Alex Burns

11th March 2010: Clarity of Thought

2010-03-11T12:06:50Z

Creating a survey using Qualtrics software.

Attended a great panel session on 'clarity of thought' and decision-making, run by The Churchill Club Melbourne, in which part of the meeting was held under the Chatham House rule. I had previously met Dr. Paul Monk of Austhink who explained to the audience how analysts avoid decision traps. Detective Senior Sergeant Ron Iddles of Victoria Police gave some very grounded, practical advice on investigative judgment and how to manage small teams. Dr. Amantha Imber of Inventium explained how she uses evidence-based research and findings from academic journal studies in a commercial environment. Lots of 'actionable' ideas from senior practitioners, and good audience questions.

For the PhD research design, trying to get my head around the event studies coding, logistic analysis, time-series trend estimation, and ordinary least squares analyses in Matthew Baum and Tim Groeling's academic study War Stories: The Causes and Consequences of Public Views of War (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

10th March 2010: Three Chapters in Too Big To Fail

2010-03-10T09:39:34Z

Follow-up emails with internal clients on various projects. Publication Syndicate written feedback.

Three chapters into the audiobook edition of Andrew Ross Sorkin's book Too Big To Fail (New York: Viking, 2009). Sorkin did over 500 interviews and looked at primary and forensic evidence. Already, this book has loads of succinct, nuanced details of decisions, meetings, and organisational politics. Maybe Sorkin can be on CNBC 'Squawk on the Street' as a regular guest co-anchor.

In contrast, Gillian Tett's book Fool's Gold (New York: The Free Press, 2009), which I wrote about here, is focussed on the J.P. Morgan team, its peers, and anthropological visits to securitisation fora.

It will be interesting to contrast how Tett and Sorkin portray decision-makers such as J.P. Morgan banker Jamie Dimon.

Tett and Sorkin's books on the 2007-09 global financial crisis also illustrate two key points I made in November 2009 academic conference paper and presentation on journalists cowritten with Barry Saunders:

(i) Journalists are adopting methodological practices and innovations from areas outside media, such as anthropology, investment banking and criminology.

(ii) Business and financial journalists will conduct an average 250+ interviews for their investigations, which will take an average 9 months to 2 years to research and write. Some of the most influential investigations will have 300 to 500 interviews, which will include with key decision-makers.

Compare (ii) with many PhDs that can take 4 to 6.5 years to research and write instead of the allotted 3 years, and that may have only 20 to 40 interviews. Sorkin's journalistic and non-fiction craft leads him to create a strong narrative, to condense the key facts and details, and to use 'deep background' interviews to cross-check and verify meeting accounts.

9th March 2010: ERA Strategies for 'Disappeared' Academic Publication Records

2010-03-09T11:01:40Z

Two separate meetings on career directions: Where do you want to be in 3-to-5 years? What actions can you take to move toward these goals?

Collaborator Ben Eltham has written a piece on how the 2010 final rankings for Excellence for Research in Australia (ERA) has affected his academic publishing record: 'When Your Publication Record Disappears'. A title reminiscent of Nine Inch Nails' song 'The Day The Whole World Went Away.'

For the past year I have been dealing, professionally, with issues that Ben raises. Whilst outside academia, journal publications are often viewed as irrelevant, they are crucial to the academic promotions game, and to getting external competitive grants. A personal view:

ERA is the Rudd Government's evaluation framework for research excellence, developed by the Australian Research Council, to include a ranked list of academic journals and discipline-specific conferences. The ARC released the final ranked list in February 2010. It may be revised and updated in the future, but not this year.

The ARC's goal for this ranked list was to ensure it was comprehensive, peer-reviewed, would stand up to international scrutiny, and would provide guidance to administrators, managers and researchers on quality research outputs.

In the near-term ERA's 2010 final rankings will require adjustments to our academic publication records. Some of the journals we have published in such as M/C were revised down or excluded, probably because of perceived issues with their peer review process. More starkly, ERA's guidelines for academic publications filters out most of my writings over the past 15 years: magazines and journals that no longer exist (21C, Artbyte), websites (Disinformation), magazine articles with original research (Desktop, Marketing, Internet.au), unrefereed conference papers, technical reports, and contract research. It also does not usually include textbooks, research monographs, and working papers. The 'disappearance' effect that Ben describes also happens elsewhere: when Disinformation upgraded its site to new servers, we sometimes lost several articles during the transition that writers had no back-ups of.

Others are in a tougher position: mid-career academics who have taught and not published or applied for external competitive grants, or who understandably focussed on quantity of articles for DEST points rather than ERA's focus on quality ranked journals and 'field of research' codes. ERA has caused a dramatic re-evaluation for some mid-career and senior academics of their publication record, impact factors, and other esteem measures.

]]> In response to Ben's piece, I mentioned the following possible strategies:

1. Know your University's policy and procedure on 'research active' status and how it is calculated. There may be variations of this at Faculty and School level. Once you finish your PhD and have Early Career Researcher status for the next 5 years, focus on building your publication record, internal grants as a rehearsal for external grants, forming a collaborative team, and establishing networks to have industry and government partners. The ARC does not want ERA to be used for academic performance reviews, but this is likely to happen.

