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A Maryland corrections officer, Robert Collins, took time off work for a personal leave of absence. When he was ready to return to his job, the corrections department, in the name of the state, demanded that he hand over details of his Facebook account, including passwords, so that his online behavior could form part of the necessary background check for his re-certification. Maryland requires this information on all social media accounts that potentially new and current employees maintain so that they can be certified. Mr. Collins, not surprisingly, did not wish to provide the information demanded and he approached the ACLU to act on his behalf. They did so in the form of a letter to the state and the latest information is that the State of Maryland is suspending the employment requirement for forty-five days “pending a review.” In the opinion of the ACLU, demanding the social media information – to allow scrutiny of the applicant’s behavior and friendships – is a “gros...

There is news this week from iSuppli (now an IHS company) that is at least partly troubling: Semiconductor suppliers, worldwide, had 83.6 days of inventory at hand at the end of the fourth calendar quarter of 2010. That inventory is in the complete channels, not just in the manufacturing environment. That is quite an ominous number as the last time inventory was at such a level was in the second quarter of 2008 – when it hit 84 days – which was then followed by the market falling to pieces in just about every segment. It is also troubling because historically, with some exceptions, the first quarter of a year sees an increase in inventory over the previous fourth quarter. It is not a frightening number, as yet, although we will have to wait some while to see how things change by the end of March 2011. Real fear occurs, as far as the author is concerned, when inventory hits 13 weeks (91 days) and all hell breaks out in the stock market regardless of where companies actually are in the business cy...

Many years ago, when I was teaching at college level, we were approached by the Government of South Africa about the possibility of training engineers from the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) in color television. A color service was to be introduced shortly after their return home. The head of our department made it clear to faculty that he would only proceed with the request on condition that we all agreed to do it. Feelings about apartheid were running high at the time, and a majority were totally against offering any support to the white regime and a continuation of its despicable policies. Some of us, however, argued that color television was a method of breaking apartheid rather than helping it. Our logic was simple. To get content for a color television service SABC would have to import the majority of its programming. That content would be totally at odds with the discrimination that was part of South Africans’ daily lives. We won the argument and the training went ahead. We didn&...

The generation that we are now raising in the western world is environmentally crazy. Its members will eat, drink, and live on tenets that espouse their desire to save the planet that they are inheriting from us. That is not bad; in fact, it is very good – within reason – for we have been guilty for the last few generations of listening to the greed of immediacy from politicians and business, and ignoring the calls of the peer-monitored science that should have demanded more of us. And even though we know all this, we still are encouraged to ignore that science: my daughter’s school recently installed, at incredible expense, a man-made playing surface so that outdoor sports could be played all year without the inconvenience of growing and maintaining grass. This huge area is a blight and is, of course, totally non-recyclable. But, hey, all those other schools can now come and play on our environmental mistake and avoid their own… Mention nuclear power to the next generation and it w...