ha!

Ha! I'm getting better at this - I am happy to report that I can now get through The Economist in a single one-hour sitting without threatening to shred it to pieces ! (Obviously I haven't lost any of my passion for life ;) ).

Let's do things by topic this time:
PERSONAL
"More than 100 people were arrested in Guinea, after an apparent attempt to kill President Lansana Conté last week. He is ill and has no obvious successor; Guineans worry that his death might spark a civil war"
Word on the street (i.e. my sister who lives there and called two days ago) is that it was staged (by the president) to (1) attract popular pity and (2) give himself the ability to imprison random people he had grudges against - although they had nothing to do with the coup. That and the price of rice, the staple food, has more than tripled in the past 10 months. Nice.

SOCIAL
"The global birth rate fell to a new low. The average woman in the developing world now has 3.9 babies over a lifetime, compared with 5.9 in the 1970s, according to the United Nations." Oh by the way, I'm in the fun process of applying for jobs, including some positions in UN organisations. Wouldn't it be fascinating?

"Brazil. Taming an urban monster." article on the challenges for the mayor of Sao Paolo.
We're doing a very similar assignment on Mexico City, and the challenges of balancing horrible air quality and economic development.
I also got landed the fun assignment of writing 1,000 words on Artificial Life. I may have sounded sarcastic (for a change?), but I actually love the topic of ALife. It was my favourite class at MIT, and the one I got to TA. So if you ever want to know about Braitenberg vehicles, Conway's Game of Life, Ray's Tierra, Karl Sims' evolutionary creatures, or the Red Queen's paradox, give me a shout. I think I'll end the assignment though by talking about the links to spirituality. It's a bit dangerous, but it's so interesting to see the similarities between the kinds of work certain people do in Artificial Intelligence and the religious stories they inherited. One of my professors' theory was basically that researchers were using AI to enact their religious background. Anyway, that's a long, wild tangent from the topic of Brazil.


"Nepal. The education system is a casualty of Nepal's Maoist insurgency."
Let me just put a plug in for a non-profit started by a fellow MIT student houser. It's NCEF for Nepalese Children's Education Fund (http://www.nepalchildren.org) and does just that: put kids through school.

Let me also talk about another wonderful experience. There were 1,600 of us singing together for a Tsunami fundraising event. Beautiful choral works in a great church at the center of town. There wasn't much room left for an audience, so apparently people crowded outside in the town square to listen. It was a truly unforgettable experience.

ECONOMIC
"Japan has released preliminary figures indicating that China (including Hong Kong) had overtaken the United States to become its biggest trading partner in 2004". It's happening, folks... Bubye USA...

"How cheap air fares are bringing Europeans together"
We had a terrible experience with RyanAir ten days ago. We decided to take advantage of my whooping 2 days of break in between an intensive course and the second term to go to Rome. Fabulous time in Rome of course. However, the way back was painful to say the least. I did a little research, given as it was that I had to hand in a paper on airlines' corporate strategies two days later, and found that RyanAir has a horrific customer sat problem. The worst in Europe. You do really get what you pay for. And if you don't pay for the extra insurance, if your luggage is lost, they don't owe you a dime nor an apology. Looks like the too much cost-cutting line was crossed way back. It's really too bad for those of us who wanted to believe in a free lunch - I mean a $1 airfare to another country.

SOFTWARE
"Google launched an online facility that allows people to search for television programme stills. The service will eventually expand to include video clips." Who is not working at Google these days?

compared with...
"Microsoft decided not to continue fighting a European Union antitrust decision..."

