Common Sense, Uncommon Wisdom

Apologies

2008-05-07T15:59:00.001-07:00

I offer my sincerest apologies for not posting as regularly lately as I have been able to previously. However, for your wait, I am releasing a paper which I have been writing for recent college courses geared towards a degree in finance.

The paper describes the seven fundamental tools that can be used to determine movement in a stock--one which makes money. I am using it as a proof of concept for a program that makes investing accessible by any investor, extremely, and very foolproof.

The paper is in Adobe's Acrobat formatter. The free Adobe Reader or compatible software is required to read the software.

Download the paper here!

Please Take My Survey

2008-05-03T12:17:00.001-07:00

As part of a required paper I must write for my forthcoming degree in Finance, I am needing to have a survey completed.

Please take a few moments to fill out my survey.

Please take my online survey here!

Nature or Nurture?

2008-05-02T09:43:00.000-07:00

The age-old question: What affects a person’s behavior more: Nature—a person’s genes and other physically intrinsic characteristics; or Nurture—the environment with which a person interacts? While the general population loves to put a “this or that” perspective on things of this sort, I have long believed that it is, in fact, a combination of the two. Science has now vindicated that position.

Daniel Nettle, Reader in Psychology in the Centre for Behaviour and Evolution, Newcastle University, offers some research presented in the London Times:

“Today, personality researchers almost uniformly agree that the things that make you the way you are consist of a combination of your genes, your peers and the idiosyncratic, chance experiences that befall you in childhood and adulthood. Your parents influence your relationship with them – loving or contentious, conflicted or close – but not your “personality”, that package of traits we label extroverted or shy, bitter or friendly, hostile or warm, gloomy or optimistic. Your genes, not your parents, are the reason you think that parachuting out of planes is fun, or, conversely, that you feel sick to the stomach at the mere idea of doing such a crazy thing voluntarily. You can’t do much about your personality, though you can tweak it a bit with cognitive therapy.”

The Lipstick Economy

2008-05-01T20:42:00.001-07:00

Interesting story determining the measure of how well or how poorly the economy is doing, courtesy the reporters from the New York Times.

Not only is the lipstick theory plausible, “it’s perfectly consistent with all kinds of economic theory,” said Richard DeKaser, the chief economist with National City Corporation, a financial holding company and bank in Cleveland.

Emotions, On the Face of It

2008-04-26T22:17:00.000-07:00

When I was in high school my biology teacher said, very early on in the class, that the human face can give away what a person is feeling--no matter how well we can control our body language, our face can show our emotional state at any one time.

Well, recent research from Canada proves my former Biology teacher correct.

From the Reuters article:

Researchers at Dalhousie University's Forensic Psychology Lab in Halifax conducted the first detailed study on the secrets revealed when people put on a false face or inhibit various emotions, and found their faces told the truth.

Maximizing Utility and the Brain: Cash or Status?

2008-04-26T21:05:00.000-07:00

Scientific American has an article regarding a study of the brain that indicates the brain places a high value on money, but a higher value on social status. From the article:

"Our study shows that both behaviorally and in the brain, people place an importance on social status," says Caroline Zink, a postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Md., and co-author of one of studies. "It's hugely influential even [when we're not] in direct competition with someone else."

The Power of the Banana

2008-04-20T12:22:00.000-07:00

Excellent article over at Salon.com regarding the power of the banana.

Economics and the Common Man

2008-04-20T10:19:00.000-07:00

Have you ever seen those polls where John Q. Public is asked about questions of a general economic nature? How many of them have, at the very least, a basic understanding of economics?

Yeah, me too; I think such an exercise is akin to asking a medical doctor about auto repair, an auto repair technician about quantum physics, or a particle physicist about literature: It makes about as much sense as, well, insert a colorful metaphor here.

Before Warren Buffet was interviewed that one Monday morning on CNBC and said that we practically have a recession, though we may not be in one technically, many people can only say as much when they’re asked about the “R-word.” In addition, I’ve noticed that the public tends to insert more emotion into their economic analysis than such things warrant.

Let me say this first: There is room for emotion in economics. When, however, a person’s opinion regarding the nation’s current economic state is based more on emotion than well-founded rational thought. Henceforth, my point: John Q. and Jane Public don’t know enough of a darned thing about economics to offer their opinion; at least not enough for it to be meaningful. In the spirit of that I’m going to point out a couple of economic concepts that might help to alleviate the problem.

Gross Domestic Product, otherwise GDP, once taught as Gross National Product, or GNP, is the number that sums all of the products and services rendered in the United States (or any country, for that matter). Right now GDP is around $13 Trillion or so, give or take a few hundred billion dollars. GDP is calculated as a combination of many things:

GDP = consumption + gross investment + government spending + (exports − imports)

While there are several nuances associated with each variable, there are a few things to point out.

· Consumption is the largest driver of the economy; essentially that is all of the dollars that you and I spend.

· Investment is nearly as powerful as consumption

· Government spending is relatively valued at one quarter the effect of investment spending.

This illustrates exactly the reason why it would be great for government to curtail spending, lower taxes, and help the marketplace—government spending doesn’t do nearly enough for the economy, lowering taxes allows for individuals to have the option to save or consume more (marginal propensity to save or marginal propensity to consume, respectively) –driving consumption and, perhaps, helping investments.

This makes sense to me, but I consider myself a fiscal conservative.

There will be the contingent out there that says that paying taxes is good because it funds essential services that the government must supply to people, and there’s the whole debate about which rights one has in regards to healthcare and such—that is not within the scope of this article—but if government were forced to act like business in their daily management then we would be able to get a lot more value from our investment in government than not. Put another way, we allow government to spend too much and, I think everyone can agree, that we get too little from it. Wasteful government spending becomes something four times as bad when you have this understanding.

So, in an ideal world there is a happy medium between extreme government spending and extreme tax breaks for everyone. We don’t live in an ideal world, however, and economics works in cycles. The best thing to remember is the economy will go up most of the time, but will go down every now and again. Panic is not something that needs to happen when it goes down. Markets correct, stocks fluctuate, and indexes do the same. It’s nothing to worry about.

Why do I say this? I say this largely because of my believe that our most recent economic downturn in 2008 has been worse than it needed to be because people tend to overreact to what they feel are negative changing market conditions. If they understood the underlying dynamics of the market and the philosophy that “this, too, shall pass,” it wouldn’t have been as bad as it was.

My tone about “was?” There are multiple indicators that are pointing towards the worst of the current downturn being over, and us being on our way back up. The recent rallies in the stock market, the change in CPI and labor numbers all point towards an increasing economy.

So, in light of whatever the market is doing, irrationality rarely does the market good in the long run. In fact, if it did well with it then we wouldn’t have had the downturn in the market which we have had.

All That Lies Between

2008-04-19T01:58:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time there was a man named Schrodinger and he had a cat. In his own words:

“One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.

It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a "blurred model" for representing reality. In itself it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.”

Meant to be a thought experiment about quantum physics: “When does a quantum system stop existing as a mixture of states and become one or the other? (More technically, when does the actual quantum state stop being a linear combination of states, each of which resemble different classical states, and instead begin to have a unique classical description?)”

A question that can be derived from this and/or the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is one of observation: What happens to a situation once it is observed. The short answer is that the mere act of observing something changes everything.

When I first started using computers in a serious sense, my school’s library had a 2400 baud modem which could connect to various bulletin board services, BBSs, which one could use for pen pal-style rudimentary communication. In the early 90s this is one of the things which I found myself doing. Though I did not know it, I was networking in my early teen years. I began a lengthy correspondence with a Lutheran pastor from somewhere in Michigan or Wisconsin, I believe (the actual location escapes me), through which we began discussing quantum physics. He posed the ageless rhetorical question to me: If a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound? I always like bringing this question up as an introduction to the general strangeness of quantum physics. The answer is that if there is no one to perceive—observe—the tree, then it is not there: It does not exist. If no one is there to observe the forest, it does not exist. Therefore, if there is no one able to perceive the action of the tree falling, it does not fall because it does not exist.

It took me some time to reconcile this notion, but eventually came to terms with it. Over time I came to find the universal truth in this notion that anything and everything changes with observation. In our classical world which we can see, feel, taste, touch, and hear on a daily basis we can express the question of “have we observed that?” as a binary function—yes or no, or “1” or “0,” the fundamental essence of a “bit,” or binary digit. Does my cat exist? Yes! (“1”). Is the moon out tonight? No! (“0”). What about if you can’t answer these questions? Herein lies what makes quantum physics so creepy to many. The notion of Schrodinger’s Cat dictates that while something hasn’t been observed it can exist in a state of “superposition,” that is a position that is not necessarily natural and exists outside of a “0” or a “1,” or yes or no.

If you don’t know about something then it exists in an odd place…one that is not easily definable; as a side-note, however, this is how the concept of quantum supercomputing works, in a sense: This sort of theoretical, almost-real device stores bits of ones and zeros in superpositions instead of in absolute states. Because of this it can calculate much faster because it is not constrained by the classic laws posed by Newton in the mechanical world, and computes things much faster than Intel or AMD could muster with their fastest processors.

How can we make this apply to our everyday lives? Have you ever feared something that was “just around the corner,” or otherwise out there in a place in your world that might be slightly unknown enough to you as to cause you to feel things that might be irrational? Fear of something, someone, or some other type of emotion of an event happening which has a low probability or likelihood of actually happening once it is observed? The superposition concept that I discussed earlier wherein any number of all possible states exist, but it isn’t necessarily true or false, is where irrational thought and feeling resides—in a place that even likes to confuse the brightest minds of the 20^TH Century deriving the basis for modern science.

Don’t let your fear, depression, anxiety, or other unproductive thoughts or feelings get the best of you. In the end you will find that your emotions or irrational thoughts are skewing the actual values of the situation which you are otherwise making more out of than you should: There is no need to kill the cat unnecessarily!

Hallmark

2008-04-17T16:38:00.000-07:00

Approximately 210 visits per month! Yay!

Monkey Mondays: Mars Monkey!

2008-04-14T17:24:00.000-07:00

Russia testing monkeys to send them to Mars!

Read all about it here!

The Surreality of the Real

2008-04-12T00:45:00.001-07:00

“We spotted the ocean at the head of the trail,
Where are we goin’, so far away?
Someone told me that this is the place,
Where everything’s better, where everything’s safe.”
—Toad the Wet Sprocket, “Walk on the Ocean”

We all find ourselves doing it: Our mind sets a stage for a place and we paint a mental picture about what we think a place that we have not yet been is going to look, feel, and smell like. The color of the ground, the heat emanating from the sun, the taste of the wind, and the feel of the culture all fill in a “paint by the numbers” portrait in your head. What is it like, though, when you finally see that which you’ve been imagining for all those years?

I did much of my substantive growing up on a farm just a mile south of the North Dakota-South Dakota border around the small communities of southwest North Dakota. There, the hills tend to gently roll with the occasional butte or larger hill; vegetation greens in the warmer months and browns in the colder ones. With the exception of a handful of state highway traversing through the county seats, smaller paved “farm to market” roads and less significant graveled stretches weave across the region along section lines and there can generally be the classic upper-Midwest town (a bar, a church, and a gas station) every 13 miles along the routes that mirror the railroads. Much like the character of Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars movie knew that there was something else out in the galaxy for him, I left the farmstead to spread my wings and see the world.

Though the last decade has taken me halfway around the world and back—I have seen the Atlantic Ocean from Amsterdam, and the Pacific Ocean from Washington State—I have never been to California or the southwestern United States. So, recently, I decided to take that step. Taking the better part of a week vacation from work, a trail was made towards the border with Mexico where I waved back at the “waving cacti,” saw the Border Patrol, well, patrolling, the beaches of San Diego, and the lights of Las Vegas.

While your mind paints pictures of places where you have not yet been, I have found that rarely the mind’s eye can ready you for the experience of being someplace new. Living in the high desert of Colorado, it tends to be very dry here: That was contrasted with the humid wind blowing in off the Pacific. I grew up in small towns where the lights let out a gentle glow in the winter sky; contrasted with the constant stream of headlights on a Friday night traveling into Las Vegas—and the daytime-at-night conditions of that city. The rolling hills of green contrasted with the rolling hills of sand of southeast California, between Yuma, Arizona, and Calexico, California, was absolutely something else.

What is the most surprising of all, though, is what I surmised about the people along the route of the trip. Sure, a person speculates that different geographies have varying cultures to an extent, but what a person might not realize is that, regardless of culture, everyone is simply trying to make their way in this world. While culture might dictate myriad ways of going about that, we can forget that our fellow person is merely trying to make it through this day onto the next. Some have small goals, some have larger schemes, and everyone has an agenda—and sometimes that agenda is just to make it to the next day, alive and breathing.

This inalienable truth is coupled with what I refer to as the “Tapestry of the World.” Having been as many places as I have, and having seen as many things as I have, I’ve come to realize that every single place on the planet is unique in its own right, while still retaining a relationship with everyplace else. For instance, I can be driving in some part of Colorado and it will remind me of the flat back roads traversing somewhere between Grand Forks and Minot, ND. Every now and again when I’m driving along I capture a glimpse of something which offers me déjà vu. The farthest place from it can remind you of home, and someplace near to your home can seem very alien at times. This is one of the beauties of the world in which we live.

I’ve mentioned times before that key traits of leaders are that they understand that diversity leads to productivity, better solutions, and such and that a heightened level of awareness can make or break a leader. With this being said, I highly recommend that if you develop the wanderlust that I tend to have every year once the weather gets warmer that you go out and explore your world—be it just a few miles away or a few hundred miles away—there is almost always someplace which we’ve not been within reaching distance.

If you need to ask why you should go over that hill on the horizon, you can answer to yourself “because it is there.” Traveling, especially in this case, works very well as a metaphor for life—because where the surreal meets the real, our world becomes that much more.

Friday Funny: Fight Club

2008-04-10T23:44:00.000-07:00

Every now and then something that really strikes me as profoundly humorous strikes me:

"Fight Club" Busted at Local High School

What is so funny about it? "The first rule of fight club is that you don't talk about Fight Club."

And the second rule?

"The second rule of Fight Club is that you don't talk about Fight Club!"

Evidently, they talked. Kids, these days...

World Fastest Processor

2008-04-10T21:38:00.000-07:00

Science keeps chugging along. When I was in high school I recall one of my teachers saying that the progression of science isn't an arithmetic progression; instead, it is a geometric progression. In other words, it isn't linear in the 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 fashion, instead it is 1 squared (1^2) to 2 squared (2^2) to 3 squared (3^2), so on and so forth.

