About a minute into the latest B-Cast by Liz Stephans and Scott Baker of Breitbart.TV (whom we interviewed a few weeks ago on PJM Political), they casually mention that their previous show attracted about 400,000 views.

In and of itself, that's an impressive number for a newscast. (Any show on MSNBC would be considered a hit if it pulled those numbers.) But consider the extreme economy of scale going on here:

As of 2005, CNN in primetime attracted less than 700,000 daily viewers, but with a budget of zillions of dollars and a ton of real estate, technicians and on-air talent. In contrast, the B-Cast is, I believe, run out of an office in Pittsburgh by two people with one set, a couple of cameras, laptops for the on-air talent (in other words, Liz and Scott) to cue those cameras and YouTube clips, and I guess another computer or two to record the sum of all those parts and upload the show to Andrew Breitbart’s news aggregation site.

I know there are a lot of ways to do this already, but none of them are simple enough that I've bothered yet, and I'm hardly a technophobe.

(HT: Instapundit.)

Clinton and her busload of traveling press moved from there to the popular local Mexican restaurant Lindo Michoacan, where a "roundtable" that was actually square passed a microphone around to tell her people's concerns about the mortgage crisis and foreclosures. She took notes and munched on tortilla chips. ...

A man shouted through an opening in the wall that his wife was illegal.

"No woman is illegal," Clinton said, to cheers.

Unless she's making a statement about the legality of a person's mere existence, I can only assume that Hillary means that no one is in America illegally -- which is strictly false. Maybe she means that the country shouldn't have any immigration laws that restrict immigration -- thereby labeling people here without permission as "illegal immigrants". If that's what she means, I think she'll have a hard time making her case.

There are six billion people in the world, and most of them would probably like to live here if they had the opportunity. Does Hillary think we should open our borders to all-comers, or just to Mexicans and South Americans? Does she think we should grant amnesty to everyone here now and then start protecting the border? I doubt it, because we'd quickly have "illegal" people once again, and "no woman is illegal!".

It's a nice, idealistic idea that we should live in a world without borders, but the reality is that in such a world Americans would be the biggest losers. I doubt that's a winning political position.

Instead what I'd like to claim is that Java is not, generally, a hard enough programming language that it can be used to discriminate between great programmers and mediocre programmers. It may be a fine language to work in, but that's not today's topic. I would even go so far as to say that the fact that Java is not hard enough is a feature, not a bug, but it does have this one problem.

If I may be so brash, it has been my humble experience that there are two things traditionally taught in universities as a part of a computer science curriculum which many people just never really fully comprehend: pointers and recursion.

You used to start out in college with a course in data structures, with linked lists and hash tables and whatnot, with extensive use of pointers. Those courses were often used as weedout courses: they were so hard that anyone that couldn't handle the mental challenge of a CS degree would give up, which was a good thing, because if you thought pointers are hard, wait until you try to prove things about fixed point theory.

All the kids who did great in high school writing pong games in BASIC for their Apple II would get to college, take CompSci 101, a data structures course, and when they hit the pointers business their brains would just totally explode, and the next thing you knew, they were majoring in Political Science because law school seemed like a better idea. I've seen all kinds of figures for drop-out rates in CS and they're usually between 40% and 70%. The universities tend to see this as a waste; I think it's just a necessary culling of the people who aren't going to be happy or successful in programming careers.

Yeah, it's too bad that most CS programs these days aren't hard enough to create good computer scientists... but then, real computer science is so hard that there just aren't many people who can do it (if I may be so humble). The fact of the matter is that the world needs code-monkeys, and Java (and the like) were created so that people closer to the mean would be able to contribute to the information age. There will always be a need for real computer scientists who can do the theorizing and architecting, but most programming jobs don't require that level of expertise.

(HT: Cypren.)

Too bad my wife is scared of robots.

VideoTrace is a system for interactively generating realistic 3D models of objects from video—models that might be inserted into a video game, a simulation environment, or another video sequence. The user interacts with VideoTrace by tracing the shape of the object to be modelled over one or more frames of the video. By interpreting the sketch drawn by the user in light of 3D information obtained from computer vision techniques, a small number of simple 2D interactions can be used to generate a realistic 3D model. Each of the sketching operations in VideoTrace provides an intuitive and powerful means of modelling shape from video, and executes quickly enough to be used interactively. Immediate feedback allows the user to model rapidly those parts of the scene which are of interest and to the level of detail required. The combination of automated and manual reconstruction allows VideoTrace to model parts of the scene not visible, and to succeed in cases where purely automated approaches would fail.

