PMI is the Project Management Institute, the biggest and oldest institution in my profession. I'm voting for the Board of Directors. There are nine candidates, three women and six men, and I can vote for up to five. Here are some quotes from candidate statements:

My vision of PMI is to be globally recognized as the de facto advocate for project management, and the key transformation agent through its innovative products, services, programs and partnerships.

PMI's position as the global thought leader in project, program and portfolio management and the authoritative source for all aspects of project management knowledge has been reinforced to me as I have worked with project managers from around the globe.

Second, remain the "Thought Leader" in project management by continuing to be the "go-to" organization for practitioners and corporations looking for project management information.

Finally, PMI must remain a forum for thought leadership in the project management profession

PMI has made significant progress to establish increased membership and presence in various regions, but a stronger focus on a large part of the African region is strategically needed.

As a Board member, I would advocate for PMI's thought leadership in bringing together diverse stakeholders (e.g., academia, corporations, vendors) and professional associations (e.g., engineering, IT, other project management associations) to promote compelling messaging around the value of the profession, and common approaches to its practice.

Slim pickings, you can see, although one of those quotes is markedly different from the rest. Most of the statements are fairly pure bullshit, of both the ב₀ and ב₁ varieties. None of these people seem likely to address what I think is the fundamental weakness of the profession and the institute: the pressures to stop dealing with reality and start dealing with an artificial world instead, a world in which "thought leadership" is a meaningful phrase.

It's barely past noon but I heard something at lunch that I'm confident will be the most important thing I learned today. If a killer robot is chasing you, throw unbalanced things with weird moments of inertia at it, like frying pans and cats. Robot motion controllers can't handle stuff like that, so if it catches a gyroscope you threw at, it may get confused long enough for you to escape. For now.

Two senses of wrong. 2+2=5 wrong. For example, the Sonny Bono act which extended existing and future copyrights 20 years. Extending existing copyrights clearly does not serve the public policy purpose of copyright, which is to incent people to create works. Another example: the US sugar industry lobbied the US Senate to change the World Health Organization to say at most 25% of your caloric intake should come from added sugar, rather than 10% as the WHO drafted it.

Global warming is another example of this kind of wrong. Over a period when 0% of peer-reviewed articles called into question the consensus around global warming (that it's real, important, human-created, important to stop, and possible to stop), 53% of media articles called it into question, and Congress delayed action.

Second sense of wrong. "That's just wrong" wrong. Example: Fannie Mae's "socialized risk, privatized benefits." Crony capitalism. Steven Paine, who was caught on tape soliciting donations to the Bush 43 library in exchange for access. The administration said this is "completely ordinary". Third example: Congressman Rangel soliticed donations to the Charlie B Rangel Center for Public Service from the people he regulates. Launched an inquiry into himself to prove there was no conflict of interest according to the standards of Washington. Wrong because corrupt.

Wrongs of the second kind lead to wrongs of the first kind.

Framers were obsessed circa 1785 with independence. Incredible corruption in Federated US driven by lack of independence among representatives. The US Constitution, however, failed to achieve this. Bribery was not criminalized in Congress until 1853. The 20th century is much better than the 19th century in this sense, but a new form of corruption arrives. Abramof and Cunningham's kind of corruption is the exception; the real problem is the need for constant attention to money to retain tenure in Congress. Incumbent re-election rates have reached almost 100%.

The costs to our society from this dependency. In 1994, Al Gore proposed to deregulate telecommunications; Congress refused because this would undermine the ability of Congresspeople to raise money from the industry. Most importantly, this dependency destroys trust.

Between March and June 2008, 94 Congressional Democrats changed from voting no to voting yes on telecom immunity. Those who had changed their vote had received twice the donations that other members had.

Public approval of Congress is down to 9%, the lowest level ever measured. This is a bankrupt institution. As Congress fails, power shifts to the president and to the courts.

The Change Congress organization, founded by Lessig and Joe Trippi, intends to coordinate and intensify existing efforts to reform. Layer 1 gets people to pledge to one of four complementary platforms of reform. Layer 2 intends to publicize the contrast between actual and pledged support by members of congress. Layer 3 is to steer support in the way that Emily's List does.

Dependency may not be the most important political problem, but it's the first problem that must be addressed because it undermines any other solutions.

Q: How does this dependency affect academics? A: The best academics simply avoid public policy issues.

Q: What about term limits? A:I used to support them, but now, because of California's experience, I oppose them. Lobbyists know more than politicians about how government actually works, so term limits shift power to lobbyists. We need more dedicated, career legislators.

Q: How can the movement you've described take advantage of the presidential candidates' rhetoric of change? A: I'm conflicted. I'm a strong supporter of Barack Obama. I was disappointed when he decided not to take public funding. There are two public funding problems, one around the president and the other around Congress. We won't be able to fund local elections through online contributions in the next ten years even if presidential candidates can.

Q: Can you comment on the decision that corporations are persons and can therefore ... free speech ... campaign contributions? A: This is a hard question for Constitutional law scholars. The Supreme court never actually acknowledged that corporations are people; instead a court reporter added that notion, which then became lore. The Supreme Court is not going to change in any interesting way in the next 25 years. We should therefore focus on what we can do; pass laws that would be upheld by the Supreme Court.

Q: Is there a resource someone can go to to see who companies contribute to? A: That's a softball question, it must come from someone from Maplight.

Q: How do you mass-market this idea to the American people? A: That's too hard. The only way you're allowed to talk about public policy such that the media will cover it is to run for something. But to run for something, you have to become part of the problem. We want to show people how whatever specific concerns they have have been mistreated by Congress because of the dependency problem. We're in a long-term strategy; we expect the Pledge campaign to take three or four cycles. We expect some campaigns to take 10 or 20 years to run.

Q: comprehensive energy policy in context of corruption? A: All evidence is no.

Q: What about eliminating riders and earmarks? A: Our Congress originally had very strong germaneness requirements. But it's better for everybody in Congress if bills are compromise bills instead of single-issue bills. (Joel's note: i.e., an institutional design flaw in Congress allows members of Congress to serve their own political needs at the expense of their intended function.)

Q: You suggested the 19th century had worse corruption, but more damage is being done today. Is this because modern government has more power. A: The 19th century Congress is full of genuinely bad people. The modern Congress is full of good people in an awful system and not taking responsibility for fixing that awful system. If they were personally corrupt, it might be better because their personal bribe needs would be much smaller than re-election costs. Increasingly Congress is just the farm league for K street, where the real money is. This is the same model as my law students: work as an associate and become a partner, somewhat the same pay structure, but I don't want my students running the government.

Q: This seems to be a big jump from your career as a lawyer. What prompted it? A: I started as a constitutional law professor. This is constitutional law; this is our government failing to function. I want to see parties actively content; the constitutional framework within which parties contest must be one we can trust, and this one isn't.

Q: What kind of organization is Change Congress? A: We are a c(3), which is a non-profit; a c(4), which is a interest group organization, and a PAC.

Q: How do you keep lobbyists from infiltrating Change Congress? A: I think lobbyists are an important part of change. But there's the same line as with lawyers in front of the Supreme Court. Note that Members can pay for lots of personal luxuries with campaign funds. That's the line we need to draw.

Q: Twenty years from now, having a conversation with your adult son, what change would you like Change Congress to have achieved. A: Judge Scalia has a line that every generation takes certain things for granted. We look back and can't believe how people were so racist, increasingly sexual orientation is like that. I want my son to say, "how could anyone has thought it would be okay for people to influence congress in the way they did? How could you have wasted your time on that when you could have been playing with me?"

I've added a category for brain stuff, so you can click below where it says "Brain" to read previous posts. Most recently, I mentioned the theory from the Red Queen, that human brains evolved via the battle of the sexes. Here's some fresh information on the issue, this time from the perspective of cooking.

Highlights:

• Human brains got bigger 2 million years ago, but there's no archaeological evidence of smarter humans until 150,000 years ago.
• "In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. But cooking, by breaking down fibers and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body. Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, Khaitovich explained, thereby freeing up calories for our brains."

The battle between brain and gut for energy budget has been pointed to before; interesting to see it pop up again.

Some things come easier than others. I've always had a hard time with simple arithmetic than goes between single and double digits. I'm probably better at estimated square roots of numbers under 100 than I am adding two numbers between six and nine quickly and confidently. Don't ask me why, just a hole in the brain. For calculating any time zones outside of the US, I've learned to absolutely, no matter what, re-check my calculations with a special tool like the World Clock Meeting Planner. And analog clocks with hands always slow me down just a bit. It almost always takes me a few seconds to sort out which is the big hand and which is the little hand, and while I know the hours, I usually end up working out the minutes under my breath just to be sure.

