Talcott Mountain Media

As today proceeds, pundits and talking heads galore will be tripping over themselves to provide interpretations of the results of last night’s Republican Caucus in Iowa.  Most of these pronouncements are going to miss the point.  Assessing whether this signals the true end of the Bachmann and Perry campaigns (Bachmann has already “suspended” her campaign after disappointing results) or not, whether this means that Rick Santorum has gone from political pariah to Republican Savior, what the effect of negative ads versus positive ads was, all this is essentially window dressing.  The true results of the Iowa caucuses were already apparent weeks ago: once again, the first reduction of the field of Presidential candidates will be in the hands of an extremely tiny, extremely unrepresentative group

While you may see a smattering of references to “rural Iowans” or to “conservative Christian voters,” it is truly remarkable just how different the Iowa Republican voter is from the average American.  The first thing to realize is just how extraordinarily small the caucus attendance was – only 120,000 Republicans participated.  It’s as if we as a nation told the population of Carrollton, TX or Lafayette, LA: “This is too hard.  Go ahead, you tell us who we should vote for.”  In a nation of almost 313 million people, this amounts to giving less than four-thousandths of one percent of us the job of picking the early favorites and eliminating the early losers.

Iowa is like those relatively small cities in ways beyond just overall population, too.  Every Presidential election cycle, candidates troop to the Hawkeye state and tell the residents that the represent the heart of America or that the reflect “real” America.  In reality, Iowa reflects American so poorly that it is like looking at a funhouse mirrors.  For starters, even despite a recent trend of Iowans leaving the farms behind, in Iowa only 61% of the population lives in urban or suburban areas, versus 82.2% for the country as a whole.

Iowa is also much whiter than the rest of the country.  Iowa is, in fact, 91.3% white.  The population of the country as a whole is only 72.4% white.  Every minority is under-represented in Iowa:

Population of Iowa by Ethnicity

Population of the USA by ethnicity

Obviously missing for these figures is the Hispanic population.  The Census Bureau tracks Hispanic origin differently from ethnicities such as Black or Asian, but Iowa is no more representative of Hispanics than it is of those other minorities.  While 16.3% of the U.S. population reports Hispanic or Latino origin, only 5% of Iowans do.

Rural/urban split and minorities are not the only ways in which Iowa fails to represent the country.  Just about every aspect of daily life is touched by notable differences.  Iowans are more likely to wake up in a home they own instead of rent.  In fact, they’re about 2.5 times as likely to have a home.  When they go to work, they have shorter commutes and (not surprisingly) are much more likely to work on a farm.  When they go to school, they are both more likely to graduate from high school but less likely to graduate college.  At home, they are about a quarter as likely to speak a language other than English.

While all these differences between Iowa and the rest of the country are important, the average caucus-goer in Iowa is even less like the average American.  The caucus process demands that you are willing to give up an evening to travel across frozen Iowa fields in early January and cluster together in open voting.  It is one that almost demands that only the most hard-core activists are going to attend.  Perhaps that is why only 4% of Iowans bothered to take part.

This is in a state where at least $12,000,000.00 was spent by candidates and “independent’ super-PAC’s.  That means that every vote took at least $100.00 to get out and get to the caucus sites.  Think about that for a second.  How much would it take to get you to drive down to your town hall or a church basement or a neighbor’s home and talk about politics for a bit?  Not a lot, maybe 50 bucks?  It would have been cheaper to bribe people to caucus than to advertise for it, apparently.

Back to those 120,000 stalwarts, though.  CNN did an entry poll on people going in to the caucuses, and found that, yes, the attendees were largely the hard-core religious right wing of the party.  Men outnumbered women 57% to 43%, for starters (in both Iowa and the rest of the nation, the ratio for adults is essentially 50/50).  They were also older, 26% being 65 or older.  That’s more than twice the ratio for the rest of the country (12.8%).

They were also richer than most Americans.  While only 13% of Iowa caucus voters told pollsters they make less than $30k a year, 54.44% of Americans make that much or less.  In other income brackets, 19% of Iowa caucus attendees reported making $30k-$50k, 39% made between $50k and $100k, and a whopping 28% made more than $100,000 a year.  In the rest of the U.S., those same brackets contain 20.96%, 18.36%, and 6.24%, respectively.  In a year where the Occupy movement put issues of income disparity and economic justice into the mainstream, at least for a little while, these figures show just how out of touch the people that voted yesterday are with the rest of us.  Little wonder, then, that not a single GOP candidate showed even the slightest glimmer of interest in addressing these issues.

