Knowledge workers and executive compensation: a surprise ahead?

This was posted on Marginal Revolution: The best paragraph and a half I read yesterday. (some typos corrected and edits applied)

About that executive compensation you mentioned as an aside. I'm hoping you'll write about an aspect of this that I've not seen discussed.

Knowledge workers are usually said to be relatively unmotivated by money. So the creative types that power innovation are "willing serfs" -- happy to churn away given interesting problems, a decent wage, an occasional bit of praise and a good work environmnet.

I think there's truth to that belief, and probably even data. But what about the innate human response to unfairness? How will the knowledge worker react when they learn that their leaders, who they may or may not respect, are earning 20 times their salary? Will they continue to be happy as "willing serfs", or will our hard-wired response to unfairness kick in? Will they then be prone to sacrifice income or work perks to join a less unfair environment?

In the short term I agree that revealing executive compensation will increase that compensation, but I think the slightly longer term results are less predictable.

Bird flu: much harder to stop than thought

When you cross industrial agriculture with world trade with migratory birds, you get some unexpected results:

Recent Spread of Bird Flu Confounds Experts - New York Times

... In Croatia, for example, Mr. Kaat said, fertilizer made of manure from infected poultry probably spread A(H5N1). The manure is commonly used to fertilize fish ponds, which are frequent stopover points for migrating birds that probably contracted the virus there, he said. The virus persists in water for weeks.

The NYT article is a lesson in why governments should fund basic research. The economic importance of research into the ecology and migration of birds has increased dramatically in the past few months. We can't go back 10 years and fund the research we need today. This is where the market breaks down, and where government needs to play a role.

Propaganda works: the belief that Saddam was behind 9/11

A polling group surveyed US troops. It was widely reported that a large majority feel the US should leave within a year. The parts that weren't widely reported are more interesting (emphases mine):

Zogby International

The troops have drawn different conclusions about fellow citizens back home. Asked why they think some Americans favor rapid U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq, 37% of troops serving there said those Americans are unpatriotic, while 20% believe people back home don’t believe a continued occupation will work. Another 16% said they believe those favoring a quick withdrawal do so because they oppose the use of the military in a pre-emptive war, while 15% said they do not believe those Americans understand the need for the U.S. troops in Iraq.

The wide-ranging poll also shows that 58% of those serving in country say the U.S. mission in Iraq is clear in their minds, while 42% said it is either somewhat or very unclear to them, that they have no understanding of it at all, or are unsure. While 85% said the U.S. mission is mainly “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks,” 77% said they also believe the main or a major reason for the war was “to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq.”

“Ninety-three percent said that removing weapons of mass destruction is not a reason for U.S. troops being there” said Pollster John Zogby, President and CEO of Zogby International. “Instead, that initial rationale went by the wayside and, in the minds of 68% of the troops, the real mission became to remove Saddam Hussein.” Just 24% said that “establishing a democracy that can be a model for the Arab World" was the main or a major reason for the war. Only small percentages see the mission there as securing oil supplies (11%) or to provide long-term bases for US troops in the region (6%).

If there's one thing that all rationalists seem to agree upon, it's that there's no evidence Saddam played any role in the 9/11 attack and there's some evidence that he was no ally of al Qaeda prior to the invasion. So why do the vast majority of the troops believe in Cheney's propaganda? I'd guess it's partly that propaganda works very well, especially in a population selected for trust in their superiors. It's also probably partly 'cognitive dissonanance', the common behavior of reconciling oneself to an irrational situation by adopting a belief that makes the situation rational. Most of us would do the same thing in their place.

It's reasuring, however, that only 1/3 consider opposition to the war to be "unpatriotic". Considering the situation our troops are in, that's a sign of their wisdom.

Why has Iran been so slow to build its nuclear bombs?

The NYT addresses an interesting question - why didn't Iran have a nuclear weapon ten years ago? The answer seems to be a mixture of a theocratic/revolutionary dislike of scientists and intelligentsia, a wavering commitment to the program, and a lot of "bad luck".

