Today we are reviewing our Myers Briggs test results. This is also the deadline to complete our 360 Reviews. This is a third-party program to whom the school is paying lots of money to operate an independent website where we can type in our co-workers' emails and names to harass them to fill out a questionnaire about us. I think we're supposed to get seven people to respond. I sent invitations to thirteen people, of which three completed the survey and two started and abandoned it. I don't blame them for abandoning it; it's seventy questions and a lot of them read like this:

AHMED reduces complexity to a few core priorities in pursuit of 
the major strategic objectives
 	1. Substantial improvement needed
	2. Slight improvement needed
	3. Effective
	4. Very effective
	5. Role model
 
	0. Not observed

Here's a few more actual questions:

• ...develops strategies in accordance with the business vision
• ...monitors the effects of change initiatives and reviews their value

Please excuse me while I go monitor the effects of my change initiatives.

Class Session

We got our Myers-Briggs results back, and spent 90 minutes arranging ourselves around the classroom in order of score. Then we got and discussed our FIRO-B scores. Some of this seems helpful but it takes me a conscious effort of will to ignore the similarities with horoscopes and cold reading techniques.

Scott McClellan becomes the latest in a long, long sequence of former Bush officials to publish a book about it. He appears to take more responsibility than Feith. And this quote takes him a lot further than many others in and outside of the administration have been willing to go:

In this case, the 'liberal media' didn't live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.

As with virtually all such attacks of honesty and conscience, it's much too little, far too late.

Steven Liew, director and legal counsel for eBay Asia Pacific.

Skype is wonderful; which is why AT&T, SingTel, Verizon, etc, hate us.

"Anybody from Singapore government here? [many raise their hands] Oh. What goes on in this room stays in this room." I guess I'll stop blogging then.

I read Harry Frankfurt's book "On Bullshit" but I don't think I quite grokked his definition, which if I remember correctly hinged on the indifference of the bullshitter to the truth or falsehood of the notion they were promoting. Mathematics uses the Hebrew character א (aleph) to denote infinity, or more precisely the cardinality of infinite sets. Since there is more than one kind of infinity, mathematicians define א₀ (aleph-null), א₁ (aleph-one), etc. since bullshit exists in potentially infinite supply, I propose the use of the Hebrew character ב (bet) to denote it. Then Frankfurt's definition is ב₀.

I propose to define ב₁ (bet-one). A text is bullshit of this variety if nobody in reasonable discourse would argue the opposite, and if removing it would not reduce the communicative value of the surrounding text. This can be tested by rewriting the text to convey the opposite meaning; if the re-written text is completely absurd in the context of the original discourse, the text is ב₁. This is not novel, of course; I've sketched it out before and I'm sure it's been defined by others many times. Let's look at it application, with this speech from the managing director of the World Bank. The original opening:

Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, Members of the Press:

We have come to a critical period in Asia’s history.

It is clear that the future will not merely be an extension of the past.

As this new world continues to take shape, those of us in business, in government, in international organizations have to adapt to unprecedented circumstances, with unprecedented speed.

And, I would argue, with more collaboration than in the past.

To complicate things even more, it is evident the changes taking place are not isolated; they influence and in some cases accelerate each other.

Let me start with an example that illustrates this new connection between events, the need for early recognition and speedy responses and, above all, the importance of concerted action.

Let's apply the test:

Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, Members of the Press:

We have come to an unimportant period in Asia’s history.

It is clear that the future will merely be an extension of the past.

As this new world continues to take shape, those of us in business, in government, in international organizations have no need to adapt to unprecedented circumstances, or with unprecedented speed.

And, I would argue, without any more collaboration than in the past.

To simplify things even more, it is evident the changes taking place are isolated; they do not influence each other.

The test method doesn't work perfectly; the last paragraph of the quote can't be reversed very easily. But I think it's a start in a promising new line of theory.

Pedestrians of Mumbai are being asked to join a new campaign to demand their right to walk freely on pavements meant only for them.

The pedestrian "satyagraha" or civil disobedience is finding support from people fed up with cluttered pavements or dangerous roads that do not have sidewalks.

... The pavements are encroached on by illegal structures, hawkers and slum-dwellers. The organisation demands that pedestrians be provided a six-foot-wide walkway along the middle of the roads.

It's not that bad here in Singapore, but there are more problems then you might expect. Here is a selection of the obstacles from a 2.5-mile walk:

Also very interesting is this story about what Paris is doing to reduce traffic. Tactics include raising parking rates, eliminating free parking, eliminating many parking spaces, changing some car lanes to bus and bike lanes and sidewalk, providing cheap rental bicycles, giving residents with parking passes, and providing short-term parking for deliveries and such. Costs were covered by selling exclusive outdoor advertising rights. Coming up next: city-sponsored car-sharing.

Class time is lagging quite a bit behind the syllabus, so I'm going to restructure each blog entry to contain a complete topic rather than match exactly what we did in class on a particular day.

Selecting criteria

Before you can choose between options, you have to assess which options are better or worse. Before you can do that, you need to define "better", but this is often very complicated. Also, the focal goal of a policy may bear little relation to its outcome and consequences. Criteria may come from many sources, from policy-makers to analysts to the public. Criteria may include:

• consequential criteria
  • good or bad outcome
  • who is affected?
  • efficiency
    • maximum output with minimum output
    • achieve objective with lowest possible cost
    • maximize net benefit for society
• moral criteria
  • right or wrong
  • Definitions of equality and equity
• Political viability
  • enough support
  • not too much opposition

Projecting outcomes

One the problem space is identified, the problem is defined, criteria are determined, and alternatives invented, the analyst must project outcomes. An outcome projection describes the outcome in terms of the criteria, including both the general direction and estimated magnitude of each value.

Extrapolation comprises three parts: secular trends, cyclical fluctuations (with seasonal variations as a special case), and irregular movement. In other words, what would happen if everything proceeded normally, what kinds of predictable periodic changes can be identified and filtered out, and what sorts of surprises may happen?

Extrapolations depend on models. Joel's note: Models 101: Models are simplified representations of the aspects of reality that are relevant to a specific problem. The path of a baseball in flight can be modeled fairly accurately with a simple Newtonian equations plus a fudge factor for air resistance. A whiffle ball is strongly affected by air and so the model for the baseball won't work as well for the whiffle ball; you'll need a different model. Everything you think you think in the context of a model, whether you realize that or not. Nobody uses formal Newtonian models to catch baseballs; but we still do have some model working in our brain based on our past observations of how baseballs behave. This can be proved by painting a whiffle ball to look like a baseball and then throwing it to someone expecting a baseball. They'll use the wrong model and fail to catch the ball. But if they know it's a whiffle ball, they'll adapt their working model, change their position, and make the catch. You should always be aware of what model you are using, its limitations, and alternative models you might need to use. End of Models 101.

