Information

The Requirements of Intelligence (Both Military & Organizational)

January 5, 2017 Defense

From The Secret War: Spies, Cyphers, and Guerrillas, 1939-1945, by Max Hastings:   “The first requirement for successful use of secret data is that commanders should be willing to analyze it honestly. Herbert Meyers, a veteran of Washington’s National Intelligence Council, defined his business as the presentation of ‘organized information’; He argued that ideally intelligence […]

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More on Too Big to Manage, Too Complex to Manage

May 16, 2012 Economics

Deep in the comments following Maureen Dowd’s Dancing with Deriviatives, on the JP Morgan Chase debacle is the following comment by Diana Moses of Arlington, MA Wasn’t there a theme in 2001: A Space Odyssey about our technological developments escaping our control (I’m thinking about HAL)? I sometimes feel that way not just about Big […]

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Too Big to Fail? Too Big to Govern. Too Big to Manage

May 11, 2012 Economics

Today’s news that JP Morgan Chase had incurred a $2 billion trading loss reminds us again of the risks to the rest of us of organizations that are not only too big to fail, but too big and complex to effectively manage. Simon Johnson, author, with James Kwak, of White House Burning, The Founding Fathers, […]

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Happiness is a Positive Cash Flow. What’s the Cost of Ignorance?

April 23, 2012 Cash

Unhappiness is a negative cash flow. Even worse is not knowing what your cash position is. For the past year, I’ve been submitting Freedom of Information (FOIL) requests to Albany County, getting their cash position each week. I’ve been using the data to prototype some displays of public data. It’s not cash flow, but rather […]

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Arithmetically Correct Lie

April 19, 2012 Data

Last week, Mitt Romney repeatedly said that women have lost 92.3% (note the precision of the “.3”) of the jobs since Obama became President. The arithmetic is correct. But there’s no need to be polite and call it “misleading.” It’s a lie, a deliberate attempt to mislead. How ironic for a guy who made so […]

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