The Corporation

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LinkTV has been running a documentary called The Corporation. I find it rather thought provoking and would recommend it to others.

The quote that sticks with me is from a business ethics seminar I took. Our prof said “sometimes it is dumb to be too smart” in business.  Witness the pesent banking disaster.  Some of our B-school geniuses have devised instruments of finance that are so convoluted and complex that the mechanism and magnitude of failure was not widely appreciated.

What has always puzzled me is that conservatives who profess open scorn and distrust of big government are somehow able to accept the privatized power of big business.  Big government extracts the wealth of our labor and disperses it in ways that are not economically efficient. But at least there are constitutional means of remedy.  If you do not like the way a business operates, you are free to quit buying their widgets.

Big business extracts wealth from labor and resources and disperses it to shareholders.  Government pays for national infrastructure to support business activity and business practices tax avoidance. Government has gotten too big and business has learned to game the tax system.  Taxpayers are left to subsidize both big government and corporate welfare.  The system is wildly out of balance.

The essence of power is in the ability to allocate resources. Governments and businesses are centralized organizations that have large resources to allocate. Consumers are dispersed and disorganized units that have microscopic resources to allocate.  The consumers biggest leverage is the ability to make politicians fearful with respect to their re-election prospects.

Russian Oil Production in Apparent Decline

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According to an article by Greg Walters at Bloomberg.com, crude oil output in Russia is expected to decrease for the first time in 10 years.

“Two years ago, we said the growth rate was falling, and we said this was bad for Russia, remember?” Trutnev said in televised remarks after a government meeting in Moscow today. “Now we’re saying the production rate is falling this year. This is not a bogeyman, unfortunately, this is real,” Trutnev said, without giving a specific forecast.

The petroleum problem in Russia seems to stem from the lack of investment in exploration in combination with exorbitant taxes on the industry.

Gail the Actuary has an interesting post on the post-peak-oil economy. Gail is a contributor to The Oil Drum Discussions.  It’s all kind of gloomy.  Time for a nice glass of Bordeaux.

NIH Manditory Open Access

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According to C&EN, the NIH has issued a rule that publications resulting from NIH funded research be submitted to PubMed Central for posting.  Naturally, organizations with copyright interest in published research is  less than enthused by this ruling.

What has happened over the last century is that a sizeable publishing industry has grown up around the publication of periodicals specializing in scientific research.  In exchange for release of copyrights, authors get free or nominally priced access to publishing and distribution of their work. For their part, publishers tap into a continuous stream of refreshed content that is virtually free of charge. 

Counterbalancing the low cost of content are the sad facts of subscriptions.  Many (most) journals suffer from low distribution numbers, so the zero cost of content helps to keep overhead down, but publishing and distribution costs cannot benefit from the economy of scale.

The special interests seem to be sitting in watchful waiting, but they have raised the issue of copyright. Their concern is that they are being forced to distribute their property by the strong arm of NIH without the chance for reimbursement.  This could resolve to a property rights battle and as such, I can’t imagine that the NIH would prevail in the courts.

Gaussling’s 7th Epistle to the Bohemians.

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In private moments, when I’m not thinking about some chemistry-related train of thought, I often wander to the intellectual bog of religion.  Especially on Sunday, when friends and family are sitting in church and I’m elsewhere.

I try not to write about it too often. It takes a lot of psychic energy to defend an unpopular point of view in public.  I awaken every day with just so many kcals of enthusiasm and am increasingly unwilling to spend it extravagantly in arguments about religion.

One of the surefire ways to rile people into a vein-bursting, mouth-foaming frenzy in this country is to criticize a particular religion or the religious enterprise in general. This sensitivity relates to the nature of the concept of Sacred.  There are several variations on the definition of the word sacred, but the concept in common usage seems to include “to set apart for veneration” or “worthy of respect”.  A corollary is that sacred concepts are to be treated devotionally and are not to be subjected to scrutiny.

Sacred or not, we are starting to see some open analysis of Christian doctrine and are beginning to ask reasonable questions as to the accuracy or validity of the doctrine guiding the religious right. Consider the following analysis from Terri Murray posted at the Yurica Report-

If liberals are more sympathetic to secular humanism than to Christian doctrine it is because Christian Scripture is ambivalent in its view of human nature, and second, because Christian doctrine has over-emphasized Paul’s pessimistic construction of human nature. The latter makes nonsense of moral responsibility, because it posits a deterministic model of human nature that is inconsistent with human experience, moral exhortation and human reason. Jesus’ system of morality, which most liberals greatly admire, conflicts with the misanthropy expressed in Pauline doctrine. Jesus’ ethical teachings are more consistent with the values of enlightenment humanism than with biblical theocracy, which Jesus spent his rabbinical career assailing.

‘Christianity’ is an abstract concept badly in need of analysis and definition. The authoritarian Christian right have assumed, with little argument, that Pauline doctrine is more essential to ‘Christianity’ than the teachings and traditions about Jesus, where they conflict. And conflict they do.

