10 Interesting Links From April 4th
April 5th, 2009
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- jfleck at inkstain » On High-Probability, High-Consequence Events – My friends in the nuclear weapons community have, over the years, helped me understand the tools for thinking about low-probability, high-consequence events, like a warhead accidentally going off. You really don’t want that to happen, so even though averaged across all possible futures the average badness might be relatively low, it’s worth spending some time and energy thinking through ways of reducing the probability of the high-consequence event.
But if the chance of the truly horrific event is somewhere betwen 57 and 95 percent over the next four decades? Holy crap. If you’ve seen that coming and haven’t already started doing an awful lot to try to drive that number down, your system for solving societal problems is seriously fucked up.
- ABQJOURNAL NEWS/METRO: Actor’s $50,000 Keeps Boys/Girls Club Running – Arthur Garcia, its executive director, said his club — which has been in Roswell since 1965 — was on the verge of closing for the summer, its busiest time. The economy, he said, had taken its toll on donations the club needs to survive.
"We were drowning," he said. "Even our grants have been cut."
So, last week after KRQE Channel 13 did a story on the club's financial pain, Denzel Washington called to say he'd love to help.
Washington, who is in Albuquerque filming the "Book of Eli" at Albuquerque Studios, donated $50,000 to the club, enough to keep it open through the summer. - Where Gadgets Go to Die: Facility Strips, Rips and Recycles – With 15 locations in the United States, Sims Recycling Solutions is one of the world’s largest electronics scrap recyclers. Pictured here is the "demanufacturing" center of the company's Roseville, California facility, where workers disassemble everything from printers, cameras and computers to Jumbotrons for their reusable materials. The facility receives roughly 150,000 pounds of used electronics a day.
- Report Details Alleged Fraud Scheme Against AT – CBS 11 News has uncovered new information about FBI raids against Dallas companies that provide web servers for dozens of businesses in North Texas and across the country.
Court documents show it's all part of an alleged massive fraud scheme against AT&T and Verizon.
Court records show Verizon first went to the FBI this past January, alleging some North Texas web server providers were cheating them and AT&T out of millions of dollars.
- Chris Paling on time spent on a ward with alcoholics | Society | The Guardian – Barrel Man is immediately put on a drain. Several clear bags of fluid are emptied from his stomach every couple of hours. During the night, at around 2am, we are awoken by the sound of a cry and a splash of liquid. The room fills with the aroma of faeces. A nurse dashes in, switches on the light and pulls Barrel Man's curtain round, but not before we have glimpsed the pool of blood and faeces on the floor. Two doctors arrive. Barrel Man is wheeled down to the theatre. We don't expect to see him on the ward again. With typical understatement, the following day the nurse reports his condition as "very poorly".
- “Dow 36,000″ and your pension – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com – So in 2007 the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation — which stands behind corporate pensions — switched from bonds only to lots of stocks, buying in at, natch, the peak of the market. Oops. And this is big stuff: the Bush administration may have left us all a gratuitous loss of hundreds of billions.
- What Fourth-Graders “Know” About Money – Recently I used some of the latitude I have in teaching social studies when completing a unit on economics with two 4th-grade classes (41 students total). One group of students was from my classroom; the other group of students was from a neighboring teacher’s class. During the unit, I had an opportunity to gauge the students’ knowledge of a few concepts of money and the financial world around them.
- Sci-Fi Hi-Fi: Weblog: What We Can Learn From MacHeist – Mac software impressario Phill Ryu brought his controversial MacHeist bundle back for another round recently, this time with one of its former critics in the fold, which means that the old debates about its legitimacy and value have been raging once again. I’ll admit I’ve been a critic of MacHeist in the past, and one way to think about it is definitely as either a sign of or cause of a troubling devaluation of indie software. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why software products and services succeed or fail, though, and I’ve started to feel that, whatever you think of them, we indie developers can learn a lot from MacHeist.
- The G-20 can do better next time | csmonitor.com – The Group of 20 meeting took place largely because of a demand by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to set up a global regulatory cop to rein in excessive risk-taking by financial institutions – mainly American and British.
For two reasons, he rightly didn't succeed.
As long as the world remains organized around sovereign states, capitalism will largely be regulated within each state. Even the European Union can't agree on tougher rules for hedge funds, etc.
A second reason is the difficulty of regulating complex financial instruments. Even the people who design them failed to see their flaws as this crisis unfolded. Would a global cop do any better at assessing such intricate risk? Exhibit A: The SEC's inability to uncover Bernie Madoff's scam.
- Al Jazeera English – Americas – FBI rejects Taliban US attack claim – The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has dismissed claims made by the Pakistan Taliban that it was responsible for an attack in the state of New York in which a gunman killed 13 people.
Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, had claimed in a phone call to Al Jazeera that he had ordered the shooting in which a man, believed to be a Vietnamese immigrant, opened fire at an immigration centre.
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