Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

The departure of Larry Summers from Harvard should encourage us all to spend a moment giving thanks that big organizations are generally commanded by bland, uncreative, risk-averse folks.  If big universities were typically home to hard-charging, plain-speaking, creative men and women like Larry Summers, new and small schools such as University of Phoenix would never stand a chance.  The same goes for big corporations.  The only thing that saves entrepreneurs from irrelevance is the fact that so many steady and boring executives clog the hallways at the Fortune 500.

Why are people near the top of big organizations typically so risk-averse?  They’ve got a lot to lose.  If you’re making a big salary, enjoy big prestige, and have all the perks, you want to make sure above all that you don’t blow it by taking a risk.  This is why most stock mutual funds don’t perform that differently from the S&P 500; the managers want to make sure that they don’t do so poorly that they get fired or that investors make substantial withdrawals.  They won’t place big bets, even ones that they think are very likely to succeed, because any big bet entails some risk of dramatic underperformance relative to the index and therefore the end of the personal gravy train.

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I was saddened to hear that Larry Summers had resigned as Harvard president.  Some friends and I had been wondering how large a donation it was going to take to get Larry to change his name to “Professor Dumbledore” and the name of the school to “Hogwarts”.  Now it may never come to pass 🙁

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Shimon Rura and I have developed a JavaScript (Ajax)-based slide show program.  You can test it out at http://philip.greenspun.com/photography/exhibits/slide-shows and the comments in the code explain how to adapt it for use on another site.  Unlike some other programs that we have seen, this one downloads all of the images in the background so that changing from slide to slide is instantaneous for the user, with no time spent looking at an “image loading” screen.  The thumbnail feature seems kind of nice too.  That is done with browser-resized images.  We’re looking for design experts who want to write skins for this system.  Basically we need some styles and buttons (the ones you see were done in GIMP in a few minutes by Shimon and don’t work very well with MSIE).  Credit will be given.  Comments would be appreciated on any aspect of the program and its interface.

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A friend at Boston Children’s Hospital wants to establish an online community for 400-1000 people who are either working at the hospital or are parents of children with a specific disorder.  He basically wants a discussion forum, but with state-of-the-art features for moderation, spam-proofing, and karma-assignment.  His main concern is quickly identifying people who are negative contributors and getting rid of them or changing their behavior.  Is there a good free and open source software package that he can simply install and run?  drupal.org perhaps?

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For my aviation nerd friends: http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/avidyne-versus-garmin (a comparison of the Avidyne and Garmin G1000 glass cockpits).

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Folks:  We’re teaching 6.171 again this semester and need some examples of online communities.  We would appreciate comments containing URLs of interesting online communities to check out and cite as success stories for the class (don’t bother citing slashdot or other well-known ones).  I’m particularly interested in online communities in which people are identified and authenticated with their real name and city (Amazon has this going to some extent in their reader reviews).

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I’ve finished a draft of http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/ (originally sketched for some of my friends who were early employees of Google).  Comments/corrections would be appreciated, either in this Weblog or via email.  I would especially appreciate suggestions of relevant books and movies (see the end).

Thanks!

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In http://www.engadget.com/2006/01/30/gates-proposes-cellphones-as-alternative-to-olpc/ there is a story about Bill Gates proposing that people plug their cell phones (running quality Windows XP Mobile, of course) into a keyboard and TV and, voila, instant home computer.  Sounds as though Microsoft may be gradually coming around to  http://philip.greenspun.com/business/mobile-phone-as-home-computer 

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Upon returning from Hawaii, I discover that it was mostly around 60 degrees every day here in Boston during my absence.  People were walking around in T-shirts in January in Boston.  The newspaper carries stories of violent Islamic groups winning elections over in the Middle East (no surprise to the author of http://philip.greenspun.com/politics/israel/, but apparently a shock to other folks) and stories about our continued failure to keep Iraq under control.

George W. Bush has spent a lot of time talking about Iraq (earlier in this Weblog, I had suggested that he should never have spoken about it, but delegated the entire procedure of removing Saddam to a subordinate) and how Arabs, given the chance to vote, would put aside their hatred of the West.  His administration has also gone out on a limb saying that burning so much “dinosaur blood” into CO2 hasn’t warmed up the Earth.  A Bostonian who spent January in a T-shirt reading the newspaper is going to have some trouble believing our Great Leader.

So… the question is, what are some safe, yet significant, topics for George W. to be talking about?

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During my two weeks in Hawaii, it seems that the decline of Ford and GM became much more apparent to Wall Street and the general public.  I think I’ve written about this before in this Weblog, but I continue to be surprised that this isn’t covered more from the angle of “What would you expect to happen in a society that pays financial engineers 10-100X what it pays automotive engineers?”  It is true that Ford and GM are being sunk to some extent by pension and health care obligations (something their highly paid financial engineers should have noticed before signing those union agreements), but they’d have a much easier time if they had designs like the Honda Accord or the BMW 3-series sedans instead of the clumsy sedans that they end up having to unload on the rental car companies (is there anyone who ever rented a Pontiac Grand Am and walked away saying “I need to buy me one of these”?).  .  In fact, why should car renters have to suffer with the Pontiac Grand Am?  Perhaps it is time for GM and Ford to give up on design engineering of ordinary sedans.  If you look at Car and Driver’s 10-best cars, the only American nameplates on the list are the Corvette, the Mustang GT, and the Chrysler 300.  The Corvette and Mustang are specialty sports cars that seem to have attracted some able and creative engineers.  The Chrysler 300 is built on top of a Mercedes design and possibly points toward a sustainable future for Ford and GM.  Let the Germans and the Japanese engineer the fundamentals of Ford and GM sedans.  The American companies can tweak the body design and add some electronic intelligence (GM was way ahead of its (moribund) peers with the OnStar system).

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