Middle aged lesson #434: Most contractors don't read books

It took me a long time to realize that most of the contractors we hire don't read books or journals about how to do their work.

Most of our contractors do what they've learned from colleagues, friends and family, and what they've invented on their own. The best of them know local code. Only a very few seem to read books and magazines related to their craft. (Some of which, of course, are nonsense -- this is not a peer reviewed literature.)

This means that contractors practices can be very far from best practices. A home owner can't hire a good contractor until they study books and journals first [1]. Then it's possible to have an informed conversation, and ask a contractor to exlain their (often correct) deviation from what's written.

This should not have surprised me.  North American trained physicians have very strong native study skills and strong legal and strong professional incentives to learn and adopt best practices. But we struggle to do that. Why should contractors, who are not selected for academic excellence, be any different?

[1] Yes, paper. This domain is very poorly represented online.

Understanding the elections - what's really changed

How can we best understand what's recently changed in American government?

First, we need to simplify. Any government, but especially a democracy, is a dynamic and chaotic sum of numerous conflicting powers.

Some of these powers are made of atoms - billionaires, CEOs, the well employed, the weak.

Others rule a different realm. Corporations are partly the will of their managers, partly powerful but dull amoeboid rulers of org space, changing their environment to suit their nature.

I think we should reduce this chaos to three agents: The corporation (private and public), the strong (healthy and wealthy) and the weak (30% of humanity). These agents are not enemies; they are sometimes allies, sometimes frenemies. Some corporations need employees and all need customers. The strong may love the weak, or at least may not want them rioting. The weak need the strong - and they need work.

This is how I imagine the American government was balanced in the spring of 2010:

This is how I think it will look in the winter of 2011, once the GOP takes the House



This was a very good election for corporations. Or so they think, but of course what they want isn't necessarily what they need.

The physics of mind and the limits of AI

Consider these three recent articles together ...

One ...

Dienekes' Anthropology Blog: Brains to Hand-axes quoting Science Daily

Stone Age humans were only able to develop relatively advanced tools after their brains evolved a greater capacity for complex thought, according to a new study that investigates why it took early humans almost two million years to move from razor-sharp stones to a hand-held stone axe...

Two ...

Gordon's Notes: The new history is deep history

... What did humans do in Georgian caves for 30,000 years? Thirty thousand years of waving and sewing and nothing changes?! They could not have had the same brains we have ...

Three ...

Optimization at the Intersection of Biology and Physics - Natalie Angier - NYTimes.com

... the basic building blocks of human eyesight turn out to be practically perfect... Photoreceptors operate at the outermost boundary allowed by the laws of physics, which means they are as good as they can be, period. Each one is designed to detect and respond to single photons of light — the smallest possible packages in which light comes wrapped...

... Photoreceptors exemplify the principle of optimization, an idea, gaining ever wider traction among researchers, that certain key features of the natural world have been honed by evolution to the highest possible peaks of performance ...  Scientists have identified and mathematically anatomized an array of cases where optimization has left its fastidious mark, among them the superb efficiency with which bacterial cells will close in on a food source; the precision response in a fruit fly embryo to contouring molecules that help distinguish tail from head; and the way a shark can find its prey by measuring micro-fluxes of electricity in the water a tremulous millionth of a volt strong — which, as Douglas Fields observed in Scientific American, is like detecting an electrical field generated by a standard AA battery “with one pole dipped in the Long Island Sound and the other pole in waters of Jacksonville, Fla.”

... Simon Laughlin of Cambridge University has proposed that the brain’s wiring system has been maximally miniaturized, condensed for the sake of speed to the physical edge of signal fidelity.

According to Charles Stevens of the Salk Institute, our brains distinguish noise from signal through redundancy of neurons and a canny averaging of what those neurons have to say...

Photoreceptors are a specialization of brains. Brains have been evolving for a very long time.

Long enough, perhaps, for brains to run up against the constraints of physics.

It's not something most of us have contemplated. It is probably misleading, it might be more true that brains have run up against the constraints of room temperature physics operating on biological systems. Still, it's interesting.

If true, it doesn't mean that an artificial brain couldn't be substantially smarter than the smartest human. It might suggest, however, that it could't be qualitatively smarter. The Ais might think us a bit dull and slow, but they might still want to talk ...