2. Send in all relevant research outputs to your University's annual HERDC data collection. Although there is usually at least 12 months delay in this, HERDC outputs mean you contribute to the block grant funding that your University can get for research. Some of this is usually passed on to individual researchers for School and Faculty level research accounts. Where you can, include citation data using ISI Web of Knowledge or Scopus.

3. Develop a 'program of research' with a 3-to-5 year time-frame. The 'program' should encompass multiple projects, collaborations, and creative work or research outputs. This helps the post-PhD transition to ECR status, and ensures you don't try to put everything into one or two journal articles. One challenge is to first conceptualise what this 'program of research' might be, and then translating it into 'field of research' codes that are used as institutional metadata. A second is to be able to articulate to others how your approach differs from others in the field; what your distinctive, significant and original contributions may be; and how you will achieve your goals, on-budget, and within the specified time-frame.

4. Scholarly published books, i.e. by academic publishers, are counted for both ERA and HERDC data collection.The problem Ben notes for history academics is also a problem for political scientists, who may publish in top journals, but whose life-work usually goes into a major book for Cambridge, Princeton, Routledge, Georgetown, Harvard, Yale, or a similar academic publisher. The ARC does not have a list of academic publishers.

A second problem: The 'research active' policies and procedures at many universities give a book the same points as two or three articles published in an A* or A-level journal. This points system seriously underestimates the work involved to conceptualise and write the book, and then to get it through the publisher's development editing process. So, as an incentives scheme it may have subtle and unanticipated effects on knowledge creation.

5. Get your research outputs into your University's institutional repository. This may be run by IT Services or Library staff. The repository may have different policies and scope of what it will accept: I have publications at both Victoria and Swinburne universities, and each institution is slightly different. Take the time to include the relevant metadata for each submission, especially the 4-to-6 digit 'field of research' codes. Keep the last version of the article you submitted to an academic journal, because due to publisher copyright and intellectual property contracts, often this is the only version that an institutional repository can publish.

6. Archive your 'primary' research and develop a stream of publications. Ben probably approached his excellent Meanjin work with the mindset of a journalist and long-form essayist. He did 20 interviews for one piece. This is more work than goes into many articles for B- and C-level journals, and even for some A-level ones. He could easily reuse and revisit this 'primary' research, for the next three or four years in academia. For example, a paper that reviews current frameworks to identify a knowledge gap or research problem, could then lead to a methodology paper, then to comparative case studies, and then to an evaluation or meta-analysis study.

The Cove

2010-03-09T02:09:21Z

Several months ago I wrote Don Webb about a documentary I had just seen at the Melbourne Internationa Film Festival: the eco-thriller The Cove. We talked about Arkte, Runa, the scientist John C. Lilly, the media's power to construct and shape social realities, and exchanged anecdotes about dolphins and other cetaceans.

Tonight, The Cove won the Best Documentary Oscar at the 82nd Academy Awards, beating out Food, Inc and Burma VJ, which are also worth seeing. National Geographic photographer Louie Psihoyos and dolphin activist Ric O'Barry attended the Academy Awards ceremony (Psihoyos' acceptance speech was cut short). To learn more, visit the sites for the Oceanic Preservation Society (Psihoyos), and the Earth Island Institute and Save Dolphins Japan (O'Barry).

]]> Information revelation or disclosure is one key to The Cove's narrative structure, and to the other alethic documentaries that were Oscar nominees in 2010. Within minutes of the opening credits, we learn of the film's central secret: Japanese fishing groups are covertly slaughtering dolphins in the small town of Taiji. The local police chief and fishing industry do not want this secret revealed, because it would shame Taiji, which also relies on tourism with eikasia-like emotional themes of dolphin cuteness.

For me, this is operant Runa (mystery) used as deception or misdirection of attention, in order to sustain a multi-million dollar industry: dolphin drive hunting. As with Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel's work on corruption (such as disclosed through statistical and pattern analysis of diplomats' parking tickets here), Taiji's secret is first reveled through oblique means to Westerners who may be unfamiliar with Japanese cultural norms: the local marine park sells dolphin meat.

Ric O'Barry gives the film an emotional resonance. O'Barry was the original dolphin trainer for the 1964 television series Flipper. In several interviews he expresses 'remorse of conscience' that he spent his money on sports cars rather than saving the dolphins filmed in the series. Instead, Flipper galvanized a multi-million dollar marine park industry, which O'Barry believes keeps its animals in artificial, stressful conditions. This is one factor being considered for the captiva orca Tilikum, who is (anthropomorphically) blamed for the deaths of three people at SeaWorld Orlando.

Psihoyos and O'Barry spend most of The Cove trying to film the covert hunting. The fishermen and local authorities resist their attempts, responding at first with confrontation, and then via surveillance of O'Barry who adopts a disguise. Surfer activists and marine biologists are attacked, blockaded or intimidated. So, Psihoyos brings in a Kerner FX team of special effects experts who have high-definition video cameras and underwater microphones. During a Japanese temple visit, the team realizes a solution: 'What if the rocks could speak back to the people meditating on them?' In a Mission: Impossible-like sequence the team plants the cameras. The multi-cam footage reveals in a two-minute sequence exactly what Taiji fishermen were trying to hide. At one point, even O'Barry is emotionally shocked to hear the recordings of dolphins . . . who are now (already) dead.

