Month: June 2010

The Social Security Administration was kind enough to send a statement that arrived in today’s mail. It listed my taxed earnings in every year since 1978 (33 years of paying in). If I continue to pay Social Security taxes until I’m aged 70, I’ll be entitled to collect $2,113 per month starting in the year 2033. That’s the good news.

The bad news came towards the end of the letter: “… by 2037, the Social Security Trust Fund will be exhausted …”

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A friend of mine has her own medical practice. She has two office staffers and I casually mentioned that they must be busy negotiating with insurance companies and Medicare. The doctor replied “They could never do that. The people who do that have degrees in medical billing. I pay a service to do all of my billing.” How much does that cost? “They take seven percent of whatever they can collect.”

Young people: http://www.medicalbillingandcoding.org/ has some information about how to get an Associates or Bachelors degree in this growing field.

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“Americans are treated, and overtreated, to death” came across my desk today. The article is about U.S. doctors playing to Americans’ hope of being cured, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process of slowly and painfully killing someone: “Cancer that can’t be cured is often called daunting but not hopeless. So that’s what patients hear. Hope is the last thing to go. People don’t give that up easily.”

It made me think of our nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Had we elected a president without hope in 2008, the first thing he or she would have done is called up Stewart and Dover and said “Fuel up the C5 cargo planes; we’re bringing everyone home tomorrow”. Congressional approval is required to start a war, but not to end one. A president full of hope, however, might be inclined to say “We’ve spent a 1-3 trillion dollars so far [various estimates] without much to show, but maybe if we spend another few years and trillion dollars we can accomplish something.”

Hope is usually considered a positive trait, but perhaps Americans have more of it than we can afford.

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My friend Tom and I had a bet on the direction of the Cambridge real estate market. In November 2008, with everyone running around panicked, I argued that it was unlikely to get worse. Tom thought Harvard Square condo prices would fall further and bet dinner. A year later we asked an expert real estate agent which way the market had gone. She said “up maybe 2 percent.” So Tom lost his bet and will be buying me dinner tonight.

I would like to take credit for being smarter than Tom, a professional “money guy”, but further reflection makes me realize that I was wrong about the market fundamentals. The economy stagnated and demand for real estate continued to deteriorate during the period of our bet. Tom’s prediction was correct as far as that went. What Tom failed to predict was government action. He did not expect, apparently, the government to hand out $8,000 to every condo buyer (this alone is about 2% of the cost of a condo in Cambridge, where the median price is about $400,000). Nor did he expect the government to buy mortgage-backed securities or prop up Fannie Mae with almost $400 billion in tax money (nytimes).

I wonder if the money-dumb guy winning this bet with the money-smart guy indicates that traditional financial and business acumen are becoming obsolete in the U.S. The most important skill may be an ability to predict what the government is going to do next.

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I’m experimenting with video editing software for a Sony HDR-CX350V camcorder. This captures video in AVCHD format, one quality step up from the Flip’s works-everywhere .mp4.

I thought “For trimming and assembly editing, surely I don’t need a heavyweight solution such as Adobe Premiere. Perhaps Windows Live Movie Maker, bundled free with Windows, will be sufficient and simpler.” So I downloaded Movie Maker and found that it could play the AVCHD videos, but there was no sound. The computer clearly has the necessary codecs to play the sound because the unedited AVCHD files would play in Windows Media Player. One theory for why this failed is that some versions of Windows 7 have the Dolby sound codec disabled, perhaps so that Microsoft doesn’t have to pay royalties to Dolby? The computer had originally been shipped with Windows Vista and was upgraded to Windows 7 Home Premium. Windows Live may have erroneously decided not to work (as far as we can tell, it is supposed to work with AVCHD files on “home premium”).

So… you’ve got an operating system that nobody understands what it does. And it comes in about seven different versions, whose distinguishing features nobody can remember. And possibly the Microsoft programmers were tasked with breaking stuff intentionally on top of their usual job of breaking stuff unintentionally.

The software shipped on DVD-ROM with the $800 Sony is much less powerful than what comes on a $100 Flip. You can’t even rename a clip from inside the Sony browser. Meanwhile the files produced by the camcorder are useless for sharing unless you go through some transcoding, so the software becomes much more critical than on the Flip.

I think it is time to give up on Microsoft. What are some alternatives, other than the obvious ones of spending big $$ on a copy of Adobe Premiere or a Macintosh (I assume the bundled iMovie software would have no trouble with AVCHD)?

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One of the fringe benefits of being a computer programmer is getting to know a lot of people who are hyper-rational. Whenever I would take some extra steps to recycle a container, suggest combining some trips to save fuel, talk about wanting an electric car, or ask when it would be possible to buy a double-walled house like they have in Germany, my friend Barry would heap derision on me. “If the CO2-based global warming thesis is correct, all the conceivable conservation measures by Americans will delay the meltdown of the Earth by about 12 hours,” he noted. Barry was probably correct from a technical point of view. We’ve already dumped a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere. China, India, and other rapidly developing nations are going to add a lot more, regardless of what Americans do.

Still, I didn’t feel like a chump walking over to the recycle bin while Barry puffed on a cigarette. After the big Gulf oil spill, though, I’m beginning to wonder if a soda can in a Massachusetts landfill has any significance. The U.S. has millions of environmentally-conscious citizens. We probably have close to a million people involved in complying with various environmental laws and regulations. Yet we’ve just destroyed the ecology of the world’s ninth largest body of water, 660 quadrillion gallons (6.6 x 10^18) of water. This was home to sea life for 300 million years before we came along and trashed it. Will it be possible to summon up any outrage the next time we see an SUV driver throwing a cigarette out the window?

