Major Donald E. Vandergriff, US Army:
Sean Naylor has just published one of the best battle narratives ever written, but more than that, he has written a powerful story of the people behind the decisions and of those charged with their execution. The book is Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda (Berkley Books, March 2005), and it is now reaching the larger bookstores.
Danial Duane on seven climbers trapped in a storm on Yosemite’s El Capitan last fall for six nights.
At the highest level (at least), spreadsheets should be treated as a corporate resource. For example, if you use spreadsheets for planning then you need to do everything you can to eliminate the possibility of error. And what do you do with corporate resources? You give them to the IT department which can implement proper testing and control procedures.
The real problem, of course, is that business managers don’t know that there is a problem (actually, lots of problems) with spreadsheets, while IT regards spreadsheets as falling outside its jurisdiction. So spreadsheet management falls down a hole in the middle.
as told to Eve Tahmincioglu:
Enron made me very angry. We are all paying a tremendous price for the screw-up.
These are powerful positions we executives hold. I have $8 billion at my disposal. We don’t have that many checks and balances on us. You can lose perspective and start to think you’re royalty. I think of these guys with their $10,000 shower curtains and I say to myself: “I could understand how they could do that.” But I also understand why you shouldn’t.
If you lose track of where you came from – and surprisingly, a lot of these people came from humble beginnings – you lose track of your moral compass, what work means to the average employee.
Davis’s Wisconsin based Alliant Energy has been in some hot water over investments in Brazil and a Mexican resort. Interesting to see this in the NY Times. I wonder if this piece was “placed” by a pr firm?
University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher said he would ask federal regulators Friday to approve the first clinical trial injecting special stem cells into the spinal cords of people with the degenerative nerve ailment called Lou Gehrig’s disease.
The trial would test whether a technique anatomy professor Clive Svendsen has pioneered on rats afflicted with the disease is safe to use on people. If successful, Svendsen said a much larger clinical trial aimed at treating the disease could be under way in two or three years.
…..
The research does not involve human embryonic stem cells, the blank-slate cells derived from human embryos that can be molded into any type of tissue cell in the body.
The circulation of daily U.S. newspapers is 55.2 million, down from 62.3 million in 1990. The percentages of adults who say they read a paper “yesterday” are ominous:
- 65 and older — 60 percent.
- 50-64 — 52 percent.
- 30-49 — 39 percent.
- 18-29 — 23 percent
Americans ages 8 to 18 spend an average of 6 hours and 21 minutes a day with media of all sorts but just 43 minutes with print media.
The combined viewership of the network evening newscasts is 28.8 million, down from 52.1 million in 1980. The median age of viewers is 60. Hence the sponsorship of news programming by Metamucil and Fixodent. Perhaps we are entering what David T.Z. Mindich, formerly of CNN, calls “a post-journalism age.”
David Weinberger (activist blogger):
It’s an interesting experience: You get to hone a topic to 90 seconds, memorize it, and talk into a camera in an isolated room. Plus, they send a limo for you. (It’s possible they pay, but I forgot to ask.) They’re nice people and were happy with the two pieces I did for them. But…
They want reports on what moderate left and right wing bloggers — “Nothing out of the mainstream,” the producer told me yesterday — say about a “major” topic. What the hell does that have to do with blogging? And when two of the producers yesterday independently suggested that I report on the blogosphere’s reaction to a Vietnam veteran spitting on Jane Fonda, I blurted out — because the flu had lowered my normal Walls of Timidity — that this wasn’t a job I’m comfortable with.
This is the Urban Madison web site. It is a home for informations and discussions about preserving the unique urban environment that we have in Madison.
It is for people that live in, work in, shop in, or do just about anything in urban Madison.
Our efforts to Save the Woman’s Building is what brought us together to discuss issues like this. We look forward to your participation in our neighborhoods and discussions.
Great article by Bruce Weber on the President of the Cooper Institute, a non-profit organization in Dallas dedicated to research on the relationship between living habits and health:
“I’m a short, fat guy who runs every day,” Dr. Blair said in a recent phone interview. “I’ve run tens of thousands of miles over the past 40 years, and in that time I’ve gained 30 pounds.”
This doesn’t exactly please Dr. Blair. (People who are skinny and never exercise “are going straight to hell,” he said, “because they’re living in paradise now.”) But he was using himself, he said, to illustrate why the federal government’s new physical activity recommendations, which are clearly aimed at the alarming rise in obesity in America, are misleading. Even though he has been doing what the guidelines advise for decades, it hasn’t controlled his weight.