The Swiss government wants to protect the "rights" and "dignity" of plants (PDF format); here's an interesting analysis. In my opinion, this is a failure of disaggregation: the Swiss government experts fail to distinguish between sentient and non-sentient living objects.
Wed, 2008-May-07, 08:53
Plant Rights
Tue, 2008-May-06, 07:31
Is "Prison Culture" Behind Chicago's Crime Wave?
According to an article by Gary Fields in the Wall Street Journal, former prison inmates bring their "prison culture" with them to the streets once they leave jail. This prison culture emphasizes "respect," which doesn't mean what I would think it means; and of course disputes are resolved by violence. The article then goes on to claim that because so many individuals in the US are incarcerated at some point in their lives, this prison culture is spreading across our cities and makes a noticeable contribution to violent crime. The City of Chicago experienced a small spike in murders recently, but with a sharp increase in deaths of school-age youth, and Mayor Daley is using this as an excuse to promote his anti-gun campaign.
While this article caught my eye — I began to wonder how disaggregation affects the connection between offender, victim, prison culture, and crimes — I would like to caution that I have to take the article with a huge grain of salt. The Wall Street Journal seems to have a cabal of reporters who promote Hillary Clinton with a stream of articles that read as if they come directly from her campaign headquarters. The most recent example was an extraordinarily poorly-written article on health care in the US, with a heavy emphasis on denigrating the management of non-profit hospitals.
This "prison culture" article carries a tell-tale quote from David Kennedy of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control: "This is part of the price we're paying for 20 years of mass incarceration." The notion that the prison population is too high is a common refrain in certain political circles.
While I've spent a while this morning trying to find some statistics on crime, the subtle political slant of this article is so unpersuasive that I think I'll put the entire question aside.
Topics: · government · society
Mon, 2008-May-05, 08:41
Suing to Change a Diagnosis?
If this article is true (found via Techdirt), I believe I can promise the tactic will backfire. I find very unsettling the idea that a doctor can be sued to change his diagnosis to conform to a corporation's dogma. On the other hand, I have to commend Taser for fighting against unlawful-death lawsuits and sticking up for their product even if it does mean suing doctors in court; few enough companies seem to do this nowadays.
Society expects that a doctor's judgment be rendered without any outside pressure; just look at the furor over hypothetical conflicts of interest when doctors receive grant money from drug companies. If a company attempts to reverse the disaggregation of medical opinion from corporate interests, they will eventually face not just public opprobrium but in all likelihood Congressional attention.
One word of warning: add a grain of salt to the newspaper article. Reporters as a class seem to believe quite sincerely that doctors' integrity is under assault from corporations; I have to wonder if this corporation's side of the case is fairly represented.
Topics: · business
Fri, 2008-May-02, 08:42
The Great Yahoo! Beer Money Caper
Microsoft's quest to purchase Yahoo! continues to puzzle me. First, there's Yahoo! itself as a company; I can't quite figure Yahoo's business model and why the company might be worth $45 billion — I can't help but thing of advertising revenue as just beer money. And Yahoo! itself evolved from a simple list of Internet resources into a huge aggregation of barely related resources. (I stopped reading Yahoo's new pages when Google News provided a more interesting new feed.)
The other question is about Microsoft itself. As others have pointed out, a hostile takeover rarely works in the Internet world. As far as I'm concerned, however, I can't imagine that Yahoo! would survive a Microsoft takeover even if it were friendly. Despite Microsoft's deep pockets and rigid control over the desktop, Microsoft's internal efforts to create a popular web site relevant to Microsoft's business model failed utterly. Microsoft clearly intends to modify Yahoo!'s operation to support Microsoft's goals (so I expect that Yahoo! will one day suddenly stop working with non-Microsoft browsers, for example).
This entire operation reminds me of AT&T's purchase of NCR. AT&T failed to create its own computer business; they purchased NCR instead, installed the managers who had failed at running AT&T's internal attempts, and promptly ran NCR into the ground. In the end, the mistake destroyed AT&T: AT&T's "trivestiture" allowed them to dispose of NCR while distracting investors by with the creation of Lucent.
Pointless aggregations are not a sign of strength. Disaggregation fosters innovation; random aggregations and forced integration generally fail miserably. Microsoft is about to make a company-killing mistake.
