Governing America – the manual

Mr. President, here is your manual.

A strange note of optimism on health care reform

It's not looking so good. The whackos are pulling ahead. The media is feeding off hate and fear, and amplifying the dark nihilism of the modern GOP.

Rationalists realize that reason has no sway. There's a whiff of despair ...

Bernie Madoff and the birthers - Paul Krugman Blog

... How did Madoff pull off his scam? A lot of it probably involved affinity fraud: Madoff’s victims, largely affluent Jews, trusted him in large part because he seemed like one of them.

What I think is going on here, at least partly, is that the peddlers of anti-progressive lies are managing to convince a certain kind of American — white, socially conservative, etc. — that the hate-mongers are people like them; and, even more important, that progressives are Those People, people not like them.

Obama’s skin color makes this easy; but the Clintons faced the same kind of thing. Why? Well, the old line about Clinton being the first black president gets at something: even if Bill Clinton had a regular skin and name, he was obviously comfortable with people who didn’t, which made him one of Them.

And anti-intellectualism is also part of it.

In any case, it’s scary: you’ve got a good segment of the American population that is completely impervious to any kind of evidence, any rational argument. I mean, who collects statistics? People in black helicopters!...

America is looking pretty sick. So why do I feel some hope?

Well, for one thing, Obama is the President. That helps.

For another, he's dealt with a lot of fear and hate in his life. If anyone can shift it, he can. If he can't -- well, then nobody can.

Not lastly, the frothing chumps that the GOP is playing are going to run out of steam. On the one hand they thrive on hate and fear, but on the other hand they will get tired of punching at the air.

Lastly -- this isn't new. America has been binging on cheap rotgut since the late 90s. This isn't just one night off the wagon, it's going to take years to get the nation to out of the flophouse. Even so, we sobered up long enough to elect Obama. That means there's hope.

Keep you head down, keep moving, keep the pressure on your state Senator (in MN, Thank Wellstone, we're now much better off than most).

Academia collides with public health

This is not a pretty picture ...

The Doctor's World - Seeking Lessons in Swine Flu Fight - NYTimes.com

... Officials and experts say they have learned a lot about human swine influenza. But relatively little of that information, including periodic summaries of what has been learned since the beginning of the pandemic, has been reported and published. Some experts said researchers were waiting to publish in journals, which can take months or longer. Journals impose severe penalties for disclosing information before publication, although they say they exempt matters of public health importance. Whatever the reason, delays in reporting such information can hamper plans for public health responses...

So when someone dies of Swine Flu, and lawyers trace the outcomes to suppressed pre-publication, will the journals be liable?

Silly Gartner hype cycle charts and "idea management"

Silicon Alley Insider's Here Comes The Twitter Backlash post includes a Gartner Hype Cycle chart.

I've seen these before, and I'm a wee bit suspicious that the items on the right side of "time" axis (which has no units) don't correspond to prior chart left side items.

In addition to selective recall and publication the unit-free time axis is key. That lets Gartner put SOA and "speech recognition" relatively close together on the graph, even though the maximal hype for SOA was about 3 years ago and for speech recognition it was 21 years ago.

There's one item in the cute info-free graphic that caught my fancy though. They list "idea management" as "post-hype".

Idea management?!

That one has completely passed me by but (thanks G) this blog post helped. Wow, I managed to almost completely dodge a very silly management fad. Until now. Yuck.

Clue to Gartner - ideas are easy.

Android comments from an iPhone perspective

Now that Apple has been condemned to the innermost circle of Geek Hell, I'm on the lookout for Android overviews like this one ...

notes on "google phone day 1"

... I'll write about the software later. For now I can say I won't have a problem using it for 30 days. I am sure I'll miss a few games, but most of the apps I use are simply front-ends to web services like Twitter or Google Reader. Google Voice is EXCELLENT. The whole Google Account integration 'just works'. I launched maps for the first time and the system knew who I was and signed me into Google Latitude. Also, my calendar is updated and synced as are my contacts pulled over from Google Voice...

My 12yo is getting into cell phone range and he really likes sliding keyboards. Hmmm.

Update 8/11/09: He couldn't stand the G1 and switched back early. I appreciate his courageous exploration of the wild lands.

Google reader “like” and the shared discovery process

I use my Google Reader shared items as my general repository for all things I find interesting, including using the “note in reader” feature to attach comments to web pages I visit (see also – memory management). This works particularly well in my iPhone Byline reader client.

