Sequestration Management

Half way through the gym week! Another not bad day, but then the weight bouncers and cacophonous educationalists are sparse on “T” days. This was science podcast day and much of the content was concerned with the sequestration, largely in the form of eye wringing and hand weeping.

Much of the discussion was about how the cuts had to be taken, being specified in the usual lazy governmental fashion as salami slices – supposed equal distribution of pain. And of course the heads of agencies were trying to break those rules by telling their minions they could cut as they pleased. In other words, if you don’t do salami slicing be prepared to take the political heat when you cancel some pet rock project. Most managers aren’t likely to do so, not so much because of the political heat and the whining of the project principal.

On which azimuth I heard a few interviewees indulge in Tarzan chest thumping declaring that their project could not be cut without complete compromise. Hearing this took me back to my own days as a manager of R&D. And I had project managers who declared thusly.

And I dearly loved it when they did.

Let me start by saying there are three types of project managers:

• those who know they have to take some cuts and so long as it does not exceed their “fair share” they accept stoically and continue to manage;
• those who take their cuts, whine for a while, and then manage on; and
• those who declare that any cut will ruin their program, which is the most wonderful thing since sliced raisin bread with crunchy peanut butter and Kosher garlic dill pickles.

I should comment that that list also is in order of management competency from good to abysmal.

But it’s the last group that actually save the day, a case of arrogance and poor cooperation doing good for a change. First, one has to understand that with R&D projects there is a greater aspect of risk: risk that the project will fail miserably for some unforeseen reason; risk that the project will fail miserably for some foreseen reason; and  raisk that the project will fail and amount to nothing. Now all projects are sold on the basis of the best possible outcome, and after a while poor project managers tend to have drunk the yellow Kool-Aid enough that they start believing it. So in the mind of the project manager everything is “IF-THEN” when actually it is “IF – MAYBE THEN”.

So if you have enough of the soap opera managers, who usually have denied that their projects have a probability of success of about 0.2, you can select the 0.8 riskiest, cancel them entirely and not have to cut any of the lower risk projects managed by competent managers. At worst you can cut the cuts down to nuisance rather than meatless Fridays. And all because of these folks who declare any cut is mortal and thereby let you cut everything.

Makes life much easier for a manager. And overall, better for progress.

organization, government, sequestration, management, stupidity

Methane Management

While we’re picking on the Yankee government for being WRONG. Notably in the matter of gun control and hounding geeks to death, both issues of death and likely horribly misplaced and ill done even for a bureaucracy, I have to offer up an instance of somewhat greater humor.

It seem the Social Security Administration, the folks who mishandle almost everyone’s old age money and work very hard to ensure the employment of lots of attorneys to litigate their mismanagement, have actually admitted to some wrong doing. [Link]

Seems they issued a letter of reprimand to an employee suffering from chronic flatulence.

Ayeh, a gas passer in the non-physician sense.

Back when I was a young man working in industry before I found a better calling working for the Yankee army, I had to go endure Friday office-out luncheons at the El Palacio, at that time almost the only (pseudo) Mexican restaurant in Huntsville. Long story made short since these luncheons were just shy of Tartarus for me, Friday afternoons were a matter of great flatulence. The wisdom was that it was the beans. The wisdom that I obtained from this was that management needs to be VERY careful on how it imposes organizational social activities.

Now I should also comment that even in Yankee government circles the SSA and the VA are considered to have rather archaic management styles, somewhere between medieval and robber baron, supposedly because of the general distrust of both citizenry, and by slop, associates. Thus, while management in almost every part of YG would know that a flatulence problem is likely medical in cause, evidently not the SSA. This seems in keeping with their disability management.

Happily the chap in question came up with a medical advisory and the bright headed managers of the SSA wisely retracted the reprimand.

Before they provided more employment for attorneys.

humans, management, organization, government, medicine, flatulence

Mind will CLOSE

Strange. That is about as well as the description gets.

I walked into gym this morning. There was a computer printed one-page MegaHard Word/PowerPoint sign taped to the door
“The gym will CLOSE on Thursday.”

The gym, it may be recalled, is closed on Sundaes in an exhibition of discrimination against all those who do not observe pseudo-sabbath on that day of the week. Hence it is open the other six days. Hence it closes at some time each of those days.

