Interrogation

http://www.fas.org/irp/dni/educing.pdf

The report above has just come out. It is long, 327 pages, and sometimes redundant.

It is interesting. The report is a study about how to get people to talk about what they know and how to know whether what they say is 'true.'

There are very few well done studies about what 'works.' It seems that all the TV approaches and Soviet era pain based techniques make interesting drama but do not educe correct information.

The method that works the best is empathy and connection, a method that the best salesmen use daily.

Lie detectors

Two underlying assumption in discussions of detecting lies are that the person speaking knows that the statement is a lie and that there is an unambiguous physiological measure of lying when a person is doing it.

The first assumption is belied every day in the newspaper. People say things that contradict what other people say. Often, both believe that they are telling the truth (so both would pass a lie detector test even though the truths that they are telling are incompatible.)

Second, in order to calibrate the physiological measure you first have to prove that such a response exists. It is not clear that it does. Then you have to show that this response is consistent across people and times. It is not clear that it is. You also have to show that the response works for the liars, the confused, the delusional, and the ignorant. I have no idea how to pull this one off.

As a specific example, if the examiner thinks that taking home classified materials is always bad and illegal, but the examinee thinks that, when the pressure is high enough, it is OK to take some materials home, then a lie detector will be confused. The answers given will have more to do with situational ethics and less to do with some external standard of what a lie is.

LLCs

There is an ongoing discussion about LANS, LLC and other LLCs for national labs.

Here is a short version of my understanding.

LLCs, limited liability corporations, are created by large companies to cover an individual project. LLCs are often formed by multiple companies for one project. There are multiple reasons to form an LLC as opposed to a sole proprietorship or a C corporation.

Most of these reasons have to do with protecting the parent company and its assets if the project for which the LLC was formed does not go so well. LLCs make lots of sense to the parent company if the project has substantial risks and liabilities that the parent company should not assume. Another way of stating this is that a large parent company should only take on certain projects under the protection of an LLC.

Jessica Quintana

People have pilloried Jessica Quintana or have attempted to use her for their own agendas.

Reality seems to be different.

Once an organization ignores or devalues their 'lower' employees while at the same time giving these employees the power to move in directions that are not what the 'upper' employees want, situations like Jessica's happen all the time (see "The Logic of Delegation").

In this view of society, the name of the person is not predictable but the event of betrayal is.

Other sources of information

There are good discussions of polygraphs and the Livermore contract on LANL: The Rest of the Story.

There is the beginning of a good discussion on brainstorming to do things for the good of the community on Boy am I pissed!

Livermore

With the awarding of the management contract for Lawrence Livermore National Lab to a UC/Bechtel consortium yesterday, the scenario plays out on schedule.

This is apparently not good for workers at Los Alamos National Lab nor, most likely, for workers at Livermore.

More later.

Monte Carlo predictions

To predict the future of the Lab or the future of a person who works at the Lab, a Monte Carlo approach seems to be most accurate.

I now have a working Monte Carlo predictor.

The future

This is not a happy post. This is an update of a post from two months ago.

For the last five months, I have been gathering current data about the future of Los Alamos.

My current best estimate is that there is an 80% chance that I, like many others, will be a former Los Alamos resident within a year, possibly within 6 months.

The rationale - Los Alamos is collapsing and no one seems willing to stop the collapse. The collapse has been building for years.

The best estimate of the start date for the collapse is June of 2007 when LANS can fire people.

Current best estimates are that 2,000 current employees will no longer be employees by the end of September. In order to make the budget numbers, a significant number of those let go must be TSMs, including TSMs in weapons work. The loss of these people will not be a RIF because, by definition, a RIF is directed from the director's office. In this case, the director tells each division to make their budget numbers. Each division then tells each group the same thing. So, an equivalent number of people are let go but, definitionally, it is not a RIF.

Many of these talented people will then be fighting for a tiny number of jobs. The feel by many of them that universities are just waiting to hire them is apparently wrong. Universities have little free money and few free positions.

