Société Internationale de Télécommunications Aéronautiques
(SITA) Neuilly France
INTRODUCTION
1.1. SITA (Société Internationale de Télécommunications Aéronautique), a cooperative company founded in 1949, embraces the majority of the international air carriers (more than 160). It provides to its members a worldwide message switching network.
1.2. Initially the network consisted of manual (torn-tape) centres, interconnected by low speed circuits (50, 75 Bauds, 60, 30, 15 words per minute, asynchronous). The Airline terminal equipment (teleprinters. Telex) was connected to the SITA manual centres, thus enabling airline messages to be exchanged via nodes of the SITA network, with consequent reduction in costs to the airlines by their sharing of communications facilities.
1.3. With the rapid development of the Air Transport Industry, the airline communications needs became increasingly important and thus the SITA network expanded very quickly, by 1963 covering the world. Network development was not, however, restricted to geographic extension; in 1963 a number of the busiest manual centres were replaced by semi-automatic systems, and three years later, due to the continuing steady increase of traffic volumes, SITA equipped the Frankfurt centre with its first computer system to perform the message switching functions. Then, in 1969, SITA began replacing the other most heavily loaded centres (Western Europe and New York) with computer systems and established a computer communication data network by interconnecting these centres with voice grade circuits (medium speed). This network, called the High Level Network, performing the task of block switching, was interfaced at that time with the rest of the network composed of manual centres. This step was soon followed by the automation of other manual centres using what are in SITA terminology called satellite processors. These stand-alone computers act as concentrators of airline teleprinter traffic and controllers of airline CRT terminals, each of them connected to one High Level Centre by medium speed circuits. By mid-1973, the SITA network comprised 150 centres including 8 high level centres and 21 satellite processors. The 29 automated centres will be referred to as the SITA medium speed network (see figure 1).
Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Dune’ is a spiritually empty, imaginatively bereft upscale spectacle, engineered for fans of Kamala Harris and subscribers to The New Yorker //
Who, after all, in 2024, can imagine a world in which anyone believes in any cause higher than girl power? Who can conceive of a moral order predicated on anything other than the dictates of intersectionality? Not Villeneuve, which means that his Dune: Part Two, as splendid as some of its details are to contemplate, is as completely and utterly sterile as any new luxury hotel in Dubai.
Without instilling in his characters the realness of belief—that is to say, without allowing his Fremen to be Fremen, not modern, solipsistic creatures that yowl about the future being female—what the director of our latest Dune has given us is the digital equivalent of a sandstorm: awesome while it lasts, then wiped away without a trace. Even nature has been sliced into metaphor: Those sandworms, so menacing in Herbert’s novel, have, in Villeneuve’s telling, been so thoroughly tamed as to be nothing more than toothy Ubers, summoned for a ride with the click of a button, more convenient than terrifying.
What do you get when you rob faith of its magic and meaning and reduce it to metaphor? First, a very boring film. And second, license to make the film mean just about anything you want. The consistently craven New Yorker even managed to review the film as a metaphor for Israeli aggression post-Oct. 7. “The movie,” cackled the world’s once-greatest magazine, now the upscale prose equivalent of Kamala Harris, “pitting Fremen fundamentalists against a genocidal oppressor, can scarcely hope to escape the horror of recent headlines.” Actually, as The New Yorker knew back when it was run by much smarter and more soulful men and women, great works of art can escape the headlines with ease, because they are committed to big ideas, not slick and comforting conventions. They make us uncomfortable, as Frank Herbert’s book did when it ended with the Muadib realizing that his followers were about to shed much blood and plunge the universe into decades of violence. Villeneuve ends his with Chalamet triumphant. The goodies have defeated the baddies. The damsel rescued herself, of course. Nothing more to see here, folks. Not a stick of furniture is out of place.
One day, inshallah, we’ll get the Dune film adaptation we deserve, a Dune that takes faith seriously and isn’t afraid to go a little gross and a little crazy trying to understand how and why we humans believe the things we believe. But as long as our pop cultural industries remain in the hands of men and women drained of all serious religious and moral imagination and intention, we’re better off with books.
