The current "possible" detante with Congress re Immigration Reform is multi-dimensional, even though it usually is couched in terms of 'closing the border leaks' between America and Mexico. Today's San Francisco Chronicle has a front-page story, titled, "UC student goes public with bold Dream Act case", that helps to illumine the problem.
24 year old Terence Park, a South Korean by birth, is a biostatistics major who heads UC Berkeley's math club. He also is an undocumented immigrant, or as some in the Republican Party prefer, "an illegal alien". Park is one of an estimated 2.1 million kids whose undocumented parents brought their young children to America when they came; Park was 10 years old when his divorced mother brought her children to San Diego. His 'rags to riches' story is reminiscent of Mark the Matchboy from Horatio Alger's pen nearly one hundred fifty years ago. Terence has been admitted to Yale for graduate school, but that state hasn't yet implemented anything approaching California's state Dream Act, which allows undocumented students meeting certain qualifications to apply for college financial aid benefits -- which is how Terence was able to complete his Berkeley degree.
With help and encouragement from Steve Jobs' widow Laurene and Hollywood director David Guggenheim (think Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for Superman), Park decided to risk making his story public in order to help advance the cause for the Dream Act to be passed this year. It is risky, but this kid has true grit, as the old movie title would describe it.
The irony for America is that immigrants -- whether via Green Card, visa, rightful ('earned') immigration, or 'undocumented -- have been disproportionately those who've built the new companies, developed many of the leading patents, products, and processes upon which "American Ingenuity" is allegedly grounded. Granted, they have tended to be Asian, or Indian, or Eastern European rather than Latino, but it is to a very significant extent, all part of the same puzzle.
This is a different case, and a different cause, than that of ALearn, which I described a couple of days ago. But it is related, in the sense that Park carries the same status -- illegal -- for any of the myriad opportunities available to "Americans" that 'outsiders' (no matter what their math scores are) cannot partake. And somehow, that doesn't feel right.
Do you agree?
Friday, February 15, 2013
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Minority Math Skills
I am recently elected to the Board of a Silicon Valley non-profit group, named ALearn, whose mission is to increase the number of underrepresented minority students prepared to attend and succeed at college. Our metric is math skills, based on numerous studies that have repeatedly shown that Algebra I success is the best predictor of students achieving college eligibility. Algebra II success in high school is the best single predictor of college completion, regardless of major field of study.
You've all heard of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) deficiency in American youth in recent years. President Obama managed to mention them in the State of the Union speech on Tuesday night (I didn't hear Marco Rubio mention them though). And you might have heard some of the statistics by ethnic group, but every time I see them written down, I stare in wonder:
In Santa Clara county, the center of Silicon Valley, 48% of all students 15 years and older are judged proficient in 8th grade algebra. Get ahold of that number -- LESS THAN HALF in America's most technically aware county. But the ethnic mix shows a decidedly mixed picture. 78% of Asians, 56% of Caucasians, 32% of African-Americans, and 23% of Hispanics have 8th grade math proficiency.
Algebra II -- the best predictor of college success -- shows 62% of Asians, 35% of Caucasians, 12% of African-Americans, and a mere 9% of Hispanics, in SILICON VALLEY schools are proficient. This is a local disgrace, but it mirrors the situation in Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Florida all too well. Three of the four most populous states in America have Latino populations approaching (or already exceeding) the Caucasian populations; all need some program ala ALearn.
Across California, 51% of students are Latino, while only 14% of Latino adults have an Associate degree or higher. So in six out of seven family units for half the population of the most populous state in America, the least skilled and most at-risk students (in terms of success predictors) have no role model at home to say, "knuckle down, you need this to be successful in life".
ALearn tries to change this, by intervention two ways -- a four week summer intensive in 7th grade math, and a twelve week, 1 hour per day optional math class in spring term. Approaches are to use young interns with an experienced math teacher, with Khan Academy modules, games, practicums, and team exercises. Kids ENJOY learning math in these stimulating environments. What a concept!
ALearn has grown in six years from 100 experimental kids to 3,000 students in 2012. Does it work? Early indications are amazing -- 82% of their Latino 'graduates' have been 'college eligible' at the end of high school, vs. 26% of all Latinos in Silicon Valley.
But 3,000 kids is a drop in the bucket, versus 30,000,000 registered Hispanics in America and another 'estimated' 11,000,000 undocumented. Check out www.census scope.org/us/map.hispanicpop.html to get a sense of how regional the 'immigration issue' really looks for America. How do we scale from one county volunteer effort to a national impact organization?
You've all heard of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) deficiency in American youth in recent years. President Obama managed to mention them in the State of the Union speech on Tuesday night (I didn't hear Marco Rubio mention them though). And you might have heard some of the statistics by ethnic group, but every time I see them written down, I stare in wonder:
In Santa Clara county, the center of Silicon Valley, 48% of all students 15 years and older are judged proficient in 8th grade algebra. Get ahold of that number -- LESS THAN HALF in America's most technically aware county. But the ethnic mix shows a decidedly mixed picture. 78% of Asians, 56% of Caucasians, 32% of African-Americans, and 23% of Hispanics have 8th grade math proficiency.
Algebra II -- the best predictor of college success -- shows 62% of Asians, 35% of Caucasians, 12% of African-Americans, and a mere 9% of Hispanics, in SILICON VALLEY schools are proficient. This is a local disgrace, but it mirrors the situation in Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Florida all too well. Three of the four most populous states in America have Latino populations approaching (or already exceeding) the Caucasian populations; all need some program ala ALearn.
