Iraqis running the U.S. airlines?

by philg

American soldiers uncover nearly $1 billion in cash in Baghdad.  Former leaders such as Saddam probably have at least $5-10 billion more in their Swiss bank accounts (even the minor Arab dictators are among the world’s wealthiest people, e.g., Yasser Arafat is estimated to have a personal checking account containing $1.3 billion siphoned from Western aid).  Meanwhile we were told throughout the 1990s that Iraqi children lacked food and medicine.


Is there an analogous situation right here at home?  Hmm… the Board and managers of American Airlines helped themselves back in October 2002 to $41 million to guarantee their personal pensions while CEO Don Carty was stating that “Shared sacrifice has to lead to shared success…”.  Thousands of workers were being laid off, thousands more taking pay cuts from what in some cases were very modest salaries.  In theory you’re not supposed to start spiriting away a company’s assets or giving them to your pals before you file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection from your creditors.  In practice the lawyer’s for American’s executives managed to construct a trust from themselves that would be unassailable and to hide the trust from their workers, creditors, and the public until a recent mandatory SEC disclosure.


http://www.governancemetrics.com rates American’s parent company, AMR, as “above average” in corporate governance.


Meanwhile US Airways emerged from bankruptcy.  The creditors got 2 cents for every dollar that they were owed.  The managers who drafted the reorganization plan decided that their shareholders, the folks who’d paid their salary to manage their investment, were entitled to 0 percent of the new company.  They themselves, however, felt that their hard work and dedication entitled them to 8 percent of the shares in the reorganized enterprise.  The theory here is that it is tough for a manager to do a good job if he or she is paid only a straight cash salary of several million dollars; the manager also needs to get an additional $10-20 million per year in stock.  Business school professors who’ve studied this question find that managers who don’t get any stock or stock options do just as good a job as those who transfer a substantial portion of the company into their pockets.


US Airways likes to pay their executives even when they don’t work.  Three top executives offered themselves $45 million in the event that they decided to stay at home instead of working at a merged US Air/United Airlines.  The merger never went through but the guys took home an extra $35 million for failing.  How did the US Airways workers fare by comparison?  Nearly 20,000 have lost their jobs entirely; the rest have taken pay cuts (a US Airways flight attendant earned between $18,000 and $38,000 per year before the cuts).


How is this situation different from other industries in the U.S.?  Isn’t it very common for managers and their cronies on the Board to steal from the shareholders?  Of course.  But the airlines are different because their executives have bludgeoned their shareholders so badly that there is nothing left to steal.  The airline execs are taking hundreds of $millions in salary out of the $6.9 billion in federal aid that has come out of taxpayers’ pockets since September 11.

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Outlining and the presidential campaign

by philg

We’re about to roll into another U.S. Presidential campaign.  The mass media tends to cover such events in an “issue of the week” style.  Thus one can read a newspaper and learn a candidate’s position on the current hot issue but it is very difficult to form a comprehensive picture of what a politician has said and done on the campaign trail (note the avoidance of the phrase “what the politician stands for” because this presumably shifts with opinion poll results).


Could the Internet be usefully applied to the challenge of informing voters?


Idea 1 (not mine):  every resident of New Hampshire sets up a blog and, if he or she encounters a Presidential candidate, writes down what happened.  Aggregation tools enable those of us who don’t live in New Hampshire, and whose vote is not therefore worth personal attention, to get glimpses of the real men and women running for office (imagine if Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones had been running blogs back when Bill Clinton was on the campaign trail; that would have been all-too-real :-)).


This idea, powerful though it might be, would not seem to help voters grapple with the challenge of forming a comprehensive picture of any one candidate.


Idea 2:  Build a dynamic outline of all the political issues that are on citizens’ minds in 2004.  Have people in New Hampshire and other campaign-heavy states augment this outline with real-time reports of personal interactions with politicians.  By November 2004 this outline should be filled with information, presented in a way that is useful for making decisions, all stuff that voters could never get from the mass media.


What would it take to make this happen?  A bit of database programming for a Web server and a small team of part-time editors whose job would be to remove/suppress duplicate reports and off-topic postings, i.e., ones that go beyond a factual report of “Jane Candidate said X on Date Y”.

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Breaking Up Countries Where Citizens Hate Each Other

by philg

The only thing more shocking than the airplane engine control falling apart that happened during the trip south was reading an editorial in the Washington Post by Ralph Peters entitled “Must Iraq Stay Whole”.  This is the first time that I’ve seen any sign in the mass media that anyone else has the same thoughts that occurred to me last year regarding Afghanistan (see the Boston-Alaska-Baja-Boston trip report) and this year regarding countries such as Nigeria and the Sudan (see the Israel essay).


