A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
Some friends have organized BarCamp, here in Boston from March 17-18. Part of Barcamp includes a programming contest. I have donated Boston helicopter tours as prizes for the winners of the programming contest. If you’re a New England programmer with a desire to see the city from a Robinson R44, this could be a fun way to do it.
Full post, including commentsI met with an MIT student today who is from South Africa. I mentioned that I was going to Cape Town in April. He said that he was from Johannesburg. “I’ve heard that Johannesburg has a lot of crime,” I mentioned. “There are more deaths every year in Johannesburg than in Iraq,” was his reply.
Full post, including commentsI’m two-thirds of the way through Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw. He became the richest man in the world in 1901 after selling his steel company to J.P. Morgan, collecting $120 billion in today’s dollars. From page 600:
Full post, including commentsCarnegie had decided long before that America’s largest universities, “such as Harvard and Columbia… were large enough; that further growth was undesirable; that the smaller institutions (the colleges especially) were in greater need of help and that it would be a better use of surplus wealth to aid them.”
Last year, the Boston subway and bus system (MBTA) used tokens and cost $1.25 per ride. Today, with my car as frozen solid as a JetBlue Airbus at JFK, I decided to take the subway up to Davis Square. They have bought fancy new magnetic debit card machines. You don’t have to carry metal tokens anymore. The cost of a ride, however, has gone up to $2. This illustrates nicely one of the problems with user fees for government services. The government agency starts out by being spectacularly inefficient (MBTA bus drivers, for example, got paid an average of $55,000 in 2004, plus free health insurance and a pension plan vastly superior to anything in private industry). Then they decide that they need to collect user fees of $X. Then they come up with a system for collecting those user fees that turns out to be surprisingly expensive. Then the usage of the system falls due to the higher price. So it turns out that the fee collected per use ends up needing to be double what was originally planned, just to yield the same net revenue.
The deeper question for me is why the subway and bus system in congested Boston charges riders at all. Anyone who rides the subway instead of driving is doing the rest of society a huge favor by reducing pollution, global warming, and traffic congestion. The total revenues from bus and subway riders in FY2005 was roughly $240 million. We have at least 1 million cars that operate in Boston for 250 working days per year. If we charged drivers $5 per day per car as a congestion reduction fee, or about 1/4 the fee charged in London, that would yield revenue roughly 3X the MBTA token/card sales (assuming that the congestion fee and free MBTA reduced car usage by 40 percent).
If we paid the true costs of our transportation lifestyle, car owners would pay at least $5 per day for driving in the city and T riders would get free coffee and donuts as a thank-you.
Full post, including commentsI’ve prepared a job posting for a photography intern and would appreciate feedback before it gets more widely circulated. What did I leave out?
Full post, including commentsJessica Livingston’s new book, Founders at work, contains a 28-page interview with none other than the author of this Weblog (plus interviews with a lot more genuinely accomplished folks!).
Full post, including commentsA friend asks
I have a lady friend who knows less than even the very basic basics of computer use, why and what programs are used for, etc.
Can you recommend a down-to-earth, layman’s terms book or possibly a website instructional that would help her get a firmer understanding of simple, basic computer use and the accompanying jargon that surrounds it?
I scanned the headlines at nytimes.com and thought that “Troubles Grow for a University Built on Profits” was another article about Harvard’s new president, announced yesterday. The new president is a Civil War historian who has been running Radcliffe, reduced to a $17 million annual grants program (they could have adopted this grand scheme from an earlier Weblog posting, but opted for obscurity instead).
Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard’s first female president, seems never to have offended anyone and has a much lower Google profile than the ousted Larry Summers. A Google search for “Drew Gilpin Faust” brings up just a handful of scholarly references, none of which are available in full text on the Web. One of her books is available currently at amazon and the two readers who bothered to comment are blandly unimpressed: “This book is rather tedious if you are not a fan nor speaker of that odd language known as academia ” and “probably only a woman interested in the history of women would be interested. The entire book is very…well, womanly.” An older book earns two out of five stars: “jargon-laden prose makes this one a sleeper”.
To judge by the Amazon reviews and the Google search, we are in for some quieter times here in Cambridge.
Full post, including commentsI’ve drafted three new articles for photo.net and would appreciate comments:
Thanks in advance for corrections or suggestions for new sections.
Full post, including commentsFolks: We’re investing in a major hardware/software upgrade at photo.net. It would be nice to know if we’re doing better or worse overall when it is done. What are the best external Web site monitoring services these days? I want to know what our average time to serve a page is before and after the upgrade. Would also be nice if Jin’s phone could be called when the site is unreachable.
Full post, including comments