austinpoet writes in with a blog post debunking the theory we discussed a few days back that scientists' beer consumption is linearly correlated with the quality of their work. Chris Mack, Gentleman Scientist and beer drinker, has analyzed the paper and found it is severely flawed. From his analysis: "The discovered linear relationship between beer consumption and scientific output had a correlation coefficient (R-squared) of only about 0.5 — not very high by my standards, though I suspect many biologists would be happy to get one that high in their work... Thus, the entire study came down to only one conclusion: the five worst ornithologists in the Czech Republic drank a lot of beer."

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This gem of a post recently popped up in my Techmeme/TechCrunch RSS feed. its Michael Arrington lamenting the hassle/aggravation/frustration of having to deal with a daily onslaught of thousands of emails.

Michael, I feel your pain. Making my email readily available seemed like a really smart thing to do when I first bought the Mavs in 2000. In hindsight, it was a huge mistake. Now of the thousand plus emails I get in a day, a hundred may be of the "You Suck" variety. Another 100 or so are of the "I want " variety. I would say that less than 20pct of the emails I get in any given day are truly of any interest and value to me and 99pct of those are from employees.

The good news is that I have a filter system setup so that I can push emails from people I already know or do business with into folders that I know are of relative importance.

Yet, I still trudge through the emails from the sports people who want to rant for the sake of ranting, giving them the shortest of glances, just in case they truly are a customer of the Mavs with a valid issue. I still glance at the "I want" emails, just in case there is something of truly redeeming value.

Unfortunately, there is one element of email that I have been forced to give up on. I have emails going back to the 1980s. Starting in about 1994, I have as many emails as I have been able to save as possible, up until about 12 months ago.

I had always wanted to keep each and every email I ever got figuring that it would be a history of my life that my kids and their kids could look back at just as I loved to look at old postcards, letters and pictures of my parents and grandparents. I kept as much as I could. I would estimate that I am well past 1mm emails in aggregate to date.

But as people got broadband, they started sending bigger and bigger attachments. So the attachments were the first thing to go. Then as people added mobile email, the volume exploded. Everything became email worthy. Which took my email files to sizes they have never been before. In fact, the biggest hassle in dealing with all of this is the 4gbs limit to copying files in Windows platforms. Zipping works, most of the time, but not all and the not all times make it not worth risking

So I started breaking them into smaller and smaller files, which just made things harder to manage and find. Even with indexing software out there.

And as far as moving everything over to my mac ? Entourage ? Setting up rules in Entourage or any mac mail i have tried takes an eternity. Try recreating more than 1k rules. Even trying to set them up as they come in hinders my productivity to an unacceptable level. So now I survive with my Windows Mail Server Box and my laptops taking in only current email.

So Michael, I feel your pain. The idea of living "The Email Life" worked so well for so long. Now, each day I say goodbye to my little email friends, I feel like Im cheating the future.


So now I just keep what I need to keep. HDNet, Mavs, 2929 stuff that I need to have available for reference.

Its kind of disapp

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antipeon alerts us to a presidential preference survey, done in late February and early March, indicating that Obama and McCain lead among IT workers with 29% each. Clinton follows with 13%, just ahead of Huckabee (11%) and Ron Paul (9%). The Computing Technology Industry Association commissioned the poll, and the article notes that this trade group claims the population of IT workers is four times as large as the Bureau of Labor Statistics thinks it is — the better to make a voting block whose views must be attended to.

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thevirtualcat found some inconsistencies in IE8's Acid2 results that made him wonder what's going on. Can anyone replicate these results or, better yet, explain them? Update: 03/22 23:54 GMT by KD : Several readers pointed out this has to do with cross-site scripting prevention, as described here.

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thevirtualcat found some inconsistencies in IE8's Acid2 results that made him wonder what's going on. Can anyone replicate these results or, better yet, explain them?

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h4rm0ny notes the furor over an anti-Islamic movie due to be released on the Web in the next week. After Pakistan disrupted YouTube worldwide over an interview with right-wing Dutch MP and filmmaker Geert Wilders, Network Solutions, acting as host as well as registrar, has suspended Wilders's site promoting the 15-minute film "Fitna" (a Koranic term translated as "strife"). The site now displays a notice that it is under investigation for possible violations of NetSol's acceptable use policy. According to the article the company's guidelines include "a sweeping prohibition against 'objectionable material of any kind or nature.'" The article describes the site's content before NetSol pulled the plug as a single page with the film's title, an image of the Koran, and the words "Coming Soon." No one but Wilders has seen the film to date. The Dutch government has distanced itself from the film, fearing Muslim backlash. A million Muslims live in The Netherlands. Wilders's party, which controls 9 of 150 seats in the Dutch parliament, was elected on an anti-immigration platform.

