New months, new material - 29 May-1 June 2010

Welcome back, people who understand the need for sportsmanship and a helping hand - enjoy the story of a good team offering to forfeit the game so that they could spend the time teaching it to their opponents, instead of just beating them down into nothing. The opposite team accepted the forefeit, and the girls spent the time taching, then they gathered equipment for their opponents, and then big companies got involved to get them good dirt, equipment, and a whole lot more. The inner city kids? Have gotten better by leaps and bounds already.

Monday was also the day where United States persons are supposed to observe a memorial for the members of their military that have died in the various wars the country has fought and to appreciate those that have survived and those who fight still. It can be difficult in conflicts of dubious need where civilians are killed, or when contemplating the possibility that one thousand persons may have died fighting a conflict that could have been avoided or left alone, but anyone who goes into military service willingly and with full knowledge of the possible consequences deserves the respect of someone who made a hard choice and fights with the idea of protecting his country in mind. Mr. Helprin insists they also deserve a citizenry that supports them fully in all their endeavours, convinced of the rightness of their cause. If he is to have his wish come true, then the discussions, the debates, and the certainties must be better-laid out than these last conflicts have been, for the holes in their arguments have already been found and shown widely.

Out in the world today, the rains in Guatemala from the first tropical storm of the season eroded the ground sufficiently that a sinkhole formed swallowed a three-story building.

The President of Malawi pardoned a couple that had been given a 14 year sentence for gross indecency and unnatural acts involving what looked to be gay sex. Likely, the visit of the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon, had something to do with the pardon. It’s not like the region around has a stellar record on LGBT relationships.

Israeli troops stormed a Turkish ship containing aid for the Gaza Strip and killed several of the people on board. The Strip is blockaded, one, the confrotnation happened in international waters, two, but accounts differ as to whether the people on board had any weapons and started shooting, three, and four, regardless of whose account is correct, did Israel just commit an act of piracy, and if they did, what exactly is going to be the fallout from this? (There’s also some facepalming that Israel ran straight into the trap the flotilla was setting for them.)

Not that this discourages the presence of nuclear subs around Iran, because we all know those crazy Iranians are just waiting to do something that’s utter suicide for them and their country. Israel also complained about a conference in 2012 aimed at establishing a nuclear-free Middle East, saying all the pressure will be on them to come clean and disarm, while Iran will be able to hide and disclaim. Israel’s position is further antagonized by the United States signing on to the idea of the conference.

The United States is considering unilateral strikes against Pakistan if any terror attack can be successfully traced back to the region. Because three land wars in Asia is better than two. Of course, we might be looking at four, instead, if the clearness that General McChrystal has about Iranian involvement in Taliban training becomes a certainty.

The United Kingdom is phasing out their national biometric identity card database, citing the cost of the project as a major reason why it is being scrapped. I wonder if actual security concerns also managed to help nix the attempt. Of course, not everyone thinks the ID card should go away, based on the amount of people who pre-registered to get one.

Staying in the United Kingdom, I wonder if the following would be incorrect billing - Tories tap Ferguson for Texas-style textbook and curriculum renovation, to build a grand narrative out of the fragments of history, one that suits the people in charge.

A cluster balloonist flew across the English Channel in his chair, having obtained the necessary permits and equipment to make his flight safe a few months ago. If you want more balloons, blimps, and airships, The Big Picture Has You Covered for your lighter-than-air excursions.

Inside the country, sometimes the greatest damage to life from an oil spill is not what you see, but what you don't see. Furthermore, despite their duck and dodge, truthfully, corporations and their greed are responsible for the disasters we have suffered, and really, the only thing the federal government can do properly is supervise the technological wizardry, and then impose regulations and sanctions that make companies think four times before flouting any sort of safety requirement anywhere and six more before passing any equipment that might have had the slightest variance outside acceptable parameters on safety. Not that it’s going to stop columnists trying to pin some sort of blame on the President to make him look bad because he could not call in the Avengers or the military to dash in and cap the well immediately when BP failed to do so. That, and he tried to plant the blame where it belonged - with the companies that put profit before people

On economics, some homeowners are taking a path of passive resistance and not paying their mortgages, allowing them to put the money they save while they’re in foreclosure (or even before then) to rebuild their lives and get stabilized in their finances.

Forbes puts up a slideshow of the worst Masters degrees in terms of job outlook. #25? Library science, of course, because we’ve been oversold on the job and growth prospects of the profession, but we’re not as bad as, say, those Fine Arts people (who always get the shaft on everything), or teachers, or Great Gods forbid, people who have divinity degrees.

