Surplus words

I really thought this little guy had character. He should - his parents certainly do :)

I know there are a number of companies that try to trawl the web and search for patterns. There are also companies and organizations that track and compile all sorts of statistics for researchers to pore over at a later date, and at a price. Even I have been tempted to write about leading indicators of different kinds and what they could mean. Mostly, that desire is driven by my aging white male’s fear of things changing. Changing, naturally, for the worst.

And so I get worried about torrential rains with lightening that actually hits people, and heatwaves, but mostly I worry about power outages. I am sure there is a strong correlation between bad weather and power outages. As of this writing, the power is still out in parts of Queens, NY, St. Louis, Missouri. It was recently out in portions of California and UK. Most of the outages are due to inclement weather, so one would hope that as soon as a particular heat wave or storm subsides, the service goes back to normal.

Still, would not it just make a great beginning to a sci-fi story of how people came to think of power - to move things, to move themselves, to provide light and heat as a given, and the historical events in this post were some of the first signs (since august 2003 at least) of the inevitable collapse of the non-animal powered civilization? I am curious whether anyone tracks MTF (mean time between failures) for US electrical grid and distribution systems and makes the data public…

ps. and of course, there is someone with a fine paper on the topic titled “Complex dynamics of blackouts in power transmission systems” with the following statistics,

“…The average frequency of
blackouts in the United States is about one every 13 days. This frequency has not changed over the last 30 years. Also the probability distribution of blackout sizes has a power tail; this dependence indicates that the probability of large blackouts is relatively high. Indeed, although large blackouts are rarer than small blackouts, it can be argued that their higher societal cost makes the risk of large blackouts comparable to or exceed the risk of small blackouts…”

and the following chart showing the distribution of blackouts:

Ed Sim makes a lot of good points in his “When to hire a VP of Sales“. I would particularly like to comment on the following statement:

“In addition, over time the sales team will get frustrated if the product is not ready for primetime and they will be out looking for a new job in a couple of quarters making all of this effort a very expensive experiment.”

That is absolutely true, and I think only comes with experience (or reading Ed’s blog). It is hard to underestimate how quickly sales people become frustrated if they feel the product is not saleable, especially if the market for the product is new in general or unfamiliar to the sales person.
Another aspect of sales hiring, very important to understand before multiple sales people are brought on, is the length of the sales cycle. It is pointless to expect a sales person to produce even after two quarters when the average sales cycle for your industry segment is nine months. So one has to remember that a sales person will use up most of their year getting that first sale, and that despite being “theirs”, the senior technical or business personnel will actually do most of the work in getting that first, or even second and third, sales for every sales person hired. It is annoying for a bootstrapping company to babysit someone who is supposed to be brining in sales and income - but there is often no other way to get the sales people to understand the new technology they are selling to new customers they are engaging.

“…rather than hire a VP of Sales first, I would encourage you to focus on generating leads and hiring a sales rep or two to follow up on them. This way you can take a smaller step to refine your sales model and product before going big.”

Absolutely. This is sage advice (don’t I sound fawning?)

Read two articles today, one about a strike by crane and other heavy equipment operators that has stopped all major construction projects in NYC - including the WTC rebuilding, and another about a billionair hedge fund manager complaining about the lack of US-born and educated Ph.D’s to use in his quantitative funds…

Obviously lack of Americans getting graduate degrees in science and math has been a topic beaten to death by every pundit out there. Examples of payscales for medical practitioners and laywers vs. scientists have often been used to explain the disparity. How about payscale for unionized workers?

The Post aritcle about the strike contained a table, missing in the online edition, listing the average salary for a “nuclear scientist” (however defined) at $32/hour or so. That’s around $65,000 a year. Nice, but that’s nothing compared to $80/hour for crane operators. Why would anyone want to get a math Ph.D when they could make twice as much money operating a backhoe or a construction crane?

I do not see why MIT math Ph.D is not going to be good enough for Simons’ office, but it is easy to imagine that there just are not enough MIT, Cal.Tech. and similar Ph.D’s awarded to feed the US Market. By contrast, someone like Pavel Volfbeyn or Alexander Belopolsky (discussed in the Simons article) with degrees from a Russian MFTI (MIT equivalent) cannot possibly make as much money in Russia as here (requesting 3-4 miliion per year), at least legally.

As any other self-respecting blog-head, I have a proposition. If indeed the demand for mathematicians and scientists is so great, their prospects so bright, then why does not Simons and other people who hire them give every US-born or -eduated Ph.D a 2 or 5-year contract to work in their firms. Let them make enough money to go back to being professors or high-school teachers. In fact, you could make it a condition. I do not know if it is going to change the reality of how many people can graduate from MIT and the like, and that other countries will have bright graduates from their countries’ top schools who will come to US to make their millions because they cannot do so in India or Russia or China. I do know that you are not going to get more people to study math when one can make twice as much money working for a union that would go on strike when offered a contract like this:

The workers, who run cranes, backhoes, compressors and other pieces of heavy equipment, earn $73 to $82 an hour, including benefits.

They’re among the highest paid blue-collar workers in the city.

They rejected an offer that would have given them 6 percent raises annually over five years, with a guarantee of no layoffs.

signing off…