Month: August 2013

Verizon is trying to buy 45 percent of Verizon Wireless from Vodafone (Reuters) for $130 billion. This values the wireless portion of Verizon at about $288 billion. There are approximately 100 million Verizon Wireless subscribers. Therefore, each one of us is worth nearly $3000 in expected future profits (discounted to present value).

Should Verizon just give us the option of mailing them a check for $3000 and then they would charge us a more reasonable monthly rate? (And yes I do recognize that some of the $288 billion in enterprise value could reflect the possibility that VZ will sign up new subscribers going forward, which makes us existing subscribers worth a bit less.)

[Separately, I’m ready for a Galaxy Note III. I want to be able to read Kindle books on my phone. Who else is excited about the Note III?]

Full post, including comments

An Israeli reader who saw my posting on divorce and child support laws in Denmark sent me an article from Israel.

The facts of the case were the following:

• a divorced father earned 13,000 shekels (approximately $3600) per month and lived in a rental apartment
• a divorced mother earned 18,000 shekels (approximately $5000) per month and owned a house
• “the children spend more than half of their time with the father,” said the judge

Israeli law has a built-in gender bias, with divorced fathers who lose custody responsible for 100 percent of the cost of their children and 75 percent of the cost where the kids’ time is divided between parents. A divorced mother with a job, however, may have to pay a share of “extras” such as vacations for children.

With these facts, the mother sought to have approximately 100% of the father’s after-tax salary transferred to her as child support (“she had sued for over 13,000 shekels a month”). The judge concluded that the mother was entitled to just 2% of what she was seeking (300 shekels per month; roughly $83) and that it wasn’t worth ordering that this small amount of money be paid from one former spouse to the other.

Israeli readers: How does it work over there? What typically happens when middle/upper income couples with kids split up? Can a parent make a substantial profit on child support payments? Would you have been surprised if this mother had succeeded in collecting 100% of her ex-husband’s income?

Full post, including comments

I haven’t been following the news closely, but people have been asking for my opinion on Syria and whether or not an American military adventure is warranted.

What would be our basis for attacking people in Syria?

1. Is it the case that the government there is less legitimate than other non-elected governments worldwide? (this Freedom House map shows that many parts of the world, including Syria, are “not free”)
2. Is it that the government has been indiscriminate in its response to a rebellion? (but governments all over the world respond harshly to any challenge to their authority; the Sri Lankan Civil War resulted in a huge number of civilian deaths (see this article) and there were no calls for U.S. intervention; the American Civil War included actions that some consider to be war crimes (see this list))
3. Is it that the government has used chemical weapons? (but note that Syria apparently has not signed any treaty regarding chemical weapons, according to Wikipedia)
4. Is it that the U.S. has something to gain from a change in government in Syria?

And if we were to attack the Syrians, what would our goals be for the military operation? The fall of the existing government? To persuade the existing government to stop using chemical weapons (if indeed they have been using them)? I see in the news that President Obama has asked Congress to approve an attack on Syrians, but did he state an objective that the attacks were supposed to achieve?

Background: Wikipedia entry on the Syrian Civil War

[Separately,“U.S. Soldiers Find Surprise on Returning to Afghan Valley: Peace”, from yesterday’s New York Times, implies that people on the other side of the globe get along better without the U.S. military being involved.]

Full post, including comments

Having always had a keen interest in sound level measurements, I eagerly opened One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World. The book is a much more curious creature than a table of environments and corresponding measurements.

The author, Gordon Hempton, is a sound recording specialist who lives near Olympic National Park. Prior to writing this book, he experiences a terrifying encounter with tinnitus and hearing loss, but recovers:

I had recently turned 50, and to celebrate this I began taking supplements that were recommended to me by my brother, who is a physician and had been on a rigorous vitamin and hormone regimen himself: high-potency B-complex, potassium, calcium, alpha lipoic acid, to name a few.

Then, about two months after discontinuing the supplements, as if God himself had spoken to me, I experienced a sudden onset of completely normal hearing.

