents, NASA interviewed people face to face. The independent committee of experts got their information from astronauts and flight surgeons anonymously. How can we be sure everyone who was interviewed by NASA about the alcohol incidents felt their job would be safe if they told what they knew? I also know that NASA has had a deaf ear in the past in listening to their own people about safety concerns, so it didn't come as complete shock to me that the people who give a go for astronauts to fly might dismiss flight surgeon recommendations.

Bauchmann, commander of the U.S. Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine in San Antonio, had this to say:

"We understand the outrage that some members of NASA have expressed at this particular finding," Bachmann said of the drinking allegations. "However, public statements that such things are simply impossible, challenging the veracity of these finding, referring to them as unproven allegations or urban legends, rather than acknowledging how difficult raising such concerns can be, do not encourage openness and safety."

Bachmann was referring to NASA Administrator Michael Griffin's remarks last week, when he dismissed the allegations of excessive drinking as "urban legends."

[---]

Bachmann said the drinking incidents and the allegations of NASA leadership disregarding safety warnings were reported to his committee by eyewitnesses to the events. Their testimony was voluntary, he said.

The fact that all current NASA flight surgeons have since signed a letter denying that they were ever aware of alcohol abuse by astronauts -- or that they felt their medical advice was ignored by superiors -- increases his concern that NASA employees feel too intimidated to stand by the allegations they made privately and anonymously to outside experts, Bachmann said.

Bachmann agreed with Rep. Mark Udall, D-Colo., that his panel and O'Connor essentially interviewed many of the same people at NASA and came to different conclusions.

Somebody is lying or hiding the truth, apparently. If the panel and O'Connor (NASA's review guy) really did interview some of the same people, why did these people tell different stories about something so serious? This question needs to be answered.

I can't help but think that if I worked for the space program and had serious, career-ending information about astronauts, I'd think through it VERY carefully before I said it out loud where it would get back to Griffin - with my name attached to the allegations. Especially since I would know that he had already been dismissive, to the point of belittling, a whole panel of experts who reported something he didn't like.

NASA is supposed to be doing an anonymous survey as a follow-up to the interviews. I'll be curious to find out if this next round of information collecting matches what the independent panel heard from NASA personnel.

EarthLink pays for delay in citywide wi-fi

The future of the city's ambitious wi-fi plan is questionable right now. From a Chron story by Carrie Feibel:

Following months of delay, an ambitious plan to blanket Houston with wireless Internet signals now is in serious jeopardy.

The city's partner in the project, EarthLink, will pay a $5 million penalty to the city for not meeting its deadlines, Mayor Bill White said Wednesday.

"They're either going to do a graceful exit," White said, "or they're really going to figure out whether they can get other industry participants."

The payment will give EarthLink an additional nine months to find investment partners for the Houston project, White said. The company also could decline to do the project altogether without paying additional penalties, he said.

EarthLink announced Tuesday it was laying off 900 employees, nearly half its work force in a company restructuring. A spokesman declined to comment on its agreement with Houston.

I think the "in serious jeopardy" bit might be a little dramatic on Feibel's part. We're already looking at a delay, but I think that either EarthLink will exorcise their internal demons and take care of this, or the city will find someone else to do it. Dwight Silverman had a nice blog post in which he says he expects EarthLink to follow through in Houston. If they want to stay in the city wi-fi business, I don't think they really have another option. I'd just really like to see more commitment from the company though. Like Dwight has pointed out before, citywide wi-fi networks are notoriously spotty, and this isn't going to be successful unless it's done well. So reading this is a little frustrating:

City officials expected installation of the wireless equipment to begin this summer, but EarthLink never completed the first step: signing an agreement with CenterPoint to place equipment on its utility poles.

EarthLink is reconsidering its business model for building municipal wireless networks. Rolla P. Huff, EarthLink's President and CEO, spoke to investors during a Wednesday morning conference call on the company's restructuring.

''We will not devote any new capital to the old municipal Wi-Fi model that has us taking all of the risk by fronting all the capital, then paying to buy our customers one by one," Huff said.

EarthLink already has the kind of deal they're looking for with the city, one in which the municipal government is the primary customer: the city's going to be paying $2.5 million over 5 years to use the network. This is an exciting project and I really want to see it work out, but I guess for now we just have a nine-month waiting game to see if they can get it off the ground.

Some intelligence on "intelligent design"

All things considered, I'd have to say that this counts as pretty good news. For now, anyway.

Should "intelligent design" - the cousin of creationism - be taught in science classes in Texas alongside evolution?

A solid majority of the State Board of Education, which will rewrite the science curriculum for public schools next year, is against the idea, even though several members say they are creationists and have serious doubts about Charles Darwin's theory that humans evolved from lower life forms.

