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C) WNYC/On the Media: Army of Three [Transcription et AUDIO d'un entretien radio sur un éditeur de musique raciste "white power" et leurs techniques de promo, dont la distribution gratuite de CD à la sortie des écoles. SI VOUS N'ARRIVEZ PAS A ECOUTER EN LIGNE, ME L'INDIQUER POUR QUE JE VOUS ENVOIE UN FICHIER mp3.]
http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/transcripts_120304_hate.html

All You Need Is Hate
December 3, 2004

BROOKE GLADSTONE: This fall, Panzerfaust Records embarked on a venture called Project Schoolyard. It's basically a distribution effort for hate music. Based in St. Paul, Minnesota, Panzerfaust is, according to Newsweek magazine, "one of the top 'white power' record labels in the country." Through methods as simple as direct mail and handing out CDs to kids filing off the school bus, Project Schoolyard aims to hand out 100,000 CDs to kids who may not even realize what they're being handed.

BOB GARFIELD: Or what they are listening to, once they pop it in. The CD, called Sampler Volume 1, purposely contains some of the more tame material that the label offers. This way the kids will be drawn in by the guitar licks and the beat without necessarily hearing what the lyrics are actually saying. The goal? Well, the website says, quote, "We don't just entertain racist kids. We make them." Alana Stern from the Anti-Defamation League says:

ALANA STERN: This is the first step in trying to attract young people, and then obviously when they take, when kids take -- if kids take the bait - it'll get deeper and deeper and more hardcore. This is a recruitment tool, but a very well-organized recruitment tool.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: According to the Panzerfaust website, Project Schoolyard originated in Germany, where it met with an all out effort by government officials to stop it dead. According to the website, police contacted every single school in Germany, warning them to look out for volunteers passing out the CDs. In the end, Project Schoolyard Germany was basically a failure. But then it hopped the pond, and here its freedom of expression is protected by the First Amendment.

BOB GARFIELD: Minnesota Public Radio reporter Jeff Horwich profiled Panzerfaust Records last spring, before Project Schoolyard hit the heartland this fall.

JEFF HORWICH: White power music doesn't have its own awards show or an aisle in most record stores. But it's out there. Bands like Brutal Attack, White Wash and Rebel Hell. Some songs celebrate white racial pride. Others glorify beating and killing minorities. Some call for a global war among the races. The industry does not publicize sales figures, but the nation's 50 or so white power music labels will sell hundreds of thousands of CDs this year. St. Paul's Panzerfaust Records is one of the biggest of those labels -- the very biggest, according to the company itself. The label is named after a Nazi anti-tank weapon. It arose in 1997 from an active twin cities skinhead music scene centered around one nationally prominent band called Bound for Glory.

BOUND FOR GLORY: [SINGING] TO THE LAND OF THE FREE, TO INSANITY, TO THE HOME OF THE BRAVE, IT'S A [KILLING THAT'S RIGHT]

JEFF HORWICH: As it grew, Panzerfaust literally helped to put Minnesota on the map -- the map of national hate groups put out by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The two men who run Panzerfaust make the Center's list of 40 figures who are the future of what it calls the radical right -- a category that spans neo-Nazis, Klansmen and Confederate pride groups. One of those two men is Byron Calvert, who agreed to meet in a St. Paul park while his [CHILDREN PLAYING BACKGROUND] wife watched their three kids on the playground. Calvert has been in and out of Minnesota since falling in with the skinhead scene here 16 years ago. Last year, he left Panzerfaust's major competitor, Resistance Records. Calvert has a history as vivid as the tattoos and scars over his massive upper body. But that image belies what even his enemies say is a genuine talent for business.

BYRON CALVERT: Panzerfaust is kind of known more as a skinhead label as far as its run by skinheads, and it runs from country to folk to rock & roll to just traditional British working class type music. We've got everything from the really hardcore, blatantly, openly racist white power type of music. You've got a lot of stuff that's more subtle.

ROCK

BAND: [SINGING] STAND ONE STAND ALL STAND UP STAND PROUD AND RAISE THE WHITE MAN'S FLAG CAUSE I'M FOR YOU, AND YOU'RE FOR ME, AND UNITY IS WHAT WE HAVE...

BYRON CALVERT: These days, the, the people that are moving into our, our circles are so musically talented, and there's literally thousands of pro-white -- what would be considered, loosely, pro-white or white power bands -- on the planet. You know, there's Czech bands, there's Italian bands. You've got Valkyria, and you've got Saga, who are female Swedish folk tunes. [CLIP OF WOMAN SINGING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]

DEVON BURKHARDT: Panzerfaust sells a multitude of different musical genres. That's part of the strategy.

JEFF HORWICH: This is Devon Burkhardt. He runs Turn It Down, an educational and marketing campaign against white power music.