And now, one of my favorite research operations in the world has developed the fastest processor in the world. Watch for the part in the block quote to see just how fast this thing is:

"The 5-billion-instructions-per second Power6 processor from IBM would beat such rivals as the 3.73 gigahertz Pentium Extreme and the 2.4 gigahertz UltraSparc T2 from Sun. 'It's hard to make the average person understand just how fast this is,' said IBM Chief Technology Officer Bernard Meyerson, offering an example meant to explain his company's baby that still leaves the listener awed with the speediness of the two laggards. 'Hold your index finger out in front of your face,' Meyerson said in a telephone interview from IBM headquarters in New York. 'In less time than it would take a beam of light to travel from your knuckle to your fingertip, the new IBM chip would complete one task and start looking for the next, he said.'"

Original IBM text here.

News article here.

There is Nothing Worse in Life than Being Ordinary

2008-04-07T20:22:00.001-07:00

I watched, again, an interesting piece of cinematic work, “American Beauty.” Kevin Spacey plays a man telling the tale of him and his family near the end of his life. A tapestry of events weaves itself together to a conclusion which brings about revelations in the lives of everyone involved. During the arc which Mena Suvari’s character makes from point A to point B, she says that “there is nothing worse in life than being ordinary.” I got to thinking about this.

There is a bumper sticker out there that reads that “well-behaved women often make history;” the intent of which is such that the people—in this case, those of the female variety—who stand out are the ones that people remember, that are written about in the history books. It means that you want to, whether you are a man or a woman, should want to make history and leave your mark upon the earth in a way that sets yourself apart from others. As it is oft-said, if you take the road everyone else takes, you end up where everyone else does—instead, if you take the road less traveled you will supposedly do much better.

Let us look at this through the eyes of an economist: The “total cost of ownership” perspective. For everything there is a cost to be paid. The questions resulting from this notion bring a person to ponder what the cost to be paid is, what are the set of results to be had, and so on and so forth. Think of it this way: What is the cost of expending some capital—be that physically, mentally, emotionally, or financially—in the current time and let the fruits of this investment compound over the years…or pay the cost of not even trying and regretting that decision down the road. A wise judge once mentioned, as I paraphrase it: “The cost of utilizing discipline on a daily basis far outweighs the cost of not doing so.”

While ordinary is fine with some people, this blog is not of the ordinary. Throughout history several a notable figure have confronted a place in their life in which they needed to choose to be ordinary or to strive towards greatness. You have the choice to do so, and you will never know quite what it is like until you are there.

In closing a thought by one of the most famous writers of all time, William Shakespeare; his perspective: “Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”

A Tribute to Charlton Heston

2008-04-07T17:37:00.001-07:00

A man who was larger than life has, unfortunately, passed.

As a tribute to him, a video depicting his position on climate change.

Life Economics

2008-03-28T00:15:00.001-07:00

Home economics is a dying discipline. When I went through school the classroom existed, but not the corresponding class. Much like civics it is being relegated to a niche of society in such a manner that it is being forgotten…at a price.

For years I have lived by the philosophy that I manage my life like I manage a business. On the surface it may seem cold, perhaps even callous—but that isn’t necessarily the case at all. In fact, improved efficiency and effectiveness makes for a better life. A few examples:

1. The Budget. Face it—you stand to get rich if you suddenly run into a large sum of money, but the chances of that happening aren’t such that you should count on it. Instead, the world of finance stresses the time value of money and leveraging your current assets. Your income is the best wealth-building tool which you have and by reducing your debt obligations you effectively increase the power of your income to produce wealth. You do this most efficiently by producing a budget and watching and managing every dollar that flows through your household. By taking this approach you can “make every dollar scream.” What to do after you get to the point where your debt is paid off and you have extra money lying around? Invest!

2. Buy Like a Business. Once upon a time we’re all financially struggling people—whether that be as a poor college student or in a period of personal financial contraction—but we’re not in that position forever. It is rarely a static condition, however, and we progress onto better financial times. At this point in time we can move from buying-to-survive towards purchasing-to-thrive. We learn to buy in bulk—and start to think like an accountant. Price items on a per-unit basis, for instance. When I worked in a grocery store, once upon a time, I noticed that the tags that accompanied stock on the shelves would always have a “price per ounce” or related entry on the tag. By making some observations a person notices where the “sweet spot” is for purchase of a particular item: To buy the smaller box of cereal or the larger, “value-sized?” The larger the package—think bulk— usually the better value per unit. Take this concept one step further and develop a product mix of products that are economical and meet your personal utility or that of your family. For instance—I purchased the specific Rubbermaid containers meant for cereal and have no problems with purchasing the “bag cereals” which are often very close to the recipe of the corresponding name brand “box cereals.” On the other hand, I am very picky about the hot dogs which I purchase.

Another step in which to take this notion relies upon you realizing that sometimes you pay more in up-front costs to save money across the lifespan of a particular item; a concept which accountants like to refer to as “total cost of ownership.” A good example is the typical inkjet printer: Cheap and comes with some ink; it may or may not come with a USB cable, and certainly comes with a notorious “power brick.” Sure, you may spend $30 on the machine, but you will likely end up purchasing a lot of ink cartridges—just black and color, if you’re lucky—over the course of your time with the printer. On top of this these ink cartridges are fickle in such a way that the printheads can easily become non-working if they aren’t treated right or used correctly. Although they can have great resolution—past 1200x1200 dots per inch—they do so by spitting small ink blobs onto the paper; this makes for a very dirty process. By contrast—if you can do without resolutions higher than 1200x1200 dpi then a laser (or LED) printer is for you. They are much cleaner, have longer lives, and are generally more efficient. Of course, there are makes and models that are better or worse than others, but a little research or stop by your local printer service shop will give you a leg up.

One project which I’m planning is to replace my cans-of-soda drinking ways with a fountain soda machine. Although the initial costs are high (several hundred dollars for the initial setup), the cost of consumables—the soda syrup itself—can be less than half the cost of a serving of its canned alternative.

While this is merely the tip of the iceberg, it is a starting point for to get you to thinking about how you, too, could make your life better!

Two Weeks is Too Long

2008-03-26T19:53:00.000-07:00

Too weeks is too long for a new post. More this weekend, but in the meantime proof that a different perspective can increase your effectiveness or efficiency by...a single move.

Taken from Slashdot.org:

"A scrambled Rubik's cube can be solved in just 25 moves, regardless of the starting configuration. Tomas Rosicki, a Stanford-trained mathematician, has proven the new limit (down from 26 which was proved last year) using a neat piece of computer science. Rather than study individual moves, he's used the symmetry of the cube to study its transformations in sets. This allows him to separate the "cube space" into 2 billion sets each containing 20 billion elements. He then shows that a large number of these sets are essentially equivalent to other sets and so can be ignored. Even then, to crunch through the remaining sets, he needed a workstation with 8GB of memory and around 1500 hours of time on a Q6600 CPU running at 1.6GHz. Next up, 24 moves."

Zen and the Art of Server Maintenance

2008-03-17T16:18:00.000-07:00

There was no regular blog post for this weekend, largely because I spent much time re-vamping my home network to include a special version of Windows Server 2003 quickly becoming adopted by the market as Windows Home Server. It’s a great thing, and as an early adopter once I got through paying the premium in the form of a learning curve with adding a degree of magnitude to the sophistication of my home network it had been 13 hours between Friday evening and through the first cartoon on Saturday morning. The rest of the time was spent configuring, tweaking, organizing the hardware, and the like. If what they say about adversity building character, then I can add some.

The situation reminded me of something that a gentleman that came into the printer-computer-office equipment repair shop I work at 40 hours a week said: “Troubleshooting is the epitome of understanding a discipline.” I’m not the best when it comes to printers and computers, sure, but I guess I’m better than 97 percent of the general public—I can take apart most any Hewlett-Packard printer, certainly, usually fumble my way through most other printer (certainly, with a service manual at my disposal), can make many a piece of computer hardware bow to my whim, and do quite a number with a multitude of a piece of software.

Information Technology—computers and the sort—just happens to be how I earn the bulk of my living right now. I don’t consider it my best skill set, or much more than a hobby. Still, I am challenged with it on a daily basis, some days better than others, and it helps to keep my mechanical and troubleshooting skills sharpened.

Discussion: Economics of Technology Early Adoption

2008-03-08T22:23:00.000-08:00

An interesting discussion over at Slashdot regarding the premium that people pay for being early adopters of technology. The discussion is done through the filter of the HD-DVD format which was recently declared dead; the casualty of the infamous "next generation format wars" between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.

They Ought to Call Me Hercules

2008-03-08T17:34:00.001-08:00

Over a cold slice of coconut cream pie and warm conversation recently a good friend of mine paraphrased an old adage that, probably, most of us have heard: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” Originally a Nietzsche quote it has been adapted to fit a plethora of situations from the warrior to the clerk that works in the local convenience store 40 hours each week: It has become a modern-day ethos of the person just trying to make it through, longing for something better as a sum result of their experiences.

The more strengthening experiences which they have to make it through, the better that it will make them: Someday these situations will make them Hercules-like.

So it stands to reason: Why do bad things happen to good people, vice versa, and other permutations of either in between. The short answer: Free will.

The longer answer: Start with a leaf that falls from far atop a high tree. Physics can tell us the individual forces affecting it—wind resistance, gravity, acceleration due to gravity, various factors of aerodynamics, and wind velocity and direction. It cannot, however, tell us where the leaf is going to land. Just as the physicist which can describe what is happening to the leaf has only a finite perspective of the universe ahead of him or her, each of us lack anything more than the finite perspective we allow ourselves.

A good way to reach this understanding is to first understand what the physicist does about the falling leaf: Understand the specific ways we are interacting with the world around us and how the world is interacting with us on a daily basis. Learn the general principles which guide you forward and figure out how you can make each better.

When we worked together at one of the major wireless companies in resolutions the same friend that I mention above taught me that problems a person has with the outside world usually originate from inside that person. In other words, if you are having problems with your spouse it is best if you look inside yourself before placing blame with them.

Even though animals have what resembles free will, the human sense of free will, combined with our problem solving skills and how the greater mix of those traits which make us human all falls into line making us, as humans, special. As humans we can choose. We are not programmed for any specific behavior, lest that which we have or allowed ourselves with which to be programmed. We are driven on a daily basis because we find specific utility in them. This utility manifests itself as pain, pleasure, morality, or one of many other things. Because we have the choice in deciding the value which our behaviors have, it is meaningful. On the other hand, if we were simply programmed to do something, lacking the choice to do it, the meaning that it would otherwise have is lost. You have the choice to do good things; you have the choice to do evil things—whichever path you choose then has all the more significance to you…and, through you, it has increased significance to the world around you.

As every child learns, however, each choice has consequences—either positive or negative. Let’s go back to the leaf for a moment: Even though it doesn’t have free will, it has a path from the top of the tree to the ground below it, through the space between the two. Every location through which it passes, each moment which it passes through that location, there are consequences. Since leaves are responsible for photosynthesis on the tree, the loss of a leaf in the community of leaves removes from the productivity of the tree for survival; the path of the leaf towards the ground might otherwise impede others in its path; where it lands on the ground might do the same, worse, or better. Just as physics teaches us the relationship between us and the energy which flows around us, it also teaches us the concept of the “world line” such that each particle—or, each person—has a path that it makes through the world. These paths interact with the paths of those in our immediate vicinity and as a component of the greater whole.

People tend to have only a finite perspective of the world around them, but without higher education or life experience tend to lack a strategic perspective; not only inasmuch as how their actions comprise the consequences of the greater whole, but also how they have or may become consequential casualties of the greater whole instead.

The reconciliation between our immediate lives and the grand quality of the greater community of humankind may seem mind-boggling, but you just need to remember that, from an economic perspective, you only need to participate to the capacity which you are able: Good deeds done on a daily basis will not only have spillover effects on the world around you, what are otherwise known as the “ripple effect,” and help to add value to the greater community.

In closing I’d like to end with a story that comes from a great movie from the mid-1990s: Phenomenon. In the movie the character played by John Travolta tells a story of a grove of trees in Colorado which were originally thought to be just a bunch of trees; in reality they were found to share a common root system which helped the grove thrive. As the modern-day human civilization we share a common root system, tempered by our freedom of choice: As parts of the entire grove of individuals, our actions have consequence to the greater community, just as the greater community affects us as individuals. If we want to make things right with the greater whole we start from within and make ourselves a more valuable part of the whole.

Monkey Mondays: Monkeys and Economics

2008-03-02T14:39:00.000-08:00

Scientists examine the circumstances under which chimpanzees, our closest relatives, will exchange one inherently valuable commodity (an apple slice) for another (a grape), which is what early humans must have somehow learned to do. The researchers found that chimpanzees often did not spontaneously barter food items, but needed to be trained to engage in commodity barter.

Why Don't Chimpanzees Like To Barter Food?

Perspective of the Giants: Warren Buffett

2008-03-02T12:23:00.000-08:00

The name of the blog is Underground Value; and they have a great quote from second-richest-man Warren Buffett as part of an interview with him.

The difference between potential and output comes from human qualities. You can make a list of the qualities you admire and those you despise. To turn the tables, think if this is the way I react to the qualities on the list, which is the way the world will react to me. You can learn to turn on those qualities you want and turn off those qualities you wish to avoid. The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. You can’t change at 60; the time to look at that list is now.

The Power of the Down Market

2008-02-29T22:11:00.000-08:00

Adam Smith, often dubbed the father of economics, is best known for his magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations. What is lesser-known about his writings, though, is what he wrote about prior to Wealth; The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Between these two works it can be argued that Smith was trying to describe the morality of humankind by superimposing economic theories onto it. Since 1776 social science has come a long way in understanding much of the behaviors of individuals: And we have finally come to the point in human history where we can recognize that markets, such as the stock market, and human behavior have many parallels—and form a symbiotic relationship with one another.

Take, for instance, the current behavior of the stock markets. Right now, as I look at the Dow Jones Industrial Average, I see that it is down 315 points; Standard & Poor’s 500 Index is down 37 points itself. When many people look at the numbers which we have been seeing in the stock markets lately they fear a word that is often brought up in the evening news, “recession.” Words like “inflation,” “stagflation,” and such are used. Perhaps some people would either categorize the behavior of the markets as overly complex, perhaps even irrational.

Just as people require corrections, controls in their behavior, to move forward and progress, the stock market requires the same. Just as risk is necessary to be in any system in which there is reward, so must there be correction. These corrections are a reflection of human nature inasmuch as people exhibit both rational and irrational components in behaviors. In his column in Forbes magazine, Paul Johnson writes an excellent column depicting the mechanics behind what is happening in the stock market right now and an impetus that helped to cause it. Pointedly:

“All the same, markets are determined by moral strengths and weaknesses, and it is useful to identify what those are at each major episode. The state of the present market is the consequence of undue patience combined with excessive greed.”

He continues to weave the intricate tapestry of morality, impatience, greed, and how they all tie into one another and become progress. The theme of rational components to seemingly irrational things, and how the up and down sides of each turn into our tomorrow, better than our today.

