Category: Uncategorized

We went to see All is Lost the other night and the engineer in me kept wanting to know “Why didn’t he have an EPIRB”? My companions haven’t spent too much time in the lonelier parts of the planet so they didn’t have to suspend their disbelief that someone who fits out a sailboat for a round-the-world cruise wouldn’t buy an EPIRB from Amazon.

Having also seen Gravity recently (six of us total; six thumbs up) I’m impressed by how much filmmakers can do with just one or two actors. All is Lost seems more impressive because the hardware is simpler and one is reminded that the open ocean can be just as lonely an environment as space.

The movies reminded me to get the batteries changed in my EPIRBs! (I have a floating ACR EPIRB that I got for a trip down through the Caribbean in a Diamond Star DA-40 (story) and a smaller PLB for helicopter trips through some of the blank areas of the American West.) Maybe it is also time to have the life raft repacked by Survival Products.

My experience as a blue water sailor is primarily limited to vomiting over the side. What did the sailors who read this blog think of the movie?

[For a separate real-life story about how bad things can go when you don’t spend $200 on a Spot or EPIRB, check out this story about a Canadian who ended up killing and eating his German Shepherd after the dog saved him from a bear attack.]

Various news articles are reporting that at least 55 contractors were involved in building healthcare.gov (example from USA Today). That raises the question of why anyone thought that all of the interfaces among 55 different components were going to work upon launch. But I wonder whether, before hiring 55 different companies, someone didn’t ask “Could we just take the source code for the up-and-running Massachusetts exchange and extend it?”

What does healthcare.gov do that the Massachusetts exchange, which has been running for at least five years, does not do? Wouldn’t that have been the lower risk approach? Add a “state” column to every database table and form, soft launch with 10,000 consumers in each state, and then release to the general public?

Obviously it is easier to say in hindsight what should have been done, but given the existence of a working exchange and the fact that federal workers themselves did not do any programming, why did the Feds fall victim to “Not Invented Here” syndrome?

Folks: It has come to my attention that Twitter has gone public at a valuation of $18 billion. The company has modest revenue (about $600 million per year) and no profit. Is it a short?

What is the explanation for how this service can make enough profit ($1 billion per year?) to justify an $18 billion valuation? It doesn’t seem like a natural advertising medium. Given the possibility of distributing information for free via Facebook or Google+, Twitter does not seem to offer a unique capability to users.

Generally I am a believer in the efficient-market hypothesis but I can’t understand this one.

My Samsung Galaxy Note 3 has such vast powers compared to my iPhone 4S that I can’t figure out how to do anything anymore…

Apple offers Photo Stream (now “iCloud Photos”) where photos taken from one’s phone show up on one’s desktop computer. After that I would copy them into regular folders and pick the ones to publish using Google’s Picasa, then push up to Google+ for sharing with friends and family.

What is the Android equivalent? All of the photos go up to Google+ automatically. But I can’t figure out how to bring them down to Picasa. The automatically uploaded directories don’t appear as folders that I can import from Google+ into Picasa. And there doesn’t seem to be a catch-all “sync everything” feature. What are people supposed to do? Once the photos are in the cloud keep them in the cloud and do all of the editing with a Web browser? The interface is very slow and cumbersome compared to the Picasa desktop app.

One thing that seems to work pretty well is Dropbox. A single setting has everything from the phone go into “Camera Uploads” and I can use that folder the way that I used iCloud Photos (actually it seems to work better; I had trouble attaching or uploading files directly from the iCloud Photos folder, which didn’t work like other Windows directories). Somehow, though, I can’t wrap my head around the idea that I need a third party service (Dropbox) to connect two Google services (the phone and Picasa).

Am I missing something obvious?

What is the best workflow that people have found to go from the Android phone to archival directories on a Windows machine hard drive and then to push the best images up to Google+ via Picasa?

I went to see The Power of Duff last night at the Huntington Theater. It is a beautifully staged and wonderfully acted play that reminds me a bit of The Weather Man, looking into the personal lives of people whose job is to be straightforwardly cheerful on TV. Some critics have complained that the play doesn’t address any profound spiritual issues but I think the play is mostly about the more banal issue of the wrench thrown into the works by a guy who begins to offer prayers during the nightly local newscast.

It plays only through November 9 so if you’re in Boston rush out and see it!

I picked up a paper copy of the Oct 26-Nov 1 Economist to read on a NYC/Boston Shuttle flight the other day, due to the ban on electronic readers during what can sometimes be long taxi/waiting times on the ground (nobody asked me to turn off my Samsung geek watch, which runs a full copy of Android, so I’m not sure how sustainable the ban on small devices is going to be in the Age of the SmartWatch).

