Remarkable Stories...

Mike Birck, the founder and former CEO of Tellabs, once made a remark during the telecom heydays about "Bush" companies (like Juniper) sprouting up everywhere. Now another Bush, of the Jenna variety is sprouting on TV- NBC to be precise. In this case, who you know easily trumps what you know, and any evidence of the latter. Jon Stewart seems to be the only reliable one on TV.

Japan had a remarkable election result- Japan’s centre-left opposition Democratic party won a crushing victory over the long-ruling conservative Liberal Democrats on Sunday, redrawing the political landscape of the world’s second largest economy.The result – the first time since the LDP’s founding in 1955 that any other party has won an electoral majority in the Diet’s lower house – gave the DPJ a mandate to pursue its campaign policies of taming the nation’s powerful bureaucrats and rolling out generous child allowances and welfare payments.The DPJ will also take over the daunting task of reviving the economy which, as figures released on Monday showed, remains extremely fragile.

Pleasant Memories

Comments from the past few weeks..

It's a memorable part of my life...PS. 9/2/09

I just read a lengthy paper on video game music (the topic of my next paper - I wanted something lighter), and I was struck by how unimpressive it was...poor grammar, bad spelling, random/snotty/tangential arguments...and then I realized it was this guy's MASTER'S THESIS! AND HE APPARENTLY GOT AN A! I suddenly felt much more comfortable about graduate school...JB. 9/2/2009

Thank you so much for your help, I really appreciate it!..AD. 9/1/2009

Every class and every interaction with you was a great learning experience for me...PS, 8/29/09

We are going to have to schedule another race at some point ... though I ran more this summer, so hopefully I can still beat you!" HW, 8/29/2009

we all student of group 3 will miss u ........i hope we will get another chance to sit in ur class in future..SG, 8/28/2009

i've already started reading the book...! btw, i love coffee.. :) as for prjct, please let me know what more can be done.. i really want to work further on the project..as for score, im happy with my score.. however, i really want to get into more details of SCM.. please let know what more can i read on SCM. also let me know the source of reading. ..RPT, 8/28/2009

I've been thinking that I should write you an e-mail for a while now... but I realized today that I couldn't wait any longer! How are you? What's new? I was particularly thinking of you this morning when I found a copy of the Wall Street Journal on the breakfast table. On the front page there was a fascinating article about Wal-Mart. It had everything to do with global business!I suppose that reading the Wall Street Journal is a sign that I'm getting my head back in the game, and getting ready for another school year. I do have to admit that I am pretty excited to test the waters and see what this year will have in store. Already the potential is building. Of my 5 housemates 2 are from China and one from Bulgaria.... they are international grad. students at U Mass. We make for a very diverse house! ...One of my great stars, CB, 8/27/2009

It was really a great time with you in IILM for one term. I really enjoyed your classes.They always drive my mind to ask queries & charge me up.Not even classes but the interactive chatting sessions that we had in your cabin...There`s always a requirement of some people in ones life that charge you up to ask things, know things & see things bit in a different mood & you are the one of these people to charge me. Well now you are back at your place but i m hoping to see you back in december as you told. We`ll miss you Sir. Have a great life & do keep guiding us whenever you feel so & we required so...RK, 8/28/2009

It has been a great joy for me to meet you and get to know you. Thank you for the "High Output Management" by Andrew Grove...RC, 8/30/2009

Its simplicity make you clear headed about all the basics of management.

Dialing a good deed

Yesterday after landing at O'Hare, I wanted to call my sister, but did not have two quarters worth of money. I found a young man and asked him if he had change. He said but he had 50 cents that her could give to me. I used it to make a phone call.

Nice people still exist...

De-Grading

The worst part of an academic's job is the task of assigning grades. My theory is that grades are degrading and kill any potential interest in the topic in anyone who does poorly on tests. Nevertheless, we are asked to design exams and grade students. After having recently completed this exercise, I find that even good students can do poorly. Wish I could give everyone multiple chances, bu would that be fair?

An Indian Dilemma

Yesterday I had dinner with some students and asked them about their views on India. The number one issue they raised was corruption. This disease was the primary reason why I had left India more than a quarter century ago, and it appears that despite the likes of Infosys and Wipro corruption is alive and well. Even after a new generation has come of age in the business world, why hasn't the culture changed? I have done my little part during my stay here, but there is a lot more to be done.

