The Other WSU

I just got back yesterday from a conference at Washington State University in Pullman, WA. Wichita State is part of a university/industry research organization called PSERC. Twice a year the group holds a conference where new research proposals are made, updates and reports on existing projects are presented, and general networking/collaborating takes place in spades. The conferences are not very large, perhaps 50 or so individuals were there this time (though I was told that this was a bit lower than usual).

I felt very fortunate that I got to attend and thoroughly enjoyed the time. Just being a part of the conference made me feel like a "big-boy" researcher even though my part in presenting findings from the project I've been working on this past semester was very small, I had a display in the poster session. This type of presentation is exactly what it sounds like and is very similar to the grade school science fair in format, just without the classic baking-soda-and-vinegar volcano. In the world of academic prestige, being a part of a post session is the lowest form of data presentation but for graduate students in PSERC, its the only option we have available.

There were two great benefits for me in attending. One was the previously mentioned networking value. Though I was slightly sick and had a sore throat which made talking difficult, I was able to meet a fair number of other students and some of the other researchers both in academia and industry. Assuming I am able to attend more of these conferences in the future, I expect these relationships to become increasingly useful in staying connected to the current state of the art. This brings up the second key value in the conference: I now have a much better and more concrete understanding of what topics are of interest to those in the know and where the research effort is being made. This not only makes me feel more connected and a part of the academic community but will be of great value as I go forward and try to define the scope of my PhD dissertation.

Details from the conference are probably not worth getting into here so for now I'll simply leave you with some slightly interesting pictures I took while in Pullman, mostly of sights seen on campus.

I'll leave it to you to judge the validity of the labeling in public places at Washington State.

The area and the campus as a whole is very hilly and covers a lot of space. Just walking around campus would be a great form of exercise.

You know you're in a Northwest college town when the VW buses start showing up.

The community garden near campus. A great idea and use of space.

Right at the edge of campus. I think they've got their demographic nailed.

Why I don't like Quicken

After talking with a good friend the other night I got inspired to look into upgrading our old version (2005) of Quicken to the newly re-designed Quicken Essentials 2010. I talked with my wife about it and we decided that the money would be well spent since we would be able to electronically access all of our financial statements and Quicken had a converter that would transfer over all our old data.

After ten or so hours on the phone with technical support, I can attest that the former is wonderfully true and the later is maddeningly not. A converter is included with the software but in our case, it doesn't seem to work the way it should. I've called Quicken four times, each time addressing a different symptom of the bad conversion and each time the only slightly helpful technical support person has run me through the same steps of trying to re-import my data, come to the conclusion there was a problem with my file, and escalate my issue to some higher ups that may get back to me eventually. This process usually takes about an hour or so on the phone. So far, I've only been contacted once by these mysterious higher ups and, thankfully, they were able to clear up that particular symptom. I've yet to hear from them the for two of the other problems.

This last time I called things ended differently. The technical support person said there was no fix for my problem and that I could either use the software in its broken condition or I could ignore all the historical data from my old version of Quicken and start with a clean slate. I couldn't believe what I was hearing so I asked a few clarifying questions and repeated that the "solution" to my problem was not really a solution at all. He agreed that this was the case.

From a business stand-point this is hard to understand. Intuit, the maker of Quicken, is the only one that knows the format of my old data and it is the only one that can migrate this data to any other format. It has me locked in to their software right now and is in a perfect position to keep me there by supporting the transition to their newest version of software. But they have decided that they don't want to support me in this transition, that they want me to start over with my financial record-keeping. This makes two points abundantly clear to me:

1. Intuit doesn't believe in customer support. I'm having trouble migrating my data from one version of their software to another version and they aren't able to help me make this work. I've invested ten or so hours of my time with them to get the data converted and they aren't able to get the job done.
2. If I'm going to lose all my historical data, then I am free to choose software from any of Quicken's competitors and in light of the above point, I'm more inclined to choose something besides Quicken. Not only are they not able to persuade me to stay but they seem to be encouraging me to take my business elsewhere.

So we did. We have resigned ourselves to losing our historical data (sad but not the end of the world) and have found another program that is better in nearly every way, iBank 3. We haven't used it much yet but so far, it seems to do everything we need including some things Quicken didn't do very well or at all. We'll be getting a refund from Intuit and aren't looking back.

Closing remark: I can't recommend highly enough that you avoid Quicken Essentials 2010.

Tragedy on the 17th St. Bicycle Expressway (or Losing My Life on the Way to School)

Today started out pretty normal for me. Katie was going to bike home after work so I drove her and her bike there this morning before returning home and preparing for my bike commute into school. The morning was a bit cooler (~55'F) with little wind which made for a nice ride. I pulled up to the school gym to park my bike and head into the shower when my stomach sank. It was the same feeling I had when, in the same spot, my bike was stolen several months ago.

