Twin Cities: where Somali meet Hmong

Interesting place ...

Twin Cities: vibrant with diversity | Twin Cities Daily Planet | Minneapolis - St. Paul

.... The cumulative effect has been dramatic. In the seven-county metro area in 2007, more than 125,000 residents were Latino, nearly 45,000 were Hmong, and an estimated 30,000 were Somali, said Barbara Ronningen, a demographer with the Minnesota State Demographic Center.

St. Paul has the largest urban Hmong concentration in the world. Minnesota has the largest Somali population in the United States, most of them in Minneapolis. More than 80 languages are spoken in the Twin Cities area...

Evolution is not obliged to simplify our lives

Natural selection makes use of all the information processing and storage capabilities at “its” disposal. It doesn’t “know” about the boundaries we draw …

Fat mice missing a specific kind of "junk DNA" more likely to be diabetic: Scientific American Blog

… Computational analysis suggests that the retrotransposon identified in this study has embedded itself in at least eight different places in the mouse genome.  One known site is in the Zfp69 gene.  Consequently the gene can no longer be fully transcribed--converted—into RNA.

In mice that did not have the retrotransposon, the Zfp69 gene was made into RNA, and these mice had higher blood glucose and more fat in their livers (both indicators of diabetes) than obese mice carrying the retrotransposon.  The group found similar results in human tissue.

These findings are unexpected in that usually interfering with RNA production triggers or promote diseases.  The results also provide evidence that transposons, once regarded as useless, might have important beneficial functions in the cell…

If we were Creators, we’d make things that were much easier to understand.

See also: freight train pneumatic braking systems.

The post-DRM world - Dave Brubeck via iTunes

A few months ago Apple removed FairPlay DRM from their Apple store music collection. It's all "iTunes Plus" now, which for the new Dave Brubeck release I reviewed means it's all 256 kbps AAC encoded.

I can play it anywhere that can manage AAC, including my SONY car stereo and any "MP3" player that's worth bothering with.

It's not the quality of a CD of course. On the other hand I could get the music quickly, listen to it immediately, save the hassle of filing the CD and ripping the music, and the $10 price on the retrospective album seems fair to me.

So I bought the album.

I wouldn't have done that back in the days that Apple DRMd all their music (video is still DRMd, of course). Now I'm willing to do it, and I'll buy more.

It took me a while for me to change my habits. If not for the mildly shady business of the used CD store, I wonder how large the CD sales market would be? After all, if even I'm done with buying (new) CDs ...

The origins of corporate mediocrity - promoting the best

It would be easy to mock the results of this computer simulation, but I think they're on to something. When you read the following synopsis consider what I assume were the assumptions of the simulations:

• Different jobs require different skill sets
• Different workers have different skill sets
• The best worker at a job will be the one who's skill sets best match the job demands

If you think through these assumptions, you might be able to predict the results of the simulations ...

Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Why Incompetence Spreads through Big Organizations - Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0907.0455: The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study

Promoting the people most competent at one job does not mean that they'll be better at another, according to a new simulation of hierarchical organizations.

There's a paradox at the heart of most Western organizations. The people who perform best at one level of an organization tend to be promoted on the premise that they will also be competent at another level within the organization...

In 1969, a Canadian psychologist named Laurence Peter encapsulated this behavior in a rule that has since become known as Peter's Principle. Here it is:

"All new members in a hierarchical organization climb the hierarchy until they reach their level of maximum incompetence."

That's not as unfair as it sounds, say Alessandro Pluchino and buddies from Universita di Catania, who have modeled this behavior using an agent-based system for the first time. They say that common sense tells us that a member who is competent at a given level will also be competent at a higher level of the hierarchy. So it may well seem a good idea to promote such an individual to the next level.

The problem is that common sense often fools us. It's not so hard to see that a new position in an organization requires different skills, so the competent performance of one task may not correlate well with the ability to perform another task well.

Peter pointed out that in large organizations where these practices are used, it is inevitable that individuals will be promoted until they reach their level of maximum incompetence. The unavoidable result is the runaway spread of incompetence throughout an organization.