In the old days a good argument for being large would have been that a country could thereby defend itself against aggression by other large countries.  In today’s world, however, where even the most armed-to-the-teeth Third World government can be unseated in a few weeks by the U.S. military, it doesn’t make sense for people who hate each other to live together in one country.


Peters makes the seemingly obvious points that (1) the Kurds hate their Arab conquerors, (2) the Kurds demonstrated during the 1990s that they can govern themselves quite nicely, (3) giving the Kurds their own country would really irritate the Turks, which is just what they deserve for not supporting the U.S. [Peters doesn’t say this but presumably it would be a powerful example to foreign governments if the Turks’ biggest nightmare came true as a consequence of their failure to obey U.S. instructions], and (4) the Sunnis and Shiites Muslims don’t seem to like each other.


Follow-Up (Responses to Comments)


To judge by the volume of comments that this posting elicited it is indeed an issue worthy of debate, which was my main point:  “Why doesn’t this question ever come up in the mass media when it seems so obviously debate-worthy?”


Most of the comments point out that the India -> India/Pakistan/Bangladesh split was a failure in their opinion.  From this we can conclude that splitting up a country into the smaller chunks advocated by anthropologists (the book A Pattern Language recommends that countries be no larger than 2 to 10 million inhabitants, and they are talking about developed countries with good road and communication networks) is not necessarily a complete solution to Islamic violence.  However, nobody mentions the successful splits throughout history:  Czech and Slovak from each other, the U.S. from Britain, the former Soviet republics and satellites from each other, Canada and Australia from Britain.  Nor does anyone mention that one can combine political independence with economic and monetary union, thus combining the efficiencies of a large market with the comfort of knowing that the supreme leader of your country is not supremely distant from your local concerns.  I’m not advocating splitting Afghanistan and Iraq before giving them independence, merely advocating a serious debate on the question.


Dimitri asks a good question: “if a country is punished for that (“a consequence of their failure to obey U.S. instructions”) what remains of the democratic ideals and liberty and rest of BS that U.S. tells us time and time again that it stands for?”  The answer to this would seem to be threefold:  (a) the U.S. must have some reason for maintaining the world’s largest military and the most obvious explanation is that we like to be able to push foreigners around whenever we feel like it, (b) the democratic ideals and liberty are for U.S. citizens only; if we cared about foreigners’ welfare we’d be feeding Africans, preventing malaria, getting medical care to the poor in India, removing generic dictators (e.g., nearly any head of government in Africa or the Arab Middle East) rather than only the ones who insist on thumbing their noses at the U.S. (e.g., Saddam), etc., and (c) our politicians like to lay on the syrup just as thick for foreign audiences as for domestic and the result is a perception of insincerity, i.e., the U.S. could have said “We’re removing Saddam because he doesn’t follow our instructions and because we can” but presumably W and Co. thought that it sounded better to paint Saddam as terrifyingly bad and heavily armed.

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Teaching them to become lawyers

by philg

This evening we showed our 6.002 students the Ken Burns PBS documentary Empire of the Air.  This was adapted from a book of the same name by Tom Lewis.  Here are the facts that were related in two hours:


Lee De Forest, who did much to publicize the idea of using radio for broadcast rather than point-to-point communication, claimed credit for other peoples’ inventions and, through good luck and great legal talent, managed to prevail in a decades-long lawsuit against Major Edwin Armstrong, the true inventor of most of the important technologies behind radio broadcasting.  De Forest ridiculed America’s entry into World War I and then became a profiteer.  On the cusp of his 60th birthday, De Forest married Wife #4, a beautiful 21-year-old actress who remained devoted to him until his death at age 88.  As an old man, De Forest wrote a book entitled The Father of Radio and unsuccessfully encouraged his wife to write a book entitled I Married a Genius.


Edwin Armstrong worked hard and labored through formal electrical engineering training at Columbia University, the very sort of EE torture that our students are getting in 6.002.  Armstrong developed the circuits that enable using a vacuum tube as a radio transmitter and the superhet receiver, which together made it practical to transmit music and voice over AM radio, rather than Morse code.  A staunch patriot, Armstrong donated a royalty-free license to all of his patents to the U.S. government for use in World War II and served in that war by designing communications systems including that used during the invasion of Normandy in 1944.  Armstrong developed frequency modulation (FM), which was suppressed by David Sarnoff at RCA because it would threaten revenues from his AM radio monopoly and the emerging television.  RCA eventually was forced to use FM for the federally mandated NTSC television system but they refused to pay Armstrong royalties on his patents.  Armstrong committed suicide while embroiled in lawsuits attempting to force RCA to stop infringing.


