Later On

Bursts of fission are continuing to occur. The situation is far from resolved and may be becoming more dangerous. Hiroko Tabuchi reports in the NY Times:

Nuclear workers at the crippled Fukushima power plant raced to inject boric acid into the plant’s No. 2 reactor early Wednesday after telltale radioactive elements were detected there, and the plant’s owner admitted for the first time that fuel deep inside three stricken reactors was probably continuing to experience bursts of fission.

The unexpected bursts — something akin to flare-ups after a major fire — are extremely unlikely to presage a large-scale nuclear reaction with the resulting large-scale production of heat and radiation. But they threaten to increase the amount of dangerous radioactive elements leaking from the complex and complicate cleanup efforts.

The disclosures raise startling questions about how much remains uncertain at the plant, the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. The Japanese government has said that it aims to bring the reactors to a stable state known as a “cold shutdown” by the end of the year.

On Wednesday, the plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, said that gas from Reactor No. 2 indicated the presence of radioactive xenon and other substances that could be byproducts of nuclear fission. The presence of xenon 135 in particular, which has a half-life of just nine hours, seemed to indicate that fission took place very recently.

Trade Minister Yukuo Edano censured Japan’s nuclear regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, for failing to report the discovery to the prime minister’s office for hours, according to local media reports.

The developments added to disquiet over how information related to the disaster has been handled. For almost two months after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out vital cooling systems, setting the stage for disaster, both company and government officials declared it was unlikely that any meltdowns had occurred. They finally conceded that melted fuel had likely breached containments in three reactors, and that it was likely pooled at the bottom of the vessels. . .

Continue reading—there’s lots more and it’s all interesting. Notice how business and government collude in the attempts to keep secret any negative findings.

Of course we in California have just been reading about the LA Sheriff’s department criminally abused prisoners in their custody, and continued to do so even after the Sheriff was explicitly informed of the problem. So some of us wonder whether the police can handle these new powers. One great thing from the police point of view: it’s going to be hard for citizens to get cellphone videos of drone attacks at night.

Here’s the report, and I thank Nick for pointing it out:

This is what happens when business interests gain control of the government: they break out the snow shovels and march to the government treasury to start loading up on all that taxpayer money. (A wonderfully funny movie about just this theme: The Great McGinty, by Preston Sturges. I highly recommend you watch it.)

Norimitsu Onishi reports in the NY Times:

After three decades and nearly $1.6 billion, work on Kamaishi’s great tsunami breakwater was completed three years ago. A mile long, 207 feet deep and jutting nearly 20 feet above the water, the quake-resistant structure made it into the Guinness World Records last year and rekindled fading hopes of revival in this rusting former steel town.

But when a giant tsunami hit Japan’s northeast on March 11, the breakwater largely crumpled under the first 30-foot-high wave, leaving Kamaishi defenseless. Waves deflected from the breakwater are also strongly suspected of having contributed to the 60-foot waves that engulfed communities north of it.

Its performance that day, coupled with its past failure to spur the growth of new businesses, suggested that the breakwater would be written off as yet another of the white elephant construction projects littering rural Japan. But Tokyo quickly and quietly decided to rebuild it as part of the reconstruction of the tsunami-ravaged zone, at a cost of at least $650 million.

After the tsunami and the nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima, some Japanese leaders vowed that the disasters would give birth to a new Japan, the way the end of World War II had done. A creative reconstruction of the northeast, where Japan would showcase its leadership in dealing with a rapidly aging and shrinking society, was supposed to lead the way.

But as details of the government’s reconstruction spending emerge, signs are growing that Japan has yet to move beyond a postwar model that enriched the country but ultimately left it stagnant for the past two decades. As the story of Kamaishi’s breakwater suggests, the kind of cozy ties between government and industry that contributed to the Fukushima nuclear disaster are driving much of the reconstruction and the fight for a share of the $120 billion budget expected to be approved in a few weeks.

The insistence on rebuilding breakwaters and sea walls reflects a recovery plan out of step with the times, critics say, a waste of money that aims to protect an area of rapidly declining population with technology that is a proven failure.

Defenders say that if Kamaishi’s breakwater is not fixed, people and businesses will move away even faster for fear of another tsunami.

“There may be an argument against building a breakwater in a place with little potential to grow, but we’re not building a new one — we’re basically repairing it,” said Akihiro Murakami, 57, the top official in Kamaishi for the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, which oversees the nation’s breakwaters. “At this point, it’s the most efficient and cost-effective choice.”

After World War II, Japan built a line of coastal defenses that was longer than China’s Great Wall and ultimately stretched to a third of the Japanese coastline. The defenses allowed more Japanese, whose numbers rose to 125 million from 72 million in the five decades after 1945, to live and work hard by the sea.

