Where did the oil go?

A panel of experts from the Interior Department and NOAA has released a report today estimating that 74% of the oil that gushed into the Gulf of Mexico from the damaged BP oil well is already gone. About 20% of the spill was skimmed from the surface, or collected by BP and burned off in “flaring” operations.

Where did the rest of the oil go? Apparently a lot of it simply evaporated. A large portion of the oil was “bioremediated.” That’s a fancy word that means bacteria in the water are eating the oil, breaking it down into water and carbon dioxide. This is a natural process that has been greatly accelerated, both by summer storms moving through the Gulf, and by the enormous amounts of chemical dispersants dumped on the oil slick by BP. The dispersants break up the oil into teeny tiny droplets. The more surface area, the more the bacteria can get at the oil.

It is not a bad idea to be skeptical about these kinds of announcements. How did they get to 74%? Why not 71%, or 76%? Still, this is not BP’s estimate. This is a theoretically independent government panel. They’ve got no reason to low ball the amount of oil left to be cleaned up.

If this is true, it is an extraordinary claim. The implication is that in light of what is widely claimed as the worst environmental disaster in the nation’s history, three quarters of the problem was cleaned up in real time. They haven’t finished cementing the well shut yet, and 74% of the oil is already gone.

If the efforts of both man and nature continue at this rate (unlikely), the oil spill will be gone by the end of hurricane season. The oil that has already hit beaches and marshes will still have to be cleaned up, and I’m sure that somebody is going to have to scoop up tar balls that float ashore for years to come. However, it begins to look like the worst of this mess is already behind us.

BP has been widely excoriated for not having a plan in place to deal with the situation ahead of time. I think people have been selling the company short. They have brought enormous resources to bear in a remarkably short time, and that huge effort seems to be working. The media has underestimated what the can-do attitude of Americans can accomplish, when faced with an emergency, and backed up by a butt load of money.

2010 Goals: Progress Report

We’re a little past the halfway point of 2010, so I thought it would be a good idea to review the progress so far towards my personal goals for the year. It is an axiom of management that you don’t get what you want, you get what you measure. This is as true in one’s personal life as it is in business.

Goal: Run 50 kilometers of road races.
Status: Complete.
A heavy race schedule in March, April, and May, including one 10K, let me complete this goal by early in June. No races are set for the hot part of the summer, but they will pick up again in September/October time frame. I clearly low-balled this goal. Next year I may have to commit to a half marathon.

Goal: Complete three authors from The New Lifetime Reading Plan.
Status: Complete.
I tackled the English Lake District poets first: Wordsworth and Coleridge. Then I jumped forward forty years and read selected works from the American essayist and philosopher Emerson. Having plucked the low hanging fruit, I have started in on The Story of the Stone, a massive Chinese novel of the late Ming period. At 2500 pages in four volumes, this will keep me occupied until the end of the year. If I get through that this year, next year I may decide to take on Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, all seven volumes of it.

Goal: Entertain at home 12 times throughout the year.
Status: Ahead of schedule.
Man does not live by money alone. A recent study showed that people who had a bigger network of friends tended to live longer. Within my experience, I would argue that they also live better. We are social animals, happiest in a group setting. So far this year we have entertained at home eight times. These have ranged from intimate dinners with another couple to outdoor barbeques with 30+ attendees. Party on, dude!

Goal: Save 20% of earned income.
Status: On-track.
Due to a larger than expected income tax refund, I was able to fund my Roth IRA with the equivalent of 5% of estimated earnings in the first quarter of the year. Between my contribution to the company 401K and the corporate match, another 15% is being added to my retirement funds. Now if only the stock market would recover and start growing again.

Goal: Reduce total debt to less than $60 K.
Status: Ahead of schedule.
Including the payments made at the end of July, I am now down to $62 K in debt from mortgage, car loan, and line of credit. I am paying down principle at the rate of $800 per month, including tripling the equity payment on the monthly mortgage. Debt reduction and savings rate are linked. I could apply a higher percentage to savings, and slow down on debt reduction. But I get a guaranteed 6.5% return on capital by drawing down my mortgage faster, and in today’s market that looks pretty good.

Goal: Earn $2000 at H & R Block.
Status: Failure.
I only made about $1000 during tax season this year. Including the training hours I put in, my hourly rate was very little better than minimum wage. After peak season was over, walk in traffic dropped down to zero, and I dropped my hours down to zero. No point in coming in just to sit in the office. I need to take certification tests to increase my compensation rate, but even then I don’t see myself hitting this goal next year. On the other hand, doing taxes does provide good blog fodder, so I’ll give it at least one more year.

