For televisions fixed in living rooms, what’s outside of the box adds nothing. Out-of-home media makes media context more significant.
Consider Doug Aitken’s SONG 1, now showing on the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. Much of its art is in its relation to what’s off-screen.
Out-of-home video should play well within its particular physical circumstances. More mobile apps should encourage users to look up.
Smart disclosure can bring to data the people-centric orientation that smart growth has to urban planning. Data is an increasingly valuable economic resource. Collecting, sharing, combining, and analyzing massive amounts of data can produce highly relevant, actionable information for individuals. Data now drive a wide variety of services, including personalized health care, personalized education and entertainment recommendations, personally relevant information search, and personally relevant advertising. Smart disclosure promotes a data ecology that serves the public interest, fosters economic growth, and incorporates beneficial competition among private enterprises.
One flagship of smart disclosure is the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission’s movement to machine-readable financial disclosures. To facilitate data processing, data-texts have to be well-structured and tagged with standardized, meaningful tags. Since 2004, the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) has been developing the application of eXensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) to SEC financial disclosures. The SEC calls XBRL-formated financial reports interactive data reporting. An SEC order issued in April, 2009, requires interactive data reporting for all companies’ financial statements covering a fiscal period ending on or after June 15, 2011. While the SEC’s current financial-filing access system (EDGAR) shows little signs of interactive data, other enterprises are stepping in to make powerful data tools.[1] Calcbench, for example, makes SEC financial data computable. By enabling instant data querying, company comparisons, and industry aggregations, Calcbench unlocks tremendous value from SEC data.
A principle of smart disclosure is that individuals should have access to their personal data in a machine-readable, computable form. The U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs gives veterans access to their health records via a blue button. Energy companies across the U.S. are giving consumers access to their energy-use data via a green button. These buttons allow individuals to get third-party health-care and energy-use analysis. Truaxis and Validas have similarly built mobile-phone bill economizing services that analyze phone users’ calling data to offer money-saving recommendations.
Thinking about smart disclosure in retailing compared to billing could be helpful. To aid consumers with phone bills, Truaxis and Validas collect data on phone companies’ calling plans. They collect that data largely through phone companies’ retail service offerings, rather than through their bills. Retail offerings, however, often do not completely describe relevant prices, terms, and conditions. For example, banks advertising consumer accounts typically reveal nothing about their overdaft terms and charges, even though overdraft fees account for 74% of all of banks’ service-charge income from deposit accounts.[2] On the other hand, consumer-service bills often don’t detail charges and may be largely incomprehensible. Getting a good disclosure data structure could help to produce a good industry structure for the underlying service provision.
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Notes:
[1] In August, 2009, the SEC announced plans to replace the EDGAR system with the Interactive Data Electronic Applications (IDEA) system. That system apparently has not thus far been realized.
[2] See 2008 FDIC Study of Bank Overdraft Programs, Executive Summary, point 11, p. III.
About 2400 years ago, the Greek physician Hippocrates grappled with information overload and the complexity of the physician’s profession. The first aphorism in Hippocrates’ book of aphorisms declares:
Life is short, and Art {of medical practice} long; the crisis fleeting; experience perilous, and decision difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and externals cooperate.
Asaph’s Book of Medicines, a Hebrew text probably from sometime between the sixth and tenth centuries, expands upon that Hippocratic aphorism:
the lifespan of a man is too short to investigate all the experiences of the branches of medicine. All the physicians relying only on their experience will not achieve a high medical skill because as the times change, so do the diseases. However, one can safely rely on the sources of wisdom. Most of the people interested in knowledge and study will be able to reach their goal only with God’s help. In olden times, people would reach the age of nine hundred years, then eight hundred, seven hundred, or six hundred years. Then, the life expectancy of man decreased. Therefore, the ancient sages had more time to try to reach knowledge and understanding. More recent sages lived less and therefore reached less understanding, and made fewer attempts at reaching it, as they did not live so long as the ancient sages did. Thus, they could not master all the fields of medicine, as wisdom is remote from man and it has to be brought unto him from a great distance. [1]
Asaph places Hippocrates’ aphorism in history and in reason.[2] The reference to long lifespans in olden times implicitly references Biblical writings. These patterns of Jewish thinking distinguish it clearly from Greek thinking.
Asaph’s reference to “sources of wisdom…remote from man” is more unusual. Proverbs refers to God creating wisdom before the beginning of the world. But Proverbs also describes wisdom addressing her children and crying out at the town gates.[3] Wisdom brought to the physician “from a great distance” seems to refer to ancient writings. Asaph seems to be grouping textually both the Book of Proverbs and a book of Greek medical wisdom.[4] That’s another aspect of Asaph’s effort to encompass within Jewish life Greek medical knowledge.