OXBRIDGE (=Oxford-Cambridge for the unitiated)
"Oxford wants to be more like Harvard. That will annoy a lot of people."
At the basis for the excellence of the undergraduate teaching at Oxbridge is the concept of supervision. Supervisions are sort of like tutorials, except that they're done an individual or pair basis. So you get very targeted teaching; during supervision you can bet your supervisor will find out how well you're doing, which means pushing you if you can handle it and explaining the tough parts more thoroughly if you're struggling. It works extraordinarily well. That is until the ugly head of capitalism rears its head. Let's see, what is more cost-effective: a tutorial class for 25 students done by a poor grad student, or an individual supervision? mmh... That's basically what the article is talking about. Interestingly, Cambridge hasn't mentioned anything like that yet, but they are also under terrible financial pressure.

Unfortunately, not all is rosy in Cambridge. Some of you might have heard my frustration when once we were discussing water resources in class in the context of sustainable development and some undergrads majoring in engineering were simply proposing that countries without proper water resource be entirely wiped off the map. (That didn't go over too well with my friend from Jordan). Another friend of mine was telling me a similar story - she's in political science and they were discussing democracy and why it was now a prevalent concept/model/framework. The undergrads had all kinds of deep thoughts, but none of them thought about the fact that it could simply be a case of "the winner writes history". Now, I don't have anything against democracy, I'm just cautious about ivory tower grads shaping the world without any experience of reality. It's like the numerous courses we had to attend about corporate strategy and corporate culture, etc. from academics who not one day in their lives have worked for a private corporation.

While we're at it, another note on Cambridge: did you know that Trinity (College) is the 3rd largest fortune in England?? They could afford to not charge any room and board fee to their students, but since they're already the most attractive Cambridge college (half the Nobel prizes went here), the other colleges made Trinity sign a contract stating they would still charge the same kind of rates as the other colleges.

I think that'll be it for this post. Next time maybe I'll do a bit more on books I'm reading - unless you have a request, in which case send it alone. Ciao!

CSR

CSR = Corporate Social Responsibility.

It makes the front page of this week's economist, yet the magasine's purpose is to shoot it down. It even goes so far as to claim that it's bad for everyone. It's quite a feat of journalism. I'll let you judge from extracts...

"Simply put, advocates of CSR work from the premise that unadorned capitalims fails to serve the public interest" (Yes, and? Doesn't everyone agree with that?)

"Thus, the selfish pursuit of profit serves a social purpose. And this is putting it mildly." (Actually, that's generally not the cause. There are at least 6 well-known categories of market failure, which encompass just about every situation you can think of, not least of which the "tragedy of the commons" whereby public goods, such as the environment, is always damaged beyond reasonable when selfish pursuit of personal profit is permitted.)

"The standard of living people in the West enjoy today is due to little else but the selfish pursuit of profit." (Really? then surely we don't need our impressive defense spendings, do we? It sounds like good economics and free market capitalism is the answer and shield to any problem.)

"There is another danger too: namely, that CSR will distract attention from genuine problems of business ethics that do need to be addressed." (oh the last resort argument! and what might those be since you failed to identify them?)

A note to a dear friend: the picture that accompanies the test is of nail polish being applied to a beast's claws ;)

the flaw of average drunks

That was one of the lessons of an intensive December course. Basically, the expected value of the average isn't the same as the average of the expected values. A much nicer way to put it follows...

It's the story of a drunk who staggers back and forth between two traffic lanes. The state of the drunk at his average position is alive. But the average state of the drunk is still dead.(Savage & Van Allen, 2002)

mini-MBA

Whether we like it or not, we're forced to attend the damn course I'm currently sitting on. The finance day was the most surprisingly interesting - not because of the topic, really, but because of the excellent lecturer.

I've actually been thinking about Microsoft quite a bit. It all started with one of the readings, the introduction chapter to "The Innovator's Dilemna: when new technologies cause great firms to fail" by C. Christensen. I guess this is nothing new for those of you who've been in business school recently, but it struck about how relevant it really was, especially wrt the international group. The basic ideas are, "there is something about the way decisions get made in successful organizations that sows the seeds of eventual failure". "good management" practices are eventually terrible. the problem is that successful companies don't invest in 'disruptive technologies' because 1) of lower margins, lower profits are typical of disruptive technologies (at least at first) 2) they're first commercialized in emerging or insignificant markets and 3) they're usually initially embraced by the least profitable customres in a market. "the larger and more successful an organization becomes, the weaker the argument that emergingin markets can remain useful engines for growth.

