Military Sabbatical Prototype: Reserve Duty

Posted on August 1, 2013 by Brian

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey has spoken publicly that perhaps the most senior 40 percent members of the armed forces should work outside the military, or even outside of government, in a sabbatical arrangement. This would do more than broaden their development as leaders, Dempsey says. It would also help to reinvigorate the passion senior officers feel about their affiliation with the military. Continue reading →

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Loss of Private Goods

Posted on July 29, 2013 by Brian

I recently had a chance to read Economics: A Very Short Introduction, by Partha Dasgupta, published in 2007. Page 52-54 is a passage teaching the definition of private goods, public non-exclusable goods, and externalities, and then applying these terms as a economic model of cultures. There is an axiom among the engineering community that, “All models are wrong (to some extent); some models are useful.” Dasgupta’s model demonstrates internal inconsistencies and deviates from reality, making it significantly wrong and questionably useful. Continue reading →

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Spend More Time with the Good

Posted on July 29, 2013 by Brian

I recently read Taxi Drivers and Beauty Contest by Colin Camerer, published in 1997.  He found that on good days taxi drivers choose to work lesser hours after hitting their preconceived target of “enough income for the day”, and he highlights that this is a mistake if the goal is to maximize income over the year for the same amount of hours worked. He does find that more experienced drivers (hence mature, wise?) drivers, make this mistake to a lesser degree.

If you generalize the underlying concept to “spend more time in goodness, and less time in badness”, Camerer’s taxi drivers model of behavior corresponds to unrelated phenomena, broad enough in scope to make me wonder if this is a broad rule of life. Continue reading →

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Butterflies and Bees

Posted on June 15, 2013 by Brian

See the beautiful butterfly? It’s doing what beautiful things do. Look again. It’s harder to see the worker bee doing what worker bees do. Sort of like real life.
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Stuxnet Innovation Masquerade

Posted on June 13, 2013 by Brian

With more than three decades experience programming calculators and computers, and three years experience as a Sr. System Engineer programming industrial PC-based real-time controllers, Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), and other SCADA systems, I would propose that Stuxnet was not particularly innovative.

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