Category Archives: Academically speaking

Garbage can

This is the best Dilbert cartoon I have ever seen, and that says something. Of course there is an academic name for this situation, and it is called a garbage can, from Cohen, M. D., J. G. March, et al. (1972). “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice.” Administrative Science Quarterly 17(1).

Aw shucks, I’ll just post it:


Update 10 minutes later: Now it dawned on me – it is the garbage man saying this. Which leads me to think that Scott Adams has read a lot more organizational theory than he wants to let on.

Supply-side supplied

Bruce Bartlett argues that supply-side economics has jumped the shark and now occupy the same place in history as Keynesianism did in the early 80s.
Hard to disagree: Any management fad (and, by extension, any school of economics) comes up to address a real problem, then expands in scale and scope, failing to recognize why it started in the first place.
Since the last sentence in itself is a Russell’s paradox, I better stop here.

Warming causes CO2?

Does global warming cause CO2 buildup, and not the other way around. Interesting discussion at Stubborn facts, summarized by Stuart Buck.

I don’t know myself – in cases like this, I would like to see the data, but as one commenter points out, the data is very hard to get. How I wish for a Hans Rosling-like source of data on environmental change, something you could put into Gapminder and see what came out.

Yes, pollution is bad, as anyone who has visited Beijing and Shanghai knows the second they step of the airplane. It is also a byproduct of certain stages in a country’s economic development, and the two biggest countries in the world are currently in that stage. That is the real problem here, not whether I should get a Prius I cannot afford or start biking to work.

Where is the data in all this? What kind of data is there that either isn’t very short-term (100-200 years) or very vague. How much does CO2-from cars matter compared to, say, Mount Pinatubo? Yes, I know that there are 3500 cars registered new in Beijing every day, and I get an instant headache the second I leave the airplane coming there. But coal-burning London was worse in the beginning of the century.

Is it nature or is it us? Most expert says it is us, the one that convinced me was Stephen Emmott, but I would so like to see the data.

Jim McKenney dies at 77

18-mckenney1-225I just got word that Jim McKenney, Harvard Business School Professor (Emeritus), died last week.

Jim was responsible for the MIS Doctoral students at HBS and my thesis advisor after Benn Konsynski left for Emory in 1992. Jim taught me many things, such as interview technique, longitudinal research strategies, and how to understand corporate strategy from behavior rather than theory. Most of all he taught me how to draw parallels between technical, organizational and societal evolution. He was an expert on the US airline industry (he was on the board of Continental Airlines) and had life-time memberships to most airline clubs, as well as a strong network of contacts in all kinds of transportation businesses.

Jim was defiantly original in everything he did. Small and wiry, he wore a bowtie and spoke quietly and eruditely in large classrooms, constantly surprising students with wry observations on why organizations did as they did. I still remember how I talked to him about an organization that did something specific (I have forgotten what). As I was trying to work out why, Jim said “That’s not a strategy – that’s just bad management!”

Jim had a big Victorian (I think) house with self-tended garden in Lexington where he and his lovely wife Mary held annual summer parties for faculty and friends. As he became my thesis advisor and I also worked as his research assistant, I frequently made the trip up to Lexington to retrieve papers or ask questions.

Jim is one of two reasons (the other is Benn) that I (and my good colleague Ramiro) wear bowties. His reason for wearing them was practical – when he arrived at HBS, he was a poor junior faculty with worn shirts collars, and the bow tie hid that fact effectively. That’s the story he told, anyway. I have a sneaking suspicion his real reason was to be original, though, to mark a distance to the slicker parts of HBS and cut a noticeable and contrarian figure around campus.

Jim was stricken with Alzheimer towards the end of the 90s, and we lost touch. I last saw him in 99, still living in his large house, still gardening, but gradually being reduced. Still, you could find that spark of originality underneath at times, and I like to think he never lost it completely.

My thoughts go to Mary and the rest of the family – may their memories be of an interested and interesting man, well read, soft-spoken, opinionated, kind and unabashedly original.