Doesn't that sound like the prepay hotmail model? Think about it - think Atlantis, think Avatars, think 3 degrees, think Google, think Netscape, think just about anything that didn't come out of top-down Redmond strategy meetings.

The other funny reading is a paper on how Microsoft teams operate! you'd be surprised how every single course seems to pick on the company - whether it be from a corporate strategy point of view, monopoly and bundling pov, large margins, corporate culture... this one details the product life cycle and all the things that have become second nature. it's quite fun to see it dissected by someone else actually. unfortunately it's a bit outdated and doesn't cover at all the challenges of web product development. it also makes it look like things are running much less chaotically than they actually are !


finally, i've had some requests re: what I'm reading these days. I finished the Sally Hacker sociology of women and technology (very good, strong recommendation). I skimmed through one on women and citizenship in europe (boring), read through one on Africa's science and technology policies (ok, very specialized), and i'm currently in the middle of Max Weber's "The protestant ethic & the spirit of capitalism". very famous book on how protestant (specifically lutheran & 'sects') influences created the environment that made harsh capitalism ok and acceptable. comparing with catholicism where interests and banking were pretty much banned by the church as evil, comparing with workers that worked only as hard as they needed to make a living, with the new ideas of doing god's work by working extremely hard (work as a vocation) and accumulating wealth, and the new capitalist speeches on productivity. I thought it'd be dreadfully dry, but not at all, i'm actually enjoying it greatly. it's much more relevant to today's world even than I thought. And it's fascinating to see how quickly norms change.
It's interesting too to see such an official literature cover something I've always noticed, which is the relationship of different cultures with money - whereas in France it's vulgar, impolite to talk about money (and arrogant if you talk about it to flaunt it), in the US it's more along the lines of "why have money if you can't flaunt it", and it's definitely ok to ask people how much they paid for something or brag that you got such a great deal on such and such plane ticket, etc. interesting to experience and read about in someone else's words.

that's it for now. ciao ciao.

the world's top currency

Good morning again,

Another quick session re: the usual suspect (magazine) ... They've got a great cynical tone this new year.

Currencies:
The dollar has been dethroned even sooner than we expected. Not by the euro, nor by the yen or the yuan, but by another increasingly popular global currency: frequent-flyer miles. Calculations by The Economist suggest that the total stock of unredeemed frequent-flyer miles is now worth more than all the dollar bills in circulation around the globe.
Central banks and finance ministries have a far greater interest in defending the value of frequent-flyer miles than in propping up the dollar. After all, their officials are continually criss-crossing the globe to attend meetings, racking up miles in their personal acounts. If their free first-class flight to the Caribbean is at risk, they are likely to fight to the death to stop a devaluation. Against such a competition, the dollar does not stand a chance.

The disaster:
If the tsunami weren't bad enough news in Sri Lanka, it's also been suggested that it moved around landmines, thereby confusing everyone as to the new location of the mines. It might be good for both sides to think twice before going on the offensive.

"Disaster aid is generally thought to be different: everyone is for it. Development aid, by contrast, is often overtly political (it tends to go to friends) and always controversial (is it squandered? does it breed dependency?). (...) (Among the pet schemes the aid issue was being attached to: ) American aid in the tsunami region is meant to dry up "pools of dissatisfaction" that led to terrorism, said Mr Powell. That's "langue de bois" as we call in French, and a dark motive.

