Month: January 2012

Folks:

Back in November, I published http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2011/11/03/where-does-google-actually-say-that-they-wont-read-gmail-messages-or-google-docs/ wondering if Google ever promises not to go curiously through one’s Google Docs (or elaborates beyond a single FAQ on the question of whether Google employees are allowed to read Gmail messages). Lately I’ve been getting a variety of notifications from Google about the new improved privacy policies but I still can’t find anything on the subject of “Can Google read my word processing docs and spreadsheets?”

Thanks in advance if you have figured this out…

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Politicians anxious to keep feeding the government are talking about new tax ideas, e.g., a special tax that would kick in when a person earned over $1 million per year. One problem with this approach is that it represents a further discouragement to investors and entrepreneurs in a country that is already looking like a bad place for most kinds of investment.

Employees and managers have done a lot better than U.S. investors over the past 10-20 years. A mid-level employee might earn $400,000 per year. An investor or entrepreneur, by contrast, might earn very little for 5-10 years and then finally cash out with $1-2 million. For that one good year, the investor looks like a rich guy, ripe for high taxation, but in reality the employee has done far better, especially on a risk-adjusted basis.

This is not an argument against a special tax, by the way, merely a reminder that it will further push the U.S. toward a culture in which young people want to be employees and managers at established companies.

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Today we celebrate the memory of one of our greatest Americans, Martin Luther King, Jr. I wonder if any of our politicians will stand up and say “It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white because probably there are at least a few hundred million people in China who are smarter, better-educated, and harder-working than you and private companies would much rather hire any of them.”

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Readers: Thought you might enjoy this article from New Yorker magazine about oil production in Ecuador, its effect on the environment and local people, and the ensuring international litigation in U.S. and Ecuador. The stakes are high, with the lead U.S. lawyer, Steven Donziger, standing to earn $200 million for himself, but the war is long, having started in 1993 and being far from finished. One tip for attorneys: don’t let anyone videotape you saying, about judges, “They’re all corrupt”, or, about an expert witness report “We could jack this thing up to thirty billion dollars in one day”.

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News reports of how badly Japan was doing never quite squared with my experience as a visitor to that country. A recent New York Times editorial attempts to explain the apparent discrepancy.

[The article is interesting to read, but I’m not sure that I buy the entire argument. The Japanese government has indulged in some massively wasteful projects. Still, they probably can’t compare in profligacy to the U.S. federal and state governments (for example, retirement age for public employees, including police officers, in Japan is 60, compared to as young as 41 or 42 here in the U.S.).]

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(Techie) Folks:

We’re expecting a pretty good-sized crowd, perhaps 60 people, for our three-day database programming course at MIT January 30-February 1 (course page). Students can often get un-stuck simply by asking the adjacent person for help, but the more teachers the better the course goes. Especially on the first day people will more likely be stuck due to a mechanical problem such as “Can’t figure out how to get back into text editor” than a conceptual problem.

Via this posting I’m looking for volunteer teachers (all existing course teachers are also volunteers, so don’t feel slighted if you’re not getting a fat paycheck!). It is a great experience to spend three days with bright young people, many of whom come up with creative ideas for queries that would never have occurred to us SQL old-timers. Here are the tasks that people are likely to have trouble with

• getting Virtual Box installed on a laptop (it is supposed to work on Windows, Linux, and Mac, but of course laptops can be quirky; Netbooks and the handful of Macintosh laptops proved the most trouble-prone last year)
• getting our virtual machine installed and running within Virtual Box (we’re going to provide both Virtual Box and the VM on a USB stick for in-class installs and, for those students who preregister, ask them to download and install everything prior; as a last resort, students whose laptop cannot be tamed can partner with others (arguably a better way to do the course, as part of a pair))
• navigating around within Linux, finding files, editing PHP scripts, saving them back, opening a Web browser to see the effect
• actual data modeling and SQL querying
• MySQL quirks
• Eclipse and the Android SDK
• the Java language (for the Android app development segment only)
• border collie biting their ankles

Nobody has a monopoly on the one right answer, so don’t be shy about volunteering if you are stronger in some areas than others. Certainly when students have sysadmin issues I bounce them to one of the other teachers (I’m lucky if my own laptop works!).

To evaluate whether or not you’re qualified to assist, please visit http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/three-day-rdbms/ and pull the “Day 1 problems” document. It has a link to our virtual machine on web.mit.edu and you can see what is entailed.

I hope that you’ll agree that this is the perfect chance to give back to the community. Instead of sweating in a malaria-plagued jungle trying to figure out how to nail a house together, you will be in a comfortable heated recently renovated MIT classroom (link) and you’ll actually be adding substantial value with the skills that you’ve worked for years to build. For folks curious about teaching techniques, it is also fascinating to see just how much can be learned in three days when people work in a lab environment rather than struggling with problems at home.

Thanks,

Philip

p.s. Lunches and dinners throughout the course are on me!

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Back in April, I published a posting comparing the federal budget and deficit numbers to those of a family. It ended up being widely circulated and now the idea has been turned into a video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li0no7O9zmE

 

Much funnier than my original post!

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