Mr. Johnson has some very brilliant insights.

No matter what we do, we exist as components of a much larger system: As people, we form communities; as workers at firm or a shop we put together a product, provide a service, or otherwise add value to something. Because we are part of something, and everything changes, we will eventually need to cope with change. Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once wrote about life that it “is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them - that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”

Management theory dictates that we survey those things around us and formulate plans to manage them and control systems to put situations back where they need to be should they fall outside of the tolerances which we set for them—this is something business students are usually taught in their first semester of school. However, anyone who has had management experience understands that no good plan survives combat intact and that no amount of control systems will hedge against change happening. There is nothing that can stop the ebb and flow of life of causing the unexpected to happen.

We learn to accept change. Better yet, we learn to balance the ebbs and move with the flows of what life throws at us. In a market that is “up” we live the good life and become richer in as many ways possible; in “down” markets we learn also how to accept it and learn ways to become richer. Necessity is the impetus for innovation, and difficult times offer us the opportunity to shine. In other words, accepting change is good, but learning how to use it to propel you forward is best.

Nothing Risked…

2008-02-22T13:50:00.000-08:00

I recently had a brief conversation about risk with a client and friend of mine that leads the Information Technology Department for a nearby Ritz Carlton. One of the sum results of that conversation was that there are two kinds of risk: The stupid kind and the smart kind. There are countless individuals in the world who behave in such a way that they don’t factor risk much into their actions and behaviors. There are, however, those who calculate risks into their activities and understand the dynamics of this powerful thing.

Drive somewhere in the town or city in which you live. I will bet that the larger the municipality in which you live, the worse the drivers are: It appears that they use minimal, if any judgment. Maybe they have a cell phone to their ears; maybe they are exhibiting poor driving skills; maybe it is a combination of factors. At any rate, professional drivers are often taught the art of “defensive driving” which dictates that you, as a driver out on the roadways, must drive with the anticipation that someone is going to use poor judgment and that you must be able to drive in such a way as to be proactive or react accordingly to these drivers whom have increasing amounts of risk factors piling up on them.

I’ve once heard it said, or read it on a bumper sticker, that life is difficult; more so if you’re stupid. Stupidity has often been equated to ignorance. Think of the driver while you are out and about that is ignorant of the traffic laws, or (worse yet) ignorant of those around him or her. Those who aren’t aware of risk often overlook the power that it has in their lives and the world around them. Perhaps I could even go as far as saying that they are more apt to be “victimized” than the alternative.

I’ve often equated risk management and the world of insurance as one that assigns numerical values to behaviors and calls these information sets “risk factors.” For example, take a driver who fails to use their blinker all the time. This driver has a higher probability of getting into a collision with another driver by not notifying those around them as to their intentions on the roadways. If they also fail to use their mirrors properly, the earlier risk factor adds to this new risk factor. Additional factors only add to the mess. While one can easily apply this to any part of life, not just driving, there are ways to minimize your exposure to such risk factors.

For a few years I lived in the Rapid City, SD area. Just as the schools were heavy into “character counts” campaigns with their students, a local television station ran a series of advertisements much to the same effect geared towards adult audiences. One of these public service messages included a judge discussing the merits of discipline. Essentially the message was that even just a daily investment in self-discipline works wonders for hedging against. If you are self-disciplined enough that you can take a walk or do another sort of moderate exercise you decrease risk factors that would otherwise influence you becoming obese, becoming depressed, getting diabetes, or otherwise becoming physically or mentally unhealthy. Think of the things that you could do less of or do more of on a daily basis that would make your life better, increase your value, or otherwise might make you or those around you better.

With that being said, there is absolutely no way to mitigate all risk involved with something. Just as the stock market has something called systemic risk that is inherent to a particular industry or to the entire market. Whenever there is the potential for gain or reward, there is always risk. In fact, since there is always risk involved any time there is reward or gain possible, it has been argued that gain and reward are possible because there is risk involved.

This is why the best risk is that which is of the calculated variety: This is why the stock markets will always correct itself, will always (eventually) increase in value, and why most of us will realize gains to ourselves or our lifestyles over a long enough timeline and given enough effort. If we are able to learn how to calculate risk in our lives we can then move our lives from being at the unsophisticated level of the haphazard risk-taker into being the sophisticated, calculated risk-taker and, along with it, move our lives along a more successful avenue.

Self-Capitalization, Self-Actualization

2008-02-16T20:30:00.001-08:00

Once upon a time most, if not every, child is told that they “can do anything.” Each of us, from a young age, is instilled with the notion that our dreams are the only limits that we have. Over the course of my years I have seen so many people with this potential to be something more. So many times have I seen so many people that have been referred to as “bright,” “intelligent,” or even “brilliant,” but what sets them apart from those that exceed the mere “brilliant” mark or otherwise find a way with which to show for such talent, drive, or another singular trait?

These traits, such as drive, intelligence, or other talents…how many people do you know that have them, but they exist in a purist form inasmuch as they are in a vacuum: Only as a talent held by the person, but serving little purpose outside the immediate vicinity of the person possessing it?

What I have come to discern is that it is often difficult for a person to capitalize on their talents and their skills. Often we find a skill existing in our “mental toolbox” which is what the job market requires and sell it to an employer for a paycheck that gets us by. Perhaps that skill is something that falls towards the more prominent end of our skill sets, and perhaps it is something more ancillary; regardless, so many people end up selling this skill, alongside their time, to an employer for less than what they perceive that worth to be. And, aside from the clear-cut illustration above, the emotions that we have—such as fear, uncertainty, and doubt, often obfuscate the reality of things. No matter how talented we are, no matter how strong that skill set of ours really is, those things which we feel will often get in the way, forcing us to value our competence for more or less than it actually is.

In physics there is a term called escape velocity. In order for the space shuttle to lift off from the surface of our planet and successfully launch into space it needs to reach a velocity of about 25,000 mph; by traveling at such a speed it is able to build the necessary force to not only to defeat the gravity of the earth, but it also builds momentum such that the rocket or space shuttle can travel into orbit somewhere on the manner of 100 miles into the stratosphere. In much the same way, each of us are searching for that escape velocity: For our talents, our skills, and those things that we feel define us to reach the next level. Some do so for the fame, some do so for the glory, others for the honor or the sense of accomplishment. Others still do it for the money. When I say “capitalizing on one’s talents,” I mean simply for you to ask yourself: For what do you wish to trade your skills for? If personal honor is it, then you need to fuel your skills with passion, determination, and going that extra mile—doing those things which others will not do—in order for you to reach the point where you’ve properly capitalized on that skill.

Although it is said that you shouldn’t do anything for anyone other than yourself, in the words of Shakespeare, “to thine own self be true,” each of us are still dependent on the pyramid set forth in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs wherein we need food on the table, a roof over our heads, and to feel secure. In capitalizing on your talents you need to remember that one of the keys with Maslow’s Hierarchy is that one needs to successfully meet the needs of each layer of the pyramid prior to moving onto the next; if the satisfaction requirements is lost or not met for any layer on the Hierarchy, then you must go back to that level of the Hierarchy and satisfy those requirements before moving on. Translate your talents into getting a roof over your head, increasing your security and social needs, then into building your reputation and…as time progresses…towards investing in self-actualization.

The Economics of Hope

2008-02-09T00:10:00.000-08:00

Hope: An expectation and wish; “a belief in a positive outcome related to events and circumstances in one's life. Hope implies a certain amount of — i.e. believing that a positive outcome is possible even when there is some evidence to the contrary.”

As part of my job I routinely travel between Grand Junction, CO and Vail and Aspen, CO. To pass the time between stops I often find myself listening to talk radio. My talk radio of choice between the hours of 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. in the Mountain Time Zone is Rush Limbaugh, conservative radio talk show host extraordinaire.

Firstly, before I go any further, I’ll mention something that I’ve said in the past: I’m not bringing this up as a political conversation; frankly, a person’s politics are akin to their religious or spiritual beliefs—they are personal and don’t have any bearing on any discussion in this forum; they merely act as a filter with which each of us process the world around us.

With that said, Rush had a monolog this week which depicted hope in a light different than I had ever looked at it before. It was very interesting in how it helped to re-shape my interpretation of the behavioral phenomenon. Let’s set the stage; from the transcript of the Rush Limbaugh Program on 5 February 2008:

“Hope is the logical extension of people who think they don't matter to anything, and a lot of people don't like not mattering. Everybody wants to have meaning in their lives. So if you hope for good things, if you hope for a better country, "I matter, because I care, because I hope for a better country."”

In this context, Rush sets up hope as being a manifestation of “one of those emotions which make one feel better about themselves,” a self-serving emotion, in other words. “Hope is the stepchild of sympathy. It's like sympathy. You can have sympathy for somebody.” Sympathy for the position of one’s self in the events of a greater scheme of things, sympathy for those in the path of the events which are part of such a greater scheme of things? Don’t get me wrong—no emotion is wrong or invalid; judging an emotion is outside the scope of this text or, even, my interest. What is within the boundaries of my interest and this text, however, is the effectiveness of such a feeling. What is the economics of hope?

A famous U.S. Senator and 2008 Presidential Candidate, Barack Obama, rose to fame in the Democrat political party in the United States, in part, by a 20-minute keynote at the 2004 Democratic Convention, which turned into a book by the same name, “The Audacity of Hope.”

Audacity: “Courage, resolution, boldness.”

“The courage of hope,” “the resolution of hope,” “the boldness of hope;” yes, all are good things…but as a principle which produces anything…hope can only go so far. The man behind the audacity of this hope was one that triumphed over his surroundings by conquering them, by besting his circumstances, exploiting opportunities, and staying true to the notion that action needed to be coupled with such hope.

Politicians, the consummate marketers which they are, try and sway our actions via votes and other support by trying to sway our emotions—in their view, a person will go to where their heart takes them. We are all constantly wooed by images of presidential candidates crafted by the individual campaigns themselves and by the media which reports (and also attempts to sway opinion) on the various players involved. The Democrats like to offer change. People hope for change, and so they vote for the Democrat which they feel will bring the most change. The Republicans, on the other hand, offer everything from a war hero to a master of the business world to a former governor in favor of the Fair Tax Plan and a minor contender which offers a strict Libertarian view on pretty much everything. Just about everyone is trying to appeal to our emotions in some form or another. Mostly, they’re trying to appeal to our emotion of hope, the courageous thing which it is.

However, hope is just that: An emotion which can satisfy that we’re a part of the process; because as long as we can hope for a better solution, we’re a part of that solution, right?

From the perspective of the 2008 race for candidates for U.S. President, in the words of Rush Limbaugh: “The discussion of hope from a political leader is pure poppycock. It's empty; it's transparent; there's nothing there. It is totally devoid of substance.”

Let’s take a step back, into a perspective more personal to you and me: Each of us have, at some point in time or in our lives currently, had hope; we have had hope for a good outcome to be realized, for our New Year’s Resolutions to take hold, or just to make it through the next day. Hope, however, is a short-term thing in these instances. Sooner or later, by itself, hope fizzles and the outcome which you had hoped to realize can quickly turn into worse, even less productive emotions: Self-inflicted suffering. Because hope didn’t allow you to realize the outcome which you had in mind, a person can quickly turn to loathing and lose hope.

“[N]one of us can predict the outcomes in our lives, and so many of us use hope as a bridge to the eventual outcome we hope for from event to event or circumstance to circumstance…"Gosh, I hope I don't get fired next week." Start thinking I'm going to get fired or whatever it is, you generally end up thinking the negative. Now, people mistakenly place hope as the sentiment or the emotional state that will lead to the outcome of things, "Oh, gosh I really so hope this happens." But that's basically an excuse for not doing anything, for not trying, and so what you're doing is you're setting yourself up to have to deal with whatever happens, probably negatively, because you're not allowing yourself to be part of the equation to get the result that you want.”

Rush pegged the remedy as well: “[I]n my experience…my hoping for something never made it happen. My desire for something did.”

Desire: “Want strongly.”Have you ever wanted something? Have you ever wanted something a lot? If you were to place degrees of “want” onto a specific outcome, the greater the degree of your desire for that outcome to happen, the more effort which you would likely put into achieving that desired outcome. The key is so easy: Actively make yourself a part of the equation which makes something happen.

I love real-world examples, perhaps you do, also:

“"What's hope ever accomplished? Did Bill Gates hope when he was in school that he'd find the secrecy to the MS-DOS system getting on every freaking computer, or did he go do it?"

In and of itself, hope is not very useful past the warm and fuzzy feelings which it gives you. The more productive emotion, the more economical one, is that of desire…especially the sort which leads to action.

Good Blog Post

2008-02-02T21:40:00.001-08:00

I found this blog post recently, and would like to share it with everyone else.

Great stuff.

Knee Deep in the Hoopla

2008-02-02T11:26:00.000-08:00

Everyone, to some degree, cares what other people think about them. Sure, there are those out there that have the “I am who I am, and all others be damned!” mentality, but even they must come to the stark realization one day that their success relies, to some degree, on the decisions of others. Sooner or later, everyone worries about their reputation.

So, what is it about this phenomenon of reputation?

Think about The effect which you have onto the world around you. Not just to your immediate family, close friends, and co-workers, but onto the circles of individuals belonging to more outlying portions of your friends and family. How about your acquaintances, lesser acquaintances, and people whom you don’t even really know, but with whom you still occasionally come into contact? The point is that we often have more impact on our own world, more than we realize. How often, however, do we take a moment to think about how we impact the lives around us, or if that impact is particularly positive or negative?

Think about the sum total of each of these groups, then think about the positive or negative impact which you have on them. Think about the degree of this impact: Just a bit good, just a bit bad, a whole lot good or a whole lot bad; or somewhere in between? In a psychological-economic sense and parlance of “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” it is essentially the net imports and net exports of the emotional capital, both deposits and withdrawals, with other people.

Yes, people remember the impacts which you have on them. Some may let you know; some may not say a thing…but remember nonetheless. People tend to criticize when a need of theirs is not being met, but others will just let the ill will fester inside of them.

For the uninitiated, the concept of emotional deposits and withdrawals: Each time you interact with someone you will affect their emotions—if you do so positively, you make an “emotional deposit.” If you do so negatively, you make a withdrawal. Of course, you want to maximize the deposits which are made with each person in your life and minimize the chance that you will withdraw too much with a person. If you have enough emotional deposits with a person, you can certainly run a line of credit, so to speak. However…run a negative balance for too long and it becomes possible that you’re go into emotional default with a person and they’ll eventually write you off.

In an economic sense—a grander one—you must be aware of the aggregate of impacts which you have on other people. The net of the deposits and withdrawals which you make is ultimately the reputation which you have. In this sense, it is wise to be actively aware, monitor, and manage the impacts which you have with other people as to increase the value of your reputation and make you more famous than infamous.