After recovering his hearing, Hempton embarks on a quest:

I placed a small red stone, a gift from an elder of the Quileute tribe, on a log in the Hoh Rain Forest at Olympic National Park, approximately three miles from the visitors center. With this marker in place, I hoped to protect and manage the natural soundscape in Olympic Park’s backcountry wilderness. My logic is simple and not simply symbolic: If a loud noise, such as the passing of an aircraft, can affect many square miles , then a natural place, if maintained in a 100 percent noise-free condition, will likewise affect many square miles around it. Protect that single square inch of land from noise pollution, and quiet will prevail over a much larger area of the park. …

By my reckoning, the rate of quiet places extinction vastly exceeds the rate of species extinction. Today there are fewer than a dozen quiet places left in the United States. I repeat: fewer than a dozen quiet places and by that I mean places where natural silence reigns over many square miles.

He selects this place because he believes that it is the quietest place in the United States, specifically including Alaska but without talking about ever having visited Alaska. Based on my experience, a randomly selected point in Alaska would be far less likely to be intruded upon by human or machine sounds (and if you were at that randomly selected point and did hear a helicopter you would be very grateful indeed!). In fact, very likely the average public airport in Alaska would be quieter (remember that a “public airport” in Alaska may be simply a gravel or grass runway with a handful of takeoffs and landings per week; see this list).

The author’s main fight is against aircraft noise, including the noise made by airliners up in the flight levels (i.e., above 29,000′). The sound reaches the ground at about 36-45 dBA, not loud enough to be heard in the city but audible within the Hoh Rain Forest (the author’s readings range from as low as 22 dBA up to a more typical 36-46 dBA, depending on how close he is to flowing water). For reference, the sound level inside a conference room would be 40-50 dBA, inside a Honda Accord on the highway between 65 and 70 dBA, inside an airliner 80-85 dBA, and, sadly, inside a crummy four-seat airplane, 85-95 dBA.

It turns out that this fight is not a great way to bond with a teenager. Hempton’s teenage daughter just wants to listen to her iPod with the sound cranked up to the max, which she is forced to do because her father drives a VW Bus, one of the noisiest personal vehicles on the American Highway (the author measures interior noise as 82 dBA at 53 mph on the highway):

Abby doesn’t get it. Or hasn’t listened. And now she sits sullenly across the table from me, iPod on, earbuds in, head turned away. When I catch her eye and frown, she yanks out the earbuds. “The whole One Square Inch thing— I think it’s bullshit. I’ve always felt that way. It’s stupid.” I guess I’ve got only myself to blame for this. Victim of that old expression “Be careful what you wish for,” I had wanted Abby along for a stretch of the trip to stand in for today’s youth, as she moved from the noise of an urban environment to the deep listening insights of a naturally quiet place . I hoped to gather her observations and insights, too. Well, she’s not very shy with her opinions. So let’s have them. “Why is it stupid?” I ask, dutifully allowing Abby to give her voice to the project “I think it’s a waste of time.” “Do you understand that if you preserve quiet at One Square Inch that it affects noise pollution for 1,000 square miles? That’s not bullshit!” “I don’t want to argue about it,” she says. “I don’t care.” After 16 years, she knows how to push my buttons. “You know, your not caring is really coming through. What do you care about?” “Maybe what a regular teenager cares about. I care about friends. I care about having fun. I don’t feel the need to go deeply into things I don’t care about. I’m willing to take a train home or a bus. Right now.”

“My intent was never to torture you, you understand that, right? This is not a plot against you. Just give me this opportunity to explain your role in my journey, all right? Then you can decide.” “All right,” Abby says quietly. “If you come along you’ll have the opportunity to listen to nature, something that you have not listened to in a long time, and I think that you’ll be surprised.” “That’s what I like,” seconds Yvette. “You’ll like it when you’re eighty-eight.” “Yeah, when I’m older, maybe.” “The idea here,” I continue, “is that when you’re listening with an iPod you’re listening only a quarter-inch away. If you come to Pipestone, you’ll have the opportunity to listen to very faint sounds— sounds that have come from miles away . Wouldn’t that interest you? Take a moment . I don’t think you can even answer that question because you haven’t heard what I am describing. This will be an entirely new place and experience. And I want to get your response to Pipestone. How does it sound to you?” “Well, it doesn’t interest me. I don’t care. I’m not interested in stuff like that.”

