Month: August 2004

According to this NYT story, the management of Hollinger International took home 95 percent of the company’s profits for themselves over the last 6 years.  I.e., these guys were looters par excellance.  Yet graphing the price of HLR versus the S&P 500 shows that the company’s stock has outperformed the market as a whole.  How to explain this phenomenon?  Could it be that HLR has extraordinarily high profits and therefore 5 percent for the shareholders is still pretty good?  Or that the rest of the S&P 500 has managements that are looting more than 95 percent?

Let’s hear from some MBAs who can explain this to us.  You’d think this would make a great B-school case study.

[Addendum: It looks as though if we go back just a few years more the stock has underperformed the S&P: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=HLR&t=my&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=^GSPC]

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This just in from a married-with-kids-in-the-suburbs friend of mine (names changed to protect the guilty) …

I  am in a pickle that involves color processing of a roll of 24 color prints — ASA 400.  The issue involves developing a roll of color prints.  My family (including our 8 year old son, Billy, and our 6 year old daughter, Susan) just got back from 3 weeks in Maine.  It was great fun. We had some friends visit for a few days with their 6 year old daughter.  One night while the adults were hanging out the kids were playing in their bedroom and got naked. Then a little while later, they called me in to see.   “Mom, come see!” I went in and found Billy, my son, naked, and the girls had tied him to the bunk bed ladder and put a pillowcase over his head.  VERY stupidly and totally without thinking, I snapped a picture (#20 on roll of 24 color pictures) just to capture the visual moment because it struck me how innocent they were while creating such an awful vision.   Of course, this was totally done in fun and the kids have no idea why I told them to stop. 

My problem: I’d like to develop this roll of color prints —— because I want the other pictures on the roll but I do not know how a camera store would receive that one shot of Billy naked and tied up.

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I signed up to www.lingo.com and dumped my wired phone line, saving (in theory) about $20/month in the process and picking up unlimited calling to North America and Europe, voicemail, caller ID, and the ability to ring another number or two simultaneously with the home phone.

After about one month Lingo was able to transfer over my old home phone number.

Here’s how it has worked…

• when they transferred my home phone number they did not make that my caller ID so if I call people from my Lingo phone they get some weird new number that I was assigned and don’t recognize the caller as me; emailing customer service regarding this issue resulted in, 1 day later, a response that I had to call tech support; after waiting in the 15-minute queue for tech support the guy said that he needed to escalate the issue
  
• incoming caller ID is displayed without an area code, i.e., just the 7-digit local phone number, and no name is displayed, only a phone number
  
• many 800/888/877 numbers are unreachable from the phone, including Lingo’s own tech support phone number; a recording says that the number is out of service but calling the same number from a wired or mobile phone results in success; this reduces the cost savings from Lingo if you have to wait on hold in various 800-number queues because you’ll need to buy an extra 100+ minutes of wireless air time every month
  
• some calls come through with very low voice volume and I have to crank up the volume on the phone
  
• no problems can be resolved via email or Web support; you really have to call their tech support phone number (from your cell phone) and wait in queue for 15+ minutes

Speaking of IP telephony… sitting in Japanese business hotels with my free high-speed Internet I wondered if I could have gotten a headset to plug into my laptop that would have enabled me to make phone calls back to friends in the US at a reasonable price.  Anyone have any luck with a computer-based telephone service that bridges the calls into the traditional phone network at the end?

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This AP story about California local governments suing Microsoft for monopoly pricing in their sales to city and county governments is interesting.  It is not clear why any of these plaintiffs need Windows.  A lot of their desktops are probably still running Win98.  One can argue the relative merits of GNU/Linux versus WinXP but it is obvious that GNU/Linux and the free OpenOffice suite are more powerful than older versions of Microsoft products.  In a state with thousands of unemployed programmers you’d think that these governments could have cooperated to hire 100 programmers to port some of their Windows-only applications to Web-based or GNU/Linux apps.  Instead they cooperated to hire 100 lawyers so that they can shackle themselves to Microsoft for another 10 years but at a slightly lower price.

