The Integrative Stream

Pascal: the gestalt gadget

I’ve spent a lot of time searching for the perfect convergence device; something to replace the cell phone, laptop and PDA that I seem carry constantly, and the MP3 player that tends to be left behind. CNET went and got an industrial design firm to tell us what it might look like (built off more or less current technology). We won’t be seeing any of these for a while, though.

Pascal: the gestalt gadget – CNET.com

Nanotech Cancer Screening

Nanowires for detecting molecular signs of cancer.

This is really cool. If it’s cheap enough you could screen large populations and potentially detect cancers before any symptoms manifest. And the technology is applicable to any disease that leaves trace elements in the blood (and I’d think that’s just about everything).

Slowing down? Can’t be.

MIT definitely keeps you busy. After spending all day Saturday at a Biomedical Enterprise Program retreat, Sunday and Monday (which was supposedly a “day off”) went to academics. Yesterday was twelve solid hours from door to door, including an evening career development office dinner (another of those this evening, one more tomorrow), followed by a few hours polishing up the various things I needed to hand in today. As of right now I’m all caught up, and if I don’t slack off I can build up a comfortable margin by the weekend.

The problems people have depend on where they come from. The pure engineers aren’t all that happy with accounting, a domain where numbers do not necessarily obey the various laws of thermodynamics. I had a strange problem on some relatively simple probability questions in a data analysis class, since years of programming in C-descended programming languages have trained me to read the | symbol as “or.” I even use it in handwritten notes. In probability, it means “given.” You can waste a lot of time by reading “A given B” as “A or B”. Little stuff, but it shows.

All the MBA work has left me little time to read, think, or otherwise produce new material for this web site. Things are starting to shake out a little bit, so that should change.

First Full Week

One thing I’ve learned this morning is that an accounting textbook, placed between one’s lap and one’s laptop, provides excellent insulation and raises the laptop keyboard to an appropriate typing height. It also contains much valuable information on the subject of financial accounting, but that’s just a nice side benefit.

Last week was the first full week of MBA classes at Sloan, and it has given me the chance to fully reacquaint myself with the word “deliverable.” I’ve also grown to love my Palm Pilot again. That particular device spent most of the summer sitting on the side of my desk, since I seldom had more than one or scheduled events a day. Such simplicity is in the past. Since I’m carrying two devices around again, I’m giving serious thought to chucking my Nokia and switching to either a Treo or one of the latest Windows SmartPhone devices when my TMobile contract comes up next month. Treos and Blackberries are fairly common around Sloan, even though most students don’t strictly need that kind of functionality–now. But they did before, and they will again.

iPhone fails the convergence test

The new Apple/Motorola “Rokr” phone came up in conversation at lunch today. The consensus statement was that the device said a lot more about the business models of Apple, Motorola and the various mobile carriers than it does about what consumers actually want. Mobile phone companies, in particular, have been particularly zealous in their search for revenue streams via ringtone sales and other presumably “value added” services. Verizon goes so far as to require use of their picture mail service at 20 cents a shot (last I checked) to get photos off your phone. That kind of wholesale customer abuse is a big part of what caused me to switch to TMobile, which has been kind enough to not disable the Bluetooth transmitter on my phone.

Anyway, as soon as I came home I saw this article from the UK’s Guardian newspaper that sums up the issues with the iPhone pretty well:

John Naughton: Why the iPhone won’t rock your world

Boston: The most expensive city in the US

Philip Greenspun’s Weblog drew my attention to a recent survey identifying Boston as the most expensive city in the country.

In a way, I’m kind of proud. I grew up in the city just as it was beginning its post-1970s recovery. I don’t remember when things were really bad, but I certainly remember when they were worse. Of course, large parts of the city have become much less local than they used to be. Newbury Street, now the city’s trendiest commercial area, presently includes Nike Town, a Banana Republic flagship store, Armani, French Connection, a Virgin Megastore, and various other major brands and high end boutiques. The used bookstore I used to visit on my way home from school was forced out several years ago when the rent hit $17,000 a month. The evolution of Harvard Square has been similiar.

So maybe not so proud. Still, I think I’ve got a better deal on housing than my friends in San Francisco.

Three Quick Hits

I can’t quite summon up the energy for a lengthy post right now, so I’m cheating:

The Carnival of the Capitalists is up. Some good stuff this week, as per usual.

Another thing to cross my desk this morning was Monobo, a collaborative news site that’s “by, and for MBAs.” The originator is at Stanford GSB; access is free, although the number of schools involved is currently limited.

Finally, we’ve got an article from September’s MIT Technology Review on MIT’s Entrepreneurship Ecosystem. We have one, and that’s a good thing.

