This is why I'm hard to get hold of on Friday afternoons. As Alan Cohen explains:

"I agree that pace of technology changes so quickly that many people believe they can't afford time out. But what they don't realize is that vacation and downtime makes you even sharper. I have a friend who convinced his boss, who was the top executive, to take a day off a week. The guy did and said that his creativity and freshness from just that one day off made him so much more productive. It's the missing link that most people don't get: that soul renewal is actually good for you professionally."

As the introduction to Political Compass explains, the old line between "left" and "right" refers mostly to economic policies. Social policies fall along a different axis, so it's possible to be fiscally conservative and socially liberal, or vice versa. This site offers a quiz to help you figure out where you stand and what sort of political company you'd like to keep. Also includes an interesting reading list, sorted by political viewpoint.

There's a short list of cities where I'd be willing to live. Boston is one, San Francisco another, and then places like Seattle, Austin, or San Diego. There's also a list of cities where I wouldn't live if you paved the streets with gold. Carnegie Mellon professor Richard Florida decided to find the reason why. His new book, The Rise of the Creative Class, suggests that arts and nightlife may have more to do with the success or failure of metropolitan areas than stadiums, corporate headquarters, and other large scale economic development projects.

Not only did telecommunications companies vastly overbuild their infrastructure during the Internet bubble, they seem to have played fast and loose with earnings reports as well. WorldCom will restate earnings for the last five quarters after discovering that US$3.8 billion worth of operations costs were incorrectly reported as capital expenditures. That's the equivalent of accounting for your electric bill as if it were capitalized along with your mortgage, to the tune of US$3,800,000,000.

WorldCom's bankruptcy, now considered likely, would surpass Enron as the largest in US corporate history. As company after company is caught using questionable accounting methods, investor confidence in the transparency and honesty of the US financial markets is taking heavy blows.

The whole mess could be seen as a side effect of the trend to tie executive compensation to stock performance. If "making the numbers" means a multi-million dollar payday for the executive team, then the numbers will be made. Even if the executive team has to commit fraud to do it.

Required reading for public relations people. Most reporters already know that most companies send out too many press releases with too little information. And yet still public relations people brag to their clients about how many releases they sent out to how many editors. Sigh....

The most tech-savvy generation in history is now in college. At the University of Michigan, 41% of this year's incoming freshmen have designed at least one web page.

The interesting thing I noticed, though, was that ubiquitous use of technology isn't just for computer science majors any more. Artists, writers, and musicians are just as likely to incorporate technology into their projects. For many of today's students, technology is becoming a tool, rather than an end in itself. Now things get really interesting.

(Link by way of Techdirt.)

Strange searches leading to this site last week, courtesy of Altavista:
rations or econometrica or ruthlessness or breakpoints or freudians
and
cliff or noteworthy or uninitialized or managua or cracking

No, I have no idea what these people might actually be looking for. I'm pretty sure it isn't me.

If you want to make search engines find you, one trick to try is liberal use of the week's top search terms from the Google Zeitgeist page. The downside, of course, is that you'll then be deluged with email from people who want to know why your site appeared in a search for "Natalie Portman" (or whoever) when you don't actually have any information about her.

My site stats tell me that a site called Pushing Rectangles is picking up my XML feed. Pushing Rectangles is nominally about desiging integrated circuits with Cadence software, plus the usual random observations typical of any weblog. Welcome!

I've been thinking of revising the site from a basically table-driven design to a layer-driven design using CSS. Thinking about it is all I'll be doing for a while, though. Fully 5% of my traffic comes from Netscape 4.0, which is infamous for not handling style sheets well.

South Korea defeated Spain in the World Cup quarterfinals, setting up an all-semiconductor semifinal against Germany. The match is scheduled for 25 June at 7:30 AM EDT (8:30 PM Korea time). Germany advanced by defeating the US.

This is why I'm self-employed. Remember all that talk about new technologies allowing more flexible hours? Well, it's still true that you can take work home with you and answer email while you're on vacation. But, the Christian Science Monitor reports, you'd better not plan that vacation on company time.

Do you always root for the villains in comic books and James Bond movies? Thought about becoming a Super Villain or other Embodiment of Evil? Then take a look at VillainSupply.com. From Civilization III (practice makes perfect) to a "SUBTERRANEAN ISLAND BASE WITH OPTIONAL VOLCANO UPGRADE", the site has everything you'll need to implement your evil plans.

Aspiring villains might also want to read the Evil Overlord List, in order to avoid some of the more common mistakes.

Rumors of price fixing in the DRAM market have apparently reached the ears of the US Justice Department, which has subpoenaed Infineon, Micron, Samsung, and other DRAM vendors. Several market observers believe that the memory glut leading to last year's sharp fall in DRAM prices was an attempt to drive smaller players, particularly Hynix, out of the market.

After climbing steadily since late November, prices have fallen sharply again in recent weeks.

And the Webby goes to... The 2002 Webby Awards may not have the clout of the Oscars just yet, but the nominees do offer a pretty good sampling of the Best of the Web. Worth a look to see what you've been missing.

