Rules vs. Principles

There’s a fascinating piece in the latest New Yorker by James Surowiecki on the difference between rules-based and principle-based regulation:

It’s something like the difference between football and soccer. Football, like most American sports, is heavily rule-bound. There’s an elaborate rulebook that sharply limits what players can and can’t do (down to where they have to stand on the field), and its dictates are followed with great care. Soccer is a more principles-based game. There are fewer rules, and the referee is given far more authority than officials in most American sports to interpret them and to shape game play and outcomes. For instance, a soccer referee keeps the game time, and at game’s end has the discretion to add as many or as few minutes of extra time as he deems necessary. There’s also less obsession with precision—players making a free kick or throw-in don’t have to pinpoint exactly where it should be taken from. As long as it’s in the general vicinity of the right spot, it’s O.K.

The focus of Surowiecki’s piece is financial: he notes that

… a principles-based system has real virtues. It can make life easier for honest corporations, since they have to spend less time complying with overly complex rules, and also thwart dishonest ones, since regulators can spend more time looking at the substance, rather than the minutiae, of corporate bad behavior. It has been argued that Enron might have found it harder to get away with its shenanigans under a principles-based system, since many of the company’s gambits, while following U.S. accounting rules, nonetheless violated fundamentals of financial reporting.

But I really think this reflects a much deeper difference between the U.S. and (particularly) Europe. I see it in the legal systems, in politics, in education…
In any case, as Surowiecki notes, the bottom line is inescapable: good regulation requires good regulators. And that’s true worldwide – just as any Premier League fan about the state of refereeing!

Smoke ring over Seattle

As I was returning home this evening, I got off the bus and saw that everyone was gazing up into the sky. This is what they were looking at. (Click to see it in the Gallery.)
Smoke ring over Union Station, Seattle
I don’t know how it got there, nor exactly how big it was… it looks to be a couple of seven or eight hundred feet up. It dissipated over a period of about a minute from when I took this.
Odd, innit?
UPDATE: I guess it was due to fireworks. (But who lets off fireworks in daylight hours on a cloudy day?) Check the comments for a link to video evidence.

Blaming one's tools

My blogging rate has dropped way off in the last few weeks, and I was wondering why. First, I’ve been pretty busy: not just with work (about which I rarely blog – Amazon is very different from Sun in this respect), but also on family stuff that has taken me back to the East Coast a couple of times this year. Second, I don’t feel that I have much to contribute to the Three Big Topics of the hour: the US election, the war, and the recession. The election seems to be just bringing out the worst in people. (See the Robert Reich piece I cited recently.) The war is in a ghastly kind of “holding pattern”, with Bush’s puppet Petraeus spinning things out until the next President can actually make some decisions. And what can one say about the the economy, except that it took rather longer than I expected for Gordon Gekko‘s chickens to come home to roost. (Thomas Frank’s comment about “plutocracy” is also right on the, er, money.)
But the biggest reason my blogging has dropped off is this wretched WordPress upgrade. I’ve already blogged about the way it screwed up the post composition window, making it much more inefficient to actually prepare a piece. I’ve fixed a few of the issues – I now have my category list to the right of the editing pane – but it’s still pretty painful. More seriously, WP2.5 broke the “scriptlet”. In the past, I often began a blog piece by noticing something interesting on the web, highlighting the text of interest, and then clicking my “Blog It!” bookmark. This ran a bit of JavaScript which opened the composition page for my blog and dropped the title, URL, and selected text into the right places. This made the workflow from seeing something of interest to posting a comment on it very efficient. Various alternative scriptlets have been posted by WP users, but none works exactly the way I want. As a result, I’ve tended to tag pieces of interest in Google Reader, which makes them show up in the “Items From Other Blogs…” sidebar. However I doubt anyone reads that. Maybe I should start doing a “links of the day” piece.
And finally, WP2.5 broke the elegant mobile admin interface that I had been using from my iPhone. This makes it more or less impossible to blog on the move. I suppose I could try to roll back from WP2.5 to 2.4, but that feels like more work (and risk) than I have time for right now.
UPDATE: I’ve improved things a bit (quite a lot, actually) by installing the Fluency admin plugin by Dean Robinson. It fixes the awful menus, which gives us back some screen real estate to actually do some composition, but it can’t do much about the inefficient layout of the controls on the writing page. (And – sob! – it can’t give us back our drag and drop widgets.) But it’s a start.

