The Game of Life – Windfalls Matter, Education Doesn’t

Nicholas Kristof painted a portrait of China as the emerging leader of this century through their serious and aggressive education goals in an article in the NY Times a few days ago. He compares his own daughter’s “excellent schools in the New York area” to a peasant school in Guangdong Province and finds it lagging two grades behind — an appalling discrepancy. When well-traveled, well-educated affluent Americans pale in comparison educationally with China, you’d think Americans would begin to understand the “competitiveness” concerns Silicon Valley has been screaming about for years. After all, if the top classes of American society cannot compete with the children of peasants, what does that say about American competitiveness in a global economy? Yet America does nothing more than wring hands and complain while China pulls ahead. Why?

Perhaps the witty essay by Lawrence Downes (“Love and Debt”) today holds the answer. In his exploration of the newly revised “Game of Life” from Milton Bradley, he found that players who chose to forgo education and have children did much better in the game than those who deferred having children, spending time and money on education. Debt just happens, with no downside consequences — no foreclosures, no homelessness. There is no connection made between career, salary and education. In fact, to make the game more interesting those who are not educated were far more likely to win lotteries or other windfalls than those who are educated. In the world of Milton-Bradley, a doctor is more likely to end up poor than a “strawberry picker”. A degree is simply a means to more debt, and not a means to social mobility.

In the real world, we laugh at such silly notions — after all, it is a game and games aren’t real. We all know that debt is real and inescapable. Credit reports make or break obtaining mortgages and using credit. Interest rates can escalate on the basis of one late payment, causing people to spiral deeper and deeper in debt for old purchases. It isn’t debt that “happens” — it’s poverty. So why should we care? Perhaps because the games we play very much reflects our biases and wishes, sometimes to the exclusion of all else.

Salaries and job security are tied very much to education. Those who start off poor and ignorant are statistically likely to remain that way if they do not better themselves through education. In Silicon Valley, there is a tremendous demand for educated workers. Whether you believe there is an H1B visa crunch or not, it is inescapable that engineering and programming jobs are increasingly going overseas to get the job done. This is not just because of lower salary costs (the costs of administering an overseas contract when factoring in time, travel and oversight ends up more in the realm of two-to-one, not the 10-to-one HR drones like to quote), but because countries like China and India are turning out more and better engineers, scientists and programmers than America.

According to Computing Research Association’s 2005-2006 Taulbee survey of Ph.D.s in computer science and computer engineering (CS & CE), instead of increasing the number of CS and CE doctorates, they have been steadily decreasing since the dot-com boom, so that the “number of new CS majors in fall 2006 was half of what it was in fall 2000 (15,958 versus 7,798)”. China and India are simply picking up the slack. In addition, the CRA notes that “54 percent of CS doctorate recipients in 2004 held visas”, up 8 percent in two years. As Americans shun these majors, more and more foreign students are taking their places in American universities. And those students are the ones Google and Microsoft and the next big startup will hire.

Very few people who hang around the house watching TV and having kids ever win a lottery. Those divorced from society are much more likely to end up in prison or hospitals. People who are impoverished through lack of education, access or debt aren’t likely to get that magical windfall — that get out of debt free card that Milton-Bradley promises them. In fact, according to mathweb’s lottery calculator, if I had to pick six correct numbers in any order from 1-49, the odds of my winning are 1 in 13,983,816! But this doesn’t even scratch the surface — restrictions on ordering and numbers reduce the odds significantly. According to PBS Frontline, the odds of winning the California Super Lotto Jackpot are 1 in 18 million! Despite the enormous reality distortion field that surrounds the occasional “lucky” lottery winner (Steve Jobs RDF is nothing compared to this), the truth is it isn’t going to happen to most everybody — just a few folks. Is that a good basis for financial security? According to a 2006 survey from the Financial Planning Association and the Consumer Federation of America, “one-fifth of Americans (21 percent) [and] 38 percent of those with incomes below $25,000” believe that winning the lottery is the means to personal wealth and debt mitigation. And it should be noted that 30 percent of those with no high school degree believe in a lottery saving them, versus only 8 percent of those with a college degree.

