Paradigm shifts

The Supreme Court is primed in the next two weeks to deliver an opinion on Legal Marriage in America, and most pundits aver that they'll mostly duck the issue if possible.  But the sway of public opinion is clearly away from the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act.  The passage of California's 2008 Proposition 8, by a 52% majority, is now supported by just 36% of Californians while some 56% favor the right to same-sex marriage.  The Supreme Court, clearly set up to handle "Law", is persuadable by public opinion although they always try to make it appear otherwise.  Conservative forces still rule, but the court of public opinion is a strong one even against "Law".

Likewise, it'd be fun to imagine swaying public opinion on COPD.  For example, we might hope to shine some light on the intransigent stance of the AMA that COPD is only a smoker's disease.  My blog, breathecopd.blogspot.com, has presented some of the indicting evidence (at least to my mind) that suggests/hints/reveals/proves (pick your favorite) that something is amiss with the AMA 'answer' because lots of people who don't smoke die, in states where smoking is not prevalent, from COPD that shouldn't kill them there.

The simple truth is that smoking does kill -- it is not recommended by anyone to anyone -- but it is not the only, or even the most responsible, reason that people contract, and then die from, COPD (which stands for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease).  What is?  Fine grain particulate matter (which means less than 2.5 micron-sized particles) combined with a toxic molecular atmosphere (think sulfur dioxide from fossil-fuel power plants or nitrous oxides from automotive exhausts) is significantly implicated in studies from 1970 onward.  These multiple studies have been exhaustively re-analyzed and repeated because they were (a) so controversial, (b) so confrontative of the AMA thesis, and (c) so threatening to power plant operators.

The earliest "credible" publication, in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine in 1993, is ONLY twenty years old.  The earliest citations trace, among others, to the Colorado Air Pollution Commission testimony in 1971 to the U.S. Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs.  The most telling imagery appeared in the 2001 comparison of 805 Health Service Regions for America at the American Statistical Association annual meeting.  The fact that these multiple efforts, with remarkably consistent conclusions, are able to be ignored continues to amaze me.

And, unfortunately, the populace isn't polled about their attitude on this one -- people tend to give credence to their doctor, especially if faced with a dire diagnosis.  The Supreme Court, to my knowledge, has seldom been invoked to ask a professional group such as the AMA to change their wording and 'answers' for a general public.

Does this matter?  Well, unfortunately, YES, it does.  It affects the amount of money that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) dispenses for research into causes of disease, into money spent by EPA for monitoring of pollutants (whether for amounts, types and locales of emissions and 'clouds'), and into directed research on possible treatments.

And the answer, which I mentioned once before, is that AIDS, admittedly a worrisome disease, gets 350x as much money from NIH per death as does COPD.  Three hundred and fifty TIMES!.  So for every $300,000 spent on COPD per death (i.e. one researcher for a year), $100 Million is spent on AIDS per death.   Wild ratios, don't you think?  Insanity if the disease has much impact.

COPD has huge impact.  It affects an estimated 15,000,000 Americans.  It accounts for some $50 Trillion dollars of lost productivity in the American economic engine   And COPD kills.  It has no cure, no effective treatment (claims about Symbicort and Advair notwithstanding), and little research.  And it is the third largest killer of Americans, higher than strokes.

How do you mobilize public opinion?  Oprah and 60 Minutes come to mind.  Thoughts?

ACM Awards addendum

I should have mentioned the monetary metrics for the ACM Awards.  A very few years ago, the entire set was funded at less than $50,000 per year.  This year, the Turing prize, co-sponsored by Intel and Google, was $250,000.  The Infosys Foundation award is for $175,000.  The Student Research competition is underwritten by Microsoft for $120,000.  Multiple other awards, from $5,000 to $35,000, are presented.  Total awards are upwards of $615,000, not bad for acknowledgment, and a great tribute to the sponsoring institutions.

Google, Infosys, Intel, Microsoft, IBM, and Tata Consultancy are the chief backers, plus a number of individual contributors, ACM speciial interest groups, and ACM itself.  AT&T (nee Lucent and Bell Labs) historically was a major backer.