The Wealth and Powerty of India

Gurcharan Das. (2002). India Unbound: From Independence to the Global Information Age. New Dehli, Penguin Books.

India Unbound is fascinating – a combination of autobiography and an essay series, where Gurcharan Das reflects on the various stages in his life and how what he learned changed his views on India, its politics and economic development. Das is a commentator and an essayist, and the book is colored by this: It repeat itself and belabors the same point from many angles. For a novice of Indian it is useful, best read with access to a computer so you can look up words and places like "haveli" and "octroi" as you go along. Das’ language is fluent and content-packed, with an elegance reminiscent of Landes’ The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (whom, incidentally, he criticises, rightly, for an overly simplistic explanation of India’s lack of progress).

Highly recommended. This essay borrows much from the book. Check out his columns here.

Some quotes:

On India after independence: There were two competing visions. Mahatma Gandhi had a vision of self-reliant villages, with a reinvigorated agriculture and craft production. He opposed modern urban industry because it dehumanized man. Jawaharlal Nehru had a modern scientific mind, and he was much impressed by the economic gains of the Soviet revolution; but he was also committed to democracy. He had a vision of democratic socialism with the state leading the process of industrialization. He spurned capitalism because it exploited and it created inequalities. Both Gandhi’s and Nehru’s ideas were flawed, however, and we have spent a long time chasing after them. Gandhi distrusted technology but not businessmen. Nehru distrusted businessmen but not technology. Instead of sorting out the contradictions, we mixed the two up. We have to deal with holy cows: smal companies are better than big ones (Gandhi); public enterprises are better than private ones (Nehru); local companies are better than foreign ones (both). They so mesmerized us that the succeeding generation, whose job was to jettison these foolish ideas, failed to do so and did us incalculable harm. (p.11) 

When ordinary human beings err, it is sad, but when leaders do, it haunts us for generations. (p. 51) 

If America is a melting pot, India is a mosaic. (p. 72)

The economists, it seems, turned out to be hopelessly optimistic about the ability of poor countries to transform their economies through investment in import-substituting manufactures and overly pessimistic about their ability to export. (p.75)

The more rules there are, the less people will do on their own, and the more effort they will spend in getting around the rules. […] The ordinary person will generally do the right thing, left to his or her own devices. The important thing is that people believe that only results will win them rewards.

In Hindu society the Brahmin (priest, teacher) is at the top of the four-caste hierarchy, followed by the Kshatriya (variously landholder, warrior, ruler). The Vaishya or bania (businessman) comes third, and the Shudra (laborer, artisan) is last. Below the four are casteless "untouchables" and tribals. The three upper castes constitute roughly 15 percent of India’s population, and have ruled th ecountry for three thousand years. About half of India is laboring or Shudra caste, divided in turn into hundreds of subcastes. [occupational or geographic]. More than 20 percent of the population are the casteless or "untouchables" and tribals for whose uplift Mahatman Gandhi worked all his life. The remaining 15% of India belongs to other religions: 11 percent Muslim; the rest Sikh, Christian, Parsee, etc. (p.140)

Modern India’s tragedy is not that we adopted the wrong economic model in the 1950s, but that we did not reverse direction after 1965. 

Businessmen are fine producers of goods and jobs, but they are cowards and do not speak out. 

Libraries vs. Google Booksearch

Tim O’Reilly provides the entry point for an excellent discussion of the research benefits of Google Booksearch.

A tenured squirt

After reading Stephen Levitt’s musings on whether tenure is a good thing or not in economics, I can’t resist quoting Daniel Dennett (from the incomparable Consciousness Explained, 1991, page 177:

The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life.  For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system.  When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn’t need its brain anymore, so it eats it!

(It’s rather like getting tenure.)

Just one perspective, of course. But useful.