Yet, even before the tsunami, the affected zone’s population was expected to age and shrink even faster than the rest of Japan’s, contracting by nearly half over the next three decades. Critics say that in cities like Kamaishi, where the population dropped from 100,000 people four decades ago to fewer than 40,000 before the tsunami, people should simply be moved away from the ravaged coast.

Japan’s dwindling resources would be better spent merging destroyed communities into inland “compact towns” offering centralized services, critics say. Unnecessary public works — Kamaishi’s reconstruction plans include building a rugby stadium — would merely hasten the tsunami zone’s decline by saddling it with high maintenance costs.

“In 30 years,” said Naoki Hayashi, a researcher at the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry, one of Japan’s biggest policy groups, “there might be nothing left there but fancy breakwaters and empty houses.”

A Web of Collusion

Even though the breakwater yielded economic benefits only to the vested interests that have a grip on the construction of Japan’s breakwaters, sea walls and ports, advocates of its reconstruction say it is vital to Kamaishi’s future. In addition to protecting the city against tsunamis, the breakwater was intended to create a modern international port that would accommodate container vessels and draw new companies here.

The birthplace of Japan’s modern steel industry, Kamaishi lived through economic booms for nearly a century, but by the early 1970s its major employer, Nippon Steel, was moving steel production to central Japan, where the flourishing auto industry was concentrated.

Construction, which began in 1978, was completed three years ago. By then, Nippon Steel had long since closed its two blast furnaces. Not a single container vessel had come here. Dependent on huge subsidies, Kamaishi’s port was one of the countless unused ports in Japan, derided as “fishing ponds” because the lack of ship traffic made them peaceful fishing spots.

“It was good for the ministry,” said Yoshiaki Kawata, a member of the government’s reconstruction design council, referring to the Land Ministry. “But the city declined. Businesses and people left.”

It was good not only for the ministry, but also for its allies in politics and business, who joined forces in the kind of collusive web that is replicated in many other industries.

For decades, Zenko Suzuki, a former prime minister who died in 2004, secured the money for this region’s breakwaters, sea walls and ports. He was supported by local businessmen like Kazunori Yamamoto, 65, the owner of Kamaishi’s biggest construction company, which helped build the breakwater.

Mr. Yamamoto once led a youth group that backed the politician, with whom he fondly remembered attending golf tournaments. “He took great care of me,” he said.

A career bureaucrat named Teruji Matsumoto headed the ministry division overseeing the breakwater’s construction in the early 1980s. In 1986, he joined Toa Construction, one of the three big marine construction companies that managed the breakwater’s construction, rising to chief executive in 1989.

Isao Kaneko, a high-ranking manager at Toa, said of Mr. Matsumoto, “Maybe someone looking from the outside would view it as collusion, but he was an absolutely indispensable person for our company.”

Reached by telephone, Mr. Matsumoto, now 84, declined to be interviewed, saying he was suffering from “depression” and “senility.”

Collapse After First Wave

Despite the breakwater’s failure to halt Kamaishi’s decline, its defenders contended that it was steadfastly protecting the city from tsunamis by sealing off the bay from the Pacific, except for a small opening for boats. The Land Ministry extolled its breakwater in a song, “Protecting Us for a Hundred Years.”

“It protects the steel town of Kamaishi, it protects our livelihoods, it protects the people’s future,” the song goes.

On March 11, the tsunami’s first wave reached Kamaishi 35 minutes after the earthquake struck off the northeast coast at 2:46 p.m. In a video shot from the third floor of a Land Ministry building facing the port, 48 people who have taken shelter can be heard in the background as they watch the breakwater’s collapse against the first wave.

“The breakwater is failing completely,” one man says softly as the waves spill over the breakwater, turning its inner wall into a white, foamy waterfall. Minutes later, the tsunami roars into Kamaishi, sweeping away nearly everything in its way.

The breakwater becomes visible seven minutes later as the first wave starts ebbing out of the city. “Wow, look at the shape of the breakwater!” an astonished man says. “It’s collapsed.” The camera zooms in on the breakwater, as the top of it lies twisted in fragments. As the people brace themselves for the tsunami’s second wave, an exasperated man says, “This breakwater isn’t working at all.”

Those in the building survived, but 935 Kamaishi residents died in the tsunami.

“I was disappointed,” said Yoshinari Gokita, an executive at Toa Construction who spent 10 years here working on the breakwater. “We all did our best. We used to say proudly that as long as it was there, everyone would be absolutely safe.”

