Today I watched a presentation by W. Lewis Johnson on Tactical Iraqi, which is language and culture training for the military.Coverage of this work was on NPR last year. They combined the Unreal engine, AI, modelling and voice recognition to create an addictive training tool. Between thinking ahead about Simeon’s education and my own trouble learning a foreign language in high school, this stuff is especially intresting.
Author: doubtr
Government Accountability Website
I like the idea of ExpectMore.gov as setting yearly goals that the program is measured against. However there are many areas for improvements. I’m cautious about political motivations for claiming that a program has unclear goals (like the pell grants) or isn’t meeting expectations. This type of thing needs to partnered with outside the government organizations for developing metrics and the ratings. There is also a need for a full list of metrics and deeper analysis then what’s listed on the detail page for each program. Then there is granularity; Medicare and it’s drug benifit is one entry. If you roll up such a huge program into a single line item with no breakdown, then what’s the point? Ineffective programs will just get attached to giant effective ones. At least FEMA was broken out a bit. Next there is the lesson of a balanced scorecard. What is the organizational health and goals? I’ve heard about a number of people leaving the government in some form of protest, where is the good/bad attrition numbers? Last there is some design aspects of the site that aren’t great. The site doesn’t give me the summary line item views when organizaing by topic, instead using the search snipit view. When I look at a topic like ‘Foreign Affairs“, I want to see the same type of view that I get when see the list of “Adequate“. As a bonus, the data should be available with some XMLRPC/SOAP interfaces. You can see the schema right off the page, let some people build some cool tools on top of this.
Today The White House released a list of government programs that were deemed either effective or ineffective. Curt Nickisch browsed the site to figure out how the government’s doing.
[Via APM’s Marketplace]
Truck horns, The Musical
Ever thought that truck horns were annoying? Well, they have a musical side too, as NPR explains:
One musical act that didn’t make the halftime show at this past weekend’s Super Bowl was Alexander Pollack’s truck horn symphony. We spoke with Pollack in November about his plans for the National Anthem and other songs to be performed on the air horns. Now, we hear the results.
The implicit hubris
Slate’s commentary on Alito’s confirmation hearing’s third day gets pretty close to my concerns with this nominee. Specifically Alito appears to have the belief that he should look at every last issue with a complete fresh open mind. Sounds good at first, but it quickly becomes worrysome. People don’t like change, and when only a case like Brown v. Board of Education is a settled matter to Alito, there is alot of room for change. This lack of deference to the past is exactly what causes much of the desire for constitutional originalism from thoose around me. It’s when the courts seem to create something completely new that seem to be at the heart of every conservative complained about judicial decision. Alito’s lack of deference points that he is going to be a very much an activist judge, which is exactly the reason he was nominated. The difference is that he’ll be activist to a different set of beliefs. So what are the specified beliefs? At one point Alito talks about traditional values, about safe neighborhoods and preventing your children from getting exposed to values and beliefs that you don’t agree with. Stuff that sounds good on the surface but then one can recall some of the more racist and ugly beliefs that can hide underneath such a noble veneer.
Even more then that there are a couple things I worry about with his philiosophy. First there is the implict implication that a judge can shake off thier implicit biases when interpreting law. This does not seem likely to me, but it’s amazing that conservatives claim to believe it so wholehartily after so often critizing the media which strives for the same thing. Second, if all a judge is, is the execution of something as mechanical as a program, then as a programmer and tester I am doubly scared. There are bugs in code, and the law is exactly that, code. I expect the judicial system as a human sanity check and part of the system to make sure that we don’t end up with insane outcomes. In the end for a judge, the law matters, but so does the person. The attempt to remove the person and this extra and important role from the judicial process isn’t healthy.
Science Friday looks at a wrap up on Intelligent Design
Barbara Forest speaks on Science Friday about the recent Dover rulling on Intelligent Design. Two key things I want to remember from this chat. One the notion of falsabilityis important for scientific theory. The second is that many of the creationists out there on school boards are pushing stuff specifically because they want to advance religion in the classroom without event understanding what they are pushing.
The Divide
I think I might be getting a bigger clue to the right left divide post 9/11. For many republicans the main focus changed; liberty, morality, constitutional originalism took a back seat to the war on terrorism, and it is quite literally one war to them. I’ve understood this before but I didn’t actually believe it. The same people who so readily condemn the things that happen under dictators and communism excuse some of the same behaviors done by the US as long as it can be defended under the word terrorism. The root logic is survival. Almost any principle can be sacrificed if it even remotely can be tied back to their safety. To me these words still seem harsh, but that is always the root aspect of the arguments. “If it prevents the loss of a major American city, would you say no?” I believe there is a fundamental cowardliness underlying this type of thinking; that our country has been reduced down to just the people in it, all the rules and ways we relate to each other are not enshrined values and principles but things that can be cast aside at the first hint of fear since they are just obstacles to an effective defense. I guess it is this downgrading of us from human to animals in the governmental sphere that drives so many people to get religion back into it. It is so much sadder that the real messages and meaning of religion has been hijacked into a war on the symbols. The religious right has decided that the latest worthy fight is what way retailers wish people a happy holiday season. If that is what religion means to them, they have lost all religious meaning completely. It seems to me to be that the fundamental position of the right in response to 9/11 is to be as much like our enemy as possible; torture as a tactic, drive religion into the public square, and a super powerful executive branch. Their message to the troops who defend us is that they are not defending the US anymore but just the collection of people who are (legally) sitting between Canada and Mexico.
C# 3.0 preview
I’m learning a bit about c# 3.0 over at a developer.com article. Following up from anonymous methods in v2 is anonymous types. Also there are extension methods, Lambda expressions and query expressions
Kevin on Curves and Stack Rankings
Kevin Schofield spends some time explaining the proper use and utility of Curves and Stack Rankings at Microsoft.
WSJ writes about the Windows Quality Gates
WSJ has an article about how the Quality Gates came about. One of my personal beliefs (in addition to some that were stated in the WSJ peice) was that test in windows had a much heavier workload dealing with xpsp2 then most dev teams, which meant that developers focused on Longhorn while Test was focused on xpsp2. Code was getting checked in and the normal quality controls weren’t getting followed. Each new build of the old Longhorn, just kept getting worse and worse until eventually the decision to restart had to be taken. At the layer of the OS I work at, we more or less didn’t lose any work outside of proving that our code met the new quality gates and checking it back into the product.
Doubt's Blog 