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Posts Tagged 'control'
Romney makes a great noise in IA, NH, and now MI; can he resolve any of it into a message?
January 10, 2008 in 2008, analysis, argument, campaign communications, campaign communiques, campaign management, conservatism, election, election 2008, Evangelicals, GOP, incompetence, media, mitt romney, republicans, rhetoric, romney, strategy, stupidity, the dark soul of Mitt Romney, triumph of unreason
Tags: Adam Reilly, Andres Oppenheimer, chris cillizza, compulsion, control, discipline, focus, indiscipline, miami herald, Michael D. Shear, noise, obsession, off-message, off-topic, on-message, on-topic, Oppenheimer Report, phoenix.com, wapo, Washington Post
[…] "The new message about change, which aides said tested well in focus groups conducted during Sunday night's debate on the Fox News Channel, was a last-ditch attempt to salvage what was left of Romney's original strategy that envisioned vaulting himself to the nomination by winning Iowa and New Hampshire," write Wapo's Michael D. Shear and Chris Cillizza in an article titled Romney Homes In on a Message That Will Stick
Note that the title suggests that Romney has yet to arrive. He is still "homing in."
Although it did not propel him to victory in New Hampshire — he came in second behind McCain — Romney is sticking with it.
During a 3 1/2 -hour "message meeting" on Tuesday night to discuss the next steps of the campaign, there was agreement that the change theme is one that resonates with Republican voters, according to a participant.
"He is finding his voice," said Peter Barhydt, a top donor from Connecticut who did not attend Tuesday's meeting […]
Only there is some confusion about whether this is a new message or an old message that got lost in the noise, the campaign's own noise. Whose fault was it that the message got lost? The media, argues his imperious aloofness, Romney himself.
"If and when Mitt Romney's presidential campaign dies, our former governor has his excuse picked out: the media did it," writes Adam Reilly in a phoenix.com blog burst titled cruelly but aptly, Chump 'Change'
In a pre–New Hampshire-primary interview with Politico earlier this week, Romney said his newfound focus on political "change" wasn't newfound at all; the problem, according to Mitt, was that reporters in Iowa kept obsessing over his conservative credentials. "I go on TV and it's, like: 'Tell me about your church, tell me where you stand on abortion,' " Romney complained. "There is no question the focus of my campaign has been on changing Washington" […]
Comment: The reporters kept obsessing? Romney spends US$80 million dollars—and US$20 million or more of his own money on top of that, only no one knows how much because the Romneys aren't telling—on IA and NH and the reporters are obsessive? To hold on to his tenuous and illusory leads in IA and NH Romney goes so viciously negative that it provokes a backlash so intense that Romney's own numbers collapse and the reporters are obsessive?
[…] So, is it the press's fault that Romney isn't currently known as the change candidate? Not really. Blame, instead, the candidate himself — who astutely sensed the electorate's desire for change, but lacked the gumption to follow his instincts.
Here's a telling Romney quote from CBS's Early Show, on the morning of January 4, one day after he lost to upstart Mike Huckabee in the Iowa caucuses: "Well, you know, I think the race in Iowa was really a very clear call that people want change in Washington. Not in the White House; in Washington."
That's nonsensical, obviously, since the White House is in Washington. But it's also vintage Romney: calculating, inoffensive, and ultimately ineffectual. Candidate, heal thyself […]
Yuh-huh. Romney's inability to stay on message has become a fixed point for friend and foe alike. For us it is evidence of the candidate's non-fitness, lack of competence, and inexperience. For the Romneys it is an excuse, a rationale for the candidate's non-performance, which for anyone else would be evidence of the candidate's non-fitness, lack of competence, and inexperience.
Luo: "Ever since Mr. Romney began his presidential bid, his campaign has oscillated between two distinct, some would say contradictory, themes—Mr. Romney as a conservative standard-bearer and him as a pragmatic problem-solving businessman"
A message that has not gotten lost is Romney's draconian-hardline position on immigration. This was another attempt by the hapless candidate to outflank his rivals on the right. It failed. And it may continue to return its dividend of failure as the campaign moves to other contests.
"The New Hampshire primary represented a victory for candidates with across-the-board political appeal, such as McCain, Clinton and in a way Obama, and a crushing defeat for real or campaign-season demagogues, including Romney and Edwards," writes the estimable Andres Oppenheimer of the Miami Herald in an Oppenheimer Report titled Anti-immigration strategy fails
Hopefully, as the race moves on from nearly all-white states to the more diverse South and West, candidates who embraced the anti-Hispanic immigration cause will realize that it may cause them more harm than good.
So far, the anti-immigration constituency has made a lot of noise but has not delivered the vote […]
Noise. Yes, Romney has made a great noise in this world. This is brute fact.
The question: Now, can Romney develop, amidst all that noise, or perhaps carve out from within all that noise, a message, a clear, compelling message that Romney can sustain and follow through with, a message consonant with Romney's life and character, a message that is internally consistent and contradicts neither empirical fact nor the candidate's earlier claims, assertions, arguments, or record of governance, a message that is positive, substantive, relevant, principled, and appropriate, and a message that does not suddenly turn and boomerang on Romney himself?
Romney has never developed nor delivered such a message before.
But we shall see.
yours &c.
dr. g.d.
willard milton romney
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SACRAMENTO (AP) — Gov. Jerry Brown and Democratic lawmakers are trying to work out the final details of a budget for the coming fiscal year that largely adheres to the governor's call for fiscal prudence while providing a modest boost to social and education programs.
Brown wants to dedicate much of the state's budget surplus to a beefed-up rainy day fund and paying down state debts. But his fellow Democrats in the Legislature are pushing him to restore cuts to welfare, health care, child care and education.
Legislative floor votes on the main budget bill for the 2014-15 fiscal year, which starts July 1, are expected Sunday, the constitutional deadline for lawmakers to pass a balanced spending plan and avoid forfeiting their pay.
"We try to balance many objectives: fiscal balance, a healthy reserve, pay down debt and make some key investments in education, health and human services and other priorities," Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg said in an interview Wednesday. "To find that sweet spot is always hard."
Brown has succeeded so far at fending off major spending proposals from members of his own party. The Legislature's joint budget committee announced a plan late Wednesday to include $264 million for expanding early education programs for 4-year-olds, an amount far below what Democrats originally sought.
That would pay for an additional 11,500 preschool slots for low-income families by June 2015, with an additional 31,500 slots planned in the future. Additional funding would be provided in the form of grants to existing preschool programs, increased child-care reimbursement rates and professional training.
Combined with existing programs, the proposal would provide early education assistance to roughly 234,000 children, covering half of all 4-year-olds in the state. Even so, it falls well short of Steinberg's original goal of spending $1 billion to provide preschool to all California children.
Steinberg acknowledged that he didn't get as much as he proposed, but he said it was progress. "We have a lot to celebrate," he said.
Democratic lawmakers had also sought more money for higher education than Brown had proposed. Under a compromise, the University of California and California State University systems will receive an additional $50 million each if property taxes come in higher than projections.
It remained unclear Thursday just how much more money would be allocated for other Democratic priorities, including in-home care for seniors and the disabled, welfare and Medi-Cal, the state's health insurance program for the poor. The legislative budget committee continued to work on remaining issues Thursday afternoon.
Democrats did secure flexibility in prison funding to spend tens of millions of dollars more on mental health services as a way to improve treatment and increase rehabilitation options.
The governor proposed a record $107.8 billion in spending from the general fund using more conservative revenue projections. Democrats, who control the Senate and Assembly, had wanted to use rosier estimates to restore services for the poor that were reduced during the recession, as California struggled to close multibillion-dollar budget shortfalls.
The governor and lawmakers already have agreed to a fresh version of the rainy day fund to smooth out the boom-and-bust cycles of state budgeting and begin paying down massive liabilities in the teachers' pension system.
Brown and lawmakers reached agreement how the state will spend new revenue generated from pollution fees under the state's cap-and-trade program.
The governor had wanted to use $250 million next fiscal year then commit 33 percent of ongoing fees for California's bullet train, but the compromise presented to lawmakers Thursday reduces that to 25 percent. Lawmakers also will allocate portions of the pollution fees for affordable housing, public transit and energy-conservation efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Such funding will help get more low-income people out of their cars and on to buses and light rail, said Shamus Roller, executive director of Housing California, an affordable housing advocacy group.
Even though the budget requires just a simple majority vote to pass the Legislature, Democrats were scrambling to negotiate details and meet Sunday's deadline.
Senate Minority Leader Bob Huff, R-Diamond Bar, criticized a hasty process that led to a budget committee hearing starting on Wednesday night without the Senate's GOP member in attendance.
"That's no way to run an institution," Huff said Thursday on the Senate floor. "We should be embarrassed."
Steinberg, D-Sacramento, said he was not aware of the incident that upset Huff. He said he expected the budget bill and companion legislation to be in print Friday with a vote starting Sunday afternoon.

