Author: philg

As Google hires all of the world’s good software engineers and my friends with startup companies fight over the scraps I am left to wonder how everyone could have been so wrong in predicting that the world would be glutted with good programmers and sysadmins by now.

In the early days of programming there was not considered to be a limit on how many people could be trained to do the job. IBM would hire graduates from all kinds of college majors, e.g., music, and train them (there were hardly any computer science programs at universities back in the 1950s). A popular idea among corporate managers is that this could be a good job for women, who were readily available at reasonable rates.

With the rise of the worldwide Internet, open-source, and inexpensive microprocessors, it seemed inevitable that the world would be glutted with technically skilled people. Programming is easier to learn than a foreign language (a friend who has a PhD in physics and is an expert hardware and software developer says that learning Mandarin and to read Chinese was by far the hardest thing that he ever did). Getting hired as a programmer does not require a specific degree or training course. Programming or system administration can be learned by anyone worldwide who has access to a $300 personal computer and an Internet connection. Why wouldn’t the millions of unemployed Americans train themselves to code? Why wouldn’t middle class people in China, India, and Africa?

Admittedly in the U.S. folks with an organized mind, the grit to get through technical subjects, and the drive to go to work every day can find higher paying jobs that involve more social interaction (e.g., medical doctor, Wall Street banker, etc.). But that doesn’t explain why people in the Philippines or China aren’t training themselves en masse to be able to soak up the $30-100/hour jobs that would be readily available to them if they could demonstrate the ability to turn a customer request into working code. Why are the Greeks, Portuguese, and Spaniards going bankrupt instead of learning to administer Cisco and Linux?

Any good futurist circa 1990 would have predicted that by now most of the world’s programming would be happening in low-to-medium-wage countries and that customers wouldn’t have to pay a lot for high quality software. But it hasn’t happened (e.g., see my posting about California’s state government spending $327 million on a straightforward ecommerce site (I visited http://www.coveredca.com just now and it seems to be a work in progress)). Why instead do we have catfights over mediocre talent in Kendall Square and Silicon Valley?

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One thing that is great about the Internet is that it makes it possible to connect simultaneously with all of the world’s criminals. I am trying to get rid of a batch of kitchen appliances and posted a Craigslist ad. “Kathy White” responded with the following:

Hi,
Thanks for the mail.. i will be paying you via PayPal, don’t worry
about the pick up, the pick up agent will be coming to pick it up
immediately your account is credited…..send me your PayPal invoice
to cgredstores@gmail.com so that i can pay in.

Thanks

Plainly this is not someone who learned English in the U.S. And plainly a non-criminal would not want offer to pay $1000 into a PayPal account based on viewing an anonymous Craigslist ad. How would the payer even know that these appliances exist?

So let’s assume that this email is from Nigeria and that “Kathy White” is not going to be coming to pick up my stylish-but-hated Bosch dishwasher and its GE brethren. How then can she possibly profit from putting $1000 into my PayPal account? She won’t get the appliances. If she arranges a refund from PayPal it will be for the $1000 that she sent me.

Related:

• if Kathy White wants U.S. dollars so badly, why doesn’t she come over here, get pregnant, and go back to Nigeria to collect $50,000 per year in child support? (realworlddivorce.com explains how it is done)

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Folks: (warning: boring domestic question!)

I want to buy a dishwasher. I want it to be quiet and to wash dishes as well as the (sort-of-noisy) Whirlpool that I bought in 1996 (the Whirlpool, with triple-level sprayers, could blast melted cheese off baking dishes). I bought the top-of-the-line Bosch about five years ago and it proved to be a service nightmare (see March 2008 posting; even after lots of service it still doesn’t wash very well), so I don’t want to go down that road again.

Consumer Reports top-rates a Kenmore Elite 12783 dishwasher but it isn’t clear who makes it. Could it be a dreaded Bosch (this posting says it might be)? They also like a KitchenAid model KDFE454CSS and say that it is very quiet, but other KitchenAids, which are just as quiet or quieter according to the KitchenAid Web site, are rated as vastly noisier. This is going into a pretty small apartment and the dishwasher needs to run during parties and not interfere with conversation.

Consumer Reports steered me very badly wrong with the Bosch so I’m not sure if I should give them too much credit, though I would expect them to be able to read a sound pressure level meter in the same room as a dishwasher. CR was the source for the beloved Whirlpool years ago and they correctly point out that Viking dishwashers are crap.

Related:

• realworlddivorce.com is a state-by-state guide to who gets the broken dishwasher

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At the cherry blossom festival in D.C., children could write on the Japanese American Friendship Mural. It turned out that The Tale of Genji was not their favorite thing: “Thank you for all of the cool Japanese stuff like video games.”

 

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A lot of what we do here in the U.S. seems to be predicated on the idea that we are smarter than Russians. We are well on our way to a fully planned economy (see my pre-election posting on how this is apparently what voters from both major political parties want). The Russians, under the Soviet system, had trouble getting their planned economy to grow robustly. We are now scratching our heads wondering why our planned economy isn’t growing much beyond the population growth rate.

