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July 16, 2009

Planet MoneyUK Moves To Withhold Bonuses

As the European Union considers new regulations and fines meant to curb bonuses for excessive risk-taking, the U.K. government has its own strategy.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said today that his government plans to force banks to hold back half of all bonuses for senior traders and executives for up to five years. He also said the Financial Services Authority, which regulates banks, is working on plans that would allow it to force banks to hold more capital if the FSA is unhappy with its bonus structure.

Both the British and European Union plans would provide firm restrictions on bank bonuses and that's left some lawmakers asking when the U.S. will adopt similar measures. The government banned cash bonuses for the top 25 employees at companies that took taxpayer funds last year, but now that many of those institutions have paid back TARP funding those restrictions no longer apply. The Treasury Department says it has plans to revolve executive compensation, but all we have right now is a set of broad-based principles.

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Michael CotéLinks for July 15th through July 16th

by-sa

Weinberg on WritingWriterly Fear

by Annie Reed (invited guest contributor)

Chris York's post on agents and fear got me thinking. That can be a scary thing in and of itself, but this time what I was thinking about a different kind of scary.


Writerly fear. Something I know well.


I'm not talking about the cower in the corner kind of fear, which I get when I see a spider or discover a six-foot snake coiled in my kitchen cabinet where a five-pound bag of flour should be. Or when I read a really oogy Stephen King story. No, I'm talking about the kind of debilitating emotion that's more a simple lack of self-confidence combined with fear of the unknown.


As an adult, which I sometimes think I am, I can go confidently about my daily life and routine without a second thought. But put me in a situation that's out of my routine, tell me I have to do something I don't know how to do, something that might be hard, and the part of me that's still five years old wants to run and hide. Routine is easier. Routine is comfortable. Routine isn't scary.


Routine also doesn't let you grow. Or learn. Or achieve your dreams.

Eight years ago I took a step outside the routine. It helped that I had a partner in crime.


On Mother's Day weekend of 2001, Louisa Swann and I took our first in what would be many, many trips to the Oregon coast, this one for a Saturday get together of professional writers hosted by Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith.


At the time, I had no story sales. I barely submitted anything anywhere, my writerly ego having taken a battering on a response to a story submission I sent to the Nevada Arts Council literary fellowship grants program. What was I thinking, going to a gathering of professional writers? Was I nuts?


Thank goodness for Louisa. Between the two of us, I worked my way through an iceberg size case of cold feet.


I think I spent most of that night sitting quietly and just listening, wide-eyed, to the stories being told around me. Not only the stories read and commented on, but stories of other writers and their escapades, the kind of oral history about writing that only comes out when writers get together and talk. Inspiring? Oh yeah.

If real life was a Hollywood movie, I'd be able to say that my life completely turned around after that one eye-opening night. Well, not really, but it was a start.

I still have my moments of fear, and there are more days than I probably want to admit where I stick to routine instead of pushing my own personal envelopes. I'm very much a child of "it has to be done right or not at all!" and that kind of life-long indoctrination takes a long time to overcome. It took a lot of workshops and lunches and get-togethers before I felt less of a pretender and more like I belonged in a group of professional writers. I'm still very much a work in progress, but I'm a lot farther along the road than I was eight years ago.

Louisa and I are heading back to Oregon for a workshop next month. I can't wait.

There is a little slice of Hollywood happily-ever-after to this story: Four years after Louisa and I went on our first Oregon coast adventure, I won a Nevada Arts Council fellowship literary grant.


Writer - 1, fear - 0, at least for that day.

Ars TechnicaReport: music fans cling to CDs, but discover music online

companion photo for Report: music fans cling to CDs, but discover music online

Despite the popularity of music downloads and streaming, music fans still seem to love an old standby: the CD. A new survey conducted in the UK by The Leading Question and Music Ally Speakerbox has found that music customers of all ages still prefer the CD to downloading, a pattern that extends into the lucrative teenage demographic. That's not to say online offerings aren't important, though—those who use subscription or streaming services tend to buy more CDs than others, so online music discovery is clearly helping to keep those sales alive.

The firms conducted a thousand face-to-face interviews with UK music lovers between the ages of 14 and 64, all of whom have broadband connections. Seventy-three percent of the group reported being happier buying CDs than downloading, with 66 percent of those between the ages of 14 and 18 being among that group. Over half (59 percent) reported listening to CDs every day.

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Linux NewsSpoiled for Choice: Assorted Linux from Utilex 4.0.0

Utilex 4.0.0 promises to be the ultimate Linux experience: the multi-boot live Linux distribution offers a whole bouquet of Linux distributions to prove it.

BBC CricketStrauss defends England batsmen

Andrew Strauss defends England's batsmen after the hosts lost four wickets in the final session on day one of the second Test against Australia.

BBC CricketStrauss leads from the front

Oliver Brett watches England's captain dominate at Lord's

BBC CricketStrauss leads from the front

Oliver Brett watches England's captain dominate at Lord's

FactCheck.orgOur election coverage wins a Clarion Award

The Association for Women in Communications selected our 2008 election coverage as the best journalism by an online publication.

BrainiacSotomayor and Sessions vs. "legal realism"

Has anyone, during the Sotomayor confirmation hearings, quoted the sainted Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes on the subject of whether law is simply a matter of applying rules and adhering to precedent, as Senator Sessions evidently believes -- and as Judge Sotomayor is pretending to agree with? "The life of the law," Holmes famously wrote, in 1881, "has not been logic; it has been experience." I'm drawing the quote from "The Challenge of Legal Realism," a chapter in the University of Virginia law professor Frederick Schauer's new book "Thinking Like a Lawyer: A New Introduction to Legal Reasoning." With that statement, Holmes was departing from the then-regnant view that law was "a largely logical and deductive march from one case to the next," Schauer writes. Holmes "had concluded that changes in legal doctrine were largely a function of an experience-based and empirical determination by judges who, when changing the law, were undoubtedly making policy choices dictated neither by logic nor by existing law." This was one of the first stirrings of a movement within legal scholarship that came to be called Legal Realism.

Planet MoneyA 'Fun' Look At American Business

FreakonomicsFor Sale: One Kidney?

Virginia Postrel examines the kidney donation system in the United States, where 11 people die every day waiting for a kidney transplant. Exchanging organs for payment is illegal in the U.S. although recent developments in organ exchanges, including donation chains, have been successful. These innovations alone, however, won't solve the problem, and Postrel advocates a new system that includes both financial incentives and measures to protect donors.


BBC CricketWalters leads Surrey from front

Stand-in captain Stewart Walters hits his highest first-class score as Surrey fight back on day two against Essex at Guildford.

Ars TechnicaAcoustic warfare: moths jam bats' echolocation

companion photo for Acoustic warfare: moths jam bats' echolocation

The predator-prey relationship has produced all sorts of novel defenses, from animals that load themselves with toxins to others that have evolved the appearance of a toxic species but actually don't produce toxins themselves. In today's issue of Science, a paper describes a form of camouflage that specifically targets the ability of bats to hunt via echolocation: some species of tiger moths can apparently emit ultrasonic chirps that jam the bat's ability to zero in on it.

But before the moths could use the chirps for jamming bat signals, they first evolved them for other purposes. There are a number of species of tiger moths, and many have an organ called a tymbal that allows them to emit noises in the ultrasonic range used by many species of bat to locate potential prey. In at least some cases, the noises act in a similar manner to the bright coloration adopted by many species that produce toxins: they warn predators off. Bright colors won't work to warn an animal that hunts in the dark without relying on vision, so moths that produced toxins clearly needed an alternate way of alerting bats that they wouldn't make a good meal. Producing noises in a frequency range that the bats were clearly paying attention to provides an obvious solution.

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Economist GulliverMexico City's wheelchair helpers

There’s a heartening story in The Economist about the main international airport in Mexico City. It has hired some 60 disabled, bilingual workers to serve as Mexico’s face to the world.

Their presence delights both passengers, who frequently offer congratulations and ask to take their picture, and their superiors. “They’re professional, attentive, always in a good mood, and never miss work,” says Héctor Velázquez, the airport’s director.

Passing businessmen are so impressed that they routinely ask about hiring the workers' counterparts.

Ars TechnicaPre developers, start your engines; users, submit your ideas

companion photo for Pre developers, start your engines; users, submit your ideas

After stressing that it planned to open up its App Catalog to all comers since the day the Pre was unveiled, Palm has finally released the Mojo SDK to the public and will begin taking App Catalog submissions from one and all. The announcement was posted on Palm's blog today, and it boasted that 1.8 million apps have been downloaded from the beta store so far. Of course, there are only about 30 apps on offer, so the number of downloads could've been astronomically higher if they had opened the developer beta program just a bit more.

Unfortunately for Pre users (like me) who have been waiting for new apps to show up in the store, we'll have even longer to wait. Palm won't begin posting new submissions in the App Catalog until "the fall," which means we'll be waiting at least until September. I'm ready for new apps yesterday, though, and I wish that there were some way for Palm to get them into the store much sooner. Perhaps ironically, despite Palm's superior multitasking interface, the App Store gives the iPhone 3G an overwhelming advantage in bang per buck right now. While the Pre does a number of things much better than the iPhone, you can just do an order of magnitude more kinds of things with Apple's handheld.

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BBC CricketJonathan Agnew column

"England dominated much of the day but the bad habits returned after tea"

BBC CricketBlackwell helps put Durham on top

Ian Blackwell hits a quickfire 38 and then takes three wickets as Durham take charge on day two against Nottinghamshire at Trent Bridge.

BBC CricketCarberry stars in Hants fightback

Michael Carberry hits a century for the second successive Championship game as Hampshire fight back on day two against Sussex.

Tim Bray Dino of the Day — Eyes!

Our friend Sally from Australia is visiting, so in early July we took a seven-day drive around nice bits of Western Canada, notably including the badlands-and-dinosaur country of Southern Alberta. I’ll run some dinosaur shots over the next few days.

Drumheller — where, oddly, my uncle was once bank manager — is at the center of all this. Just outside town is The Tyrrell, a really extremely nice museum of palaeontology. Tons and tons of dinos, models and fossils both.

Dinosaur face from the Tyrrell

The eyes are a bit fanciful — it’s unlikely we’ll ever know what they looked like — but there are grounds to believe in the rendition of the skin. They actually have a dinosaur-skin fossil, I forget the details of how the impression was rendered onto the mud, and the scales are sized and shaped about as shown here. The color, like the eyes, will remain a mystery I guess. And you have to love the tiny hint of smile.

I didn’t take notes, don’t know what kind of dinosaur this is. If you care about that kind of thing go the museum already, you won’t regret it.

Planet MoneyChina Reports GDP Growth Up Near 8 Percent

The National Bureau of Statistics of China says the country is on track to hit 8 percent GDP growth this year. According to the NBS, the economy grew by 7.9 percent in the second quarter of this year compared to the same time last year. The year over year increase is 7.1 percent.

The government credits the growth to a number of factors including increased industrial production, higher incomes among urban and rural residents and improved retail sales. Retail sales reportedly increased by 15 percent in the first six months of the year, thanks to government incentives like rebates.