[Back in 1997, I proposed that the Federales hire Linux developers instead of using Microsoft Word to write anti-Microsoft complaints.  It has been seven years and still our government prefers to hire lawyers rather than programmers.  Can we blame children if they decide to go to law school rather than doing something that will add to the G.D.P.?] 

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A friend was asking me about some of her colleagues who had joined Mensa and I said that anyone who hangs around a decent college is already effectively a member because you only need a fairly low SAT score to get admitted to Mensa (turned out to be 1250 if you took the pre-1995 test and the new wimpy test for today’s youth is not accepted at all; see http://members.shaw.ca/delajara/criteria.html).  Then I tried to figure out what average SAT scores prevailed at colleges today and the Web search brought up this interesting page from a 1998 Brookings Institution report.  What I found most striking was the discrimination against Asian-Americans at the elite old-line universities.  Harvard is the 2nd worst offender in this regard.  An Asian kid has to have an SAT score 65 point higher than a white kid to get into Harvard.  Maybe this explains George W’s illustrious career at Yale?  (not listed in the table but presumably similar to Harvard)

[Page 438 of the same study is also interesting.  It concludes that being black or hispanic rather than white at the “most selective colleges” is “comparable to the effect of having … a total SAT score of 1400 rather than 1000”.  So if you are a generic white family and want to get your kids into college it might be time to go down to the courthouse and change your last name to “Hernandez”.  The college admissions staff don’t get deeply into geneaology, do they?  Just learn enough Spanish to say “Here is a check for $40,000 to cover the first year of tuition, room, and board.”  Then your kids could change their names back right after graduation from their last degree, in order not to suffer discrimination from employers who might think “they got in just because they were Hispanic” and to conceal themselves from pesky Alumni Association donation demands.  With a system this heavily based on race and name changes as economical as they are I’m surprised that more families don’t game the system.  Perhaps there is a business opportunity here…]

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Friends of mine have a child afflicted with a kind of autism.  A parent of an autistic child has developed some free software (Windows-only) that teaches kids by asking them to perform tasks and showing them short video clips if they perform the task.  My friends own a collection of DVDs that they would like to transfer to the PC and chop up into 10-second segments.  I’m pretty sure that they can handle the chopping once they get their DVD into a standard Windows video format (.avi?).  As I understand it, Hollywood tries to make this as difficult as possible.  How can my friends work around the various encryption and other format conversion issues?  This would be on a WinXP machine.

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Catching up on the mail I read through the latest Technology Review, MIT’s alumni magazine.  Things are far worse than feared.  One letter calculates the cost of the $283 million new computer science building as $17 million in 1916 dollars.  The main buildings, which are enormous by comparison, were completed in 1916 at a cost of $7 million.

Much more depressing than the backwards slide of the American construction industry in terms of efficiency is an article about Chuck Vest’s 14 years running MIT.  The article touches briefly on Vest’s achievements in increasing research funds between 1990 and 2003, which sound very impressive due to the lack of inflation-adjustment (the actual increase in 2003 dollars was from $430 million to $472 million).  Nothing having to do with innovation in research or education is mentioned.  If the article is accurate, Vest’s major focuses turned out to have been

1. fighting with the Federal Government over MIT’s price-fixing arrangement with the Ivy League colleagues.  This agreement was predicted to be illegal by Stanford, which refused to join the cartel, and deemed illegal by a Federal District Court Judge but we ultimately beat the rap in the Court of Appeals (see my tuition-free MIT article for more)
   
2. studying the extent to which female faculty members had less lab space than male faculty members and whether this was due to discrimination
   
3. pursuing sex- and race-based discrimination in student admissions and faculty recruitment and promoting such discrimination nationwide in briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court in affirmative action cases

I guess Phil Sharp, the Nobel Prize-winning biologist who turned the job down is feeling pretty good about his decision to stay in the lab.