Kamaishi is a hilly city with little flat land. Rising directly behind its port and central district, steep hills have long provided a natural tsunami shelter that was equipped with an elaborate network of evacuation stairways, pathways and resting areas after World War II. Most inside the tsunami-prone central district were within only a couple of hundred yards of the nearest evacuation stairway, reinforcing the belief that, despite the 35 minutes between the earthquake and the arrival of the first wave, many victims chose not to flee, believing they were safe.

Takenori Noda, Kamaishi’s mayor, said loudspeakers all over the city had warned people to flee. “But I do believe that, unconsciously, the breakwater’s presence did give people a false sense of security,” he said.

Conflicting Research

Within days, however, the Land Ministry commissioned an assessment of the breakwater’s performance. Drawing on the only tsunami data available, captured by a GPS tracking system set up 12 miles offshore, researchers used computer modeling to conclude that the breakwater had done its job: it had reduced the height of the first wave by 40 percent, delayed its landing by six minutes and saved countless lives.

The report, released less than three weeks after the tsunami, would prove decisive. It quickly became accepted wisdom in Kamaishi. It also supplied supporters of the breakwater’s reconstruction with their main argument.

The report was put together by . . .

Continue reading—there’s a lot more. It’s amazing how overt the corruption is, and how resistant to factual information people can be. And one cannot but think of the US and its military-Congressional-industrial complex and how that has drained our treasury for decades as the US squandered more money on military spending than all the other nations of the world combined.

The Finance Industry, by carefully tailoring the laws beforehand, have been able to escape any sort of punishment: not only do they face no hard time for their various forms of fraud, they even got the taxpayers to cover their losses: truly Scot-free.

But, as Simon Johnson points out in his fascinating article on how countries melt down economically through crony capitalism, once the debts reach a certain level, a game of musical chairs ensues: which of the wealthy power centers will take the hit, because the money is now insufficient to cover the debt. That’s when countries go to the IMF and do a weird little dance: getting the bad news of what they must do, leaving and trying to weave gold from straw for a while, back to ask again for help, being told again what they must do, retreat again to try even more desperate measures, … , and ultimately realizing that the music’s stopped and some will not have a chair. This can turn quite ugly, or it can be done efficiently.

The US is still in the denial phase, but the Jon Corzine-headed MF Global fund quite clearly lost its chair, and we even know when: sometime over last weekend about $630 million of customer money was taken from their accounts and apparently used to cover the margin calls for all the Spanish and Italian debt MF Global was backing. The money was there last Friday, it was gone by this past Monday (roughly speaking—I don’t think the exact details are yet public, though this story has a very good countdown and provides excellent and fascinating detail).

The fact that the money vanished within the past 7 days and that Mr. Corzine was intimately involved in its fate makes one wonder whether in this case there will action be some action taken. Corzine is certainly a member of the club: former president of Goldman Sachs, one-time US Senator, one-time governor (of New Jersey), now head of a company that just imploded and in the process stole $630 million from its customers. Will he, like so many, get away with it?

The story at the link is going to make a hell of a movie.

UPDATE: You can already see how Corzine will walk: he got regulators to grant his firm an exception to a regulation, so that his firm was allowed to borrow money from its customers accounts. So no laws broken, nothing to see, move along—and now he’s doubtless negotiating the bailout.

Some time back a commenter observed that the loft of this Edwin Jagger boar brush was unlikely to be sufficient to command a good reserve of lather. I’ve been using it off-camera for a while to break it in, and this morning I did a real shave. The commenter’s right: this brush seems to have been modeled on a badger brush: this loft would be ample for a badger brush, but for boar it doesn’t cut the mustard. For the same capacity as badger, boar seems to require more loft. When I think of the boar brushes that work well for me—the Omega Pro 48, Pro 49, the Vie-Long boar+horsehair—they all have appreciably longer lofts, longer than one would expect to see on a badger brush.

The Semogue 2000 takes a different tack: a larger knot diameter with a more moderate loft. Provided that could be packaged as a brush instead a splayed collection of bristles, that would probably work as well.

In any event, the challenge facing a boar brush is capacity, and this Edwin Jagger boar doesn’t have it.

Still: I got a fine lather each pass by returning to the soap, and I enjoyed a particularly fine shave today. The backstory: a new DE shaver who’s still at the stage of shaving on alternate days (with a cartridge razor: he’s just going to go to DE shaving now) asked for advice and in the process mentioned that he basically does one pass with the multiblade cartridge: with the grain on cheeks, across the grain on chin and lips, and against the grain on his neck.

Wowsa. First, I totally understand shaving on alternate days. When I was shaving with a multiblade cartridge razor, I shaved only on Mon, Wed, Fri. It’s true that multiblade cartridges make shaving easy, but they also make it tedious, boring, and a flaming pain. (It’s odd that the DE shave, which does require more attention and effort, is so much more pleasurable to use than a multiblade cartridge razor: saving lots of effort in shaving turns out to be not only unhelpful, but apparently counterproductive.)

