Gordon's Notes

What I do

2012-01-25T22:20:00.001-06:00

I have written about 10,000 blog posts, but I've not said much about myself. This is an exception. Please feel free to skip it.

I'm writing about myself because a classmate from eons ago asked me what I do now, and in particular how I use up my brain reserves.

First of all, I'm a father and a husband. Emily and I have 3 children and we share our home with a dog (Kateva of kateva.org) and a school rescue-gerbil (Kangaroo). For reasons I won't go into here our parental duties are very rewarding but also above-average demanding. Running over, around and into some of those challenges uses up a good bit of brain space.

Then there are hobbies, of which the most intellectual one is blogging and reading and sharing and so on. Excluding sports teams I write on three blogs including tech.kateva.org and notes.kateva.org.

Lastly there's work. This comes in a minor and major flavor. The minor flavor is that I'm adjunct faculty at the U of MN Health Informatics department. This has involved teaching courses over the past decade, but more recently we've a full time teacher who has taken this on. So its pretty light duty at the moment.

The major flavor is my work for a publicly traded corporation that, among other things, develops software products that are used by physicians and nurses. There I am a variable mixture of a working informatician (industrial ontologist I used to say), a domain specialist (less so as my aging medical knowledge obsoletes), an executive (more or less), a knowledge worker (more), a manager, a designer, an analyst, a project manager, an inventor, a cautious* disruptor, a fixer, a product owner, a librarian and whatever else is needed. It's a good job for anyone who gets bored easily and likes solving problems**.

In a past life I was a country doc. Emily and I worked in the same practice.

I have worked in the bowels of a publicly traded corporation for over ten years; longer than I've worked anywhere else. I do not think of myself as a very corporate person, and I find my continued survival bemusing and a bit puzzling. To a significant extent I have persisted there because it's been a great fit for our parental joys and obligations.

And that's what I do.

-fn-

* I learned the cautious bit the hard way, but still I am. Corporations are interesting entities.
** One of the most important lessons of my professional life was learning the difference between problems that are mostly important to solve and problems that are mostly interesting to solve.

GTD: Email to task with Toodledo

2012-01-25T21:17:00.000-06:00

There are a lot of things I don't love about Toodledo. I really, for example, dislike their lack of full text search.

It's good then that they do some things very well. Import and export for example.

It's even better that they do one very important thing extremely well. You can mail a task into Toodledo.

Ah, you're not impressed? You think other task management services do this?

Perhaps, but so far only Toodledo does it right. I use this all the time. When I email someone and I want to track the response, I BCC my secret Toodledo task address. I create tasks from just about anywhere I can generate an email.

Creating tasks by email is a killer feature.

See also:

GTD series:

and elsewhere ...

Gordon's Tech: Toodledo gets it 8/2008
Gordon's Tech: Toodledo: How you can give me the search I need with your current architecture 9/2011
Gordon's Tech: Email to Task: Remember the Milk gets it wrong, Appigo and Toodledo do it right 10/2011
Gordon's Tech: Tasks from Palm to iPhone via Toodledo 9/2009
Gordon's Tech: Using Outlook Tasks: a mini-tutorial 8/2008: I don't use Outlook for personal tasks, and I switched from using Outlook tasks to focusing on creating Appointments - but that's a longer story. Work and home are different; I need a task list at home because they are small and opportunistic.

GTD: grouping tasks into Projects using Context with ToDo.app and Toodledo

2012-01-25T20:57:00.001-06:00

Emily and I started using Appigo's ToDo.app on our iPhones years ago. In those days Toodledo didn't have an iPhone app and ToDo didn't have a web app.

Now both Toodledo and Appigo market both web apps and iOS apps. Alas, Appigo hasn't figured out how creating tasks by email should work, and I don't like Toodledo's iOS app. So I still use ToDo.app with Toodledo. It works pretty well, and now that Google has turned Evil I'm happy to avoid their world.

It works pretty well -- except when you want want to group a series of tasks as a project. The project models for Toodledo and Todo don't mesh.

Most of the time this doesn't bother me -- I like to edit and move forward tasks rather than create small projects. Sometimes, however, a complex project deserves a set of tasks.

Since the Toodledo and Todo project models don't sync, I instead steal the "Context" feature - which both ToDo and Toodledo manage similarly. A "Context" is supposed to be a location or environment for doing a task; but I've never found this "Getting Things Done" idea very useful. These days I have a computer everywhere, and that's the context for most of my tasks.

So instead of a list of "Contexts" I have "Projects" that group tasks. The UI and views are very efficient for this purpose, and synchronization works perfectly.

See also:

GTD: Creating a project vs. editing a persistent task

2012-01-25T20:51:00.000-06:00

Both Appigo ToDo (app/web) and Toodledo Pro (app/web) have the idea of a "project" that can contain subtasks.

For small projects I don't bother with the overhead of project creation and task maintenance. Instead I create a single task that I edit when I complete a 'step' in the project. It lasts the life of the project.

Each time I complete a step, I edit the task to add a new "next step" and I date stamp the completed step. I also keep short notes in the body of the task note.
For example, if the task is "Update Passport" I might have the following my "notes" section:

schedule photograph
download form
complete form
schedule appointment .. etc.

In practice I don't usually write out all the next steps. I just write out the one that's up next. For A tasks I may schedule a calendar appointment too.
Similarly I don't bother with repeating or recurrent tasks. I create one task, and just reschedule it as needed. My "pay visa bill" task has been moved forward one month at a time for years. (Periodically I delete the list of dates I paid to shrink the notes section).

See also:

GTD: Create appointments not tasks
GTD: Introduction to a series
Appigo Todo.app and Todo Online: best solution for most
Toodledo: power user solution, best import/export/integration. Lacks full text search (!).

CSS was a terrible mistake

2012-01-24T08:50:00.002-06:00

It is fashionable to talk about the "wisdom of crowds" and the power of crowd sourcing.

There's always a flip-side. That's the madness of crowds.

That madness comes to mind as I contemplate the wreckage of Microsoft's SharePoint 2007 to Sharepoint 2010 Wiki conversion. How did this happen?

Part of the explanation is that Microsoft is a dying company, and SP 2010 was never finished. Microsoft redid their rich text editor, moving away from the IE embedded Word-like editor [1], but they didn't finish the conversion tools. Many formatted SP 2007 wiki pages cannot be edited in the new environment. (Apple does this stuff too, but with SP 2010 Microsoft has exceeded Apple's appallingly low standards.)

I think there's another factor though, and that's where the madness of crowds comes in. That was the decision made in the late 1990s to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to control the layout of web content.

In retrospect CSS layout was a dreadful mistake, a madness of crowds "bridge-too-far" class mistake. Table based layout worked back when 100MB was a lot of memory. Mixing table models and CSS and style sheets is too much. Humans can't scale to this level of complexity; and browsers struggle mightily to reconcile multiple formatting and layout rules.

We are going to be paying for the CSS mistake for a very long time. We would be wise to at least recognize that we blundered, and try to understand why.

[1] Chrome and IE 9 are equally bad at editing our 540 or so partly-converted wiki pages.

CEO Compensation: Apple and more

2012-01-13T16:28:00.001-06:00

Apple's Tom Cook isn't the worst example of excessive CEO compensation, but his huge stock option grant is bad news all the same.

It's bad news because it tells us that Apple 4.0 is becoming an average publicly traded corporation even more quickly than expected. This kind of compensation demoralizes employees who deal with tight budgets, even as their CEO earns a year of their pay in a day. Perhaps worse of all, when you pay a CEO a hundred times what their star employees receive, they imagine they're 100 times better than those employees.

An overpaid CEO is a CEO on chronic meth - intoxicated by the inarguable evidence of their perfect brilliance.

See also:

Gordon's Notes: What are the consequences of extreme executive income? 11/2011
Gordon's Notes: Natural selection and executive compensation 2/2009 - we've established an ecosystem that selects for internal predation, not wise leadership
Gordon's Notes: Performance-based compensation and novel financial instruments: an explosive combination 1/2009
Gordon's Notes: Will winner take all work? 9/2006
Gordon's Notes: Mass disability and the middle class 9/2011.
Gordon's Notes: Where has the money gone? To the very American oligarchy 2/2006
Gordon's Notes: Unemployment and the new American economy - with some fixes 1/2001

Wisdom summarized - Elders speak

2012-01-09T12:45:00.001-06:00

Most "wisdom" essays are pretty obvious, but this one has some science to it. Curiously I agree with much of it, but I can see how some recommendations are really personality specific.

Elderly ‘Experts’ Share Life Advice in Cornell Project:

... Maintain social contacts. Avoid becoming isolated. When an invitation is issued, say yes. Take steps to stay engaged, and take advantage of opportunities to learn new thing...

My takeaways:

Some recommendations are in conflict. "Do what you love" as a career may well contradict "spend more time with your children".
"chose to live each day as if it could be my last" is Jane Brody's personal one. Nobody else said that. Emily and I do something a bit different. We live as though our world were fragile and transient; both for us individually and for all we meet and know.
Embrace aging, don't fight it. Yech. I suspect this is a form of denial. Physical/cognitive aging sucks. "Embracing" sounds like Stockholm Syndrome.
Travel when young. Yeah, that's right. Good advice. Don't wait. Spend the bloody money; a fancy wheelchair isn't worth it.

Do whipworms make dogs eat dirt?

2012-01-08T10:07:00.001-06:00

The canine whipworm (Trichuris vulpis) is a common dog parasite.

The juvenile form of the parasite develops in dirt; it's transmitted by eating dirt (geophagy). It may be particularly common in dog parks [1]

Some dogs eat dirt.

Many parasites change the behaviors of their hosts to facilitate their life cycle.

So do whipworm infested dogs find dirt particularly tasty?

The association between geophagy and worm infection has been studied in humans, but a PubMed query on geophagy and trichuris vulpis in dogs produced no hits (PubMed includes veterinary literature).

I'm sure someone is studying this even as I write this post. I'm hoping for an article within the year.

[1] I don't know how hard it is to study this. A visit to the local dog park might be the basis for a great high school science experiment.

Rule 34 by Charlie Stross - my review

2012-01-08T07:53:00.001-06:00

I read Charlie Stross's Rule 34. Here's my 5 star Amazon review (slightly modified as I thought of a few more things):

Rule 34 is brilliant work.
If Stross had written a novel placed in 2010, it would have been a top notch crime and suspense novel. Charlie's portrayal of the criminal mind, from silence-of-the-lambs psychopath (sociopath in UK speak, though that US/UK distinction is blurring) to every day petty crook, is top notch.
Stross puts us into the minds of his villains, heroes, and fools, using a curious 2nd person pronoun style that has a surprising significance. I loved how so many of his villains felt they were players, while others knew they were pawns. Only the most insightful know they're a cog in the machine.
A cog in a corporate machine that is. Whether cop or criminal or other, whether gay or straight, everyone is a component of a corporation. Not the megacorp of Gibson and Blade Runner, but the ubiquitous corporate meme that we also live in. The corporate meme has metastasized. It is invisible, it is everywhere, and it makes use of all material. Minds of all kinds, from Aspergerish to sociopath, for better and for worse, find a home in this ecosystem. The language of today's sycophantic guides to business is mainstream here.
Stross manages the suspense and twists of the thriller, and explores emerging sociology as he goes. The man has clearly done his homework on the entangled worlds of spam and netporn -- and I'm looking forward to the interviewers who ask him what that research was like. In other works Stross has written about the spamularity, and in Rule 34 he lays it out. He should give some credit to the spambots that constantly attack his personal blog.
Rule 34 stands on its own as a thriller/crime/character novel, but it doesn't take place in 2010. It takes place sometime in the 2020-2030s (at one point in the novel Stross gives us a date but I can't remember it exactly). A lot of the best science fiction features fully imagined worlds, and this world is complete. He's hit every current day extrapolation I've ever thought of, and many more besides. From the macroeconomics of middle Asia, to honey pots with honey pots, to amplified 00s style investment scams to home foundries to spamfested networked worlds to a carbon-priced economy to mass disability to cyberfraud of the vulnerable to ubiquitous surveillance to the bursting of the higher education bubble, to exploding jurisprudence creating universal crime … Phew. There's a lot more besides. I should have been making a list as I read.
Yes, Rule 34 is definitely a "hard" science fiction novel -- though it's easy to skip over the mind-bending parts if you're not a genre fan. You can't, however, completely avoid Stross's explorations of the nature of consciousness, and his take on the "Singularity" (aka rapture of the nerds). It's not giving away too much to say there's no rapture here. As to whether this is a Rainbow's End pre-Singular world … well, you'll have to read the novel and make your own decision. I'm not sure I'd take Stross's opinion on where this world of his is going - at least not at face value.
Oh, and if you squint a certain way, you can see a sort-of Batman in there too. I think that was deliberate; someone needs to ask Charlie about that.
Great stuff, and a Hugo contender for sure.

If you've read my blog you know I'm fond of extrapolating to the near future. Walking down my blog's tag list I see I'm keen on the nature and evolution of the Corporation, mind and consciousness, economics, today's history, emergence, carbon taxes, fraud and "the weak", the Great Recession (Lesser Depression), alternative minds (I live with 2 non-neurotypicals), corruption, politics, governance, the higher eduction and the education bubble, natural selection, identity, libertarianism (as a bad thing), memes, memory management, poverty (and mass disability), reputation management, schizophrenia and mental illness, security, technology, and the whitewater world. Not to mention the Singularity/Fermi Paradox (for me they're entangled -- I'm not a Happy Singularity sort of guy).

Well, Stross has, I dare to say, some of the same interests. Ok, so I'm not in much doubt of that. I read the guy religiously, and I'm sure I've reprocessed everything he's written. In Rule 34 he's hit all of these bases and more. Most impressively, if you're not looking for it, you could miss almost all of it. Stross weaves it in, just as he does a slow reveal of the nature of his characters, including the nature of the character you don't know about until the end.

Update: In one of those weird synchronicity things, Stross has his 2032 and 2092 predictions out this morning. Read 'em.

Divorcing Google - and hoping for GoogleMinus

2012-01-07T22:54:00.001-06:00

Google hired a hit man, and was shocked to find bodies. Now the remnants of Google 1.0 are punishing Google 2.0, though Matt Cutts hasn't said anything. He didn't used to be so quiet.

Google 1.0's glorious Data Liberation Front is pretty quiet too. Their Twitter feed went silent on 9/15/2011.

It's sad. I loved Google from my first searches in 1997 until the Google-Apple war began in 2009. Even then I wanted to believe in their original mission to free the world's knowledge. I didn't really lose faith until Google deleted my Reader Share memory - with 1 week's notice.

Yeah, I was denying simple arithmetic. Google's is an algorithmic corporation that iterates on its goals, and its goals are to delivery value to their paying customers. Advertisers. Yes, Google, like health insurance corporations, has an Agency problem.

Notice how much junk their is in Google searches these days? How many "plus.google.com" pages? How ads are growing across Google's search pages? This isn't going to stop -- not unless Google divides into two companies.

Now I'm moving off the Google platform. It's a slow and painful process. Just as painful as moving from DOS to Mac Classic, from Mac Classic to Windows, Windows to OS/2, OS/2 to Windows 2K, Windows to OS X, Palm to iOS…

Especially like moving from Palm to iOS. That's because there was a wasteland between the end of PalmOS and the rise of iOS. It was a kind of technological winter; a gap between one life and the other. I nursed my aging Palm devices along because the alternative was to resurrect my Franklin Planner.

That's what life is like post-Google - because there isn't a good alternative to Google. iCloud? Please. Microsoft? I wish. Yahoo!? Ok, you get the point. I won't go on.

So it's a tough divorce. It would be even harder if I were an Android customer. I wonder if Android users understand how tightly they're tied to Google -- and why.

How will this winter end? Amazon? Apple? Microsoft?!?

Or … perhaps …. GoogleMinus.

GoogleMinus, because there are businesses in Google that make money selling value to users. Google Docs, for example, sells ad-free solutions to schools and corporations. These aren't not huge businesses, but they might be profitable if they could lease infrastructure from GooglePlus.

GoogleMinus, because there are still, I think, some idealists left at Google -- and they might prefer to work for GoogleMinus rather than GooglePlus.

It could happen. The EU might require a breakup. Civil strife within Google might make a breakup internally acceptable.

Imagine a future when GoogleMinus packages GooglePlus search. For an annual fee of $100 I get the ability to block plus.google.com searches, and a control that lets me filter out web sites that run ads. Wouldn't that be interesting?

Update 1/9/12: This Android retrospective is relevant. I'd forgotten the day Google made its deal with Verizon; a deal signed in blood at midnight

Update 1/10/12: Today Google dedicated their search function to promoting Google+ properties.

Does earlier menarche explain the growing girl-boy academic gap?

2012-01-07T21:49:00.001-06:00

Firstly, the age of menarche in Western nations has been declining...

Secular trends in age at menarche... [Paediatr Perinat Epidemiol. 2011] - PubMed - NCBI
Menarcheal age decreased over time in Western countries until cohorts born in the mid-20th century. It then stabilised, but limited data are available for recent cohorts. Menarche data were collected retrospectively by questionnaire in 2003-10 from 94,170 women who were participating in the Breakthrough Generations Study, aged 16-98 years, born 1908-93 and resident in the UK. Average menarcheal age declined from women born in 1908-19 (mean=13.5 years) to those born in 1945-49 (mean=12.6 years). It was then stable for several birth cohorts, but resumed its downward trend in recent cohorts (mean=12.3 years in 1990-93 cohort). Trends differed between socio-economic groups, but the recent decline was present in each group. In conclusion, menarcheal age appears to have decreased again in recent cohorts after a period of stabilization….

Surprisingly, we don't have good recent data - this is the best I could find. There's no evidence of a similar shift in males.

Secondly, in athletics, we know a maturational advantage of a few months can make a big difference in competitive events.

High school education is a competitive event. So, if girls are maturing earlier, how does this impact their academic performance relative to boys? Does this explain why our middle and senior high school honor role events are all female? Do boys get discouraged because they can't compete?

Seems like an interesting question. I'm thinking an 'all boy' school might be a good idea for our middle son.

Another one of our victims speaks

2012-01-07T18:42:00.001-06:00

Another victim of America's Inquisition:

Notes From a Guantánamo Survivor - Murat Kurnaz - NYTimes.com
… was taken to Kandahar, in Afghanistan, where American interrogators asked me the same questions for several weeks: Where is Osama bin Laden? Was I with Al Qaeda? No, I told them, I was not with Al Qaeda. No, I had no idea where bin Laden was. I begged the interrogators to please call Germany and find out who I was. During their interrogations, they dunked my head under water and punched me in the stomach; they don’t call this waterboarding but it amounts to the same thing. I was sure I would drown.
At one point, I was chained to the ceiling of a building and hung by my hands for days. A doctor sometimes checked if I was O.K.; then I would be strung up again. The pain was unbearable...

I'm hoping one of these victims will get their case heard in the World Court.

There's hope, as always, in the younger generation. Maybe, one day, they'll hold trials (via Doc Searls …)

Otherwise occupied: What price revolution? | Hal Crowther | Independent Weekly
… what I think I see, through the media fog of polarized America, is the return of the full-fledged idealists (as opposed to single-issue idealists) who seemed to go underground around 1980, possibly because the mass media abandoned them during the mudslide of self-celebration that began with Reaganism and culminated in Facebook.
I say God bless them, and God will if he still has any investment in the United States of America. The Goliath they challenge has crushed a thousand Davids. The good news is that "the kids" are right on target. Their diagnosis is bull's-eye correct, and the patient is critical. For this country to survive, it must find saner ways to pursue and multiply wealth, and find them quickly. The cannibal capitalism that produced a Goldman Sachs and a Bernie Madoff is subhuman and obscene. There's no form of government more inherently offensive than plutocracy—only theocracy comes close. When a citizen comes of age in a plutocracy, he has no moral choice but to slay Pluto or die trying...

Can Apple produce first class software?

2012-01-06T07:49:00.001-06:00

I use most of what Apple makes. Their hardware design is top notch. Their iOS and OS X systems are better than the competitions. Nobody beats them at retail or operations. Their service was always pretty good, but I think it's improving.

After that, things get dicey. Consider iWork ...

C’mon Apple, upgrade Numbers! | ZDNet
… Numbers performance is anything but speedy. In fact, it’s abysmal. I have a relatively tame no-formula five column table with 6000 rows and changing a value in a single cell requires 20 minutes to update the graph. That’s 20 minutes – not 20 seconds. With all the processing horsepower of a MBP, that’s absurd...

I'm amazed performance is that bad, but I've never done anything serious with Numbers.app. I have done a bit more with Pages.app, enough to suspect it doesn't scale well either. Overall iWork is an excellent start -- that needed a major follow-up in 2011.

Reading this, I thought about the other Apple products I use. The latest release of iPhotos is dismal. Aperture doesn't seem to try to compete for the pro market any more. Final Cut Pro is being abandoned by power users.

Their bundled apps are similarly miserable. ICal. iChat. Address Book. It's a veritable Hall of Software Shame. Safari is stabilizing again, but its performance issues have driven power users to Chrome on OS X.

The only Apple product that seems to rule its niche is iTunes.

Really, Apple is no better at applications than it is at Cloud services. If it didn't own the OS, none of its products would survive in the marketplace.

This is a Steve Jobs legacy. Tom Cook can't do worse. I'll close my eyes and cross my fingers and hope Cook's Apple can do better.

Great graphics: Apple OS and Video Codes

2012-01-03T14:47:00.000-06:00

AppleInsider's the next ten years of Mac OS X has fairly predictable text, but the graphics are terrific. I particularly liked the Apple/NeXT/Unix graphic, but the video codec illustration is also fine.

I remembered A/UX, but not the Unix-based OS from the early 80s.

America's Inquisition

2012-01-02T17:44:00.001-06:00

The Atlantic doesn't have this article online yet ...