Although we know what the secret is, we don't Know until Psihoyos and O'Barry force us to directly confront it.

Admittedly, this is a strongly one-sided film that at times approaches Ellulian agitative propaganda. Psihoyos and O'Barry want to wake you up, want to shock you emotionally, and they succeed in doing so. Only briefly, do they allude to other cross-cultural perspectives, such as Taiji fishermen reminiscing one evening about the dolphins and whales they used to see, and which have long disappeared from the oceans. The scenes about the International Whaling Commission's inability (like many trans-national organizations in an 'anarchical' global environment) to intervene in sovereign issues, and to prevent vote-buying are worthy of a follow-up investigation.

Yet The Cove transcends these limitations for several reasons:

Its deconstruction of dolphin cultural imagery may resonate with Arkte's philosophy of animal rights and ecosystem-awareness. I will leave others who are more informed on Arkte to explore this angle.

The narrative highlights an inter-relationship between Aletheia and Runa: Aletheia as the approach and cultivated ability to skilfully discern, sincerely pursue, and to recognize Truth; as a form of self-initiatory Quest analogous to the Runa injunctive to 'Seek the Mysteries'; and to do so even if under conditions of ambiguity, change, randomness and hazard, that may threaten to overwhelm the psychecentric consciousness. This is a necessary, observable and testable criterion to Recognize individuals in the Fichtean sense; for communal verification of Wisdom; and to evaluate and validate the initiatory process. It is one core competence of a School which distinguishes it functionally from other organizational forms.

The Cove offers a template of how to strategically navigate the issue-attention cycle and to bring change to the world. I made the following points in a workshop co-facilitated with activist, educator and action researcher Jose M. Ramos soon after the film's release. Psihoyos got a major investor: entrepreneur and venture capitalist Jim Clark. O'Barry undergoes a conscientisation process similar to nigredo in Jungian alchemy. In game theoretic terms the Taiji cove is a Schelling focal point that gives O'Barry a (potentially) achievable goal and focus for resources. Psihoyos and Clark re-edited their footage to appeal to a broader audience on a topic that few may go and otherwise see. They used social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon.com's video-on-demand to build a weak-tie coalition of supporters, and to overcome distribution bottlenecks. The team's process of problem diagnosis highlights lessons in creativity and innovation that have a wider application to business and project management. Unlike many other activist campaigns their ingenuity overcomes the barriers and they get the high-definition footage. Psihoyos uses a sub-narrative on the health effects of high mercury levels in dolphin meat, and the impact on Taiji's tourism, to do a Lakoff-style reframe of the salient issues. In the closing minutes, Psihoyos and his colleagues show the footage to interviewees, and you see a gestalt-switch occur in their eyes.

'Next stop, ending the slaughter,' Psihoyos tweeted after The Cove's Oscar win and dolphin suits on the red carpet, which clears the way for a theatrical release in Japan. But will the Oscar win translate into new cultural norms and social change in Japan, and elsewhere? Or will we have to live with virtual iPhoneDolphins or NintenDolphins instead?

8th March 2010: 2010 Oscars

2010-03-08T09:22:11Z

Facebook message to my sister: What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

Rosie returns to Hobart.

Afternoon watching the Oscars live telecast: one of the worst Oscars ever, with production mishaps, missed cues, and barely audible announcers over the orchestra. Tom Hanks messes up the Best Picture Oscar, or were the producers demanding to stay on-schedule for their cable affiliates? Deadline Hollywood's Nikki Finke blogs here on the debacle.

The Cove wins an Oscar for Best Documentary.My thoughts here.

Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker triumphs over James Cameron's Avatar. I expected the Oscars for editing and scriptwriting: Mark Boal's shooting script will be studied by many up-and-coming scriptwriters for years to come. Will Boal write his next script using Final Draft for Apple iPad?

7th March 2010: Alice In Wonderland IMAX 3D

2010-03-07T10:09:10Z

Morning: Rosie and I go to see Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland reboot at IMAX Melbourne. The car park is overcrowded with parents and cars, due to a baby expo next door. Rosie talks her way into a car space. Our consensus is that Burton watered down his vision for Disney: Alice has a couple of good sequences, but it's a 2D film marketed on Avatar's 3D hype, Depp's performance blurs into his other collaborations with Burton, and we would have preferred to learn more about the (reunited) family of bloodhound dogs.

Burton, his wife Helena Bonham-Carter and Depp: how long can a team maintain its high performance, across multiple projects, before it becomes derivative of earlier work?

Lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant in Richmond's Victoria St precinct: amazing food, confusion amongst the waiters.

Evening: half-watching Paul McGuigan's Push (2009): the Hong Kong scenes remind Rosie of Kar Wai Wong's superior 2046 (2004). The film's opening sequence creates a narrative that combines several memes: Cold War paranoia, the early 1970s Nazi Occult cycle, the 1990s disclosure of government funding into remote viewing psychics in which the money went up in smoke, and David Cronenberg's early films. Push's one genuinely interesting idea was to have a taxonomy of different human capabilities that interact in a simple rules-based system.

5th March 2010: ARC Bootstrap Process

2010-03-05T11:02:28Z

House cleaning, gardening, and article writing.

Working through the assessment exercises from Timothy Baldwin, William Bommer and Robert Rubin's textbook Developing Management Skills: What Great Managers Know and Do (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008), book site here.