Fortunately, linux offers a plethora of clocks. Here are just a few:

To change subjects for a moment, let's talk about desktop environments. A desktop environment is the code that provides the borders around all of your programs, the maximize and minimize buttons, the system menus and settings, the glue for all of the other things you look at and poke with. It's like The Force for your computer screen. It is part of the "operating system", but technically distinct from the inner guts of the operating system. If your computer were a car, the file system and kernel and such would be under the hood; the desktop environment would be the upholstery and dashboard and indeed the hood; and your programs would be the places you drove to, I guess.

If you use Windows, then all of this is smushed together; Windows XP is your kernel and your desktop and your catechism and everything else. This used to be true of Macs as well. But with OS X, Apple brought in industrial-strength Unix guts, and put a glossy desktop environment on top, and proved that you can put lipstick on a pig. Actually that's unfair to the Unix guts (BSD); it's more like proving that you can make safe and friendly consumer products with nuclear turbine engines carefully hidden inside. Neal Stephenson's 1999 essay In the Beginning was the Command Line, by the way, remains required reading if you are interested in the subject of user interfaces and operating systems.

In the Linux universe, things are more wide-open. While the industrial-strength guts are more or less standard, a much broader range of choice remains at the desktop environment level. The two main options are KDE and Gnome. KDE has a reputation as the more flexible, configurable one, while Gnome has gone aggressively in the direction of simplicity. Since I'm not a new user and I'm stubborn about how I do things, I tend to prefer KDE—more on that later. I just want to mention a single feature that comes standard with the KDE bundle, a killer feature whose absences from Gnome is sufficient to guarantee I'll stick with KDE for the duration: the fuzzy clock. It's an option within the Panel Clock (Configure -> Appearance -> Clock Type: Fuzzy). It looks like this:

At minimum fuzz, it says "twenty five to eleven". If you turn up the fuzziness, it will say "twelve o'clock", and then "Night", and then, at High Fuzziness, "Weekend!" I keep it at minimum fuzz because I do want to know what time it is; I just don't want to know to the minute, or watch the seconds and minutes ticking away. I like my doses of mortality just a bit vague. And until Gnome offers the fuzzy clock, I'll never switch.

I've published the airplane recognition poster on Cafe Press, where you can buy it as a 20" x 14" poster. Enjoy!

I just gave up on the last of the three Foundation prequels, written by the Killer Bs (Brin, Benford, and Bear). The ideas were vaguely interesting, but the characters and plot were so wretchedly thin, serving merely as didactic mouthpieces for a not-especially-sophisticated set of arguments about destiny and chaos and humanity and whatnot. The last straw for me was this passage, after the aged Hari Seldon fears he's had a stroke:

Hari yearned for a return to unconscious oblivion, rather than discover that another portion of his brain had died. He did not want to face the aftermath—another harsh setback on the long slide toward personal extinction.

All the talk about the Laws of Robotics made me realize that this may be a suitable framework for contemplating what King Kaufman calls "The Complicated Calculus of Teams I Root for". For me, the calculus goes like this:

1. Thou shalt always cheer for the Dodgers, whoever is playing the Yankees, the Nets, the US national womens' and men's football teams, Arsenal, whoever is playing the Blues, and the Mighty Ducks (but not the non-Mighty 2006 and later Anaheim Ducks).
   1. Thou shalt always cheer for whoever is playing the Giants, except when the Giants are playing the Yankees
   2. Thou shalt always cheer for whoever is playing the Cardinals, unless the Cardinals are playing the Yankees, or the Giants while the Giants are in contention for the NL West or NL wild card
2. Thou shalt always cheer for the A's, the Red Sox, the Mets, whoever is playing the Cowboys, whoever is playing the Patriots, and whoever is playing Manchester United, except when such a team is playing a team defined in the First Rule.
3. Thou shalt never cheer for or against Tiger Woods or Roger Federer or Herman Maier, except inasmuch as one may cheer for a force of nature, such as a sunset or rainbow.

In The Red Queen, Matt Ridley popularized the theory that human intelligence is the byproduct of an evolutionary arms race of sexual selection. It goes something like this:

• fact: human brains are proportionately much larger than almost any other species, including any other primate
• fact: one proven catalyst for extreme evolutionary change is an arms race, where two sets of genes compete with all other things more or less equal. For example, a predator and its prey each get faster and faster, but relative to each other they stay competitive. This continues until all other things are no longer equal; e.g., the cost to be so fast can no longer be paid. For example, it is argued that humans and other primates pay for all of that metabolically expensive brain tissue with smaller digestive tracts, an tradeoff that clearly has limits.
• fact: sexual selection occurs, in which a trait which is not otherwise critical to fitness becomes attractive for purposes of attracting mates, leading to extreme exaggeration of that trait. Example: peacock tails.
• Theory: at some point displays of intelligence became important for proto-human males to attract females, and conversely female intelligence was required to select good male mates. This turned into an arms race, leading to dramatic increases in brain size, a byproduct of which was modern human intelligence.

This is not the only explanation for human brain size; social cooperation and language are also factors. Here's a more recent study which posits something similar: "... the balance of evidence now clearly favors the suggestion that it was the computational demands of living in large, complex societies that selected for large brains. However, recent analyses suggest that it may have been the particular demands of the more intense forms of pairbonding that was the critical factor."

Today's New York Times has an article about the search for genetic causes of schizophrenia, which is taking longer than expected because none of the big obvious causes pan out. Instead, it seems likely that "the genetic component of the disease is due to a large number of variants, each of which is very rare, rather than to a handful of common variants." What this means is that evolution has done a very good job of eliminating the big causes of (some kinds of) mental illness, leaving only lots of little things that aren't as simply selected for deletion. In other words, there is evolutionary pressure to have good brains. This is surprising to a lead researcher because "I would have thought the brain was a luxury organ when it comes to reproductive success."

I guess he's not current on the Red Queen and human sexual selection for brains. Chalk up a supporting point for Ridley's theory.

Although, an alternate explanation does occur to me. Perhaps we are being bred by brain-eating zombies for taste and flavor.

Since upgrading to Ubuntu 7.10 last year, I've had problems getting the microphone to work in Skype. It sounds fine in the headphones; you can clearly hear yourself and everything else in the room, but it doesn't go through to Skype. Googling found plenty of people with problems with Ubuntu and Skype and microphones. It seems like there are a lot of reasons this can go wrong. The specific fix for me (Kubuntu 8.04 on a Thinkpad X61 (HDA Intel audio with Analog Devices AD1984 chip), external headset and microphone, the kind with separate headphone and mic plugs, not USB) turns out to be this:

• Open KMix
• Go to the Input tab
• Turn on "capture" by clicking the little radio button at the base of the scale. It should turn from black to red when it turns on
• Also for "capture", move the slider to the top of the scale. Note that there are two "capture" things; I adjusted only the first and left the second at off/zero.

Then the Skype test call worked fine.

After almost exactly a year, I was headed back to the United States. Most airlines will sell you one-year tickets but will only book you nine months into the future. So a few months ago I had to nail down the return leg of my ticket from Seattle, although I didn't have any firm plans for what would happen after arriving at SEATAC. A bit later I made up my mind to go to San Francisco because I've never lived in the Bay Area and it seemed like it might be time. So naturally I checked airlines for dog rules (no dogs on Southwest) and booked a one-way to San Francisco. So Kona and I had a three-leg trip, SIN to NRT to SEA to SFO, starting at 7:15 am in Singapore and ending at 2:30 pm the same day in San Francisco.

When the taxi driver asked if I wanted terminal 1 or 2, at about 3:50 am and after two hours of sleep, I tried to remember where I had come in and had met people coming from the US on the same flight, and said Terminal 1. This turned out to be correct, in that the flight had departed from Terminal 1. But it was moved to the new Terminal 3, and I decided to try and walk to the other terminal so Kona could get some exercise and potty time before the trip. Once I realized that I should completely ignore the advice of the taxi drivers, we made good time crossing the 500 or so meters between terminals. While it's beautifully landscaped, there are no sidewalks for most of the trip, so I was pushing a loaded cart and trailing a corgi while walking on the edge of curving on and off-ramps and splits and joins that were almost, but not completely, devoid of speeding taxis.

After ducking in through car ramp exit, we glided through a nearly empty parking lot, accompanied by surreal muzak.

Terminal 3 is, of course, a giant monument to Singapore's capabilities. While many recent mega-terminals, such as Bangkok's, Heathrow's T5, and going back a few years Denver's new airport had widely publicized disasters, Changi T3 apparently opened very smoothly. It's certainly big and pretty.