My bag, which was attached to the rear rack on my bike when I left home, was no longer there.

This bag had a good chunk of my life in it. My hard drive with both my Master's thesis and research computer files in it. My lab notebook and 3-ring binder with relevant journal articles in it. My wallet and house keys.

I hopped back on my bike and began to retrace my path, my mind racing. The bag was on the left-hand side of the rack meaning when it fell off it would have fallen off into the traffic (rather than the sidewalk) side of the road. This means it would get the way of cars traveling on the road. It also means it would be obvious and out in the open for any passerby to snatch up and claim for his or her own. This was another sinking revelation.

The movie "Signs" has a fantastic and telling bit that I call "the two kinds of people" scene. Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) and Graham (Mel Gibson) are sitting on the couch after the kids have fallen asleep watching the news coverage of the incredible events of the day. Graham, a reverend who had left the faith after the death of his wife is explaining to Merrill that there are two kinds of people and they respond differently to big events in life. One group (and I'm paraphrasing from memory) sees fantastic events and "it may be good, it may be bad but they know deep down that they are going to be all right"; they believe in a higher power that is working in their best interest. The other group knows "that whatever happens, they are on their own." There is no higher power, no God and when tragedy strikes it is up the individuals to define their future.

I don't write about it much on this blog but I am squarely in the first group, a spiritual man. When my personal tragedy struck today, I was quickly calling on God for help and mercy. The situation was entirely out of my control and it was going to take divine intervention to get the life I had in that bag back. I was pedaling and praying, both frantically, as I headed back towards home, eyes on the other side of the road, looking for that small treasure. It would take so little for things to turn out poorly. The bag could be run over and the contents destroyed or somebody could have picked it up. It would take a miracle for somebody to stop, pick up the bag out of the road, and set it aside for me to find. A small but definite miracle.

As I flew back home I began to think more about this. If I really believed in God and believed He was for me and not against me, then I had to accept the possibility that I might not get my bag back and that this would be a good thing for me. I'm reading a fantastic book right now, "How People Grow", that makes this point. Often it takes tragedy for us to grow and mature as people because we tend to slack off when life is easy and pain free. Painful events in life can work out for our best but only if we respond well to them. Cruising down the streets of Wichita I didn't want to accept that this could actually be the case. I didn't want this pain and hassle, I had things to do today. Please, please, just left me have my bag back. I was praying for mercy, for the easy way out of this. I was entirely dependent on God and I wanted Him to give me a break.

He did.

A small miracle occurred. Though it took me most of my ride home, I found my bag. Somebody had taken it and leaned it against the fence by the sidewalk. As best I can tell, it wasn't riffled through or explored, just tucked away out of harms way, waiting to be claimed.

I was thanking God the whole way back to school.

On the trail today

A few highlights from my bike ride to and from school today:

• A squirrel that had managed to abscond an entire doughnut from who knows where. He couldn't seem to decide whether to run and keep the doughnut safe or stop and eat it. He was doing some of both.
• A dozen or so Wichita Police bike-mounted officers. They were all congregated in a small neighborhood street. I had no idea we had so many bike-mounted officers and I have no idea why they were all hanging out together. I waved as I rode by; they waved back.
• A sign calling for volunteers to come out and protest Sarah Palin while she was in town for a fundraiser this past weekend. I think the newspaper said there were a few dozen protesters so I don't think that the sign was very effective. This is confirmed by that fact that I only noticed it a few days after the event.
• A long line of SUVs and trucks picking up students from the Catholic school in our neighborhood. There must have been forty or fifty of them, each picking up a child or two from the school.

Power Meter

(A warning to all my non-engineering friends: this is a highly nerdy post.)

A few years ago I received as a gift a wonderfully nerdy item for any electrical engineer: the Kill-A-Watt. The device is used to measure electrical power consumption in household items and I've been using it to do just that, mainly to see how much power devices draw when they are plugged in but turned off.

One of the measurements this device makes is something called the power factor. The power factor is a measure of the ratio of real power a device consumes to the amount of power the device appears to draw from the grid (the apparent power). Devices with a low power factor are bad because they demand more power from the grid than they actually use, sending the excess back every half cycle. Some of this power that gets sent back gets burned up in losses on the wires and is in essence, wasted.

Traditionally, power factor has been caused by electric motors due to their high inductance and the fix was relatively straight-forward: adding a capacitor near the motor provides a place to temporarily store the energy that would have been sent back to the grid. When the motor then appears to demand it again, it gets pulled out of the capacitor. In fact, in these cases, the power factor can be calculated by a tiny bit of math measuring the difference between when the peak current flows and when the peak voltage is present. The larger the difference in time between these two events, the lower the power factor.

