My daughter has to create a report and make a presentation on a contemporary political issue. She has choosen Y2K and has ask me for help. I in turn am asking the members of this forum for your assistance and opinions.

My daughter ask me for articles about Y2K. She must present the conservative view point, the liberal view point, and the middle of the road view point. (alternately: doomer, polly, or middle)

Please help me find articles that will help her with her project and which view point you consider the article to represent. I talked to her about Koskinen, North, Bennett, Yourdon and others and explained who these people are. Articles from these people and others of this notariaty(sp) is what she needs. If you have links to online articles or can point me to an article via publication and date, we will both be very appreciative for your efforts. Post here or email me.

Thanks in advance, John

-- (southeastern@my-deja.com), October 04, 1999

Answers

Go to the archives, there's plenty of stuff there. If we do all the work for her, it would not be her report. Let her do her own research. The archive categories are listed at the bottom of the forum and there's plenty of stuff there. Happy researching!

-- do it yourself (doityourself@doityourselfff.xcom), October 04, 1999.

I agree pretty much with "do it yourself." Show your child how to use the internet. Show him/her how to use a search engine. After that, bow out.

-- Anita (notgiving@anymore.com), October 04, 1999.

Actually, you have part of it wrong. The Y2K conservatives are the pollys, who don't think much will happen in 2000; the term "liberal" doesn't fit very well in this context for anyone in the Y2K community. I think of those of us who expect major Y2K problems as realists. And those in the middle are just those in the middle, some of whom think things are going to be fairly bad and some of whom just don't know what to think at this point.

I have a website, Y2K Survive (www.y2ksurvive.com), that is jam-packed with free Y2K information written from a realist point of view (that is, I think things are going to be really bad in 2000 and worse in 2001) and your daughter is welcome to make full use of anything on the site.

-- cody varian (cody@y2ksurvive.com), October 04, 1999.

Do a search on "Gary North", you'll get both ends of the spectrum by clicking on the found results of "Gary North's Y2K Forum" and "Gary North's an Idiot". No kidding, they're both there, and you'll get both sides.

-- S.Pace (space@nwaisp.com), October 04, 1999.

If your daughter is allowed to use a different media than print, try http://y2kactionday.com/ with real audio and have her listen to different "experts" talk about y2k at 100 days and counting

-- marsh (armstrng@sisqtel.net), October 04, 1999.

Depending on her age, you may want to have her pick a different topic. This stuff gives me nightmares and I've got a teenage kid. Come to think of it, he gives me nightmares too.

-- Bill (bill@tinfoi.com), October 05, 1999.

Does your daughter want to present the facts and inform her class or just spew the party line for a class project. First you must sit down and tell her like it is. Y2k is a political hot potatoe. The reality is we are facing a civil war a nuclear biological and chemical environmental nightmare and maybe even a third World War if our politicans dont start acting responsible right now and do the right things . The y2k computer anomoly is in every computing device in the world. Software took 30 years to evolve under the old 2digit FIPS (Federal Information Protocol standard) To work as smoothly as it does. No one has sucessfully to this date remediated the y2k bug totally out of systems bigger than 30 million lines of code. It is oct 4 1999. WE are now two months away. The new sap systems and FAA systems with the new code written from the ground floor up than rushed into service is very buggy (many problems, crashes, unsmooth operation.) The world has a serious technical problem ahead. Before you have your daughter give a white paper on it, Have a talk with her. the real truth is more scarier than you could possibly imagine. Pray with her first. Ask god the Father to guard her heart in the name of JESUS. And If she never accepted the Lord in her life NOW is a good time. She must be prepared for the reality that y2k may kill off a real lot of people and she needs to be spiritually prepared for that. Y2k wont be a football game it's going to affect many real hard. She needs to wiegh these considerations before doing her assignment. May the Lord our God give her strength to tell the facts un-varnished and provide comfort to those will be shocked by it.

-- y2k aware mike (y2k aware mike @ conservation . com), October 05, 1999.