Side note: the 51-49 principle (perhaps it could better be labeled "the 51-49 fallacy"?): Pushed by antagonistic group behavior, we treat our own 51% confidence as 100% confidence.

Judgmental forecasting: AKA expert knowledge forecast. Based on past experience and training, make a qualitative guess about the outcome.

The internet has a few catalogs of forecasting methods.

Feasibility

Is a proposed alternative politically possible?

Readings

Bardach Part 1, pp 25-47. Part II, pp 61-88

Patton, C & D. Sawicki (1986). Basic Methods of Policy Analysis and Planning. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Chapter 5, "Establishing Evaluative Criteria", Pages 139-175

Guess, G. M., and P. G. Farnham (2000), Cases in Public Policy Analysis. Chapter 4, Forecasting Policy Options, pp. 135-207, Georgetown University Press.

Paul Kagame spoke at the Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore to a crowd of students, diplomats, and reporters. All text is my paraphrase of his remarks unless otherwise noted.

Africa has a reputation for perpetual crisis and unfavorable investment climate, but this is no longer completely correct. What changed? Africans deposed many dictators; the end of the Cold War; the end of apartheid; the spread of information technology, finance, and investment in Africa. Resulting in improved investment climate. Joel's note: He said "investment" nine times during his remarks.

Q: What is the key to better governance? A: You need good leaders at many levels, not just at the top. [some empty verbiage] It's a matter of choice that Africans have to make.

Q: Singapore has its own kind of "democracy". What kind of democracy will Rwanda have? (Joel's note: this is a very loaded question in Singapore, since Singapore's form of democracy is not very democratic. Kagame didn't seem to pick up this nuance.) A: ... common principles of democracy, different details. People must free themselves, not just apply foreign formulas. When I'm watching TV [of the West?], I get the impression that it's about having the most money to splash about.

Q: Did Rwanda choose Singapore as a model/advisor? A: [...] yes.

Q: Being Tutsi, how did you feel about reconciliation? A: ... from my background of injustice and prejudice, I know how good it is to be different [from that behavior]. ....

Q: Your focus on human rights is rare for Africa. What steps are you taking to promote this in the African Union? Do you see leadership on this in Africa? A: [...]

Q: I commend your zero-tolerance on corruption. What institutional framework are you implementing to prevent more massacres? A: genocide is ideological, from the colonial legacy ...

Q: You come close to fitting the bill of the "Big Man" trap. What are you doing to not follow that role? A: "I don't feel close to a Big Man ... I am very conscious of the fact that there is a tomorrow without me." You have to build institutions ... constitutional processes ... limits .... "I will follow it to the letter. If you want, there is another time of judging coming up [when Kagame reaches his term limit]"

Q: What about the office of Vice President, which was created just for you in 1994 and dissolved after you became President in 2000? A: "yes..." It was during a transition period. I didn't want to be in government, but they said I couldn't leave after our struggle to get to that point, so they made me VP. The guy I recommended for president didn't work out and problems remained, so I accepted the presidency.

Q: Will China rape our resources too? A: "This is the most important thing you have come to ask. They say the right things ... the US is more worried about China in Africa than Africans are. They [the US] are worried they [China] are going to beat them at their own game." Africa must step back and plan. "I don't think anybody owes us anything. If they find you sleeping, they will take things and leave you sleeping. They will not wake you up." There is no value-added industry in Africa; cotton is exported raw instead of being processed in Africa. It's up to Africa to demand cotton processing in Africa. It's not discrimination; we have to set the terms. China and India compete for what we have, so [having both interested] will give us a better price, "if we are not sleeping."

Policy Formulation and Policy Design

What is the scope of possible alternatives? Can the analyst propose new options or only evaluate already identified options? Status quo is usually an option.

Recipes for getting new solutions from existing solutions:

• Magnify
• minify
• substitute
• combine
• re-arrange

Generic policy options for correcting market failures (from Weimer):

• If there could be a working market but there isn't ...
  • Is the market too restrained?
    • Is it overly regulated, granting some actors monopoly rents and hence causing inefficiency? deregulate, but look out for windfall losses and gains during the transition. Examples: US deregulation of airlines, telephones (etc etc etc).
    • Is something illegal when it need not be? legalize. Example: drugs
    • Does the government own companies in an industry that isn't actually subject to market failures that can be solved by nationalized companies? Privatize.
  • Is there potential for a market but none exists yet?
    • Would assigning property rights create a healthy market? Then assign property rights. Example: water markets. Watch out, once again, for windfall losers and winners. Also, the new market may be very thin.
    • Could a new good be created with legal backing? Example: pollution permits.
  • Could a market be simulated?
    • An auction can expose non-market situations (natural monopolies, public goods) to market forces. Instead of competition within the market, which is hard or impossible, promote competition for access to the market.
• Is market failure endemic, or is something else more important than efficiency?
  • supply-side taxes
    • output taxes
    • tariffs
  • supply-side subsidies
    • matching grants
    • tax expenditures (business deductions and credits)
  • demand-side taxes
    • commodity taxes
    • user fees
  • demand-side subsidies
    • in-kind subsidies
    • vouchers
    • tax expenditures (personal deductions and credits)
• Rules
  • Framework rules
    • civil laws
    • criminal laws
  • Regulations
    • price regulation
    • quantity regulation
    • direct information
    • indirect information
• direct supply
  • government provision
  • independent agencies
    • government corporations
    • special districts
  • Contracting
    • direct contracting
    • indirect contracting

Risk-averse behavior

Scenario: a flu outbreak expected to kill 600 people, and two different programs to fight the outbreak. The class was split in two and each half presented with a choice. Half the students see two choices: option A saves 200 people, option B gives a 1/3 chance of saving 600 and a 2/3 chance of saving none. That group split between the choices. The second half had option C, dooming 400, and option D, a 1/3 chance of nobody dying and a 2/3 chance of 600 dying, and went unanimously for option D. Of course A and C are the same program, and B and D are the same program, and both programs have the same statistical outcome.

This was presented as an example of the power of framing, in that the choice between two options changed dramatically based on the wording. But I reasoned differently: this is a PR problem. (Since there's no statistical difference, neither option is obviously better from the information at hand.) The public isn't going to do policy analysis of a hypothetical 600 losses from flu. The only number that will matter to the press is the actual number of dead. From that perspective, 400 and 600 are the same number, and the real choice is:

• Option 1: certainty of failure
• Option 2: 1/3 chance of not failure, 2/3 chance of failure

and that choice is easy.

Readings

Correcting Market and Government Failures: Generic Policies, Policy Analysis: Concepts and Practice Chapter 9, Weimer and Vining. 1999.

