Month: April 2009

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Loose Ends in Mid April

A lot of things make me stop and think.  Sometimes I remember to take a picture, but I don’t have enough for a full post.  Here are a few short notes. 

Above is Franklin Roosevelt’s ORIGINAL monument.  The one he wanted.   The one he had before they built the elaborate one down near the river.  Below is the explanation.

Below is “nature at work.”  It is very touching how we pretend to preserve.  I am glad they save this tree, but it seems a little strange to make such a Federal case of advertising it.  Maybe just do it.  I don’t like this because it makes an artificial distinction between nature and non-nature.

Below is nature REALLY at work.  The developers did a good job of creating a drainage.  It doesn’t just run off, but rather pools and soaks in. 

The fountains in Washington now have flowing water again after the winter.

Below is an interesting sign in Baltimore.  Read it a couple times.

Below are new oak leaves on April 14, 2009

Below is crabcake platter at Koco’s bar in Baltimore

Below is the advert for an exhibition at the Newseum.  I don’t think it is right that they pair Lincoln with the clown that shot him.  

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The Eternal Cocktail Party

One of the things I like least about my job is the necessity to go to cocktail parties and make small talk.   I am sure that someplace in Dante’s Inferno is a level where unfortunate souls circulate endlessly and chatter eternally w/o saying anything at all.  Now Twitter is spreading the cocktail party experience to all the world all the time and airheads everywhere are elated and vindicated.   They seem to feel that when their inane and banal blather is ennobled when it is carried over advanced technology. 

Some people bragged that they were twittering during a recent speech by President Obama.   I mean they didn’t hide it; they bragged about it.  How rude is that?  The President of the United States is talking and you are invited to be there in person, but instead of listening, you are talking to others, commenting on what the man is saying before he has a chance to finish his thought.    The fact that you are doing it on with your thumbs on an electronic toy only makes it worse.   Maybe I am just old fashioned, but if the President is standing in front of me talking, I think it is a good idea to pay attention.   

IMO – Twitter is good for sending out notices and very short breaking news, not much else.  The idea that people will just share their unformed thoughts is just silly.  Not everybody agrees.  Take a look at this NYT story.

Think about the kind of people who like – really like – cocktail parties.  Do we really want so many more of them?   At least at a real cocktail party you have some beer to dull the pain.  A little twitter goes a long way.    Human attention is too rare and valuable to waste.

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Never a Minute to Think

Being alone with their thoughts is evidently a frightening concept for some people and they go to great pains to avoid it, filling any empty time with cell phone conversations, twitter (see below) and games. I have mixed feelings about games.  As I wrote in a couple of earlier posts, games are ways we model and learn about the world, but as their portability and connectedness expands, they are pushing out the whole concept of introspection.    That is just my own point of view.

But we have to meet the customers where they want to go.  If they want games, then games are us.  IIP has developed its own game called X-Life.   It is an educational game that helps people from other places understand the U.S. through simulated experience.   You get an avatar with which to explore America as a student or visitor.    The current version is fairly primitive, but it has the advantage of being accessible and available.   You have to start somewhere. The media is interested in this venture, and there have been articles in WSJ, CNN, ABC and UAE News.    It is unusual for the media to take much interest in what we do.  We should be flattered, I guess. 

Games can be good, but I am never impressed by someone who is just too good at them.    I had a colleague who was the best “Mine Sweeper” player I had ever seen or even heard about … and how she prioritized her time showed in her work. 

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Survivor Bias & the Teleology Trap

I have been reading an annoying book called Tribes: We Need You to Lead US.  It is typical of many such books about change, new technologies etc. in that it has that insufferable air of superiority and fawning homage to coolness.   There are some good ideas; enough to fill an article or maybe a blog post, but not a book.   But it wasn’t a waste.   I thought about some of the reasons these books sell so well and how the faculties they employ sound so convincing … and why I probably cannot use much of the advice.

This book and others like them (some very good such as the Tipping Point) suffer from survivor bias.   They talk about how little movements turn into big things.  You get examples, like Google or Facebook, that seemed to come from nowhere to dominance.  The examples are real, but the game is rigged.   It is “survivor bias” & the teleology trap.    It is when you assume that conditions you observe today were a natural or even an inevitable outcome. You infer a pattern or purpose where none is implied.  It comes from a faulty perspective.   A lottery winner asks, “What are the chances that I would win?”   But the correct question is “What are the chances somebody will win?”  Of course, the chances of that are 100%.   If you bet on that, you are always right.