The Russians have had difficulty fighting Chechens, but we welcomed the Tsarnaev family into the U.S., confident that they would not present us with any difficulty. The Russian security services warned us about Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Instead of relying on their warning and simply deporting Mr. Tsarnaev (his asylum-seeking parents had already voluntarily returned to the country where they were supposedly being persecuted badly enough to warrant asylum, so he would have had a place to stay back in his original home country), we decided that our own security services would conduct their own investigation using American brains instead of Russian brains. (And the FBI’s American staff concluded that Mr. Tsarnaev was unlikely to be a threat.)

In our helicopter ground school foreigners with a general education often outperform Americans with a bachelor’s in a technical subject (see this April 2010 posting). I remember one middle-aged Russian woman who offered a great physics-based explanation for nearly every question posed. It turned out that she worked at a finance job here. I asked her where she had studied physics. She replied “In Russia. In high school.”

We did beat Russia in the Cold War, of course, but that was a different generation of Americans. What evidence do we have that today’s working-age Americans are smarter than today’s working-age Russians?

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My posting about a Russian tourist in Washington, D.C. occasioned some debate about the USDA in the comment section. The normally sleepy agency made the news today, though, with a New York Times story about $4.4 billion in new handouts. How much is $4.4 billion? The World Food Program estimates that $3.2 billion would eliminate hunger among school-age children worldwide (source).

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I started and finished Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness last night. It is a very tightly written personal history by a woman who endured the disintegration of her mind, a month of flailing about by confused doctors, and then a seven-month recovery.

Susannah Cahalan, a New York Post reporter, was suffering from a rare autoimmune disorder that caused inflammation on one side of her brain. A variety of expert neurologists and psychologists, however, confidently diagnosed her as (a) normal, (b) suffering the effects of heavy alcohol consumption (despite no evidence that she had been a heavy drinker), or (c) a garden-variety mentally ill person. These misdiagnoses cause delays in appropriate treatment that result in her condition deteriorating to the point that she was probably just a few days from dying.

First, you’ll feel better about your own life after reading this book, unless you are suffering from a tough-to-diagnose and extremely rare medical condition. Second, you’ll learn just how random are the outcomes in the American medical system when the patient does not fit into a common box. Probably tens of thousands of folks with Cahalan’s problem have wasted away in mental institutions and/or died due to improper treatment. Certainly plenty of doctors with big reputations and enormous reserves of self-confidence worked on Cahalan’s case and failed to get any closer to the source of her problem. What’s worse, the doctors she consulted did not do any follow-up to find out whether or not their apparently-not-so-educated guesses were right. A famous New York neurologist, Dr. Saul Bailey, whom Cahalan had seen early in her journey through the world of medicine, did not keep sufficient track of the case to learn that his initial diagnosis of alcoholism was wrong. Because of that, when Cahalan followed up with him in the course of researching the book she discovered that Bailey remained ignorant of the disorder that had nearly killed Cahalan, despite the fact that her particular case had at that point been in lots of medical journals as well as the New York Times. With no feedback, how will Bailey ever improve?

Third, if you’re a blood donor you’ll feel better about your donation (email me if you want to meet at the Children’s Hospital donation center here in Boston; I’ll buy you lunch afterward and lunch for anyone else that you bring). Cahalan went through a lot of bags of immunoglobulin infusions, each of which costs $20,000 and requires 1000 blood donations.

Separately, the book contains some interesting father-daughter and men-women relationship angles. After corresponding with hundreds of patients and relatives of patients who’d suffered from the same “anti-NMDA receptor autoimmune encephalitis”, Cahalan concludes that “Paranoia, esepcially about the men in their lives, was also a common thread. A middle-aged woman believed that her husband had fathered a baby with a neighbor; a young teenager was convinced that her dad was cheating on her mother.” Cahalan herself suffered from similar paranoia but subsequently learned that the men in her life had in fact stepped up to the challenge.

Reading between the lines it sounds as though Cahalan’s mother triumphed over Cahalan’s father in a divorce lawsuit approximately a decade before the illness. The mother ended up getting the fancy suburban NJ house, the kids, and the river of child support money that courts can assign to the parent who wins the kids. This had resulted in some distance between Cahalan and her father, who moved to Brooklyn. The illness brought her dad to his daughter’s side every day: “Sensing that attitudes toward me improved and the level of care [at the NYU hospital] rose when company arrived, my dad … started to arrive first thing every morning. Alone, I could not fight this battle.” Dad, a successful financial industry worker of some sort, learns to respect Cahalan’s musician boyfriend, who showed up at 7 pm every day to take the night shift. The father wrote in his journal, which Cahalan mined for the book, “The one friend who did come everyday was Stephen. He was terrific. I wasn’t that sold on him when I first met him, but he grew in my respect and regard with every day that passed.” In the same journal Cahalan discovered an entry in which her father prays that “God would take him instead of me.”