Interviews with 11 of the 15 members of the board - including seven Republicans and four Democrats - found little support for requiring that intelligent design be taught in biology and other science classes. Only one board member said she was open to the idea of placing the theory into the curriculum standards.

"Creationism and intelligent design don't belong in our science classes," said Board of Education Chairman Don McLeroy, who described himself as a creationist. "Anything taught in science has to have consensus in the science community - and intelligent design does not."

Mr. McLeroy, R-College Station, noted that the current curriculum requires that evolution be taught in high school biology classes, and he has no desire to change that standard.

"When it comes to evolution, I am totally content with the current standard," he said, adding that his dissatisfaction with current biology textbooks is that they don't cover the weaknesses of the theory of evolution.

While I'd certainly prefer to have SBOE members who had actual knowledge of scientific matters - it's clear that the member from Beaumont, who spoke about humans and monkeys, hasn't the first clue of what evolution is all about - at least the ones we have seem to understand the distinction between what they believe, and what is appropriate for a classroom. That's good to hear.

Not everyone is sanguine about this, of course:

Kathy Miller of the Texas Freedom Network, which advocates strict separation of church and state, said she doubted board members had given up their advocacy of intelligent design.

"Don McLeroy and the other ideologues who now control the state board have said repeatedly in the past that they want public school science classes to teach creationism and other religion-based concepts," Ms. Miller said. "So we have no doubt that they'll find a way to try, either by playing politics with the curriculum standards or censoring new science textbooks later on."

Which gets back to what I said before - it would be vastly preferable to have SBOE members who had genuine knowledge in these matters, rather than having to depend on their goodwill. But again, we could be in worse shape than this, so let's be glad for that. It's in 2011, when the textbooks come up for review again, that we'll really have to be on the watch for attempts to weaken the curricula.

I should note that it would also be nice if we had more reporters who understood what evolution is all about. Consider this paragraph:

The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and living things are best explained by an unknown "intelligent cause" rather than by undirected processes like natural selection and random mutation - key components of the theory of evolution.

Evolution is both a fact and a theory. Calling "intelligent design" a "theory" is inaccurate, since in scientific terms the word "theory" has specific properties, such as predictive value and falsifiability, neither of which are true for ID. Unfortunately, you wouldn't know that from reading this story. Quite the reverse, in fact - after all, if both evolution and ID are "theories", why shouldn't they both be taught? Balancing that out with a "Some critics say" paragraph isn't good enough. We need better understanding all around.

Does EarthLink want out?

Looks like EarthLink might be getting some cold feet over the WiFi deal they've inked with the City of Houston.

Months after the City Council approved a contract to allow EarthLink Inc. to blanket Houston with a wireless network, the build-out still has not begun.

The delay is prompting concern that the company, which publicly has said it is rethinking its business model, may be having doubts about whether to proceed in Houston as planned.

Mayor Bill White acknowledged Friday that the company is two or three months behind schedule. But he said EarthLink is obligated under contract to build the network within a certain time, so if there are significant delays Houston would receive compensation.

"I would intend to either wrap something up within a fairly short period of time -- probably a matter of weeks, not months -- or proceed with our legal remedies against the company," White said.

He said he has been working with EarthLink officials to find a mutually beneficial solution.

Options include the city paying more, and trying to sell to businesses instead of consumers. We know that EarthLink has been rethinking its business model for city WiFi services. Dwight had a link to a Business Week article on the topic that nonetheless had some good news from Houston's perspective. I think we probably won't end up with what we thought we were going to get originally, but I don't think EarthLink is going to try to get out of this. I still think the idea makes sense, and I hope everything gets ironed out.

Corpus Christi citywide WiFi rollout completed

Today's the day that the city of Corpus Christi celebrates the end of its citywide WiFi installation.

The city's wireless fidelity, or Wi-Fi, network was sold in March to EarthLink for $5.5 million and an additional $340,000 during the first year of service in franchise fees and other revenues. The sale gave the company rights to the 147 square miles of Corpus Christi the network serves.

"We are very excited that we can take this to the next level and make it improve the availability for commercial use," City Manager Skip Noe said. "When we first got it, the network was meant as a vehicle to help save on operating costs and now this next level will allow us to provide Internet access for the community to use."

The network had about 1,300 radios with 500-foot radii when it was bought from the city. EarthLink was charged with upgrading the network to industry standard equipment compared with other cities it serves. The company upgraded services and added more radios to poles and towers to improve coverage.