Across California, 51% of students are Latino, while only 14% of Latino adults have an Associate degree or higher. So in six out of seven family units for half the population of the most populous state in America, the least skilled and most at-risk students (in terms of success predictors) have no role model at home to say, "knuckle down, you need this to be successful in life".
ALearn tries to change this, by intervention two ways -- a four week summer intensive in 7th grade math, and a twelve week, 1 hour per day optional math class in spring term. Approaches are to use young interns with an experienced math teacher, with Khan Academy modules, games, practicums, and team exercises. Kids ENJOY learning math in these stimulating environments. What a concept!
ALearn has grown in six years from 100 experimental kids to 3,000 students in 2012. Does it work? Early indications are amazing -- 82% of their Latino 'graduates' have been 'college eligible' at the end of high school, vs. 26% of all Latinos in Silicon Valley.
But 3,000 kids is a drop in the bucket, versus 30,000,000 registered Hispanics in America and another 'estimated' 11,000,000 undocumented. Check out www.census scope.org/us/map.hispanicpop.html to get a sense of how regional the 'immigration issue' really looks for America. How do we scale from one county volunteer effort to a national impact organization?
STEM, Marco Rubio and College
President Obama put forth his strongest national pitch for STEM education (Science, Technology, Eningeering, and Math) last night, citing the Germany experience teaching science and math to all high school students, and also noting that this is the surest path to building skills that enable satisfying lifetime jobs. Nice to see the endorsement, but not many congressmen in the room could relate -- what's the number, 340 with law degrees, and 12 with scientific training?
Then Rubio, whom I've respected and liked in several previous speeches, gave the Republican rebuttal, bashing government help at every turn and urging us to renounce the Presidnet and his policies. But the example he cited -- "I had $100,000 in loans from my college days, which I finally just repaid" -- seemed odd to me. Lessee, who loaned him the money? And when did he go to school? $100,000? Must have gone for a very long time, or to what then was the most expensive school in the country, or both. And his high-profile job has probably been helpful in terms of earning power to repay at least some of that debt. (I hadn't yet seen the Miami Herald's blistering response, talking about the fraud that he used on Florida voters to line his own pockets, and presumably cover some of the loans)
Today, it is not hard to rack up $100,000 in student loans. Yet increasingly hard to know how to repay the debt. In the past decade, there has been an acceleration of the trend started in Reagan's second term -- let the kids pay for their own education. Parents are less of a factor, society has been excused, thank you. Used to be that the public universities were a gift, almost a legacy, from "us" to "them" as the public taxed itself to provide virtually free college for the ambitious and dedicated student.
Recall that David Gardner, then Chancellor of the entire University of California system, wrote "A Nation at Risk" to launch Reagan's second term. Too bad the ideas and concepts in the small booklet haven't been heeded.
This view of a society's benefit from an educated youth seems so distant that most people I talk to today cannot imagine it. So, the net is that the past two generations have 'saved' on investments, put themselves in debt via consumer debt and mortgages for larger and larger homes, and then shifted the education burden onto the next generation. This is far more personal and specific than shoving the national debt onto the next generation's back, from my perspective.
Some concerns arise..... How much debt are we talking about? Well, the national consumer debt load is nearly $1 trillion, about $6,000 for every adult in America. The national college tuition loan debt is slightly larger overall -- get ahold of that number, larger than all consumer debt in America. And who is bearing the bulk of that debt? Well, there are 5.9 million college graduates between the ages of 25-34, and another 14.4 million currently enrolled college students, and who knows how many -- but let's estimate 20 million who have tried college, taken out loans, and dropped out -- giving about 40 million folk sharing the $1.1 trillion debt. All in, the average debt per student (or ex-student) is $28,000. Ahem, TWENTY-EIGHT THOUSAND? Every kid?
Who gets the money? Check Senator Harkin's report which came out last summer, finding that the major beneficiaries of the college debt expansion were the managements and 'owners' of FOR-PROFIT colleges. An astounding 90% of the top-paid college officials worked for the 6% of schools in this category, making an average of $7,000,000 per year in 2010. The average pay for the top officials (leaving football coaches aside) at equivalent public and private universities (Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Michigan, Berkeley, Cornell, and Princeton to give you an idea) was one-tenth, at $700,000. Harkin tackled the top 30 For-Profit schools as a target for investigation -- the findings were more than shocking in terms of costs to students, future debt burden, benefits to owners, miniscule pay for faculty, and -- oh, by the way -- low employment prospects because the education, by and large, was inappropriate or inferior.
Small wonder that MOOCs are suddenly popular. FREE sounds better. And then we get an article this week in Dissent, articulating some of the clear concerns here as well. What kind of a future are we designing for our society? And be clear, "no design" results in a design, just not maybe the best one.
Thoughts?
Then Rubio, whom I've respected and liked in several previous speeches, gave the Republican rebuttal, bashing government help at every turn and urging us to renounce the Presidnet and his policies. But the example he cited -- "I had $100,000 in loans from my college days, which I finally just repaid" -- seemed odd to me. Lessee, who loaned him the money? And when did he go to school? $100,000? Must have gone for a very long time, or to what then was the most expensive school in the country, or both. And his high-profile job has probably been helpful in terms of earning power to repay at least some of that debt. (I hadn't yet seen the Miami Herald's blistering response, talking about the fraud that he used on Florida voters to line his own pockets, and presumably cover some of the loans)
Today, it is not hard to rack up $100,000 in student loans. Yet increasingly hard to know how to repay the debt. In the past decade, there has been an acceleration of the trend started in Reagan's second term -- let the kids pay for their own education. Parents are less of a factor, society has been excused, thank you. Used to be that the public universities were a gift, almost a legacy, from "us" to "them" as the public taxed itself to provide virtually free college for the ambitious and dedicated student.