Goal: Take 9 credit hours of graduate level accounting classes.
Status: On track.
My original plan was to take one class (3 credit hours) in Spring, Summer, and Fall semesters. After completing one class in Spring semester, I wasn’t able to find a summer class that fit my schedule. So I have doubled up, and am signed up for two classes starting in September. This is about half a standard academic load, and is more than I have ever taken since I started working. So we’ll see how this goes in the fall.

Goal: 60+ blog posts.
Status: On track.
Seven months into 2010, and I have kept my average of 5 posts a month. I need to focus on posting at least once a month for the balance of the year.

It is easy to focus on goals, and lose sight of the reality that the milestones and measurements are intended to represent. So, to put this progress report into a different perspective: I am healthy and fit, and enjoying time with a wide circle of friends and family. I am continuing to grow both intellectually and professionally, while storing up resources against the vicissitudes that inevitably come to everyone. Life is good!

Title IX and Cheerleading

An interesting legal decision regarding Title IX came down this week. Title IX is the civil rights legislation that governs women’s collegiate sports, and is widely credited with dramatically expanding athletic opportunities for women in college. Basically, the legislation says that you cannot discriminate against woman’s sports in favor of men’s sports.

This is the sticky point. How can you tell if women’s sports are being discriminated against? The most commonly used test is called the proportionality test. What this means is that the percentage of women on the school’s sports teams should equal the percentage of women enrolled in the school. If your student body is 55% women, 55% of the athletes at the school must also be women. If not, you are guilty of discrimination: you better hand out more scholarships to girls, and by the way, you can pay the lawyers on your way out of court.

Since they have to pass the proportionality test, colleges play games with their sports programs, either adding women’s sports or dropping men’s sports. This brings us to the current case.

Quinnipiac University in Connecticut wanted to drop their women’s volleyball team. To make up for the number of slots lost, they claimed that cheerleading counted as a varsity sport. Making the substitution, the proportion of woman athletes was within 4% of the percentage of woman in the student body, which the University claimed was close enough. These claims were not unique to Quinnipiac. Other colleges have made the same assumptions.

Anyway, the volleyball team sued the school (with the help of the ACLU), and the judge ruled that cheerleading was not a sport. In a world where synchronized swimming is an Olympic event, how the hell do you rule out cheerleading as a sport?

What are the criteria to determine if an activity is a sport? I think we can all agree that it should be an organized physical activity, with coaches and competitions. Cheerleading seems to fit the bill in all of those particulars. Just go to YouTube, and you will find videos of astonishing athleticism and teamwork, taken at cheerleading competitions. If Quinnipiac decided that cheerleading was more cost effective (11 slots for volleyball vs. 30 slots for cheerleading), or more popular, than volleyball, what right has a court to interfere with that decision? After all, we live in a world where synchronized swimming is an Olympic event.

Apparently, the judge’s decision turned on the fact that the cheerleading team competed against several different types of other cheerleading teams. They competed against other colleges, but also against club teams not affiliated with any school. Also, the rules were different for different competitions.

Another part of the judge’s ruling dealt with how the school counted team membership. The college had women’s teams for cross-country, indoor track, and outdoor track. They counted the athletes who participated in all three sports three times. The judge cried foul on that practice. Interestingly, the school dropped men’s outdoor track last year. How much do you want to bet they will drop the women’s track team next year? After all, you don’t get any credit for it. Now, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Ultimately, Title IX has become a form of affirmative action for women’s athletics. However, unlike affirmative action in college admissions, in the case of sports, quotas are not only encouraged, but required to meet the dictates of the law. Although it has unquestionably opened up more opportunities for women, it also leads to gaming the system and restricted opportunities for men. These are the results we would expect from any quota system.

Unemployment Benefits

I have friends among the ranks of the unemployed. I know one guy who has not had a full time job for almost two years now, and not for lack of trying. He has been to several out of state interviews, as well as numerous phone interviews, and he just can’t close the deal. This is probably largely due to his age (60+), but it also an indication of how tough the job market is these days.

However, I also know and have written of individuals who are working on the black market while continuing to draw unemployment (and food stamps, and welfare). In those circumstances, unemployment compensation is clearly a disincentive to taking on a regular job. So while I have some sympathy for those who struggling to find employment in today’s economy, I come down in favor of cutting off unemployment compensation after 75 weeks.

