[eggplant43]

A Parody of Partnership




Thursday, September 19, 2002; Page A26


VLADIMIR PUTIN, the soul-baring friend of President Bush, is offering another demonstration of why the administration's flighty rhetoric about the "transformation" of U.S.-Russian relations has been premature. Mr. Putin's government is doing its best to hamstring Mr. Bush's campaign against Iraq; the Russian ambassador at the United Nations rushed to embrace Saddam Hussein's transparently tactical acceptance of weapons inspectors and declared that no further action by the Security Council was needed. Meanwhile, Mr. Putin himself is peddling a grotesque parody of Mr. Bush's principled stand on both Iraq and Afghanistan: Last week he informed the Security Council, in terms that deliberately echoed Mr. Bush, that the war on terrorism may require a unilateral Russian attack on the small neighboring nation of Georgia, a former republic of the Soviet Union that infuriates Moscow merely by existing as an independent, democratic and pro-Western state. This stunningly brazen attempt to cloak an old-fashioned threat of military aggression in Mr. Bush's new doctrine of preemption has been accompanied by an even more cynical suggestion of quid pro quo: Allow Russia to crush Georgian sovereignty, Mr. Putin hints, and he just might acquiesce in the enforcement of the U.N.-ordered disarmament of Iraq. Bush administration officials are saying they won't play Mr. Putin's game; the White House needs to make that point unambiguously this week to Mr. Putin's visiting defense and foreign ministers.

The nominal basis for Mr. Putin's threat to Georgia, a country the size of South Carolina with a mostly Christian population of 5 million, is that it is tolerating the presence of Muslim rebel fighters from the neighboring Russian province of Chechnya. Mr. Putin insists that these are terrorists, indistinguishable from al Qaeda, and that Georgia is allowing them to operate training camps and pass freely across the border. In fact the insurgents are almost all ethnic Chechens fighting for self-rule who take refuge during summer in the Pankisi Gorge, a wild, 11-mile-long strip that has long been lawless. The Bush administration contends that some al Qaeda operatives may be present in the Pankisi, but evidence is scant. In any case, the Georgian government clearly has no interest in backing al Qaeda terrorists, or even the Chechens; it has readily accepted an ongoing U.S. training program for its army, and it recently dispatched 1,000 troops to clear out the Pankisi. President Eduard Shevardnadze has asked to meet with Mr. Putin and invited international monitoring of the border area; this week his administration agreed to extradite 13 suspects Russia says are Chechen guerrillas.

These initiatives are not enough for Mr. Putin: His generals say they are readying a cross-border invasion, following up on airstrikes carried out last month. It's not likely that Russian forces, which have failed to control Chechen movements across their own border, could eliminate or even locate any militants in the Pankisi. But that's not Mr. Putin's real aim. His goals are to distract attention from a recent series of military disasters in Chechnya -- incidents that have revived discussion in Russia about the futility of Mr. Putin's campaign to suppress the rebellion by force -- and to use the leverage of Russia's U.N. Security Council vote on Iraq to achieve suzerainty over Georgia, which Moscow has been seeking since long before the war on terrorism. This is not the behavior of a soul mate, or even a "strategic partner"; and a U.S.-Russian relationship afflicted by such tactics has not been transformed.

[rhettman5]

Online 'Smiley Face' :-) Turns 20

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It was 20 years ago today that Scott Fahlman
taught the 'Net how to smile.

The IBM researcher has devoted his professional life to artificial
intelligence, the practice of teaching computers how to think like
humans.

Fahlman is known for his work with neural networks -- a computer
technique designed to mimic the human brain -- and helping develop
Common Lisp, a computer language that uses symbols instead of
numbers, but the bearded scientist is perhaps best known for a flash
of inspiration that helped to define Internet culture, in all of its
ungrammatical glory.

On Sept. 19, 1982, Fahlman typed :-) in an online message.

The "smiley face" has since become a staple of online communication,
allowing 12-year-old girls and corporate lawyers alike to punctuate
their messages with a quick symbol that says, "Hey, I'm only joking."