Recall that David Gardner, then Chancellor of the entire University of California system, wrote "A Nation at Risk" to launch Reagan's second term. Too bad the ideas and concepts in the small booklet haven't been heeded.
This view of a society's benefit from an educated youth seems so distant that most people I talk to today cannot imagine it. So, the net is that the past two generations have 'saved' on investments, put themselves in debt via consumer debt and mortgages for larger and larger homes, and then shifted the education burden onto the next generation. This is far more personal and specific than shoving the national debt onto the next generation's back, from my perspective.
Some concerns arise..... How much debt are we talking about? Well, the national consumer debt load is nearly $1 trillion, about $6,000 for every adult in America. The national college tuition loan debt is slightly larger overall -- get ahold of that number, larger than all consumer debt in America. And who is bearing the bulk of that debt? Well, there are 5.9 million college graduates between the ages of 25-34, and another 14.4 million currently enrolled college students, and who knows how many -- but let's estimate 20 million who have tried college, taken out loans, and dropped out -- giving about 40 million folk sharing the $1.1 trillion debt. All in, the average debt per student (or ex-student) is $28,000. Ahem, TWENTY-EIGHT THOUSAND? Every kid?
Who gets the money? Check Senator Harkin's report which came out last summer, finding that the major beneficiaries of the college debt expansion were the managements and 'owners' of FOR-PROFIT colleges. An astounding 90% of the top-paid college officials worked for the 6% of schools in this category, making an average of $7,000,000 per year in 2010. The average pay for the top officials (leaving football coaches aside) at equivalent public and private universities (Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Michigan, Berkeley, Cornell, and Princeton to give you an idea) was one-tenth, at $700,000. Harkin tackled the top 30 For-Profit schools as a target for investigation -- the findings were more than shocking in terms of costs to students, future debt burden, benefits to owners, miniscule pay for faculty, and -- oh, by the way -- low employment prospects because the education, by and large, was inappropriate or inferior.
Small wonder that MOOCs are suddenly popular. FREE sounds better. And then we get an article this week in Dissent, articulating some of the clear concerns here as well. What kind of a future are we designing for our society? And be clear, "no design" results in a design, just not maybe the best one.
Thoughts?
Monday, February 11, 2013
Intrapreneuring
My post last week about "Great Companies... Once" and their leadership aroused some interest, and some controversy. Some of it ran like this -- You're right, of course, that these companies have falied us and we don't yet call them out.... But you cannot just say this is Harvard Business School's fault, without saying more, or MORE IMPORTANTLY, giving us some options."
Apt critique, don't you think?
One antidote, in my view, is INTRAPRENEURING, a word not used very commonly, but one that got briefly into the public lexicon about the time that ENTREPRENEURING became known. The difference is that Intrapreneurs wend their craft inside larger corporations, on behalf of others, rather than starting their own company.
Many pundits, including Michael Schrage at MIT, observe that Intrapreneurs cannot exist today because corporate leaders are no longer tolerant of their spasmodic, episodic inventive approach -- they seek efficiency and productivity from their design teams rather than innovation. And that, some would say, is indeed a function of the Harvard Business School teaching which has by now permeated the entire MBA school approach in America.
I think it is more fundamental than that. The problem is that MBA candidates seldom are practicing engineers; they tend to be either recent graduates with little practical experience, or folk with financial training rather than scientific or engineering training. This is a critical difference in two respects -- first, the constant experimentation / validation nature of scientific inquiry with lots of trial and error, and a whole lot of compromise, eludes such folk. Secondly, the notion that failed experimentation is positive, i.e. that risk taking and learning from the duds is valuable and necessary, feels just somehow wrong.
The net result is that we have a nation of MBA leaders who are avowedly risk-averse, rather than a nation of designers who are not innovative.
What to do about it? Well, for one, we can stop extolling ENTREPRENEURS as the only way to solve the riddle (this, you might know, is the Stanford antidote, and also the Obama 'answer'). Entrepreneurs, as almost any Silicon Valley venture capitalist will aver, are seldom suited to running a company once it passes the 'first product' stage. Instead, a 'serial entrepreneur' is brought in as "adult supervision" -- think Eric Schmidt at Google to 'help' Sergey and Larry for a decade. But note that Eric was a key Intrapreneur at Sun Microsystems in its infancy, then a leader at Novell when it contended strongly with Microsoft, before going to Google. Earlier, he had stints at Bell Labs, Zilog, and XeroxPARC, all noteworthy "corporate" innovators. In short, he was a risk-taking intrapreneur himself, rather than an MBA financial type. Richard Branson, the crazy genius entrepreneur for Virgin Airliens and several hundred other 'companies' did an interview for Entreprenurs.com where he said that the only way he could build his companies into something substantial was by using Intrapreneurs. The editors about gagged, but ran the story. Branson was spot on.
