Huffington Post has a number of items about the Gaza/Israel situation. The first commentary item that I read, Israel’s Blitzkrieg on Gaza Proves Politically Expedient, Disproportionate and Unstoppable, may be indicative of the view from the Arab side. My linking to the article should not be taken as either endorsing or condemning the point of view expressed by the author.  Reading it is valuable for learning how someone else may view a situation whether you agree or not.

It is remarkable how each side is able to see how they are provoking the other side, and yet remain powerless to stop pushing each other’s buttons.  This is a common human frailty that I see almost every day (and in which I sometimes sadly participate).

I am bereft of any ideas on how to stop this counter-productive behavior on either side.  Perhaps our new American leadership will be able to see a way out.

There is an imaginitive proposal posted as a comment to this article. Perhaps this idea is too insulting to the Gazan side.

Whenever I see Hamas engage in these seemingly hopeless retaliations against the much stronger forces of Israel, I have a mental exercise that I find thought provoking, yet it has not led me to see a solution.

I imagine the Jews of Europe during World War II when ever they tried to resist what was happening to them.  Their hopeless efforts also provoked a disproportionate response from their oppressor. The mental exercise is to make a list of the differences and similarities between the Gazans of today and the Jews back then.  The other part of the exercise is to also make lists comparing the similarities and differences between Israelis of today with the Nazis of the World War II era.

Initially I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to make up your own lists.  At some future point in time, it might be interesting to compare our lists.

I found the following three headlines juxtaposed on a Yahoo! Website investing page:

It appears that no matter what the market action, the explanation is the same.

I once heard a speaker at a Portland meeting of the American Association of Individual Investors explain this phenomenon.  He was a psychologist by vocation and an investor by avocation.  He said that among professional psychologists this kind of sequence of statements from a client would be called confabulation.

The www.FreeDictionary.com gives confabulation this definition:

2. Psychology To fill in gaps in one’s memory with fabrications that one believes to be facts.

Greg Palast has written this piece, Foul Choice Of Basketball Buddy For Education Secretary. To say the least, his opinion is not very favorable of Obama’s choice for Secretary of Education.

This is the first that I have read about this guy.  We’ll see if Palast is right or if Arne Duncan has at least some redeeming attributes.

President Elect Obama announces his new Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. What I particularly like about the announcement is Obama’s recognition that a housing mortgage crisis solution team should have the HUD Secretary as a key player. I have been wondering for months why we never hear from Bush’s HUD Secretary, whoever that may be.

I think it says a lot about Bush’s understanding of how to make the executive branch work, that he has not realized that a housing financial crisis is not just a financial crisis, but that it also involves housing.

Follow this link to the Huffington Post article that has the video plus a slow motion video and some slides of the incident.

I am sure every one has seen this by now, but I just had to record this on my Blog for posterity.

We have just gone through an ice storm and I have been without internet, cable TV, and telephone for three days.  This is the first news story I saw since getting my internet connection back.  I am surprised that this was not prominently featured in the newspaper which I have been receiving during the blackout of all my other media.  I didn’t even hear about it on NPR.

The article Four Financial Horsewomen Who Warned of the Apocalypse is a very interesting read. I recommend reading it even before I do any fact checking or delve into the reference links that the article provides.  Even if it proves not to be completely accurate, and I am not saying this will happen, it does provide a lot of food for thought.  What’s more it provides links to sites that might provide more interesting reading in the future including this site itself.

There are comments on this article at the Huffington Post.

As a software engineer I adopted the concept of top-down design of software.  I first read about this method in the early 1970s.  Essentially, you start by taking the statement of the problem and start from the top to break it down into smaller and smaller sub-problems.  The description of the design looks like a tree structure where the root of the tree is the module that solves the whole problem.  This module calls on various sub-modules that solve different sub-problems.

This technique can be thought of as an outgrowth of what I was taught in my early days at MIT. When given a tough exam question, first write down everything you know about subject of the question.  By the time you have finished writing down everything you know, you have either solved the problem or have found the direction to go to solve the problem.

When doing a top-down design, you make architectural decisions at the top that constrain what you must do at the lower level.  Many people objected to top-down design because they felt that you could not impose such constraints on the lower level before you knew what was possible to do at the lower level.

This objection comes from a misconception of how I believe a top-down design should be done in real life.

In reality, top-down design is a way of organizing the design process.  At every level, you give enough thought to the next lower level to be reasonably certain that the next lower level can in fact be implemented.  You may have to descend very far down the levels during the design phase to make certain that all your assumptions can be met.  The top-down design method is a way of organizing that descent so that it is focused on solving the top-level problem.

In the same way management decisions can be thought of as a top down design process.  The top manager, in consultation with others in the management team, breaks the problem down into sub-pieces.  No top level decision is made until there is reasonable certainty that the lower levels can do their part to accomplish the task.

So while the top manager (or top designer) guides the process using her or his own vision, nothing is cast in concrete without consultation with sub-managers (domain experts) to insure that the plan is feasible. This consultation process is where other ideas get raised that might lead to an even better solution than the manager originally envisioned.

This does not guarantee that the original plan will never have to undergo major restructuring during implementation, but it does attempt to minimze the chances of that happening. It minimizes the risk without paralyzing the effort to move forward.  If you insist on 100% guarantees, you will be too late to solve the problem (miss the market window).

A plan (or design) developed in this way ends up as also being a road-map to delegating tasks during operation (or implementation). This is what makes a project manageable when you shift from design to implementation.  Every member on the team knows what her or his responsibility is with sufficient detail, that the manager only has to manage by exception.  As long as things are verifiably following the plan, no drastic management action needs to take place.  Each manager can concentrate on the duties specifically needed to carry the plan forward.

Please think of the process described above when you think of President Obama working with the people of his administration and all the people in the country in coming up with solutions to all our problems.  Using this management style, nobody in the organization has to be a workaholic in order for the organization to succeed.

See my demonstration and download of software that I have used to carry out the software design and management method described above.

I should add that top-down implementation, testing, and documentation go hand-in-hand with top-down design.