Monday Morass

If it's Monday it must mean the Internet access is down. And so it is. Oh well, just have to keep moving on, although this means very few links this morning.

Gentoo Aloo

I burned the ISO image downloaded from Gentoo over the weekend. I know many people like Nero Burning ROM, but I find its interface rather counter intuitive. I wasted a lot of time and one blank CD-ROM and never did figure out how to create a bootable CD. So I used the copy of Roxio that came with my Plextor PlexWriter 40 and had a bootable disk in seconds.

But before you start to install Gentoo, you need to figure out how to use Linux fdisk because Gentoo leaves it to you to do your own partioning. However, don't confuse Linux fdisk with Windows fdisk and do not use the Windows version to create what you need! While they do similar things, the commands and how they do things are completely different. I have to figure out how to do what I need to do (the installation instructions for Gentoo are less than helpful) before going forward. To start, try the min-HowTo below to get you going but tread carefully, especially if your are foolish intrepid enough to dual boot. As always, I take no responsibility for the quality, or lack thereof, of the How-To. In fact, you must assume that some steps were left out or some are just plain wrong and will cause irreparable permanent damage to your drive, dandruff, the itch and flaking of psoriasis, and your dog to get mange. YMMV.

LinuxDoc

LinuxNewbie

Tanker Update

The tanker I talked about last week may have sunk. The Hawaiian Humane Society mounted a $50,000 effort to find the ghost ship and rescue a dog left behind when the cruise ship Norwegian Star rescued the crew last week. Despite their best efforts, the ship could not be found and it is assumed to have sunk.

By the way, there is a minor controversy as to whether it was a good idea to expend so much money to save one dog when many in the Society's kennels have to be put down due to lack of funds. While I will renew my membership, I think I will include a letter letting them know I am less than pleased with their lack of judgment in this case.

By the way 2, no one raised any money to recover the body of the crew member killed in the fire. I guess dogs have more worth than people.

Tipping Points

One of the insights from creating models of society and running computer simulations, based on these models, is the concept of tipping points. That is, there may be points in the flow of any society in which applying a minimal amount of force can produce an effect dramatically greater than would be expected, much as the last straw breaks the proverbial camels back. Or to put it another way, life is sometimes akin to an avalanche where the initiating event is small relative to the outcome.

But just as it is next to impossible to predict where a particular snow flake will end up at the end of the flow, due to our inability to factor in random, or at least seemingly random, events, so is it next to impossible to predict, with precision, the flow of a society in the future. Having said that, that does not mean we can't learn valuable information from running the simulations.

For example, if as some believe, genocide begins with a small core of people, who are then able to start an avalanche of violence against another group, it may be helpful to know what pressures are applied, against whom, and when. Such analysis can be applied to past events such Rwanda and Nazi Germany where it appears such situations did in fact exist. That is, it may have been possible to stop the killing, in both countries, by identifying and removing the small core, or protecting those who were most public in their opposition, before the core could start their society's spiral into horror.

If the idea of a tipping point is indeed efficient in explaining and predicting behavior, it could be a powerful tool of change (whether for good or ill is a discussion for another time, but we need to be aware of the downside and vigilant in our preventing its misuse).

For more on this subject, see this link here from the Atlantic Monthly and the work of, among others, Thomas Schelling, Robert Axelrod, and Joshua Epstein.

Aloha!

Resistance is Futile

Actually, resistance is a natural part of being human. People spend a lot of time coming to an equilibrium that is satisfying for them. Threaten that hard won comfort zone and you have to expect resistance. Below is a list of other reasons why people resist change. The list is intended to give you a map of the possible pitfalls in any effort to implement change. It is by no means exhaustive, but it can act as a guide around the biggest bumps in the road to change.

• People resist changes that they were not a part of the process to implement the change. Hence, a smart leader will involve all of the stakeholders from the very beginning.

• If people are left out of the process, a perfectly normal reaction is to feel powerless. If that happens, studies on learned powerlessness indicate people will stay in place. That is, they will refuse to move or act, even if they intellectually understand they would personally benefit from such a change.