Mike Piazza announced his retirement. Mike is my favorite baseball player; I was there at Chavez Ravine the first time he batted third. It was the third home game of 1993; Darryl and Eric Davis had been benched after stinking up the first two games. He set a lot of records for the Dodgers until they traded him shortly before his free agency, to the Marlins, who flipped him to the Mets a week later, and he played the bulk of his career for them, before playing out two final years in San Diego and Oakland. His two best years were his rookie year, in 1993, and his penultimate year with the Dodgers, in 1998 at age 28. That year, he was worth 12.3 wins, a peak season for the ages. Bench had a 13.3, but defense put him over; his offense never came close to Mike. 31 is my third-favorite number (behind 47 and 42).

When he was traded from the Dodgers, I made up this chart and used a push-pin to mark my progress, and regress, through the five stages of grieving. Then I became a sort-of Mets fan, as long as they weren't playing the Dodgers, a secondary loyalty made easier when they ended up with Pedro, among other former Dodgers.)

Here's a sportswriter:

He made the act of squatting behind a plate for three hours cool for the first time since a man named Johnny Bench did it in the '70s.

... He was the best hitting catcher of all time.

He was a Florida Marlin for five glorious games.

He pulled off a mullet [and a silly moustache] for most of the '90s.

Yes, Mike Piazza had a hell of a career.

—Kevin Kaduk

I don't know how meaningful this market is, but it seems like a plausible measurement. I find the daily noise hard to read so I made a ten-day moving average graph:

Amory Lovins, Chairman and Chief Scientist, Rocky Mountain Institute, Inc, on "Winning the Oil Endgame". Unless noted, all text is my paraphrase of the speaker's message.

Winning the Old Endgame, a free book describing a for-profit path to eliminate oil usage in the US by 2040. How? Improve efficiency, at (US$ ca 2000) $12 per saved barrel, and new sources (cellulosic ethanol) at less than $26/bbl.

Global response to the 1970s oil crisis was drastic worldwide conservation, in which the world reduced demand so much that OPEC lost pricing power for a decade.

Whaling was the fifth-biggest US industry in the early 19th century. New technologies rendered whaling obsolete (for lighting oil) before the whales were (all) gone.

Cars could be made more fuel-efficient (via streamlining, lower mass, etc) at an effective price of US$0.15/liter. Trucks can be similarly improved.

Cars can be made more efficient without being made undesirable. Of the chemical energy in auto fuel, 6% ultimately moves the car (as opposed to pushing air out of the way, warming the tires, etc etc. Only 0.3% goes to moving the driver. Carbon fiber crash cones can solve the issue of lighter cars being more dangerous (all other things equal).

Showing a demonstration design: "Think about it like a computer with wheels, not a car with chips." Uh, that may not be the best line to use. Also, the information design of his presentation is awful, not even counting the horrible black backgrounds.

Joel's note: this is very sexy, so far, but he's focused solely on replacing oil and on lighter cars. He's not talking directly about carbon emissions, although those are reduced when cars are made more efficient. Also, carbon-fiber construction is much more energy-intensive than steel, at least for now: "the effective combination of [reduce/reuse/recycle] could decrease the energy intensity of CFRP to the level of steel parts." Aside from that, I'm accumulating cognitive dissonance as he keeps describing and demonstrating all of these technology solutions that don't seem to be showing up in force in the real world. Industry conspiracy again?

Plug-in hybrids could alter the pattern of electricity usage. Power up your hybrid at night with cheap power; during the day, park your car at work at a smart plug and sell your power back to the grid at premium prices. "The first two million Americans to do this can earn back the cost of their car."

Blended body airplanes can be three times as efficient as tube and wing construction.

Joel's note: I start to suspect that the real benefit of four dollar gas is that it will batter down the social resistance to doing "weird" things. Anybody running a long-distance truck fleet could have saved a lot of money any time in the last few decades (or more, for all I know) by introducing more efficient, but weird-looking trucks. Why didn't they? I bet social resistance is a huge factor. Oh, and just to mention: we are once again sitting in an heavily air-conditioned room at noon with the shades drawn and the lights on listening to someone talk about energy efficiency.

Sweden planned to get off oil by 2020, but a new government postponed that to 2030.

Most of this will happen without government participation. Five ways governments can help.

Stimulate demand for more efficient vehicles. Feebates: rebates on more efficient cars paid for by fees for less efficient cars; revenue-neutral and serves to internalize the pollution externality. Require government procurement to include only most efficient cars. E.g., don't let officials pick their own prestige SUVs etc. Working with Wal★Mart to get more efficient supply trucks.

Share R&D risk. 50% of casualties in US military come from convoys; 70% of their cargo is fuel. This is because of military planning that assumed fuel delivery was free. By changing this assumption in procurement rules to account for fuel delivery cost (in money and human lives), fuel will count one or two orders of magnitude more, and 0.1mpg tanks will be more accurately perceived as very limited military options.

It is possible to shrink the adoption curves, so they don't take 15 years to turn over from old products to new products. How to rebuild the US military with efficiency in mind.

The Department of Defense is the largest single consumer of energy in the United States. In 2006, it spent $13.6 billion to buy 110 million barrels of petroleum fuel (about 300,000 barrels of oil each day), and 3.8 billion kWh of electricity. This represents about 0.8% of total U.S. energy consumption and 78% of energy consumption by the Federal government.

Breakthrough competitive strategy via platform efficiency. Boeing 1997 is like Detroit now.

An hour in, he mentions carbon intensity for the first time.

Peak oil is a distraction, because 1) we can't know when it happens because so much oil reserve is in non-transparent countries, 2) efficiency justifies the same actions that peak oil justifies, 3) (I missed #3).

The biggest threat to US energy security is US energy policy. The effects of US policy have transferred tremendous wealth to Venezuela, Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. US policy favors overly centralized systems of oil, natural gas, and grid distribution, and creates terrorist targets.

What about Singapore? Sitting on a gold-mine of "negabarrels" and "negawatts". You could save 3/4 of your usage in the next few decades. Singapore does have a good policy of charging close to the true social cost of driving. A modern power system (distributed, diverse, renewable) will cost less and emit less. Singapore is uniquely positioned to demonstrate the path to an oil-free future and set an example for China.

Q: Why are the policies so backwards? Is this just special interest capture? A: The oil industry is split, more good than bad. We're used to thinking that the oil problem can only be solved by draconian measures, but design, technology, and business strategy can solve the problem better. The Prius did outsell the Ford Explorer last year, and compacts and subcompacts are outselling SUVs. If I actually want to get things done, I'll work with the private sector together with civil society, not with government. I open-sourced "Hypercar" concepts in 1993 so that nobody could patent it and the industry would have to compete to implement it.

Q: How energy-efficient are the lightweights to make? A: Lifecycle analysis is very favorable. If you have a limited carbon budget, it's better to spend the carbon turning it into structural materials are light and strong and don't rust or fatigue than to burn it to propel steel.