Torturer's Apprentice, Cullen Murphy Jan/Feb 2012
... The first technique used by the Inquisition was ... torture by suspension ... it has been employed in the interrogation of prisoners in US custody ...
... The second technique was the rack ...
... The third technique involved water ... fabric plugged a victim's upturned mouth ... upon wich water was poured ...
... the (Bush) administration's threshold for when an act of torture begins was the point at which the inquisition stipulated that it must stop...

To clarify the last excerpt -- the Bush administration interrogation policy was remarkably similar to the Inquisition's interrogation policy. Their torture and our non-torture had similar (theoretical) stopping points.

ISP travails: Forget buffer bloat, what about my upload speeds?

2012-01-02T10:09:00.001-06:00

Cringely was right about BufferBloat. I give him full credit for that one - I've not seen anyone else describing this networking problem. Once again I miss BYTE; they would have caught this long ago. (Old guy thing - I'm fascinated by good stuff that goes away without replacement.)

That's not what bugs me though. My video streaming is good enough. I'm a lot more concerned about my upload speeds. I'm getting about 0.1 mbps (real data) over CenturyLink DSL (formerly qwest) with a 1 GB cutoff [3], even though my download speeds are about 10mbps (networking traffic, not real bits). Yes, my current upload speeds are less than 5% of download speeds. CenturyLink has boosted its download speeds to be more Comcast competitive, at the hidden cost of upload speed.

No, I'm not running a Torrent. I've got too much to lose to be pirating movies, besides, it's wrong [1]. I'm just trying to share 1.5 GB of our summer vacation photos [2].

So what's the problem? I can just switch ISPs right? I'll just Google those sites that compare upload speeds. I remember using them only five ... ok ... ten years ago.

Not so fast. I can't find those handy comparison sites any more. The American ISP industry has consolidated so much there's not much point in doing comparisons. Locally my only alternative option is Comcast, and while it's probably better that CenturyLink it's not much better.

Cue the ominous music, because there are logical reasons for uploading to suffer in today's market. Most customers don't care about it, or don't realize that speeds are asymmetric so are baffled by mpbs marketing. On the other hand, Torrents are enemy #1 for most ISPs. Photo sharing and online backup services may simply be collateral damage of anti-BitTorrent wars.

I can live without sharing full sized images; almost nobody I share with wants a 6MB JPEG. I can also go without online backup -- I don't trust online backup anyway.

Even so, it's a bummer. Monopoly sucks.

[1] Sort of wrong. Given the legislative conduct of the IP industry there's a definite Robin Hood angle to stealing movies.
[2] Big JPEGs. A downside of today's monster DSLs, combined with some unfortunate side-effects of processing JPGs in Aperture.
[3] Throttling? Automated nightly modem reboots?

Update 1/7/12: I did hear back from CenturyLink. Basically, 300 kbps (100 kbpbs real throughput) is as good as it gets. If I want a different balance of upload and download then I need a "business" line. Sadly, this makes sense. I'm more like a business customer than a consumer customer.

The GOP Primary is over now. What will the media cover next?

2012-01-01T19:24:00.001-06:00

The 2011 GOP primary has to be one of the most foregone conclusions ever.

Once Perry flamed out, it was going to be Romney. Yes, there was great entertainment from Cain and Santorum and Gingrich and Bachman -- but really, they never had a hope. Maybe Gingrich for VP?

The numbers have fallen in line, and now it's all over but the formalities.

So what will the media cover next? I suppose it will be Romney's VP pick.

Has Microsoft lost the malware war?

2012-01-01T17:01:00.000-06:00

I thought of John Halamka was a fairly careful writer, so this comment caught my eye (emphases mine):

Life as a Healthcare CIO: The Joy of Success
... One CIO received a negative audit report because new generations of viruses are no longer stopped by state of the art anti-virus software.... No one in the industry has solved the problem...

He refers to a previous post ...

Life as a Healthcare CIO: The Growing Malware Problem
... A new virus is released on the internet every 30 seconds. Modern viruses contain self modifying code. The "signature" approaches used in anti-virus software to rapidly identify known viruses, does not work with this new generation of malware.
Android attacks have increased 400% in the past year. Even the Apple App Store is not safe.
Apple OS X is not immune. Experts estimate that some recent viruses infections are 15% Mac...

Ok, so those sentences are a huge hit on his credibility. App Store issues are in no way comparable to Android attacks, and that 15% number could only be true for Microsoft Office malware (Duqu attacks a TrueType font parsing engine), or for something none of the Mac guys I read have run into. Nobody I know in the Mac community uses antivirals - even now. The cure is, for the moment, worse than the disease.

So Halamka is a bit lost, but it is true that the Stuxnet and Duqu platforms are formidable [1]. That's presumably what Halamka is talking about, and what some CIOs are thinking.

I haven't seen this elsewhere, but I don't track the Windows world all that closely. This will be something to watch over the next few months ...

[1] Even OS X Lion is no more secure than Windows 7 (for now). The only reason those viruses aren't attacking OS X machines is because there's no money in the Mac world. If Macs were used in banks they'd be at least as vulnerable to Duqu as Windows. The future (next?) version of OS X is expected to, like iOS, run signed code only.

Medical fads - are they cycling faster?

2012-01-01T09:31:00.001-06:00

We've always had crazy fads in medicine.

I fell for a few when I had wet ears. Magnesium Sulfate post-MI is the one I remember best. That one even made it to textbooks before it died.

It's typical of medical fads that they infest journals, and now newspapers, but usually die before they get to textbooks. Estrogen for osteoporosis wasn't in that class -- that was a somewhat understandable research problem. Medical fads are less forgivable; they really aren't supported by evidence. They're built on easy money and bored specialists.

It feels like the fads are cycling faster. Emily and I thought the Vitamin D craze had another year or two, but it died fast.

Our local minor neurotrauma ("acute mild head injury") craze reeks of fadism. In Minnesota recommendations are being written into law, with little basis in science. As of today, PubMed has precious few studies.

Maybe it will be real. Some cults become established religions, some fads become science.

I don't think this one will make it to science, I do think it will cause significant harm along the way. Labels are powerful.

Hope this cycles as fast as Vitamin D, but putting minor traumatic brain injury into law may stretch its lifespan. Medical fadism is a crime against the vulnerable...

Update: More on the Vitamin D fad.

A few readers asked me for more detail on the vitamin D fad.

Briefly, for a year or two, I couldn't avoid popular articles claiming that Americans suffered from an epidemic of Vitamin D deficiency causing a wide range of disorders, and that recommended daily allowances were inadequate. Then, at the end of 2010, the Institute of Medicine published a report declaring that the science wasn't there, and that overdosing was more harmful than expected ... (emphases mine)

... The committee provided an exhaustive review of studies on potential health outcomes and found that the evidence supported a role for these nutrients in bone health but not in other health conditions. Overall, the committee concludes that the majority of Americans and Canadians are receiving adequate amounts of both calcium and vitamin D. Further, there is emerging evidence that too much of these nutrients may be harmful...

In retrospect, within a few months of the IOM report, the media attention ended. The fad moved on.

There's still science to be done of course. Ever since medical school I've wondered about the relationship of latitude to multiple sclerosis, and whether there was some kind of cutaneous immunity/solar radiation component. Today there are many interesting articles on the relationship between vitamin D and MS. That's research though, the fad is over.

Finance 2.0, Oil and Project Syndicate - entertainment 2012!

2011-12-31T15:33:00.001-06:00

My, oh, my, it's still a whitewater world.

Ezra Klein tells us ...

America’s top export in 2011 is refined fuel ...
... UC San Diego economist James Hamilton ... the glut of new shale oil in North Dakota. Since there’s not enough pipeline infrastructure to get all that oil down to the Gulf of Mexico for export, it’s been piling up in Cushing, Okla. That makes it cheap for refineries in the Midwest to refine it and ship it out than to simply ship the oil directly...

Brad Delong tells us that the business of America is Finance (8.4%, healthcare is about 17%, emphases mine) ...

America’s Financial Leviathan - J. Bradford DeLong - Project Syndicate
... In 1950, finance and insurance in the United States accounted for 2.8% of GDP, according to US Department of Commerce estimates. By 1960, that share had grown to 3.8% of GDP, and reached 6% of GDP in 1990. Today, it is 8.4% of GDP, and it is not shrinking. The Wall Street Journal’s Justin Lahart reports that the 2010 share was higher than the previous peak share in 2006....
... it remains disturbing that we do not see the obvious large benefits, at either the micro or macro level, in the US economy’s efficiency that would justify spending an extra 5.6% of GDP every year on finance and insurance. Lahart cites the conclusion of New York University’s Thomas Philippon that today’s US financial sector is outsized by two percentage points of GDP. And it is very possible that Philippon’s estimate of the size of the US financial sector’s hypertrophy is too small.
Why has the devotion of a great deal of skill and enterprise to finance and insurance sector not paid obvious economic dividends? There are two sustainable ways to make money in finance: find people with risks that need to be carried and match them with people with unused risk-bearing capacity, or find people with such risks and match them with people who are clueless but who have money. Are we sure that most of the growth in finance stems from a rising share of financial professionals who undertake the former rather than the latter?

Perhaps, then, what we need are 'heroes' who can separate foolish rich people from their money?

Saudi America and Finance still amuck; this world would be more entertaining if we didn't live in it.

Speaking of entertainment, Brad's post was the first I'd heard of Project Syndicate ...

Project Syndicate - the highest quality op-ed articles, analysis and commentaries
... Project Syndicate: the world's pre-eminent source of original op-ed commentaries. A unique collaboration of distinguished opinion makers from every corner of the globe, Project Syndicate provides incisive perspectives on our changing world by those who are shaping its politics, economics, science, and culture. Exclusive, trenchant, unparalleled in scope and depth: Project Syndicate is truly A World of Ideas. As of December 2011, Project Syndicate membership included 477 leading newspapers in 151 countries. Financial contributions from member papers in advanced countries support the services provided by Project Syndicate free of charge or at reduced rates to members in developing countries. Additional support comes from the Open Society Institute...

Lots of the usual suspects there .... Bhagwati, DeLong, Rogoff, Robini, Stiglitz, Joseph Nye, Jeffrey Sachs, and many more names I should probably know. It's not new, Google Reader went back to 10/2010, and there are series posts from 2008. They don't seem to be marketing very seriously.

I don't see any way to explore their archives by date. It's darkly amusing to read Nouriel Roubini's predictions on the Great Recession at the end of 2008 ...

Will Banks and Financial Markets Recover in 2009? - Nouriel Roubini - Project Syndicate
The United States will certainly experience its worst recession in decades, a deep and protracted contraction lasting about 24 months through the end of 2009. Moreover, the entire global economy will contract. There will be recession in the euro zone, the United Kingdom, Continental Europe, Canada, Japan, and the other advanced economies. There is also a risk of a hard landing for emerging-market economies, as trade, financial, and currency links transmit real and financial shocks to them...
... 2009 will be a painful year of global recession and further financial stresses, losses, and bankruptcies. Only aggressive, coordinated, and effective policy actions by advanced and emerging-market countries can ensure that the global economy recovers in 2010, rather than entering a more protracted period of economic stagnation.

The NBER tells us the US left recession in June 2009, though this is a technical determination. I suspect most Americans feel we're still in a recession.

Good thing I don't have enough to read.

Update: Browsing Project Syndicate, I'm finding a fair bit of pompous nonsense (Naomi Wolf?!). I'll probably have to subscribe to individual contributors.

I win Apple's Nano recall lottery

2011-12-30T12:43:00.001-06:00

LiOn battery issues (burst into flame!) have led to an Apple recall of the 1st generation iPod Nano. I dug out my neglected Nano and sent it to Apple in early November. I wasn't using it, but it is a good match to the gym. I figured I'd at least get a new battery. Apple announced they weren't going to replace them with new devices, just replace the battery.

Weeks went by. I began to wonder what was up; past recalls were processed very quickly.

Today it showed up -- but it was now an 8GB $130 6th generation Nano. It is a sweet device, even though it's an impractical wristwatch. A very nice improvement on the 1st generation; easy to clip to clothing, radio, more capacity, etc.

I think Apple did start out returning the original Nano, so I can't promise that won't happen in the future. It may be Apple got so backlogged on repairs that they decided they needed to ship something. Or perhaps the opportunity cost of the tedious repairs was balanced against the customer satisfaction of sending a vastly better replacement.

That would fit my recent experiences with Apple service, including iTunes Apple Store errors (all my problem, not Apple's) and an out of warranty iMac repair. Apple service used to be merely better than the competition, but I think they've kicked it up a notch. Talk about crushing the competition.

It would be very nice if customer service were to rise from the dead across the economy. Retailers do follow Apple now ...

GOP 2.0: What rational climate change politics might look like

2011-12-29T12:23:00.001-06:00

"With great power comes great responsibility." Gingrich's inner geek smiled at that one. Certainly they had the power. The Democrats had been crushed by the 2012 elections. President Romney now controlled the House, the Senate and the Supreme Court -- and the filibuster had been eliminated in early 2013.

Gingrich was philosophical about the Vice Presidency; Cheney had taught him what could be done. Romney was happy enough to hand off the big one to him.

Not health care of course. That had been a trivial problem; it took only a few months to tweak ObamaCare, throw in some vouchers and a few distractions, and launch RomneyCare. The GOP base was fine with rebranding, and the dispirited remnant of the Democrats saw little real change.

No, the big one was climate change. Romney and Gingrich had never truly doubted that human CO2 emissions were driving global climate change, but pivoting the base took a bit of work. They'd begun with ritual purges; Hansen was quickly exiled to the lecture circuit. Then came the American Commission on Truth in Science. There wasn't even much tormenting of old enemies; the size of the GOP victory had taken the fun out of that. In short order the "weak mindedness" of the Democrats was exposed and the "honest and rigorous" examination of the Romney administration was completed. It was time, Murdoch's empire declared, for strong minded Americans to face hard (but not inconvenient) facts.

The hardest challenge came from a contingent that felt global warming was a good thing, even God's plan. American drought was weakening that group, but they were a constant headache.

Now though it was time for policy, and Gingrich couldn't be happier. He'd been meeting with Bill Clinton of course; the two rogues loved the evening debates. Clinton's engagement wasn't just for fun, despite the GOP's dominance there was still room for politics. America's wealthy had been irrationally terrified of Obama, but they were also afraid of runaway warming -- and they had considerable power. Trillions of dollars were at stake in any real attack on global warming, and every corporation in America was at the door. The Military was pushing for aggressive management. Lastly, Gingrich knew that power can shift. He'd seen it before.

He wrote out the options, and labeled them by their natural political base ...

Climate engineering: solar radiation reduction, massive sequestration projects (R)
CO2 pricing (by hook or crook) (R/D - political debate is how revenues are used)
Subsidies for public transit (D)
Urban planning measures (D)
Military strategy to manage anticipated collapse of African nations (R)
Military strategy to manage anticipated climate engineering conflicts with China (climate wars) (R)
Tariff's on Chinese imports to charge China for their CO2 emissions (R/D - but probably tied to American CO2 pricing)
Massive investments in solar power and conservation technologies (D)
Massive investments in fusion power (R)

The Climate Wars were particularly troublesome. There were simple things China could do, like pump massive amounts of sulfuric acid, that would alleviate the disaster their scientists had predicted. These measures, however, would be disastrous for the US. On the other hand, war with China was unthinkable.

Gingrich new he had to put a price on Carbon and he had to get China to avoid the most dangerous (for the US) forms of climate engineering. The rest was in play. This was what Great Men were made for ...

See also:

Gordon's Notes

Why is the modern GOP crazy? 7/2011
Denialists in favor of a warmer earth 6/2011: This is a common GOP position now - Climate change is not due to humans, it's a good thing, and God approves.
Global warming: Doonesbury and China 9/11 - another GOP position variant, warming is relatively bad for China, relatively good for the US. This is probably true.
Global Warming: We're scr***d. 8/2006 - it's too late anyway. Another GOP position, also partly true.
The rational basis for climate change denialism 20/2010 - God made the earth for us, so the climate is His.
Greece, America and GOP 2.0 12/2011
Global climate change: it's time to think radical 9/2006 - climate engineering is coming.
UnReason: The Republican War on Reason 2/2011
We're crazy now. We were crazier forty years ago - 9/2010 by historic standards, we're not as crazy as we fear
Birthers, Deathers and Truthers - the reason behind the madness 9/2009 - maybe the GOP is now in recovery?
America 2011: exploring the boundaries of democracy and capitalism 1/2011: Democracy is not robust
Keystone XL, carbon sequestration, and the tax in the closet 11/2011
A taxonomy of American politics 2/2011 - where values differ, how democracy would work if the GOP recovers
Climate Change and the Black Plague 5/2007 - disease changes will be disruptive
Climate Change 2010: Plan B 11/2010 - a Carbon Tariff on China
Why you should vote for the Tea Party’s coven in the century of the fruitbat 10/2010 - maybe only the GOP can tackle climate issues
Separated at birth: alternative medicine and climate change denial 5/2011 - Old discussions resurface.
Thai floods - microcosm of global climate change 11/2011 - the early and biggest impacts are outside of the US and Canada
Science, the media and the Himalayan glacier. What's wrong? 11/2011 - scientists are cowed
Tornados and global warming - how do we judge predictions? 5/2011 - Bayes and climate. Evidence is always probabilistic.

Others

Shibboleths — Crooked Timber 2/2011
The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney - 2011 book
Existential threats - Charlie's Diary 6/2011 - fun Stross post on existential threats. Climate change is fairly low in this ranking.
Some things are just really hard to believe: more on choosing your facts. « Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science - 8/2010 - Why some things are hard to believe (roots of denialism)
Weather as a weapon: The troubling history of geoengineering. - Slate Magazine 9/2010

Weight loss - a state of the science review

2011-12-28T13:02:00.000-06:00

Tara Parker-Pope, who describes herself as fat, has written an excellent state-of-the-science summary on obesity in America. I've excerpted two references I particularly appreciated. The first one was discussed years ago among 'personalized medicine' conferences -- genomic information doesn't always work as expected (emphases mine) ...

The Fat Trap - Tara Parker-Pope - NYTimes.com

... In February, The New England Journal of Medicine published a report on how genetic testing for a variety of diseases affected a person’s mood and health habits. Over all, the researchers found no effect from disease-risk testing, but there was a suggestion, though it didn’t reach statistical significance, that after testing positive for fat-promoting genes, some people were more likely to eat fatty foods, presumably because they thought being fat was their genetic destiny and saw no sense in fighting it...

... The National Weight Control Registry tracks 10,000 people who have lost weight and have kept it off. ... Anyone who has lost 30 pounds and kept it off for at least a year is eligible to join the study, though the average member has lost 70 pounds and remained at that weight for six years...

... There is no consistent pattern to how people in the registry lost weight — some did it on Weight Watchers, others with Jenny Craig, some by cutting carbs on the Atkins diet and a very small number lost weight through surgery. But their eating and exercise habits appear to reflect what researchers find in the lab: to lose weight and keep it off, a person must eat fewer calories and exercise far more than a person who maintains the same weight naturally. Registry members exercise about an hour or more each day — the average weight-loser puts in the equivalent of a four-mile daily walk, seven days a week. They get on a scale every day in order to keep their weight within a narrow range. They eat breakfast regularly. Most watch less than half as much television as the overall population. They eat the same foods and in the same patterns consistently each day and don’t “cheat” on weekends or holidays. They also appear to eat less than most people, with estimates ranging from 50 to 300 fewer daily calories....

Most of my friends think I have never had a weight problem -- but my mother is obese. I have no trouble gaining weight, it's the easiest thing in the world. I love good bread and good french pastry (fortunately near impossible to find outside of Quebec).

What I do to control my weight is a less disciplined version of what what the "one-in-a-thousand" people in the National Weight Loss Control registry do every day of their lives. I exercise more than my peers, I eat less than my peers, and I have to watch my weight constantly. Each year I age I have to eat less. (Though I think that may plateau after age 60 or so.) The only thing I have going for me there is that I love to exercise and my knees still work. [1]

Great holiday reading :-).

[1] Note to the young - human knees are a friggin' disaster. I thank my geekiness that I never played football or even soccer. Alpine skiing is nuts. It's surprisingly hard for an active person to have good knees by age 50.

American slavery - the Bachman quote

2011-12-28T11:54:00.000-06:00

Long ago Emily and I took a guided tour of Jefferson's home. He was described in glowing terms. In those days Jefferson was still a legend.

Historians don't think of Jefferson that way any more. He is recognized as a moral failure, a man clever enough to know the evil he lived with and too craven to deal with it. A man who sired children with his slave and left them to history's discovery.

America is very, very slowly beginning to look at slavery. Peter Birkenhead's Salon article is a minor marker of this process. It has a number of damning quotes from today's GOP, but the best of all comes from Minnesota's own Michele ...

Why we still can't talk about slavery - Civil War - Salon.com

Once you got here, we were all the same. Isn’t that remarkable? But we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.” –U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann

Oh Michele, you are a classic.

For much more, see TNC (his book is on the way).

Peculiar consequences of wealth concentration

2011-12-27T17:03:00.001-06:00

There is enormous, incomprehensible, wealth in the world. Increasingly, across all nations, it is concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people.

This has obvious consequences, but I'm sure there are surprising consequences too.

Emily and I remember a boat tour of island estates of eastern Florida. Each estate costs millions, but they were empty. Only caretakers visited, though we were told each had owners.

Owners who bought them, but had better things to do. Or maybe nothing good to do at all.

That is a problem with modern wealth. It's easy to spend a few million relatively well. Beyond that -- what is it good for? A yacht is nice if you like boats -- but then it gets boring. You can hire people to manage hassles, but then you have to manage people. A private jet? A mansion? Private artwork? Wild sex and drugs?

It would be different if we could buy lifespan -- and maybe one day that will happen. Not yet though -- at least not much if any more than the average citizen of a wealthy nation.

