A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
“Meet Venture Capital’s Teenage Analyst” is a Wall Street Journal story about an industry where an 18-year-old girl with no college degree was able to get a job as “an analyst and an associate.” What’s the journalist’s comment on this industry overall? It is “very much an old boys’ club.”
Full post, including commentsThe Sony A7R II has in-camera sensor stabilization. The Sony 24-70/4 FE lens has in-lens optical stabilization. Would the two working together be enough to allow us to capture stable footage from a Robinson R44? The answer seems to be “no”:
We went back to the ramp to cry and wait for our DJI Osmo.
[Related: In September we flew with a videographer from Neoscape who used a RED camera and mass gyro (not a gimbal) as we circled a real estate project. The result is visible at 0:47 in this video. (We circled the site for about 20 minutes at different altitudes, speeds, and lateral positions… all for 8 seconds of final footage.)]
Full post, including commentsAs Hillary Clinton finalizes her stroll back to the White House it is worth remembering that her election in 2016 would prove Richard Nixon correct: “.. certainly in the next 50 years we shall see a woman President–maybe sooner than you think.” (speech from 1969 to the League of Women Voters)
[How else have things changed? Peggy Noonan, one of the idea-generators in Ronald Reagan’s White House, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “[Democrats during her childhood] did not spend their time endlessly accusing people of being sexist-racist-homophobic-gender-biased persons of unchecked privilege. They would have thought that impolite.”]
Full post, including commentsIt looks as though Garmin is dragging the field of aviation very slowly into the 20th century. This caught my eye in a review of the latest version of the Piper Malibu/Mirage: Automatic Descent Mode. From the article:
the M350 also has a Hypoxia Recognition System, active whenever the autopilot is engaged and the cabin altitude climbs above 14,900 feet, as would happen in the event of depressurization. (Cockpit oxygen masks are stowed beneath the copilot’s seat.) If no pilot interactions are detected in these conditions, the system engages Automatic Descent Mode, bringing the aircraft to an altitude allowing recovery from hypoxia.
The system also exists on the Cirrus SR20/22 aircraft equipped with the latest Garmin avionics. (Those airplanes are not pressurized and the pilot brave enough to take them up high is relying on supplemental oxygen delivered to the nose.)
Compared to Siri/Cortana/Tesla this is pretty weak stuff, but it is nice to know that a 20-line Python script is now something that can be approved to protect light aircraft occupants.
[Separately, to see what one driven programmer can accomplish, free of FAA regulation, look at this video about Xavion. The runway length adequacy analysis function could have saved 49 lives and a $28 million aircraft (Comair 5191). The “fly me down to a runway after an engine failure” feature would be a great safety feature if it could be built into a certified panel.]
Full post, including commentsTwo stories from the same day…
Russian immigrant morning fitness class instructor in response to question about what she does the rest of the day: “I do some personal training and also teach nutrition to people in their homes.” Nutrition? Don’t we all know what is healthy but (mostly) lack the willpower to eat that way? “My clients don’t know how to prepare and cook food. The other day I showed a woman in a beautiful house how to turn on the fan over her kitchen stove.” [i.e., she didn’t know how to turn on the $2000 range hood in her $100,000 dream kitchen]
Russian immigrant approached by 65-year-old native-born woman in rich suburb’s supermarket: “When a recipe calls for three cloves of garlic, does that mean three of these?” [holding up three complete garlic heads] (Previously this Russian woman, in her 30s, had expressed surprise that a 50-year-old American stay-at-home mom had no idea how to roast a whole chicken.)
Separately, on the subject of maternity leave, the 35-year-old fitness instructor will be having her third child soon. In response to a question about who will take over her classes she said “I’ll teach right until I give birth and then I’m taking two weeks off so I just won’t schedule classes for those days.” The stay-at-home moms in the class gasped in horror. She said “I took 10 days off the last time.” [She operates her own business and therefore would not benefit if the government were to order employers to provide company-paid maternity leave (in fact she would be worse off to the extent that she might one day hire employees and have to provide them with paid leave).]