I also use the “star” feature to tag items for later reading or processing. Some of those I get to, some I don’t.

I haven’t known what to make of “Like” however (emphases mine) ….

Official Google Reader Blog: Following, liking and people searching

… Have you ever wanted to tell an author or publisher that you appreciate an article they wrote? Or maybe you want to let your friend know that you enjoyed the blog post he shared with you. With a quick click of the mouse (or a swipe of the "L" key -- for the keyboard shortcut pros), you can "like" any item in Reader. All "likes" are public, so anyone reading an item you've "liked" in Reader can see that you're a fan. Checking out shared items for people who have "liked" the same items as you is a great way to discover other people with interests similar to your own….

Aha. Now I get it.

“Like” is necessarily public, whereas sharing has privacy restrictions (though I share with all). Part of being public is that “Like” is associated with user-tags; if you click on the “# Like” link you get a list of names (I did get a 404 not found when I clicked on that link for an item that had been shared, but it resolved anyway). The names link to show items the person “liked”; you can then choose, I suppose, to follow their “shared” item list.

It doesn’t work in Byline though – they haven’t added support for that marker. Still, I’ll check it out as a discovery mechanism when using the reader web app. The intersection between Shared and Like is a bit weird, but that’s kind of the rule with today’s social software. There are lots of conventions and intersections we haven’t figured out yet. As a general rule, I assume everything I do is completely public.

I like who Reader works, and I’m hoping for more interesting developments in the world of shared-mind discovery. Twitter on the other hand … (more about that in a post I’m plugging away at)

COBOL and the surprising longevity of enterprise software

In my industry, we might substitute MUMPS for COBOL …

Coding Horror: COBOL: Everywhere and Nowhere

… I'd like to talk to you about ducts. Wait a minute. Strike that. I meant COBOL. The Common Business Oriented Language is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary as the language that is everywhere and nowhere at once:

As a result, today COBOL is everywhere, yet is largely unheard of among the millions of people who interact with it on a daily basis. Its reach is so pervasive that it is almost unthinkable that the average person could go a day without it. Whether using an ATM, stopping at traffic lights or purchasing a product online, the vast majority of us will use COBOL in one form or another as part of our daily existence.

The statistics that surround COBOL attest to its huge influence upon the business world. There are over 220 billion lines of COBOL in existence, a figure which equates to around 80% of the world's actively used code. There are estimated to be over a million COBOL programmers in the world today…

I’m skeptical about those numbers, but even if we cut them in half that’s still a lot of code. The linked essay skirts the subject, but I suspect very little of this code is related to new projects – the vast majority must be from projects launched in the 1970s.

It’s not just COBOL. A friend of mine is nearing retirement still maintaining and extending an RPG app he started in the 1970s. His software runs a very successful privately held company.

The longevity of enterprise software, to me, is the interesting nub of this story. Successful enterprise software has a very long lifespan – on the scale of the lifespan of a publicly traded company. This software can outlast careers, much less employment at a single company. I wouldn’t be surprised, given virtualization technology, if today’s enterprise solutions end up with sixty year lifespans.

There are interesting implications for the way we organize businesses and business processes…

Breeding even smarter dogs

The studies are probably not terribly rigorous, but it wouldn't be surprising to learn that that dogs are smarter than we thought they were -- seems just about every animal is smarter than we thought ...

Dogs as Smart as 2-year-old Kids | LiveScience

... While dogs ranked with the 2-year-olds in language, they would trump a 3- or 4-year-old in basic arithmetic, Coren found. In terms of social smarts, our drooling furballs fare even better.

'The social life of dogs is much more complex, much more like human teenagers at that stage, interested in who is moving up in the pack and who is sleeping with who and that sort of thing,' Coren told LiveScience.

The hypothesis is that dogs are getting smarter fairly quickly, that over the course of a few hundred years we've substantially increased the IQ of certain breeds.

So what would happen if we really tried to breed a dog that was smarter and lived longer? Could we get them up to, say, four year olds? Pretty soon we're in "uplift territory".

At what point do smarter dogs get civil rights? Reminds me of my childhood attempt to develop a non-species specific theory of ethics ...