The Financial Times also notes that the government's stimulus program played a major role: "The high-speed growth, above analysts' consensus forecasts, was driven by the government's aggressively loose fiscal and monetary policies, funded largely by record lending by state banks." The NBS says loans made by the country's financial institutions increased by 7.4 trillion yuan over the beginning of this year, an increase of 4.9 trillion yuan compared with the same period last year.

Some analysts suggest that the news out of China proves the country will help lead the world out of a global recession, but others remain unimpressed. Tim Holland of the South China Morning Post (sub req'd) warned earlier this month that economic figures from the Chinese government can't always be trusted. Holland points to foreign trade as important factor in growth, which often seems to be at odds with the country's GDP figures. According to the NBS, the total value of imports and exports this year is down by 23.5 percent.

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Tim Bray Into the Dark

I read Tuesday’s story of the joint suicide of Joan and Edward Downes. I’m sure this story touched many hearts, whatever we think of the ethical issues. Early this morning I was driving the kids around and they played a tune I’d never heard called I’ll Follow You Into the Dark. It’s a lovely song — at once melodious, witty, and sad — and it comes from exactly the same place as the story of the Downes’ death. This week there’s an extra chance it’ll tug at your heart as it did mine.

It turns out to be by Death Cab for Cutie, a band I’ve generally ignored on account of their having a lame name. You might want to give it a listen, there are plenty of videos online. The band’s site has a couple, but you might want to start with the words & music and this live recording.

Ars TechnicaGoogle, New America ease National Broadband Plan feedback

companion photo for Google, New America ease National Broadband Plan feedback

Up until Thursday, if you wanted to learn about the Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan and possibly submit comments regarding it, things were a little complicated. You had to go to the FCC's website, find the Notice of Inquiry, and figure out how to file a statement—none of which the Commission made easy for you.

But Google and the New America Foundation have now streamlined the process, producing a new discussion page where you can submit ideas for how to expand broadband in the United States, and read and vote on the comments of others. "Public participation in this process is critical," their press release says. "Now that the Commission has officially opened this proceeding, and with a new Chairman at the helm, we think it's time to give people the opportunity to learn about the issue and to weigh in with their thoughts."

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John D CookSolo software development

Is it becoming easier or harder to be a solo software developer? I see two trends flowing in opposite directions.

Matt Heusser argues in his article The Boutique Tester that it’s easier to be an independent software developer now than it was a decade ago. You don’t have to burn CDs and ship them; you just put your software up on the web. You don’t have to maintain your own server; you can rent a server cheaply.You don’t have to buy expensive development tools; good tools are available for free. All these things are true, but there are other issues.

Software developers are required to know more languages than ever. A decade ago, you could make a career writing desktop applications in Visual Basic or C++ and not need to know any other language. Now in order to write a web application you need to know at least HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and SQL in addition to a programming language such as Java, C#, or Ruby. However, just knowing these languages is just a beginning. You need to learn a web development framework such as JSP, ASP.NET, or Rails. The list seems to never end. See Joe Brinkman’s article Polyglot Programming: Death By A Thousand DSLs. Programming language proliferation is not the only new difficulty in software development — security anyone? — but I’ll focus on languages.

Can one developer learn all these languages? The surprising answer is “yes.” You might think that such a menagerie of languages would lead developers to specialize, but programmers are not nearly as specialized as an outsider might expect, even in large organizations. On the other hand, most developers don’t entirely understand what they’re doing, having to work with more languages than they could possibly master. This is no doubt the root cause of many bugs.

Going back to the original question, is it easier or harder to be a solo developer these days? Software development itself has gotten harder, but the external difficulties have been greatly reduced. Programmers have to know more programming languages, but programmers have a knack for that. They don’t have to spend as much time on distribution, system administration, etc. Even sales and marketing, the bane of many developers, is easier now.  So while software development itself has become harder, being an independent software developer may have become easier.

Many people disagree that software development has gotten harder; my opinion may be in the minority.  Software development tools have certainly improved. It would be much easier to develop 1999-style applications in now than it was in 1999. But I believe that developing 2009-style applications with 2009 tools is harder than developing 1999-style applications was with 1999 tools, particularly for high quality software. Throwing together applications that sorta work most of the time may be easier now, but developing quality software is more difficult.

Related post:
Programming language fatigue

BBC CricketStrauss century defies Australia

England captain Andrew Strauss hits an unbeaten 161 but Australia hit back on day one of the second Test at Lord's.

FreakonomicsDo You Owe $23 Quadrillion?

An unidentified computer glitch has led Visa to overcharge several of its cardholders for routine purchases at drug stores, gas stations, and restaurants, to the tune of $23,148,855,308,184,500.00 each. These charges, as far as we can tell, exceed the sum total of wealth accumulated in human history.


BrainiacGustav Mahler: sublime music, suspicious "physiognomy"

"Saturated with lachrymose melodies, dirgelike rhythms and the ghastly, fatal oompahs of sad waltzes," writes the music professor David Schiff, in The Nation, "the songs and symphonies of Gustav Mahler prophetically mourn the victims of twentieth-century catastrophes the composer died too soon to witness, or perhaps even imagine." How can Schiff make such a bold, seemingly anachronistic claim? Because Mahler's influence can be heard in many composers who did, in one way or another, chronicle the horrors of the century that followed 1900: Alban Berg, Dmitri Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten, Leonard Bernstein, and others ...

Planet MoneyWhat One Penny Will Buy You

Adam & Chana

Seen in Long Beach, Calif. Jessica Sweeney/Planet Money Flickr pool

 

Jessica Sweeney was one of the first to respond to Planet Money's five cents or less challenge with these photos from the Long Beach Deport for Creative Use. She writes:

I found a number of items at "The Long Beach Depot for Creative Reuse", in Long Beach, CA. In fact, it's a seriously fun place to hang out! I've met folks there who will buy 5-cent doobobs for their children, and they leave happier than clams. As you can see, it's a multimedia art supply store, but it carries things that are fun for all, as well as showing off some of the finished products from local artists.
I've bought some scraps of fabric from them, as well as a Christmas present for my partner -- a Tom Jones 8-track. This time I went with a pocket of pennies on assignment, but I was bad and went over budget for a two-tape Evita 8-track set for fifty cents. I'd only brought forty-eight, but they had a take-a-penny. Is that wise in a store that sells things that only cost a penny to begin with!?

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BBC CricketBell century gives Bears the edge

Ian Bell reminds the England selectors of his ability with a century to help Warwickshire towards a decent first innings total against Lancashire.

Ars TechnicaNew milestone of Unladen Swallow Python JIT shows progress

companion photo for New milestone of Unladen Swallow Python JIT shows progress

Earlier this year, Google's Python engineers launched a new project called Unladen Swallow. They aimed to make Python execution performance five times faster by leveraging the Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) compiler infrastructure to build a robust just-in-time (JIT) compilation engine.

The developers announced yesterday the availability of the 2009 Q2 release, the first development milestone. It is available for download from the project's Google Code repository and can be tested with conventional Python code.

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Tapestry and HiveMindInfrequent commands

Ann odd usability thought just hit me as I'm making some simple updates to my slide decks in Keynote. Adding and positioning the page number is not something you can do without using the mouse (to click the button in the inspector and drag it into place). There's no menu item for this.

That's normally OK with me ... it's a very infrequent operation so why take up valueable menu space (as well as valueable user comprehension space) with it?

But the odd thing is that I think quite often, when you need to use an infrequent operation you need to use it a lot at once. That's probably why Microsoft applications have byzantine menu structures ... they never want anything to require the mouse and from a usability perspective they throw the baby out with the bath water over those infrequent commands.

All I'm missing from Keynote is a simple macro-recording feature: turn on page numbers, select it, drag it to position, update it's style. I'd love to be able to run through my master slides (10 per presentation times 7 presentations!) and just it cmd-m or something.

Of course, if Keynote had master-masters, I might be able to make the change in one place per presentation (which would apply to the ten masters and the 60 or 70 slides per presentation).

Eugene WallingfordLengthen, Then Strengthen

(A pattern I've seen in running that applies more broadly.)

You are developing a physical skill or an ability that will take you well beyond your current level of performance. Perhaps you are a non-runner preparing for a 5K, or a casual runner training for a marathon, or an experienced runner coming back from a layoff.

To succeed, you will need endurance, the ability to perform steadily over a long period. You will also need strength, the ability to perform at a higher speed or with greater power over a shorter period of time. Endurance enables you to last for an amount of time longer than usual. It requires you to develop your slow-twitch muscles and your aerobic capacity, which depends on effective delivery of oxygen to your muscles. Strength enables you to work faster or harder, such as uphill or against an irregular force. It requires you to develop your fast-twitch muscles and your anaerobic capacity, which depends on muscles working effectively in the absence of oxygen.

You might try to develop strength first. Strength training involves many repetitions of intense work done for short durations. When you are beginning your training, you can handle short durations more easily than long ones. The high intensity will be uncomfortable, but it won't last for long. This does not work very well. First, you won't be able to work at an intense enough level to train your muscles properly, which means that your training sessions will not be as effective as you'd hope. Second, because your muscles are still relatively week, subjecting them to intense work even for short periods greatly increases the risk of injury.

You might try to develop strength and endurance in parallel. This is a strategy commonly tried by people who are in a hurry to reach a specific level of performance. You do longer periods of low-intensity work on some days and longer periods of high-intensity work on others. This strengthens your both your slow- and fast-twitch muscles and allows you to piggyback growth in one area on top of growth in the other. Unfortunately, this does not work well, either. There is a small decrease in the risk of injury from your strength training, but not as much as you might think. Our bodies adapt to change rather slowly, which means that your muscles don't grow stronger fast enough to prepare them for the intensity of strength training. Even when you don't injure yourself, you increase the risk of plateauing or fatigue.

Therefore, build a strong aerobic base first. Train for several weeks or even months at a relatively low level of intensity, resting occasionally to give your body a chance to adapt. This will build endurance, with slower speed or less power than you might want, but also strengthen your muscles, joints, and bones. Only then add to your regimen exercises that build your anaerobic capacity through many repetitions of high-intensity, short-duration activities. These will draw on the core strength developed earlier.

Continue to do workouts focused on endurance. These will give your body a chance to recover from the higher intensity workouts and time to adapt to those stresses in the form of more speed or power. For all but the most serious athletes, one or two strength workouts a week are sufficient. Doing more increases the risk of injury, fatigue, or loss of interest in training. As in so many endeavors, steady, regular practice tends to be much more valuable than occasional or spotty practice. This is especially true when the goal requires a long period of preparation, such as a marathon.

Examples. Every training program I have ever seen for runners, from 5Ks up to marathons, emphasizes the need for a strong aerobic base before before worrying about speed or other forms of power. This is especially true for beginners. Some beginners are eager to improve quickly and often don't realize how hard training can be on their bodies. Others fear that is they are not working "hard enough" they are not making progress. Low-intensity endurance training does work your body hard enough, just not in short bursts that make you strain.

This pattern applies even to more experienced runners coming back from periods of little or no training. Many such runners assume that they can quickly return to the level they were at before the layoff, but the body will have adapted to the lower level of exertion and require retraining. Elite athletes returning from injury usually take several months to build their aerobic base before resuming hard training regimens.

