I found May's utterances utterly superficial and very old-fashioned. First of all, though not many CEOs come from the post as CIO, many top executives have had a stint in the IT part of the organization, learning about what the technology does and how to think about the company as a value producing system. As for the use of Peters and Waterman's book as a sort of criteria for what constitutes a good CEO, that is laughable - the book refers to companies, not CEOs. And it has been utterly debunked many times.
May's article would have been right on about 10 years ago. Back then, the reason CIOs did not make it into the top spot (in fact, 40% of CIOs were fired, and the average tenure was about 2.3 years) was because they did not understand that the skills that got you into the top IT position were not the skills that would keep you there.
In CSC, we conducted a survey of CIOs in the top 1000 corporations in the world, and got a surprising result: Of the 40% of CIOs that were fired, only a few were fired for "not producing cost-effective IT". The rest went because they could not communicate with the top management group, were ineffective change agents, or could not contribute to business strategy development. In other words, when you are a CIO in a large corporation, you are no longer the IT organization's representative into top management, but the other way around. If you cannot make the transition to thinking about the whole company as a system, you are toast.
There are actually quite a few companies where technical competence is visible in top management. Royal Bank of Scotland comes to mind, with one of the most effective IT strategies in the world. At RBS, a central "manufacturing division" handles transactions, IT, HR, and call centers, leaving the branch network - and they have more than 50 brands - to serve customers and grow the business. UPS, Wal-Mart, Amex, Wells Fargo, Royal Bank of Canada, some of the large airlines, Dell, quite a number of telcos, some insurance companies (I particularly like a German one called AMB which runs many insurance companies off the same systems) and many others have top management that understand the impact of IT and think of the whole company as a system. Does that mean that they come from the position as CIO? Not necessarily, though some of them do.
Being a CIO is about information, not IT. For that, you have a CTO or a CIO office that handles the technical pieces. Most of the top CIOs I know worry about the customers and the customer experience. One CIO of a large hotel chain I met worried about the speed of the in-room Internet connection - and whether the ventilation in the bathroom was good enough that you could shave after taking a shower without the mirror getting fogged up.
IT is a tool. It is an important tool, but it is what it does for the customer that matters. And the role of the IT organization is not to make IT elegant - it is to make business elegant. If the tools happen to be boring and the CIO not very visible - so what?
False positives are not a problem - you have to review everything anyway. All these systems do is compare the entered paper against other digital sources, such as the open web and papers previously turned in. It then presents a color-coded text version with links to the plagiarized source and a % estimate of whether the paper is plagiarized or not. Even works with paraphrasing, where the students have tried to change the wording a little.
It is rather easy to get up to a 20% estimate, especially on shorter papers, where standard text pieces such as the assignment text or the reference list pops in. Anything higher than 20% is worth looking into.
In the few cases I have discovered, there has been no doubt, and the students immediately fessed up. In general, gaps in language and varying style gives it away - the automatic system works more as a sieve and a quick way to find the sources.
I teach tech at a business school, and have worked battling Internet cheating for a long time. It is not that hard to solve (or, at least, significantly reduce) cheating. Here is what you do:
1. Have students turn in papers electronically through a service that checks for plagiarism (Personally, I use Blackboard's SafeAssignment, which works fine, though Blackboard itself is crap). Yes, it will cost the university money. Control mechanisms do. Consider it an investment in academic reputation.
2. Institute a rule that any student submitting a term paper can be subjected to an oral examination about it within a specified time, making paper outsourcing risky. My institution has this in their student handbook.
3. Use multiple methods of evaluation, including class participation. This makes the whole course an evaluation, encourages preparation throughout the course, and might teach you something new.
4. Use fresh examples and/or new and ingenious questions every year, so that the pool of available papers to plagiarize or ready-made Wikipedia entries to amalgamate is reduced.
5. Design the content and teaching of your courses so that they value insight and deliberation rather than repetitive fact checking (for which you should use sit-in exams).
It's not that hard. It just means structuring the control mechanisms to the content of your course, and getting to know your students well enough that you have a multidimensional view of their abilities.
The simple reason rebates and coupons exist is that they allow price discrimination. They are a way of offering a price reduction to those customers who want it. If they didn't exist, the seller would have to discount the price for everyone.
I myself live in Europe, but occasionally buy electronics and other things when in the US. I get rebates but often don't bother sending them in - often because of the hassle (US addresses only, and so on), but also because the price already is significantly lower in Europe and I just want the product. I can easily imagine rich and busy Americans buying things and just forgetting about the rebate - which means that the seller gets more revenue.