subset: commoncrawl


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Just a day before a boulder the size of a car landed in the middle of the Trans-Canada Highway at Three Valley Gap bringing traffic to a standstill, Mayor Mark McKee and Columbia River-Revelstoke MLA Doug Clovechok met with the Minister of Infrastructure and Transportation Claire Trevena to discuss Highway 1.
RELATED: Large boulder closes Trans-Canada Highway at Three Valley Gap
In a social media post on April 17 Clovechok said the goal of the meeting was to push the ministry on the serious dangers around Three Valley Gap and the Kicking Horse Canyon.
A look at the rockfall that has #BCHwy1 closed at Three Valley Gap (20km west of #Revelstoke). We're assessing https://t.co/J0DeU2VJJG pic.twitter.com/OfdKzYtnCb
— BC Transportation (@TranBC) April 18, 2018
Speaking to the Review on April 19, Clovechok said little progress was made during the meeting to find a long term solution to the ongoing problems at Three Valley Gap.
"Absolutely no progress was made in terms of long term plans," said Clovechok. "The Three Valley Gap issue isn't going to go away."
Shannon Smith was nearly killed by a rock slide in Three valley Gap in late 2017.
In response to her calls for action the Ministry said the safety of motorists driving through Three Valley Gap on the Trans-Canada Highway was a priority for them, and that it would install mesh nets to prevent rocks from falling onto the road.
Clovechok wrote in his most recent MLA report that a pilot project to install netting at Three Valley Gap will be implemented this summer.
But Smith, McKee, and Clovechok argue that netting would do little to stop a large rock like the one that fell on April 18 reaching the highway.
"The real problem is that when boulders the size of basketballs come down the netting works really well," said McKee. "But when boulders the size of the one that did yesterday fall —the netting is going to do little to stop them."
Clovechok said geo technical studies in the area need to be undertaken.
"Hopefully something is done before someone dies," said Clovechok. "That netting is not going to stop those boulders coming down. There needs to be some geotechnical studies conducted there."
The Ministry has also said that it will be difficult to install netting there because of avalanche control stations that have been installed at Three Valley Gap.
McKee said the only solution to the ongoing problems on the Trans-Canada Highway is to twin the highway.
"The rock slide yesterday shows just how precarious that section of the highway is," said McKee. "The ultimate fix is twinning the highway. It opens up a lot more doors when there's a closure. When there's a large snowfall. When there's a rockslide. But I think the ministry gets that. That's there job."
McKee said that he also discussed the eastern access to Revelstoke with the minister, and the ongoing Townley Street, Fourth Street, Victoria road roundabout.
He said his priorities for the project are to install a streetlight on the highway near the eastern access, and a merge lane going east and west to help direct truck traffic away from Downtown Revelstoke.


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Don't call neutrinos elusive. Francis Halzen, who makes it his job to detect them, said that the particles' unusual properties, like their minuscule masses and tendency not to interact with matter, tend to make "elusive" one of the most common adjectives used to describe them. But in reality, they're all around us: each cubic centimeter of the Universe has hundreds of them, left over from the Big Bang. Every second, trillions of them flow through our bodies. In fact, there's probably as much matter in the form of neutrinos as there is visible matter. If we could just get a bit better at detecting them, they could tell us a lot about the Universe.
The World Science Festival hosted a discussion led by three people who have focused their careers on detecting neutrinos. Halzen helps run the new Ice Cube detector at the South Pole, while MIT's Janet Conrad works on the MiniBooNE detector, which picks up neutrinos made by the Fermilab accelerator chain. Conrad was joined by her fellow MITer, Joe Formaggio, who works on the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, buried in a mine in Canada.
The panel was rounded out by theoretician Lawrence Krauss, and moderated by noted science writer John Rennie.
So why have neutrinos picked up the reputation of being hard to get a handle on, even though they're just about everywhere? Part of it is historical; the particles were predicted decades before anyone figured out how to confirm they actually existed. They are very hard to detect because their primary means of interaction with other matter is through the weak force, which only governs nuclear reactions like fusion and radioactive decay. Of course, that "only" is a rather big deal, since Halzen noted without the reactions that involve neutrinos, we wouldn't produce neutrons, and the Universe wouldn't have much in the way of chemistry.
The association with nuclear reactions and tendency not to interact with matter make them the best way of observing what goes on in the interior of the Sun. Krauss said that it takes photons about a million years to escape from the core of the Sun because there's so much matter to interact with. When we first tried to use neutrinos to probe the Sun, however, there didn't appear to be enough of them being emitted. On its own, the apparent shortage wasn't that surprising—as Krauss said, the average solar neutrino would go through about 10,000 light years of lead without interacting with anything, and we're just lucky that the Sun produces a lot of neutrinos.
But the deficit kept showing up in additional experiments. Eventually, we found out why: neutrinos, through a process called flavor oscillations, sometimes change their identity. The missing neutrinos were there—they just didn't look like we expected them to. And that was a bit of a surprise. "The interference between flavors only works cleanly if there are mass differences," Formaggio said, "which means some of them must have mass." As Krauss described it, "if they didn't have mass but did change flavors, then there would be no way to distinguish them."
A neutrino with mass is the clearest indication that the Standard Model has to be either wrong or incomplete. In fact, a physicist in the audience pointed out that, had we known neutrinos had mass early enough, we might never have accepted the Standard Model in the first place.
Halzen called the identification of neutrinos' mass the biggest discovery in particle physics—while noting that it didn't come from a particle accelerator. In fact, it came from an instrument made to look at something else entirely, the possibility that protons decay. (That study came up empty.)
But we still don't know what that mass is, as the flavor oscillations only tell us what the relative masses of the three types of neutrinos are. Formaggio compared that to having a car dealership tell you, "'I can get you $500 off the car'—you kind of still want to know what the price is." What we do know, in part from information in the radiation left over from the Big Bang, is that it's tiny. While the lightest particle with a known mass, the electron, is a half Mega-electron-volt, the upper limit on the mass of the neutrinos is less than one electron-volt.
Formaggio said that there are a couple of ways we might be able to get a measurement of the neutrino's mass: analysis of their effects on galaxy clusters or an identification of mass that's carried away from particle decays without registering in a detector. "Hopefully, they'll get the same number," he said, at which point both Krauss and Conrad argued that life is more fun when the numbers don't agree.
But mass isn't the only challenge facing neutrino physicists. There have been some hints that neutrinos might be the only fundamental particle that is its own antiparticle (making them Majorana fermions, for the technically inclined). This, Conrad said, would explain the fact that all the neutrinos we see have their spin oriented in one direction, while the antineutrinos have the opposite spin. She suggested that a rare form of radioactive decay that should produce two neutrinos might help us sort this out.
If neutrinos were their own antiparticles, these two should annihilate at an appreciable rate, leaving the decay neutrino-less. But, just days after the session, SLAC's EXO-200 experiment announced that it hadn't seen neutrino-less decays, making this prospect much less likely. (Also this week, Fermilab announced that new data had eliminated the possibility that antineutrino masses were different from those of regular neutrinos.)
What's next for neutrino work? Some cosmological data hints there might be a fourth type of neutrino, one that may not interact via the weak force. The Fermi announcement mentioned above indicated that its Minos detector would now focus on testing whether we can see an indication of these so-called "sterile" neutrinos on Earth.
Another big goal is the detection of the neutrinos that remain from the Big Bang, which were formed as the first atoms in the Universe condensed. They should, much like the cosmic microwave background, preserve information about the state of the early Universe. But the "neutrino background" is very low energy, which makes the neutrinos themselves much harder to detect. Formaggio said that, if large atoms are kept cold enough, it might be possible to detect a neutrino interacting with an entire nucleus, rather than just a proton or neutron. So far, however, no hardware capable of this has been built.
Meanwhile, Conrad has been inspired by people who ask her about the practical impact of her work. "What have neutrinos done for you lately?" she asked, rhetorically. "I get that all the time." Her answer is that they could do useful things because of their association with nuclear decays. So she's working on getting neutrino detectors down in size from something like MiniBooNE (which is 40 feet tall) to something that's portable enough that it could be moved to a site like Fukushima in order to tell us something about what's going on there.


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Deloitte's annual millennial survey: Millennials rank Technology, media, and telecommunications as most desirable industry to build skills has been saved
Press releases
Deloitte's annual millennial survey: Millennials rank Technology, media, and telecommunications as most desirable industry to build skills
Press release
- Business needs to reset its purpose to attract Millennials
-Millennials suggest business and academia must collaborate to equip talent for the workplace
-Leadership aspiration gaps exist between women and men, and emerging and developed market Millennials
20 January 2015 – Business should focus on people and purpose, not just products and profits in the 21st century according to Deloitte Global's fourth annual Millennial Survey released today. This and other findings from the survey suggest businesses, particularly in developed markets, will need to make significant changes to attract and retain the future workforce.
Deloitte Global surveyed tomorrow's leaders, from 29 countries, on effective leadership, how business operates and impacts society. Millennials overwhelmingly believe (75%) businesses are focused on their own agenda rather than helping to improve society.