Rejecting cynicism

I don’t get to vote in the forthcoming elections, but I can’t avoid the zeitgeist. And I agree strongly with Robert Reich, who just endorsed Barack Obama. My emphasis:

“I saw the ads” — the negative man-on-street commercials that the Clinton campaign put up in Pennsylvania in the wake of Obama’s bitter/cling comments a week ago — “and I was appalled, frankly. I thought it represented the nadir of mean-spirited, negative politics. And also of the politics of distraction, of gotcha politics. It’s the worst of all worlds. We have three terrible traditions that we’ve developed in American campaigns. One is outright meanness and negativity. The second is taking out of context something your opponent said, maybe inartfully, and blowing it up into something your opponent doesn’t possibly believe and doesn’t possibly represent. And third is a kind of tradition of distraction, of getting off the big subject with sideshows that have nothing to do with what matters. And these three aspects of the old politics I’ve seen growing in Hillary’s campaign. And I’ve come to the point, after seeing those ads, where I can’t in good conscience not say out loud what I believe about who should be president. Those ads are nothing but Republicanism. They’re lending legitimacy to a Republican message that’s wrong to begin with, and they harken back to the past 20 years of demagoguery on guns and religion. It’s old politics at its worst — and old Republican politics, not even old Democratic politics. It’s just so deeply cynical.”

The Consciousness of John Derbyshire

When I first read about this year’s Towards A Science Of Consciousness conference, I really wanted to attend it. Good intentions were overtaken by other plans, and I wasn’t able to fit it into my schedule. Fortunately, NRO’s John Derbyshire was more pesistent, and his excellent account of the conference was almost as good as being there. At least I didn’t have to sit through all that nonsense about quantum consciousness. Derb captured the contradictions of this pseudo-argument. First:

It’s possible to explain [presentiment] via known quantum effects. You just have to drop some common-sense assumptions about time and causation! Sheehan argued that the explanatory power you get by bringing quantum weirdness into biology makes it worthwhile.

Well, yes. Bringing in poltergeists would explain a lot of things as well, wouldn’t it? But at what a cost…? And then:

Stuart [Hameroff] worked up a plausible model of the brain as a quantum computer, with the tubulin protein molecules of those neuron microtubules as the qubits — “Schrödinger’s protein”. There’s a slight drawback here: Far as we know, quantum computing can only work at temperatures near absolute zero, i.e. 590 degrees Fahrenheit colder than a working brain. Stuart phrased this objection as: “The brain is too warm and wet for delicate quantum-mechanical effects.”

Indeed. Not to mention the problem of scale: quantum effects get averaged out into the non-quantum models of classical physics at the submolecular level; where’s the causal mechanism?
Anyway, thanks to Derb for the blow-by-blow. Maybe next time.

Heading home

I’m packed and ready to fly back home to Seattle. It’s been a busy few days here in the Boston area. I spent a lot of time with Thomas and Victoria (Tommy and Torri, to me), both of whom were in fine form.

Free the children

Schneier on Security has a great piece about the New York woman who allowed her 9-year old son to ride the subway alone. He concludes:

I am reminded of this great graphic depicting childhood independence diminishing over four generations.

