One of the fascinating aspects of my new American life is seeing how loud the volume of dissent is from the American
Bill Moyers
people about the shenanigans on Wall Street and the Too Big To Fail banks. There is an intensity and passion that I can’t see happening on the other side of the Pond. Maybe this is the cultural legacy of a people that just a short time ago, relatively speaking, were opening up this giant country seeking a better way of life than the ‘old countries’.
This intensity and passion is why, in the end, I believe that the solution to the huge crisis that still awaits us will start from this side of the Atlantic. But it will get a whole lot worse before it gets better, such is the complexity and depth of the fraud that is being visited on decent, ordinary folks in this and many other fine countries.
Bill Moyers of the Bill Moyers Journal on PBS is retiring. He’s approaching 76 and that’s a grand age to be dealing with the workload and stress of a weekly television presentation. His last Journal was broadcast on the 23rd April, a week ago today airing two really important topics. My only regret is that I haven’t been here sufficiently long to view many more of his Journals.
William K Black
In that last broadcast on the 23rd, Bill had two key interviews. In this Post, I want to bring to your attention his first report, which was an interview with William K Black, now an academic but, just as importantly, a former bank regulator. William Black really understands what is going on in banking.
The interview is both fascinating and captivating because, well to me anyway, it explains in terms that us laymen can understand, exactly what is going on and why it is so terribly important that legislation and regulations are brought into force to stop this fraud ever happening again.
This interview has not yet made it’s way onto YouTube so I can only post the link to the Bill Moyers website.
But, please, if you care about what is happening to us in whatever country you live in, click on this link and watch the interview.
And if you want to watch the earlier interview that Bill Moyers had with William Black then here it is.
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has been in space for 20 years!
This week, twenty years ago, the HST was launched into orbit. There’s much online if you want to read about it both on WikiPedia and on the Hubble web site so this post is going to offer just two items.
A beautiful picture
Nucleus of Galaxy Centaurus A
And an interesting audio slideshow tribute from the BBC – click here, introduced thus:
Take a look at some of the sights it has seen in that time with Professor Alec Boksenberg from the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge – who was on the European team that helped build Hubble.
By Paul Handover (in awe of what is beyond our skies)
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has questioned whether Greece should have been allowed into the eurozone in the first place.
She said the decision “may not have been scrutinised closely enough”.
Indeed, Angela. Indeed it may not, especially as Goldman Sachs organised some “credit swaps” (now illegal) that helped Greece disguise the size of its deficit.
Perhaps something is lost in translation, but why the “may”? Why can’t people bring themselves to call a spade a spade? The “may” is totally misplaced, isn’t it? So why say it?
Due to my work I am one of the lucky people who has the opportunity to stay for short periods in various cities around the globe, and mostly the Hotels we stay in are the best around, and depending where we are, the flavour is often special.
I remember a stay in the Hilton Amsterdam where John Lennon had stayed, and had a week in bed to “Give Peace a Chance”, but a recent stay in the Marriott Eastside Hotel, New York caught my eye.
Georgia O'Keefe, 1918 photograph by Alfred Stieglitz
Georgia O`Keeffe lived here for 10 years!
I remember, she was the lady who painted the large scale flowers, and in particular “The Petunia”, and when she painted that particular piece, she was living in a suite on the 32nd floor of the very hotel I was staying in.
Georgia O`Keeffe was born in 1887 in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. She studied art in Chicago, and New York, and became an Art Teacher at Columbia College, South Carolina.
One of her friends had shown some of her works to Alfred Stieglitz the photographer. She came to New York, and there the two eventually married, and moved later into the Shelton Hotel, Lexington Avenue, which is now called the Marriott Hotel, Eastside.
The Petunia picture was painted in 1924, and was one of a large number of her works that were exhibited in 1925.
Her husband Alfred Steiglitz died in 1946, after which she moved to an isolated ranch in New Mexico, but she continued to produce great works. Paintings of Desert Cliffs, Animal Bones, and Flowers are among the worlds most admired works of art, and she continued to draw, paint and sculpt until her death in 1986, aged 98.
Petunia - 1925
I rather liked a comment she made at the age of 90.
“Success takes more than talent. It takes a kind of nerve.”
Author Update – the Learning from Dogs author team are delighted to welcome Elliot to their ranks.
On April 1st I set the scene for the essays that I wanted to write for Learning from Dogs as follows:
I often ask myself just how effective the modern US schooling system is as a tool of education, and whether or not its costs outweigh its benefits. I hope to have at least a rough answer to this question in the final post of this series.
I intend to examine three topics:
– In what ways does the modern schooling system function as a positive tool for education?
– What costs involved in modern schooling hinder its ability as an educative tool, and even make it a negative influence on students?
– Considering the analyses put forth in the first two posts, do the costs or benefits or this system outweigh the other? On the whole, are school and education complements or antagonists?
The author
On April 15th, I looked at the positive aspects of the American educational system. Now I look at the other side of the coin, so to speak.