Full post, including commentsThe government provides financial aid to colleges based on the income of students’ parents based on a FAFSA form. “A Chance to Boost Financial Aid for Today’s High-School Sophomores; Strategic moves by Dec. 31 may help some families reduce the income to be reported on the Fafsa form for the freshman year of college” is a Wall Street Journal article on what parents can do to minimize their own payments. (Given how colleges raise tuition in response to the availability of government handouts, this aid is properly understood as going to colleges (“aid for colleges” not “aid for students” (because they and their parents pay about the same as they would if there were no government aid)).)
To me the article is helpful in understanding why American economic growth is so anemic compared to times when the government operated a smaller share of the economy. The article talks about parents and financial advisors spending a lot of time engaged in activities that shift money from one tax year to another and can’t possibly result in more economic activity or sustainable growth. Here are some examples:
If families were contemplating actions in 2016 that might boost their taxable income, they should consider accelerating those moves into 2015 instead. And they may want to look for other opportunities to shift 2016 income into this year and delay deductions—contrary to the standard tax-planning strategy of trying to delay income and accelerate deductions.
Deborah Fox, founder of Fox College Funding LLC in San Diego, advised the business-owning mother of one high-school sophomore to wait until 2016 to establish and contribute to a simplified employee pension plan. She also recommended the woman delay deductible computer purchases until next year and speed up her company’s billing so she receives as much income as possible in 2015.
Ms. Fox advised the family against prepaying their January mortgage and property-tax bills in December as they had planned. And she told the father to see if he can receive his bonus by Dec. 31 instead of in early January.
Obviously people spending time optimizing FAFSA can explain only a small portion of why we are stagnating, but I think it has the same character as a lot of other stuff that goes on in the U.S. economy. Whereas 50 or 100 years ago you’d write a check or hand over some bills and walk away, today there are hours of planning and thinking and filling out forms and talking to paid consultants and bureaucrats. Not to mention the agony of trying to correct errors.
Related:
This interview with a social psychologist is mostly about a non-newsworthy subject, i.e., an older person complaining about how worthless the younger generation is (to the extent that this might be true I would look at what employers are willing to pay for the labor of young people and the employment rate (not the bogus “unemployment rate” but the percentage that are actually working)). Buried in the middle, though, is an interesting idea:
Another thing that happens in the culture of affluence is that people overestimate the amount of control they have and feel compelled to exert control more, including over their kids. … One thing that has struck me is a huge judgmentalism among parents pushing them to overprotect their kids. Parents are afraid that if they don’t, they’ll be criticized by other parents or a neighbor. It’s a powerful moral force.
What do folks think? We’ve become a lot richer as a society. We don’t suffer from heat waves anymore, other than having to get up from watching TV in order to flip on the air conditioner. Does that lead us to wrongly believe that we can control everything else? Could this explain why we thought that we could clean things up in Iraq and Afghanistan?
[The rest of the article is a little bit fun because it uses the word microaggression, e.g., “Moral judgment is not about finding the truth; it is more about broadcasting the kind of person you are to people that you want to like you. You might call it moral posturing. Getting angry about microaggressions shows that you are championing victims. In a victimhood subculture, the only way to achieve status is to either be a victim or defend victims. It’s enfeebling. When victimhood becomes your identity you will be weak for the rest of your life. Marty Seligman has been talking about this for decades. This is a good way to make people learn helplessness.” I wonder for how many more years the term “microagression” will be in vogue.]
Full post, including commentsJohn Chisholm, the head of the MIT Alumni Association, and author of Unleash Your Inner Company
In my mid-thirties, I accepted the fact that I’m gay. Many folks don’t see that as an asset. I disagree. It has been an asset for me in at least five ways:
• People routinely assume that others are attracted to the opposite sex. I have long known—definitely—that those assumptions can be wrong. Being gay has thus made me more willing to challenge routine assumptions and the status quo, making me a better entrepreneur.
• Being gay has sensitized me to the discrimination faced by women, blacks, and other minorities (not to mention gays themselves).
• It wasn’t socially acceptable to be openly gay when I was growing up, so at least some and possibly much of the time and energy that I would otherwise have put into dating, I put into school, sports, and career instead. Today, I tremendously enjoy the benefits of that early investment.
• By being openly gay today, others recognize that I’m comfortable with and don’t try to hide who I am, which builds trust between us.
