Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

A few random quotes from Californians…

“The state of software is such that we now have toilets that understand when a person is standing in front of them, but not computers.” [computer-human interaction expert]

“McAfee Coliseum” [sign on the enormous baseball stadium in Oakland; there are so many security holes in Microsoft Windows that you can earn enough money to sponsor a stadium by attempting to paper over the C programmers’ bugs]

“I picked the navigation system that I liked and then bought the car that came with it.” [computer-human interaction expert; car turns out to have been the Acura RL]

“The avocados are from the front yard; I just picked them up from the driveway.  We have another 100 in the garage if you want some.  The orange juice is from the back yard tree.” [Nobel Prize winning physicist and suburban farmer in Palo Alto]

“We could have airline service and even 747s on the 10,000′ runway at Moffett (old military field in Mountain View; very lightly used by the government now), but the City of San Jose spends a fortune lobbying against it so they can continue to collect fees at the San Jose airport.” [Flight instructor at the Palo Alto airport.]

“I’m going out to a company party.  Unfortunately most of the people there will be programmers.  They’re just the dullest people in the world.  It is even worse because I’m a woman and they are afraid to talk to women…. I hope that you’re not a programmer.” [Software marketing executive sitting next to me on American Airlines.]

Last night:  Good night and good luck with my friend Toby (aged 76, so she lived through the era).  We both enjoyed it.

Tonight:  Some sort of multi-media lecture by Stephen Hawking at Oakland’s Paramount Theater (my cousin got the tickets).

Tomorrow:  Hacker’s Conference in Santa Cruz.

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Here is a 51-minute audio clip of me talking about the SmartPhone + Dock >> PC idea.  (I think that the first portion of the MP3 has to do with BayCHI administration announcements.)  If you hear background noise, it is people walking out of the somewhat hot and stuffy room.  The speaker who preceded me was scheduled to talk for 30 minutes, but spent 1.5 hours going through a PowerPoint presentation.  Edward Tufte likes to remind people always to end early, but apparently not everyone heeds his advice regarding this or the evils of PowerPoint.

Normally I try to delete comments that fall into the “this sucked” or “this was great” category (on the grounds that other readers have already consumed the posting in question and aren’t interested in someone else’s opinion of its quality, but only in an alternative perspective on the same subject).  In this case, however, I’d appreciate some feedback on whether this kind of audio clip has value to readers/listeners.  If people love it, perhaps I’ll try to do more.

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I’m off to California and Mexico for three weeks, but thought that I would stick in a reminder to folks who are staying in Boston to drop by the Museum of Fine Arts.

Ansel Adams is the big show right now.  The photographs are drawn from a private collection and include lots of stuff we haven’t seen before.  It is not just “one damn mountain after another”.

MITers will love the two shows that can be loosely categorized as “stuff belonging to William I. Koch.”  Koch was the scion of a Midwestern oil family, studied chemical engineering at MIT, won the America’s Cup sailboat race the first time he entered, and built up a big energy business for himself.  Koch has a house on the Cape and a tax-avoiding residence in Florida, both normally filled with fantastic art treasures from 500 B.C. through contemporary.  It is not a huge collection, because everything has to fit in the two houses, but the Picassos and Modiglianis are familiar.  There is a comprehensive Western collection of Remington sculpture and Russell paintings.

Koch loves boats and therefore the museum has a couple of America’s Cup entrants mounted on poles in the front.  Koch also owns models of nearly every yacht that has ever raced in an America’s Cup.  The models are displayed on the first floor.

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Some friends were discussing Radcliffe College the other day.  When Harvard College, its sibling institution within Harvard University, decided to accept female students, the school was left with a huge endowment and no students.  The bureaucrats running Radcliffe responded by running a fellowship program for female scholars, nearly all of whom were older than college age and working on obscure academic subjects.  Radcliffe faded into oblivion and eventually most of their endowment was stolen by the larger university.

Could they have done something different with their hundreds of millions of dollars?

My idea was that they should have aggressively shucked off their reputation as a snobby northeastern school for rich girls, but kept their mission of educating women aged 18-22.  The growth in U.S. population is happening mostly in the Southwest so the new Radcliffe would be there, perhaps in Phoenix, Santa Fe, or Los Angeles.  To ensure that the graduates took up powerful places in society, the school would have only three majors:  Pre-Med, Pre-Law, 5-year MBA.  To make sure that the press and the public would recognize the new demographic, the school would accept only “women of color”.  No white or Asian-American students would be permitted to apply.

The new school would have been called “Radcliffe Southwestern Pre-Professional College for Women of Color”.  Compare to what they are actually doing these days: http://www.radcliffe.edu/ .

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Approaching his 70th birthday on December 1, Allen complained that ageing was a “terrible thing”. “It’s all just bad news. You deteriorate physically and die!” he said. “All the crap they tell you about — you know, dangling your grandchildren on your knee, and having a kind of wisdom in your golden years — it’s all tripe,” he said. “I’ve gained no wisdom, no insight, no mellowing. I would make all the same mistakes again, today.”