Intellectual failure
While in my last post I attempted to put a positive spin on the United States education system, I must here admit that I personally tend to view it in a much more negative light. There are several reasons for this, three of which I will try to elaborate on here.
My first major concern about education in the United States is its lack of critical thinking skills, which produces students who do not know how to question the “system” for what is truly is, but rather constantly take the context of things presented as fact (the two-party political system is a perfect example of this.)
I am not necessarily arguing that the specific curriculum is being chosen to suit this purpose, though I think this argument could be made (it would, however, require quite a bit of research.)
Rather, consider the required courses – very rarely do you see courses on economics or logic. While some schools offer these as electives, they are almost never required. This is quite sad, as a sound ability to question the established authorities and the nature of the world as a whole requires a strong background in these two fields in particular.
The history of economics is a history of government policies that have failed because of their disregard for this very topic.
The economist Ludwig von Mises wrote that “the unpopularity of economics is the result of its analysis of the effects of privileges. It is impossible to invalidate the economists’ demonstration that all privileges hurt the interests of the rest of the nation or at least a great part of it.”
A second negative aspect of the American education system is what it does to the human mind. It essentially takes the mind and makes it into a factory that is able to take in information and then spit it back out. I think there is a direct relationship between the formerly mentioned lack of classes on logic and economics and this production of human beings who are essentially taught to be cogs in a machine.
Economically, the schooling system can, in this light, be seen as a massive subsidy to corporations, who are handed people already trained in how to listen then do and repeat.
Finally, I must admit that I am skeptical as to the true purpose of compulsory education. I have rarely in history seen it as a tool for true learning, as it seems to tend to rather be a system of control. I see no reason why our school system would be any different.
J T Gatto's book
John Taylor Gatto, a former school teacher and avid critic of mandatory schooling, has written that the purpose of modern schooling is a combination of six different functions:
The adaptive function – Establish a fixed reaction to authority.
The integrating function – People taught to conform are predictable, and are easier to use in a large labor force.
The directive function – School determines each student’s social role.The differentiating function – Children are trained as far as they need to go according to their prescribed social role
The selective function – Tag the unfit with poor grades and disciplinary actions clearly enough that their peers will see them as unsuitable for reproduction, helping along natural selection.
The propaedeutic function – A small fraction is quietly taught how to manage the rest.
I am not sure if I completely agree with Gatto, but he makes some interesting points. In my final article, I’ll attempt to weight the costs against the benefits, and see which comes out on top.
…. is how Gavin Hewitt recently headed up a post on his BBC Europe blog. The headline caught my eye and then when I read the full article it seemed as yet another piece of western civilisation was sliding into chaos. Maybe it’s my age!
Gavin Hewitt
Gavin Hewitt is the BBC’s Europe Editor and as you can see from his bio, Gavin is a very experienced reporter. Here’s how this Eurozone article starts:
Friday [April 23rd, Ed] will be remembered as the day the euro needed rescuing. Sure it is Greece that has asked to be bailed out but it was still a day that the architects of the single currency had never envisaged. For when it came to it, there were no plans to save a euro member in trouble.
You see what I mean about grabbing one’s attention!
In fact the article is so powerful that I am going to run the risk of incurring the wrath of the BBC’s legal department by republishing it in full.
Stating the obvious? So why is the reality so different?
British Chancellor with his famous red budget box. Is he proud of his vast borrowing "requirement"? He seems happy enough .....
Like Greece, Portugal is terribly indebted. Not because dirt-poor Senora Tristeza who sells in the local market decided to vastly overborrow more than she could pay, but because her government did.
Likewise, I did not ask the Labour government of Britain to borrow vastly over our repayment possibilities so that my son will be in hock for decades to come.
What is this absolute rubbish about “the borrowing requirement”? The British Chancellor comes out with this glib statement every budget day as if there was some cosmic compulsion that there should be a “borrowing requirement”.
NO, there shouldn’t …. Nobody FORCES us to borrow money, except perhaps in wartime. No government, and especially the current one, EVER says “No, we can’t afford that, we haven’t got the money and NO, we’re not going to borrow it.”
They just up the “borrowing requirement” automatically to pay for all their pet schemes and shibboleths. It is NOT a “requirement”.
It is a giving way to cowardice and greed, taking the easy way out. It is trying to impress people by the clever way they spend our money. They “require” to borrow because they do not have to courage to say (particularly near to elections): “Sorry people – we just can’t afford X, Y or Z as the money just isn’t there. We must be patient and live within our means.”
But it is time everyone started living within their means.
Individuals have a hard time sometimes, especially those desperate to get a foot on the housing ladder or parents desperate to get their kid into a good school, but the government does not have these excuses. There is NO excuse for building up vast debt. You have to live within your means.
This is so stunningly-obvious I wonder why it has to be said, but vast borrowing has become so endemic people think it is normal. And the levels of borrowing involved here are absurd. What sort of endictment is it of capitalism that several European countries (on the richest continent on the planet!!) are in great danger of going bankrupt?