We arrived more than three hours before flight time, and everything was going smoothly, as I presented Kona's inch-thick stack of papers, her approved kennel with ball-tip water bottle full of ice, etc. Until the lady asked for an export certificate. Here's her health certificate, I just got it Monday from the vet. No, you need an export license from AVA (the Agri-food and Veterinary Authority). I called United several months ago and they didn't say anything about AVA. Well ...

Kona and I walked around the check-in area for a while; ran back and forth on the sidewalk outside; hung out with the very nice staff (although dogs are supposed to stay in their kennels in the terminal, nobody gave us any trouble).

People started to show up, and we were moved off to the side as various staff spent quality time on the phone. The problem, it turned out, was that the staff believed (from a checklist, I think) that you need the AVA license. They were pretty sure that without the US would put her in quarantine in Seattle at worst, and certainly not send her back, but they weren't sure if the airline might get fined. AVA was closed, naturally, and they had trouble getting anyone from the airline with authority. This went on for over an hour, while we made nice with the other passengers and screwed around in the check-in area.

Finally we were waved to proceed, and I arrived at the gate as it was flashing "last call", which turned out to a bit of hype. And off we went, fleeing the rising sun into the day.

Tokyo Narita features an extra, internal security screen applied after getting off a United flight from Singapore and before getting onto another United flight in the very same concourse. Yay for security theater. Mind dazed from the flight, the lack of sleep, and the stress at Changi, I still managed to reach a realization, aided by the profusion of United 777s at Narita and the announcements for the flight to San Francisco. I could have tried to chang the United return leg to NRT-SFO, skipping the SEA-SFO leg on United(which ended up costing about $300, including $150 for the kennel and $25 for a second piece of luggage. Every time I come back to the United States from a year abroad, air travel has reached a new quantum of suckiness. I asked someone in the security line at SEATAC if we were still doing the shoes thing. "That's never going away.").

Finally, Seattle. Immigration: no problem. Health Department: here's my paperwork. Thank you very much, here's your stamp. Off you go. Baggage. Wait, where's my dog? You'll get her at the main baggage claim. After customs? Yes. Customs: please step this way, sir, for additional inspection. You've been randomly selected.

So we go through my vacuum-packed bags, and they confiscate all of the dog food (which was manufactured in the US, possibly from ingredients made in China, and shipped to Singapore for me to buy it; if I wasn't going to get to eat organic foods, at least Kona, who is not a vegetarian, could. Somehow those variables balance out in my subconscious). But she's going to be hungry! The customs guy is very nice and apologetic, and yes I could have taped some food to the outside of the kennel and it probably would have gone through, but there are no workarounds at this point, and would I like to keep the scoop?

Finally I repack, put my cleared bags on another belt (because it's so much fun to wait for your bags to crash down the carousel slide, you'll want to watch it twice), and head to the main terminal, where I orbit between carousels 1 and 8 watching for the kennel (false alarm, same kennel different dog) and my luggage, having paid three dollars to rent a cart for the occasion. Eventually everything shows up, and Kona is fine. Most of the water bottle has leaked out, predictably, but the absorbent pad lining the kennel has done its duty and the blanket and used t-shirts (for the reassuring odor) are fairly dry, as is Kona. She doesn't get to eat in Seattle, but she does get to do her business, both barrels, in a glorious, sunny Seattle summer noon tainted only slightly by cigarette smoke and diesel fumes. And then it's back into the kennel and back into the airport.

Finally, hours later, with a minimum of anxious waiting, we are re-united, Gus picks us up, and after a stop at In-n-Out we head to Whole Foods in Palo Alto for dog food, and soon we are all relaxing at home.

I'm fairly used to returning to the US after time abroad, so the culture shock list this time around is fairly short:

• We walk on the right side of the sidewalk here
• The sun is liable to rise or set at any moment, not just at 7 am and 7 pm.
• If a car is coming towards you on the wrong side of the road, it's probably a drunk driver.
• It's possible to walk for blocks without breaking a sweat.
• The sidewalks are desolate
• There are ugly utility poles and wires overhead everywhere
• I can afford organic vegetables
• I can't reserve my seat at the movie theater

And a confession: much as Singlish was getting on my nerves the last few months, I was gone less than 24 hours before I first missed it.

Warning: nothing but materialism in this post.

At the beginning of the second semester, after relocating to an apartment about two miles from school, I tried to work out a plan for walking to school instead of taking the bus. The second week that I tried this, tragedy struck. First, my backpack fell off the couch, as it had done many times before. Inside was a Brain Cell, which in turn held my laptop. But I'd dropped this whole combination many times before so I just got back to putting music on my iPod Shuffle (which itself was a second generation Shuffle that I overpaid for at Mustafa Center here in Singapore, replacing the first generation Shuffle that died a natural (so to speak) death thanks to Apple's tradition of shiny but short-lifespan products). I'd been using Ultimate Ears headphones, which fit in the ear canal, sealing off outside sounds, sounding very good, and letting you listen at a lower, healthier volume, even in traffic. Well, healthier as long as you don't get hit by the traffic. Unfortunately, one UE headphone was slowly disintegrating due to a crack in the shell, and the sound tended to come and go. Plus the original plug broke long ago and had to be replaced with an ugly one that eventually stripped the plastic cover.

Part way through my walk, I went for my sweating cold water bottle and managed to launch the iPod to the pavement, where it suffered fatal internal injuries. Then, when I got to school I discovered that my laptop screen backlight was mortally wounded.

Long story short, I replaced the iPod with a Sandisk Sansa Clip (which a kind American friend bought and sent over, it being unavailable in Singapore and Amazon being unwilling to ship it directly). It's about half as expensive as the Shuffle, at US$40, for the same capacity. It's twice as bulky and heavy, but at that still weighs only an ounce and is small enough to hang from the earphone jack (don't try that at home; see above re: falling). It has an adequate display, a microphone, and a radio, all of which the iPod Shuffle lack. Also, it doesn't require any special software like iTunes or linux hacks of iTunes; you can just copy mp3 files over and it catalogs them.

The only minuses are lots of little annoyances in the software. After a few seconds the display goes out, and the first button click wakes it up but does nothing else. Which means that, in normal use, you usually have to hit buttons twice, and then sometimes you hit a button twice when you shouldn't and you lose your place or something. When you unplug the headphones, it doesn't pause; that was a nice trick on the Shuffle. It doesn't queue up clicks very well, so if you want to skip ahead ten songs, you have to click ... pause ... click ... pause ... click ... pause ... click ... pause ... click ... pause ... click ... pause ... click ... pause ... click ... pause ... click ... pause ... click ... pause ... click. (yes, that's eleven clicks. See above.) It has a ring-shaped four-way button, a middle button, and an offset "home" button. Which allows for a straightforward up/down/left/right, but then to "go" you sometimes go "right" and other times go "middle button", and to stop or pause or go back you might need any of the "left" button, the "middle" button", or the offset "home" button. Mostly what you want to do is either play or pause, but then you get trapped in the menu system way too often so the meaning of the buttons shifts and it gets annoying. It's not a disaster by any means; it's just ... annoying.

Meanwhile the headphones were still decaying, but I solved that problem by losing both them and the Sansa Clip. Which brings me to the moral of my story, I guess: don't buy expensive electronics. You (I) will lose them or break them or they will become obsolete. I try not to buy anything much over US$100.

By this point the Sansa clip had hit local stores, so I bought a new one. I replaced the Ultimate Ears with a rival product, the Shure SCL2. This has been obsoleted by the Shure SE110, and I paid about US$100. They are about as good as the Ultimate Ears Super.fi 3. The sound quality seems about the same. The in-ear fit is a bit better but the part of my ear outside the ear canal tends to get sore. The thick wires are less tangle-prone than the UE's super-thin wires and have less of a stethoscope effect.. The case, a stiffened nylon discus kind of thing, is much more convenient and sturdy than the UE leather pouch. Overall, I like them better than the UEs. (And, to be clear, they are in a different league than the earbuds that come with iPods and Sansas and whatnot, which you can replace for like US$10. This is not "audiophile" better, this is a very concrete, walking down the street the difference is night and day kind of better. I don't know how much of that is because of the earplug-style design, versus superior electronic guts, and perhaps there are cheaper earplug headphones that sound as good. But when I was shopping, the slightly cheaper products, especially the Sennheisers of the same style, advertised "bass-driven" sound that was really unpleasant.)