DEVON BURKHARDT: The strategy is to reach in to different youth music subcultures and try to find a base. That's why they have such a wide variety of acts and artists, so they can appeal to a larger group. Listening to this stuff 10, 15 years ago, there has been a pretty marked change, actually, in terms of the quality of production, musicianship and in terms of the variety in which they market it. So, you know, they're definitely learning the craft. Now it can't be easily dismissed as just crappy punk rock. [CLIP OF ROCK MUSIC]

BRYON CALVERT: Panzerfaust always had good customer relations. We turn around, and we send orders out the next day. They've always given away tons of free goodies to kids. If there was ever a question with an order, you know, we'd re-send it and that kind of stuff. But, you know, I like to go to the library and read books on marketing, and stickers and literature. You know, we just jam as much stuff into a package as we can. Those kids, they know who in their school or which one of their relatives or you know, their co-workers or whatever, and they actually, you know, spread the word for us. It is growing. We've got thousands of customers in, in over 40 different countries. But as far as what we do on a daily basis, we don't really get into that. But I will say that it's, over the last couple of years, it's probably doubled.

DEVON BURKHARDT: White power music has not only become the single number one recruiting tool, bringing people into the movement. It's also become a multi-million dollar a year international enterprise. Panzerfaust in particular spends most of their time funneling the money back into the movement to fund concerts and events and literature.

BYRON CALVERT: We're probably the only genre of music that I've heard of that really couldn't give two shi-- couldn't give a damn if somebody came along and wanted to bootleg or, or do free downloads of a million of our songs. It would just save us the time and trouble and hassle, you know? I mean it's going to get the music to more kids.

ROCK

BAND: [SINGING] NEVER BACK DOWN FROM THE REDS AND THE BLACKS, [INDECIPHERABLE] . . .

DEVON BURKHARDT: Many of the folks who helped found Panzerfaust were at one time or continue to be members of the Hammerskin Nation, which is a violent confederation of neo-Nazi skinheads around the country. They have a whole string of murders, assaults and other crimes going back to the 1980s.

BYRON CALVERT: When you hear people say well, by, by gosh --you guys are associated with violence. That's just nuts. I can tell you for a fact that I have never once in my life attacked anybody because of their race. I've never done it. Obviously, we don't suggest to kids that they listen to the CD and go out and do the stuff that's on the CD any more than the people that produced Grand Theft Auto III are sued or held responsible for the, the rate of car thefts in the cities in America. You know, it's entertainment. My kid's 4 years old. He watches Three Stooges, and he hasn't yet poked out his brother's eye. You know what I mean?

BAND: [SINGING] MUSICIANS READY FOR VIOLENCE, LET'S HEAR A LOUD-- [GROUP SHOUTS] TO ALL DOESN'T SUPPORT US, [INDECIPHERABLE] IN THE ROOM THAT WE PRACTICE, THE PIGS WILL PAY [INDECIPHERABLE]. . .

DEVON BURKHARDT: We're talking about lyrics which include things like -- you know, calls for violence against African-Americans, gays and lesbians, Jewish folks and others in explicitly racist and anti-Semitic terms, and it is some of the harshest, most vile language you can imagine.

BAND: [SINGING] WE STAND PROUD!

BYRON CALVERT: The rap industry is a multi-billion dollar industry where they sing expressly about hurting white people, and, and I don't see anybody calling them to question, making them justify, you know, why.

DEVON BURKHARDT: We certainly agree that they've got a free speech right to sing whatever they want to sing. We think it's also therefore important that those of us who are concerned about it, and there are many, use our First resp--Amendment obligation to speak out against it.

ROCK

BAND: [INDECIPHERABLE SINGING]

BYRON CALVERT: Eminem and Kid Rock are not the only working class white kids who ha-- who, whose experience is a story that, that needs to be told, you know, there's a lot of other kids. Our customers here in Minnesota, if you saw 'em, you probably wouldn't know it. I mean it's, it's high school kids. It's girls in the suburb. I probably do over a, a hundred emails a day, and it's just, it's just nuts how many emails I get that are your average 14 or 15 year old kid that came across us by doing a internet search or because he saw a sticker or some friends of his told him about the label. And they go, and they actually read the literature, they read the articles, they listen to the MP3s, they watch the videos, they see what it is we're saying. And it's like they just soak it up. [MUSIC]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Jeff Horwich produced that report for Minnesota Public Radio [MUSIC]

BAND: [SINGING] YOUR EYES ARE CRYSTAL BLUE, LIKE THE GREAT OCEAN. SO IMMENSELY DEEP AND TRUE, THAT YOU COULD ALMOST DROWN. AND YOUR HAIR IS GOLDEN BLONDE, LIKE A RIPENED FIELD OF WHEAT SHINING BRIGHTLY PURE AND TRUE, WHEN THE SUN FALLS ON IT. YOU ARE MY ARYAN CHILD [INDECIPHERABLE] YOU ARE MY ARYAN CHILD...