I was explaining the normal progression of the shave, when it suddenly hit me that in the three-pass shave, you are changing the direction of the cut: from shaving with the grain you gradually (as gradually as you can, over the course of two passes) move to against the grain. As I wrote:

I’d stick with the grain for the first couple of shaves. Then follow it with an across-the-grain pass overall—i.e., one pass shaving with the grain everywhere, then relather and shave across the grain everywhere. The idea is to progressively reduce the stubble as you gradually move the angle from with the grain (easiest on the face with long stubble) to against the grain (toughest so you want the stubble as reduced as possible). Thus the mid-way direction has the stubble somewhat reduced—a good thing, since this is no longer cutting with the grain—and reduces the stubble more—so the next pass will have maximally reduced stubble before beginning.

Sorry for the long-windedness. I just wanted to trace it out. That’s the first time I thought of it as “gradually” bringing the razor around to shave in the opposite direction.

Thinking of that, I remembered the four-pass shave I mention in the book (and provide a link as well): with the grain, diagonally across the grain, diagonally the other direction across the grain, and finally against the grain. The first time I did this shave I was astonished at how very easy the ATG pass was with the stubble so markedly reduced. It was an eye-opener.

So I did a four-pass shave this morning, using the Eclipse Red Ring with a Swedish Gillette blade: extremely nice and once again the ATG pass was a breeze.

Finally, a splash of Alt Innsbruck and I’m good to go.

James Fallows has another chilling account of a person losing all their data, permanently. It’s worth reading for the prophylactic measures one should be taking. Here it is. Do please click and read. The data you save may be your own.

And, reminded again, I did set about and change some key passwords, using the passphrase generator described here.

And the lie is in writing. If someone doesn’t get severe punishment for this, then we’ve just given up. Karen Dillon reports in the Kansas City Star:

The long, epic fight over whether to build a coal-fired power plant in western Kansas has taken yet another strange twist:

A federal agency is accusing a state agency of telling tall tales to the highest court in Kansas.

The battle over the Sunflower coal-fired power plant currently is before the Kansas Supreme Court.

The state maintains the pollution levels it allowed in a permit to build the plant are safe for humans. The Sierra Club has filed a lawsuit saying they’re not.

They’re not, the Environmental Protection Agency has told the state in letters and discussions over the past two years.

But in their written arguments last month to the Supreme Court, Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) attorneys may have told a stretcher.

“EPA has no substantial objection to the issuance of the construction permit,” KDHE attorneys wrote.

EPA would not comment for this story, but a letter to KDHE from Karl Brooks, EPA Region 7 administrator, on Monday essentially speaks for itself, a spokesman said.

That letter says that “Kansas incorrectly informed the court” that EPA did not object to the permit.

The letter also said KDHE failed to inform the Supreme Court that it had received three letters from EPA saying the Sunflower permit was not strict enough.

A KDHE spokeswoman said officials would have no comment. . .

Continue reading.

“Empirical” seems to be a necessary prerequisite to “engineering,” don’t you think? Quite a fascinating article, and I’ve already ordered a Kindle version of the book. Greg Wilson and Jorge Aranda write in American Scientist:

Software engineering has long considered itself one of the hard sciences. After all, what could be “harder” than ones and zeroes? In reality, though, the rigorous examination of cause and effect that characterizes science has been much less common in this field than in supposedly soft disciplines like marketing, which long ago traded in the gut-based gambles of “Mad Men” for quantitative, analytic approaches.

A growing number of researchers believe software engineering is now at a turning point comparable to the dawn of evidence-based medicine, when the health-care community began examining its practices and sorting out which interventions actually worked and which were just-so stories. This burgeoning field is known as empirical software engineering and as interest in it has exploded over the past decade, it has begun to borrow and adapt research techniques from fields as diverse as anthropology, psychology, industrial engineering and data mining.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. The software industry employs tens of millions of people worldwide; even small increases in their productivity could be worth billions of dollars a year. And with software landing our planes, diagnosing our illnesses and keeping track of the wealth of nations, discovering how to make programs more reliable is hardly an academic question.

Where We Are
Broadly speaking, people who study programming empirically come at the problem from one of two angles. To some, the phrase software engineering has always had a false ring. In practice, very few programmers analyze software mathematically the way that “real” engineers analyze the strength of bridges or the resonant frequency of an electrical circuit. Instead, programming is a skilled craft, more akin to architecture, which makes the human element an important (some would say the important) focus of study. Hollywood may think that programmers are all solitary 20-something males hacking in their parents’ basement in the wee hours of the morning, but most real programmers work in groups subject to distinctly human patterns of behavior and interaction. Those patterns can and should be examined using the empirical, often qualitative tools developed by the social and psychological sciences.

