In theory, corporate boards should have prevented this deterioration of conduct. ... This means that directors must get rid of a manager who is mediocre or worse, no matter how likable he may be. Directors must react as did the chorus-girl bride of an 85-year-old multimillionaire when he asked whether she would love him if he lost his money. “Of course,” the young beauty replied, “I would miss you, but I would still love you.”

... [Directors'] contribution to shareholder well-being was minimal at best and, too often, negative. These people, decent and intelligent though they were, simply did not know enough about business and/or care enough about shareholders to question foolish acquisitions or egregious compensation. My own behavior, I must ruefully add, frequently fell short as well: Too often I was silent when management made proposals that I judged to be counter to the interests of shareholders. In those cases, collegiality trumped independence.

... It would be a travesty if the bloated pay of recent years became a baseline for future compensation. Compensation committees should go back to the drawing boards.

... In recent years compensation committees too often have been tail-wagging puppy dogs meekly following recommendations by consultants, a breed not known for allegiance to the faceless shareholders who pay their fees. (If you can’t tell whose side someone is on, they are not on yours.)

... I have to say I wouldn't mind having a robot body.

[Jan Hewitt, who is boycotting Washington State's standardized WASL test] is working toward honors credits and is articulate beyond her age. It's not that she objects to studying or taking tests. But she feels the WASL -- which gauges critical thinking, problem solving and observation skills and measures students' progress in reading, writing, math and listening against a set standard -- is overshadowing the basics.

"The test doesn't test basic skills. It tests more of the higher-order thinking ... at the expense of good old-fashioned reading, writing and arithmetic," said Hewett, whose father gave permission to excuse her from the WASL. "It hasn't been very effective, because our schools are beginning to teach to the test."

The standard complaint against standardized tests is that they cause students and teachers to focus rote teaching methods to learn useless material. But this student seems to be complaining that her teachers are teaching critical thinking and problem solving at the expense of rote learning.

The only time I saw Iraqi men entirely intimidated by the American-British forces was in Basra, when a cluster of men gaped, awestruck, around an example of the most astoundingly modern weapon in the Western arsenal.

Her name was Claire, and she had a machine gun in her arms and a flower in her helmet.

Curiosity ... inspired Italian journalist Riccardo Orizio to pursue the seven deposed dictators he interviews in "Talk of the Devil." They include Idi Amin, Jan-Bedel Bokassa, Wojciech Jaruzelski, Nexhmije Hoxha, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, Mengistu Haile Mariam and Mira Markovic (wife of Slobodan Milosevic), who once ruled, respectively, Uganda, the Central African Republic, Poland, Albania, Haiti, Ethiopia and Yugoslavia. ... Eventually he made a project of tracking down "fallen tyrants," asking, "How does a one-time dictator, whom the history books describe as ruthless, immoral and power-crazed, grow old? What does he tell his children and grandchildren about himself? What does he tell himself?"

...

If you work hard enough at reading "The Psychological Assessment of Political Leaders," you might glean that Gerald Ford used more qualifiers than any other chief executive studied, "giving his style of speaking a halting, indecisive flavor"; that Bill Clinton said "me" when attacked, a word used most often by children, women and elderly people that tends to paint the speaker as a victim; and that Hillary Clinton's frequent use of "explainers" makes her come across as didactic. Also, that Saddam Hussein's verbal manner, with its "few expressions of feeling" and "frequent use of adverbial intensifiers and direct references" probably strikes his listeners as "cold, aggressive intrusiveness ... the speech pattern of a menacing speaker, a bully."

The American political figure whose speech most resembles Saddam's, interestingly enough, is Pat Buchanan. The chief difference between the two is that Buchanan makes jokes, and as glad as I am that Buchanan hasn't got any real power in the U.S., I suspect the difference is crucial. With the possible exception of Idi Amin -- there's always a wild card -- none of the dictators Orizio interviews shows any sign of a sense of humor.

At this point the reporter broke in. "I'm sorry, I didn't think I was going to talk about `man on dog' with a United States senator," she said. "It's sort of freaking me out."

Beginning Sunday, April 20, 2003, airline pilots began bringing handguns into the cockpit ... there's probably a higher probability of a cockpit gun being used in a suicide, or discharged accidentally, than ever being used to ward off a terrorist. Neither scenario is particularly likely, and I will not use the suicide/accident scenario as a lobbying point against the program, but if we have to split hairs, that's my position.

I predict the first self-aware system will not be a 2001 HAL-like supercomputer, but a spam filter running on someones desktop.