Zen and the Art of Brain Maintenance

2008-01-26T14:21:00.000-08:00

It seems, much of the time, that not more than a few hours, days, or (for the lucky ones amongst us) weeks can pass by without facing a difficult problem. While some people have developed methods for confronting such problems, scientists have decided to tackle the subject to determine the mechanics that take place behind such decisions.

Their hopes and definition of the issue at hand:

“’This insight is at the core of human intelligence … this is a key cognitive function that the human can boast to have,’ says Joydeep Bhattacharya, an assistant professor in Goldsmiths's psychology department. "We're interested [in finding out] whether—there is a sudden change that takes place or something that changes gradually [that] we're not consciously aware of," he says. The researchers believed they could pin down brain signals that would enable them to predict whether a person could solve a particular problem or not.”

The findings shed some light on human thought processes: Once at a mental impasses, subjects experienced strong gamma rhythms, patterns of brain wave activity which has previously been associated with selective attention, in the parietal cortex—think upper rear of the brain, responsible for integrating information obtained from sensory input. When offered clues in this particular increased gamma-rhythmic state, subjects were less likely to gain insight on getting past their impasses.

“If there’s excessive attention, it somehow creates mental fixation,” Dr. Bhattacharya notes: “Your brain is not in a receptive condition.”

When patients did not consciously monitor their thinking about a particular subject, they had their “eureka!” moments: The researchers likened it to an experience of emotional relief. Application of conscious information processing by the brain was associated with alpha waves—which have been previously associated with a relaxed and open mind. It has been shown that volunteers who were more apt to unwittingly solve problems exhibited more robust alpha rhythms as opposed to those who had to knowingly adjust their thinking to come up with the answer. In other words, the findings indicated that it is better to confront issues with an open mind rather than concentrating too much on them.

For a moment, let’s explore the larger network that the implications of these findings fit into. Research has shown that sleeping on a difficult issue is conducive to helping solve that issue, for instance. Just like any other muscle, the brain can be configured to have perspective to solve problems from a general sense, it can be trained to solve a specific set of problems, or it can be manipulated in the moment to work on a problem. My classic approach to solving a problem is that I prefer to take the tactful, graceful approach first; if that fails, then I will be apt to use a brute force approach. This particular philosophy fits in with the above, as grace employs techniques which are more concise, sophisticated, and even “Zen-like” in a sense, as opposed to the brute force approach where instead of coaxing a situation to become more to your satisfaction, you utilize more forceful techniques to control the situation to your satisfaction.

The solution for tough problems is simple, then: Either brute force your way through the toughness of the issue at hand…or use the smarter approach and walk away from the situation for a while. The alternative is to “train your brain” to have the perspective that is conducive to resolving these sorts of issues more quickly—by conditioning it to be more of a generalist than being focused on a specific manner of thinking.

Ethanol: Update

2008-01-25T17:05:00.000-08:00

--Update---

You should make sure you've read the post before this one regarding Ethanol; then read this one.

Now...recall the portion where I mentioned ingenuity and innovativeness as part of the way to counter the un-economical nature of ethanol? I forgot to mention that the same ingenuity and innovativeness could also be applied to the ethanol problem.

Like what this company is doing: They claim to be able to make ethanol from most any biological material using a bacteria-based method for $1 per gallon. Apply economies of scale, an experience curve, and you have some potentially cheap biofuel!

The Un-Promise of Ethanol

2008-01-25T16:58:00.000-08:00

I’m not usually one to write about topics that are very much political in this forum mostly out of respect for everyone’s political views, the polarizing nature that such views can be, and the fact that I could care less about a person’s political views: They are of a personal nature, and it is as simple as that. That being said, I’m going to breach what is mainly an energy topic in this post, and what is only a political topic by extension of it being an election year.

I saw a commercial today in which someone said “I don’t want to drill my fuel, I want to grow it:” Conventional wisdom that flows nicely and strikes an emotional note with many people sympathetic to the so-dubbed energy crisis.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, senior Democrat Senator from California, describes the promise of Ethanol: It is “a perfect, win-win solution for both the nation's farm economy and its energy needs. According to the National Corn Growers Association, ethanol production could make 1.4 billion bushels of corn "disappear" in 2004 ... enough to replace more than 2 billion gallons of gasoline and provide a much-needed market for farmers stricken with chronically low corn prices.” People feel the pinch of gasoline prices at the fuel pumps, eliciting an emotional reaction; furthermore people will tend to feel the plight of the depressed corn farmer—heck, I grew up on a farm and understand how economics work in agriculture.

However, I am an economist. From this perspective a dispassionate view of the situation must be done in order to properly assess the situation. What does the science say? What about the data?

David Pimentel has some insight on the situation. As an ecology professor at Cornell University, his research indicates that it takes the equivalent of just about 1 1/3 gallons of gasoline to produce enough ethanol to replace 1 gallon of fuel that goes into anything from your SUV to hybrid. In larger quantities, according to an article he authored in the science journal Natural Resources Research, it takes the equivalent of 271 gallons of gasoline to grow 2.47 acres of corn: Tractor fuel and the manufacture of nitrogen fertilizers are the biggest culprits here. The National Corn Growers Association, reporting on a study done by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, agrees: “In June 2004, the U.S. Department of Agriculture updated its 2002 analysis of the issue and determined that the net energy balance of ethanol production is 1.67 to 1. (For every 100 BTUs of energy used to make ethanol, 167 BTUs of ethanol is produced.) In 2002, USDA had concluded that the ratio was 1.35 to 1.”

Then, there’s the whole thing with the corn as part of the food supply situation: “The U.S. ethanol sector will need 2.6 billion bushels per year by 2010—1.2 billion bushels more than it consumed in 2005. That’s a lot of corn, and how the market adapts to this increased demand is likely to be one of the major developments of the early 21st century in U.S. agriculture. The most recent USDA Baseline Projections suggest that much of the additional corn needed for ethanol production will be diverted from exports.” MSNBC goes on to elaborate on the demand factors in the formula: “Demand has risen so sharply, the amount of corn in storage is expected to drop to half of last year's levels, the department said. Farmers should harvest 10.55 billion bushels of corn, a 5 percent drop from last year.”

Heck, it’s even making the price of the tacos I love so dearly to increase.

What are the essentials of the ethanol-as-a-biofuel situation? Ninety five percent of ethanol is produced from corn, and 11 percent of the U.S. corn crop went into ethanol production in 2004. With these numbers in hand, the U.S. Congress passed into law the Energy Policy Act of 2005; Section 1501 of which mandates 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol in use by 2012. As of August 2007 there were 124 ethanol plants around the country with 7 being expanded and 76 more being constructed: As a whole, somewhere in the range of 200 to 300 have been proposed.

The General Accounting Office of the U.S. Government, a body that deals almost entirely in numbers, has been quoted as saying that “ethanol's potential for substituting for petroleum is so small that it is unlikely to significantly affect overall energy security."

Now that we’ve defined the problem, what about the solution?

Human ingenuity, especially in the capacity for which the United States has been known, knows no bounds. If one is to take the two fundamental areas of scientific research of basic and applied, the former applies to research for the sake of research and “basic” or fundamental knowledge in the sciences; the latter is the sort such that the end result is a product or technology. With that, I believe strong basic research of a nation translates into a strong national defense—and I don’t believe that there is any political debate in this premise.

The best solution to this problem, then, is a joint approach whereas the markets and government work together towards the same goal of a economical form of energy which is either renewable or easily enough produced, and integrated into the current circumstances of our economy. Although not impossible, we live in an economy fueled by oil—making all that more difficult for this to happen. However, if part of economics is the risk-reward quotient, data firmly suggests that with the right motivation, impetus, and resources the reward hiding behind the risk could someday be a reality.

The Myth of the “Google Generation”

2008-01-20T15:17:00.000-08:00

Perhaps you’ve heard the news: Younger generations born or raised during the last several years, the co-called “Internet Age,” are the most web-literate. They have an ease and familiarity with the technology of computing and the Internet which often dwarves those of older generations. They can find information readily out on the World Wide Web, process it readily, and use it effectively.

Right?

A recent study by the “CIBER” research team over at the University College of London claims that these assertions become more incorrect the further one reads into the above paragraph.

“Research-behaviour traits that are commonly associated with younger users – impatience in search and navigation, and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs – are now becoming the norm for all age-groups, from younger pupils and undergraduates through to professors.”

What do they intend to do about it? Dr. Malcom Read, Executive Secretary of the British Joint Information Systems Committee, says:

“These findings add to our growing understanding of subjects that should concern all who work in further and higher education – the changing needs of our students and researchers and how libraries can meet their needs. We hope that this report will encourage debate around these important questions. We hope it will also serve to remind us all that students and researchers will continue to need the appropriate skills and training to help navigate an increasingly diverse and complex information landscape.”

I’ll be curious to see what comes from the forthcoming debate.

Evolution: Not Random

2008-01-19T21:17:00.000-08:00

Evolution is not random.

"The findings of an international team of biologists demonstrate that evolution is not a random process, but rather occurs through the natural selection of successful traits...The findings, which constitute a significant milestone in establishing and reaffirming the mechanism of Darwin’s theory, will help in understanding how evolution works in all living creatures"

The Culture-Productivity Factor

2008-01-19T11:52:00.001-08:00

I am currently studying for my Bachelors degree in Finance. In the course of my studies, particularly a leadership and professionalism course, a question was asked on a pre-assessment regarding what cultural diversity did to a workplace. The answer, of course, was not that it produced a richer cultural environment; rather that it increased productivity because different cultures have different ways of approaching and solving problems.

In fact, a recent study corroborates this information. The study shows that culture dictates the wiring of the brain, so to speak:

“Neuroscientists Trey Hedden and John Gabrieli of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research asked Americans and East Asians to solve basic shape puzzles while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner.”

It’s a fascinating study; and, in fact: "There's a hint that six months in a culture already changes you," he said, referring to psychological, rather than neurological, research. "It suggests that there's a lot of flexibility."

I, Economist

2008-01-18T22:19:00.000-08:00

The Greeks used the words oikos for house and nomos for law which would eventually be combined to reflect philosophies which would evolve from the writings in the Muqaddimah, written by the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun in 1377. Mercantilists and physiocrats would eventually arise in Europe, becoming known as economists, studying the separate discipline of economics with the publishing of Adam Smith’s quintessential work The Wealth of Nations in 1776. A discipline falling within the purview of the larger study of business, it is formally considered a social science studying production, distribution, and consumption of goods.

When I was previously in school for one of my business degrees I categorized the three business sub-disciplines of accounting, finance, and economics into what I dubbed “Matthew’s Levels of Money” such that each of the fields dealt with money at different levels: Accounting deals with the simple “accounting” of funds inasmuch as making sure what money is where; economics deals with the greater movements of such things through groups of businesses, industries, markets, national economies, and larger systems. Finance deals with money flowing in intermediate systems, between the scales which accounting and economics covers. Lastly, I posed that there were areas in which accounting merged with finance and where finance and economics merged as fields of study.

While finance and accounting are all well and good, economics, at least to me, is the physics of the business world. Physics is the study of the relationship between matter and energy, one of the fundamental sciences on which everything else in the universe can be understood and is built upon. Economics is a business and social field of study which can shed immense amounts of light onto many things, not just those that involve money, distribution, or production.

For instance, when observing behaviors of others, the economist understands that people are apt to do one of two things: Seek pleasure and avoid pain. Put another way, one needs to find the incentive in the actions of individuals or groups thereof to understand their stated or unstated intentions. People speed in their cars along their route between points A and B because there is a perceived incentive that they would rather be at point B rather than either of the other alternatives. People cheat on their taxes because there is the perceived incentive that they will not have to pay as much money to the Internal Revenue Service or that they will get more money in tax refunds. They may be honest because that makes them feel good, or they may tell lies because they feel that there is an incentive in being perceived a different way than what reality would otherwise dictate: People chasing the incentive is a powerful tool.

A concept in economics which is closely related to a person’s incentive to do something is one that is old as the science itself: Utility. It is essentially defined as the degree of usefulness which a person assesses to a situation, product, or anything involving choice; classical economics dictates that each person should be maximizing utility in any situation involving choice. While practicality is often what textbooks teach in regards to how utility is measured, this can vary based on culture or any one of a multitude of other factors. For instance, companies have a tendency to use Canada as a test market, as opposed to the United States, because Canadians tend to attach more practicality to their measure of utility and Americans tend to attach more status or prestige to their perceived utility in a decision, such as one to purchase a product. Put another way, Canadians will buy the test pizza at a fast food chain restaurant because they find it convenient or tasty. Americans will purchase the pizza because it is the cool thing to do that week.

Economics is a versatile science which allows the practitioner to look at the details of a given situation or the big picture. From the intelligent interactions between agents to the dynamics of national economies, economists rely on data and an understanding of the geometry of a given situation. Calculated, the economist is an effective decision maker that can sort through and process large amounts of information and think effectively on their feet.

In the art of corporate warfare, the economist is an able participant and a lethal combatant. Even in the hands of any other member of the business team, a firm understanding of economics will make one’s effectiveness that much more potent.

Monkey Mondays: Mouse of Keyboard Monkey

2008-01-14T20:37:00.000-08:00

The mouse which the kid of Keyboard Monkey would use.

See it here.

2008-01-12T21:19:00.000-08:00

“To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.”
—Sir Isaac Newton

Times change; everyone knows this. Change is that great constant that coincides with the passage of time. I used to work in a call center for the wireless phone industry: Starting as a vanilla agent in the receivables management department, I became one of the fastest employees to move into the “resolutions” department where the duty du jour was to assist agents in doing their jobs and assist customers in escalated situations. Just as any high technology industry, the wireless industry changes quickly. If something didn’t change (at least) on a weekly basis, something was wrong…and the next change would often be much bigger than the changes that would have normally occurred over the course of the last week or more that had not had change.

The easily-learned, but difficult to adapt to principle is that things change. Each day, all around us, we see things changing. However…what is the propensity for people to change along with the changing times?

There are conventional wisdoms abound here. Conventional wisdoms, as anyone whom as read here any time in the recent or distant past, understands that this sort of wisdom is often nothing more than convenient. The short answer is that people can change, but it can be difficult for them to do so.

The longer answer: Sir Isaac Newton, the guy that once proverbially had an apple fall onto his head, then determined that for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction and developed a brand new system of math to describe the phenomena that he had discovered in the universe. Among his definition of the brave new universe that was coming to know the world was the concept of inertia. This principle of classical mechanics dictates that an object at rest will stay at rest and, likewise, an object in motion will tend to stay in motion. People don’t change because they are often held back by inertia such that they have behaviors which hold them back. While I can’t cite the research, I recall hearing once that after a couple weeks of “staying home, holed up in the house,” doing little to nothing productive, a person’s brain chemistry changes fundamentally, such that they are more apt to continue in that mode of living: I’ve witnessed this around me over the years and experienced it myself once, during a down period. I have often asked myself about the madness in the minds of these people.