To outline how and where Pauline doctrine is incompatible with the “American worldview” it is important to clarify my terms first. For the purposes of this essay a ‘Christian worldview’ is defined as the Pauline doctrine of salvation, according to which all of humankind are rendered ‘sinners’ by virtue of the past transgressions of our progenitors Adam and Eve, or by virtue of an intrinsic defect in human nature. This same Pauline doctrine also makes it a matter of Christian orthodoxy that Jesus’ sacrificial death on our behalf atoned for man’s sin and offered each of us redeeming salvation by means of the profession of the Christian faith and obedience to its rules. ‘Christianity’ in this context does not refer to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth but to the Pauline teachings about the significance of his death and resurrection for the salvation of mankind.

As Murray suggests, the strident orthodoxy of the protestant religious right in America is based in large part on a particular slant of interpretation on the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth. But rather than anchoring doctrine to his words and deeds, the American evangelical focus is on the special effects of the supernatural transition to the spirit world- part of what Murray calls the Pauline Doctrine. 

I have always been quite uneasy with many aspects of the Christian doctrine.  While I have been able to extract useful concepts by partitioning the doctrine into a) moral philosophy with historical details, b) crime and punishment, and c) an iron age form of cosmology, I have always been uneasy with the necessity of an anthropomorphic deity.  In other words, does the existence of a supernatural being actually solve the problem of how the universe works? Does God use physics, or did he have a backstage pass to do as he pleased?

What makes the universe a workable place is the fact that not everything is possible. There are boundary conditions. Objects and events in the universe exist within constraints. Not everything can happen.  God must have known this and in fact, had to have been the installer of this attribute. As Einstein would have asked, did he have any choice in the the way the universe was constructed?

In the Christian tradition, God lets loose with an occasional miracle. We know by inspection that God uses physics in the everyday conduct of things, but when “miracles” happen, are they quantifiable? Is it possible to have one miracle be twice as big as another? If you divide the number of miracles by the volume in which they occur, you come up with a miracle density. What is the average miracle density of the universe? Is God restricted by the rule that you can’t divide a number by zero?  Hmmm. Maybe He relies on this fact?

Why do we consent to adherence to an ancient religion that is constructed on iron age notions of social order, justice, and the supernatural when we have a modern understanding of democracy, history, and physics that suggests an altogether different organization to the universe?

Religious adherents will guffaw and correct my comments with an assertion that our human concepts of God are too inadequate to subject the diety to such simple analysis. Well, God holds us to standards relating to faith, love, and sin that are assumed to be within our understanding- our sins certainly get the dieties attention. Our mortal souls hang by a thread, based on our thoughts and actions relating to our knowledge of His divine plan. Why would the rest of it be so incomprehensible? Why the disconnect?

Today, the blowtorch of religious conservatism on the public stage has abated temorarily while adherents re-group. No doubt, they will be organized for the upcoming general election in the fall of 2008. I think this time around they need to be questioned a little more closely as to the basis of their doctrines.

Sukhoi Be 103

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Check out the new amphibian from Sukhoi- the Be 103.  This twin engine airplane has a useful load of 385 kg. What caught my eye was the low position of the wing. It is said to be a midwing design, but from the way it sits in the water, the wing tips look quite close to the surface of the water, even as the plane rolls out of the water in the photo.

If a wing tip digs into the water on takeoff or landing, the airplane could cartwheel to a disastrous ending. On landing, a gust or floating object could cause a wingtip to drop.  Seems like a poor design choice.

Descriptive Inorganic Chemistry

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Now that I am doing a fair amount of inorganic synthesis and preparation of metal coordination complexes, I look back to my undergraduate education and wish that it had been somewhat different.

In my undergrad time in the early 80’s, inorganic texts were heavy in theoretical concepts- molecular spectroscopy, ligand field theory, and group theory. It made for a tidy textbook package and coursework was constructed around it.  I cannot speak for other institutions, but in my experience the inorganic curriculum is (was) somewhat leaner in course options than is organic or biochemistry. In particular, the inorganic lab experience was somewhat less endowed with resources than the more popular biochemistry lab.

In graduate school, our graduate level inorganic coursework was even more theoretical than was the undergrad coursework. Obviously, there is a good argument for this and I am not actually complaining about it. But I will say that, in my experience, descriptive inorganic chemistry in the lecture section was sacrificed by the professors apparent preference for the elegance and tidiness of theoretical inorganic chemistry.

To his credit, my undergrad inorganic professor did try to give us the best lab experience possible. We had a vacuum line and did have the chance to use it. We did a prepn of AlI3 a tube furnace. We prepared Cu2(OAc)4 and a few other complexes.  He was also a glass blower  and did his best to teach us a bit about glass.

But in the end, the department was much more highly invested in organic and biochemistry. I was enchanted by synthetic organic chemistry and continued down that track.

With the benefit of hindsight, I now see that the curriculum that I was channeled through was too lean with respect to the rest of the periodic table.  Decriptive and  preparative inorganic chemistry was wedged in only by virtue of the strength of the professors interests and personality. Theoretical inorganic chemistry does not require expensive laboratory facilities.

So, I have come out to speak in favor of more descriptive inorganic chemistry in the curriculum.  More reaction chemistry. More preparation of materials in the lab. More characterization of or reaction products. More experience with setting up reactions and isolations.  More experience with hazardous materials!!