The Obama administration recently tried to push through another extension of unemployment benefits. It was stopped in the Senate by Republicans, concerned about the level of deficit spending. In the next six months, a number of the long term unemployed will lose their benefits as they expire.

I was reading the Freakonomics blog today, and I noticed an earlier post on this subject. As part of his post, one of the things Daniel Hamermesh said was

The original, and I believe continuing, purpose of unemployment insurance is to
maintain consumption of the unemployed—to prevent hardship.

I think the author has combined two different rationales in that sentence. There are two separate arguments for continuing unemployment benefits, and the Freakonomics author has folded them together. The easier argument to follow is to prevent hardship. It sucks to be unemployed. Having a little money coming in keeps food on the table and the lights turned on while looking for the next position. If you are living paycheck to paycheck, and then those paychecks are cut off, you are in deep trouble. With the current high level of unemployment, there are no jobs, so the need for the safety net is still there. In essence, this argument is “extend unemployment, because you could be next.”

The more complicated argument is that unemployment benefits maintain consumption. This is really a macroeconomic argument, as opposed to easing hardship at the microeconomic level of the household receiving benefits. The idea is that consumption drives demand, which drives production, which drives employment. Put another way, the argument is that if laid off people have no income, their spending drops to zero. When customers stop spending, businesses lay people off. If those laid off people also stop spending, the cycle will continue until no one is left standing. Basically, this boils down to “extend unemployment, or you will be next.”

After 18 months, however, both arguments begin to wear thin. Being an American citizen is a guarantee of certain inalienable rights. But it is not a guarantee of a standard of living, or even of a job. It is not the responsibility of the government to borrow money from the Chinese in order to send people checks in perpetuity. Enough is enough.

Disability Claims

We had one of our employees quit last week. She worked half a shift on Tuesday, left for a doctor’s appointment, then called in Tuesday afternoon to say she was quitting with no notice.

Here’s what was reported to me:

At the woman’s doctor appointment, she had reported symptoms so severe, that her doctor had declared that she should be on permanent total disability. He told her he would support her in her disability claim. The woman promptly went down to the local Social Security office and filed for disability. After filling out the paperwork, the first question the officials asked her was: are you still working? When she told them she was going to give two weeks notice, she was told not to give notice, as it would screw up her claim, by continuing to work after filing for disability status.

Additional information: The woman’s husband just started receiving his disability checks, after waiting almost two years for his claim to wend its way through the system. It usually takes at least a year for Social Security disability claims to be processed. However, it turns out that you get back pay: once your claim is approved, payments are made back to the date of first filing.

A few questions: Why are the bureaucrats at Social Security coaching applicants for disability? I would think that at best, part of their job would be root out attempts to defraud the taxpayers. At worst, they would maintain strict neutrality. If you want to go back to work after filling, who are they to advise against it. Let the chips fall where they may.

This leads me into my next question, and central point. If this woman was able to work two weeks notice, then how disabled could she be? For that matter, she worked a full shift Monday. I saw her do it. There was no evidence that I could see of a disabling medical condition. Not last week, or the week before, or the week before that. She never came to management and asked for an accommodation to any medical condition.

Here’s where I speculate: Our employee worked her job, supporting herself and her husband while his disability claim was processed. Now it’s his turn to support her. His back disability will support them while her claim is processed. Furthermore, now that he has learned the ins and outs of the system, he will be able to coach her while she goes for a second helping from the same pot.

This leads to one more question: How many people on disability have another member of their household also drawing disability? Once somebody in the house figures out how to get free money, how often does another member of the home decide to go for more free money?

Okay, that was two final questions.

A Favorable Omen

After the backyard barbeque and fireworks on the Fourth, I had a holiday today to recuperate. Later in the afternoon, I decided to go to the gym and try and work off some of the bratwurst and baked beans.

Walking up to the entrance of the gym, I noticed a small pile of change sitting on one of the platforms holding the faux columns that frame the entry. Three quarters, two dimes, and four pennies. Thinking that it could be some kind of trap, I restrained myself from grabbing the money on my way in the door.

After finishing my workout, I saw that the money was still there when I came out. Well, you don't have to tell me more than twice about free money before I go and see for myself. Half expecting some kind of hidden camera stunt to materialize, I snatched up the coins and pocketed them.