Watched Stanford entrepreneurship lecture on Adding Value to Companies.

Martin Van Creveld on a 1998 television interview: soft-spoken, dismisses claims that the 'future of war' will be dominated by 'cyberterrorism' and other Revolution in Military Affairs trends.

A colleague told me this week of how a professor used the Australian Research Council's national competitive grants program as a bootstrap process for promotion to dean. First, they established their expertise, publication track record, and created a cross-institutional and collaborative research team. Second, they split the ARC grant proposal into different components, delegated each to different team members, and then reassembled them into a completed proposal. Third, they ramped up the number of applications to 15-to-20 per year, with a 50% success rate. The grant revenues made a significant contribution to the department funding. The professor was soon promoted to dean.

4th March 2010: Macquarie Edge

2010-03-04T11:03:38Z

'Pair of hands' project finishes: debriefs for process improvements and advice provision.

Tonight, I attended a Melbourne Business School (MBS) talk on the changing investment landscape. In reality, it was a case study and walkthrough of Macquarie Group's online retail trading platform Macquarie Edge, with speaker James Leplaw, head of Direct Investing at Macquarie Direct. The talk was far more than a sales pitch though, due to the Leplaw''s candour and willingness to talk about the decision traps and execution mistakes.
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1. Prototype Platform Failure: Leplaw and a top trader with 25 years experience conceived a prototype platform: a blank screen with movable widgets and components. Their 'make or buy' decision was to outsource production, hire a web development company for $A100k+ and have a 60-90 day timeline. The prototype 'bombed' during beta testing: no-one had asked customers and end-users what they really wanted.

This revelation stunned several audience members. After a decade of online broker competitors, and in a mature market, how was this decision financially justifiable? Why were client needs not identified at the outset? Some audience members felt the prototype likely wasted several hundred thousand dollars worth of investment capital and management time.

2. Agile Development and User Personas: Macquarie's project team ended up being 8-12 people, including developers, testers, and user experience specialists. Leplaw and the development team regrouped and decided to gather feedback from customers and end-users. To do so, they developed user personas like 'George', a midlife retail investor, to articulate what the platform might do. In an agile development process, the team used Vignette for content management and Drools open source software for a business rules engine. The team made decisions on what not to focus on: retail investors would not be high-frequency traders that wanted mobile applications, nor would the platform deeply integrate with other institutions, beyond data export tools. The platform would also initially focus only on ASX equities rather than international markets. Leplaw revealed that features currently in-development include a margin-lending tool for derivatives and warrants, and co-integration with the Macquarie Prime software for active investors and day traders.

3. Market Justification: Investment Trends forecasts Australia's online brokerage market to grow from 525,000 clients to 600,000 clients over the next 12 months; in a domestic market of 2 million investors. Clients are defined as investors who have made at least one trade in the past 12 months and who intend to make another in the next 12 months. At least 100,000 of these clients are dissatisfied with their current provider. Investment Trends' custom research is described here. For Macquarie Edge, client conversion rates are: 30-40% of site visitors become registered members, and 5-10% of members become full-service clients.

Macquarie Edge thus targets new investors, dissatisfied clients who will switch, and ia growth strategy that relies on mature market momentum. The platform also provides an on-ramp to Macquarie's research, stockbroking and wealth management services.

The views in the MBS lecture theatrette were mixed about this. Some audience members felt that Macquarie was a late entrant to a market dominated by the major retail banks and specialist online brokerage firms. Others felt the limitations above meant that the target market segment was actually quite narrow, compared with Commsec and ETrade, which allowed Wall Street trading. Google Finance offered some similar features for stock watchlists and market technical analysis; what differentiated Macquarie Edge was its integration with Macquarie's research analysis, in which finance editors rewrote 20-30 page investor briefings into 'actionable' 1-page summaries for retail investors.

4. Career Advice: James Leplaw gave some great, succinct advice: Be able to articulate how you can add value to a company and what differentiates you from other applicants. Tap the 'hidden' job market. Hire a search agent who has knowledge and expertise in the sector you are looking at. Identify what experience and skills you have that are transferrable or portable across different industries and knowledge domains. Look for a manager who seeks to diversify their team with different talent, from another industry or context. HR managers often make the mistake of hiring people who have followed the traditional pathway --- a business undergraduate degree and bank/finance institutional experience --- and then wonder why the employees have the same kind of thinking as existing team members.

3rd March 2010: Market St Dumplings

2010-03-03T11:29:02Z

'Pair of hands' work continues.

Subjects during tonight's dumpling dinner at Market St with Ben Eltham and partner Sarah-Jane Woulahan: how Everett M. Rogers' diffusion of innovation theory can be applied to customer demand for dumplings; Pavement's much-anticipated set at the 2010 Golden Plains Festival; what qualities empower an office space to support a team's creativity; if underground emo band Forlorn Gaze would do a hospital tour like Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison (1968); how Ben manages to keep up-to-date on current issues for Crikey and New Matilda; and current projects. Thanks, Ben and SJ, for dinner.

2nd March 2010: Fool's Gold

2010-03-02T06:52:53Z

'Pair of hands' editing and budget development on a research tender.

