Month: November 2009
COB-40: focusing on your job
Focus is a key to greatness. The best bureaucrats focus on doing their jobs. Entrepreneurs and innovators often lack formal job descriptions, and even if they had job descriptions, they probably wouldn’t follow them. But committed bureaucrats get their jobs done, day in and day out, year after year. That’s what makes a twenty-five-year service award such an important achievement.
Without a doubt, the work-a-day world is filled with distractions. Some young guy wants to try something new. Some ambitious woman pretends that she can do her work twice as fast as others. These types of persons will never succeed in maintaining their positions in a bureaucracy.
You’ve got your own challenges. Someone just outside of your door will make bodily noises or imitate animal sounds. Someone might tie a pink balloon around your head. To succeed, you’ve got to ignore all the possible nonsense, find your rut, and run smoothly back and forth in it. Nothing is better than a job well done, and well done, again, and again.
Other bureaucratic reporting this month:
Highlighting one among the many huge challenges facing the newspaper industry, Bee at Backreaction observes that journalists favor crazy and scary stories. Bee, who is a physicist at, I would guess, a large university, adds:
I will admit that most of our research indeed is quite boring and repetitive. It’s just small variations on always the same theme. I bet it’s the same in your job.
Indeed it is. I believe that this points to some deep feature of the cosmos.
Bear Matters BC reports on bureaucrats’ criticisms of their own agency’s proposed orphan black bear rehabilitation facility. Good bureaucrats fearlessly tell their leaders the truth. In light of freedom-of-information laws, it is best to tell the truth verbally in meetings.
Dipali Mukhopadhyay at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace assimilates Afghan warlords to bureaucrats. This seems to me rather inappropriate, since only a very small share of warlords are women. Mukhopadhyay writes: “Acknowledgment of hybrid governance need not mean the abandonment of formal institutional capacity building on the part of international, intervening organizations.” Of course not. Warlords or no warlords, leading bureaucracies will continue to build new bureaucracies.
THE ominously reports that Zhu Qingshi will become president of the South China Science and Technology University. Zhu has declared one of his top priorities to be the de-bureaucratization of the university. In other words, he plans to completely destroy the university. This sort of action wouldn’t be permitted in the U.S.
Under Carnival of Bureaucrats’ regulations, this carnival cannot include any posts that use the phrase “stupid bureaucrats” (see Rule 6). Under the third revision of the submission guides (not formally published and not legally binding), the phrase “stupid American bureaucrats” is considered a “similar phrase” under Rule 6. We consider it likely that “stupid British bureaucrats” is also a similar phrase and hence covered under Rule 6. However, we have issued a waiver of Rule 6 to include a post entitled “Stupid British bureaucrats kill rare bird“. The waiver issued because the death of a wild golden eagle in Britain is an exceptional event with unprecedented importance to hard-working, dedicated bureaucrats. In particular,we tentatively conclude that bureaucrats should avoid attempting to care for large, wild birds if doing so is not in their specific area of expertise. Nonetheless, this waiver should not be interpreted as establishing a rule that the death of a bird, or even the death of a wild golden eagle in Britain, permits using the phrase “stupid bureaucrats” or similar phrases covered under Rule 6. Each such case needs to apply individually for a waiver of Rule 6.
That’s all for this month’s Carnival of Bureaucrats. Nominations of posts to be considered for inclusion in next month’s carnival should be submitted using Form 376: Application for Bureaucratic Recognition.
terminating versus orginating telephone minutes
Payments between interconnecting telephone companies distinguish between terminating and originating telephone call minutes. You say let’s talk tonight. If I call you, my telephone company pays your telephone company per minute of our conversation. If you call me, your telephone company pays my telephone company per minute of our conversation. Telephone companies, and other companies providing voice communication services, thus care greatly about the “direction” of telephone conversations.
Communication, however, is fundamentally mutual, not directional. Placing a telephone call is a type of request for attention. That has significant direction and often has highly asymmetric value across parties. Time in communication, however, is not the same as a request for attention. I can’t communicate with you if you won’t communicate with me. During a telephone conversation, either party is technically free to hang up at any time. Within most telephone conversations, who called whom matters little. The distribution of value within a continuing conversation depends on many factors other than who called whom.
Who calls whom has little significance for communications infrastructure cost. The call direction relevant to payments between telephone companies is merely a convention associated with call set-up. Signaling outside of these network conventions (“Hey Bill, give me a call!” or digital non-telephone-network technologies that signal one telephone switch to initiate a call to another telephone switch) can easily reverse the conventional direction of a call.[*] At a technical level within a modern, packet-based communications network, the predominate direction of network traffic depends on who talks more, not on who called whom. More importantly, the direction in which most packets move has no significance for network cost.
From 1991 to 2008, U.S. incumbent local telephone exchange operating companies typically have reported roughly twice as many terminating telephone call minutes as originating call minutes. Ignoring accounting associated with multi-person (conference) calls, every originating minute is always associated with one terminating minute. Hence, for a bounded population communicating with each other, terminating telephone minutes necessarily equal originating telephone minutes. The imbalances in terminating to originating minutes probably come mainly from economic opportunities for competing or alternative communications infrastructure. At least historically, billing end-user customers has been more profitable than billing interconnecting telephone companies. Hence competitors have tended to target end-users with a relatively low ratio of terminating minutes to originating minutes. Similarly, non-telephone companies with their own communication infrastructure have saved more money by using their communications infrastructure to originate minutes than by using it to terminate minutes. The over-all effect is to skew incumbent local exchange carrier minutes toward terminating minutes.