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2) The Economist: The software-development industry [Il est de plus en plus de difficile de concevoir des logiciels.]

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3423238
The software-development industry: Managing complexity
Nov 25th 2004

Most software projects fail to meet their goals. Can this be fixed by giving developers better tools?

ON SEPTEMBER 14th, the radios in an air-traffic control centre in Palmdale, California shut down, grounding hundreds of flights in southern California and Nevada, and leading to five mid-air encounters between aircraft unable to talk to the ground controllers. Disaster was averted because aircraft managed to communicate with more distant back-up facilities. But why did Palmdale's radios fail? A glitch in the software running the system meant the computers had to be re-booted every 30 days, and somebody forgot to do so. But software running a mission-critical system should not have to be restarted every month. The culprit: poor design.

At least Palmdale's software worked some of the time. The same cannot be said of an $4 billion write-off that America's Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had to swallow when a multi-year effort to overhaul its computer system failed completely in 1997. And such problems are confined neither to governments nor to America. A £456m ($844m) project for Britain's Child Support Agency came in over a year late, and has failed to deliver payments to more than half of eligible applicants.

As software has become more and more pervasive in business and government, and more complicated, the impact of poor software design has been steadily growing. A study earlier this year by the Standish Group, a technology consultancy, estimated that 30% of all software projects are cancelled, nearly half come in over budget, 60% are considered failures by the organisations that initiated them, and nine out of ten come in late. A 2002 study by America's National Institute of Standards (NIST), a government research body, found that software errors cost the American economy $59.5 billion annually. Worldwide, it would be safe to multiply this figure by a factor of two. So who is to blame for such systematic incompetence?

Cost overruns and delays are common in numerous industries—few large infrastructure projects, for instance, are completed either on time or on budget. But it is peculiar to software that billions of dollars can be spent only for nothing useful to result. At a very basic level, it is the fault of the software engineers who are writing the programs, and of their bosses. Even companies that specialise in software development suffer from delays and overruns. An obvious example is Microsoft: its “Longhorn”, the long-heralded successor to its Windows XP operating system, was originally scheduled for launch this year. Longhorn is now not expected before mid-2006, and many of its key features have been put off until 2007.

The prevalence of such failures can be explained by one startling weakness: the tools available to software developers. As software projects have become more and more complicated, it has become impossible for even the most talented team of programmers to keep track of the millions of lines of “code” required. As long ago as the 1980s the industry began to rely heavily on software-development applications—basically, software that helps write software, for example by creating reusable modules that form part of broader processes. The problem is that these have simply not been up to the task. As a report in May by Forrester Research, another consultancy, succinctly put it: “Corporate software development is broken.”

Dale Fuller, the boss of Borland, a software-development company, agrees. He also thinks he can fix the problem of weak tools. So does John Swainson, long in charge of software development at IBM and now bound for the top job at Computer Associates. John Montgomery, who runs such things for Microsoft, does not think the situation is quite so bad. However, he believes Microsoft has what it takes to “commoditise common problems” and so enable average software developers to write above-average programs. And a bevy of smaller companies offers solutions as well. The challenge facing all of these companies is how to create tools that are reliable, yet capable of dealing with millions of lines of code and requirements that can shift, sometimes alarmingly, during a project's lifetime.

The importance of the software-development sector to business as a whole is huge. It is also an increasingly substantial business in itself (see chart). And, as Mr Montgomery points out, although selling software-development applications is profitable for Microsoft, it is also a way of winning new business. Better development tools mean more software is written for Windows, which in turn means more people are likely to use the operating system. Ditto for rivals—one reason IBM is making a big push to support development in various flavours of Unix (including in the “open source” version—ie, software code that is non-proprietary and ostensibly free to anyone—Linux). Unix is a long-established operating system that remains the biggest threat to Windows.

Three main trends are shaping the future of software development and giving hope to those who oversee big software projects. The first is awareness of the need to pay greater attention to the lifecycle of a piece of software, from the initial setting of requirements to ongoing implementation. The second trend is towards automating the testing of software. The NIST study estimates that $22.2 billion (more than one-third) of the cost of software failures could be eliminated simply by improved testing. The third trend is the emergence of open-source code, something embraced even by Microsoft, which is often seen by its many critics as the would-be nemesis of the open-source movement.

The five-step program

There are five steps involved in creating a piece of software: enumerating the requirements; designing the program; actually writing the code; testing it; and then deploying it. Traditionally and naturally enough, this was seen as a sequential process. However, Mr Swainson points out that by the time an organisation gets around to deploying a piece of software, its requirements have often already changed. This, he says, means that an “iterative” model, in which an organisation continually cycles through the five phases, makes more sense than the traditional “waterfall” which puts them in sequence.