It seriously requires a person to force themselves to get off of their behind and go out and do something.

An interesting corollary to this: How does one deal with the constant of change?

Most of the time people are resistant to change. Going back to my days in the call center business I learned one critical thing: The people that resist change often get left behind. The people whom grasp onto the change, ride the wave, and become a part of the change, “change agents” and “change warriors,” often find themselves benefiting from the change rather than becoming a casualty of it. However, I have a caveat coupled with a case study: Be careful not to become a casualty of the change

Quote: Extraordinary People

2008-01-09T15:28:00.000-08:00

“One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.”
—Elbert Hubbard, The Roycroft Dictionary and Book of Epigrams, 1923

2008-01-08T17:15:00.000-08:00

To commemorate the last address Bill Gates will give at the Consumer Electronics Show as the Chairman of Microsoft, a quote from one of the biggest visionaries of our time:

“If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1000 MPG.”
—Bill Gates, Chief Software Architect and Chairman, Microsoft

Quote: They Can't Get Away Now!

2008-01-07T20:02:00.000-08:00

“All right, they're on our left, they're on our right, they're in front of us, they're behind us... they can't get away this time.”
—Lieutenant General Lewis "Chesty" Burwell Puller, U.S. Marine Corps

Quote: Judgment and Experience

2008-01-06T00:32:00.000-08:00

"Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment."
—Unknown

Monkey Mondays: Happy New Year Monkey!

2007-12-31T16:06:00.002-08:00

The Knowledge Paradox

2007-12-31T14:58:00.001-08:00

“When everybody knows that something is so, it means that nobody knows nothin’.”
—Andrew S. Grove, Co-founder of Intel

In other words, “it becomes nearly impossible to look beyond what you know and think outside the box you’ve built around yourself.” It is a paradox such that as our collective knowledge increases, such does our expertise, our creativity and innovative ability will tend to plateau or decrease. It is the classic “thinking inside a box,” and the walls thicken with our experience over time.

An essay appearing in the 1989 Journal of Political Economy called this the “curse of knowledge.” Experts in their respective disciplines learn through their daily activities the jargon of their subjects and perform their routine tasks in the ways in which they have always been done. While it is efficient and possesses a concept of utility, it can stifle innovation by taking the path much-taken.

People see the world how they want to see it, since the world revolves around each individual person, through the filters with which they perceive the rest of the world. I’ve written about this before in a few posts. This is why this curse is so pervasive: It can be difficult for people to imagine what the world is like outside their own universe and their own paradigm. As an aside, this is why it can be so difficult to find really, really good trainers and teachers.

Imagine your remote control at home: Anything from your television or stereo remote control to your $1000 remote control. It probably has many more buttons than a reasonable person would need, but they all exist on that remote control because an engineer somewhere in the research, development, or production process determined a use for that button; as described by Chip Heath in a book him and his brother Dan co-wrote in their book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. Mr. Heath says of this: “People who design products are experts cursed by their knowledge, and they can’t imagine what it’s like to be as ignorant as the rest of us.”

How can a person fix this?

Cynthia Barton Rabe proposes bringing in a team of outsiders, “zero-gravity thinkers” in order to add creativity and innovation to the development mix in her book Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine — and What Smart Companies Are Doing About It. “I would ask my very, very basic questions,” making mention of the initial frustration, however transient it may be, with this approach, “it always turned out that we could come up with some terrific ideas.” She finishes her wisdom with: “Look for people with renaissance-thinker tendencies, who’ve done work in a related area but not in your specific field…Make it possible for someone who doesn’t report directly to that area to come in and say the emperor has no clothes.”

When in doubt, seek the perspective of others to forge your own wisdom in this often-chaotic world! However, in the end know that the decision is your own, and the responsibility of that decision is your own to bear, so weigh each perspective with the value with which it is truly worth!

The Not-So-Conventional Wisdom

2007-12-30T13:20:00.000-08:00

Following World War II America went through a period in which the government, or the public sector, was growing poorer in relation to the private sector which was becoming wealthier. This is the outline offered by Harvard economist John Galbraith in his book The Affluent Society. It is also the origin of the term “conventional wisdom.”

We’ve all heard it: Conventional wisdom, rules of thumb, and urban legends. What is the problem with such “wisdom?” Not only is it “easy” wisdom but it also tends not to be true, just accepted by enough people in order for it to seem true. It acts as an obstacle to the truth, to new ideas, and is only fueled by the inertia of so many people believing in such bad information. This inertia is fueled by convenience, emotion, and assumption.

Common sense, on the other hand, is largely practical: Less of the abstract and more of the “collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen,” according to Albert Einstein. In the same train of thought such practicality can have its limits when it comes to the progression of society: “Similarly, common sense has been invoked in opposition to many scientific and technological advancements. Such misuse of the notion of common sense is fallacious, being a form of the argumentum ad populum (appeal to the masses) fallacy.”

So, we return to our original premise: If so many people believe in it, it must be true, right? Logic dictates otherwise with a concept known as Argumentum ad populum. Translated from Latin it is “appeal to the people;” placed into a more concise context “if many believe so,” or “if many find it acceptable, then it is (acceptable or so).”

Alright, let’s test it.

It has been reported in the mainstream media that more than 1/3 of Americans believe there was a government conspiracy surrounding the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001. As of 1 July 2007 the population was about 301 million individuals in the United States; 36 percent of 301 million people equals about 108.3 million people. More than 100 million people believe that the U.S. government was complicit—either actively or through negligence—in the horrible attacks of 9/11. Certainly more than 100 million people, statistically, can’t be wrong! Right?

I can’t help but look at the world from the perspective of an economist, believing in some bits of logic. Sociology teaches us that while the person might be intelligent, rational, and calculated, putting many of them together and their behaviors tend to move towards the irrational. Additionally, just because the many believe something…it doesn’t mean that it’s true.

How about looking at it this way: Have you ever voted in an election? Did the person whom you voted for win or lose? Doesn’t matter, because the majority of individuals voted for the person who got into the office; that means that he or she was good in their elected position by virtue of most people voting for them! Politicians are good by virtue of how many people voted for them…right? How about at any certain time when most people think that a particular company whose stock is a good place to invest? History and your favorite Internet finance site can tell you how this is a failed notion.

So, in the end the masses aren’t necessarily correct, conventional wisdom isn’t necessarily wisdom and tends to be more convenient than possessing any utility and your own experiences should be all that draws you towards a more thorough wisdom about the world.

A Look Back: The Science of 2007

2007-12-28T12:47:00.000-08:00

Updated!

Science is arguably the single set of disciplines which propels the human race forward, drives culture, and increases our collective utility. The state of science can also be used to determine, via a snapshot, the state of the human condition; art and other elements of interdisciplinary studies flow from science. Just as this is so, I like to look back at the previous year’s scientific accomplishments.

Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs, courtesy Wired News

Top 10 Science Breakthroughs of the Year, courtesy Science News

Top 25 Science Stories of 2007, courtesy Scientific American

Craziest Science Stories of 2007, courtesy Live Science

Top 100 Science Stories of 2007, courtesy Discover Magazine

Now We're Elite!

2007-12-27T21:50:00.001-08:00

Now we're elite, or as is the popular vernacular amongst the die-hard Internet community: We're "leet."

The number "1337," as in one thousand three hundred and thirty seven, in "leet speak" dictates "eliteness."

Yeah, we're ending the year becoming "leet."

Keep on visiting and we'll see which mark we can hit next!

Help Wanted

2007-12-23T13:32:00.001-08:00

It’s well-known that we live in the Information Age. Once upon a time it was the power of industry—great pieces of equipment operated by countless laborers working countless hours. As economies of scale developed, so did the assembly line and the furtherance of the manufacturing-based economy. As the industry-based landscape matured, the economy advanced to the point where specialization became increasingly important. As the twentieth century closed we had harnessed the power of the Internet. Combined with all other elements of the day our manufacturing-based society in the United States and other locales converted into an information-based economy.

Industry-based economics seemed to be a stepping stone to where we, in the west, are now; just as other places in the world go through this phase of their development we are shifting away from such and into a paradigm based around information, services, and facilitation. This information-based economy is revolutionizing old models and paradigms and changing the way that the various agents in each component of the economy interact with one another.

For the consumer part of this is that the Internet has had a tendency to democratize everything. eBay, with its online auctions, and Wal-Mart, with its harnessing of technology to make its business processes more efficient have collectively acted as the “invisible hand” of economics and made marketplaces more efficient: There is arguably not much profit to be made from these two businesses short of selling in volume. Wal-Mart posted a net profit margin of 3.6 percent in 2005, down to 3.2 percent in 2007. eBay has epitomized the low- or zero-profit margin on the Internet: In an online sense I firmly believe that eBay is as efficient as a market gets.

Each of us goes through our days selling our time to other people: For most of us that means selling our time for a wage or a salary, and maybe some benefits. Whether that means flipping burgers at the local fast food restaurant or bagging groceries for minimum wage or being a vice president with a bank, you are effectively selling your time to your employer for a price which you and the market will handle. In essence, you are a product which you must develop, market, and sell to employers seeking you and your product. This is simply a new way at looking at an old paradigm, though. I’ll breach that topic at another time. For now, however…

Imagine an extension of the above premise with the basis that you are a product such that you, instead of selling your services to your employer, could sell the services you provide to your employer directly to the customers which you already serve. Cut out the “middle man,” and eliminate inefficiencies at that level. Instead of being tied down to the policies, protocols, bureaucracies, and whatever else you don’t like about the time which you’re selling to your employer, you would be your own boss. You would be in control of your own destiny in the marketplace. You wouldn’t have to worry about performance reviews or a supervisor validating you: The marketplace which you serve would instead be the entity which validates your abilities and efforts.

There are a few, however, which can’t fit into this model. This does not mean, however, that you can’t work within this new paradigm, however.

Each person has not only the “hard” job skills and the “soft” ones they sell to their employer: They also have skills which they apply to hobbies or other “extracurricular” activities that occupy the time which they are not working for their employer.

This is where the famous adage “do what you love and find a way to get paid for it” enters. This is the ideal route. Find a way to do that which you love and make an occupation from it. Obfuscate the traditional definition of “work” so that it seems like play to you, particularly if you are that type of person who differentiates between “work” and “play.”

A lot of these hobbies-turn-jobs can be done as a sole proprietorship: Being in business for yourself, using yourself as the sole business entity. Although it is less difficult to deal with than its more sophisticated brethren, it is also just that: Less sophisticated. Not offering any liability protection is the greatest disadvantage of this form of business organization.

The next higher form of business organization is the partnership. There are multiple types of partnerships, but the key factor in choosing a partnership is that it offers a level of protection against liability inasmuch as it spreads liability amongst a group of partners. General partnerships, limited liability partnerships, and limited liability companies are the fundamental organizational forms which they take. For more, read up on them!

Next up are the corporations. The most sophisticated form of business organization; it is also the most powerful. A corporation is considered its own separate legal entity: In other words local, state, and federal governments consider it to be its own person. As such all liability taken on by a corporation is the responsibility of the corporation. Each “co-owner” or shareholder of a corporation is only liable for as much as they invest in the corporation. Put another way if you invest $1000 into a corporation and the corporation completely tanks, you only lose your $1000. The “classic” corporation is the “C-Corporation:” This organization type is typically unlimited to the amount of shareholders it can take on but can be taxed as a corporate entity (corporations are taxed as such in U.S. states; not at individual rates) and the shareholder is responsible for their financial gains from their investment in the corporation as well. Corporations are wonderful things for making money; as Ambrose Pierce humorously defined a corporation: “Corporation, [noun]. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."

The other corporate entity is the “S-Corporation.” While some consider it a “glorified partnership,” the government still considers it a type of corporation. The name is derived from the portion of the Internal Revenue Service’s tax code that allows for the existence of this entity, “Subchapter S Corporations.” Essentially, the Subchapter S style of corporation allows for tax liability to be “passed through” the corporate veil such that each shareholder is responsible for paying them: While a regular C Corporation is double taxed (corporate plus individual), the S Corporation doesn’t pay corporate taxes, instead the individual shareholders are responsible for paying taxes on their individual investments in the enterprise. Subchapter S Corporations are typically corporations that are originally formed as C Corporations in their respective states, then paperwork is filed with the IRS in order to gain recognition as an S Corporation. An example of an S Corporation? My own.

Why such the long blog post? Because, at this time of year it seems that everyone is thinking about what moves to make in the year ahead: The obligatory New Year’s Resolution. Why not, in the upcoming year, figure out how you can break the “tyranny of the 9 to 5,” get away from the “dungeon of the cubicle” and figure out how you can become one of the successful string of businesses that drive innovation and contribute to society? Maybe it is for you, and maybe it is not for you. I strongly urge you to consider, however, this option.

While these steps take a skill set that is general and diverse in nature, one of my string of topics in the forthcoming year will be to develop the skill set required for a business owner, small business operator, or even CEO of one of the large multi-nationals. However, if you’d like to request a topic, please feel free to email me a question, your suggestion for a topic, or your feedback at this address!

Engineering Through It

2007-12-22T00:21:00.001-08:00

Engineering is a fine discipline.

Albert Einstein was once quoted as saying that “scientists investigate that which already is; engineers create that which has never been.” Most of my life I have fashioned myself a scientist, however I have served in many a role in which solutions needed to be engineered. Indeed, any practitioner or student of any field surely applies to it skills which are inherent to the engineer; as Leonardo da Vinci said: “He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.” Engineering is the practical portion of any sort of theoretical study.

Rewind to my earliest days in the military. I served as a combat engineer when its military occupational designation was still 12B, “twelve-bravo.” The Army taught us in horizontal and vertical construction, mobility and counter-mobility, bridge building and destruction and—in order to facilitate the former—demolitions. All of these were trade skills: As obedient privates in “this man’s Army” we were drilled with the motions, methods, and repetitions which would work their way as sets of skills which would be applied to a team, a squad, a platoon, or a company in the execution of a task that fit into a mission which dictated which drills we would use to get the mission completed. Yeah, this was the monotonous portion of what was otherwise a glamorous career choice for a grunt.

What I would go on to learn, though, was that this particular style of engineering in combat forces many a practitioner to think on his or her feet. Any good combat or technical engineer that had served for long enough in the career field, enlisted or officer, could tell you that there are at least three ways of doing things: The right way, the long way, and the field expedient way. For engineers in the army there is a constant barrage of problems to be matched with a solution. My two years serving as a combat engineer and four years after that supporting engineer units taught me that theory may say one thing, but it is nothing short of human ingenuity that often succeeds in breaching the otherwise arbitrary limits of when said theory meets the contact of the battlefield.