The other camp typically focuses on the “what” rather than the “who.” Along with programs themselves, programmers produce a wealth of other digital artifacts: bug reports, email messages, design sketches and so on. Employing the same kinds of data-mining techniques that Amazon uses to recommend books and that astronomers use to find clusters of galaxies, software engineering researchers inspect these artifacts for patterns. Does the number of changes made to a program correlate with the number of bugs found in it? Does having more people work on a program make it better (because more people have a chance to spot problems) or worse (because of communication stumbles)? One sign of how quickly these approaches are maturing is the number of data repositories that have sprung up, including the University of Nebraska’s Software Artifact Infrastructure Repository, the archives of NASA’s highly influential Software Engineering Laboratory and the National Science Foundation–funded CeBASE, which organizes project data and lessons learned. All are designed to facilitate data sharing, amplifying the power of individual researchers.

The questions we and our colleagues seek to answer are as wide-ranging as those an anthropologist might ask during first contact with a previously unknown culture. How do people learn to program? Can the future success of a programmer be predicted by personality tests? Does the choice of programming language affect productivity? Can the quality of code be measured? Can data mining predict the location of software bugs? Is it more effective to design code in detail up front or to evolve a design week by week in response to the accretion of earlier code? Convincing data about all of these questions are now in hand, and we are learning how to tackle many others.

Along the way, our field is grappling with the fundamental issues that define any new science. How do we determine the validity of data? When can conclusions from one context—one programming team, or one vast project, like the development of the Windows Vista operating system—be applied elsewhere? And crucially, which techniques are most appropriate for answering different kinds of questions?

Some of the most exciting discoveries are described in a recent book called Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It, edited by Andy Oram and Greg Wilson (O’Reilly Media, 2011), in which more than 40 researchers present the key results of their work and the work of others. We’ll visit some of that research to give an overview of progress in this field and to demonstrate the ways in which it is unique terrain for empirical investigation.

Quality by the Numbers
A good example of the harvest that empirical studies are generating relates to one of the holy grails of software engineering: the ability to measure the quality of a program, not by running it and looking for errors, but by automated examination of the source code itself. Any technique that could read a program and predict how reliable it would be before it is delivered to customers would save vast sums of money, and probably lives as well.

One consistent discovery is that, in general, the more lines of code there are in a program, the more defects it probably has. This result may seem obvious, even trivial, but it is a starting point for pursuing deeper questions of code quality. Not all lines of code are equal: One line might add 2 + 2 while another integrates a polynomial in several variables and a third checks to see whether several conditions are true before ringing an alarm. Intuitively, programmers believe that some kinds of code are more complex than others, and that the more complex a piece of code is, the more likely it is to be buggy. Can we devise some way to measure this complexity? And if so, can the location of complexity hot spots predict where defects will be found?

One of the first attempts to answer this question was developed by Thomas J. McCabe and is known ascyclomatic complexity. McCabe realized that any program can be represented as a graph whose arcs show the possible execution paths through the code. The simplest graph is a straight chain, which represents a series of statements with no conditions or loops. Each if statement creates a parallel path through the graph; two such statements create four possible paths. Figure 2 shows a snippet of code extracted from a cross-platform download manager called Uget. The graph in part (b) shows the paths through the code; each if and loop adds one unit of complexity, giving this code an overall complexity score of 3.

Another widely used complexity measure is Maurice Halstead’s software science metric, which he first described in 1977. Instead of graph theory, it draws on information theory and is based on four easily measured features of code that depend on the number of distinct operators and operands, their total count, how easy they are to discriminate from one another and so on. Figure 2(c) shows the values for the sample piece of code in (a).

Hundreds of other metrics have been developed, published and analyzed over the past 30 years. In their chapter, Herraiz and Hassan use statistical techniques to explore a simple question: Are any of these metrics actually better at predicting errors than simply counting the number lines of source code? Put another way, if a complexity metric is highly correlated with the number of lines of source code, does it actually provide any information that the simpler measure does not?

For a case study, Herraiz and Hassan chose to examine the open-source Arch Linux operating system distribution, which yielded a sample of 338,831 unique source files in the C language. They calculated the measures discussed above, and several others, for each of these files, taking special account of header files (those consisting mainly of declarations that assist in code organization). They found that for nonheader files, where programs actually do their work, all the metrics tested showed a very high degree of correlation with lines of code. Checking for generalizability, the effect held for all but very small files. The authors drew a clear lesson: “Syntactic complexity metrics cannot capture the whole picture of software complexity.” Whether based on program structure or textual properties, the metrics do not provide more information than simply “weighing” the code by counting the number of lines.

