paul reed

An interesting way to look at the ups and downs of the real estate market [via speculativebubble.com]

Fascinating article on BBC News about the world’s longest tunnel being built between Zurich and Milan (57km or 35 miles!). Given the environmental focus in the UK right now on using trains rather than planes, it’s interesting to see that the tunnel will:

… [reduce] the travel time between Zurich and Milan from today’s four hours to just two-and-a-half. That would make the journey faster than flying.

There has been a lot of chatter recently about the Great Firewall of China, but the New York Times’ decision to restrict who can read a certain article about last weeks London terrorism suspects raises some questions about freedom of information.

On one hand if the NYT knew the information could be damaging, then why publish it at all? The print version happily lives on both sides of the pond due to the frequency of trans-Atlantic flights, so they knew the information would get to the UK one way or another (and in fact was published locally in the UK by The Times and the Mail). On the other hand, would withholding it all together have been any better? After all, reporting the facts is what the press are supposed to do, not censor things that may be controversial or bias (don’t get me started on how the US media love to editorialize rather than report …).

In this instance, however, it seems like the NYT are really just trying to cover their backs and avoid any legal ramifications. It’s sad when a renowned news source doesn’t have the the conviction to report something for fear of the ramifications on itself.

Found an article on CNN/Money from April about the relative cost of living in different states. Interesting to see how this has changed since my previous post in 2003. Maine moves into the dubious number 1 slot at 13.5%, nudging DC down to third place. Alaska still remains at the bottom on 6.6%, although the spread between the highest and lowest has closed to 6.9% from 7.4%. The national average has risen a massive 0.9% to 10.6% with 19 states exceeding this. Massachusetts, which often goes by the nickname “Taxachusetts”, comes in surprising at number 28; below that average now by 0.3% at 10.3%, a rise of 0.4% in the three years.

Spot on episode of Zefrank. I’ve nothing else to add.

News I missed from last week about a tornado that swept through Westchester County in New Yor last week. More specifically, it hit the office park that I used to work in when I lived down there!

Oh, and for those pundits who say it wasn’t a real tornado, well even the New York Times made it official:

The storm - not officially designated as a tornado until Thursday - touched down in central Westchester about 4 p.m. Wednesday with winds that at times exceeded 150 miles per hour, making it stronger than many of the tornadoes that sweep through the Midwest.

It looks like Harpers Magazine produce a list of (useless) statistics each month. I particularly like the following ones from the current (June) list:

• Amount by which total U.S. personal debt in 2002 exceeded total disposable income : $628,000,000,000

• Number of states in which Wal-Mart is the largest employer : 21
• Days that AT&T ceased its TV advertising last March “out of respect for the U.S. military operation in Iraq” : 3
• Days that it ceased its telemarketing : 1
• Number of motor vehicles owned by Tom Magliozzi, co-host of NPR’s Car Talk : 0

The Atlantic have published a long but interesting article looking at Bruce Schneier’s views on homeland insecurity and how the measures taken after September 11th could lead to a less secure world. It makes interesting reading, and although I’m not keen on quoting other peoples words there are some interesting quotes I want to highlight (if only for my own benefit):

… the strongest crypto is gossamer protection if malevolent people have access to the computers on the other end. Encrypting transactions … “is the equivalent of arranging an armored car to deliver credit-card information from someone living in a cardboard box to someone living on a park bench.”To forestall attacks, security systems need to be small-scale, redundant, and compartmentalized. Rather than large, sweeping programs, they should be carefully crafted mosaics, each piece aimed at a specific weakness. The federal government and the airlines are spending millions of dollars, Schneier points out, on systems that screen every passenger to keep knives and weapons out of planes. But what matters most is keeping dangerous passengers out of airline cockpits, which can be accomplished by reinforcing the door.

… it is seldom necessary to gather large amounts of additional information, because in modern societies people leave wide audit trails. The problem is sifting through the already existing mountain of data. Calls for heavy monitoring and record-keeping are thus usually a mistake.

To halt attacks once they start, security measures must avoid being subject to single points of failure. Computer networks are particularly vulnerable: once hackers bypass the firewall, the whole system is often open for exploitation.

… every secret creates a potential failure point. Secrecy, in other words, is a prime cause of brittleness�and therefore something likely to make a system prone to catastrophic collapse. Conversely, openness provides ductility.

Good security is built in overlapping, cross-checking layers, to slow down attacks; it reacts limberly to the unexpected. Its most important components are almost always human.

His conclusion is that people are the missing link to security, not machines or technology. This makes me think twice … the then think again:

… these people brought to the task a quality not yet found in any technology: human judgment, which is at the heart of most good security. Human beings do make mistakes, of course. But they can recover from failure in ways that machines and software cannot. The well-trained mind is ductile. It can understand surprises and overcome them. It fails well.

Financially, living in the US varies greatly depending upon which state you live in. Whenever I travel out of Boston I’m often surprised at how cheap things are — food, rent, houses, etc. Of course I’m assuming this price change is reflected somewhat in local salaries, and standard of living (yes, I could be proportionally richer if I lived in Raleigh North Carolina, but I don’t think it would be as fulfilling as living in the Boston). Anyway, CNN/Money published a report (no longer available) on the tax burden for living in each of the 50 states. It makes interesting reading, and surprised me to see a 7.4% spread between the cheapest (Alaska) and the most expensive (DC). Massachusetts at 9.9% sits only 0.2% above the national average, although I suspect is you broke this table down to a city level, Boston would be on the high end of the list.

I take a fairly dim view of what the US calls “news” these days, but when Google start including press releases in Google News it really has gone too far. News is information about what’s going on, it’s not adverts written by marketing departments to promote their business.

My biggest peeve is the current trend for news to be presented as editorial. Almost all TV news in the US is a ‘magazine’ program with some pseudo-expert commenting on what-if scenarios or giving their �professional� opinion on a subject. Add into that the tendency for network television use carrot-and-stick tactics to keep viewers watching their channel, and the news has degenerated into an unwatchable tabloid program instead of what it should be.

Present the facts with some footnotes to explain things that the man on the street might not understand. In my view, that’s what news is.

Admittedly I don’t use Google News, but I know that many people do. I found it intriguing that such a small group of bloggers could pervert Google’s PageRankâ„¢ to change the meaning of the phrase second superpower, but I find it annoying that Google would lower itself to join the broadcast networks.