TED Talk for Mature Audiences - Dismal Science, Disappointing Careers

For many years now, Economics has been known as the "dismal science". So, who better than a (Canadian) economist to deliver a 15 minute TED talk on "Why You Will Fail to Have a Great Career". TED talks, in general, are upbeat talks and this one, despite it having a somewhat cynical tone to it, really does have an upbeat message in there. I do worry in pointing out the talk that it requires a certain amount of maturity to hear the real message. The message an immature audience just might receive from this talk could be extremely negative. You've been warned! So, if you think you have the maturity to find the constructive up-lifting message in his talk, give a listen to Larry Smith of U. of Waterloo on why you will fail to have a great career.

The talk mentions the 2005 Stanford Commencement Address by the late Steve Jobs. If you haven't given that one a listen, I urge you to spend the 22 minutes that it'll take to play that one for yourself too.

you don't have to agree with the speakers in these video talks. If you have an opinion on what you've heard here, you're invited to leave a comment down below. I'm looking forward to hearing from you. And, of course, if you know someone who might benefit from giving a listen to either or both of these videos, please pass along the link to this blog article.

Danger Lurking in the Plastic Packaging of our Food?

I stumbled across this article from a web site unfamiliar to me:

http://www.care2.com/causes/if-plastic-bags-are-causing-infertility-in-pigs-what-are-they-doing-to-us.html

Worrisome, but I didnt want to sound the alarm without checking into it further. So I did some Google searching looking for the same warning from some other source. Found it from National Geographic and that's good enough for me to consider the story to be confirmed.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/06/140605-pigs-plastic-sperm-endocrine-disruptor-infertility-science/

The troublesome chemical showed up in plastic bags imported from China, but not in bags of local (Spain) manufacture? I wish I had more confidence that the matter would be properly handled and fixed by China. But I've not seen any tendency toward openness in China.

In case you need more to worry about, here's a 17 minute TED talk on some common pesticides in our environment. You say you aren't worried about frogs? Well, you probably should be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=X9NFPZGyDPg

What should you and I do about these problems? Alas, I haven't a clue about what to do. A sternly worded letter to your congress-person (who likely is heavily under the influence of some big agricultural chemical company) would be a beginning, but I've not got much more respect left for our government than I have for that of China.

Am I the only one who has noticed that the food labels track most bad things in milli-grams (mg) but trans-fats on the label are tracked in grams (g)? In case you don't remember, 1 g = 1000 mg. Anything under 500mg of trans-fat in a "serving" is loudly touted as zero grams of trans-fat per serving by the power of rounding down to the nearest whole number of grams. And there are some pretty funny notions of "servings" to be found on those labels. Muffins from my local super-market come in packs of 4 muffins, zero grams of transfat per serving, but a serving is 1/3 of a muffin. Makes me wonder if 1/2 a muffin has enough trans-fat in it that they'd have to round it up to 1g on the label.

Dietary guidelines for trans-fat is to keep the amount that you eat each day as low as possible. Heck, even the guidelines for sodium allow 1500 mg/day of sodium as a recommended daily allowance and 300mg/day of cholesterol. (Speaking of which, have you looked at the nutrition facts for a McDonalds egg and sausage biscuit? 1170 mg of sodium in one. 250 mg of cholesterol in one. But if you are hungry, one of those isn't much of a breakfast. Advice: don't make a habit of McDonald's for breakfast.

http://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/everyone/basics/fat/transfat.html

Now if our government really had our best interest in mind, wouldn't it push the food company's to report tran-fats in mg (like they do for cholesterol and sodium)? But does that happen? No. Obviously way too controversial a matter? Right up there with identifying which products contain GMO corn.

Sigh.

Penny for NASA?

If you've been paying attention to the social media, you may have noticed that there's a lobbying group called "Penny for NASA" that is pushing the idea that we should double federal spending on NASA from it's current level of 1/2 of 1% of the federal budget to a full penny of each dollar spent by Uncle Sam. Back at the height of the moon program in the 1960's apparently NASA's budget had been as high as 4+% of the federal budget. Penny for Nasa web site.

Space exploration is exciting, and I suppose it is unsporting of me to point out that there are some awfully strong other contenders for priority in allocating the federal budget.