• People resist change if they don't know why something is being done. And they won't know why if they aren't part of the process. Most people are not stupid, so if a change comes down and they were not part of the process, the natural, and logical, reaction is to feel that the change will have negative effects on them personally (which may be why they weren't included in the first place). Regardless of whether some, or all, of the negative effects of a change will be directed at a group, that group must be included in the planning and implementation process.

• If a change is being done solely as a public relations effort, people will resist the change because there is typically no benefit to the employee. That is, a change instituted just for the way it makes things appear, as opposed to a valid strategic reason will be resisted. So don't waste everyone's time with this kind of change.

• Related to above, a change will be resisted if the problem can not be defined in terms that give a sense of personal self-interest. Or from the opposite direction, change will be resisted if it is defined in terms of those out-side of the organization.

• Change will be resisted if the fear of failure, due to a changed environment, becomes paramount. People like to have mastery of their environment. They learn to deal with the things as they are and become masters at operating within those parameters. Change the parameters and people become fearful because they will need to find out what the new rules are, and then become masters of them. The trick is to give people the confidence to make the change, and the time to experiment, that is, to make mistakes without negative consequences.

• Even if you do all of the above, people may resist change because not everyone will benefit alike. That is, some may gain and some may lose. If this is the case, no amount of sugar coating the problem will make it better. The leader must deal with this head on, with total honesty, and not try to dodge the problem. The bottom line is that not all change will benefit everyone, so don't try to persuade them that it will.

Having said all of the above, you would think nothing would ever get done. And to a great extent, you would be right. But if you have ever seen a group of motivated people meet a challenge head on, and create a process that is innovative, while still holding to such values as fairness, equality, honesty, openness, and caring for all, then you know it can happen.

Given the right motivation, people are incredibly adaptive. If we weren't, we wouldn't have survived as long as we have.

Aloha!

Taxing Times

When is a tax increase not a tax increase? State government gets its funds from several sources. The majority is from sales taxes. But there are other sources. For example, user fees, taxes on real property, and grants from the federal government, to name but a few.

Since the sales tax is a very visible and broad based tax, increasing that is a dangerous thing for a politician. So, one strategy is to "raid" what is known as special funds. Typically, special funds are setup as separate accounts to hold monies generated by users for specific purposes, and only for those purposes.

The largest of these funds is usually the highway special fund, which gets its income from gasoline taxes. In Hawai'i, the various taxes on gas amount to over 50 cents per gallon. The money is intended for road repair and maintenance. Over time, hundreds of millions of dollars is generated by the taxes, and government, being as inefficient as it is, just can't spend your money as fast as it comes in. Hence, a balance soon begins to accumulate. A very large balance.

Locally, the balance hit over $250 million in fiscal year 1997. With all that money sitting there, a politician has three options. Leave it alone; decrease the tax rate so less is accumulated; or spend some of it for a purpose it was never intended for. Guess which one is always taken? Yup.

Doing this can work for a time, especially if the economy is going well and excess taxes are coming in. But the time you raid a special funds is when things aren't going well. This means if you take too much out of the fund, you can't accomplish the original intended purpose of the fund. In this case, fixing the roads. Yes, you can extend the life cycle of a road by paving it every 13 years instead of every 10, but have you seen the condition of a road after only half that many years? Most surface streets are not designed nor constructed to last that long.

So you are now in a bind. You've spent the money in the fund because you don't want to raise the sales tax. But you now have roads that are falling apart. What to do? Well, you raise the gas tax, of course. People won't notice gasoline prices going up by five or ten cents. Heck, you see that kind of change almost weekly. So why not? Voters are blind, if not stupid.

Or are they? I hope they aren't because this kind of budget smoke and mirrors has been going on for years and it is high time that we hold our elected officials accountable for this. So take a close look at who you vote for this November and remember that increasing a user fee reaches into your pocket just like the sales tax does.

Aloha!

Van Cam Jammed

After months of uproar over the implementation of a privately run speed enforcement service, the Hawai'i legislature voted unanimously to repeal the law authorizing the program. The Governor, seeing the writing on the wall, reversed his threat to veto the measure and says he will let it become law without his signature.

