WaPost fashion critic Robin Givhan says, "There is little doubt that intellectually Cheney approached the Auschwitz ceremony with thoughtfulness and respect," but he got the wardrobe all wrong. He's from Wyoming, where they have to take winter weather seriously, but she's got a point. You don't dress for a solemn state ceremony as though you were going for a hike. The always perfectly attired president would not have made this mistake.
Cheney stood out in a sea of black-coated world leaders because he was wearing an olive drab parka with a fur-trimmed hood. It is embroidered with his name. It reminded one of the way in which children's clothes are inscribed with their names before they are sent away to camp. And indeed, the vice president looked like an awkward boy amid the well-dressed adults.
Like other attendees, the vice president was wearing a hat. But it was not a fedora or a Stetson or a fur hat or any kind of hat that one might wear to a memorial service as the representative of one's country. Instead, it was a knit ski cap, embroidered with the words "Staff 2001." It was the kind of hat a conventioneer might find in a goodie bag.
It is also worth mentioning that Cheney was wearing hiking boots -- thick, brown, lace-up ones. Did he think he was going to have to hike the 44 miles from Krakow -- where he had made remarks earlier in the day -- to Auschwitz?
His wife, Lynne, was seated next to him. Her coat has a hood, too, and it is essentially a parka. But it is black and did not appear to be functioning as either a name tag or a billboard. One wonders if at some point the vice president turned to his wife, took in her attire and asked himself why they seemed to be dressed for two entirely different events.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 28, 2005 • Comments
Boston-based strategy consultant Art Hutchinson posts on how attitudes toward risk--and, more important, practices for reducing it--have shifted since 1997, when I wrote my semi-famous Forbes ASAP article contrasting Silicon Valley with Boston.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 28, 2005 • Comments
Friends of Democracy has continuous reports by Iraqis. I found the one on the debate fascinating in its very banality--lots of vague promises and name calling.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 28, 2005 • Comments
Before the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement in 1989, one in four Canadian industries--from dressmakers to breweries--were protected by tariffs. What happened when they faced untaxed competition from south of the border? My new NYT column looks at a pathbreaking empirical study, using both industry and plant-level data. The article, by Dan Trefler of University of Toronto, is well-known in Canada, where, as econ papers tend to do, it has been kicking around for years in working paper form. But its lessons are remarkable. Even in an advanced economy with sound macro policy, simply cutting tariffs can lead to huge productivity gains.
Here's the beginning:
Economists argue for free trade. They have two centuries of theory and experience to back them up. And they have recent empirical studies of how the liberalization of trade has increased productivity in less-developed countries like Chile and India. Lowering trade barriers, they maintain, not only cuts costs for consumers but aids economic growth and makes the general public better off.
Even so, free trade is a tough sell. "The truth of the matter is that we have one heck of a time explaining these benefits to the larger public, a public gripped by free trade fatigue," the economist Daniel Trefler wrote in an article last fall in The American Economic Review.
One problem, he argued, is that there is not enough research on how free trade affects industrialized countries like the United States and Canada. Another is that research tends to concentrate on either long-term benefits or on short-term costs, instead of looking at both.
"We talk a lot about the benefits of free trade agreements, but when it comes to academics studying it, we know next to nothing in terms of hard-core facts about what happens when two rich countries liberalize trade," Professor Trefler, of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, said in an interview.
His article, "The Long and Short of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement," uses detailed data on both Canadian industries and individual companies to address these gaps. (The paper is on his Web site at http://www.economics.utoronto.ca/trefler/) The study looks at the effect of tariff reductions, the simplest kind of liberalization.
Tariffs are usually not considered that significant in developed countries, where many major industries compete without such protection. But, Professor Trefler said, "they're not significant except where they matter."
Read the rest here. Unfortunately, to illustrate the article, the photo staff chose an industry to which this story doesn't apply. Automobiles were tariff-free before the Free Trade Agreement. In fact, one reason the productivity boost is so remarkable is that some major industries were already tariff-free. (I suggested something with beer, but I guess they didn't have a good photo.)