While people who have a college education often have more relationships, opportunities and financial leverage, those who have not built this economic network rely on fantasies of wealth. Milton-Bradley built this fantasy into their world, with a twist — the lower the status and profession chosen, the more likely the player to get windfalls. The higher the status and profession chosen, the more likely the player would accumulate straight debt with no windfall potential. The message to children who play this game is pretty clear — don’t bother to go to school, stay home and have babies, play the lottery and everything will be fine. Hmm, I don’t know about you, but that’s not the way every millionaire and billionaire (yes I know a few well) in Silicon Valley got their wealth…

To be successful, a game must hold the promise of a world that we wish were real. Games reflect our values and aspirations. If Americans didn’t believe more in lotteries instead of education, why would they push games like this on their children?

Bill Gates has recently joined with Eli Broad to spend $60 million to push education to the political forefront as a nonpartisan “single-issue initiative”. According to Bill Gates, “The lack of political and public will is a significant barrier to making dramatic improvements in school and student performance”. Mr. Broad adds that “We’re trying to create a Sputnik moment, to get people to see that our very economic future is at stake.” So far, even with all their money spent on advertising, they are having little effect on the political campaign. Not surprising, really, when three of the major Republican presidential wanna-bes don’t believe in evolution (so much for healthcare and biotech investments) and Democrats spend their wad on other matters like Iraq.

This disdain for education as the key to success is why America will lose and why China will win. But Milton-Bradley will probably sell a lot of games. And isn’t that what America is all about?

Anne Wojcicki, Google and the Changing Face of Silicon Valley – A Watershed Moment

Silicon Valley has been considered a hallmark of the American Horatio Alger legend – come with an idea, build it, and become rich and famous. And it is true that many men have arrived here with little more than a degree and an idea and built a fortune. But the dirty little secret in Silicon Valley has been that those who didn’t fit the “look and feel” of investors were far less likely to get a meeting, much less a deal. African-American men in particular have long complained about the parochial nature of hiring in the “Valley of Heart’s Delight”, and the lack of women in major Silicon Valley roles, both in industry and investment, has been a subject of much study.

The claim as to why women and certain minorities were underrepresented usually hinged on the lack of a technical degree and line management experience, but as I discussed in an article on Anita Borg’s influence on women in technology in the San Francisco Chronicle a few years ago, it isn’t that simple. During the 1980’s there was a great influx of women into computer science in the top schools, with the expectation that they would take part in the booming entrepreneurial experience of that time. But most women found they were immediately channeled into field sales or marketing jobs instead of engineering jobs. The few women who were placed in engineering generally found themselves in lower-paying quality assurance positions working with men who often had no comparable degree or training. These jobs were also not considered manager tracked positions. By the time I wrote my article, I noticed there were very few women who had lasted through this gauntlet through real line management to executive level. If you make it into a top university, endure the competition, and study and receive a degree in a universally-accepted “tough” major, you would expect to be considered for positions that your credentials merit. And if you aren’t, would you feel you got a good return on your investment? I doubt it.

This is why the latest gossip about Anne Wojcicki’s new startup is so interesting. Anne, if you’ve been living on newly demoted subplanet Pluto recently, is the wife of Google’s Sergey Brin. Her sister Susan (Harvard, UCSC, UCLA) is a VP at Google, and her family is plugged into the Stanford scene – dad is the Stanford physics department’s current chairman (he’s involved with MINOS, and for those who are interested the colloquium next week is on neutrino oscillation results from MiniBooNE). Mom teaches at Palo Alto High School (no, I didn’t take journalism at Paly my junior year – I took German, but I did get a 5 on the English AP the following year). Anne herself went to Yale and majored in biology and met her future husband when Google rented their garage – there’s that Stanford connection again. The only thing missing here is the Stanford sports alumni networking dinner (my dad is a Stanford baseball alum, so we all went to the Fall football kickoff BBQ. And yes, I’m a Cal alum. Go Bears!).

So what’s the big deal? Apparently Anne has launched a startup on genetic search, and Google has made a substantial investment. This has caused loud harrumphs among the old guard, because she’s his wife and that’s so unfair!