Price discrimination works to the benefit of both the spendthrift and the miser: The former gets the product he wants at a price he is willing to pay. This allows the seller to increase the amount on the rebate, making it cheaper for the miser, who is willing to spend the time and do the paperwork.
For those of you carping about the 60% fulfillment rate: If all rebate coupons were redeemed, the rebates wouldn't be so good.
So keep quiet and keep filling in those forms.
The concept of double jeopardy does not apply in Jon's case - at least not any differently than in the US, where appeals on a number of grounds are quite normal.
There are a few differences between the legal systems that are important to consider, though: In Norway you don't rack up the enormous expenses in lawyer costs. If you are accused of a crime, the State cover the costs for a lawyer of your choice. In civil suits, the losing party will often have to pay the winner's costs, so frivolous law suits by deep-pocketed corporations looking for a settlement are few and far between. Lawyers are also not allowed no-cure-no-pay fee structures, meaning that you don't get those idiotic class action suits.
That being said, the consensus among people with technical and legal background here in Norway is that Jon will get off, but that the case is being driven upwards in the court system precisely to get a thorough vetting. It should be noted that if Jon should be found guilty, he will face much more lenient sentencing than would be handed out in the States, and the MPAA/RIAA would not even get a hearing with speculations about millions of dollars lost because of DeCSS (and anyway, Jon could easily appeal to the Supreme Court.)
Incidentally, Okokrim has been roundly criticized for even bringing this suit by almost all commentators - and I have a sneaking suspicion they don't even believe in it themselves, and are seeking a precedent judgement so as to know where they can draw the line in the future.
IANAL, but I am not that worried - what we have here is a reasonably thorough process to settle a question of criminality of a legal question that is rather new. It will work itself out, probably with Jon being found innocent, setting a precedent which will be appealed to the Supreme court by Okokrim. And I think the Supreme court will refuse to hear the appeal, thus confirming the precedent.
The Bletchley Park (HQ for UK cryptintelligence work during WWII) operation and assorted activities to capture and feed information to it involved thousands of people (I think I have seen numbers of 5000 for the HQ operations alone). Turing was extremely important in this work, especially in the earlier part of the war. However, many others contributed - for instance, it was Polish intelligence that broke the first versions of the Enigma cipher machine, even before WWII started.
We don't have the overpriced textbook problem to the same extent here in Norway, but it is there.
I teach all my courses using PDFs of academic and business articles, with public web pages for the course structure (http://www.espen.com/courses) and a course distribution product called Blackboard, which is mostly crap but does limit content distribution to students with passwords. Only thing distributed on paper are HBS cases, but they're 3.50 apiece and no big deal.
Works for most things - but I am lucky in that I teach business strategy and technology, for which good online material is not too hard to find. And the books I use are not textbooks, but business/tech books such as Shapiro and Varian's "Information Rules", which are written with a "real" market in mind.
The trouble with this approach is that you can, at least for 101 courses, come under pressure to conform to "approved" curricula, often set by the publishers. At a US college with classes of 400+ students you are forced into automated grading and other labor-saving devices in order to to something other than teach - and then the prepackaged courses from the big publishers are a way out. In fairness, some of the textbooks are excellent. But $120 books are ridiculous.
Anyway, MIT's Open Courseware Project is a great step in the right direction - not in that it makes content available, but that it gives a lot of teachers out there course structures to compare their own courses with and some much needed confidence in that they can deviate from the pre-packaged courses - since they do that at MIT.
I recently did some consulting for a large, public organization, and suggested they do their in-house documentation Wiki style. This organization has a huge body of mostly textual documentation for technical equipment - and letting everybody update it seemed to me to be a great idea. You need a couple of organizational safeguards, of course, such as version tracking and rewards for people who do a lot of editing and write well. And you definitely need to assign some people of moderator quality to hammer out a culture of neutral point of view, attention to detail and frequent cross-checking of each others material.
But the sheer simplicity of this solution, especially if you are starting from available documentation, should, as I have long advocated, make it useful for a lot more than a GPL Encyclopedia.
Well, in that comment I meant to distinguish between standards (meaning W3) and familiarity (i.e. standars as in "familiar Windows desktop metaphor"). Sorry about the confusion - I think both discussions are interesting. In the mobile phone market, there is less standardization in the States, which has hurt the industry. Which means that "familiarity" standardization might be more important. At least that seems to be Microsoft's perspective.
