Month: January 2016

I’m ashamed to admit this, but I am looking forward to going down to Orlando from Wednesday through Saturday of this week (1/27-1/30). I’ll be staying right next to the big airport there while a friend gets some simulator training.

Does anyone have good ideas for pleasant road bike rides that start near MCO? 20-30 miles would be ideal. I will probably have a rental car so in theory I could drive for a bit and then bike.

What else to do when there? I can’t muster the requisite noise/crowd tolerance for Disney. What about good places to see nature? Photographing birds with a long lens? See manatees?

What about driving to the Atlantic coast for a day? Are there good places to ride a bike around Cape Canaveral and Cocoa Beach or is the traffic too heavy on A1A?

Finally, what about a breakfast get-together on Thursday or Friday morning? Please email philg@mit.edu if interested.

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“How to Bridge That Stubborn Pay Gap” attracted 294 comments from New York Times readers. The editors select 10 as “picks” and here’s the opening of one of them:

This is a no-brainer: FIRST make women equal within the Constitution, pass the Equal Rights Amendment.

The author of the comment presumably believes that, given such an amendment, men and women would be paid the same. Here’s the text of the Equal Rights Amendment from 1972:

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

This replaces the 1923 version: “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

I wonder if this amendment, had it been fully ratified, would have lived up to the hopes expressed in the comment and the 62 other Times readers who gave it the thumbs up. Would the ERA have prohibited private employers from doing whatever it is that they are currently doing?

Aziz Ansari got a lot of Facebook shares with this image (text: If you believe that men and women have equal rights, if someone asks if you’re feminist, you have to say yes because that is how words work. You can’t be like, “Oh yeah, I’m a doctor that primarily does diseases of the skin.” Oh, so you’re a dermatologist? “Oh no, that’s way too aggressive of a word! No no not at all not at all.”)

What would happen if men and women actually did have equal rights under all of the laws? Bristol Palin found that out to her chagrin recently. She gave birth to a child in Alaska, the only state in the U.S. that grants fathers equal rights to mothers when it comes to custody and child support (some other states, e.g., Arizona, favor shared parenting but it is due to shared parenting studies showing that this is best for children, not because of a belief that running a court system where women win 90+ percent of the cases is unfair). She quickly found herself sued by the father, interested in a 50/50 parenting arrangement and monthly cash payments from Palin, whose income exceeds his. (Child support in Alaska is capped, however, so while a plaintiff might get 4-10X what could be obtained in Europe, there isn’t the possibility of unlimited payments as in California, Massachusetts, or Wisconsin.) The National Enquirer article on the subject:

Bristol Palin is facing an all-new disgrace as her formerly-heroic Marine fiancee files a custody claim on their out-of-wedlock baby — and even makes a grab for child support!

Now he’s filed legal documents seeking joint-custody of the 3-week-old, while also seeking child-support payments from Bristol!

The new mom’s rep, David Martin, sniffed: “My values are such that a real American hero doesn’t ask for child support.”

[Presumably the roughly 4 million Americans collecting support payments in excess of child-related costs would disagree with that last statement.]

According to the scholars whom we interviewed, Ansari is stuck in the 1970s when it comes to “feminism.” Here are excerpts from a section from the Rationale chapter of Real World Divorce:

Legislators and attorneys told us that women’s groups and people identifying themselves as “feminists” were proponents of laws favoring the award of sole custody of children to mothers and more profitable child support guidelines. Is that a recognizably feminist goal? For a woman to be at home with children living off a man’s income? Here’s how one attorney summarized 50 years of feminist progress: “In the 1960s a father might tell a daughter ‘Get pregnant with a rich guy and then marry him’ while in the 2010s a mother might tell a daughter ‘Get pregnant with a rich guy and then collect child support.'” Why is that superior from the perspective of feminism? A professor of English at Harvard said “Because the woman collecting child support is not subject to the power and control of the man.”

We interviewed Janice Fiamengo, a literature professor at the University of Ottawa and a scholar of modern feminism, about the apparent contradiction of feminists promoting stay-at-home motherhood. “It is a contradiction if you define feminism as being about equality and women’s autonomy,” she responded. “But feminism today can be instead about women having power and getting state support.”