Poverty, Escape and New Orleans

I’ve heard more than a few people wondering why so many citizens of New Orleans didn’t evacuate when they were first told to. The answer, of course, is that they can’t. Living paycheck to paycheck precludes travel, something that those of us in the business world don’t always manage to remember.

One of the more thought provoking things I’ve seen on the subject over the past few days is from author John Scalzi:

Whatever: Being Poor

I’ve been a devoted reader of Scalzi’s blog for a long time, and have by turns found it funny, engaging, and always very human. In the few weeks Integrative Stream has been up I’ve already blogged one of his posts. I’d suggest a few minutes spent reading his posts from the last few days would not be time misspent, whatever your views on the political and social issues involved.

Massachusetts requires open formats

John Patrick comments on a new Massachusetts requirement for open document formats.

The document formats for Microsoft Office have always been trouble. Not only are they poorly documented themselves, they’re the product of a long and not particularly well coordinated development process. As a result, it’s extremely difficult to write software that works with them, and that’s certainly set the world back. Other than the relative difficulty of dealing with Office files, there’s no reason why the information management tools, like Google Desktop, that are coming on the market now couldn’t have been available years ago.

Patrick has some other points, including a discussion of why Microsoft’s choice to not support the Open Document format is an anti-consumer decision. Microsoft will have their own XML based document format, which will probably be better suited to the needs of Microsoft Office, but it will be subject to legal restrictions that will hamper its integration into innovate new software offerings.

Hopefully the Massachusetts decision, which was made for sound technical and economic reasons, will get other states, along with the private sector, thinking about this issue. Discussion of open source in desktop applications has traditionally focused on the use of OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office. The file format issue is different: an open format gives you flexibility before and after individual users start to work.

Katrina Flood Relief

Instapundit has put together an extremely comprehensive list of
Katrina Relief Opportunities. I encourage any readers who haven’t already done something–and I imagine there aren’t very many of you–to take a look and find a way to help.

Having spent the week buried in MBA orientation at Sloan, I somehow managed to miss the brunt of the hurricane coverage, and the magnitude of the situation is only now, and slowly, becoming apparent to me. I can’t quite get my head around the scope of the disaster.

I’m proud of MIT’s response, which was both prompt and comprehensive, addressing the needs of employees for time to deal with personal issues resulting from the hurricane, support for students and alumni facing unanticipated financial challenges due to the disaster, and a concerted university-wide effort to develop strategies to help. I just heard that Sloan will be accepting several Tulane MBA students who would not otherwise be able to attend class this semester. Other universities are starting similiar programs, although I doubt that all the affected students can be accomodated.

Leading Indicators

My position in society affords me certain advantages in the analysis of leading economic indicators. To be specific, my position in society is about a block down the street from a pair of gas stations in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When I leave the house each day I collect two data points on the price of gas at retail. As I walked to the supermarket this afternoon, I saw the following sign, captured courtesy of my trusty Nokia:

$3.69 for a gallon of premium, $3.29 for a gallon of regular. That’s up forty cents from yesterday, and I believe it’s up from this morning as well. Surprisingly, the gas station on the opposite corner, which is usually a few cents cheaper but generally synchronized, is now dramatically less expensive – $3.09, $3.19 and $3.29 for regular, super and premium. There’s no real difference, other than that one station is a Gulf and the other is a Citgo. One would expect this state of affairs to be good for the Citgo, and they were still doing a brisk business filling up SUVs, but the dramatically more costly Gulf station was still doing good trade.

I suppose that customer loyalty (I’ve always gone to the Citgo even when the prices were even, except when I needed a state inspection; others always seem to visit the Gulf) is trumping price in the short term. I wonder how many days the Gulf station will be able to extract premium rents from their existing customers before defections begin. I’d guess one or two tanks of gas at most.

Update 9/3/05, 5pm: As of September 3rd, the price at this station has remained steady, while the station across the street has raised prices by a dime in each category. The Boston Globe reported this morning that the Gulf’s $3.69 price was the highest in greater Boston yesterday.

BBS: The Documentary

It’s hard to believe that Internet only took off ten years ago. Before 1995, if you wanted access to the Internet and weren’t affiliated with a major university you were more or less out of luck. Which was fine, because there wasn’t much to do on the main network anway.

I got my first Internet access in 1993, but I grew up with computer Bulletin Board Systems instead. Run by hobbyists and generally only allowing a single user at a time, they gave a whole generation its first exposure to online community. BBSes gave me my first opportunity to write, and gave me a reason to learn to program, and introduced me to many people who are still friends.

So I had a great time watching BBS: The Documentary, a four year labor of love from Jason Scott, who is also the proprietor of Textfiles.com, an archive of, well, BBS-era text files. You can find the documentary itself on BitTorrent, thanks to a Creative Commons license, or you can order the three-DVD set.