Month: October 2003

Just finished Who Invented the Computer, a recent book by Alice Rowe Burks.  For those of us who assumed that the modern digital computer, having been primarily funded by the U.S. and British governments, was a public domain idea, there are some eye-opening facts.  Here’s the chronology:

1939-42:  John V. Atanasoff, a physicist at Iowa State College, works with Clifford Berry, a master’s student, to build a digital vacuum tube computer (Atanasoff-Berry Computer or “ABC”).  The project has only paltry funding and is abandoned due to a problem with the punch card input/output system.  Atanasoff and Berry wander off to tackle projects related to America’s war with Germany, Italy, and Japan.

1941:  John Mauchly, who has been working on weather calculations using analog computers, drives out to Iowa to visit Atanasoff and gets a good look at how digital circuits can be built from analog components.  He reads Atanasoff’s big design document and goes home after five days of continuous meetings with Atanasoff and Berry.

1943:  vacuum tube Colossus code-breaking computer starts operating at Bletchley Park in England, workplace of Alan Turing, the father of Computer Science

1945:  Eckert and Mauchly’s ENIAC is operational, using many of Atanasoff’s ideas without credit

1947:  Eckert and Mauchly apply for a patent on fundamental ideas in electronic computing (“ENIAC patent”)

1964: ENIAC patent is issued by the U.S. Patent Office, running through 1981.

1965: Sperry Rand, the owner of the Ecker-Mauchly patents, demands approximately $1 billion in royalties from other computer vendors.  IBM is exempt from these demands due to an earlier cross-licensing agreement with Sperry.

1971: Honeywell sues Sperry, asking the Federal court to invalidate Sperry’s patents on the grounds of Atanasoff’s prior art and the more than one year of delay between the customer deliveries of ENIAC and its patent application.

1973:  Judge Earl R. Larson rules that the ENIAC was derived from Atanasoff’s innovations, that Sperry’s patents are unenforceable, and that IBM has been violating the Sherman Antitrust Act (i.e., that IBM is a monopoly).  Honeywell’s legal costs are estimated to be $3.5 million or roughly 700 times the cost of building the ABC computer.

The story has a number of interesting lessons.  First it shows the terrible consequences of being a bit too early.  Nobody was interested in Atanasoff’s project in the late 1930s and it did not seem worth funding to the point that minor obstacles such as the punchcard reader problem could be overcome.  If Atanasoff had only been a few years later he might have played a major role in massive federally funded projects.

A second lesson from the story is that there isn’t all that much true innovation in the engineering world.  People working independently at disparate sites often came up with similar solutions (except for Mauchly, of course, who had the opportunity to stand directly on the shoulders of Atanasoff).  Only one team, however, can get a patent and it turned out that this one was mired at the Patent Office for about 20 years following the design of the ENIAC.

Imagine how different the world would be if Sperry had been able to control, through licensing, whether or not the first microprocessors could be built (note: 1968-70 the Air Force funded a fairly powerful 20-bit microprocessor project for the F14A fighter jet, which worked but was kept secret; Intel introduced the 4004 4-bit microprocessor in 1971 for use in desk calculators).

The last half of the book is devoted to an academic bitchfest in which Burks talks about all of the hacks who don’t credit Atanasoff.  It is interesting mostly for its discussion of exhibits at the Smithsonian and PBS documentaries.  Sperry funded these projects and the non-profits obligingly ignored or downplayed Atanasoff’s contributions in favor of Eckert and Mauchly.  The only publication that couldn’t be bought and wouldn’t be intimidated by threats of legal action was … Car and Driver magazine.  Atanasoff was a hero to Car and Driver writer Patrick Bedard because he testified that a late night high-speed drive in 1937 in a V8 Ford and a few drinks in a roadhouse in Illinois had inspired a couple of the critical designs in the ABC.  Bedard speculated “Atanasoff didn’t get nearly the credit due him because the [court] decision was issued just one day before the Watergrate-inspired ‘Saturday Night Massacre’ and it lacked the combination of inconsequentiality and putrescence necessary to compete for media attention.”