"What are you doing Dave? How about a lower mortgage rate, Dave?"

Interviewing for computer jobs in Seattle in the last six years I've heard plenty of the Microsoft questions - puzzle questions asked during an interview to "see how you think." In one interview I interrupted mid-question with "the trick has to do with pouring the big bucket into the little bucket and leaving water in the big bucket and that gets you access to some different quantities of water—do you need to see the details?" I used to assume that's the sort of thing that's cost me a number of jobs. But now I'm not so sure, because of something I've always suspected:

In one experiment he describes, two trained interviewers conducted interviews with a group of volunteers. Their evaluations were compared to those of another group who saw a fifteen second video of the interview: the candidate entering the room, shaking hands, and sitting down. The opinions correlated strongly; in other words, when you are sitting in an interview telling the interviewer what you do on your day off and what the last book you read was, the interviewer has already made up his or her mind, based on who knows what subjective criteria. As Poundstone laments, "This would be funny if it weren't tragic."

Unskilled interviewers use puzzle questions with a cargo-cult mentality. They think that merely by asking them they will gain insight. If you don't already know what information you're looking for and how to gather it, puzzle questions won't help because you won't be able to interpret or steer the results. If you don't know how to conduct an interview and what your goals are, good questions won't help.

I once had a worst-case scenario, combining a snap-judgment from the interviewer with a poorly managed puzzle question. After a day of some good and some distant interviews, my next interviewer hated me on sight. He managed to exude "you suck" vibes just shaking my hand. He gave me an open-ended question which ended up consuming the whole hour. I tried to narrow down and define the question and enter into a discussion with him, but he just wasn't interested.

Good interviews, in my opinion, consist of observing the interviewee using the skills that the job will use. So a puzzle question can be used to elicit problem-solving or (more usefully) cooperative problem solving. For example, a good interview might go like this:

Q: Okay, so we have a widget that needs to do X. Show me how you would build it.

A: Looking at the problem, my first step would be, Has Y been considered? In this situation I think Y might be a better solution, and certainly five to ten times cheaper.

Q: Good point. How would you make that case to a business manager? ... Okay, now that you've learned that reason Z forces us to do X instead of Y, show me how you build a widget that does X.

A: [demonstrates]

But this guy's goal was just to kill an hour and generate evidence for his theory that I sucked. The nadir, as we discussed "how to design a city," and I struggled to enumerate ways to "build community," was when he showed a brief flicker of interest in one of my answers and asked a follow-up question, "So you'd want to encourage Starbucks, because of how their stores create that kind of community space you're talking about?"

After a too-long hesitation, I replied, "Uh, yeah."

I was sent home immediately after, but I wish I'd been sent home immediately before. Or at least given him a real answer: "No, you yuppie jackass, Starbucks does not foster community."

Oh, and the time I interrupted with the solution to the buckets problem before the interviewer could finish asking - I got that job. They wanted people who could interrupt and disagree forcefully but politely, because when everybody in a group has enough trust to do that, things go much faster and bad ideas get fixed much sooner.

The WHO issued an advisory this morning warning against non-essential travel to Toronto (international and domestic). Great. I'm living Outbreak or Twelve Monkeys. And I won't get to see Brad Pitt's ass in this real-life version.

One word I thought I may have overused when writing about the epidemic is unprecedented. But it's really the only word to describe what I am seeing during my final days in Beijing. Only a few hours ago the government held a two-hour, live press conference broadcast on national television. Trust me, it is a very, very rare occurence for this government to hold an open press conference of any kind-- but live? Nationally broadcast? For two full hours, with international reporters hammering them with tough questions? Unfuckingprecedented.

But that's just for starters ....

It's hard to predict what life will be like in a hundred years. There are only a few things we can say with certainty. We know that everyone will drive flying cars, that zoning laws will be relaxed to allow buildings hundreds of stories tall, that it will be dark most of the time, and that women will all be trained in the martial arts. Today I want to zoom in on one detail of this picture. What kind of programming language will they use to write the software controlling those flying cars?

I had a bicycle as a small child, and I'm sure I fell off it, but I don't really remember. The first time I remember falling off my bicycle was in San Diego, on a weird little bike trail that followed a canal. When the canal ran into a road and the trail into a bridge, the trail turned ninety degrees and climbed three feet in ... I'd say about three feet of distance. When I turned ninety degrees, I climbed about one foot, came to a complete halt due to gravity, and then keeled over.