"The message is clear: when looking at their career goals, today's Millennials are just as interested in how a business develops its people and how it contributes to society as they are in its products and profits," said Omar Fahoum, chairman and chief executive of Deloitte Middle East. "These findings should be well heeded by the business community, particularly in developed markets, that they need to change the way they engage Millennial talent or risk being left behind."
Only 28% of Millennials feel their current organization is making full use of their skills. More than half (53%) aspire to become the leader or most senior executive within their current organization, with a clear ambition gap between Millennials in emerging markets and developed markets. 65% of emerging-market based Millennials said they would like to achieve this goal, compared to only 38% in developed markets. This figure was also higher among men.
Additionally, the survey found large global businesses have less appeal for Millennials in developed markets (35%) compared to emerging markets (51%). Developed-market based Millennials are also less inclined (11%) than Millennials in emerging markets (22%) to start their own business.
Other notable findings from the survey include:
- Millennials want to work for organizations with purpose. For six in 10 Millennials, a "sense of purpose," is part of the reason they chose to work for their current employers. Among Millennials who are relatively high users of social networking tools (the "super-connected Millennials"), there appears to be even greater focus on business purpose; 77% of this group report their company's purpose was part of the reason they chose to work there, compared to just 46% of those who are the "least connected."
- Technology, media, and telecommunications (TMT) most attractive employers. TMT ranked most desirable sector and the one to provide the most valuable skills according to Millennials. Men (24%) were nearly twice as likely as women (13%) to rank TMT as the number one sector to work in. Among broader sectors, leadership is perceived to be strongest in the TMT sector (33%). This percentage was three times higher than second ranked food and beverages (10%), and four times that for third-ranked banking/financial services (8%). In addition, when asked about the businesses that most resonated with Millennials as leaders, Google and Apple top the list of businesses, each selected by 11% of respondents.
- Confidence Gap? Millennial men more likely to pursue leadership. Millennial men were somewhat more likely to say they would like to secure the 'top job' within their organization than women (59% vs. 47%). Women were also less likely to rank their leadership skills at graduation as strong; 27% of men vs. 21% of women rated this skill as strong. However, when asked what they would emphasize as leaders women were more likely to say employee growth and development (34% compared to 30%), an area that many Millennials felt was lacking within their current organizations.
- Organizations and colleges must do more to nurture emerging leaders. While overall Millennials did not feel their organizations make full use of their skills (only 28% say their organization makes full use of their skills), this figure falls significantly among Millennials in developed markets to just 23%. In addition, it falls below 20% in Japan (9%), Turkey (15%), South Korea (17%) and Chile (19%). When asked to estimate the contributions that skills gained in higher education made to achievement of their organization's goals, Millennials' average figure is 37%.
- The changing characteristics of leadership. Today's Millennials place less value on visible (19%), well-networked (17%), and technically-skilled (17%) leaders. Instead, they define true leaders as strategic thinkers (39%), inspirational (37%), personable (34%) and visionary (31%).
"Millennials want more from business than might have been the case 50, 20, or even 10 years ago," said Rana Ghandour Salhab, talent and communication partner at Deloitte Middle East. "They are sending a very strong signal to the world's leaders that when doing business, they should do so with purpose. The pursuit of this different and better way of operating in the 21st century begins by redefining leadership."
To download the full report please visit: http://deloi.tt/1Clhb0s
Press contact
Nadine El Hassan
Middle East Public Relations
Deloitte & Touche (M.E.)
Tel: +961 (0) 1 748444
Fax: +961 (0) 1 748999
About Deloitte:
Deloitte refers to one or more of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, a UK private company limited by guarantee, and its network of member firms, each of which is a legally separate and independent entity. Please see www.deloitte.com/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited and its member firms.
Deloitte provides audit, tax, consulting, and financial advisory services to public and private clients spanning multiple industries. With a globally connected network of member firms in more than 150 countries, Deloitte brings world-class capabilities and high-quality service to clients, delivering the insights they need to address their most complex business challenges. Deloitte has in the region of 200,000 professionals, all committed to becoming the standard of excellence.
Deloitte's professionals are unified by a collaborative culture that fosters integrity, outstanding value to markets and clients, commitment to each other, and strength from cultural diversity. They enjoy an environment of continuous learning, challenging experiences, and enriching career opportunities. Deloitte's professionals are dedicated to strengthening corporate responsibility, building public trust, and making a positive impact in their communities.
About Deloitte & Touche (M.E.):
Deloitte & Touche (M.E.) is a member firm of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (DTTL) and is the first Arab professional services firm established in the Middle East region with uninterrupted presence since 1926.
Deloitte is among the region's leading professional services firms, providing audit, tax, consulting, and financial advisory services through 26 offices in 15 countries with around 3,000 partners, directors and staff. It is a Tier 1 Tax advisor in the GCC region since 2010 (according to the International Tax Review World Tax Rankings). It has received numerous awards in the last few years which include Best Employer in the Middle East, best consulting firm, and the Middle East Training & Development Excellence Award by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW).


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Home prices posted a steep, month-over-month drop in November, falling 1.3%, according to the latest S&P/Case-Shiller 20-city report. Prices fell in 19 of the 20 cities the index covers.
Prices are down 3.7% from a year ago, and off 32.8% since they peaked in the summer of 2006. The index is currently only 0.6% above its March, 2011 low.
"Despite continued low interest rates and better real GDP growth in the fourth quarter, home prices continue to fall," said David Blitzer, spokesman for S&P.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
S&P/Case-Shiller HPI down in November
3 comments:
Case-Shiller were good for the short side of the bubble bursting, but their model has been part of the cancer that fails to differentiate troubled housing from owner inhabited and maintained product. A consequence of this is that the cities they use as indices have become self-predictive of any weakness, while data that's 'too divergent' is filtered out by them - AKA NYC. In light of NY state's tax profile and policies according to the logic of conservatives NYC should have been the hardest hit, but that turned out to be totally not the case. So it is possible that Case-Shiller is part of the disease and not a diagnostic tool in its undifferentiated and qualified application.ReplyDelete
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Could you use an additional 450,000 + new people visiting your site at No Cost to you - Ever? http://tft.bzReplyDelete


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Thursday, January 13, 2011
Sometimes you've gotta strip for copy editors
For those unfamiliar with the process, copy edits happen after you've already gone a round or two on the big-picture stuff with your primary editor. Though I've heard of copy editors slashing paragraphs and changing words with ruthless abandon, that wasn't the case here. It was mostly stylistic stuff, changing "OK" to "okay" and switching "8" to "eight."
But there was one comment that made me giggle.
You've heard me mention the Strip Battleship scene in MAKING WAVES, right? It's precisely what it sounds like, with a lot of rapid-fire dialogue as the characters fling clothing, ogle one another, and shout letters and numbers to guess the position of each other's boats.
In the middle of the scene, the copy editor wrote this:
I thought about writing a smartass comment back about how there is an easy way to check by grabbing a Battleship game board and playing a round.
But fortunately for the copy editor, I already took care of it.
Pythagoras and I invented Strip Battleship eight or nine years ago it a quiet hotel room in Jamaica. We didn't actually own the game ourselves, so when I decided to write the scene for MAKING WAVES several years later, I went out and bought one.
"Are we playing for real?" Pythagoras asked when I dropped it on the bed in front of him.
"I have to make sure the scene is accurate, don't I?"
He eyed the pad of paper in my hand. "You're taking notes?"
"You should be grateful I'm not taking pictures."
That didn't appease him much, but he got to work setting his ships up anyway.
"B9," I called.
"Miss. C6."
"Miss. E2."
"Hit." He frowned. "Did you cheat?"
"I have to. It says so in the book. Now give me your shirt."
He folded his arms over his chest. "Wait a minute. You've already written the scene?"
"Of course," I said, offering him my sweetest smile. "I just need to get the numbers down."
"So you already know you're going to win?"
I shrugged, not seeing any problem with this. "You want to just take off all your clothes now?"
He wasn't a fan of that idea, nor was he a very big fan of his predestined defeat. "So there's no chance at all I'm going to win?"
"Define win. It's kind of subjective in Strip Battleship, isn't it?"
In the end, I got my notes. I also got his shirt. And his shoes. And his…well, I'll stop there. You'll have to read the book.
Suffice it to say, I can assure the copy editor with 110% certainty the scene is accurate.
25 comments :
- lora96 said...
Now that kind of thorough research REALLY shows dedication lol.
- January 13, 2011 at 3:30 AM
- Sarah W said...
Man, I have got to switch genres!
- January 13, 2011 at 4:27 AM
- Linda G. said...
Ha! I wondered about that. Pretty much the answer I expected.
I'll bet TG wishes I'd research stuff like Strip Battleship with him, instead of knife fights in which pencils (hey, I'm not going to use a real knife with my TG) come perilously close to his man-parts.
- January 13, 2011 at 5:45 AM
- Cherie Reich said...