The number of civilian casualties in Gaza has been at the center of international attention since the start of the war. The main source for the data has been the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, which now claims more than 30,000 dead, the majority of which it says are children and women. //
Here’s the problem with this data: The numbers are not real. That much is obvious to anyone who understands how naturally occurring numbers work. The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters.
If Hamas’ numbers are faked or fraudulent in some way, there may be evidence in the numbers themselves that can demonstrate it. While there is not much data available, there is a little, and it is enough: From Oct. 26 until Nov. 10, 2023, the Gaza Health Ministry released daily casualty figures that include both a total number and a specific number of women and children.
The first place to look is the reported “total” number of deaths. The graph of total deaths by date is increasing with almost metronomical linearity, as the graph in Figure 1 reveals.
This regularity is almost surely not real. One would expect quite a bit of variation day to day. In fact, the daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15%. This is strikingly little variation. There should be days with twice the average or more and others with half or less. //
Most likely, the Hamas ministry settled on a daily total arbitrarily. We know this because the daily totals increase too consistently to be real. Then they assigned about 70% of the total to be women and children, splitting that amount randomly from day to day. Then they in-filled the number of men as set by the predetermined total. This explains all the data observed.
There are other obvious red flags. The Gaza Health Ministry has consistently claimed that about 70% of the casualties are women or children. This total is far higher than the numbers reported in earlier conflicts with Israel. Another red flag, raised by Salo Aizenberg and written about extensively, is that if 70% of the casualties are women and children and 25% of the population is adult male, then either Israel is not successfully eliminating Hamas fighters or adult male casualty counts are extremely low. This by itself strongly suggests that the numbers are at a minimum grossly inaccurate and quite probably outright faked. Finally, on Feb. 15, Hamas admitted to losing 6,000 of its fighters, which represents more than 20% of the total number of casualties reported. //
The truth can’t yet be known and probably never will be. The total civilian casualty count is likely to be extremely overstated. Israel estimates that at least 12,000 fighters have been killed. If that number proves to be even reasonably accurate, then the ratio of noncombatant casualties to combatants is remarkably low: at most 1.4 to 1 and perhaps as low as 1 to 1. By historical standards of urban warfare, where combatants are embedded above and below into civilian population centers, this is a remarkable and successful effort to prevent unnecessary loss of life while fighting an implacable enemy that protects itself with civilians.
Evil AuditorSilver badge
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Re: Needless!!
jmch: I would have thought...
Exactly, you would have thought. And hence you wouldn't have moved the rack in the first place.
2 months
John Sager
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Re: Needless!!
Yes, another example of Chesterton's Fence.
2 months
BebuSilver badge
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Big Brother
Re: Needless!!
《Yes, another example of Chesterton's Fence.》
Or in Terry Pratchett's canine latin of Discworld
"Si non confectus, non reficiat" - family motto of the Vetinari.
《standardized perfection》
Any useful standard ought to be prefaced with the Patrician's motto.
When you think about the essential (and insane) concept of perfection anything, process or system etc once it obtains perfection must necessarily be unique to the particular instance which I would think is the antithesis of standard(ized.)
Standardization is formalizing the art of the possible not aspiration to perfection. Engineering v Theology. :)
Antoine St Exupery probably had the most sensible approach to perfection:
"Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher." -Terre des Hommes, 1939.
Here, in the extreme, perfection would be the complete absence of anything - the (philosophical) void (sans vacuum fluctuations.) He was more practically claiming a minimalist approach to design would be more likely to lead in the direction of perfection.
21 days
Terry 6Silver badge
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One, additional, thing I pull out of that is that company's understanding of "training". It's not training until the point that the trainee has actually been observed ( and coached if required) to actually perform the task and deal with any issues- more than once.
Because 1) Theory is never the same as practice. 2) Even the best trainer will abbreviate, elide or just plain miss some steps, because they have at least some parts of the process ingrained and automated so they don't think about it. And 3) Even the best trainee will miss, misunderstand, forget or confuse some bits because we're only human, we have limited short term memory and concentration, and because that's what we do.. //
20 days
Jou (Mxyzptlk)Silver badge
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The training you complain about is what I call "bulimic learning". Binge in, purge out, forgotten. Most useless style, but that is what the world seems to want instead of knowledge and understanding of a subject.