The conservative contingent, as might be expected, was also very strong.  83% of caucus attendees called themselves “conservatives” (according to the Gallup organization, only about 41% of Americans call themselves conservative).   Furthermore, nearly half (47%) said they were “very” conservative.  Given this, it is no wonder that negative ads by the aligned Super-PAC’s think one of the worst things to call an opponent was “moderate.”  These voters were also mostly religious conservatives; 57% called themselves evangelicals or Born-Agains.  This conservativism was further demonstrated by the 25% who said the “most important” quality in a candidate was that he or she was a “true conservative.”

What do all these numbers tell us?  As the Iowans themselves might say, we are being handed a pig in a poke.  Somehow, the job of sorting out the field of candidates for President of the US has been entrusted to a vanishingly small group that looks very different from the rest of the country.

What’s worse, this small group wants the candidates to be something the rest of the country is not really all that interested in.  They are looking for an ideologically pure candidate, one that will support their fringe positions.  Most Americans are just worried about jobs and the economy.

Tell me again why Iowa picks first?

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Calling the NCAA a plantation economy is strong language and there are surely those that would call it hyperbole.  After all, comparing the situations of coddled American college students in 2011 to the horrors of pre-Civil War slavery is, admittedly, a huge stretch.  The  fact is, though, that college sports are a huge economic engine, producing enormous revenues for the sport’s owners without compensating its workers and limits their worker’s ability to move between employers, so what other than plantations does that sound like?

I know, I know, the  NCAA insists that they aren’t “workers” but “student-athletes” and that these aren’t “employers” but “providers of educational opportunity.”  At this point, however, calling big-time college sports anything but a business is disingenuous.  All NCAA institutions take in over $11.3billion from college sports for a profit of $488.9million. That’s a return of 4.49%, better than  profit of 14.6%. Fueled by big-time football and basketball, Division I schools did even better, taking in $6.3billion revenue on expenses of $5.8billion, for a return of 6.55%.  The real cash cows, football and basketball, make even more.  Division I-A basketball makes a profit of 21.29% and division I-A football makes 71.19%.

With this kind of money at stake, it should be no surprise that exploitation is the norm, not the exception in college sports.  A while back, I talked about the lawsuit filed by Ed O’Bannon concerning the NCAA’s selling off publicity rights without paying its “student-athletes” for the use of their likenesses.   That lawsuit still is winding it way through the courts, but it is just one aspect of how the NCAA uses its workers for every revenue stream possible while forbidding those workers from gaining any money themselves.  The Ohio State scandal that brought down Jim Tressel is another example, but the basic problem dates back to the CCNY point-shaving schedule in the early 50′s: Those that are doing the work are the only ones not making money from it.  Suffice it to say that Karl Marx would have a field day analyzing the current state of “amateur” athletics.

We now have a new story that shows how college sports administrators can prevent their workers for moving to new “employers”  (or new colleges, if you prefer).  Todd O’Brien is a  basketball player who used to play for St. Joseph’s College.  He was moved from the starting lineup as a junior to a reserve role as a senior but because of an earlier transfer, he graduated with a year of NCAA eligibility left.  The NCAA allows graduate students with remaining eligibility to play if they attend a different school that has a program their previous one did not.  O’Brien found just such a program at University of Alabama Birmingham.  The hitch?  Despite having little to no use for him last season, St. Joe’s has decided to prevent him from playing for UAB.  Just like the Reserve Clause era of baseball, they are trying to prevent player movement in order to control the labor supply.

So the next time you hear  an NCAA administrator talk about “reserving the integrity” of college athletics, just be aware that “integrity” really means “profit center.”

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As I write this, the 10^th anniversary of 9/11 is two days away.  The deadliest foreign attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor has permanently changed American society, and not always for the better.  One of those changes is that we are, as a society, irrational about terror “threats.”  That is, of course, the goal of terrorism – to induce irrational responses based on fear in the target population.  Our continual state of hyper-guarded security theater has cost the country much more than all the terror attacks here since 2001.

Terrorists can now cause terror without out even taking the trouble to cross oceans and carry out attacks.  The FBI has warned that Al-Qaeda may try to stage an attack on the upcoming anniversary.  The alert is oddly specific, warning about car bombs in New York or DC on or about 9/11.  The New York Police Department has responded with an all-out security assault on the streets of the City, with armed checkpoints snarling traffic and officers with automatic weapons posted in visible locations.

Lest you think I’m going to decry the ineffectiveness of these efforts and protest at the lost civil liberties, this is not my point.  In fact, the bystander reactions in the news story show that, on at least one level, this particular instance of security theater is effective.  New Yorkers are especially sensitive to the perception that they are at risk, and they are being comforted by the obvious and visible effort on their behalf.

