Regarding Wall Street:

1. Why is there no provision for restitution of the obscene salaries taken by officers of the failed banks and brokerage firms?

2. These securities, CDOs, etc. were deemed “risky”. Why is that now that they have failed, the consequences of the risk does not fall on those who engineered these bogus instruments…instead it is falling on the taxpayers? The firms should pay…the officers should pay, the traders should pay, and the bankers should pay before the government (taxpayer) should pay. And why hasn’t a single bank or brokerage firm offered its own assets, the limos, the executive dining rooms, the corporate jets, the office tower and other real-estate, as a partial miniscule down payment in mitigating this disaster?

3. Why, in the plans outlined today (Tues 9/23) there appears to be no provision for the taxpayers who are assuming these worthless securities, to participate in the REWARD that will presumably (well, maybe) accrue when the stock market goes back up? Again why is the RISK socialized while the reward has heretofore been privatized?

4. Why, throughout the discussion of the past couple of days, has there been no provision for those who were stupid or gullible enough to apply for and receive things like ‘no documentation mortgages”. Shouldn’t these people who were ruthlessly exploited by the banks get bailed out *before* the predatory lenders?

Just asking …

We recently had a rejection for a federal grant application. This was the first time we had applied to this agency. We received five reviews from the peer reviewers, and there were some definite commonalities among the five reviewers. Naturally, we’d like to resubmit our application. Here are some of the objections to the first application, and some possible remedies.

1. Problem: There was some definite jargon that we didn’t properly address. One word was transformation. How were we going to transform the field? Our plan lacks detail which supports the feasibility of our ability to transform when implemented. Remedy: Be more explicit about what the transformation is, and how we believe can effect that transformation.

2. Problem: Little description on how our target population (in our case students) would be recruited, targeted, and kept engaged in the project. Remedy: Actually, we thought we had addressed this somewhat, but clearly not to the extent that the reviewers expected. They also requested how we would target minority and disadvantaged students.

3. Problem: Target population not involved in the development of intervention. Remedy: Reconfigure project to include opportunities for students and teachers to have input on how the project progresses. Have one or more serve on the advisory board or implementation team?

4. Problem: Applicant doesn’t reply evidence that the program is either project or inquiry-based. Remedy: Need to include this discussion

5. Problem: Applicant doesn’t provide a clear list of project goals and objectives

6. Inconsistencies found between the budget and the narrative. For example there are different numbers of personnel on the spreadsheet budget, with different titles, than are described in the narrative. Remedy: After the committee works on all the bits and pieces of the application, a single person needs to pull everything together and reconcile all the pieces. Then, send it back out to readers before submitting.

7. Problem: No clear evaluation plan. Remedy: This was indeed what I considered to be the weakest part of our application, and I assumed it would have to be fixed even if our application was accepted as it just wasn’t strong enough. For example we didn’t have:

• Pre and Post test objectives
• A qualified third-party evaluator
• Samples of test instruments which illustrate how we would conduct the evaluation.

http://embed.break.com/NTQyNjQ5
http://view.break.com/542649 – Watch more free videos

I never look at Fortune Magazine….but then, I did over lunch, and it looks as if I’ve been missing Stanley Bing. And he is very funny.

Look. Throughout the course of human history, life on earth has been a struggle, a disappointment to most, a tragedy to some, a triumph to a few. But for most of us, the small things in life make it worthwhile, not the megatrends that make us nuts and take place around us. People managed to live through the plague years in Europe 500 years ago. Aren’t things better than that now? We have IPods.

It sounds like a country music song title. After reading maybe the fourth post somewhere about somebody’s MacBook hard drive had crashed, I thought I really really truly this time must take another look at the native backup program that comes with the Macbook called Time Machine. Previous efforts to coax TM to back up to a network drive hadn’t worked. This time I went to Staples and bought a Maxtor One-Touch4 Mini drive of 250 gigabytes in size for all of $149.00. This is a USB drive, powered from the computer’s USB ports. I say “ports”, because the cable includes two plugs for connecting to the computer and both of them must be plugged in to power the drive. So, this wouldn’t be the ideal solution, unless you have a USB hub or docking station.

Once plugged in, the Time Machine program came right up without me even starting it, with a dialog box asking “Do you want to use the OneTouch 4Mini as a back-up drive for Time Machine?” I said yes, of course, and then it told me that it needed to reformat the drive as a Macintosh Drive. Off it went and then the program automatically proceeded to perform a full hard drive backup. With the first backup complete, Time Machine will continue to back up changes every 15 minutes.

I expect to leave the hard drive permanently attached to the docking station, as it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have the backup media with the computer when I’m traveling. Still, if I wanted to, the drive is small and lightweight enough to easily fit into my briefcase along with all the other computer paraphernalia.

Even when I was reading his magazines back in the ’70’s I figured that Wayne Green was a little bit, well, odd. I may have forgotten exactly how odd, but this interview in Computerworld is great reminder. The link via Jeff Dunteman’s Contrapositive Diary, includes another link to more discussion.

Green was present at the creation of the “personal computer industry”. It is hard to imagine these days that thirty-five years ago, a bunch of hobbyist tinkerers came up with some of the more profound ideas that would evolve into the technical infrastructure that we take for granted. Things like cell phones (an outgrowth of ham radio repeaters), email (an outgrowth of ham radio teletype experiments), satellite communication, and, of course the downsizing of computers to create the first desktop and laptops.

That’s why I still occasionally enjoy checking in with people who wrote for the early computer magazines, such as those started by Mr. Green. Jerry Pournelle, Don Lancaster, and Jeff Duntemann are still going strong and they’ve got decades of archived material online at their respective web sites. Perhaps their best work is behind them, but they all continue to offer a surprisingly unique and consistant perspective on our world.