Finished reading Gillian Tett's book Fool's Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets, and Unleashed a Catastrophe (New York: The Free Press, 2009). Tett's social anthropology perspective highlights the role of securitisation and financial innovation in the 2007-09 global financial crisis. Most of her sources appear to be a J.P. Morgan cohort, interviews with J.P. Morgan Chase chief executive officer Jamie Dimon, and industry conferences such as the European Securitisation Forum. Tett believes the J.P. Morgan cohort pioneered collateralised debt obligations in the mid-1990s and that this 'super-senior debt' had a pivotal role in the crisis. Fool's Gold is most interesting when Tett describes the cohort's original goals and the CDO innovation-to-market process; although Dimon is also portrayed as a savvy corporate philosopher and details-oriented manager.

In response to a Geert Lovink post on blind peer review in academia, Barry Saunders and academic friends tweet this process in an open ecosystem. My take? Many authors will already know who their critics are if there are clear personal agendas rather than constructive suggestions on how to improve an article. Look at the list of associate editors when applying to a 'target' journal as they will probably review your work. There are ways to handle 'rejoinder' processes - such as to show the internal inconsistencies between positive and negative reviewers. Many academic journals now use a hybrid approach.

In November, Ben Eltham and I wrote a conference paper and presentation on Twitter's role in Iran's 2009 election crisis. It's been read by Australia's Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, and been heavily downloaded. Today, Ben received news that University of East London senior lecturer Terri Senft has used our paper in her coursework on digital media culture here. Check out Terri's personal site, LinkedIn profile, and LiveJournal blog.

1st March 2010: Bruny Island Cruises and ARC Discovery

2010-03-01T11:10:11Z

Still feeling ill after yesterday's Bruny Island Cruises eco-tour trip to Adventure Bay and a seal colony in the Great Southern Ocean. Amazing scenery and crew, but we hit rough weather on the way back, perhaps in part due to a tsunami warning. At a few points we feared the boat might capsize. Kenneth Kamler's book Surviving the Extremes (2004) takes on a new meaning.

Lessons from sorting out a GPS that failed Sunday morning: Customers in a time-critical bind want a solution, not 'shifting the blame'. Frontline staff need 'decision rights' and not to rely on managers who can't be contacted at weekends. Unless you check it beforehand, critical technology will create revenge effects.

Today's major task: finishing and submitting a research team's ARC Discovery proposal. This has been a personal 'shaping experience'. It takes a multi-university team up to ten months to craft a proposal. Apart from myself and the research team, the proposal had feedback from over 10 people. Advice to future applicants: read the ARC's 'funding guidelines' and 'instructions to applications closely; have lead-time to iteratively develop your proposal and form your team; and update your research impact and publication details in advance.

Alfred Hermida kindly sends me a forthcoming paper on ambient journalism, for a paper I'm drafting this week for the ERA C-ranked journal M/C. I picked up several Brian Eno events to review.

Wrote to Waldo Thompson on his website plans; Underbelly as a police-crime 'repeated game' in Australian culture; and its predecessor mini-series: Scales of Justice, Phoenix and Janus.

Several people sent me Larry Derfner's Jerusalem Post article on Mossad and Mahmoud al-Mabouh's assassination. Local coverage has emphasised Mossad's alleged use of Australian passports for operational cover. Will this incident reinforce Mossad's status amongst intelligence agencies and its reputation for careful operations? Or will the incident lead to a broader debate in intelligence studies about how counterdeception and operational security practices might, in certain outcomes, undermine an allies' sovereignty? As an independent researcher, Robin Ramsay and Lobster Magazine is sure to explore this territory.

A Rejoinder to Bernard Keane's ASIO Claims

2010-02-24T10:13:17Z

During a 2006 Monash postgraduate class on intelligence analysis our adviser made several observations on how the Australian Security Intelligence Agency (ASIO) is misrepresented and misunderstood. The 'S' stood for domestic security not secrecy. ASIO had an accountability and audit regime at multiple levels: legislative limits, the Treasury budget process, appeals processes, external audits and supply contract review, and reporting to the public and to bipartisan government committees. Australia's intelligence resources were mo stly deployed in military agencies for signals intelligence. Finally, media coverage of ASIO rarely evolves to the sophistication seen in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Bernard Keane's Crikey article 'The Answer is ASIO' (24th February 2010) risks continuing this trend in media coverage of intelligence issues. I want to illustrate below how Keane's own arguments can be interpreted as having their own "deeply-flawed logic" in his accusations of Labor's "security propaganda."
]]> Counter-Terrorism White Paper, Kevin Rudd, Peter Garrett really concern how governments can time legislation and frame announcements. ASIO and other intelligence agencies do not control such gambits, and may just bepart of a wider consultation to formulate new policies. Rather, Keane's examples illustrate what analysts fear: the politicisation of the intelligence 'product' in the media spin-doctoring cycle.

Next, Keane contends that ASIO has continuity from the Howard to Rudd governments in an expanded operational budget. Yet he provides little context or analysis of ASIO's past budgets to evaluate his claims.

The historical evidence suggests a more complex picture. It also shows the limits of Keane's historical correlation between Australian political parties in government and ASIO's powers. ASIO's budgets stalled in the Howard Government's first and second terms as the agency struggled with program reviews, the loss of key staff and corporate memory, and the legacy costs of old computer systems. The post-September 11 rise in ASIO's budget attempted to deal with this 'weight of the past' through organisational change and renewal; with an uncertain security environment where there were variations in estimative assessments; and with the influx of a new generation of intelligence analysts. In the US context, Amy Zegart illustrates how this more complex picture goes beyond a simple government-agency nexus.