It would be nice (amazing is a better word) to imagine Apple, HP, Oracle, Cisco, and Qualcomm standing in as sponsors also; certainly their products are strong beneficiaries of the work in this field.

ACM Awards banquet

Last night the annual ACM (Association for Computing Machinery, clearly a dated name) Awards banquet was held at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco.  This black-tie event has really come of age in the past decade, from a small beginning after many years of desultory awarding of the annual prizes at various conferences and workshops.

Kelly Gottlieb, who founded the ACM Canada chapter in 1949, has managed the Awards actitivites for ACM for the past 25 years.  Last night he gave an emotional farewell, with his  granddaughter and grandson in attendance ,and a tribute to Jim Hornung's memory, who co-chaired with Kelly for many years.  Kelly, 92 years young, got a standing ovation for his awesome dedication over the years.

The event was emcee'd by ACM CEO John White and ACM President Vint Cerf, notables in our field, and the entire night focused on the key 'infrastructure' contributions of many computer scientists, most of whom labor in relative obscurity except within their own community.   But their contributions have fueled the Information Age, and the myriad awards made note of the tremendous impact of these arcane contributions -- in databases, networks, communication methods, search techniques, architecturs, artificial intelligence, and cybersectuiry -- that we are all now beginning to take for granted.

What stood out for me was the clarity of how exciting this field seems at the moment.  It is well past the era of building the base layer of tools, and into the burgeoning application of those tools to problems of buisness, economics, sociology, organizational behavior, politics -- you name it, it's being changed.  And it is easy, as several at our table noted re MOOCs, to focus on the specifics and say "nothing is new in this field, yawn" while missing the context of the major adoption move.  Classic case of focusing on the trees and missing the forest.  It was somewhat painful to observe that while I usually have ridiculed others for this, I realized that here I'm guilty too.

ACM has historically been stingy (maybe I should say 'selective' or at least parsimonious) with their awards, preferring to give but a few to the MOST WORTHY rather than acknowledge teams or several contributors to a field.  I served on the Fellows committee for five years, and it was frustrating to note how few industrial contributors (vs. academics) were honored, as well as how scarce it was to find women or international contributors.  Thus, one year for example, we had 2 women and 26 men, and 4 industrial folk vs 24 academicians, and 3 internationals out of 28.   This year, by contrast, 52 Fellows were named: 17 (32%) were Int'l, so that was addressed well.  8 (15%) were from industry -- still very light; only 3 were women, worse than ever.

For the main awards, it was a somewhat different story  13 major awards were given, 9 of them to multiple folk.  A total of 26 winners in that set, 23 men and 3 women -- not much change, while 16 were academics and 10 were practitioners, a welcome shift in recognition.  7 were internationally based.   Even better, the 'newer awardees', for best dissertation and student research, had three women and five men.  So, I'd call it progress.

There are five co-sponsored awards with other societies -- these showed 7 men and 3 women, all academics.  This is still a predominantly male discipline, but as it becomes increasingly mathematically based, the evidence is good that it is attracting more women.

With respect to ACM Fellows, it is still a pretty exclusive group -- for a membership of 108,000 folk, 770 are current Fellows, with 52 more who are deceased.  And for a field of probably 2 million across the group, to single out less than 0.04% as Fellows is actually quite selective.  Listening to the feats at last night's fete, one can only concur that it takes some incredible talent to make this list today.

We are all benficiaries.

SF Chronicle letters re Prop 13

Wednesday June 12, 2013, p. A11; Letters to the Editor in Open Forum

Letter 1: "Prop. 13's devastation," by Garth Keehan, Concord

"I have a problem with Jon Coupal's vision of fairness (c.f. "Protect CA businesses, protect Prop. 13" in Open Forum, June 7).
Prop 13 protects long-term property owners by shifting the burden to newer owners.  Neighbors can pay tax rates that differ by a factor of 10 (see the previous post, documenting a neighborhood with a factor of 17).  He implies that Prop. 13 protects business, but it's really about landlords.  Most small businesses rent their space, and commercial property rarely changes hands.  (Why sell when your tax rate is locked in forever?).  The cost of everything increases, including commercial property rents, but not commercial property taxes....
The most devastating aspect of Prop 13 is the two-thirds requirement for any tax increase.  Two-thirds of Californians agree on nothing.  Wealthy areas occasionally raise a local tax, poorer areas never, helping to create permanently under-performing schools and students.
Prior to 1978, California had the best roads, state parks, schools, low-cost university, and outlook toward the futures.  Take a good look now, Mr. Coupal.