If anyone wants to do a case study on how not to implement a program (see my list regarding change from Tuesday), feel free to come and take a look. From the arrogant State Senator who first proposed this, to the arrogant Governor who supported it, to the arrogant PR person that the State Dept. of Transportation (DOT) chose to implement it, to the arrogant head of the DOT who then filled in when she failed, this a pig dung rich environment ripe for study.

While studying this steaming heap, think about how no relationship has been found between this program and lowering the accident or fatality rates. Think about how instead of generating revenue for the state, it will cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars (and millions more to get out of the contract with the private company - no fool them). Think about how the DOT refused to say how many miles above the speed limit a car had to traveling before tickets would be issued, even though a simple computer analysis of the tickets issued clearly indicated just what that speed was (six mph over the limit). And finally, think about a DOT decision to cancel an ad campaign intended to explain the need for the program to the public because the DOT didn't care if the people understood it or not. Just that they vil' obey (sieg heil!).

Stopping Light

No, I didn't make a mistake. NASA reports (see it here) on scientists who may be able to capture light and store it, to be released at will.

Last year, physicists at Harvard University shined a laser beam into a glass cell filled with atomic vapors. The light went in, but it didn't come out again. It was not destroyed or absorbed, but rather stored -- ready to emerge intact at the scientists' bidding.

Moving Images

One of the last computer peripherals to go wireless is the thing you use the most - the monitor. ViewSonic is working on a battery powered LCD screen that you can pick up and take with you, while still accessing your applications on your PC (see the story from MSNBC here). I don't know if this will become popular or not, but I'm sure it will find a niche somewhere.

Law Meme

Here's a great link from Doc Searls on a Yale law web site (see it here). It has, as you would expect, a slight liberal lean to it but that does not detract from the cutting commentaries on legal issues relevant to everyone. Give it a look see when you have a moment.

Aloha!

It's Friday!

Whats the Matter?

The more you know, the stranger the world gets. First, it's scientists stopping light. Now it's astrophysicists sayings they may have discovered a new form of matter (see the article from MSNBC here). Or at least, they may being observing something that they can not explain, other than by positing a new form of matter.

At a news conference Wednesday, astronomers announced that RXJ1856 has a temperature of about 1.2 million degrees, too cool for a neutron star, and a diameter of about 12 miles, too small to fit the standard model for neutron stars.

This evidence "points to a star composed not of neutrons, but of quarks in a form known as strange quark matter," said Jeremy Drake of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the lead researcher for the RXJ1856 observations.

Can You See What I Hear?

What would it be like to be blind and to see in sounds rather than images - to even dream in sounds? Wired has an article (see it here) on an experiment in which a small video camera is used to scan the field of vision and then convert that vision into sounds.

At this week's Toward a Science of Consciousness Conference in Tucson, Peter Meijer of Philips Laboratories presented his work on using sound to help the blind to see. His "Voice" technology uses a web cam mounted on a subject's head to scan one's field of view from left to right, and convert height into pitch and brightness into loudness.

To the uninitiated, the resulting bleepy "soundscape" sounds like nothing so much as a Kraftwerk outtake. Yet these blips and hisses have given a rudimentary sense of sight to several blind subjects who have grown to love their new Voice.

"One day I was sewing and listening to the television," said Voice user Pat Fletcher. "And I looked up and realized I could see across the plane of my bed. The edge was sharply defined, and beyond the edge rose the box of my television, and behind that the blinds on my wall.

Got That Warm Feeling Inside?

The Bush Administration is looking at reviving the decades old concept of using nuclear tipped interceptor missiles as a defense against incoming conventional/biological/nuclear missiles. The idea, studied by the Pentagon 50 years ago, has the upside of not requiring you to actually hit the incoming missile (as most of the so called "Star Wars" types of interceptors try to do), just be close enough for the shock wave/heat/radiation to do its work. The downside is you would have EMF pulses knocking out your satellites in space and probably all electronic based devices on the ground.

Most people do not see that as an acceptable trade-off. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld apparently disagrees. See the Washington Post article here.

Have a Great Weekend Everyone - Aloha!