Wed, 2008-Apr-30, 09:04
Twitter as a Technical Resource
If you haven't used it, Twitter is one of those "I don't think I get it" technologies. Leaving aside the cute terminology, Twitter provides microblogging. Ordinary blogs are short essays, such as this one; when I write a blog post it usually takes considerable time and effort. Twitter accepts only very short blog entries, 140 characters or less. These updates are sent to anyone who subscribes to them and can also be tossed into a large public pool for anyone to read. While this might sound sort of useless and derivative, it's anything but; I ask you to recall that blogging is really just a quick-and-dirty way to update web pages, and look what it has become now. Twitter lowers the barrier even further.
Is Twitter popular? Yes, extremely so; new media technologist Dan York has a Twitter account followed by over one thousand people. His "tweets" cover everything from his his latest technology thoughts to the local weather. (My account is the much same way.)
I've recently discovered that Twitter can provide an amazing technical resource: instant expert help from people who you didn't know even existed. Some individuals monitor the entire Twitter stream for certain keywords — and they might respond to your comments with extremely welcome help. Earlier today I noted in passing that I couldn't find a particular software function in the Ruby programming language; a few moments later Ivor Paul responded with a few well-chosen links to Ruby documentation that will cut hours off of my learning curve. And earlier this week Neil Edwards, twittering from London, gave me a leg up on finding the right software to make Ruby on Rails more useful.
I'm fascinated by the capabilities of Twitter. Twitter is disaggregated: Twitter allows access to Twitter as a a building block for other services. Now I've begun to wonder just where all this will lead.
Topics: · internet · technology
Tue, 2008-Apr-22, 08:46
No Cure Yet for Software Rot
Every year at about this time I do a bit of community service: I have my computer system make outbound phone calls to friends and relations who want a reminder of one of their religious obligations that's rather easy to overlook.
This year I have a very, very severe case of software rot. "Software rot" isn't a term in any dictionary; it's a phrase that I made up but that any technical person immediately understands. If you put a piece of software aside and don't look at it for six months, you often have trouble starting it up again. The software rots, a problem just as real as if though you'd put away your saddle away after riding without cleaning it properly. In my case, the outbound calls seem to work, but — ironically — the quality-assurance subsystem that I put into place verify that the calls are actually successful is itself failing.
I mean this post as a cautionary tale for managers. This particular application, as are many of the applications I work on, is built of many different subsystems. Some pieces are written in one programming language (Python) and others are written in more specialized languages (CCMXL and VoiceXML). The software relies on a wide variety of Internet protocols to work correctly (DNS and HTTP in particular). I rely on components from outside vendors and I've installed new hardware that uses some apparently very touchy new software.
Although it would be ridiculously expensive to build all this infrastructure from scratch intead of using these coponents, using the disaggregated components does impose some other costs. Any significant project I build uses change control to keep track of the software that I create, but — unlike a commercial service — I haven't instituted controls on this project to track software modules from elsewhere and the various bits of hardware. And since one of the items in the mix is a Windows-based PC, I suspect that I know where the problem really lies.
My point here is that disaggregation brings both incredible costs savings and a certain responsibility. I will get this service up and running correctly again (hopefully sometime today), but if this were a commercial service I'd be in trouble. Just because a service worked six months ago does not mean it will work today. No software exists in a vaccum. Software-based services require constant maintenance to avoid software rot.
Topics: · technology
Wed, 2008-Apr-16, 08:12
Does Your Mother Work for the CIA?
The banks and credit card companies I do business with suffer from a series of fascinating delusions. The first has to do with my social security number. That number appears on countless documents at dozens of companies, but now companies pretend that my social security number is some sort of huge secret that only I know. They use it to authenticate me when I call — and now they only ask for the last four digits, as if though that enhances security. Well, just using the last four digits is useful: someone who wants to impersonate me has fewer digits to memorize.
But the other delusion is even funnier: they all seem to think my mother works for the CIA. Well, maybe that's not actually what's going on; but certainly they seem to think she has a secret identity. The believe that no one except me (and presumeably my siblings) know her maiden name. Even better, American Express recently asked me to enter my mother's birthday to use as a PIN number to access my online account — again, her birth date must be a huge secret, with steely-eyed CIA agents purging the public records of both our birth certificates. What is even more foolish (and opens a huge security hole) is that American Express won't let you select any other PIN number when you validate a new credit card; if you select a random number to use instead, they bounce you to a live operator.