Fahlman's innovation has since inspired countless other "emoticons"
like ;-) to signify a wink or :-0 to show surprise.

"I've certainly spent 10 times as much time talking with people about
it as I did coming up with it in the first place," Fahlman said from
his Pittsburgh home. "Hopefully my actual research career will add up
to more in the long run."

In the early 1980s, computer networks were rarely found outside
university science departments and secretive government facilities.

But even then, discussions on primitive online "bulletin boards"
could quickly turn nasty when touchy users misinterpreted remarks
meant to be taken lightly.

After a particularly tangled joke about mercury contamination in an
elevator, users of a Carnegie Mellon University bulletin board
proposed a variety of markers for humorous comments, including *, %,
&, (#) and \__/.

Fahlman suggested :-), along with the admonition to "read it
sideways." Before long, other bulletin board users were placing the
smiley face in their messages. The practice spread as Internet users
found the symbol useful as a rough approximation of a twinkle in the
eye.

A FEW FROWNS

Predictably, the smiley face encountered a few frowns as the online
population exploded.

"Humans have managed to communicate with the written word for
thousands of years without strewing crudely fashioned ideograms
across their parchments. It is as if the written word were a cutting-
edge technology without useful precedents," groused Neal Stephenson
in the New Republic in 1993.

Fahlman stands by his creation. "If Shakespeare were tossing off a
quick note complaining about the lack of employee parking spaces near
the Globe Theater, he might have produced the same kind of sloppy
prose that the rest of us do," Fahlman writes on his Web site.

Yahoo!, Microsoft and America Online all incorporate emoticons into
their instant-messaging systems, while telecom firms, jewelry makers
and online retailers have filed trademark applications for products
and slogans that incorporate Fahlman's smiley face.

But Fahlman has never seen a dime from his creation.

"If it cost people a nickel to use it, nobody would have used it.
This is my little gift to the world, for better or worse," he said.

[eggplant43]

Quite a gift. I didn't know this story, so I'm glad you posted it.

[eggplant43]

Google to Launch News Search Site
Mon Sep 23, 7:23 AM ET

PALO ALTO, Calif. (Reuters) - Google ( news - external web site), the popular Internet search engine, on Monday launches a new site for searching news from 4,000 English-language sources, from The New York Times to small-town newspapers.



The new service, called Google News, will be accessible through a tab on the Google start page ( http://www.google.com/)and will pull real-time news from different Web sites around the world. News will be arranged under categories such as world, business, entertainment, technology and sports.

Beginning on Monday, search results from the news site will also be offered at the top of Google's general search page so that users who enter search terms on the main site will also see when that term is mentioned in the news.

Google is not employing any editors to work on the service but will arrange the abundance of news it gathers with the same basic technology it currently uses to rank search results in order of relevance.

The company said its technology will rank news based on how recently it has been published, the number of articles devoted to a given topic and the popularity of the particular news source.

"News is a natural extension of our mission," said Marissa Mayer, product manager at Google.com. She said the company began working on the Google News service in January.

While several Internet content sites offer links to top news sites, the Google service will be more comprehensive than most, if not all of them.

Google is initially offering the news service for free, without any advertising support. It said it plans to see what kind of demand the site generates before it considers possible ways to make money from it.



If you're a newshound like I am, you may appreciate this new service, I tried it early this AM, and liked it. I've been with google since they were in beta, and they've never let me down.

[rhettman5]

I also have the Google tool-bar installed, an excellent addition to your browser, and used daily to get quick answers...or maybe a photo or two.. ..Rhett

[eggplant43]

Have you found that one of Mulder taking the 'perp walk' yet?

[Rep]

rhett,

I also have the Google tool-bar installed,

OK rhett, would you please help me out here? Are you saying I can install the Google search thingy right into my browser window thingy, and never have to go to my bookmark favorites to perform a Google search again? How so?, if I have this right, that is.

