the guy by the door …

I had no plan to go Widener that night. There has been discussion about closing the Littauer Library for years. Last spring, people in several cirulcation departments told me they were sure this time. Most recently, I’ve been told, “there is no plan.” So I made the rounds. That took me to Widener. I found Levi putting out the lights on the Chanukkiyah. He told me that this is a word of recent origin [ ~60

I so much enjoyed schmoozing with Levi that I forgot to take his picture. So if you want to see want caring for the Chanukkiyah looks like, you’ll have to look at last year’s Third Light. I promised Levi he could have the full size picture. Berkoblogs are all under the Creative Commons License - free to Levi’s and non-Levi’s alike. Just click the pic. I may be a goy, but I’m no piker. But, Levi, send me an e-mail anyway. We’ll schmooze.

To my goyish friends, my Old Yard Chrismas lights will have to be posted either from New York City or Houston.

And I suppose I should talk about losing one’s parents. The short form: it’s painful with and without.

Life is full of pain and misery…

…and over far too soon.           Woody Allen

Young Harvard women supporting breast cancer awareness:

I didn’t buy a bra. I’m a little conventional and I couldn’t think of who I could give one to with impunity. They were also supporting women in science at Harvard:

That’s the last one they had at the table, but you can buy them through the Women’s Center.

An ageless Harvard woman, Professor Lisa Randall was on Charlie Rose last night. It was impressive in every way I can think of.* She seemed very comfortable with herself, Charlie and the audience. She was there because she’s ‘an authority’ yet she sounded like someone who travels in places few can go. Mostly, she wanted to share with us. The only downside was that Charlie’s camera person did such a good job of capturing her persona [an order of magnitude better than the book jacket] that it made me feel… well… inadequate. [If you must know, her tendency to laugh uncontrollably when she sees me, does influence my thinking.]

If I’ve read the schedule right, the program will re-air tonight Wed. Dec 13 at midnight on Channel 44.

*would ‘of which I can think’ really be better? Come on now. Or am I dating myself?

You can piss off some of the people all the time

and all the people some of the time,

but you can’t piss off all the people all the time.

Trust me, I know!

Impossible dream? Perhaps. But an experimentalist must always ask the question: “compared to what?” The Pareto idea rejects policies that disadvantage anyone no matter how well off. It is extraordinarily hard to engineer in practice and has known logical limits. [Discovered in part by Ken Arrow who was at Harvard for a time.] Yet classical economics claims to be optimally fair.

I don’t buy the premises. And I’ve done field work.

Is Harvard a ‘progressive employer’? My claim is that it depends. In the case of the many HUCTW members who are faculty secretaries, it depends very much on the personality and politics of the specific faculty member. In the case of people who work in the large hierarchical units like the Harvard College Library the answer is much more complex…

Aside from the exclusion of the majority of humans [he used 'he'], Marx’ idea is eminently worth keeping in mind. I have never seen it made to work without compromise. The point is to be honest about what compromises you are making. The road to narrow sectarianism is paved with ideological purity.
Unions are by nature creatures of the left, but to date they have always been part of organizations dominated by hierarchy. In theory, unions are free to choose any organization the membership sees fit. In practice, management can and does influence these decisions. Unions are also regulated by federal law. Knowing what the law actually does depends on who controls the means of enforcement which is divided between the the executive and the courts. The national labor relations board and the department of labor are the two most significant bodies of the executive. 35 years of the rule of the right has left a definite footprint on these bodies and the courts. My difference with both the current ‘leadership’ of the union and the ‘group variously known’* is in the details of challenging this aggregation of power - how? when? for what purpose? at what cost?

BBL

*to appear.

In the late 60’s most large corporations* changed their pension plans from defined benefit - the employer guarantees a specified level of retirement benefits - to defined contribution - the employer guarantees a specified level of money applied to investment funds. Harvard, despite a substantially different business model, followed suit.*  In the heady days ending in 2001, this seemed like a win-win for management and labor. Subsequent events have shown the down side - a massive transfer of risk to the retirees. As the attack on pensions continues in the ‘private sector’, I think we should wonder if Harvard will adopt some the business practices du jour. I propose we ask Dr. Beeferman.

If elected, I promise that he will get a good hearing with the negotiating committee.

*This is a whole nuther can of worms. Large corporations are “private” in the sense that the “owners” - the stockholders - get to keep the profits**. They do pay taxes. Havard on the other hand is explicitly mentioned in the Constitution of the Commonwealth and does not pay appreciable taxes***.
**after a hefty slice of ‘executive compensation’ is chopped off.

