Today's edition of the Toronto Star carried an item that made me smile in three different senses: Scientists Hack DNA to Spread Malaria-Resistant Gene. On a purely topical level, this could be A Really Big Deal. That makes me smile.
On a purely geeky level, the use of the term "hack" was encouraging. I/T folks like myself have been trying for years to make the distinction between "hackers" (the DIY tinkerer types who have no time for Apple-level polish) and "crackers" (the folks who keep the credit monitoring firms in business...and regular I/T folks awake at night). Alas, the rest of the world doesn't make that distinction, so even white-hat "hackers" are tarred with the same proverbial brush.
And yet...no one (geek or non-geek) likes mosquitoes, so who wouldn't get behind "hacking" their DNA, amirite? [grin]
But the question of semantics and PR is the least of the problems here. Because I yet again have to smile--albeit wryly--at the huge obstacle common to hackers across all disciplines. Namely, the gulf between a working prototype in the lab (or hackathon-occupied conference room) and full-scale adoption in the real world.
Don't get me wrong--this is really-most-sincerely NOT schadenfreude. Half a million lives a year are at stake--most of them children. And the health of two hundred million more people each year is in balance. One would be very, very hard-pressed to overestimate the significance of eliminating mosquitoes as a vector for malaria.
There are 3,500 modern species of mosquitoes, and
their lineage dates back 226 million years. Before deliberate "gene
drive intervention," humans were already triggering the development of
new species by dint of pesticides. "Hacking" every skeeter on the planet will be a knock-down, drag-out slog of decades. But it's a worthy fight...and it sure beats the tar out of poisoning the ecosystem with whatever hell's broth Dow is cooking these days.
As a programmer/tinkerer, my goals aren't even a tenth so audacious and world-changing. But that doesn't mean that I can't appreciate the scaling issues. And the wherewithal it will take to surmount them. All the best, my fellow hackers...you're going to need it. And then some.
Monday, November 23, 2015
Thursday, November 19, 2015
Permission vs. Excuse
We all know that one person. Likely we know multiple flavours of
that one person, but let's just generalise for simplicity here.
That one person of whom I speak has the Great Idea. Or above-average talent. There's no reason why they shouldn't do/make The Thing (whatever it is) that would make the world better. Except that they're being stalked by failure. And so your offers to link them with people people who could help them are sabotaged, if not rebuffed outright. Your encouragement disappears into a black hole. The time, you see, is never quite right. There are too many people willing and able to take advantage of them.
We might, even to a fractional degree, be that one person at some point in our lives. You know, making up excuses before we even do or make The Thing.
The bad news is that we will fail. The good news is that we will fail more than once.
Which sounds illogical until you consider how empowering that is. Give yourself permission to fail, and you will be more than equipped for the next failure. And the next. And so on.
Giving yourself permission to fail is not the same as making excuses ahead of time. The saying goes that it's better to seek forgiveness than to ask permission. This is one of the glaring exceptions to that rule. Even so, seeking forgiveness for failure is likewise not at all the same as making excuses.
Excuses are pernicious things, and can rob us twice. They allow us to declare bankruptcy on our responsibility for The Thing not working out the first time. But they can also give us a pass on learning from failure. Which makes it less likely that we will try another way to make/do The Thing...or The New Thing.
But with the permission to fail, it's incumbent on us to clearly define "failure" from the outset. How will we know what failure looks like? What's the plan for changing course to avoid a crash? What can we salvage in the event we crash anyway? Sure, those questions take some CPU cycles. Then again, so does sweating the timing of The Thing, or paranoia that someone will steal The Thing from you.
Now, if my Gentle Reader will excuse me, I have to go practice what I preach and fire off an email or two so that I can get back to The Thing in earnest.
That one person of whom I speak has the Great Idea. Or above-average talent. There's no reason why they shouldn't do/make The Thing (whatever it is) that would make the world better. Except that they're being stalked by failure. And so your offers to link them with people people who could help them are sabotaged, if not rebuffed outright. Your encouragement disappears into a black hole. The time, you see, is never quite right. There are too many people willing and able to take advantage of them.
We might, even to a fractional degree, be that one person at some point in our lives. You know, making up excuses before we even do or make The Thing.
The bad news is that we will fail. The good news is that we will fail more than once.