[rhettman5]

Go to Google's home page, click services and tools, then scroll down to Google toolbar under tools, it will incorperate the Google search into I/E...handy...you may want to toggle the advanced features off after you install it as this feature reports your surfing habits back to google, but this is well explained...worth the trouble...Rhett Ps here is a screenshot...

[eggplant43]

I used the Google Toolbar until I found Nutshell which I like even better. It incorporates google, Amazon, dictionary.com, IMDB, and daypop (which is out of service right now). It's unobtrusive, no spyware, banner ads etc, and works effortlessly:


http://www.torrez.org/projects/nutshell/


BTW - There is a thread in browsers about nutshell that I started, if you want to look it up.

[Rep]

Why TY rhett. I just installed it. Looks good. And eggplant, I also noted your suggestion as well. Does this mean there are more sites on the world wide web besides TSG?

One lost Rep coming up. hehe

[eggplant43]

Census: U.S. Poverty Up, Income Down


By Steven Pearlstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 24, 2002; 12:47 PM


Reversing some of the social gains of the late 1990s, poverty rates and income inequality both rose last year while the typical household's income went down, the government reported today, largely reflecting the effects of the economic recession.

In its annual report on income and poverty, the Census Bureau said that 1.3 million Americans slipped below the government's official poverty line last year, the first increase since 1993. As a result, 11.7 percent of the population is in poverty, up from 11.3 percent in 2000.

But unlike previous recessions, most of the increase in poverty was experienced by white households. The rate actually fell for Hispanics and increased only marginally in black households. Still, the poverty rate among blacks (22.7 percent) and Hispanics (21.4 percent), was roughly double that of the population at large.

Adjusted for inflation, the Census Bureau reported that the median household income fell 2.2 percent last year to $42,228. It was the first decline since 1991.

The decline in income was broad if not particularly steep, affecting all but the top 5 to 10 percent of households as ranked by income.

"This report signals a significant reversal of what had been a very positive trend in terms of income and poverty," said Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the union-backed Economic Policy Institute in Washington. "It also underscores the point that the recession was deeper than many had thought."

Other data indicates that the decline in household income came largely as a result of falling employment and loss of overtime hours, offsetting continued gains in hourly wages.

In terms of class breakdown, only households with incomes above $150,000 were able to post gains, with the greatest losses in percentage terms occurring at the bottom of the income ladder, the report showed.

Income in black households fell 3.4 percent, more than double the rate of decline in white households (1.4 percent) and Hispanic (1.6 percent).

Also hardest hit were households headed by females, both those with children and no husband present (down 3.1 percent) and those where females were living alone (down 3.7 percent). At the same time, the wage gap between men and women continued to shrink, with women last year earning 76 cents for every dollar earned by men, up from 74 cents in 2000.

Geographically, incomes also fell the most in the Midwest (3.7 percent) and the West (2.3 percent), reflecting the recession's heavy impact on manufacturing in the high tech sectors. Household incomes actually increased 1.7 percent in the Northeast.

All measures of income inequality rose last year after falling in the latter half of the 1990s.

The highest earning 20 percent of households last year earned half of the country's money income, without calculating for the equalizing effect of taxes or non-cash benefits like food stamps and housing subsidies. The top 5 percent – those with incomes above $150,000 – earned 22.4 percent of the national income, up from 22.1 percent in 2000.

[mole]

Ground Zero is not a battlefield
By George F. Will

Published 2:15 a.m. PDT Sunday, September 22, 2002

"Why did we run? Well, those who didn't run are there yet."
-- an Ohio soldier

CHANCELLORSVILLE, Va. -- The 12-mile march on May 2, 1863, took Stonewall Jackson from the clearing in the woods where he conferred for the last time with Robert E. Lee, to a spot from which Jackson and 30,000 troops surveyed the rear of the Union forces. Those forces, commanded by a blowhard, Joe Hooker ("May God have mercy on General Lee, for I shall have none"), were about to experience one of the nastiest shocks of the Civil War.

Two hours before dusk, Federal soldiers were elated when deer, turkeys and rabbits came pelting out of the woods into their lines. It was not dinner but death approaching. By nightfall Federal forces were scattered. When the fighting subsided four days later, Lee was emboldened to try to win the war with an invasion of Pennsylvania. The invasion's high-water mark came at the crossroads town of Gettysburg.

