Category: Very Berkeley

On the talk show circuit, if there isn’t a “us versus them” crisis, they’ll invent one. After all, ratings matter, and the best ratings are gotten from the “battle of the sexes”, never mind the reality.

The latest fad, seized upon by fervent talk show hosts, academics of questionable credentials, and ideological rantists is that of the “academic gender gap” where girls are supposedly pulling ahead of boys. Crisis indeed! It must be the girl’s fault, or the school’s fault. It must be favoritism. It must be bias. Or is it?

Dr. Lawrence K. Altman in the New York Times today takes on the problem of poor academic peer review and fraud in scientific journals, and how their failure to carefully vet papers has resulted in public mistrust. However, the lack of oversight, audits, and failed analysis of scientific papers cited — a good first step — to anyone involved actually describes the symptoms of a more insidious disease. The greatest problem faced by researchers today is the ease by which anonymous reviewers of unstated credentials can blackball competitive ideas and promote others they prefer with impunity. Thus, instead of a battle of ideas openly discussed, papers are promoted merely for reinforcing entrenched ideas already espoused by the reviewer or for spinning trendy ideas in which the reviewer may have a stake.

I have heard academics and researchers candidly discuss paper rejections based not on good science but on bad blood and old rivalries. Professor John Doyle of Caltech, a respected researcher who has won prizes for his papers, often quotes the ludicrous academic paper rejections he has received, primarily because he has (self-admittedly) not spent enough time stroking the reviewers at conferences prior to actually sending in a paper so as to “prepare” them and get “buy in to the idea”. And after poorly reasoned (if not completely untrue) rejections, the coup de grace is always that the paper is “poorly written”, no matter how well-published and credentialed. It is a scandal. Is it no surprise then that many researchers are now spending more time writing for trade press while the quality of papers in journals diminishes?

Recently at Stanford I was gratified to hear Dr. Shri Kulkarni of Caltech brazenly discuss his dislike for “paying” journals to publish his work when magazines like Nature gladly accept his articles and pay him for them. Perhaps as a Berkeley alumna who has written both academic papers and published extensively in the trade press, I am inclined towards the intellectual honesty of both Dr. Kulkarni and Dr. Doyle for putting the stranglehold of personal and professional bias in scientific review on the table — after all, both of them received their Ph.D’s from Berkeley, and both of them refuse to remain silent on this outmoded, repressive and ultimately anti-innovative process.

Well, we’ve finally got the lowdown on the post-IPO Google payoff, courtesy of Bill Burnham, and it’s quite a tidy haul. How much? Theoretically “…all the way back in 1999 Kleiner and Sequoia each invested $12.5M in Google for a 10% stake. Fast forward to the Summer of 2004 and these stakes were worth $2.03BN at Google’s IPO price of $85/share”.

They had to back off on selling all that at the IPO, however, which meant they did even better. According to Kleiner’s distribution statements (SEC Form 4) “… to date they have distributed shares worth $3.549BN. They still have another 2.6M shares worth $752M as of yesterday’s close, so the total value of their stake is $4.3BN which represents a 344X return on their investment of $12.5M … not too shabby”.

What about Sequoia? “making an educated guess they have returned about $3.8BN to date and have stock worth another $940M left to distribute for a total return of close to $4.7BN which is about $200M higher than Kleiner’s $4.5BN (with the mystery shares). Based on their $200M more in proceeds for the same stake and their careful doling out of shares to protect the market, Sequoia wins the award for best distrubution process”.

For those of you not sponging off one of the Class A VCs, look toward the heavens (or NASA TV). Tempel 1 is scheduled to be hit by Deep Impact to determine if it really is a dirty snowball or a dirty dustball. Unless you have a rather large (11-inch or better) aperture telescope, watch it on the Internet – it will be Magnitude 11 and pretty hard to spot unless you’re very experienced.

So for all those unhappy people who didn’t make out like bandits on the Google IPO, repeat after me: “The best things in life are free”. At least, until Google figures out a way to put banner ads on Tempel 1.

Larry Diamond of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, spoke yesterday at a special PARC forum on “Our Squandered Victory and the Prospects for Democracy in Iraq”. I must admit, I was skeptical that I would find him an agreeable (or even informed) speaker – I’m not a great fan of the Hoover Institution. But he knew his stuff, was right on the money about the money (the billions spent on this war), had lots of those “where did they get those guys” stories of screwups in Iraq (our guys – not their guys), and presented a thorough convincing argument for how badly the administration has bungled the job from an insider’s perspective.

Why is he an “insider”? Apparently Larry Diamond was asked by Condoleezza Rice to go to Baghdad as an adviser to the American occupation authorities. Diamond wasn’t an Iraq war supporter, but he said he thought creating a “viable democracy” was important. He was there last year.