Letter 2: "The proposition had no supermajority", by Revan Tranter, Berkeley

in "The Man who started an uprising" (Open Forum, June 7), James Lacy gets a significant thing wrong:  Prop 13 did not "pass 2-to-1 statewide".  It received only 64.8% of the valid votes cast.  The irony of this is that a measure requiring a two-thirds vote to approve local tax increases couldn't even manage to achieve that vote itself.    Surely it's time for a constitutional amendment requiring that any ballot measure handing power to a minority, by mandating a supermajority, must itself demonstrate such a level of support.

Residential taxes w Prop 13

Palo Alto -- true story about Residential taxes in 'our town'


The Proposition 13 disparities are unusual, not found in any other state of the union (and for that matter, not found in much of California, just the high-growth segments).   To give a poignant illustration, check Zillow for the tax bill for five homes, side-by-side in Palo Alto.  These homes are on Walter Hays Drive, a couple of blocks from the library -- simple three or four bedroom one-floor tract homes built in the 1960s by Barrett and Hilp.  Nothing fancy, all 1700 square feet or so on one-sixth of an acre (7000 sq. feet).  Addresses 109, 111, 113, 115, 117.  All homes are virtually identical to the casual eye.  Full disclosure -- we owned 115, sold it in January 1989 for $505,000.  It has been lived in by the same family since.  Next door (113) is the original owner.  111 sold in January 1998 for $772,000.  And 109 sold in 2010 for $1.65M.  117 sold sometime in the early 2000's but I don't have the exact date.

Zillow today 'values' the five homes at $1.824 M (109, 4 bdrm), $1.601M (111, 3 bdrm), $1.796 M (113, 4 bdrm), $1.901 M (115, 4 bdrm), and $1.755M (117, 3 bdrm).  So, all homes are within 8.6% of $1.75 M.  Here's the kicker: Taxes are, in order, $20,144, $$11,667, $1,167, $9,423, and $18,017.   The average tax bill is $12,083, but the disparity in terms of percentage is enormous -- certainly bears no relationship to the relative values of the homes.

The good news for the owner at 113 is that his taxes are miniscule; the bad news for the owner at 109 (with virtually the same home, in terms of lot, bedrooms, age, size, and value) is he is paying 17.3X (that is a whopping 1730%) what his neighbor pays.

This, while a boon for seniors and oldsters, is a crime that mitigates against people improving their home (because it makes it subject to reassessment) or selling; it instead encourages withholding homes from the market and passing them through to family whether they live in the area or not, and it robs schools, fire and police, and local roads and parks just to name a few.

Granted this cannot be 'fixed' easily, or without some pain for those who get by today without paying much share.  But we could (except for the two-thirds rule passed at the same time) probably make it harder to pass this along in perpetuity.  It isn't exactly that these are 'family farms' with historic significance or small family businesses being threatened by the Big Box stores.  These are tract homes, make no mistake, that with the Silicon Valley innovation craze have inflated because of the land value, not the home value.  At least in one generation, there would be 'catch-up'.

Used to be in America we all carried our fair share.  Now, between the Caymus Islands protection for the rich, and shifted tax burdens for the newly arrived, it is a double whammy.

Proposition 13 debates starting to rage

FINALLY!  The San Francisco Chronicle has managed in recent days to stimulate some real discussion about the ills and misinformation around Proposition 13.

Lately, there has been talk of rolling back the industry side of Proposition 13, the 1987 bill that hobbled state tax rates from moving anywhere close to inflation, essentially creating a privileged class (those that were here prior to 1985) and a penalized class (those arriving recently).  Worse, it has drained state revenues once used to support roads, schools, and infrastructure (including first responders).