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At least one university liberal enough to accept the deeply flawed and mostly rejected Vista OS is recommending faculty and students stay away from SP1. "University of Pennsylvania tech staffers are advising faculty and students not to upgrade their computers to the new service pack for Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system. The school's Information Systems & Computing department said it will support Vista SP1 on new systems where it's pre-installed, but added that it 'strongly recommends that all other users adopt a "wait and see" attitude,' according to a newly published department bulletin." And CIO magazine doesn't quite go so far as to call on Microsoft to throw away Vista, but it does ask its readers to weigh in on that topic.

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The God Plays Dice blog has an entertaining post on how the date of Easter is calculated. Wikipedia has all the messy details of course, but the blog makes a good introduction to the topic. "Easter is the date of the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after March 21... [T]he cycle of Easter dates repeat themselves every 5,700,000 years. The cycle of epacts (which encode the date of the full moon) in the Julian calendar repeat every nineteen years. There are two corrections made to the epact, each of which depend[s] only on the century; one repeats (modulo 30, which is what matters) every 120 centuries, the other every 375 centuries, so the [p]air of them repeat every 300,000 years. The days of the week are on a 400-year cycle, which doesn't matter because that's a factor of 300,000. So the Easter cycle has length the least common multiple of 19 and 300,000, which is 5,700,000 [years]."

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Today's guest is Matt Stoller.

http://sundaygang.com/004.mp3

"I'm a DC-based political activist and consultant, and I blog at the new strategy site OpenLeft.com. I work on telecom politics, progressive movement building, Democratic primary challengers, and analyzing internet-enabled coalition politics. I'm the President of Blogpac, a political action committee that funds progressive blogs and candidates."

Links mentioned in today's show:

http://www.theopenhouseproject.com/

http://www.mysociety.org/projects

http://responsibleplan.com/

Researchers from the University of Maryland have recently discovered three asteroids that appear to be roughly 4.55 billion years old, dating back to the formation of the Solar System. The scientists say that the asteroids have survived relatively unchanged since that time, and make good candidates for future space missions. "'The fall of the Allende meteorite in 1969 initiated a revolution in the study of the early Solar System,' said Tim McCoy, curator of the national meteorite collection at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. 'I find it amazing that it took us nearly 40 years to collect spectra of these [CAI-rich] objects and that those spectra would now initiate another revolution, pointing us to the asteroids that record this earliest stage in the history of our Solar System.'"

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Anonymous Coward writes "Garth Freeman, CEO of Australia's first WiMax operator, sat down at the recent International WiMax Conference in Bangkok and unleashed a tirade about the failings of the technology, leaving an otherwise pro-WiMax audience stunned. His company, Buzz Broadband, had deployed a WiMax network over a year ago, and Freeman left no doubt about what conclusions he had drawn. He claimed that 'its non-line of sight performance was "non-existent" beyond just 2 kilometres from the base station, indoor performance decayed at just 400m and that latency rates reached as high as 1000 milliseconds. Poor latency and jitter made it unacceptable for many Internet applications and specifically VoIP, which Buzz has employed as the main selling point to induce people to shed their use of incumbent services.' We've previously discussed the beginnings of WiMax as well as recent plans for a massive network in India.

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Bruce Schneier's latest blog entry points out an interesting analysis of how quantum computing will affect public encryption. The author takes a look at some of the mathematics involved with using a quantum computer to run a factoring algorithm, and makes some reasonable assumptions about the technological constraints faced by the developers of the technology. He concludes that while quantum computing could be a threat to modern encryption, it is not the dire emergency some researchers suggest.

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The New York Times is running a story about how hope is fading for the implementation of municipal wireless access in cities across the US. Major cities and small towns alike are finding that ISPs are withdrawing from such plans due to the low profitability of ventures that are similar to Philadelphia's incomplete network. We've previously discussed Chicago's and San Francisco's wireless status, and also some of the stumbling blocks other cities have faced. From the Times: "In Tempe, Ariz., and Portland, Ore., for example, hundreds of subscribers have found themselves suddenly without service as providers have cut their losses and either abandoned their networks or stopped expanding capacity. EarthLink announced on Feb. 7 that 'the operations of the municipal Wi-Fi assets were no longer consistent with the company's strategic direction.' Philadelphia officials say they are not sure when or if the promised network will now be completed."

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wanderindiana brings us an update on the White House missing emails mess, which we have discussed before. It seems the hard drives of many White House computers are gone beyond the possibility of recovery. Is it unusual in your experience for, say, a corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy? "Older White House computer hard drives have been destroyed, the White House disclosed to a federal court Friday in a controversy over millions of possibly missing e-mails from 2003 to 2005. The White House revealed new information about how it handles its computers in an effort to persuade a federal magistrate it would be fruitless to undertake an e-mail recovery plan that the court proposed."

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