I have written this pattern from the perspective of running, but it applies to other physical activities, too, such as biking and swimming. The risk of injury in some sports is lower than in running, due to less load on muscles, joints, and bones, but the principles of endurance and strength are the same.

Related Ideas. I think this pattern is also present in some forms of learning. For example, it is useful to build attention span and vocabulary when learning learning a new discipline before trying to build critical skills or deep expertise. The gentler form of learning provides a base of knowledge that is required for expert analysis or synthesis.

I realize that this application of the pattern is speculative. If you have any thoughts about it, or the pattern more generally, please let me know.

BBC CricketRain thwarts Glamorgan and Kent

Barely 20 overs are bowled on day two at the Swalec Stadium as Glamorgan and Kent are frustrated by rain.

FreakonomicsQuotes Uncovered: The Punchline, Please

A while back, I invited readers to submit quotations for which they wanted me to try to trace the origins, using The Yale Book of Quotations and more recent research by me. Hundreds of people have responded via comments or e-mails. I am responding as best I can, a few per week. Javy asked:
Scientists (professors, physicians) will know more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing, or will know less and less about more and more until they know nothing about everything.


Jon UdellTinker to Evers to Chance, Tripit to Dopplr to Facebook


A few months back I observed:

Tripit, meet Dopplr. Dopplr, Tripit. You two should really get to know one another.

Richard Akerman replied:

You can feed TripIt’s ical output into Dopplr, I hear (I haven’t tried it)

That remark should have rung a loud bell for me, but somehow it didn’t. Then, yesterday, in conversation with James Senior, the bell rang. We were talking about how many services publish and/or subscribe to iCalendar feeds, how few people know that, and how much latent capability is being left on the table. Paraphrasing James:

I’ll give you a perfect example. I use Tripit, it’s a wonderful service. You email it your travel itinerary, and it organizes all your information for you. But I’ve been frustrated not to be able to share that information with my friends on Facebook. I also use Dopplr, and Dopplr talks to Facebook, but Tripit doesn’t. Then I realized that Tripit publishes an iCalendar feed, and that Dopplr can subscribe to iCalendar feeds. So I made that connection, and now my Tripit events are showing up in Facebook.

Brilliant. Look:

How did I miss that? Me, of all people, Mr. Splice-Everything-To-Everything, Mr. Find-Unintended-Uses-Of-Software, Mr. Cosmic-Significance-Of-Pub-Sub, Mr. Champion-Of-The-Underutilized-iCalendar-Standard, Mr. Computational-Thinking?

Because wiring the web is still too abstract, too convoluted, and too non-obvious — even, sometimes, for me.

The phrase wiring the web comes from Ray Ozzie, by the way. At ETech in 2006, demoed a concept called Live Clipboard. From my InfoWorld writeup:

Subscribing to an RSS feed, for example, has never conformed to any familiar user-interface pattern. Soon copying and pasting RSS feeds will feel natural to everyone, and Ozzie hopes the copy/paste metaphor will also make advanced capabilities more accessible. Consider my LibraryLookup bookmarklet. Dragging it onto the browser’s toolbar isn’t something easily understood or explained. Using the clipboard as the wiring junction will make a lot more sense to most people.

The same metaphor can accommodate what I’ve called lightweight service composition and what Ozzie calls “wiring the Web.” He showed how RSS feeds acting as service end points can be pasted into apps to create dynamically updating views. Virtually anyone can master this Tinkertoy approach to self-serve mashups.

This was, and remains, a crucial insight. From now on, we are all going to be wiring the web in one way or another. And we’re going to need a conceptual frame in which to do that — ideally, a user-interface metaphor that’s already familiar. Maybe it’s as simple as copy/paste. Maybe it’s more like Yahoo! Pipes or Popfly blocks. Whatever it turns out to be, we need to invent and deploy a universal junction box for wiring the web.

37 SignalsLINK: net@night 108: Jason Fried of 37signals

net@night 108: Jason Fried of 37signals

Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte interview Jason (audio, running time: 33:54).

Planet MoneyJP Morgan Up. Charles Schwab Down.

The big news this morning is JP Morgan's higher-than-expected profits. But discount broker Charles Schwab also released its earnings today, and they're a bit more sobering: the bank posted profits of $205 million, down 31 percent from last year's $295 million.

The news comes as the troubled firm has entered restructuring, citing low interest rates and stock prices amid the recession. The company also turned down TARP funding.

Charles Schwab is known for offering brokerage services with lower commissions and fees -- meaning it makes it easier for the little guy to access the market, largely via telephone or the web. Juggernauts like Goldman and JP Morgan may be posting large profits, but it could mean more to average Americans to see more accessible institutions -- the ones they deal with every day-- recover.

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Michael NygardAn AspectJ Circuit Breaker

Spiros Tzavellas pointed me to his implementation of Circuit Breaker. His approach uses AspectJ and can be applied using a bytecode weaver or AspectJ compiler. He's also got unit tests with 85% coverage.

Spiros' project page is here, and the code is (where else?) on GitHub. He appears to be quite actively developing the project.

37 SignalsHow playtime is responsible for Post-It Notes, Lasik, and more

Are you giving employees time to play? Often, that’s when breakthrough ideas happen.

It’s something Jim Coudal has mentioned before — how he actually encourages employees to goof around. I asked him to expand on that and here’s what he wrote:

Most of the smart, creative, successful people I know spend a good deal of time looking for inspiration, tracking down ideas and doing research.

We do all those things too, we just don’t have a problem with calling it what it is, “goofing around.”

Play is essential, it’s through play that you find connections between things that might not be at all obvious through logic or practicality.

If you don’t have any accidents how are you ever going to have happy ones?

3M gives all employees 15-20 percent free time to work on their own projects. If it’s a success, the project can be spun off into a new business and the employee who originated it is given an equity share. Most of the inventions that 3M depends upon today came from this free time.

In 1968, 3M employee [Art] Fry was singing in the church choir and got annoyed that his bookmark kept falling out of his hymnal. “It was during the sermon,” Fry remembers, “that I first thought, What I really need is a little bookmark that will stick to the paper but will not tear the paper when I remove it.” Fry wondered whether it would be possible to create a repositionable bookmark that would stick only gently to a page. In the months after his church choir daydreaming, he spent his side-project time researching what would ultimately become the adhesive behind the hugely popular yellow Post-it Note. It was an unexpected, even random, invention that saw the light of day thanks to 3M’s flexible employee policy.

And you’ve probably heard about how Google offers engineers “20-percent time” so they’re free to work on things they’re passionate about. One interesting side effect of that is a more long-term view. People who are given free time often see further down the road since they’re not forced to focus on immediate problems.

IBM also gives lab researchers time to experiment and play. In fact, that’s how IBM invented the application of laser for eye surgery. A group of IBM scientists were experimenting with laser for improving IBM products. One scientist wanted to see what the effect of laser would be on a cut on his finger. Intrigued by the results, the scientists experimented on cows’ eyes and eventually human eyes. IBM eventually licensed out the technology, making millions in profit.

If you want breakthroughs, then give people some freedom.

FreakonomicsReducing Traffic by Closing Roads

The city of Vancouver has turned one lane of traffic on the busy Burrard Bridge into a bicycle route. Critics predicted chaos, but the first day of the experiment found traffic moving smoothly. This seems to be in line with recent studies suggesting that road closures actually lead to fewer traffic jams.


O'Reilly RadarBantamweight Publishing in an Easily Plagiarised World

Even professional writers are prone to infrequent accidental plagiarism. But in the world of novels, newspapers, and college exams, there are rules about bootlegging others’ work that are well-established - most everyone agrees on what behaviors are unacceptable and what the consequences are. In bantamweight publishing, however, the rules are not so clear.

In order for the British Army to raise more units during the First World War, it created battalions of otherwise healthy men with lowered minimum height requirements. In this way, short, powerful miners and similarly swarthy individuals were able to contribute to the war effort. These soldiers were called bantams (a term now heard most commonly in boxing, bantamweight). Similarly, in a Web 2.0 environment, the short powerful bursts of searchable, findable, and sharable data emitted from personal electronic devices are a form of bantamweight publishing in which persons outside the regulated publishing industry can contribute to the information sharing effort.

Bantamweight publishing comes in many forms. Twitter is certainly in this category, but there are a steadily increasing number of ways to share small bits of information with the world. From updating your Facebook Wall to Yammering inside your enterprise to updating your LinkedIn status to commenting on people’s BrightKite locations, everyone is doing it. But in an easily plagiarized world, who owns your sentences once you publish them? It’s not really clear. And in a murky environment where someone might get a macropublishing book deal by popularizing someone else’s creative hashtag, bantamweight publishing runs the risk of serious future problems.

Oh, bantamweight publishing has its customs. Self-policing crowds ensure that most people who lift someone else’s excellent quote or funny picture or news link give credit to the originator using the “retweet” (RT) convention followed by a username. But there is little downside to cheating relative to being expelled from college or fired from your newspaper. As is well known in animal behavior circles, it can be temporarily advantageous for cheaters to infiltrate a system like this.

To be sure, quoting someone’s original haiku verbatim and making it appear as if it were your own is an infraction of bantamweight publishing customs. But what if someone tweets an Abraham Lincoln quotation - must the re-tweeter cite the originator? The custom seems less pressing in this case, mainly because of a lack of intent to deceive and arguable "fair use" of a well-known statement by a famous person. One can imagine altruistic plagiarism as well, where people repeat memes to raise money for charity, or virally make people aware of an immediate Amber alert. Further, who could fault someone for copying information about a charity onto their Facebook Wall without citing the originator? In the bantamweight publishing world, information sharing can easily supersede attribution. There are gradations of citations.

Bantamweight publishing is popular among those who feel brevity is a virtue. But when an entire work of art is bounded in 140 characters, even brevity has its limits. Sometimes, squeezing in a proper attribution through editing content can change the original meaning, when the edits unwillingly shift from cosmetic to substantive. And what happens when you run out of space when attempting to retweet someone who retweeted someone who tweeted an important quotation from the Washington Post? To a large degree, a work of bantamweight publishing is like a painting with an upper weight limit, where the novelty is the canvas and the attribution is the frame; most viewers would choose to appreciate the canvas without the frame if given the hard choice.

Another major difference between regular publishing and bantamweight publishing is the lack of research and editing standards. Sometimes people attribute flawed information properly. It is obvious that excellent curators of information like NYU professor Jay Rosen and publisher Tim O’Reilly are exceptions to the rule, based simply on the phenomena of Rick Rolling, #moonfruit, and celebrity death hoaxes. To many, bantamweight publishing is not an micro-investigatory piece to be researched, sourced, edited, and spread, but rather a form of enhanced social chatter and gossip spreading. And according to the rules of gossip, it doesn’t really matter where it comes from; gossip is fun.

Few would argue that the British bantam units were a bad idea, and likewise bantamweight publishing has many virtues. But there are also pitfalls to this in an easily plagiarized world, particularly when money comes into play. Who’s looking out for the intellectual property of a winning hashtag that becomes a book, or a stream of haikus that becomes a blog that companies advertise on? At some point, bantamweight publishing will no longer be a lawless frontier territory; what will it look like next?

