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A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog
 Saturday, October 12, 2002
Irrational Pessimism?. The Economist scolds the world's investors for suffering from irrational pessimism: Economist.com: SOME six years ago, Alan Greenspan, the chairman of America[base ']s Federal Reserve, accused investors of [base "]irrational exuberance[per thou] in propelling the stockmarket to unjustified heights. Now the same investors are asking whether the same markets are suffering from irrational gloom. While investors have plenty to be glum about[~]insipid company profits, slowing economic growth, a rising risk of defaults among bonds and loans, and even the prospect of war[~]it has... [Semi-Daily Journal]
We still have some ways to go before the market is fairly priced by historical measures. Through a war in and it might go urther. 7:29:55 PM 
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Failures of Our Educational System. Every time I run across a passage like: A virtual fence goes up around schools in Zambia when an education "user fee" is introduced on the advice of the World Bank, putting classes out of the reach of millions of people. A fence goes up around the family farm in Canada when government policies turn small-scale agriculture into a luxury item, unaffordable in a landscape of tumbling commodity prices and factory farms.... And there is a fence that goes up... [Semi-Daily Journal]
Too many people only look at a single aspect of a problem. In this article, Delong raises some excellent points about some of the starry-eyed kind of person who writes about virtual fences. 7:22:39 PM
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Explosion in Finland: 7 Dead. Explosion in Finland: 7 Dead
From Yahoo News via Google News:
A bomb ripped through a one of Finland's largest shopping malls, killing seven people, injuring 59 others and stunning a nation unaccustomed to violence. Government officials didn't rule ...
[ More ]
Good lord. What's going on in the world. Snipers in the U.S. and a bomber in Finland .... [The FuzzyBlog!]
I think the world will get more violent before we find more peace. This is really sad. I hope it is just a random nut and not a terror cell. 6:23:55 PM
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Macauley v. Bono. Peter Kaminski points us to a brilliant speech given by Thomas Macauley in 1841 to Parliament as the question of copyright was being addressed. It's 10,000 words, but it is witty, thorough, deep and pithy. Man, that Macauley guy could really write good! [JOHO the Blog]
Things just do not change. Many of the same points that megacorporations are bringing up were discussed 160 years ago. I wonder if we will leanr anything from this but it makes great reading. 6:20:04 PM
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NY Times Backs Eldred vs Ashcroft. Four years ago, after vigorous lobbying by media corporations, Congress
extended copyrights on everything from "Mickey Mouse" to "The Sun Also
Rises" by 20 years. This was a bad idea. It restricts the public's access
to vast numbers of works and limits the ways contemporary artists and
writers can borrow from them.
The Constitution's drafters considered copyright important enough to the
promotion of art and science that they protected it with its own
provision. A coalition of Internet publishers and others interested in
defending the public domain argued in the Supreme Court this week that
Congress's latest copyright extension went further than the Constitution's
language permits and also failed to achieve the founders' goal of
promoting art and science. They are right, and the court should hold the
law to be unconstitutional. [Smart Mobs]
An important case. The Court may not be on the right side of history with this case but they will eventually. I just hope it is not 50 years on. A limted time means a limited time, not 125-150 years. I just do not understand why the third generation after a creative person copyrights their material should still be living off of the residuals? 6:10:38 PM
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Friday, October 11, 2002
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Okay, it is after 11 PM so I guess I am into political mode. In Desert Storm/Shield we had over 700,000 troops that participated, with 500,000 or so ready to engage the enemy. We may not send as many over this time but it will be a substantial effort. Now, it is pretty hard to send suicide bombers to the US, at least the sort that we see in Israel and Palestine. The 9/11 terrorists were a pretty well-educated lot, spending years planning (and keeping it secret), learning to fly planes, etc. It takes a special kind of fanatic to do all of this, to delay his terror for so long. In the Mid-East, there is little delay. The suicide bombers have generally come from poor, disaffected, relatively uneducated youth. The ones who feel they have nothing to live for. It does not take a lot of brains to strap on some explosives and walk into a shopping mall. Even then, they often blow themselves up without taking anyone with them. There are a LOT of them, though, more than enough to send plenty.