Leigh Goodmark, a professor at the University of Maryland law school and former Co-Director of the Center on Applied Feminism at the University of Baltimore School of Law, is the author of A Troubled Marriage: Domestic Violence and the Legal System (2011, NYU Press). Professor Goodmark explains that there are three types of feminism: equality, dominance, and governance. The feminism that has been influential in shaping family law nationwide is dominance feminism:

The particular bent of domestic violence law, however, is attributable not to equality feminism, but to the prevailing feminist ideology of the 1980s and 1990s, when many of these laws were enacted: dominance feminism. Dominance feminists, led by law professor Catharine MacKinnon, contended that male domination of women in the sexual sphere was the primary vehicle for women’s continued subordination. MacKinnon argued that “our male-dominated society, aided by male-dominated laws, had constructed women as sexual objects for the use of men.”

Rejecting feminist legal theories that advocated for women’s equality with men (equality feminism) or highlighted women’s innate differences from men (cultural feminism), dominance feminism contended that the legal system’s central concern should be remedying women’s subjugation, a subjugation created and reinforced by women’s sexual subordination to men.

“I’m Not Impressed By Aziz Ansari’s Feminism” breaks down feminism into a “first wave” (which Ansari seems to have caught) and, implicitly, later waves during which it was recognized that “equal rights” is not necessarily the right thing to demand. Bristol Palin’s current troubles with Alaska’s version of the Equal Rights Amendment show some of the problems with that first wave of feminism.

How else could women lose from the passage of an ERA? Even if the Equal Rights Amendment applied only to federal and state government, those are responsible for a lot of jobs. Affirmative action programs that favor the hiring of women would have to be eliminated, at least at government employers.

What about college admissions? Could men sue under an ERA because there are more women admitted to college than men? This 2012 Forbes article says the following:

On a national scale, public universities had the most even division between male and female students, with a male-female ratio of 43.6–56.4. While that difference is substantial, it still is smaller than private not-for-profit institutions (42.5-57.5) or all private schools (40.7-59.3). The nearly 40-60 ratio of private schools was most surprising, though perhaps this is partly due to the fact that most all-female schools are private. Nevertheless, the female domination of higher education prevails across all types of schools. It should also be noted that the national male-female ratio for 18-24 year olds is actually 51-49, meaning there are more (traditionally) college-aged males than females.

What about in government-run K-12? The Rise of Women says that “Women now outperform men academically at all levels of school.” Is the government prepared to say that boys are inherently intellectually inferior to girls? If not, how could a state or local government, given an ERA, run a school system in which boys consistently do worse than girls?

What do readers think? How would our world be different today if the Equal Rights Amendment had passed? Would there be any effect on the gender pay gap of which the New York Times regularly complains?

Related:

• Should the SEC make it illegal for public companies to employ men?

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“Bogus Web Traffic Continues to Plague the Ad Business” is a WSJ article saying that “The ANA said that in the 2015 study advertisers found between 3% to 37% of their ad impressions were created by bots compared to the prior study where the bot traffic ranged from 2% to 22%.” and “Companies could lose more than $7 billion globally this year to ad fraud, the ANA and White Ops estimate.”

I’m wondering if this is another trend that leads to dominance by Facebook. Due to the fact that Facebook users must be authenticated, are Facebook ads less vulnerable to click fraud?

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Great photographers aren’t usually good at talking or writing, but Sally Mann seems to be an exception. Here are some excerpts from Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs:

[On meeting her future mother-in-law, a social climber in New Canaan, Connecticut] I decided right there that she was a ring-tailed yard bitch. The feeling was clearly mutual.

Report card from Putney: “She feels that Math is and always will be irrelevant to her and I think its approaching it with a ‘just one more year’ attitude.” [Maybe useful if you were considering taking the advice of math-ignorant politicians to devote yourself to STEM in order to avoid career catastrophe.]