On the other hand, India is a warm welcoming country, and the hospitality of the people is just astounding. Unfortunately it extends only to one's friends and close ones. Everyone else is treated as dirt.

It's truly a wonderful life

I went out to dinner this evening with five of the best students. We went to an "authentic" Indian restaurant called Rajdhani. The food was excellent, and the company was marvellous. Students always make me energized. We had a lot of fun, and learnt a lot about each other and about life.

Students always teach me so much more than I teach them...

Thanks, RAD, PRI, RUC, PRA and PRA.

Looking down....only lowers the Looker

When I returned to the guest house this evening, I said hello to the security guard on duty, as I always do. He smiled and said that I was the only one who stops and talks to the guards. Everyone else looks away and act as if these people do not exist, except when there is a crisis and a guard is needed. I asked the guard why people behave that way, a rhetorical question, of course. He replied that the residents think that they are higher than the guards and look down upon them. A rather sad look at affairs. One more reason India has a long way to go before it becomes moral.

As time goes by...

As my trip winds down, students have been stopping by my office to chat, share their opinions, and give me their insights. The ones stopping by are smart and motivated. All are concerned about the job market. Some of the students are from an engineering background, and are interested in technical jobs.The general conclusion is that students have learned something from the course, and they are now interested in supply chain management.

Always a great delight to talk to the younger crowd.

The Daughter Deficit

A very good article in the NYT

reproduced below.

n the late 1970s, a Ph.D. student named Monica Das Gupta was conducting anthropological fieldwork in Haryana, a state in the north ofIndia. She observed something striking about families there: parents had a fervent preference for male offspring. Women who had given birth to only daughters were desperate for sons and would keep having children until they had one or two. Midwives were even paid less when a girl was born. “It’s something you notice coming from outside,” says Das Gupta, who today studies population and public health in the World Bank’s development research group. “It just leaps out at you.”

Das Gupta saw that educated, independent-minded women shared this prejudice in Haryana, a state that was one of India’s richest and most developed. In fact, the bias against girls was far more pronounced there than in the poorer region in the east of India where Das Gupta was from. She decided to study the issue in Punjab, then India’s richest state, which had a high rate of female literacy and a high average age of marriage. There too the prejudice for sons flourished. Along with Haryana, Punjab had the country’s highest percentage of so-called missing girls — those aborted, killed as newborns or dead in their first few years from neglect.

Here was a puzzle: Development seemed to have not only failed to help many Indian girls but to have made things worse.

It is rarely good to be female anywhere in the developing world today, but in India and China the situation is dire: in those countries, more than 1.5 million fewer girls are born each year than demographics would predict, and more girls die before they turn 5 than would be expected. (In China in 2007, there were 1.73 million births — and a million missing girls.) Millions more grow up stunted, physically and intellectually, because they are denied the health care and the education that their brothers receive.

Among policymakers, the conventional wisdom is that such selective brutality toward girls can be mitigated by two factors. One is development: surely the wealthier the home, the more educated the parents, the more plugged in to the modern economy, the more a family will invest in its girls. The other is focusing aid on women. The idea is that a mother who has more money, knowledge and authority in the family will direct her resources toward all her children’s health and education. She will fight for her girls.

Yet these strategies — though invaluable — underestimate the complexity of the situation in certain countries. To be sure, China and India are poor. But in both nations, girls are actually more likely to be missing in richer areas than in poorer ones, and in cities than in rural areas. Having more money, a better education and (in India) belonging to a higher caste all raise the probability that a family will discriminate against its daughters. The bias against girls applies in some of the wealthiest and best-educated nations in the world, including, in recent years, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. It also holds among Indian immigrants in Britain and among Chinese, Indian and South Korean immigrants in the United States. In the last few years, the percentage of missing girls has been among the highest in the middle-income, high-education nations of the Caucasus: Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia.

Nor does a rise in a woman’s autonomy or power in the family necessarily counteract prejudice against girls. Researchers at the International Food Policy Research Institute have found that while increasing women’s decision-making power would reduce discrimination against girls in some parts of South Asia, it would make things worse in the north and west of India. “When women’s power is increased,” wrote Lisa C. Smith and Elizabeth M. Byron, “they use it to favor boys.”