On a more light-headed note: drinking in Britain.
The average British adult drinks 12% more than when Labour came to power, and more than twice as much as in the middle of the 20th century.
(I actually found that surprising. Whenever I look at a movie from the 50's, they're always drinking (elegantly, mind you); I was convinced there was rampant alcoholism back then. Ah, movies and reality...)

us poor engineers and scientists:
There's general moaning about a supposed lack of techies. But... According to a report from UK GRAD, a government funded group, science and engineering graduates have the highest rate of unemployment, at every level from first degree to PhD. And although, when they do find work, their salaries are slightly higher than average, they are rising more slowly than most. So what's the answer? It's the technicians, not the highly-trained engineers and scientists that are in big demand.

finally, some good news from the US congress: after all, they did not pass the law to protect DeLay and loosen ethics rule.

our friends in the South:
Mexico's president, Vicente Fox, has called these economic migrants "heroes". They send back some $14 billion a year in remittances - more than Mexico's booming tourist industry brings in. As Mexicans see it, they also keep the American economy afloat on cheap and reliable labour. That is the premise of a recent film, "A Day without Mexicans". It is a satire that imagines California's Mexican maids, nannies and hedge-trimmers downing tools for a day to watch their employers suffer a collective nervous breakdown as they try to fix their breakfast orange juice.
sounds fun. anyone seen it?

Susan Sontag: Her obituary appears in that issue. Unfortunately it's a huge disappointment as they manage to subtly make her appear less credible and much less influential than she really was.

back in the groove....

hello everyone,
I'm back in Cambridge, and (unfortunately) classes started again today. That means 9 hours a day for six days of corporate strategy, finance, and a whole lotta other stuff I'm not particularly interested in sitting through. It also means it's time to hand in all the assignments we've all been slaving over during 'the break'. But, worry not, nothing could keep me from reading (and commenting on) the Economist.

A quick mention on the January 1st edition: the article "Ever higher society, ever harder to ascend" (With a cool rock-climbing picture if I may add).
subtitle: "Whatever happened to the belief that any American could get to the top?" It's a long article, so i'm cutting a lot out, but you'll get the picture.

"The United States likes to think of itself as the very embodiment of meritocracy: a country where people are judged on their individual abilites rather than their family connections. (...) Americans believed that equality of opportunity gave them an edge over the Old World, freeing them from debilitatin snobberies and at the same time enabling everyone to benefit form the abilites of the entire population. They still do. (...)
A growing body of evidence suggests that the meritocratic ideal is in trouble in America. Income inequality is growing to levels not seen since the Gilded Age, around the 1880s. But social mobility is not increasing at anything like the same pace: would-be Horatio Algers are finding it no easier to climb from rags to riches, while the children of the privileged have a greater chance of staying at the top of the socal heap.
Between 1979 and 2000 the real income of households in the lowest fifth grew by 6.4%, while that of households in the top fifth grew by 70%. The family inocme of the top 1% grew by 184% - and that of the top 0.1% and 0.01% grew even faster.
Thirty years ago the average real annual compensation of the top 100 chief executives was 39 times the pay of the average worker. Today it is over 1,000 times the pay of the average worker. In 2001 the top 1% of households earned 20% of all income and held 33.4% of all net worth. Not since pre-Depression days has the top 1% taken such a big whack.

Most Americans see nothing wrong with inequality of income so long as it comes with plent of social mobility: it is simply the price paid for a dynamic economy. But the new rise in inequality does not seem to have come with a commensurate rise in mobility. There may even have been a fall. The most vivid evidence of social sclerosis comes from politics. A country where every child is supposed to be able to dream of becoming president is beginning to produce a self-perpetuating political elite. George Bush is the son of a president, the grandson of a senator, and the sprig of America's business aristocracy. John Kerry, thanks to a rich wife, is the richest man in a Senate full of plutocrats. (...) Al Gore was the son of a senator. Howard Brush Dean was also the product of the same blue-blooded world of private schools [as Kerry and Gore and the Bushes].