On matters of health, McNeil Consumer Healthcare, a division of Johnson and Johnson, is alleged to have sent out contractors to buy up tainted children's ibuprofen rather than issue a formal recall, trying to hide the bad stuff (and possibly shirk any responsibility) from consumers.

Some medical marijuana dispensary employees are now unionized in Oakland, California. Solidarity, man.

In technology, if you have an iPhone, someone with the latest version of Ubuntu Linux can bypass all your security settings if they hook your phone up to their computer - the iPhone apparently doesn’t feel like it needs scurity when mounted as a USB drive.

In Louisiana, using tools like Google Maps to plan or commit a crime will extend your sentence by at least one year if caught and convicted.

Music students building robots to play music. And they’ve got the idea - build robots to do things that human musicians can’t do so easily, like have seven arms to play instruments with.

Exposure to nature may help your learning abilities, assumnig you ingest a particular type of bacteria scientists are interested in.

Last out, Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that people e-mailing articles from the New York Times tended to choose the ones that were positive in nature, large in scale, and that required the mind to open up and see things from a new point of view

In the opinions, The Slacktivist leads today by calling out a supposed expert on economics for thinking a wireless telephone is a luxury item, pointing out that most places require either a telephone number (or, as I’ve seen, an e-mail address) for you to apply for work. Even McDonalds, the place most people think of as the basement of jobs, needs a telephone number in their on-line application. A telephone is not a luxury item (and neither is Internet access these days). Related to economics, the Slacktivist also relates the story of how he and a professor worked through the text's frowning on usury and lending at interest to understand that the point of it all was about not exploiting the poor through usury, getting off of literal proof-texting and into the realm where it’s okay to take the point without having to slavishly hang on every word. Once you do that, you can go after problems like why the tax code and culture of the United States did their very best to make sure white people got rich, the rich got richer, and minorities were left with crumbs to fight over.

Observe the false feminism of Sarah Palin - the place that wants to fight for equality, but equality where abortion is outlawed and women make less money because they choose motherhood. They have the name but none of the substance.

Mr. Lind opines that if we are to teach the history of the Confederacy, we should do so completely, with the primary sources that show what the Confederacy was founded on, what it did, and what happened when it realized the only way out was to undo what it had done. And then, we can see what kind of effects that split still had on the country almost 100 years later.

The WSJ takes up the cry that the inquiry of whether Representative Sestak wanted an uncompensated position in the administration needs a full Department of Justice probe, as does Mr. Jacob, who compares the offer to the Blago scandal, and The Washington Times claims this isn't an isolated incident.


Last out for tonight, gazing at the future as Shimizu sees it.

Thinky: If creating innovation requires you to work the system, can you call it innovation?

Professional ponderings, but in the general sense of "professional" and not specifically-related to my own chosen profession. The touchstone for this particular thinky is Advice For a Slightly Less-Experienced Geek Librarian, a piece that aims to help the hip new librarian get over the natural frustration of being in a new locale and people not doing things the way they're used to doing it in their old place. (Written in 2007, but I get the feeling people still think it applies...)

The article itself is basically telling the new librarian "You can't fight City Hall head-on". And that's a very depressing and discouraging message to give, even though it tries to provide an avenue of hope and escape from the pit of depression that things will never change.

Anyway, the article starts with the idea that when it comes to the adoption of new technology, just because new librarians see the potential in gadgetry and have seen it work in your old spot doesn't translate to anything because their co-workers and supervisors do not have that same experience. Thus, attempting to convince them of the new and shiny is pretty well doomed to failure unless you go about it in a particular way.

The way to make it happen is basically to figure out how to fit the change to the system. It starts with the requirement to get to know the system, the politics, and the people who have the institutional power, authority, and good will to get things done. Figure out if your Fancy Wismo will actually make contextual sense for the system you're in and the work you do. Admittedly, this seems like a "Duh." thing to me - if you didn't see the potential that the Fancy Wismo could do, you wouldn't be advocating for the Fancy Wismo. Yes, there's glitz and hype and people talking about things, but librarians and professionals (and managers, although they may be a bit more hit-and-miss on that) are usually pretty good at deciding whether some New Thing is going to help or hurt them, and whether their community will want that New Thing.