The author has some trouble communicating with pilots as well.

When I was studying John Muir’s sound descriptions in his journals and recording in Yosemite, I decided to fly to San Diego to visit my brother. Because I’d had to pretty much limit my recordings to nighttime to avoid the noise intrusion of high-flying commercial jets, I asked the fight attendant to ask the pilot if he would fly around Yosemite . So I was surprised to soon find myself looking down at Half Dome and El Capitan. After we landed, the pilot was standing by the cockpit, so as I was getting off I said, “Well, thanks for at least trying not to fly over Yosemite.” He said, “Not fly over Yosemite? I thought you wanted to fly over Yosemite.”

The author begins his quest, a VW Bus drive from Washington State to Washington, D.C., during the reign of the hated King Bush II and attributes the indifference of federal officials, both within the National Park Service and the Federal Aviation Administration, to Bush’s appointment of people whose main interest in the Earth is how quickly it can be raped and pillaged for resources. The Feds seem to have ample resources overall, e.g., the the author goes camping with a friend in Canyonlands and the Park Service sends federal employees out to investigate:

Then two female park rangers burst into camp— no greeting, barking questions, pointing fingers, and expecting answers. “Why did you put a question mark on the registration form for your vehicle license? Did you gather these?” One points to a collection of deer antlers that had been in the bushes for a long time. Both of the women have darting eyes, as if they suspect us of a crime. The bulldog of the two barks out the big question: “Why have you come here ten years in a row and stayed without moving on?”

But few government workers concentrate specifically on noise. The EPA had an Office of Noise Abatement and Control back in the 1970s, with “ten regional centers of excellence on noise established at universities.” Ronald Reagan’s administrator killed the program, but somehow a handful of staffers managed to continue drawing salaries for the next three decades. The author goes to visit one. He, like everyone else on the federal payroll, seems to have plenty of time for meetings and discussion, but nothing ever gets accomplished, e.g.,

The sun set on Earth Day 2008 and the latest unmet deadline for the National Park Service and the FAA to agree on means for a substantial restoration of natural quiet in the Grand Canyon. That deadline had been set eight years earlier.

It’s now 21 years and counting since the 1987 passage of the first congressional legislation to control air traffic over Grand Canyon National Park. It’s clear the two agencies are communicating, because a couple of weeks prior to Earth Day, on April 9, 2008, the National Park Service gave “clarifying” notice in the Federal Register to remove all aircraft flying above 17,999 feet MSL (above mean sea level) from their near-term, long-overdue rule making for restoring natural quiet at Grand Canyon National Park. Despite a 2002 Federal Court of Appeals Decision (yes, there have been lawsuits slowing things down), which ruled in part that the Grand Canyon Overflight Act did apply to high-flying jets, the Park Service appears to be letting go of the rope on high-altitude commercial and private jets in its tug of war with the FAA, at least at this one battleground national park.

His teenager eventually comes around to having more respect for the project, using it as the subject for her high school senior project: “This project has inspired me to believe that one person can make a difference and I will make a difference.” Yet, thus far, despite five years of Hope and Change from President Obama (elected just as Hempton’s book was wrapping up), the author’s blog shows that no additional action has been taken by government officials. In fact, the author’s last concrete achievement was back in 2001, when American Airlines agreed to avoid flying over Olympic National Park.

Ultimately, as well as providing some hard data on noise levels in different environments, the book is interesting as an example of the challenge in working on a local issue (noise near this guy’s house) that is regulated by a 2-million-employee bureaucracy 3000 miles away (Congress, the EPA, the National Park Service, the FAA, etc.).