David Sarnoff had no formal technical training.  Through ruthless business dealings and manipulation of the federal government managed to create and sustain a magnificently profitable enterprise that included the RCA radio and TV manufacturing company and the NBC radio and TV networks.  Though Armstrong’s widow eventually made him pay up a bit for his flagrant infringement of the frequency modulation patents, Sarnoff sailed unscathed through a sea of lives that he wrecked.  He died an old and rich man.


The only people in the drama who made millions without taking tremendous risks, working very hard, and occasionally going bankrupt, were … the lawyers in the patent and regulatory disputes.


What are our students to make of all this?  It can’t be that working hard as an MIT electrical engineering student and contributing useful innovations to society will be rewarded.  If you’re walking your dog in the Harvard Law School Yard four years from now and you run into our 6.002 alumni, tell them “hi” from me.


[The video also made one wonder for whom public television programs are made.  Despite having two hours the show did not attempt to explain even the simplest physics or engineering behind radio or any of the inventions that were the subject of the disputes chronicled.  The biographical and historical information was narrated so slowly that it could have been sped up 3X without approaching the speed of dialog on the Simpsons, which most people seem to have no trouble following.  It seems as though public TV is designed for people whose minds are not quick enough to handle the quick pace and intellectual challenge of commercial TV shows.]

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Plan Retirement before College

by philg

At lunch with some retired folks here in Williamsburg, Virginia I asked “Don’t you miss your friends back in D.C.?”  No, they replied, “We went to William and Mary [the local liberal arts college] and 21 of our friends from school have retired here as well.  We have more friends here in Williamsburg than we do back where we lived when we were working.”


College is the time when a lot of people form their closest friendships.  Perhaps it makes sense to pick a college based on whether the town is a reasonable retirement destination.


Duke and UNC Chapel Hill are good (warm weather, cheap housing).  Yale is bad (high-crime neighborhood, cold weather).  Harvard and MIT are bad ($2 million fixer-upper houses, cruel winters).  Any school in Florida is prime!

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Practical Experiments in Aviation Safety

by philg

Yesterday I flew from Bedford, Massachusetts to Gaithersburg, Maryland.  East Coast airspace was complex to begin with and has become further complicated by restrictions around the Washington, DC are.  If you’re an instrument-rated pilot you can avoid all of this complexity by filing an ins trument flight plan and taking advantage of Air Traffic Control (ATC) services.  The assigned route took me straight over JFK airport at 6000′ and then through central New Jersey before proceeding over Balitmore-Washington Intl. airport and into the Montgomery Country Airpark.


My Diamond Star (DA40) is a brand-new design but it uses an engine that hasn’t changed for 50 years.  Old-style piston airplane engines require that the pilot constantly adjust the air-fuel mixture as the plane rises into thinner air or descends into denser air.  When you’re done with your flight and parked at the airport, you pull the mixture control all the way back to “full lean” and the engine stops, starved of fuel.


Descending out of 6000′ over Baltimore I noticed that my exhaust gas temperatures were rising, despite the fact that I was enriching the mixture.  Between talking to ATC and the other pilots at the busy non-towered Gaithersburg airport, I didn’t have much time to reflect on this odd behavior.  After parking the airplane I pulled the mixture control back.  The engine kept running.  I shut the airplane down by shutting off the flow from the fuel tanks, then hopped out and unscrewed the cowling.


The mixture control itself is an L-shaped arm on the throttle body of the fuel injection system.  It is attached to the mixture cable by a bolt.  In case the mixture cable snaps, a spring is also attached to the arm to pull the mixture to “full rich” (engine runs but not necessarily efficiently).  Sadly the engineers at Diamond decided that both the spring and the cable should be attached with the same bolt.  The bolt was rattling around loose in the bottom of the cowl.  The spring was hanging free.  The end of the mixture cable was hanging free.  My engine continued to run because (a) I had been conservative in running moderately rich at altitude, (b) the difference between 6000′ and sea level isn’t enormous, and (c) the L-shaped arm, free to rattle around a bit, hadn’t rattled its way to “full lean”.  [This is more than a theoretical possibility; rumor has it that a plane similar to mine landed in a farmer’s field in the Midwest back in the Spring of 2002 after the mixture cable came loose.  The incident led to a redesign, which was retrofitted to my airplane in June 2002.]


