WhichWasNice

Psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, who has spent his long career studying war and extremist political movements, comments on the prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq: Even though Iraq is very different from Vietnam, it's also a counterinsurgency war in which there's a lot of fear and uncertainty about who the enemy is and how to pin him down. An average person entering into that Abu Graib prison environment would be capable of committing atrocities because he or she was entering an atrocity-producing situation. From that standpoint, atrocities are not so much an individual expression as a group expression. The environment, which creates enormous pressures on the individual, creates the atrocity.

Beaches worldwide bear witness to the ugly impact of plastic debris on our oceans. Milk jugs, water bottles, cigarette lighters, diaper liners, jar lids, cheap toys, and goodness knows what else festoon tide lines today. But this may just scratch the surface. A new study suggests that microscopic bits of plastic have sifted, unseen, throughout the marine environment. The plastic not only litters the beach, it is — like fine bits of sand — becoming the beach. (From National Geographic). But while the environmental effects are still unknown, Thompson says there is one crystal-clear message from the study: "We should try to be more responsible with how we dispose of litter, and where possible, re-use and recycle plastics because they might last hundreds if not thousands of years."

The military desire to control the public view of events in a combat zone is well known. The ability to actually do it is perhaps less well appreciated. Take Iraq for instance: it is easy to obtain a count of the number of casualties sustained by US and US-led forces. (A quick search on Google found this site and many others.) It is slightly harder but not impossible to find the single site that provides a count of the number of Iraqi civilians killed in the same time period.

As of the time of writing (May 2004) these sources state that 9061 Iraqi civilians, 774 US soldiers, and 108 US-led soldiers have been killed.

Since the invasion of Iraq commenced the prevailing point of view has been that "the number of Iraqi [military] dead may be unknowable". But is the scale of Iraqi military casualties really unknowable? Historians and war critics say it does matter — that such [casualty] figures should be part of any conversation about war... "Iraqi losses are so heavy that it would in some ways further the image that the U.S. is a bully because the Iraqis are so overmatched," said Mark Parillo, a military historian at Kansas State University. (from the Stars & Stripes).

Another hidden statistic seems to be the number of Iraqis held in detention. This article estimates that American forces [are] holding between 10,000 and 12,000 detainees in Iraq but that the precise details are not being released, despite a legal obligation to do so. There has been a justifiable uproar about the alleged abuse of these detainees, but the spotlight seems to be totally focussed on controversial images despite the confirmed reports that 25 prisoners have died in US custody while in each instance of homicide the perpetrators have not been brought to trial.

David DeLano and Linda Rising have published this useful pattern language: Testing of systems is presently more of an art than a science, even considering current procedures and methodologies that support a more rigorous approach to testing. This becomes even more apparent during the testing of large, embedded systems that have evolved over time. To deliver the best possible product, the role of a System Tester has become vital in the lifecycle of product development. This pattern language has been derived from the experience of veteran System Testers to help System Testers evaluate the readiness of a product for shipping to the customer. Though these patterns have been derived from experience during the system test phase of the product lifecycle, many of the patterns are orthogonal to all testing phases... These patterns have been grouped according to their usefulness in the system testing process: The Test Organization, Testing Efficiency, Testing Strategy, and Problem Resolution.

From DeveloperWorks: PEAK is a Python framework for rapidly developing and reusing application components. While Python itself is already a very-high-level language, PEAK provides even higher abstractions, largely through the clever use of metaclasses and other advanced Python techniques. In many ways, PEAK does for Python what J2EE does for Java. Part of the formalization in PEAK comes in the explicit specification of protocols, specifically in the separately available package PyProtocols.

Terry Jones (yes, him from the Pythons) wrote: You can call people who are defending their own homes from rockets and missiles launched from helicopters and tanks "fanatics and terrorists" only for so long. Eventually even newspaper readers will smell a rat. Similarly it's fiendishly difficult to get people to accept the label "rebels" for those Iraqis killed by American snipers when - as in Falluja - they turn out to be pregnant women, 13-year-old boys and old men standing by their front gates. It also sounds a bit lame to call ambulance drivers "fighters" - when they've been shot through the windscreen in the act of driving the wounded to hospital - and yet what other word can you use without making them sound like illegitimate targets?

From The Guardian newspaper: the 1970 UN general assembly established the famous target of 0.7% of GDP of donor governments to be spent on overseas aid. The commission should consider why, 34 years later, just five countries currently pass that target (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Netherlands and Luxembourg).

Spot the differences:
Somnifugi is an implementation of JMS that works inside a single JVM to send JMS Messages between Threads.
Twisted [is] an event-driven networking framework written in Python and licensed under the LGPL. Twisted supports TCP, UDP, SSL/TLS, multicast, Unix sockets, a large number of protocols (including HTTP, NNTP, IMAP, SSH, IRC, FTP, and others)

I suspect that many of those not fortunate enough to be IT professionals think of Bill Gates as a man of destiny: a titan who bestrides the world single-handedly changing the course of mortal events. However a survey of IT security professionals conducted at the Infosecurity show in London this week found that "80 percent of security professionals do not believe that Bill Gates' crusade against spam will solve the problem... It is going to take a combination of technology, legislation and a change in working practices" I wonder which view is right?

According to the Royal Academy of Engineering and the British Computer Society: It is a cardinal mistake to select suppliers for a complex IT project on the basis of price alone, since it is very difficult for suppliers to accurately predict costs at the outset. If a customer is asking for something unrealistic or ultra-high risk, the supplier should tell the customer and encourage them to review the project. "Projects are often poorly defined, codes of practice are frequently ignored and there is a woeful inability to learn from past experience," says Professor McDermid. "The role of systems architects is critical - their job is to translate a business vision into a technical blueprint. They often hold the keys to success in complex IT projects but they are in very short supply." Full story at Jobserve.