• More broadly, being openly gay signals that I am confident enough in myself that it doesn’t matter to me whether or not people know that I’m gay.Similarly, if you genuinely cannot change some aspect of yourself—height, ethnicity, accent, childhood, or that you or one of your parents were incarcerated—find a way to view it as an asset. Please set your bar very high. If you would like to change something about yourself that you indeed can change—you smoke, are overweight, or haven’t finished a degree—please don’t use this as an excuse not to make the change.
But if it is genuinely out of your control, finding a way to view it as a strength will be hugely liberating and empowering for you and it will become one of your assets, as it was and has for me.
(Chisholm posted this quote from the book as his Facebook status for National Coming Out Day.)
Full post, including commentsWe MIT 1982ers derided the Civil Engineering majors as learning about “bridges and sewers.” Harvard thought Civil Engineering was so dull that they supposedly fired their entire (top-notch) department in the early 20th century. The administrators didn’t think that civil engineering was going to be interesting going forward (and debacles such as “Longfellow Bridge repairs will now take about as long as the original construction” may have proved them right).
I attended the renamed MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering “new research breakfast” recently and learned what they’re up to.
MIT has a strong bias toward “engineer and build to solve all of the world’s problems.” This works best if you first gather the world’s smartest people. These are easy to identify because they are MIT students, graduates, or employees. solve.mit.edu (A TED-style event, October 5-8, 2015) offers a succinct summary of this philosophy: “Solve will inspire extraordinary people to work together to solve the world’s greatest challenges.”
This bias was apparent during the department head’s opening slides. The world population was going to grow to 10 billion people pretty soon and we were going to engineer transportation, food, and climate solutions for them all. There was no slide noting that we’ve built a lot of highways in the past 2000 years and yet still are plagued with the traffic jams that bedeviled contemporaries of Octavian (see “The Embattled Driver in Ancient Rome” by Matthews). Nor was there any slide noting that improved food production yields and medicine had been accompanied by a huge increase in human population so that at least some people remain without adequate food and medical care.
Is there any evidence that there are limits to engineering accomplishments? That we might not be able to build our way out of any uncomfortable situation? Right in the room with us it seemed to me that there was ample evidence. The speaker with the Windows 10 laptop was interrupted by a “not connected to network; backup not started” message over the slide (i.e., the programmers at Microsoft have yet to come up with a way of suppressing unimportant alerts when PowerPoint is in “show” mode). The speaker with the Macintosh notebook computer struggled for quite some time even to get the machine connected to the projector. Fifteen years ago I wondered “Given that these classrooms have all been recently remodeled at tremendous expense, why couldn’t there be a permanently mounted camera at the back of the classroom so that live streaming could be offered with a simple switch? Why do we have to call MIT A/V to send a person down with a tripod and camera taking up space at the back of the room if we want to have a video record?” What was the situation today? The room that we were in had been beautifully redone recently, complete with super expensive projector. The folks running the event wanting to stream it out live so they… called MIT A/V to send two people down. An enormous tripod and camera took up valuable space at the back of the room while a second area was set up in the corner to monitor and push the video out to the web.
Professor John Ochsendorf gave an interesting talk about fairly traditional civil engineering. He talked about the value of physical 3D-printed models, some of which indicate that a structure can support itself in situations where computer modeling predicts failure. This technique was used in the structural engineering for Professor Meejin Yoon‘s design for a memorial to Sean Collier, the MIT campus police officer killed by the Tsarnaev brothers. Yoon designed the form of the memorial but there was a question about whether steel pins were necessary to hold together the stone that she had spec’d. The physical 3D model led to a 66 percent reduction in the number of pins. Ochsendorf talked about the achievements of the Romans in building the Pantheon, e.g., using lighter concrete toward the top (see this article in Nautilus).
The opposite side of the field was demonstrated by Professor Lydia Bourouiba, who showed videos of people coughing and sneezing and discussed fluid dynamics models of disgusting human behavior. Why does it matter? Health care environments are set up on the assumption that you need to be about one meter away from a person who is coughing/sneezing. In fact, her research shows that seven meters is the safe distance. She noted that hospitals put most of their effort into protecting workers from disease; preventing patient-to-patient transmission is something for which a good case must be made.