The "bad luck" is unlikely to have been entirely chance. The Atlantic recently wrote of Khan's (Pakistan) nuclear dissemination program; it was surprisingly well understood by everyone from intelligence agencies to industry journalists. Many of the key technologies came from European companies, and some of those were thought to have been "turned". It would be surprising if both Iran and North Korea had not experienced a substantial amount of sabotage.

The PDA is dead. Long live the PDA.

What would you call a device that's about 2.5" x 3.5", has a 4" diagonal screen and 2/3 the horizontal resolution of a VGA dispaly, has handwriting recognition, and runs a wide variety of software?

I'd call it a PDA. But that market is dead, really dead. Try looking for a Tungsten E2 stylus sold directly by Amazon (vs. vendor partners). Ok, try some other big vendor. You may find some Tungsten E styli (I think, mirablu dictu, that the E2 uses the E stylus), but you probably won't find any marketed for the E2. That's an ex-parrot of a market.

So what can one make of this?

Next Version of Tablet PC's Said to Be Lighter and Smaller - New York Times
March 3, 2006
By STEVE LOHR

Microsoft and Intel plan to announce next week that several industry partners will make small, light versions of a tablet personal computer, people close to the two companies said yesterday.

The machines, which have been the subject of considerable speculation, will be tailored more for consumer entertainment than the larger tablet machines running Microsoft's Windows that were introduced in 2002. The larger tablets, typically with 12-inch screens, sell for about $1,500 and are used mostly by doctors, lawyers, architects and other professionals in office settings. A tablet PC has a touch-sensitive screen that allows input with a pen.

The new models — a category called ultramobile personal computers — will have smaller screens, seven or eight inches, and sell for $1,000 or less, depending on options.

The machines will have the handwriting recognition software of the standard Windows tablet personal computers, and include wireless technology for browsing the Internet. But the new tablets will also have multimedia capabilities for playing music, movies and games in some models.

Intel will supply the chip technology for the ultramobile PC's, and they will run a version of Windows Tablet PC software....

They will be hefty, at about two pounds, and have a limited battery life of three hours or so between charges, the Microsoft consultant said. A new generation of low-power chips, extending battery life to six hours, will come next year. Later models, he added, will come with screens of four inches or so.

... A Web site set up by Microsoft, www.origamiproject.com, stirred interest with vague assertions that a coming mobile technology "will change your life." Then, bloggers found and posted a video advertisement for Microsoft Origami mobile technology.

Intel has its own Web site, www.umpc.com, suggesting the ultramobile PC's will be able to handle movies, music, games, television and the Internet.

The rumored video iPod is supposed to deliver than 4" diagonal (about 2.5" x 3/5" square with a 16:9 aspect ratio). Sounds a lot like what Microsoft is promising for ... late 2007. It's hard to believe they could be that far behind. To me it sounds like what they're promising is a PDA that runs XP. Wow. I'm so impressed by the radical evolution from the PalmPilot. Except, of course this device will play movies.

As to what's promised this year, I am so utterly unimpressed. The big news is that the much celebrated large slates have failed miserably. A vertical physician/architect market is not going to delight Dell. It's time to declare failure and kill those suckers. Ever try to read with one at the breakfast table? I rest my case. A laptop makes far more sense. So this year, instead, we get something that's still too big for a pocket or purse and has a when-new battery life of 3 hours?! Wow, that's such a dud.

If this story is true Apple is about to make a zillion dollars with a one year headstart on the 4" diagonal platform. I suspect, though, that Microsoft and their partners can't possibly be in such an utterly dismal situation.

Horror in France

A group of at least 19 French men and women collude to abduct a young jewish man and torture him for about 3 weeks. Somehow, before dying, he crawls from the woods where his body was dumped, and the murder is discovered. His murderers prove to be as incompetent as they are evil; many have been caught.

Craig Smith of the NYT tells the story in an understated manner. He fully captures the horror of this crime, not the least the number of neighbors who knew of it and did nothing. I cannot think of a comparable [1] crime in the history of the modern western world; even the brutal murders of gay men in the US are not quite in this league.

France is now in a Hell of its own making.