Over the past few decades, though, there has been another big power factor culprit on the rise: rectifiers. These are the circuits that change AC into DC and are in nearly every electronic goody around the house: computers, TVs, DVD players, laptops: if you buy it at an electronics shop it has a rectifier. The power factor problems these devices create is very different from motors, though. They send the power back to the grid in a very different way; they convert some of the power at the traditional 60Hz frequency to power at higher frequencies, distorting the waveform. The fix that works for motors does nothing in this case and measuring the power factor is much more complicated.

Well, in a lab I was finishing for class, we had a very fancy (and expensive) power meter we were using that measured the power factor in two ways, the motor way (displacement power factor) and the rectifier way (true power factor, the more useful and accurate of the two). Since I had access to this, I brought in my Kill-A-Watt and we set up both meters to measure the power factor on a PC (which contains a rectifier). Much to my surprise, the fancy power meter showed that my Kill-A-Watt measured the more complicated true power factor. I was very impressed that such a simple and inexpensive device was able to measure this accurately.

This made me a happy nerd for the day.

Thunderstorm

Our helpful weather radio just went off and alerted us to a severe thunderstorm warning for our county. This is the first warning of the thunderstorm season which has thus far been pretty slow. It is not, though, the first significant thunderstorm this year; I guess the others didn't have high enough winds to be classified as "severe".

The weather radio is a curse and a blessing. We are thankful that it is loud enough to wake us (if necessary) when life-threatening weather is passing through the area. We curse it, though, when it wakes us in the middle of the night for these severe thunderstorm warnings. If we are in bed and asleep, we don't want to be waken just to find out that we have already taken the precautions necessary for a thunderstorm, namely, to be inside. There have been a few nights when we felt like parents of new-borns, being waken every few hours to a whining radio.

What can you do, though? All of this disturbance is worth the hassle when tornados do come around and we'd much rather over-alerted than under.

Happy Tax Day

Hopefully all you US residents have your taxes done and mailed in. I happen to live in Kansas right now and the state has figured out that they can save money if they allow people to fill out electronic forms online. To encourage people to do so, they make filing through their website free. Once your federal returns are done, completing the forms online is fast, maybe twenty minutes. All the forms are completed and submitted electronically and any refund you may get is direct deposited in a week or so. I'm a big believer in this idea and am glad to see the federal government is slowly coming around to the idea and realizing manually processing paper returns is expensive and error-prone compared to electronic forms.

This is all beside the point, though. The uplifting topic for today is national fiscal responsibility, the national debt, and what we are going to do about it. First, some data:

• 47% of US households won't pay any income tax at all this year.
• Most tax revenue comes from a small percentage of people with the highest income.
• (Or here, presented graphically.)
• The National Debt clock (and links to related stories).
• Holders of the national debt and how it has grown over time.
• National debt over recent past.

I don't put this data up to simply give people something to worry about. I truly believe this is a very serious problem that has been effectively ignored for several decades. We are on an unsustainable course that needs to be corrected. Sadly (but fairly) I think that the solution will involve increasing taxes (sorry Tea Party) and decreasing spending (sorry social welfare and defense people). In other words, we've dug ourselves into this hole and the path out is going to be painful.

To help keep me honest and the conversations on-track as I bring this up with friends, I'm starting to think of the solutions to this problem in terms of the sacrifices that I need to be willing to make. Rather than looking at the problem as a whole (which needs to be done), I'm trying to think of it very personally. What government benefits do I need to give up to get our country back on track financially? How much more taxes will I need to be willing to pay to make this happen? What tax credits and deductions that I enjoy now should I surrender so that our country can be fiscally responsible? Being an academic, which research and development programs that I care about should lose their federal funding?

For each of us, the answers to these kinds of questions are different. There are some that are going to have to give up federal subsidies (Medicare, welfare, etc). Others will be paying a lot more in taxes. There will probably be federal employees who will lose their jobs in the government's attempt to control spending. Its not going to be pretty or fun.

It needs to be done, though. It may not seem like it to some, but these past few decades have been ones where we as a society have ignored the financial costs of the federal fiscal lifestyle (if you will) we have been enjoying. The time is coming when we will have to face these costs and the sooner the better. The first step is always admitting you have a problem.

I encourage you to write your federal Representatives and Senators. They will only be motivated to action if we make it clear that this is important to us. Vote accordingly. The attitude of the federal government is a reflection of the attitude of us, the people. We can't expect them to act responsibly until we take responsibility for our own actions and choices. Until we are upset enough with the situation to actually do something about it, we can't expect them to do any better. Doing something can start with a simple letter or email.

If you are a person of faith as I am, pray for our nation. I have been convicted lately of just how desperate a situation we are in (beyond but including our finances) and have begun to ask God to work in the hearts and minds of others and help save us from our own self-destructive desires. For the USA, a nation that has enjoyed tremendous financial wealth, to be willing to accept a lower standard of living for the sake of our country as a whole will take a miracle.