The second fall had basically the same dynamics. I was riding on the bicycle trail on Santa Monica beach on a Saturday afternoon, always a terrible idea because, even though there's a parallel, equally nice cement path for foot traffic, everybody goes on the bike path. Bicycles, roller-bladers, skateboarders, and pedestrians. But I ended up on the trail by accident on the way home from a ride up the streets and hills of Pacific Palisades, and I was admiring a woman sunning herself on a bench in the sand when I looked forward and saw a mountain on the path in front of me. Fortunately I wasn't going too terribly fast. I grabbed the brakes, slowed almost to a halt, and just like the Ford Pinto scene in Top Secret, ever-so-gently tapped the mountain, which was in fact an enormously tall and wide black man carrying a lawn chair under each arm. I thus came to a complete halt and then, as one does when one is on a bicycle but not moving in any direction, keeled over. The man I had hit turned around with a "what are you doing you crazy white child" look on his face and as I got up I pointed in the general direction of the bench, but I had been riding looking over my shoulder for so long that it was at least thirty yards back and indistinguishable from the beach crowd, and explained, "There was a woman. On the bench."

He shook his head, muttered something, and kept going. He hadn't even dropped the chairs when I hit him.

The third fall, and the only one involving injuries, happened riding home in the rain here in Seattle. I was on a narrow two-lane road, a bit before dusk, and a car was, at least in car vs bicycle terms, tailgating me. I knew some diagonal railroad tracks were coming up, and I kept looking over my shoulder, but then the tracks were in front of me and my brain locked up and I couldn't brake to a halt and I couldn't swerve towards the centerline so as to take the tracks squarly so I just kept going and then my bicycle wasn't underneath me any more and I was on the pavement sliding forward on my thigh and forearms. It didn't hurt much, and when I stopped moving I did a quick systems check, got up, walked twenty or thirty feet back to my bicycle, picked it up, gave a dirty look to the tailgater that had at last given me some room. After the backup of cars had cleared I rode home. Thanks to gloves and a full-sleeve jacket, I didn't lose hardly any skin. I had a lump on my elbow for about six months, and my shoulder still pops every time I make a full circle backwards.

This afternoon, riding home from a short visit to the office, grumpy because of the second dessert sitting uneasily in my stomach and also because of the headwind (both directions!) and the light rain combining with the sunshine to hinder visibility, I had another incident. At a busy intersection downtown (7th and Pike) a bunch of pedestrians were crossing the street against the light. Against traffic, of which I was the only member. I picked out a gap in the stream, cruised through, started to turn left, realized I should check for oncoming traffic, looked up, found some, tried to brake with my left hand while making a signal with my right arm to the car, which was itself turning right. Pure telepathy would have allowed us to coordinate our actions safely, but lacking both telepathy and right-of-way I instead reached across my body with my right arm in an attempt to communicate to the driver that I apologized for the intrusion but wished her or him to either rapidly accelerate through the turn or to stop completely, but under no circumstances to proceed slowly while showing concern for my welfare because, given my more limited options, that would be the one course of action leading inevitably to collision. This leftward reaching with the right arm apparently caused my left arm move sympathetically, turning the handlebars sharply to the left, and I found that the rear part of the bicycle was now airborne. I then completed a maneuver of which I have no clear recollection, at the end of which I was crouched on both feet on the pavement, nominally still standing, and holding some part of my bicycle behind me with my left hand, the fingers of which were smarting. I don't believe I came within ten feet of the car, which disappeared. I picked up my bicycle, walked to the corner of the intersection, straightened the handlebars, waited for traffic to clear, and got back underway. As per the rules of sumo, since no part of my body other than feet touched the ground and I did not step outside the ring, I do not consider this a fall, and my record thus remains, three falls in eight years, one with casualties.

And please don't point to jubilant Iraqis dancing in the streets to validate the case for "pre-emptive liberation." You'd be doing the Baghdad Bugaloo too if the murderous tyrant who'd been eating off golden plates while your family starved finally got what was coming to him. It in no way proves that running roughshod over international law and pouring Iraqi oil -- now brought to you by the good folks at Halliburton -- onto the flames of anti-American hatred was a good idea. It wasn't before the war, and it still isn't now. The unintended consequences have barely begun to unfold.

