Author: peteware

Politics

More exonerations for Climategate researchers

petewareLeave a comment

Yet another report says Michael E Mann is cleared of any wrongdoing related to his climate research.

An investigative panel at Pennsylvania State University, weighing the question of whether the scientist, Michael E. Mann, had “seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting or reporting research or other scholarly activities,” declared that he had not.

This is the second report from Penn St. clearing him and joins two others in Britain clearing related researchers.

Politics

Senator Robert Byrd

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From Frank Rich’s column about Senator Robert Byrd.

These senators were in the tradition of Thurmond, not Byrd — indeed, they are Thurmond’s direct heirs. Like Byrd, Thurmond had been an ardent Democratic foe of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Unlike Byrd, he left his party in disgust that year and endorsed Goldwater, jump-starting the migration of the Democrats’ racist cadre and their political toxins to the G.O.P. and setting the stage for the Republican “Southern strategy.” That strategy isn’t dead.

The NY Times had an interesting obituary about Senator Byrd including his Ku Klux Klan membership, title as “King of Pork”

Mr. Byrd’s perspective on the world changed over the years. A former member of the Ku Klux Klan, he filibustered against the 1964 Civil Rights Act only to come to back civil rights measures and Mr. Obama. A supporter of the Vietnam War, he became a fierce critic, decades later, of the war in Iraq. In 1964, the Americans for Democratic Action, the liberal lobbying group, found that his views and the group’s aligned only 16 percent of the time. In 2005, he got an A.D.A. rating of 95.

Technology

Switching keys in values in a map

petewareLeave a comment

A functor that reverses a pair: first becomes second,
second becomes first. Useful for switching
from a map to another map (or multimap in this example) where
the value becomes the key and the key the value.

std::map<std::string, int> m;
std::multimap<int,std::string> m2;
m["a"] = 0;
m["b"] = 1;
m["c"] = 0;
std::transform (m.begin(), m.end(), std::inserter (m2, m2.begin()),
                pair_switch());

And the actual code:

template<class PairType>
struct pair_switcher : public std::unary_function<PairType, std::pair<a,b>
{
 typedef std::pair result_type;
 typedef PairType argument_type;
 result_type operator()(const argument_type &p) const
 {
     return result_type (p.second, p.first);
 }
};
Technology

WordPress 3.0 update

petewareLeave a comment

Update to 3.0 went pretty smoothly. I’m having some problem with images (added how to fix below)

  • Ran my custom backup script:
$ cd ~/Desktop/wp-backup
$ ./backup
  • Downloaded wordpress 3.0:
$ cd ~/Desktop/src/downloads/pkgs
$ curl -O http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
$ mv latest.tar.gz wordpress-3.0.tgz
  • Make sure you know the WP administrator user password as WP 3.0 uses a “Super Admin” interface.
  • No real special requirements for my site for wpmu upgrade most a lot of warnings about plugins and themes not necessarily being compatible.
  • Follow the directions or these even better directions
    • Disable plugins from site admin web page
    • Remove (save somewhere else) wp-admin, wp-includes
    • Extract the wordpress-3.0.files
    • Fix permisions (this is Apple’s Snow Leopard Server)
$ cd /Library/Webserver/Documents
$ mv wp-admin wp-includes ~/tmp
$ tar xzvf ~/Desktop/src/downloads/pgks/wordpress-3.0.tgz
$ chown -R _www:_www .
  • remove blogs.php
$ cd /Library/Webserver/Documents
$ rm wp-content/blogs.hp
  • Modify .htaccess to add the rule for wp-files (replacings blogsphp):
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !.*wp-content/plugins.*
RewriteRule ^(.*/)?files/(.*) wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$2 [L]
  • Upgrade the site (site.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php). Login as the administrator user, if you don’t see “Super Admin” you aren’t the right user.
  • My site admin had some extra steps to perform like getting rid of blogs.php and adding some code
    for the cookies.
  • Update the plugins
Technology

Jeopardy playing computer

petewareLeave a comment

From NY Times is this article Smarter Than You Think – I.B.M.’s Supercomputer Challenges ‘Jeopardy!’ Champions – NYTimes.com about how IBM has built a machine that does pretty well playing Jeopardy.

Neither, as it turned out. Both were beaten to the buzzer by the third combatant: Watson, a supercomputer.

For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer.

Politics

Budget Deficits

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Deficit1

Here’s how future US budget deficits are apportioned to various legislation and events from Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Remember, the budget for 2000 was in surplus; in 2009 the deficit was $1.4 trillion. It’s not the stimulus spending that dominates deficit spending.

12 16 09bud rev6 28 10 t11

In the meantime, employment is still terrible. If the employment rate stayed at the same rate as 1999 67.1% then there are four million fewer jobs then 10 years ago. That’s a lot of unhappy people.

News · Politics

Unemployment

petewareLeave a comment

Here’s is Calculated Risk’s version of the scariest chart. It shows the change in employment as a percent since the peak employment near the beginning of the recession; for this recession, that’s Dec 2007. Don’t forget that the years up to 2007 weren’t particularly good as there was no net gain of jobs in spite of increasing population.
Inflation is at 2.2% which is lower then usual.
The dotted line is employment with the census workers taken out.

Employment an Recessions May 20101