Although the consensus among software-development providers is that iterative models are the way forward, a note of caution is in order. A paper by Phillip Laplante and Colin Neill of Penn State University in the February issue of ACM Queue, a scholarly journal, claims that, in practice, the waterfall remains by far the most popular model. It may be that real change is lagging behind developers' marketing literature, or that the iterative approach is more style than substance.

Borland, though, is betting its business on the success of the iterative model. In September it announced “Software Delivery Optimisation”, an approach that seeks to bring together all five bits of the development cycle, along with the people who are constantly making decisions about the project. At the heart of the system is management software called Themis (the Greek goddess of order), planned for release in the first half of 2005. Themis will have a module that turns models automatically into programming code. When code is written, it will instantly update the requirements input by the business developers. Mr Fuller says that this will transcend even the iterative model because the iteration will be so fast as to be seamless. As soon as a portion of the code is completed, it will be tested. As soon as requirements change, programmers will instantly change course.

If that sounds a bit utopian, it is by no means unique. In October, IBM announced its newest package, called “Atlantic”, which is poised to compete with Themis. Atlantic is based both around IBM's own products and those of Rational, a company bought by IBM in December 2002 for $2.1 billion. Not to be left out, Microsoft will release a similar product called Visual Studio 2005 sometime in the first half of next year. The rhetoric of this rush of entrants into the marketplace is almost indistinguishable.

This is partially due to the fact that, although they are competitors, and fierce ones at that, they are also collaborators. Mr Montgomery points out several bits of development software—WS-Routing, for instance (which handles network routing) and WS-Security (you guessed it, security)—that were developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft. Both firms trumpet that their development software is used by an impressive percentage of the world's largest companies, and both support the same basic standards, such as XML (a language for exchanging data on the web) and other web protocols.

Indeed, so-called web services—programs that are meant to run on the web and be accessed by many computers remotely—are the primary battleground for the next generation of software-development applications. The business case rests on the view that almost anything can be done over the web. This is particularly true for the most common, commodity-type applications where most of the available revenues appear to be.

Tick this box

One snag is that, so far, web services have turned out to be much harder to deliver than their champions had hoped. Consider the example of a relatively simple challenge: enrolling 6m Americans living abroad who wanted to use the internet to cast their votes in the recent elections. America's Defence Department, which has responsibility for helping expats to vote, decided to launch a pilot program for 100,000 people, and even came up with an acronym: SERVE, or Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment. In February, after $22m had already been spent, the project was abandoned. The software was judged to be too unreliable.

The various efforts to prevent the occurrence of such disasters—IBM's web-services platform is called WebSphere, and Microsoft's suite of development tools for web services is known as .NET—have more similarities than differences. IBM tends to favour Java as its native programming language, while Microsoft prefers C#, a language it developed itself. However, both firms' platforms support other languages. Borland claims that, being neutral, it does a better job, but marketing seems to be as important as technology when it comes to winning market share.

That is why Mr Montgomery emphasises Microsoft's efforts to create an “ecosystem” of developers. He says that the company has spent, over the years, hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars investing in the Microsoft Developer Network. This is certainly a busy website—some 3m developers a month visit to exchange programs and ideas, Mr Montgomery says. Indeed, some of the developers come up with products that compete directly with elements of .NET.

What's more, Mr Montgomery says that the tools made by companies such as Component 1 and Infragistics are better than Microsoft's own, and that this is something Microsoft encourages. The small fry make millions of dollars by staying one step ahead of Microsoft, but the giant benefits because its overall ecosystem is strengthened.

If software development in general is somewhat fragmented, in the area of software testing there is one clear market leader: Mercury Interactive, a company based in Mountain View, California. Other companies, especially IBM, are trying to make inroads into testing, and Mercury itself is trying to expand into other areas, particularly through an initiative called “Business Technology Optimisation” (yes, the initiatives all start to sound rather similar). That aims to do the kind of system-level integration at which companies such as Borland have traditionally been best. However, industry watchers say there is real promise in efforts to refine the testing process.

There are two sorts of software testing. The first, unit testing, tests a very small subroutine to see that it does what it should. The second, functional testing, is actually trying to use the software. Unit testing is far more straightforward—it is easier to test if a brick will crumble than if an entire structure is sound. Functional testing, on the other hand, is tricky—how is one to know if the software is fully tested? However, according to Mercury, about 60% of the necessary functional testing can be automated—things like repeatedly entering data. And automation allows the developers to explore a far larger number of test cases than would be possible by hand, in far less time. The gains are even greater when software is revised—old automated tests can often be re-used, whereas manual testers would have to start from scratch.

The benefits of this approach are amplified by the transition to the iterative approach—testing is much more effective if its results can be easily re-integrated into the software. Indeed, there is a symbiosis here: the faster testing made possible by automation is easing the transition from the waterfall model to an iterative one. Hence the interest from IBM and Microsoft.

An open-source solution?