All that money can be used for is to play, to compete, to make more money. A game in which there is little meaning to losing, and little meaning to winning ...

Ferret flu: An existential challenge to anti-Darwinist Republicans?

2011-12-27T09:02:00.001-06:00

The good news is that it's still hard to design a lethal plague. The 'cost of havoc' is higher than I once thought.

Yes, influenza can be weaponized by guiding Darwinian natural selection - but that takes years of patient work and advanced technologies. It's beyond the grasp of, say, Anonymous.

So this research is good news - for most of us.

Isn't it a problem for the anti-Darwinist wing of the GOP though? The group that opposes the teaching of natural selection? How do their Senators get their heads around this issue?

Greece, America and GOP 2.0

2011-12-26T20:04:00.001-06:00

Krugman tells us Germany and the EU must bail out Greece lest the entire EU crash and burn. Germany is unenthusiastic. Michael Lewis makes Germany's lack of enthusiasm understandable ...

Amazon.com: Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World Michael Lewis
… government owed … $1.2 trillion, or more than a quarter-million dollars for every working Greek ….
… In just the past twelve years the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled … The average government job pays three times the average private-sector job ...
… The national railroad has annual revenues of 100 million euros against annual wage bill of 400 million ...
… The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as "arduous" is … fifty for women …
… In 2009, tax collection disintegrated, because it was an election year ...
… as estimated two thirds of Greek doctors reported incomes under 12,000 euros a year ...
…. Greece has no working national land registry ...
… all three hundred members of the Greek parliament declare the real value of their houses to be the computer-generated objective value … "every single member … is lying to evade taxes"...

Lewis describes Greece as a "perfectly corrupt society". Greece seems to have hit the limits of corruption; where the only honest people are either perversely oppositional or autistically incapable of deceit. It's easy to see why Germany wants to put Greece through a world class social reengineering program.

Wow. Good thing we Americans aren't so corrupt. Good thing we don't have vast corporations paying no taxes. Mercifully our corporations aren't hiding trillions of dollars abroad. Our politicians don't use charitable donation scams or generate profits through insider trading that's illegal for all but Congress critters.

No way do we have the kind of widespread fraud and abuse of the weak that can lead to economic collapse.

Seriously though, if Greece is a nine on a ten point scale of democratic collapse and societal bankruptcy, how do we score? Are we a six? Do I hear a seven?

More importantly, how do we get back to a reasonable "four"? Greece is getting schooled by Germany (whose bankers were as stupid as any on earth), but nobody is going to school the US. All of Greece is barely New Orleans; we're too big to be taught.

We are going to have to reform ourselves. Occupy Wall Street can help, but to reform government we need to solve the problem of the Republican Party.

Both our political parties are corrupt, but the Dems are at least connected to science and logic. The GOP is no longer a part of the reality-based community; whatever Romney and the like may really think they have to pretend to be delusional.

We can't salvage our democracy with only one working political party. We need a reformed GOP. Some party has to do the bidding of the powerful -- lest the powerful tear the nation down. We don't need the GOP to become a shining beacon of integrity, but we do need them to be connected to logic and arithmetic and falsifiable predictions.

This isn't inconceivable. I can't imagine voting for a modern Republican, but only fifteen years ago I voted for a Republican Governor named Arne Carlson. Arne is still around, and he represents a faint voice of sanity in the modern GOP (emphases mine, note that "Pawlenty" is considered a "moderate" by modern GOP standards, but to Carlson he's a far right extremist) ...

MinnPost - Gov. Arne Carlson Blog: Bedford Falls or Pottersville?
... the Republican Party went from moderate to what I call “the new Right”. But it was more than a shift in political philosophy. Leaders like Sutton and Pawlenty and numerous others saw the party as representing not only a different and more narrow philosophy but also as having the power to rigidly enforce that philosophy on its elected members. Orthodoxy prevailed over representativeness and the result has been that cooperative governance with Democrats, Independents and Republican moderates is not possible. It is either the way of the “new Right” or not at all.
Politics is no longer a contest of competing ideas with respect for dissent but increasingly the imposition of an authoritarianism that all too often is cloaked in patriotism and religion. In this environment, the party and its beliefs are paramount and elected officials serve the party...
... my memory of Republicanism in Minnesota goes back to a party that was always building a better community … So many of our leaders came out of the progressivism of Harold Stassen while still committed to the conservative virtues of prudent financial management. Policies ranging from consumer and environmental protection to human rights to metropolitan governance bore the fingerprints of an endless array of community oriented GOP Governors from Elmer Andersen to Harold LeVander through Al Quie and on.
In addition, Republicans produced an endless array of truly talented legislators from all over Minnesota who came to our capital city to govern and always with an eye to the future. Simply put, Republicans, like their counterparts, the Democrats, felt that good politics stemmed from the competition of good ideas that produced quality governance.
And in this mix, leaders from every walk of life and every profession from medicine to agriculture participated. There seemed to be a sense of obligation to give something of oneself in order to build a better community for our children….
...The Republican Party both in Minnesota and nationally has a choice to make. Does it want to build a true Bedford Falls with a commitment to the well being of the whole or does it want to lead us to “Pottersville” where the quality of life rests with the privileged few?

We're in a bad place, but we can work our way out. Occupy Wall Street can help with some things, but they can't help with the critical mission. The critical mission is to reform the GOP; and only Republican voters can do that ...

So how do we help them?

Spider brains and the evolution of computation

2011-12-26T11:34:00.001-06:00

Brains have a big return on investment ...

Tiniest of Spiders Are Loaded With Brains, Researchers Find - NYTimes
... In the smallest spiders, Dr. Eberhard and his colleagues found, the central nervous systems filled nearly 80 percent of the cephalothorax, or body cavity, including 25 percent of the legs.
“The brain tissue of the nervous tissue is metabolically expensive,” he said. “These little spiders are paying a very large price to keep these brains functioning.”
At times, that price includes a deformed body cavity bulging with brain matter, which may in turn compromise the size of the digestive system, Dr. Eberhard said....

Were spider brains this big 200 million years ago? Across all organisms, are brains bigger than they once were? Across all worlds, where does computation stop having positive evolutionary returns?

The "War on Chrismas" is not entirely delusional

2011-12-24T20:18:00.001-06:00

The American "War on Christmas" movement seems thoroughly silly ....

Reminder: Tis the Season Not to Be an Ass – Whatever
...it’s about as silly as it ever was, considering that Christmas has conquered December, occupied November and metastasized into late October. To suggest that the holiday is under serious threat from politically correct non-Christians is like suggesting an earthworm is a serious threat to a Humvee. This is obvious enough to anyone with sense that I use The War on Christmas as an emergency diagnostic, which is to say, if you genuinely believe there’s a War on Christmas, you may want to see a doctor, since you might have a tumor pressing on your frontal lobes.

Seems silly, is silly.

And yet, I agree with TNC that Rick Perry is not completely delusional ...

Rick Perry and the Politics of Resentment - Ta-Nehisi Coates - Politics - The Atlantic
... What strikes me is the sense of being under siege, a constant theme in conservative politics. It is as if time itself is against them. And they know it. The line "I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a Christian" stands out. Who is ashamed of this? This is a predominantly Christian country, and one of the most religious in the West. People don't "admit" their Christianity here. They proclaim it -- as the president has done repeatedly.
But what if there's something else? What if the conservatives are more perceptive and honest than the moderate liberals? I love Grant and Lincoln, but they were dead wrong in claiming that emancipation did not promote "social equality." Meanwhile the bigots who asserted that emancipation meant that Sambo would be "marryin yer daughters" were right. I wouldn't be shocked if Grant and Lincoln knew this, but also knew that to admit as much would be suicidal...

Yes, to most of the world the US seems to border on theocracy. But I was born into a true western theocracy, and it fell apart in less than 10 years ...

Quiet Revolution - Quebec History
The Quiet Revolution is the name given to a period of Quebec history extending from 1960 to 1966...
... The first major change that took place during the Quiet Revolution was the large-scale rejection of past values. Chief among these are those that Michel Brunet called “les trois dominantes de la pensée canadienne-française: l’agriculturisme, le messianisme et l’anti-étatisme” [the three main components of French Canadian thought: agriculturalism, anti-statism and messianism]. In this respect, Quebec entered resolutely into a phase of modernisation: its outlook became more secular (as opposed to religious), much of the traditionalism that characterised the past was replaced by increasingly liberal attitudes; long standing demographic tendencies, associated with a traditional rural way of life (high marriage, birth and fertility rates), were rapidly reversed ...

Quebec seemed stuck in the past -- until it lurched into the future. Societies can change very quickly.

Consider the case of the 2012 Presidential campaign. The GOP's presidential candidate will be theologically non-Christian (though culturally mainstream Protestant). The Dems candidate will be mainstream Protestant but raised partly in Islamic Indonesia.

That seems different, even if the current candidates aren't as theologically extreme as Jefferson, Adams or Madison. I would not be surprised if the religious attitudes of 2020 America were similar to those of 2000 Britain.

The religious right is right to be afraid, but wrong to think there's a conspiracy they can fight. Their foe is history, and it's hard to fight history. Just ask al Qaeda.

US carrier locking of post-contract iPhones - a critique

2011-12-22T22:05:00.001-06:00

AT&T will not unlock an iPhone under any circumstances. Together with their SMS pricing this has odd results (including a glut of former iPhones).

Verizon and Sprint claim they'll allow unlocking, but the reality is more complex (emphases mine)...

How U.S. Carriers Fool You Into Thinking Your iPhone 4S Is Unlocked - Forbes
... What consumers need to understand is that there are actually four different versions of the iPhone 4S: Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, and Apple. Only the Apple phone, available from their stores or on-line, is fully unlocked and can be used on any carrier. The other phones are permanently locked and cannot ever be used on another carrier in the U.S. Even if you spend $800 for an unlocked phone as I did and dedicate it to a single U.S. carrier, you are locked into that carrier forever if you want to keep using the iPhone. Neither Apple or the other carriers will fully unlock your carrier phone.
Apple declined to return phone calls and emails to discuss this matter. However, the high level technical support supervisor that I spoke with at length indicated that she personally thought that customers should be warned about the different versions of the phones and ramifications of buying a phone directly from a carrier rather than Apple. A senior spokesperson for Verizon told me that all Verizon phones are locked to their network and she did not quite understand the problem. I am willing to bet that Verizon customers would precisely understand this issue, even if she did not.
So if you paid retail for your iPhone 4S and purchased it from Verizon, Sprint, AT&T or Best Buy, you will never be able to use that phone with a different carrier. In my view, this is a scam by these companies. I think the cellular providers should tell their customers up front that locked phones really mean that you are locked into the carrier forever. While all of these phones are iPhone 4S with the identical hardware, the difference is that if you purchase your phone directly from Apple, it is truly a universal device and will allow you to change carriers without the penalty of making the phone worthless.
I would urge the Carriers, FCC, or Courts to enforce the following rules to protect cellular customers in the United States: consumers buying new cell phones must be informed of the existence of any SIM LOCK (also known as a network lock) on their phone before sale; wireless phone companies must unlock handsets upon request, without fee, when a consumer purchases a new phone outright (unsubsidized) without a contract; wireless phone companies must unlock handsets upon request, without fee, when a consumer comes to the end of their contract, or at any time thereafter. Carriers must fully unlock their phones (as does Apple with the iPhone 4S) and not partially unlock the phone to block access to other carriers and deny consumers the right to choose any provider anywhere...

Carrier locking of iPhones is a nasty trick on consumers. It reduces the value of a post-contract iPhone; I wonder if a clever lawyer could sue carriers for theft. Another lawyer might find the shared policies a sign of illegal collusion or price-fixing among carriers.

Senator Franken - this is right up your alley!

See also:

Gordon's Notes: The Gordon vs. AT&T iPhone war - Conclusion (11/2011) - we dramatically cut our monthly charges.

Did canine distemper arise from measles in the new world?

2011-12-21T23:20:00.001-06:00

(I wrote this 9/2011, but I was mistakenly left as a draft until now.)

Six years ago I read that new world dogs (canis familiaris) died in large numbers after the European invasion.

So what killed the Amerindian dog?

I assumed it was some European plague, and I suspected distemper.

I'd guess distemper. Recently I read that wild African dogs are now dying of epidemic distemper. Seems to fit. The Euros carried viruses that killed many of the native americans, it's not surprising that their dogs would have done the same thing.

Recently I read of a twist to this story

Evidence of a New World Origin for Canine Distemper -- Uhl et al. 25 (1): 613.4 -- The FASEB Journal

.... The historical, epidemiological, paleopathological and molecular evidence supports the hypothesis that canine distemper arose in the New World from MV after the European conquest....

The Europeans brought Measles from the old world. In the new world it produced massive epidemics with astounding mortality. Tens of millions of native Americans died of Measles and other Old World diseases.

As is seen with other plagues, under these circumstances the measles virus jumped species. It went from humans to their dogs. It may have been even more lethal in the dogs of the 1500s.

Why didn't it then go back to Europe and wipe out the European dog? Did the virus adapt to its new host so it became less lethal? Could a historian who knew what to look for find evidence of massive die offs in European dogs in the 16th century?

I suspect we'll find out in the next year or two.

Syphilis - again a New World invention?

2011-12-21T23:13:00.000-06:00

Decades ago physicians were taught that syphilis was a New World disease. The Europeans brought smallpox, and Amerindians returned syphilis. This was not a comparable exchange, smallpox and its kin killed most of the Amerindians (and another disease killed New World dogs). Syphilis, even at its worst, was not quite so deadly.

By the 1980s though, when I studied medicine, we were taught that syphilis was probably an Old World disease.

Now the pendulum has swung again ... The French Disease, the Italian Disease, the Christian Disease–the New World Disease?. Seems like it may be a New World disease after all.

See also:

Conflagration -- the european invasion of the americas 11/2004
History of the First Peoples - Charles Mann's 1491 11/2007
Distemper and the death of the american dog 9/2005
Rat plagues wipe out indigenous rats 10/2007
Squanto and the non-Puritan non-Pilgrim "Fathers" 9/2007
Did canine distemper arise from measles in the new world? 12/2011

Netbooks

2011-12-17T20:04:00.001-06:00

Dell has ended their Netbook line.

That leaves Google's Chromebooks, which aren't exactly exciting.

I wasn't just a little wrong about Netbooks, I was incredibly, unbelievably, totally wrong. Again.

I mean, this is friggin' ridiculous.

What happened?

I suppose it was the pocket computer. People with iPhones and the Android equivalent are already paying for most of what a Netbook can do. It doesn't make sense to pay for an extra monthly data plan, and a Netbook without net access is kind of a bust.

That leaves Windows notebooks, which are cheap but crummy. And MacBook Airs, which are not cheap but very amazing.

There's still the grade school and perhaps junior high school marketplace, but the iPad and Android equivalents are squeezing there too.

The Netbook looks like an evolutionary dead end. Maybe we'd have taken that road, but the iPhone blew a hole in it by mid-2007. I was writing in 2009; the bloody 3G was out then!

Damnit Netbook, you made a fool of me.

See also:

Gordon's Notes: Making better predictions: 2011/03, a precursor to this mea culpa. BTW, I also predicted China's bubble would burst before 2012. Not much time left for that to happen ...

Google, Blogger and the Machine

2011-12-17T10:34:00.001-06:00

Does anyone reading this still happily use Blogger?

If so, please comment below or comment on this companion G+ public post.

I'm testing a theory, related to this old Marissa Mayer quote:

Two Schools of Thought: The Key Difference Between Apple and Google
... "It looks like a human was involved in choosing what went where,” Marissa Mayer once told an upset team of designers about a product design she rejected. “It looks too editorialized. Google products are machine-driven. They’re created by machines. And that is what makes us powerful. That’s what makes our products great.”...

More when I get my results.

No, I don't need a denominator.

Update: Fixed a bad link.

Will Friedman win Salon's hack list 2011?

2011-12-15T12:46:00.001-06:00

Last year Friedman came in third. Will he win this year?

Welcome to the 2011 Salon Hack List

Update: Darn! Friedman has been retired. Too predictably hackish to put on the list any longer.

And you thought the Jobs bio made him seem nasty ...

2011-12-15T12:30:00.000-06:00

The Jobs bio makes him look pretty nasty, but apparently some of his nastiest bits didn't make the cut ...

AppleInsider | Steve Jobs refused to talk philanthropy with biographer:

... any comments that were hurtful to individuals and served no purpose in the book were left out ...

A family doc's perspective on the best way to die

2011-12-12T17:09:00.003-06:00

As a former family doc, I loved Ken Murray's essay on how doctor's die.

Is it true?

I suspect it's mostly true of family docs and some surgeons who are older and whose children are grown. I don't think it's true of younger physicians, especially those with children. My physician friend Tom fought his glioma very hard. He probably got an extra 1-2 years out of his suffering, and for his young family that was worth a lot.

I think I'd put myself through a lot to get my young kids a year or two.

When the kids are grown though, my physician wife and I have always imagined the kind of management Ken describes. Like most physicians, we're skeptical about how much medicine can really do for most end-of-life conditions. There's a difference between treatments that are statistically beneficial and treatments that make a really important difference.

After all, we know how the story ends.

Organizing human cognition: Lessons from CERN

2011-12-12T08:05:00.001-06:00

There's a hierarchy in big time science schools, and physics holds the crown. (Math majors are in a different league.) Physicists are, face it, smarter than the rest of us -- and they know it.

Our only consolation is that they often work for a pittance.

So, from my perspective as a corporate ant, it's fascinating to read John Conway's description of how physicists organize their collaboration on history's biggest physics project (emphases mine)...

Making the (Higgs) Sausage | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

For the past year, physicists at the LHC experiments CMS and ATLAS have been analyzing ever–increasing data samples from the huge machine. Rumors are now circulating about what the experiments might announce at next week’s presentations at CERN regarding the search for the Higgs boson.

... As you probably know, each of the two big experiments has over 3000 physicists participating, from all over the world. Many, but by no means the majority, are resident at CERN; most are at their home institutions in Europe, North America, and Asia and elsewhere.

The main thing that allows us to collaborate on a global scale like this is video conferencing. We used a system called EVO, developed at Caltech, which allows us to schedule meetings and connect to them from a laptop or desktop computer, or even dial in by phone ...the experiments have gravitated toward having meetings in the late afternoon, Europe time, which makes it early morning for people like me in California.

.., In CMS, our whole system of producing physics results has a sort of pyramidal structure. Each experiment has a number of physics analysis groups which meet a weekly or biweekly, typically, and have two “conveners” who set the agenda and run the meetings. These convener positions are typically held by senior people in the collaboration such as professors or senior lab scientists, for two years at a stretch, one convener changing out each year. They report to an overall physics coordinator and his or her deputies.

Within the physics analysis groups are subgroups devoted to sets of analyses which share common themes, common tools, or similar approaches. Each of these subgroups in turn is led by a pair of conveners who establish the ongoing analyses and guide them to eventual approval within physics analysis group.

We have what I think is a pretty impressive internal website devoted to tracking the progress of each physics analysis. From a single website you can drill down into a particular physics group find the analysis you want get links to all the documentation, and follow what’s happening. In parallel, there is a web system for recording the material presented at every meeting.

The goal of every analysis is to be approved by its physics group, so it can be shown in public at conferences and seminars. This requires having complete documentation including internal notes with full details of the analysis, and a “public analysis summary” which is available to the public, and which often serves as the basis for a peer–reviewed paper which soon follows.
Every analysis is assigned an analysis review committee of three to five people with experience in the topic, who act as a sort of hit squad, keeping the analyzers on their toes with questions and comments at every stage of the analysis, both on the actual analysis details and on the documentation. After all, if we are not our own worst critics, someone else will gladly fill the role!

In parallel with processing the data that we record, we run full simulations of well–known standard model collision processes which represent our background when we are doing searches for new particles. There is a big organizational challenge in doing these simulations, which run on a worldwide grid of computers devoted to CMS data analysis. We make use of the Open Science Grid for this in the US, the EuroGrid in Europe, and other clusters scattered all around the world, comprising tens of thousands of computing nodes.

I'd love to see comparisons to organizational structures used in aerospace projects. There's nothing like this large scale organization in the industry I work in.

This framework for harnessing cognition reminds me of the original "computers" - humans who did large scale arithmetic calculations prior to the development of log tables. It's easy to imaging who this would map onto a cognitive unit made up of, initially, humans and AIs.

PS. Historical footnote: CERN was where Tim Berners-Lee, working as an independent contractor, led the development of the first web site and browser.

Is Gingrich our only hope?

2011-12-10T09:40:00.000-06:00

Bruce Bartlett, a reformed Republican, says Gingrich is our only hope ...

Economic Experts Gather In DC To Explain Why Politics Has Doomed Us | TPMDC
... The most we can hope for is that a complete crazy person like Newt Gingrich gets the Republican nomination, the Republicans lose so badly that they lose control of the House and don’t get control of the Senate and then maybe in a year we can finally talk about doing something rational ...

Rationalists for Gingrich!

On the topic of reformed Republicans, there's a post deep in my backlog about what a reformed GOP would look like. I hope I get to it someday. Briefly, a reformed GOP would be reality-based, and would respect basic logic and arithmetic. There's lots of room for political debate within a framework of reason ...

Hungary a tyranny?

2011-12-10T09:19:00.000-06:00

Krugman delivers an astonishing opinion, almost as a footnote to a blog post ...

Peripheral Stories - Krugman
... And I spent part of yesterday talking with people in Princeton’s Program in Law and Public Affairs, who wanted to talk about Hungary. It’s hair-raising — and not just because of the economics. What will the EU do when one of its members slides into dictatorship?...

The comments come quickly ...

