If people and corporations are really serious about going green, then they need to take a serious look at working from home. Having employees work from home is probably the biggest single act individuals and companies can do for helping the environment. Obviously, working from home is not possible for all jobs, but it is for many. It would not be far fetched to estimate about half of the jobs out there can work from home. If these jobs did execute such a plan, think of the impact.
Advantages

• Less traffic congestion
• Less fuel usage
• Less pollution
• Less electricity usage
• More time around family
• Less need for day care

Disadvantages

• Less face time
• Concerns about productivity

There are many creative ways to make this work. Less face time can be compensated by weekly meetings, which will also help address the productivity issue – pressing workers to have something to present every week. Offices could even hot seat desks if necessary. For example, John is in the office Mon and Wed, and Bob is in the office Tue and Thu, and everyone is in the office on Friday for meetings. This is just one idea, and it won’t work for everyone, but it will work for many.
Just Do It.

John Stossel, a reporter for the show 20/20, did a great 1 hour documentary on the power of belief. Essentially, his point was that people’s desire to believe in things, even if they are not real, had incredible power. This is essentially circular reasoning with a conscious avoidance of critical thinking. I would like to take it one step further, specifically in the areas of witchcraft and satanism. Even if these are not real forces (I am not suggesting they are or are not), the belief alone is sufficient for these tradecrafts to have some effect. As a great example, see this video. This video is also a great example of another current trend – media sensationalism. The show makes a big build up claiming that something incredible happened to this scientist that changed his mind, when nothing REAL happened at all.

I love the idea of neighborhood friends taking turns watching each others’ children. Instead of paying high price for low quality day care, everyone who has children and lives near people they know and trust (which is not always the case) simply exchange time with each other in a manner that allows their children to play with their neighbors. That’s how I grew up. In such an environment, the concept of, It takes a village to raise a child, can actually be implemented – people watching over each others’ children, and the children benefiting from multiple adult and peer influences.
However, a recent news item discusses how our degrading level of common sense in this society has finally impacted this ancient concept described above. A woman in MI who watches other neighborhood children for a few hours each morning has been asked to cease citing that she is in violation of day care laws.
I guess if she charged money, no one would have said anything.

I have noticed that the torture of the English language is becoming quite acceptable lately – beyond the typical use of slang, jargon, and colloquialisms. However, allow me to digress and address a few errors that I have seen lately that are minor, but rampant – increasingly so in just the last five years.

Lack of final comma in a series
If you provide a series of items in a sentence, then there must be a comma before the conjunction and the last item in order for the meaning of the sentence to be unambiguous.
For example,
There was a red, orange, green and blue car.
is incorrect. It should be
There was a red, orange, green, and blue car.
The same applies to the use of or.
Why is this important. Here’s another example.
There were three dresses of two colors each – a red and white, a blue and white, and a green and white.
Leaving out the final comma in the first example implies that there are three cars, not four.

One space between period and next sentence
This is incorrect. There should be two (2) spaces between a period (that indicates the end of a sentence) and the first letter of the next sentence. This rule has been around since there were typewriters, and it allows the different sentences to be noticeable at a glance. A potential reason for the change is that HTML text will always insert only a single space, no matter how many spaces you code.

Use of singular verbs for non-truths
When stating a case that is not true, the plural form of the verb should be used, even for a singular subject. For example:
If I was President, …
is incorrect. It should be
If I were President, …

Any other common errors to share?

Courtesy MSN Online

The movie writer, director, producer John Hughes passed away recently (06 Aug 2009). For those that don’t know, Mr. Hughes did not only make movies about culture in the 1980s, the culture of the 1980s were built around his movies. His movies helped make the 80s what they were – deep, happy, and highly artistic. His movies demonstrated how Maslot’s pyramid can be applied to an entire society, not just a single individual. We were at a point, partly thanks to the cold war, where we were not in a real war, the economy was positive, and as a whole, this country had little concerns (except the threat of total global nuclear war) – allowing, I feel, for this country to self-actualize. It appears that DEVO might have been right, and we were at a point where we could only devolve from there.

His most recent movie is Drillbit Taylor. If you have not seen, “The Breakfast Club”, I cannot recommend it highly enough – one of my top 10 movies of all time. It is a timeless summary of life in high school at a depth not accomplished in other attempts. We won’t forget about you.

