Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Just back from a trip to New York City.  Richard and I flew back from Teterboro airport in his fire-breathing turbocharged Mooney.  It was JFK, Jr.-style haze all the way to Boston and a fair amount of time inside actual clouds.  I’m studying to become a flight instructor so I did 30 minutes of instrument flying from the right seat, craning my neck to see the instruments that are placed in front of the left seat.  As we drove back to my apartment it was nice to see how much progress Harvard is making on a $100 million construction project two blocks from where I live.  They tore down two 30-40-year-old faculty and research office buildings and are rebuilding them exactly the same size but more opulent.

After I’d carted my purchases from New York’s Strand Bookstore upstairs I turned on my PC, still wondering how an organization could grow so rich that they could afford to tear down buildings every 30 years.  Waiting in my inbox was the following email:

Our friend will be writing Harvard a check for almost $33,000 in September (tuition plus “health fees”).

I’m just back from four nights in Naples, Maine.  This town is in the Sebago Lakes region northwest of Portland and it provides a vivid demonstration of the power of urban planning.  Nearly every small town in Latin America is built around a central plaza where the citizens gather at various hours to meet friends, play chess, etc.  Small streets radiate from the plaza and hold additional shops and restaurants.  Any highway with heavy traffic is typically at least 5 or 10 blocks from the plaza.  In Naples and all of the surrounding towns, by contrast, there really aren’t any streets except to provide access to private houses.  A “town” is defined by the intersection of two busy state highways.  All of the public facilities of the town such as shops, schools, hotels, and restaurants are built along the highways near the intersection.  Thus if you’re not in a private home you’re within 25 feet of a 18-wheeler truck going 50 mph.

The handful of locals whom I met reported that despite living in the area for 20 years or more they’d not made too many friends and had a hard time meeting people.  You very seldom ran into a friend serendipitously.  If you belonged to the Lions Club or had a kid in the school you might meet at a planned activity but that was about it for social life.

(In case you’re curious as to why I wanted to spend four nights at the intersection of two busy state highways it was to add a Single-Engine Seaplane rating to my Commercial pilot’s certificate.  The process consisted of about 100 practice takeoffs and landings on various lakes in a 1946 Piper Cub on floats, followed by a checkride with an FAA examiner.  Sadly I won’t be able to do much with this rating.  Due to the fact that seaplanes combine all of the hazards of boats and airplanes in one machine the insurance is almost 10X the cost of what you pay for the same plane on wheels.  A rental seaplane is an uninsurable risk and therefore there are almost no places in the U.S. where you can rent a seaplane and head off without an instructor.)

Fifteen of us gathered last night for a screening of the 1992 Tim Robbins political satire Bob Roberts.  This mockumentary of a folksinging conservative Wall Street trader turned politician has held up surprisingly well.  In the background of the movie, President Bush is in the White House and American troops are about to invade Iraq.  Gore Vidal does a great job playing a Ted Kennedy-style career senator.  The songs are fun but sadly the soundtrack has never been made available.

My favorite part of the movie is when Bob Roberts closes a letter to a 7-year-old girl in Vermont with the admonition “Don’t do crack; it’s a ghetto drug.”

This is the perfect movie for an election-year party.

Google is supposed to be going public soon at some sort of fantastically high valuation.  A friend asked “How can they possibly grow into that?  What can they do besides search?”

If Google is to reach and sustain a Microsoft-style valuation perhaps the best way for them to do this is by providing alternatives to what Microsoft provides.  Microsoft is the kind of desktop applications.  You buy software from a store and install it on your machine.  If a new version comes out you figure out how to buy and install an upgrade.  If you get a new computer you spend several days reinstalling all of your applications, probably buying new copies of the ones whose installation CD-ROMs you can’t find anymore.  If you’re traveling and need to edit a document or spreadsheet, tough luck.  All of your data is trapped on your home or office computer.