[1] I mean that in a precise sense. There have been worse crimes perpetrated by states, but they were crimes of states, not individuals. There have been vile mass murders and torturers aplenty, but they have acted alone or with a single accomplice. Maybe the KKK did something like this in their day.

Doonesbury is a guardian of the enlightenment

Doonesbury's latest features a potential new character - Dr. Nathan Null.

Doonesbury: March 5, 2006

" ... I always teach the controversy! Like the evolution controversy, or the global warming controversy ... not to mention the tobacco controversy, the mercury controversy, the pesticides controversy, the coal slurry controversy, the dioxin controversy, the everglades controversy and the acid rain controversy ..."

Dr. Null is presumably inspired by Bush's current advisor, John Marburger

... John Marburger, science advisor to the president, responded that the computer models used to make predictions about climate change and public health were both ambiguous and prone to group-think errors by scientists.

Advising Bush on science must be a bit like advising Genghis Khan on etiquette; it's hilarious to see GWB reinventing himself as some friend of science education. I imagine Marburger was first among those willing to consider the job.

Trudeau provides quite a list of attacks, but he left out lots of bipartisan whackiness, such as the claim that "natural" therapies are magically safer than "artificial" therapies or RFK Jr's autism by immunization campaign. I think that over the past 40 years the right has been a greater enemy of the Enlightenment than the left, but really Reason is an uncomfortable companion for any politician. GWB is simply the worst of an often bad bunch.

Bush: sociopath, dull, .... or demented?

So Bush was given explicit scenarious describing what in fact befell New Orleans, but a few days later he claimed never to have heard anything of the sort ... (emphases mine)

BBC NEWS | Americas | Video shows Bush Katrina warning

... Video showing President George W Bush being warned on the eve of Hurricane Katrina that the storm could breach New Orleans' flood defences has emerged.

The footage, obtained by the Associated Press, also shows Mr Bush being told of the risk to evacuees in the Superdome.

It appears to contradict Mr Bush's statement four days after Katrina hit, when he said: "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."

... Speaking by video link from a room in his Texan holiday ranch on 28 August last year, Mr Bush is shown telling federal disaster officials: "We are fully prepared."

He does not ask any questions as the situation is outlined to him.

... It shows plainly worried officials telling Mr Bush very clearly before the storm hit that it could breach New Orleans' flood barriers.

...the video shows Michael Brown, the top emergency response official who has since resigned, saying the storm would be "a bad one, a big one".

"We're going to need everything that we can possibly muster, not only in this state and in the region, but the nation, to respond to this event," Mr Brown says.

He also gives a strong, clear warning that evacuees in the Superdome in New Orleans could not be given proper assistance.

... Another official, Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center, tells the final briefing that storm models predict minimal flooding inside New Orleans during the hurricane.

... But he adds that the possibility that anticlockwise winds and storm surges could cause the levees at Lake Pontchartrain to be overrun afterwards is "obviously a very, very grave concern".

There are two two obvious possibilities. Bush could be a compulsive liar (sociopath), or he could be terminally dull. I wonder about the latter. He didn't ask any questions, maybe he wasn't paying attention, or maybe he couldn't follow the conversation.

It was noted during the last campaign that Bush used to be a fluent speaker, but now has trouble with syntax and word recall. Could a large part of his behavior over the past few years be explained as an organic brain disorder?

What ciphers will be broken 30 years from now?

About 10 years ago, as a very green and ignorant student, I wrote a paper on security in which I imagined that with sufficiently strong encryption there'd be, in theory, no need to secure an encrypted document. Millions of copies would be merely redundant backups.

I think the encryption standard in use then was 40 bit DES or the equivalent (I may have the names wrong). That would be trivially cracked today.

I thought of that when I read this story on cracking old German ciphers:

BBC News: Online amateurs crack Nazi codes

Three German ciphers unsolved since World War II are finally being cracked, helped by thousands of home computers.

The codes resisted the best efforts of the celebrated Allied cryptographers based at Bletchley Park during the war.

Now one has been solved by running code-breaking software on a "grid" of internet-linked home computers.

The complex ciphers were encoded in 1942 by a new version of the German Enigma machine, and led to regular hits on Allied vessels by German U-boats.