So, maybe a new word for you -- INTRAPRENEURING. More about this, and more about what InnovaScapes Institute might do to help it become more known, and hopefully more prevalent, to come
Apt critique, don't you think?
One antidote, in my view, is INTRAPRENEURING, a word not used very commonly, but one that got briefly into the public lexicon about the time that ENTREPRENEURING became known. The difference is that Intrapreneurs wend their craft inside larger corporations, on behalf of others, rather than starting their own company.
Many pundits, including Michael Schrage at MIT, observe that Intrapreneurs cannot exist today because corporate leaders are no longer tolerant of their spasmodic, episodic inventive approach -- they seek efficiency and productivity from their design teams rather than innovation. And that, some would say, is indeed a function of the Harvard Business School teaching which has by now permeated the entire MBA school approach in America.
I think it is more fundamental than that. The problem is that MBA candidates seldom are practicing engineers; they tend to be either recent graduates with little practical experience, or folk with financial training rather than scientific or engineering training. This is a critical difference in two respects -- first, the constant experimentation / validation nature of scientific inquiry with lots of trial and error, and a whole lot of compromise, eludes such folk. Secondly, the notion that failed experimentation is positive, i.e. that risk taking and learning from the duds is valuable and necessary, feels just somehow wrong.
The net result is that we have a nation of MBA leaders who are avowedly risk-averse, rather than a nation of designers who are not innovative.
What to do about it? Well, for one, we can stop extolling ENTREPRENEURS as the only way to solve the riddle (this, you might know, is the Stanford antidote, and also the Obama 'answer'). Entrepreneurs, as almost any Silicon Valley venture capitalist will aver, are seldom suited to running a company once it passes the 'first product' stage. Instead, a 'serial entrepreneur' is brought in as "adult supervision" -- think Eric Schmidt at Google to 'help' Sergey and Larry for a decade. But note that Eric was a key Intrapreneur at Sun Microsystems in its infancy, then a leader at Novell when it contended strongly with Microsoft, before going to Google. Earlier, he had stints at Bell Labs, Zilog, and XeroxPARC, all noteworthy "corporate" innovators. In short, he was a risk-taking intrapreneur himself, rather than an MBA financial type. Richard Branson, the crazy genius entrepreneur for Virgin Airliens and several hundred other 'companies' did an interview for Entreprenurs.com where he said that the only way he could build his companies into something substantial was by using Intrapreneurs. The editors about gagged, but ran the story. Branson was spot on.
So, maybe a new word for you -- INTRAPRENEURING. More about this, and more about what InnovaScapes Institute might do to help it become more known, and hopefully more prevalent, to come
Sunday, February 10, 2013
Say more about InnovaScapes Institute
Yes, I know the blog is stream-of-consciousness, not exactly a diary, but not categorized or organized in any strong way. And the website is... say we say, "under development". As is the Institute itself.
Intrapreneuring is of course a great place to start. American corporations have lost sight of innovation as the driver of good things, and today the immature 'answer' is to do ENTREPRENEURSHIP. Which misses the whole point, since 99% of even Stanford graduates will work for someone else rather than themselves almost their entire life. Why cannot 99% of us work for innovative companies? Sort of the Romney applique for business if you are a chary observer.
So, the InnovaScapes Institute (ISI) is tackling Intrapreneuring, with a couple of books (one 'about to be' published, another in draft), workshops, speeches (harangues?), and some conference material.
But ISI intends to do much more than that. The real questions center more around the impact, both positive and negative, of technology on society, whether it be our own or those of other countries, including third world countries. So health questions, environmental concerns privacy and security, quantitative measurements, and the like are fair game for the Institute.
One friend said, "you must need a lot of experts around you to tackle these questions" and of course he is right. Another said, "how REALLY are you funded?" -- knowing full well that we are mostly working with pecuniary limits and a lot of faith. A third said, "I'd love to come work with you." I liked that response!
The most consistent questions, though, are WHAT are you going to do, and WHY do you think you can make a difference? Lurking right behind those questions for some is the meta-question -- are you simply a modern day Don Quixote? I am not enamored of that perspective, but I have to admit that the laundry list of potential topics might resemble such an agenda.
Previous posts have indicated some of the potential topics. In an aging society -- true of most of the 1st world countries in the sense that birth rates have fallen below replacement level, and also true that people are living substantially longer -- several 'new' questions become important that used to be able to be ignored. Alzheimers will affect nearly one in two people who live past eighty-five years; used to be that wasn't very many people, but it will become a sizable contingent in the next twenty-five years.
COPD, mentioned herein in a couple of posts already, is an increasing killer, and its causal elements are not only not known, they are not being investigated with much effort or money. Between COPD and asthma, some twenty percent of Americans are current sufferers, and it does foreshorten life by an average twenty years, not to mention robs energy and vitality long ere that death. Why the AMA holds onto the notion that COPD is 85-90% caused by smoking is as bizarre as why the NRA and the toady Congress grant the gun industry complete immunity from sanity and legal recourse.
Jobs fuel the economy, true, but they do much more in terms of giving people hope, dignity, and a sense of purpose -- not to mention food, shelter, and some discretionary income to attend ballgames and rock concerts. But jobs increasingly are 'under pressure' it would seem, and the social fabric could unravel if we are heedless of this. Sure, new technologies have 'always' provided new jobs -- why won't they do so this time? Our feeling is that this arena also is in need of further understanding.