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Just finished Louis Begley’s About Schmidt, the 1996 novel that was made into a 2002 film.  The differences between the book and the movie are remarkable.  The book is set in the Hamptons and New York.  The protagonist, Schmidt, is a 60-year-old WASP lawyer who retires from his law firm partnership when his wife becomes terminally ill.  The wife is from an old rich WASP family and works as a literary fiction editor.  Schmidt’s daughter, a Harvard-educated yuppie who does PR for a tobacco company, is planning to marry a junior partner at Schmidt’s old firm.  This horrifies Schmidt partly because his future son-in-law doesn’t read books or appreciate culture but mostly because the young lawyer is Jewish.  Much of the book centers on Schmidt’s horror at a formerly genteel world of New York law firms and Long Island beaches, now despoiled by an influx of Jews.  The last half of the book is devoted to a romance between Schmidt and a 20-year-old half-Puerto Rican waitress, complete with a Hollywood happy ending.

The screenplay transplants the action to Omaha, Nebraska.  Schmidt and his wife are middle class salt-of-the-earth types.  There are no Jews in evidence.  The daughter is living 1000 miles away and her future husband is objectionable to Schmidt because he’s a “nincompoop” and his family, rather than being successful happily married Jewish psychiatrists, consists of divorced white trash-y New Age-y folks.  The movie Schmidt, played by Jack Nicholson, is unrelievedly sad and pathetic.  There are no romances with young women for movie Schmidt (no romances with any women, actually).

So how often does Hollywood (well, actually my cousin Harry) make a movie that is substantially darker than an already fairly dark novel? 

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Male Bostonians are glued to their TVs these days thanks to a series of baseball games between our Red Sox and the New York Yankees.  This reminded me of a section from The Importance of Being Lazy, a book by Al Gini that was on my summer reading list:

Mariah Burton Nelson, athlete and author, has written a brilliant and blistering book on sexism and the culture of sports titled The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football.  Nelson believes that the more power women have acquired–athletically, economically, and politically–the more threatened men feel, and the more they cling to football and other manly sports…  Men may have to deal with assertive wives and daughters and take a back seat to a female boss, but football remains the last bastion of mythical male domination.

Gini proceeds to trace the fantastic growth in attendance, player salaries, and the general budgets for macho gruntfests from the 1960s, when feminism took hold, and the present.  He also notes that attempts to hook females into becoming massive consumers of professional sports have been failures.  It is the guys who like sports and they especially like the ones where women aren’t competitive.

So do we believe this?  It seems plausible.  Horse racing, for example, which has no feminism-backlash angle, doesn’t seem to be substantially more popular than it was prior to World War II.

[People often seem curious to know my personal preferences in these areas.  In this case it seems that I must be gay because instead of watching the Red Sox (I attend one game every 10 years and never watch on TV) I watched the last season of Absolutely Fabulous on DVD (from netflix.com).  It is funny that we value movies more highly as culture than TV shows.  All of my friends surveyed agreed that they’d much rather own AbFab on DVD and watch episodes repeatedly than own Lawrence of Arabia or Citizen Kane.]

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An Associated Press story today describes accused rapist Kobe Bryant “[arriving at the courthouse] with his lawyers amid tight security in a caravan of three SUVs”.

A little Google News searching for SUVs brought up this summary of California news from October 7: 

A 6-year-old boy was shot in the head as he sat with his parents and brothers in an SUV…

A man was arrested and charged with attempted homicide after he allegedly ran over another man twice with a sport utility vehicle following a raucous house party in Palo Alto.

In Florida SUV owners are hitting bicyclists (story) and also in Minnesota (story).

On Long Island SUV drivers are killing and robbing people (story).

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Two publishers have approached us wanting to do a hardcopy version of http://philip.greenspun.com/internet-application-workbook/ (the textbook for 6.171 at MIT).  Both have lost interest when we said that we wanted to keep the text online.  To a traditional publisher the Web is a place for stuff that isn’t quite good enough to sell.  If the manuscript ever does become good enough to sell it should be made inaccessible to anyone who isn’t able to scratch up the $40.  An amusing side note is that one of the publishers who felt that it was critical to make every last dime possible from the sale of our book was Microsoft Press, whose working capital is $40 billion.

This dovetails slightly with http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/, a quixotic effort to fight every academic journal publisher and all professional societies.  (In my own little field, for example, ACM and IEEE do their best to deny access to computer science research results to anyone who is not working at a university, a member of their orgs, or willing to pay $$$.  I.e., if you’re a kid in Africa wanting to learn something about computer science you’re not going to do it by looking at these folks’ journals on the Web.)

Economic growth comes from scientific and technical innovation.  Scientific and technical innovation depends to a large extent on innovators having access to each others’ published results.  It is thus a shame that the only way that an author can get money or tenure is by turning over his or her work to an organization whose primary goal is artificially restricting access to that work.

