2008 in blog

Just as with last year, wanted to reflect on the highlights of my life from the past year – as told through my blog!

• Started blogging on Xhibiting and Bench Press
• Installed Opera Mini on my Blackberry
• Despite being on a large tech case, I found myself at Safeway comparing brands of women’s shampoo
• Rolled out my current practice of making quarterly financial and strategic updates on … my self (which reminds me, I need to wrap up 2008’s ASAP)
• Reflected on Taiwan’s prominent position in the technology space
• Discovered that Barack Obama is the Sandman or Blade the Vampire Hunter
• Bid farewell to the very charming and very intelligent Jeremy Knowles
• Made a “Vasa ship” at work
• Got my comic-movie fix on by watching Wanted and the Dark Knight
• Went to Comic-Con and took many pictures of cosplayers (the Wiki link if you have no idea what that is)
• Wondered if I went into the right career – haven’t figured it out yet, but am pretty sure it beats banking
• Made a standing offer with my homey Anthony of $100 for any troubled firm or division out there (we’re still looking at you, Circuit City)
• Presented 6 non-partisan suggestions to President-elect Barack Obama (online, of course, it’s not like I know him)
• Bid farewell to the First Lady of Star Trek

Happy new year, everybody!

(Image source)

I am ashamed

I only got 20/33 on the “How Web 2.0 are you?” quiz .

The Union Complex

A lot of the debate around the proposed bailout of Detroit auto manufacturers has centered around what caused GM, Ford, and Chrysler to do so poorly (random fact of the day: the market capitalization of GM is now less than 30% of that of Bed, Bath, and Beyond). More specifically, these debates have centered around the question of whether or not higher UAW wages have led to the downfall of the Detroit Three? While many commentators have chimed in, I personally think most of this debate is a meaningless distraction, for three reasons:

First, as I pointed out in a previous post, it’s counterproductive to try to blame one party for something as complex and massive as the failure of Detroit’s auto manufacturers, not only because multiple parties are “to blame”, but also because all the involved sides need to get together to come up with a credible solution.

Secondly, while I think its well-established that the oft-quoted $70/hour difference between UAW wages and non-unionized wages is not representative of actual worker salaries (UAW workers are not paid $70 more per hour than their non-unionized counterparts – that reflects the cost of paying off pensions), I think this point is irrelevant, because at the end of the day, who cares where the “$70/hour” labor cost differential comes from? It could be wages or pension costs or even college tuition subsidies for children of union members – it doesn’t matter. We’re still talking about a $2000/car cost disadvantage due to a union labor agreement (according to Mitt Romney’s column in the NYTimes). In business, you don’t have the luxury of explaining away a “$2000 price difference” or “$2000 less features/quality” by arguing its a technicality.

Lastly, the true cost of the UAW is not the $2000/car figure (which represents only a ~7% of the average selling price of $28000), but the cost of increased complexity that comes from the union contracts. Take a look at the 22 pound, 2215-page “epic poem” which is the Ford-UAW contract:

Now, I’ll admit that I haven’t read all 2215 pages, so its entirely possible I missed the magical section which talks about how the UAW enhances Ford’s productivity and causes rainbows and unicorns to appear, but for the most part the pages that I’ve looked over fit three categories:

1. Relatively “meaningless” paper (e.g. title page, contents, signed pages, etc.)
2. Rules/procedures that Ford must follow
3. Benefits that Ford must provide

Imagine running a company with very complicated manufacturing facilities around the world, a very complex supply chain, and innovative and cutting-edge competitors who have captured the eyes of your customers. Now, imagine on top of all of that, you need to deal with several hundred pages of rules that your competitors don’t, stipulating which employees can work on which parts of the assembly line, what you need to do when employees have conflicts or confusion, how senior employees need to be in order to get certain responsibilities, etc etc.

You would need to institute all sorts of additional processes to deal with these new rules and regulations. You would need to hire new people to help administer these processes. You wouldn’t be able to quickly change your operating procedures and strategies because you need to wait to get the proper sign-off from the proper union members (that is if the union allows it). You would lose out on time and efficiency and productivity as you keep unproductive workers longer and are required to factor in union rules when doing anything. You would chase away more productive, younger workers who don’t get greater responsibility and pay due to union protocol on seniority. You would ignore more product flaws as the cost of fixing them would be too high.