Allied experts initially failed to deal with the German adoption in 1942 of a complex new cipher system, brought in at the same time as a newly upgraded Enigma machine.

The advancement in German encryption techniques led to significant Allied losses in the North Atlantic throughout 1942....

[Krah] ... wrote a code-breaking program and publicised his project on internet newsgroups, attracting the interest of about 45 users, who all allowed their machines to be used for the project.

There are now some 2,500 separate terminals contributing to the project, Mr Krah said.

... in little over a month an apparently random combination of letters had been decoded into a real wartime communication.

... Stefan Krah's computerised codebreaking software uses a combination of "brute force" and algorithmic attempts to get at the truth.

Today's best ciphers will likely meet the same fate as Enignma, sometime in the next 10-30 years. Presumably there are people now collecting as much encrypted network traffic as possible, with the intent of storing it until the codes can be cracked ...

Obsidian Wings on Scientology

Obsidian Wings has a nice set of links to several recent Scientology articles. This has long been an interest of mine. Salon also did a great series last year.

Scientology seems to be moderating, they don't seem to go after journalists with their old savagery. Maybe they're afraid of qualifying for a watch list, but more likely they're following an ancient trail most recently blazed by Mormonism and newer systems migrating from cult to faith.

All worth reading for students of theology and humanity.

Update 3/2/06: Since my initial post I read through the key Rolling Stone article. Superb journalism. LRH's death sounds fairly grim, I suspect his lifelong psychiatric disorder (?schizophrenia) had gotten the better of him. The will that transferred all his assets to the church sounds rather suspicious.

Most sad of all, and reminescent of Jon Krakauer's history of the Mormon Fundamentalism, are the stories of how the church uses family relationships to silence its critics. A cruel and not terribly effective strategy. That cruelty may explain why membership appears to be dwindling.

Now don't panic ...

The Washington Post reports that the Fed's watch list has over 325,000 names:

The National Counterterrorism Center maintains a central repository of 325,000 names of international terrorism suspects or people who allegedly aid them, a number that has more than quadrupled since the fall of 2003, according to counterterrorism officials.

The list kept by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) -- created in 2004 to be the primary U.S. terrorism intelligence agency -- contains a far greater number of international terrorism suspects and associated names in a single government database than has previously been disclosed. Because the same person may appear under different spellings or aliases, the true number of people is estimated to be more than 200,000, according to NCTC officials.

... The TSC consolidates NCTC data on individuals associated with foreign terrorism with the FBI's purely domestic terrorism data to create a unified, unclassified terrorist watch list. The TSC, in turn, provides, for official use only, a version giving each person's name, country, date of birth, photos and other data to the Transportation Security Agency for its no-fly list, the State Department for its visa program, the Department of Homeland Security for border crossings, and the National Crime Information Center for distribution to police.

Ok, so that's a lot of names. If only 10% are US residents that's over 30,000 names of US citizens on the no-fly list alone. I'd wager at least 98% of those are likely "false positives", people who have been 'tried and convicted' without benefit of trial.

I thought there used to be rules about that sort of thing.

But not to worry, there's a home awaiting those folks (link and emphasis mine)...

WorkingForChange-The cost of incompetence (Molly Ivins)

... And now comes a curious new contract for KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary. The contract provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing Immigration and Custom enforcement. It's a contingency contract -- the contingency they have in mind apparently being 'in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the United States.' Canadians drowning from global warming? Mexicans feeling the return of PRI? Ah, but the contract also specifies the detention centers are to 'support the rapid development of new programs.' New programs? Far be it from me to speculate.

The alarmmeisters in the blogosphere, whose imaginations know no bounds, are already positing any number of horrors. (I cannot imagine where they get some of these far-out ideas. From reading the right-wing blogosphere?) What surprises me is that the administration has planned for ... whatever it is it's planning for. How forethoughtful of them to have something in place in case ... a lot of citizens need to be rounded up or something.

Now Molly does make mistakes, but her record is pretty good. I'm sure there's an innocent explanation for these detention ... centers. Of course if you click the link I provided you can find all sorts of explanations...