EarthLink began taking subscribers June 1 for a promotional rate of $6.95 a month for the first six months. The rate transfers to a recurring cost of $19.95 a month thereafter for download and upload speeds as fast as 1 megabyte per second. Those who want more speed can opt for service of 3 Mbps for downloads and 1 Mbps for uploads for $9.95 for the first six months, with a recurring rate of $21.95 a month thereafter.

The city began its wireless network in 2004 to automate its meter-reading system in a 20-square-mile pilot project area. The network, which allows people to access the Internet from wireless devices such as laptops, cost the city $7.1 million to install. Officials say the knowledge obtained from setting up the network compensated for the difference between the cost and sale price.

As you know, EarthLink is also Houston's provider, and at last report they'd done some good work in getting things up and running there. The better the job they do in Corpus, the better we can feel about how they'll do here. Link via Texas Politics.

Another report on voting machine problems

A comprehensive study of electronic voting machines used in California has exposed some security weaknesses in machines used here in Houston.

The tests, administered by the University of California at Davis, found that absent tighter procedures, hackers could alter vote totals, violate the privacy of individual voters and delete audit trails.

Harris County election officials called the test helpful, saying it identified places where the technology can be improved, but said the tested scenario was not relevant to live elections.

"The laboratory experiment, as conducted by the UC-Davis researchers, seems almost impossible to replicate outside that laboratory environment.

"Thus, voters in Harris County should be aware, but not be concerned by the results," said Hector DeLeon, a spokesman for Harris County Clerk Beverly Kaufman, whose office administers elections.

DeLeon called the test unrealistic because it is "premised on providing unfettered access to the voting equipment to a malicious individual with the technological savvy and ingenuity to violate the system."

It does not take into account controls and procedures designed to ensure accuracy, security and integrity of the voting system, he said.

It's true, in order to devise the attacks, researchers had unfettered access, said UC-Davis computer science professor Matt Bishop, who led the study.

But he said it didn't take long to devise attacks; some took five minutes, others took a few days.

"Relying on security through obscurity is a terrible thing to do," Bishop said. "(Attackers) can get the info, the only question is how hard do they have to work to get it. Any defense that relies on ignorance underestimates how ingenious attackers can be and overestimates how fallible people are."

I definitely agree with Bishop on this one. The problem as I see it is that county clerks don't think like hackers. I think they're too easily swayed by the promises made by vendors, who obviously have an interest in looking good.

Bishop could not say whether voters should be comfortable using the machines in place. He did, however, say that voters should "feel they can do a better job of building a better system."

The vulnerability that the study uncovered speaks more to the vendors than the election officials, he said, because security should be part of the design and implementation of the system.

One of the members of the UC-Davis team was my friend Dan Wallach, with whom I've discussed electronic voting machine security before. The full set of reports is here. I'm going to try to make my way through the eSlate reports this weekend to see what I can learn. Read 'em for yourself as well if you're interested.

Maybe not so Comcastic for some

The switch is on, but not all newly Comcasted users are happy about the experience.

Tony Speller, Comcast senior vice president, said less than 1 percent of the 750,000 Comcast customers in the Houston area have experienced problems during the technical switchover to Comcast's network in recent weeks. As of Thursday morning, all Internet and digital phone customers had been switched to the Comcast network, Speller said.

"What has happened to date has exceeded our expectations in terms of our success rate of over 99 percent of our customers' devices have come over with no challenges at all," he said. "When you do a transition of this magnitude, obviously you're going to have some fallout. We don't want to see any fallout, but for those customers who have, we've definitely been very active to get someone out there as quickly as we possibly can to get those resolved."

Dozens of customers have told the Houston Chronicle about problems with Comcast in past weeks. These have included failing Internet or phone service, hourslong waits for technicians who never showed up, holding more than 30 minutes for a customer service representative, a modem that would not work with Comcast's network, or being unable to send or receive e-mail since being switched to Comcast.

Hard to say how good or bad this is. Time-Warner had a lot of customers, and some of them are going to have a bumpy ride no matter how competent Comcast is. And obviously, the folks calling in to complain are a self-selected lot. You can't judge from that. The only way to know what the overall experience has been is to do a customer-satisfaction survey. Which I'm sure Comcast will do, though they may or may not make it public.

As I said in the previous entry, the switch seemed pretty smooth for us, and as far as I can tell the Internet service is about what it was before. For what it's worth.

Have you been Comcasted yet?

The switch is going on, and they say it's going smoothly. Which I suppose they would, but that doesn't mean they're wrong.

About 75 percent of Comcast's Internet and e-mail customers in the Houston area have been switched from the Time Warner Road Runner system to Comcast, and remaining customers will be there by Friday, the cable company said Monday.