I usually write a lot up, on paper, during important things to learn. Once it got through my head and out of my hand it stays better in my mind. Though that does not fit the usual "2 Minutes read" the teaching material says on top. //
Sherrie Ludwig
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It's not training until the point that the trainee has actually been observed ( and coached if required) to actually perform the task and deal with any issues- more than once.
I have always gone by the motto, "see one, do one, teach one", repeat until the "teach one" can be at least explained fully to a person unacquainted with the system as a whole. //
An_Old_DogSilver badge
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Re: The Reason So Many People Automatically Hate All Managers
a non-interfering incompetent one woud be refreshing.
There are three types of managers. In order of descending desirability they are:
Type I: Competent/Active
Type II: Incompetent/Inactive
Type III: Incompetent/Active //
Julz
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Hey
What about us Competent/Inactive managers?
8 days
Lee DSilver badge
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Re: The first one is free
The problem with fancy interview questions is that you are only testing whether people can answer fancy interview questions.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy - you're selecting candidates based on some arbitrary criteria which is only vaguely related to their job, so the candidate who "does best" may not actually be good at anything vaguely related to the actual job they need to do.
I've always held that job interviews should be little more than "We pay you for a day, you work with us for a day". Anything else is nonsense. All those lateral thinking and logic tests (which, incidentally, I'm amazing at, being a mathematician) will knock out people who would have been great at the job if it wasn't for that test. All those impressive answers someone gives in interviews where they turn a perceived problem with themselves on its head and make you think they're wonderful? Congratulations you've hired a very good BS'er. All those interview that utterly impress the management types with management-level BS, while all the people who are hands-on, in the field, etc. are completely hating them? If you go ahead, you've hired someone good at speaking managementese who's going to be hated by their underlings and co-workers.
The interview is a selection process - and a two-way one at that! You have to consider "What am I selecting for with this question?" but more importantly "What am I selecting for when I'm looking at the answer?". Because a simple technical question may well be useful to "get right", but someone who admits they don't know, asks if they've be allowed to research the answer, takes a decent stab, tells you what they are sure of and what they are not based on their previous knowledge/experience, and can state where they'd go to get a definitive answer... I'd rather have that guy. I want to select for their METHOD and their communication and honesty, rather than that they don't know what menu the button is under to restart a cluster, or whatever.
Interviews are a selection process. Select for what you want to see, not some arbitrary score system of nonsense. Because like natural selection, if you cull perfectly good applications based on random nonsense and/or the highest-scoring person is just someone lucky, then you're going to end up evolving entirely the wrong direction compared to what you actually want to happen.
IPFS is just a technology, not a predatory financial gambit. It is a set of peer-to-peer protocols for finding content on a decentralized network. It relies on a Content Identifier (CID) rather than a location (URL), which means the focus is on the identity of the content (a hash) rather than a server where it's stored.
IPFS focuses on representing and addressing data, routing it, and transferring it. It's not a storage service, though storage is necessary to use it. It's been adopted by Cloudflare and implemented in Brave and Opera, among others, and work is being done to make it work in Chromium.
IPFS traffic is public unless encrypted, which is why there are rival decentralized projects that strive for stronger built-in privacy protection like Veilid.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/colonization-antarctica-ice
Correlation does not equal causation, and King is leaning on correlation and, worse, inference. Ice cores can, yes, provide some interesting data on CO2 ratios and, very broadly, trends in temperature. But that's quite a lateral arabesque to go from "CO2 ratios changing," which has happened continually since the Earth formed, and "CO2 ratios changing due to human activity," which to my modest scientific background can't be concluded from the data presented here.
Science is supposed to be data-driven. If one's data doesn't support the hypothesis, one changes the hypothesis and then it's back to the drawing board. This article - not a peer-reviewed journal article, but a consumer piece for popular consumption - makes a lot of logical leaps that the data and the original study just don't appear to support.
Parts of Africa were already seeing web disruptions from damaged Red Sea cables.
