A recent college graduate I know recently found himself most unhappy in his new job. But was there something really wrong with the company he had had such high hopes for, or was it merely a case of the freshman blues? Where to turn for advice? Friends? Parents? Professors?
We humans owe a debt of gratitude to fish—after all, it’s a little bump that developed in their spines that is believed to be the precursor to the human brain. All the more reason to be concerned about preserving the salmon. In my childhood memoir, I recount the plight of these noble fish as they try to carry out their life’s mission, travelling up and down the Columbia across the dams (p. 93):
The young fish heading out to the ocean end up in a pipe called a “penstock,” filled with highly pressurized, fast-moving water, which hurtles them into a turbine rotating at 120rpm. Although it sounds like they ought to be chopped to bits, actually around ninety percent of the youngsters survive. Remember, though, that they have to make their way through not just one, but more than half-a-dozen dams before reaching the ocean. No more than fifty to sixty percent manage that.
Some dams also have a “juvenile fish bypass system” which is basically some screens in front of the turbines which deflect the fish into pipes which either dump them downstream, or in some case, into a holding pool from which they are carried downstream in a truck. The number of fish successfully deflected is called the “fish guidance efficiency,” and it ranges from thirty to eighty percent depending on the season and type of fish. Another concept is simply to spill water around the times of the migrations, with the fish getting an exhilarating ride over the dam.
Unfortunately, my description of “spilling water” over the dams was incorrect. In fact, the approach is to let the fish cross the dam under the spillways, through a high-pressure pipe whose entrance is sixty feet below the surface of the dam. This requires the salmon to make a harrowing dive to find the entrace, before being shot through the tunnel into the pool below the dam—where some are so disoriented they perish on the spot.
Now a new approach has been developed: the removable spillway weir, which requires the juveniles to dive just fifteen feet. They pass through under lower “veclocities” and “pressures”. The new weir, costing a cool $20 million, is said to improve survivability by several percentage points—which may not seem like much, until you consider that the salmon are navigating a half dozen dams or more, so the percentages add up. It weighs over 2 million pounds, and is 115 feet tall and 83 feet wide. The “removable” part of the name indicates that the entire device can be dropped to the bottom in flood situations. This device also supposedly “wastes” only 1/4 as much water per fish as existing approaches. It’s been installed on a trial basis at a dam on the Snake River.
But sorry, folks, you are still killing salmon. You’ve got to tear down the dams and let the salmon come and go as they wish.
AtomicArchive.com was kind enough to publish a review of Bobby. This is a site focused on the history of the development of the A-bomb. Here’s the review:
For those looking for a scholarly analysis of family life of those who worked at one of the nuclear weapon facilities, this book is not that. Instead, we are given a light and enjoyable tale of a little boy whose father is a Ph. D. physicist at Hanford nuclear facility. Bob Myers presents Bobby and the A-Bomb Factory: Growing up on the Banks of the Columbia. This book is a personal account of how Myers’ father attempted to balance his duties as father, husband, scientist and church member. The book also interconnects his accounts with the surrounding Indian culture and the simple point of view of a child. Overall the book was a light and enjoyable read.
Plaxo is the very cool on-line address book app that keeps you up to date with all your friends addresses, and them up to date with yours.
But recently I was flabbergasted to find that my Plaxo “add me” page, containing all my information, was being indexed by search engines. Not only mine, but other people’s as well. Just try the query site:http://www.plaxo com bob.
I was equally astonished at the response I got when I reported this obvious violation of privacy to Plaxo’s “privacy officer”. S/he informed me that it was my problem: after all, I had invited Google to index the Plaxo page by including a pointer to it on my own home page (which I did).
I quoted to them a line from Plaxo’s own privacy policy, that “your Information is your own and you decide who will have access to it.”
The unbelievable response was:
Correct. And my point is that if someone has posted the link to their Add_me page publicly, then they have to understand that public bots will likely find and attempt to index this information. This would be similar to the user creating their own page with their information and a link to the page. By allowing robots to follow the link, it makes it one step easier to contact the individual.
Guess what, Plaxo, there’s a huge difference here. I can take down my page at any time, or I can tell Google not to index it or cache it. But once my address info page on your site is indexed, it always will be. I don’t “have to understand” anything other than that you don’t know what a robots.txt file is.
But can’t I just take down my Plaxo “add me” page, solving the problem (except for the Google cache)? Oops, not so quick.
Changing or taking down the add_me page, once created is a enhancement request that we’ve targeted for a future version of the Plaxo server. Unfortunately, the only method of taking down this page that currently exists is to recreate your Plaxo account.
Worse yet, I found in the Google index a link to a page which allowed me to change someone else’s address book entry. Plaxo’s lame response to me pointing this out was to say
But as there is no benefit to indexing these pages, we will correct this problem.
When I re-iterated, in my fourth e-mail exchange, that “I continue to believe that you should not let searchbots index add-me pages”, the “privacy officer” responded:”
Point taken, and I’ll bring it up for discussion with Engineering, but I do not foresee changing the existing functionality.