The GOP likes a fight

A neighbor of mine has edited the autobiography of Walter Mondale (our copy has both Mondale and Hage's signature).

Reading Mondale's story, you learn two things.

One is that progress happens.

The other is that it's always a hell of a fight.

Some people get energy from fighting. Those people enjoy AM talk radio. You may have noticed this talk radio is almost always radio GOP. It's a trait of American conservatives; they like the fight. They like to win most of all, but they get energy from the battle.

My mates don't get energy from fighting. We get a headache. We want to figure things out, then find a solution. We enjoy intelligent debate, we can even appreciate discussions that run into the wall of pure belief, but we don't like the shouting matches and the purely irrational.

So we have a natural disadvantage when it comes to dealing with the GOP. The GOP loves a fight. In Minnesota they lost a tight election to Senator Al Franken in 2008 and they fought like rabid wolverines in a leg trap. This week they lost to Governor Dayton and they swear they'll scream ten times as hard.

We can't fight like that, but we can't give up either. We don't have to scream, but we have to fight.

Staying home is not an option. We have to be the parent, but not the pushover.

Like Mondale.

That's how progress happens.

The Health Savings Account preventive visit scam

I got stung this time. I was a mark.

Darn it.

My excuse is that this scam was a subtle one. I'd classify it as an occult emergent fraud. It's the third one I've met from Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield; health insurance is a breeding ground for these things.

The trick starts with making a "preventive care" or "routine physical" visit a "free" part of a health savings account insurance plan. These are commonly included in HSA plans ...

... A recent industry survey found that in July 2007 over 80% of HSA plans provided first-dollar coverage for preventive care. This was true of virtually all HSA plans offered by large employers and over 95% of the plans offered by small employers. It was also true of over half (59%) of the plans which were purchased by individuals. All of the plans offered first-dollar preventive care benefits included annual physicals, immunizations, well-baby and well-child care, mammograms and Pap tests; 90% included prostate cancer screenings and 80% included colon cancer screenings ...

At first, and even second, glance this looks like a nice benefit. After all, HSAs are all about having individuals feel the true cost of care, so we will inevitably reduce our use of preventive services. Making those "free" seems to make a care plan less harmful.

The catch is, as I recently discovered, is that it can be quite tricky for an adult to get this benefit. The responsible physician has to choose to bill a care episode as "preventive". These visits, however, pay poorly -- they're only cost effective if they can be done very quickly. A physician, meanwhile, is legally and ethically responsible for overall patient health. Any adult over thirty, and many younger, has health problems that can, at the least, be reviewed to confirm all is well enough.

So the physician is biased to doing at least a moderate amount of work, which makes the preventive care payment uneconomical. So these visits will usually be charged as something other than preventive care, which means they come from the general HSA pool -- not the free preventive care visit. (Immunizations and such will be covered, but not the physician fee.)

This should be possible to study. What percentage of adult males, we could ask, actually manage to get their visits billed as preventive care services?

In my particular case I was steamed about being charged a Level III fee when I had worked quite hard to get my "free" preventive care visit -- including confirming with Anthem that it would be covered. I even complained about it to the physician's billing office. It was only when I worked out the angles that I realized I'd been stung, and that I just needed to shut up and pay up. It wasn't my physicians fault, or the fault of their billing office. It was just the way the system works.

I doubt anyone planned this out. It's just a happy coincidence that an expensive (to Anthem) benefit ends up not being used. The emergent fraud aspect is that once an unintended scam like this emerges, nobody will work very hard to fix it.

See also:

• Verizon scam: Emergent fraud earns a fine
• Emergence: how entropy and incentives create scams
• Emergent fraud: Anthem and automatic payment denials
• Memphis mortgages, complexity attacks and long term consequences
• Anthem - Putting the Hell in Health Insurance
• Causes of the crash of '08 - how much fraud?

Update 11/7/10: The "13 month preventive medicine" visit is a variant of this scam. Marketing and legislative presentations will claim a yearly physical is part of a plan. This does not, however, mean that one can schedule a covered preventive medicine visit on Nov 1 and March 3rd. In practice a "year" means "no less than 365 days apart". Many people fall prey to this trick.

