Advice to a prospective student

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Wonderful letter from Philip Greenspun to two college-age children of a friend.

Your dad says that you’re applying to college. Remember that nearly all careers in the U.S. now require a graduate degree. Nobody will ever ask where you went for undergrad. It is not especially helpful to go to a prestige university undergrad because the professors won’t know who you are and won’t be persuasive about getting you into grad school. Economists found that people admitted to Ivy League schools who chose to attend state schools instead ended up with the same income. Being smart enough to get accepted to a top school has some value but actually attending the top school doesn’t have any value compared to U. Mass. And the most prestigious schools are research universities (e.g., MIT, Stanford, Princeton, etc.). It isn’t really even part of a professor’s job to teach undergrads and, in fact, they do very poorly at teaching. Check my analysis of a lecture by one of Yale’s top professors within

http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/universities-and-economic-growth

You need a bachelor’s degree, of course, but don’t succumb to the undergraduate admissions industry’s efforts to convince you that your whole life depends on what happens in the next few months. I was an undergrad at George Washington University and MIT. My fellow students at MIT were smarter/more interesting. My professors at GWU were much more interested and engaged with me. I wouldn’t say that MIT was vastly better than GWU or vice versa.

I’m always amazed by how American families subscribe to the myth that just because an institution is a great research university then the tuition is, by definition, better. One of things that really marks out Oxbridge (and some of the other leading UK universities) is that they remain committed to providing good undergraduate teaching as well as to doing frontline research.

The ipad Mini: horses for courses

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I’m trying out the small iPad, following a rave endorsement by Jason Calcanis, who claimed that it had left his big iPad for dead. That’s not quite the way I see it: my big iPad is doing just fine. But the Mini would have left my Nexus 7 for dead if it hasn’t been dead already. (It went blank a few days ago after running out of juice, and all attempts to resuscitate it have failed. So it’s going back whence it came.)

Even if the Nexus had stayed alive, however, it was doomed in my eyes, mainly because of the shape. For while it did fit easily in a jacket pocket, I found the aspect ratio hopeless for reading web pages. Some things worked brilliantly on it — Gmail, for example (hardly surprising since it is after all a Google device). And I liked the way Evernote is integrated into the Android environment. But the virtual keyboard was — for me at any rate — almost unusable. And I found that the touchscreen was erratic: there were times when it took umpteen taps to get it to do anything. The battery life was also inadequate compared to the ten hours that the iPad consistently delivers.

The iPad Mini seems, therefore, an improvement. Its most noticeable feature is the weight — it feels much lighter than its big brother. And, objectively speaking, it is: 308g compared to 662g. This matters when using it as an eReader — and I read Kindle books on iPads much more frequently than I read them on the Kindle itself. The big iPad is just too heavy to use as an eReader in bed. For many people (Nick Bilton, for example), it seems that the weight difference is the critical factor.

Some reviewers have complained that the Mini’s screen is significantly inferior to the Retina display of the big iPad. Well, it is certainly inferior in the sense that it’s a pre-Retina technology, but actually for most of my purposes (with one big exception — see below) the display is fine. And strangely, I find the smaller screen keyboard easier to use than the bigger one. Can’t explain why, but my typing on the Mini screen is much more accurate.

My other requirement — for a device that can fit into a pocket — is mostly satisfied by the Mini. At any rate, it slips fairly easily into most of my suit jackets. This is often useful because although it’s only a Wi-Fi model I use my phone as a modem and therefore don’t need to carry the bag that my big iPad necessitates.

In comparing the two iPads and reading the online arguments about which is better I’m struck by the thought that the answer will be different for each individual. It depends on what you use these devices for. In my case, I use the big iPad a lot for writing, and with the Logitech keyboard cover it’s very good for that. And I also use it for intermediate processing of photographs before uploading them to Flickr or sending them out, and for that purpose the Retina display is simply wonderful.