Fish, Fish Everywhere

An acquaintance of mine recently postulated a theory to me: Taco Bell's recent introduction of the Shrimp Taco (which he declared disgusting; I'll take his word for it) was a move to allow more observant Catholics something to eat from their menu during Lent. I was skeptical but didn't know any better one way or the other so I said nothing.

I noticed yesterday that McDonalds has brought back its fish sandwich.

Today, a BBQ place I drove by was advertising its salmon BBQ.

Maybe he was onto something.

OK Go III

I found out about OK Go's third video from a podcast I listen to which I would safely describe as not being on the pulse of pop culture (much like myself); the odds are good you've already seen this somewhere else. For the rest of you like me, enjoy this greatness:

For a lab in college I was on a team that had to make a Rube Goldberg machine, one with only a dozen or so mechanisms. The demonstration of these contraptions is a school event and I had been watching them for two years before I got a crack at my own as a junior. I was highly committed to making sure that ours worked perfectly and insisted that it run without error ten times in a row the night before the demonstration. It did by midnight and we were confident it would work fine the next day.

It didn't. Two new failures popped up that we had never seen before and we joined the almost universal ranks of those who weren't able to demonstrate a working machine in that classes history.

I bring this up because, even though it took 85 filmed takes to get it right (according to their website), a Rube Goldberg this size that works at all is a miracle.

Kansas City in Spring

My wife and I are up in Kansas City for a early mini-anniversary weekend. Here's a little trip update.

• The weather was wonderful yesterday, mid-60s. Today we woke up to snow. And they're expecting more throughout today. Its the first day of spring, too.
• We were able to get our hotel room for half-price via Priceline. The thrifty man in me is very happy.
• We went to the Federal Reserve Bank here in Kansas City and visited the museum there; definitely worth the visit. The best part was a viewing area into the money sorting/counting area. We couldn't see the whole area but it looked like it consisted of a long hallway with sorting rooms on each side the whole way down. The rooms were all glass and there seemed to be about five security cameras for every worker and there weren't a lot of workers. There were also three robots that took the cases of money from the sorting into the vault. These guys were highly automated with complete freedom of movement and the ability to wirelessly open the doors to the sorting rooms to pick-up the cases of money and, similarly, the gates to the vault to drop them off. The rest of the museum is mediocre unless you're into coin collecting but the engineer in me loved the robots. They were fascinating. Oh, and we got a free bag of shredded money.
• This morning at breakfast it was clear that there was a group of guys here at the hotel that were fanatical about some kind of Dungeons-and-Dragons-like game. Every few minutes it seemed like another one would wander in carrying an elaborate game case and/or folder. They congregated in the corner and as their numbers grew we heard more and more talk of "upgraded warlocks" and "damage rolls". As an occasional board game player (but never anything like this) I've never thought of trying to hold my own mini-gaming convention.

Up on the schedule today is probably some more shopping, an art museum, and visiting with some friends.

Day-Night Map

This is what nerds like me do when they need to take a break from reading and homework. I've been wanting to put together this animation for a while but didn't know how to get the images I needed. Until today, that is. Thanks to timeanddate.com, I was able to "create" the images and then stitch them together into a movie.

The animation below shows where the sun is and is not shining on the Earth at noon Greenwich time over the course of one calendar year. The yellow dot in the middle is the sun and the white dot that quickly passes by is the moon. And, just to be clear, the light areas are where the sun is shining at that time of day and the dark areas are where it is not.

My wife and I spent several minutes watching the animation in a loop, mesmerized by it. I hope you enjoy it as well.

Teams

I remember back in my undergrad days at LeTourneau frequently hearing from the head of the engineering department how employers today were looking for people who could work on teams and that teamwork was a norm in the workplace. He would cite the engineering advisory board that the school had assembled as his source. The advisory board was a collection of people who, for various reasons, were supposed to have their hand on the pulse of the engineering workforce. Their role was to advise the faculty in such a way as to keep the engineering program at LeTourneau relevant.

While in school, working in a team was rarely a good thing as far as I was concerned because I always felt like the act of coordinating, organizing, delegating, and the like was overhead effort; I often felt like it would be easier to just do everything myself. (This kind of gets at the "mythical man month" idea where some business managers assume that effort from any employee is interchangeable with effort from any other employee and to get something done faster you can simply add more people. In reality, adding more people introduces more overhead and coordination costs that may not pay-off in the long run.) I always wondered just where these advisory board members worked and what kind of teams they worked on. If there teams were anything like ours at school, it was a miracle that anything useful got done.