It is certainly possible, as John Mueller argues in his book Overblown (New York: The Free Press, 2006), that policymakers might have been affected by a post-September 11 'security bubble' similar to Robert Shiller's early warnings in 2000 of a US housing bubble. Large capital expenditure items like "the shiny new giant headquarters being built for the agency in Campbell in Canberra" would justify a budget rise with the costs amortised over a 25-30 year period. Without analysis we don't know, and have no way to test Keane's claims of institutional capture. One way to possibly do so would be to conduct a time-series analysis of ASIO's budgets, to weight the expenditure items, and to compare it with changes in the security environment and political processes. This time-weighted factor model would give a more sophisticated answer than a linear extrapolation where correlation may not be causation.

Keane's belief that ASIO is "unnacountable" is news to me. I agree ASIO's public annual reporting is brief compared to its US counterparts, but this is the norm for Australian agencies.The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security reviews ASIO's expenditure, financial budget, and annual reporting. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1979 sets legislative requirements. There is significant debate in analyst training, in legal case judgments that use existing laws, and in the academic literature on counterterrorism and intelligence, on personal liberties, privacy and the 'surveillance state'. Whilst it's an important issue, Keane gives an oversimplistic view.

Keane's claims about people smuggling and organised crime need further clarification. Both are transborder security issues which have a domestic security component or effect. Thus, they are already part of ASIO's remit, which Keane might have seen had he looked at the security issues raised in ASIO's past budgets. Both have been discussed in the academic literature in counterterrorism and security studies for 10-to-15 years, whilst fellow 'middle powers' like Canada have developed significant policy expertise. Whilst politicians may engage in "political risk", events such as Sri Lanka's destabilisation after the Tamil Tigers now change the estimative threat assessments that guide the agencies. Claims that people smugglers are the "Bond villains of border protection" appear to overlook the sophisticated ways that such networks do operate, and of recent anthropological investigations to document this.

In his critique of the new Counter Terrorism Control Centre, Keane blames the government that "too much inter-departmental co-ordination is never enough." However, CTCC-style activities have already been funded for several years, so the White Paper may formalise this. Keane also overlooks why such inter-deparmental coordination is vital for counterterrorism, transnational security issues, and is the bedrock of national security strategy and security clearances. Take a potential security risk - like people smuggling. Apart from ASIO several other intelligence agencies may be involved, depending on the events. The Office of National Assessments has been monitoring Indian Ocean people smuggling for at least several years. Defence Signals Directorate may provide signals intelligence, as might the Defence Intelligence Organsation, and perhaps even liaison with the US-based National Security Agency and Defence Intelligence Agency if satellite intelligence needs to be shared (DIO and DSD would at least be kept 'in the loop'). This occurs at the collections, processing and analysis stages of the intelligence cycle, before the 'product' is disseminated to the relevant policymakers and government agencies. Thus, inter-departmental coordination is critical, particularly for time-critical events that involve ambiguous information.

Finally, Keane observes: "Part of the problem is indeed the human incapacity to accurately assess comparative risk, and most people's inability to understand the sometimes counter-intuitive basics of risk management." Well, sure: the difference is that intelligence analysis involves Gregory Treverton's distinction between puzzles (like missile numbers that are solveable); mysteries (like new terrorist groups); and mysteries-plus (like complex, global, adaptive networks). Gaussian risk management models do not work for Extreme-Value events. Australian ex-analysts like Paul M. Monk might also emphasise the cognitive elements in writing and communicating estimative assessments to decisionmakers. Intelligence studies scholars like Treverton, Loch Johnson, Richard K. Betts, and Michael Herman discussed this for decades, before Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Cass Sunstein came to recent attention in media and policy circles.

Keane's problem explains why intelligence agencies exist: to anticipate such risks through comparative and estimative assessments, and to develop long-term human and institutional capacities. ASIO or another alphabet intelligence agency may be the answer --- to a different question than Keane asks.

Four Books on Heidegger, Gurdjieff and Aletheia

2010-02-24T09:25:56Z

Heidegger, Martin (1996/1927) Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit.Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Staumbaugh's 1996 translation is clearer to read than Macquarrie and Robinson's 1962 original, although it is helpful to have both for comparison. Sein und Zeit influenced existentialist, phenomenological, deconstruction and hermeneutic philosophy, and spans a bridge to pivotal later work by Hans-Georg Gadamer (Truth and Method), Alain Badiou (Being and Event; Logic of Worlds), and Paul Ricoeur (Time and Narrative).

This opens up some potential 'correspondences' to compare Heidegger and Gurdjieff's philosophies worth further exploration. Sein und Zeit may be Heidegger's 'legominism'; Heidegger's hermeneutic method an attempt to recover the 'I'; Dasein an awareness of Time as Gurdjieff's 'Merciless Heropass'; and Heidegger's 'hermeneutics of suspicion' broadly similar to Gurdjieff's 'Way of Golgotha' (during the First World War and the 1917 Russian Revolution), in that both are death-aware orientations to personal conscience. Heidegger's perspectives in Sein und Zeit about angst, falling into inauthenticity, and tradition's role in cultural transmission are similar to Gurdjieff's arguments. Finally, Sein und Zeit is about Aletheia in the sense of 'unconcealment' of being-in-life.