I thought about asking if someone mistakenly  thought that not-open was equivalent to closed? I did not. Stupidity of this depth would likely not understand the question. And if anyone did they would probably take offense and threaten me with damage. This is, after all, an adjunct to a hospital where the greatest peaceful (i.e., not-war) damage to humans occurs.

Plus, given the rather noxious penchant of the place to close for any excuse, however specious or flighty, the sign almost assuredly meant that.

I did reflect on the nature of the management of this place, once more. And speculated whether:

1. the manager made the signs; or
2. the manager directed the signs be made and didn’t check implementation; or
3. the manager directed the signs be made and did check implementation.

I am not at all sure which is worse but it adds a bit more to my file on mismanagement in the medical arena to use in lectures and monographs. And this one is a DOOZY!

And then I went motoring off to Nawth Alibam’s Shining City on the Hill and ran across what has to be the greatest demonstration of college loyalty of any alumnus I have ever seen. I shan’t mention the college other than it is not in Alibam, but I ran into this alumnus who maintains a false record of residence, a false vehicle registration, and a bank account in that state just so he can purchase vanity plates of his alma mater for his motorcar.

My neck has not felt this limber in years.

And then I met with one of my colleagues who related how the students of another colleague’s graduate ‘introduction to business for non-business graduates’ course, almost entirely populated by graduate engineers, are universally frightened of having to do interpolation from tables. The colleague, Magnetic Inductance Force, is of the opinion that it is the table look-up that is frightening, rather than the interpolation itself. Not that the interpolation may not be frightening, but these GEN Us have never not used calculators and hence probably do not know how to look up numbers in a table.

This would explain why they are also so bad at statistics?

Anyway, on that note, Selah.

management, health, organization, college, maths, stupidity

Worse than Politicians

I really dislike merchants who send me shoe advertisements when the carry zero shoes that will fit me.

I should like to take them to a planet inhabited by a race of silicon based organisms and make them watch food commercials.

management, stupidity

Joy of Incompetence

Earlier this week, I ran across an article [Link] in the Register (why are the good articles always and only in the Register? What have they got that Amerikan journalism lacks? Integrity? Creativity? Professionalism? All of these?) about how the folks working at the Missile Defense Agency use Yankee government computers to surf for porn.

I have to be a bit amazed at the apparent incompetence of both MDA’s IT folks and its management. Scheesh. Back when I was working for the Yankee army the mean time to being caught for surfing porn was seconds and then you got your badge confiscated and escorted out of the building while they fired you. Evidently at MDA, all they do is beg you to quit.

Somehow this confirms my prejudices about the competence at that organization. During my career they were characterized by an absence of creativity, technical competence, and integrity. That absence seems to have deepened, Although I suspect some of it is due to the current administrations. Politicians dislike – hate nerds but at least repulsians demand their competence, unlike democruds who are happy with pretense and fakery.

Next, while we’re on the azimuth of incompetence, I note a lovely article [Link] amply displaying the incompetence of his technological holiness, Steve Jobs. This is a refreshing article. I have never held Jobs in high esteem, for a variety of reasons, but sometimes it is nice to hear about his more egregious technical management MISTAKES. And for them to be displayed to the world for all of his adoring worshipers to add into their prayers.

Incidentally, for once small is good. I find my 5 inch slab quite nice in providing what support I want without the compromise of a smart cellular telephone.

The problem isn’t technology, it’s how the corporations mismanage it.

organization, management, stupidity, incompetence

Arrogant Fructose Rot

Friday again and once more past the gym thing. Of course this was the first week I could do gym in a while because of the confinement so the cessation is not unalloyed.

I did get to do a bit of surfing yesterday, in and around errands, and discovered that the academics at Michigan State U and U Akron had devised a testing scale and instrument for workplace arrogance.[Link] The reportage implication is that this can be used to get managers to reduce their arrogance.

I realize from watching the pablum that passes for television programming these days that managers are stereotyped as arrogant and this is viewed as the great tyranny of the workplace but as is typically the case with entertainment, warpage exceeds accuracy.

First of all, there is a fine line between confidence and arrogance and the position of the line depends on the organizational society and culture. What outsiders view as arrogance is often just slightly overblown confidence. Confidence is a key factor in advancement in many workplaces. It is viewed as reflecting competence, which is often a specious correlation but in the complex workplace environments of today most executives are incompetent technically but can recognize confidence. This ineptitude and its accompanying insecurity is one of the primary reasons why executive salaries are so large.