One of the best speakers I’ve seen this year. He answered every question, and met critics head-on. I wish more Americans could talk to him as someone who’s really “been there”. It’s one way to cut through the spin and make your own “fair and balanced” decision.

Well, Jezebel is gone. Jezebel, for those who don’t know, was the jaguar at Happy Hollow in San Jose. All my kids loved to visit her when they were little (the oldest is now 20). I always thought she was smiling. We will really miss her.

For all those programmers out there – if you are really sick of those tedious debug cycles, there is hope. You can actually eat those bugs – in Mexico. “It’s just like eating a regular hot dog, but with five or six times the nutritional value.” (Juan Garcia Oviedo, Biologist).

Lastly, you know something is on the edge of complete obsolescence when it’s still expensive to make but they have to sell it as a “disposable”. That what Benny Evangelista tried in his review of the Pure Digital Technologies disposable (kind of) camcorder. The reason they say you want one – it does 640×480 30fps, and you can trade video files. Funny thing is, I can do that with a digital camera. And I own it. And it’s small. And I can use the latest memory cards. Oh, and did I mention I own it.

For example, the Canon SD200 is a 640×480 30fps camera. Costs about $200. Uses standard SD cards you can buy anywhere. Plenty of room for switching cards or using a gig card. Has a very good editing feature for clips. You’re not limited to most recent clip or anything like that. Also has great image capability. My son Ben Jolitz used this camera for a short comedy feature film festival entry (high school level) this year called “Bots” (see “Fun Friday: How Many Robots Can You Name?”). It’s very very small and light – fits in a pocket. And he did a pro level production with it.

It has optical zoom, unlike the camcorder. If you want to spend more money, plenty of cameras have auto-stabilization (look at some of those Sonys, will ya, and they’re 60fps!!!). You’re not limited to 20 minutes – just switch memory cards, and they’re getting bigger for cheaper all the time.

I suppose if you want a DVD fast, this might work. But there are so many DVD burners on the market. While I always love labor saving processes, I just can’t endorse this one. Now, maybe if they decided to offer digital cameras instead…

The very latest new and improved whiter than white venture capitalist trend is (drum roll) – “The Consumer Internet”! “Every other venture capitalist one encounters in Silicon Valley now seems eager to reinvent himself as an expert who can spot hot new consumer-driven Internet ventures” writes Gary Rivlin of the New York Times. “The problem is that you’ve got all these software V.C.’s, they don’t know what to do with themselves…They say, ‘These are deals that make people a lot of money, and enterprise software is largely dead.’ So now they’ve decided they’re consumer Internet venture capitalists.” (George Zachary, Partner at Charles River Ventures).

Now, I know that you’re reading this blog while shopping online, running your RSS feeds of the latest stock news, IM’ing to a friend, VOIP’ing on a conference call with a client, and secretly watching a movie you got from a p2p site. But did you know that you are a part of the consumer Internet and that there’s money to be made off of you? Are you surprised yet? Are you holding your wallet tighter?

Daleks are fearsome creatures, indistructable, flustered by stairs, and good dustbins in a pinch. Perhaps that’s why one disappeared from storage recently. “A spokesman said: ‘There may be a black market out there for Daleks – but it’s still a strange thing to steal’.” (BBC News). So if you see something with an odd British accent saying “Exterminate”, cheer up – it may be worth $500 pounds.

Finally, for the last word on the Apple-Intel alliance (a slashdot reader) :
“I felt something, a disturbance in the network, as if a million Mac zealots cried out in horror and were suddenly silenced.”

First of all, my favorite search of the week from Google (search terms: NS32000 data sheet):
Jolitz Heritage – [ Diese Seite übersetzen ]
… Based on the NS32000 microprocessor, it was a portable no wait state …
In its latest incarnation, its on a huge fork mount made of sheet metal. …
jolitz.telemuse.net/news – 177k – Im Cache – Ähnliche Seiten

Wow, those first processors sure were huge!

Second, courtesy of Tom Foremski of SiliconValleyWatcher, Verizon is introducing a new service with real bandwidth:
5 Mbps down /2 Mbps up = $39
15 Mbps down /2 Mbps up = $49
30 Mbps down /5 Mbps up = $199

Sure beats the 128kbps that most SBC DSL users get stuck with. Of course, is it available in the heart of Silicon Valley, the land of innovation? Of course not. But Tom hasn’t given up hope: “I’m still trying to figure out how to use my friend as my new ISP. He’s in a canyon about 10 miles from me, so wireless won’t work. Maybe he’ll let me put my servers in his tool shed…”

Finally, Edward Rothstein of the NYTimes wrote a very thorough article on the new Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle. It even includes a display of robots from various science-fiction movies and television shows like “Lost in Space” and “Star Wars”. So if you couldn’t get all the robots in Bots (see Fun Friday: How Many Robots Can You Name?), visit the museum that Paul Allen’s money built – I’m sure you’ll spot a few familiar faces.