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Notes:
[1] Trans. Muntner & Rosner (1971) pp. 188-9 (para. 158). Asaph’s Book of Medicine includes paraphrases of most of Hippocrates’ aphorisms. See id. pp. 189-230.
[2] In an early fourteenth-century Hebrew treatise on medical astrology, David ben Yom Tov wrote:
However, since — as Hippocrates said — life is too short and every one of these arts is too long, so that one cannot reach perfection and completeness in even one of them, but only <some of> its many parts, no one lives long enough to master all of the subdisciplines <of medicine and astrology>, let alone that one would live long enough to master both arts completely. For the hearts have grown smaller and those of the latter generations are like a very fine needle. It is therefore impossible that anyone can be found to master both arts, and if such a person would be found, it would be an uncommonly wondrous thing.
Trans. from Hebrew in ben Yom Tov et al (2005) p. 84. Ben Yom Tov, like Asaph, historically contextualizes Hippocrates’ aphorism. But ben Yom Tov does so with an unusual reference to the size of the heart.
[3] Proverbs 8:22-31 (wisdom set up before the beginning of the earth); Proverbs 8:32 (wisdom addressing children); Proverbs 8:3 (wisdom crying out at the town’s gates).
[4] At the beginning of its paraphrases of Hippocrates aphorisms, Asaph’s book states:
This is a book of commentary on the Book of Medicine. In the Book of Medicine, the Greek physicians discussed and investigated how to cure, recognize and understand the properties of the drugs, and how to understand the symptoms of the diseases, disorders and pains. They also investigated the problem of how to distinguish between the dead and the living. Their aim was to make diagnoses and prognoses with the help of the Lord who teaches Man useful knowledge.
Trans. Muntner & Rosner (1971) p. 188 (para. 156). This explicit reference to an ancient book seems to be the relevant context for wisdom “from a great distance” / “remote from man.” In Jewish life, the wisdom set out in Proverbs would have permeated everyday life. But Proverbs, like the Greek medical book, was recognized to be an ancient text.
References:
Ben Yom Tov, David, Gerrit Bos, Charles Burnett, and Y. Tzvi Langermann. 2005. Hebrew medical astrology: David Ben Yom Tov, Kelal qaṭan : original Hebrew text, medieval Latin translation, modern English translation. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society.
Muntner, Sussman, and Fred Rosner, trans. & ed. 1971. The Book of Medicine of Asaph the Physician: Commentary (vol. 1) and translated text (vol. 2). Document 06-501-N-L, Prepared under the Special Foreign Currency Program of the U.S. National Library of Medicine and U.S. National Institutes of Health, Public Heath Service, U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Located in: Modern Manuscripts Collection, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD; MS C 294.
Mushroom management typically is associated with organizations filled with dead wood. But what if your organization contains some employees that show signs of life? Have no fear, mushroom management can still produce results. Move those employees to windowless offices and assign them TPS reports. If necessary, order trepanation for them. Then lean back and wait for their personal development.
Crappy newspapers executives are historical leaders in mushroom management. John Paton, who apparently isn’t a crappy newspaper executive, is advocating change in the newspaper business. A lot of change. Nothing is worse for bureaucracy than change. He must be stopped. Repeat until succeed must proceed.
Another honored management approach is Linus Torvalds’ kernel management style. Torvalds decisively advocates non-decision-making:
The name of the game is to _avoid_ having to make a decision. In particular, if somebody tells you “choose (a) or (b), we really need you to decide on this”, you’re in trouble as a manager. The people you manage had better know the details better than you, so if they come to you for a technical decision, you’re screwed. You’re clearly not competent to make that decision for them. … So the name of the game is to _avoid_ decisions, at least the big and painful ones. Making small and non-consequential decisions is fine, and makes you look like you know what you’re doing, so what a kernel manager needs to do is to turn the big and painful ones into small things where nobody really cares.
Producing large reports helps to avoid making decisions, or least to avoid making any decisions that anyone can locate and complain about.
Ben Balter has proposed post-forking for enhancing WordPress editorial workflow. With such an innovation, “any content becomes either publicly or privately collaborative.” This combines all the benefits of editing with all the benefits of meetings. It’s potentially a huge contribution to bureaucracy.
That’s all for this month’s Carnival of Bureaucrats. Enjoy previous bureaucratic carnivals here. Nominations of posts to be considered for inclusion in next month’s carnival should be submitted using Form 376: Application for Bureaucratic Recognition.