Month: August 2009

Snail Porridge, Anyone?

by Hanna Rosin

Nathan Myhrvold, of Microsoft hired a bunch of restaurant chefs and built himself a giant kitchen to explore the "science and technology of modern cuisine," reports the Puget Sound Business Journal.  Will the foodie never stop evolving?

The restaurant is known for “molecular gastronomy,” manipulating food chemically and physically to create unusual taste combinations. (The current menu includes snail porridge, salmon poached in licorice gel, and mango and Douglas fir purée.) Myhrvold enthusiastically describes it as a “Klingon cafeteria” — a reference to the alien warrior race on “Star Trek.”

Waiting For The Next President

by Patrick Appel

Fred Kaplan checks in on Afghanistan:

[If] the election turns out to be as close—and contested—as the early returns suggest, the new president will probably also have to offer a very high position to the runner-up, perhaps even form a unity government with him. If Karzai wins, the runner-up is likely to be the former foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah. There is another way to express this: If Karzai the Pashtun wins, the runner-up is likely to be Abdullah the Tajik. (Abdullah is half-Tajik but is considered the Tajik candidate.) In other words, if Karzai doesn't give Abdullah something big (or, should Abdullah win, if he doesn't give Karzai something big), the election could trigger an ethno-geographic conflict (Pashtuns live mainly in the south, Tajiks in the north), on top of the many layers of conflict that already keep Afghanistan from functioning as a coherent nation-state. This is one danger of holding a national election in a state that lacks a national consciousness or a civil society: The vote tends merely to politicize, and thus harden, longstanding social divisions. This is what happened in Iraq's first post-Saddam election.

Cubicle Meets Pandora’s Box

by Conor Friedersdorf

In Slate, Michael Agger has an interesting article on the information a company can glean from the electronic footprints of its employees. What does filtering software look for as it scans terabytes of data? Signs that an employee is unhappy include e-mails written in all caps, "call me" events where e-mail conversations are taken offline, communication with other employees in distant parts of the org chart, and updates to the resume.

Signs of a good employee: blocks of text that they produce are widely shared or forwarded, lots of people are interacting with them via e-mail, and a tendency to answer open-ended questions posed by other employees or managers.

Mr. Agger concludes:

Yes, it's lame if a manager needs to rely on an algorithm to figure out who her most valued employees are. Yes, the Big Brother-ish aspect of all of this gives one pause. But if you set aside that reaction, most of what Charnock is talking about is common sense. Are you in the mainstream of your workplace or off in a little eddy of your own? If so, why? Are you being productive in your own time and style or just getting really good at Desktop Tower Defense and wishing you did something else? Your electronic tracks don't indicate your true value as an employee—Who cracks better jokes in the weekly meeting? No one!—but it's naive to think they don't reveal anything at all.

My suspicion is that most companies would find engaging in this sort of analysis to be an unmitigated disaster. As Mr. Agger notes, it might prove useful for a big company buying a promising startup, but if an existing company's managers started running algorithms, flagging electronic content, and reading it, they'd quickly find themselves awash in information they're unqualified to interpret and unable to handle maturely. 

But the bigger problem would come when some employees inevitably grew savvy enough to start gaming this kind of analysis. Imagine if you knew you'd be evaluated by its metrics. How much work time would you waste writing calculated e-mails?

How Popular Is The Public Option?

by Patrick Appel

Only 37 percent of respondents could correctly identify what the public option is when given three choices. Nate Silver reacts:

This is mostly a debate being had among policy elites and the relatively small fraction of the public that is highly knowledgeable and engaged about health care reform; for most others, the details are lost on them. This is also why relatively small changes in wording can trigger dramatic shifts in support for the public option, which has been as high as 83 percent in some polls and as low as 35 percent in others depending on who is doing the polling and how they're asking the questions. You don't see those sorts of discrepancies when polling about, say, gay marriage or the death penalty, where the options are a little bit more self-evident.

You can find similar polls on issues like cap and trade. Mark Blumenthal has a slightly different perspective on public option polling.

The Whole Foods Boycott

by Conor Friedersdorf

Though I feel quite strongly that CEO John Mackey is being treated unfairly, and intend to spend more money than I otherwise would at his stores to counteract the burgeoning boycott, I'm not going to write about this subject at length, because Radley Balko (here and here), Julian Sanchez (here and here) and David Frum have already done it better than I can. Note my counter-the-boycott impulse doesn't have anything to do with my agreement or disagreement with Mr. Mackey's position on healthcare. Were conservatives boycotting his stores for taking an opposite position on the subject I'd increase my shopping there as readily — the only difference is that counteracting a left-leaning boycott will afford me less satisfaction when I buy arugula and spicy dijon mustard.

On the subject of Whole Foods, I'd also like to take this opportunity to suggest that Mr. Mackey provide better resources for his customers who are concerned about ocean conservation. I'd gladly pay a bit more to encourage sustainable fishing, and substitute fish that aren't in danger of depletion if afforded relevant knowledge at the fish counter.

Soldiers As Community Organizers

by Chris Bodenner

DiA reviews McChrystal's new counterinsurgency guidance for Afghanistan:

[It] recommends that troops spend 95% of their time in the communities they are working to protect. […] One interesting angle that the guidance suggests is that the Army may be thinking that it cannot rely on the promised surge of civilian aid professionals; it has to do the job itself. […] A familiar insurgent tactic is to assassinate development workers and wait for a clumsy military response, which they can evade. That is insurgents' territory of strength. Insurgents are much more reluctant to attack military forces head-on; that is their territory of weakness. The COIN guidance proposes that the military forces become the development workers. If insurgents want to attack the development workers, they then have to attack military forces head-on.

Exum adds:

One thing that jumped out at me as being particularly important is the emphasis on partnering with the Afghan National Security Forces. Partnering is not the same thing as mentoring. Partnering means that you pair units together and do everything together: live, eat, train, plan, operate. This is a big change

Michael Cohen worries about the mission creep.