To keep the body count up, the Lab is hiring very junior people who do not have to be paid much. Since there is hiring of junior people and the cost of these people must be absorbed somewhere, an increased number of senior people must be let go.

To prepare myself for this collapse, I have been doing four things.

I have been working on and for biotech businesses far from Los Alamos.

I have been giving presentations to local churches about financial strategies that they can use to survive the collapse. A church that loses a significant fraction of its older members could face hard times.

I have been taking a lot of semi-professional pictures to capture the Los Alamos that I hoped would survive.

I have started to make financial estimates of damage that will be done to an average family by the June events. An average house in LA county is currently worth $400,000. By August 2007, this same house is expected to be worth between $228,000 and $300,000. The owner's equity is expected to drop from $168,000 to around $50,000. So each homeowner is expected to lose $100,000 of their net worth soon. This net worth may come back eventually. Based on a lot of data, 'eventually' would seem to mean 5-10 years or never.

Are there readers who want to have serious discussions about the future of the town, the Lab, and the county.

The cost of privacy

Many people, especially those in a weapons town, are 'private.' They have a number of parts of their lives that are sealed off from discussion with others. These private areas are not discussed with friends and are seldom discussed even with family.

By the nature and compartmentalization of work at LANL, over time these private areas expand and harden.

One of the most common areas of privacy is financial management. Another is interpersonal relationships.

For financial management, the average Lab employee's privacy habits have an actual but unexamined cost.

That cost is about $10,000 per person per year or $500,000 over a career.

Risk aversion

When most of my days were consumed by trying to get 'impossible' experiments to work, I thought about experimental risk in a particular way. I assumed that most experiments would not work but that, eventually, I would figure out how to get them to work. The risk was not that they would not work but that they might work and then I would have to figure out why they worked. I was not at risk in my job for having months worth of things that did not work. I was attempting a project that no one had ever done before. 'Not working' was expected.

Recently, in my role as a counselor, I have talked with many people in town. Most of them say that they are 'risk averse.' They put their money into LANB, sometimes in a CD. They work diligently for many hours at their job. They are 'risk averse.'

Something seemed wrong about this phrase 'risk averse.' Finally, thanks to a friend, I think that I know what is wrong. He and I were talking about inflation and how inflation eats into a family's budget and savings. I made a calculator that figures out what an average family's inflation rate is, based on the things that they buy, including college tuition and various kinds of insurance. This 'family inflation rate' is, currently, about 6% a year.

So, a person who puts their money into a bank account that yields 3% a year is losing 3% a year in buying power. It feels that we are each getting poorer because we are. The increased number of dollars that we have this year over last year is not enough to allow us to buy the same things that we bought last year. The same logic, of course, applies to a 3% COLA (cost of living adjustment). We have 3% more dollars but are losing ground to inflation.

A risk averse approach to, for instance finances, would be one in which net income rose faster than the rate of inflation.

So, what do people mean when they say that they are 'risk averse?' In fact they are losing 3 to 8% of their worth every year.

I think that they really mean that they are 'time averse.' They are unwilling, for many reasons, to realize that their 'risk averse' strategy is not really risk averse (the risk of losing money every year is constant) but is stable, soothing, and not very demanding of their time.

So 'risk averse' seems to mean 'time averse' and 'not very emotion inducing.'

I am coming to think that this community would be much stronger if more people were willing to really be 'risk averse.'

The blunt sword of anonymity

I have been thinking about anonymous posts on this blog and, especially, on LANL: the .....

Anonymous posts serve a very useful purpose. They give a voice and an outlet to people who, for reasons of employment or personality, cannot post under their own name.

My postings are never anonymous. Someone might claim that labeled postings are easy for me because I know about the Lab but do not work there. This is not true. There are risks to me personally with every posting that I make. The risks, currently, are tolerable; but there are risks.

The reason that anonymous posting is a blunt sword is that people with the power to change the environment for the better do not lose anything by ignoring anonymous posts. There is no person, no adversary, no combatant to best. So the environment continues as before. If I remember correctly, not long ago, there was an anonymous letter to Congress complaining about problems at LANL. As far as I know, nothing happened as a result of this letter.