***The so called Payment in Lieu of Taxes [PILOT], compared to a ‘private’ business is pennies on the dollar of assessed value. The taxpayers of Cambridge pay a substantial opportunity cost, yet Harvard, when administration finds it convenient, regards itself as ‘private’.

As the pursuit of bipartisan consensus propagates through the airwaves, a very dark possiblity is also making ripples in the aether. Ed Schulz*, a former republican who now bills himself as ‘a liberal with a microphone’, points out that W has time to pull troops out of Iraq and in the event of a significant increase in ‘civil unrest’ put them back in in time for the 2008 election. “See? You should have let me stay the course.”

Is this a real possiblity? Consider education, disaster management eg Katrina, prescription drugs, etc., etc. We’ve seen how someone dedicated to proving that ‘government can’t work’ can ‘make it not work’. Do we really want to trust him to manage a withdrawal he believes can’t work. There is a risk associated with failing, in the name of bipartisanship, to remove W from office ASAP.

The heat just went on. It is oil. I see dead people again. Maybe I should call Joe for oil. Is Hugo’s oil less tainted?
*He’s on Air America Radio, the Jones Radio Network, and he has his own cul-de-sac just off the information superhighway.

In exchange for the hawk acceptance of a timetable [of sorts] for withdrawal, the doves have agreed to forgo assigning blame - misfeasance but not malfeasance. Questions: 1) will we be able to get the international support necessary, within the Islamic world and elsewhere without an admission of wrongdoing? Will there be any attempt whatsoever to actually deliver to the Iraqi people any of the economic deliverables which we the American taxpayers bought and paid for? Could the international community freeze the assests of ‘underperforming’ corporations and make them available to an Iraqi government that is a little less the product of American engineering? Or do the Bush crony corporations get to take the money and run?

Macroeconomics is the study of economies no smaller than a nation-state. Microeconomics is alternatively known as The Theory of the Firm. Both of these rely on assumptions about how people make economic decisions and make claims based on aggregate measures of bunches of people. Behavioural economics purports to measure how individuals actually behave in “the market place”.  The idea that economics could be based on empirically determined behavior rather than high altitude assumptions is encouraging. One wonders what took them so long.
Complicating the problem of observation vs. assumption is the fact that the object of study - the economy - is evolving at least as fast as ‘progress’ in understanding it. For example, there is one really, really significant change since Adam Smith analyzed the making and using of pins - as in sewing. It’s a lot harder for a person to figure out if a piece of software is going to do her any good than it is for a sewing pin. It’s a lot easier to get another kind of pin if the first one doesn’t work out. Most importantly it takes a lot longer to learn to use it effectively. Suppose I’m comfortable using one program. How do I know when, if ever, a new program will pay me back in productivity and convenience for the time I must spend to learn it. It’s not easy even for people with technical degrees and experience in the software business.

I’ll come back to this.

Like everything in the real world economics** the rapid pace of technological advance is a boon to some and bane to others. When I was knee high to a cyclotron,*** I read Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings. He realized early on that automation would have profound effects on the world of work. He went to the unions to warn them. He was not well received.

In the days of Wiener, automation largely affected manufacturing. Surely it would never reach the knowledge industry, right? Surprise! The world of knowledge work is changing as rapidly now as manufacturing did during the Industrial Revolution. Harvard has a highly mixed response to this. Unsuprisingly, the science and engineering departments have embraced much of this change. Surprisingly, the Classics Building has a very nice looking computer center. We in the infrastructure, the Havard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers, have a somewhat different problem. The administration, not the market, has reserved to itself, the right to determine how technology will change our lives. Sometimes we are told that we can’t use new technology, sometimes we are told the we must, and sometimes we are told that technology means that we are no longer needed.

Are these administrative decisions based solely on “objective criteria”, “the ’science’ of labor economics”, or “the good of Harvard.” Or are there more narrow interests involved? Why are technicians who maintain chemistry labs considered “technical workers”, but the people who maintain computer labs “managers”? And the marketers keep telling us that computers are much easier to maintain than they used to be.****

Most importantly, what say do we have in how our work environment is fashioned - that it allow us to accentuate our strengths? Or is it decided on high by managers insecure in their lack of technical knowledge being told by marketers that they must buy this or that to “stay competitive?”

I have a lot more to say, but I have to do some life support activity. I’ll discuss the nanoeconomics of technological change. i.e. why people who think Version x.y.z of Eudora was just fine are not nuts.