Or, to put it another way, of defaulting on the debts that they cannot afford to repay? And even if they CAN pay they are also paying staggering amounts of interest, all money down the drain to fat bankers somewhere …..
Borrow to build a new railway because you’ll get the benefits back in emissions and efficiency savings. OK.
But borrow to pay civil-service bonuses and index-linked public (but not private!!) pensions and £60 billion on unelected quangoes and you will never get the money back. Someone will have to earn it, but the milch camel is staggering.
We need wise, courageous and fair-minded government which thinks of the long term. What are our chances of getting it?
Current British Chancellor Alastair Darling has reverted to the original box first used by Gladstone in 1860.
Despite his trials at the ministry Perkins has been promoted!! Now he’s PA to the Chancellor, Gordon Brown. It’s now a few weeks before Budget day in 2005 …
“Perkins – the old red box looks a bit battered.”
“Well, it is 150 years old, Sir. It’s a sort of quaint British tradition.”
“Perhaps, but it’s not up to my modern, dynamic, ‘look to the future’ image. Please arrange to get some new ones made.”
“‘Some’, Sir? It’s only used once a year for a couple of hours.”
“Even so Perkins. We need a couple of spares and I must look the part. Besides, it’s a good opportunity to renew all the boxes used by other ministers. We should get a discount for quantity ….. Is there a problem?”
“Well Sir, the boxes are specially made, with lead and stuff so that if you are at sea and someone tries to get it you can chuck it overboard and it’ll sink.”
“Oh really Perkins! When am I going to be at sea with my budget?”
“No comment, Sir …”
“But we must move with the times, Perkins. What will this all cost?”
“About £400 a box, Sir – and about £60,000 to renew the lot!”
“Well there you go. A bargain.”
“But £60,000, Sir. We are already billions in debt!!
“Exactly. Compared to our existing debt £60,000 is a microscopic fleabite. See to it at once Perkins.”
“Of course, Sir. But are you sure? I could get you something reasonable from Woolies for £25.”
“Woolies, Perkins? What would people think?”
“Well, they might think you were trying to be frugal, Sir!”
Frugal? Frugal? What exactly is that, Perkins? Never come across it before.
Wow, the big picture of the IT world seems to be crumbling with increasing rapidity! Many people are at risk of getting hurt if they continue to hold traditional attitudes.
Plenty of seismic shifts have rocked and reshaped IT in the past. Some big rumblings’ epicenters had origins in an unstoppable technology shift; other fissures had nothing to do with PCs and servers. Consider the recent shocks: the Internet revolution and dotcom bust; Y2K and 9/11; the consumerization of IT; and the unstoppable broadband and mobile explosion.
However, the latest shock–the global financial meltdown–is like the recent 8.8 earthquake that shook Chile and knocked the earth off its axis. And for IT leaders today, it’s important to realize that the aftershocks are still coming.
Thomas Wailgum provides an insightful description of the challenges facing the important operational aspects of IT in many organizations. Many of the symptoms and some of the causes that he describes are undoubtedly true and have been adversely affecting the performance of many people for a long time!
But, who really cares?
I suggest that the people who really care are the people who are trying to serve the customers of the business. Consequently they will decide what they do and how they do it, including what services and products they use, including those that involve IT (almost all of them these days).
It seems to me interesting to describe this, as he has done, from the perspective of IT and IT people (of whom I am also, broadly, one!) .. but it is only interesting to IT people.
The people who require services are getting them from wherever they can and wherever they like and will continue, increasingly, to do so.
Many of the points that he makes are valid and accurate, including his list of “recent shocks”. Two of those struck me as particularly poignant and relevant.
One is “the unstoppable broadband and mobile explosion”, which seems to be a strange way to describe it. My reading of this is that IT people would like to “stop” it; but why? The availability of communication services with increasing bandwidth and location-independence is enabling greater sharing of information and understanding; many people, especially those in the “third world”, are benefitting enormously from this. I hope that I have understood his meaning incorrectly because, surely, the task of people who understand IT is to help others to take full advantage of the opportunities, not to try to stop them!
The other is “the consumerization of IT”, which is one way of looking at it but, again, seems to carry a subtextual bias. I detect a sense that this is seen to be the use, in business applications, of lower quality facilities intended for individuals who do not know the implications. There is some truth in this, but this has been a trend for decades and, so far, the roof has not fallen in! I suggest that this is misunderstanding of the bigger picture and, in a sense, does not go far enough
This is not simply consumerization, this is the commoditization of IT. This happens in every industry as bespoke products become more generally available, the nature of the competition changes. What was custom becomes standard and the action moves up a layer!
Much of Thomas Wailgum’s account of the situation is accurate and, potentially, very useful; but, by viewing it from the perspective of the providers of IT services rather than that of the consumers of IT services, the nature of the solutions seems to be pointing in the wrong direction!
Learning from Dogs 