But really the physical properties of the device are only part of the story. For example, one reason why I found the Nexus unsatisfactory (in addition to my problems with the virtual keyboard and the touchscreen) was simply that I couldn’t reproduce on it the software ecosystem that I have built up round my Apple devices. I need that ecosystem for the work that I do, and it works just fine on the Mini. Sad but true: I’m pretty dependent on the services provided in my (luxuriously-padded and skeuomorphic) Apple cell.

So, what it comes down to is the old adage: horses for courses.

Winter punting

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Winter punting, originally uploaded by jjn1.

The Cam this afternoon, with smoke signals from King’s.

It’s strange how calming photography can be. I had a frantic work day, with one large economy-sized crisis and missed deadlines whooshing by. The crisis necessitated a meeting in the centre of town at 4pm, so I decided to walk rather than cycle in from College and — on a whim — took a camera. The air was still and the late-afternoon light entrancing. As I crossed Clare bridge I noticed — to my astonishment — that there were people on the river. So I stopped, contemplated the scene — and took some photographs, of which this is one. And then I walked on, suddenly peaceful and relaxed.

The tyranny of Power Laws

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This morning’s Observer column.

Everywhere you look on the internet, you find power laws – yes, even in the Guardian’s online comment forums, where 20% of comments are provided by 0.0037 per cent of the paper’s monthly online audience. And, while there are millions of blogs out there, a relatively small number of them attract most of the readership. Various sinister explanations have been canvassed for this, but really it’s just an illustration of the power of power law distributions. As Clay Shirky once put it: “In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution”.

This is where the mathematical and political interpretations of “power” fuse into one…

Microsoft’s Google obsession: a symptom of a deeper problem

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ReadWrite has an interesting piece triggered by the announcement that Google has reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission which avoids the full-on anti-trust suit for which Microsoft (and some others) had been lobbying.

Microsoft had a pretty lousy year in 2012, putting out a string of big products – Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and the Surface tablet – that all turned out to be be disappointing.

But those pale in comparison to what may be the biggest disappointment in Microsoft’s history — its failure to convince antitrust regulators to take action against Google.

After a 19-month investigation and despite much prodding from Microsoft, the Federal Trade Commission has reached a settlement with Google that basically amounts to a slap on the wrist.This is a crushing blow to Microsoft, which has spent millions of dollars on lobbyists and phony grassroots groups over the past several years hoping to land Google in hot water.

Indeed, Microsoft’s obsession with Google doesn’t just border on crazy. It is crazy, and not just a little tiny bit crazy but full-blown, bunny-boiling, Ahab-versus-the-whale nutso.

Yep. One way of interpreting this obsession is that it’s a way of avoiding Microsoft’s central problem — that it isn’t really innovating. (Some people say that it’s never really been an innovator, in the sense that it simply bought innovative companies and incorporated their creations into its own product portfolio.) What’s certainly true is that Microsoft has spent the past 10 years missing out on many of the important trends in the industry (cloud computing, social networking, smartphones, multimedia). In search and mapping its efforts have been respectable but haven’t gained much traction. Only in the XBox3 gaming area has it really looked like an industrial leader. And in its core area — operating systems — it managed one Olympic-class screw-up: Vista.

The intriguing question is how can a rich company stuffed with clever people drop so many balls? One explanation is that it’s just a case of the bureaucratic sclerosis that afflicts all large organisations. An alternative explanation puts it down to lack of technical leadership. Whatever one thinks of Bill Gates, he was a formidable techie who had the respect of many of the geeks who worked for Microsoft in its glory days. But Steve Ballmer, his successor as CEO, is not that kind of guy. He can, perhaps, earn the respect of sales and marketing folks, because, in the end, he’s their kind of guy. To geeks, though, he just looks like another suit — a noisy and belligerent suit, perhaps, but ultimately still an embodiment of The Man.

Advice for professionals in an age of digital abundance

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From Seth Godin:

When everyone has access to the same tools
…then having a tool isn’t much of an advantage.

The industrial age, the age of scarcity, depended in part on the advantages that came with owning tools others didn’t own.

Time for a new advantage. It might be your network, the connections that trust you. And it might be your expertise. But most of all, I’m betting it’s your attitude.

Sums up the challenge for e.g. professional photographers in the age of Flickr and high-end cameras.