Q: Is this a case of negative externalities? A: The car-making industry is in many ways the biggest human enterprise ever. It's fairly unique. They base strategic decisions on accounting, not economic analysis. Breaking these habits requires strong leadership, like Mulally at Ford. Car company employees tell me they have all of the necessary capabilities but they've never been asked to put them together.

Q: I'm an engineer. Why aren't we doing these things if they are so easy? A: See my lectures on the topic. It costs less to do things right, but it doesn't happen. It's about rethinking economic assumptions. "Singapore has some of the best engineering in the world for clean rooms, HVAC design, ..., but it doesn't get much respect here because it didn't just step off a plane with slides." See also 10xE

Now that people are abundant and nature is scarce, the Next Industrial Revolution will raise natural resource productivity 10- to 100-fold.

We want to get CEOs to call school deans and warn them that they will only hire properly trained engineers.

When you are studying public policy, you see public policy everywhere.

Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, told me about a meeting he had with Robert Kennedy in the mid-1960s. It concerned Vietnam, and the $64,000 question: What would John F. Kennedy have done in Vietnam had he lived? R.F.K.’s answer was: J.F.K. would have gotten us out of Vietnam. He would have waited until after the ‘64 elections, and then “fuzzed it up.” [25]

Fuzzing it up is a common practice in government. You hide intention and responsibility. You have one person say one thing, and another person the exact opposite. You create a blizzard of paper, so much paper that actual evidence is lost in the glut. And of course, you deny anything and everything you can deny — particularly the obvious. (Denying the obvious is always popular.) You produce noise, distraction and confusion. People rarely think of this as a well-established bureaucratic technique, but it is a tried and true methodology. —Errol Morris

Leadership Direction

If a person has a sense of purpose, they seem to go much further, including perhaps going further biologically.

Happy life: research points to three factors: pleasure, engagement, and meaning.

Randy Pausch Lecture

Yay! George Takei is getting married! E! Online incorrectly refers to him as "the once and forever Lt. Sulu", but of course we all know that he is now Captain Sulu.

The Food Crisis, by Juan Jose Daboub, managing director of the World Bank.

Food prices have risen dramatically. Dollar-denominated prices have increased 2.5 times since 2002, most of that in the last year or so.

Boilerplate description of the problem and solutions. It's hard to pay attention to him reading from his prepared remarks, especially when they give the sense of being polished to a fine state of inanity and inoffensiveness. "Power is shifting not just between countries, but within countries." Seriously? I refuse to believe you until I see it on a powerpoint slide (to his credit, no Powerpoint). "A few years ago, few people knew of Youtube. Today ... million videos are downloaded each day." Really? Wow. "Singapore has much to teach the world. Of course not all lessons from a small island nation are applicable, we understand that .... but I do believe Singapore can and should do more. As a small but highly successful state highly integrated with the global economy ...." "These are unprecedented times and they call for us to work together ...." "There are no excuses for failures; Singapore's example shows hard work pays off ... you have a responsibility to help keep the flame of economic freedom burning."

And the moderator: "In a short twenty minutes you have cast canvas on a range of issues we in Singapore and we in ASEAN have to deal with, and are dealing with."

Q: My question has to do with the implications of recent food price increases for the Doha framework. Is more rapid progress in the Doha round needed? Is that one of the measures you have in mind?" That was a much less pointed question than I expected from that questioner.

Q: Can you provide more explanation of why the food crisis is happening. What kind of response is necessary?

A:

We estimate 7% of world food production is traded internationally. ... Short-term actions: we are working with 54 countries that need to provide some temporal relief to 5, 10, 12% of their population. They are providing some direct, transparent, focalized to the demand subsidies ... In the medium term, the solution is to have the supply side respond. We are reviewing policies that certain countries have and try to advise ...

Jon Stewart interviewed Doug Feith, one of the chief architects of the Iraq War, and the Daily Show website has the full ~17 minute interview online. It almost goes without saying that Feith lies more or less continuously throughout the interview, and I won't attempt to catalog that. Instead I want to point out something damning that Jon Stewart says:

Feith (at about 3:40 in Part 1): "there was a serious consideration of the very great risks of war and I think that many of them were actually discussed with the public, but to tell you the truth one thing is absolutely clear: this administration made gross errors in the way it talked about the war, some of the them are very obvious, like the WMD—"

Stewart: "—That was all we had to go on."

Which citizen in their right mind would rely solely on their own government to inform their decision about whether or not to support war? And I don't mean that in a post-Watergate, cynical Generation X or Y kind of a way, or even in a democratic way. Governments start wars. There is, in the lingo I learned last semester, a principle-agent problem, in that we the people delegate the power of war-making on our behalf to a government, but the decision-makers in that government have incentives that do not reflect the desires and needs of the people. If I could make one structural reform to the United States, it would be to require a three-quarter majority of the Senate and House to declare war. Of course, as a necessary corollary we would also have to restore the norm that the president and the military don't actually wage war without a declaration from Congress, a norm which disintegrated during the Cold War.

Anyway, on occasion of Feith's book promotion appearance on the Daily Show, a book which he claims that "if the public doesn't have accurate information, it's impossible in a democracy like ours to have a serious proper discussion of these enormously important issues. My purpose in writing the book was to provide accurate information ...." Here are a few of what I take to be well-established historical facts about the Iraq War:

• Key decision-makers in the administration, most notably Cheney and Rumsfeld, wanted from before the election to wage war with Iraq.
  • The reasons varied with each person
  • Chief among the reasons was oil, directly and indirectly
  • Another key reason for many decision-makers was to benefit Israel
• Hussein and Iraq were not an imminent threat to the United States
  • Al-Queda was not working with or operating in Iraq
  • Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction
• The administration deliberately lied to and misled the US Congress, the people of the United States, American allies, and the United Nations in order to create support for an invasion.
• Bush decided to invade Iraq in 2001 or early 2002.

Reading notes

Economies don't have purpose. They just happen. Just as wearing a striped shirt in front of a television will cause a pattern to appear; collecting a number of independent actors who can exchange things of value with one another will cause an economy to happen. There's no purpose for the moire pattern on TV; there's no purpose for an economy. It just is. Since material wealth (broadly defined to include drinking water, health care, etc) is the primary source of happiness, a good economy is better than a bad economy. A good economy is one with allocative efficiency: the most possible output for a given input. Of course that's not the only way to define "good" for an economy; other contenders include Pareto efficiency, equality, and fairness, but in purely economic terms the best economy is the most efficient one. The challenge for public managers is to balance the various definitions of "good" in a way that more or less reflects the preferences of the public, and having defined aggregate good, to do what they can to help achieve it. Last weeks' readings pointed out the danger of skipping that first part, the definition of the problem. This week's first reading assumes the problem is simply one of efficiency:

Boadway, R. & D. Wildasin (1984). Public Sector Economics, Chapter 3, "Market Failures"

A economic fundamentalist justification of the public sector's existence as a cure for (some) market failures.