Funny thing, I never hear these whines when it works in a person’s favor, like one guy I know who’s only claim to fame for a plum VC job was he was a drinking buddy in college of the firm’s founder, or the architect who brought his brother-in-law into the firm and got him hired because he knew what the firm wanted (inside information), or the investor who launched his son’s company. I hear these stories all of the time ! I’ve also hired many engineers on the basis of personal recommendation myself (yes, they were qualified – we had to build something). There’s nothing better than having someone vouch for you and put their reputation on the line to get the job done. The truth is, personal recommendations go a lot further than cold calls, and the odd luck of getting a room assignment with a future IVB or CEO means a lot of lesser lights going along for the ride. And this is one reason why it’s harder for men who are qualified but didn’t go to the top schools, and African-American men in particular, to get that inside edge.

But when it comes to women, it’s doubly hard. You see, women don’t usually get room assignments with future CEOs in college (and if they did, they’d probably get called lots of nasty names that equate their placement with promiscuity and prostitution). Smart women know that a drinking buddy relationship with a man isn’t necessarily a good or safe one (witness the recent De Anza gang rape case). And women who marry into a business, no matter their qualifications, still face ridicule and envy precisely because of the sexual access (remember the “pillow-talk” buzz about Bill and Hillary or FDR and Eleanor? Why couldn’t they be more like Ike and Mamie for goodness sakes, pundits would moan).

I view this investment as a watershed moment for Silicon Valley. Not because this is specifically a perfect investment – all investment is risk, and personally I’m not too enamored of knowing too much about who is genetically related to me. But if “Anne” had been “Albert” there would have been no breathy press reports in the major papers and hand-wringing over this investment. And Google is openly sticking to their investment and making no apologies about it or the woman who has received the investment. Yes, she has access, just like many others. And yes, she’s married and their relationship is disclosed.

I remember when Melinda French got involved with Bill Gates, there was much ado on the back channel about her influence on him. I remember a trade show back in 1995 (we were doing a talk for Dr. Dobbs Journal on 386BSD and Jolix at the time) watching a coffee-swilling dinosaur at a Microsoft display and having a couple of very puzzled Compaq engineers who knew me tentatively ask if I thought this was a great idea or a bad one – after all, it was Microsoft. I believe they decided I was a technologist and a woman so maybe I could figure this out (and no, I was just as puzzled as they were). Well, this strange apparition who’s claim to fame is that he may have been the inspiration for Scott Adam’s “Bob the Dinosaur” in Dilbert was also reputed to be a Melinda French special (actually, it came from her group at MSC that also did other products like Encarta, but she was the manager). It was a failure, of course, and it came out right after her marriage (she had worked at MSC for 7 years prior), so of course she became the target of a lot of disproportionate derision and envy. Yes, I’m sure she’s very happy to be Mrs. William Gates, but I’m also sure she’s probably still annoyed by the fact she was tarred for a group’s marketing failure with substantial buy-in when MSC has them all the time – big and small – and execs often get promoted even if they fail because they are supposed to execute initiatives and not just sit on their hands and hide in their offices. After all, risk means failure most of the time, doesn’t it? And Silicon Valley is all about doing startups and gaining experience until you succeed, right? Unless you’re a woman.

So, speaking as a woman in technology and a Cal Berkeley physics alumna and a woman who is very happily married to a well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur, I’m pleased to see Anne get funded and I’m pleased Google (along with others) funded her. Because it is no fun getting a business plan refused purely because you’re married to someone who’s invested in you and not on the basis of the business or customers or your track record or line management background or degree or all those things they tell you in biz school are important. Believe me, I know how it feels. And you know what it feels like? It feels unfair.

Boom and Bust in IP Address Space Land

Dave Reed on e2e notes a very interesting item – ARIN has announced that migration to IPv6 is now mandatory for allocation of contiguous IP address space. “I still remember debating variable length addressing and source routing in the 1970’s TCP design days, and being told that 4 Thousand Million addresses would be enough for the life of the Internet” Dave crows. But is this an accurate “read”? (I know Dave won’t mind the pun, as he’s heard it many times before).

As I commented on e2e, I remember that debate as well. But the whole genesis of why 32 bits was good enough was an (underjustified) view on the use of networks rather than an understanding of how sparse addresses were actually employed. Everybody knows hash tables work best mostly empty – the same may be true with address blocks because they are allocated in routable units. But how does this really work?