As I've pondered this over the years and worked for two very different manufacturers in industry , I've come to the conclusion that I think there was a hidden communication breakdown between the advisory board and the LeTourneau faculty. I think the root of the breakdown comes in the multiple definitions or styles of teams. Here's how I see things, making up the terms and definitions as I go along.

Independent teams: These are teams where very little interaction is required between team members and the final result of their effort is the sum of their cummulative effort. There is no synergy, no interaction effects, just a bunch of solo efforts combined. Using sports analogies, these are the wrestling, track and gymnastic teams. Everybody does their own thing and the output of the team is sum of each individual players efforts. Some might say that this is hardly a team at all and there is clearly a good case to be made for this point. Regardless, the word "team" is used in these situations and not just in the athletic world. They are some form of team.

Co-operative teams: Co-operative teams have significant independent responsibilities as well as a role in a larger whole; an example would be a basketball team. The fitness and skill of each player is required and there is definitely a huge positive effect of having superstar members but no superstar could single-handedly win on his or her own. The team must coordinate their efforts, plan and work together to achieve their goal, and often must execute in a manner that is both aware and dependent on others. There is still high value in the skills of the invidiuals though. Basketball teams need their specialists, their three point shooters or the big guy down low to get the rebounds and everybody on the team needs to be making their free throws. There are always superstars that seem to be able to do it all but even they can't win the whole game on their own. They excel but not without other (admittedly less skilled) players doing their part. Michael Jordan would win hardly any games if he was the only players on the team and wouldn't do much better if the rest of his team were high school players.

Integrated Teams: These are the teams where the value of the team is almost entirely a function of how well the team works as a unified whole. In the world of sports this is the syncronized swimming, or bobsled team. There is very little if any room for a superstar to excel and the team is at its best when in complete uniformity, when no part stands out. There is obviously a minimum level of fitness required to be on the team but the hard work is in the coordination, getting everybody to move together and to act as one. We on the outside look at the team as a whole and evaluate them in terms of the collective output. There is very little value in one swimmer (or at least the output isn't very impressive); the value of the team exists only as the collection of parts. To use a business term, it is only synergy and any part on its own has very little if any value. In the business world, these are committees where consensus is required for any decision to be made.

Clearly, these three catagories are arbitrary and the reality is that the groups above are points on a specturm. Every team falls on this spectrum somewhere. There is probably some value of thinking of the teams in your life and where they fall in this spectrum but the whole reason I bring this up is to point out there can be very wide definitions and understandings of what a team should be.

The engineering teams in industry I've been on are much closer to a track team than a synchronized swimming team. If the track team is a ten and the synchronized swimming team is a zero then I'd say the engineering teams I have experience with fall somewhere between an eight and a nine. The teams I worked on at school were more like a four. Part of the reason school projects end up being more integrated is that there is often a lack of clear leadership; this forces the team members into a consensus mindset. With a good clear leader in place, the team members can spend less time coordinating with everybody else and more time accomplishing their part of the project. Of course, in engineering classes, most people would prefer to do the engineering rather than the managing, thus the trouble. Maybe a specific team-work class would solve that problem.

Parked in Front of the Engineering Building

Yes, the key does turn when the car is in motion; I saw it the other day.

Undercover Boss

CBS is a running a new reality show called "Undercover Boss" where the CEO of a large company secretly takes on the role of an entry-level worker in his/her organization to get a better idea of what life at the other end of the food-chain is like. It provides an opportunity to honestly see without any problem-masking intermediation that bureaucracies often provide how the company is running from the ground up. This is a great idea in general and makes for some pretty entertaining viewing.

Before saying another word I have to make the standard reality TV disclaimer. We see roughly 45 minutes of a weeks worth of experience over the course of a single episode of this show. I have no idea how the companies/CEOs that are profiled are chosen and have no idea how the specific locations they work at are chosen. The goal of the show's producers is to make something entertaining to watch and that means editing out almost everything and just saving "the good parts". Those creating the show need to make a story out of the events, regardless of what actually happens. Even though there is no script, the portrayal of each person we see is not entirely up to him or her. We only get to see the parts the producers want us to see.

The last segment of the show features the CEO talking to those he worked with (now out of his disguise and back in his normal job of CEO) and his top-level executives about what he saw while working entry-level positions and what changes he'd like to make. This is the part of the show that is both the most feel-good and the most frustrating to me. I enjoy watching it because the CEO gets a chance to make things right and help out those who are sometimes struggling to get by in his corporation. For the store clerk who needs a new kidney he puts a program in place to get more of the people in his organization registered as organ donors. For the line worker with art skills he offered a position helping create some of visuals for marketing campaigns.