One bright spot in the war is that we're seeing a bunch of really independent journalists - people just up and go to the war zone and write about what they see. Judging from some of the reports, journalists outnumber the Special Forces in northern Iraq. I've been reading Back to Iraq 2.0 and Salon's Phillip Robertson. Apparently Slate has a guy in there too:

I sat in Kirkuk last night with a bottle of whiskey and an MRE donated by a kind Marine. I feasted on beef in mushroom sauce, chicken breast with apple jelly, and M&Ms. An American journalist told me about the first day of liberation in Mosul; she said it was the most frightening place she'd ever been. While she was at the hospital, two Arabs and a Kurdish peshmerga were brought in dead. She went to interview a doctor, and when she returned someone had cut off the Kurd's head and taken it away. She kept repeating, "I mean, when heads are missing; Jesus Christ, his head was gone; they took his head. ..."

The difference, as I understand from reading ... independent journalists ... is that Kirkuk is still mostly Kurdish and Turkomen, whereas Mosul was force-populated by Arabs in the last few decades. Why can't we all just get along?

The version of this joke that I heard/tell goes like this: a mathematician, physicist, engineer, and computer programmer are all challenged to determine whether all odd numbers are prime. The mathematician says, "One is prime, three is prime, five is prime, seven is prime, nine is not prime - nope." The physicist said, "One is prime, three is prime, five is prime, seven is prime, nine is probably experimental error because eleven and thirteen are prime - yep." The engineer says, "One is prime, three is prime, five is prime, seven is prime, nine is prime, eleven is prime - yep." The computer programmer says, "One is prime, one is prime, one is prime, one is prime ...." Here, courtesy of the internet and Dave Berry's blog, is some more material.

Computational linguist: 3 is an odd prime, 5 is an odd prime, 7 is an odd prime, 9 is a very odd prime,...
Chemist: 1 prime, 3 prime, 5 prime... hey, let's publish!
Programmer: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 will be fixed in the next release ...
Richard Nixon: Put nine on the enemies list. I'm gonna get that number.

...structured programming, a reform movement whose manifesto was Edsger W. Dijkstra's brief letter to the editor titled "Go to statement considered harmful." Structured programs were to be built out of subunits that have a single entrance point and a single exit (eschewing the goto command, which allows jumps into or out of the middle of a routine). Three such constructs were recommended: sequencing (do A, then B, then C), alternation (either do A or do B) and iteration (repeat A until some condition is satisfied). Corrado Böhm and Giuseppe Jacopini proved that these three idioms are sufficient to express essentially all programs.

... is that there are so many to choose from. In order to build your own linux kernel, you must have a bunch of supporting software, and each program must be relatively recent. Fortunately, the linux 2.5 kernel documentation shows you how to check the version of each required program. Also fortunately, most of the programs follow standards on how to check their versions. Unfortunately, the programs follow four different standards.

o  Gnu C                  2.95.3                  # gcc --version
o  Gnu make               3.78                    # make --version
o  binutils               2.9.5.0.25              # ld -v
o  util-linux             2.10o                   # fdformat --version
o  module-init-tools      0.9.9                   # depmod -V
o  e2fsprogs              1.29                    # tune2fs
o  jfsutils               1.0.14                  # fsck.jfs -V
o  reiserfsprogs          3.6.3                   # reiserfsck -V 2>&1|grep rei\
serfsprogs
o  xfsprogs               2.1.0                   # xfs_db -V
o  pcmcia-cs              3.1.21                  # cardmgr -V
o  PPP                    2.4.0                   # pppd --version
o  isdn4k-utils           3.1pre1                 # isdnctrl 2>&1|grep version
o  procps                 2.0.9                   # ps --version
o  oprofile               0.5                     # oprofiled --version

Snyder filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Salt Lake City suburb for allowing other pre-meeting prayers but refusing to let him offer a prayer addressed to "Our Mother, who art in heaven." ... Among other things, the prayer asked for deliverance "from the evil of forced religious worship now sought to be imposed upon the people ... by the actions of misguided, weak and stupid politicians, who abuse power in their own self-righteousness."

I updated The Quiz to show individual scores. It used to say:

March 01, 2003 40 of 236 questions completed

and now it says

March 01, 2003 40 of 236 questions completed, with 18 (45%) correct. If you guessed randomly, you would expect 13 correct answers. You did 36% better than random guessing.

It took two hours. Since some questions have three choices and others two, it's trickier than it might appear to come up with these numbers. Also, I took a figurative whack at one of my pet peeves. To wit:

If you took a ten-question true/false test, and got five right, you got 50%. Someone who got six right got 60%. But they didn't do 10% better than you. They did 20% better than you ((6-5)/5). You, however, didn't do 20% worse than them. You did 17% worse ((5-6)/6). But common usage is to quote the difference in percentages as the percentage difference. That's balony, and we won't be doing that on my web site.