Update 3/7/06: I didn't use to link to this sort of thing. GWB made me do it.

Katrina: the disappeared

The NYT has surprisingly lyrical writing in a story of the living lost of Katrina:

Storm's Missing: Lives Not Lost but Disconnected - New York Times

.... They include every permutation in the grand mosaic of human relationships, an intricate design of unpaid child support, paranoia, grudges, helplessness and anguish, the lonely cul-de-sacs of estrangement and old age.

The story is very well done.

Not all who are scattered wish to be found, and some don't know how to start looking ...

Where has the money gone? To the very American oligarchy.

DeLong liberates Krugman from the NYT pay-prison (emphases mine):

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal

From Krugman, NYT:

So who are the winners from rising inequality? It's not the top 20 percent, or even the top 10 percent. The big gains have gone to a much smaller, much richer group than that. A new research paper by Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, "Where Did the Productivity Growth Go?," gives the details. Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn't a ticket to big income gains. But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that's not a misprint.

Just to give you a sense of who we're talking about: the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that this year the 99th percentile will correspond to an income of $402,306, and the 99.9th percentile to an income of $1,672,726. The center doesn't give a number for the 99.99th percentile, but it's probably well over $6 million a year....

The idea that we have a rising oligarchy is much more disturbing. It suggests that the growth of inequality may have as much to do with power relations as it does with market forces. Unfortunately, that's the real story. Should we be worried about the increasingly oligarchic nature of American society? Yes, and not just because a rising economic tide has failed to lift most boats. Both history and modern experience tell us that highly unequal societies also tend to be highly corrupt. There's an arrow of causation that runs from diverging income trends to Jack Abramoff and the K Street project....

So when does the revolt occur? Will we see a reinvented Al Gore return at the vanguard of a populist rebellion?

Tonight, on NPR, I heard a naive young woman describing a book she'd written about the financial hurdles faced now by her Gen Xrs. Specifically, she and her husband couldn't really afford to live in New York City, but that thought didn't seem to have occurred to them -- so they ran out of cash. What she's really experiencing, of course, is life when the returns on productivity are increasingly concentrated in an Argentinian-style oligarchy. The fact that she wasn't advocating a populist government tells me things will need to get quite a bit worse before most folks catch on.

Psychoanalysis as alternative medicine: Tommyrot in the NYT OpEd page

I was thinking of Freud the other day. A great thinker, a great writer, and a flawed human being to be sure, but he started out as a scientist. I wonder if some of his very early work as, I think, a neurologist, may still hold up. Most of his time, however, was dedicated to psychoanalysis.

It was of that work that I wondered -- was there anything in there of value? Was it anything but a massive diversion and distraction from a deeper understanding of the human mind? I wondered if any modern scientist had dug through Freud's writings looking for any testable hypotheses that could hold water today. Then I came across this awful OpEd by Adam Phillips in the NYT:

A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Measure - New York Times

PSYCHOTHERAPY is having yet another identity crisis. It has manifested itself in two recent trends in the profession in America: the first involves trying to make therapy into more of a "hard science" by putting a new emphasis on measurable factors; the other is a growing belief among therapists that the standard practice of using talk therapy to discover traumas in a patient's past is not only unnecessary but can be injurious.

.... One of the good things psychotherapy can do, like the arts, is show us the limits of what science can do for our welfare. The scientific method alone is never going to be enough, especially when we are working out how to live and who we can be.

... the attempt to present psychotherapy as a hard science is merely an attempt to make it a convincing competitor in the marketplace. It is a sign, in other words, of a misguided wish to make psychotherapy both respectable and servile to the very consumerism it is supposed to help people deal with.

... its practitioners should not be committed either to making money or to trivializing the past or to finding a science of the soul.

... No amount of training and research, of statistics-gathering and empathy, can offset that unique uncertainty of the encounter.

... Psychotherapists are people whose experience tells them that certain risks are often worth taking, but more than this they cannot rightly say. There are always going to be casualties of therapy.

Psychotherapy makes use of a traditional wisdom ...

Let me get this straight. Recent studies suggest some of the key therapies of psychotherapy are potentially harmful. Rather than investigate this further, Philips makes an appeal to "art", "traditional wisdom" and the fight against "consumerism" (which apparently includes the hard cold light of reason).

