Why blogs rule - Krugman on oil speculation

An example of why blogs rule. Krugman, responding to comments, makes a side comment on recent congressional testimony on oil speculation:

Calvo on commodities - Paul Krugman - Op-Ed Columnist - New York Times Blog

...Some correspondents have asked me what I think about the Congressional testimony of Michael Masters, who told a Senate subcommittee that “index speculators” — institutions that buy commodity futures as an investment — are responsible for the price surge.

The short answer is that I think his testimony is just stupid...

Topical, yes. Direct, rather. Informed, definitely. It's like a vastly smarter, faster version of radio commentary, but it's on demand, linkable, searchable and readable.

I love this stuff.

Oh, and oil speculation? I think it's a dumb term. I wish commentators would divide "speculative" pricing into psychological (futures contracts driven largely by uninformed human psychology) and fundamental (futures contracts based on expectations that demand for "light sweet crude" will exceed supply).

In August I will deliver my eagerly awaited judgment on the contribution of fundamental vs. psychological price projection to oil and gas prices.

An astounding series on mental health disorders

I'm visiting family in Montreal, and the Globe and Mail came with the room today.

I've read the G&M before. It's a duller version of the Wall Street Journal, without the journalism. I didn't expect anything.

So I really was astounded by their special series on mental health: Breakdown: Canada's Mental Health Crisis.

The title is misleading, there's nothing particularly Canadian about the stories. The portrayal of schizophrenia (let us honor the Bigelow family) and David Golbloom's review of the mission of the Mental Health Commission of Canada are among the best writings on mental health I've seen anywhere.

The G&M has excellent journalists. I never suspected.

Canada's imperfect health care system gets knocked by people who don't read outcomes research, but it's vastly better than the America's non-system when it comes to delivering services to the underclass*. Canada is also quite good at "commissions"; Canada evolved the endless commission as an alternative to civil war. So the Mental Health commission may have an impact both in Canada and the US:

...People living with mental illness have the right to obtain the services and supports they need. They have the right to be treated with the same dignity and respect as we accord everyone struggling to recover from any form of illness.

The goal of the Mental Health Commission of Canada is to help bring into being an integrated mental health system that places people living with mental illness at its centre.

To this end, the Commission encourages cooperation and collaboration among governments, mental health service providers, employers, the scientific and research communities, as well as Canadians living with mental illness, their families and caregivers...

The world changes in the strangest ways. Decades of slow progress, regression and failure, then suddenly the world flips about. And that's just "gay marriage".

Progress does happen. We may be entering a new cultural model of cognition, cognitive disability, and cognitive variability.

* In defense of America, Canada has nothing like the Americans with Disabilities Act. There are things Canada could learn from the US.

PETCO goes down - pet food seizure

I wonder how much of this re-energized FDA activity comes from a Democratic House and Senate:

PETCO pet food seized after federal warrant issued | L.A. Unleashed | Los Angeles Times

...At the request of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, U.S. Marshals seized all FDA-regulated animal food susceptible to rodent and pest contamination. The products violated the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act because it was alleged in a case filed by the United States Attorney that they were being held under unsanitary conditions...

No more PETCO visits for us, but of course we don't know if the competition is any better.

The Mundaneum

I demand an investigation.

I demand an inquiry.

I want to know why the %$!$ I've never heard of the Mundaneum Project ...

The Mundaneum Museum Honors the First Concept of the World Wide Web

...Using 3 by 5 index cards (then the state of the art in storage technology), they went on to create a vast paper database with more than 12 million individual entries.

Otlet and LaFontaine eventually persuaded the Belgian government to support their project, proposing to build a “city of knowledge” that would bolster the government’s bid to become host of the League of Nations. The government granted them space in a government building, where Otlet expanded the operation. He hired more staff, and established a fee-based research service that allowed anyone in the world to submit a query via mail or telegraph — a kind of analog search engine. Inquiries poured in from all over the world, more than 1,500 a year, on topics as diverse as boomerangs and Bulgarian finance.

As the Mundaneum evolved, it began to choke on the sheer volume of paper. Otlet started sketching ideas for new technologies to manage the information overload. At one point he posited a kind of paper-based computer, rigged with wheels and spokes that would move documents around on the surface of a desk. Eventually, however, Otlet realized the ultimate answer involved scrapping paper altogether.

Since there was no such thing as electronic data storage in the 1920s, Otlet had to invent it. He started writing at length about the possibility of electronic media storage, culminating in a 1934 book, “Monde,” where he laid out his vision of a “mechanical, collective brain” that would house all the world’s information, made readily accessible over a global telecommunications network.