I'm a systematizer, though, and these solutions seem to be one-off fixes for specific people rather than trying to re-structure and re-design the organization so that other people in these kinds of situations can also receive a similar benefit. It is easy to do very dramatic and even expensive/generous acts towards the five or six people the CEO worked with that week. He could double the salary of each, give them fantastic medical coverage and an extra week of vacation and it would have no significant financial impact on the company, dramatically improve their lives, and make for great feel-good TV. This is, generally speaking, what I feel like the CEOs are choosing to do.

The harder work would involve analyzing the systems of the organization as a whole to try to determine who this undesirable situation arose. Does the line worker with art skills not show other people is work? Is there a path for a hard worker like him to move to a position that can use these skills? How can somebody with such talent who is already in the organization find a a job that is a better fit? For the lady that needs a kidney transplant, does she have good medical coverage now? Are there things the company could have done to help prevent her from being in a situation where she needs the transplant? Are there things that need to be done in the work schedule to make people in her situation more easily able to take time off to get the medical treatment she needs? These are hard questions to answer and the solutions can be much more expensive and difficult to implement. Systemic change is no cake-walk.

The CEOs say that their time at the bottom will change and impact how they run the company and I truly hope it does. If the man at the top has lost touch with all the ins-and-outs of the business and forgets the people behind the numbers, he needs to do something to get his perspective re-adjusted. I fear, though, that once band-aids have been applied to the five or six employees he worked with for that week that the motive for change will slowly evaporate and that no long-term, company-wide change will take effect. It will be a wasted opportunity.

I hope I'm wrong.

Curling

What does it mean that for the past two days I have scheduled my work-out time so that I can be around a TV with cable so that I can watch curling?

If you don't know the game, you should. I know its not very possible and lack glamor but it is a very interesting game. A little bit of billiards, a fair amount of strategy, and of course the skill to place those big heavy rocks in precise places on a sheet of ice. Plus lots of yelling. You should check it out if you haven't ever seen a game. Read the rules, sit back and be fascinated.

(The best part are the sweepers, in my opinion.)

EZCracker

While watching the Olympics the other day I saw the best "as seen on TV" kind of ad for an off-the-wall product: the EZCracker. Its a small mechanism that cracks eggs for you. Go ahead, click the link and watch the ad on the website so that you can understand power and utility of such a device.

Before I skewer this ad, I must say it clearly has a use. If you lack motor control for whatever reason, find getting some egg on your hand is unbearable, or like having kitchen gadgets, then this product is for you. In fact, the egg-separator is particularly ingenious and though I don't need to separate eggs often, this would be much faster than doing it by hand.

But seriously. Do we all struggle with cracking eggs so much that a device like this is needed? Like I said there are probably people out there who could use such a product, like maybe older people who have lost the fine motor control they once had. These are not the people in the ad, though, and thus are presumably not the target audience for this device. No, the people in the add are the most aggressive egg crackers I have ever seen. Eggs are known to be fragile and yet when trying to break them open they seem to be using a rather large degree of force.

And how about the consequences of eating a baked good with a bit of egg-shell in at as portrayed in the ad? You would think this gal hand stumbled across some raw chicken liver or perhaps a small fish head in her muffin by the look of disgust on her face. When cleaning up eggs that you were trying to get in the pan but somehow entirely missed, it looks like the gal is just kind of swishing them around on the stove-top rather than actually wiping them up. Who are these people?

The king of un-usefulness, though, goes to the "but wait, there's more" product: the EZScrambler. No more mixing eggs in a bowl, you can now do it right in the eggshell. Again, do we really need a device like this in our lives? Is is so hard to clean a bowl and mixing utensil that we'd rather buy a gadget?

This is why I hate marketing. Though there is clearly a market for this device, it is much smaller than the ad is trying to reach. This is the heart of marketing; creating a demand for a product that most people probably don't need. Its phony and manipulative and I wish it weren't so apparently effective; if it weren't we wouldn't have ads for the EZCracker on TV.

Office at school

I've moved up in the world of academia. The normal and somewhat demeaning status of cubical dweller in the business world is something of a prized token for students in academia and I have been awarded such a prize. I have a desk! At school! As part of my job for the university (analyzing some data on a research project) I have been given a computer and a desk that I will also be using for my Master's thesis work. My advisor has about a dozen desks just outside the lab where I will be working and one of them is mine, at least for now. Having a place to park my motorcycle gear and retreat to during the day is fantastic and it will make it easier to stay on campus for longer periods of time during the day. And the office has everything: a microwave, coffee maker, chairs, hot chocolate; everything!

The only thing that is perplexing is this sign I found posted on one of the cubical walls near my desk. I don't know what any Myers-Briggs ENFPs would be doing in an engineering lab. I hope its a joke because I can't stand those ENFPs. They totally through me out of my zone. INTJ is where the engineering power is at.

