Strategic my ass

Ah, there's the story originally reported by the NY Times Wednesday that the thesis that Senator John Walsh (D-Mont.) submitted to the Army War College in 2007 to earn his Master of Strategic Studies degree was not, uh, entirely original thought. In fact, about a third of the 14-page paper was plagiarized—entire passages from other sources used without source citation, either unchanged or altered by the odd word here and there.

Oh—and this includes all six of the recommendations Walsh put forth as his very own conclusions at the end of the paper.

So far, in the first couple of days since the Times story, Walsh and his spinpersons have told reporters that filling his master’s thesis (which has helped both his military and political career) with other people's uncredited work was:

"A mistake", and “completely unintentional.”

Not actual plagiarism, although no alternative designation has been put forward.

And if it turns out that it was plagiarism (which I would ordinarily refer to as intellectual theft, except I'm not sure of Walsh's claim to intellect), it was probably the result of PTSD. (What he said was, “I don’t want to blame my mistake on PTSD, but I do want to say it may have been a factor.”)

Oh—also, he was on medication at the time and dealing with the suicide of a friend. There may be more alternative theories coming; look out for the Cigarette-Smoking Man and Twinkies.

(Walsh is an Iraq war veteran, and he was awarded the Bronze Star. He was not actually elected to office by the people of Montana; he was appointed to serve out the term of Max Baucus.)

Well, I have a couple of thoughts about all this. (Oh—like this surprises you?)

1) It’s unclear to me how stealing someone else’s work—in fact, a bunch of someone else’s work—can be “unintentional”. In the Internet age, when you’re not recording your research and your hypotheses on 3x5 notecards before organizing them all into ideas in your paper, highlighting whole sections of online documents, copying and pasting them into your “thesis” is pretty intentional. Especially if the copy-and-paste also includes all the conclusions/recommendations you’re presenting as your own original thought.

2) The “PTSD made me do it” defense seems equally lame. Especially when you’re toggling back and forth between that and trying to pretend it never happened, or if it did it was unintentional. Or the meds—yeah, it was the meds.

3) I’m interested in any academic institution that awards any kind of master’s degree where the thesis requirement can be met in 14 pages. Of course, I guess you don’t run to as many pages when you don’t have any footnotes and your bibliography is three sources. And you’re all tired out from that copy-and-paste drudgery.

4) Not sure I want someone making strategic policy decisions who got there by virtue of a thesis basically stolen from the heads of people who actually did some cogitation on the matter. Not that I know what "Strategic Studies" are, exactly; but strategic thinking involves, you know, thought processes. And the only arena in which I'm seeing Walsh exercise his little grey cells is in obfuscating, denial and excuse-making.

5) It’s curious that the Army War College, which awarded Walsh his degree, didn’t catch the plagiarism. When I was at William & Mary, I took a lecture class from the visiting Big Gun from Rutgers. He advised the undergraduates not to consider plagiarizing, because “if it’s any good, I’ll recognize the source; if it’s not any good you’re not doing yourself any favors.” I hate to keep banging on about this, but this was in the last century. There have been software applications available to professors for at least a decade to screen student papers for passages lifted directly from sources. It’s not that hard to check this stuff out if you’re to any degree conscientious about academic standards. Could they not afford the software? Isn’t there a government discount?

6) If they’re not that rigorous about vetting the provenance of their students’ research, do the degrees issued by the War College come in or affixed to the box of Cracker Jacks?

7) Actually, I'm a little worried about who else might have been awarded degrees from the War College, and then been promoted on the basis of them. And are, you know, now in positions where they can operate dangerous equipment and order men and women into harm's way. Euw.

8) Again, back in the last century, my undergraduate school (one of the Claremont Colleges) had a student honor code, which included upholding honesty and integrity both academically and personally. I’d have thought that a military institution would have some version of that kind of thing that students must acknowledge and adhere to. Was everyone on Walsh’s committee also suffering from PTSD or on medications during his stint at the War College?

Having said all this, I do need to note that a moral compass fixed on cheating, stealing, lying and self-aggrandizement is practically a prerequisite for election to public office these days. So Walsh is probably being high-fived by most of the denizens of the Capitol.

