Two nights ago, my wife and I sat down at a Hearing Symposium next to another gentleman my age; we shared the situation that our wives are telling us that neither of us can hear as well as we once did.
My wife is an engaging conversationalist, and she drew him out. He said his accent was from his English youth, but he was "a ‘dumb immigrant’ who came to this country right out of college, and stayed, ‘on the east coast’ "
Which to a Westerner, especially for two who briefly tried the East Coast at mid-life+, made sense.
To her question of ‘what do you do?’ he replied that he was a historian. I said, brightly, that I was an erstwhile historian myself. He said, “of what?” I proudly said, History of Technology”, and went on to say, “maybe you’ve heard of SHOT. I was just at their annual conference.”
Arnold Thackray said in reply, “Yes, I’ve heard of them.”
Well, off we went. I had explored the idea of a PhD in the History of Science and Technology in 1966, coincident with getting a History Master's degree in Urban Studies from the University of Colorado (looking for something to do while working at Hewlett-Packard at a hinterland division). I'd met luminaries in the field at the time -- I. Bernard Cohen at Harvard, Thomas Kuhn at Princeton, Carroll Purcell at UC Santa Barbara, and Melvin Kranzberg at Case Western (now Carnegie Mellon). It was an attractive field, nascent to be sure, and I decided to 'stay in electronics' which was just 'going digital'. Logic Analyzers might not have happened the same way if I'd shifted, who knows?
Well, Thackray met Cohen virtually at the same time, came to Harvard to teach, went on to found the department at the Univ of Pennsylvania, and then the Chemical Heritage Foundation. He retired, sort of, to the West Coast five years ago, but is working on projects still.
We have met, discussed our mutual interests at this point (which are several!), and commiserated about our choice of line of work.
Thackray, among many achievements, did the biography of Arnold Beckman--a tour-de-force in the chemical instrumentation world, one we knew well at HP.
He added, to the 'dumb immigrant' story, saying he was a 'dumb entrepreneur also, starting a non-profit corporation re the History of Science, and a 'dumb geoscociologist' as well, since he chose both a field where everyone looks forward, not back, in a country clearly the least interested in history of any nation.
I couldn't help thinking I've found a kindred spirit!
Thursday, November 14, 2013
Friday, November 8, 2013
Cuban Reflections
My wife and I just returned from an 'educational visit' to Cuba. As you probably know, it is not easy to 'go to Cuba' if you are an American, but there are a few 'allowed' tours for specific purposes through dedicated tour groups.
Cuba is a country about the size of Northern California from say Salinas to the far end of Napa Valley, about fifty miles wide (not wide enough to reach to Sacramento, for example), with 11 million people, about the same as our geography supports. It is much more distributed--Havana is the 'big city' but is only about three million folk.
Musing in the last post about what it took to make the Minneapolis Plan workable, it occurred to me that the Cuban system does have the characteristic that someone runs the place. More than we could assert for our region with the multifarious leaderships, jurisdictions, and goals.
Mind you, I am not arguing for the Cuban system--it clearly is a failed economic model. But some things stood out. They have opened the country to tourism, and while Americans are scarce (some 100,000 last year used these 'educational' tours to visit), some two million tourists from Canada, Mexico, Europe, and Asia visited, leaving behind something on the order of an estimated $4B to stimulate the local economy.
The opportunities for 'old car' aficionados are amazing. It is like a time warp for 1940-1959 American cars, including Henry J's, Studebaker Larks, Packards, and Hudson Jets. I always wondered where some of those things went. A million 1953-1956 Chevies seemed to buzz about, along with great 'restored' Buicks, Pontiacs, Fords, and Oldsmobiles, pleasing most of us on the trip. I could have sworn that I saw some folk shed a nostalgic tear or two. I saw a '59 DeSoto station wagon, not sure I ever saw one stateside.
Some were surprised by the new Audi's, Toyotas, VWs, and even Mercedes and BMWs. None of those countries are embargoing Cuba. None in our group were surprised by the omnipresent Lata's and the Moshvich's from Russia. The sleek modern Chinese bus that took us everywhere was said to be 'junk' by the driver.
Gasoline is approx $7/gallon, which for a 1955 Chevy with at best 14 mpg is pretty hefty. And wages are reportedly, for Cubans, on average about $0.40/day, so two weeks of wages buys 14 miles of travel by 'old car'. Cooking oil is a week's wage for a liter, we were told.
On the other hand, the travel folk get paid in CUCs, which is the 2nd tier of money. Our guide, a PhD in Chemical Engineering, can make a year's wages in two weeks of tour guiding. Guess what she's doing. Ditto for our bus driver.