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2024 Total Eclipse: Where & When
Eclipse Explorer
Since the announcement that Ronna McDaniel would be stepping down as chair of the Republican National Committee, the top question that's been asked over and over is, "What are they going to do about election integrity and ballot fraud?" The second most-asked question has been, "When are they going to hire Scott Presler?" New co-chair Lara Trump answered both of those questions Friday morning. //
Partnering with Presler (who contributes the occasional column here at RedState when he has the time) is a no-brainer for the RNC, and this is another sign that it's an entirely new day over at RNC headquarters. //
AdeleInTexas
34 minutes ago
Moving to aggressively check voting problems in real-time and [honest] ballot harvesting is the best possible strategy. Looks like the RNC finally read the playbook and is bringing in the right coaches and players.
You ought to do your self a favor, if you never have, and listen to General Douglas MacArthur’s 1962 speech to the cadets at West Point shortly before his death explaining the meaning of Duty, Honor, Country:
gitarcarver | March 14, 2024 at 1:57 pm
According to West Point, the phrase “duty, honor, country,” was added to the mission statement in 1998 – a mission statement that has been changed 9 times over the last century.
That means the phrase has been around for only 26 of the 222 years (11.7%) West Point has been in existence.
How did West Point ever manage to train leaders like Lee, Grant, Pershing, the “Class the Stars Fell On,” Abrahms, Schwarzkopf, MacArthur, etc., without “duty, honor, country” being in the mission statement?
...
Finally, the “Character Development Strategy” at the USMA contains many statements such as this:
The West Point Character Development Strategy describes how, at all levels and across programs, the United States Military Academy (USMA) develops leaders of character who internalize the ideals of Duty, Honor, Country and the Army Ethic.
“Duty, Honor, Country” is being not removed from the core values at West Point.
James Madison’s list of achievements did not happen by accident. We have much to learn from him.
The following is adapted from the book Lessons in Liberty: Thirty Rules for Living from Ten Extraordinary Americans.
Happy 273rd birthday to James Madison, the most egregiously underappreciated, sadly uncelebrated, and unfairly unsung American in the history of the United States.
Consider the list of his towering achievements: Father of the American Constitution, formulator of American federalism, collaborator of The Federalist Papers, de facto doula of the Bill of Rights, and the fourth president of the United States.
Yet there is no significant monument in Washington, D.C., celebrating Madison’s titanic contributions to the American self-government experiment. No American temple featuring quotes chiseled in marble, no miniaturized version of his home, no statue strategically placed on the National Mall, no allusion to membership in the American Mount Olympus. //
1. Be the Most Prepared Person in the Room
2. Be Willing to Change Your Mind
3. Be Generous — Don’t Worry About Who Gets the Credit
But nowhere is Madison’s propensity for stepping aside or working behind the scenes more pronounced than in his friendship with Jefferson. While Jefferson is perhaps the most celebrated American to have ever lived, behind much of this success is the genius of Madison. They drafted the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions together in opposition to John Adams’ Alien and Sedition Acts. Most significantly, Madison worked steadily behind the scenes to help forge the new Democratic-Republican Party. When the party successfully defeated Adams in 1800, the first president representing the new party was Jefferson, not Madison.
Madison’s significance in our history and the lessons his life provides to Americans today should be both loud and large. In an era of potent political turmoil and personal strife, we ignore them to our and the nation’s detriment.
Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, co-author of Great Barrington Declaration: “This information will eventually come out. It’s not top secret.” //
The CDC “released” a 148 page study on myocarditis after COVID-19 “vaccination” and every single page is completely redacted. This must be a new record. https://t.co/kIE2s7Wl2z pic.twitter.com/M6xDbRYMZx
— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) March 7, 2024 //
Traditionally, when science is practiced correctly, the scientist publishes the raw data (or makes that data available to the inquisitive) and is ready to address alternative theories and accept corrections when appropriate. Being funded by the taxpayer, the CDC means they collected that data on our behalf. This information is a matter of public health…not some sort of national security secret for which substantial redaction would be appropriate.
The manipulation of FOIA rules has been noted:
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford medical school professor who has advised DeSantis on COVID policy, sarcastically posted in response to Steiber, “I hear b(5) redactions are all the rage these days. Besides, there are just some things the public shouldn’t know.”