More: Read One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World.

Full post, including comments

I live in a four-unit condo near Harvard Yard (see the epic tale of my purchase back in 1996). The ground floor unit recently went on the market for $429,000. Very shortly five bids materialized, all over the asking price. The accepted bid was for $480,000.

What was bought? The broker, from perhaps Cambridge’s largest real estate firm, listed the apartment as 1363 square feet in the MLS (realtor.com entry for 5 Irving Terrace). The city lists 5-7 Irving Terrace, Unit 2A as having 713 square feet and being worth $349,300 (property database). What is actually inside the unit are two rooms: one bedroom plus a combined kitchen/living room. If you hired someone to refinish the floors they might find 500 square feet. How did the realtor manage to find 1363 square feet for this small one-bedroom? An old version of the condo docs had this apartment combined with another. They were later (20+ years ago) split into two separate condos. Folks who showed up expecting 1363 square feet and found a small one-bedroom were apparently not discouraged, though, based on the number of bids.

If we take the city’s 713 square footage, the place sold for $673 per square foot, but in terms of usable interior space I think the total square footage is closer to that of a 500 sf place in a modern building, which gets us to $1000/sf, i.e., what people pay for an apartment in Manhattan. The apartment includes a driveway parking spot, which is a plus, but the kitchen and bathroom would need $30-50,000 of work to bring them into the modern era.

This supports my theory that the suburbs will be abandoned by the wealthy (May 2013 posting) due to the horrific traffic congestion in our metropolitan areas. Rush hour getting out of Cambridge through Alewife now extends until about 8 pm, but you can buy your way out of sitting in traffic if you’re willing to spend $480,000 on a one-bedroom apartment (plus kitchen/bath renovation costs and, very possibly, your share of a new roof (see below)).

Separately, in case you are ever tempted to trust a realtor…. the broker selling the unit had previously been managing the place for the owner as a rental. He thus became aware of an issue with leaks from the 125-year-old slate roof that might cost more than $30,000 to repair and thus result in an assessment to the new owner. The condo’s master insurance carrier had sent a letter refusing to pay for water damage because of “age-related deterioration” of the roof. I asked the realtor if he’d shared the letter, which he’d had in his possession, with the buyer. “No. That’s not my responsibility. It is up to her home inspector to discover any problems.”

[Finally, what do readers know about old slate roofs? At the end of almost every winter there is some ceiling damage from ice and snow melting through the slate/flashing/whatever. There is occasional additional damage from random events, such as a slate being kicked out of place or falling off. We hire a roofer who goes up there, charges us some money, pronounces the leaks fixed, and then departs. We repeat the cycle the next year. An experienced slate roofer (not our regular contractor) told me that the nails on our roof are copper and that they corrode after about 85 years, resulting in the slates being very easy to dislodge. This is why the life of a slate roof is not infinite. He said that the only real fix was to remove the slates, install ice and water shield material, and then reinstall the slates over the ice and water shield with new nails that will last another 85 years. Have any of the readers done this?]

Full post, including comments

Here’s one for the chemistry, chemical engineering, and mechanical engineering graduate students out there…

What’s a good way to measure the uniformity of heating of milk in a plastic cup in a microwave oven?

Explanation: I have watched a new mother pour milk into a plastic cup with measurements on the side to determine the quantity, then pour that cold milk into a ceramic coffee mug to be heated in the microwave for 30 seconds, then pour the warm milk into a plastic sippy cup to be served to a toddler (3 items to wash). I have observed day care workers perform the same task by heating the milk in the plastic server cup (1 item to wash).

When I have inquired of mothers dirtying either 2 or 3 dishes in serving a cup of milk what their reasoning was, the answer was “It is bad to microwave food or drink in plastic.” Why? “Hot or warm liquid will pull dangerous chemicals out of the plastic.” What about the fact that they were going to then take the warm liquid and immediately dump it into the plastic? If the temperature was a problem, wouldn’t the warm milk hitting the sippy cup leach out whatever dangerous chemicals were in there just about as badly as if the milk had become warm in the microwave? Blank stare in response.