Wow. What pretty, pathetic, balderdash. Philips is using arguments that even the alternative medicine cult world has largely abandoned. He's basically arguing against reason and measurement. Those psychoanalysts working hard to figure out how to maximize benefit and minimize harm have my deep sympathies -- having someone like Philips on the NYT Op Ed page is a real slap in the face.

The tragicomic security failures of the financial services industry: Acxiom's story

The security situation in the financial services industry has passed beyond shocking into darkly comical. For about four years the personal data, effectively the digital identities, of millions of Americans were sold for less than a dollar apiece to criminal organizations. The source was Acxiom, a little-known financial services company that provides transactional services for the credit card industry. This very poorly written story also has some interesting details on how extraordinary the financial data mining industry has become: (I've edited it as much as I can to help make it a bit more coherent):

Data Thief Exposes Flimsy Security, Nets 8 Years

Posted on 02/24/2006 @ 16:55:34 in Security.

The former owner of an email marketing company in Boca Raton, Florida [Scott Levine] will be spending eight years on a forced sabbatical for filching one billion data records from Acxiom, one of the world's largest managers of personal, financial, and corporate data.

According to the Cincinnati Post, Acxiom handles "14 of the 15 top credit cards companies, five of the six biggest retail banks and seven of the top 10 car makers. All share the credit card and other information of their customers with Acxiom."Other customers include TransUnion and the City of Chicago. In addition, Acxiom maintains nearly 850 terabytes of storage across five football fields worth of data centers worldwide, including the US Europe, China and Australia. Among other things, they process over a billion US postal records a day.

Acxiom claims it "continually gathers data from thousands of public and private sources," enabling it to offer the "widest and latest selection of data possible" with "the most informative, accurate and recent demographic, socio-economic and lifestyle data available-at the individual or household level."

And all that data's not being collected for posterity. Acxiom offers it to direct marketers, among others, to identify the best prospects. For example, its CPI score, which is updated monthly, tracks an individual's economic life and "quantifies the size of a specific consumer's economic footprint, indicating the historical consumer purchasing and relative amount of marketing activity surrounding that individual."

... Daniel Baas... was the systems administrator for a small shop that did business with Acxiom. He was tasked with downloading his company's files from Acxiom's FTP server.

Gregory Lockhart, the US Attorney in Charge said, "Baas committed a crime when he exceeded his authorized access, looked for and downloaded an encrypted password file, and ran a password cracking program against the file."

... Baas illegally obtained about 300 passwords, including one that acted like a "master key" and allowed him to download files that belonged to other Acxiom customers. The downloaded files contained personal identification information.

Millions of records worth US$1.9 million.

... Baas burned CDs full of Acxiom's data from 10 December 2002 through New Years [year?], Acxiom said it had no idea its security had been breached till the sheriff called nearly eight months later.

During the course of the Baas investigation, technicians stumbled over another illicit data miner... Scott Levine, owner of Snipermail... yet another Acxiom customer with a password.

The feds claimed that Levine cracked Acxiom's password system so he could filch other peoples' data. From January through July 2003, he abused this authority, ultimately downloading a billion records with a purported street value of US$7 million. ..

... Despite all this, you might say Scott Levine is lucky. His original indictment in July 2004 carried 144 counts. But by the time his jury was finished a year later, the US prison system's latest inductee was found guilty of just 120 counts of unauthorized access of a protected computer, two counts of access device fraud, and one count of obstruction of justice.

So there were two separate identified break-ins of which one led to one conviction on two counts. There were no consequences for Acxiom's crummy security -- after all, they were the "injured" party. The inability of the jury to convict more broadly is typical of these crimes; they are too complex for most trials. Given the history it is reasonable to assume there were other unidentified break-ins.

Bruce Schneier has written for years that nothing will happen until the financial services companies are held directly liable for their security.

There's a lot of enthusiasm in many quarters for electronic health care standards and transactions. Often the security of financial industry transactions is upheld as an indicator that privacy and security issues will be managed well. Pardon my skepticism.