Economics of abundance

Great article by Mike (whoever that might be) at Techdirt: If you can’t compete with free, you can’t compete, period. His argument is that there really is no difference selling digital and physical goods as long as scarcity is removed – price will over time move to marginal cost, and whether that cost is 0 or something higher doesn’t matter:

Say I own a factory that cost me $100 million to build (fixed cost) and it produces cars that each cost $20,000 to build (marginal cost). If the market is perfectly competitive, then eventually I’m going to be forced to sell those cars at $20,000 — leaving no profit. Now, let’s look at a different situation. Let’s say that I want to make a movie. It costs me $100 million to make the movie (fixed cost) and copies of that movie each cost me $0 (marginal cost — assuming digital distribution and that bandwidth and computing power are also fixed costs). Now, again, if the market is competitive and I’m forced to price at marginal cost, then the scenario is identical to the automobile factory. My net outlay is $100 million. My profit is zero. Every new item I make brings back in cash exactly what it costs to make the copy — so the net result is the same. It’s no different that the good is priced at $0 or $20,000 — so long as the market is competitive.

On the surface, this has validity from the producers’ point of view, but how about the demand side? If I have to shell out $20,000 for a new car, that is money I could spend om something else, no matter the profit. If I can get all the movies I want for free, I can consume as many of them as I have time for, at zero short-term cost to myself. The relationship between price and demand is not linear, at least not on an individual basis. And here comes the psychology part: If I decide to shell out 20K for a car, I will make a careful decision, compare features, and try to get as much as possible for my money. If the price of a movie is 0, I will just download a lot of movies and keep them around. The only investment will be in actually watching them, meaning that somehow the company selling them has to get value out of my watching the movie rather than purchasing it.

In-line advertising, it seems, coupled with a way to track actual viewings rather than purchases. Google Adsense in movies, click-on-the-hero’s-coat-and-buy-it, instant delivery and on-demand video services delivered over the web, taking responsibility for the whole viewing experience.

Now, if only my broadband service were up to snuff….

Web 2.0 animated

I can only agree with Jill – I wish I had done this video (that Michael Welsh did). With a small exception: The first three of the last four words, which pushes it a tiny bit over the edge.

End of database one-size?

Memo to self: Interesting benchmark paper on general vs. specialized database architectures. With search engines beginning to compete with database query engines as the preferred interface to structured information, this may be a viable strategy for the database engine companies.

(Via Slashdot.) 

Disruptive titling

InformationWEEK is an IT magazine that sometimes displays astonishing ability to not get it. This article is a case in point. Not so much the article – it is basically a description of five new "hot" technologies that in my view are, at best, lukewarm – but the title.

To make it clear: A technology is not disruptive because it is new. It is not disruptive because it might displace the currenlty used technology. It is not disruptive because it comes suddenly on the market.

A technology is disruptive if it replaces an old technology by adressing an unmet need in the market in such a way that the incumbent technology cannot compete because doing so would invalidate the business model of the incumbent technology. This is normally because the new, disruptive technology is worse than the old technology (according to the old measures), because the most valuable customers don’t want it, and because it would be less profitable for the incumbent companies to offer it.

None of the five technologies listed here qualifies according that those criteria. In fairness to the writer, David Strom: He doesn’t use the term "disruptive" anywhere in the text. That moniker has, I assume, been slapped on by some clueless editor with an urge to use fancy words. Too bad. But not the first time for InformationWEEK.

Fortune 500 companies using social networking services?

One of my much esteemed colleagues, Keri Pearlson, is looking for examples of Fortune 500 companies using various kinds of social software, from LinkedIn to MySpace to wikis and blogs. Any examples?

Causality and Zipf’s Law

Chris Anderson has an interesting post about Zipf’s law, which posits that the frequency distribution  of words in the English language follows a power law. He shows that if you set up a process that generates random sets of characters, you end up with the same distribution.

I am wondering if we aren’t putting the cart before the horse here – might it not be the case that the words we use more often have become shorter, precisely because we use them more often? If language evolves over time with an aim to increase understanding and reduce bandwidth consumption, this is what we would expect.

The words "mama" and "papa" are common throughout many languages because when a baby starts babbling, that is what he or she will say first. So, we made words out of babble, representing what proud parents would want them to represent. Similarly, we reserve the shortest words (single vowels, diphthongs, or combinations of one vowel and one consonant) for the concepts we need most frequently.