A simple illustration of survival bias is a game of Russian roulette.   Survival is a random event, but at the end of the game, somebody will have survived.    If a large enough group starts out, somebody will survive even repeated plays.   You just don’t know who it will be.   No doubt the “winner” will come to believe that he knows some secret of success.   He may write books about it.   But there is nothing to it.

Of course there is more involved in technology companies, celebrities or investing, but sometimes less than you would think.    Let’s take the example of celebrities.   All celebrities have talent.  They are all attractive in some way.   They are generally smart (or at least smarter than they seem).  A celebrity needs these things.  They are threshold requirements, the minimum you need them just to get through the gate, but they are not enough to provide success. Beyond that, the winning combination will not be known in advance.   It looks very different depending on when you look.    

If I know that a person is a celebrity, it is fairly easy to go back and explain why her ascent was inevitable.   But if I substituted a non-celebrity, I might find much the same biography.   When you listen to the winning Super Bowl team, they always say that they knew they were going to win and confidence is important, but the losers also knew they were going to win.   They were just wrong.

Books like Tribes play on this bias.  It is like naming the winner of the lottery AFTER the drawing.  It is easy to be prescient about the past.   The other thing I don’t like about this book is the appeal to coolness.    They talk about the latest styles and sing paeans to change.    People today demand the latest, they say.   Once again, they are right, but so what.   A lot of change is just froth.  I have been reading these sorts of books for more than twenty years.   They are always talking about the changes and the changes are always happening.   But most of them don’t stick.   In fact, the authors are usually self-contradictory.   They seem to think radical change will happen and then it will be the change they want, but things keep on moving.

Another thing that annoys me about the cool change folks is that they don’t seem to understand cycles.  The author of Tribes triumphantly states that smaller organizations are often growing faster than bigger ones.   What a surprise!   A young tree grows faster than an old one, but trends often do not continue.  Beyond that , when praising the growth of the small, it is useful to do some simple math.  Which would you rather have,  50% of $1 or 5% of $1000? 

I have a special perspective on cool fads.  As an FSO, I am away from America sometimes for years.   Sometimes I miss entire fads.   They come and go while I am away and there was no point in even thinking about them.   Ephemera.   Meanwhile, my bookshelf still has lots of classics that are never wildly popular but endure.   The book that has been longest in my possession is a copy of Gibbon’s Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire that my mother gave to my father the Christmas of 1954, the year before I was born.   It was first published in 1776.   I first read it in 1966 and it is still a joy today.  Who could have predicted that the yet unborn baby would still be reading that book fifty-five years after my mother bought it?   

Change is good & and so is continuity.   A balanced person treasures both but is beguiled by neither.

BTW – Survivor bias is why we think stuff was better in the past.  All the junk has long since gone in the garbage.  What is left is better or at least by definition the longer lasting. 

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Life is Endlessly Interesting

You have to look for changes & there are so many things going on the time.

Below are a couple of guys advertising for Gold’s Gym.   I couldn’t capture their skill and speed on the still picture.   They twirled the signs and threw them up in the air.   I don’t know if many people were persuaded to join Gold’s Gym, but they certainly got a lot of attention.

  • Below a building I have been watching in Arlington since last fall is almost done.    I have included the previous picture. 
  • The Capitol at various seasons and moods as I see it on the way to work.   The light and warmth are returning.
  • My bike trail and Shreve Rd in Falls Church VA on March 9
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Let the Games Begin

Continuing my thoughts on games in public affairs, interactive games will soon become the leading method of persuasion and a key advertising medium.   I know that is a sweeping statement.   Those familiar only with the “Space Invaders” game generation will think I am nuts.  The “Myst” people will see the merit in the statement, and those playing World of Warcraft would heartily endorse it, if they could divert their attention long enough from their games.   Games are already a primary way that young people interact with data, each-other and the world in general.   Even the EU now thinks that gaming might be good for young minds, so we better get used to the idea that games.  For a funnier approach, take a look at this video.