O'Reilly RadarDevelopers Create Unofficial Find My iPhone API

The iPhone is correctly credited with bringing location services to the consumer. It started at launch with Google Maps. It kicked into hyper-drive with the launch of the App Store (there are now over 2800 location-enabled apps - via Skyhook). However, there is still a step to go, the iPhone needs the ability to share your location in the background to a third-party server. This has been done for them by a couple of hackers.

Apple already tracks the location of any Mobile Me user who has enabled the feature Find My iPhone. Tyler Hall has released Sosumi, Mobile Me scraper, to Github. Sosumi can access a user's location and send messages to the iPhone.

So what does this mean? For "normal" users absolutely nothing. Just like Google Latitude's nascent Location API this is really just a proof of concept application for developers. Before a Mobile Me Location API will get widespread use it will need OAuth, the ability to control the accuracy of my location data, and reminders and, most significantly, it will need Apple's official sanctioning.

findmy iphone

Since it's launch the Find My iPhone has been used to track movers and to catch a thief. It's time for that data to be opened up properly as a service. Sites and apps like Loopt, Pelago, Fire Eagle or any of the other services that will take advantage of a user's location history to offer analytics, and alerts.

O'Reilly RadarNews Providers are Embracing the iPhone

To mark another iPhone milestone (1.5 billion app downloads in a year), I checked our iTunes app store data warehouse. I was expecting the Books category to continue to register the fastest-growth but was instead greeted by an explosion in News (and to a lesser extent, Navigation) apps:


pathint


On any given week, about 22% of all apps in the U.S. iTunes store are free. The percentage of free News apps is slightly higher (31%). The most popular News apps are from media companies (and tend to be free), while paid News apps are mostly software for reading and organizing news, or premium content. News content providers increasingly need to have a strategy for delivering content to the iPhone and similar mobile devices. At least for the iPhone, many news organizations have done just that: during the week ending 7/12, there were over 1,500 News apps.


The second fastest-growing category (in terms of # of apps) over the last 12 weeks was Navigation, a category that our resident geo expert Brady blogs about frequently. The share of free Navigation apps (14%) is among the lowest of all the categories (behind Books and Travel).


pathint

About 57,500 unique apps appeared in the U.S. iTunes store over the last week, roughly 22% of which were free. In the graph below, I count the number of apps available in the U.S. store during the given week:

pathint

In closing, I compare 3 fast-growing categories (Books, News, Navigation) to the largest category (Games). Once again I count the number of apps available in the U.S. store during the given week, but I normalized each time-series to start at 100:

pathint

Both the News and Navigation categories added many new apps from late May through the first week of June, surging way ahead of what was until recently the fastest-growing category -- Books. Note that all iTunes categories added lots of new apps over the past year. Of the 4 shown above, the slowest-growing category, Games, has close to 50 times the number of apps compared to a year ago.

(†) We maintain a data warehouse consisting of all apps available in the U.S. iTunes app store, dating back to late July 2008. Data for this post was through the week ending July 12, 2009.

Ron JeffriesCSM for Raikes School, Lincoln NE

Kauffman Building, UNL

For the past few years, I’ve been doing a little Agile coaching at the Raikes School of Computer Science and Management, at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Before Spring Break, Chet and I visited and helped them do a retrospective on last year’s results. In a word: excellent.

This year, we offered to teach a pro-bono Certified ScrumMaster course for the returning leads, to help tune them up for the coming year. The course will be August 17-19, in the lovely Kauffman center on the UNL campus. This will be our challenging three-day CSM Plus course, where you learn Scrum through doing it, with many exercises and very little lecture at all.

We’re opening the course to a handful of paid outsiders. If you’re conveniently located to Lincoln and would like a real Agile workout with a CSM as a side benefit, please consider signing up.

Ars TechnicaSymbian Foundation aims to improve app development

companion photo for Symbian Foundation aims to improve app development

The Symbian Foundation is launching a new initiative intended to help third-party software developers build, deploy, and market applications for the Symbian platform. The program, which is called Symbian Horizon, will provide various services to application developers with the aim of lowering some of the platform's barriers to entry and reducing the time that it takes to get a program into the hands of end users.

Symbian Horizon is currently in an early testing stage with a limited number of participants, but it will be opened up to the broader Symbian development community in October. It will include signing and certification assistance, localization services, and co-marketing opportunities. It will also help developers get their software distributed via various application stores.

Click here to read the rest of this article

Planet MoneyFewer Jobless Claims: Not Necessarily Good News

The Department of Labor says new claims for jobless benefits fell last week to the lowest level since January. Applications for unemployment were at 522,00, analysts had expected a number closer to about 575,000. The number may look like good news on the face, but as we told you last week there are problems with these seasonally adjusted figures. Based on seasonal trends, the department expected a large number of layoffs in the automotive sector and elsewhere in manufacturing -- these temporary layoffs usually occur during the summer months. This year these industries have already lost so many jobs that claims rose by much less than expected, creating this large drop. The unadjusted figures actually showed that new claims rose by 86,389 last week.

Meantime, J.P. Morgan Chase is joining Goldman Sachs in the profit circle. The bank announced that it brought in a profit of $2.7 billion in the second quarter. Most of that profit came from its investment bank which brought in a record breaking revenue of $1.5 billion. In June, the company repaid $25 billion it got from the government under TARP.

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Michael NygardTwo New Circuit Breaker Implementations

The excellent Will Sargent has created a Circuit Breaker gem that's quite nice. You can read the docs at rdoc.info. He's released the code (under LGPL) on GitHub.

The other one has actually been out for a couple of months now, but I forgot to blog about it. Scott Vlamnick created a Grails plugin that uses AOP to weave Circuit Breaker functionality as "around" advice. This one can also report its state via JMX. In a particularly nice feature, this plugin supports different configurations in different environments.

FreakonomicsCan't NASA Find a Better Launch Site?

After bad weather foiled several launch attempts, the Space Shuttle Endeavor finally took off last night from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida's Cape Canaveral. With stormy weather so typical there, why does NASA continue to use it as a launch site?


Linux NewsManaging Dependencies: Apache Releases Stable IvyDE 2.0

The IvyDE plugin searches for and resolves dependencies in Eclipse projects. The new version 2.0 should work without a hitch.

Cool ToolsBackwoods Home Magazine

Imagine Martha Stewart as a gun-toting Libertarian and you’ll have good notion of the editorial outlook of Backwoods Home Magazine. What makes this magazine useful, regardless of your political persuasion, is the wealth of information written by practitioners in the arts of self-reliance. You’ll find articles on everything from growing vegetables to baking bread to, yes, cleaning your Glock. Even if you live in the city there’s plenty to learn in the pages of BHM, in particular from Jackie Clay, Backwoods Home’s resident advice columnist. Clay can parse out and troubleshoot what have become almost lost arts, things like food preservation, soap making and small-scale poultry keeping. The rambling, unedited reader letters and the thrift-store-painting cover art are endearing bonuses.

Backwood Homes converges with Mother Earth News in terms of subject matter lately, but where MEN is liberal/progressive BHM is libertarian. MEN is professional, BHM homespun. MEN is rock and roll. BHM is country.

And what makes Backwood Homes magazine different from other DIY publications is that all of the columnists walk the walk in addition to talking the talk. They don’t just theorize, they actually do the things they write about. While the Libertarian rants may be off-putting to some, with what I’ve witnessed of our local government in action, the more I tend to agree. Even if I may never shoot, skin and make raccoon stew, I can appreciate the self-reliant activities profiled in BHM as part of an essential American skill set that needs to be recovered. We urban dwellers have been too busy in recent years with less useful activities such as selling mortgages and collateralizing debt obligations. Time for some tasty squirrel!

-- Erik Knutzen

Backwoods Home Magazine
$25 (6 issues)

Sample Excerpts:

Restoring Rusty Cast Iron
Rusty cast iron is easily reclaimable unless the rust has deeply eaten into the iron, causing deep pits or holes. This is not commonly seen, but is always a possibility. Most of the time, all that is needed is a good washing with hot, soapy water and a green nylon scrubby. With lots of elbow grease and a couple of trips through the sink, the pot or pan is often smooth and nearly as good as new. If the rust is more tenacious, you can use a steel wool pad and scour it off with that. In severe cases, I've taken a sanding disc to it, removing the rust first, then using a very fine grit to re-polish the surface of the iron.

Once your pan is clean and smooth, rinse it well with boiling water, then dry it with a kitchen towel. As the iron is now unprotected, even a little moisture can quickly rust your new pan. You will now season the pan, as if it were new.

*

bhm2.jpg

Jackie burns two of her cast iron pans in a fire to remove years' worth of crusted-on food and grease.

*

Trusses
Wood is not a homogeneous material. It is much stronger in one direction than in others. Wood’s greatest strength is in resisting compression along its length. Wood is also quite good at resisting pulling tension, but it is weakest at resisting bending (flexion) and twisting (torsion). One way to make a wooden building as strong and rigid as possible is to arrange the wood so it is being used in its strongest dimensions.

Here’s an example. A typical peaked roof frame consists of two rafters with a cross-tie to keep the tops of the walls from spreading. The cross-tie exerts its strength in tension, so it can be made of smaller size lumber, such as a two-by-four. But the rafters must resist bending (flexion), where they are relatively weaker. So the rafters must be made of two-by-sixes, two-by-eights, or even bigger stock. Such lumber is expensive. Long ago, engineers learned they could add greatly to the strength of a roof by inserting compression members within the frames.

bhm3.jpg

Cantilever truss in a jig made from two sheets of plywood and scrap blocks. Some plywood gussets are not shown, to reveal joint details. Cut and set all truss members. Shim tight, then glue and screw gussets from top side. Pull shims and remove truss from jig. Turn truss over on a flat surface, and glue and screw gussets on the other side.

*

Solar Hot Water Systems
Except for batch heaters which have no electronic control devices, any solar system that includes automatic valves or solar loop pumps will require a differential temperature controller. More expensive temperature controllers will include a digital display to indicate system temperatures and alarms, but all are based on a very simple control strategy. One temperature sensor is mounted inside the solar panel on the roof, and one temperature sensor measures the water temperature inside the solar storage tank.

The control concept is simple; when the solar panel sensor is hotter than the water in the tank, a relay inside the controller is activated which turns on the pump. When both sensors read the same, the relay opens and the pump stops. More sophisticated controllers allow the installer to adjust these temperature setpoints to fine tune the system.

bhm4.jpg

Related Entries:
Making the Best of Basics Storey&aposs Guide to Raising Chickens Pruning Saw


Ars TechnicaAvoiding the lazy way out: Behind Ghostbusters on the Wii

companion photo for Avoiding the lazy way out: Behind <em>Ghostbusters</em> on the Wii

The Wii may be selling consistently—not to mention remarkably—better than the 360 and PS3, but its games have a reputation for being either junky collections of minigames or dumbed-down ports of games from other systems. We're starting to see some evidence that this trend is slowing down, however: Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 is the definitive golf game and it's on the Wii, not the PS3 or 360. An even better example would be the "port" of Ghostbusters to the Nintendo Wii, done by Red Fly Studios. 