Why should this be? A clue lies in what Das Gupta uncovered in her research in Punjab in the 1980s. At the time, it was assumed that parents in certain societies simply did not value girls. And in important ways, this was true. But Das Gupta complicated this picture. She found that it was not true that all daughters were mistreated equally. A firstborn daughter was not typically subjected to inferior treatment; she was treated like her brothers. But a subsequent daughter born to an educated mother was 2.36 times as likely to die before her fifth birthday as her siblings were to die before theirs — mainly because she was less likely to see a doctor. It turned out that a kind of economic logic was at work: with a firstborn girl, families still had plenty of chances to have a boy; but with each additional girl, the pressure to have a son increased. The effect of birth order that Das Gupta discovered has now been confirmed in subsequent studies of missing girls.

What unites communities with historically high rates of discrimination against girls is a rigid patriarchal culture that makes having a son a financial and social necessity. When a daughter grows up and marries, she essentially becomes chattel in her husband’s parents’ home and has very limited contact with her natal family. Even if she earns a good living, it will be of no help to her own parents in their old age. So for parents, investing in a daughter is truly, in the Hindi expression, planting a seed in the neighbor’s garden. Sons, by contrast, provide a kind of social security. A family with only daughters will also likely lose its land when the father dies: although women can legally inherit property, in areas of north India and China, they risk ostracism or even murder if they claim what is theirs. And sons are particularly important to mothers, who acquire power and authority when they have married sons. Sons, according to Chinese custom, are also needed to care for the souls of dead ancestors.

What Das Gupta discovered is that wealthier and more educated women face this same imperative to have boys as uneducated poor women — but they have smaller families, thus increasing the felt urgency of each birth. In a family that expects to have seven children, the birth of a girl is a disappointment; in a family that anticipates only two or three children, it is a tragedy.

Thus development can worsen, not improve, traditional discrimination. This can happen in other ways too. With the access it brings to cutting-edge technology, development can also offer more sophisticated and easier options for exercising old-fashioned prejudice. In China and in the north and west of India, for instance, the spread of ultrasound technology, which can inform parents of the sex of their fetus, has turned a pool of missing girls into an ocean. The birth of girls has long been avoided through infanticide, which is still practiced often in China. But there are even more couples who would abort a pregnancy than would kill a newborn. Ultrasound has been advertised in India as “pay 5,000 rupees today and save 500,000 rupees tomorrow.” In both countries, it is illegal to inform parents of the sex of their fetus, and sex-selective abortion is banned. But it is practiced widely and rarely punished.

Finally, because higher education and income levels generate more resources, development offers new opportunities to discriminate against living girls. After all, if people are very poor, boys and girls are necessarily deprived equally — there is little to dole out to anyone. But as parents gain the tools to help their children survive and thrive (and indeed, all children do better as their parents’ education and income levels advance), they allocate advantages like doctor visits to boys and firstborn girls, leaving subsequent daughters behind.

To be sure, development can eventually lead to more equal treatment for girls: South Korea’s birth ratios are now approaching normality. But policymakers need to realize that this type of development works slowly and mainly indirectly, by softening a son-centered culture. The solution is not to abandon development or to stop providing, say, microcredit to women. But these efforts should be joined by an awareness of the unintended consequences of development and by efforts, aimed at parents, to weaken the cultural preference for sons.

The lesson here is subtle but critical: Development brings about immense and valuable cultural change — much of it swiftly — but it doesn’t necessarily change all aspects of a culture at the same rate. (India and China have myriad laws outlawing discrimination against girls that are widely ignored. And how to explain the persistence of missing girls among Asian immigrants in America?) In the short and medium terms, the resulting clashes between modern capabilities and old prejudices can make some aspects of life worse before they make them better.

Connecting....Again

Today, I was invited to talk to an Executive MBA class. The students happened to be from the telecom sector, one in which I had spent more than a decade. I had a great time going through the rapid developments in telecommunications and answering students' sharp questions on what the future holds for telecom in India. This was one of the more enjoyable professional moments on this trip.

Chasms in an Educator's Experiences

Perhaps the greatest reward for any educator is when a student comes up and asks the question 'why' or 'how' on any topic other than grades. I have had that experience a few times this week. Today a student asked me to explain the concept behind the Holt Model for forecasting, and how it would be used. She then related it to finance and how she uses the same concepts in Portfolio theory. Another student wanted to know why cross-docking isn't risk pooling. These questions show that the students have exercised their brain- I count that as a success in my metric.

On the other hand, a great disappointment, if not the greatest, is when students cheat or plagiarize. I had had those happen too. Little children can be taught the difference between right and wrong and can be corrected. When students are adults, the educator is simply at a loss.