Dear tech friend,
I am (gasp) a business school professor. And I have seen repeatedly that the best product does not win - not that I need to tell this crowd. IMHO Opera has a chance less because of their product (though it is good and has to be) but because they are displaying the right attitude - as manifested in their marketing of Opera the browser. In this context, it matters less that they have a fast browser than that they rigorously adhere to standards and have the collaborative nature necessary to want other companies to bet on them.
While client-side filtering wastes bandwidth, it deal s with the personalization problem of spam - the fact that despite our agreement on what constitutes spam here in/., others may actually like "cute" poems or being invited to Gold Card member events from Amex or other crap.
I use Mailwasher, which "washes" email based on downloading the headers from the mail server and filtering them using a number of approaches at once: Blacklisting, language checking (I think, at least if you preview it), filters that you set up yourself, and a learning over time of what you have done. It bounces the spam with a fake "no such user" message and can also operate in the background. And best of all: I allows me to filter out spam for all email accounts on my web site at once.
However, it is still susceptible to faked subject lines and mail addresses etc., it still requires that I check its actions (though I have only seen two false positives so far, and they were not on my personal email account but on someone else's (and therefore not based on my criteria).
The key to killling spam is to kill the economics - and to do that, we must have integrated filtering based on each user's preferences, done as a natural activity over time, using all the anti-spam weapons in our arsenal. While I agree that bandwidth waste is a problem, it is temporary, bandwidth is cheap compared to user time, and if everyone starts to filter based on the content and because it is an integrated part of the mail package, we will get rid of this thing.
So Kudos to Mozilla, and I sure hope that the next rel of Netscape (7.0 is built on Mozilla 1.1) will make spam filtering integral and natural. If everyone filters, the economic rationale for spam disappears. So make filtering easy....
Actually, www.mailwasher.net is pretty effective, certainly has solved the problem for me. Also generates bogus bounce messages which are returned to the spammer. And it will remember those forged headers and not try to bounce more than once.
While I am waiting for a "statistical" solution, I am more than happy to use Mailwasher.
I teach college, and I try very hard to catch people who cheat (that is, I don't start trying until I have a suspicion, such as very similar reports, but then I am relentless.) I wish I could agree with you about the cheaters eventually failing, but in my experience that can take a long time, damage some other people's careers and companies' profitability, not to mention the reputation of the college. As a college prof., I think it is my fiduciary responsibility to ensure quality of students as well as quality of teaching.
As for group work, there are ways to get around the "free rider" problem. I have experimented with peer review: Each student in the group gets 100 points per other member, and have to distribute those points among the other members, but cannot let two students have the same number of points. Works well when I spring it on the students after the fact (it is a fairly new method) but could be tricky if the students get wise and start gaming the system. Peer review is uncomfortable for the students, but they are much harder graders than any teacher I know...
Slashdot Mirror
I found May's utterances utterly superficial and very old-fashioned. First of all, though not many CEOs come from the post as CIO, many top executives have had a stint in the IT part of the organization, learning about what the technology does and how to think about the company as a value producing system. As for the use of Peters and Waterman's book as a sort of criteria for what constitutes a good CEO, that is laughable - the book refers to companies, not CEOs. And it has been utterly debunked many times.
May's article would have been right on about 10 years ago. Back then, the reason CIOs did not make it into the top spot (in fact, 40% of CIOs were fired, and the average tenure was about 2.3 years) was because they did not understand that the skills that got you into the top IT position were not the skills that would keep you there.
In CSC, we conducted a survey of CIOs in the top 1000 corporations in the world, and got a surprising result: Of the 40% of CIOs that were fired, only a few were fired for "not producing cost-effective IT". The rest went because they could not communicate with the top management group, were ineffective change agents, or could not contribute to business strategy development. In other words, when you are a CIO in a large corporation, you are no longer the IT organization's representative into top management, but the other way around. If you cannot make the transition to thinking about the whole company as a system, you are toast.
There are actually quite a few companies where technical competence is visible in top management. Royal Bank of Scotland comes to mind, with one of the most effective IT strategies in the world. At RBS, a central "manufacturing division" handles transactions, IT, HR, and call centers, leaving the branch network - and they have more than 50 brands - to serve customers and grow the business. UPS, Wal-Mart, Amex, Wells Fargo, Royal Bank of Canada, some of the large airlines, Dell, quite a number of telcos, some insurance companies (I particularly like a German one called AMB which runs many insurance companies off the same systems) and many others have top management that understand the impact of IT and think of the whole company as a system. Does that mean that they come from the position as CIO? Not necessarily, though some of them do.