... Orban has established the rule of arbitrary tyranny in one and a half years. He appointed apparatchiks to key posts with unchecked authority for 9 or 12 years. These positions are:
1. Chief Prosecutor, who was given the right to select even the judges for trials of his choosing.
2. Chief Judge, with the right to appoint/promote/demote/dismiss judges
3. Chief of the Media, with the right to take away the licenses of radio stations and fine opposition outlets out of existence.
4. Head of the Financial Control Office.
He also stuffed the Constitutional court with Party and Personal faithful, enlarging it with from 8 to 15, and forbidding the Court to review cases that have anything to do with money.
It took a mere 3 weeks for Orban to push through a new constitution that restricts people's right to hold referendums, to appeal to the Constitutional court.
Hungary lives in fear now. You can be put in detention without trial for up to 3 years. You can be fired for political reasons and the unemployment rate is 12%.

and in response ...

As a Hungarian, let me correct the picture of my country as one "sliding into dictatorship." This is far from reality. Our government is indeed concentrating and extending its power as far as possible in a democratic system and is definitely doing so beyond good taste. Bearing a 2/3 majority they can even modify the constitution and they use this weapon without hesitation and without seeking consensus. This truly weakens our democracy somewhat, so harsh criticism is well deserved, but Hungary is not turning into a dictatorship, this is simply nonsense.
But where is all that nonsense coming from? Well, Hungarian politics is difficult to see clearly for a foreigner. The reason is the huge advantage of the Hungarian left (which is practically an alliance of liberals and former communists) of having a well-built international network which gives them an access to foreign media that the right just does not have. Hence, no matter who is in power, the foreign opinions about Hungarian matters are dominated by leftists' views. The key players in this game are renowned Hungarian leftist intellectuals residing in Western-Europe. Whenever it is not their team in power they always scream dictatorship - that is what they did with earlier conservative governments as well! Oh, and if the left were telling the truth, we would have a right-wing military dictatorship for 17 years by now, as this is what they "forecasted” before the 1994 elections...

Meanwhile, back home, Newt Gingrich must now be considered a real contender for the presidency.

Humanity dances on the edge of the knife. It's a habit.

The Il crime

2011-12-09T07:33:00.001-06:00

The use of a font where these two characters have the same appearance is a data crime and should be punished by audit: lI.

Wikipedia's problem

2011-12-08T13:02:00.003-06:00

A marketing firm is caught manipulating Wikipedia. The interesting bit is their response ...

BBC News - Wikipedia investigates PR firm Bell Pottinger's edits

... Lord Bell, chairman of Chime Communications, the owner of Bell Pottinger, said an internal review had been launched.

"I can't see any bad headlines for our clients," he told the BBC. "You won't find anybody, including journalists, who doesn't do exactly the same thing."...

"Everyone does it, so don't look at us."

I hope journalists will dig deeper into the state of Wikipedia and how the "pay-to-edit" problem will be managed going forward. I suspect there are are some reasonable answers, mostly building on Wikipedia's existing frameworks for managing malign edits. Problem is the same as the spam wars and the (new) voice-bot wars -- the costs keep rising.

Ghost story

2011-12-04T21:47:00.001-06:00

It's not hard to do the numbers.

There are billions of people in the world and trillions of stories. Every day someone has a one in a million weird event.

Today was my turn.

It happened while I was using Google maps to visit my aunt's new residence in San Francisco. I clicked the zoom button for more detail.

Suddenly I was looking at dark green forest. I wasn't in San Francisco any more.

I zoomed out, and I found I was visiting the wilderness of British Columbia's Mount Garibaldi. It look something like this:

I zoomed in and out and suddenly I was back in San Francisco.

No big deal, just a glitch in the maps.

Except I have a connection to that part of the world. My brother Brian Faughnan vanished not far from there in July of 2002. He left his Whistler youth hostel room to go high alpine exploring - solo, off trail. Yes, that's at the far end of the risk spectrum.

There was a search but we never found a body. We searched Rainbow Mountain, because he could walk to that and he'd spoken of it. We did make a few inquiries about Garibaldi though. It's a beautiful destination, and he could have hitched a ride there.

So perhaps I was visiting his grave. It is certainly a beautiful and dramatic resting place.

Curious, I googled Garibaldi and Faughnan and tuned up a journalist's story I didn't remember and a post by Matt Gunn who met him in Vancouver before he was lost:

RainbowMountain - Missing Person/Fatality

Brian Faughnan went missing in the whislter backcountry in the summer of 2002. An extensive search failed to turn up any evidence about what happened. I met brian a few days before his disappearance while working at MEC and answered some questions he had about good hiking and scrambling destinations. We discussed rainbow mountain, which is where the search team believes he went missing. This story is a real tragedy and reminds me of the inherent danger of hiking alone.

There is a sequel to the story. I still wear a technical shell we found amongst Brian's gear. It's very faded, but it works. Tonight I thought I'd left it at an ice rink; so the kids and I went to look. We found it in my gear, but, for the first time in a while, we talked about my brother.

My 14 yo was five when Brian was lost, but he remembers more than I thought. He even mentioned Rainbow Mountain. We spoke about my brother for a while.

One of the very hardest things I've ever done was to call my 5 yo son from Vancouver and tell him we hadn't found his Uncle Brian.

These are tales for the dark nights of winter.

Update 12/6/11: I shared this story on Facebook the night I published it. A friend of Brian's, who lives in Vancouver responded that she new Matt Gunn. Then Matt Gunn replied.

Ants, corporations and the great stagnation

2011-12-03T11:54:00.001-06:00

Do the great stagnation failures of the research enterprise and the modern publicly traded corporation have the same roots? Are not both ant-colony-like adaptive entities with emergent agendas of "their" own? An agenda to grow and survive regardless of the interests of their individual members or of their economic and human ecosystems?

See also

Emergent computation -- the thinking world (Nature) 1/2004
Malice, incompetence, and happy accidents 5/2011
Why do corporations (firms) exist? 10/2010
Speculation: The corporate ecosystem and American stasis 11/2010
Why did medical progress slow after 1984? 12/2010
Unemployment and the great stagnation 1/2011

PS. Extra credit speculation. Could these longterm trends be an independent contributor to the lesser depression? Independent of the macroeconomic disequilibria of disruptive globalization and IT innovation?

The AI Age: Siri and Me

2011-12-02T19:48:00.000-06:00

Memory is just a story we believe.

I remember that when I was on a city bus, and so perhaps 8 years old, a friend showed me a "library card". I was amazed, but I knew that libraries were made for me.

When I saw the web ... No, not the web. It was Gopher. I read the minutes of a town meeting in New Zealand. I knew it was made for me. Alta Vista - same thing.

Siri too. It's slow, but I'm good with adjusting my pace and dialect. We've been in the post-AI world for over a decade, but Siri is the mind with a name.

A simple mind, to be sure. Even so, Kurzweil isn't as funny as he used to be; maybe Sir's children will be here before 2100 after all.

In the meantime, we get squeezed...

Artificial intelligence: Difference Engine: Luddite legacy | The Economist
... if the Luddite Fallacy (as it has become known in development economics) were true, we would all be out of work by now—as a result of the compounding effects of productivity. While technological progress may cause workers with out-dated skills to become redundant, the past two centuries have shown that the idea that increasing productivity leads axiomatically to widespread unemployment is nonsense...
[there is]... the disturbing thought that, sluggish business cycles aside, America's current employment woes stem from a precipitous and permanent change caused by not too little technological progress, but too much. The evidence is irrefutable that computerised automation, networks and artificial intelligence (AI)—including machine-learning, language-translation, and speech- and pattern-recognition software—are beginning to render many jobs simply obsolete....
... The argument against the Luddite Fallacy rests on two assumptions: one is that machines are tools used by workers to increase their productivity; the other is that the majority of workers are capable of becoming machine operators. What happens when these assumptions cease to apply—when machines are smart enough to become workers? In other words, when capital becomes labour. At that point, the Luddite Fallacy looks rather less fallacious.
This is what Jeremy Rifkin, a social critic, was driving at in his book, “The End of Work”, published in 1995. Though not the first to do so, Mr Rifkin argued prophetically that society was entering a new phase—one in which fewer and fewer workers would be needed to produce all the goods and services consumed. “In the years ahead,” he wrote, “more sophisticated software technologies are going to bring civilisation ever closer to a near-workerless world.”
...In 2009, Martin Ford, a software entrepreneur from Silicon Valley, noted in “The Lights in the Tunnel” that new occupations created by technology—web coders, mobile-phone salesmen, wind-turbine technicians and so on—represent a tiny fraction of employment... In his analysis, Mr Ford noted how technology and innovation improve productivity exponentially, while human consumption increases in a more linear fashion.... Mr Ford has identified over 50m jobs in America—nearly 40% of all employment—which, to a greater or lesser extent, could be performed by a piece of software running on a computer...
In their recent book, “Race Against the Machine”, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology agree with Mr Ford's analysis—namely, that the jobs lost since the Great Recession are unlikely to return. They agree, too, that the brunt of the shake-out will be borne by middle-income knowledge workers, including those in the retail, legal and information industries...

Even in the near term, the US Labor Department predicts that the 17% of US workers in "office and administrative support" will be replaced by automation.

It's not only the winners of the 1st world birth lottery that are threatened.   China's Foxconn (Taiwan based) employs about 1 million people. Many of them will be replaced by robots.

It's disruptive, but given time we could adjust. Today's AIs aren't tweaking the permeability of free space; there are still a few things we do better than they. We also have complementary cognitive biases; a neurotypical human with an AI in the pocket will do things few unaided humans can do. Perhaps even a 2045 AI will keep human pets for their unexpected insights. Either way, it's a job.

Perhaps more interestingly, a cognitively disabled human with a personal AI may be able to take on work that is now impossible.

Economically, of course, the productivity/consumption circuit has to close. AIs don't (yet) buy info-porn. If .1% of humans get 80% of revenue, then they'll be taxed at 90% marginal rates and the 99.9% will do subsidized labor. That's what we do for special needs adults now, and we're all special needs eventually.

So, given time, we can adjust. Problem is, we won't get time. We will need to adjust even as our world transforms exponentially. It could be tricky.

See also:

Silvio

2011-12-02T07:53:00.001-06:00

Italy, Europe and the world will pay a high price for the long reign of Silvio Berlusconi.

Government is like parenting. Good parenting is somewhat helpful, but bad parenting is enormously destructive.

Corruption matters. Elections matter.

Are home phones now a sign of vulnerability?

2011-11-30T22:29:00.001-06:00

We get a lot of junk calls now at home on our unlisted home wired phone. Many hangup calls, "survey" calls, robocalls -- our home phone number needs a spam filter. It's beginning to resemble my mailbox -- mostly junk.

Of course many homes no longer have fixed phones -- especially in all adult households. We keep ours for everyday use, as a security measure, and because we keep our mobile phone minutes low. As the junk level rises though, a combination of Google Voice and an increase in our mobile voice minutes becomes more appealing. [1]

Some of the calls these days drop as soon as I pick up. I wonder if they're looking for more vulnerable sounding voice. As fixed line phones become less common, they will become a marker for the vulnerable elderly [2]. The sharks will move in ...

[1] Google doesn't support moving a home number to GV, just a mobile number. So we'd have to first move to a mobile, then cancel the mobile...
[2] Not a new trend, Google tells me I wrote about this in 2004! - Phone Phishing (spam): coming soon to the elderly and the vulnerable

The Gordon vs. AT&T iPhone war - Conclusion

2011-11-30T22:11:00.001-06:00

Twenty-seven days ago I declared war on AT&T Mobile.

The war is done - for now. At this time I've slashed the amount of money we send AT&T, gotten a new 4S for me, ported away a sweet local phone number, and AT&T's "Executive Response Team" has been phoning me about a letter from the Minnesota State Attorney General.

I am geek, hear me roar.

Yes, even as you read this AT&T is licking its wounds, cowering in the corner.

It wasn't easy. I had to, for example, spend way too much time figuring out the microeconomics of the US iPhone marketplace and how AT&T's response to the end of SMS is killing SMS. Painful - but revenge usually is.

My revenge is not quite complete, however. I still need to summarize what I did, so you too can take revenge. My response was crafted around our family plan, but elements of it could work for any plan. Here were all the things I did and, briefly, why. There are more details in the links and below.

We dropped child #2 from our family plan. He wasn't interested in phoning or texting - he wanted email, games and videos. We were paying $10 (plus taxes and fees) monthly for his plan and we'd have stuck with that, but AT&T's mandatory data plan for out-of-contract smartphones was going to make his cost $25/month. Too much.
I liked child #2's easy to remember mobile number -- any my corporate Google Voice number was non-local (they no longer have MSP numbers). So I ported #2's number to Google Voice. Cheap at $20; I suspect AT&T puts more value on its numbers than that.
I got a new 4S (more below), so phones moved around and child #2 ended up with iMessage and Facebook Messenger for texting with WiFI.
Child #1 was stuck with the data plan, but thinking through iPhone Microeconomics it was clear I should use his off-contract $15/month data plan [2] to get a highly subsidized iPhone [1] that would facilitate iMessage use. He was eligible through our family plan and his voice rate did not increase. I could have been short-term cheap and gotten a 3GS, but a 4S has a longer lifespan and the camera and other features were worth the cost to me. I got the 4S, he got an old 3GS.
I dropped our family plan from 1400 to 700 minutes. With Child #2 off the plan, and using GV at work to decrease my use of the iPhone for business, this was not hard to do.
I dropped our $30/month family texting and any-mobile plan. This was the big cut, but looking at usage patterns it was clear that with iMessage and Facebook Messenger we'd pay less than $10 a month even at 20 cents/message.
We were paying for SmartLimits for Wireless. I studied it and realized it was useless for an iPhone.
We were paying for a Canada Calling service -- but I almost always use Google Voice to call Canada (saves me $1300 a year). Canceled that. [3]
Emily and I had $30/month unlimited data plans - but we never come close to even 2GB. Emily is often under 200, and I'm always under 1GB. That's $10/month we don't need to spend - $240 over tow years. We dropped to 2GB plans. Emily may go to 200MB in time.

We've saved several hundred dollars and picked up a new 4S. You can do something similar. Start by dropping that expensive texting plan.

Now to figure out what to do with our increasingly junky home phone ...

See also:

[1] The 3GS costs $1 with a contract. AT&T gets a portion of a data plan to cover the rest of what it owes Apple. A $15 data plan doesn't leave much margin for AT&T to pay Apple, so this is a highly subsidized phone.
[2] He uses about 100MB at most, usually less. We monitor with Dataman Pro, Safari and YouTube are parental control disabled. iTunes video samples is his main data drain, if that increases I'll disable iTunes - but he does well.
[3] To AT&T's credit, it's now easy to add and remove services from their web site and the accounting seems fair.

What Steve Jobs teaches about psyche and adaptive advantage

2011-11-27T12:18:00.001-06:00

Steve Jobs bachelor party consisted of him, a reluctant Avie Tevanian, and one other guy. At that point in his life, he had no true friends. It's not clear how many he ever had, though he had many acolytes and several congenial colleagues.

He was a nasty person, though, like most of us, he improved somewhat with age. He never made it within two sigmas of decent however.

He was also a great gift to me and my family. We got the products of his company, without the displeasure of his companionship. It would, however, have been fascinating to observe his mind. It was extraordinary.

It was also completely unsuited to most of human existence. Even his powers of manipulation could not outweigh the enmity he created throughout most of his life. Were he born at another time, he would have likely died young. Throughout most of human existence his mind would have been a disability, not a gift.

There was a place and time where his mind was perfectly suited, and he had the fortune to be born to that time and to that place.

It's a good lesson on the distinction between adaptive advantage and dysfunctional trait. The distinction is not the trait alone, but its suitability to the environment.

It's also a lesson on the evolution of mind. Human minds are astonishing diverse; in physical terms it's as though a single species could have children with fins and children with wings. A winged mind flies in some times, drowns in others.

Mass disability goes mainstream: disequilibria and RCIIT

2011-11-26T09:18:00.001-06:00

I've been chattering for a few years about the rise of mass disability and the role of RCIIT (India, China, computers, networks) in the Lesser Depression. This has taken me a bit out of the Krugman camp, which means I'm probably wrong.

Yes, I accept Krugman's thesis that the proximal cause of depression is a collapse in demand combined with the zero-bound problem. Hard to argue with arithmetic.

I think there's more going on though. Some secular trends that will be with us even if followed Krugman's wise advice. In fact, under the surface, I suspect Krugman and DeLong believe this as well. I've read Krugman for years, and he was once more worried about the impact of globalization and IT than he's now willing to admit. Sometimes he has to simplify.

For example, fraud has always been with us -- but something happened to make traditional fraud for more effective over the past thirteen years. I think that "something" was the rise of information technology and associated complexity; a technology that allowed financiers to appear to be contributing value even though their primary role was parasitic.

Similarly, the rise of China and India is, in the long run, good for the entire world. In the near future, however, it's very hard for world economies to adjust. Income shifts to a tiny fraction of Americans, many jobs are disrupted, people have to move, to change careers, etc. It takes time for new tax structures to be accepted, for new work to emerge. IT has the same disruptive effect. AI and communication networks will further limit the jobs we can take where our economic returns are equal or greater than the minimum wage.

I think these ideas are starting to get traction. Today Herman Gans is writing in the NYT about the age of the superfluous worker. A few days ago The Economist reviewed a book about disequlibria and IT

Economics Focus: Marathon machine | The Economist
... Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist, and Andrew McAfee, a technology expert, argue in their new e-book, “Race Against the Machine”, that too much innovation is the bane of struggling workers. Progress in information and communication technology (ICT) may be occurring too fast for labour markets to keep up. Such a revolution ought to be obvious enough to dissuade others from writing about stagnation. But Messrs Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that because the growth is exponential, it is deceptive in its pace...
... Progress in many areas of ICT follows Moore’s law, they write, which suggests that circuit performance should double every 1-2 years. In the early years of the ICT revolution, during the flat part of the exponential curve, progress seemed interesting but limited in its applications. As doublings accumulate, however, and technology moves into the steep part of the exponential curve, great leaps become possible. Technological feats such as self-driving cars and voice-recognition and translation programmes, not long ago a distant hope, are now realities. Further progress may generate profound economic change, they say. ICT is a “general purpose technology”, like steam-power or electrification, able to affect businesses in all industries...
... There will also be growing pains. Technology allows firms to offshore back-office tasks, for instance, or replace cashiers with automated kiosks. Powerful new systems may threaten the jobs of those who felt safe from technology. Pattern-recognition software is used to do work previously accomplished by teams of lawyers. Programmes can do a passable job writing up baseball games, and may soon fill parts of newspaper sections (those not sunk by free online competition). Workers are displaced, but businesses are proving slow to find new uses for the labour made available. Those left unemployed or underemployed are struggling to retrain and catch up with the new economy’s needs.
As a result, the labour force is polarising. Many of those once employed as semi-skilled workers are now fighting for low-wage jobs. Change has been good for those at the very top. Whereas real wages have been falling or flat for most workers, they have increased for those who have advanced degrees. Owners of capital have also benefited. They have enjoyed big gains from the increased returns on investments in equipment. Technology is allowing the best performers in many fields, such as superstar entertainers, to dominate global markets, crowding out those even slightly less skilled. And technology has yet to cut costs for health care, or education. Much of the rich world’s workforce has been squeezed on two sides, by stagnant wages and rising costs.

In time the economy will adjust -- unless exponential IT transformation actually continues [1]. Alas, the AI revolution well is underway and technology cycles are still brutally short. I don't see adjustment happening within the next six years. The whitewater isn't calming.

[1] That is, of course, the Singularity premise, as previously reviewed in The Economist.

Update 12/3/2011: And how does the great stagnation play into this - Gordon's Notes: Ants, corporations and the great stagnation?

iPhone micro: How SMS pricing is accelerating the smartphone transition

2011-11-24T20:44:00.001-06:00

I've been playing with a simplified model of the carrier-locked AT&T American 2011 iPhone marketplace. I think it makes some interesting predictions.

For the purpose of this discussion we'll assume that a minimal phone must include both:

phone system compliant voice services
text messaging: either SMS or non-SMS (example: Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc)

We further assume that voice services cost the same for all phones, that iPhones are assigned AT&T's minimal $15/month [1] data plan and that SMS and non-SMS text messaging are equally valuable [2]

In this model there are only 3 phones:

A: iPhone optimal - today that's the 32GB 4S.
B: iPhone minimal - today the 3GS 8GB. This is similar to the 'A' phone of 2 years ago.
C: pPhone: Plain Phone. Includes SMS and Voice but does not trigger AT&T's

So how do prices and lifespans break down, assuming phones are purchases with a 2 year contract, we get a new contract q 2 years, and the iPhones use non-SMS messaging ($15/month [3]) but the Plain Phone (pPhone) uses SMS ($20/month)?

A: $300 + ($15 * 24) = $660.
B: $0 + ($15*24) = $360.
C: $0 + ($20*24) = $480.

Based on this simple model what can we say will happen to pPhones? Assuming a healthy iPhone can run for four years [4], then at the end of the 2 year contract, what is the rational selling price of a used phone?

Clearly, the pPhone should disappear immediately. It costs 30% more than the minimal iPhone, and it doesn't have apps, wifi browsing, video, calendar, pen light, quality camera, etc, etc. It has no resale value. (A bizarre conclusion, but it follows from the extraordinary high price of SMS services.)

Less obviously, the resale value of 2 year old iPhone is also quite low [6]. A formerly class B phone iPhone is probably no longer supported by Apple at that point and the formerly Class A devices set a low ceiling (below).

The formerly Class A iPhone at age 2 is a 'Class B' phone, but for a new-contract customer it has NO price advantage over a current generation Class B device. Both will cost $360 over two years. The only market for an out of contract 2 year old carrier-locked 'Class A' iPhone is to replace a lost or broken contracted phone.

That's worth something -- but there are a LOT of those 2 year old former Class A iPhones on the market. After all, in this model there's no rational reason to not have a data plan, and since a data plan pays most of the cost of a phone, everyone in this model gets a new phone every two years [5]. That means there's a glut of post-prime iPhones on the market.