While a battlefield can be a harsh place, so can our daily lives. The realities which we call our own have good guys, bad guys, fires to extinguish, and battles with which to contend. While there are countless books out there that can help us with the theory of dealing with it, the bottom line is looking within ourselves and to our environment to find the tools—mental and otherwise—to aid us in adapting to our world. We must take the theory which we know from our pasts and apply them with an eye towards “how can I better adapt in this moment to make the most of my situation?”

On the flip side of this coin, American psychiatrist M. Scott Peck points out: “The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.”

That which ensues are thoughts about comfort zones and expanding them in such a fashion that you’ll be ready for the big moments to happen: Engineer your life for what you want it to be.

Monkey Mondays: See Monkey Teach Economics

2007-12-17T18:00:00.000-08:00

See monkey teach Fairtrade.

Article here.

Monkey's game here.

Breaking News: Artificial DNA

2007-12-17T16:12:00.000-08:00

I thought that this was good enough to include in these virtual annals.

Although this is a natural extension of the Human Genome Project, something that I figured about a decade-and-a-half ago would happen, it is amazing nonetheless.

A brief couple paragraphs from the full article.

"I see a cell as a chassis and power supply for the artificial systems we are putting together," said Tom Knight of MIT, who likes to compare the state of cell biology today to that of mechanical engineering in 1864. That is when the United States began to adopt standardized thread sizes for nuts and bolts, an advance that allowed the construction of complex devices from simple, interchangeable parts.
If biology is to morph into an engineering discipline, it is going to need similarly standardized parts, Knight said. So he and colleagues have started a collection of hundreds of interchangeable genetic components they call BioBricks, which students and others are already popping into cells like Lego pieces.

Keep in mind: From here on out the progress being made isn't arithmetic in nature, rather it is a geometric progression: In other words, instead of "1, 2, 3, 4..." so on and so forth, it is more akin to "1, 2, 4, 16..."

History in the making, right in front of our eyes!

Opportunity

2007-12-16T12:32:00.000-08:00

I am a firm believer in the notion that we each know, at each point in time, that which we need to know. Yes, this is a point of view in which destiny is a key factor, something more than a random consideration.

I have stayed fairly busy as of late: Secretary and Treasurer on a couple nonprofit boards as well as taking on key managerial roles with each, running and operating in an executive capacity on a nonprofit which is my brainchild, a for-profit company, and other volunteer work in the discipline of IT consulting. This is not to mention my regular “9 to 5” job, as I refer to it. Also of note is that next month I begin college again towards a degree in Finance.

I have had at least a couple people worry about me stretching myself too thin in the last week. One had mentioned that the comment was made to them that perhaps I “am setting myself up for failure.” I have thought long and hard about this, trying to perceive it from an unbiased and logical, rational perspective.

I subsequently came across a quote in a movie:

"When a person prays for patience, do you think that God makes them patient, or gives them the opportunity to be patient? If he prays for courage, does He give him courage or the opportunity to be courageous?"

I applied this singular thought to my own situation. What I decided upon was that right now, right at this time, I am being challenged and simultaneously offered the opportunity to prove myself and to succeed in that which I have been working towards for years.

“Sometimes it seems so long, yeah, but his passion is so strong; and something makes him carry on… He'll do what he has to do, to be part of the game. Yeah, he knows what he'll have to go through, till the world knows his name.”

Part of what I’ve learned, so far, along this journey; something that’s just been reaffirmed for me, is that you get back that which you give: The more you give to other people, granted that they don’t “screw you over,” the more that you will receive in return. If you give to the absolute, you will receive in kind. If you are apt to take in the absolute, then you can expect the same of others.

Like a Good Bartender

2007-12-15T13:24:00.000-08:00

For years I have held that, from a purist’s perspective, there are two types of functional individuals: Subject matter experts and professional managers. One should aspire to become one or the other or both in whichever industry they are in.

A subject matter expert, commonly referred to simply as SME, is one that is just that: An expert in the subject matter of their discipline. If this means that you are flipping burgers, be the best burger flipper than you can be. Subject matter expertise insists that you become technically proficient in a particular discipline or subset thereof. As a young soldier I found my expertise in the subject matter of soldiering, engineering, administration, personnel, information technology, and others. One by one, I knocked out the learning that was necessary to become practically proficient in each piece of subject matter as to create a promotion pathway for me. By the time I left the military I was working as a key individual in a personnel and administration section of an engineer headquarters.

The notion of subject matter expertise didn’t hit me as much, however, than it did when I worked with Cingular, now the new AT&T. As a receivables management agent, I took inbound calls from wireless phone customers using a handful or two of different systems. I was told that in order to progress, I needed to memorize policies and procedures for receivables management.

So, that’s exactly what I did. In between calls I spent my time going through the company’s knowledgebase and memorizing policies and learning procedures. As I progressed in these studies over a few weeks I started to learn how the system worked, how the system thought, so to speak. I became, at the time, the quickest-promoted person in history of the call center in which I worked. To this day I hold second place—a good friend of mine beat me by a matter of weeks; he entered the call center in which I worked from another division of the company which was even more empowered and difficult. We both rose to positions of prominence in the same call center because we took paths that others were not willing or able to travel, went the extra mile, and stood out amongst our peers.

We became subject matter experts in our field.

The professional manager, by contrast, is less focused on specific technical details and more focused on being a generalist. However, this isn’t exactly what it seems. In an earlier blog post I point out the fallacy of the “conventional wisdom” of the “jack of all trades, master of none.” It is my personal sentiment that this phrase was constructed by those more apt to be SMEs rather than the generalist that is more suited to being a professional manager.

If a subject matter expert is much like the Army’s warrant officer program—a special subset of the officer corps that was established and exists to operate and maintain the specialized technical systems of the modern military, the professional manager is a manager that adheres to a code similar to that of the Bushiddo—the warrior code that the samurai used in feudal Japan, not unlike portions of the code of chivalry used by the samurai’s European counterparts.

A professional manager uses the sub-disciplines of business and organizational theories and practicum and applies them to any situation: Accounting-Finance-Economics, Management, Information Systems and Information Technology, Sales-Advertising-Marketing, Human Resources, Law, Organizational Psychology, so on and so forth.

Like I said, the professional manager can apply managerial skills to any circumstance. In this regard they are akin to “Special Forces” of the managerial world: For the situations in which they find themselves will often only find it smelling like roses after they have entered themselves into the equation.

That is not to be said that subject matter experts aren’t like Special Forces. In fact, what each SME and Professional Manager should aspire to is to become both: Subject matter experts should learn the “soft skills” of management and associated disciplines to give them a broader perspective when it comes to the performance of their duties and professional managers should heighten and hone their component subject matters as well as others.

What does this mean for the rest of us? Basically just to start down one path or the other and find the other path along the way!

Monkey Comes Home

2007-12-10T17:04:00.001-08:00

Following a successful campaign, Armani the pet capuchin monkey, is being returned to his home in Maryland!

Momentum from the Funk

2007-12-09T06:42:00.000-08:00

After last week’s post, I couldn’t help but to think about how closely the words initiative and inertia are alike. Anyone reading my blog for any significant amount of time understands that part of my background is in physics, and therefore I like to apply the classic Galilean notion of the simple forces involved in a given system. In this instance the simple forces involved fall onto Sir Isaac Newton.

One of Newton’s assertions as a premier physicist, natural philosopher, of the time was that an object at rest tends to stay at rest: Once there, it doesn’t like to go anywhere. Sound familiar? People, I have come to realize, are much the same way. I’ve even heard it stated to go as far as that, after a couple weeks of stagnation, a person’s body chemistry can change to feed their sloth. Furthermore, without some sort of energy applied to the system…without even trying to do something to get out of such a funk…entropy ensues, chaos reigns, and it becomes even more difficult.

About a year ago several events transpired over the course of a few months, putting me into a depression of sorts. I thought it would pass, as certain times it tends to do, however it only got worse. Taking its toll on things, I holed myself up in my little world, tucked away in a comfort zone, and only interacted with the world on an as-needed basis. I hid from the remainder of it.

Fast forward to several months forward: I knew where I was at, I knew where I had been; I realized that I was in a low point in my life and the manifestations of that state of mind had begun to take its toll on things that were close to me and held dear. What did it take?

Energy applied to a system at rest will have a tendency to move it along a prescribed force vector. In other words, a kick in the pants got me going in the right direction—anywhere that was away from my present state of mind at the time. This process to gain momentum found me first reflecting through long and deep sessions of how events would transpire. What I came up with were things that were right under my nose all along, I just needed to watch and to listen, being mindful of opportunities.

Of course, throughout my affiliation in each of these places, tapping into my initiative, momentum has started to gain: Momentum that, I feel, given enough time and energy will result in the ultimate goal of my larger dreams being achieved…the grand scheme of things.

As I said last week, a personal mantra of yours when confronted with the notion of adversity between the “here” and the “there:” “If it is going to be…it is up to me.”

Monkey Mondays: Robotic Monkey Overlords!

2007-12-03T17:22:00.000-08:00

Would you believe that brain signals from monkeys in North Carolina can control a pair of robot legs in Japan?

Read about it here!

If It’s Going to Be…

2007-12-02T20:48:00.000-08:00

Imagine any one of the battles during, say, the Revolutionary War. Gentleman’s wars, at the time, consisted of two uniformed military elements marching towards one another and firing inaccurate rifles, cannons, and other instruments of destruction. When I saw my first movies depicting this form of warfare I was stunned, thinking that popular military theory for engagement at that time in history was grossly inefficient.

This mode went on through the 18^THand 19^TH centuries—the War of 1812, the Civil War and such. It wasn’t until later in the 19^TH century that a new element started to find itself into the vernacular of warfare: Initiative. “In personal behaviour, initiative is the ability and tendency to initiate: to start an action, including coming up with a proposal and giving or helping without first being requested to do so.”

I’ve always equated the development of initiative with the period that John J. Pershing served actively in the United States Army. Born John Joseph Pershing on 13 September 1860, “Black Jack,” as he would come to be known, graduated from West Point in 1886, serving in the Spanish-American War, the Philippines Insurrection, and the Mexican Expedition through his service during World War I.

It was during the period of Pershing’s influence in the U.S. military and abroad that the concept of initiative would develop. Instead of lining up in columns and rows and marching towards another military unit lined up in the same fashion, initiative dictates that you do just what it suggests—move to the enemy, to contact. Oddly enough, the underlying concepts for the military doctrine of initiative can be seen in doctrines long before its coming of age in the 20^TH century. Sun Tzu is known to teach that the commander calculates, in part, battlefield conditions prior to entering armed foray. General Clausewitz popularized the notion of battlefield geometry amongst his contemporaries. General Nathanial Bedford Forest, from the (American) Civil War era put it simply: Be there “the firstest with the mostest.”

Initiative is a force multiplier—a single person’s dedication amplifies the efforts of many in a single group of people organized for the same purpose. It also sets the stage for higher levels of economics to take effect and add to the synergy of the team.

Continuing with the analogy, initiative built into a formidable concept after The Great War and morphed into something that helped General George S. Patton command his troops through Europe in World War II and gain more ground than any other army in history. He did this, in part, because of the indoctrination of initiative into formal military education and the manifestation of initiative into the main battle tank—an awesome feat of military weaponry if ever one existed. Initiative would go on and help form the basis for the Airland Battle doctrine that reigned during the Cold War…but that is a discussion for another time.

Remember this: Take the initiative…because if it is going to be, it is up to you to make it happen.

Monkey Mondays: Fun Times With Weapons

2007-11-26T19:40:00.000-08:00

Gorillas have recently been spotted...with weapons.

"Gorillas Fight Human Invaders Using Weapons."

No Man is an Island

2007-11-24T00:25:00.000-08:00

Imagine the first fax machine: A machine of which we know the capabilities today. What about the first one, though? What is the usefulness of this machine that can send a facsimile to other fax machines…when there are no other fax machines?

The point of a single fax machine is moot.

Now…add another fax machine. What is the usefulness of your fax machine now? Common sense indicates that it would double. This isn’t exactly true: The effect of these two fax machines is directly proportional to the number of fax machines—instead of being an arithmetic proportion, it is a geometric proportion. In other words the net result of the utility of these two fax machines is not 1+1, but rather 2^2, or 2 squared. The increase is so great because each user can either send or receive a document instead of the fax machine offering just a single purpose in relation to each other fax machine in the world.

In fact, there is a mathematical formula depicting this relationship: n * (n − 1) / 2 whereas n is the number of fax machines in the network.

Network. Networking. Networks. Thirty years ago this word meant much less than it does today. The man behind the power of this simple word, Robert Metcalfe, was half the man behind the technology called Ethernet. Ethernet, in short, is the largely the technology behind our home and business networks and the entire connectivity of the “wired” portion of the Internet (in contrast to the “wireless” portion). In selling his wares, Metcalfe grasped to his background as a trained engineer and businessman to inform his customer of the simple economies of scale involving his new networking peripheral. While their work may be able to take their businesses to a certain point, in order to grow past this point of critical mass, they would need something revolutionary—a force multiplier—to realize any newfound value.

This brings us to a more generalized definition of the network effect. From Wikipedia: “A network effect is a characteristic that causes a good or service to have a value to a potential customer which depends on the number of other customers who own the good or are users of the service. In other words, the number of prior adopters is a term in the value available to the next adopter. One consequence of a network effect is that the purchase of a good by one individual indirectly benefits others who own the good — for example by purchasing a telephone a person makes other telephones more useful. This type of side-effect in a transaction is known as an externality in economics, and externalities arising from network effects are known as network externalities. The resulting bandwagon effect is an example of a positive feedback loop.”

How does this apply as wisdom? Think about applying such economics to your daily life. As I’ve said before, we can each consider ourselves a good wishing to perform services with other people (some more than others, sure) and from whom we look to offer our services—exchanges in the free market economy of life. Just as the 17^TH century poet John Donne wrote “no man is an island, entire of itself,” as individuals we have little value to anyone but ourselves, if that is to be of any real value at all. When we are able to offer our services to another, then our value as an individual increases because we are able to both offer of ourselves and receive what things of value the other person in this exchange can offer. The more people that we have in our lives, to whom we are able to offer something of value, the more we are able to use the networking effect—those things which we can accomplish, thusly, can grow as a square of the people in our lives with whom there can be reciprocating value.

At a glance, it might seem like a complex concept, but think of it in this way: It is often said that a fraction of total jobs available in a given market are advertised through traditional sources—newspaper, Internet, radio, job service, etc; whereas most jobs are assumed through “connections” that a person might have. This is a direct result of the networking effect.

Ever get a tip from a friend? Can you say that you’re a better person because of the people in your life? How about what you are able to offer to other people?

