The retirement finance lecture that I heard yesterday had a very good statement of what should have been obvious.  He'd already established the many reasons the defined benefit (DB) plans are impractical and problematic.  What he pointed out is that the regulation, goals, and reporting of defined contribution (DC) plans is not appropriate.  DC ( Read more... )

• Indonesia, etc., Elizabeth Pisani, Well written kind of travelogue.  Instead of being written by a tourist, it's written by a news reporter/ HIV researcher.  So the perspective and locations are very different than a typical travelogue.  It gives a very nice feel of Indonesia.
• Faceless Killers, Henning Mankell.  This is one of a the large Wallander ( Read more... )

• The New Democrats and the Return to Power.  Al From.  This is a good memoir/history of the revival of the Democratic Party from 1980 to 2000.  Al From was a major insider and while there is the usual self contratulatory tone it's also an engaging historical story.  The publication timing feels related to the Clinton candidacy.
• Everything is ( Read more... )

During the month of October I finished:

• The Human side of Post Mortems, by Dave Zweibeck.

This turns out to be about a couple software project postmortems.  It's not nearly as useful or informative as I expected.

• Toxic Schools, by Paulle Brown.

An interesting ethnographic study of two high schools, one in the Bronx and one in Amsterdam.  Mr Brown ( Read more... )

There is a lot in common between product architectures and standards.  I was pondering that today after someone suggested using Agile methods to create standards.  There are Agile tools that would help in some places, but this sounded more a fad following suggestion than a realistic suggestion.  Actually I think some of the techniques specifically ( Read more... )

I finally took a break to do some programming for fun.  I put together some Python programs to fetch weather observations (METAR) and forecasts, extract the parts I wanted, and put them into the background window dashboard of "conky".  Conky is similar to the Windows "rainmeter" tool.  It can put various useful status stuff into a semi-transparent ( Read more... )

It  was a bad week for computers.  During the F2F I was doing battle with a difficult Lotus Notes.  It was in the mood to hang, vanish into never never land, and become as slow as refrigerated molasses.  Repeated kills and reboots were needed.  I don't know why it had problems.  Lotus Notes sucks big time.  I never did get it to work from the hotel ( Read more... )

More details need to be disclosed, but there are growing indications that privacy laws like HIPAA are being converted into walls against whistle blowers.  The latest is growing evidence that VA employees who disclose unsafe practices are being threatened under HIPAA.  You can't disclose facts to back up claims of unsafe practices without disclosing ( Read more... )

The first two books of this trilogy are published, with the last coming soon.  I found it from Scalzi's "Big Ideas".  The basic concept is that since 1980 one in a thousand children has been "brilliant" has an extreme savant skill of some sort.  They are otherwise normal, not disturbed like the "idiot savant".  This leads to discrimination, fear, ( Read more... )

This came across my web feed while I was starting again on reading MPQ.  I give you the future of mobile health:

( Read more... )