Strip Battleship...that's just so awesome on so many levels. Love it!
- January 13, 2011 at 6:10 AM
- Bonnie R. Paulson said...
thank u. was wondering what to do for date night when we can't leave the house!
- January 13, 2011 at 6:13 AM
- Danica Avet said...
LOL, I think Battleship is going to become very popular again as soon as your book comes out. I know I have to get the game now, lol
- January 13, 2011 at 6:18 AM
- Amanda Bonilla said...
One of the best blog posts I've EVER read! :)
- January 13, 2011 at 6:26 AM
- Matthew MacNish said...
Hmm. As fun as this is you do realize that now when we read your book we're going to be picturing you and Pyth playing this scene out, right?
Just kidding, but seriously that comment from the editor is hilarious! They must really have organized minds to be able to consider such detail.
- January 13, 2011 at 6:50 AM
- Jen J. Danna said...
Now that's research! I simply love your dedication to making sure that all the details are correct. It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it... :)
- January 13, 2011 at 6:52 AM
This is freaking hilarious.
- January 13, 2011 at 6:56 AM
- Penelope said...
Ha, I love this blog post! It's really great to hear how dedicated you are to your job.
- January 13, 2011 at 7:12 AM
- Rick said...
Sarah W - My thoughts *exactly*.
- January 13, 2011 at 7:29 AM
- Debs Riccio said...
Strip Battleships - hilarious! Fancy inventing Naked Twister? (Eee..eew, maybe not...)
- January 13, 2011 at 7:29 AM
- Liana Brooks said...
That's awesome! I can't wait for the book. :o)
- January 13, 2011 at 7:45 AM
- Jeffe Kennedy said...
Gives "you sank my battleship!" a whole new vibe...
- January 13, 2011 at 7:47 AM
- Unknown said...
Wow, nothing like taking your research seriously. Off to buy Battleship. Thanks:)
- January 13, 2011 at 9:07 AM
- Patty Blount said...
Jeannie Moon and I decided months ago that the local sex shops should sell jars of Nutella next to the body lotions.
Now I have to hit them up to stock Battleship beside the Sexual Trivial Pursuit board game.
*sighs* The things we do in the name of realism.
- January 13, 2011 at 11:48 AM
- JJ said...
Hahahaha I think research might be the best part of writing ;)
- January 13, 2011 at 1:40 PM
- Candyland said...
Talk about write what you know!!! Sexaay!
- January 13, 2011 at 1:55 PM
- The Novel Road said...
I wonder what strip Monopoly would be like? You would get to buy things with the money...
- January 13, 2011 at 3:28 PM
- B. WHITTINGTON said...
AND how do you like working with SOURCEBOOKS???
I've heard they are good. Barb
- January 13, 2011 at 6:47 PM
- Jessica Bell said...
LOL. Now that's what I call research! :o)
- January 14, 2011 at 9:31 AM
- Unknown said...
Strip Batteleship... damn, I cannot WAIT for this book to come out! *grin*
- January 14, 2011 at 9:42 PM
- Claire Dawn said...
Off to buy Battleship!
- January 15, 2011 at 6:28 AM
- Harley May said...
LOVE the Battleship strip tease. I wonder if we can play it with Uno, or Chutes and Ladders, or Connect Four, or....
(heart you)
- January 17, 2011 at 8:07 PM


text:
This is another whiteboard exercise I was presented with in a real life interview. I had come across this several times in blogs and interview books but I still had to struggle when put on the spot. Solving this while sitting down at home is always going to be ten times easier than trying to think out loud in a roomful of strangers.I started by misunderstanding the question and then over-thinking it; I was thinking mathematically because instead of being given a number of "rows" as a function parameter, it was presented as the "height". For this particular problem I quickly realized that I had to think in terms of a grid and allow for the spaces to the left of the X's - this was the crux of it. Otherwise I would have ended up with something like this:XXXXXXXXXXThe best advice I can give anyone in these types of situations is to get into a relaxed state. Think it out loud by asking yourself questions out loud and what it is you are going to actually try to do. Interviewers will then be tuned into your thinking and more able to offer hints as you move through it. Rationalize it in your own mind as you go along. Here's a working example:
public static void CreateTriangle(int height)
// Number of rows
for (int i = 1; i <= height; i++)
// Print spaces
for (int j =1; j <= (height - i); j++)
Console.Write(" ");
// Print X's
for (int k = 1; k < (i * 2); k++)
Tags: C#, Algorithms
Algorithms | C#
Disclaimer: I was recently asked this in an interview and quickly found myself dealing with some very messy indexing syntax using arrays. I decided to revisit the problem later to see if my initial hunch of treating the uint input as a string would tend toward a cleaner solution.
/// <summary>
/// Input treated as a string for simplification
/// </summary>
/// <param name="x"></param>
/// <returns>bool</returns>
public static bool IsPalindrome(uint x)
string givenNum = Convert.ToString(x);
char[] input = givenNum.ToCharArray();
string testString = String.Empty;
foreach (char a in input)
testString += a;
return givenNum == testString;
It works fine but I still thought it was a little more verbose than it could be so I posted this question on Stack Overflow and got some very interesting responses. I eventually went with the following solution; since a uint was specifically specified as a parameter, it would seem that an interviewer would be looking for a numerical, non-string answer.
public static bool IsPalindrome(uint x)
uint original = x;
uint reverse = 0;
while (x > 0)
reverse *= 10;
reverse += x % 10;
x /= 10;
return original == reverse;
Tags: C#, #Strings, Algorithms
C# | Algorithms
Having spent two days trying to set up a custom URL for my Azure website, I'm sharing the configuration settings that worked for me. The existing documentation for this is seriously lacking when it comes to setting up CNAME and A record entries in our DNS admin.
After following the Microsoft documentation, I finally had my root URL working but got 404 error when trying to access my site using "www". Here's how I fixed that...
Assuming an Azure Website name is myazurewebsite and custom DNS is mywebsite.com I have one A record:
1) Host name:mywebsite.com IP:126.96.36.199 (IP taken from domain management in Azure Website)
And two CNAME records:
1) Alias:awverify.mywebsite.com points to host:awverify.myazurewebsite.azurewebsites.net 2) Alias:www.mywebsite.com points to host:myazurewebsite.azurewebsites.net
Then I have Azure Website configured with two domain names:
1) mywebsite.com 2) www.mywebsite.com
Tags: ASP.NET, Azure
ASP.NET | Azure


text:
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text:
Tour Information: Day of Ideas
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Atlantic Home Page
June 1999
Building Wealth
by Lester C. Thurow
The old foundations of success are gone. For all of human history the source of success has been controlling natural resources—land, gold, oil. Suddenly the answer is "knowledge." The king of the knowledge economy, Bill Gates, owns no land, no gold or oil, no industrial processes. How does one use knowledge to build wealth? How do societies have to be reorganized to generate a wealth-enhancing knowledge environment? How do they incubate the entrepreneurs necessary to bring about change and create wealth? What skills are needed? The knowledge-based economy is asking new questions, giving new answers, and developing new rules for success.
Rule #1: No one ever becomes very rich by saving money.
The rich see opportunities to work and invest in situations where great disequilibriums—imbalances or openings in the economy created by new circumstances—exist. Something, usually a new technology, has opened up opportunities to jump to new products with very different capabilities or to new processes with much higher levels of productivity. This was as true for John D. Rockefeller as it is for Bill Gates. For both of them lifetime savings constituted a small fraction of total wealth. Carefully saving money and investing in normal equilibrium situations can make one comfortable in old age but never really wealthy.
In what will come to be seen as the third industrial revolution, new technological opportunities are creating fortunes faster than ever before. The United States has created more billionaires in the past fifteen years than in its previous history—even correcting for inflation and changes in average per capita gross domestic product. Bill Gates might spend close to $100 million on his house and still have only the second most expensive house under construction in the United States. The thirteen billionaires of 1982 had by last fall been joined by 176 others. Together these 189 people have well over a trillion dollars in wealth. An additional two dozen people would have been on the list if the assessments had been made in July rather than October, and with the recovery in the stock market they were probably back on the list by the end of the year. To be among the fifty wealthiest Americans last year required a minimum of $2.9 billion. The richest Americans don't hide their wealth; they actively seek to get their names on the list, and produce their financial records to prove that they belong there. They want to be seen as economic winners.
The slightly less wealthy exhibit their wealth in other ways. Conspicuous consumption is rising. Whereas since 1993 general consumption is up 29 percent, adventure travel is up 46 percent, sales of gourmet chocolates up 51 percent, pearls 73 percent, luxury cars 74 percent, and yachts 143 percent.
This wealth explosion isn't usual in America. In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s the economy was growing much faster (twice as fast from 1950 to 1970 as from 1970 to 1998), and average wealth was going up, but great wealth was not erupting. America did not suddenly give birth to a generation of super Americans. Americans in the fifties, sixties, and seventies were no less talented, no less inventive, no less ambitious. Our political and economic systems—democracy and capitalism—were not different. The opportunities to become wealthy simply weren't there.