Surprisingly to me, there was little feel of a police state or lurking army types with machine guns... hardly the feel of Yugoslavia in the 1980s or China in the 1990s. People were even candid about their views of the 'regime' though they did not use megaphones.
The recent 'celebration' of the 50-year anniversary of the Russian missiles arriving seemed incongruous, as did the tank and missile display at the Museum de Revolutionarie. Polemic books about the U.S. and its Seven League Boots are available for purchase; some of the facts about U.S. foreign policy were not that comfortable to read about from their perspective.
Which maybe is why we need to think about this. How many of you have visited (and enjoyed) Japan or Germany or Italy? Seventy years ago, they were the enemy, remember?
Weird. But we felt privileged to see this country before it morphs into modernism.
The Minneapolis Miracle
Minneapolis in 1950 was a pretty desolate, cold, forbidding place in the winter, and yet they had a couple of things going for them. First of all, they had a tremendous Scandanavian education ethic, coupled with a 'home-schooling' belief in 'well-rounded' folk that translated into a love of the arts.
Somewhat surprisingly, they voted for computers to augment the grain mills producing cereal, and the result built a formidable Computing Base. There is a new book, by Thomas Misa, director of the Babbage Institute, called Digital State, that describes some of what they accomplished with Control Data, Cray Research, Sperry, ATC, and Honeywell just to name a few. For nearly three decades, they were the true competitor to IBM on a worldwide basis.
The Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, MECC, was briefly mentioned, but unfortunately Misa missed the real significance of this group. It in fact spawned the Apple Education group, which transformed American schools a decade ahead of any other country, which accounts still today for the leadership America has in software development. This particular factoid was also missed by Walt Isaacson's sweeping grandiose biographical treatment of our wunderkind, Steve Jobs
But my purpose here is to reflect on another element scarcely mentioned in Misa's fine book--> the Minneapolis 5% club. This was conceived by Bill Norris, the CEO of Control Data as a self-taxing scheme to rebuild Minneapolis and St. Paul (the twin cities) for the arts and sciences. Working first with the downtown Minneapolis Club, sort of a brahman Bohemian Grove membership, he convinced them that the larger corporations of the Twin Cities should set aside 5% of their pre-tax earnings and pay it to a local "Development Fund" rather than send their tax dollars to Washington D.C. and hope for grants from the national level back to their fine arts efforts. The good news was that corporate taxes then were even higher than today, so a 5% tax kept locally only cost the companies 2.5% of net earnings. The second piece of good news was that Minneapolis/St. Paul had seven of America's top 50 corporations, so this was sizable money (General Mills, General Foods, CDC, SperryRand, Honeywell, 3M, and Post Cereal). Today, of course, local Minneapolis firms include Sheraton, Target, Best Buy and Cargill -- DID YOU KNOW THAT CARGILL is as large in revenue as APPLE? Yup, foodstuffs are 'big business'.
Today, Minneapolis has more Arts per capita by a factor of five than any other city in America--some sixty-three civic playwright groups for a middling size town. It worked, for their goals. You might have been to the Guthrie Theatre?
It wasn't just 'the arts' but also the sciences. Mayo Clinic owes its strength in part to this initiative, as do many of the best biomedical advances we've enjoyed.
Why am I carrying on like this? Well, just think about it. Pittsburgh took a 2% plan version of the Twin Cities plan and rebuilt the Golden Triangle. If we had a 1% plan for just our top ten companies in the valley, it'd be $740M this past year instead of $34M. The U.S. Treasury would be $250M lighter, which could be made up by repatriating one-tenth of one percent of the squirreled-away money from last year from the same companies in the Bahaman/Irish scams... and we'd have some true outreach money--like $1B over a decade or so for local agencies. That presumably could do some good.
If there were an agreed-on plan for how to use the money, it might even make sense.
Somewhat surprisingly, they voted for computers to augment the grain mills producing cereal, and the result built a formidable Computing Base. There is a new book, by Thomas Misa, director of the Babbage Institute, called Digital State, that describes some of what they accomplished with Control Data, Cray Research, Sperry, ATC, and Honeywell just to name a few. For nearly three decades, they were the true competitor to IBM on a worldwide basis.
The Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, MECC, was briefly mentioned, but unfortunately Misa missed the real significance of this group. It in fact spawned the Apple Education group, which transformed American schools a decade ahead of any other country, which accounts still today for the leadership America has in software development. This particular factoid was also missed by Walt Isaacson's sweeping grandiose biographical treatment of our wunderkind, Steve Jobs
But my purpose here is to reflect on another element scarcely mentioned in Misa's fine book--> the Minneapolis 5% club. This was conceived by Bill Norris, the CEO of Control Data as a self-taxing scheme to rebuild Minneapolis and St. Paul (the twin cities) for the arts and sciences. Working first with the downtown Minneapolis Club, sort of a brahman Bohemian Grove membership, he convinced them that the larger corporations of the Twin Cities should set aside 5% of their pre-tax earnings and pay it to a local "Development Fund" rather than send their tax dollars to Washington D.C. and hope for grants from the national level back to their fine arts efforts. The good news was that corporate taxes then were even higher than today, so a 5% tax kept locally only cost the companies 2.5% of net earnings. The second piece of good news was that Minneapolis/St. Paul had seven of America's top 50 corporations, so this was sizable money (General Mills, General Foods, CDC, SperryRand, Honeywell, 3M, and Post Cereal). Today, of course, local Minneapolis firms include Sheraton, Target, Best Buy and Cargill -- DID YOU KNOW THAT CARGILL is as large in revenue as APPLE? Yup, foodstuffs are 'big business'.
Today, Minneapolis has more Arts per capita by a factor of five than any other city in America--some sixty-three civic playwright groups for a middling size town. It worked, for their goals. You might have been to the Guthrie Theatre?
It wasn't just 'the arts' but also the sciences. Mayo Clinic owes its strength in part to this initiative, as do many of the best biomedical advances we've enjoyed.
Why am I carrying on like this? Well, just think about it. Pittsburgh took a 2% plan version of the Twin Cities plan and rebuilt the Golden Triangle. If we had a 1% plan for just our top ten companies in the valley, it'd be $740M this past year instead of $34M. The U.S. Treasury would be $250M lighter, which could be made up by repatriating one-tenth of one percent of the squirreled-away money from last year from the same companies in the Bahaman/Irish scams... and we'd have some true outreach money--like $1B over a decade or so for local agencies. That presumably could do some good.
If there were an agreed-on plan for how to use the money, it might even make sense.
Taking in and giving back
Okay, I couldn't resist. The last post 'celebrated' the corporate donors in our valley. But there's a context worth considering here....
Vis-a-vis the list of Silcon Valley 'donors' to our local charities, etc., I took the top five locally based high-tech firms (Cisco Intel, Applied Materials, Oracle, and SAP) and compared them in aggregate (see the last post) to five other local firms who didn't reach very far up that same list (Apple, Google, HP, eBay, and Facebook). Call them GROUP A and GROUP B
GROUP A (working from the most recent fiscal year reports)
ANNUAL REV = $163 B, growing 2.5% last year
Annual PROFIT = $36B, a healthy 21.5% margin, completely flat from last year
CASH and Equiv = $103B, up 6%
TOTAL ASSETS = $306B, up 11%
TOTAL DONATIONS locally = $32.1M, up 33%
GROUP B
ANNUAL REV = $360 B, growing 8% last year
Annual PROFIT = $40B, a fairly healthy 11.0% margin, down 20% from last year (HP the drag)
CASH and Equiv = $223B, up 18%
TOTAL ASSETS = $462B, up 12%
TOTAL DONATIONS locally are LESS THAN $3.0M, with eBay doing $1.0M announced.
So, lessee, Group B, which tends to get much more favorable Stock Market press, wouldn't you agree, makes the same amount of net profit, has twice as much cash which is growing 3x as fast, and more than twice the annual revenue, which is growing three times as fast...
and GUESS WHAT--the offshore tax shelters for these five are working JUST FINE, and the net charitable contributions at home are ONE-TENTH that of their collegial companies. So the 'giving' companies are THIRTY TIMES as generous as their somewhat more famous colleagues.
Thank goodness for the contributions of those who suport our local agencies!
Vis-a-vis the list of Silcon Valley 'donors' to our local charities, etc., I took the top five locally based high-tech firms (Cisco Intel, Applied Materials, Oracle, and SAP) and compared them in aggregate (see the last post) to five other local firms who didn't reach very far up that same list (Apple, Google, HP, eBay, and Facebook). Call them GROUP A and GROUP B
GROUP A (working from the most recent fiscal year reports)
ANNUAL REV = $163 B, growing 2.5% last year
Annual PROFIT = $36B, a healthy 21.5% margin, completely flat from last year
CASH and Equiv = $103B, up 6%
TOTAL ASSETS = $306B, up 11%
TOTAL DONATIONS locally = $32.1M, up 33%
GROUP B
ANNUAL REV = $360 B, growing 8% last year
Annual PROFIT = $40B, a fairly healthy 11.0% margin, down 20% from last year (HP the drag)
CASH and Equiv = $223B, up 18%
TOTAL ASSETS = $462B, up 12%
TOTAL DONATIONS locally are LESS THAN $3.0M, with eBay doing $1.0M announced.