If I new Class A iPhone has an initial purchase price of $300, I expect its value after two years to fall to about $70. Indeed, the primary market may be persons wanting a very cheap iPod Touch. Effectively the price difference between the Class B and Class A iPhones over two years is $660-$360-$70 or $230 -- which is what we pay for the storage capacity and features of the Class A device (well worthwhile for most of us).

In this simple model then, it's deeply irrational to buy a pPhone, one should not fear loss or breakage of an iPhone as there will be a glut of affordable used phones on the market, the value of an out of contract iPhone is going to fall, and there are good reasons to buy either a Class B iPhone (save $230) or a Class A iPhone (features, performance).

The real world is a bit more complex - but not much more complex. Data network based texting is not yet a full replacement for SMS texting for example. However, the future of SMS is very limited. An unintended consequence of carrier's addiction to SMS margins is that they're ferociously accelerating the transition to smartphones that will destroy those margins.

See also:

- fn -

[1] Note we're talking contract, so this is fair -- unlike AT&T's mandatory smartphone data plan for non-contract phones.
[2] Clearly SMS is superior at the moment, but this is going to change quickly.
[3] I'm assigning the FULL cost of the data plan to non-SMS messaging.
[4] Based on our experience, assuming even minimal care.
[5] That's probably too simplistic. A two year old former-Class A device may be superior to a new Class B device -- though not by much.
[6] Today businesses that buy used 3GSs are offering only $100 - for a device with an unsubsidized purchase cost of perhaps $300. That's a very low price for a device that may be only two years old and can run iOS 5. It's so low because the primary market is small -- people who need to replace a lost contract phone or who want a 2nd rate iPod Touch (troublesome to activate, flaky iMessage performance, not truly supported by Apple). The market would be much larger if not for AT&T's carrier lock and mandatory data plan policies, and the price would be higher.

Update 11/26/11: A Felix Salmon Reuters post is a good complement to this article. It's a sign that the marketplace is beginning to think through the weird consequences of AT&T's contracts, all-smartphone-data-plan-mandate, and SMS pricing.

Update 11/30/2011: added footnote [6] to clarify.

I will probably delete my Google Profile

2011-11-23T23:21:00.002-06:00

I visited my Google Profile today. It includes G+ posts, and more was public than I'd expected.

There's no longer a way to disable the Posts tab in Google Profile. I recall that was once optional.

I can, however, delete my Profile:

Downgrade from Google+
... Delete Google+ content or your entire Google profile If you delete Google+, Google attempts to restore your experience of other Google products to the way it was before you joined Google+ and to permanently delete your Google+ circles, posts, and comments. If you delete your Google profile, you delete Google+ as well as other services and their data that depend on a Google profile...

I'm going to give this a few days, but I expect I'll delete my TrueName Google Profile. I'll take the opportunity to take another step away from Google 2.0.

It's interesting to reread my first post on my Google Profile in 2007.

Today I have been re-christened 113810027503326386174. It is the ID Google assigned to the persona associated with Gordon's Notes and other blogs. I assume it will be the foundation for Google's future identity management services...

...I will need to add this new number to the page where I park all my public and related personas.

I really didn't expect Google to choose its current path.

In its place, at least for the moment, I have created a John Gordon profile, a companion to my blogs.

Update 12/6/2011: I've deleted my G+ Profile and G+ Content. The dialog I received said ...

Over the next few days, Google will attempt to delete all Google+ features and your Google+ data from your Google Account:
Your circles will be deleted, but people in your circles will remain in your Contacts.
Your +1's will be deleted.
Your posts and comments will be deleted and won't be available to anyone you shared them with.
Any profile information that you did not make public will be deleted.
Many Google+ social and sharing features will be disabled for you on other Google sites.
Content from other services, such as videos, will no longer be visible to people in those circles.
However:
No photos will be deleted: you can still access them in Picasa. To delete them, go to Picasa Web Albums.
Your connections to third-party services will not be affected. To manage them go to Connected accounts settings.
Your chat buddies in Google Talk and Gmail will not be deleted.

The Iran-Mexico assassination plot -- so what about the traffickers?

2011-11-23T14:11:00.001-06:00

Everyone I read had the same reaction ...

... Plausible Culpability - By Daniel Byman | Foreign Policy

Incredulity has been the most common response to reports that Iran plotted with Mexican drug traffickers to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, at a Washington, D.C. restaurant...

Now, six weeks later, the emerging consensus among my sources is that ...

Iranian intelligence really is this stupid ...
Mossad does dumb things too, so why not Iran ...
Come to think of it, we're not that smart either ...

So it's being treated as "real". Lots of CIA operations going on against Iran, Saudi Arabia presumably friendlier now, etc, etc.

That's ok, but what about those Mexican drug traffickers? Didn't they just engage in a proverbial "act of war" against the US government? Does this mean they need to be watching for little dots moving in the night sky?

This really wasn't the smartest move for them.

Too much history

2011-11-23T10:38:00.001-06:00

One of the reasons I blog is to engage with a fascinating world, and to track the streams of history.

I'm finding that harder to do. It's not that I don't see the streams, or see ways to connect them -- it's that there's too much. I feel as though history just kicked up a gear.

Partly this is the loss of Google Reader's share/tracking functions. They were a key component of how I engaged with my fragments of the world's knowledge flow. Even if nothing else had changed, losing those functions and my share repository would be disorienting.

I don't think it's just the loss of Reader though. It's more that Reader's capabilities masked the rate of change. Without them, it's easier to see how the world is changing.

These are truly whitewater times.

Remembering when the iPhone cost less

2011-11-22T07:44:00.002-06:00

Our iPhone-bearing family is going through complex gyrations to claw some money back from AT&T.

Things were simpler, and less costly, there years ago. I came across this 2008 TidBITS article while researching whether it makes sense to get a 4S with a child-contract then transfer various phones around the family (emphases mine) ....

TidBITS iPhone iPad iPod: iPhone 3G Actually $160 More Expensive (2008):

... So buying an iPhone 3G may cost $200 less than before, but paying the monthly bill will set you back $240 more over your 2-year contract with AT&T, for a total of $1,680 in subscription fees instead of $1,440 (previously, the lowest monthly voice+data plan cost $59.99 per month). How exactly is that cheaper?

Wait, it gets worse! Om Malik, in an interview with Ralph de la Vega, president and chief executive officer of AT&T Mobility, learned that SMS messages are no longer included in the data plan either, so you'll have to pay extra for them. Previously, the data plan included 200 SMS messages per month. AT&T's Messaging 200 plan, which includes 200 SMS messages, costs $5 per month, so it would seem likely that the iPhone 3G's SMS plan would be similar...

The original iPhone looked expensive, but that was only because most of us, including most journalists, can't do grade school arithmetic -- and because the modern corporation has made an art form of misleading marketing.

I suspect Steve Jobs was disappointed that we couldn't do the math back in 2007. The iPhone became a contract-phone with a higher cost of ownership -- and then AT&T's obligatory data plans and unending carrier lock dramatically reduced the resale value of old phones...

The checklist in aviation and medicine

2011-11-20T18:49:00.000-06:00

Four years ago Atul Gawande wrote an astounding article on the "stupid little checklist" and its impact on health care.

It was a great article, and of course it's been largely forgotten since. Progress is slow. It's hard to keep something so simple and obvious in the public mind; there's no business model.

I remembered this article after a recent experience in my own world of corporate software development. For want of a checklist a release was lost.

This is a good time to refresh memories ... (emphases mine)

Annals of Medicine: The Checklist - The New Yorker 2007 by Atul Gawande
... For every drowned and pulseless child rescued by intensive care, there are many more who don't make it-and not just because their bodies are too far gone. Machines break down; a team can't get moving fast enough; a simple step is forgotten. Such cases don't get written up in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery, but they are the norm. Intensive-care medicine has become the art of managing extreme complexity-and a test of whether such complexity can, in fact, be humanly mastered.
... Fifty years ago, I.C.U.s barely existed. Today, in my hospital, a hundred and fifty-five of our almost seven hundred patients are, as I write this, in intensive care. The average stay of an I.C.U. patient is four days, and the survival rate is eighty-six per cent.
... A decade ago, Israeli scientists published a study in which engineers observed patient care in I.C.U.s for twenty-four-hour stretches. They found that the average patient required a hundred and seventy-eight individual actions per day, ranging from administering a drug to suctioning the lungs, and every one of them posed risks. Remarkably, the nurses and doctors were observed to make an error in just one per cent of these actions-but that still amounted to an average of two errors a day with every patient. Intensive care succeeds only when we hold the odds of doing harm low enough for the odds of doing good to prevail...
... intensive-care medicine has grown so far beyond ordinary complexity that avoiding daily mistakes is proving impossible even for our super-specialists. The I.C.U., with its spectacular successes and frequent failures, therefore poses a distinctive challenge: what do you do when expertise is not enough?
On October 30, 1935, at Wright Air Field in Dayton, Ohio, the U.S. Army Air Corps held a flight competition for airplane manufacturers vying to build its next-generation long-range bomber.
...The plane roared down the tarmac, lifted off smoothly, and climbed sharply to three hundred feet. Then it stalled, turned on one wing, and crashed in a fiery explosion. Two of the five crew members died, including the pilot, Major Ployer P. Hill.
An investigation revealed that nothing mechanical had gone wrong. The crash had been due to "pilot error," the report said. Substantially more complex than previous aircraft, the new plane required the pilot to attend to the four engines, a retractable landing gear, new wing flaps, electric trim tabs that needed adjustment to maintain control at different airspeeds, and constant-speed propellers whose pitch had to be regulated with hydraulic controls, among other features. While doing all this, Hill had forgotten to release a new locking mechanism on the elevator and rudder controls. The Boeing model was deemed, as a newspaper put it, "too much airplane for one man to fly." The Army Air Corps declared Douglas's smaller design the winner. Boeing nearly went bankrupt.
Still, the Army purchased a few aircraft from Boeing as test planes, and some insiders remained convinced that the aircraft was flyable. So a group of test pilots got together and considered what to do.
They could have required Model 299 pilots to undergo more training. But it was hard to imagine having more experience and expertise than Major Hill, who had been the U.S. Army Air Corps' chief of flight testing. Instead, they came up with an ingeniously simple approach: they created a pilot's checklist, with step-by-step checks for takeoff, flight, landing, and taxiing. Its mere existence indicated how far aeronautics had advanced. In the early years of flight, getting an aircraft into the air might have been nerve-racking, but it was hardly complex. Using a checklist for takeoff would no more have occurred to a pilot than to a driver backing a car out of the garage. But this new plane was too complicated to be left to the memory of any pilot, however expert.
With the checklist in hand, the pilots went on to fly the Model 299 a total of 1.8 million miles without one accident. The Army ultimately ordered almost thirteen thousand of the aircraft, which it dubbed the B-17. And, because flying the behemoth was now possible, the Army gained a decisive air advantage in the Second World War which enabled its devastating bombing campaign across Nazi Germany.
Medicine today has entered its B-17 phase. Substantial parts of what hospitals do-most notably, intensive care-are now too complex for clinicians to carry them out reliably from memory alone. I.C.U. life support has become too much medicine for one person to fly.
Yet it's far from obvious that something as simple as a checklist could be of much help in medical care. Sick people are phenomenally more various than airplanes. A study of forty-one thousand trauma patients-just trauma patients-found that they had 1,224 different injury-related diagnoses in 32,261 unique combinations for teams to attend to. That's like having 32,261 kinds of airplane to land. Mapping out the proper steps for each is not possible, and physicians have been skeptical that a piece of paper with a bunch of little boxes would improve matters much.
In 2001, though, a critical-care specialist at Johns Hopkins Hospital named Peter Pronovost decided to give it a try. He didn't attempt to make the checklist cover everything; he designed it to tackle just one problem.. line infections. On a sheet of plain paper, he plotted out the steps to take in order to avoid infections when putting a line in. Doctors are supposed to (1) wash their hands with soap, (2) clean the patient's skin with chlorhexidine antiseptic .
. Pronovost asked the nurses in his I.C.U. to observe the doctors for a month as they put lines into patients, and record how often they completed each step. In more than a third of patients, they skipped at least one.
The next month, he and his team persuaded the hospital administration to authorize nurses to stop doctors if they saw them skipping a step on the checklist; nurses were also to ask them each day whether any lines ought to be removed, so as not to leave them in longer than necessary.
Pronovost and his colleagues monitored what happened for a year afterward. The results were so dramatic that they weren't sure whether to believe them: the ten-day line-infection rate went from eleven per cent to zero. So they followed patients for fifteen more months. Only two line infections occurred during the entire period. They calculated that, in this one hospital, the checklist had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs.
Pronovost recruited some more colleagues, and they made some more checklists. The researchers found that simply having the doctors and nurses in the I.C.U. make their own checklists for what they thought should be done each day improved the consistency of care to the point that, within a few weeks, the average length of patient stay in intensive care dropped by half.
The checklists provided two main benefits, Pronovost observed. First, they helped with memory recall, especially with mundane matters that are easily overlooked in patients undergoing more drastic events. (When you're worrying about what treatment to give a woman who won't stop seizing, it's hard to remember to make sure that the head of her bed is in the right position.) A second effect was to make explicit the minimum, expected steps in complex processes. Pronovost was surprised to discover how often even experienced personnel failed to grasp the importance of certain precautions. In a survey of I.C.U. staff taken before introducing the ventilator checklists, he found that half hadn't realized that there was evidence strongly supporting giving ventilated patients antacid medication. Checklists established a higher standard of baseline performance. ..
... 2003, however, the Michigan Health and Hospital Association asked Pronovost to try out three of his checklists in Michigan's I.C.U.s. It would be a huge undertaking. Not only would he have to get the state's hospitals to use the checklists; he would also have to measure whether doing so made a genuine difference.
This past summer, I visited Sinai-Grace Hospital, in inner-city Detroit, and saw what Pronovost was up against ... between 2000 and 2003 Sinai-Grace and eight other Detroit hospitals were forced to cut a third of their staff, and the state had to come forward with a fifty-million-dollar bailout to avert their bankruptcy.
... they were, I discovered, filling out those pages. Mostly, it was the nurses who kept things in order. Each morning, a senior nurse walked through the unit, clipboard in hand, making sure that every patient on a ventilator had the bed propped at the right angle, and had been given the right medicines and the right tests. Whenever doctors put in a central line, a nurse made sure that the central-line checklist had been filled out and placed in the patient's chart. Looking back through their files, I found that they had been doing this faithfully for more than three years.
Pronovost had been canny when he started. In his first conversations with hospital administrators, he didn't order them to use the checklists. Instead, he asked them simply to gather data on their own infection rates. In early 2004, they found, the infection rates for I.C.U. patients in Michigan hospitals were higher than the national average, and in some hospitals dramatically so. Sinai-Grace experienced more line infections than seventy-five per cent of American hospitals. Meanwhile, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan agreed to give hospitals small bonus payments for participating in Pronovost's program. A checklist suddenly seemed an easy and logical thing to try.
In what became known as the Keystone Initiative, each hospital assigned a project manager to roll out the checklists and participate in a twice-monthly conference call with Pronovost for trouble-shooting. Pronovost also insisted that each participating hospital assign to each unit a senior hospital executive, who would visit the unit at least once a month, hear people's complaints, and help them solve problems.
The executives were reluctant. They normally lived in meetings worrying about strategy and budgets. They weren't used to venturing into patient territory and didn't feel that they belonged there. In some places, they encountered hostility. But their involvement proved crucial. In the first month, according to Christine Goeschel, at the time the Keystone Initiative's director, the executives discovered that the chlorhexidine soap, shown to reduce line infections, was available in fewer than a third of the I.C.U.s. This was a problem only an executive could solve. Within weeks, every I.C.U. in Michigan had a supply of the soap. Teams also complained to the hospital officials that the checklist required that patients be fully covered with a sterile drape when lines were being put in, but full-size barrier drapes were often unavailable. So the officials made sure that the drapes were stocked. Then they persuaded Arrow International, one of the largest manufacturers of central lines, to produce a new central-line kit that had both the drape and chlorhexidine in it.
In December, 2006, the Keystone Initiative published its findings in a landmark article in The New England Journal of Medicine. Within the first three months of the project, the infection rate in Michigan's I.C.U.s decreased by sixty-six per cent. The typical I.C.U.-including the ones at Sinai-Grace Hospital-cut its quarterly infection rate to zero. Michigan's infection rates fell so low that its average I.C.U. outperformed ninety per cent of I.C.U.s nationwide. In the Keystone Initiative's first eighteen months, the hospitals saved an estimated hundred and seventy-five million dollars in costs and more than fifteen hundred lives. The successes have been sustained for almost four years-all because of a stupid little checklist.

Apple and self-delusion

2011-11-20T09:30:00.001-06:00

Jobs was the best salesman of the past 50 years.

I wonder, though, if deep down he knew what was real and what was not.

His Heirs don't seem to know ...

AppleInsider | Apple VP shares four keys to company's success:
... Drawing from 20 years of experience at Apple, Greg Joswiak, the company's vice president of worldwide iOS product marketing, has explained four keys to the company's success: focus, simplicity, courage and a commitment to being the best....
... The fourth and final guiding principle that Joswiak shared was Apple's commitment to only enter markets that it believes it can be the best in...

Right. The best.

iWork. iPhoto. Aperture. Calendar.app. iCloud. MobileMe. Must be the very best eh?

Some of what Apple produces is excellent. Some of it is 3rd rate. A lot of it is second rate. If Apple's leadership really believes they are always "the best" they are delusional and Apple will become an average publicly traded company. Another Microsoft, another Google.

Apple's flagship product is the iPhone -- and there are lots of issues with the cost/value it delivers compared to Android. Apple needs to work very hard, and with clear eyes, to increase the value they bring to their customers.

Is there anyone in Apple whose job it is to question Apple's own myths?

The super-optimist take on the super-committee

2011-11-20T08:41:00.001-06:00

To the surprise of nobody I read, the super-committee is said to be focusing on how best to present complete failure.

Since this was expected all along, why create a "super"-committee? Much of our political leadership is incompetent, but many have a few functional staffers. So why bother?

The super-optimist view is that this was all a magic trick. Magicians draw attention to the right hand, while the left hand does the real work.

Perhaps the super-committee's only function was to distract the masses, while the real work was done elsewhere. Or else-when, such as around the time the Bush tax cuts expire.

Quantum action - Pusey's theorem

2011-11-19T23:28:00.000-06:00

I'm looking forward to the discussions on this paper by Pusey et al ...

Quantum theorem shakes foundations : Nature News & Comment
... Robert Spekkens, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, who has favoured a statistical interpretation of the wavefunction, says that Pusey's theorem is correct and a “fantastic” result, but that he disagrees about what conclusion should be drawn from it. He favours an interpretation in which all quantum states, including non-entangled ones, are related after all.

Spekkens adds that he does expect the theorem to have broader consequences for physics, as have Bell’s and other fundamental theorems. No one foresaw in 1964 that Bell’s theorem would sow the seeds for quantum information theory and quantum cryptography — both of which rely on phenomena that aren’t possible in classical physics. Spekkens thinks this theorem may ultimately have a similar impact. “It’s very important and beautiful in its simplicity,” he says...

Pusey's interpretation is that the wave function models a physical reality. The paper allows, however, that the wave function is a predictive model [1] -- but, in that case, all quantum states are interconnected across space and time, even uncorrelated states.

This ought to be very interesting ...

[1] If you've done basic stats, you have worked with linear regression models that predict systems statistically, but once the system is understood, are found to be weakly related to the fundamental "truth". Sometimes these models do reflect fundamentals, but they don't have to. This is relatively basic math, but it gives me a way to think about statistically predictive models that don't resemble the "true" mechanistic model.

Update: Shtetl Optimized (Scott Aaronson) hates this article, PBR's definition of statistics, and especially Slashdot... (emphases mine)

... There’s an important lesson here for mathematicians, theoretical computer scientists, and analytic philosophers. You want the kind of public interest in your work that the physicists enjoy? Then stop being so goddamned precise with words! The taxpayers who fund us—those who pay attention at all, that is—want a riveting show, a grand Einsteinian dispute about what is or isn’t real. Who wants some mathematical spoilsport telling them: “Look, it all depends what you mean by ‘real.’ If you mean, uniquely determined by the complete state of the universe, and if you’re only talking about pure states, then…”

Aaronson is a theoretical computer scientist. I don't think he's happy right now.

Rick Perry really is an idiot

2011-11-19T23:04:00.003-06:00

I knew Rick Perry was ignorant, but this moves it up to a new level...

Republican Financial Plans - NYTimes.com

... This week, Perry laced into Barack Obama as a man who could not possibly understand what ordinary Americans were going through because he “grew up in a privileged way"...

Rick Perry, unlike Mitt Romney, grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. So maybe he considers Obama's lower middle class life to be extraordinarily privileged. By that standard, I was presumably privileged -- and I remember being short of food on occasion.

What an ass.

Science, the media and the Himalayan glacier. What's wrong?

2011-11-18T08:23:00.009-06:00

This morning's NPR Marketwatch summarized the latest IPCC climate change report. They included the mandatory scornful reference to the first IPCC's "error" on Himalayan glaciers ...

AR4 WGII Chapter 10: Asia - 10.6.2 The Himalayan glaciers:

... Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world (see Table 10.9) and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 km2 by the year 2035 (WWF, 2005)...

Of course since the first IPCC report the world has exceeded the worst case scenarios for carbon emission; despite the first American depression since the 1930s.

So when do today's mainstream climate scientists expect those Himalayan glaciers to vanish?

I thought this would be easy to discover, even though far too much science is still behind paywalls - despite some uncelebrated but huge progress in the waning days of the Bush II.

It wasn't easy at all.

This was the best recent survey I could find, but it's abstract only [1] ...