Tragically, just as Otlet’s vision began to crystallize, the Mundaneum fell on hard times. In 1934, the Belgian government lost interest in the project after losing its bid for the League of Nations headquarters. Otlet moved it to a smaller space, and after financial struggles had to close it to the public.

A handful of staff members kept working on the project, but the dream ended when the Nazis marched through Belgium in 1940. The Germans cleared out the original Mundaneum site to make way for an exhibit of Third Reich art, destroying thousands of boxes filled with index cards. Otlet died in 1944, a broken and soon-to-be-forgotten man.

After Otlet’s death, what survived of the original Mundaneum was left to languish in an old anatomy building of the Free University in the Parc Leopold until 1968, when a young graduate student named W. Boyd Rayward picked up the paper trail. Having read some of Otlet’s work, he traveled to the abandoned office in Brussels, where he discovered a mausoleum like room full of books and mounds of paper covered in cobwebs....

How did this all go missing? Twelve million index cards? Everyone just forgot about it?

What else from this era has been forgotten? (For relatively modern variants, see these links).

Mega drive 2008: the newest innovations

We're doing one of our family mega-drives. Thousands of miles with 1 dog, 3 children, 2 adults, one van.

It works. Better than a reasonable person would expect.

Each time we do this there's some technology variation. This year we had two.

First of all, we got the video iPod to output video to our shockingly reliable $200 car video "system". This would have worked years ago if I'd tried harder (or bought a custom video iPod cable), but Apple didn't distribute much kid vid. I would have had to rip my own video. Too much trouble!

Now Apple sells "Ben 10" and similar TV for $2 an episode, a small price for auto peace. We put Tom and Diane's iTune's gifts to good use.

Three year old technology, so this one was about the content.

Our second innovation was 3G Net Access with Emily's Blackberry browser. Between Saint Paul Minnesota and Escanaba Michigan Emily asked Google (I drove) about the location of Liverpool and three other topics:

• Rib Mountain, Wausau, Wisconsin: The mountain/hill rises mysteriously from flat land. It's a final remnant of the 1.9 billion year old Penokean mountains, and the 2nd downhill ski resort in America. When I see it I imagine a colossus of the new earth, a tower far greater than Everest. Now all that remains is this rock, the broken heart of the ancient mountain. Once a century it beats "I was".
  
  
• Chippewa Falls and Seymour Cray: How the heck did Cray, a certified eccentric genius, persuade a team to follow him from Minneapolis to Chippewa Falls? How good was Cray that Control Data built a lab for him on land he owned? (Very good, of course.)
  
  
• The Yellowstone Trail: America's first northern coast-to-coast motoring road, the fruit of a small group of South Dakota entrepreneurs. I can't tell from the web site how much of this trail can be followed today.

We couldn't continue our data tourism into Canada, the long distance data costs are prohibitive. So all of this was from a few chance encounters in a single day's drive.

My iPhone to come will have a GPS. It will learn what I am interested in. Soon, when I travel, it will strike a bell each time I pass near these sorts of things.

Our next car trip will be even more novel.

PS. Another drive related observation. The UK academics that grace Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time program don't know squat about economics. What gives? Is it forbidden knowledge over there?

That which does not kill me is not torture

At last we understand why the Bushies say they don't torture people:

BBC NEWS | Americas | US interrogation debate detailed

... John Fredman, then chief counsel to the CIA's counter-terrorism centre, argued during the meeting that torture 'is basically subject to perception'.

'If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong,' he said...

We've killed several detainees, so even by the Bush standard we do torture.

If they hadn't died though, no torture.

A clear cut standard.

Understanding net neutrality – Imagine Amazon owned the post office

Net neutrality is

Network neutrality - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

…  a principle that is applied to residential broadband networks, and potentially to all networks. A neutral broadband network is one that is free of restrictions on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, on the modes of communication allowed, which does not restrict content, sites or platforms, and where communication is not unreasonably degraded by other communication streams

How can we explain why the Net Neutrality discussion is important?

Imagine that there was no UPS and no Fedex. USPS only. There’s only one shipping service in this world.

Now imagine that Amazon owned the USPS.

Now you understand.

Private farming now, private manufacturing when?

Emily and Christina have joined a farm coop. We get a weekly produce share, and we're invited to visit and put the kids to work (as if).

It's good stuff. No melamine. No salmonella.

So what's next?

Why not private manufacturing?

Can't find a decent toaster? What if we could buy shares in a local manufacturing facility, and get goods built to our specs?