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Authorities have spent two days searching for a crashed helicopter Columbia, Missouri based on a 911 call.  Here are some details from a TV station’s story:

He told the dispatcher his name was Larry Bishop and they were flying from North Carolina to Kansas City.

He also said there were six others on board and the pilot was dead.

Towards the end of the conversation Larry repeatedly said he could not feel his feet. Just before the phone line went dead, he was calling out a female’s name.

This is a very strange incident.  From RDU to Kansas City is nearly 800 nautical miles, well beyond the range of any helicopter ever manufactured.  You’d probably have to make two refueling stops to make it from North Carolina to Kansas City, an all-day ordeal at the sluggish cruising speeds of even the most expensive helicopters (pushing into a typical west-to-east headwing slowing the machine down even further).  Anyone rich enough to charter a helicopter would be rich enough to charter a jet or turboprop instead and fly non-stop in a tiny fraction of the time.

A helicopter that can carry 7 people is at least a $2 million machine that requires a substantial support crew.  One of them would very likely have noticed the pilots’ failure to report arriving in Kansas City.

Anyone who can afford to charter a $2 million, $1000/hour helicopter ought to be someone with, if not a lot of friends, at least a lot of dependants.  You’d think one of them would have noticed his boss’s disappearance.

If this story proves to be true it will be almost as amazing as the U.S. Navy’s failure to notice the sinking of the 1,100-person cruiser Indianapolis during World War II (see the book In Harm’s Way).

[Update:  Manila seems to be failing to post the comments that have been placed on this article.  The most interesting is a link to the audio recording of the 911 call:  http://www.thekansascitychannel.com/news/2538847/detail.html]

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Time to stick my neck out with a prediction:  Arnold will lose the California election today, for reasons that have nothing to do with his recent spate of bad press.  Arnold will lose simply because there are enough craven risk-averse people in California terrified at the prospect of trading a known (Gray Davis) for an unknown (Arnold as politician).  Either (a) the recall will fail and Gray Davis will keep his job, or (b) a lifelong political hack such as Cruz Bustamante will prevail over the replacement candidates without experience in politics.

[Update October 8:  Sometimes when you stick your neck out it gets chopped off…  Arnold seems to have won by a landslide.  This on top of the humiliation of arriving home from flying and finding out that philip.greenspun.com (my main server) was down for 11 hours (it runs on the photo.net box and none of the new staff there seems to have noticed or have monitors installed).]

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Summer is over.  Fall has begun.  Christmas is not yet upon us.  Thus it is a good time to clean up personal investments.

One thing that I recent did was close all of my accounts with firms that do investment banking and IPOs.  There is an inherent conflict of interest between wanting to collect fees from companies selling shares to the public and providing impartial advice to individual investors.  A typical example of where the conflict arises is the July 28, 2003 settlement between the SEC and JP Morgan and Citigroup (source).  It seems that the two firms assisted Enron in defrauding investors by manipulating its financial statements.  A more direct example was furnished by the great “stock analyst scam” of the 1990s, which resulted in a $1.4 billion settlement in April 2003.  A good archive of stories about this settlement is available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/business/specials/wallstreetprobe/.

Hear are the firms involved that agreed to pay the SEC to settle conflict of interest charges:

• Citigroup/Salomon Smith Barney
  
• Credit Suisse First Boston
  
• Merrill Lynch
  
• Morgan Stanley
  
• Goldman Sachs Group
  
• Lehman Brothers Holdings
  
• J.P. Morgan Chase
  
• Bear Stearns
  
• UBS Warburg
  
• U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray

(source: Washington Post).  If you have an account with one of these organizations and you’re not yourself a corporate criminal or wanting to execute an extremely complex leveraged buyout… perhaps it is time to ask yourself why.  If they have to choose between your best interest and that of a Fortune 500 company from whom they stand to earn $100 million per year in fees, how can they possibly choose you?

Sometimes there is no alternative but to deal with an organization that has been convicted of violating federal law and cheating its customers.  For example, if you want to send your kid to an Ivy League college you will become a customer of an organization that was prosecuted for tuition and financial aid price-fixing in violation of antitrust laws.  If you want to listen to your favorite musician and don’t have time to waste on Kazaa you’ll be buying a CD from a record company that was very likely guilty of violating those same antitrust laws.  If you want to run the same software as everyone else you’ll be a customer of Microsoft, no stranger to the Federal court system.