Our society has a long way to go before harnessing the enormous potential hidden and waited to be discovered in the human race.

Plastic Decomposition

Published research on Plastics, reported on Discovery News..

Amidst waves and wildlife in the world's oceans, billions of pounds of Styrofoam, water bottles, fishing wire and other plastic products float in endless circles.

This bobbing pollution is more than just an eyesore or a choking hazard for birds. According to a new study, plastic in the oceans can decompose in as little as a year, leaching chemical compounds into the water that may harm the health of animals and possibly even people.

"Most people in the world believe that this plastic is indestructible for a very long time," said Katsuhiko Saido, a chemist at Nihon University in Chiba, Japan. He spoke this week at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Washington, D.C.

"We are now concerned that plastic pollution is caused by invisible materials," Saido said through an interpreter. "This will have a great effect on marine life."

Patterns in ocean currents create conglomerations of swirling trash that have received a burst of attention recently. The so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch, for one, is a mound of waste, mostly plastic, that's about twice the size of Texas. It lies some 1,000 miles off the west coast between California and Hawaii.

In Japan, Saido said, up to 150,000 tons of plastic wash on shore each year. Much of it is Styrofoam, a type of polystyrene plastic.

In their lab, Saido and colleagues used a new chemical technique to simulate the decomposition of polystyrene plastic in the oceans at 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit). The process produced some potentially toxic chemicals, including bisphenol A (BPA) and PS oligomer.

****The worrisome news is that India is just beginning to go wild on plastics, with the use of plastic bags and containers soaring. Most of the plastic material is thrown by the roadside or by the beach as trash.

An Un"guarded" Moment

For the past few weeks I have been staying at a gated condo complex in Gurgaon. This complex has 24/7 security, with guards at the gate, and at the entrance to the condos. I have come to know the guards quite well, especially those that work the night shift. When I go out to run early in the morning I stop and say hello and have a little chat with the security folks.

This evening, I went out for a short walk, and as I was returning, one of the guards came by and complimented me in chaste Hindi. At that moment, I wished that I had learnt my Hindi well, or at least that I had my brother with me to translate. The guard said that there was no sign of arrogance or status-driven pride in me, and that I was humble. He was quite emotionally moved- it was one of the nicest expression of gratitude, and I was quite moved myself. I had done nothing exceptional, but had treated him and others just like I would treat any of my "well-to-do" friends- with respect.

Moments like these bring some welcome joy and relief- when it has become so easy to lose good friendships and love over rather trivial matters or fears.

Taking flight...fast

• On my flight from Delhi to Chennai on Wednesday I happened to sit next to an attractive young lady, dressed in a traditional salwar kameez. I started reading my Holmes, and I heard a flight attendant say "Is this your suitcase, Sir?" I looked down and noticed that there was a suitcase on the aisle, placed next to my seat. I should have said "No ma'm, but did you check if your name is on it?" Instead I said politely that it was not mine, and that it should be removed. Security was called in, and while this hungama was going on, my neighbor and I exchanged introductions. Holmes always serves one key purpose- provides a great topic for discussion. We talked about a number of topics, and exchanged our good movie lists. Eventually the topic turned to Kutub Minar, and I mentioned to her that there were some pillars from Hindu temples with the faces of the Hindu gods chopped off. She then told me that she was a muslim, and gave me some more insights into the Islamic culture for which I am grateful. A very friendly woman, she was smart and provided great company, and made the flight time pass quickly. She provided another great on-board learning experience.
• I flew Indigo air from Chennai to Delhi, and the senior flight attendant made an announcement about the airline. She cited some awards Indigo had won, including being voted as one of the "best" places to work in India. After a few minutes, I corralled a friendly attendant and asked her to 'spill the beans' and tell me if employees really liked working there. She gave me some insight into the business- that management, including MDs, listen to employees, that she can raise any issue with her senior attendant and it would be addressed, they have not been asked to take pay cuts or go on leave, and that employees go the extra mile. She herself did not take a leave day even though her mom was sick, because she had gone more than six months without a leave day. Management is not hard- respecting people, listening to them, and charging reasonable prices for reasonable service. One can learn a lot just by flying...

An Education in Contrasts

A couple of days ago I renewed my acquaintance with a somewhat distant cousin. He currently teaches English, Telugu, and Sanskrit to college students, despite the fact that he studied mostly in a school where the medium of instruction was Telugu. He was reciting Longfellow and the Vedas with ease.