• p 58: "... the jointness in use of public intermediate goods prevents the market from extracting a price from firms unless they can be excluded." Ack. No. Jointness of use does not prevent the market from extracting a price; only lack of excludability does. Jointness of use, more commonly (but no more usefully) called rivalry, is separate. Consider a golf course. It is, up to a point, non-rival. If I'm playing the tenth hole, I could care less whether or not somebody is playing the first hole. Within a certain range, let's say between one and a hundred golfers at a time, adding an extra golfer has no cost. That's great for the club because it provides them with a large "inventory" of time slots to sell. But it neither enables nor prevents them from "extracting a price". What enables the golf club to extract a price from golfers is the fence they put up around the course to keep the public out. That's excludability.
• p 73 to 77: charts of US government expenditure. Not adjusted for inflation, so mostly worthless; they do include percent of GDP, though. The total expenditure table does include state and local, which is nice. Still, I think this is pretty skippable.
• p 77: "Veterans Services", as it usually is, is mistakenly broken out into a separate category instead of included within "National Defense". If you send a million people to war and promise to take care of them, surely the lifelong cost of that care is part of the cost of war. (And if you manage that obligation as a cost to be cut, obscenities like this will be inevitable.

Kleiman, M., and S. Teles (2006). "Market and Non-Market Failures," in Moran, M., M. Rein and R. Goodin (eds) Oxford Handbook of Public Policy, Oxford University Press, pp. 624-650

Same topic, two decades later. Let's see if anything has improved.

• p 625: "Under certain highly restrictive assumptions, the market can be shown to be a a Pareto optimum." Those are better qualifiers for "assumption" than the last article's "It has been shown by Friedman and Savange (1948) that under certain reasonable assumptions individuals will behave [so as to maximize their expected utility]". Does that reflect 20 years of progress or are these authors just more rational (hah hah) to begin with?
• p 625: "The economic analysis underlying the doctrine of market failure assumes an individual capable of maximizing expected subjective utility ... That assumption is obviously false for children and the insane. But it is also false for many decisions made by ordinarily competent people about, for example, time management, saving, financial risk taking, diet, exercise, and the use of psychoactive chemicals. ... Thus the scope of suboptimal performance in voluntary individual choice and spontaneous organization is substantially larger than orthodox welfare-economics approaches suggest." Yay! Much better.
• p 637: causes of government failure: Inadequate Penetrative Capacity, i.e., not enough detailed information; Inadequate voluntary cooperation; institutional overhead; voter attention and inattention; path dependence of political decision-making; competition for technical expertise; weak administrative culture.
• p 647: "Public policy, institutional analysis, and political philosophy do not deal with three distinct subject matters; rather, they are three different attempts to deal with the problem of how human beings ought to govern themselves."

Much better.

Class notes

Class lecture starts with the material from class 2 reading.

Cheese is almost all flown in from Australia or further, and it's not cheap, ranging from S$20 to S$60 per kilo (S$10/kg is about as US$3/lb). This pale orange stuff was fairly cheap, but the way it was packaged, I couldn't tell what it was. It smelled good, so I bought it, but then I couldn't get it to taste very good. I tried various combinations of dark rye, crackers, dijon mustard, and soylent pink, but it was never more than so-so. Until I made some pasta and threw tiny cubes of it into the pasta sauce; then it was incredible. Umami festival in my mouth. Still no idea what the cheese was, though. It seemed like a visitor from the hard cheese family, Parmesan and Romano and whatnot, but it was closer to chedder in consistency, a bit crumbly and not very plastic.

Kona has a new chew toy:

And here are a few pictures from the balcony.

The One Laptop Per Child project has been interesting to watch; it's not hard to find negative opinions about OLPC leader Nicholas Negroponte and his MIT Media Lab (here's my own, albeit second-hand). Despite a lot of problems and opposition, it's gotten surprisingly far. Recently, a whole lot of shit appears to have hit a whole lot of fans, as key people quit, often in anger or despair. Since I'm trying to figure out what to do after graduation (I've got it narrowed down, ideally, working in a tech/management job for a non-profit on the West Coast of the US), I've been following semi-closely. Well, here's the latest inside scoop and it does indeed appear that it's hard for a born dysleader to lead. Is the project doomed? Impossible to say. Even if it is, the surge of ultra-cheap laptops is a substantial accomplishment, although not necessarily a world-saving one.

Three causes of mass death: disease, famine, and deliberate killing. The last is the domain of the leader. (I guess the traditional inclusion of Death in this list violates fourth rule of good categorization systems.)

Speaking of Jim Jones, here's a transcript of part of his final speech:

Please get us some medication. It’s simple. It’s simple. There’s no convulsions with it. . . . Don’t be afraid to die. You’ll see, there’ll be a few people land[ing] out here. They’ll torture some of our children here. They’ll torture our people. They’ll torture our seniors. We cannot have this. . . . Please, can we hasten? Can we hasten with that medication? . . . We’ve lived — we’ve lived as no other people lived and loved. We’ve had as much of this world as you’re gonna get. Let’s just be done with it. (Applause.). . . . Who wants to go with their child has a right to go with their child. I think it’s humane. . . . Lay down your life with dignity. Don’t lay down with tears and agony. There’s nothing to death. . . . It’s just stepping over to another plane. Don’t bethis way. Stop this hysterics. . . . Look, children, it’s just something to put you to rest. Oh, God. (Children crying.). . . . Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, please. Mother, please, please, please. Don’t — don’t do this. Don’t do this. Lay down your life with your child.

The key to getting people to do awful things is to diffuse responsibility.

Extended discussion of the Milgram experiment. The Wikipedia entry raises the point that the phenomenon in those experiments is more probably learned helplessness than obedience to authority.

Positive psychology: instead of how to get from negative to normal, how to get from normal to positive.

Shreekant Gupta, an NUS econ professor.

The drain of CO2 from the atmosphere is negligible. This is a detail I'm still not clear about: if the drain is close to zero, then how can any level of emissions over zero be sustainable? I know that, at this scale, there's a big difference between zero and negligible, and it's important to count your zeros. So it might be possible to emit X gigatons of CO2 without moving the PPM count more than Y points per year, but since Y really needs to be zero or negative (since the total accumulated CO2 in the atmosphere today already commits the Earth's climate to change pretty radically), surely X can't be all that big, and so Z, the amount of economic activity that produces X, is kind of a mystery.