Which of the following was not one of the goals of this war?
(a) Disarm Iraq's weapons of mass destruction
(b) Bring Saddam Hussein to justice
(c) Create a democratic and free Iraq
(d) Tear down a statue of Saddam Hussein

PS: Have we found Osama bin Laden yet?

Greenspan's latest speech is taken as evidence that he wants to reform patent protections. But his fundamental premise is wrong:

In the case of physical property, we take it for granted that the ownership right should have the potential of persisting as long as the physical object itself. In the case of an idea, however, we have chosen to strike a different balance in recognition of the chaos that could follow from having to trace back all the thoughts implicit in one's current undertaking and pay a royalty to the originator of each one. So rather than adopting that obviously principled but unworkable approach, we have chosen instead to follow the lead of British common law and place time limits on intellectual property rights.

No, no, no. Greenspan implies that, in principle, intellectual property rights should last forever just like physical property rights. And that the only reason they don't is that that would be to inconvenient to enforce. What about the concept that right derive from their benefit to humanity? By creating unnecessary scarcity, intellectual property rights hurt humanity.

You can also read his speech in plain English.

DUHOK, Iraqi Kurdistan — Well, that last post was quite a cliff-hanger, wasn’t it? However, after two nights and a day of walking — well, walking, marching, climbing, scrambling — from Turkey to Iraq, I can confirm that I’m safe and well in Duhok at the Jiyan Palace Hotel. The crossing was a Bataan death march. Luckily we survived. I’m exhausted. It’s 4 p.m. here in Iraq, and I need to sleep for a while. Sorry for no details on this one, but I’m just absolutely knackered.

At least I’m alive. Now, I can get to work.

I'm now reading the weblogs of two different independent journalists in Northern Iraq, Christopher Allbritton, quoted above, and Phillip Robertson, reporting for Salon. What's weird is that Robertson keeps mentioning camera crews and reporters all over the place in Northern Iraq. Who are they? Where are their weblogs?

Retired General Anthony Zinni, former CinC of the Central Command and recently "retired" from being Bush's middle east envoy, is the most generally credible military viewpoint I've seen.

"You don't speak to Arab pride and Arab manhood in this way. That whole psychological business gave them another cause to fight for, more than they would have fought just for Saddam."

Zinni said everything in the Iraq war will climax in what he called "the moment."

"That moment will be when the region, the country and the world realizes Saddam is gone. It will be a moment of decision. There will be tremendous mixed emotions in the Islamic and Arab world," he said.

As some of you know, I work for a major Toronto hotel. My department head has never seen occupancy plummet so far, so fast. A city-wide conference (American Association of Cancer Research) has cancelled, at enormous cost to the organization and to the city. My observation for today: Australia's travel warning about Toronto is out of sheer spite. We're not on board with mother England on Iraq. You do the math. And, for the first time since the fall of 2001, I'll be going down to a 4-day workweek. Oh well--I'll be able to watch Oprah's inevitable SARS show.

Up to now, SARS has had a fatality rate of about 3.5 percent. If that sounds mild compared, say, to the virus that causes AIDS, consider this: The pandemic flu of 1918 killed "only" about 2.5 percent of those whom it infected. That amounted to 50 million people worldwide. ... Up to now, U.S. authorities have been effective and probably fortunate in controlling the spread of SARS. Except for a handful of close relatives and health workers, the 69 known suspected SARS patients here were all sickened in Asia. By keeping them off the streets, U.S. officials have prevented community outbreaks so far. The same is largely true of Vietnam and Singapore. But that is not the case in Hong Kong ... In Canada, with over 100 suspected cases, the fear is palpable. ...

The SARS threat, which could end up requiring considerable vigilance and resources, bears out what many state and local health officials said about the smallpox vaccine program: that it was a waste of their precious time and energy.

"I'm more worried about smallpox vaccine than I am about smallpox currently," says Wenzel. Meanwhile, his hospital is treating its first possible SARS patient.

"That's real," he says. "That's here."

Natural uranium is a blend of several isotopes. After you take out the one percent that's U-235 - the extra-radioactive part, very good if you like chain reactions - and traces of other isotopes, the leftover 99% is barely radioactive and almost twice as dense as lead. (Remember, when people say that it stays radioactive for 4.5 billion years - well, first, they don't understand half-lives; it stays radioactive for much longer than that - but mainly, that means that if you stare at an atom for, say, a billion years, it only has a 25% chance of radio-acting.) It gets used commercially where they need really dense stuff, and it's safe it that context - few people climb into elevator shafts to lick the counterweights. On the battlefield, though, it's used in bullets and armor. In this context, it tends to get vaporized. Those alpha particles that can't penetrate a few sheets of paper get a chance to work you from the inside. But mostly the problem is that it's a heavy metal, like lead and cadmium, and heavy metals are poisonous.