GPLv3 – Yes, You Can Run DRM (If You’re Very Very Sneaky)

GPLv3 and DRM. Yes, we’ve heard it all before. The license says you can’t use it (essentially, if you use it, you have to show the code, which means people can remove it). The advocates from the Linux Foundation and their mouthpieces say you can. It reminds me of the policeman shrieking “Do not panic, all is well” at the rioting crowd in Animal House right before he’s trampled. Meanwhile, open source followers seem to be trapped in the alleyway…

So, does it ban DRM or doesn’t it? It does, but there is a big loophole, and Microsoft (and a few of us old hands at open source – after all, we helped invent it) know it.

Taking a Byte out of Cookies

When I wrote Memories and Cookies for Byte several years ago after the dot-com boom went bust, I got pushback from the editor. Why would anyone care about persistence, monitoring and cookies structures? As a Director at one of those Internet datacenter companies at the height (and fall) of the bubble, I knew that cookies were very important to bizdev and sales as an indicator to tracking unique visitors. Of course, the underlying assumption was that cookies were persistent even though browsers allowed one to selectively delete them. On my modern Firefox browser there is even a special “remove all cookies” button that makes non-flash cookie removal a snap (flash cookies, aka local shared objects in flash-speak, are persistent objects embedded in the flash plug-in, and not removed by the browser’s cookie mechanism; this is one reason lots of sites are going to flash). And remove them we do — up to 1/3 of computer users remove cookies at least once per month, according to comScore, and 7% of computers account for 35% of all cookies served.

While not surprising, this has serious implications for ad monetization.

Fun Friday – Electric Sportscars and Commodity Chips

From prototype electric sports cars to commodity chips, a few items of interest to round out the week.

Yesterday the much-hyped Tesla Motors Roadster prototype was seductively displayed outside of PARC, courtesy of JB Straubel, Tesla Motors CTO. While the motor was buttoned-down and just out-of-reach, the leather seats were quite accessible and comfortable and the light carbon-composite body with aluminum frame attractive and shapely. The TM salesman was carefully positioned with a towel to wipe off any drool and greasy fingerprints from careless admirers.

One of the primary objections to all-electric cars is that they require new battery technologies which are untested on a massive scale and can result in unpredictable and costly liability suits. Even Li-ion batteries have had their share of “combustible” announcements, like when Sony manufacturing standards slipped as laptops went up in flames.

Tesla Motors decided that the benefits of a standardized Li-ion commodity battery (the 18650) outweighed the risk, and developed a fault-tolerant battery architecture that isolates each battery in 6800 individual metal cells with microprocessor-mediated power management and monitoring. As batteries fail, capacity reduces safely over time.

With $30M in orders already on the books (the first 100 orders at $100,000 up-front, and follow-on orders at $50,000 up-front) and plans for a plant in New Mexico, Tesla Motors may be the first car company in 50 years to introduce a new car well under the half-billion dollar cost estimate that is routinely bandied about by modern car companies. Of course, if you want one you’ve got to wait in line. It isn’t a touring car (consider a 200 mile limit), and it won’t fit a trunk. It does fit a couple of golf clubs, but I’d rather take an overnight bag and a guitar and drive to Santa Barbara.

Here’s a quiz for our hardware guys. How long does it take to get delivery on a little 8-bit commodity processor sample for development from the manufacturer? A few days? A week? As Don Adams of “Get Smart” liked to say, “Would you believe six months?” Yes, six months. That’s the delivery time one engineer recently complained he got for an Infineon 8 bit Microcontroller (PLCC – 84). He set out the call pleading with people to tell him why a common part in appliance products with volumes of millions would be so hard to obtain in a timely way.

Like a Zen Koan, the answer to the question is the question. Because it’s a common commodity part. Infineon ships this little chip in volume with six month advance orders because there is no reason to do it any other way at the low cost per piece. So if your little company wants it too, but you’re not going for a million volume order, the manufacturer will think you’re getting “too good a deal” piggybacking off of everybody else’s big order because they made it so cheap. Want it fast? Go to Frys and pay retail.

