Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Courtesy of a friend with a business meeting and a fancy airplane, I took a trip to New York City yesterday, starting with an 0530 wakeup and landing on runway 24 with winds from 310 gusting to 25 knots while a low-level wind shear advisory was in effect. Not fun and not pretty, but now I have verified that the landing gear is attached remarkably securely to the plane. The ramp in Teterboro was packed with Gulfstreams and mid-size jets and takeoffs and landings are brisk. They’re partying like it’s 2007. The drive into Manhattan took an hour, i.e., longer than the flight from Boston. Judging by the packed ramp at Teterboro and the horrible traffic through the Holland Tunnel, it seems that Wall Street is doing better than ever.

I met my friend Iris in Chelsea and we walked into a few art galleries, each one of which was presided over by a disdainful young woman typing at a computer who would barely look up as we entered. The experience at ET Modern is completely different. A freshly-filled dog water bowl out front welcomes canine guests, along with a “dog-friendly” sign on the glass door. Mahmood (sp?) greets every visitor and offers an essay designed to be helpful when looking at Edward Tufte’s sculptures. A clean public bathroom awaits those who’ve been crossing their legs at the other galleries in Chelsea. A lot of Tufte’s sculptures deserve to be seen as part of a beautiful landscape and in the ever-changing light of the outdoors, but the ET Modern gallery is a great place to get an introduction to Tufte’s sculpture and the smaller pieces can be appreciated fully here.

Three readers were kind enough to join us at the gallery and we proceeded to a local patisserie for lunch. We discussed an article from that day’s New York Times about an international comparison of 15-year-olds. Students in Shanghai were absurdly smarter than American kids. The standard American response to mediocre objective results from its K-12 schools is to say “Well, we have great universities.” One of the readers works in a company that produces a database management system, exactly the kind of systems programming challenge that computer science graduates are supposed to be good at. “We interview CS graduates from Columbia and they can’t solve the simplest interview problems, such ‘write a program to reverse a linked list'”. [in Lisp: “(reverse the-list)”] “Our company has ended up being mostly staffed by people who studied other subjects and were drawn to programming as a passion.” Note that Columbia now costs $57,000 per year (source).  [Related: “What’s wrong with the standard undergraduate computer science curriculum”]

I met some cousins at the Metropolitan Museum and enjoyed “Our Future is in the Air”, photographs from 100 years ago. My favorites were of helicopters circa 1912. The big show is The World of Khubilai Khan, with some beautiful portraits done in silk tapestry. The Mongols were Buddhists and the show is heavy on Buddhist religious art that is not familiar to most Westerners (i.e., you’ll be intrigued or bored).

I had dinner with a man who considers himself a serious artist, a great composer and librettist whose works have been performed by the Chicago Symphony and orchestras throughout Europe. Also at the table was a literary novelist, whose works are best described as “like Kafka, but without the humor”; he claims to be attempting to expand the form of the novel itself, not merely aping Tolstoy. Also at the table was a Brazilian who has made her living dancing, acting, and modeling. She makes no claims for herself as an intellectual. When presented with a challenging family dynamics problem, however, the great intellectuals offered advice that ranged from incomprehensible to useless to insane. The dancer offered useful actionable advice.

We took a car ride back to the Hilton Hasbrouck Heights, where the interior design reminds you constantly that you’re in New Jersey. It has the advantage of being a three-minute ride from the Hilton to Teterboro, where we fired up this morning at 0900 and departed for Martha’s Vineyard to pick up a cancer patient (Angel Flight) and bring her back with us to Boston where she is getting treatment. Winds were gusting 25-30 knots everywhere, which made for a bumpy ride, but the plane went back into the hangar without anything bent.

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Here are a few recent aviation stories that relate to old blog or Web site postings of mine…

A 25-year-old Air India Boeing 737 pilot pushed his seat back, inadvertently shoved the yoke forward (probably disengaged the autopilot), and then panicked, unable to consider the idea of pulling the nose back up to a normal attitude (story). The 39-year-old captain was on a bathroom break and the plane lost 7,000′ of altitude and allegedly nosed down 26 degrees before the captain was able to recover. This ties into my December 2009 “Foreign Airline Safety versus U.S. Major Airlines” in which the different paths to the right seat of a Boeing 737 are charted. Air India should be able to find an unlimited number of very qualified pilots from the U.K., Australia, the U.S., France, etc., but instead prefers to recruit and train Indian nationals with no flying experience. If nothing goes wrong, such folks are able to learn how to push enough buttons to persuade the B737 to fly itself from runway to runway, but it would appear that there is no substitute for some stick and rudder time.