Himalayan glaciers: The big picture is a montage PNAS Kargel et al
... The gaffe by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change helped to trigger a global political retreat from climate change negotiations, and it may prove to have been one of the more consequential scientific missteps in human history. An equally incorrect claim, on a different timescale, was that large Himalayan glaciers may be responding today to climate shifts 6,000–15,000 y ago (2). However, both mistakes (1, 2) and some solid scientific reporting on Himalayan glacier dynamics (4–10) highlight large gaps in the observational record. In PNAS, Fujita and Nuimura (11) competently reduced the knowledge gap....

I thought with the clues in the abstract I could find new disappearance predictions, perhaps for more specific regions of the Tibetan/Indian glaciers.

I couldn't -- at least not in my 20 minute time budget.

There's something wrong here. Something wrong with science, the media, us, Google, or all of the above. I'm positive there are mainstream predictions, but scientists aren't marketing them -- and the media isn't digging.

We need scientists with more spine, because nobody else has any.

[1] The abstract overstates the significance of the "gaffe". Humanity was, and is, profoundly unready to think about global climate change. We would have found another reason to defer thought.

Update 11/19/2011: After writing up notes to help my son with his 9th grade history, I realized why this particular bit of climate change is so sensitive. The Indus River is fed from the Himalayan snowpack. India is named after that river ...

Social media is so 2000

2011-11-18T07:02:00.007-06:00

GigaOm has a longish cloud computing post around a Peachtree Capital Advisors investor survey (full report is by request only).

I usually don't pay much attention to consulting group reports like this, but there were a few comments that struck me as interesting....

VCs: Don’t mistake cloud computing for cloud opportunity — Cloud Computing News
... tech investors are underwhelmed by social computing: A whopping 88 percent characterized the social media segment (including collaboration) as overvalued....
... The whole big data explosion that most businesses are trying to capture depends on the wide availability of diverse data from many sources, including the so-called Bermuda Triangle of Facebook, Twitter and Google...
... 35 percent of those surveyed said they think enterprise software as a category is undervalued...

By enterprise software they presumably mean Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, etc.

I was struck by the declining interest in social media. That may be because investors figure it's a mature segment (!) and Facebook owns it. Or that consumers are (re)turning to Cable TV.

I think both may be true. When a sclerotic company like Google 2.0 jumps into a domain, you can be pretty sure it's yesterday's news. Consumer tech cycles are viciously short now; fashion designers understand this all too well.

On the other hand, I'm also impressed by how quiet Facebook, G+ and the rest feel now, and "how happy this man looks" (SplatF). By my estimate we're in year 12 of the long depression, and we have years to go. Cable TV has not been displaced, and if consumers have limited time and attention ...

BBC Jan 14, 2012: How Europe was saved

2011-11-16T22:36:00.002-06:00

BBC news Jan 14, 2012.

In a shocking move earlier today the European Central Bank announced an orderly default of Greece and the appointment of Professor Paul Krugman as the head of the Bank.

In a brief speech Dr. Krugman dumped a paper bag of Euros from the podium. "There's plenty more where they came from" he said. "I'll get 3.5% inflation if I have to print them myself". Within moments of these announcements China and the United States each purchased 200 billion Euro Bonds in a new offering.

Trading volumes broke prior records then broken them again. Goldman Sachs bet heavily against the ECB strategy, and by the end of the day it had lost over 80 billion US dollars. The future independence of Goldman Sachs is now in doubt ...

Thai floods - microcosm of global climate change

2011-11-16T21:12:00.000-06:00

Three years ago Corinne Kisner wrote ...

Climate Change Case Study: Thailand July 2008
... Climate change threatens all three important sectors of Thailand’s economy: agriculture, tourism, and trade...
... The effects of climate change, including higher surface temperatures, floods, droughts, severe storms and sea level rise, put Thailand’s rice crops at risk and threaten to submerge Bangkok within 20 years. The damage to agriculture, coastal tourism, and the capital city as consequences of climate change will have enormous economic, cultural and environmental impacts: one degree of warming will destroy the rice crops that are central to the economy, and a few centimeters of sea level rise will submerge the capital city and devastate coastal tourism...

Today Cringely reviews some of the impacts of the 2011 Thailand floods ...

I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Intel is fit to be Thai’d - Cringely on technology
... The industrial park that’s sitting underwater still in Thailand will be out of action for at least four months, I’m told, and possibly as long as 12 months. And what happens then? Why another monsoon, of course! The flooded industrial park, built in an old rice paddy on a historic flood plain with little added drainage will go under water during the next big storm, too.
The hard disks manufactured in the flooded region are nearly all 3.5-inch drives, so those will be most immediately affected. Since 2.5-inch drives are in ascendancy with 1.8-inch almost out of business and 3.5-inch in decline, the global product mix is likely to change even more, with 3.5-inch drives possibly reaching end-of-life earlier than expected.
But wait, there’s more! Among the Thai plants currently under water is a Western Digital factory that makes 80 percent of hard drive stepper spindle motors in the world. So while the 3.5-inch drive supply will be most immediately affected, 30-60 days later every other type of drive will be in as short supply...

Are these the floods Kisner predicted? I don't know of course. In 1981 I remember wading through Bangkok's PraduNaam (water/fish market) on the way to the office. The city has flooded before. Thailand will flood again.

Still, this is what we expect -- bigger events happening more often. Most people, however, didn't expect the world supply of computer components to be restricted. Thailand has come a long way since I lived there.

What lessons can we learn? What lessons are technology companies learning?

They're learning that in the "whitewater world" risk has to be distributed. Manufacturing cannot be concentrated in one region, one country, or even one climate zone. We will have to learn redundancy and flexibility. The companies that learn that first will have a large competitive advantage.

Today is a good day to have a functioning disk drive factory.

Google 2.0 gives Microsoft ammunition

2011-11-16T21:11:00.001-06:00

Via Daring Fireball Linked List ...

Google Atmosphere or “Admosphere”? - Why Microsoft
.. More importantly, with advertising revenue (and therefore mining customer data) remaining central to Google’s business model, and leadership that until recently took pride in declaring comfort with getting “right up to the creepy line” around privacy. Every CIO needs to ask if that value system is consistent with your privacy needs. Are you comfortable with every click in your business, every document, and every communication being in Google’s hands? Are your customers and business partners?...
... Organizations need to plan for the future without having to question a cloud provider's long term commitment to their business. Despite the need for customers to understand their roadmap, Google and others often surprise their customers by unexpectedly removing important features - or adding new ones - which increases both headaches and cost. These unexpected changes often lead to more work....

I don't trust Google 2.0. Microsoft has a fat target now.

Oprah

2011-11-12T21:14:00.001-06:00

I'm not exactly a TV guy.

Emily and I watched Star Trek Next Generation. That was early 90s. Before that, MASH I think. After that, almost nothing. Saw a Simpson episode once.

Even so, I knew there was a TV celebrity named Oprah, that she lived in Chicago, was black, a Democrat, and fabulously wealthy. Sometimes I'd see Oprah magazine around the house, but I don't think I ever read it.

So I read Caitlin Flanagan's The Glory of Oprah empty of impressions.

Now I'm impressed.

What a hell of a life.

Go Oprah.

A good time to invest in old bicycles?

2011-11-12T15:15:00.000-06:00

As all my friends know, I'm one of those annoyingly cheerful Pollyannas, nothing like that Kassandra fellow we all ignore [1].

So I liked Jay Goltz's NYT blog post on the case for optimism ...

... things have slowly been getting better. In 2011, I hired about five additional people. And I really hired them. No 1099 contract workers, no temporary workers, no part time...
... seeing an increase in the amount of furniture people are buying, partially because houses have been selling again and people are moving again. Large real estate projects in the corporate world that have been on hold are being completed, and art is being bought for the walls. And my picture-framing business has started to see customers who come in with art they say they have been meaning to frame...
... With the exception of things like restaurant meals and car washes, many purchases can be put off only so long. Eventually, they have to happen. Roofs, air conditioning units, clothes, cars and even dental care will be bought. In my business, I have been buying new equipment – trucks, computers — and taking care of maintenance that had been avoided the previous couple of years. I have talked to four car dealers who say they are very busy, as well many other business owners from roofing contractors to a large carpeting business. Almost all say things are better and that they believe pent-up demand is one reason...

This is how balance sheet or even liquidity trap recessions are supposed to end. It may take a very long time, but eventually people spend. Or wars happen and governments spend (oops, that wasn't so optimisitic).

There are some countervailing sentiments however. Europe is doing a slow motion version of the Crash of '09. Maybe we'll get to see how it plays out without massive governmental intervention [2].

Meanwhile, perhaps related to the slow motion train wreck of European finance, Google is cutting back on its projects. Adobe just shut down its decade-long investments in Flash, Flex, and Air. Olympus is collapsing because it can no longer conceal losses from 17 years ago -- and nobody believes Olympus is the only Japanese, or US, company with falsified accounts. ATT is squeezing customers hard. Apple's quality problems continue.

In a development that goes largely unnoticed, corporations are taking a "destroy the village to save it" approach to information security. The diversion of corporate wealth to elite compensation continues, with effects that are poorly understood.

Lastly, our whitewater world is no less frothy, complexity attacks are still ubiquitous and virtually unnoticed - and the AIs are getting smarter [3]. If you're a 'structuralist', you'd say that the Great Disruptors are still working on the world order.

And there's the "China bubble" (334,000 Google hits today).

So is this a good time to invest in proven bicycles, long lasting antimicrobials, and garden tools?

Well, bicycles are always a good idea, but I suspect what lies ahead is, as usual, a lot like what lies behind.

Somethings are improving. Other things are worsening. So the US will see some trendline improvement with periodic disruptions -- and we'll be lucky to do that well.

[1] We all know, of course, that the curse of Cassandra was that she would be always right and always ignored.
[2] It is comically ironic that the "marketarian" leaning US government should be able to intervene and the European Government cannot. Oh, wait, that's right. Europe doesn't have a government ....
[3] Meanwhile quantum computing is looking more real every day. Not that that will be disruptive.

What are the consequences of extreme executive income?

2011-11-12T12:25:00.001-06:00

Despite a few hiccups in our economy, the diversion of money to executive compensation continues, particularly to the shareholder employees [1] of large publicly traded corporations. The US is in the lead, but other countries are following a similar trend.

I've seen much discussion of the trend, but not so much about the effects on corporations - regardless of social justice or market operation [2].

I don't think we know what it means, but I can make some informed guesses.

First, we can dispense with the myth that employees don't know what CEOs are paid. I suspect even people working with their arms and backs know their CEO's compensation. Certainly middle-management and knowledge workers know.

So how does that affect employees? And, perhaps more interestingly, how does it affect executives?

Employees, in most corporations today, see limited raises, underfunded projects, difficult work conditions and employment uncertainty. They do the arithmetic; half the CEO's compensation would fund all the projects they know of. This has obvious and direct effects on morale.

No, they don't imagine they'll sit in the CEO seat one day, or even another C-seat. Employees aren't that dumb.

How does this affect executives?

Well, it's a rare human who doesn't think they deserve their salary. If you pay a CEO 50 million dollars, they assume they deserve 50 million dollars. They can do arithmetic too. This must mean they are 250 times smarter, faster, wiser, stronger, and better than their superstar worker bees. They have gifts far beyond the ken of mortal men.

They make decisions accordingly.

It also moves the executive class into a different sort of reality. They still age and die, but most of the time that is forgotten. They are free of the other concerns of mortal life. They don't fly coach. They don't deal with time tracking and travel expenses. They don't have to manage their Flex accounts. Their lives are relatively complexity free.

Executive hyper-compensation may explain a lot of the poor decisions and poor returns of the modern publicly traded company. Not so much from the diversion of revenue, but from its impacts on employees and, most of all, because of its effect on executives.

[1] The CEO, CFO, etc of a publicly traded company are, in theory, employees of shareholders.
[2] I think this is a market failure. I've known several CEO class executives. They are not necessarily imaginative, insightful or academically intelligent, but they are always good at operating in the corporate setting, they always work very long hours, and they always sacrifice a great deal. Whether that helps the corporation or not is debatable; their selection pressures are complex. Even so, it would be reasonable to compensate a CEO of this sort at 1-2 million dollars (total) a year. We are far beyond that level of compensation at large PTCs.

There is a contrary argument of course. At a certain level of power and wealthy, individuals gain direct access to the global wealth stream. There are many ways to divert tens of millions of dollars from that stream that don't involve working for a PTC. Perhaps that's what boards are bidding against.

Google 2.0

2011-11-11T19:55:00.001-06:00

I liked Google 1.0. Even in its fading days it gave us the data liberation front.

The DLF had a twitter feed. Their last post is dated September 15th, 2011.

Google 1.0 died on November 2nd, 2011. The Google 2.0 era belongs to Larry Page (emphases mine) ...

Google’s Chief Works to Trim a Bloated Ship - NYTimes.com
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, so hates wasting time at meetings that he once dumped his secretary to avoid being scheduled for them.
... It is losing employees to the new, hotter start-ups, and is being pushed around by government regulators and competitors like Facebook, Apple and Amazon, which are all vying for people’s online time...
Naysayers fret that in his rush to refocus the company, and especially in ending projects, he risks squelching Google’s trademark innovation, which bubbles up when engineers are given the time to experiment. “He’s going to lose some people at the end of the day,” said one employee who, like others, agreed to speak only anonymously because the company bars them from talking to the press without prior approval.
... “It’s much more of a style like Steve Jobs than the three-headed monster that Google was,” said a former Google executive who has spoken with current executives about the changes and spoke anonymously to preserve business relationships. “When Eric was there, you’d walk into a product meeting or a senior staff meeting, and everyone got to weigh in on every decision. Larry is much more willing to make an O.K. decision and make it now, rather than a perfect decision later.”
.. The most significant change at the company is the killing of projects Mr. Page deems unworthy...
Some employees find it frustrating to discover they do not fit into Mr. Page’s plans. “These teams are unfortunate casualties of these types of decisions,” one said...

Google 1.0 was powerful, but it tried to do good. I could overlook its effective monopoly because it did so many good things for me personally -- and it was occasionally goofy.

Google 2.0 is powerful, and ruthless. It reminds me of another monopoly that was astoundingly successful seventeen years ago. Google may be similarly successful, but I hope not. I don't think Google 2.0 will handle power well.

In praise of the (almost) modern bicycle

2011-11-09T21:33:00.001-06:00

The Subaru is in the shop, so I get an extra day of bike commuting this week. Most weeks I'm allowed one day of bike commuting leisure, but this week I have two. It's a blessing.

During today's commute though, the shifting was rough. I adjusted the cable, but it didn't help. Finally, i took it down to my workshop.

Wow. I'm amazed that Shimano Deore XT derailleur could shift at all. It was coated with sedimentary rock forming from strata of clay and oil and leaf and the odd bug. After a bit of excavating and polishing thought it shifts like new.

That's incredible. I paid $600 for that bike over 14 years ago ...

Commuting/Touring Bike
... I ended up buying the 1996 T400, primarily because I already owned the wheels and components found on the T2000 (I did spend $5.00 or so to upgrade the crummy front derailleur to a Deore LX, my existing front derailleur is not compatible with this bike's tubing.). I like the old-fashioned stone simple mounting of the shifters on the down tube and the older 7 speed Hyperglide cassette (freewheel)...

This touring/commuting bike just keeps going. Yes, I did have cyclocross wheels put on and I recycled some nice components, but the basic bike was pretty fine.

It gets pathetically little maintenance, but it still runs.

I don't know what bikes are like today, but I assume they're equally fine. I can't justify a new one; I have three great bikes, including my 1976 Raleigh International,

a (hard fork!) 1988 Trek mountain bike and the Cannondale.

Bikes are good stuff. Spend a bit of money and get payback for fifty years.

AT&T and Google may give me hearburn, but a good bike is a joy forever.

Keystone XL, carbon sequestration, and the tax in the closet

2011-11-07T13:58:00.001-06:00

The Keystone Pipeline XL (Keystone Expansion) is a part of a multi-billion dollar project to "transport synthetic crude oil and diluted bitumen from the Athabasca Oil Sands in northeastern Alberta, Canada to refineries in Illinois and Oklahoma, and further to the U.S. Gulf Coast".

There is debate about the project, but the media coverage is hard to follow. That's because there is an "elephant in the room". (see - unspoken).

The elephant is carbon. If we taxed CO2 to offset the externalities of global climate change the Keystone XL would not be built and the existing Keystone pipeline would be dismantled. Of course if we had a Carbon tax the price of energy would rise about 10%, though that would be offset by the increasingly low costs of solar power.

It's easy to see why the media is missing the Keystone XL story. Without a Carbon Tax, or the regulatory equivalent, the Keystone XL makes business sense. A Carbon Tax, however, is a wee bit unpopular. It's easier for XL opponents to talk about other environmental impacts such as oil spills, water contamination and the like.

Of course once Keystone XL is built, instituting a carbon cost would mean dismantling a suddenly irrational multi-billion dollar investment. So maybe we should be talking about the real issue now.

It's a similar story with coal plant carbon sequestration. To the surprise of nobody whose paying attention, it's not happening. Shareholders would fire the CEO of a corporation that invested in carbon sequestration without either a carbon tax or the regulatory equivalent.

There's more than one elephant in this (too small) room. The other is Peak Oil, defined as the beginning of the end of the good stuff. It's gotten lost in the so-far-lesser depression, but our fracking and Keystone investments are consistent with Gwynne Dyer's 2008 prediction. We are now post-peak-oil.

Does it all make more sense now?

Yeah, I thought so.

There's a twist to this story though.

Is a Carbon Tax really all that unpopular? Governments need money to provide services an aging and increasing disabled population needs. There's no happy way to increase taxes. Compared to the alternatives, a Carbon Tax may not be as unpopular as we imagine. Maybe that's why nobody is talking about it. When politicians are forced to deal with big problems, they prefer to keep the real solutions behind closed doors.

The fear that's driving AT&T's smartphone data plan policies

2011-11-07T08:34:00.003-06:00

AT&T, one of my least favorite vendors, raised our family mobile costs last week by about $450 a year. That's a risky thing to do to customers, as Netflix recently discovered.

Once I calmed down I tried to understand what motivated such a desperate move ...

Gordon's Notes: AT&T and the mandatory iPhone tax - even out of contract phones must pay

For about two years my son has used my old iPhone on our family plan. He has never had a contract and he doesn't have a data plan. The phone is configured not to use cellular data...

Today AT&T enrolled him in a mandatory data plan because "he has a smartphone". His text messaging stopped working, perhaps because his cellular data was turned off...

... [I think ... ] They are preparing for the end of their text messaging revenue stream.

They figure they can hold onto voice for a while; longer than most of us think. They do, however, expect Apple, Google, Facebook and others to steal text messaging. So in the short term they're getting as much money as they can out of text messaging, while ensuring every single customer has a data plan...

When I wrote that I hadn't read a GigaOm post from 11/3 ...

Operators better say goodbye to the SMS cash cow — Broadband News and Analysis

... The carrier cash cow of SMS text messaging is on the wane, driven by third-party messaging apps that include BlackBerry Messenger, iMessage, Skype and others. The trend was highlighted Thursday by Wireless Intelligence, which used data from Dutch mobile operator regulator OPTA ...

According to OPTA, the total number of SMS sent in the Netherlands stood at 5.7 billion for the first six months of the year, down 2.5 percent from 5.9 billion in 2H 2010, even though total SMS revenue rose slightly (0.6 percent) to EUR378 million during the period.,,,

... This year, AT&T changed its messaging plans to push new subscribers into an all-or-nothing price plan where they pay per text or pay up for unlimited. The bet is most people who weren’t on unlimited plans will find themselves paying more or getting stuck with insanely high bills for sending a few too many texts.

... That’s how AT&T is squeezing out the last bit of value from its cash cow, but it’s undoubtedly aware that such draconian measures or too-high-rates on the unlimited side might push people over to the third-party apps even faster. The downside to most of those apps is that users have to make sure their friends are also on the service, which can be complicated. For carriers, the downside is they are trading high-margin texting revenue for barely profitable data use.

So expect more texting and data plan changes, and a continued focus on machine-to-machine communications, as well as more apps that try to make third-party messaging across different platforms easier...

Turns out we're right on target then, because our response to AT&T's mandatory data plan/cost increase is to drop our $30/month unlimited texting plan (offsets price increase exactly) and switch to a combination of Facebook Messenger and Google Voice while disabling all texting [2]. As predicted, AT&T's moves are accelerating customer migration from their most profitable revenue stream.

See also:

[1] If Apple were to make iMessage available as an app and independent of texting we'd go that way; we're still exploring options.
[2] AT&T is required to do that on request. They don't like to admit it's possible. Say you want "administrative texting only". We also dropped a $5/month "Smart Limits for Wireless" plan because that is useless with smarphone accounts. There are other responses that AT&T won't like. As long as we have to pay a data plan, we might as well get a contract too. That redirects AT&T's revenue to Apple, and let us make money by selling either the new or older phones.

The sharing challenge: access, topic and identity. Why G+ fails.

2011-11-06T10:43:00.001-06:00

Setting aside the act of mass datacide that moved Google up my corporate evil scale, G+ suffers from a fundamental Circle problem. It may be an attempt to work around Facebook patents rather than a misguided design, but either way it doesn't work.

G+ provides these tools for publication and subscription:

A single identity. (In this case, identity is equivalent to a maximal set of Identity-Circles + Public)
Circle: both Access Control and Topic definition and Subscription-filter option
Person level blocks

These aren't sufficient. They put far too much of a burden on the publisher to create and maintain a multitude of Circles that pre-coordinate Access Control and Topic definition [1]. The pre-coordination work fails due to combinatorial explosion [2].

A full set of controls looks like this.

Multiple identity: where identity is a set of access controls and topic definitions.
Access controls: who can see what.
Topic definitions: what are the topics, so subscribers who can see a stream can choose what they follow within that stream
Person blocks: hide all comments from a person

A full set of controls seems more complex, but the workload largely falls on the Publisher, not the consumer -- and the combinatorial explosion problem is resolved. Subscribers choose which topic to follow. Unfollowing all topics is equivalent to blocking a person's posts but not their comments.