One hundred and thirty-nine years after the battle here, a more protracted struggle is under way. In 1863 the nation's survival was at stake. Today, only the nation's memory is at stake. "Only"? Without memory, the reservoir of reverence, what of the nation survives?



Hence the urgency of the people opposing a proposal to build, on acreage over which the struggle surged, 2,350 houses and 2.4 million square feet of commercial and office space. All this would bring a huge increase in traffic, wider highways and the further submergence of irrecoverable history into a perpetually churned present.

Northern Virginia, beginning about halfway between Richmond and Washington, is a humming marvel of energy and entrepreneurship, an urbanizing swirl of commerce and technology utterly unlike the static rural society favored by Virginia's favorite social philosopher, Jefferson. Chancellorsville is in an east-west rectangle of terrain about 15 miles long and 10 miles wide, now divided by Interstate 95, that saw four great battles -- Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania, the Wilderness -- involving 100,000 killed, wounded or missing.

Where a slavocracy once existed, Northern dynamism prevails. But Northern Virginia has ample acreage for development, without erasing the landscapes where the Army of Northern Virginia spent its valor. As for the Federals' side, it is a scandal that the federal government's cheese-paring parsimony has prevented the purchase of historically significant land -- 20,000 acres, maximum -- at Civil War battlefields from Maryland to Mississippi.

Just $10 million annually for a decade -- a rounding error for many Washington bureaucracies -- would preserve much important battlefield land still outside National Park Service boundaries. The government's neglect can be only partially rectified by the private work of the Civil War Preservation Trust, just three years old. (You can enlist at www.civilwar.org. Also check www.chancellorsville.org.)

CWPT's president James Lighthizer, a temperate, grown-up realist, stresses that CWPT's members are "not whacked-out tree-huggers" who hate development and want to preserve "every piece of ground where Lee's horse pooped." But regarding commemorations, Americans today seem inclined to build where they ought not, and to not build where they should, as at the site of the World Trade Center.

In New York City, many people who are anti-growth commerce-despisers want to exploit Ground Zero for grinding their old ideological axes. They favor making all or most of the 16-acre parcel a cemetery without remains, a place of perpetual mourning -- what Richard Brookhiser disapprovingly calls a "deathopolis" in the midst of urban striving.

But most who died at Ground Zero were going about their private pursuits of happiness, murdered by people who detest that American striving. The murderers crashed planes into the Twin Towers, Brookhiser says, "in the same spirit in which a brat kicks a beehive. They will be stung, and the bees will repair the hive." Let the site have new towers, teeming with renewed striving.

But a battlefield is different. A battlefield is hallowed ground because those who there gave the last full measure of devotion went there because they were devoted unto death to certain things.

Those who clashed at Chancellorsville did so in a war that arose from a clash of large ideas. Some ideas were noble, some were not. But there is ample and stirring evidence that many of the young men caught in the war's whirlwind could articulate what the fight was about, on both sides. See James M. McPherson's "For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War."

Local government here can stop misplaced development from trampling out the contours of the Confederacy's greatest victory. A Jeffersonian solution.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[eggplant43]

Thanks for posting this important story. I think Gettysburg is hallowed ground, and that these developers are spitting on it.

[eggplant43]

MacArthur Foundation awards 24 fellows $500,000 each
By MAURA KELLY
Associated Press Writer

September 25, 2002, 4:00 AM EDT

CHICAGO -- Brian Tucker helps developing countries make their cities more resistant to earthquakes by analyzing buildings' strength and recommending ways to improve construction.

"We want them aware that these buildings that they're building now are not safe and that they will fall down. We want them to rectify that," said the seismologist and disaster prevention specialist in Palo Alto, Calif.

Now that Tucker, 56, has been named one of 24 winners of this year's $500,000 MacArthur Foundation "genius grants," he said he will be able to expand his work and evaluate the safety and preparedness of 30 of the world's largest earthquake-prone cities.

