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| http://www.gilder.com/ | Issue 293.0/May 4, 2007
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HEADLINES:
- The
Week / The Apocalypse Has Been Postponed
- Friday
Feature / Digg Encryption Uproar
- Friday
Blogger Bonus / The
Optimists: Making Money
- Readings /
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The
Week / Good news, Mr. Gore, the Apocalypse has been postponed
George Gilder, Gilder Telecosm Forum (4/30/07): The
following is an essay by my medical student
daughter Mellie prompted by watching Gore's “An Inconvenient Truth.”
Mary Ellen Gilder: Good news, Mr.
Gore, the Apocalypse has been postponed
You may have missed it, but April
22nd was National Day of Hope, Prayer and Reflection about Global Warming –
presumably not by the edict of the current administration. In the political
world Bush is becoming more and more isolated in his stance on this subject.
Other public figures are acquiescing one by one. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger,
who once seemed likely to be an unmovable bastion of big-business conservatism,
has been converted and is on the cover of Newsweek, twirling a fragile
and endangered world on his finger and announcing draconian measures to limit
carbon emissions in California. He’s a believer.
Global warming has galvanized the
developed world. Liberals sound the warning, Conservatives respond with
gradually mounting enthusiasm. Clergy fall to their knees in prayer and
repentance. Atheists find new purpose and a moral lodestone. Americans slap
concerned bumper stickers on their SUVs and flock to “An Inconvenient Truth”.
Hollywood swoons and bestows on Gore’s slideshow two Academy Awards. The
scientific community churns out technical paper after paper in the journals
reporting the mounting evidence.
Or do they?
Gore assures us of it, stating
that there is no controversy. He refers to the multitudes of the world’s top
scientists voicing unmitigated concern through the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) report. He cites a study of a random sample of 928
articles on global warming, none of which were found to express doubt. There is
a consensus.
However, Michael Crichton (best known for his novels but also a graduate
of Harvard Medical School and a former postdoctoral fellow at the Salk
Institute for Biological Studies) warned his audience of the dangers of
“consensus science” in a 2003 speech, Historically, the claim of consensus has
been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming
that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of
scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're
being had.
Let's be clear: the work of science
has nothing whatever to do with consensus.
Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires
only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has
results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science
consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest
scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the
consensus.
Think of Semmelweiss and puerperal fever. Think of Goldberger and
pellagra. Even Gore’s favorite example of continental drift highlights the
folly of the scientific consensus that mocked Alfred Wegener’s theory of
Pangaea for half a century.
Al Gore Goes to Hollywood (but not to Caltech)
In his film Gore urges an
auditorium full of students to “separate the truth from the fiction and the
accurate connections from the misunderstandings”. In keeping with that
exhortation I watched the An Inconvenient Truth with careful attention to the
research on which its arguments were founded. At the time of my second viewing,
I began to take notes and read the scientific literature.
Within the first half hour of the
film it is clear that Gore does not see global warming merely as a future
threat. He states, “Now we’re beginning to see the impact in the real world.”
The example of this impact that made the biggest impression on me was that of
Lake Chad in Northern Africa. Gore showed dramatic satellite images
demonstrating the rapid shrinking of the once-giant lake to near dryness since
the turn of the previous century. He suggested that this water shortage has
brought on the conditions that have lead to the tragedy and mass violence in
the bordering areas of Niger and Darfur. This made me listen. What would it
take for a lake of such magnitude to dry up? The warming must be dramatic
indeed. I decided to Google it…. Was he purposefully misrepresenting the evidence or
had he really not done his homework even on the most basic level?
Read Mellie Gilder’s complete
essay: http://blog.gildertech.com/
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Friday Feature / Digg Encryption Uproar
Chris Maxcer, TechNewsWorld (5/4/07): What
Digg did and didn't do in response to a HD DVD encryption-cracking code on its
site is the subject of much controversy. By the thousands, Digg members jumped
on the freedom of speech bandwagon, which gets closer to the heart of the
matter -- that there's some fundamental issues at stake in the form of a
32-digit number.
Keep reading: http://www.technewsworld.com/story/57225.html
_____________
Adario Strange, Epicenter (5/02/07): The
Digg CEO Jay Adelson Interview
The last 24 hours were historic for this thing we call Web 2.0
social media. As you can see, we've been all over the story today covering it
from various angles. I finally managed to get Digg CEO Jay Adelson on the phone
and he offered some insight into the recent controversy.
