Category: Uncategorized

Pilot shortage is the 21st century horse manure crisis?

by philg

“The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894”:

By the late 1800s, large cities all around the world were “drowning in horse manure”. In order for these cities to function, they were dependent on thousands of horses for the transport of both people and goods.

In 1900, there were over 11,000 hansom cabs on the streets of London alone. There were also several thousand horse-drawn buses, each needing 12 horses per day, making a staggering total of over 50,000 horses transporting people around the city each day.

This problem came to a head when in 1894, The Times newspaper predicted… “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.”

Recently pilots have been in the news for reasons other than screwing up: there aren’t enough pilots to meet expected global demand.

A 50-page report from UBS, however, says “UBS analysis of the Aerospace, Airlines and Logistics sectors suggests that reducing the intervention of human pilots on aircraft could bring material economic benefits and improve safety. Technically speaking, remotely controlled planes carrying passengers and cargo could appear by c2025.”

UBS acknowledges that what can be built by engineers might not be approved by government bureaucrats: “The regulatory framework will define the waves of technology advancements becoming reality and cargo will likely be at the forefront” and “The technology is there; two main obstacles are regulation and perception.”

Back in 2008, I wrote about a ground-based co-pilot who could bring airline safety to private operations. UBS talks about this too: “in the not-too-distant future, we would expect to see a situation where flights are pilotless or the number of pilots shrinks to one, with a remote pilot based on the ground and highly-secure ground-to-air communications.” This would dramatically cut the need for pilots per flight because a ground-based pilot could monitor 4-8 in-flight aircraft as long as they’re not all taking off or landing at once.

Readers: What do you think? Despite the current favorable outlook, will pilots circa 2030 actually find themselves in the same employment situation as draft horses circa 1920? (see unemployed = 21st century draft horse?)

Related:

  • ADS-B, technically feasible in 1995 and we’re hoping to have it mostly implemented by 2020.
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Google Heretic sparks interest in the history of Computer Science

by philg

James Damore, a.k.a. the Google Heretic, has spurred my Facebook friends to talk about the history of Computer Science. A sample illustrating how the early years of CS are now understood:

in the beginning computer science used to be almost entirely women.

It’s hard to find a profession less suited to illustrate women’s alleged biological unsuitability for certain vocations than computer science and specifically programming, given the history of the profession. … “Women aren’t good with computers”? They _were_ the original computers. (NASA article)

Piling abuse onto the already-cast-out heretic being a well-respected human endeavor, I responded with

So true. Church, Turing, von Neumann, and Emil Post all identified as women.

That’s why it is always “E.F. Codd” for the RDBMS pioneer. She didn’t want anyone calling her Edgar.

The non-nerds accepted these as legitimate responses. A couple of programmers, though, offered up Ada Lovelace.

When I asked for examples of what these folks thought of as early “computer science” it was setting up patch cords for the ENIAC.

It is kind of an interesting history. Women created computer science. After the excitement of the first few decades was gone, women wandered off into law, medicine, business, banking, politics, etc., and left working out the remaining dull details to colorless men.

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Great reminder that none of us own land in the U.S.

by philg

“Rich SF residents get a shock: Someone bought their street” is a reminder that “owning” property in the U.S. should really be called “renting it from the government by paying property taxes every year.”

Excerpts:

Tina Lam and Michael Cheng snatched up Presidio Terrace — the block-long, private oval street lined by 35 megamillion-dollar mansions — for $90,000 and change in a city-run auction stemming from an unpaid tax bill. They outlasted several other bidders.

Now they’re looking to cash in — maybe by charging the residents of those mansions to park on their own private street

Those residents value their privacy — and their exclusivity. Past homeowners have included Sen. Dianne Feinstein and her financier husband, Richard Blum; House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi; and the late Mayor Joseph Alioto. A guard is stationed round the clock at the stone-gate entrance to the street to keep the curious away.

The couple’s purchase appears to be the culmination of a comedy of errors involving a $14-a-year property tax bill that the homeowners association failed to pay for three decades

Two years ago, the city’s tax office put the property up for sale in an online auction, seeking to recover $994 in unpaid back taxes, penalties and interest.

He and his wife see plenty of financial opportunity — especially from the 120 parking spaces on the street that they now control.

“We could charge a reasonable rent on it,” Cheng said.

Lam and Cheng happen to be immigrants. How awesome would it have been to have been able to survey the rich people on this street, just before and just after learning about the new ownership structure, regarding their attitudes toward immigration?