Being a CIO is about information, not IT. For that, you have a CTO or a CIO office that handles the technical pieces. Most of the top CIOs I know worry about the customers and the customer experience. One CIO of a large hotel chain I met worried about the speed of the in-room Internet connection - and whether the ventilation in the bathroom was good enough that you could shave after taking a shower without the mirror getting fogged up.
IT is a tool. It is an important tool, but it is what it does for the customer that matters. And the role of the IT organization is not to make IT elegant - it is to make business elegant. If the tools happen to be boring and the CIO not very visible - so what?
False positives are not a problem - you have to review everything anyway. All these systems do is compare the entered paper against other digital sources, such as the open web and papers previously turned in. It then presents a color-coded text version with links to the plagiarized source and a % estimate of whether the paper is plagiarized or not. Even works with paraphrasing, where the students have tried to change the wording a little.
It is rather easy to get up to a 20% estimate, especially on shorter papers, where standard text pieces such as the assignment text or the reference list pops in. Anything higher than 20% is worth looking into.
In the few cases I have discovered, there has been no doubt, and the students immediately fessed up. In general, gaps in language and varying style gives it away - the automatic system works more as a sieve and a quick way to find the sources.
I teach tech at a business school, and have worked battling Internet cheating for a long time. It is not that hard to solve (or, at least, significantly reduce) cheating. Here is what you do:
1. Have students turn in papers electronically through a service that checks for plagiarism (Personally, I use Blackboard's SafeAssignment, which works fine, though Blackboard itself is crap). Yes, it will cost the university money. Control mechanisms do. Consider it an investment in academic reputation.
2. Institute a rule that any student submitting a term paper can be subjected to an oral examination about it within a specified time, making paper outsourcing risky. My institution has this in their student handbook.
3. Use multiple methods of evaluation, including class participation. This makes the whole course an evaluation, encourages preparation throughout the course, and might teach you something new.
4. Use fresh examples and/or new and ingenious questions every year, so that the pool of available papers to plagiarize or ready-made Wikipedia entries to amalgamate is reduced.
5. Design the content and teaching of your courses so that they value insight and deliberation rather than repetitive fact checking (for which you should use sit-in exams).
It's not that hard. It just means structuring the control mechanisms to the content of your course, and getting to know your students well enough that you have a multidimensional view of their abilities.
The simple reason rebates and coupons exist is that they allow price discrimination. They are a way of offering a price reduction to those customers who want it. If they didn't exist, the seller would have to discount the price for everyone. I myself live in Europe, but occasionally buy electronics and other things when in the US. I get rebates but often don't bother sending them in - often because of the hassle (US addresses only, and so on), but also because the price already is significantly lower in Europe and I just want the product. I can easily imagine rich and busy Americans buying things and just forgetting about the rebate - which means that the seller gets more revenue. Price discrimination works to the benefit of both the spendthrift and the miser: The former gets the product he wants at a price he is willing to pay. This allows the seller to increase the amount on the rebate, making it cheaper for the miser, who is willing to spend the time and do the paperwork. For those of you carping about the 60% fulfillment rate: If all rebate coupons were redeemed, the rebates wouldn't be so good. So keep quiet and keep filling in those forms.
There are a few differences between the legal systems that are important to consider, though: In Norway you don't rack up the enormous expenses in lawyer costs. If you are accused of a crime, the State cover the costs for a lawyer of your choice. In civil suits, the losing party will often have to pay the winner's costs, so frivolous law suits by deep-pocketed corporations looking for a settlement are few and far between. Lawyers are also not allowed no-cure-no-pay fee structures, meaning that you don't get those idiotic class action suits.
That being said, the consensus among people with technical and legal background here in Norway is that Jon will get off, but that the case is being driven upwards in the court system precisely to get a thorough vetting. It should be noted that if Jon should be found guilty, he will face much more lenient sentencing than would be handed out in the States, and the MPAA/RIAA would not even get a hearing with speculations about millions of dollars lost because of DeCSS (and anyway, Jon could easily appeal to the Supreme Court.)
Incidentally, Okokrim has been roundly criticized for even bringing this suit by almost all commentators - and I have a sneaking suspicion they don't even believe in it themselves, and are seeking a precedent judgement so as to know where they can draw the line in the future.