So, my feeling is that unless some people have the courage to become named (no longer anonymous) at least to each other and then do something effective LANL will continue on its present course.

Lifetime Los Alamosans

Last Sunday, a friend suggested that there are two classes of people who work at LANL.

The first class consists of people who are here for a while, a few years, and then often go somewhere else.

The second class consists of people who are, essentially, here for life. They will leave but only if they can no longer be employed at all here. They will suppress their ambition, their need for income, and their desire to be treated well at work in order to stay in Los Alamos.

They may complain about how they are treated, but they will not effect change nor will they leave Los Alamos as long as they can work, in any capacity, at the Lab and live in Los Alamos.

I would appreciate comments on whether my friend might be right about these two classes of people. Hugh Gusterson in "People of the Bomb" seems, by a different route, to come to the same conclusion.

Thanks,

Not posting details

My answer below seems to deserve a slightly longer explanation.

When I started 'Science at LANL' a couple of years ago, I tried making long posts. I got complaints. A blog format, with scrolling on short screens, seems to work best for concise posts and not for long discussions. So I stopped making long posts.

At one point, I divided posts into topic areas so that a topic would be many posts deep in a branching structure. This was not so effective.

For the current topic, appropriate posts would be both long and deep and would be very time consuming for me to prepare professionally. So I have not done this.

Also, for the current topic, much of the really critical material is unpublished in newspapers and other sources and is complex. Much of it should not be published because the publication would hurt my attempts to be of use to colleagues at LANL and LLNL not help these attempts.

Later

Posting versus asking

Part of this information is in a comment below by me.

I do not post answers in detail for four main reasons.

1. The answers are long, more than 100 pages if written out, and therefore very time consuming to prepare.
2. The answers are individualistic. So one person's hundred pages will only overlap with another person's hundred pages by 30 to 50 pages.
3. Much of the material that is critical to an individual should not appear on a public site for a number of reasons.
4. The appropriate material is time sensitive and varies from group to group and division to division.

Predictions of the future of LANL

These predictions are hard to make accurately. The explanation of my current best approach to a making such predictions would take about an hour of someone's time.

If you want more details, ask.

People leaving

In a comment to the Update post, there is a request for more information about the number and kind of people leaving the Lab and about the budget situation.

This story is important to each worker. It is also long and complex. It varies from division to division and group to group. It is different for people in their 20's, 30's, 40's, 50's, and beyond. It differs from X to P to HR to NMT.

If someone wants to know a best estimate of the story that applies to them, they should email or call me directly. If they want a plan to protect themselves and their families against the likely future of the Lab, they should also contact me. As you can see by reading other posts in this blog and by reading the archives, I have been trying to find the truth about the future of LANL for a long time.

To get this story started, I propose four questions. The answers to these questions seem to be critical to predicting the future of the Lab.

1. Whatever happened to the $200,000,000 shortfall in the budget? This translates to more than 1,000 lost jobs.
2. If random polygraph testing is initiated and people lose their clearance and are fired, who will choose to work at LANL and who will buy the many houses that are on the market now?
3. If your buddies in other divisions no longer work at LANL and a number of businesses in the town close for lack of customers, do you still want to work here?
4. If the value of your house drops so that you now owe more on the mortgage than your house is worth, is that OK with you? In many communities with similar budget problems, this is what happens.
   

More later

Livermore and beyond

The counseling that Bart Jacobs and I have been doing in Los Alamos is likely to extend to Livermore folk.

Bart and I have been helping people create their own individualized plan to survive the transition. The standard plan includes financial and job hunting sections.

I have also started to present information to organizations in Los Alamos, such as churches, to help them survive the transition.

An update

A lot has happened in the last month.

1. The transfer of pension funds to LANS from UC
2. A number of people leaving
3. Inquisitions in DC
4. Jessica Quintana, latest version
5. Committee meetings in D.C

If any one wants to discuss these topics or others, let me know.