After that, he says, do the research on why things are the way they are. Find the policies, the practices, and the reasons why things are set up in this bizarre and non-adoptive way. They may have very good reasons for it, he says. Figure out how to make your advocacy fit into this framework, to show people how the work they do now will be better or shinier because of adopting the new thing. And then - find the person that everyone actually listens to, the power broker, the person who can make stuff get done because they have the contacts, the ability to frame, and the ear of the right people to get stuff done, and make them an ally, it says. Know your stuff backwards and forwards so you can answer questions and demonstrate how you've used it to great success on small things, and trust that your colleagues are pointing out things because they're well-meaning and looking for shortcomings, not because they want to torpedo new ideas out of spite or laziness.

Thus, so far, the only way to change the system is to become properly integrated into it, and then to hope that you find an ally somewhere who has actual pull and convince them of your idea. Then you have to hope that they can walk the idea up the chain and around so that other people with pull are convinced of your idea's merit. You can't fight City Hall.

As his avenue of escape, the author offers a few ideas. His big one is to keep multiple irons in the fire, so that when you have an opportunity, instead of having to build a whole New Shiny Thing, you can graft it or forge it on to something else already in use, or combine it with some other Shiny Thing to produce a useful Fancy Wismo.

He also offers advice on how not to get cynical or burnt out at your failures. First, you have to learn to take rejection gracefully, and instead of just blaming the people who are standing in your way, learn from it and make your next proposal better. Oh, and to be prepared for the time when some young punk is going to tell you that your New Hotness is now Old and Busted. Because it will happen.

That's seriously cold comfort for those brimming with ways to try and make things better. Anyone want to take a stab at why the "consulting" business booms? Because sometimes, an outsider's perspective is exactly what you need. Who's more of an outsider to the way your system works than a new employee (and at a fraction of the cost of organizational consultants)? Why not harness that dynamo and have them document and explain every time they run into something that doesn't make sense for them? Even if they only have a 10% hit rate on "Hey, we never thought of that", that's still pretty good for making changes.

As for that other 90%, there's a very small window of time between being the outsider and being another part of the system. Being the heretic who suggests stuff and is promptly ignored because "it won't work" or "that's not how we do things" is a part of any system, too. It would be nice if even the entrenched things were evaluated if someone makes mention that they don't make sense. Cruft and chains and bureaucracy grow like vines on things, and you need to weed more than just your collections in any organization.

It's depressing and idea-killing when it looks like the culture doesn't react well, doesn't listen, or moves too slowly on ideas that could be good. I think more people would be satisfied if the company/organization at least made an effort to show that they do listen to suggestions, and then evaluate them, and come back with a final decision on them, with reasoning and explanation attached. What usually happens, though, is that there's a suggestion made, and there might be a little bit of follow-up to make sure that the idea expressed is clear, and then nothing happen. there's no status update on where the idea is, who might have seen it, who approved/disapproved and why. No feedback makes it sound like the organization isn't listening and doesn't care about suggestions from anyone. After enough times of hearing nothing, the employee stops making big suggestions and starts focusing on what little domain they can control or influence, which might make for some nice incremental change, or finding a great way to do things in their department that nobody else ever finds out about. The employee never makes the suggestion that it might have a wider impact, because they know that's a black hole, nor does the supervisor take the idea and start seeding it in elsewhere to get other people thinking about whether or not it works best for them, possibly for the same reason. Because of all this, all the good ideas generated get swallowed up, and then expensive consultants get hired to revamp, and they make suggestions that sound suspiciously like what the employees were saying, but because the consultant said it, it gets implemented almost immediately. It cements the idea in an employee's mind that the management doesn't care about whether they have ideas to improve them, they just want them to obey and do the work they're assigned to do. For a place like a library, that has to stay nimble, up near the cutting edge, and reinvents itself to stay relevant, cutting off what may be your best line of suggestion and improvement (your front-line staff) is asking for trouble.

So I feel that while the article may be right, in terms of "this is the highest-probability way of getting your ideas to the people that will like them and any on them", it is also wrong because it assumes that office politics is the right way to get things done, the status quo deserves priority over innovation by virtue of having tradition and many years of experience behind it, and that if your idea doesn't get traction, it's because you couldn't relate it to the system, not that the system might be broken or wrong.

The more things shift, the more they look the same - 2 June 2010

Good morning, those who hope for a disease-free world. The Future may be closer to us with the announcement of what may be a vaccination against most forms of breast cancer, through targeting of certain protiens common to the most likely strains of cancer. Human trials are a ways off, and the complete product may not be ready for ten years or more down the line, but if this line of research pans out into a useful product, it could create a completely new line of preventative medicines (and generate a vaccination schedule for many of us in our later years, filling in the gap between kid vaccinations and elder vaccinations against the things that come back to haunt us later).