The third big industry trend is arguably the most promising of them all. As Mr Montgomery points out, there are two ways of thinking about open-source software development. The first is to see it as a business model, and the second is to understand it as a development process. Microsoft, he says, makes a large amount of source code available under a so-called shared-source licence, which grants users downstream a limited set of rights to modify and use the code.

For purists, this is not enough. However, Mr Montgomery says it suffices to build the sort of community Microsoft wants, while retaining its ability to make a profit. (For instance, people are allowed to take the code, modify it and sell it, but only if it will be used on a Microsoft operating system.) IBM uses a similarly restrictive licence, but it has built its platform on top of Eclipse, a purer open-source framework for building integrated development environments.

However, other companies, such as CollabNet, a firm based in Brisbane, California, are using a less restrictive licence, along the lines of what is traditionally thought of as open source, with only one exception—the licence allows for commercial use. Brian Behlendorf, founder and chief technology officer of CollabNet, says that the open-source ethos allows programmers, particularly those collaborating from different locations, to work together more efficiently. He contends that the freedom to tinker with and improve tools essentially without restriction is the best route to efficiency. Mr Behlendorf was a pioneer in the development of the well-known Apache open-source web server, so his views come as little surprise. Less predictably, they are shared by businesses not usually thought of as being open-source enthusiasts.

For instance, CollabNet signed a deal earlier this month with Barclays Global Investors (BGI), a large asset manager, to provide it with development tools for the next three years. Mr Behlendorf points out that software-development companies, like software companies themselves, are moving towards a model of selling services rather than products. The tools that CollabNet uses are almost all open-source, but by paying “rent”, clients get the benefits of the company's expertise. It seems to work. BGI reports that since it first started using CollabNet two years ago, the time it takes to complete a project has halved.

The three big industry trends—lifecycle management, testing and open source—come together in a movement known as “agile” programming. This approach to software development was codified in a meeting in February 2001 in Utah when a group of programmers declared its allegiance to doing things quickly, using common sense and simplicity. The canonical example of what they are trying to avoid was a 1980s program called CONFIRM. Funded by a consortium of hotels, airlines and rental-car companies, it was meant to be a comprehensive travel-reservation system. After three and a half years and $125m, it was cancelled.

The main principle of agile programming is that developers must talk to each other often, and that they must talk to the business people setting requirements equally often. Combine this with a short time-scale—ideally agile proponents seek to deliver a working bit of software every few weeks—and you have an accelerated, informal version of the iterative model. This means that no project can go on for years and produce nothing—a fatally flawed project will be caught sooner.

Gartner, a consultancy, estimates that agile programming will have a substantial impact on high-priority projects. Nonetheless, pessimists argue that the problems plaguing software development are so fundamental that none of the many innovations being pursued today will really make a difference. In mitigation, software engineering is still an immature discipline. It is just possible that the techniques now being pursued by Microsoft, IBM and their growing army of competitors will lead to a future where failure is an exception rather than the rule.

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3) The Economist: The business of mazes [Une nouvelle activité pour les paysans : créer des labyrinthes géants.]
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2926209

The business of mazes: Profit and lost
Jul 15th 2004

There's money in mazes

MAKING mazes may not be the oldest profession, but it dates back to at least 1500BC. Even so, it is not a mature industry: a global maze-making boom is under way, thanks, not least, to Adrian Fisher, a British designer. His firm, Adrian Fisher Mazes, creates roughly 90 mazes a year for clients in 26 countries. One of its latest, which opened this week at Dobbies Mazeworld, a theme park in Britain, claims to be the world's longest permanent maze, at over 3.9 km (2.4 miles). But a longer Fisher maze—using 8km of jasmine bushes—is in the works in Yunnan, China, to mark the 2008 Olympics.

According to Mr Fisher, half of the world's mazes were created in the past ten years. He attributes their modern appeal to an age-old desire of families for entertainment that engages young and old together, unlike the latest video game. But there is nothing old-fashioned about the technology that goes into creating today's mazes. Computer design software and global-positioning satellite systems are used to mark out paths on the ground.

Mr Fisher uses all sorts of materials, not just hedges. One of his most popular models is the “mirror maze”, using mirrors to multiply perspective and thereby add to the complexity of wandering through. Although commercial mirror mazes date from the 19th century, Mr Fisher has brought them up to date, spending nearly £500,000 ($930,000) on research and development. One of the most elaborate is a new horror maze in Hamburg, complete with torture tableaux and eerie sound effects. Another craze is the maize-maze: farmers have designs cut into their fields when the plants are still young, bringing in tourists during the summer growing season and a still-sizeable crop come harvest-time.

