COB-17: honoring Petrov
This month at the Carnival of the Bureaucrats we honor a true bureaucratic hero, Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov. The comically rational blog Overcoming Bias described well what Mr. Petrov did: On September 26th, 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov was the officer on duty when the warning system reported a US missile launch. Petrov kept calm, [...]
concern about superficiality and stagnation in academia
An accounting professor has recently produced an insightful paper entitled “Constituting the Academic Performer: The Spectre of Superficiality and Stagnation in Academia.” While the paper focuses on academic research in accounting from a North American perspective, it suggests that its argument can be extended geographically and to other social science disciplines: The present paper should [...]
Tagged: knowledge
familiarity is a resource for making sense of presence
Most person-to-person communication occurs between persons who know each other well (family and close friends). A recent study of a large number of mobile phone voice calls found that in an 18-week period, about two-thirds of mobile phone users engaged in mutual calling with only two other persons. The mean number of partners for mutual [...]
FCC volunteer army paints call boxes
This past Monday, Veterans’ Day in the U.S., an FCC volunteer army painted call boxes in the FCC’s neighborhood. Army of one!
making rules
From the NFHS Basketball Preseason Guide 2007-08: “In the past, a common interpretation has been that any touching of a dribble by a defender ended the dribble,” said Mary Struckhoff, NFHS assistant director and editor of the NFHS rules book. “However, the language in our rules implied that the touching had to be by the [...]
Tagged: law
making multisensory evidence
Digital multimedia presentations can powerfully affect legal trials. Consider the Skakel trial: During the Connecticut District Attorney’s closing argument in the trial of Michael Skakel for the murder, twenty-seven years before, of fifteen-year-old Martha Moxley, jurors heard and read Skakel’s own words [which appeared] on the screen before them. And in the instant that Skakel [...]
Tagged: images, law
voicelessness
While I was looking at the O Project installed at the Arlington Arts Center, a bird crapped on me. Wet, dark brown mush hit the top of my glasses and dripped down the left side of my nose. Once someone told me that this sort of indignity is auspicious. That’s merely a comforting rationalization. I [...]