Other topics are tempting -- privacy and anonymity questions raise a lot of issues re government intrusion as well as crowd sourcing apps for your iPhone. If the Syrian government can track you within five meters whether your cellphone is on or off, maybe others can do so as well. Do you care?
The mountain of debt -- some $1.1 TRILLION -- in student loans, mostly soaked up by the thirty leading "FOR-PROFIT" colleges from desperate kids wanting jobs, is a timebomb waiting to go off. That unfunded loan pool is larger than the entire consumer debt load in America, and nearly as large as the hidden profits of America's largest corporations in Bermuda and other offshore 'banks'. Why these two topics seldom get raised when questions of debt ceiling and "fiscal cliff' topics fill the airwaves is beyond me, since they equal or dwarf the amounts usually in debate.
Yes, yes, these look like an attempt to boil the ocean, and we've only just begun. What topics would make YOUR list? And should you toss them into the mix? Would you? And would you help work on them?
Intrapreneuring is of course a great place to start. American corporations have lost sight of innovation as the driver of good things, and today the immature 'answer' is to do ENTREPRENEURSHIP. Which misses the whole point, since 99% of even Stanford graduates will work for someone else rather than themselves almost their entire life. Why cannot 99% of us work for innovative companies? Sort of the Romney applique for business if you are a chary observer.
So, the InnovaScapes Institute (ISI) is tackling Intrapreneuring, with a couple of books (one 'about to be' published, another in draft), workshops, speeches (harangues?), and some conference material.
But ISI intends to do much more than that. The real questions center more around the impact, both positive and negative, of technology on society, whether it be our own or those of other countries, including third world countries. So health questions, environmental concerns privacy and security, quantitative measurements, and the like are fair game for the Institute.
One friend said, "you must need a lot of experts around you to tackle these questions" and of course he is right. Another said, "how REALLY are you funded?" -- knowing full well that we are mostly working with pecuniary limits and a lot of faith. A third said, "I'd love to come work with you." I liked that response!
The most consistent questions, though, are WHAT are you going to do, and WHY do you think you can make a difference? Lurking right behind those questions for some is the meta-question -- are you simply a modern day Don Quixote? I am not enamored of that perspective, but I have to admit that the laundry list of potential topics might resemble such an agenda.
Previous posts have indicated some of the potential topics. In an aging society -- true of most of the 1st world countries in the sense that birth rates have fallen below replacement level, and also true that people are living substantially longer -- several 'new' questions become important that used to be able to be ignored. Alzheimers will affect nearly one in two people who live past eighty-five years; used to be that wasn't very many people, but it will become a sizable contingent in the next twenty-five years.
COPD, mentioned herein in a couple of posts already, is an increasing killer, and its causal elements are not only not known, they are not being investigated with much effort or money. Between COPD and asthma, some twenty percent of Americans are current sufferers, and it does foreshorten life by an average twenty years, not to mention robs energy and vitality long ere that death. Why the AMA holds onto the notion that COPD is 85-90% caused by smoking is as bizarre as why the NRA and the toady Congress grant the gun industry complete immunity from sanity and legal recourse.
Jobs fuel the economy, true, but they do much more in terms of giving people hope, dignity, and a sense of purpose -- not to mention food, shelter, and some discretionary income to attend ballgames and rock concerts. But jobs increasingly are 'under pressure' it would seem, and the social fabric could unravel if we are heedless of this. Sure, new technologies have 'always' provided new jobs -- why won't they do so this time? Our feeling is that this arena also is in need of further understanding.
Other topics are tempting -- privacy and anonymity questions raise a lot of issues re government intrusion as well as crowd sourcing apps for your iPhone. If the Syrian government can track you within five meters whether your cellphone is on or off, maybe others can do so as well. Do you care?
The mountain of debt -- some $1.1 TRILLION -- in student loans, mostly soaked up by the thirty leading "FOR-PROFIT" colleges from desperate kids wanting jobs, is a timebomb waiting to go off. That unfunded loan pool is larger than the entire consumer debt load in America, and nearly as large as the hidden profits of America's largest corporations in Bermuda and other offshore 'banks'. Why these two topics seldom get raised when questions of debt ceiling and "fiscal cliff' topics fill the airwaves is beyond me, since they equal or dwarf the amounts usually in debate.
Yes, yes, these look like an attempt to boil the ocean, and we've only just begun. What topics would make YOUR list? And should you toss them into the mix? Would you? And would you help work on them?
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Unbelievable Headline
The San Francisco Chronicle business report (Section D) carries a subtitle: "The Chronicle with Bloomberg". Presumably, this implies credibility, as in 'connected to reality of business, Bloomberg himself having been pretty good at that. And of course, Business Week is now a Bloomberg magazine, thin though it has become.
Front page today, though, carries a story by Business Week Bloomberg editor Peter Coy with this headline: "Long-term jobless crisis is stumping experts". In seven columns, each a half page long, Coy manages NEVER to mention outsourcing or offshoring, while bemoaning the fact that America's long-term unemployed (those out of work more than 6 months) has tripled in the past five years.
The lead paragraph says, "here is the face of a new problem that remains poorly understood--long-term unemployment that continues even as job growth resumes across the economy.... The rate of long-term unemployment, 3 percent in January, is precisely triple its 2001-2007 average."
Why?
"Economists are puzzled over what has changed. Is it generous benefits that make it easy to stay unemployed? Or erosion of skills that render people unemployable? Or discrimination by employers?"