A maize-maze costs at least £20,000; a mirror maze comes in at close to £500,000. Even so, mazes can be value for money, says David Camp, head of the theme-park practice (really) at Economics Research Associates, a consultancy. While they may lack the “thrills and spills” of a $20m roller-coaster, mazes can improve with age, unlike higher-tech attractions. For farmers facing falling subsidies and foreign competition, mazes offer a route into agro-tourism. Paul Swaffield, an English farmer, says that he would have had to sell his land in Dorset had he not diversified into mazes. His maize-maze brings in 25 times more in entrance fees than the crop does when the maze ends its days as cattle feed.

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4) The Economist: Executive perks [Les avantages en nature des cadres de haut niveau sont peut-être justifiés.]

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3446891
Executive perks: In defence of the indefensible
Dec 2nd 2004 | NEW YORK

Is showering the boss with perks good for shareholders?
Boosting his productivity

NOTHING has come to embody corporate greed like executive perks: the corporate jets, chauffeured limousines and country-club memberships that bosses consume in a seemingly deliberate attempt to outrage public opinion. Not for nothing has Warren Buffett, Omaha's celebrated investor, named his corporate jet “The Indefensible”.

The usual explanation for the perk is that it is a (rather enjoyable) way for corporate insiders to misappropriate shareholders' money. Because perks are poorly disclosed, shareholders have no way of knowing when the boss is living it up at their expense. This has led to the theory that perk-laden executives are likeliest to be found in firms with lots of cash, but few investment prospects.

But in a recent paper*, Raghuram Rajan, the IMF's chief economist, and Julie Wulf, of the Wharton School, looked at how more than 300 big companies dished out perks to their executives in 1986-99. It turns out that neither cash-rich, low-growth firms nor firms with weak governance shower their executives with unusually generous perks. The authors did, however, find evidence to support two competing explanations.

First, firms in the sample with more hierarchical organisations lavished more perks on their executives than firms with flatter structures. Why? Perks are a cheap way to demonstrate status. Just as the armed forces ration medals, firms ration the distribution of conspicuous symbols of corporate status.

Second, perks are a cheap way to boost executive productivity. Firms based in places where it takes a long time to commute are more likely to give the boss a chauffeured limousine. Firms located far from large airports are likelier to lay on a corporate jet.

So there it is. The boss needs his luxury pad on Fifth Avenue and his chauffeured stretch-limo because he might otherwise do less work. Making it harder for the boss to consume conspicuously risks dangerous anarchy as, bereft of its symbols of corporate status, the firm's hierarchy collapses into a muddled heap. Perhaps, in light of these findings, Mr Buffett should call his next jet “The Indispensable”.

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5) The Economist: Security through viral propagation [Une nouvelle technique pour assurer le contrôle accès dans les immeubles de bureaux.]
http://www.economist.com
Security through viral propagation
Dec 2nd 2004

Security technology: A new kind of door lock combines low-tech and high-tech approaches to enhancing security—but is it really safer?

IN THE security industry today, one part is decidedly sexier than the other. The sexy part deals with digital security, which includes everything from fighting computer viruses and fending off malicious hackers to controlling which employees have access to which systems. All of this has overshadowed the less glamorous part of the industry, which deals with physical security—in essence, door locks and that sort of thing. At parties, the digital guys come across as cutting-edge, whereas the door-lock guys soon have to admit that their last truly stunning innovation, the pin-tumbler lock, was devised in ancient Egypt but then got lost for 4,000 years until Linus Yale, an American inventor, rediscovered it. And even that was a century and a half ago.

Assa Abloy, a Swedish company that is the world's largest lockmaker, wants to change that. So it has teamed up with CoreStreet, a software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to merge digital and physical security into a single system. The idea is that the same computer database that gives employees of a firm or government access privileges online also opens (or closes) doors for them. The twist, however, is that the doors need not have a permanent, hard-wired connection to the central computer.

Today, the only way to allow door locks to authenticate (“Are you who you claim to be?”) and validate (“Are you supposed to be entering at this hour?”) people in real time is to install electronic card-readers on doors, and then hook those readers up to a secure computer network. If an employee named Jane then gets fired, the central database will immediately inform all the connected card-readers, which will stop accepting Jane's key card.

The problem is that this sort of network is very expensive. An electronic lock costs between $3,000 and $5,000, 80% of which is the cost of network wiring, says Phil Libin of CoreStreet. Wiring up all the locks of, say, a nuclear power plant, university campus, airport, or military base therefore becomes extremely costly. Hard-wiring the doors of trucks, containers, aeroplanes and other moving things is out of the question. This is why, even in the most secure settings, at most 3% of locks tend to be connected.

CoreStreet's solution is “to make the cards themselves the network”, explains Mr Libin. There is still one central access list that says who is allowed to open what, and it is regularly sent out to the 3% of locks that are connected. The cunning part is how the list is propagated to other, unconnected locks: by the users themselves. Whenever an employee swipes his card through a connected lock, the list is copied, in encrypted form, on to the card. As he then walks through unconnected doors, the card transfers the latest copy of the list on to their locks, replacing their older versions. These locks in turn pass the new list on to any other cards passing through, and so on.