As a result, testing instruments and even subordinate reviews are largely irrelevant as behavior modifiers. If they are negative, most managers will reject them as petty or bitchy. Managers know that promotions and bonuses are approved from above, not below. Indeed, in most workplaces, subordinate reviews are morale tools to delude the subordinates. So if anything, a testing instrument for arrogance is more likely to make conditions worse than better.

There are managers who are neither arrogant nor incompetent. They seldom rise above middle level because they know how incompetent and asocial their own bosses are and refuse to go to the dark side. Nice guys don’t finish last; they  finish in the middle.

And while we’re on the stupidity azimuth, a Gallup Poll reports that 0.48 of sample population consumes at least on soda pop a day. [Link] Almost all of those soda pop are sweetened with fructose which converts much more readily to fat in the body than other sugars. And that happens despite what the fructose industry propaganda on the electromagnetic audio-visual receiver claims.

Advertising is de facto anti-accurate!

This would seem to be the modern equivalent of Romans drinking wine in lead tumblers, the lead dissolving in the wine and staying in the body where it wrecked all sorts of damage and eventually leading to the barbarian invasions and the fall of Rome. If that logic seems a bit whacked, it is, in the spirit of the idea that soda pop is a staple food.

I have noted however, that really bad junior managers with excessive hubris tend to drink a lot of soda pop, mostly the diet kind that uses another type of sweetener that does rot the mind. Of course this is a chicken-egg situation. Did the soda pop rot their minds and make them bad managers or did being bad managers with rotten minds move them to become addicted to soda pop.

If you can’t get a good boss, at least don’t drink soda pop with stercus sweeteners.

http://www.myhealthnewsdaily.com/2878-soda-consumption-united-states.html

Salad Fat

Moving over to my other deskbox, the process of tab closing may continue. And in extension of the previous blot on obesity and maths, I come to some work done at Purdue [Link] that indicates that eating a salad with fat-free dressing compromises the nutritional value of the salad.

Despite the common Amerikan bog delusion that humans are carnivore biased omnivores, eating gathered rather than hunted foodstuffs is the more predominate source of nutrients going back to the days when we got down out of the trees and began to eat meat regularly. And yes, meat eating, or at least protein eating, is necessary to keep the big brain stoked even though there seems to be a negative correlation between meat predilection and brain usage.

Of course it is impossible to avoid the fat-free thing in an Amerika that seems to think diet is a transitory, punitive thing instead of a regime indistinguishable from life. Still having raised a daughter and being married it is inescapable that fat-free and salad would be collided at some time in Castellum SCP. I personally have never subscribed to this theory. Even before the tender ministration of cardiologist I was rather careful to balance fat intake and set aside adequate ration share to assure that my salad dressing didn’t taste like repasturized motor oil.

Next, courtesy of the Register, is a rather intriguingly titled article [Link] “Microsoft’s Surface proves software is dead” written by our esteemed colleague Matt Asay. Sadly this is a case of titling as maskarovka. The thesis is anything but. What the argument is, is that revenue from software is deceased, decomposing, evaporating. But software is, if anything, more important than ever. And the model is Mozilla. It’s not the software written by MegaHard that is important (we’ve all known this since Linux came along, haven’t we?) it’s the software written by Joe User and marketed by MegaHard this is important. Or at least that’s the Mozilla add-in model successfully plagiarized by Apple and Android and almost everyone but MegaHard in the form of the ‘app store’.

But the introduction of the Surface raises the question of whether MegaHard is not just a cash cow rapidly decaying with Bovine Encephalitis? Do we care that MegaHard has defecated a slab? At least anyone but the corporate mugwumps who direct what their members can use and think BYOD is some sort of dirty, atheistic, Commie plot. Yes, the thought process that led to a tablet from laptop rather than a tablet from cellular phone is intriguing. But hardly original. All that is apparent that Surface brings to the marketplace is a belated MegaHard presence. If this device going to make a difference in a world dominated by the Apple Evil Empire and the fascism of Android? Isn’t this just an invasion from Mars that will soon succumb to microbial infestation? The World Wonders.

