If you're interested in reading some detailed analysis of what went wrong in the financial world, the New York Times carried two lengthy articles today that get into it:

First, there's a two-parter, starting with The End Of The Financial World As We Know It. With a title like that, I was hoping that part two would be called "And I Feel Fine", but it's really How To Repair A Broken Financial World. These articles are written by Michael Lewis and David Einhorn, and you might recognize the former as the author of another very interesting article that came out several weeks ago called The End. The new series begins with the story of Harry Markopolis, who had been waving red flags in front of the SEC regarding Bernie Madoff for years, and the authors use this story to illiustrate their point: "What’s interesting about the Madoff scandal, in retrospect, is how little interest anyone inside the financial system had in exposing it." and they then make the same point about the inherent problems throughout the financial system: that it wasn't necessarily that nobody saw warning signs. It's that nobody had incentive to do anything about the warning signs. Not regulators, ratings agencies, traders, executives, boards, stockholders, or investors -- not to mention elected officials.

The other article is just called Risk Mismanagement and it is about the use (or mis-use, or abuse... take your pick) of models that put a dollar figure, known as "VaR", on financial risk. It seems that this number started out as a useful 40,000-foot management tool with known limitations, but it took on a life of its own. It was a number, therefore it must be All-Important, right? Wrong! It was a number and a probability -- and the probability was 0.99, so if the number was X that meant that the model predicted that 99 times out of 100 the risk of loss from a firm's transactions was X or less. The fact that it was expected to be wrong 1% of the time was ignored, and there was never a second number for the multiple of X that might be lost in the 1 in 100 case. By putting too much faith in VaR, risk managers systematically ignored the worst risks, and then the Rand cum Greenspan philosophy that financial institutions are inherently better than regulators at understanding their own risk kicked in: VaR became the accepted formula for determining reserve requirements. That's despite the fact that VaR gave no information at all about the outlier scenarios in which reserves are critical to a financial institution! And to top it all off, the risks that the model considered didn't include the risk of a liquiditiy crisis so even if outliers were considered, the worst-case outlier would still not be accounted for.

Very interesting stuff.

Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah is an IBMer. I don't recall when or how I found my way to his blog, Koranteng's Toli, but over several years it has been one of the best that I have followed. It is very well-written, in an engagingly unpredictable style that sometimes rambles but never strays from its purpose. The material is technical, philosophical, political, literary, political, and every which combination of the above.

I believe that most of my regular readers are more than a little interested in the political process. Some, I'm afraid, view political participation rather cynically, and that's unfortunate. Most of us, though, are fortunate to live in countries where political particiption is not something that routinely involves taking physical risks. Read the article that Koranteng posted today The Wound, Part 1 for a rather jarring reminder of what it is like for people in places where that fortunate level of safety in participation can't be taken for granted.

Two and a half years ago, I posted a complaint about the RSS feed that was being published on the DominoPower site. The problem was that it wasn't a feed for DominoPower, it was a consolidated feed for a number of publications, and the Domino-related articles were in the overwhelming minority. To his credit, David Gewirtz posted a response to my blog, conceding that it should be changed, and saying "Stay tuned."

Well, time goes by, but a few weeks ago David posted a new comment on that post:

Well, uh, turns out "won't happen immediately" means it took almost 2 1/2 years , but we've finally got them, as of today. You can subscribe to an articles-only DominoPower feed at:

http://www.dominopower.com/feeds/articlesOnly/rss20/feed.xml

This is Day-One of our availability, so, uh, you might be helping us test the feature, but it's here. So never let it be said we don't listen-ish.

So, I re-subscribed to check it out, and I am happy to report that it now is what it claims to be: a feed for DominoPower, contining useful Domino-related content and nothing to distract. There's a bunch of stuff I can catch up on because I missed it during the long period where I was unsubscribed, and new articles from such fine writers as David himself, Mick Moignard and others. (Hey, Mick! I owe you a return dinner from one night in London several years ago. If you're ever in New England, give me a shout!)

Kudos to David for (a) getting it done, however belatedly, and (b) for remembering to contact someone who had complained about it.