As long as people keep moving through doors, says Mr Libin, the freshest list of privileges spreads by “viral propagation”. The trick is to position the few connected locks carefully, to ensure that updates to the list spread within minutes to all the other doors. That way, Jane, having been fired, will find that her card no longer works. The new “intelligent” locks from Assa Abloy and CoreStreet that do all this cost about $1,000 each.

Not everyone is convinced, however. Marc Tobias, an expert on locks who has literally written the book on the subject— all two volumes and 1,400 pages of it—has heard grand claims being made about new kinds of lock before. He has been picking locks since he was 15, though he has not yet picked one of the new Assa Abloy locks (which have so far been supplied to ten trial customers). But, he says, “I'd be really paranoid about this until it has been thoroughly vetted.” As Bruce Schneier, a security expert, likes to point out, security is like a chain, and is only as strong as its weakest link. The new system's security depends on protecting both the encrypted access list and the network that links up the connected doors. Making physical locks as secure as computer networks, in other words, means precisely that

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Below are four (4) questions and a bonus question. You have to answer them instantly. You can't take your time, answer all of them immediately. Let's find out just how clever you really are.

Ready? GO!!! (scroll down)

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First Question:

You are participating in a race. You overtake [dépasser] the second place person. What position are you in?

Answer: If you answered that you are first, then you are wrong! If you overtake the second place person, and you take their place, you are second!

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To answer the second question, don't take as much time as you took for the first question.

Second Question:

If you are in a race, and you overtake the last person, then you are?

Answer: If you answered that you are second to last, then you are wrong again. Tell me, how can you overtake the LAST person?! You're not having a good time at this! Are you?

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Very tricky maths! Note: This must be done in your head only. Do NOT use paper and pencil or a calculator. Try it.

Third Question:

Take 1000 and add 40 to it. Now add another 1000. Now add 30. Add another 1000. Now add 20. Now add another 1000. now add 10. What is the total?

Answer: Did you get 5000? The correct answer is actually 4100. Don't believe it? Check with your calculator!

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Today is definitely not your day. Maybe you will get the last question right?

Fourth Question:

Mary's father has five daughters: 1. Nana, 2. Nene, 3. Nini, 4. Nono. What is the name of the fifth daughter?

Answer: Nunu? NO! Of course not. Her name is Mary. Read the question again!

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Okay, now the bonus round. You can partially redeem yourself with this one!!!!!

Bonus Question:

There is a mute [muet] person who wants to buy a toothbrush. By imitating the action of brushing one's teeth he successfully expresses himself to the shopkeeper and the purchase is done. Now if there is a blind [aveugle] man who wishes to buy a pair of sunglasses, how should he express himself?

Answer: He just has to open his mouth and ask. He's blind, not mute - so simple.

KEEP THIS GOING TO FRUSTRATE THE "SMART PEOPLE" IN YOUR LIFE

DAVE BARRY

Christmastime is a festive time -- a time of parties and presents and songs that we all love, except for Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, which I for one got tired of in approximately 1958, and which now causes me to dislocate my forefinger stabbing the car-radio button. I prefer traditional Christmas carols, such as Ding Dong Merrily on High. I am not making this carol up. The lyrics are:

''Ding dong merrily on high!''

(Something something something)

I don't know the rest, because I never got past the first line without cracking up. This song used to absolutely slay me and my boyhood friends when we sang it in St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Armonk, N.Y. And no wonder: It is a well-known axiom of music, discovered in 1783 by Mozart (this was Herb Mozart), that 'there is no such thing as a bad song that has 'ding dong' in the title.'' Other examples are Ding Dong the Witch is Dead and Shama Lama Ding Dong, which is not to be confused with Rama Lama Ding Dong, also an excellent song.

But getting back to Christmas: My point is that, although this is a festive time of year, it can also be a difficult and stressful time for a certain group -- a group whose needs, all too often, are overlooked in our society. That group is: men.

Why is the Christmas season so hard on men? There are many complex reasons, by which I mean: women.

This problem dates back to the very first Christmas. We know from the Bible that the Wise Men showed up in Bethlehem and gave the baby Jesus gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Now, gold is always a nice gift, but frankincense and myrrh -- at least according to my dictionary -- are gum resins. Who gives gum resins to a baby?

The answer is: men. The Wise Men, being men, didn't even START shopping for gifts until the last minute, when most of the stores in the greater Bethlehem area were closed for Christmas Eve. The only place still open was Big Stu's House of Myrrh.

So the Wise Men showed up at the manger, handed their baby gifts to Mary, and headed for the eggnog. Mary looked at the gifts -- which were not wrapped, nor were they accompanied by cards -- rolled her eyes, tossed the gum resins to the goats (which ate them) and said: ''Next Christmas, we are going to have some gift-giving RULES.'' But the Wise Men didn't hear her, because by then they were over by the crib trying to teach the Baby Jesus to pull their finger.