How did that game beat the odds? We go to the men behind the game to get some answers.

Click here to read the rest of this article

Linux NewsSidux 2009-02: New Kernel and KDE 4.2

The Sidux Linux distro now appears in version 2009-02 as based on Debian and with Kernel 2.6.30, KDE 4.2.4 and free sofware as usual.

InfoQCross-platform Development – Lessons Learned from Banshee/Mono

In a Scott Hanselman interview, Aaron Bockover of Novell talks about the challenges to create Banshee, a cross-platform application built in C# on Mono for Linux, Max OS X and Windows. By Abel Avram

BBC CricketFlintoff issues burnout warning

England all-rounder Andrew Flintoff fears other top cricketers may be forced into Test retirement early because of the heavy workload.

TheServerSide.comRenaming JavaRebel

Anyone who knows what it's like to come up with a name for an internal, open source, or commercial project, let alone a name for a child (personal favourites: Jermajesty, Kyd, and Blue Angel) knows how hard it can be. RE-naming something close to you comes with extra challenges of its own.


TheServerSide.comSmartGWT Pro/EE 1.2 Released

SmartGWT Pro & Enterprise Editions are built on SmartGWT LGPL and provide accelerated server side integration with SmartGWT's visual components.<br><br>SmartGWT Pro/EE Showcase : <a href="http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwtee/showcase/" target="_blank"><a href="http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwtee/showcase/" target="_blank">http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwtee/showcase/</a></a>


Baseline ScenarioCIT Down


At the end of the day, CIT had nothing.  Their asset quality was poor, their systemic risk implications seemed limited, Sheila Bair dug in her heels, and Jeffrey Peek (CEO) didn’t have sufficiently strong connections to get her overruled.

CIT had friends, but not enough - and maybe this tells us something about the shifting political sands.  The Financial Services Roundtable (top financial CEOs) came out in force, the House Committee on Small Business reportedly made worried noises, and Barney Frank sounded supportive.  But the American Bankers Association (the broader mass of bankers) publicly stood on the sidelines and Senate Banking – and prominent senators – seemed otherwise engaged. 

CIT’s small and mid-size customers are important to the recovery.  But the reckoning is that this business can be easily sold to someone else – after all, this is exactly what bankruptcy can get right in the U.S. 

So the question became: is CIT too big – on its liabilities side – to fail?  And if $80bn financial firms are now “too big to fail”, what does that imply for other potential bailout conversations and for our fiscal future? 

In the final analysis, CIT wasn’t even big enough to meet Secretary Geithner face-to-face – he’s still out of the country.

The bottom line: we need fewer $800bn firms and more $80bn firms.  If Goldman Sachs were broken into 10 independent pieces, we could all sleep much more soundly.

By Simon Johnson

(More in my NYT.com column this morning – what are the implications of CIT’s failure for overall levels of capital in the banking system?  This will run shortly.)

TheServerSide.comBDD: Generating Groovy EasyB Story with Selenium IDE

Are you an easyb user which would like to create story that run selenium's commands? You can let's Selenium IDE generate it for you instead of code it with your hand.


TheServerSide.comGrepCode releases Java search engine

GrepCode releases a search engine to search open source Java code. It provides higher quality searching and browsing as compared to existing code search engines.


Robert PestonCurbing bank executives' enthusiasm

A Treasury-sponsored review has today recommended substantial reforms to the structure and behaviour of banks' and financial institutions' boards, to restrict the freedom and the incentives for senior executives to take reckless risks.

Sir David WalkerSir David Walker, who is a senior adviser to the US investment bank Morgan Stanley and is a former director of the Bank of England, believes that last year's financial crisis, which helped to precipitate the worst global recession since the 1930s, was in part a consequence of "failures in governance in banks and other financial institutions".

After five months of analysis, he has concluded that:

1) the boards of big banks didn't understand the scale of the risks their organisations were running;

2) that non-executives of big banks did too little to rein in the excesses of the executive directors;

3) that shareholders in banks also failed to curb reckless gambling by financial institutions, that the owners didn't "exercise proper stewardship",

4) and that bankers were paid in a dangerous way which encouraged them to speculate imprudently.

One recommendation which is likely to alarm some banks is that boards' remuneration committees would set the pay not only of executive directors but also of executives below board level whose "total remuneration" might be "expected to exceed the median compensation of executive board members".

In the case of Barclays, for example, which owns a substantial investment bank, this would lead to the board setting the pay of hundreds of bankers paid as many millions each year as those on the Barclays board.

The pay of these so-called "high end" executives would also be disclosed "in bands" in the banks' annual reports, although the executives' names would not be published.

In an interview with me, Sir David said he was fully prepared for protests about this degree of disclosure on pay from the big banks, who are likely to complain that they would be revealing commercially sensitive information that could put them at a competitive disadvantage.

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Like the Financial Services Authority, the City watchdog, Sir David also wants a significant element of bonuses or performance pay to be handed to relevant bankers only after several years have elapsed, up to five years, or enough time to verify that the deals triggering the bonuses aren't toxic.

Other proposals are:

a) new risk committees should be set up on boards, separate from the audit committees, which would be chaired by a non-executive;

b) these risk committee would overseas all substantial transactions and would have the power to block those deemed too dangerous;

c) non-executives would devote 30 to 36 days each year to the affairs of a bank or financial institution, up from 20 to 25 days at present (many of you probably won't believe they earn their fees of £100,000 or so a year for four to five weeks of work);

d) non-executives would be better trained, they would be scrutinised more rigorously by the FSA and they would be encouraged to hold the executives to account, in a way that would probably end the "collegial" nature of bank boards;

e) the chairmen of banks or other financial institutions would commit no less than two-thirds of their time to the business, they would have significant and relevant "financial industry experience", and they would face re-election by shareholders every year;

f) boards would monitor more closely whether their big shareholders were selling shares and would take steps to learn why these shareholders had lost confidence in their businesses;

g) the FSA would also "be ready to contact major selling shareholders to understand their movitation";

h) institutional shareholders would sign up for a new set of "principles of best practice in stewardship", to encourage them to be more actively engaged in the affairs of companies, which would be overseen by the Financial Reporting Council.

When I spoke to Sir David he stressed that he was acting in an independent capacity when making these recommendations and that the Treasury was under no obligation to implement them.

Some may feel that his reforms would lack teeth, because he does not want them enshrined in legislation. Instead he wants them enforced through the Combined Code, the voluntary code on UK boardroom practices that is overseen by the Financial Reporting Council.

Update, 15:35: Barclays has told me two interesting things: first that its board already approves all group pay packages worth more than £500,000 a year; second that it's not worried about disclosing in its annual report how many of its staff receive pay of that magnitude and greater.

BBC CricketBangladesh aim for series victory

Bangladesh hope to secure only their second series win in nine years when they meet West Indies in the second Test in Grenada.

BBC CricketAn Aussie guide to sledging

Cricket writer Gideon Haigh gives an Australian's guide to cricketing verbals

InfoQInterview:Micheal Feathers on Programming Languages

In this interview with Sadek Drobi, Michael Feathers explores working with legacy code, working with different programming languages, the right scope/size of modules, and the importance of readability of code regardless of the programming language. By Michael Feathers

BBC CricketAshes live - England v Australia

England captain Andrew Strauss hits a century but Australia fight back on day one of the second Test at Lord's.

Linux NewsMontaVista Linux: One Second Startup

On the first day of the three-day virtual Freescale Technology Forum, MontaVista Software demonstrated that it take merely a second to start its Linux for embedded industrial applications.

InfoQPresentation:Multicore Programming in Erlang

Ulf Wiger shows typical Erlang programs, patterns that scale well on multicore and patterns that don't, profiling and debugging parallel applications and ensuring correct behaviour with QuickCheck. By Ulf Wiger

Harry PiersonLinks for 2009-07-15 [del.icio.us]

  • Project Tuva
    Microsoft Research's Project Tuva explores core scientific concepts and theories through presenting timeless videos with its new enhanced Video Player featuring searchable video, linked transcripts, notes and interactive extras

Robert PestonCan non-execs cure banks' madness and badness?

Sir David Walker, a former regulator and someone who in the past would have been described as a City grandee, will today publish his prescription for how the so-called governance of banks can be improved.

Governance is the sententious word for the structures and rules for institutions that are supposed to prevent them doing the wrong thing.

cityworkers595.jpg

And since banks all over the world in the years before the credit crunch did the wrong thing on a scale that was without any precedent, there must surely have been a collective failure of governance.

Or to put it another way, the owners and non-executive directors of banks from UBS in Switzerland to Merrill Lynch and Lehman in the US to Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS in the UK were useless at preventing those banks borrowing and lending in a reckless and dangerous manner.

So presumably that means the owners and non-executives were either under-qualified nitwits, cowards or unhealthily close to greedy manic chief executives.

Which would mean - surely - that new codes of conduct for shareholders and initiatives to improve the quality of those who sit on bank boards would make a world of difference.

That may be so.

But it's worth reminding ourselves what actually happened at Royal Bank of Scotland, for example, before we conclude that accidents can always be prevented if only the right people are in the right jobs.

Because the non-executives at Royal Bank were an impressive bunch - on paper.

They included three former bankers, an erstwhile treasury official whose responsibilities included financial regulation, the one time boss of an insurance giant, and the titular head of Goldman Sachs in Europe.

At the time, these were not individuals who would have been described as either ignorant of finance, shrinking violets or nincompoops.

Some have alleged that the non executives were terrified of the steely chief executive of the time, Sir Fred Goodwin.

This, I have to say, is less than compelling. I know some of these non-execs. And I can tell you that they are materially tougher and less pliable than old boots.

Then there's the question of whether they knew as much as they should have done about what was going on.

That is is a moot point. Some non-execs say they didn't know all the relevant details about RBS's holdings of lower quality housing loans in the US.

But it wasn't non-executive ignorance of those risks - or perhaps of any risk - that led to its collapse into the arms of the state.

What really did for RBS was its record-breaking takeover of the rump of the Dutch bank ABN Amro in the autumn of 2007.

This was the wrong deal, at the wrong price and at the wrong time.

The non-executives were not ignorant of the risks RBS was running in buying ABN. However they thought these risks, which turned out to be suicidal, were worth taking.

All of which simply says that even smart, well-qualified people can be gripped by irrational exuberance - and that therefore we shouldn't get carried away with the idea that governance can be a perfect protection again catastrophe.

Economist GulliverBreaking: some baggage handlers steal things

A RECENT police sting seems to have caught two workers at New York's JFK airport red-handed. The New York Daily News reports that Brian Burton, 27, and Antwon Simmons, 26, stole a laptop from a bag the Transportation Security Administration (and Delta Air Lines, which was in on the sting) had filled with tech devices and planted in the checked baggage.