The effect of telephone service competition on the ratio of terminating to originating minutes can be seen both across customer classes and across regions. The Ameritech telephone operating company distinguishes its interstate switched access telephone minutes by whether those minutes are interconnected with a competitive access provider. Public tariff data for Ameritech show that telephone minutes that Ameritech interconnects with a competitive access provider have a higher ratio of terminating minutes to originating minutes. In public tariff data for demand years 1997 and 1998, the Nynex telephone operating company distinguished switched access telephone minutes interconnected in Lata 132 (New York City). Lata 132, with a high density of persons and economic activity, has more competition among telephone companies than do other service areas. Somewhat surprisingly, Nynex’s switched access interconnected telephone minutes show roughly than the same terminating/originating ratio in Lata 132 and outside Lata 132. However, originating minutes in Lata 132 declined 2.0% from 1997 to 1998, while originating minutes outside of Lata 132 grew 2.2%. Within Lata 132 in 1998, Nynex multi-line business telephone customers had a 2.6 ratio of terminating to originating minutes, while single-line telephone customers had a ratio of 1.8.
Telephone companies’ accounting of originating and terminating telephone call minutes is rather inconsistent. The terminating / originating minute ratio has varied greatly across years. For example Bell Atlantic reported a ratio of 0.88 for 1995, and 1.88 for 1996. Ameritech reported a ratio of 1.61 for 2002, but 2.08 and 2.48 for 2001 and 2003, respectively. Pacific Bell has reported a ratio below 1 from 1996, and Nevada Bell has reported a ratio below 1 from 1992. Inconsistent reporting of terminating and originating telephone minutes is not surprising in light of the communicative and network superficiality of the terminating-originating distinction.
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Data: Online spreadsheet of U.S. local telephone companies’ originating and terminating interstate switched access minutes (Excel version); coded dataset of Ameritech transport interconnection charge minutes, 1998-2009; coded dataset of Nynex switched access minute elements, 1998-1999
[*] An early example of reversing the conventional direction of calls was international callback. In 2003, the FCC eliminated its comity-based prohibitions on call-back.
Sun Xun's Shock of Time
If the price of an artwork were set according to the hours of labor put into it, Sun Xun’s animations would cost an enormous amount. He makes animations by hand-drawing each individual frame. He recently stated that one animation cost him two years to make, working ten hours every day. All this labor is transformed into a video that today can easily be shared globally on magical services like YouTube. Our time is fundamentally unsettling to a mass of scholarly economic theory-writing spanning the centuries from Smith through Marx to the present. But at the Sackler Gallery, Sun Xun’s videos Chinese Words: War and Shock of Time are not offered for a price. Anyone can come and freely view them in the Moving Perspectives exhibition. But hurry, because these videos will vanish from the Sackler after November 8.
Chinese Words: War animates Chinese characters and fragments of characters in the development of military technology. Its concern with the development of characters and the relationship between character form and meaning is similar to that of Xu Bing’s The Living Word and Book from the Sky, both of which were installed at the Sackler in 2001. Sun Xun’s work has less sense of eternal aesthetics and balance, if only between illusion and disillusionment; instead, Sun Xun’s animation invokes an urgent, forward-driving menace to humanity. But humans and other animals do not need writing to fight with each other. In truth, human groups have been fatally attacking each other since long before the invention of writing. War is not simply a problem of words or other externally constructed technologies. Chinese Words: War is psychologically superficial in way that doesn’t, despite its primal soundtrack, promote ironic appreciation for its flatness.
Shock of Time is much more ambitious and thought-provoking. Industrialized print and a public wired-speaker system over-write worlds in this animation. “Mythos can expel truth” declares a closing character string. Yet in the U.S., the power of traditional media is being revealed as myth: print publications like newspapers are rapidly dying, despite their increasingly desperate efforts to write themselves into the future. And yet, with black-and-white, hand-drawn animations centered on industrial machinery and dead or dying communications technology, Shock of Time remarkably captures life lived in the midst of ubiquitous screens continuously refreshed with conventional symbols. Newspapers are the first draft of history. “History is a lie of time.” Shock of Time‘s new-media sense points to a world without time and a world without the public direction that time/history implies.
The viewing room in the Sackler is well-arranged for appreciating Shock of Time. Movie theaters and living rooms typically have viewers confined in seats. Viewers in front of a computer are similarly confined in seats. The new wave of screens are mobile devices that allow persons to move the screen and move themselves while they peer into screens. The viewing room in the Sackler has two benches placed against the back wall of the stark, square viewing room. This arrangement frees viewers to choose widely their positions relative to the screen and to move about the space while watching. Shock of Time retains its impressive force even when viewed from widely different physical angles. One important arrangement was beyond the power of this exhibition. Play Shock of Time backwards in your head, if you can. Shock of Time is beyond time.
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Sun Xun’s animated videos, Shock of Time (2006, 5:29 min) and Chinese Words: War (2005, 2:12 min) are on display at the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery, in its Moving Perspectives exhibition, through November 8, 2009.
Additional notes: At a presentation he gave in conjunction with the exhibition, Sun Xun stated that he refuses to use computers to create animations because he wants to control every aspect of his creative tool. His animations, however, are far from technologically naive or primitive. A member of the audience at that talk told Sun Xun that she recognized a newspaper that he incorporated in Shock of Time, and she asked him why he chose that newspaper. He said he used it just because it was ready at hand. Mashing up readily available video and image sources is a characteristic feature of much new-media work.
At least in the Soviet Union, wired public-speaker systems were once roughly as ubiquitous as newspapers. In the late 1980s, a wired, monophonic public-speaker system reached 85% of the Soviet population.