As for me, I have an Android tablet and it is adequate but left in its sleeve most of the time, not worth the burden of even its small carry cost. I have put my name in the pot to purchase a Linux tablet (as distinct from Android) so that I have the potential of using a slab as something other than an ear friend (go look on Wikipedia if you don’t know that one.) The tablet is an over-sized hand axe and we should use it for something other than smashing our own foreheads.

While we’re bashing journalistic practice, one of my colleagues, Total Angular Momentum Magnetic Inductance, sent me a link to an article entitled “Watch the everyday Slinky ‘defy’ the laws of physics and gravity (but try not to go loopy)”. The article is about dropping a slinky and a video of its trajectory. It’s a neat video guaranteed to give bogs a headache. Sadly, the journalist who titled this evidently never finished first semester freshman physics. So the title is utter stercus.

To wax physics and physicist for a moment, what the luvvies at the Mail don’t seem to realize is that there are two pieces of motion to the falling slinky. First of all we have to recall that a slinky is nothing more than a relatively weak spring. So we have to go back to the seventeenth century to understand this, back when Newton and Young were around. The two pieces of motion are the motion of the center of mass – the center of the spring in terms of mass or weight, and the motion about the center of mass. If you watch the video with this in mind the whole defy-the-laws-of-physics thing evaporates like dew in the desert. And if we recall that the part of the slinky above the center of mass gets pulled down, by virtue of being a spring, while the part below the center of mass gets pulled up, then the entirety of the motion is evident and obvious.

Why can’t all journalists be as good as Matt?

Next, and a bit of a new azimuth, I got pointed to an article [Link] in Armed Forces Journal by an academic on how the folks who work for the military services, military, civilian, and contractor, are doing powerpoint briefings wrong. It’s a great article. It explains, based on human psychology how briefing information can be transferred and how not. It’s a three point recipe for better briefings.

And it’s largely irrelevant.

What the author misses is that he being an academic he is a member of a permissive organization. That means he can structure and give briefings as he wants subject only to effectiveness. The military services are directive organizations, and they have both formal and informal standards of how briefings are given. And these standards almost completely overwhelm any individual initiative.

The author seems to be laboring under the illusion that the way military service folks structure and give briefings is a matter of society. It isn’t, except in small part. It’s almost entirely legal (as in rules) and cultural (survival). Every organization I dealt with when I worked for the Yankee army had strict rules on how briefings were structured and how slides looked. I recall one general officer I had to brief who insisted that baseball metaphors were to be used exclusively. If you got to slide three without baseball clip art or some similar similie, then that was the end of your briefing. Simply put, if you don’t follow the formal and informal standards of structure and composition, you are not just ineffective, you are negated.

Nice try. Good advice. Sound information. Totally irrelevant.

Now, lastly, we have this cartoon [Link]

that strikes me as being the beginning of a wonderful opportunity. I suspect that the number of times “I’m not telling you again” is said before punishment is applied is a pseudo-random variable. It’s pseudo-random, as opposed to random, because there are factors that can’t be measured. And because the little girl is slender, she’ll probably find this out and learn from it.

humans, organization, management, government, health, computers, physics

Fracking Academia

Yesterday one of my colleagues, Force Spring Constant, sent me an article [Link] about the degradation of Amerikan colleges due to the ascendancy of administrators over faculty. I was more perplexed at the attention and outrage than the article per se.

Simply put, this rot has been growing for quite a while, at least since sometime in the twentieth century although we might argue its origins are earlier. Amerika has always been a nation addicted to colleges with that number peaking in the first fifty years or so and decreasing steadily over time as the market consolidates. Pray note that critical term ‘market’. It is central to understanding why this situation is not surprising.

Originally, almost all colleges were small affairs of a few ‘professors’ and a very limited curriculum, usually what passed for liberal arts in those days and included literature, rhetoric, a classical language or two, and perhaps geography and history. Crafts were taught by apprenticeships that included both attorneys and physicians. The few exceptions were either classical colleges in the English sense or women’s polishing shuls.

The next phase tended to be a growth of some colleges, forcing competitors to disappear by economy of scale, and diversification to include medicine and law. The second part of this phase was the burgeoning of land grant universities, mostly after the Second American Revolution that further reduced the number of institutions.