The alleged offenders had been "on cops' radar" for a while, and they got caught. That's really the best-case scenario for luggage thievery. For every Brian Burton and Antwon Simmons there are a bunch of other (alleged) luggage pilferers who won't get caught. That means you have another reason to pack light. Keeping your things in a carry-on will get you through security faster than trying to check a big suitcase. It will also keep your things safer. If you've got an eye on your suitcase at all times, it's unlikely that someone will start rifling through it, looking for your iPod. It's also a lot less likely to get lost in transit.

Smart business travellers don't check bags. It slows you down, stresses you out, and often costs you money. But if for some reason you absolutely have to check a bag, please remember to keep the stuff you can't live (or work) without in your carry-on. If you can't fit your laptop and your other electronics in your carry-on, get a bigger bag or leave some at home. There's no reason to give the dishonest baggage handlers of the world an opportunity to steal your computer. Leave those tests of strangers' integrity to the cops.

Ruby InsideAlias: Enhance Your Ruby Console/irb Experience

aliasA couple of weeks ago we featured Gabriel Horner's Hirb framework for formatting irb output. I've recently been playing with another of his projects, Alias, which further enhances the Ruby Console experience (but it conceivably could be used in your Ruby programs too).

It's already possible to set up aliases in your .irbrc file, but this can get confusing and it's easy to run into conflicts. Alias takes a more structured, hash-based approach which (by default) lets you set up aliases for constants, instance methods or class methods. For example:

create_aliases :instance_method, "ActiveRecord::Base"=>{"update_attribute"=>'ua'}

You can store and retrieve your aliases in an easy-to-read YAML configuration file and it's simple to have script/console (or irb) load them automatically from that file on start-up, by adding a small amount of code to your environment.rb (or .irbrc) file.

Extending Alias is fairly straightforward. Just subclass Alias::Creator and implement a few methods for mapping the aliases, checking their validity and generating the Ruby code to be evaluated.

For more details, check out the documentation and Gabriel's recent blog post. You can install the gem from Github with:

sudo gem install cldwalker-alias -s http://gems.github.com

jslab.pngAlso.. Jumpstart Lab is offering workshops teaching Ruby for beginning female programmers (Ruby Jumpstart) on August 1st and 2nd, then beginning Rails (Rails Jumpstart) for everyone on August 15 & 16. Save 10% with code "rubyinside"!

InfoQArticle:FlexMonkey brings unit testing to Flex user interface developers

This article explores how Gorilla Logic's new, open source Flex user interface automation testing tool, FlexMonkey, can enhance the productivity of both developers and QA testers. FlexMonkey allows developers to incorporate user interface testing into unit test suites and continuous integration environments, and allows QA testers to expand those tests into comprehensive quality tests. By Stuart Stern

Baseline ScenarioThe AEI Versus the Real World


Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute accuses the Consumer Financial Protection Agency of being a liberal plot to restrict good financial products to sophisticated elites. Mike at Rortybomb does a point-by-point takedown complete with actual data, so I can stick to the high level (not to be confused with the high road).

Wallison’s op-ed reads like a caricature of conservative ideology – all supposed moral principle and no real-world implications. His argument is basically that by imposing restrictions on complex products (Option ARM mortgages) that are not imposed on plain vanilla products (30-year fixed-rate mortgages), the CFPA is limiting choice for the poor and unsophisticated and preserving choice for the rich and sophisticated; since according to conservative ideology choice is always good in principle, the CFPA is discriminatory.

Where do we start?

First, this is exactly the way consumer protection is supposed to work. If you go to a convenience store, or wherever you can still buy cigarettes, you can buy lots of things that don’t have warning labels. The cigarettes have warning labels.

Wallison dismisses warning labels with a non-argument: “If the issue is whether the consumer understood the risks of the more complex product, strong warning labels or written ‘opt-ins’ simply raise the same question and will not be a defense for the provider.” Warning labels and written opt-ins are used all over the economy; every time you sign a piece of paper saying that you understand the risks of something and you agree not to hold the provider liable, you are opting in. It is true that these do not always hold up in court, but that’s a fact-specific question. In general, they certainly do protect service providers, although Wallison asserts the contrary.

Second, this is exactly the way securities regulation works today. The Securities Act of 1933 creates exemptions for securities that are only sold to “sophisticated” investors. This is how hedge funds escape most regulation; they only allow sophisticated investors in. The CFPA is extending this principle to a class of financial instruments that, in 1933, no one thought could be complex enough to be limited to sophisticated investors.

Third, the CFPA is simply broadening the concept of fiduciary responsibility, which already exists for various categories of service providers, such as lawyers, CPAs, and some investment advisors. Someone with a fiduciary responsibility has to put the interests of his client first. In a financial context, this would mean that you can’t put a client into a financial product that does not serve his interests. The purpose of the CFPA is similar: you can’t sell a product to someone without first making sure the he understands what you are selling him. Now, this is not exactly the same thing as a fiduciary responsibility; it’s actually considerably weaker. The point is that the idea that you should not treat your customers in ways that harm them is hardly liberal or elitist.

Fourth, Wallison asserts, without example or argument, that the more complex products are better.

So who will be able to get those more complex products and services? Not ordinary Americans, whose lack of financial sophistication will make the risks of selling to them too great for most providers. The more complex products, the ones that are better tailored to the needs of the particular consumer, will be offered only to the more sophisticated and better educated — in other words, to the nation’s elites.

“Better tailored to the needs of the particular consumer?” We’re talking about exploding mortgages and reverse convertibles here. Speaking as someone who could pass any test of sophistication, my personal opinion is that the CFPA regime would actually benefit the “unsophisticated,” because the “more complex products” are just higher-margin ways for banks to relieve rich people of their money. It’s a good thing that most people are not allowed to pay hedge funds 2-and-20 for the privilege of not being able to take their money out whenever they want. But that’s another topic.

Fifth, Wallison asserts that this is “not because the products or services are inherently dangerous, like drugs or explosives,” and hence need consumer protection. This completely ignores the biggest news story of the last two years (OK, maybe the second-biggest story after the election of an African-American president). We have millions of foreclosures – that’s people losing houses who either (a) would not be losing their houses if they had been given traditional mortgages that they would have qualified for or (b) would have been better off renting and not losing down payments, closing costs, refinance costs, and their credit ratings. Those foreclosures have negative externalities for their neighborhoods, including lower property values and higher crime. (Mike already nailed this in his now-famous “degenerate crackhead” example in this post.) And we have the biggest recession since the 1930s. How are complex financial products not inherently dangerous?

Sixth, what’s the alternative? The only one that Wallison mentions is disclosure.

Traditionally, consumer protection in the United States has focused on disclosure. It has always been assumed that with adequate disclosure all consumers — of whatever level of sophistication — could make rational decisions about the products and services they are offered. No more. . . .

Apparently, adequate disclosure will not be the answer to the provider’s dilemma. As outlined in the white paper, no amount of disclosure can adequately protect consumers against complexity.

Note that Wallison is clever enough to avoid saying that disclosure works – because it obviously doesn’t. But still he leaves it floating out there as his only alternative to the CFPA. So let’s avoid the clever rhetoric. Disclosure doesn’t work. If it did, we wouldn’t be where we are today. We tried it; now we need to try something else. And Wallison doesn’t suggest anything.

What ties these six points together? Let’s see, we have:

  1. ignoring the fact that warning labels and opt-ins are already used routinely in the economy;
  2. ignoring the fact that the “sophisticated investor” concept is already used in the financial industry itself;
  3. ignoring the fact that fiduciary duty, which is more restrictive than the CFPA approach, is already used for various classes of professionals;
  4. ignoring the very real possibility that complex financial products are not actually good for you;
  5. ignoring the fact that the financial products in question have just caused enormous harm to millions of people; and
  6. ignoring the fact that his implied alternative, disclosure, has resoundingly failed.

The genius of the modern conservative movement (not the traditional conservatism of Edmund Burke, for which I have a great deal of respect) has been its understanding that to win in politics, the facts of the real world – the “judicious study of discernible reality,” if you will – only slow you down. Wallison does the movement proud.

By James Kwak

InfoQCoping with Bugs on an Agile/Scrum Project

An often asked question is how does Scrum recommend a team to handle bugs? Should they be placed on the product backlog? Or on a separate bug list? If they’re on the backlog, does the Product Owner get to set their priority or are they automatically the most important items? Should there be a separate bug fixing sprint? By Mark Levison

Baseline ScenarioIs It Possible to Detect Bubbles?


On the one hand, it seems obvious; didn’t we all know there was a housing bubble back in 2006? On the other hand, if it’s that easy, why aren’t we all as rich as John Paulson?

A while back I suggested that the Fed could spot a housing bubble by treating housing prices the same way if treats the prices that make up the CPI. If there is high inflation in the core CPI, you don’t stop and ask if there is a fundamental reason for higher inflation; you tighten monetary policy (raise interest rates). The Fed could do the same thing for housing prices, since housing is an asset that people need to consume. But that’s probably a simplistic view.

Leigh Caldwell thinks that behavioral approaches may be able to separate out irrational overvaluation from changes in fundamental values. I believe his argument is that you can measure the degree of irrational overvaluation for certain types of assets, and you can extrapolate from there to see if there is a bubble:

Outside of the laboratory, precise knowledge of the returns of some assets does become available at times, and it would be possible to measure investors’ behaviour with regard to those assets. If investors, in aggregate, become overconfident about returns it will be possible to spot this from certain types of price change.

This makes logical sense to me, but it’s pretty vague. Caldwell’s VoxEU post goes a bit further:

I propose that regulators develop a small set of measures of irrationality that can be calculated and published at least monthly. These might include measures related to expected personal income, job security and asset values; measures of expectations about the performance of the economy as a whole; and measures of hyperbolic discount rates and other specific observable cognitive biases.

In essence, I think, the idea is that instead of trying to figure out whether a given financial asset is overvalued, we create an index of consumer expectations and cognitive biases and use that to tell us if we are in a bubble. If people are wildly optimistic, as reflected both in what they say and in how they act, then asset prices are probably also irrationally high.

There may be something here, but I worry that you still have to have something to compare your expectations index to. We already have indexes of consumer confidence – which, granted, are not quite what Caldwell is talking about – and I don’t think they have been much good as bubble-spotting devices. Maybe if you graphed consumer confidence against average economic forecasters you might see something – but most likely those forecasters are just as prone to irrational exuberance as the ordinary person. Really what we want is a reliable indicator of irrational exuberance that will be the same in every bubble; but how you would find such a thing, and how you would be sure that it would work in the next bubble, is beyond me.

By James Kwak

InfoQWorkflow Engine – To Build or Not to Build One?

A new post by Bernd Rücker discusses whether it makes sense to write your own workflow engine or time and money are best spent on learning and using a commercial or open source implementation. By Boris Lublinsky

Harry PiersonArchitecture Astronauts and Over Engineers

Since it’s apparently Architecture Week™ [1] here at DevHawk, here’s another of my favorite Dilbert cartoons of all time – relevant to the discussion at hand.