We once did this at Symmetric Computer Systems with DRAM during the memory wars of the 1980’s. When 1mbit DRAM rose from $12 to $40 in a day, we went to Frys and bought every single piece they had at $19 to make shipment to the NSA. The next day, their price went up to about $50. About the same time, Apple’s CEO Scully went off on vacation and left CFO Debi Coleman minding the store. When the DRAM crisis hit, she and the other Apple execs went on a buying binge. The resulting oversupply nearly killed that company. It was very funny.

Buying retail isn’t the solution for every chip. Little guys are in the pole position for exotic or new parts, and manys the time I’ve had field service engineers sit in my office pushing their cool new I/O or multicore products. My philosophy is always go for the low end of the exotic parts for tests because the sales and FAEs hand them out to our eager design engineers like jellybeans. Then sell them on how your hot new innovative cutting-edge state-of-the-art startup is going to use their high-end product still on their drawing boards to drive both our sales. That’s something they’re never going to hear from the 8-bit chip big guys. And that’s how a smart small company deals with a big guy — even Intel or Infineon. Have a good weekend.

Models, Simulations and Bugs, Oh My!

A recent discussion on e2e focussed on the efficacy of mobile / wireless simulations. You see, in the world of computer academia, simulations are de rigor to getting a paper through the peer review process, because it can provide you with lots of neat numbers, charts and diagrams that look nice but may mean absolutely nothing in practice. But “in practice” means applied (or horrors, development) work, and that’s usually met with disdain in the academic world (see Academics versus Developers – Is there a middle ground?). In other words, blue sky it but never never build it if you want to get a paper approved.

Simulations and models are an important tool in understanding the behavior of complex systems, and they’re used in most every scientific discipline today. But there’s a delicate distinction between a model of an environment and using the model as the environment — one that is often lost in the artificial world of networks and operating systems.

Dealing with Mean People – A Silicon Valley Manager’s Perspective

I suppose it had to come — the inevitable “What made that poor boy do such a horrible thing?” brooding and hysteria after the Virginia Tech murders. Already people are seeking to blame culture, video games, racism, conjectured bullying / criminal exploitation in his past, and so on, as if that makes it all understandable. Sadly, no matter how you slice it, nothing will balance out with the horrible crime this kid’s committed — the murder of innocents — and to spin wheels trying to do so misses the point. No action like this is redeemable.

Instead of focusing on a hateful monster, we should ask a different question. Why, when the world perpetrated a terrible evil on one man, who witnessed murder on a mass scale, suffered deprivation and want — who literally witnessed the face of evil during the Holocaust — did he give his life to save his students? Professor Liviu Librescu did not give in to meanness and cruelty, although his life was shaped by the meanness and cruelty of others. If anyone should have had a “reason” to be bad, he was the one. Yet he is the model of all that is good in people. He was literally “good” in times of evil.

Speaking as a manager, I’ve seen my share of hostile angry employees. Silicon Valley is extremely competitive, and some people don’t thrive in the pressure cooker of high-stakes startups…

The American “Can’t Do” Culture

In the aftermath of the terrible slaughter of 32 students and professors yesterday at Virginia Tech, there have been a number of calls to action on staunching the proliferation of guns, and counter-calls for more guns. My son came home from school, and the first thing he asked me was “Is it true that the first thing Bush said after the Virginia Tech killings was he supported gun rights?” The answer was – Yes, he did. The blood was still wet on the ground and ideologues were commending the killer for possessing (although not using) guns.

If it appears like madness prevails in America to us Americans, it is a certainty to those outside of America…

When Bad Things Happen – Cellular and Internet Provide News, Experience Overloads

Today a gunman at Virginia Tech went on a rampage, killing and wounding scores of people at two locations on campus. Details are still emerging, but there are some examples of how the use of Internet and telecommunications technologies has impacted both the school and the country.

There were four technology issues that have arisen over the course of this event: 1) problems with notification of the crisis via email to students affected, 2) overloading of the local cellular network, rendering student cellphones essentially useless, 3) the overloading of the university servers during the crisis, preventing students from learning in real-time what what going on from their school, and 4) individuals cohering conflicting information on news sites via Wikipedia and social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.