Now Pluchino and co have simulated this practice with an agent-based model for the first time. Sure enough, they find that it leads to a significant reduction in the efficiency of an organization, as incompetency spreads through it....

But is there a better way of choosing individuals for promotion? It turns out that there is, say Pluchino and co. Their model shows that two other strategies outperform the conventional method of promotion.

The first is to alternately promote first the most competent and then the least competent individuals. And the second is to promote individuals at random. Both of these methods improve, or at least do not diminish, the efficiency of an organization.

Clever!

Of course the assumptions I assume were used in this study do have limitations. Many (most?) corporate superstars are characterized by an insatiable appetite for work and a relative disinterest in sleep, family and friendship. These traits do transfer well between roles. It's also true that senior roles are largely about managing down (reports), laterally (peers), and up (bosses). The political and personal skills that allow people to excel in those roles are reasonably universal.

So the model oversimplifies.

On the other hand, there really does seem to be something amiss with the modern publicly traded corporation. In general, they are less than the sum of their people. If not for the sheer advantages of size, such as the ability to buy or destroy smaller would-be competitors, I suspect most large corporations would not be able to effectively compete. (The CEO? The empiric evidence suggests that CEOs don't have large effects unless the business is very troubled or the CEO is really incompetent. Additionally, CEO selection is particularly perverse, it's no surprise most are ill-suited to the role they fill.)

Maybe the promotion effect does play a role in limiting how well a corporation can do.

PS. I think they should have tested a strategy of random promotion and rapid demotion for those who don't succeed.

The end of passwords - episode LXVII

Yawn.

It turns out that if you know a little bit about someone it's possible to compute their social security number. Social security numbers, of course, are often treated as a secret password, something that's known to only one person, and thus proof of identity.

Well, ok, two people. You and the the bank.

Okay, you and the bank and the hospital and your employer and your former employer and the IRS and your spouse and your ex-spouse and whoever stole your health insurance card and 425,000 hackers.

In other words, it's a lot like the secret questions my scream-inducing bank tortures from me. It's a backdoor for anyone who wants to steal your Gmail account (fortunately, few do).

Houston, we have a problem.

Shades of grief

World of sorrows ...

BBC - James Reynolds' China: Three years in China

... In the summer of 2007, I went to central China to cover the news that hundreds of men had been found working as slaves in illegal brick factories. Some had been kept underground for so long that they no longer knew their own names.

I met a man called Zhang Bairen. His son Zhang Zhike had gone missing and the father was hoping that his son might be one of the rescued slaves. But he wasn't.

I asked the family if they could show me a picture of their missing son but they didn't have one. The family was too poor to afford any photos.

A year later, some more men working as slaves were rescued. The family hoped that the missing Zhang Zhike might be among them. But, again, he wasn't.

Another year on, family members tell us that they have now given up hope of ever finding their lost son. Theirs is a silent grief...

Other people love Microsoft Word almost as much as I do

About 6 years ago I wrote about Microsoft Word: Living with the Beast. Nothing has happened since to change my opinion of Word.

Recently some Word bug related to cross-references made a hash of a technical document I wrote. A quick Google turned up this pithy quote from an anonymous tech writer commenting on a newsletter post

Word annoyance: Cross-referencing « CyberText Newsletter

[JR, comments]… Microsoft Word 2007 is a steaming pile of flaming maggot [censored] coded by a bunch of monkeys typing random keys on their keyboard and hoping it compiles…

Join the club comrade.

The GOP’s amazing spiral into historic irrelevance

Somewhere Mitt Romney is screaming “Pull Up”, Pull Up” and hauling back on the control stick as his one winged plane screams groundwards …

GOP Pols Losing Control Of Tea Party Movement? | TPMDC

Thousands of right-wing activists across this country rang in the Independence Day holiday with yet another round of tea-party protests against President Obama...

… Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who is chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, was booed at the event in Austin -- on the grounds that he's part of the problem in Washington, having voted for the Wall St. bailout last fall…

… Gov. Rick Perry -- who famously seemed to raise the specter of Texas seceding from the union during the April Tax Day protests -- was also booed at the same Austin event as Cornyn. Attendees saw him as yet another tax-hiking tyrant, because he supports toll roads in order to relieve traffic congestion…

… Katie Vandermeer … heard about the tea party through the Texas Nationalist Movement, which advocates Texas' secession from the U.S.