To provide real security on some of my more important accounts, I've started using a different and random "mother's maiden name" for each account. In the meantime, unless your mother really does work for the CIA, please be aware that these questions about your Mom by the banks and credit card companies provide no actual security. A secret shared by dozens of different companies isn't very much of a secret.
Tue, 2008-Apr-15, 09:18
If Only American Airlines Were Certified Kosher
A few days back I wondered about the lessons of the American Airlines business disaster: what did it mean for Southwest Airlines, for example, and how could other airlines avoid similar costly problems. Could disaggregation play a role? For example, should American diversify its fleet and not rely so heavily on MD-80 jets?
But then I realized American Airlines' biggest problem: it isn't certified kosher.
Did you ever wonder how Jews find out what foods are kosher? (Or how Moslems find out what foods are compatible with Halal?) Different organizations across the country are hired by manufacturers to certify food as kosher; the manufacturer is then allowed to place the organization's logo on the packaging and those who are interested recognize the logos. Here in Chicago, for example, there's one large organization with almost national scope; a few smaller organizations of various sizes (and perceived reliability); and local representatives of the two national certification organizations. If I'm a manufacturer and I want my food certified for the kosher market, I have a choice of who will regulate me.
On the one hand, each organization must be strict — otherwise no one will trust their certifications and their endorsements become worthless; in other words, they compete on the basis of how well they can guarantee compliance with kosher standards. On the other hand, again because the organizations compete with each other, they cannot be wildly unreasonable towards the businesses they regulate (although that certainly happens, because once a business hires a kosher certifying organization, it's rather difficult to switch to another). And for the most part the certification business is congenial: organizations know about each others' inspections and how they interpret the rules about kosher foods, and "as long as everything is kosher" they'll accept each others' certifications.
The FAA ordered American Airlines to ground all its MD-80 airplanes because the ties on wire bundles are one and one-quarter inch apart instead of one inch apart, even though the FAA knows the problem is not urgent. Why can the FAA act so arrogantly and arbitarily? Because they're the government: they have monopoly power. Now imagine if an auditor you had hired did something wildly unreasonable that cost you tens of millions of dollars. Not only would you never hire them again, but everyone else in the industry would avoid them like the plague.
So the answer to the huge fines (Southwest Airlines) and huge business losses (American Airlines) of the past few weeks is not better enforcement; the answer is competition in the world of airline regulation. Let's adopt the kosher-certification model to lower costs and improve overall saftey.
Topics: · business · government
Thu, 2008-Apr-10, 08:19
American Airlines and the Question to Southwest Airlines
American Airlines' fleet of MD-80 planes is grounded yet again for inspections — not for a flight-safety issue but because of a dictat from regulators. Regardless, American is suffering a public-relations disaster. And O'Hare is expecting thunderstorms this afternoon...
The question in my mind is whether the American Airlines experience applies to Southwest Airlines. American relies heavily on the MD-80 but Southwest relies exclusively on a single airplane, the Boeing 737. By using just one type of airplane Southwest eliminates substantial costs — not just in inventory of spare parts, but of training of both pilots and mechanics. While this has worked for Southwest in the past, American's reliance on the MD-80 also worked for them in the past. One question is whether or not investors will devalue Southwest Airlines because of a newly perceived vulnerability; the other question, one that I find more interesting, is if there's some method to mitigate Southwest's risk, and how disaggregation can play a role. It's a question that I can't answer just yet.
Topics: · business
Tue, 2008-Apr-08, 08:04
Will Microsoft Disaggregate Windows? Will It Matter?
This article discusses the "modularization" of the Windows operating system. The author raises the question of whether the disaggregation will be technical in nature or simply marketing.
In my opinion, Microsoft isn't capable of anything but a marketing effort. That is, will make it possible to buy single components, such as email, rather than bundle them all into the operating system. The impetus for the decision will be to extract money from the consumer; two purchases instead of one, and the ability to mandate intermediate purchases between upgrades to the entire operating system. Even though, e.g., email wouldn't be bundled I believe I can guarantee that email will still be tightly integrated into the operating system. In other word I believe Microsoft will disaggregate their marketing efforts but not their technology, competitors will still be shut out, and the consumers will remain with few choices.
Topics: · microsoft