No one jumped out and accused me of stealing their money. So far, so good. Not only that, but as I walked across the parking lot, I spotted more change: a quarter here, a nickel there, a couple more pennies. My mama not having raised no fool for a son, I pocketed them as well.

Due to the long weekend, the coming week is going to be a short week at work. And now I'm up $1.31. Is this going to be a great week, or what?

Headlines in the News

You absolutely have to wonder who writes the headlines sometimes. Here is a headline from today's Washington Post: "Top Defense Officials Say They 'Fully Support' Obama on Removing McChrystal."

Well, duh! Given that McChrystal was removed from command of US forces in Afghanistan because of interviews where it sounded like he did not 'fully support' the administration and every member of the civilian staff, what would you expect them to say? They may think it was a terrible idea to fire the guy, and they would publicly say they fully support the decision.

You have to wonder what the troops on the line think about this kerfluffle. Actually, I can guess. I bet their thinking runs something like this: "The general screwed up and criticized the civilians, and they punished him by sending him home to the States. If I screw up like that, can I get punished the same way?"

The more things change ...

Recently I have been reading some of the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the nineteenth century philosopher and writer. In his essay titled Self-Reliance, I came across the following passage:

“…do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men
in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee thou foolish philanthropist that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold: for them I will go to prison if need be; but your miscellaneouspopular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots, and the thousand-fold Relief Societies; -- though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.”

Written in the 1840’s, this hit me like a thunderbolt. There really is nothing new under the sun. The only change to the terms of the debate in the last 160 years has been that now Emerson’s philanthropist would argue that it is the government’s job to “put all poor men in good situations,” and Emerson must give his money in taxes to support this worthy goal.

BP Oil Spill: What Not To Do

Although BP is having some success capturing the oil from their undersea well, some is still escaping into the Gulf, adding to the enormous amount of oil already spilled. As the oil slick continues to spread, and oil begins to come ashore in coastal communities, the sense of frustration in the general populace continues to mount.

I have been reading a lot of wild proposals coming from both op-ed writers and the commenters on news sites. I thought I might react to several of the most preposterous.

Boycott BP
This has got to be the dumbest idea yet put forward. Let’s “punish” BP by not buying their gasoline. Even if it were possible to get enough people acting in concert to impact BP’s sales, this would be a bad idea. Cleaning up this spill is going to take years, and a ton of money. If BP is going to be held responsible, they are going to need a continuing stream of cash flow to pay for this mess. They are going to get that money by continuing with their on-going business of producing and selling oil and gas. Starving your cash cow is never a good idea.

Turn the situation over to the armed forces
What are they going to do? Defend the beaches by shooting the oil as it tries to come ashore? Launch air strikes against an oil slick? I was in the army, and I was actually in a Corps of Engineers unit that had earthmoving and construction capabilities. One thing we were not trained or equipped to do was clean up spilled oil. Even more ludicrous is the idea that the military will take over efforts to shut down the leaking well. All they can do is provide unskilled labor. The know-how, gear, and systems for cleaning up will have to be provided by someone else.

A variant of this is the plea for the government to take over the effort to plug the leaking well. Nobody in the government knows jack-all about undersea well drilling operations. There is no evidence anywhere that BP’s management and operating personnel aren’t doing everything they can to plug this well, and they seem to be throwing all their resources into trying to solve the technical problem.

Criminal prosecutions against BP executives
I read a news story earlier this week that said people being polled wanted to see criminal prosecutions by a ratio of two to one. To even conduct the opinion poll is an example of mobacracy at its worst. I am hard put to imagine what the crime is supposed to be that the senior executives committed. Did they knowingly buy defective blowout preventers because they were cheap? Did they direct personnel to falsify test reports and bypass safety protocols? No evidence of any such activity has come to light.

Stop drilling oil wells
The fantasy here is that screwing in compact fluorescent bulbs and driving hybrid cars will drop our energy usage to the point that we can stop using petroleum. Even if we cut our energy usage in half, we still need to face the fact that all of our transportation systems are totally dependent on liquid fuels. Unless we want to outlaw air conditioning and airplanes, and put everyone on a bicycle, we’re going to continue to need oil to make our civilization function.

Frustrating as it is to watch the live video feed showing oil continuing to pour out BP’s well at the bottom of the Gulf, they will eventually solve the problem and seal off the leak. Containing, and then cleaning up all of the leaked oil will take years, maybe decades, and BP should have to pay, both for the clean up efforts and for the losses other people are going to suffer as a result of this disaster. As a going concern, BP has the size and scope of operations to compensate the victims of this colossal accident.