On the other hand I have witnessed a poor level of discipline, work ethic, and the desire to learn in the students here. Nearly every student wants to take a short cut.

Brevity is the wit...of Dolphins.

An interesting story.. Discovery.com

Among the words we use most often, short ones like "I," "a" and "the" top the list. It turns out we're not the only ones who strive for this type of efficiency in the way we communicate. Dolphins, found a new study, do it, too.

It's the first evidence that another species follows one of the basic rules that defines allhuman languages: the law of brevity.

The work, which is just one step in a larger attempt to understand the evolution of communication, also suggests that humans might not be as special as we like to think we are.

"Indirectly, this is telling us something about us," said David Lusseau, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Aberdeen, in Scotland. "More broadly, it is helping us understand how you get to this level of complexity. Is there only a limited way to reach it or can you reach it in many different manners?"

Does this compute?

An interesting article on the evolution of family life...
Breakfast Can Wait. The Day’s First Stop Is Online. (NYT)

Technology has shaken up plenty of life’s routines, but for many people it has completely altered the once predictable rituals at the start of the day.

This is morning in America in the Internet age. After six to eight hours of network deprivation — also known as sleep — people are increasingly waking up and lunging for cellphones and laptops, sometimes even before swinging their legs to the floor and tending to more biologically urgent activities.

“It used to be you woke up, went to the bathroom, maybe brushed your teeth and picked up the newspaper,” said Naomi S. Baron, a professor of linguistics at American University, who has written about technology’s push into everyday life. “But what we do first now has changed dramatically. I’ll be the first to admit: the first thing I do is check my e-mail.”

The Gudes’ sons sleep with their phones next to their beds, so they start the day with text messages in place of alarm clocks. Mr. Gude, an instructor at Michigan State University, sends texts to his two sons to wake up.

“We use texting as an in-house intercom,” he said. “I could just walk upstairs, but they always answer their texts.” The Gudes recently began shutting their devices down on weekends to account for the decrease in family time.

In other households, the impulse to go online before getting out the door adds an extra layer of chaos to the already discombobulating morning scramble.

Weekday mornings have long been frenetic, disjointed affairs. Now families that used to fight over the shower or the newspaper tussle over access to the lone household computer — or about whether they should be using gadgets at all, instead of communicating with one another.

“They used to have blankies; now they have phones, which even have their own umbilical cord right to the charger,” said Liz Perle, a mother in San Francisco who laments the early-morning technology immersion of her two teenage children. “If their beds were far from the power outlets, they would probably sleep on the floor.”

The surge of early risers is reflected in online and wireless traffic patterns. Internet companies that used to watch traffic levels rise only when people booted up at work now see the uptick much earlier.

Arbor Networks, a Boston company that analyzes Internet use, says that Web traffic in the United States gradually declines from midnight to around 6 a.m. on the East Coast and then gets a huge morning caffeine jolt. “It’s a rocket ship that takes off at 7 a.m,” said Craig Labovitz, Arbor’s chief scientist.

Akamai, which helps sites like Facebook and Amazon keep up with visitor demand, says traffic takes off even earlier, at around 6 a.m. on the East Coast. Verizon Wireless reported the number of text messages sent between 7 and 10 a.m. jumped by 50 percent in July, compared with a year earlier.

Both adults and children have good reasons to wake up and log on. Mom and Dad might need to catch up on e-mail from colleagues in different time zones. Children check text messages and Facebook posts from friends with different bedtimes — and sometime forget their chores in the process.

In May, Gabrielle Glaser of Montclair, N.J., bought her 14-year-old daughter, Moriah, an Apple laptop for her birthday. In the weeks after, Moriah missed the school bus three times and went from walking the family Labradoodle for 20 minutes each morning to only briefly letting the dog outside.

Moriah concedes that she neglected the bus and dog, and blames Facebook, where the possibility that crucial updates from friends might be waiting draws her online as soon as she wakes. “I have some friends that are up early and chatting,” she said. “There is definitely a pull to check it."