Which sounds illogical until you consider how empowering that is. Give yourself permission to fail, and you will be more than equipped for the next failure. And the next. And so on.
Giving yourself permission to fail is not the same as making excuses ahead of time. The saying goes that it's better to seek forgiveness than to ask permission. This is one of the glaring exceptions to that rule. Even so, seeking forgiveness for failure is likewise not at all the same as making excuses.
Excuses are pernicious things, and can rob us twice. They allow us to declare bankruptcy on our responsibility for The Thing not working out the first time. But they can also give us a pass on learning from failure. Which makes it less likely that we will try another way to make/do The Thing...or The New Thing.
But with the permission to fail, it's incumbent on us to clearly define "failure" from the outset. How will we know what failure looks like? What's the plan for changing course to avoid a crash? What can we salvage in the event we crash anyway? Sure, those questions take some CPU cycles. Then again, so does sweating the timing of The Thing, or paranoia that someone will steal The Thing from you.
Now, if my Gentle Reader will excuse me, I have to go practice what I preach and fire off an email or two so that I can get back to The Thing in earnest.
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
Crisis Management vs. Management by Crisis: A Cautionary Tale
In the year 1310 CE, The Most Serene Republic of Venice had hit one of the rockiest points in her 1,100-year career. Simply put, she was at war on too many fronts.
La Serenissima was entirely dependent on trade -- not only for her prosperity, but survival itself. Comprised of a collection of small islands (notoriously vulnerable to tides and earthquakes), she could no longer grow her own food, much less the timber for the ships that weighed anchor throughout the Mediterranean, Levant, Black Sea, and occasionally the Atlantic. (The "John Cabot" who crashed Canada's party in 1497 in the name of England was in fact "Giovanni Cavuto," a citizen of Venice.)
But Venice's Middle Eastern trading post, Acre, had disappeared when that Crusader-held city fell back into Muslim hands. She was by now paying the price for the greed and ruthlessness of her for-profit (cough!) "Crusade" (cough!) a century before: She was on the outs with the Byzantine Emperor, and many of her principal Constantinople residents languished in prison. Again.
Closer to home, her on-again-off-again war with hated rival-city Genoa had resumed, and, for the moment, Genoa was in the lead. And territorial squabbling over the city of Ferrara had brought down the wrath of Pope Clement V. The latter, in addition to spiritual penalties such as forbidding baptisms, weddings, and funerals, also included an injunction to the rest of Christian Europe against trading with Venice.
One might expect that in times when a storm appears on the horizon, people would put aside their differences and face the common dangers united. After all, the Venetians had certainly been more than capable of this before (and would be again). In this case, however, one would be very wrong.
The fight with the Pope, for instance, had been the most avoidable part. The "old guard" nobles of Venice favoured conciliation, while the nouveau riche patricians tended to be war hawks. Debate had been fierce, and had even spilled into street-bloodletting. But, in the end, the hawks had carried the day...with disastrous results.
Now, Venice's political system was All About checks and balances. Relatively early-on, she had rejected the notion of hereditary monarchy. At the top of her social and political order was a Doge -- a title that means "Duke." In reality, the office was rather analogous to that of the U.S. President, except that it was for life (or retirement) and its powers decreased, rather than increased, over the centuries. Once, "election" had nominally been a matter of popular accord; in later centuries its Rube Goldberg complexity made the U.S. horse-race of debates, primaries, and the Electoral College look straightforward by comparison.
In the late 13th and early 14th century, however, this office's authority was still very real. The current Doge, Pietro Gradinego, being from the newer clans, had been the loudest of the war hawks. And, in the threadbare tradition of arrivistes everywhere, his other (ahem!) "gift" to Venetian history was the consolidation of his class's gains by shutting out everyone below them on the social ladder. Thus, only members of certain families were henceforth allowed to serve in what functioned as Venice's legislature, the Maggiore Consiglio. Already tending to oligarchy, its exclusivity was given the force of law in 1299.
Despite suppression by the police, the unrest, demonstrations, and public blood-letting continued. As Doge Gradinego's popularity plummeted, his arrogance increased. The "old guard" (which included the Querini and Tiepolo families) plotted government overthrow. For reasons unknown to history, they chose the dodgy, if dashing, Bajamonte Tiepolo as their leader.