But striking out at the company as a result of built up frustration won’t solve anybody’s problems.

Helen Thomas: Did she really say that?

At 89 years old, Helen Thomas is both the oldest, and the longest serving member of the White House press corps. As the longest serving member, she not only gets a front row seat at the daily press briefings; by custom, she has the right to throw out the first question at the President's press conferences. By virtue of her longevity, she has transcended her position to become an institution.

She also appears to be a raving anti-Semite.

Last week she was captured on camera giving her opinion regarding the Israeli-Palestinian problems in the Middle East.

Now, you can deplore Israeli policy towards the occupied West Bank. You can call Israeli military actions against the Gaza strip completely disproportionate, compared to the provocations offered by Hamas. You can even make the argument that Israeli has ceded the moral high ground of a democratic society, and created an apartheid regime.

What you really can't do is state that Jews living in the Middle East should "Go home...to Germany and to Poland...and to everywhere else."

You might be able to make the excuse for Ms. Thomas that she has suffered enough microstrokes in her frontal lobes that it has seriously affected her judgement. Maybe she really doesn't mean, or even understand, the implications of her statements.

Be that as it may, it's time for her to go. When she recites what is basically the Hamas party line, she demonstrates that she is unfit for any position as a responsible journalist. The Hearst newspaper syndicate needs to fire her.

And people bitch about Rush Limbaugh.

Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

In high school (a long time ago), I took a class in Science Fiction as Literature. One of the themes of the course was the Frankenstein story.

Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant scientist, builds his creature without considering the consequences of creating artificial life. Once animated, Frankenstein is unable to control his monster, which goes on to destroy everything that Frankenstein holds dear. Finally, Frankenstein himself perishes in the attempt to destroy his creation.

At the heart of the Frankenstein myth is the fear of the unintended consequences of new and developing technologies. The Terminator movies are a version of the myth. Jurassic Park, and most of the other novels of Michael Crichton, merely ring changes on the theme.

I’m put in mind of Frankenstein by watching news coverage of the BP oil spill disaster. Seeing live video of that dark, mysterious cloud billowing out of the pipe, a mile under the surface. Watching satellite photos of the spreading oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico, spreading its tentacles further and further. The oil pouring up from the bottom of the sea is the monster.

Filling the role of mad scientist, BP’s drilling crews created the monster. And with every failure to stem the flow of oil, the lack of control over what they have created becomes more apparent.

In every good horror story, the real fear comes from the anticipation of what is going to happen, not the action itself. Life copies art in this respect as well. As of this writing, no one knows how much oil is eventually going to leak into the Gulf, or what the final environmental tally will be. We just know that it is going to be bad.

The biggest sinkhole ever.

Holy Cow!

This is an image of the sinkhole that opened up in Guatemala City over the weekend as a result of a tropical storm.

It looks like something out of a science fiction movie. Like the one where aliens burn a hole in the crust of the planet from space. Or maybe like the one where the supervillain activates his seismo ray device and chews up the heart of a city. Or maybe like the one where the hero realizes that all of what he thinks is real is actually a computer generated illusion.

Astonishingly, no one was killed when the sinkhole opened up, although it did swallow part of a building.

Violence vs Non-violence

I just watched the video of Israeli commandos rappelling onto one of the ships of the Gaza relief convoy. It looks like the commandos and the passengers on the ships are working off two different scripts. The Israelis are working off the standard non-violent resistance script. The Israeli role is to play the heavy, intercepting a peaceful humanitarian mission in international waters. The “activists” on the convoy, by peacefully resisting, establish the moral high ground, and focus international attention on the justice of their cause.

The folks on the convoy were apparently not working off that script. They were attempting to repel enemy boarders. There is nothing non-violent about clubbing someone to death with a metal bar, which is clearly what the passengers were attempting to do.

The Israelis were clearly surprised by the ferocity of the reaction to their boarding. Near the end of the video you can see one of the commandos pointing a paintball gun at the passengers. I’m thinking they wouldn’t have been carrying paintball guns if they had planned on things turning as ugly as they did.

Of course, at some stage of the proceedings the commandos declined to be swarmed and beaten to death. They pulled out the real guns they were carrying and used them. The escalation of the violence caused ten times the international reaction that a non-violent incident would have engendered.

This has become an public relations disaster for Israel.