For the birds, Part 2

Okay, do you see what I mean about needing Nyjer seed in 20-lb chunks?

Here’s my bird feeder as of 1600 Tuesday:

And here it was at 1445 yesterday:

Whoever coined the phrase “s/he eats like a bird” obviously never maintained a bird feeder for finches.

For the birds

Well, I thought this was interesting. The finches, goldfinches and juncos go through the seed in my feeder on the balcony so fast that I decided to order a 20-lb bag from Amazon.

  

Not so much because it’s cheaper than at PetsMart, but because this way the UPS guy schlepps it up to the third floor walk-up, not me.

(You would not believe how rapacious those little birds are. I stopped filling the feeder to the top because that would only result in 20 of them seething all over the exterior, pushing each other off and throwing seeds onto the ground. Even so, I have to replenish it once a day.)

Well, I got an order confirmation PDQ, and then a couple of hours later, confirmation that the order had shipped. Fine.

What was interesting to me was that the order confirmation gave me a guaranteed delivery date:

By shipping confirmation time, however, it had changed to expected delivery date:

Um.

To protect and serve

I came across this sight driving along Central Expressway (or, as my sat-nav insists on calling it, “Central Ex-pwee”) in Mountain View.

(Oh, hold your horses—I was parked at the stoplight and my camera was right there.)

I have to say that I spent some time wondering how a cop car, with a cop driving it, could be “Out of Service”. No doughnut shops anywhere near there. Not even a Starbucks (which I know you’ll hardly credit, but it’s true).

I also wondered what would happen if that cop came across any situation that required police response—traffic accident, 7-Eleven robbery in progress, alien landing? Would he call 911?

STOP PRESS: The Mountain View PD tweeted me that this is their fleet attendant (not a sworn officer), who shuttles vehicles headed to and from maintenance. So I'm guessing that the 911 call would be the appropriate action for alien-sightings. 

I'll stand down, now.

Gratitude Monday: Friends with fireworks

For Gratitude Monday today, I’m grateful for friends who support me when I get thrown crap like that system-generated email from the company looking for employees with empathy.

In particular, for the friend who sent me incredibly beautiful Chinese fireworks:

She also assured me that any company that could send such an email in the circumstances is unlikely to provide a salubrious work environment. (Not her words, exactly, but essentially the drift.)

It was an unexpected act of consolation from someone I basically know virtually, and it made a really nice change from people who said, “Well—at least [company] told you… That’s something.”

So I’m sharing it with you. At the least, if you’re feeling fine it will expand on that; at the most, if you’re down it’ll lift your spirits.

Light in the dark night

Seventy years ago today, officers of the Wehrmacht attempted to seize the German government from the Nazis by assassinating Hitler. They did not succeed, and the reprisals against them, their families and anyone who might have been connected with them redefined the concept of savagery.

There were 7000 arrests and nearly 5000 executions, although of course (as with the Night of the Long Knives, which had been carried out ten years earlier) there were a lot of unrelated scores being settled in all the bloodletting.

Nonetheless, the attempt was an extraordinary act of courage and honor, all the more remarkable when you consider that every member of the Wehrmacht swore an oath of personal loyalty to Adolf Hitler—not to the German government (or, as US armed forces do, to uphold the Constitution). And officers, in particular, took things like oaths seriously. To decide that there was a higher loyalty than that of their professional, soldierly oath was huge.

Moreover, although the July Conspiracy, as it’s come to be known, is most often referred to as an assassination attempt, that was only part of the plan. Killing Hitler—or even killing him and his top henchmen, Himmler and Goering—without replacing the Nazis with another government would have done nothing more than set off a power struggle and result in more lunatics running the asylum. Which would make no difference in dealing with their external enemies.

No, Claus von Stauffenberg, Henning von Tresckow, Friedrich Olbricht, Ludwig Beck and the rest wanted to find a way to seize control of Germany to negotiate some kind of peace (or at least an agreement) with the Western Allies, which would prevent the total destruction of the country, and perhaps enable a continued fight against the Soviet Union. They basically wanted to find a way to get around the Allies’ stated policy of accepting nothing less than unconditional surrender from Germany.

