Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

The New York Times editorial board contains people who studied history, economics, law, history (again), journalism, journalism (again), history (again, this time for the “science” expert),  journalism, English literature, French literature, English literature (again), comparative literature, law, psychology, international relations, German, modern history, and law. Yesterday, the group signed an editorial entitled “Missing from Science Class; Too Few Girls and Minorities Study Tech Subjects.” The group of history and literature majors confidently wrote about the benefits of a tech education, how to motivate women and people with particular skin colors, and the sagacity of President Obama’s proposal on preschools (my previous post on the subject; note that Obama has previously extolled the virtues of STEM education for people other than himself (example)).

Why would folks who apparently preferred other subjects suggest that women and particular minority groups be encouraged to study tech subjects that they themselves did not like and ended up not needing?

Separately, here is a much more substantive approach to the challenge of getting more women interested in computer science: “Feminism and Programming Languages” by Arielle Schlesinger. Excerpts:

• “In the scope of my research, a feminist programming language is to be built around a non-normative paradigm that represents alternative ways of abstracting. The intent is to encourage and allow new ways of thinking about problems such that we can code using a feminist ideology.”
• “The idea came about while discussing normative and feminist subject object theory. I realized that object oriented programmed reifies normative subject object theory. This led me to wonder what a feminist programming language would look like, one that might allow you to create entanglements (Karen Barad Posthumanist Performativity).”
• “I realized that to program in a feminist way, one would ideally want to use a feminist programming language.”

[Among existing technologies, my personal choice for a feminist programming language would be SQL. The woman expresses her demands for data with five lines of code; a team of 100 men writes 2 million lines of C that must consider all possible ways of satisfying the the query and ultimately supply the answer.]

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My son, Alexander Daniel, was born this morning at 6 am. I attended the birth of my 4-year-old, Greta, but it was a C-section and over before there was any time to think. Also, the docs and nurses strategically place a big white sheet to screen their activities from laypeople.

It was a fairly conventional birth by American standards, with three medical interventions: antibiotics to prevent infection, pitocin to hurry the baby out because the water broke before labor started, and then an epidural to ameliorate the intense pain caused by the pitocin. A midwife presided over an all-female team at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The actual pushing lasted about 30 minutes during which time the room was active with five or six women monitoring for the mother’s blood loss and blood pressure, the baby’s health and position, the baby’s health once out in the world, etc.

I’ve become moderately accustomed to life-or-death situations, but those that arise during helicopter instruction last for just a few seconds, not for 30 minutes. Sitting next to someone whom you love and who is putting herself at this much risk for the benefit of someone whom you’re going to love deepened my feelings in ways that I wouldn’t have expected. Even from a position up by the mom’s head, it is impossible not to notice the flood of blood and tissue that come out with/after the baby and wonder “How can a person survive that kind of loss?”

Generally I’m not a medical worrier. If I have a pain in my side I think it must be from playing LEGO with Greta, not rib cancer. And throughout the pregnancy I hardly gave a thought to the possibility of a baby or mother with problems. But in the last hour or so I was plagued with worries about something going wrong or something being wrong. The sometimes-worried looks on the faces of the professionals didn’t help. Nor did it help when a nurse said “I don’t like the way he’s breathing.” Soon enough, however, the new baby was nursing apparently happily.

In http://philip.greenspun.com/politics/health-care-reform I argue against the idea of spending 18 percent of our GDP on health care. And the idea that the typical American hospital charges more to handle a delivery than does the most deluxe private hospital in England where the royal baby was born (story) is kind of ridiculous. But the staff at Mt. Auburn made me a believer for about an hour. I’m grateful to them.

