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 Thursday, November 14, 2002
WSJ. Computer use is driving productivity growth. However, it only works if a companies use of computers is tied to sound strategy (obviously).
Here is an interesting stat from the article:
U.S. productivity zoomed by 2.75% a year in the quarter-century after World War II, creating the modern American middle class. Around 1973, productivity growth slowed mysteriously to 1.5%, and showed no signs of revival despite the spread of computers until 1995. Since then, productivity has grown by more than 2.5% a year. This is big. Adding just two-tenths of a percentage point to productivity growth over a decade works out to an extra $1,000 in income for each man, woman and child.
Obviously, we didn't see anything close to this growth in incomes since 1995. Where did it go? Into the pockets of CEOs like Ken Lay, Bernie Ebbers, and others is one answer. It has also been siphoned off by corporations and Wall Street. Imagine the improvement in personal incomes if American families got the full benefit of productivity improvements.
This chart shows the increasing gap between productivity and income (note, this chart depicts median income which factors out the incomes of super-rich families):
[John Robb's Radio Weblog]
Wow, this is a tremendous graphic.Increased productivity should have a direct effect on family income. This is usually a given. The money all went to the guys at the top instead of the middle class. This is pretty much what happened during the early years of the Industrial Revolution. There were huge increases in productivity but the money went to the Carnegies, the Rockefellers and other trusts. The only tools the working classes had were unions. They spent 40-50 years trying to work a balance with management that moved more of this money to the workers and away from the capitalists. I feel that this balance was reached best following WWII, say from the early 60s to the 90s, thirty years of relative balance, at least compared to the previous 50. Now we are seeing the same pattern seen 100 years ago. What will be the response? Will another generation or two have to pass before more a equitible relationship reoccurs between productivity and median income? 11:58:28 PM 
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Safire on Poindexter's Panopticon. WASHINGTON [~] If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you:
Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend [~] all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database."
To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you [~] passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance [~] and you have the supersnoop's dream: a "Total Information Awareness" about every U.S. citizen.
This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks.
Remember Poindexter? Brilliant man, first in his class at the Naval Academy, later earned a doctorate in physics, rose to national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan. He had this brilliant idea of secretly selling missiles to Iran to pay ransom for hostages, and with the illicit proceeds to illegally support contras in Nicaragua.
A jury convicted Poindexter in 1990 on five felony counts of misleading Congress and making false statements, but an appeals court overturned the verdict because Congress had given him immunity for his testimony. He famously asserted, "The buck stops here," arguing that the White House staff, and not the president, was responsible for fateful decisions that might prove embarrassing.
This ring-knocking master of deceit is back again with a plan even more scandalous than Iran-contra. He heads the "Information Awareness Office" in the otherwise excellent Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which spawned the Internet and stealth aircraft technology. Poindexter is now realizing his 20-year dream: getting the "data-mining" power to snoop on every public and private act of every American. [Smart Mobs]
The ability for an unelected government official to be able to 'dial-up' this data on any American citizen will be too great a temptation. It may start with good intentions but you know that it will be misused at some point. It is just too tempting. And what sort of idiot thinks that John Poindexter is a good choice. Couldn't they find ANYONE who was not already tarred with the Iran-Contra affair? Are we going to see Ollie North get a job in Homeland Security? I would not trust Poindexter to watch my car, yet we are going to let him have access to information that would have made J. Edgar Hoover sell his mother for! I would go for this if I could also access the data and find out everything about him. David Brin wrote a book, that I will now HAVE to read, called The Transparent Society. In it he examines the fact that technology will soon make it extremely easy to spy on ANYONE, that privacy will not exist. If this tools only remain in the hands of the powers, then we all become serfs, with little authority ourselves. But, if these tools are cheap enough to be available to anyone, then the tables become turned. ANY corrupt government MUST act in secrecy to reach its dastardly aims. If anyone can see what they are doing, it makes it a lot harder to do them. Maybe technology will take recreate the times when everyone lived in small groups and knew what everyone else was doing. Such transparency may be the only hope we have. Of course, the powers will NEVER want this to happen, so we may have quite a few battles ahead. But secrecy was something the Founders hated. They tried to make our government as transparent as possible. Maybe we will just have to complete the process.(Some more reading) 11:43:23 PM
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Safire on Poindexter's Panopticon. WASHINGTON [~] If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you:
Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend [~] all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database."
To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you [~] passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance [~] and you have the supersnoop's dream: a "Total Information Awareness" about every U.S. citizen.
This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks.
Remember Poindexter? Brilliant man, first in his class at the Naval Academy, later earned a doctorate in physics, rose to national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan. He had this brilliant idea of secretly selling missiles to Iran to pay ransom for hostages, and with the illicit proceeds to illegally support contras in Nicaragua.
A jury convicted Poindexter in 1990 on five felony counts of misleading Congress and making false statements, but an appeals court overturned the verdict because Congress had given him immunity for his testimony. He famously asserted, "The buck stops here," arguing that the White House staff, and not the president, was responsible for fateful decisions that might prove embarrassing.