If we send troops over there, what are the security measures really going to be to protect them? We have already seen a soldier killed and others shot at. This will occur in supposedly 'safe' countries like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. We will place a lot of our citizens in very dangerous territory, even before the fighting begins. In fact, Iraq might be a lot safer on the ground than being stationed in Saudi Arabia. For, while it might be very tough to get some of the elite terrorists into the US, they are all over the place in the Mid East. We are making it a lot easier for them to get to our citizens. What will be our response when the soldiers are killed over there while they are just waiting to attack Saddam? Is this what Osama really wanted? Did he think: 'It is really difficult and costly to train terrorists for several years and to get them halfway across the world to America. What if I could get the Americans to come to us?' One of the main tenets of Osama's line of rhetoric is that the land of Mecca (Saudi Arabia) was desecrated by stationing foreign soldiers there during Desert Storm. How will this play with his fanatics if we do it again?
So, what to do? Hey, I'm just a middle-aged scientist. I would hope that the finest military minds in the world are trying to figure this out. But, as 9/11 showed, you can get hit really hard in your blind spots. I just hope that we have people who have really thought this out. Because it seems that at the moment some in the military has not really figured out just how they want to fight this thing. They have huge blind spots. Because in the real war, you can not cheat.
More on this topic from the Army Times article entitled War Games Rigged? Now, this was an experimental sort of war game trying to test new technologies. All well and good, but the Red team, representing the 'Persian Power', seemed to keep winning. This was supposed to be a free play exercise, where the Red team had a chance to win. And they did, using relatively low tech approaches to winning. They used motorcycle messengers to give orders, negating the Blue team's high powered eavesdropping tech. Listen to this description of a Red victory
...when the Blue fleet sailed into the Persian Gulf early in the experiment, Van Riper's forces surrounded the ships with small boats and planes sailing and flying in apparently innocuous circles. When the Blue commander issued an ultimatum to Red to surrender or face destruction, Van Riper took the initiative, issuing attack orders via the morning call to prayer broadcast from the minarets of his country's mosques. His force[base ']s small boats and aircraft sped into action By that time there wasn't enough time left to intercept them,' Oakley said. As a result of Van Riper's cunning, much of the Blue navy ended up at the bottom of the ocean. The Joint Forces Command officials had to stop the exercise and 'refloat' the fleet in order to continue, Oakley said.
I wish it was as easy to refloat ships in real life. Retired General Paul van Riper was the leader of the Red team. His creative thinking overmatched the superior technology of our side, the Blue team. He was not going to just sit down and roll over. The US Joint Operations Command describes the Millennium Challange by saying 'The basic premise is that critical decisions on future military doctrine, organization or technology should be based on solid empirical results.' How can the results be empirical when you skew the experiment? I believe a good 'researcher' would take the lesson of the sunken fleet that no matter how high tech your equipment is, you should watch out for the creative exploits of a low tech enemy. That high tech can create a blind spot, make you overconfidant. From the descriptions, it would appear the the 'researchers' instead learned than van Riper was a pain in the butt who ruined their carefully laid out scenarios.
This was described as an experiment. That would be true if they were learning lessons from this. But the article seems to indicate that the 'researchers' were kind of ticked that Red kept gumming up the works. A quote from van Riper describing the best way to do research:'You don't come to a conclusion beforehand and then work your way to that conclusion. You see how the thing plays out.' How can you test the new high-tech way of doing things is you prevent the enemy from doing things to get around it? If you pretend that your opponents are idiots, then you risk the lives of many soldiers in a real war. It must have really ticked the organizers off to spend TWO YEARS planning this exercise at a cost of $250 million and have most of the Navy sunk by low tech means before they even got close to the targets.
So, they then ran the experiment their way so that they could validate all their new concepts. It would have been devastating to have all their great new concepts invalidated. Man, as a scientist, I have seen this way too often. It is so easy to fool yourself into believing what you want. You ignore negative results and, at least those committing scientific fraud, arrange the experiments to give you the answer you desire, not the truth. Van Riper seems to be someone who would not stand for this. Here is one last quote from the Army Times: ...several days into the exercise, Van Riper realized his orders weren't being followed.