So, lessee, Group B, which tends to get much more favorable Stock Market press, wouldn't you agree, makes the same amount of net profit, has twice as much cash which is growing 3x as fast, and more than twice the annual revenue, which is growing three times as fast...
and GUESS WHAT--the offshore tax shelters for these five are working JUST FINE, and the net charitable contributions at home are ONE-TENTH that of their collegial companies. So the 'giving' companies are THIRTY TIMES as generous as their somewhat more famous colleagues.
Thank goodness for the contributions of those who suport our local agencies!
Corpoate Citizenship
Nov 8, 2013, 6:06am PST
The Silicon Valley Biz Journal today carried a story about Corporate Giving in the area, titled:
The Silicon Valley Biz Journal today carried a story about Corporate Giving in the area, titled:
Meet Silicon Valley's 25 most generous companies
It was quite a list. Cisco was the #2 most generous company for the second year in a row, donating $12.0M to local agencies, up 29% from last year's $9.3M. This at a time when the company has furloughed 4,000 workers to maintain its profitability as its sales growth has slowed.
Intel, also hit with declining microprocessor sales to a sluggish PC market, was the #3 most generous, giving $7.3M, up from last year's $5.1M that earned it a 5th place ranking in 2012.
Applied Materials, one-tenth the size of Intel and supplier of much of its fabrication technology, was #4, with $4.8M, slightly up from last year.
Oracle, not thought of usually as a very generous company, was #5, donating $4.1M, down $500K from last year (maybe the sailboat party cost more than we thought).
SAP, the German company with a major R&D lab in Palo Alto, gave a whopping $3.9M up 829%, incluidng a major gift to the Computer History Museum for which I'll personally thank them!!!
Juniper, Symantec, and Agilent were #12,13, and 14 respectively, donating nearly $5.0M between them.
NetApp and Adobe gave $13M and $1.0M respectively, which eBay matched, but IBM could not.
Odd, isn't it, that we have the three largest high-tech firms in the world with major operations here (Apple, HP, and IBM), two of them HEADQUARTERED here, and collectively only one even made the list (IBM) with $651K, down 18% from last year.
Monday, October 28, 2013
APPLE SURPRISES to the upside
Contrary to the ARGUS INSIGHTS prediction (see post 5 days ago), Apple reported nearly 34 M iPhone sales--below the higher street predictions which went to 37M, but well over the 27-31M prediction by Argus. You can't win 'em all, right?
But my guess is that the Argus team will be sifting data the next few days, trying to assess where they erred, and what the algorithm tuning needs to be to become more predictive.
It's amazing to think about the jobs for numerical analysis mathematicians these days compared to twenty years ago. Ditto for library science (huh?), and curation of data (you thought it was only for museums and working for Britannica, right?).
The intersting thing to me is that these new jobs, and their immediacy, are ample proof of the STEM thesis, although clearly not what the pundits had in mind when they started the clamor.
But my guess is that the Argus team will be sifting data the next few days, trying to assess where they erred, and what the algorithm tuning needs to be to become more predictive.
It's amazing to think about the jobs for numerical analysis mathematicians these days compared to twenty years ago. Ditto for library science (huh?), and curation of data (you thought it was only for museums and working for Britannica, right?).
The intersting thing to me is that these new jobs, and their immediacy, are ample proof of the STEM thesis, although clearly not what the pundits had in mind when they started the clamor.
Sunday, October 27, 2013
MEDIA X @ Stanford
Media X@Stanford University, now entering its twelfth year, is one of the groups that should have impact and import for SHOT, although in truth Media X is focused on 'the future' rather than the past.
The interesringthing to me about STS, VTSS, and Media X at Stanford is that they all are multi-disciplinary, which is a difficult thing for most faculty folk to deal with, especially before they have tenure. Ditto for the Center for Information Technology at Santa Barbara (CITS @UCSB). All of these groups were represented at SHOT, but none of them (except STS at Stanford) have practdicing historians as their chief faculty.
This is a story worth amplifying, but it will have to await another day
The interesringthing to me about STS, VTSS, and Media X at Stanford is that they all are multi-disciplinary, which is a difficult thing for most faculty folk to deal with, especially before they have tenure. Ditto for the Center for Information Technology at Santa Barbara (CITS @UCSB). All of these groups were represented at SHOT, but none of them (except STS at Stanford) have practdicing historians as their chief faculty.
This is a story worth amplifying, but it will have to await another day
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