As that sales pitch indicates, automated 3D model generation from video is very hard and doesn't work that well yet. By relying on a human operator to perform some of the edge recognition Video Trace is a great intermediate step towards full automation.

Pregnant students in a Denver high school are asking for at least four weeks of maternity leave so they can heal, bond with their newborns and not be penalized with unexcused absences.

The request is unusual in Colorado's public schools, where districts tend to deal with pregnant students or new moms with specialized programs or individualized education plans. ...

"It's critical that these young women have a chance to bond with their babies," Moss said. "Maybe we do need a policy. Clearly, as a district, we have to look at what is going on with our young women. We've got to look at the birth-control issues and teen pregnancy and how we best help them deal with it and still graduate."

Despite the fact that high school graduates earn more than drop-outs, I expect that girls who have babies while they're in high school earn about the same whether they end up getting a diploma or not.

"If there are young mothers asking for maternity leave, the board should listen to them," said Lori Casillas, executive director of the Colorado Organization on Adolescent Pregnancy, Parenting, and Prevention. "If they think it is a barrier to graduation, the board should look at that."

Her organization advocates that schools provide child-care services for new moms. Too many girls drop out after giving birth, and schools must do something to keep them, Casillas said.

My hunch is that there's very little point. The 1.5% of teen mothers who go on to finish college are undoubtedly exceptional; I suspect that the vast majority of girls who get pregnant in high school will benefit very little financially from a symbolic piece of paper.

Finding the pre-1999 newsletters was no easy task, but I was able to track many of them down at the libraries of the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society. Of course, with few bylines, it is difficult to know whether any particular article was written by Paul himself. Some of the earlier newsletters are signed by him, though the vast majority of the editions I saw contain no bylines at all. Complicating matters, many of the unbylined newsletters were written in the first-person, implying that Paul was the author.

But, whoever actually wrote them, the newsletters I saw all had one thing in common: They were published under a banner containing Paul's name, and the articles (except for one special edition of a newsletter that contained the byline of another writer) seem designed to create the impression that they were written by him--and reflected his views. What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing--but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics. ...

[skip past pages of craziness]

In other words, Paul's campaign wants to depict its candidate as a naïve, absentee overseer, with minimal knowledge of what his underlings were doing on his behalf. This portrayal might be more believable if extremist views had cropped up in the newsletters only sporadically--or if the newsletters had just been published for a short time. But it is difficult to imagine how Paul could allow material consistently saturated in racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy-mongering to be printed under his name for so long if he did not share these views. In that respect, whether or not Paul personally wrote the most offensive passages is almost beside the point. If he disagreed with what was being written under his name, you would think that at some point--over the course of decades--he would have done something about it.

Anyone who supports or associates with this sort of idiocy should be ashamed. I know that none of the mainstream Republican candidates are perfect reincarnations of the idealized Ronald Reagan, but that doesn't excuse embracing a nut like Ron Paul.

On any given day, more than 87,000 flights are in the skies in the United States. Only one-third are commercial carriers, like American, United or Southwest. On an average day, air traffic controllers handle 28,537 commercial flights (major and regional airlines), 27,178 general aviation flights (private planes), 24,548 air taxi flights (planes for hire), 5,260 military flights and 2,148 air cargo flights (Federal Express, UPS, etc.). At any given moment, roughly 5,000 planes are in the skies above the United States. In one year, controllers handle an average of 64 million takeoffs and landings. ...

There are 14,305 air traffic controllers that work for the Federal Aviation Administration, according to FAA data (dated Aug. 2006).

Assuming the air traffic controllers don't work much overtime (unlikely) we can guess that 20% of the ATCs may be on-duty at any particular moment -- they work 24 hours a day, seven days a week -- so about 3,000. Does it really take 3,000 air traffic controllers to coordinate 5,000 flights?

I'm not a pilot, so am I missing something? Is our air traffic management system so inefficient that we need a controller for almost every flight?

Then Clinton began getting emotional: "It's not easy, and I couldn't do it if I didn't passionately believe it was the right thing to do. You know I have so many opportunities from this country just don't want to see us fall backwards," she said.

Then, her voice breaking and tears in her eyes, she said, "You know, this is very personal for me. It's not just political it's not just public. I see what's happening, and we have to reverse it." ...

After the event, Pernold Young told ABC News that she was glad Clinton showed emotion.

"That was real," Pernold Young said.