If you're at all inclined to wade through econometrics--or, for that matter, to just skip to the bottom line--I recommend downloading the Trefler paper. The non-mathematical parts are unusually well written for an academic piece. A personality actually comes through the prose, even making an occasional self-deprecating joke.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 26, 2005 • Comments
In response to my posts (here and here) on the waste and distortions created by Sarbanes-Oxley, Jay Manifold emails:
Yeah, it's a pain. The following excerpt from an internal document (with anything remotely sensitive redacted) gives a hint of just how much, but I can tell you from personal experience that there's nothing quite like dealing with this stuff for the first time, under the kind of deadline pressure characteristic of software release implementations, when obstacles have to be cleared in minutes or hours rather than days or weeks. The new de facto size threshold for publicly-traded companies is one thing, but the stress these requirements are placing on individuals is something else:
Passed in 2002, Sarbanes-Oxley requires Information Technology groups to test, evaluate, reconcile, document, publish, and monitor internal control procedures that directly impact financial information. As such, [deleted] has identified key financial applications that require compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley. Those impacted applications can be viewed on the [deleted] web site under [deleted].
Based on the Sarbanes-Oxley requirements and the compliance audit completed, [deleted] will be making changes to our policies and controls to ensure compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley. The following policy changes will be made effective on [deleted].
Category 4 change requests for Sarbanes-Oxley identified applications will no longer be accepted.
Any automated work order that is a code migration or affects batch scheduling (this includes temporary, permanent and adhoc executions) for Sarbanes-Oxley applications must be tied to a Change Request. These automated work order types will not be implemented to production without a corresponding approved Change Request.
Change Requests for Sarbanes-Oxley applications are required to have a business unit point of contact (name and phone number) for change request approval. The business unit point of contact is defined as a non-[deleted] associate who is authorized to make such a request.
Change Requests for Sarbanes-Oxley applications are required to have a business unit point of contact (name and phone number) to perform user acceptance testing of the change.
Business unit point of contact (name and phone number) must send an email to the implementer signifying formal User Acceptance prior to code being placed into production. This email will be documented in [deleted].
[deleted] infrastructure/maintenance activities will be reviewed by change type to determine if a business unit point of contact is also required. This list of change types will be published when complete.
As I write this, I am -- among other things -- pulling together a list of Sarbanes-Oxley related questions which now appear in our online ticketing systems, with typical answers, so that our people won't have to hack their way through a bureaucratic jungle on a daily basis. Your tech-writer correspondent is dead on -- there's definitely a market for people who can deal with this stuff.
Now for the good news. I expect things to get better with time, not because the regs will ease up, but because process developers like me will gnaw away at this stuff until it's (relatively) painless. The analogy is airport security, where a barrage of questionable (to say the least) requirements resulted, initially, in high costs and annoying delays; but three years on, the procedures -- at least in the airports I've been in -- have been significantly streamlined.
Recall our discussion about process improvements in general of a few months back; my intuitive guess (is there any other kind?) would be that with sufficient dedication, compliance costs could be halved every three years. See also the Kamm quote at the end of my sig. We're not marching toward dystopia; there is a deal of ruin in a nation, as I believe Adam Smith said. That multi-hundred-million-dollar revenue figure for the smallest possible public company may drop quite dramatically within this decade.
This is no defense of Sarbanes-Oxley, which I regard as a triumph of conspiracy theorists who think that all publicly-traded corporations -- well, all corporations, actually; these are just the ones they can get to easiest -- are up to no good and must be constrained with the present-day equivalent of the Nuremberg Laws. Fuckers.
Blogging is light this week, because I'm working not only on my Times column but on a feature for a special Times section on small business. In an interview today, the CFO of the company I'm profiling said in passing that it's no longer feasible for businesses its size ($68 million in sales) to be publicly held. Fortunately for these founders, the grand visions they had at age 26--15 years ago--didn't come true. They built the business steadily, using retained earnings, and never went public. But similarly sized public companies are now looking to go private. Somehow I don't think this particular distortion does much to protect the publi
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 24, 2005 • Comments
The hardback version of The Substance of Style is no longer available via Amazon (except for used copies). While I do encourage readers to buy the paperback--which actually has additional material, just like a DVD (that's the way the publisher puts it)--many people simply prefer a hardcover, especially if it's signed. So I'm once again accepting direct orders. The book is $20, plus shipping.