'I was giving him [Army Col. George Utter, the Red team's Chief of Staff] directions on how I thought the OPFOR ought to perform, and those directions were being countermanded by the exercise director,' Van Riper said. The exercise director was Air Force Brig. Gen. Jim Smith, Utter's real-life boss at Joint Forces Command.
'Matters came to a head July 29. That morning I'd given my guidance for what was to happen, and I found that [Utter] had assembled the staff and was giving them a different set [of instructions] based on the exercise director's instructions to him.'
The exercise director was giving the orders for one of the teams! How empirical can your results be? This is why we have double-blind studies because the observer can too easily skew the results. So, to prevent Col. Utter from a moral dilemma by having to choose between obeying the orders of his 'wargame' commander or to obey the orders of his real-life direct superior, van Riper stepped aside as commander of the Red team. If Smith wanted to run things, he could.
I have to say, I wish van Riper would come out of retirement and run this war. I trust him to be creative with the troops at his disposal. It might not be a high tech sort of war, but I am not really worried about that. I am worried about protecting the troops that are over there. Because, I am afraid, they will be under attack from the get-go by low tech assailants who probably use motorcycles to exchange messages. Van Riper seems to be able to think more like them than the military minds who devised the Millennium Challenge 02. 11:56:20 PM
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McDermott: Sane and no traitor Following up on yesterday's comments about Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wa.), here is probably the sanest thing uttered in the wells of the House or Senate during the debates on the Iraq resolution:
"Let's adjourn for one hour and go down to the Vietnam Memorial before we commit ourselves and our children to an unknown world in which any president can decide to go to war as long as he or she determines it is in the national interest at that moment... Let us not, in pursuit of oil or power or the blandishments of empire, be the ones to lead the world to failure."
- - Rep. James McDermott (D-Wa.), Floor of Congress, 10/8/02
Thanks for the quote to Rhino via DWS. [RatcliffeBlog -- Social and Political]
While I don't think McDermott helped his cause with the trip to Iraq (the soundbites he gave overshadowed anything he hoped to accomplish), when he is able to speak in greater detail, he does a much better job. He has been on several of the local town meeting kind of shows and does a much better job defending his viewpoint. You may think he is an idiot, insane or a traitor but I believe, at least, that his view is heartfelt. Now honesty does not make you right, just as being right does not make you honest, but I really hope that these words are proven wrong during the coming days/years. 10:54:27 PM
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Thursday, October 10, 2002
Thank You Dawn ! Ten Best Things to Say If You Are Caught Sleeping At Your Desk. Thank You Dawn ! Ten Best Things to Say If You Are Caught Sleeping At Your Desk
10. They told me at the bloodbank this might happen.
9. This is just a 15 minute power nap like they raved about in that time management course you sent me to.
8. Whew! Guess I left the top off the white out. You probably got here just in time.
7. I wasn't sleeping. I was meditating on the mission statement and envisioning a new paradigm.
... [ More ] [The FuzzyBlog!]
These are great. I just wish I was still working at a desk so I could use them. 8:23:13 PM
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IT advances to drive lots of job cuts, Gartner predicts. I always like to read the forecasts done by IDG, Gartner, Forrester or the other market research firms. Especially when they taht a particular market will increase from $10 million today to $50 billion two years from now. And I really enjoy reading these forecasts two or more years after their first publication.
Anyway, with this particular report, Gartner gives almost no numbers. It's more qualitative than quantitative. So I suppose their experts cannot really go wrong with this forecast.
Here is how Thomas Hoffman starts his review about the latest Gartner's analysis of the IT market.
The good news, according to Gartner Inc. prognosticators, is that technology is going to continue to help companies become more efficient.
The bad news is that it could cost you your job.
Gartner said it expects successful companies buoyed by a stronger economy and continued advances in technology to lay off millions of employees starting within the next two years.
Here are the ten predictions done by Gartner.