More: read the book

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A friend who lives in a wealthy suburb of Boston posted this update on Facebook:

Parent/Student/Teacher night at school. Each child was assigned to teach the parents what they were learning. My son was demonstrating adding fractions. Several of the parents could not do it – 2nd grade math.

Coincidentally, as he was posting that I was in the middle of a couple of hours of recurrent training for instrument flying. A jet pilot friend who is a CFII graciously went up with me in a Cirrus SR20 and watched for other airplanes and monitored my performance while I wore a hood that restricted my view to just the instruments. It is a well-known phenomenon that pilots get rusty and there are embarrassment-free opportunities for refresher training. In fact, given that FAA regulations require at least some refresher training every two years, even the sharpest pilots can do a bit of training without anyone asking “How come?”

The Facebook posting above shows that most folks don’t remember everything that they learned in elementary school. But where can one get refresher training on fractions, state capitals, and the rest of the 1st-5th grade curriculum? The obvious answer would seem to be Khan Academy, but https://www.khanacademy.org/math/arithmetic/fractions seems to be geared at first-time learners and those who want to develop an exhaustive knowledge of a subject, not at those who just want some dusty neural pathways touched. A quick Google search turned up Homework for Grown-ups: Everything You Learned at School and Promptly Forgot, but 368 pages doesn’t seem like enough.

Is there a weekend course that grown-ups could take every 10 years?

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Folks:

It is pretty common in litigation for a party to demand, via discovery, “all email correspondence between the defendant and Joe Smith” or “all email correspondence in which ‘rebar failure’ is discussed.”

I’m wondering if there is a good automated tool for extracting this from Gmail or another IMAP source.

It would be nice if the tool could do the selection by sending a search term to Gmail. But it would also be acceptable if the tool were capable only of grabbing one IMAP folder. In that case the Gmail user could use Gmail tools to search for a particular recipient or subject line substring, then put all of the results in a folder named “JoeSmith” and have the tool pull all of JoeSmith.

Another nice-to-have feature would be to preserve the conversation threading, but I don’t think it is necessary to fulfill the requirements of the legal discovery process.

Output could be one text file per conversation, one PDF file per conversation, or one huge file with page breaks between messages or, preferably, between conversations.

To me the most obvious way to implement this is as an IMAP client to Gmail. However, given that Gmail already does most of what one would want I wonder if it wouldn’t make more sense to implement this as browser action scripts to simulate user actions and clicks within a Web browser.

Does this exist already? If not, does it seem like it would make a welcome open-source software product?

Thanks in advance for ideas.

Note: About a year ago, I developed a specification for software to do something fairly similar. This was for a friend’s startup that was going to build databases of corporate email, but the company ended up moving in a different direction: ExtractingConversationTimelinesfromEmail

[Update: I should note that the Gmail web interface already does virtually everything that is required above. All that the Google programmers would need to add is an option to “print everything to PDF” where “everything” is a set of a search results, a folder, or all the messages that are selected via a checkbox.]

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Federal, state, and local governments have been waging something of a “war on work” in the U.S. over the last 50 years or so. Payroll taxes, paid only by workers, have skyrocketed. Regulations and paperwork related to all kinds of jobs has been dramatically increased. In cities such as Cambridge, workers are made to feel like chumps in mixed-income developments because the apartment next door is often occupied by a family none of whose members have ever worked and who yet enjoy more or less the same material lifestyle as the worker (but perhaps a much better overall lifestyle because the non-workers usually have the joy of parenthood whereas the worker often does not).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Freedom_Day calculates some of this, showing that a worker must now spend from January 1 through April 17 to pay taxes. In theory that means the worker is enjoying the fruits of his or her labor from mid-April through December. In practice I think it would make more sense to look at the marginal return to work. On what day of the year does the worker actually pull ahead of the typical non-worker (who may collect some combination of welfare, disability, food stamps, free health care, subsidized housing, etc.)? In Cambridge I think it might not be until October or November. So the worker does end up with some disposable income to spend on travel, etc., but the effective hourly wage compared to not working is quite low (2000+ hours of work for perhaps 125 hours of pay (after taxes) that is above what a neighboring family collects in government benefits).

On casual inspection it doesn’t seem to make sense that a tiny restriction in the growth of federal government spending (the “cuts” referred to by newspapers are actually a reduction in spending growth; in every case the government will spend more than in the previous year) would result in the government melting down one of the rare things that almost everyone agrees it does reasonably well (albeit spending rather lavishly). However, it might make sense if the air traffic control cuts and subsequent delays for business travel are just the latest battle in the government’s campaign against work. An insufficient number of workers were discouraged by seeing their stay-at-home neighbors enjoy their continuous streams of government checks and free services. A remarkable number of people have irrationally decided to persist in working. Many of those folks will have to travel on business, which often means air travel. So what can the government do to make work an even more miserable experience? Cut air traffic controllers in the busiest airspace and impose 1-2 hour delays on a lot of people who were hoping to make it to a meeting. So business travelers will be getting up at 4:30 am instead of 6 am and endure being squeezed into a coach seat for 3 hours instead of 1.

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