Like all negative results, this one is a bit disappointing. However, that does not mean these metrics are useless—for example, McCabe’s scheme tells testers how many different execution paths their tests need to cover. Above all, the value here is in the progress of the science itself. The next time someone puts forward a new idea for measuring complexity, a validated, empirical test of its effectiveness will be there waiting for them.

Two-Headed Approach
Metrics research looks at the code that programmers produce, but at least as much research effort has focused on how they produce it. An interesting case is pair programming, a work style that burst onto the scene in the late 1990s (though people have been using it informally for as long as programming has existed). In pair programming, two programmers sit at a single workstation and create code together. The driver handles the keyboard and mouse, while the navigator watches, comments and offers corrections. Many programmers have noticed over the years that duos like this seem to produce code more quickly and with fewer bugs. If asked, they would probably say that the benefits arise because different people naturally notice different sorts of things, or because not having to type gives the navigator more time to think, or possibly that having an audience makes the driver think more carefully. But is pair programming actually better, and if so, which of the possible explanations is the reason?

The first empirical study of pair programming, by Temple University professor John Nosek in 1998, studied 15 programmers, 5 working alone (the control group), the other 10 in 5 pairs. A challenging programming problem was given, with a time limit of 45 minutes. The results were statistically significant. Solutions produced by the pairs took 60 percent more total time, but dividing the total time by two, they completed the tasks 20 percent faster. And the author of the study reported that the pairs produced higher-quality code.

Subsequent studies with larger groups over longer periods of time, summarized by Laurie Williams at North Carolina State University, have expanded on these early results. Pair programmers tend to produce code that is easier to understand, and they do so with higher morale. Their productivity may fall initially as the programmers adjust to the new work style, but productivity recovers and often surpasses its initial level as programmer teams acquire experience. Related studies have also given insight into what actually happens during pair programming. For example, successful pairs often don’t work together for a full day—pairing can be mentally exhausting. Changing partners regularly seems to help, and swapping roles periodically between driver and navigator helps keep programmers engaged.

These results can even influence hardware design. Some teams have two people who both do best when they have control of the keyboard. Why not provide dual keyboards and mice? Jan Chong and Tom Hurlbutt tested this approach at Stanford University in 2007 and found it a worthwhile advance in pair programming, a finding subsequently supported by additional studies by Andreas Höfer at the University of Karlsruhe and by Sallyann Freudenberg, a software coach. Once again, what we’re seeing is the science rapidly improving as early studies generate questions and methods for follow-on research.

What we also see is that being right isn’t always enough to effect change. Despite the accumulation of evidence in its favor, pair programming is still very much the exception in industry. Managers and programmers alike often brush the data away, clinging to the idea that putting two people on one job must double staffing requirements and therefore cannot deliver efficiency. This is an unfortunate phenomenon in many fields. Some people resist change tenaciously, even in the face of evidence and at the risk of failure.

Getting Good Programmers
Another holy grail of empirical software engineering research is finding a way to tell good programmers from bad. . .

Continue reading.

Some good primary colors in today’s shave. The Omega Pro 49 is another excellent boar brush—and truly a brush, unlike my Semogue 2000, which was merely a brush-shaped object. I soaked it while I showered, and then I worked up a Creamy Lather from the Czech & Speake in the Marvy mug. I’ve had no problem at all with the large C&S puck.

Three passes with the Gillette Special adjustable holding a Kai blade (or a Tesco: at any rate a featureless blade with no printing on it at all). Very pleasant three-pass shave, and then a dab of Castle Forbes Lavender balm.

I’m ready for a busy day: cleaning ladies, pre-surgery doctor appointment, and Pilates.

I get the feeling that there’s an awful lot the government wants to keep secret from us. Michael Grabell reports for ProPublica:

On Sept. 23, 1998, a panel of radiation safety experts gathered at a Hilton hotel in Maryland to evaluate a new device that could detect hidden weapons and contraband. The machine, known as the Secure 1000, beamed X-rays at people to see underneath their clothing.

One after another, the experts convened by the Food and Drug Administration raised questions about the machine because it violated a longstanding principle in radiation safety — that humans shouldn’t be X-rayed unless there is a medical benefit.

“I think this is really a slippery slope,” said Jill Lipoti, who was the director of New Jersey’s radiation protection program. The device was already deployed in prisons; what was next, she and others asked — courthouses, schools, airports? “I am concerned … with expanding this type of product for the traveling public,” said another panelist, Stanley Savic, the vice president for safety at a large electronics company. “I think that would take this thing to an entirely different level of public health risk.”

The machine’s inventor, Steven W. Smith, assured the panelists that it was highly unlikely that the device would see widespread use in the near future. At the time, only 20 machines were in operation in the entire country.

