Here are some of the email's former-FEMA directory Michael Brown sent during the crisis. I'm still reading. Congressioanl analysis about the email is here. To sum it up, Brown was full of crap at his appearence before Congress. He was not a good leader and utterly failed to response to the worsening conditions or act on opinions that fell into his lap.

Tom, Nick: Can we load the email senders/recipients into that social network mapping code you guys have to see who communicated with who and how strong the ties are. It could be cool to see if we can determine who picked up the slack and was making all the decisions. At the very least we can see who knew when and what they did about it.

Brown's emails during Katrina (PDF)

Y Combinator is a new kind of venture firm specializing in funding very early stage startups. We help startups through what is for many the hardest step, from idea to company.

We invest mostly in software and Web services. And because we are ourselves technology people, we prefer groups with a lot of technical depth. We care more about how smart you are than how old you are, and more about the quality of your idea than whether you have a formal business plan.

Very cool concept, the deadline for their second batch of funding is past but there's always next time. Basically they provide you all the money you need to survive for a few months during which you do nothing but work on developing a prototype and business plan -- in return they have an investment in your company should it succeed.

Put on your thinking caps

Open Source Projects

Everyone always talks about how Google uses open source. Here is a list of open source projects google has started all of which are hosted on SourceForge.

Google Code: Projects

1 Some electronic voting systems did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, thus making it possible to alter them without detection.

2 It is easy to alter a file defining how a ballot appears, making it possible for someone to vote for one candidate and actually be recorded as voting for an entirely different candidate.

3 Falsifying election results without leaving any evidence of such an action by using altered memory cards.

4 Access to the voting network was easily compromised because not all digital recording electronic voting systems (DREs) had supervisory functions password-protected, so access to one machine provided access to the whole network.

5 Supervisory across to the voting network was also compromised by repeated use of the same user IDs combined with easily guessed passwords.

6 The locks protecting access to the system were easily picked and keys were simple to copy.

7 One DRE model was shown to have been networked in such a rudimentary fashion that a power failure on one machine would cause the entire network to fail.

8 GAO identified further problems with the security protocols and background screening practices for vendor personnel.

Holy shit!

Daily Kos: Nonpartisan GAO Confirms Security Flaws in Voting Machines

As the baby boomers retire, will it help or hurt high tech?

I think it can only help.

In the U.S. the Baby Boom generation includes anyone born from 1946-64, which means everyone 41-59 years old. Those ages generally cover the top technical management positions in most companies and universities and they are starting to retire.

The implications are huge. Imagine 100,000 engineers and programmers leaving the U.S. work force every year for the next 18 years, because that's what is going to happen. Some of those people will find other careers, but most of them will be motivated less by money than they were earlier in their lives. Most of them will want to remain active. And once a nerd always a nerd, so I think many of them will gravitate to Open Source.

But this new generation of retirees started with Pascal, quickly transferred to C, and has been doing object-oriented programming or program management for at least the last decade. Even the retiring Visual Basic programmers, of which there are literally millions, have skill sets that easily transfer into the projects being developed today.

So we're likely to have an influx of talent into Open Source projects, supplanting the mid-20s geeks that have been pushing that business. Yes, they are retired and therefore not inclined to stay up all night, but maybe they don't need to stay up all night, either. There's something to be said for wisdom.

Columns like this are why I read Cringley. Everyone writes about Microsoft's Vista or the latest Apple rumor. Cringley tends to take interesting events that aren't always tech related and look at them through a tech lens.

I had not considered the implications of the boomers in the light before. Very cool.

PBS | I, Cringely . October 27, 2005 - Changing the Guard

Nice remix of the soundtrack from Donkey Kong Country. I rediscovered it on my MP3 player today. Download it, its free.

Kong in Concert - Donkey Kong Country Arrangement Collaboration

Americans don’t accept evolution

Polls for many years have shown that a majority of Americans are at odds with key scientific theory. For example, as CBS poll this month found that 51 percent of respondents believed humans were created in their present form by God. A further 30 percent said their creation was guided by God. Only 15 percent thought humans evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years.

Other polls show that only around a third of American adults accept the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, even though the concept is virtually uncontested by scientists worldwide.

“When we ask people what they know about science, just under 20 percent turn out to be scientifically literate,” said Jon Miller, director of the centre for biomedical communication at Northwestern University.

He said science and especially mathematics were poorly taught in most US schools, leading both to a shortage of good scientists and general scientific ignorance.

US school students perform relatively poorly in international tests of mathematics and science. For example, in 2003 US students were ranked 24th in an international test that measured the mathematical literacy of 15-year-olds, below many European and Asian countries.

Scientists bemoan the lack of qualified US candidates for postgraduate and doctoral studies at American universities and currently fill around a third of available science and engineering slots with foreign students.

The larger article is very important but I found these statistics frightening.

American's view on The Big bang, Evolution, and Science

Elonka wrote:

10.28.05 - As we near completion of our speaker selection process, we are excited to clue you in on the second round of selected speakers for ShmooCon 2006, which includes: Richard Bejtlich, Damin, Deviant Ollam, Elonka Dunin, HellNbak, Jason Scott, Hendrik Scholz, Eric Smith, Joel Wilbanks, and superstar of "The Matrix: Reloaded"... Fyodor!

Shaping up to be quite a con! Who else is planning on going? January 13-15, 2006, Washington DC.

Elonka :)

Hehe, I'm flying up Friday morning, my talk is friday night.

I'm trying to help out with Shmoo's Hacker Arcade which sounds cool as hell. I also plan to visit Abend's magstripe talk and see if he's doing anything cool.

ShmooCon 2006

Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president?

News outlets both right and left are going to be giving you the big numbers (41% approval rating across party lines, 55% view presidency as a "failure" across party lines, 54% believe Iraq war was a mistake, 53% believe Bush deliberately lied to the public) but here at Memestreams we give you the raw figures and let you observe the trends!

There is a nice battery of questions here from Supreme Court Nominees to Iraq to the Plame scandal, with several months of polling samples for the big issues. The only thing lacking that I wanted to see were hurricane questions. Good read.

USATODAY.com - Bush poll raw stats

Libby resigned Friday after a federal grand jury indicted him on charges related to the leak probe, including one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury and two counts of making false statements.

While their were no indictments for revealing Plame's identity, I think there can be no doubt that White House officals did do something they shouldn't have or perceived they had done something they shouldn't have to the point they were willing to lie about it.

Cheney's top aide Lewis Libby indicted, resigns - Oct 28, 2005