Bravo to Alan Deutschman of Fast Company on his Icon book review. According to Alan, since Jobs won’t cooperate with any biographer after Michael Moritz’s successful book “The Little Kingdom” in the 1980’s, “Jobs’ freeze-out gives two options to would-be biographers: Either they can succeed at a bit of investigative reporting, or they can plunder the work of those who have. Unfortunately, the authors of “iCon” are guilty mostly of the latter.” He then proceeds to rip the book apart, finding rehashes of his and Moritz’s work. “I felt disturbed reading the brief prologue of “iCon,” with its play-by- play of the crazed reaction of the crowd at the January 2000 Macworld convention when Jobs announced he was taking the title of CEO — the same scene I used in my similarly brief prologue to “Second Coming.” Then I relaxed while the next 135 pages were basically a condensed version of Young’s earlier bio (which drew much of its best material from Moritz’s “Little Kingdom”). Then, on Page 138, it began to seem as if Young had reached the end of his previous book — and had begun to condense my book.”

There is nothing more annoying than doing the hard work in original reporting / research, only to find someone rips it out of your book without even giving credit, or worse yet, distorts what you wrote so that it is completely wrong. I know – I had the same thing happen to me. I co-wrote a kernel design book, Operating System Source Code Secrets Volume 1: The Basic Kernel (see Jolix for more information) describing the design, implementation and internals of 386BSD and incorporating original work. No one else had ever done this work before in any operating system – we had done the long series of technical articles in Dr. Dobbs Journal on which some of it was based, plus years out of Berkeley with the majority of work. The book was released in 1996 to good reviews, but it was about BSD of course, and focussed entirely on evolving that architecture.

OK, so we put together a very nice neat academic paper “Beyond Network Processors: Using Dataflow Architecture for Low-Power Low Latency TCP Processing” for a conference. A really fun paper to write and to read. So fun I’d rather place it in a journal, get paid, and get compliments from real readers than send it to a stodgy corporate fest (although a few conferences like ACE are real cool). But when you got to do it, you do it.

But you know how these things go – you submit a lot of work, get comments back of the variety of “you caaant spell” and “your such a bad writer” variety, get gonged by a “secret” competitor on the review panel that you all know is lurking there in the shadows, complain, resubmit, and so forth. After about a gazillion times (during which I’ve written more articles, books and papers than the entire committee together), you get an acceptance dependent on paying for your registration. Well, if the company pays, it’s OK with me.

But sometimes I just think these conferences are just too amateur to be tolerated, especially with respect to their deadlines and requirements. The one thing you’d be serious about is a deadline, right? Nope, maybe not…

Well, it’s Friday so I suppose I should go through the odds and ends catagory. The first item is a story about Rambus latest patent to speed up graphics. Dean Takahashi of the Merc is breathless in his admiration, “Micro-threading is the brainchild of a team of Rambus engineers led by Fred Ware and Craig Hampel. They were trying to figure out a way for memory chips to catch up with microprocessors and personal-computer components that have become faster over the years.” Yes, memory bottlenecks are a problem and they do , and Rambus deals with it.

But what’s their “invention”, really. Instead of one 32-byte fetch, they do 4 8-byte fetches in parallel… this is considered “clever”. Sigh. Actually, they’re very smart at Rambus, but I think they spend way too much time with lawyers (and journalists) and not enough with engineers.

Byte Online decided to rerun my article The Problems of Personalization this month, and I got quite a kvetch from a reader who caught every typo the editor missed. Needless to say, I agreed with him, notified the editor, and had quite a laugh. It’s good when your readers are so involved in your story that a double “and” is grating. So keep my editors on their toes and let me and them know if you find any other problems.

Mike Cassidy of the SJ Merc’s column today on old ham radio antennas brought back memories. Last summer my kids sold my father-in-law’s old Hammarlund HQ-129-X after realizing they were never going to use it (they spent the money on telescope parts). Now that they’ve got the Internet – why bother with radio? They buyer was a nice young undergrad from the Naval Postgraduate School ham club. I was told I could get a lot more for it from a collector, but this kid was really nice, drove over from Monterey and picked it up (it weighed about 40 pounds). So it got a good home and everyone was happy. Well, not quite. The antenna got taken down years ago and scrapped, so it wasn’t part of the deal.