Midterms 2010

So far I've found three things that seem novel about the American 2010 midterm elections.

The first is that the federal results were unsurprising. In the blog age any interested person has access to the analytic work once limited to a few newspapers or to major political campaigns. We knew what would happen, and it happened. This is different.

The second is that the results, at first glance, seem to be very much to the taste of the Corporate Entity (CE). I have more to say about this. The CE should not be confused with shareholders, the board, or the CEO. The CE interacts with our material universe, but it's not made of atoms.

The third is that candidates identified as crazy by the national media lost. That's interesting.

Looking for glimmers

About as bad as expected nationally, worse than expected in my home state of Minnesota.

Two glimmers of hope:

1. The average voter has a 3 month memory. In 2012 there is now a chance that they'll remember the GOP.
2. In Minnesota the GOP will have to balance the state budget. This will be a disaster for special needs education, but they'll have to make some very hard choices that they would prefer to avoid.

Any other glimmers?

A NYT job interview and capitalism 2010

Emily told me of a lightweight NYT piece on job searching describing the clever and industrious things a young man did to land a job in a competitive marketplace. She was appalled by the implications -- the job market for bright young men is lousy.

Emily missed the darker subtext though.

The job is in search engine optimization (SEO).

Few non-geeks know what SEO is. SEO is about fighting a war with Google. Google wants to give us answers to our questions, SEO wants us to read marketing material. SEO geeks make their living exploiting flaws in Google's search algorithms.

SEO is about making my life worse. It's not unique. A vast amount of American intellect, from Wall Street to SEO, is not delivering value. It is engaged in making all of our lives worse.

We are pouring our water into the sand.

Apple's share price, market movers, and the latest market bubble

Two fragments that I like to consider together. One is an anonymous comment on an Irish Economy blog called out by Paul Krugman ...

What markets want ...

... The markets want money for cocaine and prostitutes. I am deadly serious.

Most people don’t realize that “the markets” are in reality 22-27 year old business school graduates, furiously concocting chaotic trading strategies on excel sheets and reporting to bosses perhaps 5 years senior to them. In addition, they generally possess the mentality and probably intelligence of junior cycle secondary school students. Without knowledge of these basic facts, nothing about the markets makes any sense—and with knowledge, everything does.

What the markets, bond and speculators, etc, want right now is for Ireland to give them a feel good feeling, nothing more. A single sharp, sweeping budget would do that; a four year budget plan will not. Remember that most of these guys won’t actually still be trading in four years. They’ll either have retired or will have been promoted to a position where they don’t care about Ireland anymore. Anyone that does will be a major speculator looking to short the country for massive profit.

In lieu of a proper budget, what the country can do—and what will work—is bribe senior ratings agencies owners and officials to give the country a better rating. Even a few millions spent on bumping up Ireland’s rating would save millions and possibly save the country.

Bread and circuses for the masses; cocaine and prostitutes for the markets. This can be looked on a unethical obviously, but since the entire system is unethical, unprincipled and chaotic anyway, why not just exploit that fact to do some good for the nation instead of bankrupting it in an effort to buy new BMWs for unmarried 25 year olds...

The second fragment comes from an analyst ...

asymco | Apple trading even with the S&P 500

if you had invested $100 in the S&P 500 in September 2005, you would have $103 now. If you invested $100 in Apple in September 2005, you would have $529 now....

... Although Apple received a premium valuation to the S&P prior to October 2008, it has traded at a discount or in-line with the S&P since then...

Another way of putting it is that the P/E ratio for large companies has returned to pre-recession levels. The P/E ratio for Apple has not...

However, in terms of reward for earnings ... For much of 2009 and early 2010, Apple was considered to have a far less promising future than the average large American company...

Asymco makes a persuasive case. Apple is valued as though it were a quite mediocre company.

Now consider this.

No publicly traded company in history is as studied and dissected as Apple. It is analyzed from a thousand directions. The "market", in the case of Apple, is not made up of "junior cycle secondary school students".

On the other hand, the share price of most companies, as best I can see, bear little resemblance to value delivered. I can believe those prices are largely determined by the hormones of young traders.