It was much more ambitious and complicated than a simple assassination—even one of a figure like Hitler, and I wonder whether there was any realistic possibility of achieving the ultimate objective (seizing military and political control). But perhaps what matters is not so much that they succeeded as that they tried. Someone—a small group of principled men and women—tried to turn their country away from the path of nihilism.

As I said, their failure had serious consequences not only for them and their own loved ones, but for the Nazis’ prosecution of the war. It’s hard to imagine them prosecuting a more vicious war than they had in the East, but it was as though any thought of restraint or accountability had been blown up with the Wolf’s Lair in Rastenburg.

It took a long time for the Germans to acknowledge that the Walküre conspirators were one of the good things of 1933-45. For years they were considered the worst sort of traitors, soldiers—officers—who broke their sacred oaths and betrayed Germany.

It took a generation for Germans people to accept some responsibility for the starting and prosecution of the Second World War. Even with their nation in ruins and evidence of atrocities clear in front of them, they were sorry not that they’d started the war, but that it had had a bad outcome for them. They viewed Stauffenberg and the others s having contributed to that bad outcome.

However, slowly they began to acknowledge that maybe the July Conspirators upheld values higher than those of mindless order-following and national arrogance, and that they were in fact exemplars of the notion that not all Germans were active or even passive Nazis.

The Bendlerblock building—a center of German military planning from the time of the Second Reich—was from which the Walküre group had hoped to run the transition from the Nazi government to their own. Instead, late on the 20^th, forces loyal to Hitler stormed the building and arrested the conspirators. Stauffenberg and a couple others were taken out to the courtyard and executed in the early hours of 21 July.

It is now the home of the German Resistance Memorial Centre. And this is how it is represented in the courtyard:

I think that, considering the kinds of militarized madness we’ve been seeing in our world just in the past week, it’s good to remember that even in the worst situations, there are some people who step up to the plate (however imperfectly) and proclaim, “Hey—let’s try to stop this.”

International affairs

I don’t often devote an entire post to a joke. Although I suppose it could be said that many of my posts are jokes…

However, this came from my friend Joyce, Wisconsinite born and bred, so it's got, like, a pedigree.

* * * *

Sven, a furniture dealer from Wisconsin, decided to expand the line of furniture in his store, so he decided to go to Paris to see what he could find. 
           

After arriving in Paris, he visited with some manufacturers and selected a line that he thought would sell well back home. To celebrate the new acquisition, he decided to visit a small bistro and have a glass of wine.

As he sat enjoying his wine, he noticed that the small place was  quite crowded, and that the other chair at his table was the only vacant seat in the house.

Before long, a very beautiful young Parisian girl came to his table, asked him something in French (which Sven could not understand), so he motioned to the vacant chair and invited her to sit down.

He tried to speak to her in English, but she did not speak his language. After a couple of minutes of trying to communicate with her, he took a napkin and drew a picture of a wine glass and showed it to her. She nodded, so he ordered a glass of wine for her.

After sitting together at the table for a while, he took another napkin, and drew a picture of a plate with food on it, and she nodded. They left the bistro and found a quiet cafe that featured a small group playing romantic music.

They ordered dinner, after which he took another napkin and drew a picture of a couple dancing. She nodded, and they got up to dance. They danced until the cafe was about to close and the band was packing up.

Back at their table, the young lady took a napkin and drew a picture of a four-poster bed. To this day, Sven has no idea how she figured out he was in the furniture business.

* * * *

I’m sure it’s indicative of some defect in my mental processes, but I swear I did not see that ending coming. I did not. So there I was, projectile-snorting latte onto my keyboard at the Korean café, when I got to it.

Fortunately, they’re quite used to me doing stuff like that.

More than a lady who lunches

Ah, another acting powerhouse has crossed the bar: Elaine Stritch died today, aged 89.

If you’ve never seen her on stage or screen, well, damn, I’m sorry for you. She had the most commanding presence. I know her best from her Emmy-winning stint on Law & Order, where she played Lainie Stieglitz, one of the classiest lawyers ever—bigger cojones than most men, but an upright integrity, which you don’t often find in any calling, much less the legal one.

