By now you have read about the 7,000 votes that magically appeared on the computer of Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus. If not, Susie Madrak has the story which is encapsulated in this paragraph:

Wisconsinites should respond with equal skepticism to the news that Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus, a former Republican legislative staffer who worked for Prosser when he served as Assembly speaker and with Gov. Scott Walker when he was a GOP rising star, has found all the votes that justice needs to secure his re-election and that the governor needs to claim a “win” for his agenda.

Susie’s article mentions that Nickolaus claimed the problem was because she forgot to hit “save” after entering the data initially, and that computer people have already pointed out that you don’t have to “save” in ACCESS, it saves data automatically.

I go back so far that I used the first version of ACCESS. It was an ill-fated, terrible communications program, so bad that Microsoft expunged it from memory and reused the name for the data base component of the Windows Office suite.

If you want a taste for how thoroughly integrated into ACCESS the autosave function is, read this forum entry about stopping Access from autosaving. You can’t just turn it off, you have to program around it, and even then, you might not stop it completely.

I did some volunteer work for a group that used an ACCESS data base, and we really wanted to verify the data before it was entered because the people who were doing the entry were all volunteers. In the end it was easier to clean up the data after the fact than to fight with ACCESS.

If she entered anything into an ACCESS data field, it was saved. There are a lot of problems with ACCESS, but losing data isn’t one of them. With 15 years of IT experience, Nickolaus knows that.

This is the sort of thing that destroys credibility with the public, when the government and scientists refuse to state the obvious because there is “an ongoing investigation” or “there is a lawsuit pending”, but neglect to qualify their statements by stating, flat-out, that the lawsuit / investigation is keeping them from saying what they know.

UPDATE: The researchers working on the situation in the Gulf of Mexico are almost all under non-disclosure agreements with BP or the US government. Their funding and access is tied to their not saying or writing anything about what they discover. The few independents working on the problem are extremely limited in what they can do, as access to the area affected is strictly controlled, so they have to work on the fringes.

CNN reports that Scientists unsure why dolphins washing up dead

(CNN) — Dead baby bottlenose dolphins are continuing to wash up in record numbers on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, and scientists do not know why.

Since February 2010 to April 2011, 406 dolphins were found either stranded or reported dead offshore.

The occurrence has prompted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to designate these deaths as an “unusual mortality event” or UME. The agency defines a UME as a stranding incident that is unexpected or involves a significant loss of any marine mammal population.

“This is quite a complex event and requires a lot of analysis,” said Blair Mase, the agency’s marine mammal investigations coordinator.
…
[Read more →]

At Last

You looking at me?

[Editor: And I shall call this one S.U., for Specialist Underhouse, because the facial markings look like the Army’s Specialist stripes, and this is the second of the two cats that have spent their lives under my house.]

Friday Ark