Faye, Emmanuel (2009) Heidegger:The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935. Trans. Michael B. Smith. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Faye's book ignited controversy during its 2005 publication in France. Smith's translation has done so again, in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Faye makes three main arguments. (1) Heidegger embraced Nazi metaphysics in the late 1920s before he became Rector of Freiburg University, and this influence is clear in his 1933-35 seminars. (2) Heidegger's Nazism has influenced hermeneutics, postmodernists, and radical ecologists, who may be susceptible to proto-N. ideas. (3) Heidegger's political beliefs mean that he should be banished as a philosopher from university courses, and censored in libraries.

For many reviewers, Faye's contribution has been to highlight the archival sources in (1), although others claim Faye has misrepresented Heidegger's ideas to advance his arguments. (2) and (3) have ignited the debate: Who has Heidegger influenced over time, and to what effect? Under what conditions can knowledge creation be separated from its sociopolitical contexts, particularly when these contexts may change? What should be the fate of philosophers who may be brilliant in one sphere, but taint their reputation in other areas? Is it possible to be influenced subtly by 'evil' ideas, and how would we be ethically self-aware enough to know?

Faye's book is best read as an 'active exercise' with these issues in mind, issues that highlight Lethe as the opposite of Aletheia: how knowledge may be de-manifested, fragmented or (willfully) forgotten over time. A comparison of Heiddeger's period as Rector of Freiburg University with Gurdjieff's Paris groups raises some intriguing questions about Aletheia and ethical self-awareness in the midst of revolution, war and societal conflict. On the Paris groups, see the Gurdjieff group transcripts in William Patrick Patterson's Voices in the Dark: Esoteric, Occult, & Secular Voices in Nazi-Occupied Paris (Fairfax CA: Arete Communications, 2000).

De Salzmann, Jeanne. (2010) The Reality of Being: The Fourth Way of Gurdjieff. Boston: Shambhala Press.

De Salzmann (1889-1990) was the closest pupil of Gurdjieff's during his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleu, and during the later Paris period in World War II. She was pivotal to the Gurdjieff Foundation, to the transmission of the Movements, and to Peter Brook's film adaptation of Meetings With Remarkable Men (1979). Her publicly available writings have a directness of presence that differs from most other sources, the exceptions being Uspenskii's In Search of the Miraculous (New York: Harcourt, 1949) and John Pentland's Exchanges Within (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1997). This book compiled from De Salmann's 40 years of private notes promises to be a watershed moment in the Gurdjieff Work.

Tamdgidi, Mohammad H. (2009) Gurdjieff and Hypnosis: A Hermeneutic Study. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Robert Fripp's DGM diary for 3rd February 2010 alerted me to Tamdgidi's study, which has an introductory essay by noted Gurdjieff Work scholar J. Walter Driscoll. Tamdgidi contends that Gurdjieff's expertise as a hypnotist is essential to understand his relationship with students, and the deep structure of his books, especially the 'legominism' Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson (New York: Harcourt, 1950). In doing so, Tamdgidi demonstrates the methodological value of hermeneutics to interpret Gurdjieff's texts and to reconstruct the hints and 'fragments' into a coherent whole. This book reveals some of the 'mesoteric' ideas on the transcultural sources of Gurdjieff's cosmology, the appropriate use of friction in the teacher-student relationship, and the hypnotic structure of many occult ideas. Tamdgidi's analysis however has some broader implications about the performative nature of Uttering a Word, and why the Task and Curse of a Magus involves a paradigmatic shift or conceptual distance.

The Double

2010-02-24T09:14:37Z

Don Webb writes: '1. There is a cheap out-of-print mystery novel by Don Webb with 24 chapters, each one keyed to a Rune. Buy it. Heck have a book club. It is called The Double.'

Anyone have a copy of The Sarandib Revelations?

Or an Austin flyer for Zandor Sinestro's Circus of Terror?

Or know the Secret of the Brotherhood of Travelers?

The One-Species Dilemma

2010-02-22T07:47:27Z

Dr. Michael A. Aquino once posed a central question of Setian philosophy to me. Rephrased from memory, it was something like: 'Why is it that Earth has only one species which has the self-aware consciousness to create civilization, symbolic systems, and other complex manifestations? Why not two or more? What would it be like if there was more than one species?' In this email exchange Dr. Aquino did acknowledge research into ape and dolphin communication, which perhaps has significance for Lilith Aquino's Utterance of Arkte. I pose this as a philosophical, existential dilemma, and not as a position of species infallibility. Within the Temple of Set, Dr. Aquino and others referred to this self-aware consciousness as the Gift of Set. Category 17 of the TS Reading List explored this in more detail, in the following categories. (1) Illustrative and Descriptive approaches of: (a) evolutionary change in species, and (b) the evolutionary potential of individual self-aware consciousness. For the early cohort of Setians, the alien Overlords in Arthur C. Clarke's novel Childhood's End (#17A) and Stanley Kubrick's adaptation 2001: A Space Odyssey (#F17A) were evocative. The British Quatermass series (#F17B) was also influential for suggesting that superstitions about the Prince of Darkness superstitions was a designation of this evolutionary change at group and societal levels (see the discussion in Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces). Several other Reading List categories such as the historical Prince of Darkness imagery (#3), H.P. Lovecraft (#7), the vampire and werewolf as phenomenological models of consciousness (#8), and space exploration (#22) provided other illustrative, resonant examples.