The New York Times did a story on Mann in 1992 and forwarded to her the letters from readers. When people had to get out pen, paper, envelopes, and stamps, the volume of reader comments was apparently much smaller. It seems that there were fewer than 100 letters. The readers confidently diagnosed Mann as having been a victim of childhood sexual abuse by her father, a medical doctor, but she had repressed this memory. The armchair Freudians diagnosed her as taking pictures of her own children, sometimes naked, because she “was unconsciously working out some kind of psychic pathology in [her] photographs.”

About a third of the book is directly related to life as one of the country’s leading art photographers. The other two thirds is interesting for its portrayal of 20th century American life. For example… Department of Family Wisdom: Mann’s grandmother to Mann’s mother, circa 1927: “Marry and divorce as often as you think you have to, but don’t be any man’s mistress.”

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Mann’s paternal great-grandfather made a fortune manufacturing cotton gins and then developing Dallas real estate. Mann describes the man’s interest in philanthropy as being unique for the time period, but this article suggests otherwise. (Note that there was no income tax or significant estate tax, so Americans kept a much larger share of what they earned.)

Mann’s father, a medical doctor, seems to have gotten her started in photography. Dad had a Leica for snapshots and a Linhof for serious portraiture. The father was also passionate about dogs, which caused some marital discord after Tara the Great Dane moved into bed and pushed Mom out. Mann’s father traveled through Europe in 1938 and, among his extensive written record of the trip, there is barely anything about the politics or military situation in Germany. With the perspective of history it is obvious to us that 1938 in Germany was a momentous time, but this wasn’t apparent to the traveler. He continued around the world on a total budget of about $1400 and his favorite spot was Angkor Wat.

“It’s Payback Time for Women” is a recent New York Times article on how women in general should be paid more than currently for their efforts as mothers (the Times neglects to mention that any American woman who wants to be paid for being a mom can do that through our child support system, which can yield a higher after-tax spending power than going to college and working in states such as California, Massachusetts, and New York). Mann’s book, however, reminds us that not all women devote themselves to their children. Mann’s father provided nearly all of the household income by working long hours as a country doctor (housecalls, 30-minute interviews with patients, surgery when necessary, etc.). Mann’s father was the nurturing parent as well, providing emotional support for the children and, eventually, the grandchildren. The hands-on parenting that the Times wants to see women get paid for was done by… woman being paid for the task: “Down here, you can’t throw a dead cat without hitting an older, well-off white person raised by a black woman..” Mann received “unconditional love” from a widow she called “Gee-Gee” who “worked for my family until her early nineties. At age one hundred, with her hands curled into gentle claws, she died on Christmas Day, 1994.” After giving birth to the Mann clan, what did the mother do? According to Sally, she seems to have invested her time and energy into a variety of what the daughter describes as “progressive” political causes.

The book is marred to some extent by the repeated use of the phrase “dear friend.” Readers may correct me but I associate this phrase with insincere people and name-droppers, e.g., “My dear friend Hillary Clinton.” Emily Dickinson did not say “My dear friends are my estate.” Helen Keller did not say “I would rather walk with a dear friend in the dark, than alone in the light.” Aristotle did not say “What is a dear friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.” Tennessee Williams didn’t say “Time doesn’t take away from dear friendship, nor does separation.” What if Cassius had said to Brutus “A dear friend should bear his dear friend’s infirmities,” in Julius Caesar?

Due to the generally feeble image presentation capabilities of the Amazon Kindle format, I recommend getting this book in hardcopy form, where it also serves as a good example of how to mix photos and text (an average of nearly one per page).

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“Anti-Abortion Groups Join Battles Over Frozen Embryos” (nytimes, January 19, 2016) has an interesting financial planning angle that the newspaper didn’t explore.

A properly planned career of collecting child support pays better than going to college and working at the median college graduate wage (see Real World Divorce, e.g., the California, Massachusetts, Utah, or Wisconsin chapters). It can provide earnings over a long period of time, e.g., if a plaintiff has the first child at age 18 and the last child at age 40, in Massachusetts the cash will flow until age 63. However, with human lifespan increasing, a plaintiff might want to assemble a portfolio of cashflow-positive children that will pay dividends beyond age 63. Enter the New York Times to show how it can be done!