A Capital (Anachron)Ism

Plenty of interesting stories today....While I try very hard to get internships for my students, all paid ones, a report in today's NYT describes the "for profit" internship placement firms. In "Unpaid Work, but They Pay for Privilege" Gerry Shi writes that "With paying jobs so hard to get in this weak market, a lot of college graduates would gladly settle for a nonpaying internship. But even then, they are competing with laid-off employees with far more experience.So growing numbers of new graduates — or, more often, their parents — are paying thousands of dollars to services that help them land internships. Call these unpaid internships that you pay for.“It’s kind of crazy,” said David Gaston, director of the University of Kansas career center. “The demand for internships in the past 5, 10 years has opened up this huge market. At this point, all we can do is teach students to understand that they’re paying and to ask the right questions.” Not that the parents are complaining. Andrew Topel’s parents paid $8,000 this year to a service that helped their son, a junior at the University of Tampa, get a summer job as an assistant at Ford Models, a top agency in New York. “It would’ve been awfully difficult” to get a job like that, said Andrew’s father, Avrim Topel, “without having a friend or knowing somebody with a personal contact.” Andrew completed the eight-week internship in July and was invited to return for another summer or to interview for a job after graduation..."

An interesting report in the NYT, Job Growth Lacking in the Private Sector, reveals that "For the first time since the Depression, the American economy has added virtually no jobs in the private sector over a 10-year period. The total number of jobs has grown a bit, but that is only because of government hiring.The accompanying charts show the job performance from July 1999, when the economy was booming and companies were complaining about how hard it was to find workers, through July of this year, when the economy was mired in the deepest and longest recession since World War II. For the decade, there was a net gain of 121,000 private sector jobs, according to the survey of employers conducted each month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In an economy with 109 million such jobs, that indicated an annual growth rate for the 10 years of 0.01 percent.Until the current downturn, the long-term annual growth rate for private sector jobs had not dipped below 1 percent since the early 1960s. Most often, the rate was well above that.As can be seen from the charts, there were some areas of strength in the economy. Health care jobs continued to grow, particularly jobs that involve caring for the elderly. Home health care employment rose at an annual rate of 5 percent, a rate that indicates a total gain of more than 60 percent. On an annual basis, that was twice the overall rate for health care of 2.4 percent a year.There were also job gains in education and in a host of service industries, including lawyers (0.7 percent a year), accountants (0.9 percent) and computer systems designers (2.4 percent). The field of management and technical consulting leaped at an annual rate of 5 percent.But while designing computers and related equipment was a growth field, building them was a very different story, as the manufacturing shifted largely to Asia. The number of jobs making computer and electronic equipment in the United States fell at an annual rate of 4.4 percent, substantially more than the overall decline in manufacturing jobs, of 3.7 percent.That was a better showing than that of the automakers, which shed jobs at a rate of 6.7 percent a year. By contrast, auto dealers cut jobs at a much slower rate of 1.3 percent a year, although that rate may accelerate later this year as General Motors and Chrysler dealerships are closed.Hard as it may be to believe, the consumer economy of the United States actually lost retail jobs over the decade, at a rate of 0.2 percent. There were fewer people working in food stores. But the category of general merchandise stores — like Wal-Mart and Costco — showed an impressive gain of 1 percent a year, even though the category also includes department stores like Macy’s, where the number of jobs has fallen.For a good part of the decade, the construction business was a growth industry. But there are now fewer jobs there than there were a decade ago.The total picture is of an economy that has changed in substantial ways over the decade. After the recession ends, job growth is likely to resume. But there is no indication that the secular trend toward a more service-oriented economy will reverse. A decade from now, there are likely to be still more jobs at architecture and engineering firms (up 1.2 percent a year over the last decade) and at bars and restaurants (up 1.8 percent a year). But few expect that manufacturing will reverse its long decline as a major employer in the United States."

**It has to be noted that this analysis is based on the BLS data, which is highly suspect.

Telling it straight... "Urging consumers to spend like bleeding a sick patient, Allstate CEO says."

Allstate Corp. reported its first profit in a year, as the recession continues putting the brakes on its business, but Chief Executive Tom Wilson doesn't want economic growth at all costs.Consumers need to spend less and ratchet back their debt, even if it means they buy fewer homes and cars, cutting into Wilson's property and casualty insurance operations. "Trying to encourage consumers to spend and take on more debt...it's like bloodletting," the Allstate chief said in an interview Wednesday afternoon.To combat the recession effectively, he said, "We need to be prudent about how we grow out of it."

Kenya to Las Vegas - The zenith and the nadir of human behavior...

When most students are enjoying their summer and getting a tan, one of my students is in Kenya volunteering his time and effort to help local children with their education. This is quite exceptional, and makes a teacher proud.