Sometimes, the irony of peoples’ names can be amazing. So, Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years today. Although what he did was unethical and illegal, there is another aspect to this story. Mr. Madoff did not do anything different than most financial institutions in this country. Apparently many people forget the Savings & Loan Crisis where too many people tried to withdraw their money at once, only to discover that the S&Ls did not have enough to cover. Wikipedia describes this cause of the S&L crisis as, “Absence of an ability to vary the return on assets with increases in the rate of interest required to be paid for deposits”.
Hedge funds are also Ponzi schemes. Even our Social Security system is a Ponzi scheme. Employees are paying into it today to cover those collecting today, with no guarantee that the money they are investing will be there for them when it is their time.

As I predicted, soon, in the US, college would end up being a bad investment from a business perspective. There is now a recent article echoing these concerns. Of course, the real value of education depends on the individual and what they do with it, but the economic value must be evaluated from the resulting salary (multiplied by the probability of getting such as job and the years in service), vs. the full cost of acquiring the education needed for the position (including all living expenses and missed opportunity income and years of service). Hence, there will be a point, if it has not been realized already, where a good paying job that does not require a degree (and there are still some out there), will be a better investment (ecomomically) than a low paying 4 year degree.

There are many examples or individuals acquiring wealthy salaries without a college education (some actors, athletes, musicians, etc.). A common joke when fellow engineers make a brilliant accomplishment is, “Now if I could just hit a ball with a stick, I would be a millionaire.” However, this phenomenon is tempered by the low probability of scoring such an opportunity, based on the assumption that these positions are destined for the creme de la creme – which may or may not always be the case, but it is a safe assumption.

On the flip side, a weekend with a Java book will give someone all the necessary skills for a high tech position that would otherwise be reserved for someone with a 4 year degree.

If you are my age, or older, you are familiar with the many phases of Michael Jackson’s career. And although he was a bit eccentric at times, he was an icon that had great influence on music and pop culture. Although I am not a fan of pop music, I cannot deny his impact. To watch any of his early performances (e.g., the Ed Sullivan show), one can easily see how amazing this person was.

As for the child molestation accusations, it’s common sense. If someone molests your child, you don’t ask for money – and you definitely don’t forgive for money. If the police were smarter, either case would not have gotten as far as it did. The press made MJ a star, and made him a pedophile. His talent not withstanding, the media built him up, and tore him down. And it was not until his death that any media spoke of these accusations as weak. Truly a shame. I hope he is remembered for his positive accomplishments.

I just purchased a laptop with Windows Vista installed. The machine is 64 bit and has 4 GB of RAM. When I am not doing anything, the OS is using at least 30% of my memory. WOW! But I could live with that if I were getting some high speed performance as a trade off. Haven’t see it. But that is not the worst part. They have merely amplified everything that microsoft has been doing wrong in the OS business.
The file system (or at least how it is displayed) is insane. There is this folder on the desktop that is named after the computer login name – similar to that useless folder/directory called “My Documents” that has been on the last several versions of Windows. At least they got rid of the space in the name. However, this new desktop folder is very interesting. I am not sure where it “physically” resides on my hard drive. Of course by physically here I am merely referring to the next level of abstraction below this one. It looks like it is under C:/User/Owner/ when I browse from the C drive, but the path is different if I browse from the desktop. In fact, the computer appears as a subdirectory under the desktop. Huh? To make it worse, the actual directory names in the path are different????
In addition, not only did they not fix that eternal problem of having a directory named “Program Files” (it contains a space and the word Files is not necessary), they made it worse by making two of them. There is another directory called “Program Files(x86)”. Incredibly stupid. I always make a directory simply called “Programs” and install everything there.
Finally, there were all these “special” folders preinstalled, like Favorites, Documents, Photos, etc. This is like buying a house and someone else putting furniture in it you don’t like. So I deleted some of these, and that caused all sorts of problems. Now the browser cannot save my favorites, and I have no idea where files I download go to.
Vista is the worst OS I have ever worked with. I do give Microsoft credit for leading the Windows movement (if not inventing it). However, the pioneers must have left the company. They obviously traded sanity for useability here. Microsoft is in desparate need of a systems engineer for their OS.

We recently had a tragic train wreck here in the DC area, yesterday, where 2 Metro trains collided. Unfortunately, over the 2 days prior to the accident, I had 2 separate conversations with people explaining how I predicted that there would be more plane crashes due to the economic crisis. Unfortunately, I was correct. I have not checked the stats, but it appears there were more crashes on the news recently, and the reasons are related to economic crisis (for the cases where we have a good estimate of the cause). The rationale is straightforward. Airlines are typically running in the red and sensitive to consumer spending trends. They have little room to cut expenses during economic low points. Hence, critical areas get cut – maintenance labor, part replacements, pilot rest periods, training, and selection criteria are lowered to those with failing test scores. It was reported today that the train that crashed was overdue for brake replacements and that the Metro could not afford to keep up with maintenance. Is the same phenomenon occuring here?