[...]

Some customers may have noticed temporary outages during the transition in recent weeks, but spokesman Ray Purser said the problems have been minimal.

"It's all gone very smoothly," Purser said. "I think it's been a lot easier than people thought it was going to be."

I think we got switched last night. I know I had to reboot our cable modem this morning, and I did get a call from Comcast yesterday saying we were about to be switched. That call also told me to look for an email with more information, which I have not gotten, so I'm just guessing. I also got a second call from Comcast yesterday, but my cellphone battery died right after I picked it up, so who knows what that was about.

Customers get the faster Web-surfing speeds without having to do anything, but those who used Road Runner e-mail -- houston.rr.com -- need to register comcast.net addresses.

Comcast is sending e-mail users a message telling them they will need to change their addresses and providing a link to do so.

[...]

Comcast has been sending customers an e-mail giving them 60 days to pick a new e-mail address.

That email I haven't gotten, though perhaps I'm assuming incorrectly that it will go to the email address associated with my billing account, and not to the actual houston.rr.com address we have; that address belongs to Tiffany, so maybe it's been sent and I just don't know it. She hated the rr.com webmail interface, and switched to gmail pretty quickly, so there won't be too much hassle with that. We do have an old rr.com web page, though. I've downloaded everything from it, and may or may not resurrect it as a Comcast page. I may host it on this site instead, we'll have to see.

How has your Comcast switch experience gone?

Don't wear your iPod in a thunderstorm

I suppose this makes sense, even if it is something I'd rather have remained ignorant about.

Listen to an iPod during a storm and you may get more than electrifying tunes.

A Canadian jogger suffered wishbone-shaped chest and neck burns, ruptured eardrums and a broken jaw when lightning traveled through his music player's wires.

Last summer, a Colorado teen ended up with similar injuries when lightning struck nearby as he was listening to his iPod while mowing the lawn.

Emergency physicians report treating other patients with burns from freak accidents while using personal electronic devices such as beepers, Walkman players and laptop computers outdoors during storms.

Michael Utley, a former stockbroker from West Yarmouth, Mass., who survived being struck by lightning while golfing, has tracked 13 cases since 2004 of people hit while talking on cell phones. They are described on his Web site, www.struckbylightning.org.

Contrary to some urban legends and media reports, electronic devices don't attract lightning the way a tall tree or a lightning rod does.

"It's going to hit where it's going to hit, but once it contacts metal, the metal conducts the electricity," said Dr. Mary Ann Cooper of the American College of Emergency Physicians and an ER doctor at University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago.

When lightning jumps from a nearby object to a person, it often flashes over the skin. But metal in electronic devices -- or metal jewelry or coins in a pocket -- can cause contact burns and exacerbate the damage.

Yet another means by which modern technology will kill us all. Ah, well, it still beats listening to the radio.

One curious thing: in the comments to the story (yeah, I know, it would be more a productive use of my time to stick forks in my eyes), someone complained that the headline "Experts warn against wearing iPods during electrical storms" is "trashy" and "sensationalistic". Headlines of the "Experts warn about some particular behavior" variety seem pretty mundane to me. I admit, the stories themselves are often excessively lurid, but I don't see how that's the case here. Maybe I'm just inured to it by now, I don't know. But I'm not seeing any foul here.

I do not have an iPhone

Nor will I be getting one any time soon. I like whizzy gadgets as much as the next guy, but at some point, one must say "Get a life!"

AT&T's Dan Feldstein says 80 percent of the store managers in the Houston area say they've got folks waiting in line for the iPhone.

[...]

At the Galleria, another three dozen were in line around 10 a.m., the queue wrapped around the clear plexiglass balustrade across from the Apple Store on the mall's second level. The first to arrive, 24-year-old D.J. Lewis, told Kevin Moran he'd gotten there about 4:30 a.m., and had to wait until 8 a.m. to get into the mall.

Lewis told Moran that, when it comes to gadgetry, he's gotta have it all on Day One.

"Every electronic gadget, I have tried to get it the first day it comes out," Lewis said. "I normally get a new phone about every six months."

The iPhone, he said, "will complete my collection."

Until the next gotta-have-it gizmo comes along. I'll wait, thanks.

Philly's WiFi experience so far

There's good news and not-so-good news in this story on Philadelphia's experience with municipal WiFi as provided by EarthLink.

Testing by the Houston Chronicle and a private consulting company show that the first phase of Philadelphia's project works -- most of the time. But while the technology only needs tweaking, the company likely has a bigger obstacle to overcome: residents' skepticism.