The true cost of the UAW is not the (fairly marginal) labor cost differential, but the cost of complexity. This is not to say Detroit doesn’t have other complexity issues (e.g. Japanese car companies define their product families and product options a lot more rationally than Detroit’s, which makes them harder to manufacture and customize and sell), but my argument from the beginning is that the labor cost differential, while something to address, is only the tip of the iceberg of inefficiencies which have hit Detroit. To focus so much attention on labor costs ignores the massive productivity, quality, and time-to-market costs which have really hurt Detroit – and that’s something lawmakers, management, and the UAW need to sort out to dig themselves out of the hole they’re in.

(Image Credit) (Image Credit – Ford-UAW contract)

SUND-ay terror

I’m a big fan of House, not only because the lead character is someone we all (or maybe just me) wish we could be (someone so brilliant that he can get away with saying and doing just about anything), but because of their use of bizarre medical cases showing off some of the extreme things that one’s body is capable of when sick.

While SUND (Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death) will probably never show up on House (given the sudden, inexplicable death of the patient preventing House and company from being able to do or say much of anything), it is definitely one example of an extremely bizarre condition which doctors still don’t have a good handle on.

I first read about it in an article on Forbes covering bizarre sleep disorders. The craziest thing about this “condition” is that it seems the victims die of nightmares!?:

Since 1977, more than a hundred Southeast Asian immigrants in the U.S., primarily ethnic Hmong from Laos, have died from a mysterious disorder known as Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome, according to reports by the U.S. Center for Disease Control. The victims were mostly men in their 30s or older, who were apparently in good health when they died in their sleep for no apparent reason.

"The victim has no known antecedent illnesses, and there are no factors  that might precipitate cardiac arrest," the Cambridge History of Disease notes. "At autopsy, no cause of death can be identified in the heart, lung or brain. Postmortem toxicologic screening tests reveal no poisons."

Shelley Adler, a professor of integrative medicine at the University of San Francisco, California School of Medicine, speculates that the cataclysmic psychological stress caused by war, migration and rapid acculturation created such wrenching nightmares among Hmong refugees that they died. In other words, nightmares killed them.

Doing some additional research on Wikipedia reveals that the current operating hypothesis appears to be cardiovascular – mainly that SUNDS victims could all have potentially died of ventricular fibrillation (a lethal heart arrhythmia where the heart ceases to pump normally). There’s even a syndrome named for this – Brugada syndrome – with 6 associated genes which show a higher risk for the condition.

Now, in all honesty, I’m not sure how you diagnose a patient who’s already dead (esp. when autopsies and histories reveal nothing significant), but that leads us to the prognosis:

1. If no one you know died suddenly in their sleep, you probably won’t either (it’s at least partially genetic)
2. If someone you know did die suddenly in their sleep, go bulk up on Thiamine (Vitamin B-1), get routine heart monitoring, and maybe get a cardiac defibrillator implanted into your chest.

On that note, happy holidays everyone!

Paradigm Shift@Home

I recently made a post on Bench Press about the potential for distributed computing (projects like Folding@Home and SETI@Home which combine the computing power from volunteers over the internet to do supercomputer style calculations) to help any initiative needing extra number-crunching power, as well as steps that the scientific and distributed computing communities can take to help get us there, as well as what I think is a valuable paradigm shift in science that the distributed computing approach represents:

What impresses me the most about projects like Folding@Home and SETI@Home is that they have defined some brilliant new ways to do science:

• Use the internet – It’s a common theme on Bench Press, but with more and more people having faster and faster access to the internet, the potential for distributed computing becomes greater and greater. As Folding@Home demonstrated, such approaches can produce computing systems as powerful (or potentially more powerful) as leading supercomputer systems at a fraction of the cost.
• Mobilize the public – We’ve discussed ways for the scientific community to reach out to the public like using social media and creating interactive applications/tools for the public to use, but efforts like Folding@Home illustrate a way to not only reach out to the public but to get them vested in science. In a world where high school science teachers find it difficult to get teens interested in science, initiatives like Folding@Home have created a system where teams of individuals compete on who can contribute the most to the effort! Instead of simply hoping that the public will continue to fund and listen, why not borrow a page from the many existing cancer-walk-a-thons and make it easy for the public to get involved?
• Leverage new technology – It may not come as a surprise to our readers that a significant amount of the computational power at Folding@Home comes from graphics cards and Playstation 3’s. But, while many “mainstream” supercomputers ignored the new power afforded by these new chip types, Folding@Home developed software so that volunteers could quickly and easily use these powerful chips to boost their Folding@Home scores. The Folding@Home initiative also developed software to take advantage of innovations AMD and Intel included in their chips (new multi-core architectures and special instructions to speed up calculations). Is it any wonder, then, that Sony, NVIDIA, and AMD have all publically announced support for the initiative with their products?