This falls in line with a quip of wisdom I’ve held for several years. Take two ice cubes: One in the shape of a cube, the other with the same amount of mass in the shape of a thin sheet. Which will melt first? Why? Certainly the ice sheet will melt before the cube because it has more surface area exposed to the environment. If we make the assumption was the preferred result of this process, wouldn’t your preferred result of your life be the success that you’d like from it? Increasing your “surface area” to the world, that is to increase the potential for interactions which you have, can thus increase your potential for reaching critical mass and, with help of the networking effect, geometrically grow into and past your hopes and dreams.

Warren Buffet Quote

2007-11-21T10:50:00.001-08:00

He's been called "The Oracle of Omaha," but by many accounts his personality is just that of a farmer or other tradesman from the Midwest. Money has not inflated his ego at all. For a man who has been as liberal as he has, though, he certainly has a fiscally conservative view. Interesting.

“I don't have a problem with guilt about money. The way I see it is that my money represents an enormous number of claim checks on society. It's like I have these little pieces of paper that I can turn into consumption. If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the GNP would go up. But the utility of the product would be zilch, and I would be keeping those 10,000 people from doing AIDS research, or teaching, or nursing. I don't do that though. I don't use very many of those claim checks. There's nothing material I want very much. And I'm going to give virtually all of those claim checks to charity when my wife and I die.”

2007-11-20T19:46:00.000-08:00

Ever think that you might be better than most others on the road? You might be right.

A recent test administered GMAC Insurance indicates that most people wouldn't pass a driving test if they had to take it again.

• Drivers 35 and older were more likely to pass
• Illinois, Georgia, Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Massachusetts were the least knowledgeable states overall, with average scores under 75 percent
• Fifty-five percent of the respondents didn't know how many feet before making a left or right turn to activate their turn signals
• The national average score was 77.1 percent

Monkey...Tuesday

2007-11-20T18:43:00.000-08:00

Attack of the Monkeys!

Competence and Confidence

2007-11-19T20:23:00.000-08:00

In our daily lives we tend to encounter all types of individuals. Some of them know what they are doing, some of them do not; others have the allusion of knowing something with great degree, but don’t necessarily have any competence to back it up.

The world is filled with all sorts of people with varying degrees of competence and confidence. Have you ever stopped for a moment to think of the relationship between these two things, though?

Competence: “The quality of being adequately or well qualified physically and intellectually.”

Confidence: “Assurance: Freedom from doubt; belief in yourself and your abilities.”

From our youngest years we either have skills forced upon us (learning to fold towels, clean our rooms, or take out the trash, for instance) or we actively seek them out (putting things together, taking things apart, drawing, etc). When I was in the military I became acquainted with the government model of assessment of one’s competencies: Knowledge, skills, and abilities; known simply as “KSAs.” The theory, I gathered, was that various bits of knowledge built upon one another towards the end of developing skills, combining to form greater abilities: The knowledge, for instance, of such things as telephony fundamentals work together to form the basis for skills to work with telephone platforms, switching equipment, and the like. These skills cohesively bind to form the ability to maintain, troubleshoot, and repair these systems.

In human resources the term “skill set” is thrown around to describe just that—particular sets of skills that go into various job domains or career fields. We seek education, training, and our own versions of the school of “hard Knox” to acquire the various skill sets which each of us possess.

Well, most of us, at least. Let’s look at the other side of the coin.

Confidence, as described above, is a function of assurance in oneself. Following this to a logical conclusion of “what happens if you have confidence, but no competence” we are left with a simple, glaring truth: Arrogance.

In a book in which he speaks about MBA graduates and their successes, Henry Mintzberg writes “confidence without competence breeds arrogance.” In this article he goes on to describe the relationship between confidence and competence:

“Imagine a 2 x 2 matrix of confidence and competence. The effective people have both, the sad ones neither. The unfortunate people have competence but lack confidence. They are worth worrying about, however, because a small boost in confidence can have great benefits. The dangerous people, especially in this hyped-up society, are the remaining group: those whose confidence exceeds their competence. These are the people who drive everyone else crazy.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

If you think Mr. Mintzberg has some good ideas, you can pick up the book here!

Programmer Search!

2007-11-17T10:13:00.000-08:00

One of my side projects, The Phoenix Institute, is looking for volunteer programmers to program an open source game.

If you're interested, visit this page where you can submit your resume and qualifications.

Support This Website!

2007-11-17T10:01:00.000-08:00

Instead of begging and pleading for your generosity this holiday season, I'm going to offer you some of the greatest deals of the season by offering you a link to the Black Friday deals of Amazon.com. In addition to some very, very cool things, you'll be helping me, this blog, and my website.

From Amazon:

Amazon.com Black Friday Deals

Next week is Thanksgiving, and Friday November 23rd is the biggest shopping day of the year - Black Friday. This represents a tremendous opportunity for you to earn referral fees by sending your site visitors to the deals and events available on Amazon.com. Your visitors are sure to find some great deals, and we have just released a brand new interactive Deals widget that will help you showcase the latest deals on your site in real time.

Black Friday Deals

On Black Friday Amazon.com won’t have a cold, dark parking lot to line up in, but we will have a bunch of great deals to help you and your site visitors get holiday shopping done for less. This year we’ve created a Black Friday page for holiday shoppers at www.amazon.com/blackfriday. Amazon.com will be offering hourly deals from 6am to 6pm PST along with thousands of products on sale for a limited time. Also, customers will get gift wrapping for $.99 per item. So, let your site visitors know that this year they shouldn’t fight the crowds when they can shop online at Amazon.com from the comfort of their own homes.

New Associates Deals Widget

We have launched a new interactive Amazon Deals Widget. Show your visitors exactly what the best deals on Amazon are at any and every time they visit your site. This widget lets you showcase Amazon.com's Gold Box Deals including Deal of the Day, Lightning Deals, and Our Best Deals in real-time on your site. We are offering Sidebar and Banner formats in a range of sizes to give you flexibility in placing this widget on your site.

On Black Friday the Amazon Deals Widget will pull in the hourly Lightning deals. But be sure to add this to your site as soon as possible to capitalize on the wave of shopping excitement that begins next week and runs through the rest of the holiday season.

Customers Vote - 6 rounds. 18 ridiculous deals.

Amazon Customers Vote is back for 2007. Each round of Customers Vote lets you and your site visitors vote for the deal you’d most like to have. Voting begins on Thursday, November 15th and continues through Monday, November 26th. There will be six rounds of voting this year with three products in each round. Beginning Thursday, November 22nd, each day the new winning product will be announced, and randomly selected customers will have the opportunity to purchase the item for which they voted at a great discount. Products this year will include:

1,000 Nintendo Wii Game Systems (see prices on Customers Vote page)
500 Panasonic 7.5MP Digital SLR Cameras, $499 (*normally $1,149.95)
1,000 Razor E100 Electric Scooters for $29 (*normally $89.99)
500 TiVo HD Digital Video Recorders, $89 (*normally $253.48)
500 Magellan Maestro 3140 Portable Auto GPS Systems, $99 (*normally $247.00)
200 Samsung 46” 1080p LCD HDTVs, $719 (*normally $1,899.98)

* “Normal” prices quoted above are accurate on release date but are otherwise subject to change at any time.

The other 12 products can be viewed on the Customers Vote page. To link directly to Amazon Customers Vote and earn referral fees on any subsequent qualifying purchases, use the following link, substituting your Associates ID:

We look forward to working with you to make this holiday shopping season a success. Happy Holidays to you and yours.

Sincerely,
The Amazon Associates Program

Just Give Up

2007-11-15T22:56:00.001-08:00

Monkey Mondays: Clone the Monkey

2007-11-12T17:02:00.000-08:00

For the first time, scientists have created dozens of cloned embryos from adult primates. But what are the implications of this technical breakthrough for the future of mankind?

A great breakthrough in cloning with monkeys!

I Will Hug It and Pet It and Call It Fuzzy Logic

2007-11-10T20:53:00.000-08:00

We live in the era of the Fuzzy Logic Generation.

Throughout our educations in school we learned the mechanics of Boolean Algebra. It is the easiest of algebra to teach because it is linear: That is, with a few simple rules, one can logically see progressions that can easily be spotted and built upon: Two comes after one, positive numbers are greater in value than negative numbers, and odd numbers and even numbers are two completely separate things. Things generally make sense and the world is in order.

While Boolean Algebra is pretty great and wonderful, the real world can often not be described in such linear, or even binary terms. Enter fuzzy logic. In the real world where values don’t necessarily have a binary range of “true” or “false,” or “one” or “zero,” This form of Non-Boolean algebra can help in decision making with imprecise data.

With the background of a computer programmer, I can look at the world and give it a vast series of conditional formulas and craft it into a working model. However, the amount of formulas grows increasingly complex; while this isn’t impossible, the mandate of the wise engineer is to simply things as thoroughly as possible. When such a system hits the “real world,” unnecessary complexity tends to make things, well, more complex than they need to be. Fuzzy logic is great for being able to eliminate much of that complexity, solving problems with expert and realtime systems reacting in an imperfect environment that can be highly variable, unpredictable, and volatile.

In 1964 Lofti Zadeh, a former chairman of the electrical engineering and computer science department over at the University of California at Berkeley, was programming software to solve the handwriting recognition issue. Since traditional set theory didn’t work for him with the binary approach—“off or on—“that it applies, Dr. Zadeh needed something that applied more a “matter of degree” approach rather than the alternative.

From a page that describes Fuzzy Logic:

“Fuzzy logic manipulates such vague concepts as "warm" or "still dirty" and so helps engineers to build air conditioners, washing machines and other devices that judge how fast they should operate or shift from one setting to another even when the criteria for making those changes are hard to define. When mathematicians lack specific algorithms that dictate how a system should respond to inputs, fuzzy logic can control or describe the system by using "commonsense" rules that refer to indefinite quantities. No known mathematical model can back up a truck-and-trailer rig from a parking lot to a loading dock when the vehicle starts from a random spot. Both humans and fuzzy systems can perform this nonlinear guidance task by using practical but imprecise rules such as "If the trailer turns a little to the left, then turn it a little to the right." Fuzzy systems often glean their rules from experts. When no expert gives the rules, adaptive fuzzy systems learn the rules by observing how people regulate real systems.”

Short of being a mathematician, what is the point of Fuzzy Logic?

Try having a conversation with anyone under the age of 30; certainly anyone under the age of 20: They have grammars and use sentence structures which are laced with “like,” “kinda,” and “sorta.” How difficult is it to get someone to give you a straight, firm answer about anything?

Fuzzy logic doesn’t dictate a world that belongs or doesn’t belong; in other words, it doesn’t dictate bivalent sets: Cannot belong to both a set and its complement set or to neither of the sets—preserving logic to avoid any contradiction that a number can and cannot simultaneously be a part of multiple sets. Instead, the multivalent sets of fuzzy logic break these laws to some degree. According to fuzzy logic, the number 5 (for instance) can belong to both “odd” and “even” number sets. Imagine an air conditioner: While you may consider the air coming from it to feel “cool,” another person might consider it “just right.” The air coming out of the air conditioner can be measured as belonging to multiple sets. The boundaries of standard sets, those able to be manipulated by classic algebra, are exact while those of fuzzy logic, Non-Boolean Algebra are curved and can taper off, creating partial contradictions: The air coming from that air conditioner can be 25 percent cool and 75 percent not cool at the same time.

I’ve long held to this belief: While many, many things in the world can be described in black and white, it is things like human emotion that add color to our worlds. If you can cut past all of that, you might very well be able to simplify the situation.

“We’d rather miss a good one than hire a bad one.”

2007-11-09T12:09:00.000-08:00

It's tough to find good help these days. That is why these companies are changing their tactics for finding good workers in a national economy with less-than-natural unemployment.

Do you play well with others?

Effective Habit Change: Five Things to Know

2007-11-08T23:26:00.001-08:00

The title says it all.

Read about it here.

Get Rid of "Brain Drain"

2007-11-08T23:23:00.000-08:00

Here are some of the signs you might be suffering from brain drain.

Mental exhaustion.
Irritation or drowsiness when thinking about what you have to do.
Putting off certain tasks because they are "too hard to think about."
Snipping at others who are not moving fast enough.
Feeling as if the harder you work, the farther behind you get.
Feeling depressed, stressed out, or as if you can't keep up mentally with your task list.

Have these symptoms? Learn tools to get past them here!

College?

2007-11-08T23:17:00.001-08:00

While I'm a very big proponent of a higher education, it should be kept in mind that a higher education, namely college, isn't necessary for success. What is in you, rather, is the key to success.

15 Successful Entrepreneurs Who Didn't Need College

(Belated) Monkey Monday: A Babysitter for Bananas a Day!

2007-11-06T17:48:00.000-08:00

A babysitter...for bananas a day!

The Ineffectiveness of Labor Unions

2007-11-03T12:17:00.001-07:00

Remember a few weeks ago when the United Auto Workers had their strike fiasco with Chrysler?

Now, just weeks after that, Chrysler is cutting 12,000 jobs and models from their inventory.

This is the effectiveness of irrational greed in the marketplace, or lack thereof.

10 Debunked Myths on Cognitive Science

2007-11-01T20:24:00.000-07:00

A fairly quick read that describes...exactly what the title says it does!

Read the article.

Today’s Gamer, Tomorrow’s Strategic Leader

2007-10-31T20:11:00.001-07:00

An interesting article caught my eye through one of my news aggregators over at myadsl.co.za. From the article:

“Video games have become problem-solving exercises wrapped in the veneer of an exotic adventure.”

Certainly a first line that intrigues and piques one’s curiosity, let alone the affect the headline has on someone. Reading on:

“Video games have become problem-solving exercises wrapped in the veneer of an exotic adventure. In today's fast and rapidly-changing business environment, the strategic skills they teach are more important than ever.”

The article goes on to debate, through the perspective of the two authors of the book Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever. The authors state that instead of being like television where people are the bystander, gaming offers a suspension of disbelief and includes the gamer into the world of the game—they become a willing participant.

As such, the gamer must think strategically in interacting with their environment, propelled to win.

These skills, the article states, are indispensible to the business world. These traits are even more accentuated in multi-player online environments—the MMOGs like World of Warcraft—such that small team leaders need to leverage the abilities of their teammates in the execution of success.

This culminates in an important point:

“Games teach by trial and error. Consequently, gamers learn that failure is a necessary and unequivocal part of the path to success. This is a message that is often lost in the real world, because repetitions are few and far between and therefore the stakes are too high during each attempt. In games, repetition is high and immediate feedback is provided to the gamer. While failure in the real world is disheartening, in games it serves as an encouragement to try harder. This attitude towards failure eventually permeates life outside of the game. The result is that the gaming generation is willing to take more risks and be more entrepreneurial than previous generations.”

The kicker?

“80 percent of managers in the US under the age of 35 had significant video game experience and that gamers had a more positive outlook on life than non-gamers. Gamers tended to prefer multitasking to individual assignments, to stave off boredom.”

“Time Machine,” Two Races, and Spam

2007-10-29T00:11:00.001-07:00

Ever get a spam email? Does the below sound like promises that they throw around frequently?