As revolts go, this one was more than the usual let-down. Tiepolo, for one, had absolutely no desire to roll back the oligarchy: As far as can be determined, he planned to set himself and his allies up as the rulers of Venice, sweeping away centuries of constitutional safeguards.
But one of their co-conspirators lost the nerve (or stomach--it doesn't matter which) for the enterprise and had already informed on them. A wild summer storm prevented one of their three contingents from linking up with the rest. Another contingent ran into an ambush, and those who escaped had their attempts to regroup frustrated by the painters' guild (whose loyalties were certainly to the Republic, if not its Doge). More ignominiously, Bajamonte Tiepolo paused his assault at an unlucky spot by the house of a old woman who attempted to kill him by dropping a stone out her window. She killed his standard-bearer instead, but the confusion (plus the raging storm) took what wind remained out of Tiepolo's sails.
Surprisingly, the Bajamonte Tiepolo party (standard-bearer excepted) came out relatively unscathed, but only because they had the great, good sense to retreat to a section of the city more hospitable to their cause. He was sentenced to four years' exile and his house pulled down, along with that of his Querini co-conspirators*.
But freak storms and feisty old ladies aside, the Venetian government had been lucky...and they knew it. The next (and heavily secured) session of the Maggior Consiglio addressed the not-new problem of efficiently responding to sudden crises. The issue was made more poignant by the fact that the Consiglio's exclusivity--which would only increase over the years, as the sons of noble fathers born to "commoner" mothers would be barred--set off a scramble to prove eligibility...and thus swelled its ranks.
Their solution was to streamline the handling of time-sensitive business (such as rooting out conspirators) by appointing the tribunal known as the Council of Ten. (A misnomer, by the bye: The Doge plus six more elected officials brought the effective head-count up to seventeen.) True to the Venetian phobia of autocracy, checks and balances were baked in from the get-go: Terms were limited. Multiple members of the same family could not sit on the Council at the same time. To prevent a single person from wielding too much power, it had three "captains," rather than one, and their terms were fixed at a single month. Additionally, "captains" could not go out in public where they could be bribed or listen to accusations that were not vetted by the entire Council. And as the ultimate safeguard, the lifespan of the Council was set at two months.
As my Gentle Reader will doubtlessly be unsurprised to learn, that last fail-safe didn't quite work out as planned. A clause allowing for two-month extensions to its mandate was invoked again...and again...and again...and the fiction of "extension" recurred for another two dozen years until the Council's permanency was made law in 1334. Its term expired only with the Republic itself in 1797.
Do the math: An "emergency" two-month response to a specific crisis lasted very nearly half a millennium. During those five centuries, the Ten took on increasing power as, among other things, Venice's spy agency, secret police, Dept. of Defence, and diplomatic corps. Also unsurprisingly, its secrecy and utter non-accountability earned it a sinister reputation, within Venice and western Europe at large.
In fairness, the Ten's efficiency to a large degree justified their extraordinary powers. Checks and balances were kept, and even increased. Alas, these became increasingly meaningless. Two and a half centuries after permanently legalising the Council, even the Maggiore Consiglio was scarcely capable of exempting review of its own laws by the Council...and little else. As La Serenissima glided into the dolce far niente era roughly (and ignominiously) ended by Napoleon, the Ten's corruption was merely one tumour in the larger cancer eating the Republic.
Yet as much as historians so often succumb to an over-dramatic tendency to hang their story around those at the very apex of society, in this case I consider that dangerous. History is not biography, unless it's in a very collective sense. And that's what makes the events of seven hundred years ago and (for me, anyway) a continent away such a very modern tale.
Technology, true, is occasionally a bona-fide game-changer (although, it turns out, this happens less frequently than you'd think...and certainly doesn't live up to predictions). But the human condition has been fairly immutable over the centuries. Our biggest mistake in the West has been to think of our hothouse as the world and then freak out when an outside stone smashes a window. And our second-biggest mistake is to deny that the stone bears our fingerprints (e.g. al-Quaeda, Daesh, the Taliban).
Ignorance of 13th/14th century Venetian history is perfectly understandable (unless, of course, you're a nerd that way). But ignorance of recent history is inexcusable. Most especially when we allow our soi-dissant "leaders" to let past missteps point the way further down the wrong path.