Related:

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Canceled my Amazon Fresh subscription

by philg

Earlier I asked Who loves AmazonFresh? The answer turns out to be “not me.” On a Saturday I placed an order and picked the following Tuesday morning as the delivery slot. After I placed the order I realized that Wednesday morning would be better. This was just a few minutes later. It was possible to add stuff to the order, change the payment method, etc., but not to change the delivery date/time. It was easy to reach Amazon Fresh support via chat, but unfortunately the answer was “you have to cancel the order and start over.” I canceled my $14.99/month subscription instead.

The more I used AmazonFresh the less I liked it. Peapod is a subset of all of the most popular items you’d find at a regular grocery store. You can get produce, Windex, and packaged food all in one order. With AmazonFresh you are constantly guessing as to what they might have (strange considering that Amazon is “the everything store”; why does their delivery service actually have way less choice than 30-year-old Peapod?). The inflexible interface was the straw that broke the delivery camel’s back.

Amazon does get some credit for having good customer service people. I didn’t walk away from the experience saying “I don’t want to use other Amazon services.”

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Casting out the heretic at Google

by philg

My Facebook friends are talking about the Google programmer’s memo regarding why there aren’t more coders at Google who identify as “women” and “Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap.” Here’s a representative comment:

female VC: Even if it were true that there were “population level” differences in women/men, Google doesn’t hire nearly enough people to make this relevant. Back when I worked at Google, it was a haven of rationality. Said man should be fired for inane use of statistics.

her friend: Did you read the entire document?

female VC: No, just the first two paragraphs. It was very poorly written.

The article quotes the Google VP of Diversity:

Part of building an open, inclusive environment means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions. But that discourse needs to work alongside the principles of equal employment found in our Code of Conduct, policies, and anti-discrimination laws.

The guy’s boss:

… we cannot allow stereotyping and harmful assumptions to play any part. One of the aspects of the post that troubled me deeply was the bias inherent in suggesting that most women, or men, feel or act a certain way. That is stereotyping, and it is harmful.

The Code of Conduct is available online. Will this guy ultimately be fired for violating “Each Googler is expected to do his or her utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias, and unlawful discrimination”? Among other things the guy says women are prone to “Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.” [Update: these are precisely the parts of the memo and the Code of Conduct cited by CEO Sundar Pichai in a company-wide response email.]

Separately, is the memo ridiculous on its face? If an employer is short of Worker Category X, isn’t the first explanation that these workers aren’t being offered sufficient pay? Google could have plenty of female workers in any category if they were willing to pay up, no? Why would an intelligent hard-working woman want to be a coder at Google, get paid 1/20th the cost of a decent house nearby, and stare at a screen all day when she could instead be a physician, get paid 2X the cost of a decent house near her office, and interact with people all day? (Alternatively, she could realize the spending power of a programmer by having sex with a couple of programmers.)

Programming is considered by most people to be a disagreeable boring job, a desk-bound analog of sewer cleaning or garbage pick-up, so, absent much higher pay to women, wouldn’t we expect there to be a similar male-heavy gender ID ratio as in other disagreeable jobs?

I asked the Facebookers in the thread why Google didn’t stop with the fine sentiments about diversity and instead just pay whatever it took to get the workers it wanted. One guy said “It would be illegal to adopt practices that specifically aim to increase pay for women.” (But why not instead pay for some characteristic that women tend to have in a larger quantity than men?) Another responded with “A very small data point but I sat on a small committee which placed a few hundred elite tech grads at Google and FB. In this limited sample size of high performers, women were making 40% more.” (i.e., the market is working; women programmers are more valuable to employers and therefore can command higher pay)

Readers: What do you think? Is this guy a pinhead? Will Google fire him? Once his name gets out, will any other employer be willing to take the risk of hiring him? (thus opening themselves to a slam-dunk sex discrimination case because they have created a “hostile environment” for female coders)

[Update: I broached this topic with a female programmer friend. She said that she thought there was some truth to the heretic’s point of view, e.g., that men were more willing to put in hours of dreary solitude when learning to code. I was able to convince her, however, that the only real problem was money. I ran through a list of mutual acquaintances, all of whom were smart, capable, and had great jobs. She agreed that all of these women would have been able to become competent software engineers and would indeed have done so if the compensation and working conditions were competitive with the career options that they’d actually chosen (e.g., medical specialist, Wall Streeter).]