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Having switched from an iPhone 4S to a Samsung Note 3, I am amazed almost every day at some of the user interface decisions made by Samsung. (Apple fans: please don’t post comments about how it wasn’t smart to switch; I needed the Note for a work project.) Today I installed an operating system upgrade and was hopeful that some of the most glaring problems had been fixed. Sadly, they hadn’t…

One of the most heavily used parts of the phone is the “Phone” app. This has a “Contacts” tab. If I search for a friend whose last name is “Bailey” I would think that the first result would be the single contact in the phone that has a phone number attached to a person with a last name of “Bailey”. Yet astonishingly the contact with the phone number is not even on the first page. The app, which the owner entered by touching the “Phone” icon (presumably indicating an intent to make a call) shows first three random people that I don’t know at all but perhaps at one time might have replied to an email from them from my Gmail account using a browser. Then I get eight email-only contacts that have the same first and last name as the contact with the phone number. Mr. Bailey is an entrepreneur who wears a hat at a lot of distinct small enterprises and consequently has many distinct email addresses. Google Contacts wasn’t smart enough to merge these when I instructed it to merge whatever it could. But why isn’t the phone smart enough, given a list of contacts with the same name, to show the one with the phone number first?

Another crazy bad interface is from the “Messages” app. It will show a notification of a new text message in red. If I touch the icon, though, it takes me to an unrelated text message conversation with someone who might not have sent me anything for several days, i.e., whatever the last conversation I was in.

The camera is simply unusable if the subjects are humans and moving. It seems that most of the sites that test mobile phone cameras do it with studio scenes. That capability has nothing to do with a mobile phone camera being a practical photographic tool. This seems like something that Google should take over as part of the core Android software. It is too important to leave to the handset manufacturers, particularly if the goal is competing with Apple, whose camera software seems to be the world’s best (Canon, Nikon, and Sony obviously make better cameras, but because they use huge sensors and heavy traditional optics).

I’m thinking the Samsung software for the Note 3 was developed by someone who did not use Google Contacts, did not have many friends, and never used text messaging…

[Separately the phone/contact software freezes frequently, e.g., after one has unsuccessfully tried to make a call to a person’s office phone and then wants to navigate back to the contact and try a mobile number.]

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A friend of mine works in a big law firm where attorneys commonly charge $1000 per hour. These are among the best legal minds in the country, but Obamacare has at least some of them stumped. Here’s an email that went out on a firm mailing list….

Client has employed his housekeeper and paid her through payroll over the last few years. Her insurance was cancelled because of Obamacare, and she was told that her employer (our client) has to provide her with insurance. Is there someone who is our Obamacare expert who can tell me why that is false? (Less than 50 employees? She doesn’t work 40 hours? I read the papers but that doesn’t mean I know the law!!)

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Here’s a conversation that I had over Thanksgiving:

• My 16-year-old cousin: I broke my phone.
• Me: I will give you an iPhone 5s if you agree to one condition.
• Young cousin: Deal.
• Me: I’m also going to send you a three-pound bronze plaque that says “Donated by the world’s best uncle/cousin” and you need to superglue the phone to the plaque and carry both with you at all times.
• Young cousin: That’s fine.

And then I had to send my old iPhone 4S to her little sister… So now I am firmly committed to the Samsung Note 3 and Galaxy Gear geek watch. The Note 3 is good for reading Amazon Kindle books but it is painful to use as a camera or phone and there are a lot of software freezes.

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Illustrating the magic of choosing one’s statistic carefully, today’s New York Times front page carries a story about how the jobless rate has fallen to a five-year low of 7%. Investor’s Business Daily, however, calculates unemployment at nearly a modern-day high of roughly 12% by holding labor force participation constant at the 2007 level (66% of working-age adults actually working). See “Labor Force Exodus Hides Nearly 40% of Hiring Shortfall”.

I was able to observe the statistics in action this week in Denver, Colorado. I stayed in a Marriott Courtyard on the 16th Street Mall. The sidewalks were populated by native-born Americans who had dropped out of the W2 workforce in order to panhandle. The hallways of my hotel were populated with Spanish-speaking immigrants who were being paid to clean rooms.

Related: my August 2010 posting about whether or not unemployed Americans today are like draft horses during the Industrial Revolution.

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If you’re feeling grumpy this year and irritated by relatives, here are some stories that may make you appreciate them more…

Frozen, a Disney movie that I previewed in order to see if there was anything in there that would upset my 4-year-old. It turned out to be too upsetting for me (85% dead) and my companion (26). A little girl loses both of her parents in a shipwreck and then her older sister won’t talk to her for years. I would be interested to hear from parents who have taken children to this movie. How old is old enough?