In the world of personal finance, however, plenty of pure alternatives are available.  Vanguard and Fidelity offer a huge range of investment instruments.  Suppose that you move your money to Vanguard, a company that is actually owned by its investors and that does no investment banking.  You don’t have to scrutinize every communication from Vanguard to figure out if they’ve colored their message to benefit one of their big corporate customers.  Vanguard’s instruments are 0.5-1% lower in fees than those offered by the typical investment bank/full-service brokerage.  When people were making 8% after-inflation annual returns it didn’t seem ruinous to pay an extra 1% in fees.  However, we live in an age where investors might consider themselves lucky to earn 2% above inflation; do you really want to give up half of your return to a stock fund manager, financial planner, or whatever?

What’s worth buying these days?  This blog seems to be mostly a techie hangout so let’s consider the challenges of middle-aged techies (like me!).  If you are a computer programmer over the age of 35 you should probably plan like a retiree and figure out how to live on whatever money you currently have.  Remember that retirement doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re old or that you’re rich; it could simply be that you’re no longer a useful component of the labor force.

For any retiree, inflation is the big risk and we seem to have all the makings of a couple of inflationary decades right in front of us.  George W. “Hoover” Bush may need to invade quite a few more countries in order to win the 2004 election.  We only attack poor countries because it minimizes the chance of getting our ass kicked.  Then we start feeling sorry for the defeated inhabitants because they are so poor.  So we have to spend $200 billion “rebuilding” until whatever country we invaded reaches the standard of living of Arkansas.  The government is going to get the $200 bil by borrowing.  The easiest way to pay back the borrowed money, especially to foreign suckers who bought our bonds, is by inflating the U.S. dollar so that a $7 trillion debt isn’t scary anymore (because $7 trillion might be a typical annual salary for a Walmart cashier if we go for Latin American-style inflation).

Regular bonds are a terrible choice when inflation starts to gallop.  With a bond you have a promise from the government or a company to pay you, for example, $1,000 in 2030.  But what if $1,000 in 2003 is only enough to buy a Big Mac?  Tough luck.  You could buy real estate on the theory that Americans will keep adding working longer hours and outbidding each other until a typical mortgage is for 80 percent of a three-job couple’s income.  The problem with real estate, however, is that municipal governments will attack your investment with savage real estate taxes and by every estimate the price of U.S. real estate is absurdly high right now.

A reasonable inflation-protected choice is a standard common stock mutual fund.  You’re buying shares in operating companies.  Even if inflation runs wild as it did in the late 1970s, owning 1 percent of General Electric will still make you a very rich person.  The latest gimmick in stock mutual funds is the “tax-managed” fund that tries to minimize capital gains distributions by (a) selling the big losers every year to get capital losses, and (b) penalizing people who pull their money out after a year or two.  Research shows that careful tax management can beat an ordinary index fund by about 0.5% in after-tax returns (I once looked into a JP Morgan tax-managed index fund; its expense ratio was 0.8% higher than the standard Vanguard index fund and therefore all of the benefit of the tax management would have gone into JP Morgan’s pocket; fortunately Vanguard has a few tax-managed funds of its own).

The ultimate in inflation protection is an inflation-indexed bond from the U.S. government.  You can learn about these in this Motley Fool article.  They can be purchased through Vanguard or Fidelity.  If you don’t have enough money to hold the individual bonds, both Vanguard and Fidelity offer inflation-protected bond funds.

To summarize…  (1) consider voting against the Wall Street criminals by moving your assets to a non-criminal non-conflicted organization such as Vanguard or Fidelity, (2) if you’re someone whose performance is evaluated by a clueless MBA and whose job could conceivably be done by a guy sitting at a computer in a low-wage country, plan for early retirement by investing in assets that won’t wither in the face of inflation.

 

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In “Where Nobody Knows You’re a Music Thief” by Daniel Akst in the Sunday, October 5, 2003 New York Times we find the first serious advocation of letting the RIAA monitor all Internet activity so as to prevent file sharing:

“The answer is probably authentication. Sooner or later we will need to know who everyone on the Internet is, and who confirmed their identities. Internet access providers who admit unauthenticated users will have to be shut out, even if that means shutting out whole countries.

“In such a world, there would be no doubt about who was violating copyright laws or otherwise misusing the electronic commons. It’s sad, I know. The ability to shed one’s identity online seemed a dream for a while, but as the poet Delmore Schwartz reminds us, ‘in dreams begin responsibilities.'”