"legacy preferences", a programme for the children of alumni. In most Ivy League institutions, the eight supposedly most select universities of the north-east, "legacies" make up between 10% and 15% of every class. At Harvard they are three times more likely to be admitted than others. The students in America's places of higher education are increasingly becoming an oligarchy tempered by racial preferences. This is sad in itself, but even sadder when you consider the extraordinary role that the same universities played in promoting meritocracy in the first half of the 20th century (cf. James Conant's reforms, Harvard president 1933-53, to prevent American from producing an aristocracy).

The most remarkable feature of the continuing power of America's elite - and its growing grip on the political system - is how little comment it arouses. Britain would be in high dudgeon if its party leaders all came from Eton and Harrow. Perhaps one reason why the rise of caste politics raises so little comment is that something similar is happening throughout American society (...): in the Hollywood Hills or the canyons of Wall Street, in the Nashville recording studios or the clapboard houses of Cambridge, MA - you see elites mastering the art of perpetuating themselves. America is increasingly looking like imperial Britain, with dynastic ties proliferating, social circles interlocking, mechanisms of social exclusion strengthening and a gap widening between the people who make the decisions and shape the culture and the vast majority of ordinary working stiffs.

finally!

Finally a pleasing article from The Economist (Christmas special edition), titled nothing less than 'Capitalist, Sexist pigs'!

I quote... "But The Economist, apparently had more frontal nudity in its photographs than all the other magazines combined [in a study of the photographs of five news magazines from 1982 to 2000]. (...) Particularly curious to the authors was our use of sexual content to illustrate stories on topics such as finance and technology. A photograph of three bikini-clad beauty contestants, used to illustrate a story on financial regulation, with the caption "Pick your regulator", was both emblematic and problematic."

The whole article is worth reading actually, pages 151-152...

gender and technology from a sociologist's point of view

I'm back from delicious French food and finally the curse of the failed New Years in Paris has been broken -this year's was great. Except for the news of the catastrophe.


Been reading a book called "Doing it the hard way: Investigations of Gender and Technology", a compilation of sorts of the work of Sally Hacker, a sociologist who studied gender and technology, from AT&T's affirmative action mandate to agribusiness to MIT's classrooms to math as a selection criteria for engineering. Very interesting. A few passages...

Data to counter backlash myths around affirmative action: at AT&T 16,300 men gained formerly women's work, only 9,400 gained formerly men's work during these three years of affirmative action. Parallels Carol Jusenius's (1976) work showing that where decreasing sex segregation in employment occurs, it is primarily due to men performing traditionally women's work and not to women performing traditionally men's work.

"women and minorities functioned as a reserve labor army, particularly useful when a company moves rapidly to capture a new market or to change its technological base"

"With such stress on the rational and technical and on competition for grades rather than on comprehensive understanding, the most creative and sensitive students opt out; those who recognize and accept the game continue (Snyder, 1971).".

Engineers often hold the most conservative beliefs about social and cultural change (Ferguson, 1981).

Explicitly place women in work to be automated because 'women resist displacement less than men'.

Contrary to popular misconceptions, the data suggest that women are just as competent as men in mathematics. The 1911 US. Bureau of Education report noted that women were outperforming men for instance. "Women can surmount the barriers to male-dominated professions, in this case, perhaps, by "overcoming math anxiety", as Sheila Tobias titled her excellent work on the subject. But if a primary functon of mathematics courses is limiting the number and kind of applicants to a field, then large numbers of women (and men disadvantaged by race or class) mastering mathematical test taking would simply cause the criteria to shift. So, at the same time as we learn "how-to" -- today's fashin in literature, courses and programs -- we also need to understand how and why the professions selecte the standards of excellence they do. Otherwise, most women will remain at least a step behind".

"women need a larger view of how the world of work is changing so as not to fight merely for a place in things "as they are"".

3/4 of women workers in the US either have no husbands or their husbands earn less than $10,000/year (1980ish).