An acquaintance who works for Harvard University managing engineers building scientific experiments opined that the mothers were likely right. “The milk right up against the cup might get super hot while it is in the microwave while the milk in the center remains cold.” I pointed out that this didn’t make a lot of sense given the relatively long wavelengths of microwave cooking energy compared to the size of a sippy cup (Wikipedia says standard frequencies for microwave ovens are .9 to 2.45 GHz, resulting in wavelengths of about 5-12 inches). And wouldn’t convection and conduction within the liquid also make the heating pretty uniform? Hot spots seemed more likely when microwaving solid foods. We put some milk into a sippy cup and tried an on-the-spot experiment. Using sophisticated temperature probes (i.e., our fingers) we couldn’t discern any differences between the edge and center temperatures.

How would one construct an experiment to do this in an actual microwave oven and measure the edge and center temperatures continuously as the milk is heated? (we stuck our fingers in only once the milk was done) There are plenty of infrared temperature probes, I think, that don’t require contact with the item being measured, but I don’t know how well they would operate if stuffed into an operating microwave oven.

Full post, including comments

A friend told me about his new job: setting up an office for a Silicon Valley hardware/software company here in the Boston area. “I need to hire about 10 engineers,” he said. Why would they want to fragment their workforce by adding an office 3000 miles away? “Everything costs about 30 percent less here in Cambridge, including salaries.”

Readers: Is this a trend? Should we coin the term “other shoring” for hiring cheap workers in Boston?

Full post, including comments

Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, which I reviewed back in May, continues to be on the New York Times bestseller list. At least one of my friends in business says that the book has been an inspiration to her and that she has applied for some bigger jobs as a consequence of reading the first half of the book (one of the things people learn at top B-schools, apparently, is that business best-sellers need not be finished!).

Separately, I watched The Queen of Versailles where the protagonist talks about her days as an engineer at IBM. One day she asked her manager why he had a clock counting down. The manager said that it was showing him the days, hours, minutes, and seconds until he could retire. Why did he care? “Because that is the moment when I can start living,” was what the guy said. As a result of this conversation, the Queen of Versailles quit her engineering job and took up fashion modeling in Manhattan. Then she devoted herself to being the wife of a rich guy and mother to seven children.

Sandberg’s advice is apparently inspiring, but even someone as successful as Sandberg cannot figure out a way to put more hours into a day or more days into a year. For most people, a bigger career means fewer children. As the Queen of Versailles found, even some of the better jobs in our society, e.g., engineering manager at IBM, are not very satisfying. According to various studies (see Forbes, for example), only a minority of American workers are at least “somewhat satisfied” with their jobs. Even for those who are satisfied, if you asked them, at age 70, “Would you rather have had thirty percent more career success and one fewer child?” I wonder how many would say “Cut me back to 1 kid from 2 and make my final title two rungs up higher in the bureaucracy.”

One of the original English-language authors who provided advice and inspiration to young women is Jane Austen. She been in the news this summer due to a controversy over Austen replacing Charles Darwin on an English banknote (example story). She more quietly inspires individuals (implicitly; explicitly). Austen spends a lot of ink describing women who marry for money, e.g., in Mansfield Park:

First page: About thirty years ago Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet’s lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income. All Huntingdon exclaimed on the greatness of the match, and her uncle, the lawyer, himself, allowed her to be at least three thousand pounds short of any equitable claim to it. She had two sisters to be benefited by her elevation; and such of their acquaintance as thought Miss Ward and Miss Frances quite as handsome as Miss Maria, did not scruple to predict their marrying with almost equal advantage. But there certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world as there are pretty women to deserve them.

[Regarding Maria’s proposed loveless marriage to the rich blockhead Rushworth, Mary Crawford says] “Oh yes I know it is. I was merely joking. She has done no more than what every young woman would do; and I have no doubt of her being extremely happy.”

