LRECL and Mark Adamo

There's a recent report of research showing that infants are able to recognize the differences between languages. It's part of the innate and learned ability to categorize the "blooming, buzzing confusion"* of the world into something that makes sense.

Last night my wife and I went to the Kennedy Center for the last NSO concert of the year. Mark Adamo had a concerto for harp, a premiere well reviewed by the Post.

As I was sitting through it, I remembered the COBOL class where I first met my wife, where the instructor explained that computers only read binary, zeroes and ones, and that they had to be told how to handle the stream. LRECL was part of it--defining the logical record length (often a multiple of 80 characters, which was the maximum you could get on a punch card). You'd define the block size, which was how many characters the computer would eat at one gulp, then how many records were in the block--the LRECL, then the fields within the record and their length.

That's what babies do: they separate their experiences into chunks, defining what a word is, then make associations. That's how we learn to identify one cow from another (if you grow up on a small dairy farm) or one person from another, or one language from another.

Or, learn the language of classical music. Unfortunately, I haven't learned to be flexible enough to enjoy Mr. Adamo's concerto, I'm stuck back in the nineteenth century with Mahler's first, which was great.




* William James

The Virtues of Stovepipes

"Stovepipes" have gotten a bad name, both in IT and bureaucratic organization. It means that each organization/program has its own focus, its own data, its own concerns and doesn't share well with others. There's a case to be made in their defense, which is not a case I'll make today. But this article from Government executive, reporting that a subcommittee of the House Ag committee has voted to remove the ag inspectors from Homeland Security and put them back in USDA gives a sense of both the petty politics behind stovepiping and, in the comment, one of the virtues of stovepiping.

Loose Linkage on Immigration--see Passports

The administration has had to back off the rule that travelers within this hemisphere have passports, because the State Department's bureaucracy couldn't handle the backlog of applications. (People waiting until the last minute.) See this Government Executive piece.

That's the sort of thing one could expect if the immigration bill, that seems dead in the water, were to pass. What we could and should be doing is encouraging people to issue, and illegal immigrants to get, any form of ID possible (municipalities, consular ID's, etc.) with the idea that they'd be first in line for any future reform and they wouldn't suffer by doing so. That sort of halfway step is what I mean by loose linkage--easing people into the system, mostly for the benefit of the bureaucrats, but it will also benefit their clients.

Bureaucratic Interns

We die. Unfortunately.

Any self-perpetuating organization needs to recruit those who leave it on their way to the coffin. One way is internship. See Angry Drunk Bureaucrat's take.

(I'm not sure about the carbon paper though--maybe they didn't clean out the supply cabinet.)

Windows Vista and the Bureaucracy

As a result of PC problems, I'm now running Windows Vista (not my choice) and having problems getting old programs that ran under XP to work. So I read today that the Army medics are using software that runs under Windows 2000, and will only have new XP compatible software in 2008.

Our Tolerance Exceeds Our Knowledge

Via Crooked Timber, it seems that 83 percent of the population are okay with interracial dating but 74 percent believe the earth revolves around the sun (as opposed to vice versa or don't know). For someone who believes we're getting more and more knowledge, that's real depressing. But at least we can live together.

D-Day and Responsibility

The Post editorial page today notes June 6 by quoting the announcement that Eisenhower wrote to use if the D-Day landings failed. He took responsibility. The Post thinks it's a good model.

Causes me nostalgia. Perhaps the first "adult" book I ever read was Ike's "Crusade in Europe". It probably was a Christmas present for my father, who was into history and biography, for 1949. I very vaguely remember (I think) my grandfather trying desperately to get the news on our old radio--was it the Battle of the Bulge? Those old vacuum tube radios couldn't get good reception when the station was 10-15 miles away, considering the hills that surrounded us.

He wrote clear prose, not great, and didn't directly reveal how he felt dealing with the prima donas like Monty and Patton. Long before the Holocaust, he wrote about the freeing of prisoners from the concentration camps and included pictures.

I don't know whether it was the atmosphere of the time, knowing the importance the grownups placed on the events, or simply a small boy's fascination with things military, but I read and reread the book over the years.

Immigration and Bureaucracy

Shannon O'Neill calls for: "More attention to functioning bureaucracies and less attention to walls will better address current policy failures." She says the US Citizenship and Immigration Service hasn't been able to process its current workload and won't have the ability to handle workload resulting from the proposed new system. (She also has some points about the Mexico population and its birth rate.

She's right that, for laws to be implemented, the bureaucracy that gets handed the law has to be capable. ( The Farm Service Agency for most of its history for some of its programs was capable.) Give Bush his due, HHS and Mr. McClellan (I think it was) ended up doing a good job implementing the drug benefit program. They got lots of flak along the way, but having been in their shoes (not as big) I salute them.

I still haven't researched the legislation--understand it's 400 pages. My guess is that it may be too black and white, which can be a big problem, particularly if there's interdependencies. My own leaning would be to a loosely coupled system, openly acknowledged, that gets tighter as we go. (Sort of like Clinton with the welfare reform package he was handed--he signed on the basis he and Congress could tweak in later years, which they did.) So now we should acknowledge we aren't agreeing on an ultimate system, simply signaling a change of direction.

Bureaucrats Fear People

That's the truth. Here's someone who tells Federal bureaucrats not to fear dealing with their staffs:

Drawing on more than 30 years' experience in federal agencies from the General Services Administration to the Veterans Affairs Department, Liff encourages government bosses not to believe the prevailing wisdom that managing in the public sector is impossible. Federal managers too often are governed by fear, and Liff is out to help them conquer it.

"Fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy," Liff warns when discussing how managers can deal with problem employees like the staring bully. "If supervisors and managers understood that the system provides plenty of protections for management, as well as employees, they would begin to see things in a different light."

The problem I had as a manager was the Peter Principle. I was a very good bureaucrat, but as a human being I didn't like conflict. Unfortunately, management requires some conflict (despite the romantic manuals for managers which promote harmony). Of course this failing isn't limited to government managers, but it's a bit more prevalent because it's harder to evaluate performance of a government agency than a corporation.

Near Death Experiences

Marginal Revolution has had some interesting threads (here and here )on the effect a near death experience should have on a person. A reader rolled his car 4 times on a dry empty road and survived with no big injuries. Prof. Tabarrok has an interesting, if totally idiotic to me, take on the idea. His logic is logical, but he's never met a human being. But to each his or her own.

What does strike me is the fact no one has paused to give thanks to the bureaucrats who drew up and enforced the rules that make cars today much safer than they were in my youth. Time for all good bureaucrats to feel sorry for ourselves.