Turning the Cards

At work we are still in hiring and training mode. The hiring is now not being driven by an expansion of our business, or even the turnover of experienced personnel from retirement or relocation. No, we are now hiring trainees to replace the trainees who washed out.

One guy found a better job, and we determined that a couple of others were not going to work out long term. From management’s point of view, it is always best to cut ties as early as possible, once you have decided that you have an unsatisfactory candidate. Why continue to invest training dollars in someone who is not going to make it?

Despite our best attempts at interviewing and upfront testing, hiring is largely a blind process. I know of no way to determine is someone is truly going to perform in a job, prior to having them start in our unique environment. With some people, it is apparent early on that they will excel, going far in our organization. Sometimes it’s an absolute disaster: the person who creates a quality problem, or breaks equipment, or gets someone hurt. But they all look pretty much the same coming in the front door.

It is also a linear process. When I say that it is linear, I mean that we can only try out one candidate at a time for a position. It would be tempting to hire multiple candidates simultaneously, and then select the best one at the end of training. You retain the star, and drop the others.

A Darwinian selection process would probably be more cost effective than working with one candidate at a time. But that approach strikes me as fundamentally flawed and unfair. We make hiring decisions in good faith. Hiring multiple people, with the intent of cutting some of them, breaks that faith. If a person can do the job, they get to keep the job. I will forego the possibility of finding someone even better.

So, hiring is both, blind, and linear. The metaphor I use to describe this process is playing solitaire. You can shuffle the deck all you want, but eventually you’re going to have to turn over a card. Most of the time you get a number card, a three, or an eight, or a ten. And that’s how many days they last. Then you have to turn over a new card, and try again.

You’re hoping for an ace, you’ll settle for a face card, and you’re praying you don’t get the joker.

Cell Phones for All

I discovered a fresh outrage this weekend. Unusually for me, I was glued to the tube, watching the series finale of Lost. Four minutes of show, three minutes of commercials. Anyway, from sheer repetition, commercials for Assurant Wireless began to penetrate my consciousness.

Assurant Wireless offers a free cell phone, along with 200 minutes of free nation-wide calling every month, as long as you qualify. The primary qualification is to be receiving food stamps, or to have income below 135% of the Federal poverty level.

The first problem with this is that the “free” cell phone service is not free, of course. It is being paid for out of the taxes attached to the paying customers’ phone bills every month. So I’m being taxed, not to pay for a common good like police or fire protection, but for someone else’s specific good. But the irritation doesn’t stop there.

I can kind of wrap my mind around the concept of food stamps. No one should starve in a nation full of food. But when was it decided that cell phone service is a right, not a discretionary expense?

Then there’s that 135%. The whole point of having a Federal poverty level is that is supposed to be the line demarcating the poor (who presumably need help from the government), from the not-poor, who should be able to fend for themselves.

Those are all bad enough to give me dyspepsia. The part that really frosts me, however, is the television commercials. The contract to provide the “free” cell service is so lucrative that the company (a division of Virgin Mobile) can afford a primetime TV ad campaign. They want to reach anyone who might be qualified, and get them to sign up. There used to be at least a little bit of a stigma associated with government assistance. You were supposed to have enough pride to take care of yourself. Not any more. Don’t be embarrassed to get free cell phone service. You’re entitled to feed at the government trough.

This whole situation irritates me, but in reality, it is only an irritant. The taxes that pay for this program are not unduly onerous. But I wonder how the folks who earn 140% of the poverty line feel. If they want cell service, they have to choose what to sacrifice to afford the luxury of a cell phone. I’ll bet this makes them just wild.

Synthetic Life

This was a big week for molecular biology geeks. Craig Venter and his team at the Venter Institute in Maryland announced that they had successfully created what they call “synthetic life.” Like Dr. Frankenstein, we have now created life from non-living material. Surely designer organisms that eat carbon dioxide and secrete oil are not far away, thereby solving both global warming and the energy crisis!

Well, maybe not.

When you get beyond the hype of the press release and examine what Venter’s team really did, it boils down to three things. 1) They completely decoded the DNA of an existing bacteria. This is known as sequencing the genome. 2) They artificially created a copy of the sequenced DNA, starting with the nucleotide bases that are the building blocks of the DNA molecule. As part of that process they modified some of the nonfunctional sections of the DNA to insert what are called “genetic watermarks.” 3) They took a different bacteria, removed the genetic material that was native to the germ, and implanted their prebuilt DNA. The newly implanted DNA then took over the machinery of the cell and began making copies of itself in the normal process of cell division.