My mixture control was held together with a regular bolt and a locking nut (that apparently did not lock and is now on the ground somewhere between Long Island and Baltimore).  Tull, one of the best mechanics at Gaithersburg, happened to be on the field at 6:00 pm on a Saturday and he reassembled the airplane, this time using a bolt with a little hole in the middle so that a safety cotter pin could be inserted to prevent future separations.


There are a bunch of ways to look at this incident.  One is despair at the state of engineering in this world.  Had an extra hole been drilled in the L-shaped arm, the spring could have been attached separately from the mixture cable.  The engine would have gone to full rich after the mixture cable detached.  Alternatively, Diamond could have used a bolt with a hole in the middle and a safety, like the one that the mechanic in Gaithersburg used.  A few extra cents and the plane would have been spared the risk of an emergency landing.


Another way to look at this incident is to be ever-vigilant when flying a piston single-engine airplane: have an emergency landing spot in mind at all times. The #1 reason for engine stoppage is running out of gas but it apparently is not the only reason.


Project for today:  make it to Williamsburg, Virginia with both the airplane and myself in one piece.

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Saudi Royals, Big Rockets, and Hitler

by philg

The May 2003 Atlantic Monthly merits a trip to the library or newsstand.  While the great minds of the Boston Globe fret about Cessna 172s, Robert Baer’s “The Fall of the House of Saud”  points out that a simple terrorist strike at one location in Saudi Arabia could remove from the world markets an amount equal to one third of the U.S.’s oil consumption.  The article is rich with details on the more eccentric princes, such as Abdul Aziz who built a magnificent $4.6 billion palace and Islamic theme park that “includes a scale model of old Mecca, with actors attending mosque and chanting prayers twenty-four hours a day.”  For those who slept through 9/11 and its aftermath, Baer recounts the Saudi funding and manning of Al-Qaeda and its continued obstruction of FBI investigations.


Gregg Easterbrook also has an article in this issue, about the Russian-American Sea Launch company that sails from Long Beach to the equator, fires off huge rockets into space, then sails back to LA.  The cost is 1/10th that of the Space Shuttle for a comparable payload.


Timothy Ryback visits the Library of Congress and discovers the “remnants of the private library of Adolf Hilter, a man better known for burning books than for collecting them.”  In fact Hitler had thousands of books and, even when his means were modest, spent lavishly on books and bookshelves.  Hitler was not a huge fan of novels but enjoyed non-fiction, being motivated to underlining by a nineteenth century writer’s call for “the relocation of the Polish and Austrian Jews to Palestine”.


If you’re soaking in the bathtub and done with New Yorker magazine, give the May Atlantic a whirl.

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My camera went to Iraq and all I got was this URL…

by philg

… and some oil.


Have a look at the following photos from the Iraqi oil fields: http://menzelphoto.com/recent/iraq20031.htm.  They come from my Canon D60 digital camera.  Because I was too busy exploring the wonders of linear differential equations and the impedance method with MIT EE students, I couldn’t accompany Peter Menzel (he and Faith D’Aluisio did the Material World books and Robo Sapiens) to Kuwait and Iraq.  When Peter returned the D60 he included a small vial of Iraqi crude, fresh from the wells!  I’m thus one of the very few Americans who can truly say that he got what the U.S. Army went to Iraq for 🙂

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Happy Friday: Machine-assisted Fun

by philg

It’s Friday again and therefore time to put the Happy Helmet on.  What could be more fun for an American than wallowing in materialism and playing with machines?


This old gold dredge is on the road from Nome, Alaska to the small town of Council.

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MIT demonstrates its patriotism by giving us a four-day weekend for Patriot’s Day and I’ll be heading south in the airplane:  Saturday to DC (parents/sibs); Sunday to Williamsburg, Virginia (w/parents); Tuesday morning to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (visit Matthew Amster, anthropologist, and Andy Wermuth, documentary filmmaker); Tuesday evening back to Boston (weather permitting; the forecast is a bit ugly).  On the way down I hope to repeat a fun flying experience from Monday:  asking the Logan Airport tower for a “city tour” clearance.  On the way to East Hampton we were able to fly down the Charles River at 1500′, right over Harvard and MIT, then made a right turn to the south in front of the tall buildings of downtown.  The only other aircraft in this space normally are the medical helicopters.