[Update 2: A friend sent me this post from Slate Star Codex: “About 20% of high school students taking AP Computer Science are women. … which exactly matches the ratio of each gender that eventually get tech company jobs.”]

[Update 3: “No, the Google manifesto isn’t sexist or anti-diversity. It’s science,” by Debra Soh, a professor in Canada with a PhD in sexual neuroscience, says “the memo was fair and factually accurate. Scientific studies have confirmed sex differences in the brain that lead to differences in our interests and behaviour.” Thus the Hillary supporters at Google who mocked Trump voters for being “science-deniers” now find themselves denying neuroscience whose implications they don’t like. (Separately, I must part company with Professor Soh on a non-scientific point. She says “seeking to fulfill a 50-per-cent quota of women in STEM is unrealistic.” Give me a stack of cash and I will fill any quota!)]

[Update 4: In response to a Facebook posting characterizing the memo as containing “logical errors,” her friend responded with “I’d love your thoughts on what you think is illogical. You may not agree, but to me it was all a reasonable position to state, and I agree with most of it. I’m a woman in tech, and a woman CEO, and I know full well why there aren’t more women in my position and it has less to do with discrimination or bias than biology and lifestyle preferences. Would love your thoughts as to which bits you didn’t agree with?” (note that the response kind of proves the Google Heretic’s point; she softens her disagreement with “would love your thoughts”).]

[Moderator is removing some comments to keep the total within the 50-comment display limit of Harvard’s software.]

Related:

the reason I left is that I came into work one Monday morning and joined the guys at our work table, and one of them said “What did you do this weekend?”

I was in the throes of a brief, doomed romance. I had attended a concert that Saturday night. I answered the question with an account of both. The guys stared blankly. Then silence. Then one of them said: “I built a fiber-channel network in my basement,” and our co-workers fell all over themselves asking him to describe every step in loving detail.

At that moment I realized that fundamentally, these are not my people. I liked the work. But I was never going to like it enough to blow a weekend doing more of it for free. Which meant that I was never going to be as good at that job as the guys around me.

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Where in the world are the current round-the-world pilots?

by philg

My vote for World’s Bravest Person currently is Karl-Heinz Zahorsky, traveling around the world in a 1985 Continental-powered Piper Malibu. The Malibu is the best personal/family airplane ever designed… as long as you have a letter from God promising that the engine won’t quit. So far he and his copilot have made it from Germany to Sri Lanka (zahorsky.net). How stressed out is that engine? I was chatting with a pilot the other day who had done a lot of long-distance Malibu trips. Asked if she’d ever had any issues she replied “No. The engine never quit. Well, once we heard a loud bang and lost oil pressure [presumably a turbocharger] and had to land. All of the emergency equipment was waiting for us by the runway, but the engine never stopped.” This was conveyed in the same tone that a Cessna 172 pilot might use to describe the failure of a backup radio.

Shaesta Waiz, 29, is at least 10 years older than the youngest pilots, e.g., Matt Guthmiller, to fly solo around the world, but she expects to be the youngest solo female pilot when she lands her leased 2001 Bonanza back in Daytona Beach. So far she has made it at least to Indonesia (her site says “At this time, flight tracking is unavailable due to the region Shaesta is flying” but there are some recent news stories from Indonesian media). The home page is devoted to relating statistics about the lack of women in aviation and STEM: “450 female airline captains worldwide; 24 percent of U.S. STEM professionals that are female; 3 percent of pilots worldwide that are female.”

[Could a 25-year-old cisgender male pilot identify as a woman for a month, become the youngest woman to fly solo around the world, and then switch back to a male ID?]

Related:

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The paperwork blizzard following my annual physical checkup

by philg

I had an “annual” physical this year for the first time in a while. This generated a lot of work for the U.S. Postal Service. I received some paperwork in advance via mail. Now I’ve got the follow-up mailings. One of these is a statement from the Obamacare insurance provider. My doc ordered four standard tests at Emerson Hospital, which tried to bill $558.60 for these services. The insurance company, Harvard Pilgrim, decided that the price should be $89.42 instead and apparently this amount was accepted. $23.73 of this was “deductible” applied, so the insurer actually paid out only $65.69 to the hospital. This triggered a hardcopy bill from the hospital for $23.73. I think that there is a theory for Obamacare policies (this one is a “silver” policy that costs about $8,500 per year) that screening procedures are not supposed to require a copayment, but somehow this one did? It looks as though the “lipid panel” was paid in full (well, not the $228.84 that the hospital asked for, but the $37.58 that was the negotiated price) but the “comprehensive metabolic panel” ($88 marked down to $23.73) had to come out of the deductible? ($10,000 per year?)