The only encouraging news in the magazine concerned Erika Ebbel, MIT Class of 2004 in Chemistry, who as Miss Massachusetts will compete in the Miss America pageant on September 18.

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Manila, the software from Userland that sits behind Harvard’s Weblog server, has recently been enhanced with a feature that makes it easy to moderate the comments.  This should make it tougher for spammers to abuse a Manila-hosted Weblog and maybe also to improve the overall interest level of the comments.  Oftentimes the comments tend to be abusive, which satisfies the (angry) person who posted them but not other readers.  The result is emails like the following, from one of my former students at MIT:

“P.S. Your blog’s comments section continues to amaze. It’s like some kind of zoo, but with idiots instead of exotic animals.”

My strategy in moderating the comments here will be similar to the strategy that I employed on photo.net 10 years ago.  Alternative perspectives on the same topic are welcome.  Anything that seems like a review of the article or posting should be deleted.  A review is useful in the hardcopy world because you might want to learn about a 300-page book before investing $20 and several hours reading the actual book.  A review-comment is not useful in the Internet world because it is generally only accessible to someone who just finished reading the article in question.  If you’ve read Article X and liked it, what difference does it make to you that someone else liked or did not like it?  Similarly a comment praising or condemning the author as a person is not interesting to other readers who presumably have already formed their own opinion about the author.

If moderation attracts more thoughtful comments perhaps I’ll hire a kid in India to continue moderating according to these guidelines.

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An Associated Press story about MIT’s president, Susan Hockfield, devotes a lot of space to her sex and the sex ratio among MIT faculty members.  What is more interesting to me is Hockfield’s background as a life scientist.  Her last research and teaching position was at Yale Medical School.  She is not an engineer.  She was never a computer programmer.  MIT’s current president, Chuck Vest, was a mechanical engineer.  His predecessor, Paul Gray, was an electrical engineer.  His predecessor, Jerry Wiesner, was an electrical engineer.  (See http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/mithistory/histories-offices/pres.html for more detail.)

Hockfield has a good opportunity to realign MIT with the national mood.  Harvard University, for example, nearly a century ago was host to the world’s #1 department of civil engineering.  The president of Harvard at the time looked around and decided that civil engineering wasn’t going to be important to the United States.  He shut down the department and fired all the faculty members, including those with tenure.  There are plenty of things that folks at MIT do that (a) attract reasonable research funding, (b) are among the best projects of their kind worldwide, and (c) are things that nobody cares about anymore or that are done just as well by Industry.

After she has cleared out some space on campus what new initiatives might she push?  How about a medical school?  MIT has one of the world’s best biology departments but, except for some ties to Harvard Medical School, very little in the practical side of medicine.  MIT could probably do better work in biology if there were medical colleagues close at hand with whom to collaborate.  MIT’s engineering research would take on new relevance if it were tied to challenges in patient care.

Starting a medical school will be a huge challenge, of course.  Despite the growth in the U.S. population the American Medical Association has generally opposed new med schools due to the fact that more doctors might lead to lower average salaries.  But if there is to be a new medical school in the United States where better than at MIT, where a random door in the bio department might very well open into the office of a winner of the Nobel prize for “physiology or medicine”?

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A magazine article about American Indians has some rather disturbing information for folks who hope for a resolution to the AIDS epidemic via a vaccine.  Starting with the arrival of the Spanish in the late 15th century the American Indians began a steep decline in numbers due to their lack of resistance to European diseases, notably smallpox.  A vaccine for smallpox was developed in 1796 by Edward Jenner in England.  Five years later, in 1801, President Jefferson ordered the nationwide immunization of American Indians.  Yet as late as 1836-40 there was a terrible smallpox epidemic among Indians along the Missouri River, apparently sparked off by an infected riverboat passenger.

The U.S. in the early 19th century probably had better roads and communication than many African countries do in the 21st century.  So even if we had a working vaccine against all the different strains of HIV (and any future strains that might evolve) it seems that the eradication of AIDS could take many decades.

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