Google Reader Social had no access controls (that I remember), but it did allow multiple identities (an identity is equivalent to a subset of topics). The topic controls were very weak (subscribe to tags - almost never used), but the UI made it very easy to pick items of interest from a large stream. The G+ UI makes the combinatorial problem much more significant.

Google has promised pseudonym support. That will be roughly equivalent to a subset operation on Circles. Boolean operations on Circles would also somewhat alleviate the publisher combinatorial problem.

Alleviate, but not eliminate. Sooner or later, G+ will need to separate access control from topic definition.

(I'm grateful to a G+ comment from Peter C that helped me think this through.)

[1] Note too the 3 people on earth who'd probably appreciate this. This is identical to the pre- and post-coordination problems that bedevil anyone who works with concept based knowledge representation ontologies, including clinical terminologies/vocabularies like SNOMED and (yech) ICD-10-CM and ICD-10-PCS.
[2] A Sept 2011 WSJ post on "injury by falling turtle" in ICD-10-CM causes of injury illustrates this also. See #1.

Gordon's scale of corporate evil - 3rd edition

2011-11-05T16:58:00.001-05:00

Top end of the scale is 15. It's a linear scale.

My personal scale rates large for-profit corporations. CARE International is provided as a baseline measure and Philip Morris shall forever define the upper limits of corporate evil.

Philip Morris: 15
Exxon: 13
Goldman Sachs: 12
United Healthcare: 11
AT&T and Verizon (tied): 11
Facebook: 10
Google: 8
Average publicly traded company: 8
Microsoft: 7
Apple: 5
CARE International: 1 (They're not a PTC, so this is merely a non-evil reference point)What's your ranking?

There's been a lot of action since the 2009 1st edition. Google was once tied with Apple, but the manner and actions of the Reader affair moved them, for the first time, above Microsoft. They're heading into Facebook territory, even as Facebook itself is improving. AT&T and Verizon are slowly rising up the scale , breaking into the top five for the first time.

Conversely Microsoft has been relatively angelic over the past two years. They are incompetent, yes, but this is a scale of corporate evilness. Similarly Netflix is not so much evil as incompetent.

Apple, for all its sins, has stayed relatively low on the chart. They take our money, they mostly give us what we expect. They did nuke several customer services, but with a 1 year warning (vs. Google's 1 week warning before eliminating my shared reader items).

Some past editions for comparison:

AT&T and the mandatory iPhone tax - even out of contract phones must pay

2011-11-03T14:51:00.002-05:00

For about two years my son has used my old iPhone on our family plan. He has never had a contract and he doesn't have a data plan. The phone is configured not to use cellular data, it does have text messaging. He has data access only via wifi.

Today AT&T enrolled him in a mandatory data plan because "he has a smartphone". His text messaging stopped working, perhaps because his cellular data was turned off.

This was not completely unexpected, though AT&T's policy has been ambiguous when it came to off-contract customers ...

I called AT&T, put his SIM card into his old phone and they said they'd remove the data plan. However, they haven't done it yet [1], the charge is still showing on our family bill. Instead of enrolling him in the lowest cost data plan, he was auto-enrolled in the highest cost plan - $26/month.

So not only are iPhones carrier-locked in the US, they also incur an unwanted data plan even when they cannot use any cellular data, even when the user has no subsidized phone, and even when the user has no contract.

I am having a very bad week with evil corporations. First Google, now AT&T. If I wasn't already an OWS fan I'd sign up.

I'm researching what will happen if I get an AT&T GoPhone package and swap the SIM card into the iPhone. If that works I'll take both of our kids off the family plan. With iOS 5 on my iPhone 4 we can also drop our family texting plan and simply pay per text. In the meantime I'll review the policies of Sprint, Verizon and anyone else.

AT&T has complicated my life, but perhaps we'll save some money.

For what it's worth, I have filed a complaint with Minnesota's Attorney General. Even with the help of CU I couldn't find a physical address to use for AT&T, though other companies are listed. Evidently they hide well. eHow has it: AT&T Mobility, 5565 Glenridge Connector, Atlanta, GA 30342. (I wouldn't be surprised if they've changed their address to avoid the law.)

[1] On a 2nd call I was told it would be reversed.

See also:

Update 11/4/11: I've been ruminating on what AT&T is trying to do. I think they have a rational goal, which they are pursuing in the blundering and inept manner of almost all publicly traded corporations.

They are preparing for the end of their text messaging revenue stream.

They figure they can hold onto voice for a while; longer than most of us think. They do, however, expect Apple, Google, Facebook and others to steal text messaging. So in the short term they're getting as much money as they can out of text messaging, while ensuring every single customer has a data plan. They can't get away with mandating a data plan for a dumb phone customer, but they would do that if they could manage the outrage.

Eventually they'll give up on text messaging entirely, and make do with data plan revenue. That transition may be painful, so they'll try anything they can imagine to increase data plan usage.

Update 11/23/11: Our Attorney General sent a letter to AT&T, which prompted a call to my home from a member of their "executive response team". Nice to know they have some sensitivity to these kinds of actions. I'll schedule a discussion with them.

The nine heroes

2011-11-03T00:31:00.002-05:00

This is purest idiocy ...

Why affirm ‘In God we trust’? - - The Washington Post
Yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives spent a good bit of time debating a resolution reaffirming “In God We Trust” as the official national motto. (Are you surprised that the vote was 396-9 in favor of the motto?)...

So who were the 9 heroes?

They are:

Nay NY-5 Ackerman, Gary [D]
Nay MI-3 Amash, Justin [R]
Nay CA-32 Chu, Judy [D]
Nay MO-5 Cleaver, Emanuel [D]
Nay CA-15 Honda, Michael [D]
Nay GA-4 Johnson, Henry [D]
Nay NY-8 Nadler, Jerrold [D]
Nay VA-3 Scott, Robert [D]
Nay CA-13 Stark, Fortney [D]

In addition 2 other representatives are, if not heroes, at least not cowards ...

Present MN-5 Ellison, Keith [D]
Present NC-12 Watt, Melvin [D]

Ellison is local - he's the only Muslim representative in the House. Come to think of it, given his religion, just abstaining is heroic.

The biggest surprise is Justin Amash, the Republican. I really didn't think there were any left of his caliber.

Sadly, my own representative, Betty McCollum, caved.

Refugees from the wreck of Google Reader ...

2011-11-03T00:20:00.001-05:00

Forbes ...

The Google Reader Redesign is an Ugly, Lonely User Experience - Ed Kain - Forbes
... On the overall changes as well as the unhelpful response from Google to its user base I give the new Google Reader a big, fat “E” for Evil. I guess the company’s slogan really was just a slogan. What fools we were to think it might have been anything more than that...

Kain is write about "sharebros". I never heard of it, and I was a mad sharer.

The Atlantic Wire

The Sharebros Are Building a Google Reader Replacement - Technology - The Atlantic Wire

Good article about Hivemined, despite the "sharebros".

Google 1.0 is dead. When did it start dying?

2011-11-02T22:23:00.001-05:00

Google 1.0 ended October 31, 2011. It wasn't just the vast destruction of cloud data, though this was an order of magnitude greater, and far more sudden, then Google's past kills.

It was the destruction of data and the incompetent design. Google is not just being evil, they're being stupid evil.

We're in the Google 2.0 era. Maybe they'll recover someday, but grim times are ahead.

Marco Siegler said it well ...

→ Faith No More:
... I specifically remember being excited about the launch of Google Calendar in 2006 because Google was a company cranking out hit after hit after hit. Great products. But recently, what have they done? ...
... That’s maybe my biggest problem with Google. They release something, and I no longer have any faith that it’s going to be any good. It’s hard to get excited about a company like that. It’s the same reason why it’s hard to get excited when Microsoft and Yahoo release new things. The track record just isn’t there any more. The faith is gone.

Google was great in 2006. I remember them doing exciting things in 2008. So when did Google start dying?

The Apple-Google war began in July 2009, two years after the launch of Google Android. I think Google began dying when they went to war with Apple.

How to replace Google Reader

2011-11-02T13:19:00.005-05:00

Google Reader Social is dead. Thanks to its creators for showing what could be done, and thanks go Google for leaving room in the market to do this right.

Fortunately, it's not hard to do it right. At least, it's not hard for Reeder or NetNewsWire to do it right.

Even better, there's money in this market. We Google Reader infovores are ... different. Ok, not quite human. Whatever. We'll pay to reestablish what was lost.

The solution has the following components:

a. The shared item store: Posterous, Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr (any blog-like thing will do)
b. The shared item data: Title and any one or none of: annotation, excerpt, url (all editable).
c. The tweet: Title, url (short), annotation.
d. Optional: A G+ pointer to the persistent shared item.
e. Optional: A Facebook pointer to the persistent shared item.
f. The platform: Reeder, NetNewsWire or a non-Google web based feed reader.
g. Bookmarklet to invoke the platform

This is how it works:

Using NetNewsWire or Reeder.app (iOS) or Reeder.app (Mac) I see an item I want to share.
I click a button or swipe, etc.
I get a Google Reader style data entry area - title, url, excerpt, annotation. (Note I can simply share a note).
On submission Write to the persistent store and create the Tweet.
Note the minimal action set is two clicks. One to show the data entry area, one to submit it. Optionally provide a secondary 1 click action that shares title, url, annotation.

That's it. That's all we need. The rest is details. This implementation meets my replacement criteria. If I use Wordpress on Dreamhost as my persistent store, for example, I have the data and I'm paying for the service and for the platform. That's what I want.

No rights reserved for any of this. It's all public. Anyone can use it. Do whatever you want.

The end of Google Reader shares and the rebirth Gordon's twitter feed

2011-10-31T23:06:00.001-05:00

(cross posted to Gordon's Notes and Gordon's Tech)

Google Reader shares are gone.

I'm not going to switch to sharing via G+.

I will, however, be sharing via Twitter: John Gordon (jgordonshare) on Twitter.

That Twitter stream used to consist of feed-generated tweets from GR shares. Now it's the closest thing I have to an archive of those shares.

Now it will be the primary place I share -- with the help of the Twitter share bookmarklet.

Lessons from Dapocalypse Reader

2011-10-31T22:46:00.001-05:00

I'm processing Google's day of infamy. I've written my Dear Google letter. So what lessons do I take away from this?

Here are a few ...

If you're not paying for it, you're the product.
If you can't store Cloud data locally, you're just renting.
It's time for me to learn Twitter. I've started; there will be more on that in future posts.
I'm done with G+. Why should I trust Google to save my G+ content? That would be like going for date with a serial killer.
I need to move my blogs to a service I'm paying for. (That won't be easy.)
My components of a knowledge share solution post is simpler now.

I'm sure I'll come up with a few more.

Dapocalypse now: Google's day of infamy

2011-10-31T22:03:00.001-05:00

I shared thousands of articles through Google Reader.

They were a part of my extended memory. I often searched that repository.

This evening they are gone.

I had expected bad news, but I didn't expect the entire shared story repository to vanish.

Yes, there's a JSON export. I will do it of course, but Google is not providing any tools to navigate or transform that data set. The export of data in a non-useable format is no export at all.

Dapocalypse now. Google, I want a divorce.

Update: The JSON export links aren't working for me.

This is your life: Kiyoshi Tanimoto

2011-10-30T14:18:00.001-05:00

Kiyoshi Tanimoto was a Christian minister who survived the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. My son was asked to write about his life.

In the course of research we came across a 1950s television program called "This is your life: Kiyoshi Tanimoto". The program included Reverend Tanimoto meeting the man who piloted the Enola Gay.

It starts with a realtime advertisement for cleaning products and cosmetics, though, mercifully, the sponsor omitted some later commercials. They did manage a nail commercial after the conclusion of the most intense part of the program. "Not a chip anywhere ... Hazel Bishop long lasting nail polish ...".

The word surreal was created to describe this program. 1950s America was both yesterday and a very long time ago.

How Minneapolis went from bicycle bust to bicycle boom in 30 years

2011-10-29T21:22:00.001-05:00

Great review of how Minneapolis became a bicycle town following the Dutch model of bike/car separation, with very encouraging news from St Paul ...

Behind the Bicycle Boom - JAY WALLJASPER
People across the country were surprised last year when Bicycling magazine named Minneapolis America’s “#1 Bike City” over Portland, Oregon, which had claimed the honor for many years....
... This year the city is adding 57 new miles of bikeways to the 127 miles already built. An additional 183 miles are planned over the next twenty years. By 2020, almost every city resident will live within a mile of an off-street bikeway and within a half-mile of a bike lane, vows city transportation planner Donald Pfaum...
... it boasts arguably the nation’s finest network of off-street bicycle trails. It was chosen as one of four pilot projects (along with Marin County, California; Columbia, Missouri; and Sheboygan County, Wisconsin) for the federal Nonmotorized Transportation Pilot Program, which aims to shift a share of commuters out of cars and onto bikes or foot...
... Minneapolis features two “ bike freeways,” that are the envy of bicyclists around the country. The Cedar Lake Trail, and the Midtown Greenway both connect to numerous other trails, creating an off-road network that reaches deep into St. Paul and surrounding suburbs. Intersections are infrequent along these routes, which boosts riders’ speed along with their sense of safety and comfort. In a good sign for the future of biking in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis engineers recently reversed a stop sign to give bikes priority over cars where the Midtown Greenway meets 5th Avenue South...
... While only a quarter of riders are women nationally, the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey reports 37 percent in Minneapolis...
... Since the 1970s Dutch planners have separated bicyclists from motor vehicles on most arterial streets, with impressive results. The rate of biking has doubled throughout the country, now accounting for 27 percent of all trips. Women make up 55 percent of two-wheel traffic and citizens over 55 ride in numbers slightly higher than the national average. Nearly every Dutch schoolyard is filled with kids’ bikes parked at racks and lampposts.
The Dutch also that as the number of riders rises, their safety increases. Statistics in Minneapolis show the same results. Shaun Murphy, Non-Motorized Transportation Program Coordinator in the Public Works Department, notes that your chances of being in a car/bike crash in the city are 75 percent less than in 1993...
... Steve Elkins, Transportation Chair of the Metropolitan Council, highlighted his efforts as city council member in suburban Bloomington to push the idea of Complete Streets--meaning that roadways should serve walkers and bikers as well as cars...
..City workers clear snow from the off-road bikeways just the same as streets, sometimes doing them first. Studded snow tires and breakthroughs in cold-weather clothing makes year-round biking easier than it looks, Clark said...
.. Local bicyclists would have howled at the idea of Minneapolis being named America’s best city 30 years ago. It was a frustrating and dangerous place to bike, crisscrossed by freeways and arterial streets that felt like freeways. Drivers were openly hostile to bike riders, some of them going the extra step to scare the daylights out of us as they roared past. Bike lanes were practically non-existent at that time....

I wager Portland cyclists are happy we took the crown. I suspect their officials were getting complacent. Maybe they'll win it back, but that will only motivate Minneapolis. It's the kind of battle nobody loses.

Really, Portland's not a natural bike town either. It's bloody icy and hilly in January. So the success of Minneapolis and Portland shows the power of the Dutch model of bicycling, amply championed by David Hembrow and Mark Wagenbuur.

Alas, though the distinction seems academic beyond Minnesota, I can't claim to live in the promised land of Minneapolis. I'm a St Paul resident, the older of the Twin Cities. We're not quite as advanced. So it was good to recognize how much Minneapolis has changed in 20 years. With the help of the Saint Paul Bicycle Coalition, and the example of the younger Twin, we might get there yet.

Why does Apple suck at calendars?

2011-10-29T18:06:00.001-05:00

Apple can produce decent software. There are, for example, some nice improvements in Lion. Lots of bad stuff too of course, but eventually we'll see 10.7.4 as a good OS. iWork is buggy and into heavy duty data bondage, but it shows some thought. iOS is elegant.

Calendars though - they are really bad at Calendars.

There was a brief time when Apple did Calendars well. Ok, not Apple, but Claris - which has been in and and out of Apple over the years. Claris Organizer was pretty good. It was, I believe, during the Apple 2.0 era, when Jobs was gone.

During Apple 1.0 and Apple 3.0 though, when Jobs was around, every calendar app Apple did was unspeakably bad. iCloud sounds no better than MobileMe calendar -- and they were just bad. iCal for OS X is beyond miserable. iOS Calendar? Try setting a two week alarm so you get a birthday gift in the mail. Right. You can't.

I haven't read Jobs bio yet, but I've read the excerpts. My guess is the man hated, from the very depth of his soul, boundaries. Being told what he had to do when. I suspect the only way he ever made an appointment was because he was rich and powerful enough to have people whose entire mission in life was to manage his time.

I think that's why Apple sucks at Calendars.

Apple 3.0 was a reflection of Jobs. His virtues, and his defects.

Apple 4.0 is a different show.

Maybe they'll do better at Calendars.

I killed RSS

2011-10-29T17:42:00.003-05:00

Ok. Ok!

I'll talk.

It's true. I killed her. Oh god, I swear ... it was an accident.

I didn't mean to do it. None of us did.

Of course I wasn't alone! You think I could have killed her all by myself? She was huge. Powerful! Millions of users. We all loved her. We loved her to death.

How? How did we do it?

It's obvious buddy. Staring you in the face. Just look. Look!

Ok, do I need to spell it out? I mean, how did you read this?

Yeah, I thought so. Google Reader user eh? Yeah, the hard stuff. Jacking the info stream right to the cortex. RSS junkie you are.

You killed her too.

I mean, did you pay for this? No, you didn't. There's no way to pay. Free beer.

Did you read the ads?

Yeah, trick question. There are no ads. At most you added a cookie. Worth a nano-dollar to someone.

You got the full feed ad free. You spent your time here instead of making someone money. You used Google Reader to steal money from Google.

Google doesn't like that. That's why G+ doesn't have an RSS feed.

Facebook doesn't like that. They turned personal page RSS feeds off a year or so ago.

Twitter ... Yeah, you get it. I see it in your face.

RSS was too good for this world.

That's why she had to die.

We loved her to death.

Clayton "innovators dilemma" Christensen: Apple will fail

2011-10-26T21:12:00.001-05:00

Clayton Christensen, famed guru of innovation, predicting Apple's inevitable failure - in 2007. Emphases mine ...

Clayton Christensen's Innovation Brain
... Who or what do you think will disrupt Google (GOOG) or Apple (AAPL)? It's hard for me to see what will disrupt Google. I think they've got a pretty good run ahead of them. Chapters five and six of The Innovator's Solution describe how at the beginning phases of the industry, in order to play that game successfully you really need to have a proprietary, optimized, end-to-end architecture to your product.
Apple sure has that. That's why they've been successful. But just watch the [competitors'] advertisements that you hear for the ability to download music onto your mobile phone. Music on the mobile phone has to be downloaded in an open architecture way from Yahoo! Music or someplace else [other than iTunes]. Which means it's clunkier, not as good. Mobile phones don't have as much storage capacity, nor are their interfaces as intuitive [as iPods]. But for some folks, they're good enough, and the trajectories [of people using their phone as a medium for listening to music] just keep getting better and better.
So music on the mobile phone is going to disrupt the iPod? But Apple's just about to launch the iPhone. The iPhone is a sustaining technology relative to Nokia. In other words, Apple is leaping ahead on the sustaining curve [by building a better phone]. But the prediction of the theory would be that Apple won't succeed with the iPhone. They've launched an innovation that the existing players in the industry are heavily motivated to beat: It's not [truly] disruptive. History speaks pretty loudly on that, that the probability of success is going to be limited."

History is now hiding in a closet, afraid to show its face.

Years later, Christensen said - "There's just something different about those guys. They're freaks."

Exactly. Apple has been a freak. The corporation that crossed the speed and inventiveness of a private firm with the capitol and reach of a publicly traded corporation.

Now we're in the Apple 4.0 era. Without Jobs, perhaps Christensen will be right, and Apple will become a normal dismal failure. Or maybe Apple's corporate structure, and its training programs, will be Jobs last and greatest innovation. Apple 4.0 won't be Jobs Apple, but if it manages to be merely abnormal it may be the cure for the ailing American corporation.

Credit to the base: The Mormon, the Minority and the Maroon

2011-10-26T08:31:00.000-05:00

The GOP is morally and intellectually bankrupt -- and they're likely to get another chance to finish off America.

This is, of course, the fault of the GOP voter. They deserve blame for that. History will not be kind to them.

History should give them some credit though, maybe even let them out of purgatory a bit early.

I mean, look at the leaders.

A black man is leading in the (vote free) polling. This isn't the same getting real votes but it's something. I wouldn't have predicted older white male GOP voters would give the man an audience. Sure he's balm for their guilt -- but the mere fact that they feel guilt is impressive.

Meanwhile, the man pundits favor to win isn't a Christian [1]. Goldberg said it well - Romney is culturally Christian, theologically not. Yes, GOP voters are having trouble with this, and with his total lack of credibility, but even so Romney is always close to the lead. I didn't think GOP voters would tolerate a heretical President.

Then there's the maroon. Perry is what I expected, a dimmer version of George Bush. I think he'll be the nominee; in the end Romney won't be theologically acceptable.

I might be wrong though. The GOP base is surprising me. They have abysmal judgment, but in a strange way their bad choices are a good sign.

[1] To me Mormonism seems as good (or bad) as most religions. I think people should be more worried that Romney is a fan of Battlefield Earth.

Facebook makes no sense any more

2011-10-25T22:15:00.001-05:00

Facebook is getting seriously weird.

Ok, I'm not a FB expert. On the other hand I've created and managed four different Pages and I'm a regular reader. It's true I don't use FB apps, but I'm not a total FB newbie.

Even so, I don't get it.

