New York Times :: Security Companies: Shadow Soldiers in Iraq
Article

> The combination of a deadly insurgency and billions of
> dollars in aid money has unleashed powerful market forces
> in the war zone. New security companies aggressively
> compete for lucrative contracts in a frenzy of deal making.

More of that grandeur that was Rome. What I wonder is who will be the Bill Gates of the private security forces industry. And when will he march on Baghdad?
posted by Tomohiro Idokoro @ 11:03 PM

New York Times :: Humans vs. Computers, Again. But There's Help for Our Side
Article

> A current race for a solution goes by the deceptively blah
> name of "knowledge management," or K.M. It is an effort to
> bring Google-like clarity to the swamp of data on each
> person's machine or network, and it is based on the
> underappreciated tension between a computer's capacity and
> a person's. Modern computers "scale" well, as the
> technologists say - that is, the amount of information they
> can receive, display and store goes up almost without
> limit. Human beings don't scale. They have finite amounts
> of time, attention and, even when they're younger than the
> doddering baby boomers, short-term memory. The more e-mail,
> Web links and attached files lodged in their computer
> systems, the harder it can be for people to find what they
> really want.

I've never understood why you can't do a Boolean search using the Search function on Windows. As far as I have been able to figure it out, you can only do single word or phrase searches. This doesn't seem like it would be technically that challenging. Google can do it with 4 billion web documents.

Incidently, Google's Gmail is now available for regular users of Blogger. Very elegant. 1 GB storage. Ads, yes, but they're very unobtrusive. And with its search function, it addresses this very problem.
posted by Tomohiro Idokoro @ 7:26 AM

New York Times :: Wal-Mart, a Nation Unto Itself
Article

> Wal-Mart has created a very different model from General
> Motors, he added, noting that G.M. helped build the world's
> most affluent middle class by paying wages far above the
> average and by providing generous health and pension plans.
> Mr. Lichtenstein said G.M.'s wage pattern spurred other
> companies to raise compensation levels, while Wal-Mart's
> relatively low wages and benefits - its workers average
> less than $18,000 a year - were doing just the opposite.

I wonder if the Federally defined poverty-line figures into their determination of base salaries.
posted by Tomohiro Idokoro @ 7:16 AM

New York Times :: No Time for Bullies: Baboons Retool Their Culture
Article

> In a study appearing today in the journal PloS Biology
> (online at www.plosbiology.org), researchers describe the
> drastic temperamental and tonal shift that occurred in a
> troop of 62 baboons when its most belligerent members
> vanished from the scene. The victims were all dominant
> adult males that had been strong and snarly enough to fight
> with a neighboring baboon troop over the spoils at a
> tourist lodge garbage dump, and were exposed there to meat
> tainted with bovine tuberculosis, which soon killed them.

Who knows? Maybe Baghdad will prove just the piece of tainted dumpster meat that this country needs.
posted by Tomohiro Idokoro @ 7:52 AM

Los Angeles Times :: One Year Later: Where Is Iraq?
Article

> Still, back in May, most Iraqis had an open mind about the
> U.S.-led occupation and hailed the removal of Hussein.
> Most expected the U.S. to quickly call a council of opposition
> parties, set up a new government and prepare to leave the
> country.
>
> But the replacement of Garner with L. Paul Bremer III in mid-
> May brought another series of shocks to the Iraqi population.
> Bremer said it was too early for any grand council or turnover
> of meaningful power to Iraqis. He abolished the Iraqi army,
> saying that its soldiers had in effect dissolved the army by
> fleeing during the war. That pen stroke left about 500,000
> men desperate for work, creating a reservoir of anger that
> would come back to haunt the U.S. leadership.
>
> The months of May, June and July were marked by the
> beginnings of the anti-U.S. insurgency, scattered attacks
> that were dismissed at first as the last spasms of the "dead-
> enders." At first, the resistance took the form of rocket-
> propelled-grenade and automatic-rifle ambushes of passing
> convoys. When such actions became too deadly for the
> attackers, the guerrillas adopted the "stand-off" tactic of
> roadside bombs, detonated by remote control. Military
> spokesmen reluctantly acknowledged that U.S. forces were
> facing 15 significant attacks a day.

Don't go back to Iraqville,
and waste another year.
posted by Tomohiro Idokoro @ 11:24 PM

New York Times :: The Abortion Question
Article

> That's why it makes sense to try to reduce abortions by
> encouraging sex education and contraception. The
> conservative impulse to teach abstinence only, without
> promoting contraception, is probably one reason the U.S.
> has so many more abortions per capita than Canada or
> Britain.

God is profligate with his gametes and zygotes.
posted by Tomohiro Idokoro @ 9:07 PM

New York Times :: Jittery? Peevish? Can't Sleep? What Are You Drinking?
Article

> After the habitual two cups of Starbucks coffee, Adam set
> to work. So far, so good. But as the academic pressure
> mounted, he had to work longer hours, and that meant more
> coffee - a lot more coffee than he had ever consumed in his
> life. In fact, for six weeks, he had been drinking up to 10
> cups of Starbucks coffee daily.
>
> That is a lot of caffeine, considering that each large cup
> contains on average about 375 milligrams, according to a
> 2003 study of caffeinated coffee published in The Journal
> of Analytical Toxicology. With 10 cups a day, Adam was
> turbocharged with nearly four grams of caffeine.

10 cups a day of Starbucks coffee? That's like $200/week!
posted by Tomohiro Idokoro @ 9:19 PM

New York Times :: We're More Productive. Who Gets the Money? [Bob Herbert]
Article

> The situation is summed up in the long, unwieldy but very
> revealing title of a new study from the Center for Labor
> Market Studies at Northeastern University: "The
> Unprecedented Rising Tide of Corporate Profits and the
> Simultaneous Ebbing of Labor Compensation - Gainers and
> Losers from the National Economic Recovery in 2002 and
> 2003."
>
> Andrew Sum, the center's director and lead author of the
> study, said: "This is the first time we've ever had a case
> where two years into a recovery, corporate profits got a
> larger share of the growth of national income than labor
> did. Normally labor gets about 65 percent and corporate
> profits about 15 to 18 percent. This time profits got 41
> percent and labor [meaning all forms of employee
> compensation, including wages, benefits, salaries and the
> percentage of payroll taxes paid by employers] got 38
> percent."

Curiously, I can't find this report on the web. Herbert writes in his article: "This is extraordinary, but very few people are talking about it, which tells you something about the hold that corporate interests have on the national conversation. " I guess so!

(There was a story that interviewed one of the report's authors on PRI's Marketplace.)
posted by Tomohiro Idokoro @ 8:56 PM

New Yorker :: The Height Gap
Article

> Inequality may be at the root of America’s height problem, but it’s too
> soon to be certain. If the poor are pulling all of us down with them,
> some economists say, why didn’t Americans shoot up after the war
> on poverty, in the nineteen-sixties?

Probably because we didn't really put up all that much of a fight.
posted by Tomohiro Idokoro @ 8:44 PM

New York Times :: Google to Roll Out E-Mail Service
Article

> The new service, to be named Gmail, is scheduled to be
> released on Thursday, according to people involved with the
> plan. It will be "soft launched," they said, in a manner
> that Google has followed with other features that it has
> added to its Web site, with little fanfare and presented
> initially as a long-running test.

Get ready to jump on your @google.com email address of choice. It's going
to be a land-grab.

For more info:

Google Gmail

(And no, it's not a hoax : Boston Times )
posted by Tomohiro Idokoro @ 6:22 PM