Saves bandwidth. Just ask any kid with an SMS thumb.

Why professors should blog

Dan Cohen has an excellent article on this topic – which, if nothing else, is a pretty good argument for blogging in general and RSS feeding in particular.

Go for it. Nothing is as eternal (and as findable) as something written in silicon. Thanks to RSS, Google, and good ol’ Gordon Moore’s law, which pretty soon will lead to a situation where we are all working off the same (virtual) machine.

Jurassic Blackboard

Blackboard (or, as I like to refer to it, Blackbored) is a learning management system used by many schools and universities, including mine.  I will have to admit to being somewhat involved in the selection process, by advocating that since there really was no difference between these products 6 years ago (still not much of a difference, really) we might as well go with the market leader, for reasons of externalities and experience.

Blackboard is not a good product. It reminds me of certain software packages I used on an IBM mainframe under VM/CMS back in the 80s – packages like PROFS, which were good then but are obsolete now. Blackboard has a few good attributes, first and foremost that it can be used by the truly clueless, both teachers and students. And it does have a nice sub-system called SafeAssignment, which does a good job with plagiarism detection.

Over the summer, the IT department here installed the newest version of Blackboard – version 7. As far as I can see, there are very limited additions in functionality, mainly associated with keeping score of students’ grades (which I do in an Excel spreadsheet, much faster and more flexible than Blackboard’s web interface). I am now working on re-establishing my courses after a six month sabbatical. That is a chore at the best of times, and Blackboard makes it worse with its tedious interface and limiting structure.

Here is a running list of irritations, as I notice them:

  1. When you upload a file, you can only upload one at a time (no control-click to select more than one.) Yes, you can zip the files and upload the zip archive, but that is a kluge. Why on earth can’t I click on several files at once – every web service under the sun can do that, starting with services that lets you upload pictures?
  2. It doesn’t work well in Mozilla Firefox. It has gotten better: Version 6 had several things that only worked in Internet Explorer. No problem, Firefox has a small market share – except on campuses, where it sometimes dominates. What kind of companies use Blackbored? That’s right, universities. Smart.
  3. It is not possible to publish a course, or parts of a course such as individual pages, to the web. Those of us who like to share our courses with the world will have to maintain separate web sites.
  4. You cannot pull external web pages into Blackboard, only link to them.
  5. Possibilities for customization are very limited – you can change the color of buttons and such, but you cannot, for instance, rearrange the order of courses that appear on your login screen, or where they go.
  6. The menu system requires an incessant stream of clicking – start at a top screen, click down in the hierarchy, click to do something, fill in a form, press Submit, wait forever, get a "success" screen that you have to click to close, and then get taken back to the screen you started with. If you have a lot to do, especially repetitive tasks, this drives you nuts.
  7. There is no ability to apply changes to more than one course. As a matter of fact, there are no shortcuts whatsoever for people who are comfortable working with information technology.
  8. There is excessive duplication of information. I am listed in 5 courses, and for each one of them I have to go in and fill out "staff information" about myself. To put it in technical terms, their database is not in normal form. If you have a number of courses that use (wholly or partially) the same material, this drives you nuts. Especially if you find an error and have to correct it 5 places.
  9. You cannot customize announcement displays – so I end up getting my login screen cluttered with stale announcements from courses I have guest lectured in a long time ago.
  10. The system is a nightmare to manage for the IT department. Trust me. Those guys usually don’t complain much, but they are swearing over the complications of adding new users to a course, for instance.
  11. There is no possibility to use social software tools, such as RSS feeds (meaning students could subscribe to changes), wikis (collaborative content creation), blogging functionality such as Trackbacks, or tags. (And don’t tell me about "next release" – this should have been in there a long time ago.)
  12. There is no click-and-drag functionality anywhere.
  13. There is no functionality for having a local copy and uploading (replicating), so that you could work in a non-connected setting.
  14. It doesn’t preserve session state, so when you press Refresh, it takes you out of the screen you were working in (the Control Panel, say) and back to the starting screen for the course.
  15. The courses (individual pages or courses in themselves)  are not searchable (or, to use Peter Morville’s term, not findable.)
  16. Each screen contains very little information, mainly because the fonts are big, so it is hard to get an overview. You end up clicking around a lot  just to find things. A more compressed view, perhaps with browser functionality that would let you jump between branches in an information hierarchy would be appreciated.
  17. You can’t log in automatically – in fact, you have to go via an opening screen with a "Log In" button. How about having the browser remembering the password and UID and jumping straight in?
  18. (added 8/31): The system makes it extremely tedious to change small errors in several entries. Item: I had, for one course, entered 10 assignments, all with text, due date etc. Then it dawned on me that I had forgotten to specify that they should be SafeAssignments, i.e., that they should be subject to plagiarism control. There was no way I could fix that, neither for the whole group of assignments nor for each entry. Instead, I had to create 10 new assignments, copy the text over, and set the "display until" dates again. Why oh why? Doesn’t the company have anyone with even rudimentary knowledge of user interfaces?
  19. (added 9/17): When students submit a paper to SafeAssignment, they don’t get a receipt that the paper has been received (for instance through an email). Coupled with performance problems in SafeAssignment, this means quite a few students think they have submitted the paper even though they haven’t.
  20. (added 9/17): When you send out an email to all participants in a course, there is no standard way of limiting it to only students. There is also no way to CC: someone who is not inside the system – for instance an external guest speaker. Instead, you have to go back to your email inbox and forward the mail from there.