Right around this time, I also dropped my trusty old Palm Vx for the last time; the front bezel came partway off and the buttons stopped working properly. This is technically the third or fourth Palm V; I first bought a Palm V in 2000 for US$330, but left it on the roof of a car in Alaska. I bought a used replacement in Hong Kong for about US$100 in 2002. In 2007 I snapped one up in a junk store for US$20 just to get the real brass stylus (and as a spare), and I think that's the one I have now, the other lying in storage somewhere. I may also have bought one on eBay, also for about US$20, or I may just have price-spotted. At my age the memory starts to go, which is precisely why one needs a Palm Pilot. But beautiful as it is, it's too heavy, about half a pound, and it's getting harder to harder to find serial ports (instead of USB), so rather than try to fix it I'm just giving up.

Just to complete the story, I also lost my Jimi wallet by leaving it under my seat at a movie. It was on its last legs, with some cracked corners and a slowly tearing plastic hinge, but it was an apparent gift from Tom Bihn and so I mourn its loss. Happily, the thing is so damned small that all I could fit in it to lose was a subway card and a few bills.

Meanwhile, I had to do something about my laptop, because the screen tended to not work. Repair was the first option, but a place at Sim Lim had it for most of a week and then gave it back, no charge but unfixed and possibly unfixable. Since it was three years old and accumulating various problems (keys that didn't work too well, a scary clicking noise in the hard drive, deteriorating screen even before the backlight died), I opted for replacement. Naturally, the only suitable option was the latest Thinkpad X; the X60/61. I did try the Asus EEE, much closer to my "don't spend more than $100 on anything you can lose" rule, but the keyboard was too small for real touch typing.

I'd been window-shopping this model for a few months, and even tried out my lessons from Negotiation class at Sim Lim over winter break. The X60 was selling in the US for about US$1000, before tax and shipping and without the 8-cell battery and extra RAM that it really needs. At Sim Lim the bundles started at about S$3000, or roughly US $2200, after tax. So my strategy was to print out the US page and go to vendors and say, "I can get this much more cheaply in the US, but then I have to pay tax and shipping and wait for it. If you can give me an equivalent price, I'll buy it from you right now." What I found was that most (out of 4 or 5 places I tried) would give an immediate S$300 to S$500 discount, but also juggle some more balls, so that they take away hundreds of dollars of value at the same time, and keep you from comparing apples to apples.

One interesting tidbit was that they all wanted to give me 3 gigs of RAM, whether I asked for it or not. When we did practice negotiations in class, we all worked from scoresheets, that told us what our total points would be for various combinations of concessions. But you couldn't see the other party's scoresheet, so the challenge was to figure out what was worth a lot to you but not much to them, and vice versa. Clearly, Lenovo was dumping RAM out that channel cheaply. This wasn't especially important to me in negotiation, but it was cool to see how, by comparing lots of players, you can start sussing out what their scoresheet looks like.

Here, by the way, is a chart for one of the class exercises. Paige Turner's literary agent negotiates a new book deal with Bestbooks. There are eight different points to the deal, from royalty rate to the size of the advance to how many books the deal includes and how long the book tour will be. Each point has five options (e.g., 2% royalty, 3%, 5%, 10%, 15%). So there are 5⁸ possible outcomes, or about four hundred thousand. Some of the points are win-win (translating books into many languages helps both parties); some are purely distributive (royalty and advance payments; if Paige gets more, Bestbooks gets less), and some are very asymmetrical (Paige really, really doesn't want to go on a long book tour but Bestbooks, while preferring a long tour, doesn't actually care very much). So it's possible for two parties to reach a deal where one robs the other blind, or where both do relatively poorly, or even where both do great. Each dot on the graph is a possible deal; the further to the right, the better for Paige; the further up, the better for Bestbooks.

What I learned from laptop shopping in Singapore was to order from the US if at all possible. Singapore has lots of shopping, but very few bargains. Lenovo USA refused to ship to Singapore, so I figured I'd have somebody accept delivery and then re-mail it. But it was a two or three week wait, and then there was some hassle with authenticating my (US) credit card, and my bank (credit union) said there was no problem on their end, and whoever I talked to a Lenovo US said there was no problem on their end, but some other machine in the Lenovo apparatus disagreed because the order got cancelled.

So I headed back to Funan Digitalife Mall, the slightly less seedy and more obnoxiously named alternative to Sim Lim, to the place that had been the squarest dealer in my first round of window shopping. I ended up paying S$2000, or about US$1500, for a "special employee deal" model extracted from the back room that was almost as good as the US model that was US$1200 not including tax and shipping. Break-even, if you count the ten to twenty total hours of time I put into research and haggling over a period of three months as equivalent to spending ten minutes clicking through a web order form.

The X61 is basically the same as the X40. Faster, of course. The battery has some extra rubber feet that make the whole thing about half an inch thicker, and even so it still seems to run a bit hotter. They squeezed in yet another special windows function key, which is annoying until your finger muscles retrain. The left shift key is two keys wide, but the plunger is in the middle of the keycap. I shift with my left pinky (never the right, it turns out) and I don't stretch my finger far enough, so I often depress the keycap without triggering the plunger. That is to say, the left shift key is unreliable due to poor design.

The top bezel, above the keyboard and below the screen, hosts the power button, volume buttons, and a "ThinkVantage" key. I personally find "ThinkVantage" to be a thing that I don't want; if the keyboard must have a silly button with a hideous portmanteau name, I would prefer "FrikSharkLasr". But the real problem with the bezel is that it's flimsy, and flexes when the power button is pushed. This kind of cheap design damages the impression of solidity typical to ThinkPads.

The fan is a bit noisy. The volume buttons were rearranged from the X40 for no good reason. The power supply plug and dock are different from the X40 so you can't re-use any accessories. The ThinkLight is white instead of amber. Of course I put Kubuntu on it. The volume and screen brightness buttons didn't work, though I could still control those things from the command line, until I upgraded to Kubuntu 8.04, at which point almost everything works perfectly without any fussing. One exception is the microphone for Skype, which hasn't worked on any machine I put Kubuntu 7.10 or later on. After a futzing session, it now works; the critical change seems to be turning on the Capture thingie in alsamixer. Wireless seems less reliable than on the X40: at school, the connection often spontaneously died until I reconnected or even unloaded and reloaded the wireless kernel module, a problem which I didn't have with the previous laptop. Battery life is about the same: a reliable four hours plus while the battery is still new. Sleeping and hibernating work fine in Kubuntu, but the machine intermittently refuses to wake up promptly, in particular if it went to sleep on battery and wakes up on AC. That could be the model or Kubuntu or the fact that this particular specimen came out of a box in the back of the shop. All in all, the X61 offers negligible improvement over the X40, to the point where I wish they had upgraded the chips without tweaking the case design; they probably just did that to obsolete the accessories.

And finally, I was able to sell the old ThinkPad (after a thorough hard drive wipe) for scrap at Sim Lim. For all of S$50 for the full kit:

A friend working in the medical data analysis business explained to me that nobody every has diastolic blood pressure of 89, 90, or 91. This is because 90 (mmHg) is the threshold for high blood pressure, so when a doctor or nurse measures your blood pressure, if it's 89 or 90 or 91 but you are otherwise healthy, they squint and write down 88. That way they and you don't have to deal with all of the extra paperwork and hassle of having high blood pressure. It's only when your blood pressure is 92 or 93 or higher that they decide that it's in your best interest to be recognized as having high blood pressure. So if you look at aggregate blood pressure data, there's a gap between 88 and 92.

The Wall Street Journal reports on China's preparations for the Olympics, and includes Beijing's pollution index for the last year. The numeric rating corresponds to concentrations of various pollutants in the air. China considers a rating above 100 to be dangerous; assuming the scale is consistent with that used in other countries, that's two to three times the level that triggers a warning elsewhere. Even so, there's something peculiar about this data:

In exactly which counting system is it normal to round numbers between 51 and 70 down to 50, and 101 and 120 down to 100, but leave all other numbers apparently untouched?

The Straits Times reports (5 July 2008, p S14) on the Large Hadron Collider about to go into to service:

the LHC can pump an energy of 7 teraelectronvolts (Tev) into a proton as it flies around the tunnel. This is roughly the energy of seven mosquitoes in flight. Although this may seem small, a proton is about a trillion times smaller than a mosquito.

Sort of. If a mosquito is, generously, a centimeter in size, then it's

(1)

1×10−2 m 1.65×10−15 m

which is about 10⁻¹³, or a ten-trillionth. But that's not especially relevant. The essential difference, for purposes of colliding masses, is in mass. And the difference there is

(2)

1×10−3 g 1.7×10−24 g

or about 10⁻²¹, which is a billion-trillionth.

So squeezing seven Tevs into one proton is more like putting the energy of ten million battleships into one mosquito.

The AP reports that

"There are a lot of people with new wealth looking for relaxation and enjoyment," said John Dane III, president of privately owned Trinity Yachts, the largest U.S. builder.