In the mean time. if you missed my previous posts they’re flipped to private by still on the server.

HUCTW:The light dawns on Marblehead

HUCTW:Much ado about not much.

I always have a lot of “works in progress” like, My Heart is on the Left. But Tru is half right when he says that all an artist has is his life. The whole truth is that’s all any of us have. Be a work in progress. It’s a good thing.
*Actually, I would like to include younger workers with a Luddite bent in this conversation.
**As opposed to Planck scale economics in which picking the right standard alleviates the need for any engineering. Some believe in Pareto Optimality and voila they are in the best of all possible worlds. Most of them are bankers, CEO’s, or economists. Others incant, “From each according as he is able to each according to his needs,” and think they are surely destined to lead the way to the promised land. Me? I think we should build the future together. In overwhelming likelihood, it will require engineering. Step one would to include the sisters of Xanthippe in the above nostrum. Sadly Wikipedia does not yet know the best story about her - related by Carl Jaspers. Did you ever wonder how Socrates could afford to hang out in the market place being all Socratic and stuff?
***They’re about the size of a refrigerator these days.

****I once had a bad bit in THE accumulator of my PDP-8. That bit required a 4″x 6″ printed circuit card.

I’d sing a song to make you feel this way:

Sadly, I never learned to sing. I’m afraid it might be too late. But I think I can learn to take pictures. Leaving my apartment this morning, John Denver popped into my head. I remember Catherine telling me that during her years at Harvard she realized she needed help because she liked Barry Manilow and nobody else did. She and I have both come to terms with our common malady, but I hope John Denver isn’t a sign of senile dementia.

Coming across the Charles, the sunshine in my eyes almost made my cry. The sunshine on the water looked so lovely. It made me high.

But if I had a wish that I could wish for you, i would not wish for sunshine all the while. I would wish that you also understand how Gene Kelly could sing in the rain. Or why I asked Philip Mannheim* to stop in the middle of Memorial Drive - seriously annoying 3 drivers - to run back and catch the fog on the river.

Beauty almost always makes me high.

*Dude! We can get a better picture than that!

We DO have an online HUCTW election announcement. I still remember the summer of 2001. It was Friday evening I came home to find the notice of the contract ratification election for the FOLLOWING TUESDAY! That meant ONE DAY to campaign! So we’ve made some progress to a more open Union. Did my nudging help? After the 2001 contract election, it was more than a year before the full text of the contract was made available to the members. In fact, the election for officers was held before the full contract was shown to the membership. There was no informed discussion of just how well the officers had done before the election. Hopefully this time around we can remedy that as well.

Nominations were closed on Tuesday. Hopefully the candidate list will appear on the website soon. I am running for Union Representative in the College Library and Executive Board from the FAS Arts Region. Laura Johnson has also declared for this position. I think her three issues are good ones, but I would like to be a little more specific [as well as add some issues.]

The HUCTW website [and for that matter the OpenHUCTW website] are both broadcast style. The few [I'll quietly avoid the adjectives 'brave' and 'proud'] talking to the multitudes - top-down or Read-Only culture as Larry Lessig says. A Union should be bottom-up, many-to-many, or Read/Write culture in Lessig’s terms. We have, after 5 years achieved a Web 1.0 website, but there is abundant Web 2.0 technology available. The exact choice depends on knowing our membership. Personally I find Wiki’s as in Wikipedia an encouraging technology. For example, if you open my Wikipedia user page and the accompanying “edit this page” entry, you can flip between the presentation and the markup that generates it. You don’t actually have to know wiki markup to edit. Find something that does what you want and copy it. Go ahead! Try it! Leave me a message! I The system keeps ALL the backup copies!

[This by the way, is step one in bringing flexibility to the workplace, learning from each other. ]

So I have made quite a few edits, but I don’t actually know wiki markup. I have to admit though that I have had a lot of years of experience with software, so I may not understand how hard it is for others.

If that’s the case, we could use a slightly older technology - the discussion forum. It is not harder than e-mail and it has the advantage that all the different contributions are in one place rather than sprinkled through your inbox. But, this summer at Wikimania2006,a prototype of Wysiwiki was presented. You don’t need to know markup at all. It’s like Micro$oft Word where “What You See Is What You Get” except it makes wiki pages rather than printed documents.

I’ll regale you with the events of 2004 tomorrow including the raise that was not a raise and why Donene thinks none of y’all should burden your pretty little minds with the Consumer Price Index.
-r