Their video makes mention of a "petroleum industry subsidy" that dwarfs NASA's budget. So this got me to wondering where exactly to find a line item for "petroleum industry subsidy". Doing a little digging, I find that apparently it is buried in the complexity of the federal income tax and comes in the form of taxes not levied on petroleum industry profits. e.g. See http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/01/09/1423351/oil-zero-subsidies/

A presumably harder to sell proposition is: Let's reform the income tax and raise the effective corporate tax rate and then spend more of the revenues on space exploration. If there was a net increase in federal revenues, there are many contenders for the money with deficit reduction at the top of the list. Even if the feds were persuaded to increase the spending on science and technology, I expect NASA would be in for some stiff competition for the money from folks who'd like to see more medical research or more work on alternative energy sources. The old "If we can send men to the moon, why can't we ...", for your favorite choice of "...".

So far, we have visited the moon and established a "permanent" space station in low earth orbit, and done some limited robotic exploration of Mars. Manned exploration of Mars is exciting to discuss, but difficult problems like fatal levels of radiation exposure while in-transit to Mars remain ahead without obvious solutions. Star Trek-ish "shields" and warp drive (to shorten the transit time) don't seem to be in the cards at present.

Perhaps a more do-able objective would be a permanent manned base on the moon to serve as a lower gravity launch platform for deeper space exploration. To be a "Good Idea" I think it would be dependent on showing the base could be built drawing on materials from the moon. Otherwise, maybe the better choice would be an even lower gravity high orbit space station. If nothing else, digging deep to put some of the mass of the moon into use as radiation shielding might make the moon more suitable than a Disney-inspired high orbit permanent space station.

If we're going to have folks be permanent citizens of the moon, it is probably time to re-read Heinlein's "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress".

Or has Material Science gotten far enough that we should start by building a space elevator?

Certainly there's no shortage of places to spend money, if we have money for such discretionary expenses and the vision and political will for adventure. The politics of the discussion are likely to devolve into debate on the economic stimulus value of the proposed increase in federal spending. An argument for "Investing in the future" sort of demands the context of a long range plan for the future. Even JFK's "we will go to the moon" had more to it than just an intent to go to the moon. http://rdrewd.blogspot.com/2009/07/that-other-thing.html

Am I being too harsh in suggesting that there's much more to consider than just a blind doubling of NASA's budget? The social media would have us believe that the "Penny for NASA" efforts have grass-roots origins. But "Follow the money" is good advice when evaluating any grass-roots movement. If anything, I've over simplified the debate in my article here. e.g. see A Penny for NASA -- or For Congressional Pork

Bill Gates TED Talks - Ideas Worth Sharing

Bill Gates is the well known founder of Microsoft. I'm not a fan of Bill nor of Microsoft. I am an advocate for "open source" software, and I think Microsoft has brought much harm to the computer industry. But that isn't what this brief article is about.

Bill Gates' modest house
 
 

Bill has given a couple of really good TED talks, short ones, about 10 minutes each. I pointed out this first one before. It advocates more technology in the classroom, specifically video recorders so teachers can assess their teaching sessions.

Teachers Need Real Feedback

A balanced assessment of the idea would have to take George Orwell's concerns from "1984" into account, but as presented, I think the video idea has merit.

A second Bill Gates TED talk, looking at the education problem from an entirely different perspective, is this one:

How State Budgets are Breaking US Schools

Alas, he does better at explaining the problem than he does at suggesting solutions.

What do you think of his suggestions? Is he merely advocating that a larger slice of the education budget should go into technology because that is in his self-interest, or is he showing real forward thinking?

Education Automation - R. Buckminster Fuller

A few months ago, in response to one of my "education" tagged blog posts, an old friend from high school contacted me via Facebook and suggested that I really should take a look at the book "Education Automation" by R. Buckminster Fuller, the famous architect. The book was published way back in 1961 and for someone without access to Doc Brown's DeLorean, it had remarkable foresight. He basically predicted the Internet, though he called it 2-way television.

The Book

The book is a slim paperback volume, only 88 pages long. It was put together at a time when Southern Illinois University was undergoing major expansion in 1961 - a transition from being a state teacher's college to being a full-fledged university. Fuller had been invited to give a talk to the committee planning the new campus. The book doesn't quite read like it is a transcript of his talk. I believe it is more like a report by Fuller of what he said.

I have to give credit to the Westbury Public Library for finding a copy of this book for me to read. They borrowed it from the library of Hartwick College way off in Oneonta, NY, about a 200 mile drive upstate from Westbury. I was tickled to notice the 1961 price of the book printed on the book's cover: $1.95. If you convert that into how many gallons of gasoline you could get for $1.95 in 1961, and then figure out what the contemporary price for that many gallons of gasoline would be, I suspect the $1.95 maps to a pretty good approximation of what a slim academic book would cost these days. The years have not been kind to the purchasing power of a dollar.