These days, the biggest problem at Trinity's shipbuilding yards is having enough workers to handle the 24 custom contracts the company currently is working for the luxury vessels.

Meanwhile the local paper reports that "sales for mass market cars may be sluggish but it's boom time for high-end marques" (Straits Times, Life p9, 5 Jul 2008).

The class war is going strong, and it's pretty clear who's winning.

Ambassador Patricia Herbold, former mayor, chair of the King County (Seattle) Republican Party, etc, etc, (her husband is, or was, an adjunct professor at LKYSPP, although there was no sign of him this last year) spoke at the National Library about the US election. We're in the "pod" on the top, 16th floor of the library in downtown Singapore, and the view is quite nice. The following text is my paraphrase of the speaker unless otherwise marked.

First election without an incumbent President or VP. Lots of young people voting. www.18in08.com. Joel's note: she may be a native speaker, but stilted remarks read off the page with good pronunciation are still stilted remarks. I can't remember the last seminar I attended where the speaker such much of anything interesting or even listenable during the prepared remarks. Turnout is between one and two hundred, very mixed. Perhaps there will be interesting questions.

Examples of how things have changed with modern media: Obama's "bitter" remark, Clinton's sniper incident; McCain's alleged, "unsubstantiated" relationship with a lobbyist. What a negative ad is. "These ... have no place in political discourse."

Primary and convention schedule. Delegates and superdelegates. "Superdelegates comprise about one fifth [of Democratic delegates]." (Bonus points for using "comprise" correctly.) Superdelegates can change their mind, so his nomination is not actually certain. Republican unpledged delegates comprise about one fifth of Republican delegates. Convention speeches as a precursor to future success.

The electoral college.

"So what should we look for as we follow this year's exciting election?" (delivered in a deadpan drone). Key groups: working-class males; young, single, college-educated women; latinos; young people. Influence of technology. www.fightthesmears.com. (A halt because somebody's phone is ringing. "Let me start that sentence again.")

The macaca video "went viral". She shows a video catching McCain in a contradiction. Then a video about Clinton and sniper fire. A video attacking Obama for being out of touch, which starts with a music clip, "Nigger better dance now."

Blogs and Facebook.

Q: something about Democrats, Republicans, and Singapore. And something about polls. A: Voter turnout was up in 2006 and I think will be up even higher this year. To answer your first question, if I understand it, voters can vote for a candidate of any party. They used to say the US was 1/3 Democratic, 1/3 Republican, and 1/3 Independent, though I think that has shifted. John McCain is not a far, far right Republican, and I think he will attract some independent voters.

Q: What impressed me about Obama is "change". You are telling us all these teennagers were impressed by the internet. Do you think if this Afro-American president wins the election, there will be a change in America? A: It's not easy to answer because what you hear on the campaign trail is designed to appeal to certain voter constituencies. And when you are elected, you have to face the realities of life. Strong Congress, lobbying groups ... you have a more reasonable and prudent eye. Example: Clinton was making some of the same noises about free trade, that it was bad for American, but when he was elected, he was responsible for NAFTA.

Q: You talked about young voters, but McCain is old. There is a large senior citizen population in America and most of the developed world. Will they come out and vote for John McCain? Do you believe there's going to be a change in Asia policy if a different party is elected? A: I think the majority of older voters will vote for McCain, not because he's older, but because they tend to be conservative. If elected, I'm sure McCain will not lose focus on this region. Barrack Obama spent some time in Indonesia ... People think we don't pay attention to these region, but it's not true. Our top leaders are spread so thin trying to attend so many meetings and conferences .... We have a very active embassy here, twelve different agencies of the US government, military to military contacts, training sessions, exchange of military personnel. ... Just because a cabinet member does not accept an invitation to a particular event does not mean the US has lost interest in the area. (Sounds like that's not a hypothetical problem)

Q: How much support for free trade in Congress? A: I am concerned. The current Congress seems to be more protectionist. I would like to think this is just posturing during the election cycle.

Q: do you think Obama will be like JFK, to inspire America again? A: I think he's already inspired a lot of people, especially young people.

Q: Which candidate will have a bigger impact on the US trade imbalance? Obama is always emphasizing on withdrawal of troops. Less global influence. If Obama is elected, will US influence as global military police go down? A: I'm not sure I've heard either candidate discuss anything specific with respect to China. Our policy is to encourage China to be a resposible global citizen, which they've been achieving. ... I take issue with your referring to us as military police. We don't go into a country to occupy, we go in to solve a problem. Certainly when you consider the loss of life of our military and the huge financial toll it takes on us, it's not something any of us want to jump into without ... a great deal of thought. McCain would be more inclined to maintain our military posture as it is, but I have no idea what Barrack Obama would do. He's not been in the military; the comments other than with respect to Iraq .... I'll be interested to hear his comments after he visits Iraq.

Q: My question relates to certain schools of thought that American society is fundamentally racist. So far Obama has had a fairly smooth ride; now that he goes out into the open, is it possible that people, red necks, racists, will [vote him out] A: I don't know the answer, but if you look at the number of minorities elected in towns, etc, it's hard to argue this is an overriding situation of racism. Yes there are pockets of racism, there are blacks who are racists, but .... with respect to electing an African-American, I don't think that's a problem. I would like to think that our country is past that.

Q: I'm curious about that issue of gender. Did it play a role in why Hilary Clinton failed? What do you think is going to happen to the constituency of women that were voting for her? Will they defect to McCain? Do you think Obama's choice of running mate might take this into consideration? A: Most Clinton supporters by November will become Obama supporters. Those who are most irritated may stay home and not vote; I'm not sure that they will switch and not vote for McCain. ... There are people, even in the Democratic party, who just don't like her. They think she's shrill, abrasive, any number of things. She started the campaign with an attitude that it was hers, she didn't have a plan if she didn't win after February 5. She had money problems, problems with her campaign manager. Her husband got irritated on the campaign trail and that was caught on video. That caused the media to decide that Obama was going to be the candidate, and the media focus on Hillary was more on the negative side. I don't think it was ever a gender issue with Hilary. I don't think her experience means that women won't be able to be nominees for the next quarter-century.

Q: What will be the major issues in the US political climate in the next several months? A: The economy; surveys show Iraq has moved down, I think because the surge has made progress, but no progress is being made with the economy. Kitchen table types of issue. ... That said, if there is some dramatic event, like another terrorist attack, that will swing things the other way.

Jerald Greenberg, Robert A. Baron, Behavior in Organizations. Chapter 13: Leadership in Organizations

The leader is the person with the most power in a group. A leader is non-coercive, goal-directed (Joel's note: I think this one is debatable; if someone can effectively veto any other goals, but puts forth no goals of their own, perhaps they are a leader that breaks this definition or an anti-leader; either way, their role clearly has something to do with leadership), and has followers.

A leader, who determines the group mission, is different from a manager, who implements that mission. But this distinction can be blurry, and one person can have both roles.

Great person theory says that all leaders tend to share special traits, such as drive, honesty, motivation, self-confidence, intelligence, domain knowledge, creativity, and flexibility.

Behavioral analysis of leadership suggests several dimensions. One grid is Autocratic to democratic and permissive to directive. Another is high to low person orientation and high to low production oriented; these are two different axes, and grid training is a technique to move people who are low on one or both to high on both, "9,9".

Analysis in terms of followers: the leader-member exchange (LMX) model, which defines "in-groups" and "out-groups"; leaders treat in-group members better. In self-managed teams, a team leader builds trust and teamwork, expands the team's capacity, attempts to create a team identity, exploits (in a positive way) differences between group members, and tries to foresee and influence change. Grassroots leadership empowers people to make decisions.

The attributional approach is a theory in which leaders try to understand and change the causes of followers' behavior. It also describes how followers think about leaders' motivations, e.g., the "rally 'round the flag effect" when followers extend additional trust to leaders when the group is in crisis.

Charismatic leaders exert special power due to personal charisma. Transformational leaders revitalize and transform their organizations.

Contingency theories focus on the relationship between leaders' characteristics and the context in which they lead. Least Preferred Co-worker (LPC) contingency theory says that leaders can be evaluated by how they treat the follower they like least (like judging someone by how they treat waiters and servers). A low LPC leader is likely to succeed in environments of low situational control, when impersonal direction is usually appropriate, and high situational control, when the leader has unchallenged power. In context of moderate situational control, a high LPC leader will be more effective. The notion of putting leaders in situations appropriate for their personal capabilities is leader match.

Situational leadership theory defines two axes: task behavior (higher means more direction required) and relationship behavior (higher means more support required). In low task, low relationship, delegation is the best strategy. In low task, high relationship, participation. In high task, high relationship, selling. In High task, low relationship, telling.