In Bemidji, Minnesota, a headline speaker for their "Freedom Over Socialism" rally was state Rep. Mary Seifer … who warned of government taking away everyone's personal freedom: "Now suddenly we tell you that you have to wear your seat belts … Another speaker, former state legislative candidate John Carlson, spoke favorably of the Articles of Confederation.

The tea party in Columbia, South Carolina, featured Sen. Jim DeMint and state Rep. Nikki Haley, a leading Republican candidate for Governor. One prominent person was missing, though: Gov. Mark Sanford, who had previously headlined a Tax Day tea party back in April.

The tea party in Boiling Springs, South Carolina, featured a colorful cast of characters. The headline speaker was Alan Keyes, who has been a leading name of the "Birther" movement … One attendee took out a flyer that said, "Zelaya today, Obama tomorrow," but said he was advocating impeachment of Obama after he was asked directly whether he was in favor of a coup.

At the event in Los Angeles, right-wing former Saturday Night Live actress Victoria Jackson -- who has previously called Barack Obama a Muslim and a communist -- called for the President's impeachment, "There, I said it," and did a handstand dedicated to our men and women in uniform….

I knew the GOP was in trouble, but I didn’t expect it to come apart at the seams.

This is bad. We all need a credible, Rational, alternative to my currently favored party. The only thing a wrecked GOP will produce is right wingnut terrorists.

Maybe Romney will pull the GOP out of its dive into oblivion. Or maybe they’ll be so shattered in 2010 and 2012 that we’ll end up with a new political party …

Alternative local news: MinnPost and TC Daily Planet

Our Twin Cities newspapers are in intensive care and not expected to live.

Dog bites man stuff.

So I'm looking for alternative sources for local professional investigative journalism. I'm following two at the moment via Google Reader:

• Twin Cities Daily Planet | Minneapolis - St. Paul
• MinnPost

I haven't figured out which is the more Rational of the two. Reason aside, they should both give up on world/nation coverage. That's the beat of NPR, the Guardian, NYT, BBC, WSJ and the blogosphere. At the very least they need to provide a feed that excludes national/world coverage - just local news, events, entertainment, etc.

Anyone know of other new media startups doing metro and state coverage?

CompuServe was still alive! It’s dead now.

I thought CompuServe was long dead.

Turns out, it was still running until a few days ago! It’s just been officially shut down. There are still people with CompuServe email addresses, apparently they’ll continue to function.

I’m sure I have my old CompuServe user ID around. I think I was one of a very small number of people who actually used an OS/2 CompuServe client!

In honor of the passing of an era, some threads from a web discussion I came across. The last is the most amazing …

CompuServe Requiem » Basex Blog »

…The CIS addresses were octal - digits ranged only from 0 to 7. Mine was 70014,2316…

… they were properly “programmer/project numbers” (PPNs), intended to identify who was working on what software project.

the idea of having ever assigned such an arcane nomenclature to ordinary, frequently non-technical users was an absurdity from the beginning. and it caused no end of difficulty when the time came (1987) to gateway CServe email to The Greater Out Here — that damnable embedded comma was a huge source of confusion for users…

.. Yes, the origin of CompuServe user IDs were TOPS-10* PPNs. A pair of octal half-word (18 bit) unsigned integers. The CompuServe Information Service started as a way to sell excess computer time on the timesharing systems that were used by businesses during the day. The Information Service eventually took over the company…

… The PC software was originally developed by a user to make interfacing to the DECsystem-10* command line a little easier. While they (and their partners) developed some great ideas, they failed to sufficiently invest in both marketing and user interface development which allowed AOL to come from nowhere, flood the marketplace with free floppies, and dominate the market in very short order. Being owned by H&R Block at that crucial juncture didn’t help, either…

*TOPS-10 was the operating system, DECsystem-10 was the hardware (36-bit word with a settable byte-size)…

… Up until they did this, I was still paying a legacy $2.50/mth fee for Compuserve and my old account could still log in to the service at gateway.compuserve.com via telnet.