There are plenty of smells of age to be found in the book such as frequent mention of "men" where a more contemporary book would surely have said "people". And, I was surprised at how high an opinion Fuller seems to have of himself. I expect a tad more humility from great men of the past.

What did he call for?

Fuller foresaw a future in which "earning a living" was no longer required. He expected that change was going to arrive within 10 years of the time he was speaking in 1961. He expected that the only lasting world industry would be education. He anticipated that scholars would stay for years and years at the universities, "for the rest of their lives", "developing more and more knowledge about the whole experience of man".

One somewhat off-the-wall suggestion from Fuller is that a 200 foot diameter (or larger) geodesic dome be suspended 100 feet above the campus and be covered with light bulbs on the entire interior and exterior surface, each bulb under the control of a computer, so the 'Geoscope' would be a gigantic display screen. "It will make possible communication of phenomena that are not at present communicable to man's conceptual understanding." I've seen enough movies to have my doubts about any good coming from a large screen for mass viewing. Brings to mind Apple's 1984 commercial.

He clearly suggested that the university acquire as much land as it can. But forget about any permanent structure anchored to whatever the shape is of today's curriculum. Everything should be dynamic. e.g. bring in a geodesic dome via heavy-lift helicopter to serve as an auditorium whenever you need another big auditorium. Or just build a gigantic half-mile wide geodesic dome to enclose the entire campus and give people large clear spaces to do their work. "Don't waste dollars on great, heavy stone masonry and any kind of Georgian architecture."

What did he get wrong?

From my 21st century perspective, he did get some things wrong. He still seems to expect that education is something that is done by herding large groups of students into giant auditoriums. Current consensus seems to be that the Internet particularly obsoletes the large-to-the-point-of-student-anonymity lectures, replacing them with on-demand viewing of pre-recorded lectures. (e.g. MOOC's).

I wish I knew more about what they actually did there at SIU after the planning sessions. I Google searched for images of the Southern Illinois University campus and only found a few pictures, none of which seem anything like Fuller's suggestions. I'm slightly more familiar with a more recently developed college campus, Liberty University. Though I have never set foot on Liberty University's campus, we received a magazine from them a few months ago detailing their campus expansion projects. From what I can see, Liberty University initially built large warehousey "temporary" buildings, but then in more recent years has been replacing those buildings with new prettier more permanent structures.

Fuller's 1961 advice was to build with the inspiration of circus tents, not wasting money on, e.g., Georgian architectural detailing. From what I can see of the continuing development of Liberty University, they initially erected structures that were slightly more solid then circus tents, but without significant ornamentation, but more recent structures are in a style that would be fitting for colonial Williamsburg, with lots of brick and big decorative columns and with large windows consisting of many small panes. It would seem that Fuller was overlooking the role of campus buildings in inspiring pride in alumni as a stimulus to continuing generous donations. In the book, he made little mention of budget constraints. He also, despite his own involvement in campus athletics (he'd been a football quarterback in his high school years), seemed to pay no attention to the huge investments large schools seem to make in sports facilities.

I noticed that Fuller's advice seemed to pay no attention to matters of infrastructure: e.g. bathrooms and parking and/or provisions for on-campus transportation. Research labs need plumbing, fume hoods, marker boards, bookshelves (at least they still need those today), desks, chairs, network access, electricity, heating, lighting and air conditioning. Much more than just the generous amounts of space Fuller advised should be acquired and enclosed.

He had a curious fixation on a proposal for a large domed display screen that could be used to display images, charts and graphs to help the people on campus to attain a commonality in their point of view. I wonder if Leo Villareal would give any credit to Fuller for Villareal's "Cosmos" installation on the Cornell U. Johnson Art Museum. Villareal's piece makes sense of what had been a seemingly pointless architectural detail of the museum building, which building has been compared to the shape of a gigantic sewing machine.

The foreword of the book says Fuller served as a research professor at SIU. I hope he didn't get overpaid for the advice he gave but that they apparently didn't follow. If you have affiliation with SIU and can say more about what influence Fuller's suggestions had on the development of that campus, I'd sure like to hear from you in the comments.

Maybe Fuller was just way ahead of his time, but I'd have an easier time expecting a virtual campus that is spread around the world and reconfigured as different specialists get involved in a research project. A campus where there's no "there" there? Good luck figuring out where home-game sports events are going to be held. Perhaps the central feature of the physical campus will be a large Internet connected data center/online digital library to facilitate research and online collaboration by the people affiliated with the university, wherever they may be.