Assemblyman Phil Ting (D) wrote to the Editor on Monday June 10, saying:
"As the former San Francisco assessor-recorder, I know the rules -- and loopholes -- deep-rooted in Proposition 13.  Prop 13 remains popular today because voters don't understand the unfairness that these loopholes create.  Jon Coupal ("Protect California business, protect Prop 13" Open Forum, June 7) does not address the main issue or the main beneficiaries of Prop. 13 -- commercial property owners.
Prior to Prop. 13, in San Francisco, almost 60 percent of property taxes were paid by commerical property owners.  Today that figure is less than 47 percent....
Coupal also doesn't acknowledge that the Prop. 13 commercial property tax subsidy enjoyed by old businesses deters new businesses from purchasing property.  In addition, a large disparity exists between what a new property owner must charge businesses that want to rent or lease versus a landlord who owns a 30-year old property.
All the proposals being discussed now continue to protect homeowners by keeping Prop 13 intact for residential property.  Let's close the loopholes voters don't know about and strengthen Prop. 13 for what it was meant to do -- protect homeowners and seniors."

Tedx Livermore Round 2

TEDx Livermore June 8, 2013 Round 2

The music groups, music presenters, humanists, and the forensics pair were also highlights for me, as they stretched my own dimensional limits.  The Basement Boys opened the day with a twenty minute jazz improv session; they were outstanding.  Youth Rock the Rebuild had a superb vocalist, and a mission to sing for charity groups – their dedication as well as their music, was awesome.

The highlight for me was Walter Collins, Exec Director for the Calif Symphony Orchestra and his Sound Minds program for children.  He brought a group on stage, complete with stringed instruments, to regale us.  He also introduced Benjamin Zander, "The transformative power of classical music" which is a TED talk on the web.  Go see it, it will move you!

Along that same vein, Sugata Mitra, "Build a School in the Cloud" told an earlier TED audience a compelling story about children learning with computers in unstructured ways.  Think about leaving a computer in a "wall" or a "fence" for anyone to use, and then watching, sort of in a "Candid Camera" mode.  Astonishing results!  Even more interesting than the old "Stand and Deliver" movie.

There were, as befits any TED conference, 'serious talks' which is how I'd label my own.  I spoke to Resilience as the key to innovative success, using examples from HP, my old nursery in Colorado Springs, and COPD and emphysema death-rates across America, hardly correlated with what the AMA insists is the cause.   Aside from the stage being set up in a way it is hard to hear audience reaction, I felt very good about the talk, the questions later, and the enthusiasm it seemed to create.

Ro Khanna, a great talent who worked in Dept of Commerce for Obama's first term (2009-2011), is now at Wilson Sonsini and at Stanford.  He gave a clear-eyed talk about MOOCs, and the possibility (nay, the probability) that they will revolutionize education.  Tie his perspective together with that of Mitra's "hole in the wall" and Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk about escaping the Death Valley of Education, and we had a ripsnorter (how do the Brits say it?  Gobsmacked?) for educational reform.

But it went onAlex Eckert, Vice Principal at Livermore High, and Meagn Fallone, with Barefoot College, and Dustin Haisler all talked to aspects of how education is morphing.  Lisa Highfill did a bang-up job talking about her "Flipped Classroom" and Betsy Burroughs taught us about mood vs. goals with a set of flip cards we should take with us on walks and sojourns.

I can't omit Jade Meskill, who shared some provocative thoughts about societal change, with his work with Gangplank (a name not calculated to excited big company consulting contracts???).

But none of this compared with Andrew Todhunter's presentation about a new program called "Senior Reflection" at Stanford, and his guest who is laboring to save elephants from extinction.  The Senior Reflection concept is essentially a year to blend multi-disciplinary learning on a personal pursuit.  Shelly Xie, an artist and biology grad (with honors) from Stanford, showed us her 'sand animation' painting to illustrate the drama and pathos of the schistosomiasis disease in Ghana.  Without seeing this work performed, you'd never imagine that it was possible to blend computer imaging, sand designs, and a story like she was able to do.  Talking later with Andrew and Shelly about what it took to learn this skill was genuinely stimulating.