By contrast, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau has released a preliminary report (click to the right to grab the full PDF) on the Airbus A380  that suffered an uncontained engine failure that damaged some electrical and hydraulic systems. The obvious action to take in this case would have been to dump fuel and return to land, but the fancy computer systems were indicating “fuel jettison fault”. They ran at least a dozen checklists, calculated how to land the airplane overweight and with compromised hydraulics and reverse thrust. The final approach speed was 166 knots, which isn’t atypical for military fighter jets, but is faster than usual for an airliner (the CRJ that I flew approached at 145 knots; Boeing 737s and Airbus A320s can be as slow as 120-130 knots). Once on the ground they could not shut down the #1 engine, despite having pushed the fire switches that are supposed to disconnected everything at the firewall. The first officer of the plane had 11,280 hours total time and, if typical, would have had significant flying experience before joining Qantas.

Air traffic controllers in Spain have shut down the country, upset that their $450,000/year average salaries might be reduced (in January I linked to a story about how some Spanish controllers were earning over $1 million per year). The average working Spaniard earns $26,500 per year.

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Folks:

On Tuesday I am helping a friend fly his airplane to Teterboro, NJ so that he can attend a meeting in Manhattan. My first stop will be ET Modern, Edward Tufte’s new art museum/gallery (mostly sculpture right now, I think), in Chelsea. Whether or not you need to use Tufte’s books on information design in your work, you will probably appreciate his sculptures (current show info and photos). This is the perfect place to catch up if you missed the big show at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and, unlike the Aldrich, ET Modern is dog-friendly. I propose a meeting at ET Modern around 11:30 am or earlier and then walking over to La Bergamote for coffee/lunch/conversation. Please email philg@mit.edu if interested in getting together and I can update everyone with an exact time.

Thanks.

[Monday night update: Everything is going forward as planned, so let’s meet at ET Modern at 11:30.]

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Folks:

I’m teaching a course in RDBMS programming and Internet application development in January at MIT. Most of my development experience is with Oracle, which is available for anyone to download and install, but it is a short class and I would rather not have the students engaged in sysadmin/dbadmin. MIT does not maintain an Oracle installation for student use. The school does, however, have a MySQL server and associated HTTP server that students can use to build a database-backed Web site. I’m wondering if I can use this installation for teaching and am asking MySQL experts reading this Weblog to comment.

My first assumption is that the InnoDB storage engine will be the best choice due to its support for integrity constraints and isolation of simultaneous users with Oracle-style multiversioning.

Here’s what I want to teach for the RDBMS component:

• Using integrity constraints such as CHECK, NOT NULL, and foreign key
• create table as select and INSERT into Table A by querying Table B (so INSERT with a SELECT)
• open two simultaneous connections and show how Isolation (the “I” in “ACID”) works (one connection will have half-finished transaction and the other one will do a query and see the unmodified data; also want to show locking)
• JOIN, OUTER JOIN, GROUP BY, HAVING
• set operations, including UNION, INTERSECT, MINUS
• using views
• stored procedures and triggers
• techniques for dealing with tree-structured data
• techniques for dealing with time series data

Can MySQL support all of this? Is InnoDB the best storage engine to use?

(Separately I want to have each student build a minimal iPhone application that queries the RDBMS; assume that this will have to be done by basically building a custom Web apge. I also want to have the students build an Android app that queries the RDBMS via a Web request, but it looks as though this can only be done with a heavyweight SDK and a lot of Java experience (which some of the students will have).)

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Here’s a snapshot from a recent commercial airline flight. It shows a happy iPad customer using the device on top of a laptop. So now the guy has two gizmos to lug around and two batteries to remember to charge every night…

Due to the fact that hardly anyone ever masters desktop/laptop operating systems, I’m a big fan of limited-purpose appliances, but it sure would be nice if they could charge themselves somehow.

[Photo taken with Motorola Droid 2 mobile phone. I was also carrying an iPod and a Lenovo Thinkpad and associated chargers on this two-day trip.]

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Tonight is the first night of Hanukkah, also known as the “Festival of Lights”. Since nobody understands the purpose of the holiday, it is a good time to reflect on how much better Christmas lights are than Hanukkah lights. My personal favorite display is this Web-controllable 22,000-light setup in Colorado. As an added bonus, a “view source” will show a complete catalog of HTML tags and CSS syntax.

[Update: A friend sent me this video… “Can I interest you in Hannukah?”]

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Taxes are being debated this month on Capitol Hill and one factor in the debate is the question of whether the government’s appetite for funds (approximately 45 percent of GDP; why it should require nearly half a country’s GDP to maintain roads, defend against invasion, etc. is a separate issue) can be satisfied by soaking the rich with higher tax rates. Economists generally argue against high tax rates because they reduce the efficiency of an economy. Rising income inequality in the U.S., however, has given a lot of ammunition to those who would ignore conventional economics wisdom.

