Tim Oren's Due Diligence

Climategate in Plain English

Apparently it takes a Finnish television station to put a narrative to the Climategate disclosures, since our own MSM unaccountably seems to have checked out on the story. The link is to the English transcript; I'm sure the original video is quite interesting should you happen to speak Finnish.

Photoshop Forensics

Here's an awesome How-To on detecting manipulations of digital images. Many of the techniques rest on the difference in image statistics among natural captures, algorithmic manipulations and manual editing. Good stuff if you're interested in how 'fauxtography' can be detected and dissected.

Hat tip to Tyler Cowen.

Samsung Fail - The End of the Story

About three weeks back I posted about the premature failure of the Samsung plasma TV that I had previously raved about. Five weeks from new to dead is no one's idea of good quality, but it did give me a chance to see Samsung's customer support and warranty response in action, so worth a somewhat belated write-up.

I'd rate Samsung's customer support line at C+. Short hold time and a polite agent. Started out with the usual brain dead script - "Is the little red light on?" ("Have you got it plugged in, you idiot?") After being convinced that it really was toast, she then guided us to finding the serial number in the least accessible location possible, and mis-transcribed it when entering the warranty claim. Things did get better from there, however, as Samsung seems to have implemented a pretty efficient e-mail based CRM and incident tracker, that told us what was happening.

Things also got better when we were handed over to the local warranty repair affiliate, TV Unlimited of Sunnyvale. The followup call was ahead of promised schedule. Since I'd been watching the TV when it failed, I was able to give a good description of the symptoms. The technician I was talking to was familiar with the model, and opined that it might be one of two circuit boards or, at worst, the panel itself. The two possible boards were ordered so the initial service call might also result in a fix.

Cycle time from that conversation to an on-site service call was a week. Not great, not hideous. Certainly better than some of the waiting-for-parts horror stories documented on the net for other brands or earlier Samsung efforts. I got to see the current state of field TV repair: board swaps, just like computers and everything else these days. Unfortunately, the worst fears were true and it was the plasma panel itself that was fried (perhaps arcing somewhere inside the assembly). Back into the queue for a parts wait for a 50" plasma panel.

That also turned out to be a week, making me think the time is characteristic of Samsung's replacement part pull-through logistics. You probably won't do worse, you're not likely to do better. I got to see the TV completely eviscerated on the living room floor - or maybe it was an organ transplant since the case and half the circuit boards of the original TV were all that ended up in the 'repaired' set. Which fortunately started right up and has been running well through the bowl game season. From initial call to final fix, the process was two weeks.

Overall, I give the process a 'B'. Room for improvement, but fairly predictable and doing well on continuing contact and status updates once the process was started. Of course, I also have to knock a star off my initial five star opinion of the product, since failure at five weeks after installation reflects quality issues and does not make for a happy customer. I'll likely buy Samsung products in the future, but only after careful checking on reliability reports from previous buyers.

Dirty Little Secret, Part II

It's not just Silicon Valley. Highly trained immigrants to the US are packing up and heading back home taking their skills with them.

Meanwhile, "...average government workers are now making $30,000/year more than the average private sector worker...".

There is, of course, no possible correlation.

Akbar and Jeff's Climate Modeling Hut

Know how to run a spreadsheet? Want to learn how Mann, the CRU, et. al. did it?

Iowahawk doffs his jester's cap, picks up his keyboard and displays his mad day-job skilz, to show us how to make a hockey stick chart on our own. And for the advanced students, some 'exercises for the reader' to show how shaky that conclusion may be.

If you care at all about the AGW debate, this is the post to read this weekend. Even if you just read it as a gloss on the jargon, it's well worth the 15 minutes to do so.

I Come Not To Praise, But To Bury

Michael Malone call this an 'Obituary for Obituaries', but it's not; it's an obit for an industry. The payload:

...newspapers (and even more obviously, troubled national newsmagazines like Newsweek) have essentially abandoned the news business and gone into the comfort business. In other words, they have a pretty good idea now just who constitutes the heart of their loyal readership, and they write for that group, with the intent of either delivering news that fits their world view or sanitizing bad news that does not. And, since there is no way that they can deliver that information in a timely way – they assume that their readers have already learned from the Web about important events – now it is the paper’s job to reduce any discomfort or cognitive dissonance by contextualize the story into the tribe’s existing prejudices and self-image.

Hmmm, I seem to have mumbled something like that in the past:

Only in the case where the buyer is aligned [with bias] and not searching for ground truth will an increase in value result.... We have just reinvented the party organ newspaper. We might also have invented a way to salvage a decaying legacy business by guiding it into a stable, but ideologically defined niche.