What if embryos are frozen when a plaintiff is age 30? They can be incubated either by the plaintiff (if female) or via a surrogate at any later date, e.g., when the plaintiff is 60 years old, thus providing a stream of tax-free cash through age 78, 81, or 83 depending on the state. What if the defendant parent has died in the intervening years? Many states allow for a plaintiff to collect child support from the estate of a dead parent.

An advantage of this approach is that, due to the spread in birth years, the amounts of the payments can be roughly double than if children from the same defendant had been born in the same year (e.g., see New York or Wisconsin where the formula is very simple; one child pays 17% of a defendant’s pre-tax income while three children yield only 29% of the defendant’s pre-tax income (remember that the money is tax-free to the defendant, though, so this corresponds to roughly half of the defendant’s after-tax income)). A disadvantage is that the future cashflow needs to be discounted. Given a sufficiently high discount rate it might make more sense to incubate the embryo to term today and invest the child support proceeds in a Vanguard index fund.

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One of the users of our household desktop Windows 10 box is two years old. His approach to the keyboard can best be described as “all-encompassing”. When I want to log in, Microsoft’s software rejects my password and then reminds me that “CAPS LOCK is on.” Instead of taking the trouble to display that message, assuming that the CAPS LOCK key actually has been pressed, why not simply re-try whatever was typed as though the CAPS LOCK key had not been on? How hard would that be? Presumably Windows sees every key press event. How hard would it be to flip the case of whatever was typed in and try again? (And perhaps turn CAPS LOCK off automatically if it had been turned on while the machine was on the login screen?)

Apple fanboys: Is this something that Steve Jobs figured out or does Mac OS exhibit the same behavior?

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I’ve been noticing that stuff that I could have built in three days by myself (SQL data model, HTML templates, some scripts to bridge the two) now takes a team of multiple programmers weeks or months. The result is far prettier than the clunky rendered-by-Mosaic-or-Netscape sites of the 1990s but the function is about the same.

“The Sad State of Web Development” by Drew Hamlett is a fun read (I learned about it from Dave Winer’s comment on the article). It seems that the same forces that led the world of computer nerdism down the J2EE path in the 1990s are still at work:

The web (specifically the Javascript/Node community) has created some of the most complicated, convoluted, over engineered tools ever conceived.

At times, I think where web development is at this point is some cruel joke played on us by Ryan Dahl. You see, to get into why web development is so terrible, you have to start at Node.

You see the Node.js philosophy is to take the worst fucking language ever designed and put it on the server. Combine that with all the magpies that were using Ruby at the time, and you have the perfect fucking storm. Lets take everything that was great in Ruby and re write it in Javascript, I think was the official motto.

Most of the smart magpies have moved on to Go at this point, but the people who have stayed in the Node community have undoubtedly created the most over engineered eco system that has ever appeared. No one can create a library that does anything. Every project that creeps up is even more ambitious than the next. It all starts with a core module and 400 plugins for this module. No one will build something that actually does anything. I just don’t understand. The only thing I can think, is people are just constantly re writing Node.js apps over and over.

React: Facebook couldn’t create a notification indicator on Facebook.com, so they create this over engineered dump pile to solve that problem. Now they can tell you how many unread posts you have while downloading 15 terabytes of Javascript.

How does rewriting your interface in the latest framework get you to the next customer? Or the next 50 customers. Does it actually make your customers happier?

A [single-page application] will lock you into a framework that has the shelf life of a hamster dump. When you think you need a SPA, just stop thinking. Just don’t. Your users just don’t fucking care.

The code examples in my 1990s book on web development still run! So does the open-source software that we distributed starting in the mid-1990s. This code doesn’t respond differently to a request from a tablet or a mobile phone, but the browser software on those devices is smart enough to make all of the pages usable. I wouldn’t advise a developer building something new today to use Perl scripts linked to the Oracle C library as I did in 1994 for the Boston Children’s Hospital web-based electronic medical record system (see JAMIA paper that I co-authored unknowingly). But on the other hand I haven’t seen any new development tools that are obviously more productive.