The current situation: if emissions have to peak by 2020 and drop dramatically, we can stabilize CO2e (CO₂ plus methane and other gases, all converted into the CO₂ equivalent) around 550 PPM, with a total temperature change around 4 or 5 degrees C (which is huge).

The best current climate change legislation on the table in the US is the McCain-Lieberman Act. Seriously. It was voted down 43-55 in 2003.

Most countries in the world really are bit players in GHG. The 173 smallest countries add up to 20% of emissions (if you count the EU-25 into one country, and speaking as someone who would (grossly simplifying) love to see some kind of global government and welcomes the black helicopters, it's encouraging to see the EU being treated as one entity instead of 25)

Q & A

Points of analysis for different proposals:

• how much price certainty is provided. Adoption of alternatives to status quo, i.e., fossil fuels, depends on some price stability. Lots of things become competitive when oil is $40/barrel, but the multi-year, multi-billion dollar investments in these things depend on oil staying over $40/barrel for years and years.
• economic efficiency
• how will it be enforced?
• wealth transfer from North to South

The South would have no objection to joining into a global climate treaty on some kind of per capita basis. The tacit assumption is that the South is going to get paid a lot to join, via emission credit transfers. But this may not be true, because it depends on the actual price of emission credits. The Montreal Protocol is an example: the North basically paid the South to stop using CFCs.

There should be a sense of liability from past performance (historical GHG emissions) but in reality the Northern countries refuse to take any responsibility for historical emissions.

Getting agreement is easy compared to implementation and enforcement. Canada stopped complying with Kyoto without any penalty.

Update: While looking up the question of how many people Hitler personally killed (for Leadership class), I came across this comment linking Hitler's rhetorical ability to induce genocide with global warming advocates' rhetorical ability to ... induce genocidal economic damage, I guess. What's most interesting to me is that those concerned with global climate change bemoan the total lack of substantive action to address the problem, while, simultaneously, others are warning that efforts to address climate change will cause effects parallel to genocide. Maybe both viewpoints are right.

Update: Jon reminds me that there's a lot of mystery in how land use relates to carbon emission and sequestration, and suggests that sustainable CO₂e emission levels might not be much higher than pre-industrial levels. Which obviously is never going to happen the easy way. In the face of news like this I always like to retreat to my environmentalism bottom line mantra to cheer myself up: Pollution doesn't hurt the Earth; the Earth is a six- billion-trillion-ton ball of rock that is beyond our power to hurt. Pollution only destroys the capacity of the surface of the Earth to sustain our lives.

What is public policy analysis?

Problem conditions, policy problems. Traffic congestion is a problem condition. The policy problem may be one or more of:

• gas price is too low
• import tariff is too low
• public transportation is inadequately used
• car culture dominates
• Insufficient support for bicycles

How do we know there's a problem? People complain.

Traffic congestion problem turns out to be a market failure because of externalities. Joel's Q: Is this a commons question? The common good is empty freeways, which get over-consumed? I think that's the same problem and same solution from a different analytical angle.

Some tools:

Boundary Analysis

Saturation sampling: sample everything. E.g., talk to everybody.

Sample and interview.

Boundary estimation

Joel's note: I bet card-sorting exercises (from usability testing) would be applicable. You would interview a sample of stakeholders to get things to put on the cards (in the prison example, phrases like "prison" and "sentencing guidelines" and "crack cocaine" and "building prisons"), and then give people stacks of cards and ask them to sort them into two piles, a pile of issues that are relevant to the problem and a pile of issues that aren't relevant. One challenge would be to get enough issues that are probably out of the boundary to be sure the boundary is big enough and well-defined. Hmm, looks like somebody's done something similar, though not exactly boundary analysis.

Classification Analysis

Hierarchy Analysis

Possible causes, plausible causes, actionable causes.

Multiple Perspective Analysis

Readings

Quade, E. S. (1982) Analysis for Public Decisions, Chapter 1, "The Need for Analysis"

Quade, E. S. (1982) Analysis for Public Decisions, Chapter 20, "Politics, Ethics, and Guidance from Analysis"

Executive summary: public policy analysis is thick with politics.

Weimer, D ... Policy Analysis

Howlett, M & M. Ramesh (2003) Studying Public Policy ...

Bardach Part I, pp 1-10

Dunn, William N, 2007. Public Policy Analysis: An Introductory .... Chapter 3, pp 71-120, 4th ed. Prentice Hall

• Policy problems are "unrealized needs, values, or opportunities for improvement."
• The biggest part of public policy solutions is discovering and defining problems, aka "structuring" problems.
• policy problems arise out of problem situations that are sensed by analysts and other stakeholders.
• policy problems are interrelated
• policy solutions go obsolete even though the problem may remain
• Errors of the third type, solving the wrong problem. Errors of the first type are false positives, or, in bad English, "rejecting the null hypothesis when it is true". Errors of the second type are false negatives, or, "accepting the null hypothesis when it is false".
• p 87. Descriptive and normative models. Finally, the right language choice. I don't quite follow the example of using the formula for compound interest is a normative model. I guess you could (and I guess the author does) consider the formula itself descriptive, but the act of using the formula normative since it pushes the analyst towards assuming that having the most money is the most important thing.
• p 92. Another sloppy example, in which drawing a graph (er, "simple symbolic model expressed in the form of a linear equation") relating rainfall and reservoir depth is alleged to lead an analyst to confusing correlation with causation, or of getting the causal arrow backwards. I understand that it's useful to remember that drawing a graph is an act that implies a certain model, and I understand that correlation should not be confused with causation, but I don't follow the path (to hell) between the two.
• p 99: rules for good classification systems
  1. Substantive relevance
  2. All things to be classified must fit
  3. Categories must be mutually exclusive
  4. Consistency (which follows from rules 2 and 3)

Class notes

"eightfold path to policy analysis": define the problem, assemble some evidence, construct the alternatives, select the criteria, project the outcomes, decide!, tell your story. Looks more or less like the scientific method. Researching a paper last year for States Markets, I came across this paper by Philip Gorski (that URL is specific to NUS's JSTOR access, but I bet you can hack it for your own institution), which argues that the Hypothetical-Deductive Model (the fancy label for the scientific method as more or less practiced in the 20th century) doesn't work well for social science, and a different model should be used. He argues for ... well, I am skimming his conclusion and it's so jargon-heavy that it's hard to summarize what he's arguing for. I think he's arguing that we can't use the pure HDM in social science, but we can and should still use the principle of falsifiablity.

Anyway, back in class discussion, we are still working through basic models of decision-making. A Chinese classmate offers this example of a limited decision-making model (my paraphrase): "When the Chinese government planned the Three Gorges Dam, they were concerned with energy and the economy. Then some experts said there would be environmental problems. But when the officials were planning the dam, they did not have that information." My own mental model of how that decision was made was that environmentalist voices were probably actively excluded; that officials were aware there was some environmental impact but simply didn't care until public (and foreign) pressure about the environment made it into a political issue.