- - - - -
* A somewhat ridiculous coda occurred when the Querini house was found to be co-owned by three brothers, one of which had had absolutely nothing to do with his guilty siblings. Because destroying only two-thirds of the house proved problematic, the Venetian government sensibly (and fairly) bought out his share and then razed the structure. History can be goofy like that.
- - - - -
Bibliography:
La Serenissima was entirely dependent on trade -- not only for her prosperity, but survival itself. Comprised of a collection of small islands (notoriously vulnerable to tides and earthquakes), she could no longer grow her own food, much less the timber for the ships that weighed anchor throughout the Mediterranean, Levant, Black Sea, and occasionally the Atlantic. (The "John Cabot" who crashed Canada's party in 1497 in the name of England was in fact "Giovanni Cavuto," a citizen of Venice.)
But Venice's Middle Eastern trading post, Acre, had disappeared when that Crusader-held city fell back into Muslim hands. She was by now paying the price for the greed and ruthlessness of her for-profit (cough!) "Crusade" (cough!) a century before: She was on the outs with the Byzantine Emperor, and many of her principal Constantinople residents languished in prison. Again.
Closer to home, her on-again-off-again war with hated rival-city Genoa had resumed, and, for the moment, Genoa was in the lead. And territorial squabbling over the city of Ferrara had brought down the wrath of Pope Clement V. The latter, in addition to spiritual penalties such as forbidding baptisms, weddings, and funerals, also included an injunction to the rest of Christian Europe against trading with Venice.
One might expect that in times when a storm appears on the horizon, people would put aside their differences and face the common dangers united. After all, the Venetians had certainly been more than capable of this before (and would be again). In this case, however, one would be very wrong.
The fight with the Pope, for instance, had been the most avoidable part. The "old guard" nobles of Venice favoured conciliation, while the nouveau riche patricians tended to be war hawks. Debate had been fierce, and had even spilled into street-bloodletting. But, in the end, the hawks had carried the day...with disastrous results.
Now, Venice's political system was All About checks and balances. Relatively early-on, she had rejected the notion of hereditary monarchy. At the top of her social and political order was a Doge -- a title that means "Duke." In reality, the office was rather analogous to that of the U.S. President, except that it was for life (or retirement) and its powers decreased, rather than increased, over the centuries. Once, "election" had nominally been a matter of popular accord; in later centuries its Rube Goldberg complexity made the U.S. horse-race of debates, primaries, and the Electoral College look straightforward by comparison.
In the late 13th and early 14th century, however, this office's authority was still very real. The current Doge, Pietro Gradinego, being from the newer clans, had been the loudest of the war hawks. And, in the threadbare tradition of arrivistes everywhere, his other (ahem!) "gift" to Venetian history was the consolidation of his class's gains by shutting out everyone below them on the social ladder. Thus, only members of certain families were henceforth allowed to serve in what functioned as Venice's legislature, the Maggiore Consiglio. Already tending to oligarchy, its exclusivity was given the force of law in 1299.
Despite suppression by the police, the unrest, demonstrations, and public blood-letting continued. As Doge Gradinego's popularity plummeted, his arrogance increased. The "old guard" (which included the Querini and Tiepolo families) plotted government overthrow. For reasons unknown to history, they chose the dodgy, if dashing, Bajamonte Tiepolo as their leader.
As revolts go, this one was more than the usual let-down. Tiepolo, for one, had absolutely no desire to roll back the oligarchy: As far as can be determined, he planned to set himself and his allies up as the rulers of Venice, sweeping away centuries of constitutional safeguards.
But one of their co-conspirators lost the nerve (or stomach--it doesn't matter which) for the enterprise and had already informed on them. A wild summer storm prevented one of their three contingents from linking up with the rest. Another contingent ran into an ambush, and those who escaped had their attempts to regroup frustrated by the painters' guild (whose loyalties were certainly to the Republic, if not its Doge). More ignominiously, Bajamonte Tiepolo paused his assault at an unlucky spot by the house of a old woman who attempted to kill him by dropping a stone out her window. She killed his standard-bearer instead, but the confusion (plus the raging storm) took what wind remained out of Tiepolo's sails.
Surprisingly, the Bajamonte Tiepolo party (standard-bearer excepted) came out relatively unscathed, but only because they had the great, good sense to retreat to a section of the city more hospitable to their cause. He was sentenced to four years' exile and his house pulled down, along with that of his Querini co-conspirators*.