What is odd is that, even though this alert is specific to two urban areas, there is both official and unofficial willingness and readiness to extend the target area.  Connecticut police are currently executing “Operation Iron Eagle.”  Named after a bad 80’s movie where an All-American teenage hero takes on an Arab nation’s faceless fighter pilot mooks, this is a law enforcement effort dripping with unfortunate implications.  On the unofficial side, various professional groups have sent me warnings about being extra vigilant about suspicious activity this week and next.  Speculation is rife about where the terrorists will (not “might,” it seems) strike on Sunday.

This reminds me of the days after 9/11 when facilities and attractions across the country suddenly went into “high security” modes to “prevent” attacks.   I suppose this worked in the same way that the stone I carry in my pocket has prevented tiger attacks.  I may live and work in Connecticut where the total tiger population is two but on the other hand I don’t have any tiger scars, either, so it must have prevented tiger attacks.  It is difficult to know just how much this tiger fallacy has in common with the security efforts of the last ten years, but many efforts were just as wasted.  No matter how obscure, no matter how inoffensive, no matter how secondary, every manager talked about how they were a potential terror target.  A CT legislator even seriously proposed a measure to register kayaks and canoes to protect the Thimble Islands (peak population < 250) from terror attacks.

There are two sides of this “terrorism cachet.”  On the most immediate level, millions of dollars of Homeland Security funding has depended on convincing the federal government that there really was some sort of terrorism threat to your town, building, tourist site, whatever.  Taking a shot at your chunk of $1.3B was enough to convince almost anyone to play up the dangers foreign terrorists posed.

On a deeper level, however, being a self-proclaimed potential terror target is about importance and ego.  You might not be the Twin Towers or the Pentagon or even Mt. Rushmore, it says, but you’re just as vital to America.  If you are a potential terror target, it means that people living in caves in the mountains of Afghanistan have heard of you.  Granted, it means those same people also hate you and want to destroy you, but think of the fame that entails.

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The accident in October, 2010 which saw Windsor Locks police officer Michael Koistinen take the life of Henry Drang continues to reverberate through Connecticut.  The release of investigator Frank Rudewicz’s report into the actions of the police agencies involved in the initial response makes it clear that the officers present made nearly every misstep and oversight possible.  From the failure to administer any sort of alcohol test to Koistinen to the presence of the officer’s father in a supervisory role on-scene to bumbling attempts to conceal Koistinen’s identity, multiple opportunities to do the right thing were passed by in favor of the path of least resistance. Rudewicz  identifies a “failure of leadership” as the root cause, but more than that, the actions of the officers initially involved represent a complete abandonment of professionalism.

New legislation is needed to prevent  these failures from happening in further such tragedies. A bill that would require accident investigations involving an off-duty police officer to immediately be turned over to a different police agency from the one that the office involved works for is immediately necessary to restore public confidence. In the Drang/Koistinen crash, Hartford State’s Attorney Gail Hardy had to order this exact thing after it became clear that the regional accident team was hopelessly compromised. Legislation  should make such a transfer of responsibility automatic and timely rather than ad-hoc and delayed.

The tragic consequences of having the initial stages of the Drang/Koistinen crash investigation in the hands of the local and regional officers, include multiple resignations, criminal charges, and even a suicide. Transferring responsibility would not only help prevent such failures of leadership, but it would also preserve the confidence of citizens in the competence and impartiality of the officers that protect them.

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The closing of NewsCorp’s British tabloid News of the World has led the usual 24-hour news channel talking head suspects to bring up a law that almost all of us have never heard of, called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).  That law says:

It shall be unlawful…to…promise to pay…or offer, gift, promise to give, or authorization of the giving of anything of value to any foreign official for purposes of…inducing such foreign official to do or omit to do any act in violation of the lawful duty of such official, or securing any improper advantage – United States Code, Title 15, Section 78DD-1

In short, if your company is traded on a US stock exchange, you aren’t allowed to bribe foreign officials.  Why is an obscure piece of US securities law in the news?  It has to do with the phone hacking of British journalists.  I’ll let The Daily Show’s John Stewart and John Oliver explain.

If you watch that clip, John Oliver mentions payments to police.  One of the editors has already been arrested by British authorities over “allegations of inappropriate payments to police.”

It doesn’t matter that these bribes were paid in England instead of the U.S.  The News of the World was owned by Murdoch’s News Corporation which is headquartered in New York City and traded on the NASDAQ stock exchange.  It doesn’t matter that the bribed officials were “ordinary” cops.  They fit the definition of foreign officials.  It doesn’t matter that these actions were done by employees of a subsidiary.  The prohibition applies to the entire corporation if it is subject to US law.  It doesn’t even matter if Rupert Murdoch and his upper management knew nothing about the bribery.