Nobelist MIT economist Peter Diamond goes out on a limb and says regardless of cause, this is bad for morale, and demands a public policy action plan. Unfortunately, I took the science and math side at Caltech, where they teach "cause and effect" as a primary predicate, so my approach would be to say, "ought to know the cause in order to try an effective remedy." Doesn't MIT teach that?
Editor and writer Coy coyly says "the optimistic take is that the bulge is the result of an unusually deep recession and will shrink with time and growth.... The pessimistic view is that the jobs aren't coming back." He cites Andy Stern, former president of some union, who observes that there will be a "more generalized job drought, which will be the result largely of automation.... You ain't seen nothing yet."
My post two weeks ago about Robert Atkinson's new book seems apropos here, when he asserted that the classic neo-economists are delusional, unable to read the tea leaves or anything else. It's the dismantling of American manufacturing at the root of all of this, acc. to Atkinson, and I couldn't agree more. Between 2001-2010, IBM grew by 133,000 workers (to 410,000), yet shed 33,000 US jobs. Ditto HP. Cisco, Intel, Oracle, Apple all had variants of these offshoring numbers, and in addition, outsourced almost all of their manufacturing. In the decade, America lost almost half (15,000,000) of its manufacturing jobs, few to automation for that period.
The service sector is not far behind -- where is your VISA support person living?
Andy Grove's prescient and alarming article in the same Business Week Bloomberg (July 1, 2010) entitled "How America can create jobs" caused a furor at the time. One viewpoint from Vivek Wadhwa saying "Why Andy Grove is Wrong..." is getting lots of neo-economist praise. But Atkinson (and me, for that matter) thinks that Grove nailed it. Worth pondering?
Front page today, though, carries a story by Business Week Bloomberg editor Peter Coy with this headline: "Long-term jobless crisis is stumping experts". In seven columns, each a half page long, Coy manages NEVER to mention outsourcing or offshoring, while bemoaning the fact that America's long-term unemployed (those out of work more than 6 months) has tripled in the past five years.
The lead paragraph says, "here is the face of a new problem that remains poorly understood--long-term unemployment that continues even as job growth resumes across the economy.... The rate of long-term unemployment, 3 percent in January, is precisely triple its 2001-2007 average."
Why?
"Economists are puzzled over what has changed. Is it generous benefits that make it easy to stay unemployed? Or erosion of skills that render people unemployable? Or discrimination by employers?"
Nobelist MIT economist Peter Diamond goes out on a limb and says regardless of cause, this is bad for morale, and demands a public policy action plan. Unfortunately, I took the science and math side at Caltech, where they teach "cause and effect" as a primary predicate, so my approach would be to say, "ought to know the cause in order to try an effective remedy." Doesn't MIT teach that?
Editor and writer Coy coyly says "the optimistic take is that the bulge is the result of an unusually deep recession and will shrink with time and growth.... The pessimistic view is that the jobs aren't coming back." He cites Andy Stern, former president of some union, who observes that there will be a "more generalized job drought, which will be the result largely of automation.... You ain't seen nothing yet."
My post two weeks ago about Robert Atkinson's new book seems apropos here, when he asserted that the classic neo-economists are delusional, unable to read the tea leaves or anything else. It's the dismantling of American manufacturing at the root of all of this, acc. to Atkinson, and I couldn't agree more. Between 2001-2010, IBM grew by 133,000 workers (to 410,000), yet shed 33,000 US jobs. Ditto HP. Cisco, Intel, Oracle, Apple all had variants of these offshoring numbers, and in addition, outsourced almost all of their manufacturing. In the decade, America lost almost half (15,000,000) of its manufacturing jobs, few to automation for that period.
The service sector is not far behind -- where is your VISA support person living?
Andy Grove's prescient and alarming article in the same Business Week Bloomberg (July 1, 2010) entitled "How America can create jobs" caused a furor at the time. One viewpoint from Vivek Wadhwa saying "Why Andy Grove is Wrong..." is getting lots of neo-economist praise. But Atkinson (and me, for that matter) thinks that Grove nailed it. Worth pondering?
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
COPD thesis
I mentioned the rise of COPD deaths in a blog a couple weeks ago, along with the meager research investments. Driving with a friend recently, we were struck by a major backlit inversion layer nearby. That led to discussion of the components in the "Air We Breathe" and the possible correlation to COPD deaths.
The thesis I have become enamored with is as follows:
Most air pollution efforts measure gaseous concentrations (ozone, CO2, NOx, SOx) and particle weight and concentration. They don't generally measure particle count or particle size concentrations. Most agencies respond to 'dirty air' which for complaining citizens is dusty, dark, smoky, gritty, and visible emissions. But the mantra for air pollution control groups has long been "clear air is not necessarily clean air" and the corollary is "dirty air is not necessarily killer air".
The human filter system is actually pretty efficient. The nose and throat (think sneezing and coughing) trap almost all particles between one and five microns. Sub-micron particles are the only particles easily able to get into the lung, and if they are inert and carry an adhering gas molecule of NOx or SOx, they carry an effective little acidic etching agent into the lung. Particles larger than one-tenth micron tend to lodge in the lung for awhile, rather than expel with the next exhaling -- great!
Sub-micron inert particulates (between one-tenth and one micron) are a common byproduct of 'fired' processes -- coal-burning power plants, all sorts of manufacture (talc, cement, plastics), and some automotive exhaust products -- increasing elements across America (coal fired power plants are 600% more than forty years ago, for example). And while scrubbers and other technologies have been used for power plant plumes, they tend to be more effective at particles larger than three microns. So we're putting lots of energy and expense into cleaning the air of particles that look bad, but don't kill.