What we are seeing in America today was last seen in the 1890s, during the second industrial revolution. Two innovations were changing the nature of economic advancement then and opening up opportunities to build great wealth.
The first was the birth of the corporate research laboratory. In creating its chemical industry Germany established the concept of systematic industrial research and development. Technological advances did not just randomly happen; they could be systematically invented. Previously the economy had advanced on the brilliance of what we might call great entrepreneurial tinkerers—James Watt, Henry Bessemer, Richard Arkwright. Technological advances were not closely coupled to scientific advances. Bessemer, for example, never knew what chemistry made his blast furnace work. He just fiddled around until it worked.
Electricity was the other element behind the second industrial revolution. Electrification allowed a whole new set of industries to emerge (telephones, movies), and radically altered the production processes of every old industry. In the steam era a giant engine powered a central rotating shaft, and machine tools ran off pulleys in long linear factories. In the new electric model of production, small motors could be attached to each machine tool, and very different, more productive configurations of machinery could be arranged on the factory floor. It was an early industrial version of what is known today in the computer industry as distributive processing.
With the electric light bulb, night became day. The price-performance curve for the light bulb looked like the price-performance curve for today's computer. The lighting that can be had for thirty-three cents in a 100-watt bulb from Home Depot would have cost $1,445 in 1883 (adjusted for lumens emitted, length of bulb life, inflation, and changes in per capita income).
Being able to do something after dark changed basic habits. People had slept an average of nine hours a night; now they slept slightly more than seven hours. With electricity came transportation systems—underground and street railways—that allowed the emergence of the modern metropolis. Electricity powered the telephone communication system that allowed small local markets to become big national markets.
The second industrial revolution created a sharp discontinuity in economic affairs and opened up opportunities to do things never done before. Old things could also be done in new ways. The smart and the lucky did not have to content themselves with highly competitive businesses producing commodities that earned bond-market "equilibrium" rates of return. In the jargon of economists, high "disequilibrium returns" replaced low "equilibrium returns." America's first set of billionaires (in inflation-corrected dollars)—Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, Morgan, Schwab—emerged.
Disequilibrium conditions always disappear eventually. New industries with high returns and high growth rates become old industries with much lower returns and normal growth rates. As technologies mature, costs stop falling faster than selling prices. Competitors arise to drive down selling prices. The new products reach saturation levels. Growth markets become replacement markets. But "eventually" often means several decades. It takes time to attract enough capital and people into new industries to turn them into mature industries with normal growth rates and normal rates of return. In the meantime, there are great fortunes to be made.
Although billionaires and market wealth dominate the headlines, there is another way to look at wealth creation that could generate a very different set of headlines if anyone wanted to pay attention. Real wealth is the ability to produce more with less—to generate a flow of goods and services without having to sacrifice something else of equal value. It is not created by taking time away from other activities and devoting it to money-making. Real wealth can be created by increases in what economists call labor productivity: the same time spent working generates more income (and hence wealth) than it did in the past.
But wealth can also be created by investing in plant and equipment. If one sacrifices consumption in order to save and invest, the sacrifice must be subtracted from the flow of income from that investment. Real wealth is ultimately not created by taking income away from consumption and devoting it to investment; it flows from increases in capital productivity—getting more out of the same capital resources or using fewer capital resources to generate the same levels of market wealth.
Rule #2: Sometimes successful businesses have to cannibalize themselves to save themselves.
Businesses must be willing to destroy the old while it is still successful if they wish to build the new that will become successful. If they don't destroy themselves, others will destroy them.
Disequilibrium means great threats as well as great opportunities. Only six of what had been the twenty-five biggest firms in 1960 were still on the list in 1997. Most had been merged into other companies, but two of the twenty-five had gone out of business. Of what were the twelve largest American companies at the beginning of the twentieth century, eleven will not be around to see the beginning of the twenty-first. Technological breakthroughs occur, the economic environment changes, and they could not adjust.
Old big firms understand, and often even invent, the new technologies that transform the world, but they have a structural problem that is almost impossible to solve. When breakthrough technologies come along, such firms must destroy the old to build the new. Four of the five makers of vacuum tubes, for example, never successfully made transistors after transistors emerged to replace the vacuum tube—and the fifth is today not a player. When the microprocessor allowed the personal computer to replace the mainframe as the dominant growth market in the computer industry, the old industrial leader, IBM, fell off a cliff, and new leaders, Intel and Microsoft, emerged. IBM understood the new technology and wanted to compete but could not destroy its old (mainframe) business to build the new. In the 1980s IBM sold its 20 percent stake in Intel; if it still owned that stake today, IBM's total market value would be almost 30 percent greater than it is.
New firms have the great advantage of not having to destroy themselves to save themselves.
Rule #3: Two routes other than radical technological change can lead to high-growth, high-rate-of-return opportunities: sociological disequilibriums and developmental disequilibriums.
Entrepreneurs see sociological opportunities to change human habits. Starbucks persuaded Americans to replace their fifty-cent cup of coffee bought at a local restaurant with a $2.50 cup of coffee bought at a coffee bar. They turned a competitive commodity with widely distributed points of sale out of which no one made much money into a noncompetitive differentiated product, and created a rapidly growing industry with high rates of return from which great fortunes could emerge.
The cruise industry took advantage of a shift in demographics: the relative purchasing power of the elderly had doubled in two decades. Seventy-year-olds twenty years earlier had cash incomes 40 percent below those of thirty-year-olds; suddenly seventy-year-olds had cash incomes 20 percent above those of thirty-year-olds. Cruises, known at least since the days of Cleopatra, became the perfect vacation for the elderly: We move you; you don't move. Some owners of cruise lines have become billionaires by exploiting sociological disequilibriums.
The problem with wealth generated this way is that sociological disequilibriums usually reflect a transfer of existing wealth rather than the generation of new wealth. Those who were selling conventional cups of coffee now sell fewer of them, and thousands of mom-and-pop restaurants make less money. The extra two dollars a cup that goes to Starbucks is two dollars that isn't spent somewhere else.
What might be called developmental disequilibrium exists whenever countries or entrepreneurs can replicate the activities of the developed world in the underdeveloped world.
A year or so before the hand-over of Hong Kong from Britain to China, I was sitting in the lounge at the Hong Kong airport eavesdropping on a conversation between two rich Chinese businessmen on their way to spend six months in Vancouver in order to get Canadian passports—their insurance policy in case things went wrong in Hong Kong. They were complaining about having to stay so long in Vancouver, because they could see no way of using their time there to make money. To hear them describe it, Vancouver was an economic desert. Why? Vancouver, after all, is richer than Hong Kong.
The answer is to be found in the absence of developmental disequilibriums in Canada. In Hong Kong these businessmen had become rich by exploiting the differences between the developed world and poor, but now open, mainland China. They simply copied what was done in the developed world and replicated it in China. What were commodity operations with low rates of return and few growth prospects in the developed world were high-return, high-growth opportunities in China. These businessmen were skilled at replication and at knowing the exact time when mainland-Chinese conditions were ripe for any particular activity.
Vancouver held no replication opportunities. All the normal First World activities already existed there. To get rich in Vancouver one needed breakthrough technologies or new sociological concepts. The businessmen had neither. For them Vancouver truly was an economic desert.
Rule #4: Making capitalism work in a deflationary environment is much harder than making it work in an inflationary environment.
Systematic deflation is not a certainty, but the third industrial revolution has made it likely enough that there's good reason to think about how standard economic operating procedures change when prices start to fall.
Globalization is forcing prices down. Production is being moved from high-cost to low-cost locations, and prices are falling as a result. Name any major product, calculate how much the world could produce if every factory were operating at capacity, subtract what the world is going to buy, and you'll find that the world's production potential exceeds expected consumption by at least a third. Cars, semiconductor chips, and oil are but three of many examples. With such an excess of production capacity, falling prices are no mystery. Firms have an enormous incentive to lower prices in an attempt to keep their facilities operating closer to capacity.
Globalization also brings pressure to bear to change work practices, to raise productivity, and to lower wages. BMW used its ability to set up a manufacturing plant in the United States as leverage with its unions to change work practices in Germany. Flexible shifts were introduced in Germany so that when demand was high, the plants could operate on weekends. This allowed capital costs to be cut by a quarter. BMW workers essentially have bank accounts in which their hours of work on weekends or after a normal shift can be deposited. When demand is low, workers who aren't needed can draw pay for the hours of work accumulated in their bank accounts. Overtime is not paid unless it is clear that total hours of work in a year will exceed the standard. The company is now spreading these practices to its Rover plants, in Britain. The British workers have been told that they must cut the productivity gap, of 30 percent, between themselves and the Germans. BMW does not have to threaten that if they don't, production will be moved elsewhere. Everyone knows that. With labor costs and wages down (the same pressures have been forcing down real weekly U.S. wages for the bottom two thirds of the work force at the rate of about a percentage point a year for the past twenty-five years), prices must eventually start to fall.