A comparison to the situation at Avon is useful.  Right now, Avon Products is currently conducting an internal investigation of FCPA violations, as well as being investigated by the SEC for those violations.   The costs of the internal investigation alone already exceeds $176 million and is estimated to cost up to $250 million.  That’s before the SEC levies any fines.

The real question, though, is how could the leadership of News Corp not know what was going on?  Although the scandal shut down News of the World only last week, we now know as early as 2002 the paper’s reporters and editors were involved in wrongdoing.  The recently-arrested former royal affairs editor Clive Goodman actually spent four months in jail in 2007 for intercepting private communications.

And yet, paying police for communication and hacking into phones and voicemail went on at the paper apparently without restriction until early this month.  It is utterly inconceivable that the management of the paper, and the parent companies, didn’t know this was a regular practice.

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Few childhood illnesses are as feared, or as mysterious, as autism.  Like diabetes, the number of children diagnosed with an autism-spectrum disorder increases every year.  Many parents anxiously monitor their children’s development for the least sign that they might not be “normal.”  Many autism treatment specialists advocate early intervention, but the sequence of developmental markers can vary widely from child to child without necessarily implying any disorder.  This confusion makes detecting autism difficult in toddlers and almost impossible in infants using standard measures.

Early treatment obviously requires early detection.  Autism and related conditions develop before age three, although the average age at diagnosis is between 5 and 6 years old.  New tools for diagnosing autism and better training of health professionals to recognize the signs of autism, however, can reduce the age at autism by almost two years.  With such earlier detection now proven, researchers say the next step is getting more clinicians trained in early autism detection across America.

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Diabetes rates have been growing alarmingly.  If current trends continue, the Centers for Disease Control estimate that 1 in 3 Americans will develop diabetes sometime in their lifetime.  While many different factors have been suggested as causes for this increasing epidemic, recent research suggests that exposure to a common type of plastic may contribute to diabetes.

Bisphenol A, commonly abbreviated as BPA, is a chemical that is used to make plastics.  Most of us come into contact with these plastics regularly.  The clear water bottles that hikers and campers favor, the coating on the inside of your soda can, and the developer used on many types of register receipts are all made using BPA.  Some of the BPA is left behind in the finished product.

In the human body, BPA mimics the female hormone estrogen.  It can interfere with several biological processes, and since 2010 it has been banned from products that come into contact with infants and young children, like baby bottles.

New research is coming out that shows that BPA is linked to diabetes.  BPA essentially overstimulates the activity of the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin.  This causes the other cells in the body to not use insulin effectively, so that the activity of insulin is resisted.  Such insulin resistance is part of the diabetes disease process.

Many products are now being produced in BPA-free versions.  You can also look at the recycling code on the bottom of the item.  Items that have a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 inside the “chasing arrow” triangle are unlikely to contain BPA residues.

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As small business owners, we’ve always been under pressure to differentiate ourselves from “the big boys.”  30 years ago, a one-person computer consultancy didn’t take on IBM directly, but instead did the things IBM didn’t do. Differentiation is perhaps more important than ever today.  We think nothing of sitting at a computer and ordering an item that was conceived in the US, designed in India, manufactured in China from parts sourced from across the world, shipped to California, ordered from a website hosted in Texas, and delivered from a warehouse in Illinois.  Globalization and the internet have changed business permanently.

The classic way for a small business to differentiate itself is by offering superior quality and service.  This still applies, even in the new environment.  How can you demonstrate superiority, though, to those who have never used your business?  One way is to show that you are an expert in your field.  The beauty of this approach is that you can take advantage of those same changes in the business environment to prove your expertise.

Although the Internet may taketh away, the internet also giveth something back to us.  Never has it been easier for a small business owner to get their message out to a huge audience. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, websites, email, Constant Contact, etc. They all connect you to hundreds or even thousands of people that otherwise might never have heard of your business.  They all also have a near-relentless hunger for new content, and the faster the medium moves, the more content it seems to want.  How can you possibly keep up with this deluge while actually running your real business?

The secret is to write once, and reuse it in multiple different ways.  Though it sounds like cheating, it is a common practice in many industries.  I’ll give an example: When we used to provide documentation for the clients of a software firm, they got in-application help, manuals, online documentation, knowledge base documents, and more.  Did we write brand new content for the same feature for each medium?  Of course not.