“The places I think you are not going to see these in the next five years is lower-security facilities, particularly power plants, embassies, courthouses, airports and governments,” Smith said. “I would be extremely surprised in the next five to 10 years if the Secure 1000 is sold to any of these.”

Today, the United States has begun marching millions of airline passengers through the X-ray body scanners, parting ways with countries in Europe and elsewhere that have concluded that such widespread use of even low-level radiation poses an unacceptable health risk. The government is rolling out the X-ray scanners despite having a safer alternative that the Transportation Security Administration says is also highly effective.

A ProPublica/PBS NewsHour investigation of how this decision was made shows that in post-9/11 America, security issues can trump even long-established medical conventions. The final call to deploy the X-ray machines was made not by the FDA, which regulates drugs and medical devices, but by the TSA, an agency whose primary mission is to prevent terrorist attacks.

Research suggests that anywhere from six to 100 U.S. airline passengers each year could get cancer from the machines. Still, the TSA has repeatedly defined the scanners as “safe,” glossing over the accepted scientific view that even low doses of ionizing radiation — the kind beamed directly at the body by the X-ray scanners — increase the risk of cancer. . .

Continue reading.

Completely in contradiction to pledges voluntarily made by President Obama and US Attorney General Eric Holder, who apparently are unable to exercise effective control of the organizations they head. Given the contradictions between their commitments and what occurs, the most charitable interpretation seems to be that they do not know what is going on in their areas of responsibility or are openly defied by their subordinates.

Here’s a recent report from McClatchy by Peter Hecht:

The U.S. drug agents’ vehicles rumbled past vineyards and cattle ranches, traversed winding roads through oak woodlands and cleared a gate marked with a sign: “Member, Mendocino Farm Bureau.”

Camouflaged and heavily armed, Drug Enforcement Administration officers brought a battering ram to the door of Matthew Cohen and a chain saw to cut down his 99 marijuana plants earlier this month.

The raid on Cohen’s Northstone Organics garden, which boasted of “farm direct” marijuana deliveries to medical users, has stoked a fierce debate over whether federal authorities sought to nullify California’s most renowned local regulatory program for medical marijuana cultivation.

In Mendocino County and beyond, Cohen, 34, was applauded as a leader who worked with local officials to initiate a program in which the sheriff issues $50 per-plant zip ties, with serial numbers, to enforce 99-plant limits for growers with dispensary contracts or documentation that they serve medical marijuana patients.

In a county infamous for black market marijuana growing and trafficking and distrust of the government nearly 100 local pot farmers signed up for the oversight program in two years. They paid more than $8,000 in annual fees each to let the sheriff inspect their gardens, count their plants and enforce environmental standards and rules for fencing and security.

Other Northern California counties were looking to emulate the Mendocino County model. Now those efforts are in doubt. And locals fear the raid may send Mendocino’s pot culture scurrying back to its illicit past.

“It’s paranoia season up here right now,” said Fran Harris, who with her husband, James Taylor Jones, runs a clothing store in the town of Laytonville and grows marijuana for medical users under the county-supervised program. “Matt (Cohen) may have been targeted to send a message. He was trying to promote doing it the right way. And the federal message is there is no right way.” . . .

Continue reading. The end of the article suggests the petty if not petulant motivations behind the raid:

. . . Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman, notified of the raid shortly beforehand, defended local efforts to regulate medical marijuana cultivation. The county restricts medicinal growers to 25 plants per property but allows residents with 5 acres or more to apply for special permits to grow a maximum of 99 plants.

“I would clearly say that what Matt Cohen was doing was in full compliance with our ordinance. And he was not violating Proposition 215,” the California medical marijuana law “under the interpretation we have,” Allman said.

Weeks before the raid, Mendocino County Supervisor John McCowen and a sheriff’s sergeant supervising the marijuana zip-tie program testified for the defense in a Sonoma County preliminary hearing for two of Cohen’s drivers charged with transporting pot for sale. They were stopped on two days in 2010 with a total of 2.3 pounds of marijuana in bags for 35 registered medical users.

The Mendocino officials testified that Northstone was operating legally under their county’s ordinance. Cohen and his lawyer say that infuriated Sonoma prosecutors. They suggested the neighboring county called the feds, triggering the raid on Northstone.

“The very day that they testified was the very day that the DEA did a flyover of Mr. Cohen’s property,” said William Panzer, a co-author of California’s medical marijuana law and attorney for the two drivers, Daniel Harwood, 33, of Willits and Timothy Tangney, 29, of Lucerne. “Maybe that’s a coincidence.”