Games’ pervasive persuasive ability is part of a continuum of imagined worlds so let’s digress a little to the more familiar previous persuasion champion – the play (or in the modern versions the movie or TV show).  Sophocles and Shakespeare, Ibsen, Shaw, O’Neil and George Lucas & Steven Spielberg were/are masters of persuasion and they all knew what they were doing.   Think of a play as a very long commercial message that you volunteer to watch.  And remember that if a thirty-second commercial can sell you a product, don’t you think an hour and thirty minute play or a thirty minute TV show can sell you an idea or a lifestyle.

The writers, producers, directors and actors work together to sell you an idea.  Sometimes it is  innocuous; sometimes not.  Shakespeare sold us all the Tudor version of English history and we bought that Richard III was nothing but a sneaky rat and Henry V was a great and brave hero.  There is some truth to some of these characterizations, but they are fictional caricatures, not history.  It was a conscious effort at propaganda, but it was so skillfully done that it is still part of the fabric of our society four centuries later.   A skillful current propagandist is Oliver Stone.   Many people draw their knowledge of JFK or Nixon from his movies and the images are strong.  Even when you know the real history of the events, it is hard to get the image out of your mind.   The living, moving image often trumps the truth of history.   That is the power of the play/movie/TV Show.    

The writers/producers/directors control ALL the characters.   They can make the ones they don’t like unlikable or stupid.  It is all a set up.  They can structure events so that faults are revealed AND they can give characters the faults to be revealed.    It is analogous to your own dream, where all the characters are you but they seem to be others and that is how you react.   In every play, for persuasion purposes, the bad guys and the good guys are on the same side.  They are all working for the guy who wrote the play.  But the illusion remains.    Directors sometimes disingenuously talk about characters as independent or they ridicule critics by pointing out that it is only fiction.   Think of how you view familiar historical people or events.  Now consider whether your image came from reading actual history or just watching it on TV.   

BTW – the power of the producer has increased in Orwellian fashion.  Now many directors go back to their movies and change them to fit the current situation and sensibilities.   The “Star Wars” you saw in 1979 is not the same one you will see today.  “He who controls the past controls the future and he who controls the present controls the past,” is the philosophy of Ingsoc and Big Brother in George Orwell’s “1984.”

But the power of the play/movie/TV show pales in comparison to a modern game.  Viewer might get involved in a drama, but not matter how involved the couch potato gets, he is still a passive participant.   None of his intelligence or perception will change the course of the investigation on “Law & Order”  and none of his passionate tears will prevent one death on “House” or “ER” and the rerun will unfold exactly as it did the first time.

Not so in a game.   The game provides some choices and the illusion of free will.   What you do makes a difference to the outcome.   That is why games are so addictive.   You get to be a player in all the senses of that word.    The irony is that BECAUSE you are making choices and seeming to go your own way, the power of persuasion is multiplied.  

The game maker sets all the parameters.   He can suspend the universal laws of physics.  He can dictate the nature of human interactions.   He can dictate the nature of human nature itself.  Animals can become wise; inanimate object can be animated.   The game maker can determine heroes and villains, but now they are also YOUR friends and enemies.    Humans have a wonderful capacity to personify animals and objects.   It is much easier when these things have elements of a real personality.    Games create that.

I don’t think most game makers have an explicit social or political agenda, but they do have perceptions and prejudices that color their view of reality and so come to color the reality of many others. 

I no longer play many video games and I date myself when I say that used to play Sid Meyer’s Civilization, a game from the 1990s.   It is the only game that I really know well and it is familiar enough to many people, so let me use one example from that game.  You can find examples from other games at this link.

Civilization requires you to develop from a society of Stone Age wanders into a future with space travel.  As you develop various technologies, you get more options, both in civil and military matters.   The game makers have determined the relative merits of particular advances and you get them as givens. You compete with other civilizations and you have to spend a lot of time defending yourself and there was some criticism that the game was too warlike, but so was human history.

The first rendition of the game the other civilizations had characteristics broadly correlated to their historical activities.    For example, Hammurabi and the Babylonians were builders who spent relatively more time developing irrigation and road.  Lincoln and the Americans were technologically savvy and likely to develop democracy.   Shaka and the Zulus were less interested in technology and were more aggressive in attacking others.   The most aggressive and dangerous people on the board were Genghis Khan and the Mongols.   This was very un-pc and it disappeared from subsequent versions of the game.   