Out in the world today, The police saw a car with a window open and towed it to stop it and its contents from being stolen. They now, naturally, want the driver to pay the tow fee.

After significant pressure from worldwide governments and NGOs, Israel will release and deport the persons it took captive from the Gaza aid flotilla it raided yesterday.

Back here in the States, can we find someone here to investigate an oil company that hasn't spent a lifetime in it? It’s great that the Justice Department is looking into both civil and criminal cases against BP for this disaster, now that they’re basically waiting for the relief well to be drilled, but there’s got to be enough people around who can do a proper investigation of what went down that don’t have oil industry ties and can thus be seens as free from influence. Plus, they might also help stop BP from screening and denying access to reporters using a security company that's already been scandalized by a horrible hazing environment, including vodka shots off of anuses.

The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that one must affirmatively invoke one's Miranda rights to use them, and that simply refusing to speak or staying silent but allowing the questioning to continue is an indication that one has waived those rights and anything said later on can be used. The liberal wing of the court, led by Sotomayor, blasted the decision as both against precedent and against the spirit of the Miranda requirement.

Representative King claims that unions, the ACLU, and Muslims have taken over the Justice Department and are calling the real shots, which bodes exceedingly ill for the Papers Please law and other measures that the Representative no doubt believes are sane and essetnial laws and policies toward non-white people. I wonder whether he will also believe those three are responsible for the Justice Department currently not designating one agency or person to be the boss in case of a weapon of mass destruction attack.

On the politics of November, With so many hot-button social conservative issues raised in the course of the first half, the religious right may be energized sufficiently to be a player in midterm elections. This does not, however, guarantee that they will vote Republican, as a significant number of Blue Dog-style Demcorats may be seeking their vote and running as a candidate that will help rein in the Administration by sabotaging it from the majoirty position.

The passed eventual repeal of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy has pitted the people who can authorize the repeal after the study is done against the other Joint Chiefs of Staff, who are mostly rankled that the civilian leadership and the Chairman are telling them what they have to do instead of letting them continue to discriminate against openly LGBT people on pretenses that don’t play out in actual experience. Hell, from some of the accounts I’ve read, being gay is less problematic than being non-Christian.

In technology and sciences, a startup found its niche by collecting compostable waste from restaurants and performing the composting off-site, charging the restaurants less than other services.

Logic gates constructed of strands of DNA herald the possibility of injectable organic computing devices that can tailor their response patterns based on the markers they detect - multiple payloads loaded, one released based on what it detects is attempting to infect.

At&&T has decided to eliminate the unlimited iPhone data plan, will charge extra to allow other devices to tether to the phone, all in the hopes that their 3G network stablizes and allows more people to access the mobile Internet.

Finally, a conversation with a neuroscientist intrigued by the way all creatures work and respond to music, including the possibility of using musical phrases to return some speech ability to those whose language centers are damaged. (And the remarkable ability of even advanced Alzheimer’s patients to remember, in the proper order, the words to songs they have sung in their lives.)

Going up to the opinions department, The Infamous Brad calls anybody whose primary attack methods are to strike at unarmed civilians, because engaging the proper defense/military forces means your own people might get hurt or killed, cowards, and that extends to both the rulers of Gaza and the people who just attacked a flotilla of aid ships. Elsewhere on the issue, Mr. Carroll is swift to defend Israel's right to attack civilians, insists that the United States must forever be in lockstep with Israel, and that they should be doing more to directly stop Iran from doing more nuclear stuff and Mr. Hornik insists the pacifists were in fact, violent to the core and beat up the commandos before the commandos were allowed to fire their handguns, making them all “jihadis” because they have ties to dubious places and because they were intending to confront Israel when they sailed.

Mr. Weissberg suggests that the unease people feel with Barack Obama's presidency is that it's apparently similar to what life would be like if America were ruled by some outside entity that had its own ideas, agendas, and designs in mind, regardless of how that affected the people. He thinks Americans feel like they’ve lost the capacity for self-rule, and so the reappearance of imagery and words recalling the War of Independence is completely justified, tapping into our subconscious. If he’s right, then America has lost the capacity to imagine even centrism as something that can happen in America. I wonder what the phrases would be like if an actual liberal were somehow elected to the Presidency. Would there be some sort of epithet past the socialism/communism department that the president is routinely accused of being? Either way, it’s a scary thought, not because we’re supposed to believe that Barack Obama is ruling like a foreign king and we never liked that, but that the political imagination of America has diminshed so greatly that anything other than social conservatism mixed with corporatism, jingoism, and belligerence is considered alien, foreign, and unacceptable as a governing philosophy. That’s scary.