Dilbert.com

Two interesting comments on yesterday’s post:

Architectural thinking is a necessary (and very important) part of software development - but beyond the systems level (which is systems administration and not software architecture) I have a hard time seeing divorcing architectural thinking from the actual development as anything but a terrible thing. Although I see that your definition of architecture (at the functional level) does not match my caricature of the 'architecture astronauts' which I do think can be endemic in languages that encourage additional layers of architecture. [Michael Foord]

So based on the definition of architecture I'm reading into your post, you wouldn't consider the choice of object-oriented versus functional programming styles from an architectural perspective? I'm trying to understand what level of architecture you mean here. Like Michael, I usually think of architecture even down into the implementation patterns level (hence the architecture astronauts), but that seems to be included in what you might be calling an engineering concern. [Ryan Riley]

Let me be very clear. Using my definition, there is no such thing “architecture even down into the implementation patterns level”. I’d argue that the implementation patterns level is engineering, not architecture. From what I’ve seen, the terms “architecture” and “engineering” tend to be used interchangeably in the software industry, and frankly I think that’s a mistake. I said as much in yet another post I wrote four years ago:

Architecture is the intersection between business and IT.

If a decision doesn't effect a business person, it's not an architecture decision. I'm not saying it's not important - I think the role of the software engineer is critical in large-scale enterprise system design and construction. And I will readily admit that often a single person is responsible for both architecture and engineering. But that doesn't make them the same activity. As long as we continue to confuse the two disciplines, we hold them both back.

Michael and Ryan (or anyone else for that matter) are welcome to disagree with my definition of architecture. I often joke that if you asked ten architects to define “architecture”, you’d get twelve answers. But that’s my definition and I’m sticking to it.

But what of the Architecture Astronauts? Both Michael and Ryan mentioned them. Unsurprisingly, I think that term is used too broadly as well. If you go back and read Joel’s original post of Architecture Astronauts, there wasn’t much reference, if any, to the implementation layer at all.

The Architecture Astronauts will say things like: "Can you imagine a program likeNapster where you can download anything, not just songs?" Then they'll build applications like Groove that they think are more general than Napster, but which seem to have neglected that wee little feature that lets you type the name of a song and then listen to it -- the feature we wanted in the first place. Talk about missing the point. If Napster wasn't peer-to-peer but it did let you type the name of a song and then listen to it, it would have been just as popular

[Joel on Software, Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You]

I feel that my definition fits very well with the way Joel writes about architecture in this paragraph. The Architect Astronaut is trying to solve a real business problem - people need access to information besides music. But the mistake they make is thinking they can solve multiple problems with a single solution. So they abstract higher and higher until they’ve lost sight of the original problem and can only focus on the abstractions. If you look at what Joel has to say about technologies like Hailstorm and Jini, you see the same pattern emerge.

This isn’t to say that similar problems of over-abstraction don’t happen at the implementation layer – they do. But they happen for very different reasons. Astronaut Architects are trying to solve multiple problems with a single solution. But when over-abstraction happens at the implementation level, it because someone thought they could predict the future.

We’ve all seen our fair share of over-engineered systems that introduce significant unneeded complexity on the off chance that the development team can successfully predict the kind of change likely to come in the next version of the product. Invariably, the team’s precognitive abilities are revealed to be as poor as everyone else's, so they’re left with a bunch of extra layers of software cruft that has to be maintained but provides zero additional value to the system. I’ve blogged about that problem before as well: Kitchen Sink Variability.

Since I’m big on keeping the terminology of architecture and engineering separate, then I’d argue that we need a different term than Architecture Astronaut for people who want to introduce additional layers of abstraction at the implementation layer on the off chance that they don’t suck at precognition. Since we call such systems over-engineered, wouldn’t that make the people who build them “Over Engineers”?


[1] It’s like Shark Week, but with white boards and even more terrifying.

Sam GentileNew and Notable 342

Trying this one from Windows Live Writer even though it refuses to detect my Graffiti theme or any of those supplied, and thus won’t format for it.

Domain-Driven Design

Software Architecture

  • Perhaps the closest publically available example of what my default reference architecture is S#arp Architecture. So, I am very pleased to see It is Done… S#arp Architecture 1.0. This is the one to look at.

Windows Azure

Silverlight

 

July 15, 2009

Ars TechnicaExperts clash over cell phone jamming at Senate hearing

companion photo for Experts clash over cell phone jamming at Senate hearing In the debate over cell phone jamming in prisons, the skeptics have caution and reason on their side, but the advocates bring impressive horror stories. Take Texas State Senator John Whitmire, who testified at Wednesdays' Senate Commerce and Science hearing on a bill to let prisons use jamming technology to block mobile phone use within their walls. At the event, he described how he received a phone call last year from Texas death row inmate Richard Tabler.

"Not being convinced or thinking it was even possible for [Tabler] to make such a call," Whitmire explained, "he proved his identity by holding the phone so that I could hear the unforgettable sounds of a prison in the background, the clanging of steel doors and hollering of voices." Over the course of a series of conversations, Tabler pressed Whitmire for various favors. Meanwhile he mentioned that he knew that Whitmire had two daughters, and also knew where they lived.

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Planet MoneyHear: Fancy Food Economics

Adam & Chana

Adam and Chana gear up for the competition. David Kestenbaum/NPR

 

On today's Planet Money:

A very special radio competition. We sent Adam Davidson, Chana Joffe-Walt and David Kestenbaum to New York's Fancy Food Show and challenged them to bring back the best economics stories they could find. Listen to their stories, hear our panel of celebrity judges weigh in and then decide who you think should be the winner.

Bonus: Listen to each story individually and vote for the winner, after the jump.

Download the podcast; or subscribe. Intro music: Flying Lizards' "Money." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/ Flickr.

Adam delves into the burgeoning Palestinian export food market.


Chana explains why cultivating vanilla is harder than you think.


David asks why fancy food is so darn expensive.


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Bruce EckelMeta-Reframing

The "interesting economic times" and breaking my leg in February have combined to put me into a reflective frame of mind about careers.

Ars TechnicaStudy: Americans driven online for help during recession

companion photo for Study: Americans driven online for help during recession

A large majority of Americans have used the Internet to seek advice or help during the current recession, according to a new report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Whether it's to find out what went wrong with the economy, look for new jobs, save money, sell personal items, or apply for loans, 69 percent of all Americans (88 percent of adult Internet users) now fall into the category of "online economic users," with Pew noting that these people are making sure to be extra-networked in order to get through the downturn.

According to Pew, 52 percent of Americans have been hit by economic troubles of some kind. The largest group is made up of those who have lost more than half the value of their investments, but others have experienced pay cuts, lost more than half the value of their homes, or have been laid off from their jobs. Because of this, price comparisons and searches for new jobs lead the way when it comes to economy-related Internet use, though searching for information about bankruptcy and advice on protecting personal finances also make the list.

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linux.comShare Firefox Add-ons with Collector

Ever had problems finding Firefox extensions? Want to tell the world about the extensions you find most useful? Now you can, using the Firefox Add-on Collector.

Baseline ScenarioWSJ Editorial Page Favors “Bailout Tax” on Large Financial Institutions


I had a post criticizing John Carney on the topic of bankslaughter. However, I must say I agree with him when it comes to Goldman Sachs. Even more surprising, I largely agree with the Wall Street Journal editorial that Carney links to.

Here’s what the Journal has to say:

We like profits as much as the next capitalist. But when those profits are supported by government guarantees or insured deposits, taxpayers have a special interest in how the companies conduct their business. Ideally we would shed those implicit guarantees altogether, along with the very notion of too big to fail. But that is all but impossible now and for the foreseeable future. Even if the Obama Administration and Fed were to declare with one voice that banks such as Goldman were on their own, no one would believe it.

. . . Banks that want to be successful will also want to be more like Goldman Sachs, creating an incentive for both larger size and more risk-taking on the taxpayer’s dime.

One policy response to the incentives created by last fall’s bailout is simply to restrict the proprietary trading done by the subsidiaries of bank holding companies that enjoy both FDIC deposit insurance and an implicit government subsidy on their cost of capital. This is what Paul Volcker proposed, only to be overruled by Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. Another answer would be an FDIC-style bailout tax, perhaps tied to leverage ratios, for those in the too-big-to-fail camp. Developing a template to facilitate the seizure and orderly winding down of failing financial giants is also an essential element of whatever reform Congress cooks up.

Did I read that right? The WSJ proposing a new tax?

And here’s Carney’s conclusion:

What’s worse, letting CIT fail might not help this situation at all. Rather than clearing the way for market discipline to reassert itself, CIT’s failure might only reify the policy of Too Big To Fail.

Financial firms that are deemed too small to be rescued will find credit hard to come by and expensive, which will incent them to grow or sell themselves to a systemically important firm. In short, we’re increasing the concentration of financial power and hence systemic risk in the largest Wall Street firms that led us into this mess.

To use traditional labels for a moment, the right-wing criticism is that the implicit government guarantees created by Too Big to Fail distort the market. The left-wing criticism is that bailing out large banks enriches capitalists at the expense of ordinary people, and the benefits don’t trickle down into the economy at large (see the number of foreclosures, for example).

The Obama Administration’s defense is that only by enriching those banks can we keep the economy from sinking further and hurting everybody. It’s not an implausible position to defend, but it can’t be fun, especially for people who always thought they were progressives.

By James Kwak

Eugene WallingfordReady for a More?

As I set out on my first 12-miler since running a half-marathon in May, I could not help recalling Barney's First Law of Running. Just keep running. It is dark, and the miles lie formidably ahead, but you conquer them in the simplest of ways: keep running.

A couple of weeks ago I began to think about training for fall marathon. If I could run a full post-race week, maybe I was ready to try. Well, I have now run two full weeks, for the first time since a strong three-week stretch in April. Last week was my highest-mileage week -- 32 even -- since April 7-13, 2008, when I put in 33.5 miles. I have been fatigued, but I have managed to run each planned running day.

These have been strange days, indeed. In the span of five days, I ran my fastest 5-miler in recent times, ran a negative split 12-miler that started oppressively slow and finished reasonably, ran my slowest recorded 5-miler ever, and turned around the next day to shave 4 seconds off of last Friday's fast 5-miler.

Th two fast 5-mile runs were on the track, my first real forays on the track since coming down with whatever ails me last May. One day on the track is a healthy practice for me mentally, because it helps me think of pace and speed in a way that longer-form runs outdoors don't. I'm not running "fast" yet, just faster. That I have been healthy enough to do three in the last week and a half is a positive sign, even if they have sapped me more than I would expect.

I have thrown in one cross-training twist. Since I began training for races quite a few years ago, I have tended to neglect stretching and other basic exercise. I was getting plenty of work on the road. My wife has recently started doing Classical Stretch, which is a perfect fit for her, because she danced a lot of ballet growing up. I've been doing a workout or two with her each night. Wow. This is what in the modern running world is called a core workout. It focuses on the usual body parts, such as the abs and hamstrings, but also on infrastructure like the back and hips. The athletic workouts are tough. I never realized how had a workout one could get without using weights or other resistance. This could be good for getting me back closer to marathon condition.

The last time I started on a training plan for a marathon was July 30, 2007. That week, I ran 43 miles, including three 7-milers and a 5x800m track workout. I am nowhere near ready for that yet. I was already in great shape and had trained hard for a half-marathon earlier in the year. That plan required only twelve weeks, though, so I have some hope for getting ready to run an October race. It will be slower, less aggressive, but no less challenging, given where I am right now.