This is basically how things stand today. At this point in the Christmas season, your standard woman has already purchased and wrapped thoughtful gifts for approximately 600 people, including her children, her relatives, her friends, her husband's relatives, her co-workers, the children of her friends, relatives of children of her friends, coworkers of friends of her relatives, husbands of her coworkers' relatives' friends, etc. She has also purchased several thoughtful gifts for nobody in particular, so she will not be in the horrifying position of receiving a gift from somebody for whom she does not have a retaliation gift.

In contrast, your standard man, at this point in the Christmas season, has purchased zero gifts. He has not yet gotten around to purchasing an acceptable gift for his wife for LAST Christmas. He did give her something last year, but he could tell by her reaction to it that she had not been dreaming of getting an auto emergency kit, even though it was the deluxe model with booster cables AND an air compressor. Clearly this gift violated an important rule, but the man had no idea what this rule was, and his wife was too upset to tell him.

And now ANOTHER Christmas is looming, and this man, terrified that he will screw up again, has been wracking his brain for gift ideas for his wife. Nothing automotive this time: He won't make THAT mistake again! He's thinking Weed Whacker.

But he's not sure. He's a nervous wreck. A lot of us men are. That's why we buy gifts at the very last minute, or, optionally, never. It's not that we're thoughtless jerks!

Well, OK, thoughtless. But not jerks! We're doing our best to get through a stressful season. So on behalf of all men, I ask all you women to cut us some slack; and accept us for the imperfect beings that we are compared to you; and above all, in the spirit of another great Christmas carol, bring us some figgy pudding.

^RETURN TO TOP^

I am often asked, "How do you, as a CEO, avoid getting isolated from what's going on inside your company?" In other words, how do I avoid what this magazine has termed the "CEO Trap"? The answer is that every successful leader has to have contacts with employees at all levels of the organization, supplemented by the "outside-in" view from customers, partners and suppliers and government officials.

To get the most complete picture from our employees, I rely partly on the usual processes: one-on-one meetings with my direct reports, staff meetings, operating reviews and financial and operational reports. Additionally, we have well-developed two-way communication processes with employee groups: town hall meetings, sales conferences, management forums and an annual meeting at each of our U.S. facilities. We also have regular, facilitated discussions at the department level for managers and employees known as "Council of Personnel Relations" meetings in our product businesses and "the daily huddle" in our service business.

However, one of the most effective tools I have used is the one-on-one skip-level meeting with employees who do not report directly to me. I was inspired to start the skip-level process after doing some informal benchmarking on the practices of CEOs who have been successful over a long period of time. One of them was Reuben Mark of Colgate-Palmolive, who has delivered exceptional shareholder value for more than 20 years. I learned that while Mark respects the chain of command, he makes sure that when it comes to critical issues, he obtains data and insights from those closest to the issues and below the level of his direct reports.

I now do more than 150 one-hour skip-level meetings a year. Most are scheduled in advance and held in my office, but there are also impromptu meetings when I have lunch in the cafeteria, visit a field office or run into employees in the community and strike up a conversation. I try to avoid a structured agenda even in the scheduled meetings. If the employee wants to share prepared material with me, that's fine, but I really want the freedom of a less structured discussion.

These meetings have many benefits:

* I learn far more about our business without the filters and distortions one comes up against when receiving information through a chain of command. I don't mean to suggest that my direct reports hide things from me, but, rather, out of necessity, they are selective in deciding what's important for me to know. They may not always be clear on all of my areas of interest.

* The employee learns how I think and gets a more global view of the business. I also learn how the employee thinks, which helps put his or her actions into context.

* The employee feels valued by this one-on-one access. One of our executives, who had had other career options, chose to remain at Pitney Bowes because of his ability to gain access to the CEO.

* I have the opportunity to assess a great deal of talent and strengthen relationships while getting to know our leaders on a more personal basis.

* I use many of the sessions to coach and mentor employees.

Although CEOs should stay focused on the big picture and not get mired in the detail, I find these meetings provide much-needed validation for the key strategic and operational assumptions I use to operate the business. I consider them so valuable, I've asked my direct reports to conduct skip-level meetings as well.

I also recognize that our board of directors can be most helpful to me by having its own skip-level process--conducting one-on-one meetings with executives who report to me. Because outside directors are not immersed in our day-to-day business, they can ask questions and generate ideas that would not necessarily emerge in my own interactions with my team. They can also give me more valuable feedback about our executives.

There is a time to respect your company's hierarchy--and there is a time to subvert it. If you can achieve the right balance, I believe it makes for a much healthier, more effective organization.

Michael J. Critelli is the chairman and CEO of Pitney Bowes in Stamford, Conn.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Chief Executive Publishing
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group