For the Colorado Air Pollution Commission in 1970/71, I did a study which implicated the above casual agents, finding that high mountain valleys with specific pollution sources had emphysema death rates well in excess of any urban environment. Warren Muir, now Executive Director of the Division on Earth and Life Studies for the National Academies (an enormously influential job!), did a similar study in 1974. Both were effectively ignored by the AMA, which to this day blame smoking almost exclusively. Studies in New England in the mid-1990's focused on 2.5 micron concentrations vs. 10 micron in six eastern cities, and found analogous results. In this country since then, very few studies have been conducted, but northern Europe has picked up on this research thread, publishing several major studies in recent years that appear to validate the thesis.
This is a topic that I worked on a very long time ago, driven by an early diagnosis of emphysema, and after a few years, my career took a different turn. I met Muir in 2010 at a Stanford conference on Data Visualization, and we compared notes after a serendipitous conversation uncovered our mutual history. He asked why I was interested in the Data Visualization topic, and I described my early air pollution work, saying somewhat glibly that I'd found one of the root causes. His retort: "You did not!" Challenged, I rose to the bait. As did he. It turned out that he'd discovered virtually the same causal indicators in roughly the same time frame, working independently. My question -- what happened to your findings? His reply was that he was ignored, just as I had found. Voila!
Three weeks ago, in Washington DC, I spent some time at the Library of Congress, and found a paper I presented to the Senate hearings on the Four Corners power plant complex. That jogged some recent investigation on my part, which fueled this blog entry.
My question of all of you is -- "What if this is correct?" First of all, is it worth pursuit of trying to find out if it has validity? Second, to whom do we direct the appeal in investigate? NIH seems a plausible place to start, especially given the 350x disparity between deaths and research dollars between AIDS and COPD. Somehow, the idea that COPD is now the third leading killer of Americans, and we don't spend any money investigating the causes, is remarkable. And worth trying to correct.
Your thoughts?
The thesis I have become enamored with is as follows:
Most air pollution efforts measure gaseous concentrations (ozone, CO2, NOx, SOx) and particle weight and concentration. They don't generally measure particle count or particle size concentrations. Most agencies respond to 'dirty air' which for complaining citizens is dusty, dark, smoky, gritty, and visible emissions. But the mantra for air pollution control groups has long been "clear air is not necessarily clean air" and the corollary is "dirty air is not necessarily killer air".
The human filter system is actually pretty efficient. The nose and throat (think sneezing and coughing) trap almost all particles between one and five microns. Sub-micron particles are the only particles easily able to get into the lung, and if they are inert and carry an adhering gas molecule of NOx or SOx, they carry an effective little acidic etching agent into the lung. Particles larger than one-tenth micron tend to lodge in the lung for awhile, rather than expel with the next exhaling -- great!
Sub-micron inert particulates (between one-tenth and one micron) are a common byproduct of 'fired' processes -- coal-burning power plants, all sorts of manufacture (talc, cement, plastics), and some automotive exhaust products -- increasing elements across America (coal fired power plants are 600% more than forty years ago, for example). And while scrubbers and other technologies have been used for power plant plumes, they tend to be more effective at particles larger than three microns. So we're putting lots of energy and expense into cleaning the air of particles that look bad, but don't kill.
For the Colorado Air Pollution Commission in 1970/71, I did a study which implicated the above casual agents, finding that high mountain valleys with specific pollution sources had emphysema death rates well in excess of any urban environment. Warren Muir, now Executive Director of the Division on Earth and Life Studies for the National Academies (an enormously influential job!), did a similar study in 1974. Both were effectively ignored by the AMA, which to this day blame smoking almost exclusively. Studies in New England in the mid-1990's focused on 2.5 micron concentrations vs. 10 micron in six eastern cities, and found analogous results. In this country since then, very few studies have been conducted, but northern Europe has picked up on this research thread, publishing several major studies in recent years that appear to validate the thesis.
This is a topic that I worked on a very long time ago, driven by an early diagnosis of emphysema, and after a few years, my career took a different turn. I met Muir in 2010 at a Stanford conference on Data Visualization, and we compared notes after a serendipitous conversation uncovered our mutual history. He asked why I was interested in the Data Visualization topic, and I described my early air pollution work, saying somewhat glibly that I'd found one of the root causes. His retort: "You did not!" Challenged, I rose to the bait. As did he. It turned out that he'd discovered virtually the same causal indicators in roughly the same time frame, working independently. My question -- what happened to your findings? His reply was that he was ignored, just as I had found. Voila!
Three weeks ago, in Washington DC, I spent some time at the Library of Congress, and found a paper I presented to the Senate hearings on the Four Corners power plant complex. That jogged some recent investigation on my part, which fueled this blog entry.
My question of all of you is -- "What if this is correct?" First of all, is it worth pursuit of trying to find out if it has validity? Second, to whom do we direct the appeal in investigate? NIH seems a plausible place to start, especially given the 350x disparity between deaths and research dollars between AIDS and COPD. Somehow, the idea that COPD is now the third leading killer of Americans, and we don't spend any money investigating the causes, is remarkable. And worth trying to correct.
Your thoughts?
