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July 31, 2005

Doyle lights the lamp at the Senior Open

A tip of the hat to my favorite senior golfer, Allen Doyle, who won the US Senior Open today, in Ohio. In addition to having one of the most unorthodox swings on tour -- an abbreviated Doug Sanders-like affair developed by working on his swing in the basement during long New England winters -- Doyle also has the strangest accent on tour: pungent Northeast R-less dialect combined with Georgia drawl from living down there in recent years (excuse me, ye-ahs).

For those who missed it, Doyle shot 63, including 2-under on the back nine. While the rest of the field was backing up, Doyle was dialed in. We didn't see much of him on the NBC telecast, because he never held the lead until he was in the clubhouse (actually, on the practice tee, staying loose for a possible playoff). So I can't really say too much about how he played. But while NBC was showing us the leaders, plus occasional shots of other marquee players, such as Tom Watson (who had a pretty good week after winning the Senior British Open last week), Doyle was busy "sneaking in the side door," as he put it afterwards. He's hardly the first player to win a major by posting a score early, then waiting for the rest of the field to implode.

Doyle's a generous guy, too. A couple of years ago, when he won the Charles Schwab cup and the $1,000,000 that goes with it, he donated it to charity. He has made other large donations since then, too. In an age of huge egos, polished swings, and tax-shelter "foundations" that wealthy athletes use to make themselves look generous, it's great that there's still room for an ex-hockey player with a funny swing and a funnier accent. Long Live Allen Doyle!

Posted by Urbie at 03:01 PM | Comments (0)

July 28, 2005

Beware of "enormous cost" figures

One of my favorite columns is WSJ.com's "The Numbers Guy," by Carl Bialik. He's always debunking dubious statistical claims that make the rounds in the news media.

This week, Bialik debunks the idea that "Workers who used the Internet for non-work-related tasks cost their employers a whopping $178 billion last year in lost productivity, according to a new study sponsored by Websense Inc., a company that sells software to monitor employee Internet use."

Bialik says that this "statistic" is most likely a great exaggeration, because (a) the "study" was sponsored by a company that has a vested interest in getting companies to monitor their employees; (b) the number was based on a survey of managers, and is based on how much time they thought their employees spent Web-surfing; and that (c) even if true, it assumes that all of that time would otherwise be spent with machine-like productivity.

I'd like to see a similar debunking of the inflated figures for the "costs" of software piracy and music downloading (even though readers of my column know very well that I take a dim view of both practices, especially the latter).

The software industry has long argued that piracy costs them hundreds of billions of dollars a year. But this assumption is always based on the raw amount of illegally copied software present on people's computers, and it assumes that all of that software would otherwise have been purchased legally. I say that's nonsense -- most people who have illegal copies of, say, Microsoft Office, would not have paid for it if they didn't have access to an illegal copy -- they'd have made do with something else, like shareware.

As far as music copying goes, it's the same deal -- when the industry claims huge losses from illegal copying, they're assuming that everyone who makes a copy would otherwise have gone out and bought the record. This is patently false.

It goes without saying that employees should be productive, people shouldn't pirate software, and music listeners should go out and buy records. But no useful purpose is served by trumpeting inflated statistics about the "abuses" of technology.

Posted by Urbie at 07:27 AM | Comments (1)

July 25, 2005

Albert Mangelsdorff, 1928-2005

German TV is reporting that Albert Mangelsdorff has died. It's a sad day -- but I'll accentuate the positive by recalling that he was one of the most creative, different trombonists ever.

Mangelsdorff gave a recital in Boston -- I think it was at BU's Marsh Chapel -- in 1978. I was in attendance, and since I'd never heard him before, it took a couple of tunes to get used to what he was doing. It was great stuff, though, and made a strong impression on me. I started fooling around with multiphonics (playing one note while singing another note, usually higher) the next day, and began to incorporate them into my daily routine. Although I've never done much with multiphonics in performance, outside of using them in blues bands (notably a famous cable-TV duo concert with guitar/vocalist Rob Carlson), the technique has always fascinated me. Mangelsdorff was a clinician at an International Trombone Workshop I attended in the '80s, and he spent a lot of time demonstrating and answering questions about multiphonics. He also handed out a couple of charts to his own compositions -- I've still got them on my music stand.

Mangelsdorff was not widely imitated -- probably because he was so different from everyone else and therefore hard to imitate -- but he was one of the most important jazz musicians of the past 50 years or so.