This ring-knocking master of deceit is back again with a plan even more scandalous than Iran-contra. He heads the "Information Awareness Office" in the otherwise excellent Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which spawned the Internet and stealth aircraft technology. Poindexter is now realizing his 20-year dream: getting the "data-mining" power to snoop on every public and private act of every American. [Smart Mobs]
The ability for an unelected government official to be able to 'dial-up' this data on any American citizen will be too great a temptation. It may start with good intentions but you know that it will be misused at some point. It is just too tempting. And what sort of idiot thinks that John Poindexter is a good choice. Couldn't they find ANYONE who was not already tarred with the Iran-Contra affair? Are we going to see Ollie North get a job in Homeland Security? I would not trust Poindexter to watch my car, yet we are going to let him have access to information that would have made J. Edgar Hoover sell his mother for! I would go for this if I could also access the data and find out everything about him. David Brin wrote a book, that I will now HAVE to read, called The Transparent Society. In it he examines the fact that technology will soon make it extremely easy to spy on ANYONE, that privacy will not exist. If this tools only remain in the hands of the powers, then we all become serfs, with little authority ourselves. But, if these tools are cheap enough to be available to anyone, then the tables become turned. ANY corrupt government MUST act in secrecy to reach its dastardly aims. If anyone can see what they are doing, it makes it a lot harder to do them. Maybe technology will take recreate the times when everyone lived in small groups and knew what everyone else was doing. Such transparency may be the only hope we have. Of course, the powers will NEVER want this to happen, so we may have quite a few battles ahead. But secrecy was something the Founders hated. They tried to make our government as transparent as possible. Maybe we will just have to complete the process. 11:43:07 PM
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DAVE TROWBRIDGE WONDERS if Osama bin Laden has pulled a Hari Seldon: What if bin Laden recorded a series of "gloats" about various operations (... [InstaPundit.Com]
For some reason, Asimov's Foundation has been on my mind also when I think about current events. This article describing possible links between Asimov, 'Foundation' and Osama is also provocative. I feel more like 'Foundation and Empire' when Seldon's messages to his followers started diverging dramatically from events that were transpiring. Maybe what resonates in this story is that Asimov describes a time of transition, when the Empire is dying because it was unable to effectively change, to adopt the much more adaptive culture that the first Foundation did. The Empire had a huge bureauocracy that made it very slow to adapt to changing circumstances. The First Foundation was able to bring very creative people into positions of power and was able to move quickly to protect itself and stave off the Darkness. I would be very, very surprised that Osama followed much science fiction. In cases like Dune and Foundation, it is a reactionary government that is overthrown through the actions of a very adaptive culture, one that is, at the end, forward-looking, not backward-looking. I would thin that most science fiction would be unlikely to appeal to a fundamentalist. Unthinking followers of religious sects do not get much sympathy in the vast majority of science fiction. I'm sure my mom will have a comment. 11:23:41 PM
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Scientists Discover Ancient Protein And DNA Sequences In The Same Fossil. Science Daily - For the first time in the world, researchers at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, along with collaborators at the University of Oxford, Harvard University, and Michigan State University have uncovered two genetically informative molecules from a ...
Protein found in fossil opens scientific door The Globe and Mail
Ancient bison bones give up secrets Guardian
ICNewcastle - New Scientist - and 8 related » [Google Technology News]
This could be a very significant find but I have to be a little sceptical until I read more. According to the article, they got the complete sequence of a protein found in bone. This means that every amino acid was also intact, because they used a technique, mass spectroscopy, that determines the molecular weight of every amino acid present in the protein. But several amino acids, such as glutamic acid, are very labile and degrade quite rapidly at high temperatures. For this amino acid to remain intact for over 55,000 years is really surprising and requires some more supporting work. If they had found the bone protein with altered glutamics, I would be a lot less sceptical. 11:11:00 PM
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In the November 13 Federal Computer Week, William .... In the November 13 Federal Computer Week, William Matthews assesses the impact of killing PubScience and reports that the lobbyists who killed it are targeting other government-funded FOS, including one database in law and one in agriculture, both unnamed. The lobbying campaign is led by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), a trade association of commercial electronic publishers.
SIIA spokesman David LeDuc said, "We have no intention of going after PubMed." But it's not clear why. According to LeDuc, as paraphrased by Matthews, "it is fairer to charge researchers for the articles they use than to charge taxpayers for the cost of running a Web site that makes them available for free." (PS: Let's get this breathtaking assertion straight. When the research is funded by the government and the articles donated by authors, then taxpaying readers should have to pay a second levy to read them, and pay it to a third party with no role in the research? The cost of a running a government web site is a greater burden on taxpayers than the cost of paying profiteers standing between authors and readers?)
Le Duc says that SIIA picked out PubScience because some SIIA member organizations didn't appreciate the competition. To be charitable, we can assume that many SIIA member organizations deplored this attack on the public interest. Scan the list of companies that are members of SIIA. You probably use software from at least one. Let these companies know what you think of what the SIIA is doing in their name and whether you want your dollars to support this kind of piracy from the public. [FOS News]
This will be a sign of the coming battle -taking a free database that is available to everyone in the world and make it a way for a third party to make money by simply providing access. The battle will be between old style approaches that create value by making information scarce and new style approaches that recognize the importance of easy access to information for the creation of novel ideas. Groups that follow the latter will always be able to move faster and make better decisions than the former. In a rapidly changing world, this will be critical for survival. 4:11:22 PM
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In the November issue of First Monday, John Willi .... In the November issue of First Monday, John Willinsky has an important article on Copyright Contradictions in Scholarly Publishing. He looks closely at the copyright implications of commercial and open-access publishing. "I have been struck in exploring the case for open access by how the very principles of copyright law, oddly enough, appear to be on its side....With the emergence of a new publishing medium, enterprising researchers and others have introduced a second economic model - open access - into scholarly publishers. This model invites and supports a wider readership, on a far more global basis, and is far more in accord with the copyright interests of researchers and those who would back such scholarly and scientific activities." [FOS News]
Some very good ideas about publishing in the future. 3:56:05 PM
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Knowledge workers hold key to survival. ZDNet Nov 5 2002 2:39PM ET [Moreover - moreover...]
The idea that fast followers are inportant, that you do need to be at the bleeding edge has been said before. But here they make a great point - things are changing so fast that fast followers have to decide much more rapidly what they will do than ever before. If you chose wrong, capital will move that chose correctly. 3:51:29 PM
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