The notion that laboratory experiences for chemistry majors must be constrained by the need for Green consideration is nonsense.

I believe that microscale equipment for chemistry majors should be banned. Students should minimally prepare a few grams of materials so that they can be handled for subsequent purification and characterization. Forcing inexperienced students to prepare a spatula tip of product is unfair and needlessly harsh.

The idea that constraining a junior or senior to preparing less than 100 mg of product in a reaction is somehow green and worthy of merit is absolutely ridiculous. This is chemistry lab, not church camp.  The savings in environmental insult is minimal. There are much bigger fish to fry than this anyway. 

I suspect that equipment expenses and waste costs for university chemistry departments are drivers in what is chosen for the lab experience. If indeed efforts are being thrown on better instrumental experiences rather than better preparatory experiences, then I would say that we are missing the point. Given the creeping featurism in computer controlled instrumentation, I would suggest that monies be spent on better synthetic experiences than on the latest hyphenated instrument. 

Perhaps someone could comment on this.

New Cessna 162

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According to news sources, Cessna is preparing to produce a new primary training aircraft- the Cessna 162 Skycatcher.  The target price of this “affordable” light aircraft is US$111,500 per copy.  Cruise speed is reportedly 118 kts with a range of 470 nautical miles behind a 100 hp Continental O-200 engine. The prototype recently completed its maiden flight.  Production is schedule for later this spring.  

I am really glad to see this. The existing Cessna trainer fleet is getting quite old. While the fleet of Experimental category aircraft has grown tremendously, it is difficult for a flight school to offer training in a home built airplane.  

There is a Skunk in the Woods

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So what is Karl Rove up to during this run up to the ’08 election? I was reading an article on fascism in America and my minds eye naturally turned to this character. I hear he is writing a column for Newsweek.  But what else is he doing? What is he up to?  Hmmm.  

The “Architect” should be hounded mercilessly by reporters for pictures and interviews a` la Britney Spears. This nocturnal creature should be in plain view during election season.

Fork in the Road

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Storms here in the Colorado Territory.  A spring upslope storm guides moisture up the rising terrain and drops frozen water on the high plains. Unlike the Eskimos, we have reduced it to a single word- snow.

I’ve spent much time lately with the attorney crafting business agreements. It is a delicate art. Sins of commission or omission can come back to clobber you.  Having been involved in a few of these things, I am beginning to see the patterns and whorls of terms and conditions, vision and revision, twisting and turning to morph, vanish, and crystallize over time. Hammering out a business agreement is a learning experience for all involved.

Over the course of negotiation, both parties learn about each other. They learn the strengths and weaknesses of the respective organizational structures and of the individuals involved.  Expectations that began as firm requirements slowly undergo plastic deformation into other shapes.

There are two main fears for most negotiators. Making a blunder of some sort and leaving money on the table.  Nobody wants to immortalize bad judgement or inattentiveness in an iron-clad document that will be in force for years. And notbody wants to aim too low in their expectations of performance or price.  Parties speak piously of win/win, but secretly they want WIN/win.

Buyers need a bargain trophy to parade before their bosses at the next performance review. Sellers want to appear shrewd in front of their bosses. Participants in a negotiation need many things and the appearance of sound, shrewd judgement is not the least of the needs.

Most large companies have whole departments that manage contracts and license agreements. They have specialists on staff to manage business agreements- maybe even a few lawyers. Chances are, if you are a chemist/engineer who has strayed from the lab and find yourself in business development or sales, you may be working on supply agreements, tech transfer agreements, tolling contracts, secrecy agreements, etc., already.

At some point in the career of a chemist/engineer, a choice will be given as to the kind of upward mobility opportunities one may take. Some, like myself, chose the path of business. A chemist may be assigned to a procurement job where chemistry skills are applied to buying chemicals for your organization.  Others may move into sales and represent a territory or become one of the Knights Templar of commerce- a business development manager.

Laboratory work is fun and gratifying. But so are many other activities. The operation of any scientific endeavor is complex. Universities and industry alike require that at least some of its soldiers move into administration so they can continue to operate.

Passport Control

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According to the AP, emloyees of Stanley, Inc., have beed fired for reportedly viewing the passport records of Sen. Obama.  The New York Times reports that the passport files of Senators Obama, Clinton, and McCain have been accessed inappropriately. Whether they revealed more than name, place and date of birth, and social security number remains to be seen.

No doubt this will result in a flood of rule making and billable hours for consultants. It seems to me that there is an alternative to devising higher security for government records.  If the government collected a lower volume of sensitive information, then there is less information that can be inappropriately viewed. 

The gov’t collects a good deal of information from people who fill out forms for some service or consideration. The question is, just how many different data fields are really necessary for a given service? In other words, how much excess information is being collected to satisfy the just-in-case doubts suffered by the gov’t form designer?

Passport information may be a bad example on which to raise this question owing to the gravity of passport issuance.  But the larger questions still exists- Just how much information about citizens is truly necessary to run the government?  Are there any checks and balances here?