Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

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.

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I’ve drafted three new articles for photo.net and would appreciate comments:

• http://www.photo.net/learn/aerial/primer
• http://www.photo.net/equipment/canon/efs_17-55/
• http://www.photo.net/equipment/canon/24-105/

Thanks in advance for corrections or suggestions for new sections.

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Folks: 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.

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A question for the Oracle/RDBMS experts… At photo.net, we have an Oracle 9i database approximately 50 GB in size. The I/O stats show that Oracle is doing about 2 TB of reading per day from the disk drives. In other words, the entire database is read 40 times per day or 2-3 times per hour during peak periods. Our server has 16 GB of RAM, of which maybe half are devoted to caching database blocks. I’m wondering if this is too much swapping in the age of relatively cheap RAM. Should we have a server with 32 GB or even more RAM and basically try to keep the entire database in RAM at all times, maybe having physical reads be 4X the database size per day?

Comments would be appreciated.

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A friend recently installed Windows Vista on a 3.2 GHz (single core) machine with 4 GB of RAM. The performance was initially extremely slow. http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html talks about how Vista encrypts all of the data that flies around internally. One wonders if a dual-core machine is required to run Vista. One CPU core can serve the user while the other one encrypts and decrypts.

Anyone else out there running Vista? Experience?

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Arrived home to find a Robinson newsletter in the mail and learned something that was not reported by the general media. The wife and daughters of James Kim, trapped for a week in the Oregon wilderness by a snowstorm, were discovered by John Rachor, a Robinson R44 helicopter owner, who decided to conduct his own search for the missing family. Reflecting on the fact that James Kim had died of exposure before the family was spotted from the helicopter, Rachor said “It turned out well; I just wish it had turned out better.”

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The Sunday New York Times business section carries an article about tax shelters in the Netherlands for people such as writers, artists, musicians, and other entities who get most of their income from royalties; in the aggregate, these folks are able to escape tax on approximately $1 trillion in annual income. With a little creative accounting and legal work, the effective tax rate can be reduced to 1.5 percent. Bono and U2, the billionaire advocates for greater aid by rich world governments to people in poor countries, have not had to worry about this until recently. Ireland has long exempted all income by musicians, writers, and artists. Bono was thus out there advocating the spending of tax revenues to which he himself had not contributed. Ireland is going to start taxing royalty income over $320,000 per person per year, which has led Bono and U2 to migrate their royalty-generating properties to the Netherlands. The article talks about how Bono is taking criticism as a hypocrite for advocating massive tax-funded relief schemes when he himself has never paid any taxes.

Is Bono unusual for voting his pocketbook?

I thought about the people I know who are relatively well-off. They are more or less evenly divided between Republican and Democrat, but the division is not random. Those who get their money every year as a salary tend to be Democrats. Those who start small businesses and get their money in big lumps as capital gains when they sell those businesses tend to support the Republicans. If you are a W2 employee with a high income, it turns out that it doesn’t cost you much to rail against Bush’s idiocy and the unfairness of heterosexual-only marriage. Proposed tax rates on ordinary income are very similar from the two parties. On the other hand, the Reagan capital gains tax cuts were dramatic, making it much more lucrative to start, grow, and eventually sell a company. A small business guy who says “I hate the Republicans” is saying “I am so enthusiastic about the teaching of Evolution in Kansas schools that I want to pay twice as much in taxes.”

Politicial scientists have found that the correlation between income and party affiliation isn’t all that strong, but they were looking at ordinary income where the tax policies of the parties aren’t very different. I wonder if people who made most of their money via capital gains disproportionately support the Republicans….

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I spent the weekend in Los Angeles where it was 70 degrees with calm winds and sunshine. Here are some disconnected impressions…

• stuck in traffic on I-10 out of Santa Monica; turned out that a Ford SUV had rolled over
• cousin left work at 2 pm in an attempt to find his way home without using the 405; a construction crane had fallen at 1 pm and blocked all five northbound lanes; traffic was snarled city-wide until after midnight. All of the cars on the highway managed to swerve and avoid the crane, but a jet fuel tanker and an SUV were not so nimble and collided.
• leafed through the Sunday Los Angeles Times; the book review section was the thinnest part of the paper and the Op-Ed page carried an article in favoring of opening up the U.S. Presidency to immigrants, citing Arnold Schwarzenegger as the sort of presidential candidate we were being deprived of by the stipulations in our current Constitution
• having breakfast with a former student and asking him whether he thought it would be nice to live in Santa Monica: “Santa Monica is where the police from all over Los Angeles dump their homeless people. It is legal to sleep in parks in Santa Monica, which means that hundreds of homeless people live here. I live in Manhattan Beach, surrounded by rich 32-year-old divorcees. Their ex-husbands are directors who’ve moved on to the next trophy wives.”
• constant helicopter traffic up and down the beach
• alternating of self-storage facilities and sex shops for five miles along Santa Monica Boulevard
• a mid-air collision of two vintage biplanes on Saturday; the more heavily damaged plane landed in shallow water and the 82-year-old pilot waded to shore unharmed
• “I don’t have to work all that hard; my wife was one of the creators of a reasonably popular TV series.”
• flew in a DA40/G1000 around the most crowded skies in the world, but never had to adjust for another airplane until landing
• drove down the 405 to the Long Beach airport (JetBlue) at 5:35 am on a Monday morning; traffic was moving but heavy across all five lanes
• had to get up a few times during the 5-hour flight home and stretch; realized that long airplane flights are easiest for young flexible folks (i.e., don’t put off that round-the-world trip until you’re 65 unless you’re planning to go First Class with flat beds)

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An article by Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick in today’s Wall Street Journal says that the only way to understand the U.S. economy is by rolling it up with the Chinese economy, with which we do an enormous import/export business. By itself, the U.S. economy has grossly inflated asset values, non-existent personal savings, and ridiculously low interest rates. What happens when we add in China? First off, you get 25% of the world’s people, 33% of the world’s GDP, and 60% of the world’s GDP growth over the past five years. More interestingly, the Chinese portion of the heavily mixed combined economy do the savings and supply the educated low-cost labor force. This explains why the cost of capital (interest rate) is so low and why the returns to capital (corporate profits) are so high. It also explains why wages aren’t going up as fast as productivity and profits.

Are there any clouds on the horizon? The authors identify two: (1) restrictions on imports from China by the U.S. Congress; (2) lack of success by the Chinese in keeping consumer price inflation low over there.

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According to Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-winning economist quoted in today’s Wall Street Journal, our attempt to make Iraq safe for democracy is going to cost $1 trillion, assuming troops are withdrawn by 2010. Can we compare Iraq to Vietnam then? Not economically. The same article says that the Vietnam War cost only $660 billion in today’s dollars.

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