I've mentioned Lawrence Lessig's work on intellectual property issues before. In an interview in Reason, he talks about the dangers of treating intellectual property as sacred, rather than balancing intellectual property rights against the public interest.

(Link by way of Tomalak's Realm.)

Semicon West is coming, which means it's embargo season. An embargo is when an individual or organization makes an announcement, but asks journalists to not publish it until a specified date. Companies love embargoes because they control the flow of information. They also allow the company to spread its public relations effort out over a period of weeks, rather than days.

Journalists, and especially online journalists, hate embargoes because they make scoops impossible. Still, most journalists will play along because they don't want to lose access to company sources. The embargoed story is almost never important enough jeopardize a long-standing relationship.

Many journalists take a middle road. They'll honor an embargo as long as other journalists do, and as long as the story doesn't leak out by other means. That's the policy here as well. I'm not worried about being the first with a particular story, but I'm not going to ignore a topic that's become common knowledge simply because of an embargo.

I'm reading Barbara Kingsolver's most recent book of essays, Small Wonder. It isn't as good as High Tide in Tucson, which is breathtaking in spots. Still, Small Wonder includes the most coherent explanation of the risks of genetically engineered crops that I've seen.

Genetic diversity, Kingsolver explains, is the food supply's insurance policy against blight, drought, global warming, and other agricultural disasters. For both technical and economic reasons, genetically engineered crops tend to squeeze out native species, threatening that insurance policy. Further engineering simply can't react to unexpected conditions as quickly as the natural seed bank's built-in diversity can. Meanwhile, unintended consequences of genetic engineering can spawn ecological disasters of their own. For example, corn pollen modified to kill pests can also kill all sorts of beneficial insects.

Companies that sell genetically modified seeds will tell you that their inventions are a boon to mankind, a way to dramatically increase crop yields and feed a hungry world. It's nice to see an argument for the other side that focuses on science rather than politics.

MIT is resisting prepublication reviews of unclassified research. Good for MIT. Most of the worries about basic science falling into "the wrong hands" seem to stem from a severe lack of understanding of the difference between science and engineering.

Any competent physics student can tell you how an atomic bomb works. Any competent biology student can tell you how to spread anthrax spores. In both cases, though, an enormous amount of engineering expertise lies between theory and practice. Trying to conceal unclassified science that "might" be misused won't work, and will cripple research institutions.

If people can download music or movies for free, they won't pay for them, and therefore the entertainment industry will die. That's the industry's argument, and it intuitively makes sense. Except, according to economist Stan Liebowitz, it doesn't seem to be true. Music sales dipped last year, but only as much as you would expect in a recession.

Dongbu Electronics announced a package of services for foundry customers wishing to incorporate CMOS image sensors in their designs. CMOS image sensors can reside on the same substrate as the image manipulation circuitry, improving performance and reducing chip count for digital cameras and similar applications. However, the sensors require specialized optical layer processing and special packaging. Through the GeneCIS program, Dongbu can streamline manufacturing and coordinate production logistics for these devices.

Back from a long weekend in New York City. I'm still trying to get my head around it. We stayed only about a block away from the World Trade Center site. Very strange how the absence of a building can be as tangible as its presence.

The site itself looks like any other construction site at this point, except that most construction sites don't have a viewing platform covered with flowers, handwritten notes, and other remembrances.

Lots of other details, too, from the boarded up windows and crime scene markings on the nearby buildings to the impromptu memorial tucked into a corner of the Intrepid museum. I'll try to write something a little more coherent at some point. Right now I'm still trying to process it all.

I've got a new software toy. NewzCrawler crawls a list of pages that I give it, downloading the contents in background while I do something else. For blogs and news sites that supply XML-based files, Newzcrawler builds a list of headlines and instantly tells me what's new. For standard HTML-based pages, it simply caches the page for later reading.

I haven't been happy with news aggregators I've used in the past. Earlier approaches often relied on "partner" sites that might or might not have any actual content, or used poorly-defined keyword searches to deliver vast numbers of mostly useless articles. This concept, which simply makes it easier to follow the sites I'd normally read anyway, is much less ambitious, but much more effective.

Undeterred by the relative immaturity of organic LED technology, suppliers are rolling out OLED display products. It will be interesting to see whether the portability advantage of these displays can outweigh their cost, performance, and reliability disadvantages.

RSS and XML are everywhere lately, but what they actually do is mostly hidden in a morass of programmer-speak. LLRX.com, a site for legal researchers and librarians has a non-technical introduction to RSS and what it does.

VLSI Research has completed their annual market share summary, detailing the top three suppliers in each major manufacturing equipment segment. I didn't spot any big surprises, but it was interesting to see how the biggest players completely dominate some segments, but not others.

(PDF file, Adobe Acrobat Reader required.)

It's the beginning of the month, and so I wrapped up my latest article for Semiconductor Magazine over the weekend. It's scheduled for the July issue, and will appear on the publications page once it's on the magazine's site.

This one is about CMP, particularly for shallow trench isolation.

It's the thought that counts. A Kenyan Maasai village gave its most precious possession, 15 head of cattle, to help the bereaved of September 11.

(Link by way of Metafilter.)