For more details on distributed computing and some of my thoughts on how the scientific community can better adopt these, check out the post at http://blog.benchside.com/2008/12/distribute-compute/

Dilbert does subprime

If you’ve ever wondered just how the decision-making process which caused countless (supposedly) intelligent financial analysts to buy into securitized subprime mortgages and then cause the global economy to tank, a recent Dilbert might just have the answer:

I think “it’s called math” and “I feel all savvy” pretty much wrap it up.

For those of you who are wondering how seriously to take this analogy – the logic behind securitization is basically just as Dogbert explained (buy up a lot of bad mortgages/cows and expect at least some of them to make it). The cartoon does leave out one (very dangerous) assumption which, if true, almost makes the whole scheme make sense (but just almost): mainly that the price of cows/homes is always increasing – so much so that even if one sick cow dies, you can still make a fair amount selling the carcass. That this entire scheme depended on being able to sell dead cows (foreclosed homes/re-financed mortgages) for more than they were originally worth is still mindboggling to me.

The first lady of Star Trek

I just discovered, with much sadness, that Majel Roddenberry, wife of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, the actress who played the ever-memorable Lwaxana Troi, and the voice of all the various incarnations of Star Trek’s “computers” has just passed away.

I just spent the past couple of minutes browsing her Wikipedia page, and found some amusing anecdotes:

She first appeared in Star Trek’s initial pilot, "The Cage", as the USS Enterprise’s unnamed first officer. Barrett was romantically involved with Roddenberry, and the idea of having an otherwise unknown woman in a leading role because she was the producer’s girlfriend is said to have infuriated NBC executives who insisted that Roddenberry give the role to a man. In Star Trek Memories, William Shatner noted that women viewers felt she was "pushy" and "annoying" and thought that "Number One shouldn’t be trying so hard to fit in with the men." Barrett often joked that Roddenberry, given the choice between keeping Mr. Spock (whom the network also hated) or the woman character, "kept the Vulcan and married the woman, ’cause he didn’t think Leonard [Nimoy] would have it the other way around."

I don’t know what Gene Roddenberry was thinking, but Star Trek would always cast her in the role of women who fell in love with men who could/would never return their affection: first as a woman who fell in love with the non-emotional Spock [on the left] and later as the outrageous mother of Deanna Troi [on the right] who chased Captain Picard (who had a big sign with “not interested”) and Odo (who was, very cutely and madly in love with Kira):

Although I wasn’t necessarily looking forward to the new Star Trek movie, that Mrs. Roddenberry reprises her role as “the computer” in it has just made it a lot more meaningful for me.

RIP.

(Image Credit) (Image Credit) (Image Credit)

The Media sucks at covering Larry

A friend of mine (Lisa X) shared this article from the New York Times on Larry Summers’s appointment to Obama’s economic team. I was originally going to just leave a comment on my Google shared list , but my list of comments got so long I felt I needed to actually make a blog post on it.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“Barack thinks with his mind open,” said Charles Ogletree, a law professor at Harvard. “Larry thinks with his mouth open.”

Aides to President-elect Obama say a top administration role for Mr. Summers once would have seemed to be a remote possibility because of his controversial tenure at Harvard, during which he angered women and members of the faculty.

From the moment he stepped down, Mr. Summers, advised by powerful supporters who said he had been unfairly maligned, worked hard at repairing his reputation. He defended his time at Harvard but admitted mistakes; wrote a column that repositioned him politically and predicted the coming trauma; helped build a research group that supplied Mr. Obama with economic ideas and aides; and strengthened ties to women who helped dispel the accusation — stemming from a 2005 talk in which Mr. Summers wondered out loud about a relative lack of women in top academic science and engineering posts — that he thought poorly of their scientific abilities. He helped practically anyone who asked for advice, like undergraduates, economists and candidates.