“Men will have symmetrical facial features, deeper voices and bigger penises, according to Curry in a report commissioned for men's satellite TV channel Bravo.

Women will all have glossy hair, smooth hairless skin, large eyes and pert breasts, according to Curry.”

According to an evolutionary theorist from the London School of Economics…in several thousand years, this could be you! That is, unless, you end up being part of that other race.

The Silicon Ball of Finance

2007-10-29T00:05:00.000-07:00

Recently I posted a story here about complex algorithms being used to predict acts of terrorism and advise military and state leadership in the conduct of matters of diplomacy. An obvious extension of using such sets of mathematical formulas would be to predict how to win the lottery, as I mentioned in that post.

My view of the lottery, though, has changed since I devised my original concept on the matter: The lottery is a tax on poor people and those with a lesser amount of economic and financial knowledge.

What the lottery-winning seeking public should do, instead, is to use the stock market.

So, without further ado…who is better in the game of investments: A computer or a person?

Let’s start by defining a couple types of investing: There are those that believe in and practice the fundamentals: Observing P/E ratios and, essentially, applying a series of formulas to a company, an industry, their stock picks, etc. Fundamentals’ investing is in my opinion, just that: The fundamentals of investing.

Take a man like Warren Buffet: He is the epitome of someone who believes in behavioral finance. When I was much younger I remember a commercial for some large Wall Street Trading firm which stressed that after they looked at a stock, they would go and investigate it in-depth: Interview managers, examine infrastructure, and perform other in-depth activities which filled in the blanks that a fundamental stock pick couldn’t do.

The comparison and contrast is a simple one: Fundamental investing is a very logical, linear, rational method of investing. Behavioral investing, on the other hand, has a million shades of human emotion involved and, therefore, is open to the irrationalities which we are prone to as humans.

And that’s it: A computer program which attempted to account for the human aspect a investing would need to be exceedingly complex.

The odd part of this whole stock market thing? The irrationalities which incite risk in the system is why the stock market goes up as much as it does over time and is why any money put into the stock market as a portion of Gross Domestic Product adds to GDP by factor of 400 percent; in other words, when constructing the value of GDP if you put $100 into it as a form of investments—anything in the stock market—it is calculated to increase as a portion of GDP at a rate of 4 to 1, making that $100 investment worth $400 in terms of GDP; contrast that against the 1:1 ratio of government spending.

The Science Sensei

2007-10-25T22:04:00.001-07:00

I'm impressed and think you will be too.

He's funny, he's informative... he's the Science Sensei!

The Misnomer of Racism

2007-10-25T21:38:00.000-07:00

“They’re standing on the corner and they can’t speak English. I can’t even talk the way these people talk: Why you ain’t, Where you is, What he drive, Where he stay, Where he work, Who you be… And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk.”

Bill Cosby has been making waves lately amongst certain parts of the populace with how he is fed up with, for lack of a better term coming to my head, “the Black Culture.”

Let me clarify before I continue. So often people whom criticize blacks are called racists; the same term can and will likely be applied to you if you are considered Caucasian and criticize anyone of another skin tone, color, or race. “Prejudice or discrimination based on an individual's race,” is the definition of racism. I am not racist. I could care less what your skin color is; it’s merely a sequence of genes arranged in such a fashion to allow a person to adapt better to their environment.

Bill Cosby makes remarks about a culture that permeates society, trending the most in certain geographic areas, ideologies, etc. In his latest rant he stresses that black people “can’t blame the white people anymore.”

I urge you to read the short piece. To coax you further, one more paragraph:

“Brown or black versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person’s problem. We have got to take the neighborhood back. People used to be ashamed. Today a woman has eight children with eight different ‘husbands’ — or men or whatever you call them now. We have millionaire football players who cannot read. We have million-dollar basketball players who can’t write two paragraphs. We as black folks have to do a better job. Someone working at Wal-Mart with seven kids, you are hurting us. We have to start holding each other to a higher standard.”

This phenomenon isn’t confined to any single race or culture, either. I can walk down to my local Wal-Mart and find the same kind of people—with any color of skin.

Wisdom of the Nerds: String Theory in About 2 Minutes

2007-10-25T20:07:00.001-07:00

This was too good not to share with you:

The fundamentals of the underlying theory of the entire universe: String Theory.

...In about 2 minutes, complete with a rubber ducky!

Watch the video here!

Consider It Similar to America's "Area 51"

2007-10-23T20:35:00.000-07:00

Baikonur, once one of the Soviet Union's most secret cities, is still closed to outsiders and surrounded by barbed wire. Armed soldiers at checkpoints guard dozens of launch pads, five tracking control centers and a missile test range.

A bit outside the theme of this blog, this is still a fascinating article nonetheless: A write-up on Russia's Baikonur, the center of the Soviet, now the Russian, space program.

Read the article here.

Monkey Mondays: Tiny Monkey Born in Great Britain!

2007-10-22T20:45:00.000-07:00

The Sun online was invited down for a first, exclusive look at the pint-sized Primate - who's just three inches long.

Read the article and see the pics here!

It's a School Day: Do You Know Where Your Child Is?

2007-10-20T11:56:00.000-07:00

“"From my own experience - this could get me in trouble - I think every single school district in the nation has at least one perpetrator. At least one," says Mary Jo McGrath, a California lawyer who has spent 30 years investigating abuse and misconduct in schools. "It doesn't matter if it's urban or rural or suburban."”

That is the most shocking statement from the entire article, in my opinion.

Sexual Misconduct Plagues US Schools

The Seven Percent Solution

2007-10-19T11:04:00.000-07:00

Feeling down? Would you consider yourself depressed? Research suggests that you should get a full-time job!

“The 7% figure isn’t news so much as the fact that if you don’t hold down a full-time job, that figure nearly doubles, to 12.7%. That is, 12.7% of people who don’t hold a full time job in the U.S. have reported an episode of depression from 2004 to 2006.”

That is, of course, if you don’t already have a full-time job.

7% of U.S. Workforce Depressed

What the 2007 Nobel Prize for Economics Can Teach Us

2007-10-18T20:32:00.000-07:00

The 2007 Nobel Prize for Economics

“Three Americans -- including the oldest-ever Nobel Prize winner -- will share award for creating mechanism design theory.”

“Mechanism Design Theory,” a subset of Game Theory in which we can learn several things to enrich our lives. Some key points to take away:

· Auctions are the most efficient form of market transaction: Think cheap items on eBay.

· Double auctions are the best type, in fact: Think the Google IPO.

· There is often no good market solution to providing some goods, like uncrowded roads

The Algorithm Vs. The Unpredictable

2007-10-18T17:57:00.000-07:00

$2.2 Million Grant Calls for Designing Computer Software to Predict the Unpredictable

You ever have one of “those ideas” which, later, someone else is able to make come to fruition? It happens to me all the time, and is one of the more frustrating things about my existence.

Years ago, while serving on active duty as an Air Security Officer I came up with the notion of how to win the lottery or predict the weather. They both could be manifest of the same theory. I hypothesized that an algorithm—or series thereof—could be devised with which to emulate the behavior of certain complex systems with discrete outcomes, eventually “catching up” with the behavior of the system and then outpacing it. Once the algorithm learned the dynamics of the system it could not only tell you what it was doing at this instant, but also it could predict what it would do.

This system could be applied to the lottery and meteorology, I speculated at the time. It’s been years since that thought had occurred to me, but when I read this article I realized that this had boundless opportunities in other fields.

In the post-September 11^THworld we are faced with terrorists and unstable regions of the world that rival similar parts of history during the Cold War, but even more savage. The implications of a set of algorithms which could “predict the unpredictable” could revolutionize many, many areas of the world in which we live.

Something to think about.

Food for Thought

2007-10-16T19:18:00.000-07:00

What separates the winners from the losers?

"I'll try means I'll fail."

Epilepsy: The Human Brain Overheats Like a Computer

2007-10-12T11:26:00.000-07:00

Researchers have crafted a theory for a "brain radiator" that would help with epileptic siezures:

In severe epileptic fits, over-excited brain cells fire at such a rate they can raise the brain's temperature in that area. This causes more nerves to fire in a feedback mechanism that makes the fit even worse. One way of preventing such escalating fits is to cool the area of the brain that is susceptible.

So Takashi Saito and colleagues at Yamaguchi University in Japan have developed a heat pipe that is surgically implanted into the affected region of the brain and then connected to a heat sink on the outside of the skull. This device carries heat away from the affected area, keeping

Monkey Mondays: KoKo.org

2007-10-08T19:16:00.000-07:00

Monkeys and a site for them.

Friday Funnies (Belated)

2007-10-06T12:18:00.000-07:00

Hardees/Carls Jr. is advertising its Frisco Burgers again. Only thing is, this time, the commercials are absolutely hillarious. Consider them to be a parody of Sir Mix a Lot's crossover rap hit of the early 90s.

Alan Greenspan: The Best Financial Authority of Our Times, Living or Dead?

2007-10-05T13:05:00.000-07:00

John McCain made an interesting remark published today:

"If he's alive or dead it doesn't matter. If he's dead, just prop him up and put some dark glasses on him like, like 'Weekend at Bernie's,'" McCain joked. "Let's get the best minds in America together and fix this tax code."

Having served for 18 1/2 years as Fed Chairman, Greenspan is considered at the top of his field of central banking. Obviously some politicians consider him in even much higher regard.

Some recent video of Mr. Greenspan:

Follow-Up: Go Figure

2007-10-05T10:35:00.000-07:00

Go figure. The previously-mentioned editor of a student-ran university newspaper in Colorado gets to keep his job.

The punishment was one of the least severe the board could impose. The only lesser penalty was to dismiss the allegations against McSwane.

America's Youth: What We Have to Look Forward to

2007-10-05T10:31:00.001-07:00

This isn't indicative of all of them, just a subsect of the next generation which is frightful enough in and of itself.

A screaming 15-year old girl who is resisting arrest after violating a curfew law.

Monkey Mondays: Matthew the Monkey

2007-10-01T16:11:00.000-07:00

Animal rights activists campaigning to get Pan, a 26-year-old chimpanzee, legally declared a person vowed Thursday to take their challenge to Austria's Supreme Court after a lower court threw out their latest appeal.
A provincial judge in the city of Wiener Neustadt dismissed the case earlier this week, ruling that the Vienna-based Association Against Animal Factories had no legal standing to argue on the chimp's behalf.

What Kind of World...

2007-10-01T16:07:00.000-07:00

What kind of world do we live in when Britney Spears is ordered to give her kids to ex-husband Kevin Federline?

Come on, I know Britney is the role model for (among other things) being a bad parent...but Kevin Federline...better?

Wow.

The Fall of Languages

2007-09-30T22:19:00.000-07:00

Some fascinating stuff about languages around the world.

“a report, released a couple of weeks back by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in Oregon, on the alarming rate of extinction of the world's languages. While half of all languages have gone extinct in the last 500 years, the half-life is dropping: half of the 7,000 languages spoken today won't exist by the year 2100. The NY Times adds this perspective: "83 languages with 'global' influence are spoken and written by 80 percent of the world population. Most of the others face extinction at a rate, the researchers said, that exceeds that of birds, mammals, fish and plants."

A physics principle and a math principle applied to linguistics: Half lives and the 80/20 principle. Great stuff!

What Printers Taught Me about Me

2007-09-27T21:07:00.000-07:00

While I’ve been working with computers since before the fourth grade, I’ve only been working in the realm of printer repair for about a year and a half. While I came into the job with a background for the mechanical—I served as an engineer in the U.S. Army and spent many of my formative years on a farm—I was coming into what is now my current position in which I repair printers and work with other aspects of Information Technology from what was part administrative, part support, part customer service position with Cingular (now the new AT&T) and my level of confidence in conducting my job was lower than when I had started other job roles.

“Arm yourself because no one else here will save you.”
—Chris Cornell, “You Know My Name”

It took me several months for a printer not to become daunting, while I gathered my courage and developed my confidence. When confronted with an issue with a printer I found myself, sometimes, reacting like a child struggling in the water, thrown in for one of his or her first times. It wasn’t until I learned to stop panicking and rely on myself to solve the problem.

Because, that’s one of my core competencies: The ability to solve a problem.

Of course, the best way to do this, in my experience, is to learn as much as possible about an issue and the all bodies of knowledge surrounding it until such time that you can come to a resolution. Appearing contrarian to my perspective of “perfect information” on the surface, this has developed itself over the years in that I try to find the “perfect amount of information” surrounding an issue instead of going in with so much information as to develop prejudices about conclusions that might not be the case. In any situation, however, I develop a core set of scenarios in which I ensure that I have parts available to be able to repair things on sight.

Yeah, something the Boy Scouts taught me: Always be prepared.

There are those situations, though, that I found where I would be confronted with an unruly piece of equipment which would require repair while I was there, even if it worked only partially or temporarily, so that the primary users would have the printer or other piece of equipment at their disposal to print checks, do reports, or whatever else their hearts or jobs desired. I started learning “field expedient” fixes which would carry something until such time that I could see to a proper repair.

That was something the Army taught me.

After I got it through my head something of my own advice—That I am not much more or less than the sum of my experiences—I realized that the best way to solve a problem was to have me be part of it. Why rely on fate, outside circumstances, chaos, or random circumstances dictate what the variables in a given situation would be? Why should I allow for something to turn out in a fashion that was counterintuitive—and counterproductive—to the way which I wanted a situation to turn out?

I learned that in any given situation—be that an office machine or a land war in Eston—if I made myself the determining piece in the situation, then I would have a much better chance of resolving it into my favor.

Rely upon yourself, because you’re the element in your life which makes the most difference.

Monkey Mondays...on Tuesday

2007-09-25T19:43:00.000-07:00

The magic monkey tree.

Bananas, peanuts and peaches have been left as offerings to please the monkey god, sacred in Chinese mythology and Hinduism. A wheel-like device which kneeling gamblers turn by hand in front of the tree to spit out numbered balls has helped fuel the mania.

Freedom of Speech and Abusing the Right

2007-09-22T11:18:00.000-07:00

Dateline Fort Collins, Colorado: The Colorado State University campus there. An editorial ran recently:

"Taser this ... F*** Bush."

The expletive was spelled out.

An article covering it reads: ""I think they went over the line a little bit, but it's free speech and they're allowed to write what they want," one student told 7NEWS."

Yes, because everyone has a right to free speech. I have nothing wrong with free speech or anyone practicing any other rights. But where do those rights end?

Two places:

1. When the practice of that right becomes something that inhibits someone else from living their life or pursuing liberty or happiness.

2. When they abuse that right.

I will stand up any day for any person to practice their rights, but when they violate one of the above I take a step back and take a look at the real character of the person practicing their right.

Moral of the story: Rights are only such because they don't infringe on everyone else or when it is an abuse.