Michael does have senior toldyahso rights, both by date and tenure in the business.

Samsung Fail

It seems I may have been premature in my kudos for my new Samsung plasma TV. Last night, while I was watching a DVD, the picture crumpled into the center of the screen over a period of seconds, went black, and the audio went to a steady buzz. No amount of cajoling or cursing would bring it back. Five weeks from delivery to dead. Reports of customer satisfaction were premature, it seems.

Now I get to deal with Samsung's warranty network. The first experience was half and half: The support phone was picked up immediately and the call handled courteously. But it's a "1-2 day wait" just to hear from the local contract servicer.

More reports as events warrant, just in time for your Xmas buying season.

Data Center Dialectic

For the last few years, 'virtualization' has been all the rage for the corporate IT set, and hence for many venture funders. The idea of being able to shuffle applications and operating system images among physical servers, rather than let those with low loads stand idle, burning capital and energy, makes a lot of sense. But even a good thing can be carried to extremes, and awake a counter-trend. Enter the antithesis: physicalization, a proposal to break the hardware processing elements themselves down into smaller bits.

To be sure, the meme has been in part hatched by an interested vendor whose products misfit the current trend, but they are raising some valid points. Compaction of processing into ever-more-dense multicore units might have overshot its economic sweet spot, at least for some users. With commercial real estate in free fall, optimizing every square foot of data center floor space may not be so important, nor does spending tight capital on rebuilding HVAC to deal with higher energy densities seem such a great idea. More to the point of industry economics, the high end servers used for both virtualization and 'scale up' approaches are one of the few places where the silicon merchants still command high margins. The physicalization approach relies on more commoditized silicon, the processors cranked out en masse for consumer-grade machines, potentially putting some of that profit back in the hands of the IT managers. If this approaches sticks, look for some margin pressure on Intel et. al.

The third stage is synthesis, and indeed the two approaches are not that dissimilar, if regarded from the software point of view. Both have the issue of managing a plethora of deployments over a dynamic computing base. Adopting a physicalization approach won't get out of that problem, since their smaller power implies the need to be able to rapidly stand-up new images on further mini-servers when loads increase. Figuratively speaking, virtualization creates the problem of managing many small logical boxes (VMs and app images) within large physical boxes. Physicalization will pose the dual problem of managing large logical process boxes across many small physical 'boxes'. We've been there before. (Now where did I put my old 'grid' slides?)

Or All The Seas Without Oysters

One of the fun things about about chasing AGW links, as a balance to all the heated rhetoric and wretched code, is wandering into corners of science I would never otherwise encounter. Today's find is a study by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute investigating the effects of increased CO2 levels on shell-building sea creatures. (Some fraction of CO2 dissolves into water, creating the relatively weak carbonic acid, which nonetheless has the potential to screw up deposition of shells built of calcium, which is normally dissolved by acids.)

The study used gaseous CO2 concentrations well beyond those currently observed to see what might happen if we keep dumping it into the atmosphere. It seems that some of the critters did in fact have trouble growing their shells under extreme conditions, but others liked it just fine and even grew heavier shells. Us crab and lobster munchers are in good shape, you oyster and uni fans, maybe not so much.

In a way, this isn't very surprising. It's well known that most organisms have collections of genes that are normally repressed and inactive, but might become active depending on conditions in the environment or internal to the individual. The critters we eat for seafood dinner have been around in more-or-less similar forms for much longer than Homo saps. Their evolutionary history could very easily include atmospheric and climatic conditions well beyond our current experience, and they may have genes evolved during those periods sitting around ready to become active at need. Might be some interesting research possibilities there when sequencing gets even cheaper.

(Found via Open Markets.)

Cruel, But Fair: Some Questions For Ben Bernanke

At Zero Hedge, some proposals for what Fed Chair Bernanke should be asked at his reconfirmation hearings. Some are quite technical, some understandable to all. A sample:

6. An important factor in the financial crisis (and a large part of the ultimate cost to taxpayers) was the implicit government guarantee of the GSEs. In part because of decisions you made, there is now an explicit government guarantee of every large firm on Wall Street. Has moral hazard increased or decreased over the past year?

You don't have to be a financial wizard to tell something's amiss. Gold headed for the sky, banks sitting on piles of cash, and the double ready to dip. There are a lot of avoided questions and evaded responsibilities that need to come home to roost. This might be a good place to start. RTWT.