Some residents say they won't subscribe because they found the service to be unreliable months ago, when EarthLink was still making significant adjustments. Both EarthLink and a private consulting company say the service has since improved, but those potential customers say they don't plan to give it another shot.

"It's pretty useless," said Joanna Bacelli, a 21-year-old Temple University student who lives off campus and tried unsuccessfully to get an EarthLink signal in the past. She doubts the service is any better now.

But in much of the area where the network is up and running, it does work, at least for outdoor users.

Signal strength varies significantly depending on the user's proximity to an access node, but online speed tests show the connection speed averages about 1 Mbps, sometimes a bit slower. That's fast enough for the average user to surf the Internet, check e-mail and watch videos on YouTube.

In some areas, however, the signal is weak, particularly when an access node isn't within sight. At several locations, including two free hotspots, this reporter's computer couldn't connect to the network even though the signal appeared to be strong and an access node was clearly visible.

[...]

A review of the EarthLink network by a consulting group called Novarum Inc. showed the service has improved in the last six months and now ranks as "one of the better performing metro WiFi networks deployed so far."

Using a laptop equipped with a standard WiFi card, the same equipment available to most residential customers, Novarum found the service in early June to be reliable at 74 percent of the outdoor locations tested. Back in December, just before EarthLink began its monthlong trial phase when it offered free service, the group found the network's first 6-square-mile coverage area reliable at only half the locations tested. Cell phone networks, by comparison, are usually reliable in about 85 percent of the coverage area, the group reported.

"Our experience the second time through was that it was much better," said Phil Belanger, Novarum's managing director. "So we think they're making the appropriate investment to improve the network."

Basically, it sounds like the technology has lagged the marketing a bit. There's nothing terribly unusual about that - there's a reason the word "vaporware" exists - but it is potentially worrisome for EarthLink's business plan. As with the technology itself, I hope they use this experience to figure out how to do it better here in Houston. We shouldn't suffer the same early-adopter problems as Philly (thanks for beta testing for us, by the way).

Dwight has more. I too will be interested to see how EarthLink rolls it out here in Houston, both in terms of what their progression will be and how they structure the promotional phase. We ought to know pretty quickly how well they've learned the lessons Philadelphia has given them.

Mammoth extinction: Not our fault

Well, I don't know about you, but I'm relieved to hear this.

Paleontologists long have assumed that massive hunting by humans led to the extinction of the woolly mammoths about 12,000 years ago. New genetic analysis indicates, however, that inbreeding and loss of genetic variability was the cause.

Paleontologists Ian Barnes of the University of London, Adrian Lister of University College London and their colleagues studied mitochondrial DNA samples from 96 bone, tooth and ivory specimens collected primarily in Alaska and Siberia. Their findings, published in the journal Current Biology, chart the animals' evolutionary history.

The animals apparently originated in Asia about 150,000 years ago, migrating over the land bridge connecting Siberia to Alaska in what now is the Bering Strait to form populations on two continents.

A gradual warming of the Earth caused sea levels to rise, inundating the bridge and isolating the two groups, which became genetically distinct.

About 100,000 years ago, the land bridge opened again, allowing the two groups to intermingle. By about 43,000 years ago, the Siberian lineage had died out, leaving only the Alaskan contingent.

The ice age 20,000 years ago then stressed the population further, the researchers said, reducing their viability.

"A picture is emerging of extinction not as a sudden event at the end of the last ice age, but as a piecemeal process over tens of thousands of years involving progressive loss of genetic diversity," Barnes said.

"For the mammoth, this seems much more likely to have been driven by environmental rather than human causes."

One less thing to feel guilty about. Thanks, guys!

Offshore wind farms are a no go

That's too bad.

Plans to build what would have been the nation's largest offshore wind farm in South Texas have been called off because the multibillion-dollar project didn't make economic sense, the developer said Monday.

John Calaway, chief development officer for Babcock & Brown Ltd., the Australian investment bank, said the company notified the state a month ago that it was giving up its 30-year lease on nearly 40,000 acres in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Padre Island.

Calaway was chief executive of Houston-based Superior Renewable Energy when the agreement was announced 14 months ago. Superior was acquired by Babcock & Brown last summer.

"We just don't see the economics working offshore in Texas," Calaway said, noting the project cost would have been "in the billions."

Alas. Perhaps in the near future this will make more sense to another developer.

Babcock is moving on with an onshore wind farm in South Texas' Kenedy County, a $700 million-plus venture that calls for 157 turbines on thousands of acres, Calaway said. He noted the expense of building an offshore farm can be more than double the cost of one on land.

Like the nixed offshore project, Babcock's Kenedy County wind farm, slated to begin spinning late next year, has been criticized by some conservationists because of its potential to kill migrating birds.