All in all, you missed a good Saturday in Livermore, never mind that it was 109 degrees outside

TEDx Livermore Round 1

TEDx Livermore June 8, 2013 Round 1

A GREAT conference, “Creating our Future: Innovate and Educate”

See www.tedxlivermore.com for more details, but here are some highlights

Dominique Pierot was our TEDx Licensee.  He flew over for two days from Vegas despite (or maybe because) his first child was born seven days ago.  His leadership was key for permission to use the fabled TED labeling and approach. 

Rosalind Hamar , head of the local Montesorri school, was the Lead Organizer.  She brought much energy and enthusiasm to the task, and rallied a superb support team. 

We had, by my estimate, 250 attendees for this ‘first ever’ event in the Tri-Valley area, competing with the justly famous Livermore Rodeo today.  Few people in the sponsorship group or in the audience had previously known about TED, but the day provided much insight and acclaim for its value.

Sixteen speakers, four singing and music groups, and two forensics students were complemented by three 18 minute TED films in the fast-paced day. 

Three speakers dealt squarely with international issues, from the peril facing elephants from ivory hunters, to Ethiopian necessities, to women in 54 countries learning to install solar heating and cooking systems, to studies and solutions for schistosomiasis in Ghana.   Stories from Tazmania, India, China, and Africa buttressed their presentations.    The obvious concern for humanity everywhere, and the effort to render these solutions scalable were noteworthy, to say the least.

One young woman, Erica Gruidl, told a captivating story about creating a ‘safe haven’ for ‘special-needs’ kids at her Livermore high school.  She wove a story about how aloof the faculty and administration stood versus her attempts to get a group of six students ‘accepted’ as “normal” for such things as dance, band, and just simple shared classroom experience.  It was wildly successful, but not without some major learning.  She got a standing ovation, well deserved.

She mentioned the phenomenon whereby ‘whites’ teach their children not to stare at handicapped folk, and how easily that bridges into ‘not noticing’.  I found this in my own wheelchair days, whereas both Latino and African-Americans were quick to ask if I needed help, and solicitous about asking “how are you doing?”.  Another man and I, talking to Erica afterwards, compared notes on how we’d both be with someone and invariably people would address our companion with some version of “how’s he doing?” instead of talking to us directly.  You wouldn’t believe it unless you too have been in a chair.

Rehearsal night for TEDx

Rehearsal night for TEDx Livermore  Friday June 7

Getting ready for a superb TEDx conference, the speakers assembled Friday afternoon for a dress rehearsal at Las Positas Community College.  The theme, “Creating our Future: Innovate and Educate,” seemed to resonate well amongst the speakers, as we all learned to cope with the stage set and the lighting.  Jocular comments went back and forth, light banter betraying a slighter higher than normal amount of nervousness. 

Then we repaired to the Wente Winery restaurant, a surprisingly good viand place (where our god-daughter had her wedding family dinner thirteen years ago, in fact in the very same room).  Ironically, she had met her future husband at TED two years prior.

At dinner, folk from the sponsoring companies (Fremont Bank, Wente Winery, Marriott Courtyard, Sensiba San Filippo Accountants, Innovation Tri-Valley, and a half dozen others) joined the speakers and organizers for a wonderful dinner and sharing time about the significance of this event being staged locally.

Livermore is in fact home to an increasing number of ‘high-tech’ and medium-tech firms, to go along with the Lawrence Livermore Labs and its energy generation research (it is the leading USA fusion program, for example).

And we mentioned in a previous blog post that Jim Nissen flew out of here, and had virtually every USA and most foreign astronauts fly with him in his old Curtiss JN-4, known as the Flying Jenny.  I’ll bet only Houston can match that claim for American cities (oh, maybe Orlando or somewhere near Cape Kennedy).

Just listening to the various speakers and their reasons for coming was a delight.