This is sort of an echo of an idea put forth here in this blog on Thursday, September 25:

Prediction:  RIAA will get a law passed making it illegal to email sound recordings.  To enforce the law the RIAA will have the right to read anyone’s email at any time.  Encryption of email will need to be outlawed so as to thwart terrorists and music thieves.

[Of course as noted here on September 5, the most likely explanation for the declining sales of clunky physical objects containing brief musical recordings (e.g., CDs) is that the product is unappealing compared to subscription music services such as XM, Sirius, and 500-channel digital cable (which includes 50 channels of commercial-free music), $12 DVDs at Walmart, and other entertainment options that did not exist when Edison cylinders were introduced 125 years ago (or when CDs were introduced more than 20 years ago).  It is a testament to the power of the RIAA that their posited connection between Internet file sharing and their sagging sales is accepted uncritically in the mass media.]

Update:  I mentioned this story to Robert Thau, author of the core of the original Apache Web server.  He said “If the Chinese government had proposed this scheme, the New York Times would have editorialized against it.”

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This section is for recording random interesting things that happen at BloggerCon…

One constant debate was on whether blogs will substantially improve journalism, public discourse, and worldwide understanding.  At first this idea seems laughable.  All of the money is in Big Media and in our society money = impact.  As an example of how pathetically uncommercial blogs are, consider this one that you’re reading now.  It is the #2 most popular blog on Harvard’s server.  The ranking page shows that it has been viewed about 450,000 times in six months.  Google AdWords pays publishers roughly 50 cents per 1000 pages in which its ads appear (see this story for how serving Google ads, like other forms of advertising, can only be done if you’re willing to accept some limitations on your future speech).  So the total revenue for a moderately popular Weblog is apparently on the order of $400 per year, i.e., only barely enough to pay for a DSL line.  The New York Times has a larger budget than this for even the smallest story.

There are smart people out there in Blogland, e.g., Larry Lessig.  Lessig is of course much more interesting than 99 percent of the day-to-day journalism out there.  But if you don’t know Lessig, how would you find him among the clutter?  Perhaps technology will help us.  Right now there is no good way to ask an information system “Show me blog entries that people at least as discriminating as Larry Lessig thought were interesting.”  Maybe it will happen in 10 years or so.  As Jin S. Choi says “Mere matter of programming.”

Meanwhile the profusion of garbage leads salaried journalists to cluck with disapproval and quote the old adage that “A lie gets halfway around the world before truth gets its boots on” (Winston Churchill by way of Christopher Lydon).  Some audience members argued that truth propagates faster than ever.  My personal experience is that Google makes it fairly easy to check the veracity of a story.  If some organization is out there trying to debunk an urban legend Google will bring up their page.  In the pre-Google era people had no easy way to evaluate whatever they heard from a neighbor.

One woman on a panel is an author/editor at gawker.com, which today carries a somewhat cruel story about Lori Berenson, the MIT alumna imprisoned in Peru since 1996.  Hearing about Lori, though we did not overlap at MIT, always makes me sad.  Visit http://www.freelori.org/ to learn more.  You can help Lori’s parents with a Paypal donation or frequent flyer miles.  I kicked in $250 on the following theories:  (1) MIT alums should stick together, (2) the money won’t be squandered on administration as at most non-profit orgs (this report on Harvard shows what a successful non-profit looks like financially and how little they need $250).

A woman from the Harvard School of Education made what I always felt to be the canonically stupid comment on any Internet application:  it won’t help people who lack Internet access and the people who are working on the app should turn their attention to the “digital divide.”  Her main concern was American kids in the inner city.  It is true that a decent used PC can be obtained for $200, less than the cost of the most fashionable running shoes, but what remains expensive is Internet access.  I was tempted to jump up and push my idea that the Federal Government should sponsor a universal wireless Internet over the U.S., with access free to people who don’t need much bandwidth, a system that would cost a tiny fraction of whatever it is going to cost us to invade whatever country that is next on our list.  Fortunately a much more intelligent audience member spoke first, noting that Moore’s law would eventually take care of the economic divide (ed: unless the telcos and cable monopolies have their way) but the real divide would be literacy and if we want the underprivileged to benefit from the Internet we should concentrate on teaching them to read and write.

Speaking of the benefits of IT… after I introduced myself as a CS teacher from MIT and made my first comment, the guy two seats over pulled me aside.  “Aha,” I thought, “those trenchant observations really made this guy think.”  He said “I hate to bother you but since you said you were from the MIT CS department I thought you could help me with this Macintosh, which seems to have crashed and no amount of paperclip sticking into the little buttons on the back will revive it …”

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