Readers: Are tools for building straightforward web-database applications getting worse or better?

Separately, a youngish programmer friend was telling me that he thinks discriminating against older programmers is rational because programmers usually learn about new tools during evenings or while doing uncompensated side projects. He thinks that older programmers, e.g., due to family responsibilities or reduced energy levels, are less likely to build stuff without being paid and thus employers assume that they won’t know about Node.js and the other frameworks mentioned above.

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A friend’s son will be celebrating his bar mitzvah soon. His parents have told him that he must give 50 percent of any monetary gifts to charity. He says that he wouldn’t give any of his money away if it were up to him. One of the boy’s current passions is computer gaming. I asked him if there was an option in Grand Theft Auto to give away half of your winnings to charity. Apparently there is not.

What do readers think? Will making a 13-year-old give up his dream of Alienware in favor of choosing a 501(c)(3) make him a better person in the long run? And, if so, what is a charity that a 13-year-old might donate to? (let’s first check the Form 990 at guidestar.org to make sure that the executives don’t earn over $1 million/year)

Could the teenager reduce his tax rate a little by asking guests to give him physical things instead of money? What if he spreads his dream gaming computer across an Amazon wishlist or similar and asks people to buy him one component at a time?

Finally, can we argue that this is important preparation for becoming an adult American? He will have to learn to hand over approximately 50 percent of his income (or up to 90 percent, depending on the state and the judge’s mood, if he has an encounter with the U.S. family law system) going forward. So maybe he needs to learn how to do that cheerfully?

[One of my MIT 1982 classmates had this to say: “My son and I just took care of his donations from his bar mitzvah. We had settled on a more standard 10%. While it’s true that most of our children want for nothing and could easily donate 50% or the whole amount for that matter without missing anything, our practice has been to instill in them the responsibility of always giving 10% per our tradition. We talk about it as a family, they see us do it personally, and he had the benefit of seeing his sisters do the same before him. I would hope that the tzedakah (charity) would be a positive thing and reinforce the notion of a bar mitzvah as joining the ranks of Jewish adults, which of course entails additional responsibilities. And if the 13 year old is set on a gaming laptop, what’s wrong with using some of the gift money and, if that’s insufficient after making the requisite donations, earning the rest through baby-sitting or other age appropriate jobs? I know we struggle with teaching our kids the value of money simply because they’ve never had to learn the hard way.]

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I am trying to convert a batch of WordPerfect files to PDF, ideally with the filename of each file displayed in a header. As Corel is the publisher of WordPerfect, I decided to download a trial version of their “PDF Fusion”. Dragging a WordPerfect file into the PDF Fusion app, however, produced an error of “-1”. Digging into the user guide, published on the “wordperfect.com” site, I discover that WordPerfect (WPD) is not one of the supported formats (you can start with Microsoft Word, Open Office, or WordPad files, however).

I think this deserves to be on the cover of Why you need a product manager magazine.

File under: Proud to be part of the software industry.

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The digital age has not been kind to Leica, especially with the killjoys at DxOMark showing the technical inferiority of their products to Sony’s and Nikon DSLRs equipped with Sony sensors.

The new Leica X-U may be an exception, however. It seems to be the first purpose-built underwater point-and-shoot camera with an APS-C sensor (same size as the popular Canon Rebel). The lens is a fixed 35mm equivalent, where “fixed” means that there won’t be any water leaking in through the lens mount. The cost is no worse than taking the family for a week at Club Med: $3000. The big missing feature is image stabilization.

The closest competitor is the Nikon 1 AW1, which has a smaller 1″ sensor and interchangeable lenses at a tiny fraction of the price. Customer reviews on the Amazon and B&H Photo mention problems with the water-sealing, which is not a great thing in an underwater camera…

Let’s hope that Olympus, which has a tremendous track record in rugged cameras, makes a four-thirds competitor to this Leica with image stabilization and a price under $1000!

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