Actually, the project has been under fire from the King Ranch, not so much conservationists. It's a fairly nasty battle, one in which my sympathies have so far gone to the Kenedy Ranch. And as we already know, claims about dangers to migratory birds are at least somewhat oversold.

Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson said he was disappointed to see Babcock drop the project, but he was confident another developer would be found because of the ideal location and the ease of doing business with only one landowner -- the state of Texas.

In fact, Patterson said he spoke to a few potential suitors at a wind conference last week in Los Angeles. He said those entities were good prospects because they've built offshore wind projects overseas.

Patterson has been a big booster of wind energy (and geothermal, too), for which I applaud him. I'm quite certain he will continue to pursue this.

Wi-tricity?

Wireless phones. Wireless networking. Wireless electricity. Had to happen sooner or later, right?

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers announced last week they had made a 60-watt light bulb glow by sending it energy wirelessly, potentially previewing a future in which cell phones and other gadgets get juice without having to be plugged in.

The breakthrough, disclosed in Science Express, an online publication of the journal Science, is being called "WiTricity" by the scientists.

The concept of sending power wirelessly isn't new, but its wide-scale use has been dismissed as inefficient because electromagnetic energy generated by the charging device would radiate in all directions.

Last fall, though, MIT physics professor Marin Soljacic explained how to transfer the power with specially tuned waves. The key is to get the charging device and a gadget to resonate at the same frequency -- allowing them to efficiently exchange energy.

It's similar to how an opera star can break a wine glass that happens to resonate at the same frequency as her voice. In fact, the concept is so basic in physics that inventor Nikola Tesla sought a century ago to build a huge tower on Long Island that would wirelessly beam power along with communications.

The new step described in Science was that the MIT team put the concept into action. The scientists lit a 60-watt bulb that was 7 feet away from the power-generating appliance.

The development raises the prospect that we might eliminate some of the clutter of cables in our evermore electronic world.

That sound you hear is Tiffany, who hates hates hates the clutter of cables in our house, doing the Happy Dance. If there's a beta program for this, I suspect she'll want in on it.

Comcast: We hope we don't suck

I've been dealing with a dead high-speed Net connection all day today, so this strikes a chord with me.

Comcast Corp. is taking steps to improve customer service -- long a point of criticism for the cable industry -- as it prepares to put its name on the local operation.

A review of complaints to the Better Business Bureau since Comcast took control of Time Warner Cable in Houston and surrounding areas on Jan. 1 shows little change in the level of complaints. It does show customers fed up with waiting all day for technicians who never showed up, sales staff who didn't apply credits correctly and customer service representatives who promised one thing and did another.

Comcast, which is rebranding the service under its own name on June 19, is vowing to do better by making service calls more convenient for customers, monitoring its network to spot problems before customers do and providing new channels customers have requested.

"We are investing more than $200 million this year in the Houston market to upgrade our network, enhance our customer service and launch our products and services," said Tony Speller, Comcast's senior vice president for the Houston region, which includes 750,000 customers in Houston and more than 60 surrounding communities.

[...]

In an effort to limit the number of customers who say goodbye to Comcast, the company is trying to eliminate the friction points, Speller said.
A common complaint in the BBB records was customers' having to wait around an entire day for an installer to show up. Under Time Warner -- and currently under Comcast -- service windows have run from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

Speller said Comcast will narrow service windows to no more than four hours, and customers will be able to ask for two- or three-hour windows. Comcast technicians will make service calls seven days a week. There is no timetable to implement the changes, Comcast spokesman Ray Purser said.

Sometimes, according to the BBB records, a salesperson on the phone promised the customer would get a call when the technician was 30 minutes from the home. When no call came, the customer missed the technician and had to reschedule, sometimes days later.

Under the company's new courtesy-call policy, if a customer asks for it, a company representative will phone 30 minutes before a technician arrives.

Comcast also said it will hire more call center employees and increase pay for new workers. It declined to reveal specific wages, citing competitive concerns.

You know what would make me happy today? Have enough roving technicians so that when your home Internet service craps out, you don't have to wait two full days for a repair person to make a visit. I was going to be doing some work at home this week and next so Tiffany can take care of some stuff at her office, and let me tell you, this was beyond inconvenient. The good news is that it belatedly appears the problem was a system outage, and not merely my connection - I'm waiting on confirmation of that. All I know is that if I'd been running a business from home and had this happen, and then been told I had to lose two whole days waiting for a technician to fix it, I'd be really pissed.

(If we had citywide WiFi in place today, I'd at least have a backup option for when this sort of thing happen. Someday, someday...)