My October travel schedule complicates picking a race. Right now, I am giving most consideration to Indianapolis on October 17 and Mason City, Iowa, on October 25. Indianapolis would repeat the destination of my half earlier this year, but it would be all-new as a run; the half was downtown and on the west side, and the full is on the northeast side of town. This is a big city (373.1 square miles), and so a repeat would not seem like one. Running there twice in one year would be ironic, though after growing up there and never running there at all. The Mason City race is run by a local school system as a fundraiser and has a longer history than most anyone knows. The experience there would be a polar opposite to that of Chicago, my first marathon. It would require a different sort of mental preparation: fewer runners, much smaller crowds, and a lot more solitude. Can I be ready for that?

The cost, looser registration deadlines, and later race date have me leaning toward Mason City. The prospect of running a bigger race, on a day I'll already be in central Indiana, makes Indianapolis attractive. I need to decide by the end of the month for early registration, if nothing else, but more important are getting my training schedule in order and beginning to prepare my mind for the rigor of training.

It's time.

BBC CricketAndrew haul secures Worcs victory

Gareth Andrew takes one-day best figures of 5-31 as Worcestershire edge to a 12-run victory over Yorkshire in a tight Pro40 contest at New Road.

linux.comExtend Your Scripting Language with SWIG

SWIG makes it easy to write an extension for your favorite scripting language (or languages). Learn how it works.

Open Source at EclipseMaking Money In a Free World

Quoting Chris Anderson (from his book "Free", as quoted in TechFlash):

That's how he says one competes against free software.
I'm sure the successful Eclipse member companies already know this.

Ars TechnicaChurches, mosques say broadband is about "economic justice"

companion photo for Churches, mosques say broadband is about

Jesus said that the poor would always be with us—but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to bring them broadband. A coalition of Christian churches and the Islamic Society of North America has launched a new campaign to bring broadband to everyone in the US so that "our poorest communities, our rural areas, our public libraries, our public schools, and community centers" benefit from the communications revolution that the Internet hath wrought.

The "Bring Betty Broadband" campaign casts the broadband debate in moral terms. It's about the "right to disseminate and receive information," it's a "right that helps to define ourselves as human beings and political actors," and it's absolutely essential for everyone in a modern society.

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O'Reilly RadarFour short links: 16 July 2009


  1. Transparency Camp West -- a few more slots left for Google-hosted Aug 8 and 9 Bar Camp on open government.

  2. Meeting Ticker -- count the cost of a meeting in real time, just enter the number of people, the time it started, and the average salary. (via make on Twitter)

  3. More Creative Shops Are Commercializing Their Own Product Lines -- Tellingly, ad companies don't run ads for their products. "[W]e haven't bought a single ad in support of any of our brands. Not one. Why would we? You can do so much if you know what you're doing with product placement, sponsorship, digital PR. It's that whole "I haven't got any money, so I'll have to think." It makes you much better at grinding out media without paying. (via someone on Twitter, apologies for forgetting whom)

  4. 18 Essential Skills for a Maker -- 13. Strip, splice, and terminate wire- Trickier than it sounds. You should be able to splice wire using a crimp splice, a wire nut, and heat shrink + solder (note: electrical tape is NOT on that list). You should know how to use a wire stripper to strip stranded wire without cutting more than one or two strands. You should be able to attach a wire to your project in such a way that it will still be attached in two weeks, two months, or two years. (via Makezine)

Linux NewsSpring Quarter Results: Sun Vague, Intel Pale

Sun and Intel have presented their quarterly figures for the second three-month period of 2009.

Greg YoungUnshackle Your Domain

Many people have asked me for links to this video. It has been up on infoq for a week or two now. http://www.infoq.com/presentations/greg-young-unshackle-qcon08 this is from last fall in SanFran for QCon.

Planet MoneyFed: Expect Higher Unemployment

Officials at the Federal Reserve think that unemployment could hit 10 percent later this year. The forecast comes out of the the Fed's June 24th meeting. Minutes from that meeting were just released today. From the minutes:

The large number of people working part time for economic reasons and the prevalence of permanent job reductions rather than temporary layoffs suggested that labor market conditions were even more difficult than indicated by the unemployment rate.

Members of the Federal Reserve predict an unemployment rate of 9.8 to 10.1 percent for 2009. In April, those same officials predicted a 9.2 to 9.6 unemployment rate for the year. According the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment currently stands at 9.5 percent.

On a more positive note, the Fed did predict that unemployment is likely to decline next year. They also raised their prediction for GDP growth, saying the U.S. economy would grow up to 3.3 percent in 2010, and 4.6 percent in 2011.

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Greg YoungThe Anemic Domain Model Pattern

OK so I assume that you have run into the Anemic Domain Model Anti-Pattern at some point or another likely here on the bliki.

To quote from the bliki

The basic symptom of an Anemic Domain Model is that at first blush it looks like the real thing. There are objects, many named after the nouns in the domain space, and these objects are connected with the rich relationships and structure that true domain models have. The catch comes when you look at the behavior, and you realize that there is hardly any behavior on these objects, making them little more than bags of getters and setters. Indeed often these models come with design rules that say that you are not to put any domain logic in the the domain objects. Instead there are a set of service objects which capture all the domain logic. These services live on top of the domain model and use the domain model for data.

What if I were to tell you that there are times and places where gasp an anemic domain model were in fact a best practice that would be highly recommended to a team? I really do vision the pitchforks and torches coming at me when I say this … Many including myself have lambasted unmentioned groups for pushing people towards anemic domain models so ….

 

Making the case

To start with let’s analyze why you were using that domain model in the first place. Ideally you were using it because it provided you the benefit of being able to effectively handle more complexity as opposed to a system like active record or transaction script. In other words you found your system was too complex to be modeled in a more procedural way. This complexity is often seen by analyzing the duplication of code in your more procedural transaction script based system.

Of course I find it rare to hear people cite this as why they are using a domain model. The reasons I hear tend to be more focused on the layering that necessarily comes with having a domain model. Instead I hear reasoning like testability, maintainability, abstraction from persistence mechanisms, strongly defined contracts etc.

Where am I going with all this what happened to the anemic domain model pattern? Well it depends why you wanted a domain model in the first place. If you are using a domain model in an object oriented way to help you in the managing of complexity it is absolutely an anti-pattern for you to be seeing an anemic domain model. What if you are in the IMHO much larger group that is mainly seeking the benefits that come with a domain model in layering?

The simplest in me would say that we would need to then compare the anemic domain model with other mechanisms to see if it would derive any benefit. We can pretty easily gain over a classical Active Record pattern because we can better express what is happening (especially in cases where we have an existing data model as we can map the data model if we want to). This leaves us with the more interesting case of transaction script, I deem the case “interesting” as both models are in fact transaction script we are comparing transaction script over an object model vs transaction script over say table module.

I would say that even in this close distinction that the anemic domain model can have some advantages. At the least single property level validation tends to be encapsulated within the object.  This although really a slight step towards having a functional domain model can offer huge gains in terms of dealing with transaction script where all of the validation is distributed. There can however be other advantages such as the ability to more easily test in isolation and the long term maintainability of the system.

 

Defining a context

So the real question becomes can we define a context where purposefully creating an anemic domain model would be a good idea over our alternatives?

We want a layered architecture. We understand that our application due to non-functional requirements will need the benefits that a layered architecture provides. We understand the cost of creating a layered architecture and it has been justified by the stakeholders of our project.

Our domain is not extremely complex. This is a bit of a misnomer, but let’s say that our domain falls within the bottom 90% of systems in terms of domain complexity. There are likely some spots of higher complexity that we may focus more on (and perhaps even model in a more object oriented way).

Our team is not highly functional in object oriented design and analysis. When I say this I mean that team members must be highly functional in order to attempt creating a domain model (all other attempts will be doomed to failure, likely as an anemic domain model). When I say highly functional I would consider the AJM model (and people at the least being journeyman with maybe a single apprentice as the complexity of the system increases the number of masters needed increases). Said bluntly, 90% of teams in the Microsoft world should be looking at building anemic domain models as opposed to actual domain models for solely this reason. Using things that the development does not have a large understanding of is a certain recipe for failure.

We would otherwise consider a simpler model such as transaction script but feel that we can benefit from things such as further testability.

 

I believe that using these five viewpoints we can effectively create contexts within it makes perfect sense to be choosing to create an anemic domain model.

Brainiac"Tapecraft" as soulcraft

A Flickr user named Happy Monkey has developed a new art form, "tapecraft," that puts a contemporary gloss on the ancient Japanese art of origami. The smallish architectural forms are similarly complex: multifaceted spheroid objects covered with pyramids of various colors, for example. But the key ingredients here are scotch tape and permanent markers. The works are crafty, DIY, and cheap, a popular combination in these straitened times ...

Ars TechnicaIntel's gain, Dell's pain as PC market coasts along bottom

companion photo for Intel's gain, Dell's pain as PC market coasts along bottom

In the recent global meltdown, one truism that had long been forgotten came back and whacked every holder of every asset class square in the face: in a crisis, all correlations go to 1. Numbers that once either had no apparent connection with one another, or had an inverse relationship, moved in tandem, so that the price of tea in China and the price of a share of Dell both went straight down at the same rate at the same time.

One of the major signs that the meltdown phase of the crisis is over, or at least taking a break to regroup for round two, is that many of these crisis-driven correlations have disappeared, so that normal seasonal and market dynamics are once again visible in the data (albeit faintly, since all of the numbers are much smaller now). 

Nowhere is this condition more apparent than in the current round of technology industry earnings releases that Intel kicked off yesterday, where the chipmaker is seeing demand for some products in particular geographies snap back a bit like an overstretched rubber band, while others stay flat or even continue to decline somewhat.

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Planet MoneyCongress Moves Closer To Protecting Car Dealers

Last week, we told you about a House bill that will force GM and Chrysler to bring back over 2,000 dealerships that were scheduled to close or have been closed. Well, yesterday dozens of dealers went to Capitol Hill to lobby Congress to support the bill. The dealers said that many of the dealerships were closed down for arbitrary reasons -- and some even claim that they were targeted.

So far their efforts seem to be working -- over 240 House members have signed onto the bill, according to supporters.

The automakers of course hate the bill. They say the main reason they have cut down the number of dealerships is to improve profits. General Motors says it could save $2.5 billion annually by cutting dealers. The company says it spends that money on sales incentives, advertising and other programs that support dealers.

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Michael CotéLinks for July 15th

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FreakonomicsMake It a Taedonggang River Beer

North Korea has come out with its first beer commercial for Taedong River Beer, "the pride of Pyongyang," which shows both Western businessmen and a sweaty worker in uniform enjoying a cold one.


Planet MoneyA New Life For A Failed Bank

bank

Seen in Lakewood, Wash. u.dweller/Planet Money Flickr pool

 

Flickr user u.dweller sends the photo above. She writes: "This is my idea of a green shoot." It's been just over a year since IndyMac failed and was seized by federal regulators.

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