The Supreme Court should re-think its ethical guidelines and standing. Ronald Goldfarb takes a look at the offenders:

It is “do-as-I-say, not what-I-do” time at the U.S. Supreme Court. In a majority opinion in a 2009 case involving the conflict of interest of a state Supreme Court justice in West Virginia, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote:

Courts, in our system, elaborate principles of law in the course of resolving disputes. The power and the prerogative of a court to perform this function rest, in the end, upon the respect accorded to its judgments. The citizen’s respect for judgments depends in turn upon the issuing court’s absolute probity. Judicial integrity is, in consequence, a state interest of the highest order. 

By that standard, the Supreme Court needs to review the actions of three of its own members. And if the courts won’t act, Congress should.

As Common Cause and Alliance for Justice have documented, the past activities of Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia raise questions about the propriety of some of their extracurricular experiences. In September, the two groups, along with more than 100 law professors and ethicists, called upon Congress to require the nine justices of the high court to apply to themselves the existing ethical code of conduct rules covering all other federal judges, and to require them to publicly provide valid reasons rejecting recusal for alleged conflicts of interests. As the professors pointed out, the Supreme Court now has no policy on recusal. The justices simply decide for themselves if they have a conflict of interest.

At a time when all government officials are held in diminishing repute, one would think the Supreme Court would not need to be told that it, of all institutions, is not beyond the law and is subject to meticulous standards over which it alone should not be the exclusive decision-maker. A recent poll found 46 percent of the public approves of the Supreme Court; a favorable view higher than that enjoyed by Congress and the president but lower than at any time since 2001. Fatuous criticisms of the federal judiciary by the current crop of Republican presidential candidates exacerbate the image problem – important for an unelected body’s power of moral suasion, and compounded by real problems like this one.

Lawyers are reticent to question the judiciousness of judges trying their cases, for obvious tactical reasons. Most judges are careful about displaying their dispassionate distance from the matters before them. The system usually works, and the rules governing judicial conduct and conflicts of interests are there to assure uniform and fair standards. It is perverse that the highest court in the country is not covered by the same ethics rules governing all their judicial colleagues, all the more so when the justices themselves are the sole arbiters of these questions when they arise. A classic truth of judicial behavior is that no one should be a judge in his or her own case. Yet the court has no guiding comprehensive code of ethics. Its denials of challenges are not reviewable or sanctionable.

Don’t expect the justices to discipline themselves. When it comes to its own administrative behavior, the justices consider themselves their only judges. Claims for televising its public proceedings, for example, are denied because they do not want to be viewed publicly – to be recognized in the supermarket, one of them said. As the late great jurist Jerome Frank observed, the justices historically have protected their mystic aloofness. Even the more liberal, now retired, Justice John Paul Stevens recently dismissed the call for reform of recusal and conflict of interest rules as something that doesn’t concern him. It seems justices – even admirable ones – take their institutional arrogance with them when they leave the court. Stevens just doesn’t get it that “we know what’s right and wrong about ourselves” isn’t an acceptable attitude for Supreme Court justices.

The prevailing 1973 Code of Conduct for judges sets out ground rules for assuring integrity and independence of federal judges, avoiding partiality (and the appearance of it), prohibiting activities inconsistent with their judicial obligations, and barring economic or political activity by them or their families.

The behavior of Justice Clarence Thomas calls into question the code’s rules about the private interests of family members. . .

Continue reading.

A darker photo this morning for unknown reasons, but you can make out the Omega 10048 (Pro 48) brush, another excellent boar brush and probably the best starting point for boar exploration. At $16, it’s not a great risk, and once it breaks in, as this one has, it is a marvelously soft brush, but with good backbone to make Creamy Lather.

And Creamy Lather is what I got from Saint Charles Shave’s Bulgarian Lavendar shaving soap. As is advisable when working with boar, go for an extended loading time, continuing to brush the soap vigorously even after lather has begun to form: the more soap you load into the brush, the creamier the lather that will result.

I brought out my 1930-ish Gillette NEW, this one the long-toothed model, and loaded it with a new Treet carbon-steel Black Beauty blade. I’m greatly enjoying my return to that blade, a blade that’s not for everyone (to say the least).

Three passes, a splash of SCS Bulgarian Lavender aftershave, and things are looking up.

The wrap-up Xmas shopping is now underway. As you plan for Xmas gifts for the shavers you know, take a look at the offerings of the artisanal soap and shaving-cream makers:

• Al’s Shaving
• Em’s Place
• Ginger’s Garden
• Honeybee Soaps
• Kell’s Original
• Mama Bear
• Nanny’s Silly Soap Company (in the UK)
• Prairie Creations
• QED
• Queen Charlotte Soaps
• Saint Charles Shave
• Scodioli
• The Shave Den