Learning a second language may or may not be beneficial

A week or so ago Market Watch ran an article claiming that learning a second language can help boost your earning ability. While I agree that high demand skills can be fiscally lucrative I believe the author not only understates the challenge of becoming truly fluent in a second language, but overlooks the social implications of doing so. She also ignores the competitive advantage that native speakers have over non-native speakers.

I base my opinion on several facts. First we as children in the United States are not exposed to secondary languages which from the start makes the task more difficult.Second even though many of the children who grow up in bilingual homes they typically learn a second language out of necessity not choice. And third a second language will only help if it's the right second language, but the task of predicting what is in demand is a difficult one.

Another year of war, another year of the unknown

They call today "Patriot Day", but in reality it's a reason for us to reexamine our ongoing war against terrorism and to weigh our successes and failures. I've heard many politicians, commentators and bloggers draw similarities between Sept 11th and Pearl Harbor. I wonder if Americans who lived through that attack celebrated the disaster by wondering if the United States would ever defeat the Japanese?

It seems that this solemn commemoration has become more of a sore point for some people. It reminds us that we are still vulnerable, that we are fighting a two front war and that control of the Middle East is slowly slipping into the hands of radical Islam. It reminds us that we as Americans have more to lose than the terrorists who threaten us.

Just as surely as there can be no great war to end all wars, there can also never be a decisive battle in the war against terror. Terror is something that men and women feel in their hearts, it is not some place or some mission objective that can be captured and held.

Conflicts of ideology are difficult to explain and even hard to maintain support for once the cost begins to rise. While I reject many of the parallels of the Vietnam War and War on Terror I do believe that we are fighting a very similar threat. Communism was and still is against nearly everything we believe in as a free democratic society. Likewise, radical Islamic rule also stands against our core beliefs. We can neither allow it to flourish in the free world nor can we allow it to compromise our pursuit of life and liberty.

That said, communism's greatest defeat came not at the hands of the US military. We can not expect to bomb, suppress and police our way to victory. If we are to truly become the "shining city upon a hill" that President Regan spoke of in 1989, then we have to face the reality that this conflict will not be won by force alone, but by the will of the United States, her ingenuity and the resolve of her people. That should be the lesson of "Patriot Day", that we stand united and steadfast in our resolve to protect freedom and to live the American dream no matter who threatens to take it from us.

The story of corporate data breaches is nothing new. A study by Redemtech claims that "off-network security is the source of 75% of all data breaches". In other words the true enemy is not an outside hacker, but the careless employee within. The report goes on to blame companies for not setting clear and concise data handling policies and claims that off-network is a security "blind spot".

If this study can be corroborated further I can see two problems developing from the results. First companies are going to knee jerk and clamp down on all forms of data retention devices in an effort to keep sensitive files from walking out the door. This includes, but is not limited to, laptops, PDAs, flash memory sticks, personal music devices, etc. Friends on the inside of the large corporate firewall claim that this is already the case, however I believe it will become the norm for all businesses especially in the wake of more scrutiny by privacy watchdog groups.

The second problem is the theoretical possibility that since an employee is usually responsible for the data leaving the building then that person could potentially be liable for the data breach. Mishandling of data could be construed as negligence and furthermore could cause that person to be liable if the fact can be proven. Companies may try to defend the guilty party but more likely they will simply scapegoat the offender and try to distance themselves at least publicly.

Could this be a new form of white collar crime? I'm no lawyer but I do know that the potential for lawsuit is always a possibility. Whether that case has merit and is actionable is left to the court to decide.

The Carolinas are experiencing a drought the likes of which hasn't been seen since 2002. It's a matter of debate exactly how bad this year's drought is historically, but one thing has been established; this region undergoes a drought every four to five years.

So it's a bit puzzling to me when I hear or read reports via the local sensationalized news stations of "how bad" it is this year. Those who don't follow the weather, at least statistically, are often surprised by it, and this year has brought more of what we traditionally experience when there isn't any rain during the summer.

Now, perhaps the trend is getting worse but such long term transitions don't make great headlines no more than then explain short term swings in the weather. I'm no meteorologist, but given my experience with the regional weather plus the current outlook for Atlantic hurricane predictions, I'd say the hot, dry weather means a lot of dead grass but also a relatively uneventful storm season.

Blame it on the weather patterns or what have you. Simply put it is what it is, and there is nothing we can do to change it in the short term.