Friday, February 1, 2013
GREAT COMPANIES "once"
In my HP Phenom blog, I reported this morning on some musing that several of us did this week -- What are the metrics that determine GREAT COMPANIES? Remember Jim Collins' book, Built to Last? That book argued that "staying power" was paramount, and HP was a leading example. Critics took Collins to task, especially Richard Foster, arguing that adaptiveness to change was key. That inspired Collins to write "Good to Great", which was a superb book also. I'd recommend both of those Collins books, along with Foster's "Creative Destruction". Foster found out that HP was the fastest growing company for the four decade period 1958-1998, but wouldn't report it in his book because he didn't know how HP did it, and he felt most readers wouldn't believe the answer anyway since HP was "so stodgy" as he reported it to me.
For these folk, REVENUE GROWTH is the key parameter (see my HP Blog for 'our answer')
So anyway, I did some compilations for your edification. Here's the news
The four companies whose CEOs or Board Chairs HEADED THE PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION on COMPETITIVENESS for America this past decade are DuPont, Merck, Xerox, and Motorola. You might recall that John Young set this commission up for President Ronald Reagan in the mid-1980s in response to the Japanese threat. Their website today says they are MOST INTERESTED in having US COMPANIES COMPETITIVE and the AMERICAN WORKER with a great job.
So how did the collective wisdom leading this commission do with their own companies? On aggregate, they managed REVENUE GROWTH of NEGATIVE 2% for the entire decade . They lost 59% in PROFITS, 62 % in Employees and 73% in American employees. THANK GOD for their leadership for America.
How did they get picked, why are their companies honored in the first place? Well, from 1960-1970, they grew 350% from $5.4 B to $28B, and then got pretty big the next decade, growing 175% to 87B. By now, 1990, the "BRAND" was built. Sure, the next decade was not quite as good, growing 5% per year and 60% overall to $126B. So, we found ourselves in 2001--and amid the dot.com meltdown all of Silicon Valley is suspect, but these companies are "THE HEARTLAND" of corporate America. And the heartland, just as much as, and maybe more than, Wall Street, let us down.
Each of these esteemed leaders, and collectively all of them, should have EGG on their face, and apologies galore for American workers, but instead we have CORPORATE INNOVATION POLICY for America built on the flawed predicates of these clowns.
Robert Atkinson's new book, INNOVATION ECONOMICS, could have and should have cited specific examples like these to buttress his strong and compelling arguments about AMERICAN LUNACY re INNOVATION. He notes, for example, that we don't need to do much more outsourcing because we've already done it all -- getting rid of 15,000,000 manufacturing jobs (more than half of what the country had).
If you think Merck, Xerox, Motorola, and DuPont are singularities, guess again. IBM, Boeing, Texas Instruments, and Kodak were powerful potent BIG players in 2000. Their collective performance matched the other four. Kodak since 2010 has been the worst train wreck, but the other seven aren't far behind. And now Elon Musk has done public to say that Boeing designed the dumbest approach to lithium-ion batteries imaginable (and his track record on that topic is pretty solid).
Where did these leaders get their training? One guess -- Harvard Busienss School
For these folk, REVENUE GROWTH is the key parameter (see my HP Blog for 'our answer')
So anyway, I did some compilations for your edification. Here's the news
The four companies whose CEOs or Board Chairs HEADED THE PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION on COMPETITIVENESS for America this past decade are DuPont, Merck, Xerox, and Motorola. You might recall that John Young set this commission up for President Ronald Reagan in the mid-1980s in response to the Japanese threat. Their website today says they are MOST INTERESTED in having US COMPANIES COMPETITIVE and the AMERICAN WORKER with a great job.
So how did the collective wisdom leading this commission do with their own companies? On aggregate, they managed REVENUE GROWTH of NEGATIVE 2% for the entire decade . They lost 59% in PROFITS, 62 % in Employees and 73% in American employees. THANK GOD for their leadership for America.
How did they get picked, why are their companies honored in the first place? Well, from 1960-1970, they grew 350% from $5.4 B to $28B, and then got pretty big the next decade, growing 175% to 87B. By now, 1990, the "BRAND" was built. Sure, the next decade was not quite as good, growing 5% per year and 60% overall to $126B. So, we found ourselves in 2001--and amid the dot.com meltdown all of Silicon Valley is suspect, but these companies are "THE HEARTLAND" of corporate America. And the heartland, just as much as, and maybe more than, Wall Street, let us down.
Each of these esteemed leaders, and collectively all of them, should have EGG on their face, and apologies galore for American workers, but instead we have CORPORATE INNOVATION POLICY for America built on the flawed predicates of these clowns.
Robert Atkinson's new book, INNOVATION ECONOMICS, could have and should have cited specific examples like these to buttress his strong and compelling arguments about AMERICAN LUNACY re INNOVATION. He notes, for example, that we don't need to do much more outsourcing because we've already done it all -- getting rid of 15,000,000 manufacturing jobs (more than half of what the country had).
If you think Merck, Xerox, Motorola, and DuPont are singularities, guess again. IBM, Boeing, Texas Instruments, and Kodak were powerful potent BIG players in 2000. Their collective performance matched the other four. Kodak since 2010 has been the worst train wreck, but the other seven aren't far behind. And now Elon Musk has done public to say that Boeing designed the dumbest approach to lithium-ion batteries imaginable (and his track record on that topic is pretty solid).
Where did these leaders get their training? One guess -- Harvard Busienss School
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