I don't read nearly as many books as some people. I do read an awful lot, but it's just not usually in book form. I usually tend to carry three or four magazines (typical ones being The New Yorker, Scientific American, The Economist, or Foreign Affairs) onto an airplane instead of a book or two, and I can't even begin to estimate how much on-line reading I do.

Recently, however, I learned that two friends had books published. One is Michael Sampson's new book about SharePoint, Seamless Teamwork: Using Microsoft® SharePoint® Technologies to Collaborate, Innovate, and Drive Business in New Ways . The other is The Presidential Book of Lists: From Most to Least, Elected to Rejected, Worst to Cursed-Fascinating Facts About Our Chief Executives, by Ian Randal Strock. Most of my readers are probably familiar with Michael, but while few if any know Ian. Suffice it to say that Michael is one of the first people I'd actively seek out for objective opinions about any collaboration technology, and his book comes at a very opportune time for me as I need to start getting myself up to speed on SharePoint. Ian, on the other hand, is one of the few friends I'd go up against in a trivia contest and fully expect to lose, and his book comes out at a time when my thirst for anything and everything related to Presidential politics and history is still at a post-election peak. So although books generally take a back seat to magazines and on-line reading for me, I happened to find out about both of these books within the past few day. I ordered them separately, but both from Amazon, and they both arrived today.

A certain amount of artistic license with the Star Spangled Banner, even in ordinary circumstances, is understandable. It is admirable, even, when it adds subtlly to the pride of experience of hearing the country's National Anthem. Done properly, with the skills of the artist never overshadowing respect for the music, it glorifies the song, the listeners, and the country... and, though least of all, it glorifies the singer.

And yes, there are certain places where the usual sensibilities do not apply, e.g., the open field in Woodstock, New York. And there are certain contexts where the rules are easily understood to be different, e.g., a musical event of such size and variety that it could not help but be the defining moment of the political and cultural changes of its time. And there are certain artists who possess unique skills that no other musician can match, along with the inspiration to use them, e.g., Jimi Hendrix... Put all these elements together, and taking great liberties with The Star Spangled Banner can be a triumphant musical restatement, driven by and inspiring patriotism in new ways. In such very rare cases, taking great liberties is a show of genius and a show of respect.

An ordinary football stadium is not such a place. The beginning of an ordinary football game is not such a context. And as of now, I don't know who the vocal quartet was that performed at tonight's Patriot's - Jets NFL game, but they were not in the league of Jimi Hendrix. This was not a rare case, and there was no show of genius, not to mention no show of respect.

What I heard tonight in the broadcast of this football game took license far beyond any reasonable limit..

The continual stream of melodic deviations and flourishes taken by the singers was so great that they could have glorified only the singers themselves... if those flourishes and deviations had actually worked. In actuality, though, they were so discordant in several places that they didn't even succeed in that.. They only brought more disrespect on themselves, while showing disrespect to the song, the listeners, and the country.

It was offensive.

I blame the Super Bowl, and other major sporting events, where promoters have created too much of a spotlight on the singers of the national anthem, encouraging them to push the envelope too much, taking more liberties than appropriate -- though usually at least with a level of musicality that keeps it from being offensive.

P.S. It's a pure coincidence that I've mentioned Jimi Hendrix in two posts today, after never having done so in this blog before. I think.

As power trios go, few if any compared to The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Now, drummer Mitch Mitchell, the last surviving member of the original Experience lineup has passed away.

Little Wing on the iPod now.

I don't think I had ever really, truly experienced pandemonium before. I had seen it on TV, but never actually been in the middle of it.

I have experienced and reacted to many wonderful things in my life, and of course a few stand alone without any possible comparison to anything else. The best of those moments have been shared with family, of course, but last night I shared such a moment with a few hundred people, most of whom I had only known for a few days, weeks, or months.

It felt good. It was, for a moment or two, totally overwhelming. It felt like a huge weight was lifted off my back. At first I didn't understand why. It took a while to figure it out.

Late last night, I promised "more later", with the intention of telling the story of my day. Here it is. It's a bit long.

More on this later. I am totally spent.