Orders received before February 2 will be filled promptly. (Orders received after then will be shipped on February 15, assuming I don't run out of books.) Please be sure to not only give me your shipping address but also to tell me to whom I should inscribe the book. Thanks!
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 24, 2005 • Comments
Given what goes on in domestic prisons, with little or no public objection, it's hardly surprising to find soldiers torturing and abusing enemy prisoners. From today's Dallas Morning News report:
Four years ago, Mr. Cunningham said, a state corrections officer raped him near the showers of a prison. Afterward, the inmate lay in bed, weeping. "When I was awake, I thought about wanting to die, because I didn't want to live with this," said Mr. Cunningham, 33.
Since 2000, at least 129 Texas prisoners, including Mr. Cunningham, have alleged that they were raped or had had sexual contact with corrections officers, according to state records. Allegations of inmate-on-inmate rape are even more frequent and appear to be increasing. Overall, the number of reported sexual assaults in Texas prisons has increased 160 percent, to 609 in 2004 from 234 in 2000.
Inmate advocates – who have launched a nationwide legal campaign against assaults and the complacency that they say allows them to flourish – say that the problem is greater than the statistics show, with the situation in Texas acute.
"I really have become convinced over the last three years or so that Texas is the prison-rape capital of the country," said Margaret Winter, a lawyer who represents two inmates who sued the prison system. "When prisoners report it, they are ignored, laughed at and often punished."
Read the whole thing.
Prison rape isn't a way to be "tough on crime." It is crime, whether perpetrated by prisoners or by guards. Because it's illegal, not a public policy, I'm a dubious about the success of an Eighth Amendment challenge. But at least these lawsuits bring some much-needed court discovery and public scrutiny.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 24, 2005 • Comments
John Paczkowski's Good Morning Silicon Valley blog is soliciting captions for this photo of Bill Gates, which left Paczkowski "slackjawed and stammering."
His favorite entries so far: "I made the screen blue ... to match my eyes"; "Hi, I'm Bill. And this is my friend, Longhorn Reduced Media Version"; "A hot new amateur every day!"; "Thanks for the brownies, Steve"; "It's not the Blue Screen of Death, it's The Blue Screen of Desire"; and "... I'm waiting for your call. Dial 1-800-LONGHORN, now."
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 20, 2005 • Comments
On Design Observer, Michael Bierut posts an utterly charming remembrance of Alton S. Tobey, who died January 4. Never heard of him? I hadn't either, but I won't forget him now.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 19, 2005 • Comments
Maybe English majors really are better at this stuff than MIT biologists. Here's Megan McArdle on the Summers flap. Here's a small sample:
4) People who are arguing that it's stupid to generalise from means or distributions to individuals...are right, but only in a trivial, irrelevant way. The particular discussion at hand revolves around the fact that there are fewer women than men in many scientific disciplines, particularly, it seems to me from the outside, the ones that involve a great deal of rather abstruse math. We are looking at a population, not an individual, and it is entirely proper--nay, necessary--to discuss group averages. That we cannot divine any individual's ability from those averages is true, but irrelevant; we're looking at the group.
Look at it this way: I am 6'2 (1.88 metres), which puts me four standard deviations from the mean height of American women--approximately one tenth of one percent of American women will be as tall as, or taller than, I am.
Could we use the average of the female population to predict that I am not 6'2? No! I am 6'2. We would get the answer wrong if we tried to use the average predictively.
Could we use the average to bet, sight unseen, on whether or not I am taller than 6'1? Yes! Only 0.3% of the female population is taller than 6'1. If you had to bet, you'd bet against it. Of course, in my case you'd be wrong--but it would still be the right way to bet.
But do we need to bet? No! We can measure me. Similarly, physicists considering female candidates have lots of other means to assess their physics ability. They don't need to look at whether or not she's female.
But if we were looking at an organisation that only hired people who were taller than 6 feet because they needed them to reach very tall shelves, most of the employees would be men. We might infer discrimination, but we'd be wrong. It's just that innate differences would produce differing results for men and women. And if I showed up and they refused to hire me because I'm a women, and women have a very low probability of being that tall, that would be discrimination, because they can look right at me and see that despite being a member of a group with a lower mean height, I myself am in fact configured like a beanstalk.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 19, 2005 • Comments