Oh, and I bet there'll be a lovely administration building with columns and brick and many window panes and a board room for the meetings of the trustees (who probably are going to lag on acceptance of online meetings). I'm not advocating that all future research be conducted in the researcher's home kitchen. Space (rented?) with suitable labs facilities would be acquired wherever the researcher chose to be. I foresee big demand for lab space in Hawaii. Lovely weather - especially compared to Ithaca, NY, just to name a place where you can find a conventional physical campus today.

Yucca Mountain Post-Mortem

It is clear to me that the US needs more domestic sources of energy. Fracking to get more natural gas, perhaps at the price of ruining underground aquifers and with the obvious consequence of increased carbon emissions, looks like a bad choice. More coal and more drilling for domestic oil isn't a big win either. Energy without increased carbon emissions means nuclear, but Obama seems to have kept his 2008 promise to oppose that. (Obama and obstruction have a nice alliterative compatibility). I haven't seen any serious growth in research of alternatives to nuclear fission (nuclear fusion is at least a hope, but it seems to not be on an urgent-need fast-track). Here's an article that got me pissed off at both major political parties, but mostly at the Democrats. The Republicans angered me by not speaking plainly with a counter-proposal even though the alternative will draw clear opposition. They campaigned on more domestic hydrocarbons as the solution for the next 100 years. Humbug!

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/yucca-mountain-a-post-mortem

Not clear to me what was so wrong with Yucca Mountain, Hanover Reservation, and middle-of-nowhere Texas. But, if there's not going to be a domestic solution to the problem, how about negotiating internationally? A highway to far northern Canada, perhaps? Maybe even build some large nuclear power stations up there and powerlines to ship the power back to the US? Arguably, power lines are less environmentally risky than really long oil pipelines. Are the deserts of Mexico geologically stable enough to be worth considering for nuclear waste disposal? Are we sure we've completely evaluated the recycling possibilities of the "spent" fuel? If it's going to be dangerous for 10,000 years, doesn't that imply there's additional energy that could somehow be extracted from the spent fuel? Sounds like a topic that could put some scientists and engineers to work towards creating a solution where so far the money has just been going to lawyers and politicians to oppose progress.

May 10, 2016 Update

3+ years later and I don't think I've really found the right places to publicize this particular blog article of mine. Google's stats for the page say it has only had 28 page views so far. Seems that fracking may be contributing to a surprising increase in the number of earthquakes in the US midwest. I've seen nothing to make me think I should embrace fracking as a good idea. If anything, fracking now is looking to be an even worse idea than I'd thought it was. I hope you smirk as much as I did at this official US gov denial of there being any connection between fracking and earthquakes. Myths and Misconceptions. They explain that it isn't fracking that is causing the earthquakes, it is waste water disposal that is causing the earthquakes, and unless you read the piece carefully, you might not even notice where all that wastewater is coming from. It comes from the oil wells that the fracking made profitable, and for whatever reason, Uncle Sam let's them pump the hazardous waste water into deep wells where they promise it won't bother anybody (unless you are the namby pamby sort of person who gets upset by, say, earthquakes or the prospect of that hazardous waste water mixing in with your drinking water well-water some day). How about requiring the hazardous water be processed to make pure water and some reduced quantity of hazardous waste that then has to be disposed of in some safe (though perhaps expensive) manner. Given ten thousand years, nuclear waste at least decays, eventually leaving just "rocks". How long does fracking waste need to be safely contained and monitored before it loses its toxicity and other dangerous properties? You say my proposal for handling the fracking waste seriously reduces the profitability of fracking? Aww... Break my heart. It's nature's way of telling you something's wrong... <- a song from 1970. Everything old is new again? <- a song from 1978

I did recently come across a related article from Boston and am encouraged to learn there are people in the nuclear power business who are seriously pursuing the notion that there is much more energy available to extract from today's nuclear waste. A New Way to Get Nuclear Power, Reducing Waste in the Process. A pleasant surprise is that the proposed reactor not only can be fueled with "spent" fuel, from today's reactors, but that in the process of extracting more energy from that spent fuel, although it still eventually results in its own "spent fuel" nuclear waste to dispose of, but the half-life of the twice-spent waste is merely hundreds of years, not ten thousand years. Sounds like their molten salt reactor (a revival of a 1960's design idea?) is many years away from becoming a real part of our energy supply, but it at least let's me feel like less of a crack-pot. (In case it wasn't already obvious to you, I am not a nuclear engineer at all. I have an engineering education, but went into the business of software development, which I might term "software engineering", but there are "real" engineers out there who would regard that as a controversial claim. An essay topic for another day...).