Path-goal theory says that followers like leaders who help them on their path to their goal. Leaders can adopt four styles: instrumental, supportive, participative, and achievement-oriented.

Normative decision theory says that seven criteria (leader information rule, goal congruence rule, unstructured problem rule, acceptance rule, conflict rule, fairness rule, acceptance priority rule) together suggest which of five basic strategies (autocratic, autocratic with input, consultative with individuals, consultative in group, group decision) is best for a specific context.

The substitutes for leadership framework describes conditions where leaders are not necessary, such as when individual characteristics of workers make leadership unnecessary, or when the jobs or organization are structured to not require leadership.

Leaders can develop via 360-degree feedback, networking, coaching, mentoring, and on-the-job experience.

---

Okay, that was the study guide. Now I will stop biting my tongue on my personal interpretations:

• p 504. "In view of all the attention that has been paid to the dishonest dealings of many top business leaders in recent years (e.g., most notably the late Ken Lay and his associates at Enron), it's important to note that successful leaders do, in fact, place a considerable emphasis on ethics and morality." This is the purest bullshit, special pleading of the rankest species. "oh, those guys don't count, because they were caught. real leaders are good people. How do we know that? Because leaders are good." This line of logic comes from the same batch of mental vomit as Bush's assertions that the US doesn't torture, or the idea that, "When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal."
• p 517. Rupert Murdoch's vision is cited as "To provide accurate access to news for people throughout the world." He may have said that, but nothing in his record suggests he's ever believed that for as long as one second.
• p 522. "An airline pilot leading a cockpit crew is expected to take charge and not to seek the consensus of others as she guides the plane onto the runway for a landing." In fact, the most horrible air disaster of all time happened because a pilot, impatient to take off on a foggy runway after many delays, ignored his flight engineer's concerns about another plane possibly being on a runway. 583 people died. It's certainly true that, "when the demands of the task make it clear what a leader should be doing, it is perfectly acceptable for them to focus on the task at hand." But the example cited better illustrates the risk of a leader refusing to listen to subordinates.
• p 529. So, can we run nations through the checklist and see if democracy ever comes out as the appropriate leadership style?
• p 540. Question for discussion: "What special qualities make Chan Suh [founder of Agency,com, an online advertising company] so effective as a leader?" Oh, I know. The quality of being lucky. Lots of people are bold visionaries who create companies in sectors that conventional wisdom says there is no market. It takes leadership to do that. But most of those companies fail; it takes luck to land in a sector that really does explode. Bad leadership will help you destroy a success, but good leadership is not a sufficient condition for success. Again, the premise of the question is that, because person X has success, they must be an effective leader, and to me this is a circular premise.

Ethnocentrism is in-group versus out-group identity; pride in the in-group; disrespect for the out-group. Ethnocentrism is necessary for maintaining group identity, and thus for maintaining groups. Every country's foreign policy discourse is ethnocentric, not just China's.

Okay, I'm having trouble following his point. Looking around the room, I'm not the only one. Looking around the room, I see only two other white people; perhaps the speaker would do better to switch to Chinese? He's reading prepared remarks, and his head goes up and down from the table to eye level every second or so, and if I look directly at him, I get dizzy. The talk is grammatical but, given how much trouble he's having getting to any sort of discernible point, the speaker is ill-served by his poor pronunciation.

Okay, none of the details and examples are registering in my brain, but the gist is that both the Chinese and Americans are ethnocentric. China and other countries are somewhat obsessed with the US; this is somewhat natural given the weight of the US, but many countries magnify that perceived weight. For example, there is a slogan that "the Chinese-American relationship is the weightiest of the weightiest" (it sounds better in Chinese). A sign of progress is that this slogan is no longer used. China's foreign policy elite were thrilled after good Clinton/Zhang Zemin relations, but the Belgrade embassy bombing was very bad for relations.

Many Chinese policy elite—challenge from the audience after the speaker names a Chinese academic: what makes him an elite? Does Deng Xiaoping listen to him? The tone in the rooms starts to turn a bit impatient. The speaker thinks the crowd is hostile because of his position; personally, I can't really figure out what his position is in order to judge it.

Chinese policy elites and newspapers give excess weight to the US; Kissinger and Brzezinski get quoted regularly and the US dominates "foreign"-oriented Chinese newspapers.

Some article titles, loosely translated: "Who else can take the ring after the inevitable decline of the United States". One academic's recent article is "Let's compete against political ideologies with the west." He was explicitly denying there is any universal ideology among men. "China should try to slow down the inevitable decline of the United States." "China's moral hegemony will sustain while the US immoral hegemony will not sustain." An outburst from the audience as an academic is named: "He's not an elite. he's my friend actually"

Obsession with the US will be counterproductive to a more dynamic Chinese foreign policy. Some signs of progress in shedding US obsession. The weight of the US in China's interests has declined. China cannot always use the US perspective on things, human rights, development, etc.

Q: You're saying that China's making its own policy based on its own interest. That's simple; why do you have to spend so much time working through this? What is your sample size? What is your hypothesis? How do you test it? A: (he's talking but I don't follow what he's saying or how it relates to the question.) I'm not taking a quantitative approach. How many articles? Fifty, and more than a hundred pieces ....

Q: Among "elites", have you found anyone promoting universal rights, individual human rights? (interjection from another person at the table: What universal rights? US or Chinese?) A: Because of the Chinese political system, talking about universal rights must be "fuzzy".

Q: Psychologists use experiments, not guesswork. Your sampling could be subject to selection bias. How do you define the foreign policy elite? Look at all their writing, speeches, comments, and then decide what are the dominant themes. (that reminds me of this.) A: Yes, in psychology you can do experiment, but not in foreign policy. You can't do a Cuban Missile Crisis experiment. ... Nietzsche, foucault, ... a lot of things can't be quantified. Interjection: you could use one journal back to 1997 or earlier and study all the words and issues.

Q: Many African-Americans and Hispanics still say in surveys that they are inferior to whites. ... A ...

Q: where is Chinese foreign policy formulated? At the X school, or the "muliao"? A: It's far more open than any time before; Zhang Zemin initiated more openness.

Q: There is a theory that national perception and interest are part of the context of foreign policy. But the elite groups actually express foreign policy.

Q: Who and where to watch for changes in foreign policy? A: Read journals, but it's mostly private internal discussions. I can't name who I think are the most influential; I have a list but I can't tell you.

Q: At X university where I was for some time, perhaps half of students and professors' research focus was on US domestic politics or Sino-US relations.

Q: What's the percentage of Chinese elite have a strong version of ethnocentrism? A maybe 30%.

I wrote in March about the Democratic candidates for president that "I can visualize any of them as an excellent president and I can visualize (and have seen) all three of them disappoint." I wish the future weren't so easy to predict. Obama disappointed in a big way this week with his FISA cave. Sigh.

Some excerpts of what H.R. 6304 does:

• ... permits the government to conduct mass, untargeted surveillance of all communications coming into and out of the United States ...
• ... explicitly permit[s] the government to continue surveillance programs even if the application is denied by the court. The government has the authority to wiretap through the entire appeals process, and then keep and use whatever it gathered in the meantime.
• ...ensures the dismissal of all cases pending against the telecommunication companies that facilitated the warrantless wiretapping programs over the last 7 years.

In reaction to the huge response to their last event, SPMI's schedule is blossoming with events. Another full room today (A few more ang moh's here today. Apparently we're all doing the shaved head thing now) for "Collaborating with the Enemy", by Steven Blais of IIL. This event is S$10 for SPMI members, including a very tasty Indian Vegetarian meal (places in the world that have to deal with halal and other religious requirements tend to be very kind to vegetarians as a bonus. Some sort of drawing with a prize over $1000 is announced, which gets a loud murmur going as people dig for their business cards. Given that S$10 each probably doesn't cover catered meals plus rental, IIL must expect to drum up a lot of business here.

Joel's executive summary: Projects must solve problems. Problems come from business. Business analyst, project manager, and system analyst are distinct and mutually exclusive roles. The business analyst role is responsible for ensuring the project solves the problem.

The rest of this post is my paraphrase of the speaker unless otherwise noted.

The great gap between project managers and those people who want our services. We have to bring in projects that are on time, on budget, and have all the features we promised. And what keeps us from doing this? The customers! When I started they didn't have this gap, they didn't have users. My first system was the automated payroll for the Navy. Punchcards, line printer. Chesty Puller: "I don't really understand this stuff; we have a printer that can print 1400 lines per minute; who can read that?" Not much user interface, the users worked with us, it was fine.