How to speak to global warming skeptics

I'd recommend that you read Grist's How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic page, but be warned that the weight of evidence they bring is depressing. File it away for future reference in any event, as you'll be sure to need it some day. And while you're at it, bookmark the Talk.Origins FAQ as well, since I daresay there's a lot of overlap between the two groups of disbelievers. Thanks to Ezra for the link.

Another Corpus Christi WiFi update

Dwight pays another visit to Corpus Christi, and says their WiFi installation is much better than it was the last time he was there. Yes, EarthLink is their provider, so that's very good to hear. Check it out.

Earthlink passes test in Philadelphia

Good news for EarthLink, our city WiFi provider.

EarthLink, the Internet Service Provider that has contracted to build a wireless network in Houston, today cleared a major hurdle in Philadelphia, where it has begun building another of the nation's largest networks.

The first phase of the Philadelphia project, a 15-square mile network that blankets downtown, works well and has gained approval from the nonprofit group hired by the city to oversee the project, Mayor John Street announced.

That means EarthLink can continue to build in Philadelphia, which expects to have a wireless connection by the end of the year that covers nearly all of the city's 135-square miles.

Houston's project is planned for nearly five times that size, 640-square miles, the biggest in the country.

Nice to see progress. Hopefully they'll see equivalent process in their business model review as well.

WiFi woes?

Dwight notes that EarthLink is rethinking its municipal WiFi commitment.

Following a quarter in which it posted a loss of $29.96 million broadband provider EarthLink said it is reviewing four of its Wi-Fi deployments in Philadelphia, Anaheim, Milpitas and New Orleans before deciding if it wants to take on any new projects.

The pause for EarthLink could just be momentary. Or it could signal that the push for municipal Wi-Fi deployments could be losing steam if one of it's biggest proponents starts to rethink the whole venture.

EarthLink is "not yet able to establish that comfort level" that the investments are really profitable, Kevin Dotts, EarthLink's chief financial officer told the AP.

Dotts said they will be looking at factors like topography; concentration of households; and alternative revenue opportunities to determine where they might want to continue building. It's likely he said that the company will only pursue large projects in the future such as Chicago.

I'm sure Houston counts as a "large project", for which they're already committed. We'll see how (or if) their review affects what they do here.

Ten years of camera phones

I have four things to say about this story about the ten-year anniversary of the invention of the camera phone:

"It's had a massive impact because it's just so convenient," said Philippe Kahn, a tech industry maverick whose other pioneering efforts include the founding of software maker Borland, an early Microsoft Corp. antagonist.

"There's always a way to capture memories and share it," he said. "You go to a restaurant, and there's a birthday and suddenly everyone is getting their camera phones out. It's amazing."

If Kahn feels a bit like a proud father when he sees people holding up their cell phones to snap pictures, there's good reason: He jury-rigged the first camera phone while his wife was in labor with their daughter.

"We were going to have a baby and I wanted to share the pictures with family and friends," Kahn said, "and there was no easy way to do it."

So as he sat in a maternity ward, he wrote a crude program on his laptop and sent an assistant to a RadioShack store to get a soldering iron, capacitors and other supplies to wire his digital camera to his cell phone. When Sophie was born, he sent her photo over a cellular connection to acquaintances around the globe.

A decade later, 41 percent of American households own a camera phone "and you can hardly find a phone without a camera anymore," said Michael Cai, an industry analyst at Parks Associates.

1. Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, I worked for a company whose product worked with both Borland and Microsoft C (this was even before C++ was widely available for PCs). My first real exposure to computing religious wars was Borland versus Microsoft. And even back then, most people took the anti-Microsoft position. Not that it would help the value of your Borland stock today, of course.

2. I am in awe of someone who could jerryrig such a thing while in the maternity ward. I can only imagine what his wife thought of it.

3. I think I bought one of the last non-camera phones ever made.

Market researcher Gartner Inc. predicts that about 589 million cell phones will be sold with cameras in 2007, increasing to more than 1 billion worldwide by 2010.

Mix in the Internet's vast reach and the growth of the YouTube generation, and the ubiquitous gadget's influence only deepens and gets more complicated. So much so that the watchful eyes on all of us may no longer just be those of Big Brother.

"For the past decade, we've been under surveillance under these big black and white cameras on buildings and at 7-Eleven stores. But the candid camera is wielded by individuals now," said Fred Turner, an assistant professor of communications at Stanford University who specializes in digital media and culture.

4. When I was a kid, there was an invisible-to-me army of people who knew my parents or grandparents and could recognize my face. Never knowing for sure at any given time that I was not being watched helped keep my behavior more or less in line. As such, I'm as prepared for the world of ubiquitous cell phone cameras as anyone can be.