Search engine blind test: poor Yahoo

I tried the search engine blinded comparison test:

Which Search Engine Do You Choose In The Blind Test? - washingtonpost.com:

... Have you tried out this blind search tool yet? It provides results from Google, Yahoo and Bing in three columns but doesn't tell you which column is which search engine. You then tell it which one you think shows the best results, and you then see which answers are from which engines. I keep choosing Yahoo as the best results...

In my testing all the results were all pretty similar, but I also choose Yahoo. I think it was by chance, but I can believe Yahoo is better than it was. Bing was, as usual, the worst.

Poor Yahoo, finally somewhat competitive, but Microsoft is going to replace them with Bing.

The results are a bit misleading though. I'm a heavy user of Google Custom Search, both through Google Toolbar training and my hand crafted custom search set. Those results are much better, for me, than the blind search test results.

So Yahoo had caught up with the old Google, but Google's intelligent search optimization is a step beyond ...

Status five nanosols

Observations on an utterly unique event, occurring once only in all of space and time ...

Chronology

• 0.0000005% (5 nanosols) population 1 main sequence star lifespan (1 sol = 10^10 years)
• 400% average modern dog lifespan
• 140% historic human male lifespan
• 66% of productive lifespan (25 to 63 year)
• 54% of calculated life expectancy
• 600% lifespan of average american corporation [1]
• 200% lifespan of successful enterprise software [9]
• 250% of post-industrial civilization
• 22% of the anthropocene
• 1% of the information age
• 47% of the lifespan of the oil age [4]
• fifty times round the sun

Status (personal metrics)

• 55% total lifetime contribution [3]
• 95% wisdom (guesstimated) [2]
• 100% duties and obligations
• 100% lifetime satisfaction level (to date)
• 100% lifetime effectiveness [5]
• 100% lifetime income [6]
• 100% lifetime confidence
• 100% lifetime kindness [7]
• 30% lifetime arrogance
• 30% lifetime certainty
• 20% lifetime temper
• 100% lifetime baseball skills
• 90% lifetime hockey skills
• 50% lifetime bicycling performance
• 70% lifetime strength
• 50% lifetime hair

Minimalist lessons

• When swimming outdoors wear a swim shirt (see also).
• Schedule haircuts q4w.
• "A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person." (Dave Barry)
• Our next home will be wheelchair accessible
• When you're too old to drive you'll be too old to know you're too old to drive.
• Accident is far more common than intent.
• You only think it's about you.
• When you hear a confident expert, run away.
• People who are paid for a service are very unlikely to tell you their service is not working.
• Sometimes the crowd is right. Sometimes the crowd is wrong. I can't tell the difference, but I pay more attention to the crowd than I once did.
• Take pictures.
• If you're think you can't be fooled, you are a fool. If you think you can't be corrupted, you are corrupt.
• Obsolete things last a lot longer than I expect. (see also)
• There was another one, but I forgot it. [8]

Footnotes

[1] Guesstimate. The tiny number that survive into the S&P 500 have a 40-50 year life expectancy.

[2] Eventually the dementia starts to whack the experience.

[3] Meaning I'm ahead of what it cost to make me, but still producing.

[4] Started around the Model-T, ends around 1917 though cars will last a long time.

[5] Ability to get things done. This is all about skill compensating for raw power. (see also)

[6] Historic record. Could go to zero tomorrow.

[7] I think I have average empathy, but I really have to work at some aspects of being kind. I work at it more now than I did when I was an obnoxious new physician.

[8] More profound that it seems.

[9] Successful enterprise software is very long lived -- longer lived than the average corporation and comparable to human work lives. This is an interesting situation.

How to use bear spray

Helpful advice...

Nicholas Kristoff - How to Recharge Your Soul - NYTimes.com

... 10. In grizzly or polar bear territory, carry bear spray (which is a bit like mace). Frankly, the spray is unlikely to stop a 1,000-pound bear hurtling toward you, so experienced hikers respond to a menacing bear by using the spray in one of two ways. The first option is to spray yourself in the face, so you no longer care what the bear does to you. The second option is to spray your best friend beside you, and then run....

Google - please give me tasks that appear on my calendar

I get a lot of value from Google Calendar, but there's plenty of room for innovation. In particular there's something relatively easy Google could do that would significantly improve my life.

First though, a bit of background.

I used to manage my time and planning around tasks, using a Franklin Planner biased version of Getting Things Done. I did so much with tasks at work I wrote an Outlook tutorial on advanced task management.