You could not do much in there of course anymore, but I was also once a sysop, and I still knew how to get into the PRO area, do directory listings of their hard drives (and see files with dates dating back to the 70’s), and with that knowledge run some of the old apps from the command line (like biorythms, and some adventure games), and even things like TE2TRN.EXE (the program that allowed the TI-99/4A TE2 cartridge to transfer files from Compuserve…

… It is true that you can no longer use the PPNs to access the forums on Compuserve, but there are still quite a few of them there. A few even have rather large numbers of messages per day still, though most are pretty small now. But anyone can access the forums, using any browser, and can participate in the forums as much as he/she wishes. You are required to have a ’screen name’ which can be an AIM name, an AOL name, or a Netscape name….

BUT - many of the old forums continue to exist and to serve the small number of people who come. I’m still in the Genealogy Forum and the Vintage Computers Forum. Many of the sysops you all knew are still there…

So until recently, there were still people posting on the CompuServe forums. There's a good eulogy here as well. I wonder if Facebook will last as long as CompuServe.

Green shoots on climate change

The infamous green shoots of economic recovery are dust now, but I feel twinges of optimism about climate change.

A few weeks ago I wrote …

Gordon's Notes: Human progress and global climate change – are we good enough?

We are not what we were 20,000 years ago. We are not the people of 2,000 years past.

Hell, we’re not even the people I was born to.

We’re better than we were.

We’re better at damned near everything. I don’t know the how or why, but we’re still around 50 years post-fusion weapons. We got rid of Freon. We don’t routinely torture children in public schools. We have the ADA. We don’t smoke on airplanes. We have Obama. Gay unions, by whatever name, are inevitable….

…I think that if the climate change riff on our smoldering Malthusian crisis had come along in 2060 that we’d be ok. Fifty more years of Singularity-free progress and we’d be ready to handle our CO2 problem.

Except it isn’t 2060, and we’re struggling big time. The US Congress has passed a bill that gets us about 5% of the distance, and the Senate is expected to suffocate it. To add injury to injury, those who argued against the bill were babbling gibberish…

Even then I came down on the side of mild optimism. Since then I’ve actually become more optimistic.

Why?

Well, first, there is that bill. Sure the Senate may kill it, but it was an admission. It’s like the first Surgeon General’s report pointing out that smoking wasn’t really a healthy habit. The bill doesn’t change much, but it changes everything.

The second came from Grame Wood’s Atlantic article on geo-engineering (aka terraforming or climate engineering). There are two advantages to the geo-engineering track. One is that it gives nature hating Republicans a face saving way to admit there’s a CO2 problem. Face saving because they can acknowledge the problem while still offending tree huggers and continuing to pave paradise. That’s progress – of a sort. More importantly, however, is that geo-engineering is a low cost weapon of mass destruction …

..The scariest thing about geo-engineering, as it happens, is also the thing that makes it such a game-changer in the global-warming debate: it’s incredibly cheap. Many scientists, in fact, prefer not to mention just how cheap it is. Nearly everyone I spoke to agreed that the worst-case scenario would be the rise of what David Victor, a Stanford law professor, calls a “Greenfinger”—a rich madman, as obsessed with the environment as James Bond’s nemesis Auric Goldfinger was with gold. There are now 38 people in the world with $10 billion or more in private assets, according to the latest Forbes list; theoretically, one of these people could reverse climate change all alone. “I don’t think we really want to empower the Richard Bransons of the world to try solutions like this,” says Jay Michaelson, an environmental-law expert, who predicted many of these debates 10 years ago.

Even if Richard Branson behaves, a single rogue nation could have the resources to change the climate. Most of Bangladesh’s population lives in low-elevation coastal zones that would wash away if sea levels rose. For a fraction of its GDP, Bangladesh could refreeze the ice caps using sulfur aerosols (though, in a typical trade-off, this might affect its monsoons). If refreezing them would save the lives of millions of Bangladeshis, who could blame their government for acting? Such a scenario is unlikely; most countries would hesitate to violate international law and become a pariah. But it illustrates the political and regulatory complications that large-scale climate-changing schemes would trigger…

So all those island states and African nations that will be destroyed by a 11 degree F rise in temperature have a card to play. They can nuke the sun, so to speak.