[Upon the father returning from the Caribbean and giving his daughter the opportunity to escape the loveless marriage… ] He had expected a very different son-in-law; and beginning to feel grave on Maria’s account, tried to understand her feelings. Little observation there was necessary to tell him that indifference was the most favourable state they could be in. Her behaviour to Mr. Rushworth was careless and cold. She could not, did not like him. Sir Thomas resolved to speak seriously to her. Advantageous as would be the alliance, and long standing and public as was the engagement, her happiness must not be sacrificed to it. Mr. Rushworth had, perhaps, been accepted on too short an acquaintance, and, on knowing him better, she was repenting.

With solemn kindness Sir Thomas addressed her: told her his fears, inquired into her wishes, entreated her to be open and sincere, and assured her that every inconvenience should be braved, and the connexion entirely given up, if she felt herself unhappy in the prospect of it. He would act for her and release her. Maria had a moment’s struggle as she listened, and only a moment’s: when her father ceased, she was able to give her answer immediately, decidedly, and with no apparent agitation. She thanked him for his great attention, his paternal kindness, but he was quite mistaken in supposing she had the smallest desire of breaking through her engagement, or was sensible of any change of opinion or inclination since her forming it. She had the highest esteem for Mr. Rushworth’s character and disposition, and could not have a doubt of her happiness with him.

[Later in the book, Mary Crawford points out..] “I mean to be too rich to lament or to feel anything of the sort. A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.”

Austen’s world is alive and well at Harvard College today. I remember one undergraduate saying “I used to think that I wanted to be an investment banker, but then I realized that I could just marry an investment banker.”

A woman friend of mine observed that the modern world is in some ways friendlier to women seeking their fortune through romance or marriage. “A woman used to have to stay married, possibly to someone that she had never loved, in order to retain access to the money, the house, and the title,” she pointed out, “but now she can get most of that from a quick marriage and a divorce.”

A couple of recent New York City tabloid articles (News; Post) reinforce my friend’s point. It seems that Liza Ghorbani, a New York Times reporter, was having an affair with a married British man. Ghorbani is the mother of a healthy 8-month-old baby, apparently a result of the affair. In Austen’s day she would be trying to hide the facts both of the affair and the child. Today, however, there is apparently insufficient social stigma to discourage the filing of a public $3 million child support lawsuit.

[Note that if the New York Times pays her $100,000 per year (source), a decent salary for a journalist, Ghorbani’s compensation from working would be at most $65,000 after federal, state, and city income taxes. The $3 million that she stands to collect, tax-free, as a result of having a child, therefore, would equal approximately 46 years of after-tax income. For a reporter on the Bureau of Labor Statistics median pay of $36,000 per year, the $3 million would be closer to 100 years of after-tax income.]

In case there are young people reading this blog, my personal experience supports a position somewhere in between the Queen of Versailles’s perspective and Sheryl Sandberg’s (Austen, like Shakespeare, wrote about a lot of different characters and therefore I would hesitate to ascribe a position to Austen herself). I worked 80 hours per week on some computer-aided engineering software back in the 1980s. It was all written in Common Lisp and very little of my original code, if any, is in use today. I remember that customers were happy with the system, but the memories of being thanked by those customers are vague. I am an inventor on three patents, but nobody ever had the money or energy to chase after infringers and two out of three cover technologies that are now irrelevant. In the 1990s I co-developed a popular free and open source toolkit for building Internet applications. I was proud at the time of the roughly 10,000 sites worldwide that adopted the software but today it is usually considered “legacy code” and companies, such as Zipcar, are investing money and effort to replace it with newer software. I have taught a lot of students, e.g., at MIT, and they have gone on to have good careers, e.g., at Google. But the 300+ students taken together do not call me as often as I call my parents and from this I infer that an adult child would be more of a comfort in old age than a career’s worth of students. [Note to self: spend the next few weeks calling/emailing my former teachers!] The textbooks that I’ve written, and made available for free via the Web, and the photo.net online community that Rajeev Surati, Jin Choi, and I nurtured continue to be useful to others and, therefore, continue to provide me with some career satisfaction. So while on the one hand I am glad that I “Leaned In” to finish those textbooks and keep the photo.net server refreshed with new content and software and may sometimes smile when receiving an email from a grateful reader, I experienced a lot more joy last Tuesday afternoon taking my almost-four-year-old daughter to her first feature-length movie (“Planes”; lacking an adult vocabulary, after the movie was over, Greta referred to the aircraft carrier as “the airport in the middle of the water”).