Here are some interesting tidbits…

Puerto Rico is bankrupt, more or less in the same manner as Greece. In addition to the pension obligations that render most states insolvent under reasonable assumptions regarding investment returns, Puerto Rico also simply borrowed about 89 percent of its residents’ annual income (i.e., everyone there would have to work for an entire year, paying 100% of their income in tax, in order to pay it off). This compares to a U.S. state average of 3.4 percent. Interestingly, Massachusetts figures prominently in the borrowing binge as well, with debt of nearly 10 percent of state personal income (Hawaii, NY, NJ, California, and Illinois are also identified as high borrowers). The lending fever was fueled by tax breaks for the bonds and the money was spent on a “bloated public sector.” What had kept Puerto Rico going was a manufacturing tax break that expired in 2006.

In a special section on South Korea, the magazine opines that people there need to have more babies so that they can grow the population to a sufficient size for paying health care and pension obligations to those who are currently old and middle-aged. No mention is made of the fact that South Korea is already one of the world’s most densely populated countries (Wikipedia says 1308 per square mile compared to 90 here in the U.S.) or that this population density understates the on-the-ground reality of compression due to the mountainous nature of much of the country. Does it really make sense to try to push off the day of reckoning by producing a big generation of children and then hoping that there will be an even bigger generation after them to pay off their pensions and health care?

There is a section on designing space ships and it turns out that there is an economics connection. Paul Krugman, who turns out to be an avid science fiction fan, wrote a paper in 1978 on how to organize interstellar trade in the presence of relativistic time effects while goods travel between Earth and Trantor.

Albeit not as exciting as a trade route from Earth to Trantor, the magazine carries an article about a plan to build a 262-mile long railroad from Kunming, China to Vientiane, the capital of Laos. This would enable passengers and freight to travel all the way from Bangkok to Kunming. The new railroad would include 76 tunnels and bridges at a cost of $7.2 billion (i.e., less than half what it cost for the Big Dig in Boston).

Folks:

The Obamacare exchange, healthcare.gov, web site has been in the news lately. It supposedly cost a lot of money to build and doesn’t work very well, but none of the news articles seem to explain what it does.

For example, does a consumer actually complete a transaction on the healthcare.gov web site? Or does the site simply allow a consumer to fill out a form that gets forwarded to an insurance company where coverage will be established?

And what did it cost to build? It seems safe to assume that it was more than the $25 million in funding that sufficed for Google’s expansion for the first six years. (Wikipedia) Was it more than the $327 million that California spent on their state exchange? (see this earlier posting)

I am testing out the Samsung Galaxy Gear (a.k.a. “the Geek Watch”) and associated Note 3.

Let’s start with the health applications. The phone has a built-in pedometer and a “walking mate” app that says that I walked 6821 steps on this sedentary day (sitting in a meeting, sitting in a car, a 1.2-mile round-trip walk to a restaurant) and covered 3.4 miles. The app is part of “S Health,” which says that a 6′ tall male like myself shouldn’t weigh more than 169 lbs. (that was about what I weighed as a 15-year-old who regularly swam laps in the MIT pool). If I want to feel good about my body and lifestyle, though, I can just look at the watch, which says that I walked 11,000 steps and 5.3 miles (about 300 of those occurred at a 45-minute business lunch at which my companions will swear that I never left my chair).

How about messaging? My main application is Gmail and it would be nice to see new messages on the watch… except that one can’t. The only email that can appear on the watch are messages that get delivered to the “Mail” app, designed for IMAP/POP accounts. Text messages show up on the phone, which would be great if I were a teenager. Even for a teenager, though, it is annoying that even if a message has been read on the watch it still shows up as new and alert-worthy on the Note 3 (i.e., reading the message on the watch does not clear the “new message” alert on the phone). If you want to respond to a text message on the watch, you can do it with voice recognition (very unreliable) or a voice call. Why not a menu of canned responses such as “yes,” “no,” “will get back to you in 15 minutes” or whatever?

My favorite feature on the watch is that it can be configured to show the current time and date as well as the next event on any of one’s Google calendars (I could never get the iPhone to sync with more than one Google calendar). Unfortunately getting the phone to show the time involves either pressing a button (like on a 1970s LED-based digital watch) or shaking one’s wrist a bunch of times. Another good feature of the phone is seeing who is calling and being able to answer or reject a call by swiping on the watch (i.e., no need to pull out the phone when in a meeting). In a quiet environment it is possible to use the phone while speaking into the watch and listening from the watch and I have done some short calls that way.

You’d think that a watch would have wireless charging so that you could plunk it down on a night table at bedtime, but in fact it needs to be wrapped in a weird little plastic case that lines up with some charging pins on the bottom of the watch. Heading out for a trip? Better remember to pack this strange custom charger because the battery life on the watch is about two days max. The Note 3 also lacks wireless charging.

As the founder of photo.net and a moderately annoying parent-with-camera (results), photography is important to me. One thing that I liked about the iPhone 4S that I used for the last two years was that the camera was very responsive. It was possible to take a bunch of portraits in succession without a lot of shutter lag. The Note 3 has a camera that is comparable in basic image quality to the 4S camera but the software imposes unpredictable shutter lag and, oftentimes, several seconds of inaccessibility after a photo while a “processing….” pop-up appears over the viewfinder. The Samsung has some clever modes, of which my favorite is one that drives front and rear cameras simultaneously so that it is possible to send a postcard from a vacation with a big outdoor scene and a small inset face of the phone owner (captured by the front camera). As a practical photo tool, though, the iPhone 4S seems much better and the 5S is surely another world altogether. (The watch can take photos and videos but I haven’t played with it too much yet.)