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Back in November 2009, I wrote a post about a very capable woman who entered the U.S. workforce in 2006 and was laid off in 2008. Let’s call her “Jessica”. For more than a year she had been collecting unemployment benefits. Jessica recently enjoyed a spa vacation with our mutual friend and I asked my friend how the vacation went. “We had a great time,” she responded, “but it made me wonder how the U.S. economy can survive. Jessica has worked a total of two years in her life. Now she has collected unemployment for almost two years. No wonder taxes are so high.”

What was next for Jessica? “She’s says that she’s going to look for a job when her 99 weeks of unemployment run out.”

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I wonder if anyone else has noticed the following: Ask an American about Greece and he or she responds “They’ve got way too much government debt, plus they’re on the hook for huge pension and health care obligations. They’re finished.” Ask the same person about the U.S., which is on track to accumulate an even larger debt as a percentage of GDP and which also has enormous pension and health care obligations. A surprising number of people who wrote off Greece say “It’s just the business cycle” when asked to account for the 15 million Americans currently unemployed.

Presented with similar facts, Americans seem to reason differently depending on whether they’re asked about their own country.

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… may be writing about what it is like to be a scientist.

I just finished listening to Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Uncovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence as a book on tape.

A 10-year-old girl might hear the story about Irene Pepperberg’s 30 years with Alex, an African Grey parrot, and think “I wonder if it would be nice to do important research with a remarkably intelligent and friendly bird.”

A 20-year-old woman hearing the story might be more inclined to ask “Would I like to be divorced, childless, working seven days/week, 12 hours/day, and starting my first ‘real job’ at age 40?” or “Would I like to be in my 50s without a secure income, eating tofu and keeping the winter thermostat at 57?”

Pepperberg is one of the world’s more successful scientists. Because scientists and philosophers are so chauvinistic about humans, there was a lot of received wisdom in Academia about what animals could and could not do. Pepperberg laboriously demonstrated that Alex the parrot was capable of some fairly sophisticated thought and language. Most of her findings, however, wouldn’t have been news to a preliterate tribesman living with parrots 4000 years ago.

Pepperberg chronicles her career scrounging for jobs, begging for money (most often refused), and working with colleagues who are unintelligent, dogmatic, petty, and spiteful (except at the MIT Media Lab, which was the Promised Land for her until they ran out of money). Pepperberg endures the hardships of graduate school in chemistry and the peripatetic life of a young would-be academic. Right about the age when a New York City employee or Boston bus driver would be contemplating retirement, she finally gets a tenure-track job at the University of Arizona, only to discover that she dislikes her colleagues.

When a grant is denied or a lab runs out of money, Pepperberg is reduced to penury, apparently having no savings. Her total lifetime earnings are probably less than what a top radiologist would earn in two years.

Perhaps Barack Obama read this book before he recommended science as a career for people other than himself and his family.

More: my old women in science article.

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Our helicopter flight school sold coupons for 2600 introductory lessons and I’ve been trying to train the other instructors to teach a group ground school (outline). When I teach a group of 15 or 20 students, I do it by going around the room, learning each person’s name, and asking a question. If the person doesn’t give the right answer, I ask the next person. If that doesn’t work, I give a hint and ask the next person. We keep going around the room with questions such as “What happens if you have the helicopter parked on a frozen lake and turn on the engine to start the rotor system spinning?” (answer: fuselage turns in the opposite direction; this leads naturally to the next question “What would you then want to add to the helicopter?” (answer: tail rotor)).

Students stay awake because they know that they’re going to be asked a question within the next five minutes or so. The material ends up being naturally paced to the comprehension level of the class. If people aren’t answering correctly, the class slows down, people have more time to think, and I provide more explanations. At any time during the two-hour class I can tell you which students are getting it and which may need remedial instruction.

Helicopter instructors who’ve watched me teach the class assure me that they’re ready to do it themselves. I sit in the back to make sure. They stand up in the front of the room and start talking. They might ask two questions per hour of the students and they typically won’t select a student to answer, but rather let the student who is best-prepared answer. After about 20 minutes, just as education researchers have found, most of the students assumed a glazed uncomprehending look. Functionally I think it would be better to call this “live video” rather than teaching, since the same effect could be achieved by emailing students a link to a video to be viewed in a Web browser.

These are guys with 20 or more years of experience teaching helicopter students, both on the ground and in the air. They are genuinely great teachers 1 on 1. Yet they are hopeless in a group instruction setting (this was not only my (biased) conclusion, but that of our young assistants). It turns into high school all over again, with about 10 percent of students learning a lot, 40 percent muddling through, and 50 percent enduring a total waste of their time (since they quickly got lost and then the rest of the lecture was over their heads).

I’m basically giving up on the group idea because I don’t think it is possible for the teachers that we have to be effective in front of a group and we can’t accept the kind of failure-to-learn rates that are common in our public schools (the laggard graduates of our lavishly funded public schools have wrecked the U.S. economy but they haven’t wrecked any helicopters, which is a risk that is ever-present at a flight school if a student lacks proper ground schooling).

People talk about the importance of teacher training for our public school teachers, but as far as I can tell there is no way to make the lecture method work for anything that requires students to develop a conceptual grasp of a topic.

[You might ask what we’re going to do with our 2600 students. The answer is that I’ll continue to teach them in a 20-person Q&A session and the other instructors might teach them in groups of 2.]

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