World's biggest outsourcing since the fall of Soviet Russia..

Bush administration to outsource half the federal government. The White House's Office of Management and Budget Circular No. A-76 (Revised), will be published on Friday in the Federal Register. This will open 850,000 federal government jobs to private sector competition. This means firing half the federal workforce. This includes all government work deemed a "commercial activity," from secretarial duties to building and grounds maintenance. the full story...

[diJEST: a journal of extrapreneurial strategy and technology]

I'll have to check but as I recall, the creation of the Homeland Security Dept. was held up because of the need to remove its employees from civil service regulations. One of the worries Dems had was that this was a first step to privatizing all government employees. Looks like they were right. So, now we are supposed to let the same guys who brought us Enron, Global Crossings, etc. run the government through private employees. And, none of these CEOs are elected, so we can't do anything about them. Nice.  10:32:52 PM    

Airport screeners go unpaid. Boston Globe - Hundreds of new federal airport security screeners hailed as front-line defenders in the war on terrorism are working without pay because of logistical glitches, government ...
Problems Remain In US Computer Security Information Week
Agencies Fail Cyber Test Washington Post
Baltimore Sun - Detroit News - WKYT - Help Net Security - and 51 related » [Google Technology News]

Great. We are being protected by people who are afraid their cars are going to get repossessed because they are not getting paid. Not all of them but who knows which ones. These are the government employees that WILL NOT be privatized. We just won't pay them . I loved this from the article:

AFGE [American Federation of Government Employees], which represents 650,000 federal workers, could add as many as 50,000 more dues-paying members if the organizing drive succeeds.

9:31:29 PM    

Lovely Law in Texas

9:24:17 PM    

Microsoft: Peer-to-Peer beats Digital Rights Management any day.

MS Researchers say P2P will always beat DRM. According to The Register (File swap nets will win, DRM and lawyers lose, say MS researchers), a paper from a group of Microsoft researchers says that "darknet" file swapping will always be able to share pirated files, no matter what DRM technology copyright holders use. The paper goes through the various options like watermarking and explains why they all will fail. This true even for DRM built into the hardware. The paper concludes that the only way for corporations to compete is to make their services more convenient and full-featured. We have known this all along, but it is pretty amazing to hear some Microsoft people say it. This paper is just the thing to refer to when the next congressional bill comes up to make DRM manditory, just explain to them that even MS says it won't work. [infoAnarchy]

Which reminds me of that great Gene Kan quote, "The only way to make music that cannot be copied is to make music that cannot be heard. The only way to make movies that cannot be copied is to make movies that cannot be viewed."

[Seb's Open Research]

This is really bizarre since one of the big things MS tries to use to sell its software to the Content Cartel is its DRM technology. That is why the Mac is not able to access some of the recorded material available from the Content Cartel. Will MS disavow this approach now? Will it say this was a mistake? This sounds like something got out that MS will not be really happy with. If it was on purpose, what is the ulterior motive? BG or Ballmer almost never do anything unless it will make MS billions or further secure its monoploy.  8:31:12 PM    

Wil Weston, Access to Scientific Literature, Natur .... Wil Weston, Access to Scientific Literature, Nature, 420, 19 (November 7, 2002). Accessible only to paying subscribers. Here's the summary written by Margaret Gross for Current Cites: "Wil Weston, a librarian at the University of New Orleans, Earl K. Long Library, reinforces what all librarians already know. The internet is no substitute for libraries, and concomitantly, the guidance to research that librarians provide. Presently only 8% of journals and scarcely a fraction of books are accessible via the World Wide Web. Not only are search engines selective as to what to include, but also are biased. Search engines promote those sites which pay a listing fee, thereby ensuring these display early and prominently in retrieved site listings. This would be analogous to librarians offering their clients primarily those books for which publishers had paid a fee for precedence ranking. While this article doesn't present anything new for librarians, it is nevertheless a concise recap for non-librarians about the state of web research, and the qualitative advantage offered by libraries. Interesting citations included are: Lebedev, Alexander Moscow State University, Best search engines for finding scientific information in the Web, Version: August 9, 1996, and Lawrence, Steve, Online or Invisible."

(PS: I haven't read the full text. But is it possible that Weston compares the strengths of a good library to the strengths of the lowest form of searching on the web? Does he mention OAI-compliant cross-archive search engines or even Google?) [FOS News]

Well, in my field (biology/biotechnology), I would estimate that >90% of the journals are on-line and 100% of the important one. Highwire Press is responsible for much of this. PubMed, which is free (for the moment. see artcles on PubScience), permits very complex serachs of all the literature but alsp permits searching by proteins, DNA sequences, etc. You can even link to many of the on-line articles. All the Highwire press journals are connected, so that if one article references another article in the database, it is 'live' in the on-line article. If the article you are reading is referenced by another, more recent article, you are given that link. This is something that can not be done with paper journals. Many people used PubMed rather than Ovid because of these sorts of links. The important role for a librarian is helping devise an appropriate search routine. Highwire is also involved in the push for opening access to any scientific paper after a period of time has passed, say 6 months. This is in stark contrast to the commercial publishers, who still try to restrict access to make a profit. Open publishing will happen in science because it will be driven by different scientific associations whose memberships will fund this. The membership does not care about a profit. They want the esteem that comes from easy access to the work they produce. Open publishing will return the compyright to the authors. (In contrast to most publishers today who retain copyright for themselves as a condition for publication).   8:24:47 PM    

Time pressure vs creativity. Teresa Amabile: our research suggests that managers should try to avoid or reduce the "obstacles to creativity" (time pressure and organizational impediments like political problems, harsh criticism of new ideas, and emphasis on the status quo) and enhance the "stimulants to creativity" (freedom, positive challenge in the work); sufficient resources (work-group supports, putting together diversely skilled teams that communicate well, are mutually committed to the work, and constructively discuss ideas); supervisory encouragement (team leaders who communicate effectively with the group, value individual contributions, protect the group within the organization, set clear goals while allowing freedom in meeting the goals, and serve as good work models); and organizational encouragement (like conversations about ideas across the organization, and a top management focus on rewarding and recognizing good creative work).

She indicates being surprised that while our participants were giving evidence of less creative thinking on time-pressured days, they reported feeling more creative on those days. [via Tesugen] [Jinn of Quality and Risk]

I think you need a little time pressure since constrints tend to help focus things. Time pressure is the easiest way to apply constraints. You just need to keep it from overwhelming the creativity.  1:34:55 PM    

Incentives, wrong direction. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and several other firms paid $1.6 m each for failing to keep e-mails as was required by regulation. In contrast, Merrill Lynch was hit with a $100 m settlement to atone for wrongdoing evidenced in e-mails that it kept. [WSJ via John Robb's Radio Weblog] [Jinn of Quality and Risk]

I am sure that many companies are keeping track of this. The apparent fiduciary duty for the business officers then is to delete all your emails. It will be a lot cheaper. This is one of those lessons from things like Iran-Contra. You will never get in as much trouble AFTER you shred everything than if they happen to find something incriminating.  1:23:26 PM