Livescribe Pulse Smartpen

This is it, the device that smoothly bridges that classic analog/digital divide in the college classroom: paper notes. The Livescribe Pulse Smartpen, when using special paper, records not only what is written down but, if you so desire, the audio in your environment when you do the writing. The pen does more than capture your notes and more than record the classroom lecture; it does both in a synergistic way. After class, if you want to hear the lecture related a graph you drew, just tap the page with the pen and the audio starts playing back, just like that. Even better, to clarify your written notes you can add to them while the audio is playing back and that writing will be captured as well and associated with the audio at that point. You can also upload the audio and captured writing to your PC and review everything there.

The feature list and uses for this pen could go on and this last Christmas I got one. I've been using it in class for a few weeks now and it works exactly as advertised. Its been easy to go back through lectures, listening, reading my notes and adding to them. Having the digital copy of my course-work is great and the product works as advertised.

Except when it doesn't.

My first pen had a problem. It would only hold a charge for about twenty minutes (though new), far less than even a single lecture. I called Livescribe and they said this was a known issue on a number of pens and sent me a new one, free of charge; I didn't even pay for shipping the new one in or the old one back. Though it didn't make it in time for the start of school I was very impressed at how responsive they were.

The first chance I could I put the new pen in action, recording my first full lecture (audio and notes) and then a conversation with my professor afterward regarding my thesis. When I got home I re-listened to the lecture, augmenting my notes as I went along. Except there was this loud whine through both recordings that at times made the audio almost unusable. I didn't remember anything in the classroom that was making that much noise and decided to test things out at home and in the empty classroom before everybody showed up. No noise at home, plenty of whine in the empty room. Great. The only place I really need my pen to work and its picking up the electronic Martian landing beacon or something and now I can't hear the professor over the din.

I called Livescribe and they suggested a few tweaks in the settings to see if that would help. I tried those today with no success. Another call this afternoon and after much over-the-phone shrugging they offered to send another pen out. Reluctantly I agreed. The tech support on the phone was very helpful and said that in the three years she's been working there she's only heard of a few cases of this happening. She thinks its something in the classroom making the electrical noise and not a problem with the pen, per se.

This is a product I wanted to believe in and have been hesitant to endorse or promote since I haven't had much time with it. I'm still hanging in the balance at this point but know two things. One, there is clearly still a need for some engineering work to be done. Two, their customer support has been great so far with low wait times on the phone and the ability and willingness to make things right as much as they can.

Here's hoping pen number three is the trick.

Free Time

Despite the title for this post, I don't necessarily have that much free time in my life right now. My general commitments for this semester include nine hours at Wichita State (one traditional class plus my thesis) and working half time for the university. Well, the work stuff hasn't started up yet and my thesis has been stalled out this past week while I wait on some equipment to get installed for me. In addition to this school stuff, though, I have other tasks around the house that didn't get done over Christmas due to being out of town a lot. There's also church-related stuff and other longer-term projects. I don't lack things that need to get done.

More accurately, then, the title should be "Unstructured Time". Every morning (or the evening before) I have to sit down and think through what I'm going to do, what the next day looks like for me. Even on the days when have class I have to decide if I'm going to stay on campus, for how long, if I need to bring a lunch, what I would do with that time, etc. I have to create my own structure and, in essence, my own priorities; build my own day. This is not a bad thing at all, I would even argue that it is a luxury to be able to have such control over one's life. I'm not being dictated to, I'm looking at the next twelve hours of my life and deciding what is important, what needs to be get done and what can wait.

It reminds we a lot of how I felt after graduating college and starting on my first job. Sure, I had work every day but after that I was totally free, no homework (and no family at that point). I could do whatever I wanted and had complete freedom of how I spent those hours. Life stretched before me and there was a wide, seemingly endless gamut of choices. I could be more involved in church, I could take up new hobbies or get back to ones I had dropped in college, I could read, I could watch TV or go to the movies, I could go to the park or the art museum, I could join a club or a band,....

Its a unique place to be in and it doesn't happen very often in life. Such broad latitude is a gift; we should all pray that if or when it comes along next, we don't squander it. That's what I'm trying to do, put it to good use while I can.

The Oath

The new semester is off and rolling and this time around, I have a job on campus! One of my professors hired me to help with some research, mainly doing some statistical analysis on some data that another university is collecting related to something in the power system. I don't know much about it right now as things are just getting started. Stay tuned.

As part of getting this (paying) job I had to fill out paperwork to get hired on as a student at Wichita State. This was a mostly harmless but very repetitious process as I wrote down the same information on multiple applications: federal documents, state documents, university documents, background check authorization, etc. I'm sure I went through the name/address/birthday routine at least six times. It is in moments like this that the engineer in me kicks in and wishes for some kind of centralized database where all of this can be stored and easily accessed. It is then that the libertarian in me kicks in and points out what a dangerous idea this is. Oh well.