So, please, publically speak up in opposition to fracking, and in favor of non-carbon energy sources. If you can help bring this little essay to the attention of some more people so more people would actually read this, that would make me feel like I at least did my part.

Financial engineering

Re-engineered to Smithereens is interesting reading. Linkedin.com pointed me to the piece via a posting there by the piece's author. I think her essay dwells a bit much on baby boomers, but maybe you have to have come from Lucent to see how losing sight of the purpose of a company can mess up the jobs of far more than one generation of (former) employees.  What the financial engineers seem to overlook is that if a company's stated mission is no grander than "Our mission is to make money for the stockholders", that that is not going to inspire many of the company's staff to rally round the corporate flag.  My undergrad degree is in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, so I kind of can see where the numbers argue that its a great idea to sell off all the factories and outsource all the production of the company's products, but somehow along the way, the company (formerly known as Western Electric) lost the idea that the way the company earns its money is to sell products.   I'll not insist that you have to manufacture the products in order to sell them, but somehow with the factories gone, the management seemed to lose its sense of direction.  Didn't anyone understand that to sell products with a fat profit margin, you need to have products that people can't get from anyone else, not commodities.  Last year's gee-whiz item is next year's commodity (if not sooner).  Seems to me that things worked out better when the Great Depression idled the factories and management's reaction was to find ways to keep the factories working, even if that meant producing washing machines or some such things that are far out of the company's usual scope.  (Confession:  I tried to find something on the web to substantiate my assertion that Western Electric built washing machines during the Great Depression, but was surprised to learn they were making washing machines and sewing machines in the early 1920's.   Not what I expected to find   But I did find of Western Electric in the Great Depression:

The company paid its employees to make "articles in general
demand" from furniture to cigarette lighters to keep them employed,
then it distributed the goods at-cost through the company stores.

according to http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1802.html).  But now, in the 21st century, with no factories, the management just seems to blame the economy and look for more costs to slice ("The beatings will continue until company morale improves"). 

They sold off vast portions of the company, including the chip-business, which produces the raw materials (integrated circuits) from which innovative products can be built.   I'm a bit less comfortable with the notion that all the chips we'd ever need can be purchased from elsewhere.   If we buy commodity chips, how distinctive can our products be?   And if we pay other companies to make custom chips to our specifications, who is going to pocket the profit margin on those chips?   Surely Lucent management didn't make the humerous assumption that they are consumate deal-makers!

Lucent had some interesting starts on products that far out-distanced what the marketplace was currently demanding.    I'm thinking about the micromirror based optical router, long since canceled to the best of my knowledge.   "Nobody" needs that kind of bandwidth capacity.   Why walk away from a future market.   Wouldn't it have been smarter to help cultivate demand for more bandwidth.   Lucent had pioneered development of HDTV.    Why not work with web cam companies to bring HDTV to the PC?   HDTV video chats might step up the demand for IP bandwidth.  Youtube, I hear is already pressing the capacity of Internet service providers.   Verizon is gambling on the future by building FIOS now.   More bandwidth than the customer demands at present, but it'll take some real work and hefty investment for the cable companies to provide as much capacity as FIOS can.   Capacity isn't all that's needed to compete with the cable TV companies, but at least Verizon apparently noticed that they had competition and had to do something about it for Verizon to have a future.

(Disclosure:    I'm a Cablevision "triple play" subscriber.   I use Vonage for my home phone [though the Cablevision phone line has been useful to provide a phone for Aunt Dolly, who currently lives here].   My only monthly bill from Verizon is from Verizon Wireless for cell phone service.  [In other words, I'm not a FIOS subscriber even though they tell me it is now available in my neighborhood].  Since I am no longer employed by Bell Laboratories, I have so far managed to resist the call of the marketplace to move on up to HDTV.   I watch HBO on a plain old NTSC [that is, old non-digital] television set).

"Field of Dreams" projected the kind of thinking that Lucent management lacked.   "Build it and they will come".  But somehow Lucent was never interested in a market space until Cisco or someone had demonstrated that there was a significant market there.   That's not leadership.   "Me too" products are not a good way to bang big bucks to the bottom line.   At Lucent, the bottom line was "a lot fewer bottoms on the line".

Drew