So perhaps it is misleading to say that Apple is undervalued compared to the average publicly traded company. It may be more enlightening to say that the average publicly traded company is now grossly overvalued. Apple is fairly priced.

Bubble.

Greg Bear: City at the End of Time - A review

I gave Greg Bear's City at the End of Time three stars; five for ambition, two for execution...

Amazon.com: John Faughnan "John G...'s review of City at the End of Time

Bear aimed high with this one. Very high.

It's something between science fiction, magical realism, and hard fantasy. I think it's primarily science fiction; an abstract description of a reality and technology vastly beyond human compression.

It's dark, like much of modern science fiction it shows the influence of horror and zombie. It's densely written, with eloquent phrases and language that sometimes works and other times struggles.

I was never captivated by any of the characters. It was a relatively easy book to put down, but I pushed through to the end out of admiration for Bear's ambition. If you want to stretch a bit, and need a dense book you can put down when its time for sleep, this one has a heart.

I do respect the ambition. Death, creation, murderous struggle, the root of all evil and the wellspring of young love and the nature of reality transposed to a human perspective -- that's extreme ambition! The execution could have done with fewer zombies.

It's not just Bear. There are far too many zombies in the science fiction of the past five years. Give it up guys, it's time to move on.

Words we need to add to English

In a list of novel words from around the world, I found six we should add to English, and three in bold I have added to a list of words I practice ...

Language Log » Translating the untranslatable

• tartle (Scots): hestitate while introducing someone because you forgot their name
• Torschlusspanik (German): gate-closing panic as age begins to close off opportunities
• wabi-sabi (Japanese): way of living that peacefully accepts the natural cycle of growth and decay
• dépaysement (French): the feeling of not being in one's own country
• tingo (Pascuense): obtain desired objects from a friend by borrowing them one by one
• l'appel du vide (French): that "call of the void" that makes you feel you want to jump when you look down from somewhere up high

Is Quebec why Minnesotans drive on the right side of the road?

It finally occurred to me to wonder why Americans, and especially Canadians, drive on the Continental (right) side of the road instead of the UK/Commonwealth standard. I believe the UK practice was well established in the 18th century, so the US should have followed that convention. Canada was an English possession until 1867, so the Canadian deviance is even more puzzling. (When Newfoundland left the UK for Canada in 1945 they had to change driving habits.)

This article came up early, but is a bit vague ..

Drivers.com: Driving on the wrong side

Today, most of the countries that adhere to left side driving are those that came under the influence of British rule during the 19th Century. It would seem likely then that the USA, having been once a British colony, would have retained the driving on the left rule. However, in his book The Rule of the Road: An International Guide to History and Practice (now out of print), author Peter Kincaid states that he could find no evidence that left side driving was ever widespread in the USA. He attributes this to the influence of European settlers used to driving on the right, and also the fact that vehicles such as carts and the postillion-controlled Conestoga Wagons were popular in the colony and favored right-side driving. However, there may have been some parts of the country that did adhere to left side rules for a time.

In Canada, the evidence is that Ontario and Quebec, which started out under French influence, always had right side driving. Other areas such as British Columbia and the Atlantic provinces, remained staunchly English in their influence and drove on the left. They switched to the right in the 1920s to conform with the rest of Canada and the USA."

There's a bit more here ...

Why do some countries drive on the right and others on the left ?

... In addition, the French Revolution of 1789 gave a huge impetus to right-hand travel in Europe. The fact is, before the Revolution, the aristocracy travelled on the left of the road, forcing the peasantry over to the right, but after the storming of the Bastille and the subsequent events, aristocrats preferred to keep a low profile and joined the peasants on the right. An official keep-right rule was introduced in Paris in 1794, more or less parallel to Denmark, where driving on the right had been made compulsory in 1793.

Later, Napoleon's conquests spread the new rightism to the Low Countries (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg), Switzerland, Germany, Poland, Russia and many parts of Spain and Italy. The states that had resisted Napoleon kept left – Britain, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Portugal. ...

