Alex Burns

12th March 2010: The Gentle Art of ERA Self-Defence

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 22:05:52 +1100

Generating a range of different grant and funding ideas for a client's 'program of research'.

Tony Boyd in today's Australian Financial Review ('How Myer float sprang a leak', p. 64):

The joint managers of the Myer IPO, Goldman Sachs JBWere, Macquarie Group and Credit Suisse, did a masterful job in locking up just about every broker in Australia.

Were there no 'contrarian' views or Monte Carlo testing of Myer's post-IPO valuation price?

11th March 2010: Clarity of Thought

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:06:50 +1100

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

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:39:34 +1100

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

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:01:40 +1100

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.

The Cove

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:09:21 +1100

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).

8th March 2010: 2010 Oscars

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:22:11 +1100

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

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:09:10 +1100

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

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 22:02:28 +1100

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

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:03:38 +1100

'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.

3rd March 2010: Market St Dumplings

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:29:02 +1100

'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

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:52:53 +1100

'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

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:10:11 +1100

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

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:13:17 +1100

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."

Four Books on Heidegger, Gurdjieff and Aletheia

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:25:56 +1100

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

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:14:37 +1100

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?