So the message of the later versions was that the unpopular idea of national character or any sort of cultural determinism was completely useless.   This is a very important point, BTW.   IF applied to the real world, it would mean that over time you would expect the Swiss and the North Koreans to behave in the same ways and that their national character would have no predictive value.   This, BTW, is the message of cultural relativism that you get in many universities.    If you get it directly, you can counter with the Swiss-North Korean argument.   If you imbibe it unconsciously as a teenager, it just becomes part of your world view.

But there is even a deeper message implicit in the game.  You, as the leader of your civilization, have nearly complete knowledge.  You make choices based on calculation or preference, but you can be logical.   Real world leaders never have this option.   There is always fog and uncertainty.   So if players take a lesson from the game, they have way too much confidence in the ability of leaders to run the economy or engage in foreign policy.   Conversely, if the leader does not deliver as promised, they are less likely to understand the constraints, unavoidable ignorance or mitigating circumstances.

Anyway, more and more we will use games to persuade and train.   Games are artificial models, created by humans, bundled with their unconscious preconceptions and prejudices and often peppered with deliberate manipulation.  As with any model, they represent one reality.  They are not THE reality.  But they sure seem like it to the players and I wonder what sorts of mind-sets the games are creating.   Games can create an entirely artificial world, whose characteristics players may carry over to the real world they (sometimes) live in.

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Tell it Plain

Below is Smokey the Bear, no doubt reading plainly written government regulations.

The Congress in its wisdom has mandated that Federal employees should write in plain language. This is a great idea, but what does it mean?

I write in a simple way.  I don’t use the passive voice very much.  Most of my sentences are simple noun, verb & object.   I don’t use circumlocutions, but I do use the most appropriate word, for example, “circumlocutions”.   Using that one word avoids having to write two or more sentences.  

Plain writing requires a wide vocabulary. You have to use the words appropriate to the ideas you are trying to express.  Speaking of writing plainly does not mean making it so easy that a fifth-grader can understand.  Some concepts are beyond the understanding of a fifth-grader.     We have education to improve people so that they can indeed understand more.

Lord knows that government writing can be convoluted and confusing.  (Note the use of the word “convoluted”.  That is the best word for this thought.  An easier synonym for convoluted is difficult, but that does not adequately convey my meaning.)  I guess I am afraid that this great idea will be misused by some in the government to dumb-down our writing.    Some overzealous official might strip out words like “circumlocutions”, “convoluted” and … “overzealous”.   That would make my writing more simple-minded, but not simpler and not easier to understand.

There is no small irony in assigning a bureaucratic process to the art of writing.  Bureaucracy is the biggest reason our writing is difficult to understand (note that I did not use the word “opaque”, which was my first thought.  Instead I had to use three words (“difficult to understand”) that do not exactly convey the meaning I had in mind.    Much is lost when writing becomes a lowest common denominator group exercise.  The first goal of bureaucratic language is not to offend anybody, BTW. Conveying meaning is always a subordinated goal.

When I was in Poland, one of my Polish staff wrote a note asking for office supplies.   It was very clear, but also very clearly written by someone whose native language was not English.  The person receiving the request sent it back to me with a snarky comment “Didn’t you edit this.”   I wrote back much more politely, “No, I did not edit it.   I understood what she wanted and so do you.  Just send us the requested supplies and don’t bother me again.”  This was very clear and it caused some consternation among the admin folks.  My boss even called me to caution me about hostility, but they never bothered us again and it was worth it.   Had I knuckled under, I would have empowered the pedants and all of us would have spent many hours rewriting great prose like “Please send five boxes of pencils.” 

Government employees spend an inordinate amount of time on these sorts of things. Life is a lot easier if you just say no.  

And, BTW, the legislation specifically does NOT apply to regulations.  They can remain as opaque as ever, so that ordinary educated people cannot figure them out with any certainty.  I think we call that the “lawyer and bureaucrat full employment act.”

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Just a Lane Change

Above is my morning commute on the W&OD bike trail in Arlington, VA.  Notice that they are doing utility work in one of those big cherry pickers.  The rain was coming in behind me.  You can see it in the clouds, but I got to work before the rain did. 

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Robust.  That is what we want and that is what are getting with the new media.  A robust solution provides lots of options and achieves desired outcomes by whatever means work best and whatever path is easiest. 