Related:

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Americans interested in everything that goes on at universities except for the education part?

by philg

“Don’t Weaken Title IX Campus Sex Assault Policies” (nytimes) is an op-ed coauthored by Jon Krakauer (see Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town (a.k.a. majoring in partying and football)). There are hundreds of comments by Times readers.

Americans love to watch college sports. Americans apparently love to debate the appropriate post-sex litigation procedures for college students. Americans love to argue about whether applicants to college should be sorted by skin color (e.g., see Discrimination against Asian-Americans in Harvard admissions). The one thing that nobody cares about is whether colleges are effective at teaching?

The book Academically Adrift (2010) suggests that colleges are becoming increasingly ineffective at education per se. From my review:

At the heart of the book is an analysis of data from the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), which requires students to synthesize data from various sources and write up a report with a recommendation. It turns out that attending college is a very inefficient way to improve one’s performance at this kind of task. After three semesters, the average college student’s score improved by 0.18 standard deviation or seven percentile points (e.g., the sophomore if sent back into the freshman pool would have risen from the 50th to the 57th percentile). After four years, the seniors had a 0.5 standard deviation improvement over the freshman, compared to 1 standard deviation in the 1980s.

Why isn’t this trend of convergence between the abilities of high school graduates and college graduates the big story? People just assume that college teaches something useful? Or nobody cares that a lot of people going to college don’t learn anything?

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How to succeed in the academic math world: put on a dress

by philg

A friend recently attended a big conference of American mathematicians. Out of 15 plenary speakers, roughly half were female. “There are women getting tenure-track jobs at Ivy League schools who, if they were men, would be stuck in a series of post-docs, each one at progressively lower quality institutions.”

theliberatedmathematician.com is a blog by Piper Harron, smart enough to be a professor in Hawaii (our happiest state), who says that she spends most her time “dealing with childcare, worrying about politics, or researching the history of social injustice.”

In this June 2017 post, Professor Harron notes that she “suggested we stop hiring white cis men.” There are three commenters (math is a small community!), two of whom are approving. Katrin Wehrheim, a Berkeley professor whose home page offers readers the opportunity to “chat about queer life in academia” and links to “LGBT resources,” says the following:

Practically, I hope that more of us can take a stand in their departments and voice the simple fact that any cis-white-male hire is a missed opportunity. (Yes, that’s a fact). The follow-up view that has coalesced for me thanks to Piper’s writing is the deduction from that fact that cis-white-male hires are thus never “the best” choice. More follow-up thoughts: * Yes, if we don’t have other ‘qualified’ candidates then that’s our recruitment and evaluation criteria failing.

Striving for tenure at a top school in the mathematics world is crazy hard (also irrational, as I discuss in “Women in Science”). For cis-white-males who’ve invested 10+ years in education in hopes of winning one of the handful of good jobs in this field, why not identify as women, at least while at work? The title of this post says “put on a dress,” but Professors Harron and Wehrheim, who seem to identify as women, are pictured wearing gender-neutral clothing. Maybe being transgender will keep a person out of the Trumpenfuhrer’s armed forces, but it would appear to be the ideal gateway to an academic sinecure.

Related:

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Is the ad-supported Android app ecosystem collapsing?

by philg

I’m using an Android phone for a project. I re-downloaded some of my previously selected apps. The ones that were “free with ad support,” such as Angry Birds Star Wars, now stop the game entirely for 10 seconds out of every minute, forcing the user to watch a video ad. Has the entire ecosystem morphed from “display ads at the top or bottom” to “video ads that stop you from using the app”?

Has the huge inventory of Facebook ads made the ad-supported app world unsustainable? Is it time to have apps that are free to use for 30 days and then, if you like them, you pay?

This experience has reduced my opinion of the entire Android platform. Interrupting a user with badly targeted video ads that are entirely unrelated to the app seems cheesy and cheap compared to the iPhone world (already pretty bad with pop-ups and other distractions; maybe iOS games also have video ads but I haven’t used one lately?).

Is it fair to say that the ad-supported Android app ecosystem is done?

Related:

  • June 2017 article on Apple’s policies, which state “Apps should not require users to rate the app, review the app, watch videos, download other apps, tap on advertisements, or take other similar actions in order to access functionality, content, use the app, or receive monetary or other compensation.”
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