Problem is, I was adding tasks faster than I could complete them - especially when I tried creating tasks rather than letting emails sit in my inbox. The task backlog was kind of crazy. Since entropy means I'm getting dumber every day in most every way I had to find a new edge.

My current business approach works better. It's something like this (my personal planning is similar, but it's coordinated with my wife and is a bit simpler):

• I use mind map software to do a 2-3 week planning cycle (Agile software devpt methodology taught me that).
• I put the "A" tasks on my calendar. They don't go to my task list, just the calendar. I schedule what it takes to do them, and I'm getting better at time bounding those tasks.
• I create very few "B" tasks -- these get dates but no calendar slots. They get completed opportunistically.
  
• I create "C" tasks that are categorized by context -- but lack dates. Example: If I'm near a store I check my shopping list. (Less common at work, but common at home. If it's work related and it's not critical/must do I just don't do it.)
  
• I do clear out my email inbox every day or two, mostly following GTD principles. I found I really have to do this, but I work hard to discourage email. How I reduce email use is a topic for another post, but among other things I follow the "two strikes" principle. If any email generates two send/receive cycles I create a meeting. Since most folks really dislike these meetings it encourages them to think hard before sending email. I also invest time and thought into email I write, crafting it to "kill" the response and save time on the back end. I think of business email like a serve in tennis - it should be impossible to return.

My newer approach is a significant improvement on my old methods. By combining these approaches with better use other people's brains I stay one step ahead of the reaper. Or so I dream.

Which brings me to where I want Google to help.

I really would like to have those appointments also be tasks. That way I could thread them to projects, use the completed task archive as a useful guide, and distribute tasks/projects across calendar slots. Gorilla Haven's DateBk did something like this on the old Palm Classic. You could create a kind of appointment (forget the type) that had a complete attribute and would jump forwards a day if not completed. It was close to what I want, but not close enough.

I want to have tasks that have optional one to many relationships to calendar slots.

From a task I can create a calendar appointment that links back to the task. From the calendar I can create an appointment that has a companion task with a link to the appointment. I also want to be able to add appointment links to an existing task.

From the appointment I want to be able to complete the appointment subtask, or the entire task.

Is that too much to ask?

OK, so maybe it's a bit extreme. I'd accept a simple 1:1 task to appointment link. Just throw me a bone Google! (See also - a prior, similar, plea on my tech blog)

Of course if Google gets that one done, I've another one they could look at next ...

Google Maps is seriously broken today

Google Maps is way broken.

It started a few weeks ago with our home address. When we entered it we got two results – one with the letter W for West (which is not part of our address). At first either of them worked, but tonight neither of them are recognized by Google.

For the first time in memory, our address can’t be found in Google. We live in a 90 yo urban residential neighborhood, so it’s not like there’s been a lot of change around here.

My next test was to find a route from Saint Paul to Montreal. Since our address doesn’t work any longer, we went from city to city. The preferred route was via Chicago, but the Canadian alternative was through Timmins Ontario – way up in the Shield! It was as though Google Maps had forgotten about the Trans Canada Highway.

Bing maps worked as expected. It found our home and had the usual routes from St. Paul to Montreal.

Wow. What the heck happened to Google? Some kind of covert Apple cyber-attack?

Aug 10, 2009: My house has one entry, and Google has rediscovered the Trans Canada. (Sorry Timmins). Don't you wish you know what was happening with this stuff?

How to deliver services badly

I think I've come up with a recipe that will guarantee bad services within an enterprise.

They key is to remove executives from direct use of a service or from direct contact with users. This is typically done by the use of admins (who are direct users for executives) and by an insulating layer of management.

This is hard to do when services are managed locally. In this case the service will report into someone who cannot easily attain isolation.

So, in practice, the delivery of a really bad services requires centralizing or outsourcing service delivery. This makes the essential executive isolation much easier to achieve.

The Belgian Atomium

The Geek Atlas recommends a visit to Belgium's Atomium. Bizarrely, the book couldn't include a photograph; Belgian copyright law doesn't allow any reproduction without paying a large fee (which goes to inheritors of someone involved in design and construction -- I guess they've fallen on hard times).

Odd country Belgium.

Instead the atlas refers us to the net, such as this Panoramio image.

According to the Atlas, you can travel through the structure to the globes (iron atoms); one is reserved for school children overnighters.