On the other hand,a NYT story discusses the plight of the homeless. The article says that "...A report due out this weekend from the National Coalition for the Homeless documents a rise in violence over the last decade, with at least 880 unprovoked attacks against the homeless at the hands of nonhomeless people, including 244 fatalities. An advance copy was provided to The New York Times.

Sometimes, researchers say, one homeless person attacks another in turf battles or other disputes. But more often, they say, the assailants are outsiders: men or in most cases teenage boys who punch, kick, shoot or set afire people living on the streets, frequently killing them, simply for the sport of it, their victims all but invisible to society.

“A lot of what we see are thrill offenders,” said Brian Levin, a criminologist who runs theCenter for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino..."

A sad commentary on a scoeity where people including teenagers take thrill in hurting the homeless. Where's the soul?

Luck of the Irish

When I visited Ireland in 1998 it was a booming vibrant economy, just bubbling with energy. Today's report says it all...Irish unemployment at 14-year high of 12.2 percent-Collapse of property boom sends Ireland's unemployment rate to 14-year high of 12.2 percent

ObamAdminstration- Drugged and Delivered

It looks like the Obama administration is not willing to take on any special interests, and is instead applying patches everywhere. The Cash for Clunkers program is just supporting wasteful spending when that money can be ploughed into mass transportation. Now, a report in the NYT indicates that the administration does not want to put any pressure on the drug firms to reduce the prices they charge.
White House Affirms Deal on Drug Cost

".... Pressed by industry lobbyists, White House officials on Wednesday assured drug makers that the administration stood by a behind-the-scenes deal to block any Congressional effort to extract cost savings from them beyond an agreed-upon $80 billion.

Drug industry lobbyists reacted with alarm this week to a House health care overhaul measure that would allow the government to negotiate drug prices and demand additional rebates from drug manufacturers.

In response, the industry successfully demanded that the White House explicitly acknowledge for the first time that it had committed to protect drug makers from bearing further costs in the overhaul. The Obama administration had never spelled out the details of the agreement.

“We were assured: ‘We need somebody to come in first. If you come in first, you will have a rock-solid deal,’ ” Billy Tauzin, the former Republican House member from Louisiana who now leads the pharmaceutical trade group, said Wednesday. “Who is ever going to go into a deal with the White House again if they don’t keep their word? You are just going to duke it out instead.”

A deputy White House chief of staff, Jim Messina, confirmed Mr. Tauzin’s account of the deal in an e-mail message on Wednesday night.

“The president encouraged this approach,” Mr. Messina wrote. “He wanted to bring all the parties to the table to discuss health insurancereform.”.."

The new attention to the agreement could prove embarrassing to the White House, which has sought to keep lobbyists at a distance, including by refusing to hire them to work in the administration.

Nothing but Net...Flix, that is..

Netflix is one of the great success stories of this decade. Excellent service combined with a good user community makes it a very powerful profit machine. An interesting article in the ChicagoTribune details the operation of one of the Netflix warehouses- it is an interesting read.

How Netflix gets your movies to your mailbox so fast

This extract reveals the crux of the operations...

"...Six nights a week, a truck leaves for the post office and picks up cartons full of these return-address envelopes; pickup is at 3 a.m. (It's also the reason that the time of day you mail your DVD back has no effect on when you receive your next one.) Back at the 28,500-square-foot warehouse, from which more than 60,000 discs are shipped daily in the Chicago area alone, cartons are placed at the feet of employees, who glance in two directions -- down (to pick up an envelope) and up (to look at the disc), and that's about it. This is the first, and least automated, stage of the process, performed mainly by women, including a seemingly disproportionate number of local grandparents; they have full medical benefits and a 40-hour workweek.

They inspect each returned disc. They rip open each envelope, toss it, pull the disc from its sleeve, check that the title matches the sleeve, inspect the disc for cracks or scratches, inspect the sleeve for stains or marks, clean the disc with a quick circular motion on a towel pulled tight across a square block of wood, insert the disc into its sleeve, and file the disc in one of two bins. The bin to the right is for acceptable discs, the bin to the left is for damaged discs or discs not in the proper sleeve.

To a casual observer, this all seems to happen in a single motion, a flurry of fingers. Employees are expected to perform this a minimum of 650 times an hour. Also, customers stuff things into the envelopes. Scribbled movie reviews, complaints, pictures of dogs and kids. That needs sorting too. After 65 minutes of inspection, a bell rings. Everyone stands up.