Despite having pretty close to the world’s largest screen, the Note 3’s screen still isn’t wide enough for all of the little notification and status icons that are ever-present at the top. Is the watch connected? There’s an icon for that. Continuously displayed despite the fact that if you have your phone in your pocket and the watch on your wrist it is in fact always connected. Verizon adds its own layer of ugliness with a “Caller Name ID” application that proudly leaves an icon at the top of the phone screen if it was ever able to determine a caller’s name. Have Bluetooth and near-field communication enabled, as you’re pretty much likely to 24/7 if you use the phone as intended? Those will be permanent status icons up at the top of the screen. Because there is so much clutter on the status line I don’t know how any phone customer would notice an important notification.

The Samsung TouchWiz interface adds apps that run on screens that would otherwise be places to hold icons for launching apps. The phone comes preloaded with some of these “widgets” that are mostly just big adds for additional apps. Where users previously had to understand two modes of interacting with a phone, i.e., “interacting with operating system” or “interacting with app” Samsung makes them understand a third (“interacting with widget”).

The speaker in the Note 3 has a lot of distortion if you try to listen to music at a normal volume level. The ringer is not loud enough for middle-aged folks who carry the phone in a pocket. If you do manage to catch a call and hold the big phone up to your ear, whether or not you can hear the caller speaking is dependent on precise phone/ear alignment.

The Note 3 is spectacularly poor at holding onto a WiFi connection in my apartment. Though not a large place, there is a brick wall splitting it down the middle, which has lead me to operate two base stations, both with the same SSID. The Google Nexus 7 and 10 devices are very good at picking the stronger base station and switching appropriately if I walk around the apartment. The iPhone was good at this but not as good as the Nexus 7. The Samsung will go on and off the WiFi network every few minutes even if one is simply sitting in the same place in a part of the house where one of the base stations should dominate. Similarly, when carried right up next to a base station it will show just two bars of WiFi signal strength, telling me that it hasn’t been smart enough to switch (disabling WiFi and reenabling then shows a connection with full strength).

Returning to Android after a couple of years away is a startling experience in creeping featurism. The Nexus tablets are reasonably clean and simple to use, though I have come to prefer the iPad. But adding telephony capabilities and the extra Samsung software results in a lot of extra complexity. This phone was shipped from Verizon to me. Why isn’t there a simple standard voicemail section as there is on the iPhone? I’m supposed to download Google Voice and engage in some configuration magic and then it will maybe sort of work like the iPhone (except it won’t because the place that you go when you’re alerted to a missing call is nowhere near the place where you’d go to launch the Google Voice app)? When I switched from Android to iPhone I sorely missed the Back button that was off the screen on Android. But on the Note 3 and maybe on any Android the function is not always consistent. Worse yet is the “menu” key that lets you configure options and settings in some apps. I was trained on the iPhone that everything that one could do with an app was somehow accessible by touching somewhere on the screen. With Android this is true of many apps, but some apps have important settings and options that are accessible only from the off-screen buttons. These are easy to forget, particularly as they are not true buttons on the Note 3 and are often simply not visible (they are backlit when touched).

To end on a positive note (so to speak), I like the Samsung touch keyboard. It takes advantage of the large screen by showing both letters and numbers at all times, which makes it much more convenient to enter passwords, street addresses, etc.

In January 2011, I questioned whether paying able-bodied people to stay home and play Xbox for 99 weeks was a smart idea. In January 2013, I wrote about academic studies that found that indeed the American economy’s recent period of high unemployment and high long-term unemployment was closely tied to our politicians’ decision to pay people to stay home. Last night a reader sent me a link to an October 2013 paper: “Unemployment Benefits and Unemployment in the Great Recession: The Role of Macro Effects,” by economists from the University of Oslo, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and the University of Pennsylvania. The authors look at integrated labor markets that happen to be intersected by a state border. In markets, there are workers who have the same job opportunities but potentially different maximum duration for unemployment benefits.

The conclusion? “We found that unemployment benefit extensions have a large effect on total unemployment. In particular, our estimates imply that unemployment benefit extensions can account for most of the persistently high unemployment after the Great Recession.”

In my October 1 posting I predicted that the government shutdown would last for 8 days. So it looks as though the risk of me having to buy everyone a Taco Gigante is increasing.

How is the shutdown affecting my friends? Here’s a note from one who lives in Concord, Massachusetts:

The Minuteman National Park has cordoned off all of its parking lots. Busloads of people are still showing up, but now the buses are parked on the sides of Monument Street, creating, well, monumental traffic jams. They don’t chain off the lots at night or on holidays. Why do they do it now? Because a central bureaucrat in the National Parks Service or in the White House told them to. Our public servants feel it’s their job to make our lives difficult to prove how important they are. This is what happens when Americans vote for more and larger Government …