The project manager: what are your requirements?

The business person: I have a problem. You're the IT, you fix it. What are requirements? I have a problem with the annuities system.

PM: Give me some requirements

B: Well etc etc

PM: (to self) this is great, I can use that new java framework and ...

Joel's note: it doesn't seem like hilarity is going to ensue. Summary: the project manager and business person have different goals, contexts, and languages. Process-oriented business versus project-oriented project management. Business teams are together for years; project teams may last two months.

Anecdote about delivering a computer system to which the user responds, "it doesn't feel good." After many weeks, this was articulated into how it looks, how the mouse moves across the screen.

Standard personalities for technical people: INTJ (that sounds familiar. Now can we get the stereotypical FIRO-Bs?). For business people: ESFP.

How does the gap affect the project? changes, delays, scope creep, cost overruns. What tools help deal with this? change management, product acceptance. Joel's note: Hmm, agile techniques are one way to try and deal with this structural problem. I wonder if he'll talk about them, or some other approaches? Here's some thinking on integrating Agile and PMBOK.

I won an award 35 years ago for a US Navy project. On time, under budget, delivered everything promised, never had a defect reported since delivery. Of course, it was never used, and we knew it would never be used before we started working on it. Best project I ever did, because there were no users to mess it up. The point is that a successful project is not the same thing as a successful business. Projects are tactical, not strategic. Strategic business people should not be involved in projects. But now there's a gap between the business needs and the project. Who fills the gap? The PMO? No, it's not their business either.

Let's fill the gap. Organizations have a role for that, whether they label it or not: business analyst. Most of you PMs also do that role. The business analyst's job is to ensure that the project produces a product that solves the problem. The business analyst is a bridge.

As a consultant, I'll be working with a company to improve their project management, and I'll ask, what do you see the role of the business analyst as? And they say, they're a bridge between technical and business. Actually, they are a bridge between problem and solution, which may or may not be technology. The definition of the solution is the requirements. The business analyst establishes the bridge and the project manager gets us across the bridge. In SCRUM we call them the product owner. (Ding! Agile mention. Quick sidenote: I don't want to be mistaken for an Agile cheerleader. My own experiences with Agile are mixed. Whether or not one or more Agile methods is a good solution, they are at least addressing the right problem, which is basically this same gap he's talking about.)

Business Analyst is a role: they define the real business problem, completely and accurately; and "maintains full communication between stakeholders with the problem and solution team". At IBM we weren't allowed to have problems, only challenges.

The business analyst should ask, how will you know that we've solved your problem? If there isn't an answer, there isn't a problem. When we have that, we have acceptance criteria, a contract. The issue is that many times, the business doesn't know their real problem. Incidentally this happens well before we have a project.

If customers get more features, it's scope creep. If IT throws in some extra things, it's gold-plating. Notice who's naming these things.

Incidentally, this guy is a very good speaker, even though he's got powerpoint in the background. I think he could spike 80% of his slides, leaving only a few diagrams, and be better for it. But perhaps the other, wordier slides, which he generally ignores, are helping the readers? Anyway, he's very animated, vivid; you can see the punchlines coming but that just makes it more intimate.

Users don't have requirements; they don't know what's possible. They develop requirements together with the technical team. It's not if the requirements change, it's when. Plan for that evolution and you won't have creep. Halting scope creep won't help if the product doesn't solve the problem, e.g., have the right scope; if the product doesn't solve the problem, why are you making it? And, scope can't creep unless somebody agrees. It's up to the PM to say no to anything that doesn't solve the problem. Um. It feels like there's some sleight of hand here. How can you predefine the scope, given that we've agreed that it's impossible to understand the requirements before you start? I'm not convinced that scope exactly equals problem.

A need is not a problem. Why do you need it?

PM has conflict of interest. PM defines the project she's responsible for, and may push for a better project rather than a better solution. The business has a conflict of interest: it is not objective about the problem or solution. Businesses rarely do due diligence over the project: creating a charter, determining ROI, etc.

The business analyst starts before the project and ends after the project. The business analyst communicates changes back and forth between the business and the project. After project close, the business analyst is still confirming that the delivered product solves the problem. "If you have a solution that does not create at least three new problems, you have the wrong solution." If you are a PM who is also a business analyst, skip the party, go down and have just one Singapore Sling with the project team, then go back and see if the product works in production.

What's the difference between business analysts, project managers, and system analysts? They all do the same functions, (plan, manage risk, work with stakeholders, requirements, test, estimate, impact analysis, evaluate alternatives). But they all do them differently, for different people. BA does acceptance tests; PM tests project plan; SA tests integration. How to test the project plan? The plan breaks everything down into work tasks. Each task has an input and an output. You test the plan by ensuring that all inputs and outputs are used. You test it by laying out the tasks with your team (not with MS Project, but with the actual people). BA focus is business; PM focus is project; SA focus is technical. It is very difficult for one person to do all three roles, especially if they aren't trained.

How many of you grew up and went to school and said, I want to be a project manager. We're almost all accidental project managers. There are people who grow up to be systems analysts, go to school for that. Hopefully some day there will be schools for PMs, fraternities, etc. These three roles call for different personalities, different talents.

BA to customer: Is what you are asking for going to solve your problem? My job isn't to build something, it's to solve your problem.

(Side note because he said something about dodgeball: this is cute but raises the disturbing question: why would you pay three dollars to see the equator?)

How to wear two hats: As the PM, focus on the team. As the BA, don't let project noise (deadlines, etc) influence your relationship with stakeholders. I literally had different hats that I switched back and forth depending on the work I was doing.

First, make sure you understand what the role of the business analyst is. Keep the roles separate. Write the requirements as a BA; come back as a PM and pretend somebody else wrote the requirements.

about ten people just got up and left simultaneously. It's 8:35; are they all going to catch a bus, or like CEOs giving themselves raises, did they just realize that they could leave? The speaker is good but it's true the crowd (myself included) has been drifting for a few minutes.

An abrupt ending, and only one question. I think he could have wrapped up ~8 minutes earlier and had 10 minutes of good questions.

Q: Who has authority? A: The project manager has authority and accountability for the project, the BA for the business.

A lecture from Shaukat Aziz, former Prime Minister of Pakistan.

Joel's note: The Boston Globe seems to think he's one of the good guys. The following notes are my paraphrase of the speaker unless otherwise noted.

"Think beyond and outside the box, and try to meet the new challenges with vigor. ... The only constant in life today, ladies and gentlemen, is change. You must adapt to change. ... Staying still is not the answer." Apparently this will be an all-platitudes speech?

Today's topic was chosen and approved by Dean Mahbubani. Perhaps he thought that as a survivor of several assassination attempts I would be qualified to speak ... Terrorism is global.

With the recent upsurge in terrorism—clearly it has increased. If you try to travel today, it is a hassle. If your name is Muhammad .... This is done because not everybody knows who you are and there's a risk that if they let the old person in, they will cause trouble.

People link terrorism with a particular region or religion, Islam, but this is not historically the case. In my view, one word can describe most, not all, of the causes: "deprivation".

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Joel's note: Hm. Let's see what a cursory literature search says.

Club de Madrid says ... well, they certainly didn't come down to one word. "Poverty per se is not a direct cause of terrorism."

The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, Robert A. Pape, U Chicago :

"this study collects [188] terrorist attacks worldwide from 1980 to 2001. ... This study shows that suicide terrorism follows a strategic logic, one specifically designed to coerce modern liberal democracies to make significant territorial concessions. Moreover, over the past two decades, suicide terrorism hasbeen rising largely because terrorists have learned that it pays.

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Meanwhile back to the speaker, who has said essentially nothing notable. "If you treat people with respect, they'll be less prone to getting into extreme behavior. More importantly, we must give people a voice. ... At the end of the day, if people have a voice, can within certain norms express their views .... Give people a level playing field and a sense of hope and you will see ... this will bring the temperature down. It has to happen, because there are many fires burning around the world ...."

"Here the role of the media in civil society is critical. The media ... if there is a message that, see how destructive this is, it will help in the hearts and minds of people."

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Q: (from Dean Mahbubani) We both lived in New York, in fact in the same apartment, St James Tower. A: but your apartment was twice as big. Q: But your salary was more than twice as much. A: That's true.

Q: How do we change the American conception of Islam? A: If you see what goes through their minds, 9/11 and 7/7, these are not minor incidents. The whole country was shaken up. ... Make people aware that the acts of a few angry people do not represent ...

Q: So Pakistan decided to side with the US. We hear that Pakistan is signing deals with the people it was fighting against. Is this a good idea? A: We joined the coalition against terrorism because terrorism is bad [my paraphrase]. If a group is willing to talk, I think that is the right way to go. The more people you can get back to a normal life, you have gained.

