ims

This is pretty pedantic, but wouldn't

    for k in m

be more "pythonic" than

    for k in m.keys()

?

You pretty much described the way jobs are structured in the U.S. military officer corps. You typically have fewer than 2-3 years in any given assignment. There are some interesting pros and cons.

On the one hand, it really forces people to learn to learn and adapt quickly -- even in very different spheres (especially because people are usually rotated between operational jobs and policy/admin/planning staff jobs). That is paired with the "up or out" selection mechanism to try to weed out people who are bad at that. Through the arc of your career of many different jobs, the organization's goal is to give you a broad understanding of its whole portfolio of missions and business processes while making them an expert in one or two areas. (Similar to the industry term of being a "T-shaped" employee.) It is also an attempt to shake things up periodically so that people and processes don't get too entrenched. Performance reports lean heavily on what you have accomplished in a short period of time.

On the other hand, you lose quite a bit of corporate knowledge when 25%-30% of any given group leaves every year. As soon as you start to feel like an expert, you are reassigned and have to start all over again. As for the attempt not to get too entrenched... this works well for smaller units, but is markedly less effective at large, staff-based ones (i.e. the Pentagon).

> Any kid with a family that can afford books will score higher on "can this kid read English".

True, but there are also many families that can afford books but don't buy them, instead spending money on other things. Not having books in the house has been shown to correlate with decreased academic success.[1] I'm not saying this isn't a wealth issue, but that probably isn't the only dimension.

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0276562410...

18 U.S.C. 3056 may be instructive here: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/3056

I won't go so far as to call this unethical, but this is basic social engineering. You're tricking somebody into violating the normal "flow" of external communications into the company. This may end up hurting that person if, say, they are identified as the reason that some random person schmoozed their way onto the phone with a busy higher-up.

This term comes from "ded" (short for "deduced") -- deduced because you are advancing your last fix based on course and speed.

Single page version: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/10/ff-inside-googl...

You're right, of course. But the point he's making seems to be based on the idea that to experience mastery of a domain can be truly fulfilling even if that domain is boring. That is, the feeling of power and self actualization that comes from competence can happen even if you are doing something that is not innately enjoyable.

I draw an intuitive connection in my mind to the study [1] suggesting that people are happier with having a higher status compared to their close associates than with a higher absolute status but lagging behind the peers to whom they aspirationally compare themselves.

Would you rather be a mediocre newbie working in a dazzling, sexy field, or the best damn X in the Y field who knows all the tools and has confidence about relative competence?

[1] http://pss.sagepub.com/content/21/4/471.short

Look at the date of Mark Cuban's post (March 18, 2012).

Cal Newport and Mark Cuban are both well known bloggers who have been making this same case for some time. No plagiarism involved.

Administrative decisions can often be made without corresponding rulemaking actions. Even when a rule is made the 90 day comment period (normally 60 days after the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and 30 after the Final Rule) is more of a guideline. You could call it strongly encouraged by several Executive Orders, most recently E.O. 13563.

It sounds like you may have read it, but you would probably enjoy this essay by William Deresiewicz:

http://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-...

> The managers' job is to take cleverness out of our jobs, not because they're assholes or don't trust us (usually not the case) but because if our work relied on our cleverness or creativity, then they wouldn't be doing their jobs, which is to deliver business value reliably.

Great point. Or as Daniel Geer et al put it[1] (discussing security, but applicable in general): "The central enemy of reliability is complexity. Complex systems tend to not be entirely understood by anyone. If no one can understand more than a fraction of a complex system, then, no one can predict all the ways that system could be compromised by an attacker. Prevention of insecure operating modes in complex systems is difficult to do well and impossible to do cheaply: The defender has to counter all possible attacks; the attacker only has to find one unblocked means of attack. As complexity grows, it becomes ever more natural to simply assert that a system or a product is secure as it becomes less and less possible to actually provide security in the face of complexity."

[1] http://cryptome.org/cyberinsecurity.htm

> The way you reach monetary/economic success as a musician is usually about non-music-related stuff you do, which is strange because in most professions, the way you become successful is by practicing your art and honing your skills.