Wave, a book by a woman who loses both parents, her husband, and both of her children while vacationing in her native Sri Lanka during the 2004 tsunami. She gets angry and crazy at the same time, her life duct-taped together by the constant companionship of extended family.

“Where is Your Mother?” a New Yorker story by Rachel Aviv that is sadly behind a paywall. Niveen Ismail, who grew up in Kuwait with Egyptian  parents, comes to Orange County without the support of friends or family and makes one bad decision after another. She becomes a single mother, which in California can be a lucrative occupation if the father is chosen correctly (see https://www.cse.ca.gov/ChildSupport/cse/guidelineCalculator and plug in the salary for a plastic surgeon. for example), but her profit from child support in this particular case was apparently not sufficient to pay for full-time day care. One day in 2005 Ismail snaps and leaves her three-year-old son home alone. The police arrive 90 minutes later and take the kid away, but instead of saying “You’re a bad mother and we’re putting your child into foster care” (an immediate tsunami-like loss) they subject Ismail to nearly three years of legal and psychological torture where she (unsuccessfully) tries to demonstrate her competence as a parent to a variety of social workers and psychologists.

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After the shock of the recent fatal crash of a Metro-North train in New York (Wikipedia) wore off I began to wonder… Google and BMW are very close to creating practical self-driving cars (see recent New Yorker article and one in Technology Review). Why aren’t trains, which operate in a much more structured environment and whose capital cost per vehicle is much higher, already self-driving?

Separately, when my American friends hear about a train crash or a building failure in China they use that as more evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with the Chinese social and political system. But when a train derails in the U.S., that is just bad luck and not a reflection on anything having to do with America or the U.S. social/political system.

And finally, though not related to trains, the above articles make me wonder what happens when most of the cars on a highway are self-driving. Each car is putting out a huge quantity of signals via laser, radar, and ultrasound and depending on getting clear returns. This seems easier when there is only one self-driving car on a given highway. What happens when signals from different cars collide?

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A friend of mine has a risky new startup. He was able to secure angel funding recently and I asked him on what terms. “It is a convertible note that will turn into shares at the same price as the Series A investors, plus a 20% share bonus.” In other words, if the company navigates its way through all of the risk that afflicts a startup’s first few years the investor will buy in at almost the same price as the professional venture capitalists who waited for the concept to be proven with customers and proven to be executable. Given that venture capital in general returns about the same as the S&P 500, such an investment should only be sensible if there is at least an 80 percent chance of the startup making it all the way through to Series A ($2-10 million in VC money).

The other seed funding rounds that I’ve heard about are happening at valuations of around $3 million pre-money. That’s a lot more value put on a team of three 25-year-olds than in most years.

Aside from sky-high valuations, another obstacle to earning a good return from a venture capital investment is the recent increase in tax rates. Tax law changes, including the Obamacare surtax, mean that capital gains that formerly faced a federal tax of 15 percent are now taxed at 23.8 percent, a 1.6X increase in the amount of investment profits that will feed the federal government instead of the investor and his or her family. And unlike with an investment in the S&P 500, the angel investor does not get to choose when to take a capital gain or loss. The company will either fail or be acquired on a schedule that cannot be controlled. (There are possible exemptions from capital gains tax for qualified small business stock investing, but it seems hard to predict whether or not one will in fact qualify (see this article).)

I wrote about what a bad deal angel investing was back in June 2010 (posting) but the terms seem worse today.

What do readers think? Is the world of tech startups in a bubble? At the valuations and on the terms angel investors are offered, why isn’t it better to invest in big companies that can profit from the growth of robust economies around the world?

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http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520441/a-tale-of-two-drugs/ says that Vertex offers a cystic fibrosis drug for $307,000 per year to insurance companies and Medicaid/Medicare. The article also notes that Vertex offers the drug for free to patients who are uninsured. Doesn’t that give an incentive to an insurance company to cooperate with the patient? Instead of paying for 20 years of this drug ($6 million), the insurance company could give the patient $2 million to drop his or her policy. With that $2 million, the patient could buy health care as needed and get the $307,000/year drug for free.

What stops an insurance company from offering this incentive?

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