Huh? You need to talk to Engineering about adding one line to your robots.txt file? Let me help you out here. All you need is:
Disallow: /add_me
Plaxo is a useful concept, but we can’t possibly use it until they “get” privacy issues.
After five months, Google Print has still not gotten around to scanning in my book. They told me:
The amount of time it takes to get your book online will vary, depending on a number of factors. These can include the current volume of books to be scanned, as well as the complexity of your book. Because of these factors, we are unable to provide a specific time frame during which your books will go live, but we do make every effort to get your content live on our site as quickly as possible.
That’s lame. What use is their program, seemingly innovative in the way they share ad revenues with authors, if they never scan in your book and can’t even tell you when they will? Amazon.com scanned my book within one month.
Get it together, Google.
“Believe in yourself.” “You can do anything you put your mind to.” “Your possibilities are unlimited.”
Sounds like a load of pop-psychology crap.
Stanford psychology professor Albert Bandura has given this concept a scientific basis (as well as a new name, self-efficacy). According to the review of his book Self Efficacy: The Exercise of Control:
This book is based on Bandura’s theory that those with high self-efficacy expectancies – the belief that one can achieve what one sets out to do – are healthier, more effective, and generally more successful….[there are] provocative applications of this work to issues in education, health, psychopathology, athletics, business, and international affairs.
An Amazon.com reader points out the life-cycle aspects of the theory:
Self-regulation and perceived self-efficacy help people to adjust to realities of each life’s stage, from early childhood till aging and preparation to death.
In general I’m leery of starting lots of new books, no matter how interesting they sound, especially since I already know so much. But this one sounds like it could be well worth the time.
edge.org asked 119 scientists and futurists: “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?” Two answers impressed me deeply. The first is by Donald Hoffman of UCI (picture), which I excerpt here:
The world of our daily experience—the world of tables, chairs, stars, and people, with their attendant shapes, smells, feels and sounds—is a species-specific user interface to a realm far more complex, a realm whose essential character is conscious. It is unlikely that the contents of our interface in any way resemble that realm.
He goes on to point out that the nature of user interfaces is to simplify and symbolize:
Evolutionary pressures dictate that our species-specific interface, this world of our daily experience, should itself be a radical simplification, selected not for the exhaustive depiction of truth but for the mutable pragmatics of survival.
Nicholas Humphrey, a psychologist at the London School of Economics, contributed this:
I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an inexplicable mystery. Who is the conjuror and why is s/he doing it? The conjuror is natural selection, and the purpose has been to bolster human self-confidence and self-improtance—so as to increase the value we each place on our own and others’ life.
Indeed. If we realized our true significance we’d just walk in front of a bus and forget about it.
Now the New York Times reports that obsessive hoarders have decreased activity in the anterior cingulate, the “brain structure involved in decision making and problem solving, […as well as the] posterior cingulate, an area involved in spatial orientation, memory and emotion.” The theory is apparently that these poor guys worry about losing track of their stuff so they keep it piled up in the living room.
Google can do no wrong. It’s forthcoming IPO will be the most successful in history. It will completely own the search market and then mail and whatever else it tries its hand at. It’s the Microsoft of the 21st Century. Its corporate culture is an open geeknoid ideal to which we can only hope to aspire. It will create the humongous centralized personalized computing infrastructure which will set the next stage for the evolution of mankind.
I’ve never seen quite such a perfect contrarian play. Although as usual, the contrarian scenario will probably take at least several years to unfold. (Disclaimer: the writer passed up an opportunity to buy MSFT at $14 in 1988, thinking it overvalued.)
Search is going to be much more competitive than it looks. Advertisers have a limited number of dollars and are going to deploy them where they are most efficient. Meanwhile, there are already dozens and dozens of sponsored listing brokers that will be fighting tooth and nail to get their piece of the business. They’ll compete coming and going.
Mail is not as big as it looks. The privacy issue won’t go away. More basically, the Google business model for mail will fall apart when advertisers realize that people don’t want to click on ads while they’re trying to read their mail. The 1GB of storage is nothing special; Yahoo! can do that tomorrow. Searching all your mail is a very nice feature, but there are a number of other ways to do that that don’t involve keeping all you mail on one company’s servers; an interesting one is Zoe.
And the Fortune article that painted Google as basically being unmanaged chaos was probably being generous to them. Someone I know recently applied for a job there and was finally contacted five months later. Google then spent two months taking him through an opaque, unstructured interview process that eventually went nowhere. That’s no way to run a company.
Google has a lot of international revenue—but that’s just because search, when done right as they did, is pretty internationalized out of the box. The same won’t hold for any of their newer services, such as zip-code search, which will require huge effort to roll out internationally, and face much stronger local competition—and Google doesn’t even have people on the ground in some major markets.
Google will be fully-priced as of the IPO. There may be some upside as they experience good growth over the next few years, but I’d get out sometime in 2006.
Just found Magnatune, a fabulous on-line music store; or perhaps on-line publisher is a better description:
I downloaded an album by Jeff Wahl, who plays some great acoustic new age guitar, for $8. The FLAC download was 342MB.