During a program supporting President Obama’s discussion with Turkish students, CO.NX provided a great example of how a robust system works in practice. 

CO.NX had an audience of hundreds of Turkish young people interacting over the internet while watching President Obama live on streaming video.   Unfortunately, the video pod on the CO.NX software broke down.   Disaster?  It would have been in an earlier technological age, but CO.NX is robust.  

The Adobe software gives users the ability to stream in video from other sources.   CO.NX staff just opened another link and viewers in Turkey seamlessly switched to watching video from the Whitehouse sources, or some preferred CNN Turk, which provided a local angle.  

What would have been an embarrassing program-killing crash is now as uneventful as changing lanes to pass a slow truck on the highway or pushing a button on your remote to get a different perspective. 

There is a greater lesson from this event about robustness. In order to achieve success, we relied on systems outside our own and that gave us several good options.  In the past, we would have needed to produce costly backups, which would have come with their own risk of failure and would never be as elegant as what we can get free.

I think an old saying fits well in this case:  why own a cow when you can just go to the dairy? The new media gives us choices.  Updating the old saying, why own a cow and get only milk, when you can just go to the supermarket and get yogurt, ice cream, Swiss cheese …?

Robust.  I am making that my word of the day.

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Below is the front of our townhouse complex.  I planted those pine trees.   The one in front is an Austrian pine.  Behind is a white pine.

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International Generosity

A lot depends on how your draw the graph and the measures you use.  Statistics are often used in ways that bring the U.S. down.  For example, when we talk about CO2 emissions or military spending, the measure is usually the straight big number.   On the other hand, when we talk about things like foreign aid or investment, we usually find a measure as a % of GDP.   In the apples-to-apples comparison, the U.S. is the world’s #1 foreign aid donor and the #2 producer of CO2.  Per unit of GDP, we are a medium producer of CO2 and a low donor of official foreign aid, although we do significantly better when the total aid (private plus public) is included.

Consider this graph from the Economist.  The graph gives you one impression and the numbers tell another story.   As $26 billion, the U.S. accounted for almost 22% of the entire official foreign aid given world wide.   In fact the increase of U.S. aid from 2007 to 2008 was bigger than the total foreign aid given by some countries.  Sometimes size matters.

If you made a graph of actual outlays, the U.S. would be almost twice as big as the second place donor (Germany).

So I guess it depends on what sort of point you want to make.  If you are trying to make a moral point – that U.S. official aid is stingy because the U.S. could afford more, the graph in the illustration works.  If you are actually wondering how much poor people are receiving, you might want to look also at the raw numbers too, because if you had the choice between getting 90% of my salary or 1% of Bill Gates’, you should go with Bill.

The irony is that declining economic fortunes may improve the outlays as a % of GDP.   If you manage to lose half your money, you become twice as generous by this reckoning, perhaps another reason to reconsider the measurement.  

Beyond the measuring problems, there are questions about the overall effectiveness of official foreign aid.  If official foreign aid was the key to development, Tanzania would be really rich and Singapore would still be a basket case.  The WSJ ran an article today re how aid helps keep Latin America poor.  You sometimes get perverse effects from generosity.

You have to consider behavior.  Unconditionally pouring money into corrupt societies just sustains klepocracies.  U.S. foreign aid has become more effective in recent years when we started to demand reforms in return for the cash.  The Millennium Challenge Program was the best thing that ever happened to foreign aid, IMO.   But overall, the best thing the rich world can do for the poor world is to make trade easier and more transparent.   It has something to do with the old saying about giving a man a fish.

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The Last Three Feet

Those of us who got our jobs in the old USIA grew up professionally with the example of Edward R. Murrow. Murrow was a great newsman when newsmen were great. He was  director of USIA & we remember him for the “last three feet”.  Murrow observed that communications spanned the world, but real persuasion happened when people made personal connections, in the last three feet.  Of course, we cannot talk personally to millions or billions of people and the challenge remains how to bridge those last three feet on a massive scale.  It is a paradox, like mass customization.  But mass customization is demonstrably possible with computer aided design and manufacture.  Maybe technology can help us too.  New communications technologies give us lots of opportunities to reach out in more personalized and interactive ways.  We can talk and listen in real time and engage and in ways that were not possible only a short time ago. And my colleagues are trying to figure out how to use new technologies and old techniques in new ways to adapt and engage in a mutually respectful communication. 

I don’t think they get noticed enough.  It is the usual problem.  People doing good things are too busy doing to have time to talk about them.  So I am making it my business to find success.  Let me start with CO.NX. CO.NX is the fastest growing IIP program in recent months.  It is the multimedia descendent of the simple webchats we started to do regularly a few years ago, but the character has totally changed in the course of its evolution.  We knew we were in a different league when we got 45,000+ questions during an election night program.  Much of this change was facilitated by technological improvements and changes in organizational culture. 

CO.NX use Adobe Connect, which is a very simple but effective interface.  It requires the recipients to download no software and a reasonably adept participant can be using the program within minutes.   Participant do not have to register, which is a big deal in many places.  It takes up little bandwidth, which is crucial given the vast diversity of technologies used by our audiences worldwide.  Important for the same reason is its scalability.   Anything from interactive video to simple text is possible, so countries and individual audience members can participate at the level and to the extent they prefer or their equipment allows. Programs are only useful in the context of the communities they create.  The creation of communities, both entirely online and online facilitated face-to-face communities, is the key to CO.NX’s recent meteoric rise.   The key to the communities has been Facebook and Twitter to a lesser extent.  (Although we work across platforms, these are the ones currently producing the best results).   The original webchats relied on list serves.   This method is a clumsy way to reach an audience and does not easily facilitate discovery of new members or the viral spread of information.  

Facebook provides an excellent framework to connect the various parts of CO.NX.   It allows a simple way for people to become part of an online community as well as a place where information can be disseminated.  In addition, Facebook engagement is phenomenally well targeted and inexpensive.   First, you can simply engage through friends already in the community, but you can also search out interested new people with targeted advertising.  A recent outreach to build an audience in Pakistan among people interested in the new U.S. strategy in the region produced 203 participants for the program in about twenty four hours at the cost of just a little more than $35.00.   IIP research indicates that each of these participants has an average of 183 friends, which means that we touched an audience in the thousands, even accounting for overlap among friends networks.   Beyond that, the program made its way into the Pakistani blogosphere where the new U.S. policies were explained and discussed by opinion leaders.   A program like this would have been impossible to arrange a few years ago, no matter the price we were willing to pay.  

CO.NX can engage with audiences sorted by age, gender, location, university affiliation and even by major at the university, among other categories.  It is an amazingly effective tool and it means that we no longer have to put our product out there and wait for a reaction.  We can proactively shape the public affairs terrain where we participate.   Another free technology CO.NX is using is YouTube.    As I mentioned above, CO.NX can have a video component and most programs do.   Parts of these videos have been put onto YouTube, sometimes by the CO.NX people directly and sometimes by others, which show the interest our programs are generating.   If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, how much better is a direct copy?   In addition, in the Internet world,  having someone other than ourselves post adds to the credibility.    Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama himself are among  those whose images and statements have made it into cyberspace with the facilitation of CO.NX. 

Of course, the IIP CO.NX staff is very small.  There is no way that a couple of full time employees and a few interns can effectively reach the whole world, no matter the technological leverage they enjoy.  Fortunately, IIP enjoys the support of a human network worldwide – our posts and IRCs overseas.  A network solution is emerging, with IIP providing the initial information, training and platforms, and people from posts overseas becoming more autonomous and helping each other.  This is especially crucial in time zones far removed from Washington. 

Posts such as Afghanistan, China, Thailand and Mexico have been avid pioneers in independently using the CO.NX system.   Secretary of State Clinton did a live town hall CO.NX program from Belgium.   A member of the IIP CO.NX staff was dispatched to advise, but the posts did all the heavy lifting for this immensely successful outreach.   This is as it should be and as it will become more commonly.   Note: CO.NX was a useful tool in building realationships with Turks around President Obama’s talk to students in Istanbul.  Follow this link to read about how the robust system worked.

Our overseas posts understand the local environments, can speak the languages and have the opportunity to build robust relationships, bridging the last three feet that Edward R. Murrow talked about.   That is what we need for persuasion and there is no substitute, but IIP CO.NX is helping us get in range and maintain relationships across space and time zones.  It is something simple that works.