But freak storms and feisty old ladies aside, the Venetian government had been lucky...and they knew it. The next (and heavily secured) session of the Maggior Consiglio addressed the not-new problem of efficiently responding to sudden crises. The issue was made more poignant by the fact that the Consiglio's exclusivity--which would only increase over the years, as the sons of noble fathers born to "commoner" mothers would be barred--set off a scramble to prove eligibility...and thus swelled its ranks.
Their solution was to streamline the handling of time-sensitive business (such as rooting out conspirators) by appointing the tribunal known as the Council of Ten. (A misnomer, by the bye: The Doge plus six more elected officials brought the effective head-count up to seventeen.) True to the Venetian phobia of autocracy, checks and balances were baked in from the get-go: Terms were limited. Multiple members of the same family could not sit on the Council at the same time. To prevent a single person from wielding too much power, it had three "captains," rather than one, and their terms were fixed at a single month. Additionally, "captains" could not go out in public where they could be bribed or listen to accusations that were not vetted by the entire Council. And as the ultimate safeguard, the lifespan of the Council was set at two months.
As my Gentle Reader will doubtlessly be unsurprised to learn, that last fail-safe didn't quite work out as planned. A clause allowing for two-month extensions to its mandate was invoked again...and again...and again...and the fiction of "extension" recurred for another two dozen years until the Council's permanency was made law in 1334. Its term expired only with the Republic itself in 1797.
Do the math: An "emergency" two-month response to a specific crisis lasted very nearly half a millennium. During those five centuries, the Ten took on increasing power as, among other things, Venice's spy agency, secret police, Dept. of Defence, and diplomatic corps. Also unsurprisingly, its secrecy and utter non-accountability earned it a sinister reputation, within Venice and western Europe at large.
In fairness, the Ten's efficiency to a large degree justified their extraordinary powers. Checks and balances were kept, and even increased. Alas, these became increasingly meaningless. Two and a half centuries after permanently legalising the Council, even the Maggiore Consiglio was scarcely capable of exempting review of its own laws by the Council...and little else. As La Serenissima glided into the dolce far niente era roughly (and ignominiously) ended by Napoleon, the Ten's corruption was merely one tumour in the larger cancer eating the Republic.
Yet as much as historians so often succumb to an over-dramatic tendency to hang their story around those at the very apex of society, in this case I consider that dangerous. History is not biography, unless it's in a very collective sense. And that's what makes the events of seven hundred years ago and (for me, anyway) a continent away such a very modern tale.
- Increasing concentration of power in hands that already hold much of it
- Politicians willing to divide--even at the risk of being conquered
- Those at the top of the social pecking order arrogantly treating the state as their private property...including as a weapon in their own feuds
- Those nearer the bottom of the pecking order not uniting (and raising Hades) to stop their government from becoming a country club
- Elective wars (including a for-profit one that destablised an entire region)
- Government using a temporary crisis (self-inflicted or not) to justify a permanent power-grab
Technology, true, is occasionally a bona-fide game-changer (although, it turns out, this happens less frequently than you'd think...and certainly doesn't live up to predictions). But the human condition has been fairly immutable over the centuries. Our biggest mistake in the West has been to think of our hothouse as the world and then freak out when an outside stone smashes a window. And our second-biggest mistake is to deny that the stone bears our fingerprints (e.g. al-Quaeda, Daesh, the Taliban).
Ignorance of 13th/14th century Venetian history is perfectly understandable (unless, of course, you're a nerd that way). But ignorance of recent history is inexcusable. Most especially when we allow our soi-dissant "leaders" to let past missteps point the way further down the wrong path.
- - - - -
* A somewhat ridiculous coda occurred when the Querini house was found to be co-owned by three brothers, one of which had had absolutely nothing to do with his guilty siblings. Because destroying only two-thirds of the house proved problematic, the Venetian government sensibly (and fairly) bought out his share and then razed the structure. History can be goofy like that.
- - - - -
Bibliography:
- Norwich, John Julius, A History of Venice, New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1989
- Biography.com: http://www.biography.com/people/john-cabot-9234057#north-american-voyages
- Digplanet: http://www.digplanet.com/wiki/Council_of_Ten
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_Gradenigo and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Ten
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