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.

I hear many people expressing doubts that Obama can bring about the change he promised after nominating so many people who served in the Clinton administration to high posts in the Obama administration.  The following is my reason for believing these appointments are not a hindrance to the change that he promised.

I accept Obama’s statement that the vision comes from him.

When a board of directors replaces a failing CEO with a new, powerful CEO with vision, many times the company will successfully make a large change in direction. Many of the people in the company other than the new CEO will continue to be the same people that managed the company with the old CEO. Nevertheless the company takes a drastic change in direction. So it can plausibly be with Barack Obama as the new CEO and experienced people who served in the Clinton administration as the rest of the management team.

Since the managers manage to the leader’s vision, many of the people from the Clinton administration may actually have had a vision that aligns more with Obama than with Clinton. They just did not get to behave this way when working for Clinton.

A good manager will either follow the leader’s vision or get the leader to modify his or her vision. If the manager cannot do either, the the manager ought to resign.

The leader sets the direction by deciding the tone that solutions should take. It is up to the managers to find and implement solutions that match the tone or explain to the leader why it can’t be done. A good leader will recognize good faith efforts that fail to find the solution in the direction she or he desired. Upon this recognition, the leader will bow to reality and accept a different solution.

Follow this link to the announcement of the program that is the subject of this video.

Your Seat at the Table is your opportunity to know what is going on in the transition and to provide your inputs to the process.

A book titled How to Break a Terrorist is about to be published.  Its author is a former special intelligence operations officer who, along with his team of interrogators, “successfully hunted down one of the most notorious mass murderers of our generation, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq and the mastermind of the campaign of suicide bombings that had helped plunge Iraq into civil war.”

Contrary to George Bush’s assertions, this interrogator and his team did not use torture to gain the information that led to this result.

This former U.S. interrogator has said the US  “torture policy has led to more deaths than 9/11 attacks”.

Follow this link to an interview with this author. At the link you will find out why non-torture techniques of interrogation work much better than their immoral counterparts.  You will also find a link to a stunning op-ed in the Washington Post called “I’m Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq.”

If you didn’t already know that if you want to be moral and ethical you should not use or condone torture, then learn why wanting to be effective should also prevent you from using or condoning torture.

Huffington Post has this story on their web site. I made the following comment on the story.

Sen Corker, Republican from Tennessee, was full of it when he said that the GM pensions were toast if GM went into bankruptcy. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (US Taxpayer) would be on the hook for it.

These Southern Republicans just want to protect the foreign auto companies that they lured to their states with huge tax giveaways. Where is the putting country first slogan when you need it? Do they expect us to believe that Japan and Korea are not going to bailout their own auto companies?

Did you notice that Senator Shelby, Republican from Alabama, seems to have inherited the Bush smirk as he twists the knife into the body of the auto companies?

Later I posted, the following additional comment:

Senator Bennett, Republican Utah, is concerned that any help to the Big 3 automakers is tantamount to the government having an industrial policy like the Japanese do.

The huge tax breaks, favorable labor laws, and other giveaways that the Southern states gave the transplant automakers to lure them to their states is not an industrial policy, I suppose.

Another commenter on Huffington Post remarked:

An ultimatum implies an “or else”. What are the Dems going to do if the White House refuses??? Seriously… what is the “or else”???

I came up with the following or else:

Or else we will seriously investigate the Bush administration war crimes and violations of the constitution?

In his review of Paul Krugman’s book The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, Brad Delong explains:

And the problem this time is that we did not understand the degree to which all the mortgage finance companies, investment conduits, MBS vehicles, CDO tranches, monolines and other non-bank financial players that had taken on the role of banks — of making long-term durable risky investments yet promising those who contributed the funds that their funds were liquid and safe — without being regulated like banks.