February 06, 2002 -
Q&A: Steve Ballmer--trust us - By Charles Cooper, Special
to ZDNet News, REDMOND, Wash.--Little in Steve Ballmer's two years
as CEO resembles the scope of the challenge Microsoft embarks upon
this month, when the company will go into lockdown mode to conduct a
top-to-bottom review of its software code. Call it March Madness, one
month early...
February 06, 2002 -
The
media dinosaur: Premature extinction - By Jack Shafer,
SLATE.COM, Author-filmmaker Michael Crichton's predicted in 1993
that traditional media such as the New York Times would be extinct
within a decade. Reports of death of The New York Times were greatly
exaggerated. “To my mind, it is likely that what we now understand as
the mass media will be gone within ten years,” novelist-filmmaker
Michael Crichton wrote in a widely quoted Wired magazine piece, “Mediasaurus,”
which he adapted from an April 1993 speech before the National Press
Club. “Vanished, without a trace.”
February 12, 2002 -
Same as
it ever was - The vanishing American voter is a myth - Turns
out we are as apathetic about voting as our elders were... By
Jonathan Alter, SPECIAL TO MSNBC.COM, NEW YORK, The disappearing
American voter — he (or she) is almost a cliché; has been for years.
What stump speech is complete without some ritualized regret over
declining voter participation? What self-respecting foundation lacks a
program to fund “civic engagement”? What publication doesn’t do its
share of tsk-tsking over eligible voters who won’t get off their duffs
on election day and go to the polls? What’s wrong with this picture?
...
February 12, 2002 -
Stop Paying for E-Mail Spam - Enterprises are being besieged
with increasingly more junk e-mail. It may be inherently worthless,
but spam doesn't come free. It hogs your bandwidth, diverts your
employees from their daily tasks, and, if the message is potentially
offensive or X-rated, it could land your company in court...
February 6, 2002 -
Pleading for a Social Conscience - By Paulo Rebêlo, Wired
News, PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil -– The World Social Forum wrapped up
several months of business with the usual proposals for making the
world a better place, but the stark reality remains: All talk is
meaningless unless the richest nations pitch in and help. The forum,
founded as a kind of social riposte to the capitalists who make up the
World Economic Forum, hosted 28 separate conferences and more than 700
seminars dedicated to a range of subjects. Among the themes touched
upon in this southern Brazilian town: the production of wealth,
dealing with unemployment, labor relations, civil rights, prejudice
and racism, ethics, religion and, yes, even socialism as a living and
breathing concept...
February 28, 2002
-
Try it and see -
PHILADELPHIA, From The Economist print edition,
In the social sciences, it is often supposed, there can be no such thing
as a controlled experiment. Think again... IN THE scientific pecking
order, social scientists are usually looked down on by their peers in
the natural sciences. Real scientists do experiments to test their theories—or,
if they cannot, try to look for natural phenomena that can act in lieu
of experiments. Social scientists, it is widely thought, do not subject
their own hypotheses to any such rigorous treatment. Worse, they peddle
their untested hypotheses to governments, and try to get them turned
into policies...