The Asian meltdown substantially increases the downward pressures on prices. Indonesia and Thailand have to export more, and can do so only by lowering prices. If their global competitors, mostly in the Third World, do not want to lose market share, they have no choice but to match the lower prices. In the developed world similar pressure comes from Korea and Japan.
New technologies, especially those affecting energy, minerals, and agricultural products, are also driving prices down very rapidly. Oil prices were at an all-time low early this year. Gold, that bellwether commodity, is also down dramatically from where it was just a few years ago. In every case new processes are dramatically cutting the costs of extracting value from nature.
Downsizing and outsourcing have also played a role in reducing prices. It is common in America for companies to have contracts with their suppliers that require annual price reductions. Auto-parts manufacturers, for example, have signed contracts with the major auto producers calling for price reductions of three percent a year. Outsourcing is largely responsible for these tough contracts, because it is easier to get tough with an outside supplier than it is with an inside supplier. If an outside supplier makes no money with the lower prices, that is his problem. But if an inside supplier makes no money, the corporation loses in one of its selling divisions what it gains in one of its buying divisions. It sees no gain in aggregate profits. Such practices led to a fall in new-car prices in the United States last year for the first time since the early 1970s.
In a deflationary world debt is to be avoided at all costs. Real interest rates (nominal money rates plus the rate of deflation) are very high and debts have to be repaid in dollars of greater value than the dollars that were borrowed. Those with debts want to repay them as quickly as possible, because debt burdens automatically grow larger in real terms over time. If prices fall by 10 percent, a $100 debt effectively becomes a $110 debt. And if debt reduction becomes the No. 1 priority, no one will invest in the things that cause growth.
Rule #5: There are no institutional substitutes for individual entrepreneurial change agents.
Capitalism is a process of creative destruction. The new destroys the old. Both the creation and the destruction are essential to driving the economy forward. Entrepreneurs are central to the process of creative destruction; they bring the new technologies and the new concepts into active commercial use. They are the change agents of capitalism.
The old patterns of powerful vested interests must be broken if the new is to exist, but those vested interests fight back. They are not willing to fade quietly into the pages of history. Entrepreneurs built the national companies that destroyed local companies at the end of the nineteenth century, and they are building the global companies that are destroying national companies at the end of the twentieth century.
History teaches us that it is only too easy to stamp out entrepreneurship. It is a fundamental human characteristic but, despite its creative and destructive powers, an extremely fragile one. Among most peoples in most times and most places entrepreneurs do not exist. The economic possibilities exist, but they are not seen, the energy to realize them is lacking, or the risks they involve seem too great.
When societies aren't organized so that the old vested interests can be brushed aside, entrepreneurs cannot emerge. Social systems have to be built in which entrepreneurs have the freedom to destroy the old. Yet destroying the old can too easily be seen as a step into chaos. Societies that aren't ready to break with the past aren't willing to let entrepreneurs come into existence.
Europe provides a good example of the importance of entrepreneurship. Europe saves and invests more than the United States, has a better-educated populace, and has a basic understanding of science that is just as good as that in the United States, yet it has created none of the new brainpower industries of the twenty-first century. Last year the production arm of the last indigenous European computer manufacturer, Siemens Nixdorf, was sold to Acer, of Taiwan. How can a region be a leader in the twenty-first century and be completely out of the computer business? The European entrepreneurs that should exist don't.
Sociology almost always dominates technology. Ideas often lie unused because people do not want to use them. The fact that something is possible does not mean that it will happen. Great persistence is needed to bring a truly new idea into the market. Steam toys have been unearthed in the archaeological exploration of ancient Greece, and the ancient Egyptians had steam-powered temple doors—yet the steam engine did not emerge as a source of power for economic production until the eighteenth century. The right sociology had to be in place for revolutionary new products to emerge.
Rule #6: No society that values order above all else will be creative; but without some degree of order creativity disappears.
Consider China at the outset of the fifteenth century. Its curiosity, its instinct for exploration, and its drive to build had created all the technologies necessary to launch the Industrial Revolution—something that would not actually occur for another 400 years. It had the blast furnace and piston bellows for making steel (the amount of pig iron that China produced annually in the late eleventh century would not be matched anywhere in the world for 700 years); gunpowder and the cannon for military conquest; the compass and the rudder for exploration; paper and movable type for printing; the iron plough, the horse collar, rotary threshing machines, and mechanical seeders to generate agricultural surpluses; the ability to drill for natural gas; and in mathematics the decimal system, negative numbers, and the concept of zero, which put the Chinese far ahead of the Europeans. Large Chinese armadas—carrying as many as 28,000 men—were exploring Africa's east coast at about the same time that Portugal and Spain were sending much smaller expeditions down the west coast of Africa. Seven major Chinese expeditions explored the Indian Ocean with ships four times as large as those of Columbus.
But the geographic conquests and the industrial revolution that were possible did not happen. The Chinese rejected and ultimately forgot the technologies that could have given them world dominance. New technologies were perceived as threats rather than opportunities. Innovation was forbidden. Imperial edicts prohibited the building of new oceangoing ships and sailing away from the Chinese coastline. By the end of the fifteenth century the demand for order had overridden intrinsic human curiosity, the desire to explore, and the drive to build.
Consider the opposite case of Russia in the seventy-five years before the Russian Revolution. Creativity flourished in the chaos of a dying empire. Think of all the great authors: Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Chekhov, Turgenev, Gogol—the list goes on and on. Likewise in the world of music and the arts. Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Kandinsky, Kasimir, and many others are still played in our concert halls or admired in our museums. In science Russia was a leader. Wilhelm Ostwald was one of the first Nobel Prize winners in chemistry, for his work on the speed of chemical reactions. Ivan Pavlov, also a Nobel Prize winner, is perhaps the most famous physiologist ever. Dmitri Mendeleyev devised the periodic table of chemical elements. Markov chains—named for the mathematician Andrei Markov—have found a wide variety of applications in physics, biology, linguistics, and economics. Nikolai Lobachevski developed non-Euclidean geometry. Being skeptical and refusing to accept authority are the secrets of scientific advancement. Living in chaos, Russians could be skeptical. Compared with the dangers of political revolt against the Czar, the risks of scientific revolt against perceived wisdom were small.
Creativity flourished in the chaos, yes, but without some degree of order it was impossible for the Russians to use that creativity to develop a successful economy. Chaos led to more chaos, and ultimately to the Russian Revolution. Order was reimposed. Creativity died.
To advance and use knowledge a society needs the right combination of chaos and order. Too much order (China) does not work. Too much chaos (Russia) does not work. Although not as extreme, America and Japan are in many ways similar to Russia and China. America has more than enough chaos to be creative, but too little order to use its ideas in the most efficient ways. Japan has more than enough order to be efficient but too little chaos to be creative. Both could gain if each moved a little in the direction of the other. Successful societies create and manage a tension between order and chaos without letting either of them get out of hand. New ideas are easily frustrated if societies are not receptive to the chaos that comes from change, yet societies have to maintain an appropriate degree of order to take advantage of creative breakthroughs.
At the individual level these same forces show up as a tension between tradition and rebellion. Einstein dropped out of high school at the age of fifteen; renounced his citizenship a year later; lived on the margins socially, economically, and morally; and called himself a gypsy and was viewed as a bohemian. His life was in some sense a search for order in disorder, both scientifically and socially. Great creativity requires hard facts, wild imagination, and nonlogical jumps forward that are then proved to be right by working backward to known principles. Only the rebellious can do it.
Entrepreneurial and organizational skills, curiosity, the desire to explore, and the drive to build can be enhanced. Useful curiosity is a characteristic of individuals who have mastered the existing body of knowledge but are not paralyzed by it.
Rule #7: A successful knowledge-based economy requires large public investments in education, infrastructure, and
research and development.
It is not just a matter of brilliant individuals and aggressive entrepreneurs. The new economic game is simultaneously a team game and an individual sport. Without the support of the team the individual fails. Without individual initiative the team fails. Both are necessary.
Some countries are willing to invest in research and development; others are not. The right amount to invest is not obvious. The industrial world's four biggest economies spend very similar percentages of GDP on R&D: France and Germany spend 2.3 percent, Japan 2.8 percent, and the United States 2.5 percent. But the similarity derives more from a desire in each not to let the other three get ahead than from any proof that they are spending the right amount.
Most private American R&D, about four fifths, is done by big firms. Even among these big spenders, however, spending levels vary greatly: Boeing spends four percent of sales, Intel nine percent, Lucent 12 percent, and Microsoft 17 percent. Expenditure levels depend on the industry under consideration and on whether firms in that industry believe that the basic science is in place to make real progress in developing new goods or services. Virtually 100 percent of Intel's sales and profits come from products developed within the past three years, but only about 30 to 40 percent of IBM's profits come from recently developed products.