Applying the same principle to new media means that you can take your blog post, tweet about it,  and link to it on Facebook or LinkedIn.  In fact, many sites make it intentionally easy to do this.  If you go to your profile in LinkedIn, for example, you can find a section labeled “applications.”  Click the “Add an application” link to add your blog or tweets to your LinkedIn profile.  When the content is updated, then so is the LinkedIn profile and all your LinkedIn contacts are notified.  In fact, this very article will be available that way.

When it comes to microblogging services like Twitter, there is a different issue: message length.  Although Twitter allows links, putting in a normal URL that directs a user to your content while also including a meaningful comment is difficult in 140 characters.  The secret is to use what’s known as a URL shortening service.  The biggest one is a site called bit.ly.  That’s the entire Internet address of the site – no http://www. or anything else.  It has an incredibly simple interface: all you do is type or copy your long url into the only field on the page (for example: http://talcottmountainllc.com/wordpress/?p=57) and it gives you a shortened url that you can use in your tweet (http://bit.ly/ejkGnq).  My original url has been reduced by more than half and I have another 120 characters left to say something about why that link is interesting.

So, go ahead and plagiarize yourself a little.  It is the best way to keep getting your message out in multiple ways and still have a life.

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One of the most respected medical journals in the world recently published a controversial study that claims that alcohol is a more dangerous drug than tobacco, cocaine, speed, crack, or even heroin.  Sadly, few reporters that covered this story mentioned the severe limitations of the study.  These limitations are so severe, they almost invalidate the entire study.

The problem isn’t the study’s conclusion.  Despite the general reaction that the study’s finding is “controversial,” most of us have an intuitive sense that alcohol is at least in the top five of drugs that cause the most harm to society.  Alcohol is readily available and legal, so it is used (and abused) far more often than many “hard” drugs.  Consider that alcohol-impaired driving causes almost 10,000 fatal crashes in the US, that two-thirds of cases of violent assaults on domestic partners involved alcohol, and that alcohol causes more workers to lose productivity than other drugs.  All these effects are fairly widely-accepted.  The problem is, the “data” presented in the Lancet’s study amounts to little more than a group of self-appointed experts sitting around a table and making similar intuitive judgments.

There is potentially hard data on such factors as the degree of mortality for each drug considered which would have been feasible to collect but this is not how the authors came to their conclusions.  They didn’t look at any hospital records to see how many heroin-related admissions there were, they didn’t track alcohol-related medical conditions in the National Health System. They didn’t find out how many lung cancer deaths there were from smoking. None of that.

Instead, data collection consisted of assembling a group and essentially voting on how bad each drug is.  This is subjective opinion data, not actual harm data.  Any group of “experts” could sit around a table and groupthink themselves into rating any of a number of drugs higher or lower on these measures.

The essence of the scientific process is formulating a hypothesis and subjecting it to tests to find evidence that supports or does not support the hypothesis.  If the hypothesis for this paper had been: “Drug-harm professionals believe alcohol is the most dangerous drug,” then the methodology would have been correctly chosen. That isn’t what they said they were testing. They tested whether alcohol is objectively the most dangerous drug, and then used a subjective procedure to test it.

Thus, the article is nothing more than: “This group of ‘experts’ got together and this is what they felt. Trust us on this. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. In fact, don’t even bother looking behind the curtain.”

What the Lancet has published is, in fact, pseudo-science. It sounds like science, it has a bunch of impressive names attached, and there is an authoritative body giving its endorsement to the piece, but the essence of the scientific method has been thrown to the winds. Instead of testing a hypothesis, they gathered “evidence’ to favor a pre-established position.

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A friend asked me recently to help them with some written materials they presented to potential clients. The clients weren’t understanding what the she thought the leave-behinds should be saying, leading to misunderstandings that had to be cleared up later (if there even was a “later”).

Initially, it didn’t appear anything was wrong, but I was making the same mistake that my friend’s clients were. In trying to convey some statistical information, the way she had written about it implied almost the exact opposite of what she wanted it to say. Although it could be re-written I realized that it shouldn’t be edited or even re-written at all. Writing was not the best way to present the information.

Communication is about selecting the right tool for the job. Sometimes that’s words, but often times it’s graphic images, charts, or numbers. Most of the time, it’s about combining those tools correctly. What my friend was trying to do was reaching into the toolbox and picking up the first thing that she found, whether it was right or not. Instead of finding new and better ways to continue banging on a nail with the handle of a screwdriver, though, it was time to reach for a hammer.

The same principle applies to any communication medium, whether on the web or on paper. Don’t be afraid to use all your tools and experiment to find the right one to convey your message.

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