"Having this level of recognition of our work is just wonderful for us," said Tucker, founder and president of the nonprofit GeoHazards International.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has awarded the no-strings-attached grants to scholars, artists and others since 1981 to free them to pursue their work without having to worry about making a living.

This year's MacArthur fellows were announced Wednesday. Potential MacArthur grant winners are selected by hundreds of anonymous nominators; recipients cannot apply for the awards.

This year's winners include one New Jersey recipient, Bonnie Bassler, 40, an associate professor of molecular biology at Princeton University. Bassler, who specializes in bacterial genetics, is a pioneer in the investigation of chemical signaling mechanisms that bacteria use to communicate with each other.

The bacteria make and then release molecules like hormones. When the number of molecules reaches a certain level, the bacteria detect the molecules _ a phenomenon scientists call "quorum sensing" _ and then all act at once, such as by releasing toxins inside their host.

"They understand when they are at the right number that they will win the war" or achieve other goals by acting together, Bassler said Wednesday. "It makes bacteria act like multicellular organisms."

Now, she said, scientists are trying to develop antibiotics to prevent quorum sensing.

"It was really hard for me to get funding before," because the field is barely 10 years old and had been considered offbeat, Bassler said. She likely will use some of her prize money to fund unconventional future work for which she cannot obtain research grants.

Bassler said she's hardly been able to sleep since the foundation called her a week ago to notify her of the award.

"I thought they wanted me to be on a committee or something," she said. "Then he told me, and I was just flabbergasted."

Lee Ann Newsom, a scientist from University Park, Pa., who studies ancient plant remains to learn about prehistoric societies, said she wants to use the money to improve her lab and work on new projects.

"I've got a million ideas floating around," said the 45-year-old associate professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University.

Another winner: George Lewis, a 50-year-old trombonist and composer who works with improvisational music and is writing a book on the history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.

"Money like this allows you to plan and think, which is something every artist needs time for," said Lewis, professor of music at the University of California at San Diego. "I'm going to try to look for ways in which I can be helpful to the creative, experimental music community."

Daniela Rus, 39, works with robots that change shape to adapt to their environment or task. The associate professor of computer science and cognitive neuroscience at Dartmouth College said she wants to find a worthy project for her money.

The foundation does not require or expect specific projects from its fellows. Nor does it ask them to report on how the money is used.

The youngest winner this year is Sendhil Mullainathan, 29, an economist from Newton, Mass. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Katherine Boo, 37, a staff writer at The Washington Post, is also a recipient.

Liza Lou, 33, an artist from Los Angeles who creates large works using glass beads, said the money will allow her to explore new avenues for her work.

"It doesn't change anything and yet it changes everything for me as an artist," she said. "The ability to completely make the work, unfettered by the normal, everyday things that everyone has to deal with, is an incredible opportunity."

[mole]

Eggplant wrote:

I think Gettysburg is hallowed ground, and that these developers are spitting on it.

Yes, they are. As often is the case they have help from the local politicians, such as county commissioners, executives and the politically appointed planning and zoning commissioners who "reccomend" courses of action frequently heavily influenced by the potential for their own personal gain (as in a sitting commissioner owning a local "quickie-mart" chain or land on which zoning is changed so a food store chain can be enticed to build). These are the people who often get re-elected on name recognition only and are downright dangerous with respect to their view of regional planning and hand-in-glove operations with developers who foster the premise that "towne" house developments are a better American tradition to preserve, especially when spelled with an "e" at the end of everything. They'd rather play political kickball between junk like a regional shopping mall or office space that goes half filled versus a soccer field to babysit the kids of the bedroom communities after school as appropriate for a historic site such as we have with Chancellorsville. Bigger and bigger roads are built at tax payers expense to handle the commuting traffic from these ill-conceived suburban jungles.

I think George Will hit it well drawing the distinction between not preserving every spot Lee's horse pooped versus not plowing under real historically significant lands and working in not creating a "deathopolis" in NY.

Glad you liked it.