IANAL, but I am not that worried - what we have here is a reasonably thorough process to settle a question of criminality of a legal question that is rather new. It will work itself out, probably with Jon being found innocent, setting a precedent which will be appealed to the Supreme court by Okokrim. And I think the Supreme court will refuse to hear the appeal, thus confirming the precedent.
The Bletchley Park (HQ for UK cryptintelligence work during WWII) operation and assorted activities to capture and feed information to it involved thousands of people (I think I have seen numbers of 5000 for the HQ operations alone). Turing was extremely important in this work, especially in the earlier part of the war. However, many others contributed - for instance, it was Polish intelligence that broke the first versions of the Enigma cipher machine, even before WWII started.
I teach all my courses using PDFs of academic and business articles, with public web pages for the course structure (http://www.espen.com/courses) and a course distribution product called Blackboard, which is mostly crap but does limit content distribution to students with passwords. Only thing distributed on paper are HBS cases, but they're 3.50 apiece and no big deal.
Works for most things - but I am lucky in that I teach business strategy and technology, for which good online material is not too hard to find. And the books I use are not textbooks, but business/tech books such as Shapiro and Varian's "Information Rules", which are written with a "real" market in mind.
The trouble with this approach is that you can, at least for 101 courses, come under pressure to conform to "approved" curricula, often set by the publishers. At a US college with classes of 400+ students you are forced into automated grading and other labor-saving devices in order to to something other than teach - and then the prepackaged courses from the big publishers are a way out. In fairness, some of the textbooks are excellent. But $120 books are ridiculous.
Anyway, MIT's Open Courseware Project is a great step in the right direction - not in that it makes content available, but that it gives a lot of teachers out there course structures to compare their own courses with and some much needed confidence in that they can deviate from the pre-packaged courses - since they do that at MIT.
But the sheer simplicity of this solution, especially if you are starting from available documentation, should, as I have long advocated, make it useful for a lot more than a GPL Encyclopedia.
Well, in that comment I meant to distinguish between standards (meaning W3) and familiarity (i.e. standars as in "familiar Windows desktop metaphor"). Sorry about the confusion - I think both discussions are interesting. In the mobile phone market, there is less standardization in the States, which has hurt the industry. Which means that "familiarity" standardization might be more important. At least that seems to be Microsoft's perspective.
Dear tech friend, I am (gasp) a business school professor. And I have seen repeatedly that the best product does not win - not that I need to tell this crowd. IMHO Opera has a chance less because of their product (though it is good and has to be) but because they are displaying the right attitude - as manifested in their marketing of Opera the browser. In this context, it matters less that they have a fast browser than that they rigorously adhere to standards and have the collaborative nature necessary to want other companies to bet on them.
I use Mailwasher, which "washes" email based on downloading the headers from the mail server and filtering them using a number of approaches at once: Blacklisting, language checking (I think, at least if you preview it), filters that you set up yourself, and a learning over time of what you have done. It bounces the spam with a fake "no such user" message and can also operate in the background. And best of all: I allows me to filter out spam for all email accounts on my web site at once.
However, it is still susceptible to faked subject lines and mail addresses etc., it still requires that I check its actions (though I have only seen two false positives so far, and they were not on my personal email account but on someone else's (and therefore not based on my criteria).
The key to killling spam is to kill the economics - and to do that, we must have integrated filtering based on each user's preferences, done as a natural activity over time, using all the anti-spam weapons in our arsenal. While I agree that bandwidth waste is a problem, it is temporary, bandwidth is cheap compared to user time, and if everyone starts to filter based on the content and because it is an integrated part of the mail package, we will get rid of this thing.
So Kudos to Mozilla, and I sure hope that the next rel of Netscape (7.0 is built on Mozilla 1.1) will make spam filtering integral and natural. If everyone filters, the economic rationale for spam disappears. So make filtering easy....
Actually, www.mailwasher.net is pretty effective, certainly has solved the problem for me. Also generates bogus bounce messages which are returned to the spammer. And it will remember those forged headers and not try to bounce more than once. While I am waiting for a "statistical" solution, I am more than happy to use Mailwasher.
As for group work, there are ways to get around the "free rider" problem. I have experimented with peer review: Each student in the group gets 100 points per other member, and have to distribute those points among the other members, but cannot let two students have the same number of points. Works well when I spring it on the students after the fact (it is a fairly new method) but could be tricky if the students get wise and start gaming the system. Peer review is uncomfortable for the students, but they are much harder graders than any teacher I know...