Blackboard does something for straightening out formalities and making administration easier – but not as easy as it could be. It offers a space to leave content you want limited to the course participants, and has a rudimentary collaboration system. But the system forces you into a very rigid and limiting form of teaching and communicating – essentially, it automates a traditional way of teaching rather than make use of all the wonderful things the technology can do. Rather sad, for someone who is a market leader in learning management systems.

That being said, the fact that they are suing competitors to protect a patent for the idea of bringing together online learning in one package might be an indication that I am not the only person onto something here. It would be nice if they started listening to the people that use their softw
are and give them tools that made them better. If they did, they wouldn’t have to worry so much about the competition. And I wouldn’t have to work with a system that assumes I am an idiot.

PS: A tip if you have to work with Blackboard: Get the administration to set up a fake course for you (I call mine "0 Espens resources", with the "0" ensuring that it shows up on top of my list of courses) where you stuff all your teaching material in nice little folders, with questions, articles and data. When you are setting up a course, you can then copy materials from this repository into the new course, and not have to laboriously upload everything. Works like a charm. Would be even better if it was part of the package. Would be even greater if I could do it automatically from my PC and press "synchronize"….

Power of power laws

Note to self: Chris Anderson’s discussion of the underlying distribution of long tails looks interesting. Time to investigate, at some point.

Hans Rosling talk at TED

Hans Rosling at TEDHans Rosling, professor of public health, speaker extraordinaire, software entrepreneur and one of the best illustrators of fact-based research and policy discussions I have ever seen, is now available in English from the TED conference.

See it. This is required viewing for anyone wanting to understand how the world evolves and what we need to do to make it evolve in a direction beneficial for all. Rosling is one of the best speakers I have ever seen, on any subject, and this subject is critically important.

 

That word again

Not only brillantly written, but laugh-out funny without (overtly) trying to be: Fuck by Christopher Fairman (March 2006). It will be interesting to see which journal, if any, will publish this. Not to mention, who will debate him?

On a side note, I missed a reference to Bill Bryson’s brilliant discussion of fuck in Mother Tongue, where he lays out all the various ways the word can be used. Brilliant, indeed.

(Via Feld). 

Paul Graham on conditions for entrepreneurial success

Paul GrahamPaul Graham, one of the finest essayists to ever publish on the Internet, has two stellar examples of how to take a complex issue and present it in a clear and consistent way:

As usual, Paul does not leave out the difficult parts or avoids pointing out the faults of the current model. Both essays are reworked from a keynote he gave at Xtech.

Excellent stuff. Read it. I will assign it for classes.

(Via Dragos.)