Sandberg doesn’t talk a lot about money, but there is a financial subtext in her book. The bigger jobs pay more and the parents about whom Sandberg is writing use some of that money to hire household and child care help, typically for just one or two children. The happiness researchers have found that money beyond an upper middle-class level of income does not yield too much additional happiness (Forbes has a recent article describing a challenge to this finding, thus providing more evidence that John Ioannidis is the only correct researcher). My personal experience is that my overall mood has not been strongly correlated with my income or wealth, despite wide swings over the past 30 years (from an engineering grad student stipend of about $32,000/year in today’s dollars up to a maximum of about $300,000/year). I have gotten a lot more happiness from spending time with a child than from reflecting on the fact that my income was higher in Year X than it had been the previous year. Thus I would say that it is not rational to take on a bigger job in order to make more money if that means that one will end up with fewer children.

This idea of giving more priority to children than to career, at least for a portion of their working lives, seems to be prevalent among my friends. I spent yesterday with a woman at the very top of American credentialism. She has an MD and a PhD in engineering. She has been the author of textbooks for medical students. For the moment, however, she has done the opposite of what Sandberg recommended. She has scaled back her career so that she can work part-time from home and spend more time with her husband and three children (youngest is almost 4 years old). Even though the youngest child was being a little difficult at the time (a crisis developed over the question of which chair she would occupy at dinner), my friend answered without hesitation that she was much happier with that third child than she would be with additional career advancement. Her husband is a work-from-home entrepreneur and could have been advancing the products that he is designing on the day that I visited. There were three other adults who could have watched the four total children. But he spent the whole day playing with the kids instead.

The older people that I’ve met are more in agreement with the Queen of Versailles than they are with Sandberg. I recently spent a couple

Full post, including comments

If you’re headed to the Cape, don’t forget to stop in the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton (quick stop off Route 24). They have some great exhibitions right now, including a large collection of glass art from MIT. According to Wikipedia, the museum’s architecture and gardens inspired the Louisiana modern art museum in Denmark.

Reasonably good for kids (we went with a 4-year-old and she was losing interest after about 45 minutes).

Full post, including comments

The Longfellow Bridge here in Cambridge, built in 1906, is going to be partially shut down for the next three years. The project is forecast to cost about $260 million, though previous construction cost forecasts in Massachusetts have been optimistic (e.g., the Big Dig was originally planned at $2.8 billion but ended up costing close to $15 billion). The project has already generated some controversy due to the fact that Governor Deval Patrick imposed a rule that excluded non-union workers from contributing (Boston Globe editorial).

I was interested to know how the cost of renovating the bridge compared to the cost of its construction but none of the news articles on the subject of the bridge project mentioned the original cost. Nor does Wikipedia. I found a “Cambridge Bridge Commission Report” on archive.org that on pages 53 and 54 summarizes the cost. The “total paid for new bridge” was about $2.5 million. In today’s dollars that’s approximately $65 million. In other words, assuming that this project comes in within its budget, renovating the bridge will cost roughly 4X what it cost to build.

If you’d like to play with the figures, I hired Cristian Blendea of Bucharest, Romania (via Guru.com) to prepare an Excel spreadsheet with all of the numbers from the book: Longfellow-Bridge-Construction-Cost

[When the project is all done, the current four lanes for cars (two in each direction) will be reduced to three (just one lane from Boston to Cambridge), so if examined in terms of cost per lane of travel, it was $16.25 million to construct and will be $86.67 million to renovate, a 5X increase in cost.]

Full post, including comments