Another woman in the group, Alison Hamilton of Portsmouth, New Hampshire said she, like most of the people in the group, had been leaning toward voting for Obama.

But after seeing Clinton become emotional, she said she was going to back Clinton.

"That was the clincher," Hamilton said.

If I made this stuff up I'd be branded as a sexist. Can't Hillary, the voters, the media, and America do better?

Los Angeles, CA. According to Hank Hernandez, chief legal counsel of the Los Angeles Police Protective League (LAPPL), the City of Los Angeles entered into a collective bargaining agreement with the police union four years ago. And now the City is attempting to change the agreement that was negotiated in good faith. Hernandez says the Police Commission’s vote to require gang and narcotic officers to disclose their personal finances is “unacceptable.”

The FULL DISCLOSURE NETWORK® presents an exclusive eleven minute Video News Blog featuring Hernandez, a former LAPD Lt. who has served for over 20 years as the legal counsel to the Los Angeles police union. He describes the Federal Consent Decree as the reason the Police Commission voted to require financial disclosure. Among the disclosure requirements for gang and narcotic officers, to be implemented within ten days of the vote are:

• List of assets, investments and liabilities, even if jointly owned.
• Proof of bank accounts and mortgages with statements.
• Individual financial disclosures to be reviewed and questioned.
• Positions could be denied based upon the review.

Hernandez also describes how the LAPPL is advising the officers whether or not to comply and suggests the perils when an employer requires employees to turn over their personal information.

]]> http://www.mwilliams.info/archive/2008/01/los-angeles-wants-fiancial-disclosure-for-police-who-handle-cash.php http://www.mwilliams.info/archive/2008/01/los-angeles-wants-fiancial-disclosure-for-police-who-handle-cash.php Mon, 07 Jan 2008 09:14:27 -0600 Despite my tongue-in-cheek post about loving global warming, we really need to be preparing for the global cooling period we're poised for (as I've been warning for years now). Global cooling based on the various solar cycles is likely to be far more dangerous than global warming (even if it were real) and we need to figure out how we're going to cope with it.

Given the number of worldwide cold events, it is no surprise that 2007 didn't turn out to be the warmest ever. In fact, 2007's global temperature was essentially the same as that in 2006 - and 2005, and 2004, and every year back to 2001. The record set in 1998 has not been surpassed. For nearly a decade now, there has been no global warming. Even though atmospheric carbon dioxide continues to accumulate - it's up about 4 percent since 1998 - the global mean temperature has remained flat. That raises some obvious questions about the theory that CO2 is the cause of climate change.

Yet so relentlessly has the alarmist scenario been hyped, and so disdainfully have dissenting views been dismissed, that millions of people assume Gore must be right when he insists: "The debate in the scientific community is over."

And as I've predicted in the past, Al Gore and his ilk will be revealed as the hucksters they are... eventually. Even mainstream "science" can't continue to ignore the accumulating data forever.

]]> http://www.mwilliams.info/archive/2008/01/global-cooling-danger.php http://www.mwilliams.info/archive/2008/01/global-cooling-danger.php International Affairs Science, Technology & Health Mon, 07 Jan 2008 08:22:12 -0600 If this is global warming then count me in. Yesterday was sunny in the mid-seventies and I barbecued out on the deck in short sleeves. Needless to say, that's unseasonable for St. Louis in mid-January. It smelled like Spring and all the birds were out. Pretty sweet.

It's nice that we occasionally have better weather than California!

]]> http://www.mwilliams.info/archive/2008/01/i-love-global-warming.php http://www.mwilliams.info/archive/2008/01/i-love-global-warming.php Life Stories Mon, 07 Jan 2008 07:22:55 -0600 One can only hope that Wal-Mart solves the "health care crisis" before November....

The issue highlights the difference between the right and the left. Leftists see our health insurance / care system and think the answer is more government regular. Rightists see the same problems but think that the best way to solve them is by unshackling the free market. Wal-Mart's example should be a light for our path.

(HT: Instapundit.)

]]> http://www.mwilliams.info/archive/2008/01/walmart-health-care.php http://www.mwilliams.info/archive/2008/01/walmart-health-care.php Business & Economics Science, Technology & Health Sun, 06 Jan 2008 16:49:23 -0600

]]> http://www.mwilliams.info/archive/2008/01/lost-returns-january-31st.php http://www.mwilliams.info/archive/2008/01/lost-returns-january-31st.php Entertainment & Sports Sat, 05 Jan 2008 11:34:52 -0600