GM CEO Rick Wagoner “referring to GM, Ford Motor and Chrysler,” in the FT (Simon+Guerrera, “GM Chief Defends Reliance on SUVs,” 6 June ’08; liberated version here).
Is it the US manufacturers who are stupid? I don’t think so. You have to recognise that the consumer makes the call here … and we are reacting.
So how [...]
Slide 3 of ANSI’s “Standards and Conformity Assessment Bodies of the United States” (PPT, version 2006-07-21):
Explanation:
The primary purpose of the chart is to attempt to portray, in high-level, block diagram form, the entities of the standards and conformity assessment systems of the United States, their and primary inter-relationships and relationships to international and regional organizations—on [...]
Peter Van Dijck’s excellent 2003 “Themes and Metaphors in the Semantic Web Discussion.”
A gloss on it + an ASCII version (of some version) of it here.
Kamber + Arango, “4,000 U.S. Combat Deaths, and Just a Handful of Images,” NYT (26 July ’08):
News organizations say that such restrictions are one factor in declining coverage of the war, along with the danger, the high cost to financially ailing media outlets and diminished interest among Americans in following the war. By a recent [...]
(Like lots of things, this news is a few weeks old.)
Indy software developers, meet the ISO:
The new standard, ISO 32000-1, Document management – Portable document format – Part 1: PDF 1.7, is based on the PDF version 1.7 developed by Adobe. This International Standard supplies the essential information needed by developers of software that create [...]
Matthew Fuller and Usman Haque, with illustrations by David Cuesta:
This document proposes that another lesson can be learned for architecture from computing: the way in which software is made. Here, we want to concentrate on the current most significant mode of software development—Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS)—steering clear of ubicomp fantasies that may [...]
Citing the Veeck decision (7 June ’02), Carl Malamud and Public.Resource.Org have posted the building, fire, electrical, plumbing, and mechanical Public Safety Codes for the state of California. In itself, this may excite a handful of people, but the following statement makes its importance clear:
The courts have long held that the law is public [...]
That’s the title of a paper delivered at Appropriate Healthcare Technologies for Developing Countries 2008 (program here) by Michael Dobson MRCP, FRCA, University of Oxford, UK, Robert Neighbour C.Eng, F.I.E.T., Diamedica Ltd, UK.
Abstract: The anaesthetic standards committees of the ISO are dominated by representatives from equipment manufacturers. The standards produced are such that their main [...]
ICANN has a formidable track record of screwing up new new global top-level domains (gTLDs). The seven it approved in 2000 (.aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum, .name, and .pro) are a smorgasbord of ways to fail. The 2005 round (.cat, .jobs, .mobi, .tel, and .travel) isn’t looking much better—compared to, say, .biz, which is a [...]
Right-turn-on-red (“RTOR,” in some circles) was introduced nationwide in the mid-1970s as part of a broad, national fuel-saving strategy in response to the “Arab fuel embargo” of 1973–74 (context here). The goal was to save gas by minimizing idling.
In a tribute to former Senator Dale Bumpers, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia said:
The above discourse [...]