For countries or companies technological leadership is not the same thing as R&D spending. Europe spends its share on research, but if one looks at technological leadership, that spending does not seem to be paying off. To pay off, obviously, research has to be followed by the activities necessary to embed the newly developed technologies in the economy. Where America outclasses Europe is not so much in R&D spending on information technology, for example, as in investments in information hardware and software. As a fraction of GDP, U.S. investments were twice those of Germany or France in 1996. What has been learned isn't very different, but what is being done with the learning is quite different.
Private rates of return on R&D spending (the financial benefits that accrue to the firm doing the spending) average about 24 percent. But social rates of return on R&D spending (the economic benefits that accrue to the entire society) are about 66 percent (as computed by averaging eight different studies), with a range from 50 to 105 percent—almost three times as high as private rates. Two out of three dollars in net benefits generated do not accrue to those paying for the R&D. This result, never contradicted in the economic literature, provides powerful evidence that there are huge positive social spillovers from research and development. Left to themselves, private firms will spend too little, because they cannot capture all the benefits that flow from their activities.
Because the government doesn't care exactly which Americans reap the benefits, it has a very important role to play in R&D. Rates of return on R&D spending are far above those found elsewhere in the economy. Government now pays for about 30 percent of total R&D, but with a 66 percent rate of return it should be spending much more. Americans as a whole are investing too little in R&D. Put simply, the payoff from social investment in basic research is as clear as anything is ever going to be in economics.
Private returns are apt to be much more certain if one is looking for an extension of existing knowledge rather than for a major breakthrough; thus private firms tend to concentrate their money on the developmental end of the R&D process. Time lags are also shorter, and in the business world speed is everything.
Because of this proclivity in the private sector, government should focus its spending on long-tailed projects for advancing basic knowledge. This is where private firms won't invest, but it is also precisely where the breakthroughs that generate private business opportunities are made. That is why biotechnology had to be supported by the government. Where it did not receive government support—everywhere except the United States—it did not develop. No private company would have made the investments that the National Institutes of Health did, even if the company had known that success was certain, because money went in for more than twenty-five years before any salable products came out.
Rule #8: The biggest unknown for the individual in a knowledge-based economy is how to have a career in a system where there are no careers.
Education has always been a high-risk investment for the individual. More than 20 percent of all college graduates will end up making less than the average high school graduate. They invested and it did not pay off. But recently it has become even riskier. How does one plan the investments necessary to have a career in the face of corporate downsizings at profitable firms?
For my generation of high school graduates the concept of a career had meaning. During the 1950s in Montana, where I went to high school, many high school graduates started as laborers in the copper mines. Starting wages were good, and one could count on annual raises of two or three percent. There was a skill ladder. Laborers moved up to operating underground trains or other kinds of heavy equipment, learning the necessary skills by working as assistants to the operators. Someone who demonstrated intelligence and judgment could be given responsibility for setting off underground explosions. Each promotion meant higher hourly wages. When a worker reached his mid-thirties, he could expect to take the last step on the earnings ladder and become a contract miner, who was paid for each foot of tunnel dug rather than by the hour. He was no longer a wage slave. On this career ladder high school graduates could match college graduates in earnings.
But that's all gone now. Those mines were shut down. The thousands of people who worked there were laid off.
What used to be true only in declining industries—that skills suddenly become valueless—is now true everywhere. Downsizing is a way of life even in good times. In a global economy, if skills are cheaper somewhere else in the world, companies will move there to lower production costs. They aren't tied to any particular set of workers. When new knowledge makes old skills obsolete, firms want to employ workers who already have that knowledge. They don't want to pay for retraining. In the second half of this decade profitable American companies have laid off more than half a million workers each year despite the economic boom. The old career ladders are gone. The old lifetime employees are gone.
Explicitly or implicitly, today's high school graduate is given a message: "You are unlikely to have a lifetime career in any one company. You are going to have to learn to take responsibility for and manage your own career. Regular annual wage increases are a thing of the past. Paternalism is gone." If they are honest, employers themselves deliver the message. But how does anyone follow this advice?
If career ladders don't exist within any one company, maybe they exist across different companies. This would mean that a good initial performance at Company A would lead to training opportunities, a better job, and higher wages at Company B. But the world doesn't work that way for most employees. Companies don't tell other companies who their good employees are—even if they have no promotion opportunities to offer those employees. They don't want to lose them. And even if they did tell other companies, they wouldn't be believed. They would be suspected of trying to get rid of their bad workers. Similarly, they don't tell other companies about their bad employees. They don't want to open themselves up to lawsuits. If asked, and they seldom are, companies are willing to tell other companies just one thing about a worker seeking a new job: Yes, that person did work for us.
In this context a good performance at Company A doesn't matter, because it does not lead to opportunities for training and promotion at Company B. When workers move from one company to another, they simply start over at another entry-level job; there is no progress up a career ladder. The rational strategy is to keep moving until one finds a company that still has internal career ladders. But as such companies become fewer, the number of high school graduates with real career opportunities ahead of them declines to the vanishing point.
A cross-company career ladder runs into other problems. After age forty-five cross-company career moves are difficult, and after age fifty-five they are impossible. (Those tracking downsized workers find that after age fifty-five they seldom find good jobs with good companies.) Age-discrimination laws can protect older employees against being unfairly dismissed from their old firms, but they cannot get them a good job at a new company. Employers have the right to hire the best workers available. In a fast-changing world older employees too often bring obsolete experience and out-of-date skills. There are always a lot of young potential employees who look more promising.
The lack of career opportunities is dramatically visible in earnings data. The gains in real annual earnings of high school graduates aged twenty to forty are much smaller than they used to be. There are lots of jobs, and unemployment is low, but opportunities to acquire skills and the higher wages that go with them don't exist. As a result, earnings profiles are flatter. The lack of on-the-job opportunities to acquire new skills is another reason that the wage gap between high school graduates and college graduates has gotten much bigger in recent years.
Real wages have also been falling for most of the male labor force. Graduating from American high schools, these men don't initially have the same level of skills as their counterparts in the rest of the industrialized world, nor do they get the post-secondary skills training (apprenticeships, for example) that most of the rest of the world gives its non-college-bound labor force. At the same time, wage gains for those in the top 20 percent of the work force have never been larger. The widening disparity in earnings and wealth doesn't create problems for the economy (it simply produces more luxury goods and fewer middle-class goods), but it probably does create long-run political problems in a democracy. How does one preach political equality in an economy of ever-growing inequality?
The issue is not jobs. It is high wages and careers. If wages fall to be commensurate with skills, jobs are always available. That is what the American experience proves. Jobs have never been more plentiful than they are in the 1990s, yet wages have been falling for more than half of the work force. In contrast with jobs, careers are in very short supply in America.
With career ladders in place, the ambitious worker of the 1950s or the 1960s could figure out what skills were needed for advancement. He or she knew what to take in night school. But without career ladders, how does anyone rationally plan an educational investment? What skills will pay off? No one wants to waste investment funds on skills that will go unused.
Historically, on-the-job training has been central to skills acquisition for much of the population. But with downsizing, the days of extensive on-the-job training have ended. What replaces it? In economics textbooks workers start to pay employers for the training they used to get free, when they were expected to be lifetime employees, by working for wages below what they could get from an employer who was not providing training. This has not happened. Judging what skills to buy from one's employer is no simpler than judging what skills to buy from an outside institution.
Also missing from a downsizing environment is a sense of economic security. If workers are asked what factors are most important in a job, economic security always comes out ahead of maximum wages. This is not the answer that is supposed to be given by Homo economicus. He or she is supposed to be interested in lifetime income maximization, and not to be worried about the risks and uncertainties of economic life. But real live human beings like the feeling of a solid economic floor under them. Homo economicus does not worry about starving between jobs.
Paradoxically, just when one would think that firms would be building closer relationships with their key knowledge workers, in order to keep them committed to the firm, they are smashing the implicit social contract with these workers. Knowledge workers, like other workers, are now fired when not needed or when their skills become obsolete. They, too, see a reduction in their real wages when cheaper alternatives are found elsewhere in the world. Firms invest less in on-the-job training for knowledge workers even when they want them to stay around, because they know that in the future fewer of them will stay around. If workers are laid off when not needed, the smart ones know that they should leave whenever an even marginally better job opportunity presents itself.
As job uncertainty rises, the numbers of those with a strong interest in the success of their current employers dwindle. Surveys show that although attachment to their occupations has remained constant for American workers over the past two decades, the number of those with a strong attachment to their employers has gone down by a fifth. The system is evolving toward less commitment and less investment in skills just as it should be moving in the opposite direction.
The basic problem in the United States is that every employer wants a free ride in the training system. "You train, I'll hire" is the American way. Whenever unemployment is low, employers who themselves do no training bitterly complain about the shortage of trained workers. They see nothing strange about their complaints. As for the employees, without career ladders they cannot intelligently acquire the right skills on their own. Since they will be switching employers frequently, they don't know what skills they will need or how long those skills will be relevant to their earning opportunities. As a result—rationally—they don't invest in skills.