This imagery also acts as a screening mechanism: it resonates with some people as spooky, and scares others. Perhaps one reason is that these are potential 'images of the future' (Fred Polak) that have historical baggage from past religious controversies (#3, #4, #6). A second reason is that terms such as 'Gift of Set' and 'non-natural' have led to definitional confusion outside the Temple. A third reason is that illustrative and descriptive approaches will act as self-propagative memes across different communication vectors and cultures.

(2) Causal and Explanatory theories of: (a) evolutionary change in species, and (b) the conditions under which individual self-aware consciousness might occur. Aquino first conceived this whilst in the Church of Satan, and developed its conceptualisation further in the Temple of Set. The 1970s was a period in which orthodox Darwinian approaches were under attack from several fronts: anomalies in the historical record such as megaliths and dolmens (#17B; #5), the anomaly of human self-consciousness as differentiated from artificial intelligence (#17H; #15), the emergence of new theories such as neo-Lamarckian genetic memory, Stephen Jay Gould's 'punctuated equilibria', and Rene Thom's 'catastrophism' (#17E), and the limits of theories to explain the causal mechanisms by which this could occur, except via epigenetic and neurobiological selection pressures, posited as buffers from a collective unconsciousness or quantum-level objective mind (#17C; #19C). Such theories reflected the times. Later, Richard Dawkins (#16O) would counterclaim that Darwinian evolutionary theorists had no problems in answering some of the anomalies posited in these times, like the human eye.

In their search for answers, Setians considered a range of different factors. Dr. Aquino considered Robert O. Becker's thesis that the electromagnetic field may have affected human brain evolution, potentially during the Wuerm glaciations in Europe (#17F). James Lewis added the broad view of deep history (#17G). Pat Hardy added Richard Dawkins' theory of memes, sociobiology and game theory (#16O). Many other theories were explored in the Scroll of Set and individual Pylon and Element papers.

Much of the Temple of Set's knowledge base came from human consciousness research (#19), which although it began as a Lakatosian research programme, led to some wild conjectures throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. Novelty, little comparative theory-building, poor research designs, and the politicization of research were all factors. The personal computer, the Internet, and social networking has largely replaced this period in the media's coverage and public attention.p>During Don Webb's tenure as High Priest, individual Setians also discussed the theories of Gerald Edelman, Gregory Bateson, Douglas Hofstadter, and intelligence augmentation; the Extropian and Transhumanist schools of philosophy; and the popularizations by Stephen Mithuen and Terence Deacon of current research in the evolution of culture, mind and species. In part, this may have been driven by the wish to update the Temple's 'currency' of knowledge, and the personal interest/expertise of Pat Hardy and Ronald L. Barrett in these areas.

(3) Theories of: (a) Individual Action and (b) Change. The first category of theories provided Setians with illustrative models of species evolution. The second category tentatively suggested explanations of why this had occurred, and posited some initial causal mechanisms. What to do with this evolutionary potential? The Church of Satan and Dr. Aquino's Wewelsburg Working had emphasized the stressfulness of individual change (#17D). Anthropological and neurobiological research programmes highlighted that evolutionary strategies acted as constraints on individuals (#17I, #16P). Films such as Forbidden Planet (#F19A) and John Lilly's floatation tank experiments (#19N, #F19B) highlighted both the promise and the individual perils of quasi-experimental methods.

During Webb's tenure the Temple adopted Polish-American psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi's 'flow' research as a model for individual meaning-making and willed change. Webb added Alfred Bester's science fiction novel The Stars, My Destination (#17K) as a fictional, illustrative model of how self-limits could be overcome. That they could be overcome did not mean that individuals were always successful in doing so.

Its public records suggest that the Temple of Set has mainly pursued aesthetic and illustrative, research, and, in some cases quasi-experimental approaches to the knowledge domain hinted at in the above philosophical dilemma. The predominant approaches in the Temple's public writings include personal and group Workings, theory-building research, and to integrate exploratory methods from other Schools, such as Uspenskii's psychological interpretation of early Gurdjieff (#19B, #19C), Bruce Lee's Jeet Kun Do (#19D), or Aleister Crowley's methods (#9), amongst many others.

The tradition of Working analyses and commentaries, similar to the 'secret autobiographies' in Tibetan Buddhism, provides more phenomenological and thick description of this, and attempts at exploratory theory-testing in the context of individual Setians' research programmes.

Dr. Aquino's 1997 introduction to the Onyx Tablet, which provides justification for the Priesthood and the Temple of Set's existence, is most explicit on the Temple's guardianship role: 'If most of that humanity is not yet ready to confront its evolutionary potential, the requisite tools may at least be developed and safeguarded against a time when society may rise from its self-imposed imprisonment to grasp them.'

Just what 'evolutionary potential' this might be at a species level, how it might be best 'confronted', what the 'requisite tools' are, and how they are optimally 'developed and safeguarded' remains to be articulated in full detail - at least publicly.

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