Pretty much all federal IG’s assembled chimed in to protest how agencies have been denying access to materials IG’s request. Constant vigilance seems a necessary approach to preserving IG’s investigatory powers.
Author Archives: Dr. O
Snake-bit by Software–DOA (706)
The headline award goes to the blog post linked here: How to lose 172K a second for 45 minutes. That’s nearly a half billion dollars of venom. The company was DOA in under an hour. Cause of death: long dormant programming code deep within the high-speed electronic trading system rose up and sunk its fangs into the firm’s jugular. How? In just one of eight servers, a systems upgrade produced a coding glitch that inadvertently activated the long-forgotten trading-bot, whose corresponding cross-checks and controls no longer existed. So, on the day of it’s debut, 12% of the system started executing trades without being restrained by how many securities the firm actually had to trade or could buy. Then staff, trying to isolate the problem, turned off other servers, which routed more and more electronic trade orders to the renegade server operating without limits. A “normal” accident, as unstoppable as it was statistically predictable, in the ever more complex and super-velocity world of electronic trading.
Privatized Lockups Duck Costly Cases
This story is mostly about racial disparity but a subtext is about private operators of contracted out prisons finding ways to leave more costly prisoners in the public system. This phenomenon also arises in charter schools, many of which manage to have a “special education” population far below the public schools from which they are drawing students. Competitive models for public services are one thing, but comparing public vs. contractor performance is a dishonest exercise if the game is rigged so that the privateers skim the cream.
Seattle FBI chief abruptly retires (706)
Seattle FBI chief abruptly retires | Local News | The Seattle Times.
Not sure where this story is headed but Ms. Laughlin seemed to have a tumultuous reign at the Seattle office. A fuller story will likely emergeand students may want to compare some of Ms. Laughlin’s experiences to John O’Neill’s–the “Man Who Knew”–whose story on Frontline we all will be viewing for the “Structure” class. Note also, as one 706 student reminded us in class a few weeks ago, the strong egos apparently at play in both cases.
Clear Degree Pathways–Outrage!
What Non-Profit Universities Can Learn from the For-Profits | Inside Higher Ed. Lessons like clearer paths to degrees, career-linked degrees and scaling up courses with technology, none of which engenders much enthusiasm among the professorate holding sway at most universities. Where I teach, City University of New York, a “Pathways” proposal (see clearer paths to degrees above) was recently scaled back after years of faculty rage, protests and a lawsuit or two.
Chaos Good! (706)
Readers: Some posts will now have (706) attached. (706) posts may highlight “healthy” organizational behaviors/arrangements, as opposed to the “ER admits” dominating this site. This story, on managing “organized chaos,” is about healthy organizational living. FYI: 706 is the number of a graduate course I teach, which, not surprisingly, is called Bureaupathology. Dr. O.
Bratton Watch–NYPD
A major move by Bratton in his first month back at the helm of the NYPD: Rookie cops will no longer be assigned to anti-crime operations targeting high crime neighborhoods, because, Bratton says, precinct assignments provide a more-rounded post-Police Academy experience. Here’s what else the new policy gets at–an entrenched system where vets land in softer assignments because newbies get assigned to the tough ones (shades of urban public schools); and high-intensity enforcement in poor and minority neighborhoods spearheaded by mostly middle-class rookies–both black and white–who, for the most part, are strangers in a strange land. Talk about a policy that deals with critical variables.
Arrogant FBI
The FBI takes a few star turns in my book Why Law Enforcement Organizations Fail. The reasons for that starring role repeat in this story centered on the FBI’s fatal shooting of an individual being questioned in regard to his relationship with the Boston Marathon bombing suspects.
Cooking the City’s Books
If this story was only about Detroit, it wouldn’t be so scary. But imagining that bankruptcy-level financial projections are fixable is almost irresistible to all involved–legislators who don’t want to deliver hard news to supporters, executives who don’t want to be remembered as the captain of the municipal (or state) Titanic, budget and revenue officials who don’t want to bring bad news to their elected bosses. To free-market tea partiers who cluck disapprovingly over governmental sleight of hand, let me say this–Enron, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase.
CSI Black Eye
Yes, there has been a rash of CSI/forensic lab scandals over the past few years, as this NPR story details. Criminal justice system leaders face a structural challenge in overseeing labs whose science is difficult, if not impossible, for them to fathom. And peer accreditation faces an equal challenge if, as this story indicates, reviewers are presented with false “complying” paperwork and empty assertions of the “procedural purity” of the lab’s personnel and practices. I think the piece is on the money in placing accountability with individual labs, whose leaders control the ethical culture of their operations. Though the story features a miscreant lab chemist, local accountability would be better served if her boss’s photos, captioned with “resignation,” highlighted the piece.