A pocketful of Kryptonite

Where can I get some?

Kryptonite, which robbed Superman of his powers, is no longer the stuff of comic books and films.

A mineral found by geologists in Serbia shares virtually the same chemical composition as the fictional kryptonite from outer space, used by the superhero's nemesis Lex Luther to weaken him in the film "Superman Returns."

"We will have to be careful with it -- we wouldn't want to deprive Earth of its most famous superhero!," said Dr Chris Stanley, a mineralogist at London's Natural History Museum.

Stanley, who revealed the identity of the mysterious new mineral, discovered the match after searching the Internet for its chemical formula - sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide.

"I was amazed to discover that same scientific name written on a case of rock containing kryptonite stolen by Lex Luther from a museum in the film Superman Returns," he said.

I didn't even realize that kryptonite had a chemical formula. I mean, if it's supposed to be an element, there's not much to it. Be that as it may, it had never occurred to me that someone had defined a formula for it. And now it exists. Don't you just love science?

But instead of the large green crystals in Superman comics, the real thing is a white, powdery substance which contains no fluorine and is non-radioactive.

The mineral, to be named Jadarite, will go on show at the London's Natural History Museum at certain times of the day on Wednesday, April 25, and Sunday, May 13.

Oh. Well, that's a bit of a letdown. What fun is it if it isn't green and glowing? Link via Oliver Willis.

Light pollution

As you know, I grew up in New York City. I experienced a number of culture shocks in coming down to Texas as a college student, but one of the more vivid ones was during my sophomore year, when I was keeping score for the baseball team. We'd all travelled to Kerrville, about sixty miles west of San Antonio, for an afternoon doubleheader against Schreiner College (now Schreiner University), and by the time it was all over it was nighttime. I remember being amazed at how utterly, completely dark it was in that little Hill Country town once the sun went down - it seemed like I could reach out and touch the darkness, it was so enveloping - and consequently how jam-packed with stars the sky was. For someone used to urban night skies, it was quite the revelation. I know that couldn't have been the first time I'd seen such a thing, but for whatever the reason it felt like the first time, and some 20 years later I can still recall it clearly.

I tell you that as an intro to this article, which as you can tell has struck a chord in me:

As the show begins, visitors to the Morehead Planetarium see a night sky free of polluting light. Projected onto the dome is a truly dark sky pricked by countless sparkling points. A narrow smudge -- our galaxy, the Milky Way -- is as clear as day.

Then the light grows to a brightness familiar outside the building. The number of stars visible in the virtual sky drops dramatically, to just a handful of tiny bright spots.

"I know, it's terrible," Morehead educator Amy Sayles says sympathetically to a multigenerational crowd of dozens who gathered at the planetarium for Our Vanishing Night, a program that led up to the Earth Day celebrations.

This year, a growing coalition urged the rest of us to turn down the lights. A group of amateur and professional astronomers has made this plea for decades. Now the astronomers are joined by a new ally -- environmentalists. They think cutting light pollution will cut wasted energy and greenhouse gases from power plants.

It's a match made for the heavens, which are fading to human eyes all over the world.

The International Dark Sky Association estimates that 99 percent of the people in the U.S. and Europe live in light-polluted areas, unable to see traces of the Milky Way or many stars when they walk out of their homes and gaze skyward.

[...]

In 2001, Raleigh, N.C., passed a lighting ordinance that limits illumination spillovers across property lines and requires shielding parking lot fixtures so their light travels only down. In May, all residential fixtures are expected to comply, even those installed before the rules passed.

Orange County has an ordinance too, passed in 2003. Government leaders and planners there are considering requiring fixtures installed before then to lose their exemptions -- over time. The aim is not only to limit the growth of light pollution, but also to reduce it, said Craig Benedict, planning and inspections director.

Although Benedict doesn't expect unanimous support in his growing county, he sees more interest, particularly among environmentalists.

"Energy issues are really bringing this to a head," he said. "The need for more electricity creates the need for more energy production and that means more nuclear plants or coal plants. That's the linchpin that pulls groups together."

I'm not always the best at remembering to turn out lights when I leave a room, so I'm going to try to take this as an inspiration to do better. I figure it's the least I can do to help.

The day without BlackBerry

Thankfully, yesterday's unpleasantness turned out to be not so bad. One of our servers hadn't reconnected after RIM's switchover at their network operations center, so we had to reboot it. As noted in my comment at Dwight's place, we had to help some people reregister with their wireless networks - I had to do that for my own device as well. Oddly, somewhere along the line it lost its ability to sync deleted emails with Outlook. I fixed that today (for the techies w