Let’s look at the source of the increased income inequality, though. A lot of researchers (sample) have found that much can be attributed to a single industry: financial services, i.e., Wall Street. We’ve set up a system where a lot of money managers place bets on behalf of pension funds and other large investors. The winners get to keep 20 percent of the winnings on these multi-billion-dollar bets. The losers get paid 2 percent of the total fund size (actually so do the winners, as whipped cream on top of the 20 percent ice cream!). If the bets are placed randomly and there is a reasonable amount of volatility in the market, basic probability ensures that this system will result in enormous salaries for tens of thousands of workers.

Corporate management for public companies is set up the same way. Managers place bets on behalf of the shareholders. If the bets work out well, the manager takes home hundreds of millions of dollars. If the bets don’t pay off, the manager sticks the shareholders with the losses and contents him or herself with merely tens of millions of dollars in compensation (see Carly Fiorina, for example, or Robert Nardelli, who took approximately $500 million from Home Depot shareholders, or Stan O’Neal, who bankrupted Merrill Lynch after siphoning off hundreds of millions for himself). [Shareholders have little control over public company boards or management, due to SEC regulations and are more or less powerless to stop a CEO and board from looting out the enterprise that they nominally own.]

Voters and politicians look at Carly Fiorina, Robert Nardelli, and Stan O’Neal and say “these folks didn’t create anything, but benefited from a system set up by the government; they should pay more taxes to support the government that enabled them to become rich at shareholder expense.” The most direct example of this comes from England, where the government installed a 50 percent tax on financial industry bonuses (story).

Unfortunately, the clamor for higher taxes on these folks who took no personal risk, destroyed a lot of jobs, and shrunk the U.S. economy inevitably ensnares America’s entrepreneurs. Just as the TSA cannot distinguish between an 85-year-old Minnesota-born grandmother and a 23-year-old Islamic Jihadist whose own father had ratted him out to the CIA, the IRS has no way of charging Stan O’Neal, a guy who came into a 100-year-old company and destroyed it, a different tax rate from Ken Olsen, who founded Digital Equipment and created tens of thousands of jobs and a massive stream of exports that helped the U.S. economy grow from 1957 through the early 1990s when minicomputers succumbed to the PC.

The U.S. political system moves very slowly, especially now that Congress and the White House are no longer both controlled by one party. So we don’t yet know what changes to the tax code and other policies will ensue from the average voter watching his own wealth shrink while Wall Streeters and public company executives get richer. But I’m wondering if the result will be that the U.S. becomes uncompetitive as a place to set up new companies. Given a democracy, could it be that having a very successful financial services sector inevitably means a poisoned environment for entrepreneurs? England provides us with an example of a mature economy in which it is great to be a banker, but entrepreneurs are better off emigrating. (I compared the U.S. to the U.K. on October 1, 2008 and January 28, 2009, supplemented by a Mancur Olson piece on March 16, 2009.)

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I recently finished Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Solar,which would make a great Christmas gift for anyone in academia or science. The protagonist is a Nobel laureate physicist with a surfeit of ex-wives and a dearth of recent research. The novel accurately captures the selfish pursuit of academic fame and priority and will also serve as a good chronicle of a peculiar time in history when governments were using tax dollars to enrich solar energy charlatans.

I would say more, but I don’t want to spoil the book.

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Folks:

We have a lot of aerial photographers who charter our helicopters and lately they’ve been capturing video as well. We’ve had limited success in the past with using a Kenyon gyro to stabilize the video. Now I’m wondering if digital magic post-processing has progressed to the point that we could improve the video quality on a desktop computer. I found one command within Adobe After Effects called “Animate->Stabilize Motion” and it does not seem useful. You have to pick a point in the scene that you want to remain fixed. I don’t see how this could work with video that is taken from a moving helicopter since the scene is constantly changing.

Does anyone know of a tool that you simply feed a video and walk away while it crunches?

Thanks,

Philip

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We taught a helicopter ground school today at East Coast Aero Club. One of the students was a recent graduate in mechanical engineering from Northeastern University. He was unable to understand or work with the concepts of potential and kinetic energy, achieving the lowest score on the final exam out of the 15 or so people present (folks who’d majored in political science achieved near-perfect scores, for example). His score was slightly better than chance, which put him above a Boston University engineering graduate last spring. A remarkable number of U.S. science and engineering graduates seem to have missed the entire “big picture” of science and engineering.

“The Shadow Scholar”, an article by a guy who writes term papers, makes me wonder if the schools in question can be exonerated for granting bachelor’s degrees to those who are almost entirely ignorant and unskilled. The 105th comment on the article is interesting: “Mandatory math, statistics, physics, and chemistry courses are my bread-and-butter. Online grading and test taking allow me to earn a good living. I have done this for students ranging from secondary school to medical school. For me, business has exploded with online courses and the poor economy. Overburdened faculty try to find the most efficient way to administer exmas and they have opened up a surprisingly lucrative business area.”

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