Seems like this is actually common to every profession where other people matter to your success... which is almost every profession. On HN, one usually hears this same idea framed as coding/design/product versus business/selling/marketing. I think people in most lines of work would agree that as long as you are not incompetent it is personal relationships, image, persuasion, and all of those 'soft' skills that that matter more to (financial) success than technical skill.

Really interesting post. Thanks.

Very interesting to hear that about New York. Are international disputes an exception to the general preference for Delaware?

This is an idiom.

http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=20010312

I would say it's not very accurate on a per-tweet basis, but when you analyze a bunch and you look at the breakdown of positive:neutral:negative and the different keywords, it can be pretty telling.

The best results obviously come with things that people feel strongly about, because they are more likely to use strong words associated with their sentiment.

Funny you should mention it, I actually made an Android app that does basic sentiment analysis on tweets given a search term. Not very sophisticated, but it uses large corpuses assembled by text mining researchers.

Shameless plug: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.txtmine.txtminer

I'm very wary of this sort of tracking, and I do take it seriously... but I just want to point out that this number could make the tracking sound more widespread than it actually is.

The article implies that certain targets are pinged continually in order to establish their patterns. Pinging somebody once per minute for an entire day would come out to 1,440 messages.

Not saying the number is or isn't inflated, just pointing out that they could potentially have tracked a very small number of people for a while.

You're probably thinking of the National Marine Fisheries Service under NOAA for recreational fishing (under Dept. of Commerce, not Homeland Security). The Coast Guard, under DHS, enforces Magnuson-Stevens and the other conservation acts farther offshore where the commercial vessels fish.

And your point is well taken about DHS (as a department), but administrative organization seems to me to be a completely different problem than sinister-sounding "security theater," which is how the article paints pretty much all efforts associated with "homeland security".

This article makes some big leaps. It says in the fourth paragraph: "Since 9/11, the U.S. has spent more than $1.1 trillion on homeland security." It seems to imply that this is mostly because of wasteful TSA-like spending.

The Department of Homeland Security's FY11 budget authority was around $56 bil. The TSA only accounted for 14% of that money. [1]

Just for perspective -- top 5 slices of DHS's FY11 pie: U.S. Customs and Border Protection (20%), U.S. Coast Guard (18%), Transportation Security Administration (14%), Federal Emergency Management Agency (12%), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (10%).

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge fan of the TSA... I think we all feel a little silly as grownups waiting around in a security line in our socks. But I don't think all the hand waving about "security theater" is really justified. And there are probably quite a few things that fall under "homeland security" that aren't so controversial. Disaster response? Maritime search and rescue? Enforcement of fisheries conservation regulations? Border protection?

[1] All numbers from DHS's "FY 2011 Budget in Brief"

Keep in mind that the United States, while observing UNCLOS in many of its particulars, has not ratified it.

If you liked this movie, may I suggest the David Mamet movie that inspired it: Glengarry Glen Ross (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104348/).

Brilliant (but NSFW, language) "Always Be Closing" scene to give you a feel for it: www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-AXTx4PcKI

This just occurred to me -- sites that use CAPTCHA are probably difficult for blind and/or elderly users. How are sites dealing with this, if at all?

> One is an effort by the White House Communications Office to move the executive branch from BlackBerry devices to Android-based phones. The reason is because Android devices with the new kernel can be secured at a higher clearance level than BlackBerry devices, McCarthy said.

I'm not convinced that people wandering around with Secret-level (or even Confidential/FOUO/LES/SBU) material on a smartphone is the best way to go...

One reason that the Fed Gov spends more in the short term on contractors (in addition to all those reasons in common with most private employers, like insurance) is to avoid pension costs.

It is also very hard to fire a GS employee.

Right but we're not talking about lawsuits. We're talking about criminal law and government agents being bound by laws.

How so? I can't think of where that would hold true, aside from certain liability issues and other circumstances where it would be impractical or contrary to the public interest.

This looks really well done.

I wonder what the motivation is to do this when R is so mature (especially in the availability of specialized packages), and available through RPy.