Adario Strange: Did
you actually receive a legal cease and desist document regarding Digg’s
content?
Jay Adelson: We did receive a legal notice, just not
specific to that posting. We received it about a month ago.
Strange: Can
you address the seeming conflict between the fact that Kevin Rose has a show
available for download (The Broken) that contains illegal hacks for
DVDs, XBox games and CDs, but Digg removed a post from a user that contained
information that would allow someone to hack an HD DVD?
Adelson: Revision3 is a content creator, not a content
aggregator. There is no similarity between the two businesses. You are refering
to a show where the two hosts played characters that are exaggerations. The
intent is to be funny. Obviously they make jokes about pirating and hacking.
Strange: What
about the assertion that because Kevin’s show DiggNation had HD DVD as a
sponsor this is somehow connected to the deletion of the HD DVD hack code on
Digg.com?
Adelson: Diggnation is a show where they discuss their
dissatisfaction with DRM. But there is no connection between the shows on
Revision3 and Digg.com.
Strange: OK, but the
show DiggNation is primarily based on posts listed on the Digg.com website. The
content on Digg.com is the meat of the DiggNation show...
Adelson: In the case of HD DVD being a sponsor on Revision3,
if Revision3 takes a call from an agency that wants advertising space on DiggNation,
it is no way connected to anything that’s on Digg.com.
Strange: Is there a
specific reason Revision3 stopped doing The Broken?
Adelson: Our intent is to produce it as a comical labor of
love. We know that it has a big following, but our intent is to continue to
produce the show on relatively rare occasions. Kevin is extraordinarily busy so
it’s hard for him to do more than DiggNation …
Read
the full interview:
http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/05/exclusive_the_d.html
____________________________________
Friday Blogger Bonus / The Optimists: Making Money
Russell Redenbaugh (4/27/07): Here’s Jerry Bowyer’s
excellent take on Dow 13,000 and the success of the supply-side over at NRO…
Question:
What do Neil Cavuto and most of the folks over at Fox News; Steve Forbes, Rich
Karlgaard, and much of the intellectual inventory over at Forbes magazine;
Larry Kudlow, Art Laffer, Don Luskin, Brian Wesbury, and most of the other money
types who pop up around 5 p.m. EST each weekday on CNBC; the crowd over at the
Wall Street Journal editorial page; and the full complement of writers right
here on NRO Financial have in common?
Answer: They stuck to their models when the financial world was awash in pessimistic hysterics, and reminded all who would listen that the underlying economy was strong, that the 2003 tax cuts would do their magic, and that smart investors and entrepreneurs would act accordingly and put their money to work. They were ridiculed. They were shouted down. They were attacked. And they were ignored by the vast hoard of pundits and talking heads. But in the end they were right.
Dow
13,000.
If
you thought like the members of the optimistic club, you made a lot of money.
And if you thought like their detractors, you got crushed.
That’s
how it’s supposed to work: Markets are leadership evaluators. They assess the
pronouncements of presidents and Fed chairmen. They appraise the decisions of
CEOs. They prove or disprove the predictive power of financial forecasting
models: Keynesian, Rubinomic, populist, Marxist, supply-side. Each model
guessed at what was in store for investors and the economy all across the
2000-07 period. And only one model, the supply-side one that links growth and
prosperity with low taxation and low regulation and free markets and a general
environment of entrepreneurship and opportunity, consistently outperformed the
rest.
I
understand how hard it was for the optimists to hang in there. Four years ago,
the received wisdom was so gloomy ….
Check our Russell Redenbaugh’s “Reading the World” blog:
http://www.readingtheworld.com/
____________________________________
Readings /
Yahoo!
Jumps on Microsoft Talk
http://www.forbes.com/home/markets/2007/05/04/microsoft-yahoo-post-markets-equity-cx_af_0504markets07.html
Making
Money with Ma Bell
http://www.forbes.com/home/personalfinance/2007/05/03/telecom-att-voip-pf-ii-in_sr_0503soapbox_inl.html
EZchip: 2007 should be a lot stronger
than 2006
http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/docview.asp?did=1000207728&fid=1724
The Weekly
GTI
http://www.gtindex.com/
Kevin Rose AACS LOLGeek Mashup
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/05/kevin_rose_aacs.html
Wiretapping Woes
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/may07/5047
Vonage is Dealt Setback in Patent Case
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/technology/04vonage.html?_r=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin
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