In the Internet enthusiasm of the 1990s various people predicted that desktop applications would be replaced by Web-based applications  For most users this has come true in the case of email.  If you’re a Hotmail or Google Mail user you can read email from any Internet-connected computer in the world.  There are a fair number of Internet-based photo sharing and database services.  What is then left on one’s PC?  Word processing, spreadsheet, and PowerPoint documents.  If Google were to offer a private database service and a suite of reasonably powerful application programs usable from a Web browser, this might be a serious competitor to Microsoft Office.

So that’s my prediction:  while Microsoft is trying to replace Google with MSN Search, Google will be trying to replace Microsoft Office with Google Web-based Office.

On Sunday I attended a block party hosted by a friend up in Newburyport.  He had hired an English circus family to perform and afterwards I served some food and drink to the 13-year-old and 16-year-old members of this family.  Unlike the typical sullen American teenager they had exquisite manners.  It turned out that they had never been to school.  They’d lived their whole lives traveling around with their parents and siblings, oftentimes in a smallish RV (they started calling themselves “the Sardine Family” because of these cramped quarters).  All of their education came from their parents and from older siblings.

Could it be that going into a community of thousands of teenagers (i.e., school) is bad for a kid’s manners?   And that spending time with a high percentage of adults (i.e., home school) is good for a kid’s manners?

While driving up here to Naples, Maine for some seaplane training I listened to a lecture on political theory by Dennis Dalton, a professor at Barnard.  One interesting point was that Aristotle did not approve of voting except by middle-class or richer people.  His theory was that a poor person is likely to be illiterate and that, without having much property, won’t have any stake in stability.  Thus if Aristotle were remaking Iraq only perhaps 10 percent of the population would be entitled to vote.  In the U.S. maybe 80 percent of us would get to vote (though of course only 40-some percent bother).

Dalton talked about how the U.S. illustrates all of the ills of Capitalism predicted by Karl Marx.  In particular Dalton cited the percentage of children living in poverty here in the U.S. (”living in poverty” means in a family whose income is less than the Federal Poverty Level, a number determined by trying to figure out what the minimum necessary income is for a normal American life).

If the quantity of children in the U.S. were fixed it seems obvious that the higher the percentage of kids living in poverty the worse the situation.  But the quantity of children is not fixed.  People decide to have an extra child based on their perception of how easy it will be to take care of an extra child.  Perhaps a high percentage of children living in poverty means that poor people feel comfortable with (a) the  level of government support to be expected for that child (e.g., Medicaid, AFDC), and (b) the ultimate career prospects for that child once grown up.

What would stop a Reagan-style optimist from saying “look at all the children that our poor people are having, confident that their future will be bright” and citing that as an example of what a fantastic country this is for a poor family?

While driving up here to Naples, Maine for some seaplane training I listened to a lecture on political theory.  The professor was talking about Karl Marx and how the U.S. is a perfect illustration of all the ills of Capitalism described by Marx.

Just back from a workshop at MIT on technology for community-building in America.  The focus turned out to be poor communities.  Apparently the middle class don’t need community because they can enjoy their suburban comforts.  I reflected that technology has so far mostly harmed the poor in the U.S.  In the old days when telecommunications and transportation were expensive there was a real need in our economy for the labor of the lowest economic class.  Maybe they’d work in a factory or do some kind of clerical job.  In 2004, however, our businesses can get all of the unskilled labor that they want in China or India.  Fear of crime was once a motivator for trying to improve poor neighborhoods.  But improved management techniques, universal cell phones for calling 911, innovations like the gated community and security cameras everywhere, and pure technology such as the fancy alarm system have lessened this fear.