Call me a cynic, but I believe climate weapons will concentrate minds more effectively than a hundred pleas for common humanity.

The third green shoot come from a recent post by James Fallows …

semi-encouraging_climate-change

…The speakers were Thomas Lovejoy, a long-time biodiversity expert, and David Hayes, who has recently become the #2 official in the Department of Interior.

Lovejoy's presentation began with a reminder of all the bad things that are happening to wildlife, to biodiversity, to life in the ocean, etc as CO2 levels in the atmosphere go up, taking temperatures with them. But … he emphasized how huge a role the Earth's own natural processes and vegetations -- its forests, grasslands, wetlands, even deserts -- can play in absorbing much larger quantities of carbon from the atmosphere than they do now and thereby reducing the greenhouse effect…

… He tied this analysis to perhaps the most frequently-used chart in modern climate-change thinking -- one produced by McKinsey & Co and the McKinsey Global Institute comparing the relative costs of different measures to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) levels in the atmosphere.

On the chart, the below-the-line items, on the left side, are GHG-reduction measures that save more money than they cost. Most of these are sheer efficiency measures (insulating buildings, switching to more efficient lights). The above-the-line escalating figures on the right are the rising costs of other abatement measures. The most expensive of them are high-tech "carbon capture and sequestration" systems, plus protecting forests in heavily-populated Asian countries.

Lovejoy's point was that a lot of "re-greening" steps are near the middle of the chart, either actually saving money or costing very little compared with a variety of clean-energy technologies…

… then Hayes stepped up with what was news to me. This was the announcement that the Department of Interior … is now quite serious about applying a "Re-greening" approach to the 20 percent of the US landmass under its control.

Hayes gave more details than I will recount here. They boiled down to a sequence of: trying to measure and understand the carbon-absorption properties of the various lands under its control; seeing how they can be improved, including with market-based offsets; telling the story to the public of why protecting and expanding forests, grasslands, wetlands, etc has an important climate-change component; making forest-preservation an important part of international climate negotiations (rather than talking only about clean-energy sources); and a lot more. (Including changes in U.S. agriculture, which are of course outside Interior's direct control, so that instead of being, incredibly, a net emitter of greenhouse gases, it has a positive effect. This is related to the Food, Inc. discussion of industrial agriculture mentioned here.)

.. it was surprising enough to hear from a senior DOI official and seemed politically and psychologically shrewd, in letting people think that there was some reaction to dire greenhouse gas projections other than holding their hands over their ears and wishing the whole problem would go away.

So we’ve got three green shoots. We’re painfully, slowly, moving to admit we have a very big problem. We’ve realized that poor nations in the path of the climate juggernaut have a (potentially lethal) card to play. And, lastly, a Rational President means we have a Rational Department of the Interior thinking about how humanity can win this one.

Today I’ll be optimistic … about climate change.

Health care? I still don’t see Americans coming to terms with the real options.

Alaska - stranger than you can imagine

Back when Palin was threatening the future of human civilization in her run for a post-McCain presidency, I recall an Alaskan trying to explain where she came from.

I don't recall the details, but the gist of it was that Alaska is very small, very eccentric, and surprisingly tolerant in an incoherent libertarian-welfare sort of way. It sounded like a place I'd enjoy, though maybe not with kids.

I thought again of that essay when I first read this mornings WSJ resignation coverage claiming Palin had a 92% approval rating in early 2007, and then read ...

Sarah Palin resigning as Alaska governor - Joan Walsh - Salon.com

.... In an angry, rambling press conference that will rival Gov. Mark Sanford's as a stunning example of a bizarre public meltdown, Palin basically blamed her decision on her national critics, who she said were blocking her agenda and costing Alaska taxpayers money.

"You are naïve if you don't see a full court press right now on the national level picking apart a good point guard," Palin said, a reference to her days as Sarah Barracuda, high school basketball star. What does a good point guard do? "She drives through a full court press protecting the ball, keeping her head up…and passing the ball so her team can win. I know when it's time to pass the ball for a win.