... In the early years of English colonisation of North America, English driving customs were followed and the colonies drove on the left. After gaining independence from England, however, they were anxious to cast off all remaining links with their British colonial past and gradually changed to right-hand driving. (Incidentally, the influence of other European countries’ nationals should not be underestimated.) The first law requiring drivers to keep right was passed in Pennsylvania in 1792, and similar laws were passed in New York in 1804 and New Jersey in 1813.

Despite the developments in the US, some parts of Canada continued to drive on the left until shortly after the Second World War. The territory controlled by the French (from Quebec to Louisiana) drove on the right, but the territory occupied by the English (British Columbia, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland) kept left. British Columbia and the Atlantic provinces switched to the right in the 1920s in order to conform with the rest of Canada and the USA. Newfoundland drove on the left until 1947, and joined Canada in 1949.

I wonder if this understates the influence of Quebec and Louisiana on the adaptation of right hand driving in North America. Quebec was very dominant along the river routes of (future) American and the northeast region through the 17th and early 18th centuries, and Louisiana would have had a similar influence from the south.

Any Quebecois historians out there?

Lessons from the Cloud: Nobody loves your data like you do

There's a lesson here worth sharing  in this personal story (revised from original post to correct and clarify) ...

I now have about 5000 posts without paragraphs - Blogger Help

... I have about 8,000 posts in 2-3 "blogger" managed blogs going back to 2001.

As of today thousands of them no longer have paragraphs. Google did something that changed the way their software recognizes paragraphs. Perhaps it was a side-effect of using one of Google's newer templates. (For example.)

These posts are rather difficult to read. There are far too many for me to repair.

This is the most impressive episode of content destruction I have ever encountered. I've lost many hard drives over the years, but I was always able to restore from backup.

I can't fix this...

Coincidentally, Apple did something similar to their loyal customers this week. An update to iPhoto destroyed many customers entire photo libraries.

Although Apple's sin is even greater than Google's, there's an important difference that we all need to remember.

I can manage Apple. I don't use their software until months after a release; Apple uses early adopters as beta testers. I also use a very robust (but still imperfect) backup strategy. If Apple trashes my data I can restore it.

I can't manage Google. I don't have control over my Cloud data.

Sure, there's probably somebody at the increasingly troubled land of Google who feels badly about trashing my posts. I can guarantee though, that they don't feel as badly about as I do.

That's the problem with Cloud data, and it was a problem with the "ASP" market too (application service provider, which is what we used to call "Cloud services" before that market went pear shaped).

Nobody cares about my data as much as I do.

The problem with the Cloud isn't a technical problem, it's a social problem. If Google had to pay a billion dollars every time they mangled data, they'd really care. As it is now, they only sort of care.

My blogs are the my only serious investment in the "Cloud" data -- and that investment has gone sour.

Don't trust your data to people who don't care for it the way you do.

Rally for Sanity - and The Enemy Within

The Rally to Restore Sanity was today. It went well. Emily and I would love to have attended, but most sane people our age are pretty rooted. It's no accident many of the "6 billion" attendees were around retirement age.

The theme of the Rally reminded me of one of Shatner/Kirk's better Star Trek moments -- as the divided Kirk of The Enemy Within in the fifth episode of the first(!) season. The ever unreliable transporter splits the Captain into a sane Kirk, and a sociopath Kirk.

The sane Kirk is clearly the better half, but he's not an effective leader. Like any modern CEO, he needs his inner sociopathy. When the two Kirks are reunited the Captain returns.

America needs all of its components, including some version of the GOP.

My life with Amazon

Amazon's Improve Your Recommendations list is a chronological record of purchases. The oldest item on my list of about 560 items is a book on Java and Corba (!) published in 1997 [1].

Amazon went only in 1995 and I believe I bought some books from them in 1995 or early 1996 -- so the list isn't complete. It's close though.

When I started the list we had 1 dog and no children; I worked in the early days of a startup company (Abaton.com - the domain has lapsed). Today we have 3 children, 1 (different) dog, and a fish. I work in a large publicly traded company.

Browsing the list is a strange window into the past 13 years. There were some surprises -- I bought too many (non-fiction) books I never read. I'm better about that now.

What's your list like?

[1] Oddly, there are three prior items listed that I'm reasonably sure we didn't order. You can skip the end of your list by editing the URL.