- Adding bandwidth will become more cost-effective than buying new computers
- Most major new systems will be interenterprise or cross-enterprise systems
- Despite the complexities, interenterprise systems will provide a macroeconomic boost to companies
- Companies will lay off millions of employees
- The consolidation of vendors will continue in many segments of the IT market
- Moore's Law will hold true through this decade
- Banks will become the primary providers of "presence services" by 2007
- Business activity monitoring will hit the mainstream within five years
- Business units, not IT, will make most application decisions
- The pendulum swings back to decentralized IT operations by 2004
Source: Thomas Hoffman, Computerworld, October 7, 2002 [Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends]
Now this is really scary. It will be an interesting few years;-) 3:01:47 PM
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September Unemployment Report. Briefing.com's reports on economic numbers are available for free if you subscribe to the Wall Street Journal online. Well worth reading... WSJ.com -- Reports from Briefing.com: September Nonfarm PayrollsCommentary and background from Briefing.com. Updated: 04-Oct-02 Updated: 04-Oct-02 | Archive | Glossary Return to Economic Calendar Highlights September payrolls -43K, unemployment 5.6%, earnings 0.3%, workweek 34.3 hours. Key Factors Nonfarm Payrolls: First decline since April follows strong upward revision to 107K in Aug. Service-producing payrolls -5K after six months of gain, 118K average over prior... [Semi-Daily Journal]
I WILL have to check this out, particularly after reading the Gartner report about how many jobs will be lost in a recovering economy. 2:54:58 PM
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Wednesday, October 9, 2002
A personal manifesto for growth. Manifesto for Growth
via Absolute One:
- Allow events to change you
- Forget about good
- process is more important than outcome
- love your experiments like ugly children
- go deep
- capture accidents
- study
- drift
- begin anywhere
- everyone is a leader
- harvest ideas, edit applications
- keep moving
- slow down
- don't be cool (cool is conservative fear, dressed in black)
- ask stupid questions
- collaborate
- an image which email won't replicate
- Allow space for ideas you haven't had yet
- Stay up late
- Work the metaphor
- time is genetic
- repeat yourself
- make your own tools
- stand on someone's shoulders
- avoid software (everyone has it)
- don't clean your desk
- don't enter awards (its bad for you)
- creativity is not device dependent
- organisation is liberty
- don't borrow money
- listen carefully
- take field trips
- imitate
- make mistakes faster
- scat (break it, stretch it, crack it, fold it)
- explore the other edge
- coffee breaks, cab rides, ream (?) rooms
- avoid fields, jump fences
- laugh
- remember
- power to the people
[via NotExactly] [via Sebs Open Research] [via The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty]
» Thought provoking list. I would add:
- always write it down
- listen to lots of good music
- seek first to understand, then to be understood
- review often
- ride change
- go do something different instead
- ...
[Curiouser and curiouser!]
A very timely list for me. 8:42:35 PM
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Monday, October 7, 2002
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This is a very interesting article and I will have to read 'Rebuilding America's Defenses'. Presumably, these guys have been waiting since 1992 to make this a reality. They have learned how to present the proper facade and have adapted to ongoing events with a focus that is amazing. One question I have if this is true is how are they going to make it irreversible? How would they prevent some other president from essentially turning back the clock? I've downloaded 'Rebuilding America's Defenses'. Jay Bookman took part in a live discussion of his article today. There is also an article from 1996 by the founder of the New Century Project (the ones who wrote the present report) calling for a benevolent hegemony as America's new goal. I guess that is what they are calling empires these days. It should make good reading. I think it may be very interesting to look back at this a few years down the road. Because, if this is the plan, how are we going to pay for it? One of the things that arguably allowed Japan to recover so fast after WW2 was the fact that it had to spend very little on defense. We took care of that. If we are the world's policeman, then our allies will be able to spend their money on other things in their economy. Unless we force them to pay taxes to us to pay for their defense. I must read 'Rebuilding America's Defenses' to see what these great minds have thought of. 11:38:57 PM
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BBC NEWS | Middle East | Craft 'rammed' Yemen oil tanker [Daypop Top 40]
I wonder what sort of ecological disaster blowing up tankers would do, not to mention clogging up the shipping lanes and affecting the price of oil. This was a double-hulled tanker in calm waters on a clear day.Even if it was something other than a terrorist attack, it has to give them ideas. Are we going to have to escort tankers out of the Gulf into open seas? 11:11:04 PM
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Sunday, October 6, 2002
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