Well, we have been expecting computer controlled on demand manufacturing for a while ...

Gordon's Notes: A quick preview on the next thing to blow your world apart (Nov. 2005)

Do it yourself. Almost. ... Dan's Data provides a quick update on the state of the art in 3 dimensional "printing". As in download the specs, run the illegal hacking software, and print yourself an anonymous encrypted cell phone...

Probably going to happen, even without the nano stuff.

Maybe I'll get a good toaster before I die ...

Two years to crack Khan's hard drive encryption and reveal more bad nuke news

Presumably the NSA was truly responsible for cracking Khan's hard drive. It wasn't easy ...

Nuclear Ring Reportedly Had Advanced Weapon Design - NYTimes.com

...Two former Bush administration officials said they believed Mr. Tinner had provided information to the Central Intelligence Agency while he was still working for Dr. Khan, including some of the information that helped American and British officials intercept shipments of centrifuges on their way to Libya in 2003.

When news of that interception became public and Libya turned its $100 million program over to American and I.A.E.A. officials, President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan forced Dr. Khan to issue a vague confession and then placed him under house arrest. Dr. Khan has since renounced that confession in Pakistani and Western media, saying he made it only to save Pakistan greater embarrassment.

It was not until 2005 that officials of the I.A.E.A., which is based in Vienna, finally cracked the hard drives on the Khan computers recovered around the world. And as they sifted through files and images on the hard drives, investigators found tons of material — orders for equipment, names and places where the Khan network operated, even old love letters. In all, they found several terabytes of data, a huge amount to sift through.

“There was stuff about dealing with Iranians in 2003, about how to avoid intelligence agents,” said one official who had reviewed it. But the most important document was a digitized design for a nuclear bomb, one that investigators quickly recognized as Pakistani. “It was plain where this came from,” one senior official of the I.A.E.A. said. “But the Pakistanis want to argue that the Khan case is closed, and so they have said very little....

I noted related stories in 2004, including the last good Maureen Dowd column and Seymour Hersh's theory that Pakistan would give us bin Laden if we went easy on them for AF Khan.

Of course Pakistan didn't deliver bin Laden and now they're getting ready to release Khan from house arrest. So that deal is off I suppose.

It will all make for a fascinating book, assuming our peculiar luck streak continues.

For today though I'm most interested in how the encrypted data was hacked. I suspect that story won't be out for a long time ...

ISP access control: great for VPN providers

VPN providers like WiTopia VPN protect open Wifi users from packet sniffing attacks.

That's why I pay my yearly fee.

They have other benefits though. They provide a secure channel, so you can bypass access controls like this:

Slashdot | Verizon Cutting Access To Entire Alt.* Usenet Hierarchy

... Verizon has declared it will no longer offer access to the entire alt.* hierarchy of Usenet newsgroups to its customers. This stems from last week's agreement for major ISPs to cut off access to 'newsgroups and Web sites' that make child pornography available. The story notes, 'No law requires Verizon to do this. Instead, the company (and, to varying extents, Time Warner Cable and Sprint) agreed to restrictions on Usenet in response to political strong-arming by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat. Cuomo claimed that his office found child porn on 88 newsgroups — out of roughly 100,000 newsgroups that exist.' In response, Verizon will cut its customers off from a large portion of Usenet, as it will only carry newsgroups in the Big 8....

Eons ago, before spam, there were some important resources in the alt groups. I'm sure some persist, but I haven't come across any in the Google Groups era (newsgroups via Google's connection rather than nntp clients). Google Groups, needless to say, doesn't carry problematic groups.

Even so, this is stupid politics.

Good business for Witopia though.

Why we have constitutions - a reminder

Dyer has 4-6 new articles up. For example ..

Civil Liberties

...a majority of the British public, given the right lead by the gutter press, would probably also support 90-day detention, waterboarding of suspects, 180-day detention, torture of their relatives, 360-day detention, and summary execution of detainees. Provided they were Muslim, of course. But democratic countries have laws and constitutions precisely to fend off this kind of ignorant populism....

By the vote of a single supreme court justice we still have a working constitution in America.

McCain is upset. He doesn't want a constitution.

Remember that.

The new signs: Generation X, Y and B

A colleague's presentation included a Generation X, Y, and B (boomer) profile.

It was good fun, reminded me of the periodic "what's your sign" astrology kicks that cycle through. Silly, but fun.

The closest thing I could find to her presentation were these Gen X, Y and B profiles.