Ms. Williams peers into the case of a man who claims he had an agreement with his girlfriend that if she got prengant (again), they'd abort, and that he shouldn't have to pay child support because she carried the child to term and gave birth over his objections. It has thus become a poster case for the Men’s Rights Organization, who believe that men should be able to have some control over whether or not the women in their lives have children. Which trips the very well-aimed trigger of I Blame the Patriarchy, pointing out that the only 100 percent effective way of not getting pregnant is not having sex, and that once the decision to have sex and ejaculate is made, it's basically out of the hands of the man what happens next. It is the same argument that women should not be given a choice on whether they want to have a kid, but in this case, the mother chooses to have the kid when the man doesn’t want her to, instead of the woman choosing not to have a kid when the man and the society are telling her she has to. There’s further taking of the conclusion that once given, an agreement is binding all the way out to the fringe end, where every woman is always and forever saying yes to any man that she encounters, because she dresses a certain way, or she agreed to it once with someone, somewhere. We’ll have to see how the courts decide this one.

On the matter of the oil spill, Mr. Boortz blames environmentalists for the scope of the disaster, because their decrees apparently forced oil companies to move further out to drill instead of letting them stay closer to shore, where disastrous explosions would have even less time to make it to the shore and begin contaminating the ground.

Mr. Will considers the latest attempts by President Obama to give him some measure of control on spending to be shadow puppetry, because the grand majority of the budget as is will never be denied passage, with entitlements and defense covering more than three-fourths of the budget.

We return to Mr. Boortz, as he complains the media is not covering all of the swastikas and Nazi comparisons on the Papers Please law, one that would require persons who are not white to carry their identification with them at all times or risk fines, jail time, and deportation back to their home countries. Can’t understand at all why someone might invoke a historical example where non-white people were required to carry papers at all times and even then faces fines, jail time, deportation, or extermination.

Mr. Hawkins returns to a familiar well in claiming the President lives in fantasyland where people get along and cooperate on big international issues, isntead of only going along to get along or going along until they can find the right point to stab each other in the back. Running counter to that idea, Mr. Brooks suggests that the people are the ones living in fantasyland, expecting the President to be able to do things he can't, a government to run effectively without corporate corruption, and corporations and the individual people to be able to run purely without the spectre of government corruption. Mr. Brooks points out about the only place such desires can land is in comrpomise, where we should go, to regulate enough to minimize disaster risk but not to kill innovation. (It can also end in the looney bin, if those contradictions don’t get resolves or the people are insistent that all of those competing things be done at the same time.)

Mr. Tapscott shouts fire and damnation about the results of an FTC worksop on reinvigorating journalism, citing all sorts of people making opinions about the proposal, but providing no links to the primary source itself. Fact-checking ability? Never. For those who want to do their own research, the data and presentations are available from the FTC itself, without snark attached. These are policy proposals, generated from a workshop in March. If/when any of them get adopted or put up for serious adoption, then someone can scream their head off all they like, but this is premature at best and fearmongering at worst.

Finally, staying in the journalism vein, Mr. O'Rourke suggests that newspapers begin a column of "Pre-Obituaries", where columnists can talk about the still living and say why they should already be dead because of all the bad things they've done. He naturally provides a few capsule examples, most of them aimed at liberals, feminists, pop culture figures, and Randy Newman, although he does throw a small bone to the liberal crowd by talking about alleged and actual philanderers as deserving of Pre-Obits.

Last out for tonight, the conservative graduation speech to encourage students to go into the private sector, compete, and invent, and thus drive the real economy instead of listening to bureaucrats extol the virtues of becoming bureaucrats in the name of making a difference. Missing the point entirely of volunteerism and public service, which performs a lot of needed functions. Want to start your business? The library has information and provides it as a public service. Want people to buy your product or service? Then they need to know it’s manufactured safely and that you’re a competent person, which requires regulation and licensing. Do you want to help the poor? Good, we’d like to make sure that you’re not going to rip them off, or rip your donors off, and that you’re actually qualified to do the work that you want to do. Oh, the bureaucracy! Just making sure that everyone comes out of it alive, safe, and better off than they were before. And by the time you graduate, really, most people have an idea of what they want to do with themselves, whether in the public or private sector. They’re ready to walk the walk, and most of them will be good enough at it. Some will be brilliant, some mediocre, and there’s always the chance that someone will become a CEO and drive an entire sector of the economy into the ground. Them’s the breaks. Praising the private sector over the public sector mindlessly does them all the good you perceive is done to them by praising the public sector mindlessly over the private one.