"I really don't want to disappoint anyone with this decision," Palin continued. "I cannot stand here as your governor and allow millions of dollars to go to waste. I don't know if my children are going to allow it either…This decision comes after a lot of prayer and deliberation." Palin said all of her children endorsed her decision, and she closed by complaining about people mocking her Down's Syndrome son Trig, with little Piper standing by her side.

"In the words of General MacArthur, we are not retreating, we are advancing in another direction," Palin said, as she turned the podium over to the apparently shocked Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell.

There was rolling hilarity and a total news vacuum on television for about 10 minutes after the news first broke. CNN's Rick Sanchez wondered aloud if Palin could be pregnant again – shocking Candy Crowley – before interviewing Frontiersman reporter Andrew Wellner, who says the press conference came as a total surprise to local reporters.

"She didn't take any questions, she said she could be more effective outside of government," Wellner said, reading his notes to Sanchez. Then CNN got tape of Palin's announcement...

.... CNN is now running the entire speech; earlier, it only ran a clip from her resignation statement onward. It's crazy stuff. For the first 10 minutes or so, Palin rambled weirdly about all the good things she's done for Alaska, on energy and budget issues, sounding kind of like a Furby who memorized a lot of information but has no idea how to repeat it in a human-like way. The tone and inflection were completely off...

There's lots of speculation on her plans, including my favorite -- that she doesn't really have a plan other than to make tons of money, duck a lot of investigations, and see what happens next.

I still think we should be mildly terrified of her. Any country capable of reelecting Bush/Cheney in 2004 is clearly capable of electing Sarah Palin in 2012 or 2016.

Low grade terror aside, this makes Alaska even stranger than I'd thought. This Governor had a 92% approval rating?! Nobody gets those kinds of approval ratings in a democracy. Even recently she was running at something like 60%, which is landslide-level for most politicians.

I really do hope I get to visit Alaska soon.

Visit to a lost world

I have returned from a visit to a lost world. I must tell my story swiftly, for the Guardians of the secret ways know me now. Only a fraction of our expedition notes have survived, little can I show of that mysterious land of Shangri La.

I came upon it by chance, accompanied only by my faithful hound. The way is only paces off a well worn path, but it can be approached only when waters run low and the blood sucking guardians sleep. By chance then came we fell upon the ancient steps.

Long we climbed that broken way, thinking of the men who labored there and the blood sacrifices that sanctified their labors.

We passed by meadows whose peace belied the eldritch history of this place. Then the rustling of the winds

became the roaring of a great cataract.

A monstrous bridge, broken by time, spans the might river above the falls.

Its might beams lay shattered on the rocks below. How many eons had passed since that span stood?

At last, at the very ends of our strength, we emerged atop the vastness to uncover yet another route to the forgotten empire. So many years had I passed that way, never knowing what terrifying mysteries lay just beyond the edge of mere civilization.

We returned to our encampment by a twisted path, and there discovered evidence of the Guardians!

The roped cliff face could only mean others came this way! In shock, we turned to flee, but it was too late. A Guardian nodded to us as she and her slavering beast walked by. We were marked. There are those who know this way!

I write these words hurriedly, for Guardians are jealous of their ancient secrets. I send you my last words now by evening post, keep them well. Beware the Guardians of the hidden falls!!

Above average: Shangri La on the Mississippi

Best urban cycling.

Best healthcare.

Fittest kids: "Another victory of sorts for Lake Wobegon: Minnesota has the lowest rate of overweight children in the nation, according to a report on obesity in America."

Who knew?

Google: Please fix Gmail's broken threading model

I'm going to keep posting variations of this every 6 weeks until Google surrenders.

Dear Google,

Gmail's threading model was a cute idea. I suppose it would even work if you hadn't hidden subject lines in threads, thereby promoting subject line reuse and thread metastasis.

It doesn't work. Honest. One day you'll agree with me.

As a compromise, let me change the subject lines in the messages people send me (Outlook's killer feature). If you like, you can propagate the new subject line down the thread.

Alternatively, let me easily toggle your thread by subject line feature.

Thank you.

I'll write again.

Yours,

john