We are still talking about the "incremental model". This overlaps closely with the PMI seminar I went to the other night, which was talking about how to handle risk. Nobody in class (to the extent that I've been listening, which is a smaller extent than it should be as I fiddle with JSTOR and Gorski and the lot) is talking about risk or how this model addresses risk.

Other models of decision making:

• Two-stage mixed scanning: first stage is groping around to set up the problem; second stage is rational decision model.
• garbage can model: all the inputs, context, etc, get thrown into the bin together and the decision/solution is the result of everything banging into each other. Or, as the original authors put it, "one can view a choice opportunity as a garbage can into which various kinds of problems and solutions are dumped by participants as they are generated. The mix of garbage in a single can depends on the mix of cans available, on the labels attached to the alternative cans, on what garbage is currently being produced, and on the speed with which garbage is collected and removed from the scene." The different things that go into the can are problems, solutions, participants, and choice opportunities. This was then somehow implemented in a computer simulation.

  A later article points out that "although the model's verbal description assumes the presence of decision makers, the FORTRAN code retains just problems, choices, and solutions as elements of the decision-making process." Class consensus: what's the point? I think that it's confusing to talk about this model without noting its roots in computer analysis of decision making. I guess I would summarize it thusly; the garbage can model is that people, problems, solutions, and opportunities all go zooming by more or less randomly. That's simply how it works in the real world, like it or not. So as a policy analyst you should focus on what you can control: coming up with solutions to problems that are current and that are "in play". And keeping history in context: there may be good solutions on the shelf, or good historical lessons about bad solutions; and your solution may in turn sit on the shelf.

• elitist model: the elitists get what they want.

Meanwhile, please enjoy this amusing picture.

Class discussion has worked back to "common sense" and "gut feeling" as decision-making processes. There are three interesting lines of thought here, in my opinion:

1. Research into how brains make decisions, for example the tendency to decide first and rationalize/explain second.
2. Antonio Damasio's books about the role of emotion in making decisions. Unfortunately the one I tried to read kept putting me to sleep, or perhaps I shouldn't have tried to read it at bedtime, so I never got past the second chapter. But it was very interesting.
3. Stephen Colbert's research into Truthiness. Somebody should get some research grants. Actually, if the show and audience ended up funding serious research in cognitive science, that would be totally awesome.

We seem to still be recapitulating the reading. It would be nice if we could start from the reading instead of ending there. For example, somebody just said it's important to be objective, but one of the readings, perhaps the Dunn, pointed out that analysts can only avoid intentional bias, not unintentional bias (and we know from much research that unintentional bias is incredibly powerful, from constraining the imagination of the possible to confirmation bias etc). While the tour through the methodology is interesting, we haven't caught up to the essential, unsolved problems in the field and in its foundations:

1. principle-agent problem. For practical reasons, the public has to delegate power to decision-makers. How can those elected or self-appointed decision-makers be trusted?
2. preference discovery and aggregation. how can we figure out what we collectively want?

Apropos to that, see this thread, about the new US Republican Party slogan, "The change you deserve." Highlights from the comments include, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard," and "Mercy, High Ones. Not justice, please, not justice. We would all be fools to pray for justice," "You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe." (that one's more poignant because the actor being addressed died of a stroke aged 44) The slogan is already being used to sell an antidepressant, Effexor, which bears a warning that it may promote suicidal tendencies.

It's now noon; there is an interesting seminar in the same room at 12:15, and of course class at 2 pm (I was going to go home to walk the dog, and come back for the evening version of the 2 pm class, but it's raining and I think I'll just stick it out (Kona seems to be fine skipping the noon walk, not that I make a regular habit out of it, but it stresses me out to no end). I guess I'll try to get lunch after the talk and take it with me to 2 pm class. Grump grump grump.

Meanwhile we continue to recapitulate the reading; we're talking about the importance of defining the problem correctly before taking action to solve it. This is a huge point in the reading, and even that may understate the issue. As they say, "ἐπὶ δηλήσει δὲ καὶ ἀδικίῃ εἴρξειν", "never do harm to anyone", or less accurately but even more pointedly, "first, do no harm". I think that can be extended to, "zeroethly, stop doing harm."

The Singapore branch of the Project Management Institute isn't especially active, which is surprising considering Singapore's reputation for management. If you hold the PMI's "Project Management Professional" credential, you need to earn 20 PDUs per year to maintain your credential; a PDU is a "Professional Development Unit" and you get them from attending seminars and meetings and such, at about one PDU per hour. The Puget Sound and San Diego branches (home to Microsoft and Boeing, and to half the US Navy, respectively) offer monthly breakfasts, dinners, and whatnot so you can pick up PDUs steadily. Singapore's branch does very little, aside from an annual all-day seminar that's only worth 8 PDUs.

So when they announced a seminar for Monday night, on a topic that's not completely boring, for two PDUs, and for free for local members, they should not have been but were surprised to get 270 registrations instead of the seventy they planned for. I'd bet that the total number of credentialed PMPs in Singapore is probably right around, oh, 270? Anyway, on to my observations: Attendence was announced at 270, which seemed about right. Counting the five rows around me, there were 44 people, of which 10 were women. Mostly Chinese, but a strong Indian representation. If there were Malays, I couldn't clearly spot them, but I'm not so good at telling Malay from Chinese without staring or telltales like headscarves or names. Two people carried on extended conversations on their cell phones; the local norm is apparently that it's okay to do this as long as you talk very quietly and cup your hand over your mouth.

---

The talk was by Assistant Professor Lieven Demeester from INSEAD (an international business school), previously a management consultant. Following is my paraphrase of the speaker, unless otherwise noted