I'm genuinely interested in tracking the activities of various orgs that use Facebook Pages -- but with the newest UI tweak they're not showing up. They appear in a scrolling layout on the right side that's difficult to navigate, and the main page is limited to a very few recent posts. Facebook is beginning to remind me of Netflix, another company that thought it knew what I wanted. (I feel evil joy every time Netflix's share price drops another 30%.)

The good news is that Pages have RSS feeds. So I could simply start following them with Google Reader, and "unlike" the Pages so FB just shows my friend's activity.

Except that Google Reader isn't in the best of shape either...

Update: Well, that was quick. My usual FB page behavior is back; I can scroll to past pages. I wonder if I was seeing a new UI experiment or a service outage. In any event I have moved 14 Pages I followed into Google Reader and I've "Unliked" them. Their output is a much better fit to GR than to FB, and now I can share and manage what I learn outside of the FP straightjacket. One page had an invalid RSS feed, no idea why.

Inflation isn't what it used to be (cosmologic version)

2011-10-24T13:28:00.001-05:00

I barely got my head around the inflationary universe, and it's already passe.

Sean Carroll starts us off with his debut article in Discover -- Welcome to the Multiverse. That's just a warmup though, his blog digs a lot deeper. ...

The Eternally Existing, Self-Reproducing, Frequently Puzzling Inflationary Universe | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine
... it is crucial to note that in conventional non-inflationary cosmology, our current observable universe was about a centimeter across at the Planck time. That’s a huge size by particle physics standards. In inflation, by contrast, the whole universe could have fit into a Planck volume, 10-33 centimeters across, much tinier indeed...
... “essentially all” — models of inflation lead to the prediction that inflation never completely ends. ... inflation will end in some places, but in other places it keeps going. Where it keeps going, space expands at a fantastic rate. In some parts of that region, inflation eventually ends, but in others it keeps going. And that process continues forever, with some part of the universe perpetually undergoing inflation. That’s how the multiverse gets off the ground — we’re left with a chaotic jumble consisting of numerous “pocket universes” separated by regions of inflating spacetime...
... thinking about black hole entropy has led physicists to propose something called “horizon complementarity” — the idea that one observer can’t sensibly talk about things that are happening outside their horizon. When applied to cosmology, this means we should think locally: talk about one or another pocket universe, but not all of them at the same time. In a very real sense, the implication of complementarity is that things outside our horizon aren’t actually real — all that exists, from our point of view, are degrees of freedom inside the horizon, and on the horizon itself....

Sean ends by sending us back to read a 2007 article than runs through stories of pre-inflationary creation ... How Did the Universe Start? (April 2007)

That's a lot to digest, but the very next day Sean features a rant by Tom Banks, a fierce physicist who must put coffee in his Ritalin ...

Guest Post: Tom Banks Contra Eternal Inflation | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine
A lot of research in high energy theory has been devoted to the topic of eternal inflation. More and more, over the last few years, I’ve come to regard this as an enormous waste of intellectual resources and I’ve chosen Cosmic Variance as a very public way to make my objections to this theoretical mistake clear...
... We also discussed a solution to Einstein’s equations which was a black hole with de Sitter interior embedded in this homogeneous isotropic cosmology. In the paper referred to above, we have found an exact quantum model, satisfying all the consistency conditions of HST, which corresponds to that solution. There is a one parameter family of models corresponding to the choice of dS c.c. We can also find approximate solutions of the consistency conditions corresponding to two or more such black holes, separated by a large distance...
... So we can construct models in which there are many values of the c.c. depending on which black hole interior one resides in. Each mini dS universe will be stable, unless it collides with another...

I didn't get much out of Tom Banks essay -- it's aimed at someone who knows something. I'm left with a vague sense that we're on the wrong side of a black hole and we know it as our universe. Of course since we have black holes in our universe, it's presumably holes all the way down. Maybe we're computational ghosts replaying whatever fell in from the other side.

Fortunately I've read Greg Egan's Permutation City so this feels pretty comfortable.

Carroll thinks we'll get this figured out sometime in the next 30 years or so. I hope I live to see it.

Setting aside the "simulation" thesis for the moment, and inspired by Egan but unconstrained by knowledge or data, I'll make a guess as to how it will all turn out. For the fun of it, because, after all, this is my blog.

I think the infinities will go away and that everything everywhere will all sum to zero.

I think when this theory is explained to someone like me, physicists will use the analogy of a granite cube 3 meters on a side. They'll say that in this cube is every shape and form there could ever be, all atop one another, waiting to be revealed by the sculptor.

Or they'll show how two sounds can produce silence, and tell us that in silence is every sound, every word, every signal and thought that could ever be. All at once.

Renewing a US Passport: 2011 edition

2011-10-23T12:55:00.001-05:00

With 3 adopted kids including two born overseas and different parental last names [1], we suffer when it's time to renew our passports. For reference, here's the procedure we follow as of Nov 2011. Average adults might try renewal by mail, but I don't trust that process.

Note government web sites are usually outsourced to contractors. Every time a contract changes all the links break. You'll usually need to search on key words to find current links.

References

Recommendations and notes

Use a regional passport center or other dedicated Passport service. Don't use anywhere else for photographs, don't use the Post Office to renew unless you have to. This is not well documented. If you go to the State Department site you'll find a short list of regional centers. However, we use a local Passport Center that's not on the list: Roseville, MN - Passport Services. We know of that center because I saw it when renewing a driver's license. It is walk in only, there doesn't seem to be a way to reserve an appointment. We know they do photos because we saw them do it. Yes, this is crazy.
Always pay the expedited service fee, you need it to use the regional passport center anyway. Yes, it's expensive.
When you have current passport you can use it as proof of citizenship and identity. So never let your passport lapse.
If renewing a child and parent's passport, do them both in person at the same time and place or else you'll run into catch 22 problems.
When you go to renew bring checkbook, VISA and Cash. You never know what you'll need.
Print out the renewal forms and complete them beforehand. If you read the inept State department web site carefully you'll realize that it's not clear if you need DS-11 or DS-82 for an adult renewal. Print them out and complete both in black ink. Minors need DS-11.
When renewing an adopted minor's passport bring everything you can think of, not limited to:
- Proof of citizenship: Mercifully, an undamaged US passport will qualify, probably even a not-current passport.
- Driver's licenses: Just in case
- Proof of marriage :(esp. if Parents last names differ [1])
- Adoption documents (evidence of relationship)
- Birth certificates (evidence of relationship)
- Adoption related citizenship documents (in theory only need for initial passport)
- Bring originals and bring photocopies of everything following the strict photocopy rules
When applying in person you must be patient, reasonably but not excessively friendly, and compliant.
Bring books for the kids to read, you can't use electronic devices at passport sites.
Show up at an off-time of day, but not a time when everyone is on break.
Kids will usually have to miss school to get a passport renewed.
Even with expedited service, assume a two month turnaround. During that time you won't have a passport.

[1] America really, really, really wants women to adopt the last name of their husband. This is not changing.

See also:

Does anyone seriously test Apple's iWork products?

2011-10-23T10:27:00.001-05:00

I've been using Apple's Pages and Keynote for a few modest projects.

They're functional span is very good and the price is excellent.

Quality though, that's a problem. Once you move outside of the basic functionality there are big unfixed bugs and half built solutions.

I'm somewhat used to this from Apple. Their software quality is only as good as it has to be -- and their customers are notoriously compliant. (Though years of poor quality Aperture releases probably cost Apple the professional photography market.)

I'm used to Apple's poor quality software, but I don't like it.

We're into the Apple 4.0 era now. There are reasons to expect Apple's elegance and share price to decline. i'm good with that. I'd trade 20% of Apple's elegance for better quality products.

Straight and Crooked Thinking - Wikipedia's remarkable catalog of rhetorical devices and cognitive errors

2011-10-22T22:43:00.001-05:00

I reader recently asked me to resolve a bad link in a post I wrote 7 years ago about the book "Straight and Crooked Thinking'.. I had no memory of the original, but my personal Google Custom Search found it in seconds.

I found the original article in what I suspect is a modern splog. I didn't want to give that any link love, but I will grant that the splog is the only remnant of the original work.

Instead I found a terrific synopsis of rhetorical devices in a Wikipedia reference: Straight and Crooked Thinking. From that article there are links to memory and cognitive biases. It's altogether a true Wikipedia tour de force.

Beyond that, the 1953 edition of the book is available as a well done PDF. I've added it to iBook for later reading.

I love the web.

An American toaster

2011-10-22T11:41:00.001-05:00

Five years ago, when China's manufacturing quality was at its worst, I used the crummy toaster crisis as a missing-middle example. It was easy then to find cheap goods that were crummy, and with difficulty one might find luxury or industrial goods that might be reliable, but the market for quality goods at a reasonable price had evaporated.

A cheap toaster might cost $25, but a $75 toaster wasn't any better.

Since then, a few things have changed. With the Lesser depression Americans started to pay attention to how long things lasted. China's own internal markets have, I suspect, become more demanding. I think the quality of manufactured goods is better than it used to be.

About two years ago a small repair business started selling a Wide-Slot Automatic Pop up Toaster Made in the U.S.A. for about $350. Now it's down to $265 for an "introductory price". Clearly, this is a luxury good purchase.

Still, the price is coming down. Perhaps a large scale manufacturer will pick it up, particularly as China's currency (mercifully) appreciates against the US dollar. Perhaps one day a $150 US made toaster will sell as a luxury good in China, and a quality good in the US.

In fifty years, what will our sins be?

2011-10-22T09:42:00.001-05:00

In my early years white male heterosexual superiority was pretty much hardwired into my culture. I grew up in Quebec, so in my earliest pre-engagement years add the local theocracy of the Catholic church.

Mental illness, including schizophrenia, was a shameful sin. Hitting children was normal and even encouraged. There were few laws protecting domestic animals. There were almost no environmental protections. Children and adults with cognitive disorders were scorned and neglected. Physical disabilities were shameful; there were few accommodations for disability.

Our life then had a lot in common with China today.

Not all of these cultural attitudes are fully condemned, but that time is coming.

So what are the candidates for condemnation in 50 years? Gus Mueller, commenting on a WaPo article, suggests massive meat consumption and cannabis prohibition.

I am sure Gus is wrong about cannabis prohibition. Even now we don't condemn the ideal of alcohol prohibition; many aboriginal communities around the world still enforce alcohol restrictions and we don't condemn them. We consider American Prohibition quixotic, but not evil.

My list is not far from the WaPo article. Here's my set:

Our definition and punishment of crime, particularly in the context of diminished capacity.
Our tolerance of poverty, both local and global.
Our wastefulness.
Our tolerance of political corruption.
Our failure to create a carbon tax.
The use of semi-sentient animals as meat. (WaPo just mentions industrial food production. I think the condemnation will be deeper.)
Our failure to confront the responsibilities and risks associated with the creation of artificial sentience. (Depending on how things turn out, this might be celebrated by our heirs.)

The WaPo article mentions our isolation of the elderly. I don't think so; I think that will be seen more as a tragedy than a sin. This is really about the modern mismatch between physical and cognitive lifespan.

The article is accompanied by a poll with this ranking as of 5800 votes:

Environment
Food production
Prison system
Isolation of the elderly.

Google Reader: This is going to hurt

2011-10-21T18:43:00.001-05:00

Let's get the good news out of the way.

Google has stepped back from their Buzz/G+ nymwar policy. Google will support pseudonyms. So they listened after all.

More good news. As promised, Google Reader lives.

That's enough of the good news. Don't want to overdose.

The bad news is that Google will be ripping out a lot of GR in favor of G+, even though G+ lacks a mechanism for subscribing to aspects of a person's stream. Much of the functionality I love, such as the feed for GR shares, the web page created from GR shares and notes, the ability to follow my trusted curators shares -- it's all at risk. In my case, tens of thousands of annotations, a vast amount of Cloud data, is at risk. Reeder.app, by far my most heavily used iPhone app, is at risk.

The worst news is that Google is giving us 1 week's warning. It's almost as though they want to get this over with before they get a nymwar level of feedback.

Happily, we bereaved GR users are not alone. There are 357 comments on Alan Green's G+ announcement, and the last few hundred are a tad ... unhappy. Please feel free to add your comments one way or another.

My primary comment is that Google needs to stop and think - carefully. Sure, there aren't many GR power users. What we lack in numbers, however, we more than make up in geekery. We are uber-geeks and/or journalists, and we have a long memory. Apple can blow away data, but we don't mind. We never trusted them with our data. Google though, Google's not Apple. We expect different failures from Google.

There's a tsunami of hurt building in the obscure little GR community. We may be small Google, but we're rabid little buggers. E.D. Kain, Sarah Perez, Skeptic Geek, Jesse Stay, Incidental Economist, Martin Steiger, Brett Keller, me... We're coming out of the woodwork.

There is a right way to fix GR. That would be to clean up and fill out the current feature set, and replace Reader's dead Buzz functionality with similar G+ functionality. Offer us the option to share via G+ in addition to GR -- assuming G+ gets its interest streams working.

Google's making the same kind of mistake they made with the nymwars. That one they're fixing. Maybe they'll fix this one too.

So we're gonna yell. One week isn't much, but it may be enough time to get Alan Steel and his colleagues to put the brakes on. Stop, then think.

Update: My companion G+ stream post (restricted).

Update 10/21/11: There's a petition expressing user concerns about Google's plan.

Choices

2011-10-21T09:52:00.001-05:00

The Atlantic has a sure fire winner online. Kate Bolick's All the Single Ladies follows the formula - single woman in New York, romantic life, no true love, aging now, allegedly happy single. Every magazine can do it once a year, usually in the fall.

I skimmed this one. Can't help it, I get the paper rag though it often annoys. It's my way of saying thank you to Fallows and TNC.

These articles feel sad to me; the authors protest too much. I hope it's just part of the formula, the adult equivalent of the dead mothers of Disney orphans. Something to pluck the strings and get the hits. We all need to work.

There's a deeper theme to play with though, one Bolick wisely avoids. The vast majority of humans, from nameless peasant to feudal king, have had short lives of abundant suffering and few choices. Bolick has, by their standards, vast wealth, luxury and choice. Me too and probably you, we're the lucky ones.

It's relative though, our active lives aren't much longer than the life of a Roman citizen. We have many more choices, but roughly the same number of prime years to spend them. We have to leave a lot of roads untraveled.

If our lifespan were matched to our choices, we'd be 35 for a hundred years. It still wouldn't be enough of course.

Me, I say there's a truck waiting on every one of those roads. Step off the curb one day, and meet the truck. So this road really is the best of all ...

The iPhone - Android cost difference is getting large

2011-10-18T11:50:00.004-05:00

A colleague of mine bought a $200 unlocked Android phone made by Acer. He's pairing it with an AT&T paygo plan using an automated purchase option that effectively costs him about $200-300 a year total for some voice and a modest amount of 3G data. Of course in many locations he's using WiFi.

So his total two year smartphone cost is on the order of $700.

A minimal iPhone plan, assuming purchase of the 4G without jailbreaking, would be perhaps $1,800 with all the fees and taxes of non-paygo plans.

That's an $1,100 gap.

The iPhone 4 (much less the 4S) is much better than his Acer phone - and iOS is mostly better than Android [1]. I'll count that as a $300 offset against that $1,100 gap.

That leaves an $800 value gap and an $1,100 gross gap. This is not sustainable. Apple's brand isn't worth a value gap that large.

I'm awfully glad Android is out there. As Android captures more of the geek market, and as the cost of Android data falls, there will be enormous pressure on the cost of iPhone plans.

[1] However Calendar/Contact/document functionality with iOS 5/iCloud is much worse than Android/Google Apps.

Update: Lots of great comments on this post. I hope I get to do a f/u post, but in the meantime ...

Apple missed analyst expectations today... "Net income in the fiscal fourth quarter was $6.62 billion, or $7.05 per share ... Analysts ... were expecting $7.28 per share... iPhone sales were up 21 percent from last year at 17.1 million ... Analysts, however, were hoping for 20 million". There are lots of good reasons for this expectations gap, but it is consistent with price pressure.
I'm only writing about the US. The US Apple Store doesn't yet sell an unlocked iPhone 4S, but it sells an unlocked iPhone 4 for $650. Unfortunately, it's not clear that US users can use it with a PayGo data plan, or even that AT&T officially allows it to be used as a voice-only phone. So using an unlocked iPhone might increase the price gap (unless you can live with T-mobile's limited service area.)
It's easy to forget that in the US the purchase price of a phone is a fraction of the cost. The real basis is the costs of ownership over two years. That's why I don't compare unlocked phone purchase costs but compare phone and service. There are a lot of odd and disturbing rules about how and where iPhones can be used.
I think the Acer phone is probably more like an bizarro 3GS than a 4, so I'm overstating the value gap by comparing it to a 4.

Apple can obviously close the price gap significantly, but that will impact their margins and, eventually, their share price. The good news for families like mine (five iPhone devices) is that our costs are likely to fall. (It's good for us if Apple's stock price falls!)

Limbaugh defends Satan's army

2011-10-17T15:48:00.001-05:00

If Satan had an army, it would be the Lord's Resistance Army.

Rush Limbaugh knows that Obama doesn't like the LRA.

So Limbaugh likes the Lord's Resistance Army. They are, after all, called the LORD's resistance army.

Limbaugh has not merely jumped the shark and nuked the fridge. We need a new name for the domains he's visiting now. Snorted the shark?

What if we are measuring economic output incorrectly?

2011-10-14T09:43:00.000-05:00

Imagine that your compass was 20 degrees out of alignment.

Imagine you didn't know that.

Good luck finding the North pole.

Now imagine life if our economic compass were 20 degrees off.

That's what Ezra Klein and Uwe Reinhardt are suggesting in two coincidentally synchronous articles ...

Ezra is responding to a NEJM report on the economic impact of RomneyCare (Massachusetts' health care reform, the template for ObamaCare):

Health care and jobs: Mixed news from Massachusetts - Ezra Klein - The Washington Post
... On the surface, the NEJM study looks to be great news for Massachusetts: health care jobs in the state have grown much faster than in the rest of the country since its reform law passed...

... But the study actually isn’t good news when you look into what type of health jobs propelled this strong growth. Most of it, the study authors conclude, came from an increase in administrative positions, jobs like billing specialists and office support staff. It’s quite likely that more people with health insurance mean more resources necessary to bill insurance companies and administer the business of health care.
An increase in those kind of jobs is great for employment. But it’s not so great for health care costs. It’s part of the reason that American doctors have administrative costs four times higher than their Canadian counterparts. It likely contributes to growing health care costs that have eaten up nearly a decade worth of increased earnings....

Ezra doesn't make the connection directly, but in the traditional model of measuring GDP this increase in administrative activity is economic growth.

Let that sink in a bit.

Now read Reinhardt (emphases mine)...

Uwe E. Reinhardt: Make-Work and the G.D.P. - NYTimes.com
... Suppose some evening a group of bored and mischievous teenagers slash tires on a number of cars in the parking lot of a shopping center. Distraught car owners call sundry nearby garages to send someone to fix the damage on the spot or tow the cars in for repairs. That work is speedily done, and the cars are ready for use again. The car owners pay the garage owners sizable repair bills.
This fictitious event leads to a number of questions:

1. Did the garages deliver value to the car owners?
2. Was gross domestic product increased or decreased?
3. Were the car owners better off, after paying the repair bill?
My answer to the first question is yes and to the second yes, as well, unless the garages had to give up other jobs with revenue equal to or greater than what they earn coming to the car owners’ rescue. To the third question, my answer is, it depends....
... In many instances, Person (or Enterprise) A delivers great value to Person (or Enterprise) B to extract the latter from a situation into which B should not have been put in the first place. We count in G.D.P. the value added by the extrication but do not detract the value destroyed by being driven into a precarious situation.
... Now think about the almost incomprehensible tax code that Congress has imposed. Think of it as a disaster of human making. To cope with it, individuals and businesses hire legions of lawyers and accountants who have deployed their human capital to understanding this bewildering code. These tax experts work hard and often brilliantly to shield their clients from taxes, usually achieving tax savings that are multiples of what they charge for their services...
... In many ways, our health care system mirrors our tax code — especially in its financing and health insurance facets. These can be made so complex and have been made so complex in the health care system in the United States that many decision makers in health care — patients, physicians, hospitals, employers and so on — need in-house or external consultants to find their way through the maze.
.. An academic health center may have a dozen or two dozen employees devoted to compliance. Such a center may employ several hundred billing clerks to cope with the myriad of private health insurance plans and policies, each with its own coverage, nomenclature and payment rules and requirements for prior authorizations...
... At Yale University I had the privilege of sitting in the classroom of the lateJames Tobin, an early Nobel laureate in economics and one of our profession’s greats. He distinguished between “enjoyable” and “nonenjoyable” G.D.P., with the latter including military spending or other “value added” from coping with either externally inflicted or self-inflicted damage done to our society. I often think of our revered professor when I contemplate the composition of this country’s G.D.P.

More than twenty years ago it occurred to me that different economic activities had different secondary multipliers. My focus was on the multiplier effect of military vs non-military activity. I was so impressed by my cleverness I wrote a letter on it to, I think, Time magazine. Of course it vanished, and subsequently I thought my "insight" was trivially obvious.

Maybe I shouldn't have given up so easily.

What Reindhardt describes is an aspect of the increasingly AI mediated "complexity wars". This is vast economic activity that is both destructive and creative.

We build castles and we tear them down.

We count this as economic activity.

What would our GDP per person growth look like over the past thirty years of innovation stagnation if we stripped out this "nonenjoyable" GDP activity?

Might explain a few things.

This is important.

Nay	NY-5	Ackerman, Gary [D]
Nay	MI-3	Amash, Justin [R]
Nay	CA-32	Chu, Judy [D]
Nay	MO-5	Cleaver, Emanuel [D]
Nay	CA-15	Honda, Michael [D]
Nay	GA-4	Johnson, Henry [D]
Nay	NY-8	Nadler, Jerrold [D]
Nay	VA-3	Scott, Robert [D]
Nay	CA-13	Stark, Fortney [D]