Calisthenics!

The team leader leans back, and everyone leans back. The team leader leans sideways. Everyone leans sideways. And so on. This pattern of inspection and exercise repeats every 65 minutes, until rental-return inspection is complete. Swasey, who drove in fromColumbus, Ohio, where there is an even larger hub, pointed to a photocopy taped to the wall -- a picture of Disc 4 of "Rescue Me" Season 4 alongside a sleeve that promised Disc 4 of "Rescue Me" Season 3. It's a kind of Netflix perp walk. Some diligent associate caught the mistake before it shipped. "To me, I see it as a goose-bump moment," Swasey said.

From there, action shifts to long machines that go ffft. This, right here, is how you get discs as fast as you do. Inspected discs are scanned into the inventory by a machine that reads 30,000 bar codes an hour -- ffft, ffft, ffft. The moment this machine reads the bar code, you receive an e-mail letting you know that your disc arrived. Then discs are scanned a second time -- if a title is requested, and around 95 percent of titles get rented at least once every 90 days, the machine separates it and sorts it out by ZIP code. (The entire inventory of the building is run through this daily, a process that alerts other warehouses of the location of every one of the 89 million discs owned by Netflix.) After that, separated discs are taken to a machine called a Stuffer -- which goes ssssht-click, ssssht-click -- and stuffed in an envelope, which is sealed and labeled by a laser that goes zzzt...."

A great graph..

Poetweets....

Beam me up Scotty...Shatner Reads Palin Poetweets...

Hope...and Recovery

Over the last two decades, easy money and easy path to an affluent lifestyle, especially by foreign standards, has created high and unreasonable expectations among the populace. Why should anyone who happens to be born in one country do much better than someone else who works harder and smarter, but happens to be in another place? Laptops for kids and summer camps and Disneyland visits...these are not rights by birth.

An article in the NYT, Prolonged Aid to Unemployed Is Running Out, illustrates these points, through examples of some individuals...

"Ms. Lampley, 40, who is married with three children, lost her job as a human resources officer in January 2008 and had been receiving $351 a week, which covered the groceries and gas. Even so, she and her husband, who still has work as a machinist, were sinking into debt. Now, still poorer, she feels devastated because they cannot buy their son a laptop to take to college and she cannot give her 9-year-old son money for the movies.

In Ohio, where unemployment is 11.1 percent, Cathy Nixon, 39, a mother of four teenagers from Lorain, has been out of work for much of the time since June 2007, and her benefits — $313 a week — run out in September. Ms. Nixon is already fighting foreclosure and said she feared that when the benefits end, “we’ll be homeless.” She was unable to afford summer camp and baseball activities for her children, despite scrimping on basics.

Raymond Crouse of Columbus operated heavy construction machinery but has found no work since 2007. Mr. Crouse is 72 and receivesSocial Security but said that was not enough to live on. The $190 a month he has received in unemployment benefits enabled him and his wife to hang on to the house they bought 15 years ago, he said. But with the benefits ending next month, he fears that they will not keep up....

Ms. Lampley, whose benefits have ended, described the tough job market. She used to make nearly $15 an hour and has unsuccessfully sought office and clerical work at $8 an hour. Mr. Crouse said that even if new building projects were planned, construction slows in the winter cold.

And Ms. Nixon said that she had interviewed endlessly for jobs in real estate and office work and that even her teenagers could not find fast-food jobs because laid-off adults were filling them..."

Food For Thought...

The Meryl Streep movie "Julie and Julia" is inspiring quite a bit of talk about food, er, cooking. Mr. Pollan has a thoughtful article titled "Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch" in the NYT, which also has a somewhat lighter piece by Ms. Dowd titled "Can You Eat in Bed?" - an interview with Nora Ephron, the Director of the movie.

Explaining the Truth- the 'Net' truth

Today, the students had to analyze a case study of Altera. Back in the 2001 era it was another tech firm that wrote off hundred million dollar plus of inventory. At the end of the analysis a student asked a simple question- how come no one saw that the forecasts were too high? The moment of truth had arrived- so I had to tell her that quite a number of people had figured out the truth, but the executives of a number of the firms were doing everything possible to pump up the stock price so that they could cash in their options. The stock price attraction made many of them issue false or erroneous forecasts that led to real damage. A few culprits, including Bernie of WorldCom, have been punished; many have escaped any punishment.