I'd probably approach it like this: Use the high and low end of the scale and of course they'll understand what lies between.

For those who think the disruptions will rank from say 1 to 4 (low to med. impact) I'd use Bennett, Kosky, Greenspan ("Pollyticians").

For those who think the disruptions will rank from say 6 to 10 (med. to high impact) I'd use Yourdon, Michael Hyatt, and Gary North (the Realists).

Plenty of good articles at all these sites, recommend the basic 1-10 structure, let her choose her favorites.

Good Luck!

-- @ (@@@.@), October 05, 1999.

The Girl Scouts of America has a y2k web page that would be age appropriate, she might want to start there. The url is

http://www.girlscouts.org/girls/Why/Y2K/Y2K.htm

The Senate maintains a y2k web site as well. I myself find the hearings transcripts particularly interesting. It has links to testimony from many of the people you mentioned.

http://www.senate.gov/~y2k/hearings/

In terms of liberal, conservative, etc. Y2K makes for very strange bedfellows indeed. Feeling that we are not getting the truth from the corporate, advertising-driven media is common to liberals and conservatives alike, so it may not break down quite that way. I know that the people on this forum span ALL ranges of political beliefs.

But, yes, make her do her own research. My daughter's working on her history fair project. I take her to the library and set her loose.

(email is real, remove the X)

-- mommacarestx (harringtondesignX@earthlink.net), October 05, 1999.

Just obtain copies for her of The Millennium Bug (Hyatt), Time Bomb 2000 (Yourdon), Infomagic's Deevolutionary Spiral, the infamous >7 pages of Y2K quotes by famous people, at least 50 pages of Y2K failures that have already happened, The Mythical Man-Month (Brooks), and get her onto Gary North's website (www.garynorth.com), making sure she knows about the "No Big Problem" section. Maybe throw in Man and Society in Calamity (Sorokin) as well if she is unusually gifted. I am presuming the child in question is high-school, and reads at least at grade level; otherwise, there is little point to her being assigned such a complex topic. A student of lower level might as well be working on a report on quaternary structure of enzymes or why Karl Marx was >96% wrong about everything, as her chance for learning anything of value would be low.

my site: www.y2ksafeminnesota.com

-- MinnesotaSmith (y2ksafeminnesota@hotmail.com), October 05, 1999.

I'm not sure why noone has mentioned Dr. Ed Yardeni's site:

http://www.yardeni.com/cyber.html

Ed Yardeni is the Chief Economist for Deutsche Bank Securities. he has been a programmer and has researched this subject extensively.

I disagree with your analogies for points of view tho..

Conservative, Liberal, middle of the Road. these political tags don't very well translate into Doomer, Polly, middle.

Best of luck trying to find a Middle of the Road view.....

-- plonk! (realaddress@hotmail.com), October 05, 1999.

Y2K is not political at all and it may in fact be interesting for your daughter to focus on this for her project. So much public discourse seems to be aligned with the socio-political labels of "conservative" and "liberal/progressive", but Y2K discussions do not seem to lend themselves to this at all. This forum is considered something of a "Doomer" hang-out (Edwards 3-4), yet we have folks of every political stripe who seem in agreement about the very real risks and the prudence of preparing for them.

The publisher of the Utne Reader is hardly a conservative, nor would one be tempted to label Dr. Yardeni a liberal, yet both would be and are classified as "doomsayers".

-- Mac (sneak@lurk.hid), October 05, 1999.

From: Y2K, ` la Carte by Dancr near Monterey, California

Don't forget the Cassandra Project. I've been pulling together a list of sites that I think would be of value to folks who want to pick up on Y2K as quickly as possible, including a couple sites for a completely different point of view.

If you have relatives who are still DGI but do know something of the internet, have your daughter recruit them to help her with her project. They may well Get It as a result. That's how it happened for me. A friend of mine who is in High School was looking for help with such a project. I "got it" immediately.

-- Dancr (addy.available@my.webpage), October 06, 1999.