These are all neat tricks, to be sure, and incredibly difficult to boot. But I think they fail two key tests for the claim of truly creating artificial life. First, true artificial life will have a genetic code designed from scratch. Venter borrowed the genetic code from an organism that had developed over a billion years of trial and error evolution.

Second, to be truly synthetic, they would have to combine their novel DNA with both a lab grown cellular membrane and built from scratch cellular metabolic machinery. If that assembly then began to grow and reproduce, then they could truly claim to have built an artificial life form.

We’re still a long way away from gleefully cackling “It’s alive! My creature lives!,” as we rub our hands together with glee. Consider: the bacterial DNA Ventner synthesized consisted of a little over one million base pairs, combined to make a single chromosome. Human DNA includes over three billion base pairs, spread out over 46 chromosomes. That’s three thousand times more genetic code.

Those caveats aside, it is still an astonishing technical achievement. Clearly with some fine tuning, they will soon be able to use their techniques to do the kind of design work mentioned above.

Educational Qualtiy Control

I want to build on my concept of testing as educational quality control that I started in my last post.

Quality control, or quality assurance, as it is sometimes called, is a core function in every manufacturing plant I’ve ever seen. We continuously check product at every stage, from incoming raw material to assembly to final audit before shipping. The question is always the same: does the product meet specifications? Put another way, what we are doing is verifying that the manufacturing process is generating the desired result.

If you check parts, and find you aren’t getting the correct result, then there is a problem with the process. But until you do your quality checks, you don’t know what you are producing. Also, one of the key guidelines of quality control is to check your quality as early in the process as possible. It makes no sense to wait until after you have finished final assembly to test the product and discover there was a problem with the first step in the assembly process. Finally, a good quality control program relies on objective evidence. If a good part has to be round within .004”, everyone agrees on that, and everyone agrees on how to measure the part. There is never any discussion of “the parts look round enough to me.” It is either round within .004”, or it is not. If not, then there is a problem, and we have to fix the problem.

In education, standards and standardized testing take the place of quality control. That’s why I can never understand why the educational establishment fights so hard against standardized testing. Actually, that’s not true. I completely understand why teachers fight so hard against testing. If I had a complete lack of accountability for producing the desired result in my job, I would want to protect that too.

What I don’t understand are the lame excuses offered as to why we shouldn’t use standardized tests to evaluate the performance of our education processes. For example, “all we do is teach to the test.” If the test is a representative sample of what we want students to know, than test scores should accurately show the students’ mastery of that body of knowledge.

Conversely, without testing, there is no way to establish that the student has learned anything. And based on my experience trying to employ a number of high school graduates, many of them really haven’t learned anything.

Training the Trainer

We’ve gone into hiring mode for the first time in a couple of years. This is due to two factors. First, business continues to strengthen, necessitating more workers to get the job done. Second, some of our people have moved on to greener pastures. When somebody leaves, it creates an opening for somebody else. The end result is that we’re not just calling back former employees who were laid off. We’re bringing new people into the organization.

Since it has been a couple of years since we have done that, we are relearning lessons on training new people. Our usual method of training is OJT or job shadowing. We assign the trainee to follow an existing employee for a few weeks. In theory, the trainer shows the trainee all of the ins and outs of the job. Anything the trainer doesn’t teach, can be picked up from the work instructions and operating procedures.

At least, that’s the theory.

We had one guy training for five weeks at one position. When we gave him a written test at the end of that time, he failed miserably. It turns out he couldn’t read the questions, either on the test paper or the work instructions that contained the answers. We had to let him go. Oh yeah, we’re supposed to test for literacy on the front end. So now we’ve reinstalled that part of our hiring procedures.

Another lesson we’ve relearned is to provide milestone tests to be administered during the training period. We fell into the lazy trap of waiting until the very end of training, and then testing everything at once. We had one person fail all of the tests. It turned out the trainer had used the “monkey see, monkey do” technique to have the trainee go through the motions of the job. But the trainer had never bothered to explain what the individual actions meant, or why they were included in the job.

It’s possible that the trainer had tried to explain these things. But this was the first time that particular trainer had ever trained anyone, it is very loud out on the shop floor, and the trainer was not particularly articulate in the first place. However, we realized that by virtue of hindsight. The bottlenecks to successful training could have been removed weeks earlier if we had enforced a testing regimen on both the trainee and trainer.