When it is clear that something must be done but rational individuals and companies won't do it, society has to reorganize itself to make what is individually irrational into something that is individually rational. There is a simple solution. For example, France levies a training tax of 1.5 percent of payroll. The purpose is not to collect taxes but to make it rational for every employer to train. Employers can deduct their expenditures for training from that 1.5 percent tax. Thus if they spend 1.5 percent of their sales on training their work force, they pay no tax. Since the money will be taken away from them if they don't train, training becomes a free good as far as the firm is concerned. No one tells employers what skills to teach their workers, but they are effectively being told that they must teach some skills. Such a system aids everyone. It makes employers invest as if there were career ladders even when these have been abolished. If all employers have to invest, no one gets a free ride.
Major Unresolved Problems
The biggest problem of the third industrial revolution is as easy to enunciate as it is difficult to solve. Technology is creating a global economy that is rapidly supplanting our old national economies. National governments cannot control this new economy, yet no one, least of all Americans, wants to create the forms of global government that might be able to control it. As a result we are going to be living in a fundamentally unmanaged economic system. The difficulties of containing the 1997 Asian economic meltdown are just the first of many such difficulties we can expect.
National governments, which used to worry about managing and maintaining their economic systems, are slowly being pushed out of business. Changes in global finance overwhelm all but the largest governments. Governments have lost much of their influence over the movement of information and capital. They cannot control who crosses their borders either physically or culturally. They still have their armies, but they are afraid to use them when wars are also fought on television.
Conversely, the power—or perhaps we should say the freedom from government supervision—of global businesses is growing with companies' ability to move to the most advantageous locations and to play countries off against one another in bidding for attractive investment projects.
As national governments shrink and global corporations expand, a second major problem emerges. Almost everywhere we look we see rising economic inequalities among countries, among firms, among individuals. Returns to capital are up; returns to labor are down. Returns to skills are up; returns to unskilled labor are down. Firms will be global players or they will be niche players. The mid-sized national firm is a species in danger of extinction. Traditionally, national governments have acted to keep such inequalities under control. But having lost their ability to manage the system, they have also lost their ability to restrain economic inequalities. For at least a while we are simply going to live in a world with greater inequalities on a broad scale.
The third industrial revolution is making obsolete old institutions and old modes of operation, requiring the individual, the firm, and the nation to change.
For individuals here are three words of advice: skills, skills, skills. The economic prospects of those without skills are bleak. What we now see—falling real wages for those without skills—is going to continue. In education the needs of the bottom two thirds of the labor force are particularly acute. In an age when brawn earns little and brains much, this part of the labor force simply has to be much better educated. Something is fundamentally wrong when the bottom quarter of South Korean eighth-grade students score, on average, higher than their American counterparts.
Entrepreneurial opportunities were few in the 1950s and 1960s. Today they are many. But for every success we read about in the paper, every new billionaire made, dozens of entrepreneurs will go broke unnoticed and unmourned. The downside risks are real.
Cannibalization is the challenge for old business firms. Can they aggressively seize the opportunities opened up by the third industrial revolution, even when that means deliberately destroying existing profitable activities? History is clear: few can, and those that don't are likely to die. For new firms the economic opportunities have never been better. The world is full of openings for businesses to grow in environments without established competitors.
Nations that are heavy investors in education, infrastructure, and R&D are going to tend to win. We need a national capital investment budget to remind ourselves of how we are spending our resources. The negative savings rates that we now have are not the route to success.
For those with skills and a fondness for risks, however, who are willing to cannibalize their old activities and are living in high-investment societies, the times have never been more favorable.
Volume 283, No. 6, page 57-69


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Animal doctors love their patients
LOMBARD - "We're all hoarders, you know," my wife, Joan, explained to me after attending the Illinois State Veterinary Medical Association's annual meeting.
The vets were practicing doing ultrasounds on dogs from the local animal shelter.
And the doctors were quickly falling in love with the homeless canines.
I'm sure I wasn't the only veterinary spouse to hear: "Can we adopt one?"
Animal doctors have such an intense love for creatures that their homes tend to become, well, menageries.
You see, I've been blessed with two veterinarians in my life - my father and my wife.
Vets have an affinity for animals that most people don't understand.
When I asked my wife for her hand in marriage, I made her promise: no animals would be added to our family - unless we both agreed. I asked for the promise with a childhood memory in the back of my mind.
When I was 8, my dad came home with a billy goat.
Dad was vaccinating cattle at a sale barn and as a joke bid $5 on a lonely billy goat that didn't have any ears.
We ended up owning the beast that devoured newspapers, cigarette butts and just about anything else. The ruminant had no respect for fences or screen doors. No sooner had the goat been put in the pasture than it jumped the fence, ran across our yard, peered through the screen door and baaed loudly.
My mother took to chasing Billy off the porch with a broom - until he ate the broom. Having no respect for fences, the animal took to sunning itself on the front porch, where more than a few drivers nearly swerved off the road after observing the goat.
Given this history, you'd think I'd have gone into marriage to a vet with my eyes wide open. Dream on.
My wife brought a cat into the marriage that hated all men. Within a week, the cat marked my suit and every freshly pressed white shirt of mine hanging in the closet. But marital adventures in felines didn't end there.
A couple of years after we wed, my wife was more than eight months pregnant with our first daughter and she came home with a kitten that was born without eyes.
Between sobs, Joan said, "They wanted me to put it to sleep just because it was born this way. I couldn't do it, Scott. What happens if our child is born without any eyes?" As my pregnant wife stroked the blind kitten she added, "It's just a foster cat. It will stay with us just until we find someone who will give it a home permanently."
The foster cat is still with us eight years later.
It has the floor plan of the house memorized, avoids the kids' toys on the floor with an eerie sixth sense and lounges on the window sill like a prince on a throne.
And there have been other creatures.
There is the rabbit that suddenly appeared in our home after my wife discovered it needed a home.
Our three daughters play with it along with their Barbies, My Little Ponies and costume jewelry.
In addition to four dogs, two cats, two parakeets and a rabbit, there are other creatures in our family: namely three goats.
Several nights a week, my two older daughters and I found ourselves scratching behind the ears of Blackie, Snowflake and Alfred. They like to nibble on carrots and apples.
Goat slobber sticks to our fingers and my girls giggle as they receive gentle butts from the top of their heads.
The time with these creatures brings us closer together.
It's the legacy of the vets in our lives: loving animals and loving one another.
Scott Reeder is a veteran statehouse reporter and the journalist in residence at the Illinois Policy Institute. He can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.com. Readers can subscribe to his free political newsletter by going to ILNEWS.ORG or follow his work on Twitter @scottreeder.


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I am all for avoiding excesses, but every once in a while I will throw caution to the wind and indulge. A bread studded with chunks of roasted potatoes will not make you feel light as a feather, no matter how carefully you go through the "portion control" route. We are talking a fair amount of calories here, but those are very tasty calories, therefore, worth consuming. Just don't bake it every week! 😉
This is another recipe designed by Dan Lepard, published on The Guardian website – you can shape it as a loaf, but I opted for a thick and rustic focaccia. My electric oven handles flat breads a lot better than loaves, and it's been a while since I made a focaccia anyway. The clock was ticking….
(Dan Lepard)
450 g yellow, thin-skinned potatoes
a little olive oil to coat potatoes
375 g (ml) water
1 tsp instant dry yeast
100 g yogurt
50 g honey
175 g pitted green olives, coarsely chopped
1 small bunch dill, chopped (I substituted thyme)
2 tsp sea salt
625 g Italian 00 flour (I substituted bread flour)
Olive oil and salt flakes
The potatoes are briefly roasted and incorporated with all other ingredients to make a very sticky dough. Using Dan's minimal kneading method, the dough rises for several hours, until patted in a baking dish as a focaccia or shaped as a loaf.
For a full, detailed recipe, please follow this link to Dan's site.
Comments: Part of the charm of this bread is the inclusion of potatoes and olives in large chunks, don't cut them in small pieces. Next time I intend to roast the potatoes just a little bit longer, to make the flavor more prominent in the bread. Some pieces of potato will tend to fall off as you knead, don't worry, just stick them back into the dough, which, with each kneading cycle will be smoother and smoother.
I am sending this hearty focaccia to Susan's Yeastspotting event….
ONE YEAR AGO: SALMON CURRY (one of my favorite recipes ever!)


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This is the bluff just above route one north of town about two miles. The buildings on the left near the ocean are Long's marine labs. The fields near the ocean grow brussel sprouts.
I didn't even stop rolling taking these photos of the fire roads behind the U.C. Santa Cruz campus. Riding after work makes this framebuilder happy indeed. What makes me unhappy are the bozos that start all the fires with cigarettes and general carelessness.These signs are truthful as this forest could go up at any time if someone just flicked a butt out the car window. The air has been smoky enough for the health department to recommend not exercising outdoors.....I didn't pay attention to the warnings-hopefully my lungs aren't black. Fortunately, today was clearer and the fires are getting smaller .