It is biking time again.  If you’re old and creaky and don’t like biking because it hurts your neck, back, and, uh, butt, I can recommend a recumbent.  It is as comfortable as sitting on your living room sofa except that sometimes you fall over sideways onto pavement (recumbents have smaller tires and therefore less angular momentum and therefore less resistance to tipping over).  You can pick them up new for $600+ and learn about them in alt.rec.bicycles.recumbent


If you live in the Boston area, I found a bike shop that seems vastly superior to the usual suspects (Wheelworks and IBC):  ATA Cycle on Mass Ave near Porter Square in Cambridge (http://www.atabike.com/).  They are very fast yet thorough with mechanical work.  They have some beautiful mountain bikes for trips through the Middlesex Fells, Lynn Woods, and other local spots.


When you get tired from biking and watch to relax on the sofa, this summer will bring the first crop of HDTVs that have enough holes in the shadow mask to display something like all the pixels in an HDTV signal (1920×1180).  Unlike with computer monitors, TV makers don’t tell you how fine the dot pitch can be.  The HDTVs sold so far have taken a high-res signal in but aren’t capable of producing anything other than a low-res picture because there aren’t actually enough distinct holes in the metal grille separating the electron gun from the phosphors.  Blowing $2500 on a Sony KV-34XBR910 so that you can enjoy every pixel of Laverne and Shirley will provide a much-needed boost to both the US and Japanese economies.


If you’re concerned that America’s maturation into neo-feudalism will tempt the serfs to try to take away some of your hard-earned wealth, consider an armored car from Lincoln, Cadillac, or Mercedes.


 

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The Death of the Media Lab?

by philg

In a world where the only enterprise that is happy with its investments in high-tech is the U.S. military, what chance does the MIT Media Lab, the product of corporate money have?  This is the question asked by a recent WIRED magazine article.


The Media Lab made its money by convincing big companies to spend a portion of their profit on funding advanced R&D.  Today the average big companies, with a combination of stock options and cash, pays its top managers an amount roughly equal to total profit.  I.e., there is nothing left to invest in R&D at MIT or elsewhere.


In the long run the Media Lab may be remembered best for its revolutionary organizational structure.  The typical university professor is expected to manage research, teach students, raise funds, and promote his or her glorious results.  Very seldom will an individual be expert in all of these areas.  Why not ape the commercial world and divide labor among specialists?  That’s precisely what the Media Lab did.  A dedicated staff of PR professionals did the promotion.  A dedicated team of expert after-dinner speakers and schmoozers did the fundraising.  The founders discovered that MIT did not valorize teaching and therefore the Media Lab elected to leave the grunt work of teaching to other departments.  The best researchers were thus free to spend all of their time managing research.


It all worked great until (1) corporations decided they’d rather spend their money on vacation homes and private jets for their executives and board members, and (2) the Media Lab discovered a $multi-million accounting error that forced a lot of layoffs.


How did the accounting error happen?  Basically there are two ways to set up a business.  If you don’t believe that you’re a management genius you push profit-and-loss responsibility down to the lowest level possible.  In the case of McDonald’s and its franchisees, for example, P&L responsibility is at the individual restaurant level.  If one restaurant is doing badly if doesn’t have access to the bank accounts of the other restaurants and thus there is no way for the bad apples to drag down the barrel.  Furthermore the top managers don’t need to care too much about how an individual restaurant is spending its money.  As long as the group with P&L is making a profit, who cares how they are doing it?


An alternative approach is central management by function.  The Freedom Fries cooks at all McDonald’s would report to regional managers and a VP of Freedom at headquarters.  The soda pourers would report to middle managers under the VP of Soda.  The drive-through cashiers at different restaurants would share a manager and so forth.  If you have amazing business management skills in theory this method could produce higher performance and greater efficiency.  However, without metrics and cost controls there is a substantial risk of bankruptcy because many fewer people have profit and loss on their minds.


Traditional research universities push P&L responsibility down onto the individual faculty member.  He or she must apply for grants and can spend money only from those grants.  Once the money from a grant is gone, that professor can no longer spend money.  This way the university makes sure that more cash never goes out than came in (in fact they charged a fat overhead commission on that grant money when it came in so actually a lot less cash can go out than came in).  A professor who is not successful at raising funds never puts at risk a lab that is getting a lot of grants.


The Media Lab went the big-company division-of-labor route but didn’t mature fast enough to have all of the departmental profit metrics and cost controls of the best large companies.


Prediction:  In 100 years the Media Lab will be remembered primarily for its pioneering approach to managing university research. 


(In the meantime, let’s hope that the new building gets finished.  If you go to the basement of the current building and look at the model, I’m sure you’ll agree that it would be one of the nicest-looking and most comfortable buildings in Cambridge.)

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