But it was the financial crisis, or a series of phone calls about it, that almost instantly resuscitated Mr. Summers’s career. 

And some predict that Mr. Obama’s style could mellow that of Mr. Summers. 

Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor, said Mr. Obama’s “affability and inclusiveness might help nurture those same qualities in Larry, even though those haven’t been among Larry’s notable strengths.” 

And, some thoughts on this article’s sheer ridiculousness in hyping meaningless trivialities to the verge of lying:

• Everyone seems to re-use this picture — Larry, why would you look so evil while the whole world is watching you get nominated to join Barack “Jesus Christ” Obama’s superstar economic team?
• The media really loves to hype up everything. It’s nowhere near that dramatic:

• Summers never said he felt that women were stupider — he was commenting on the standard deviation of standardized test scores being higher for men rather than women as a hypothetical thought exercise on why there were more male faculty. Doesn’t mean the analysis was right, nor does it justify the president of a national university saying such a controversial thing, but get the facts straight.
• Larry Summers does not just walk around spewing forth prejudices and judgment, as is charaterized here. At least, not around me — think about it, he held senior positions at the World Bank, in the Treasury Department, and was a top professor — you learn a little tact after all of that.
• Larry Summers has always been incredibly helpful and reachable to undergrads, economists, think tanks, etc. This wasn’t a sudden change inspired by some desire to get back in the public’s good graces.
• Summer’s career did not need “resuscitating” — he was making a ton of cash at D.E. Shaw, doing a lot of good by joining the board for Teach for America, and getting a great deal of popularity while writing for the Financial Times … the phone call from Obama? Definitely kicked his career up a notch — if you define “career” solely from a Washington DC perspective.
• Summers has not suddenly “moved to the left”. He’s always been center-left, and I fail to see how his new role has suddenly made him a bleeding heart as characterized in this paper?
• I liked Larry. But, seriously — its not like I had pizza with him every week (and my year was the year when he did that). I gave him a standing ovation at commencement, yes, but unless my memory fails me, my class gave standing ovations to lots of people… this doesn’t make him uniquely popular/suited to undergrads.
• “poor at reading others” — the only people who say that are Harvard faculty who care more for their ego than for meaningful reform. Greg Mankiw (who sits on the opposite side of the political spectrum) thinks very highly of Summers. There’s a reason, President Faust hasn’t really changed any of Summers’s agenda…
• Obama is awesome — and yes, he may just be Jesus or Superman or whoever, but Summers doesn’t need “mellowing” and I highly doubt that a career politician will suddenly make Summers into something he’s not — he survived the Clinton years and the World Bank years after all…

(Image Credit )

Box of crickets

I’ve been very impressed by my manager’s ability to:

• follow all the technical details of some of the discussions that go on with our current client (a major technology company)
• understand the nuances of the large, sophisticated models I’m oftentimes asked to build

I think it’s a testament to the consulting industry’s model of trying to hire versatile, intelligent people who can quickly come up to speed on anything.

Of course, if he didn’t, I would of course have to bring in a box of crickets to keep me company during meetings (HT: Dilbert, who else?):

I wonder if there’s a good business to be made in selling these…

The QBook

Last week, pictures surfaced of Qualcomm’s Netbook concept design, powered by their Snapdragon platform – something I’ve decided to call the QBook. I posted some technical specs and pictures over on Xhibiting:

Although no specific product has been announced, Qualcomm did promise a release next year (I know what’ll be on my Coveted for Christmas wishlist) as well as present a reference design (which are where these pictures are from, HT: Silicon.com) showing off the following features:

• built-in 3G networking
• integrated GPS (sorry, not even Christine’s baby, the new Lenovo IdeaPad, has that)
• Bluetooth and WiFi
• High-def video recording and playback
• MediaFLO (mobile TV)
• WSXGA resolution (1440×900)
• touchscreen capability
• tablet capability
• swivel-screen with QWERTY keyboard
• extra-long battery life

For more pictures and details, check out the post at http://www.xhibitr.com/xhibiting/2008/12/the-qbook/