Indeed. It prompted me to fire up Google Earth to measure how independent I was at that age. I can’t remember age 9 exactly, but I can bracket it:
By age 8, I would routinely:

  • Walk or take the bus to school (1 mile)
  • Walk to the library (1.1 miles)
  • Walk or cycle to Gladstone park (1.4 miles)
  • Walk or cycle to Cricklewood Broadway to go shopping (1.1 miles)

Around the same age, I rode my bike with a friend to Marble Arch (4.8 miles), but I think I got into some trouble for that. By age 10, I would routinely take the bus and/or tube to:

  • Paddington Station (4.8 miles)
  • Waterloo Station (7.8 miles)
  • Kew Gardens (8.6 miles)

I remember being jealous of my cousin, Clive, because he lived at the top of a hill just outside Huddersfield, and (so I imagined) he was free to range over the Yorkshire Moors.
My theory is that just as humans have ancient, deep-seated intuitions about physics, causality, psychology, and time, so we have an inbuilt sense of probability: of assessing risk and chance. All of these things were “baked in” by evolution when we were living in small, nomadic groups; we can see some hints of them in the behaviours of the other primates. And just as our “folk psychology” and “folk physics” break down dramatically when confronted with the scale of the modern world, so our “folk probability” is quite hopeless at assessing true risk in a world of global communications. Couple this to the fundamental shift in the Western attitude towards death that took place during the first half of the 20th century – from inevitability to avoidability – and parental paranoia is understandable. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t seek to overcome it. After all, “folk psychology” attributed most mental disorders to demonic possession, and we’re only now shaking that superstition off.

AWS and Ruby

The book of the moment is James Murty’s “Programming Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS, and SimpleDB”. It’s a really nicely-written introduction and tutorial for our utility computing services, with plenty of sample code that just works. Highly recommended.
Murty chose to write his examples in Ruby, which pushed one of my buttons. I have a love-hate relationship with Ruby, and it’s getting to the point where I’d love to find an alternative ((And that doesn’t include PHP or Python, or even Groovy.)). On the one hand, Ruby offers Smalltalk with instant gratification. On the other, we have a syntax replete with ad hoc short-cuts, looping constructs with inconsistent scope rules, and ASCII rather than UTF-8.
My friend Jon Irving agreed:

Hahah, yes – I love it, although the things which I love are the
things that make it horrific for any large app. Re-opening class defs,
awesome, except when you’re trying to find where a method is defined.
Monkey-patching, awesome, except when you suddenly find that for *no
perceptible reason* a core API has been changed by some library you’re
using.
And rails, oh rails. What is this “thread safety” of which you speak?
Srsly, it’s like it’s 1995 all over again. But much prettier, and this
time smalltalk won!

Writing Ruby is great fun; reading someone else’s Ruby application (particularly anything substantial) is deeply frustrating. In other words, Ruby is a candidate write-only language. And that’s a shame.

File under "Spin cycle"

From Juan Cole, we get various perspectives on the recent upsurge in violence in Iraq. First, John McCain:

Republican presidential hopeful John McCain said Sunday that Iraq’s military performed “pretty well” in its recent Basra assault despite the “mixed” results of the battle… “Overall, the Iraqi military performed pretty well… eight or nine months ago, it would have been unthinkable.”

But from those on the spot….

Stephen Farrell and James Glanz of the New York Times estimate that at least 1,000 Iraqi soldiers and policemen, or more than 4% of the force sent into Basra, “abandoned their posts” during the fighting, including “dozens of officers” and “at least two senior field commanders.”
Other pieces offer even more devastating numbers. For instance, Sudarsan Raghavan and Ernesto Londoño of the Washington Post suggest that perhaps 30% of government troops had “abandoned the fight before a cease-fire was reached.” Tina Susman of the Los Angeles Times offers 50% as an estimate for police desertions in the midst of battle in Baghdad’s vast Sadr City slum, a stronghold of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia.
In other words, after years of intensive training by American advisors and an investment of $22 billion dollars, U.S. military spokesmen are once again left trying to put the best face on a strategic disaster