Up until the end of the Great Patriotic War, the student bodies were limited in size by economics. Only the scions of successful families, the athletically (if not mentally) gifted, and the brilliant poor were students, the latter two by scholarship or some other accommodation, and generally excluded from the curricula of the liberal arts which enjoyed a shibbolethic existence. After the GPW, veterans were guaranteed support by the Yankee government and vastly increased the size of the student bodies of admitting colleges.

This situation is notable in that it shifted the economics of the college. More students brought in more tuition but not enough to defray the cost of college operation that was delicately balanced among tuition, endowment, and government pork. As a result, two forces came into play: decrease the cost of education; and increase cash flow. Both of these are primarily managerial than functional in form.

This set the stage for the current situation. Bring in more money and keep expenditures down. The former is typified by the constant lobbying of government and donors that so alienates organizations and alumni. The latter is typified by the dilution of curricula and the neutering of teaching. Emphasis on grants and research income is not a primary symptom but part and parcel of the dunning. A vicious cycle, possibly unstable or chaotic, of seeking ever more students and seeking to balance the discrepancy between tuition and expense has resulted.

And the rider of the tiger is the manager not the functionary. Or in academic terms, the administrator not the professor. The college has become a business rather akin to that of fast food restaurants. What is important is the experience, not the product. So long as the food is served rapidly, is tasteful (if not healthy or nourishing,) and the ‘feeling’ is good, then the business is successful.

There is a cogent argument that modern colleges are fast food restaurants. The education is made as enjoyable and palatable as possible with a minimum strain on the digestive system (mental instead of physical.) It is usually neither healthy nor nutritious, but that is not as relevant as that the experience be enjoyable. Hence the emphasis on athletics and partying, not lectures and research. And it has to be rapid. Degree programs should be never more than four years and preferably less, a growing trend hailed as cost saving. Of course, what goes with this is also a standardized menu of courses and disencouraged variation. Exceptions are granted only to minimize the period of residency.

This is strangely also the epitome of a diploma mill.

Or is it strange?

Sixth Watering

Back into the saddle today! A quick (?) return to Greater Metropolitan Arab.Our route is not yet selected to confuse those who wish to compromise us. Somehow FD SCP has managed to purchase less than last time and I have comfort in my belief that I can pack the motorcar in less than an hour or so, which will likely be a boon given the foretellings of the weather beavers realized this morning.

I heard on the electro-magnetic audiovisual receiver last evening that the Amazing KF has network interaction issues. This is hardly a selling point for an appliance that is supposed to be the bog’s entertainment conduit.

I can also – happily – announce that the Unity experiment has been concluded. After struggling with it and the hotel’s network last evening, I reached a conclusion that Unity also has interaction issues. But what is it about business hotels that they are so miserly paranoid about their networks for guests? It makes me happy to go home to my own network that has security and is not as antisocial.

Wet Spanning

In the wake of transfusion of ersatzblud, I ran across this article [Link] on "fecal transplants". The immediate thought I had on this is that it really makes sense, especially when the vermiform appendix fails in its function. The name however, is not slightly accurate. Yes, it is a transplant but not of stercus per se. For one thing, you technically can’t transplant stercus since there is no planting. Stercus does not grow, but is manufactured. I am not sure what the accurate term should be, grafting is also probably too static as well? Anyway, what is transplanted are microbes and the stercus is merely the packaging.

Sounds like a better idea than those clear plastic packages that require special tools to open lest you do yourself a serious injury.

Next, a research [Link] on telecommuting in Japan. The results look quite positive, and are the first actual data I have seen on the subject. Mostly all you get is organizational propaganda with no real substance behind it, giving you the feeling it is either the Yankee government wanting to not spend money on transportation instrumentality or corporations not wanting to spend money of office space (or harassment litigation?) The difficulties I have with this are that the sample is very small, even for the corporation using telecommuting, and whether there are social variations across regions or nations?

Next, I have to express my admiration for the citizens of Sarnac Lake [Link] who told MalWart to purchase sand and amuse itself, and built their own box store. I can only hope this is the start of a new way of doing things in the Yankee republic.

And lastly, researchers in Italy have data that indicates daily beer is as beneficial for health as daily wine. [Link] And since Italy is wine country, definitely not beer country, there is a sort of moral affirmation implicit. This may be better news than the fake blood thing, at least for physicists.