Stritch completely carried that off. She gave you the impression that you’d like to sit down for a couple of rounds of martinis with Stieglitz, but that you’d want to keep your wits about you, because she was entirely capable of leaving you in the dust at any juncture of the conversation.

I’ve also seen snippets of her stage performances, including her one woman show, Elaine Stritch Live at Liberty, a few years ago. I’m telling you, it was envy-inducing to see how amazing that woman, in her 80s, looked in a man’s oversized shirt and a pair of black nylons. And you could have slapped up the Red Army’s chorus on the stage behind her, and no one in the audience would have noticed anything except Stritch. Like I said, commanding presence.

And, of course, that voice. You never forget that voice.

Primarily happy on stage, she was very active in the musical scene, and closely associated with Stephen Sondheim’s work. As I understand it, she completely nailed “The Ladies Who Lunch” in Company. I’m not sure there’s anyone else out there who could even approach the force of her delivery.

She had quite a few knocks in her life, and yet faced up to filming a very honest biographical documentary earlier this year, Elaine Stritch: Just Shoot Me. Following its release she had a fascinating interview with NPR’s Scott Simon, in which she faces such topics as her diabetes, her drinking, the death of her husband, and getting old. Listen to it, especially if you can’t see the docu just yet.

It’s not actually easy to hear, because she’s honest about everything, including being short-tempered. But it’s all class. Just like she was.

Location, location, location

Whoa—this is not something you see very often here in the Valley they call Silicon:

By which I’m referring to the “price reduced” addendum to the For Sale sign. Because residential property prices are pretty much unidirectional, and headed into the stratosphere.

So I knew when I saw the dreaded "price reduced" addition a week after the original sign was put up that this place must have serious, deeply serious problems. Because it went from $987,000 to $799,000.

Here’s the original flyer:

(The only thing that changed in the replacement was the price.)

This hovel was built in 1949, and from the looks of the front yard, nothing has been done to update it since then. I’m telling you, they haven’t even watered the weeds.

And here are a few selected photos from their listing on Redfin. The kitchen:

The bathroom:

The other bathroom:

Well, the clue was “Ideal Home for Remodeling”. That’s the marketing hype. A friend of mine tells me the internal real estate term for these sorts of properties is “scrapers”, because you’re just going to scrape it off the lot and start over.

The new, $200,000-lower price must have done it, because a few days later, here was the sign:

See, the thing is—this property is about half a mile from the new Apple spaceship headquarters. You could sell a 1970s rabbit hutch with nothing but fecal droppings in the shag carpeting for décor in that neighborhood for $595,000.

(I can't find any data on the last purchase price; if it's changed hands since 1949 it was so long ago that the MLS system isn't picking up on it. But there's another house on my walking route, which is right across the street from the Apple complex. It last sold in 1998 for $370,000. It's listed now for $1,088,000.)

It’ll be interesting to see how quickly the house disappears and construction starts on the McMansion.

Spitting into the wind

A few weeks ago I went through several rounds of interviews for a product manager position with a company in the online health insurance space. The vertical wouldn’t have been my first choice in opportunities, but as it happens the challenge was to devise the best ways (over multiple web domains) to inform a vast audience of users about particular healthcare choices.

And by “vast audience”, I mean pretty much every American sooner or later in their life. So every possible demographic, literacy level, education background and blah, blah, blah.

It was a very interesting challenge, and I would have done a superb job at it. (And I do not very often make sweeping statements like that. As in, I so seldom make sweeping statements about my capabilities as to statistically constitute never.)

I say would have because—after a week and a half of complete silence despite pinging the hiring manager, I finally got a system-generated no-thanks email. Not from any one of the three persons in HR and recruiting with whom I had been in contact, but from the “recruiting team”, via a third-party applicant tracking system (ATS). I particularly get a kick out of the use of the first person singular pronoun, combined with the absence of any individual name in the signature block.

What’s particularly interesting about this organization's hands-off approach to communication is that in my first interview, I asked the person who manages the hiring manager what they’re really looking for in the product manager they hire for this position (aside from technical competency). “Empathy,” he said. “More than anything, we need someone with empathy.”

And that’s all I have to say about that.