• What's new in the last few decades in project management and uncertainty? Game theory, psychology, etc. And globalization.
• If you plot the chance of a task completing against time spent, with time on the X and chance on the Y, you get something like this (Joel's note: found this on Google, not from the seminar): There's a 50% chance the task will end within, say, 10 days, and a 95% chance it will end in 20 days. If you ask how long the task will take, an answer with a single number is misleadingly simplified. It's probably going to take about ten days, not much less, very possibly twice as long, and maybe even longer.
• The consequence of this is that if you ask for an estimate and they are conservative, it will come back much closer to 20 days. Then the schedule gets built around these estimates, and they reify. That is, the (longish) estimate becomes the reality; workers will pace themselves to complete the task at the "deadline", called the "college student" effect. If the task is completed early workers will probably go and do non-critical work until the deadline instead of reporting completion promptly. If they are juggling several tasks, especially with several bosses, they will load-balance tasks, which may be optimal for them but sub-optimal for the big picture. And even if early completion is achieved and reported, other people may not be ready to start early.
• Goldratt's solution with "Critical Chain Project Managament" from 1997 is to set the expected duration for each task on the lower side of the estimate range, and then put the difference between low and high estimate for all of the tasks into a single, project-wide buffer. This has two benefits:
  1. The earlier dates motivate everybody
  2. Because the buffer is based on lots of individual risks, it's more accurate. (Under the same principle as insurance: Even with good historical data telling me you have a 0.001% chance to crash your car every day, I can't predict if you will crash today. But if there are a million drivers, it's a safe bet there will be about ten crashes per day.)
• "It's very hard to eliminate multi-tasking" but you should try
• Joel's paraphrase: Failure is an option, in fact small-scale failure is nearly certain, and you should plan for it.
• Some of the cognitive biases that hide risk: framing the issue too narrowly, overconfidence, confirmation bias (counting the hits and forgetting the misses), escalation of commitment.
• Well-managed projects are boring and appear to have a lot of time wasted on risks that never happen. Joel's note: we end up with an Institutional Design problem: how you do structure an organization so that finding and mitigating risks is rewarded instead of punished?
• Four strategies to manage risks (this was arranged in yet another two by two matrix, probability of risk vs impact; I'll let you figure out which strategy goes in which box): let it run but monitor it, delegate, control (with help from above), and actively manage.
• Two strategies to deal with unknown unknowns
  1. Iterate and learn. Joel's note: Examples: China's economic policy, called "crossing the river by feeling for the stones one step at a time"; agile programming, spiral development, etc. Timing depends on the speed of learning. Note that this strategy requires the capacity to learn
  2. many parallel attempts. Example: electronics and car manufacturers rolling out many products and then discontinuing the losers. Internally competing teams to build the same thing.

Overall, I think this was a great event, because it did exactly what it's supposed to do: teach some new lingo and buzzwords in use in the field. I learned things I didn't know, I could imagine applying some of it, and the speaker was competent at presenting. It was only during questions that the quality of the event dropped: the question I remember was in two parts: why are you talking so much about CCM and not at all about CPM, the last big buzzword? And how do I do CCM if my client wants firm deliverables?

Unfortunately, the speaker chose not to give direct answers. For the first, he danced around so much I'm not sure what the answer was, other than that you can buy CCM add-ons to some CPM tools (which could mean anything; vendors love to be buzzword-compliant and adding a frobitz tool to your Enterprise Schmebling System could do anything from nothing to breaking everything to actually turning your Schembler into a Frobitzer; the only thing you can count on is that whatever the effect, it's simultaneously the opposite of what the salesperson told you it would be and what you want (and in a stunning demonstration of non-transitive math, even if you want exactly what the salesperson told you, the way in which it's different from the promise is different from the way in which it's different from what you want)).

For the second question, I felt he committed the original sin of project management: he wouldn't deliver bad news. The point of CCM, if I understand it, is to make the project somewhat more efficient by being more honest and focused in accounting for risk. You can be more confident that the whole thing will be finished by the end of your buffer, but your visibility along the way is not radically better than before. It's better, because you have genuine fuzzy information instead of precise but false dates, but the only firm date you can expose is the last one. So if your client wants lots of firm dates, you have to have lots of little chains, which erodes the benefit of having a chain (which is, to reiterate, that pooling the risk for lots of little tasks into one shared buffer is better than baking risk, i.e. padding, into each individual task). But instead the speaker ran like a broken record on the script that, if you talk to your client (or vendor) about how doing it the old way you can promise them September, but with the new way you can maybe hit March but probably May or June. Which first of all doesn't make sense as an example, because why wouldn't you just promise June? But more importantly, in my experience it's not credible to promise great results from a new method. People who've been in software for a long time learn that it doesn't work that way. The best you can promise is transparency.

The second core class for the special short semester, two three-hour classes per week for six weeks. Six classes on Policy Analysis, four on cost-benefit analysis, three on program evaluation.

One of the other students asked me how to blog at the end of last semester (that is to say, last Friday) and said he experimented with all of the big blogging sites over the weekend, so I hope to share a link to his new blog this week.

This Monday morning class marks the beginning of our third semester: two core classes, each at twice per week, to wrap up two complete classes in six weeks plus finals.

This class has a lot of personality test sorts of things, including (of course) the MBTI. There's also some sort of online assessment thing where you ask one boss, four peers, and four "reports" ("report" being the very unpleasant word for people who report to you, e.g., subordinates (not a better word)). Which confused me because we don't have an "reports" here at school, but now I'm realizing that we were supposed to pick people from the real world, not from school. D'oh. That makes more sense then my addled thinking. I guess I'll go and invite some more reviewers. Some discussion; a student comments that back home, nobody who reported to him has internet access. Apparently, if you are Japanese it's unlikely you will get high ratings from your peers, no matter what. Questions about the wording of the invitation that "reports" get; what if many of my "reports" were more politically powerful than me, even if I technically wrote up their reports? What if my boss was my father? What if I've never had a boss?

FYI: American Dental Association's notes on brushing and flossing. (Yes, it's relevant to class.)

Group discussion on whether phones, SMS, and laptops. Consensus: phones bad, SMS fine. Some mild mockery of the student in the back who has been emailing and SMSing for the whole first hour of class and is oblivious every time class attention is directed towards her. No problem with laptops (or phones, for that matter) perceived by students. Faculty have discussed banning laptops. Suggestion (from students) that there should be no laptops in class except for taking notes. Joel's note: My own behavior fits the "infovore" or "internet addict" profile. I want to pay attention to class, but I struggle. Blogging helps by keeping me focused, but it leads to a bigger problem, which is that I follow up interesting things and tune out of class. I have actually tried playing solitaire simply as a way to occupy a bit of the more spastic part of my brain so the bulk of it can pay attention, and that does actually seem to work, but of course it looks terrible to anybody sitting behind me. I think knitting would accomplish the same thing and be more socially acceptable, but I don't especially want to have a bunch of knit things. And I'm not the sort of person who dresses my dog. From the prof: "When somebody's taking notes, you get a sense of participation and eye contact. When they are day trading, it's simply a void and you ignore them and the students near them."

People who get silver (where silver means something pretty special) and want gold instead. The psychology of peak performance. Joel's note: but peak performance and peak achievement are only loosely related. Most peak achievements can only be reached by via extreme performance, but peak performance doesn't guarantee peak achievement.

The value of IQ and EQ as performance predictors. Applied EQ is called, of course, Primal Leadership.

As an aside, (almost) everything that's wrong with the Business self-help industry can be found in this quote adorning the Amazon page for that book: "Harvard Business Press is discovering innovative ways to conquer the changing business universe while keeping its focus on the basics." As Orson Welles would say, "This is a lot of shit, you know that?"

Pictoral highlights from today's surfing: