You're the product.

Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of the US Senate yesterday and the House today where he primarily succeeded at demonstrating the great majority of US Congress Critters have no idea how Facebook works or what it's business model actually is. Of course, US Senators and Representatives represent their constituents, who also probably have no idea how Facebook works, and primarily think of it as a place to provide visual evidence their life is a resounding, never ending happy fest, or take solace in the carefully crafted echo chamber the platform lends itself too. For myself, neither destination was an imperative, or probable, after events at my "childhood's end" and so my use of the platform is probably not in alignment with the majority of it's users.

So, I'm preternaturally loathe to embrace tech giant schadenfreude simply because it fits into "Never Trump" desires to overturn a presidential election and gives psychological relief to the losing side. I would, in addition, observe the following:

• If you haven't paid for the service (i.e. posting Gigabytes of cat videos for perpetuity), somebody is.
• If you're using the service, you're the product (which doesn't bother me simply because I like the give and take of opposing credos and ideas, it generally results in needed revisions to ill conceived first drafts)
• People put aspects of their life on-line to get social media attention and adulation. Given that "user need", it seems silly to believe anything placed in that electronic coliseum will somehow be subject to default privacy mandates unless the user utilizes the privacy tools made available by Facebook. 
• At worse, Facebook data is utilized for a more focused form of advertising, which I've been inundated with before Facebook escaped the Harvard quad. So far I haven't fallen victim to QVC addiction, or letting an anonymous poster direct any action of mine. 
• In any case, Facebook is a piker compared to folks who are really serious about meta data analysis (i.e. Google).

From my standpoint, the availability of the platform has more value to me than the opportunity cost of making available knowledge of my personal preferences to some third party looking for a better way to sell their goods (it's analogous to Kroger's keeping track of my purchases and offering me a 3 - 4% discount on my purchases). Is there a higher, more serious cost to the use of this technology? Probably, but I doubt it has to do with getting a better response to advertising "cold calls".

When I construct software hazard analysis for non-product software, I'm most concerned with identifying hazards associated with high severity harms (I tell my team, we can live with changes in estimated hazard, or harm, occurrence, but we don't want to miss potential high severity harms). The trickiest hazards to dig out, are associated with algorithms we don't fully understand the behavior of across all possible inputs. The danger in this set of circumstances is we get a result we trust, but we don't really understand how the result was produced. Which I guess is another way of saying we are probably ill-advised to allow "expert" systems to make decisions for us. That puts us on the path of becoming a "global useless class" as a species. I don't see how that works out well for us.

Alt-J (an alternative indie band I like) has an album called "This is all yours", which works on expanding some of the themes found in movies from the 1980's which impressed one of the band's writers. "The Gospel of John Hurt" draws from the movie "Alien" (John Hurt was the actor who played a character who birthed the first alien in the movie in a very unusual fashion (hard to forget if you've seen the movie)). That type of biological entity would be catastrophic for any species actually encountering it. Needless to say, "The Gospel of John Hurt" is not a gospel of hope. Let's hope we understand the AI algorithms we're developing better than the crew of the Nostromo understood it's alien passenger in "Alien". 

"That's my secret Cap, I'm always angry."

And an even longer time since my last effort at rebooting (7 years, really?). Florida is somewhere far behind us and things worked out okay after a fair degree of effort (particularly from Gary Singer, staff and partners), but I still miss our old place. Jan's and mine children are all grown and in various stages of their adult lives, recognizable and unrecognizable.

My folks are still around, but age has encroached upon their forthright independence (which was also further enabled by both good fortune, good health and good finances). Now none is enough to reverse the receding tide and, hopefully, some choices will be made this week to best preserve functional independence for both of them to the largest extent possible. And I, alias Night2night, look back at the relationships, the places I went to which would never result in a materially successful life, the houses, the loses, the renovations, the different jobs done and skills learnt though practice and necessity, and realize I never really wanted that standard successful thing; the 3/4 acre luxury estate, the picket fence, the local girl, the single community where we all knew each other, complemented each other on how swell we look and took week long vacations in distant places staying in places that looked like upscale versions of home.

So I've been on a different journey. I truly love some of the things I've had the opportunity to do, and sometimes just the opportunity to contribute and participate in enterprises and goals bigger than me, even when the endings were not capable of justifying a social media profile which claimed, "everything was the greatest". If they always had been, I suspect I wouldn't be capable of doing some of the things I've done over the last few years, and wouldn't have had the understanding you can't step up to the edge of the stage and pull a rabbit out of a hat every time. I tell my team, experience simply means you've had a chance to fuck it up. The only real setback is quitting.

I think Jan and I are going to move (again, LOL), because we'd like a little larger place with some better aesthetics (it's all temporary) and we've been in this temporary place for 5 years. I think within two years we should be back in a place of our own (maybe?) and I think, at least as far as our adventures and travels have taken us, I can think of worse places then southern Cal to retire in (and who knows, maybe this "black sheep" was always intended to wander in the far pastures for as long as I could and as long as it makes sense for the security of my pack). I think it's also time to finish some long abandoned studies and finish some graduate work in applied statistics (I need the larger tool set to do those things I'm working on).

I like a movie clip from "The Avengers" which kind of squares up with this view (not that I'm a real fan of super hero movies, but I love this particular line). Dr. Bruce Banner, who due a freak accident becomes "the Hulk" when angry (at least in the MCU), reluctantly returns to join the Avengers when an alien threat arises. Although Banner initially struggles to maintain his composure following the accident to prevent his transformation, in this scene we realize Banner has accepted who he is and realizes the capability his "accident" has wrought in him can make those emotional triggers and his transformation useful under the right conditions. I may not be an angry superhero, but some experiences which changed me I'm not going to forget and that's OK because they've brought me to this place and stand today and they're of some use under the right conditions.

Aftermath

It started with a light whirring noise in the engine compartment while on route 75. What goes through your mind? One, nuts, not another engine problem, and two, what is that? And now that our attention is pricked, we start to notice other things. The car doesn't seem to be moving as rapidly as normal (eyeball the speedometer, 65 mph, not the normal 75; depress the gas pedal and the engine doesn't respond as it normally would). Fortunately, my exit is coming up so I exit onto local two lane road through Weston. There's a light at the intersection for Indian Trace and the engine just doesn't sound right. I accelerate onto Indian Trace after the light turns green and the engine stalls. Night2night editorial voice: from whatever root cause precipitated the series of events for that night as I've described it so far, opportunities for meaningful risk mitigation sufficient to preserve the car, and in retrospect, me, are rapidly vanishing.

The inertia of the car's motion was enough to allow me to steer to the curb. I try to start the car, but the entire instrument panel is dark when I turn the key in the ignition. Light colored smoke is coming from the engine compartment, but I figure the radiator is busted (for whatever reason) and get out of the car to call J for pick-up (about 1 mile from home) and inform her I'll call Allstate Auto while I wait for her. I get back into the car, try the ignition again, the instrument panel lights up this time and engine starter cranks, but no engine ignition apparent. I exit car again and smell still light smoke from engine compartment and note it doesn't smell like antifreeze. Again, although opportunities are shrinking for possible responses, I'm unaware how close to the Volvo singularity I am.

I look under the car and some type of fluid is exiting the engine in a thin stream. Crap. It ignites.

Fire school training while at Shoreham with demo of car fire. Very short time until flames engulf the car.
Don't lose work. Grab laptop, car emergency kit and sunglasses.
911
Back off.
(Inane conversation with 911 operator, "What color is your car? (orange and yellow, soon to be ash black, my car is on fire)"; "What direction are you heading in? (intersection of 84 and Indian Trace Road, my car is on fire, get a blankin fire truck here lady!)" First Broward County Sheriff’s unit responding tells me when he stopped he saw some small flickering flames under the engine; three minutes later the car was engulfed in a fireball.

There's a rather rapid series of events following the start of my return home that evening (we left for Rochester at 4:30 the next morning for R's graduation from Nazareth College).  J shows up in rather wide eyed disbelief after seeing the spectators gathered to watch.  A flatbed tow truck shows up to remove the dripping wreck, and the spot where she burnt is marked by a set of brackets formed from the molten remains of the bumpers.

I get a couple of shots of the car's remains in the towing yard with Allstate's field investigator.  I'll probably start one of my infamous letter writing campaigns asking Volvo (Ford?) whether this usually happens with their cars.

Nothing was recoverable.  Time to look for another car before the boys go back to school.  I walked away and at least saved my work from the last few weeks (maybe I should consider backing up better to the corporate network).  Could it have been a worse outcome?  After I had a chance to think about it, yeah, I think it could have been worse.

Appropriately, this seems like a good place to complete this set of blog posts addressing liberty, risk, the need for both personal and public security, and those mechanisms available for addressing all of it.  I think we like to think things are more rational and predictable than they actually are.  We want all risk mitigated to the point of insignificance, but the reality is that's impossible.  And at those rare points, when we approach those singularities, when we stumble upon an ill-intentioned "black swan", sometimes we can only draw upon our gut instincts, beat the clock, and hope for the best.  Of course, in those situations, you best have your own estimation of acceptable risk, and some general plan for dealing with hostilities.  You can't always count on help arriving in time.

I suspect the occasional reader I have will look at this and say, "Ah, it's just some set-up for another crazy rant of his."  Well, maybe, but, our destinations are pretty uniform and I suspect most of the meaning to be had is in our conduct during the trip.  So here's to the guys and gals who recognize the threats out there, handle them as best they can, but understand risk is never negligible, not in this life. 

A big, black, gooey, mess.

I can't really adequately express how angry I am about the current Gulf oil spill. Mass media reporting (particularly in the beginning) seemed to show more ignorance of events than anything else and now serious voices are beginning to question how close the main body of the oil spill is to the Gulf Loop current.

Scientists watching where oil spill headed next - Yahoo! News

Of course once this mess gets sucked into the loop current it will flow through the Florida straits and then up the east coast (I've heard mixed opinions on how great an impact ocean currents and offshore winds will have on actual beach impact; at least as of yesterday, US Geological Survey seemed to feel Palm Beach and north was more likely). Of course one could get in extensive discussions on how this would best be mitigated and cleaned up (apparently beaches are easier than marshes). Still, the southern Florida ecosystem is a complicated, diverse wonder and I don't doubt the long term implications could be ghastly (both for the tourism business and the natural fauna and flora).

Although not very familiar with the particulars of deep sea drilling, it's pretty apparent the folks responsible for the operation of the Deepwater Horizon platform failed to meet minimum standards of due diligence with regard to both risk mitigation and verification of those systems necessary for the blowout preventer to function under the design conditions present at the wellhead location. I personally would like to see criminal charges levied against the organizations involved and their corporate officers.

What I'm interested at in this point of the situation (beyond limiting the negative environment impacts to the greatest extent possible) is understanding what can be done to preventing events like this from happening again. Instead what I see is the usual high level government investigations and threats of impending lawsuits for this event. In all of this I wait to see some claim of full corporate responsibility and admittance that individual employees pursued high risk activities which resulted in loss of life and property due to their lack of concern with proper process and reflecting a culture which devalued real ethical concerns if they impacted profit and loss. How do we fix stuff like that? Can a government regulator substitute for corporate responsibility? Can any individual acting in a professional capacity properly exercise his responsibility to the community he lives in if he thinks his job is just a paycheck and an opportunity for advancement?

We all want that cool, calculating professional next to us when the "black swan" event shows up, but I suspect there's more than standard operating procedures involved during those moments (particularly for the individuals at the scene). Anyway, here's hoping we can find "The Professional" when we need him.

The Black Swan

Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book "The Black Swan" explores the impact of highly improbable game changing events (the book was published at the start of the recent financial crash in 2007) and our tendency to undervalue statistical outliers in risk mitigation (like generals, we're always fighting the last war) and justify our approach in an overreliance on "normal" behavior (statistical and anecdotal). The term "black swan" is a reference to what we all know, swans are always white. The pertinent question for him is what happens when a black one shows up. Taleb postulates 3 prerequisites for "black swan" events. "First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable." The original NY Times excerpt from his book is worth reading:

‘The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable’ - New York Times

Which, in my way of reasoning, brings us back to a recent op-ed column by David Brooks in the NY Times. As the congressional wizards deliberate over the financial carnage of the last few years, they come up with a bill to remedy the misbehavior of the larger financial institutions. David (who often seems undervalued to me by "true believer" conservatives) makes an excellent point on the track record of expert panels with regard to preventive efforts. In almost all cases, no one recognizes the black swan.

The Goldman Drama - nytimes.com

My thoughts on the next financial Waterloo waiting for us. I think the impact of sovereign debt accumulated by a slew of developed western countries to provide all matter of goodies to its citizens has yet to fully impact us. I wonder where the legislature for that little misstep is.

"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice."

Travel, projects (personal and professional), and an unplanned disaster has compressed the time I had available for extracurriculars over the past month. Today I find myself back in Rochester, NY celebrating my daughter, R's graduation from Nazareth College (first of the offspring to complete their undergraduate studies, hoorah). Still with some time, some sleep, and a general predisposition to mulling over what germinated in my mind some weeks ago, I've decided to complete and publish these few entries (which sort of follow my recent thinking on the limits of federal government and the proper mitigation of public risk), just ex post facto.

Some weeks ago I came across an essay by Penn Jillette in the weekend interview in the Wall Street Journal which I think addresses an important, pragmatic essence of liberty. At its most basic, liberty is the freedom for an individual to pursue his or hers prerogative, even when the outcome is stupid. Of course for most of us, putting up with our fellow citizens stupidities (which are so much worse than our own) is the biggest trial of liberty. If only those other idiots could be more like us. If you can, follow the link and read the essay.

Penn Jillette's Homage to Hummer - WSJ.com

I worry our preoccupation with better outcomes (particularly the ones learned experts prefer), with maximizing the government planner's capability to forbid bad outcomes, and with our desire to control the free agents (out of either jealousy or a desire to control what is perceived as chaotic, and therefore, undesirable) will result in a loss of liberty, in a loss of those attributes of freedom which make so much possible in this land. Ironically, although some classical liberals (which Penn Jillette always seemed to me because of his contempt for all religions) and authors like Kurt Vonnegut (whose work I got to love in high school) do seem to recognize the threat to our liberty implicit in following these preoccupations to their logical ends. In light of that observation, one of Kurt Vonnegut's earlier short stories, "Harrison Bergeron", is probably worth reading as a chaser for the Penn Jillette essay.

Harrison Bergeron

What do I conclude? Hang on to your stupidity and the unfairness of life, if the alternative is the sacrifice of your liberty.

Some Righteous Anger

Riehl World View: When In The Course Of Human Events

I originally meant to post this when it came out around March 3 (first real discussion of committing to reconciliation as a way to pass Health Care Reform). I created HREF link and then forgot to create posting. Sigh. Well, beyond the MSM media portrayal of all those unstable, mouth-breathing, tea party types, Dan Riehl's expression of fury still resonates with me. So, here's the original post for your perusal. On a side note, Dan doesn't seem to get upset normally.

As for me, I'm still angry.

The end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end?

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with a result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence:


From Bondage to Spiritual Faith
From Spiritual Faith to Great Courage
From Courage to Liberty
From Liberty to Abundance
From Abundance to Selfishness
From Selfishness to Complacency
From Complacency to Apathy
From Apathy to Dependency
From Dependency back into Bondage"

- Alexander Tytler, 18th century Scottish historian, Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic.
 
Where do you think democratic progressives have brought us today?

"All the news that's fit to print."

Results Unproven, Robotic Surgery Wins Converts - nytimes.com

Old joke: Severity scale for lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics. In my areas of professional endeavor, when I execute comparative studies I'll use commonly excepted statistical methods like 2-sample t-tests, which in turn require certain technical prerequisites like, is the population's behavior I'm studying normal (you know, that old college friend of ours, the bell curve)? Am I comparing populations which can be sorted by the variables I've selected to partition them by? Of course as the health care reform continues to simmer, the usual suspects (Our editorial policy does not affect our news editing functions. No really.  Stop laughing.) appear with their helpful information to educate the public with. Stuff does get technical, but out and out misrepresentation doesn't help. Here's a data set which, if it was normal, would look like a diagonal line:

What does this mean?  Well, most statistical methods assuming a "normal" probability distribution will probably give you a questionable conclusions on questions like, "Does treatment "A" effect my process the same way as treatment "B"?", or "What is the probability of making what we call a Type I error (the thing I have said is true is actually false)?".  More importantly, what does this have to do with "The Paper of Record".  Notice the Times is talking to physicians who utilize manual surgical methods for relieving prostrate restrictions of the male urethra and the recent popularity of Intuitive Surgical's DaVinci system with urologist patients (1.  Study participants should not bias your conclusions).  Further, the Times produces data saying clinical outcomes between manual methods and more instrumented methods are not statistically different.  The implication is "idiot" patients are being sold by clever marketing campaigns which consume more healthcare dollars, while delivering few real benefits.  What the Times buries in the article is the fact the Medicare data used confounds robot surgical systems and endoscopic surgery.  They both use instruments, and they both work with small incisions, but the robotic system is much more precise.  Does this matter?  It needs to be validated by actual clinical outcome studies (which take time), but I suspect the answer from the anecdotal record is yes (not to mention the reduced postop recovery time).

The interesting thing about the article is it seems to unjustifiably conclude we don't need this "expensive", "unproven" medical device.  Does this article seem to prepare the ground for the Times support of health care reform (which focuses on basic medical services we want to get for "free")?  I'll let you reach your own conclusions, but I'm a cynic with most media reports these days.

And if my prostrate doubles or triples in size, I'll probably look for a urologist who has an extensive track record with the DaVinci machine.

"Where do they go?"

The Weekend Interview with Temple Grandin: Life Among the 'Yakkity Yaks' - WSJ.com

Interesting article (also an interesting HBO movie simply called, Temple Grandin), about a young woman suffering from autism who went on to earn advanced degrees in agricultural sciences. Today her chute and mechanism designs to handle cattle in feed lots and slaughter houses are widely employed throughout the country. She teaches at Colorado State today, and is also sought after as a speaker on autism. My interest in her reflects her acute awareness of visual patterns, and her capability to utilize her unique individual perception to model systems. This, of course leads back to the question of "What is intelligence?". How do we see things? How do we recognize things? Temple had very little use, or interest in social relationships, and yet took her unique perspective and capabilities to engineer devices that met a variety of requirements better than their predecessors (some requirements weren't even recognized by their users).

I think part of this achievement reflected a freedom from the tyranny of majority suppositions. Temple simply observed from within the edifice of her own mind. Once she could model the behaviors she was interested in, it was a much smaller jump to design devices intended to complement them. Perspectives, to be useful, are not limited to a majority view.

Consequences schmonsequences... as long as I'm rich.

The consequences of the great American real estate gamble continue to accumulate. In formerly booming real estate markets, like southern Florida, prices have again started to decline. The interesting thing is a sizeable proportion of the population and media seems to expect the federal government to remedy what, basically, were bad purchase decisions by individual buyers. Of course this seems to parallel a number of recently stated public expectations where we expect profits to be private and losses to be socialized. Whether this approach is healthy for civic society, or our country, remains to be seen.

Contracts, from my perspective, represent a codified public trust between individuals, or groups, whose only relationship may be the commercial transaction they jointly participate in. Is it really the duty of the federal government to isolate us from the negative consequences of those relationships and contracts we voluntarily enter? Would this destroy the power of markets to discipline both buyers and sellers (specifically caveat emptor). More importantly, would we want a federal government with such powers?

"I don't see the votes for it at this time."

Nancy Pelosi announces she can't come up with the 218 votes necessary to pass the Senate version of health care reform. 

Pelosi: House won't pass Senate bill to save health-care reform - washingtonpost.com

Of course the Washington Post advances the microeconomic meme; it's lacking "this", or "that". I think the larger (and more important) conclusion is the huge government mandated restructuring of American health care is dead (maybe permanently). By the time the government gets around to trying this again medical technology will have advanced so far only the social justice types will consider it worth pursuing. For now the American people don't want it, and moderate politicians reading the tea leaves and always concerned about self-preservation have decided not to follow their leaders off the cliff. In the meantime, I hope congress gives serious thought to straightening out the insurance stuff (level playing field for individual and company purchased medical insurance, loosening of preexisting condition clauses, allowing selling across state lines), make sure things work and make sure people can decide what level of risk they're comfortable with in their purchase of medical insurance.