The elephant in the room that nobody wanted to talk about was education.  The non-profit world likes to think about affordable housing, leadership development, better health care, specialized training, etc.  If everyone in a poor neighborhood were educated to the standard of the average Harvard graduate all of the other problems would be solved.  Someone who is really well educated probably has a good job and makes a lot of money and can afford whatever housing is out there.  Someone who is really well educated may find that others naturally want to follow him or her so leadership development isn’t that important.  Someone who is really well educated will probably have better habits and won’t need as much health care (it is the college grads who wear seat belts).  Someone who is really well educated can read a For Dummies book and learn how to use a computer application.

Schools for poor people are government schools.  Everyone who works there is either a bureaucrat or a union member.  None of these people incurs any kind of pay loss or risk of firing if the kids remain totally ignorant.  All attempts at reform over the past 40 years have failed.  So people give up.  One community organizing expert sitting next to me responded to my observation that if everyone had a first class education the other stuff would fix itself with ”that’s just not realistic”.

Working from the assumption that most people in a poor community are doomed to a third-rate education, what can we do for them with technology?  It turns out that the answer is “not much”.  Foundations fund thousands of small groups nationwide and they spend $billions on IT (i.e., indirectly the foundations are spending $billions every year on IT).  None, however, has a large enough budget to do more than buy packaged software or write some half-working half-documented custom software.  All the groups complain that there is no packaged software that actually serves their needs and that they can’t afford to develop full custom apps.  Although their IT needs are fairly similar none of them have a large enough budget to attract commercial software companies except for fundraising management software.

You’d think that the open source revolution would have attracted some notice.  Programmers who weren’t paid a dime generated a tremendous amount of social benefits worldwide.  What more effective use of grant money than to pay some programmers to develop open-source software products and toolkits for common non-profit organization requirements?  Yet nobody at the conference had ever heard of a foundation funding an open-source software project.

One bright spot… a handful of folks had set up free wireless Internet access blankets over struggling neighborhoods in various parts of the country.  All of the academic papers written about the “Digital Divide” turned out to be nonsense.  As soon as a poor person had an opportunity to get broadband without being reamed out for $50/month by the local telco or cable monopoly the poor person was able to leap right over the exotic language and cultural barriers that sociologists had posited.  I.e., it turned out that these folks were poor, not stupid.

At one end of Cambridge we have Larry Summers dissing the ladies for not being hardcore math nerds.  While the women are using their mediocre math skills to become surgeons, corporate lawyers, corporate leaders (go Carly Fiorina!), McKinsey consultants, etc., what are the guys doing?  I went to the other end of Cambridge to find out, i.e., to the police station.  At the Cambridge (Massachusetts) Police Station there is wall where they keep photo binders of perpetrators.  One large bookcase was filled with photos of white males.  Another large bookcase, equal in size, was filled with photos of black males.  A third bookshelf was only partially filled up with miscellany: Asians, Hispanics, a small section for black females, and just one or two binders of white females.  According to http://cambridgema.usl.myareaguide.com/census.html, white males constitute only about 35% of the Cambridge population and black males about 6%.  Yet these two groups apparently account for almost all of the criminals who get caught.  Either women are too busy in Med school or they are able to avoid being apprehended in their crimes because their minds aren’t wandering off thinking about differential geometry problems.

Hmm.. it appears that for $25/month we Broadband Achievers can transfer an existing phone number to www.lingo.com, an Internet Protocol telephony service, and get unlimited calling domestically and to Western Europe.  Should we sign up and start calling random people in France, Spain, Germany, Italy to discuss the big issues?

[Would multi-lingual readers please fill up the comment section with French, Spanish, German, and Italian language translations of the following potentially useful phrase:  “Why can’t you speak English like an educated person?”]

Update:  I actually did try to sign up to Lingo immediately after posting this entry and 12 hours later.  Their server responded with “No backend server available for connection” and “A java.lang.IllegalArgumentException exception was thrown and not handled by any Page Flow.”  It seems as though Java, the SUV of programming tools, is not working out too well for these folks.  Let’s hope that the actual phone service was not built by the same programmers and/or that these folks don’t suffer the same fate as my students who were using Java.