Posted by Urbie at 02:46 PM | Comments (0)

July 22, 2005

The myth of the whiz kids

Just to expand on yesterday's news item, it's true that the younger generation of college graduates may be lacking in technology skills. But it's disingenuous to say that this constitutes a "skills shortage." The problem is that the technology industry is looking for cheap workers with all the skills they want. There are lots of older, highly skilled technology workers out there -- but such people are more expensive than Microsoft would like. There is a shortage -- but only of skilled workers who'll work for entry-level salaries.

As for today's grads, there is some truth to the notion that their computer skills fall short. The CIS professor who taught my introductory class here at the NAU College of Business Administration says that when he began teaching, some 15 years ago, the typical incoming freshman had pretty good computer knowledge. Not so anymore. "Today," he says, "I have to assume that the typical incoming student knows nothing whatsoever about computers." This may come as a surprise, but not to me. The persistent myth that today's kids are computer whizzes -- as exemplified by a recent "60 Minutes" story about a few college dropouts who made millions through technology entrepreneurship -- is misleading. The rank-and-file Generation Y-ers may be able to load up their iPods with free music, send lightning-fast cell phone text messages, and rack up high scores in Fullmetal Alchemist 2: Curse of the Crimson Elixir -- but in terms of skills that are useful in the software industry, they're actually behind my generation. Strange but true.

Posted by Urbie at 01:47 PM | Comments (1)

July 21, 2005

Industry's mood swings

A friend of mine sent me a link to a Seattle Times story about a "mismatch" between industry's hiring needs and the unemployed people who are out there looking for work. The article says that there are 70,000 job openings in Washington state, but that at the same time, there are 180,500 people out of work. What's going on here?

The article quotes Bill Gates as saying that Microsoft is struggling to find "qualified" college graduates, while at the same time, several thousand local Microsoft jobs go unfilled.

The problem is that employers, having been burned by their own hiring mistakes during the Internet bubble of the late '90s, are now being so picky that they won't hire anyone.

Over the past 15-20 years, I've found it amusing how the technology industry swings back and forth between hiring in-house staff and using consultants instead. Pick up a trade publication like Computerworld, and you'll read it week after week. "We're going to have to rightsize our headcount and hire more consultants," executives will say. "Consultants have the skills to hit the ground running, saving us thousands of dollars in training costs." But just like the phases of the moon, you can count on a flip-flop a short time later -- stories will appear in the same trade publications, quoting the same executives: "We're going to have to wean ourselves off these consultants -- they're too expensive. We can save a lot of money by going with in-house staff."

I think the same phenomenon is at work with the tech execs' lament about "lack of skilled workers." They've become obsessed with resume buzzwords and forgotten that it's not all about what software tools you know -- it's about how well you can think and solve problems. Gates et al. use the perceived "lack of skills" as an excuse to move more jobs offshore -- until they find that the foreign shops don't have people with the communication and cultural skills needed to make good software products for the domestic market. At that point, the industry will have another mood swing and announce, "We need to wean ourselves off these foreign workers. They're not getting the job done."

Executives need to understand that running a technology business is not all about finding workers with the right buzzwords on their resumes and the willingness to work for $3.00 an hour. It's about hiring smart people who know how to solve problems. Technology companies still remember their hiring mistakes of the '90s -- but their mood has swung too far the other way. Will they ever learn?

Posted by Urbie at 07:30 AM | Comments (0)

July 20, 2005

Tech Writing for Tech Writers

This summer, I've been taking care of some of my general-business requirements for an accounting degree. One thing the NAU College of Business Administration requires all students to do is take a writing class. So, after working as a technical writer, of one sort or another, for more years than I'd care to recall, here I am in English 302W, Technical Writing.

A big waste of time, you say? Actually, not at all. I'm finding that the class covers a lot of things I've never done before, or at least never been trained in before. For example, writing abstracts of magazine articles or book chapters -- sounds soporific, but as I've discovered, a good "informative" abstract is a wonderful thing. And it's not easy to write a good one. Summarizing a scientific or technical book or paper in 200 words requires you to have a nose for what's important and what isn't. A good abstract should function as a substitute for the book or article itself.

Another useful idea -- and one that I haven't often used in my past work, although I'll probably use it in the future -- is that you can often write better technical documentation if you start by "storyboarding" the material, producing the illustrations first and then writing text to bind them together, instead of the other way around. Sounds obvious -- and I've done this in the past when writing software documentation (essentially going from one screen shot to the next) -- but I haven't often heard it explicitly stated as a "best practice."

By the way, you can find more abstracts than you can shake a stick at, by going to Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com) and searching for kafalas -- this turns up dozens of abstracts of my dad's scientific papers, as well as some by my late uncle Peter and by my cousin Philip.

Posted by Urbie at 03:10 PM | Comments (0)