In our training model, testing performs a quality control function. If you want to know if your training is effective, than you devise a test that covers the material being trained. If the trainee can pass the test, then the training is effective. If they cannot pass the test, then your training is ineffective.

Obviously, if your training is going to be ineffective, you want to know as early in the process as possible. That way you can take steps to improve your training (maybe replace the trainer, maybe replace the trainee) before too much cost has been expended.

Because the testing is a pain in the butt, the trainers tend to push it off as long as possible. It’s up to management to enforce the testing regime. And as this whole incident has shown, everybody needs refresher training every now and again.

A New Passion: Off Topic Post

In the last couple of weeks a have discovered a new area of interest: molecular biology.

It started last year when I bought The Teaching Company course on Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity. Fourteen billion years condensed into 48 lectures on CD. Woo-hoo!

One of the critical thresholds discussed in Big History was the origin of life on Earth. So a couple of months ago I bought the course The Origins of Life. To talk about the research into the origin of life, you have to talk about biochemistry. There is also a chicken and egg type of problem with the origin of life. To be recognizable as life, the organism has to have both metabolism, a way of extracting energy from the environment, and inheritable reproduction, a way of making copies of itself. Which came first, and how did they combine? Nobody knows ... yet.

One of the lectures in The Origins of Life course covered the basics of genetic coding, how RNA is built out of DNA, and how proteins are assembled by RNA. I was hooked. I know we can splice DNA, and I know we have sequenced the human genome, but I don't know what that means. So I'm on a journey to find out.

My current Teaching Company course is on fundamentals of biology, which includes a number of lectures on cellular mechanics. After listening to a couple of lectures, I went online and did some searches for molecular biology. I found a Berkeley molecular biology course, and listened to a couple of lectures. Different perspectives, but not as well structured as The Teaching Company course.

Then, on a whim, I went to YouTube and typed in "DNA Replication." I hit the mother lode. It turns out there are tons of animations for all kinds of biological processes: DNA replication, translation, and transcription. Under metabolism, there are animations for glucolysis, the Krebs cycle, the citric acid cycle, and ATP synthase.

The animations run the gamut from block diagrams to real time scale reproductions of cellular processes. What is most amazing to me is that we now actually know the shapes of the various large molecules in these processes.

This is a whole new area of human knowledge for me to explore, and I can totally get my geek on doing so. I foresee hours of fun chasing down the minutiae of various biochemical processes.

Yeah, I'm a nerd. You got a problem with that?

Greece's Problems

Greece’s fiscal problems have been much in the news recently. Essentially, the country is bankrupt. They have bond payments coming due this month, and they don’t have enough euros in the treasury to pay back the bond holders.

There is nothing unusual about that. Most governments don’t actually pay off their bond holders when the note comes due. What they do is issue new bonds, and just keep rolling the debt over. Greece’s problem is that they have hit their credit limit. The international financial markets are so nervous about how much debt has already been issued that they don’t want to allow Greece to continue digging the hole deeper.

This is not the first time a sovereign nation has run into this problem. Nations can’t handle their credit cards any better than the average American. The nation state playbook says that in a circumstance like this, you devalue your currency. Devaluation makes your exports cheaper, imports more expensive, and pays back the bond investors with a cheaper currency than they loaned you. The inflationary effects make everyone poorer, including the bondholders, who have to take a haircut on the value of their investment.

This isn’t an available option for Greece, because the Greeks don’t have their own currency anymore. They use the common European currency, the euro. If Greece defaults on its bonds, all of the countries in the Euro zone are in the splash zone. Hence the incentive for the other European Union countries to bail Greece out.

The other European nations, notably France and Germany, along with the International Monetary Fund, have agreed to be the lender of last resort to the Greek government. But there are conditions. They are requiring Greece’s government to reduce the government budget deficit from 13.9% of GDP to 3.9% over the next three years.

With their back against the wall, the Greeks are agreeing to the plan. They are cutting pensions, cutting salaries of government employees, and raising the retirement age. On the revenue side, consumption taxes are being increased one tenth, from 20% to 22%.

How big a cut is this going to be? Government spending makes up about 43% of the total Greek economy. The proposed austerity package of tax increases and budget cuts aims to get that down to about 35%. The government in Greece is going to have to shrink by about 20%. Overall, the average man on the street is going to get 10% poorer over the next couple of years, but the effect will be concentrated for government employees and retirees.

No wonder they’re protesting.