Q: Assassination of Bhutto discouraged good men and women. to some, terrorists are merely freedom fighters. Can you comment on that? A: Bhutto's death was a national and global tragedy. Every life is precious.

Q: [A regular attendee at these seminars reads from two pages of notes until he is cut off firmly. No idea what his point or question was. He started with "Singapore has found racial harmony with four races and four religious beliefs living together." Aziz responded that the questioner had an incorrect view of Islam?

Q: Is Islam being used as a force multiplier, or is the root cause relative (not absolute) deprivation? Is there a need to control radical madrassas? A: Madrassas are religious schools. I was asked to open a school; they had O-levels and were going to A-levels, they had proper computer classes. In Pakistan, the madrassas we have are clearly performing a role. There may be a few, who are, not as an institution but with individual teachers promoting extremism. Largely they are helping people memorize the Koran and so forth, and also free lodge and board for children who need education. Free books. The curriculum is being broad-based; those who are strictly in religious teaching, no need to be defensive about them, this is an important function in any society. To your first part, there may be affluent people going into terrorism, but they can still be deprived. They may be living in a country where a dispute is festering for ages.

The dean is getting very impatient with long-winded questions. A: The question is on ISI and its links to uh. Let me say that ISI is professional and respected. They pursue the national interest. The Taliban, the people in Afghanistan ... the rest of the world together recruited young people to fight the Soviet Union. ... Pakistan is very clear that we do not allow on our soil activities that are prejudicial to our interests or any other nation's. The Taliban is an Afghan government. We have 3 million refugees in Pakistan, Afghan will not take them back. We would like resettlement, more aid (which is happening in the Paris conference), a concerted effort against drugs.

Q: Karzai threatened to send troops to Pakistan after a jail break? do you think he's serious? A: Pakistan has always said that a strong, stable Afghanistan is good for the region.

Q: in the west, there's a myth that the religious reasons for terrorism are more important. Is that true? A: Faith does play a part, but it's only part. Islam as a faith doesn't promote violence. There are many attacks outside the Islamic world.

Q: When you were prime minister, what did you do to improve the quality of life of the people and deprive people of the financing for the terrorism? A: Great economic growth in Pakistan. Pakistan's per capita GDP is much greater than India. For the last several years, 7.5 percent growth, 5.5 percent this year. In terms of quality of life, reduction of poverty .... In terms of financing, it's a global effort.

Q: What is the greatest cause of deprivation that is leading to terrorism and what can we do? A: It's hard but I'll give you a few. Lack of people having rights, lack of income, feeling of hopelessness, ...

Like many of these seminars featuring politicians, the informational content of the seminar is very close to nil. The value in attending is in getting a sense of the personality of the speaker.

Impact Analysis

What would have happened to those receiving intervention if they had not received the intervention? In scientific terms, you need a control group. Remember that a control group is not a population that remains unchanged. A control group is a population that is subject to everything the target group is subject to except the intended intervention. The important thing to know here is that there are many, many ways to end up with useless data, as this Economist article about randomized evaluations discusses. A randomized study showed that giving away mosquito nets for free was far more effective that charging anything.

You might conclude that the trial showed that they should always be given away. Yet it turns out that millions of nets were already in use in the part of Kenya where the field trial took place, so their value was known. The experiment guaranteed supplies, so it did not test the assertion that you need to charge something to encourage reliable suppliers. And the recipients were pregnant women, whereas the point of giving bednets away is to provide anti-malaria treatment universally. The evidence from western Kenya was clear. But it hardly settled the question of whether the government should give bednets away across the country.

As an aside, it seems like we could very profitably spend a few weeks on the scientific method directly, rather than orbiting it with alternate language.

Experiments

The best experiment possible: fully blind, randomized, large sample size, repeated.

Since this is rarely possible in economics and social science, especially at larger scales such as national development, we can use alternative methods:

• natural experiment. For example, when different states in the US which are otherwise similar adopt different policies.

  An example of a natural experiment occurred in Helena, Montana during the period from June 2002 to December 2002 when a smoking ban was in effect in all public spaces in Helena including bars and restaurants. Helena is geographically isolated and served by only one hospital. It was observed that the rate of heart attacks dropped by 60% while the smoking ban was in effect.—Wikipedia

• matching
• statistical equated controls
• non-experiments

The instructor apologizes for putting Mao in a list with Stalin and Hitler in a previous lecture. I certainly think, based on my understanding of history, that by many plausible definitions of the set of "most prolifically evil dictators of the 20th century", Mao is a solid member (scholars actually put him at the top of the democide league table). Where's my apology for taking him out of the list? The instructor further notes that anyone who thinks that Hitler, Mao, et al were "born evil" is missing the point of the class. Judging from remarks in this and previous classes, those of us who are not in the habit of writing and forwarding angry emails are missing out on a substantial portion of discourse for this class.

Perspective: when I get somewhat frustrated with the challenges of this course and fantasize about nasty feedback (example: instructor: "students who are not faring well in terms of points right now should ..." me: "is there a way for us to know how we are faring in terms of points right now?" instructor: "no, but there will be soon" Oh good, it's the final session of class for the semester and the only information about our performance is a single paper that has been returned.) I find it helpful to read things like this, which illustrate how you can easily out yourself as an asshole to be ignored. Then I take a deep breath and pet my dog.

I supported the notion of impeaching Cheney enough to make T-shirts, which very aggressively failed to sell. Now that Kucinich has introduced a bill to impeach Bush, it's worth thinking about again.

Briefly, the basic argument for impeachment is that Bush committed many impeachable offenses. But just as Supreme Court decisions are rooting more in counting to five than in pure application of legal theory, impeachment is a political, not legal act. Probably most presidents have committed impeachable acts; after all, the US has gone to war at least eight times since the Congress, the sole organ with Constitutional power to wage war, last passed a bill declaring war. But only two presidents have been impeached, and neither was convicted.

Politically, both Bush and Cheney would have to be impeached simultaneously, which would lead to the speaker of the house succeeding to the presidency, which puts Pelosi in a very awkward position and probably ends up as a strong incentive for her not to allow impeachment. The other standard political arguments against are that it will distract from more important issues, and than Bush will be out of office very shortly anyway.

The strongest argument for, I think, it to begin re-establishing the basic civil norm that politicians, even and especially the president, must obey the law, and that there will be consequences if they do not. From that perspective, Ford's pardon of Nixon morally enabled the disasters since. A commenter at Making Light argues that it literally enabled some of the disaster-makers:

... if [they] are impeached (House) and tried and convicted (Senate), they will not get Federal pensions and they will be ineligible for any Federal office.

This is what should have been done to Nixon and Reagan's cohorts -- if it had we wouldn't be dealing with the current criminals.

A third argument would be that impeachment might help restore international respect for the United States (and restore some of our "soft power"). Between that, re-establishing rule of law, and removing many dedicated imperialists from government permanently, I think impeachment is at least worth serious public discussion. Otherwise, it's business as usual.

Since we are still talking about cost-benefit analysis and how to apply it to situations with hard-to-value outcomes, here's an interesting article in the New York Times:

The Bush administration is about to propose far-reaching new rules that would give people with disabilities greater access to tens of thousands of courtrooms, swimming pools, golf courses, stadiums, theaters, hotels and retail stores.

... The Justice Department acknowledged that some of the changes would have significant costs. But over all, it said, the value of the public benefits, estimated at $54 billion, exceeds the expected costs of $23 billion.

If you've seen my sidewalks photo-essay, you'll know that Singapore isn't great with accessibility. This is not scientifically collected data, but I do see very very few disabled people, such as people in wheelchairs. in public here.

About half an hour before class was over, a camera crew from "Corporate Communications" came in to film the lecture in progress for some unspecified purpose. A few minutes later, we came to this slide in the lecture:

Design contamination refers to the situation where participants know that they are being observed (tested) and act differently because of it.

In the slightly stunned silence after they left, someone muttered, "this is contamination."

Evaluation

Programs convert inputs to outputs, which lead to outcomes. Process evaluation is a descriptive analysis, performed after implementation, which measures the efficiency of inputs to outputs. Impact analysis measures the relationship between outputs and outcomes and seeks causes.

Reading

Rossi, P., M. Lipsey and H. Freeman (2004) Evaluation: A Systematic Approach. 7th Edition. Sage Publications, Chapter 1—An Overview of Program Evaluation, pp 1-28

Rossi, P., M. Lipsey and H. Freeman (2004) Evaluation: A Systematic Approach. 7th Edition. Sage Publications, Chapter 12—The Social Context of Evaluation, pp 373-419