Personally I seem to break down this way:

• Values: X
  
• Attributes: Y
  
• Work: Y/X (they don't seem so different really)
  

I really couldn't fit myself into my chronological group (boomer), but that shouldn't surprise anyone. I've always been a geek.

The GOP thanks heaven for Al Franken

Even if by some miracle Franken wins, it's time to take apart the Minnesota DFL party.

SFGate: Politics Blog : GOP Clings to Firewall

... Ensign said it will be a really bad night if Republican incumbent Norm Coleman loses his Minnesota seat to Al Franken. 'We were very fortunate' to get Franken as an opponent in what looked like a race Democrats were set to win...

We need to start by getting rid of the caucus system in this state.

From now on this is the first thing I'm going to ask every DFL member I speak with:

How do we get rid of the Minnesota DFL caucus system?

Beating email - it's doable. Here's how.

[I'm doing a talk on a related topic, so I'm incrementally updating this post. Most recent update: 7/14/08]

Feeble NYT article: Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast. Thousands of emails, can't manage, etc.

At home I am not so reliable a correspondent, but not terrible. At work though, email is a part of my job. These are the lessons learned over decades of business email use.

First, start with the goals:

1. Solve business problems efficiently.
2. Build respectful relationships
3. Eliminate replies. Inferior email multiplies. Superior email terminates. Get the job done with a single message.
4. Turn your work email into a searchable knowledge repository that will add value over years and decades.
   

Here's what works:

1. Email is an essential part of my job, but there's no credit for email work. It's a means to an end. I schedule 1 protected hour in the am, 1 hour in the pm, and deal with it opportunistically in between. I switch Outlook into offline mode so I don't get distracted by notices between scheduled times.
2. When sharing knowledge, make your email a link to a blog post or a wiki. Instead of sending updated emails, update the blog post or add to the wiki. Interested persons can subscribe to the post/wiki feed. This helps eliminate
3. Manage email using some variant of the GTD two minute rule.
   
4. No email lists. Lists should have been buried long ago. If there's no feed, the owners are clueless. In theory I could auto-route into a folder and make them fodder for full text search, but in practice I don't do email lists.
5. Use a feed reader for event subscription/notification. No Sharepoint 2007 email alerts, just feeds.
6. Don't file email. The single killer feature of Outlook is the ability to edit the subject line. If email is worth keeping, then revise the subject line as needed and dump into the Save folder. Full text search, like Windows Search or Spotlight was invented to save you filing time. I do have 4-5 active project folders I throw things in, but this takes me no time and I don't worry if I get it wrong.
7. Learn your full test search engine very well. You will use it all the time.
   
8. Keep only the last email in a discussion thread. When I Search and find a long thread I delete the redundant emails as a part of my search work (quite fast, makes future search more effective).
9. Spend time on emails. Bad emails create more bad emails. Craft the subject line carefully. Say what you need/want done/want help with. If the email is informational only say no action required. Clean up the copied email thread in the email so only the core information is there. Eliminate the thread.
10. Email breeds email. Send as few as possible. Learn to reply to complex emails by creating an appointment.
11. Don't do anything complex by email. Email is for simple things. Email should fit in a small window.
12. Never bcc except to yourself. Use CC very carefully. Resist people who extend CC chains. The To line is strictly for people who have to do things.
    
13. Don't send thank you emails to people who know you. They are a necessary email for many coworkers however.
14. Don't use email to manage tasks. Drag and drop an email to a task icon
    
15. Reserve 1-2 hours twice a day for email.
16. If you find you're doing frequent important emails with one correspondent, schedule a weekly 30-45 minute meeting. Put all the topics into tasks or an appointment agenda. Discuss and send a summary email if needed.
17. Triage your incoming email by rules that operate on sender and to line. If I'm not on the to line I rarely respond to an email.
    

I've got another ten or so, but I'll add them later. Out of time for now ...

The point is, it can be done. A key is to improve email quality to reduce volume.

This is largely cultural, the only technology component is the ability to edit subject lines (Are you listening Gmail?) and full text search. Culture takes a while to develop, but we're getting there.

Google's minimal progress towards sharing files - now PDF

So now we have Google's own products and a PDF viewer:

Google Docs supports PDF upload, viewing and sharing:

...Google Docs now allows you to upload PDF files to store them online. You can view uploaded PDFs right in your browser, and determine who else should have access...

Sharing PDFs through this mechanism is very helpful, I'll definitely make use of this.

The news does, however, remind me that it's been two years since I expected an imminent general file serving function for Google Apps.

Clearly, there's a reason they don't want to support other file types. Copyright violation? Performance? What?