How come we’re always sick? Professor Martin Polz explained that we’ve been running a massive evolutionary experiment with bacteria by pumping farm animals full of antibiotics. “The bacteria compete with the animal for food,” he noted, “so you get faster growth if you use antibiotics in quantities that are many orders of magnitude greater than what are used with humans.” He reminded us that the vast majority of bacteria are harmless, that we ingest billions of bacteria with every glass of water, and that the bacteria that are in and on us outnumber our own cells by a factor of 10. Now that we have antibiotic-resistant bacteria taking antibiotics can be a crazy bad idea. The drugs are broad-spectrum so they kill off a lot of harmless bacteria, thus opening up a big ecological niche within your body. That niche gets filled with the pathogenic antibiotic-resistant bacteria so by taking antibiotics you’ve hugely increased the quantity of nasty bugs inside your body. What can be done about it? Stop using antibiotics on farms, for one thing, but after that treat humans with bacteriophages, specific viruses that target harmful bacteria. The idea of designer phages goes back to the 1930s but people in the West lost interest when antibiotics became available. The Soviets were skeptical about the long-term effectiveness of antibiotics and the shotgun approach so they kept advancing the state of the art, but that work stalled with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Polz’s Lab does stuff that looks a lot like biology.
Take-away: (1) “Bridges and sewers” per se still don’t excite people in academia, but the department has reinvented itself; (2) it never hurts to add biology to any research project!
Full post, including commentsI’m reading The Oregon Trail
George Washington was America’s original maharaja of mules. Historians have long been squeamish about acknowledging that General Washington, like many of the American founders, was a voracious land speculator. Few academics and high school history teachers want to risk their careers by suggesting to their students that the father of their country worked the same day job as Donald Trump. Washington was a land developer, often described as the richest of his generation. By the end of the American Revolution, General Washington controlled about sixty thousand acres of land, more than half of it in the promising frontier country west of the Alleghenies, in what we today call West Virginia, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania. Wresting clear title to this rich bounty of soil from the English crown may not have been a principal motive for fighting the Revolutionary War, but Washington knew that he would profit mightily if independence was achieved.
How does this relate to mules? It seems that Washington needed a way to get around and collect rent:
Full post, including commentsThe traditional draft horses imported from Europe or bred on colonial plantations were magnificent equine specimens, weighing up to a ton apiece, their marbled thighs glistening under the sun as they pulled plows and farm wagons over the flat corn and tobacco fields of eastern Virginia or Pennsylvania. But these agrarian mastodons were enormously hungry at the end of the day, and, like so many “purebred” species, suffered the common defects of animals mated too often within the same bloodlines. The big, beautiful drafts were prone to lameness and chipped hooves, they lacked stamina, and essentially they could perform only one job— yanking a plow or a wagon across level cropland. Heavy draft horses were notoriously ungainly on the kind of steep slopes and rocky ground that would be encountered while conquering the Alleghenies.
Washington and his fellow Virginia planters had long known about the plucky, kick-ass little mules developed for pack trains and for pulling light freight wagons in the Spanish territories of the lower Mississippi and Texas. These “crosses” were bred from horses and small Mexican donkeys, usually producing a mule that stood only four feet at the withers, the part of a horse or mule where the neck joins the body. What the young republic needed now was something much bigger— sturdier, draft-quality mules that stood at five or six feet. In Spain and France, where farming required pulling loads up the steep paths of terraced vineyards and wheat fields, mules of this size had been bred for centuries out of tall donkey sires called “Mammoth Jacks.” Mammoth jacks were any of several long-legged, large-boned studs selectively developed for draftlike qualities, probably from Middle Eastern donkeys brought back from the Crusades. The mammoth jacks had eventually branched off into several discrete European breeds: the Andalusian, Catalonian, Majorcan, and Maltese lines. But the courts of France and Spain, reluctant to share such prize breeding stock with the colonies of their rival Britain, had always banned the export of mammoth jacks to America. After the American Revolution, however, Washington was a global hero, and the Europeans were glad to help the man who had trounced their old British foes. In 1785 the king of Spain, Charles III, dispatched to Mount Vernon a shipment of mammoth breeding stock that included an Andalusian jack named Royal Gift. The shipment included two “jennies,” or female donkeys, suitable for mating with Royal Gift to create more mammoth studs. In the meantime, Washington’s old fighting companion during the Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette, had shipped from France his own gift, a Maltese jack named Knight of Malta and four jennies.
…
By 1810 the region’s initial breeding stock had yielded an estimated 800,000 mules distributed throughout the South and beyond the Allegheny frontier.