How poisonous? The Army insists so strenuously that it's safe that you're left with the impression that we ought to feed it to babies for their health. "[kidney-damaging doses] are far above levels soldiers would have encountered in the Gulf or the Balkans." -- DU Library - Department of Defense. Well good for our boys, I guess, but not so good for the people whose backyards we fought in while we liberated them. The DoD also quotes a WHO study: "No increase of leukemia or other cancers has been established following exposure to uranium or DU." But that study also says things like "Long-term studies of workers exposed to uranium have reported some impairment of kidney function depending on the level of exposure. However, there is also some evidence that this impairment may be transient and that kidney function returns to normal once the source of excessive uranium exposure has been removed." And it has a whole chapter on "Biokinetics of uranium species from the standpoint of nephrotoxicty" but I have to confess I didn't read it. Bottom line, as far as I can tell with a cursory literature inspection, is that US military use of DU may make a few (hundred) people sick but probably won't kill anybody, and if it did it would be hard to prove.

Meanwhile, here's an explanation of why it's used:

The unit (part of the 24th Infantry Division) had gone on, leaving this tank to wait for a recovery vehicle. Three T-72’s appeared and attacked. The first fired from under 1,000 meters, scoring a hit with a shaped-charge (high explosive) round on the M1A1’s frontal armor. The hit did no damage. The M1A1 fired a 120mm armor-piercing round that penetrated the T-72 turret, causing an explosion that blew the turret into the air. The second T-72 fired another shaped-charge round, hit the frontal armor, and did no damage. This T-72 turned to run, and took a 120mm round in the engine compartment and blew the engine into the air. The last T-72 fired a solid shot (sabot) round from 400 meters. This left a groove in the M1A1’s frontal armor and bounced off. The T-72 then backed up behind a sand berm and was completely concealed from view. The M1A1 depressed its gun and put a sabot round through the berm, into the T-72, causing an explosion. -- excerpted from Dunnigan, James F. and Austin Bay, From Shield to Storm: High-Tech Weapons, Military Strategy, and Coalition Warfare in the Persian Gulf, William Morrow & Company, 1992, p. 294-295.

Putting these together, the average amount of information per ejaculation is 1.560*10^ 9* 2 bits * 2.00*10^ 8, which comes out to be 6.24*10 ^17 bits. That's about 78,000 terabytes of data! ... If you figure that a male orgasm lasts five seconds, you get a transmission rate of 15,600 tb/s. In comparison, an OC-96 line (like the ones that make up much of the backbone of the internet) can move .005 tb/s. ... If you consider signal to noise, though, the figures come out much differently.

[Commander in Chief of Pacific Command] Admiral Blair advocated the notion that U.S. military officers could reform their foreign counterparts. He pushed countries in his theater to send their officers to American schools and to open their hallways to U.S. planners and trainers. (Priest, Dana. The Mission, p 51. 2003 W.W. Norton & Company)

Can you spot anything in the careers or biographies of military officers that makes them more likely to violate human rights?

What was the big risk for Salvadorean military officers committing huge human rights violations? US training. It's very, very clear. I think US training selects the officers who are the most motivated, and the way that you distinguished yourself in the Salvadorean military in the 1980s was by killing people. So the most motivated officers are also the worst. But what this also says is that US training is useless for restraining human rights abuse. US training also advantages officers relative to other officers, so when they come back they get better jobs and are in a position to commit more violations. (Patrick Ball "has spent 12 years designing software that turns information on human rights abuses into databases." Interviewed in New Scientist)

Every human rights story goes like this: I am a deponent, and I'm here to tell you about things that happened to one or many victims. I myself may or may not be one of those victims. Each of those victims may have suffered one or more violations, and those violations may or may not be what historians call colligated at one or more points in time or space. Each of the violations may have been perpetrated by zero, one, or many identifiable perpetrators, and those perpetrators may be individuals with names and ranks, or they may be institutions. Each of those may be associated with one or more of the violations in this story. That's the complexity of one story. Now we're going to collect 10,000 stories. (Patrick Ball "has spent 12 years designing software that turns information on human rights abuses into databases." Interviewed in New Scientist)