Source: “Sex scandal was my luckiest break, claims Woody Allen”, Sunday Times, November 2, 2005

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The October 3, 2005 issue of Fortune magazine carries a “wall street: special report” called “The Money Game” by Marcia Vickers. This details the investment strategies of David F. Swensen and Jack R. Meyer, who managed the endowments of Yale and Harvard, respectively. While most mutual funds that pick stocks underperform indices, both schools have consistently earned a much better return than the stock indices. How did they do it? Below are their allocations.

Note that Harvard’s total is 105 percent because of leverage, i.e., situations in which they’ve borrowed money to purchase investments. Conspicuously absent from these portfolios are heavy investments in American companies run by Harvard and Yale graduates. “Domestic Equity” are publicly traded stocks such as GE and Microsoft. Harvard and Yale have faith that their graduates will make a lot of money for themselves, but no faith that they will make money for their shareholders.

	Harvard	Yale
Domestic Equity	15%	14%
Foreign Equity	15%	14%
Private Equity	13%	17%
Fixed Income (bonds)	27%	5%
Real Assets	23%	25%
Absolute Return (hedge funds)	12%	25%

 

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Just finished listening to Conspiracy of Fools, a fantastic book about Enron, while driving back and forth to various airports.  One interesting item from the book is that it lays out exactly how much white collar crime pays.  Andrew Fastow and Michael Copper looted from Enron’s shareholders in ways that attracted the ire of the Justice Department.  Fastow earned something like $100 million from his Enron salary and, mostly, the off-books partnerships that he created to enrich himself while helping the Harvard Business School and McKinsey crowd produce the quarterly numbers that they wanted to show the public.  As part of a plea bargain with the Federales, Fastow had to refund about $20 million of his illegal profits and serve up to 10 years in prison.  Copper is in a similar boat, having to refund a small percentage of the tens of $millions that he obtained illegally.  So it would seem that crime pays roughly $8 million per year spent at Club Fed.

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We’re teaching 6.171, Software Engineering for Internet Applications, next semester at MIT (February through May 2006).  We need to find a teaching assistant from among the MIT grad student population.  We’re also looking for client projects.  Clients can be from for-profit or non-profit organizations.  The only requirement is that they need an Internet application built where there is significant user-to-user interaction.

http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/6171/2006-spring/ta is the teaching assistant ad.  http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/6171/client-questionnaire is the starting point for potential clients.

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In the 1990s, it was very difficult to get any kind of compensation for developing content and putting it on the Internet.  That’s presumably how we ended up with an Internet that is 99 percent spam, porn, and catalog shopping.  I never liked banner ads and did not place them on any site that I controlled because the ads were so poorly targeted.  It seemed like a waste of everyone’s time and energy when the chance of the reader being interested was so low and therefore the chance of a clickthrough was minimal.  Sure enough, ad rates that had been reasonably high in the 1990s fell to the point that even very popular sites couldn’t get serious money from banner advertising by 2002.

A friend convinced me that perhaps it was time to give Google Ads a try.  The ads are targeted by looking at the words on the page where they appear.  The ads are text, so they’re not graphically obnoxious.  I started my experiment by adding Google ads into the bulletin board pages at http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/ .  This is a server that suffered a database meltdown six months ago.  Nobody is going there to post anymore.  I had planned to throw the machine out.  Google’s terms prohibit me from writing about the clickthrough rate, but not the bottom line.  After about 10 days, it seems that the ads are bringing in a steady $60 per day or nearly $20,000 per year.  Encouraged, I put some ads into a few of the pages at http://philip.greenspun.com, including the materialism, flying, and aquarium subdirectories.  These bring in another $20-30 per day and the click through rates are high enough that I don’t feel too embarrassed for wasting screen space and reader attention.

Could it be that we are going to enter a golden age of content, fueled by the Google Ads team?

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The controversy over “intelligent design” just won’t disappear from the news.  My biologist friends here in Cambridge are upset with George W. Bush, which I find surprising.

The most plausible outcome of teaching intelligent design in public schools is nil.  All of the people who are currently advocating intelligent design were themselves taught evolution in public school.  They either forgot what they’d been taught, or did not find the unionized civil servant’s (teacher’s) explanation convincing.

You’d expect anyone to be delighted that the President of the United States was paying attention to them or their group.  Saddam Hussein loved having his name in the papers and in W’s speeches so much that he was willing to risk war.  Imagine the delight of physicists if W said that he was staying awake nights worrying about how muons turn into tau neutrinos.  Or of computer scientists if the President were to mention how outraged he was at the syntax of Haskell.  The only thing worse than being talked about badly is not being talked about at all.

Most importantly, you’d expect PhD scientists, who, adjusted for IQ and education, probably have America’s worst career prospects, to be delighted that the next generation will be hobbled.  Consider a 30-year-old soccer player.  What hope can he have of twenty more years of collecting a paycheck unless a Tonya Harding follower comes along to break the knees of all the 15-year-old soccer players?  Similarly for biologists.  A 35-year-old, $35,000/year postdoc’s best hope for a long-term job is the mental crippling of young people so that they can’t conduct experiments successfully.

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