What will this mean? I'm hoping the end of most of the all-encompassing, impossible to kill, top down government schemes by the self-anointed elite who believe their every thought is a revelation, and their every worry requires government intervention. The Republicans will hope the midterms will bring them a reversal of their electoral fortunes, and the majority of Democrats will realize the president, while well thought of, is advancing a very unpopular agenda. I'm hoping for gridlock and majority approved, incremental changes which can be evaluated as they are instituted.

For me as one citizen and a guy who has worked in medical device development for the past 15 years a good news day.

Liberty and the failures of markets

After all the spin masters have finished commenting on the implications and (later tonight) results of the Massachusetts special election, I still believe what we're witnessing is a general pushback against the insistence of progressive political elements that the social safety net we operate above is not sufficient for it's task, or in possession of enough prescriptions to assure our confidence in it.  Of course all of this has to do with the level of individual and social risk we feel comfortable living with as a society.  In the health care reform debate I wish we had been more explicit about what the tradeoffs involved here really are.  Are we willing to trade a certain level of medical treatment development for the a guarantee of a government funded minimum level of care for individuals?  The markets can't decide that question for us although they will eventually show after the fact the broad decisions of the population in terms of preferred purchases.  Can we live with the individuals who either through fortune, or poor decision making, make a decision which results in their harm?  Is the government responsible for constraining the many, to protect the few?  Do the majority of citizens wish for such a government?

In my work I'm often forced to think about "What is safe enough?", and "How do we know we're done?"  The strictly business types don't exactly welcome this line of questioning.  They want to get to market.  Who's right and protects the greater public good?  I don't know, but I want to at least know the process so I can hold someone accoutable.  Here's my process flowchart for addressing failure modes and effects analysis for medical device risk management.  It doesn't tell you how to do a good job, but it gives you a framework to make decisions in.

History

I suppose we never really think of ourselves as living in the midst of historic events, we still have to worry about paying the utility bills.  Still, the last week has been both horrifying and interesting.

It's been 6 days since the shallow 7.0 earthquake struck Port-au-Prince in Haiti.  Estimates this evening are somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people died in the structures which collapsed during that minute long assault.   That country has been a basket case for so long, it's not surprising so many people died.  If you compare the magnitude 7.1 Bay Area Earthquake of 1989 (65 fatalities) with the Haiti quake it rapidly becomes apparent the major difference between the outcome of the two events is the poverty and lack of building codes in Haiti.  In my opinion both of these conditions are driven by the horrible political heritage of that land and the tenuous nature of social stability among its' people.  Satellite views of the area not only show the horrifying devestation of the quake, but also the social partition between Haiti and the Dominican Republic which also shares the island of Hispaniola.  Of course for all of the money spent there, so little has improved for its' people.  Still, this is a humanitarian disaster, so I send my donation and hope it makes some small difference in the lives and deaths of Haiti's people.

In Massachusetts, republican State Senator Scott Brown has come out of nowhere in the past month to challenge democrat Martha Coakley for Ted Kennedy's old Senate seat.  In Massachusetts alone, that development would be astounding, but Senator Scott Brown would represent a 41st vote for the Republican Senate Caucus and the end of the Senate Democrats fillibuster proof majority.  With the current Health Care Reform bill (pick Harry Reid or Nancy Peliosi's effort) being advanced as a strictly partisan offering which rewards partisan allies, and creates another huge entitlement program under the subterfuge of advancing healthcare for those without coverage, I would prefer an actual bipartisan bill which would look to improve medical insurance coverage without totally revamping the medical care system in this country.  I would expect we'll know by this time tomorrow how things went.  I'm trying to be optimistic, but elections are tough to predict.

On a professional level, my efforts to totally revamp the Risk Management system at M continue with another set of VP level edits.  More details tomorrow.