The most unusual part of the application was a simple one-paragraph section of the state paperwork which I will reproduce here in full:

STATE OF KANSAS EMPLOYEE’S OATH

K.S.A. 75-4308 et seq requires that the following oath from K.S.A. 54-106, be signed by new employees before entering the duties of employment and before funds for services may be disbursed:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support the constitution of the United States and the constitution of the State of Kansas, and faithfully discharge the duties of my office or employment. So help me God.

___________________________________ Employee’s Signature

Not making this up at all. Coming across this stopped me in a bemused pause. I guess I was effectively going to be a state employee so I guess that means I have to take an oath of office. Sadly, I don't have a working knowledge of either the US Constitution or the Constitution of the State of Kansas and I hope that whatever knowledge I do have combined with my ability to "discharge the duties of my office or employment" will be good enough.

Hollywood and the Feel-Good Story

Katie and I went to go see "The Blind Side" yesterday afternoon and both of us enjoyed the movie. It was a well-crafted, feel-good, inspirational story that was at least loosely based in reality. For those of you who haven't seen it, the plot focusses on an older teenager, lost in the foster care system, who is taken in by a family and through a lot of effort, is able to succeed in school and football in a way he never was before. The plot is not horribly creative (hard to do in a feel-good movie) but still entertaining nonetheless and, using the Creshell Pennington criteria, "its a good movie because it makes your cry."

I have no problem with stories like this making it to the big screen. Like many movies, there is some degree of "escaping from reality" that many people desire to see and following a story full of winners makes everybody happy when they leave the theater. There is a place in the spectrum of films for stories like this; dozens more have been made and will be made where the down and out are helped to success by caring outsiders. School teachers tend to be featured in such films.

All that said, I do have a nit to pick with this movie because it implies that the problem that many of the "under-privileged" have is a lack of opportunity, that nobody seems to care enough to give them a shot. These films tend to portray a situation where the key to changing lives is that loving mentors give these children the opportunity to succeed and they will. In this film, the family that takes on the down-and-out youth does invest quite a bit; they provide him a home, clothes, food, a tutor, and genuinely make him a part of the family. Based on my relatively limited experience with working with at-risk kids, I'd have to say that the story ordinarily isn't as simple as that. Often, even when given opportunities, kids in the these situations do not respond well and often end up making choices that are self-defeating. More simply put, coming from a broken home can't be fixed by a change in circumstances, at least for most people.

Most kids who have difficult home lives have more than problems than the externalities of these situations; its more than not having, say, a reliable source of food, money for school supplies, a quiet place to do homework, parents to offer support and encouragement, etc. These are all real barriers and some of them can be overcome simply; the federal school lunch program is an example of such an attempt. More fundamentally, though, these students have a problem with developing good decision-making skills and behavior patterns that will allow them to grow into healthy, mature adults. You might call this "having character", in a non-moral sense of the word.

The cause for this lack of character development is usually straight-forward: the naturally influential adult figures in their lives (mostly parents) often have not been good role models and have failed to instill these good habits to their children, usually because they don't have the habits themselves. The damage done to these students has been deeper than a school-lunch program or after-school tutoring can fix. It requires digging in and making a significant investment of time and energy. It requires a great inconvenience on the part of those seeking to help and, in my experience, will be more frustrating than rewarding for a very long time.

The church I attend is partnered with an organization called Youth Horizons that seeks to provide mentors/role-models for kids who are in these kinds of difficult situations. I have many friends who are mentors and know a few of the stuff there decently well. For all of them, it is a labor of love. There is no high-altitude "love-bombing", this is "in the trenches" kind of work that isn't done in a casual way. The only reason they stick with it is that it can sincerely believe that this kind of work can actually change lives and have meaningful impact down the road.

I had a friend from my time in Boise that, in his thirties, finally was reaping the benefits of investment that others made in his teenage years. Fifteen years after his time in a church youth group where he had many loving adults pouring into his life, he realized that his life back then was better than it was now and that he needed help like that to get his life in order now. He moved back Boise, where his old youth pastor was working, still in ministry, and asked for help.

I ended up connected with him and saw a humble man who had realized that many of his choices in life had not played out the way he hoped and that he needed a fresh start under the influence of people who cared about him. There were some externalities that needed fixing: he needed a cheap place to stay, he needed a job, he needed help getting his finances in order. More importantly, though, he realized that he needed a new character. He needed to learn how to make good decisions for himself, he needed to learn how to make short-term sacrifices for long-term gain, he needed to learn how to follow-through on commitments he made. He was extremely teachable and a joy to walk along side as he tried to re-build his life and it was all because of the investment made when he was a young adult.

Clearly, children who don't develop character in their youth grow up into adults that also lack this kind of character. Being ten or twenty years older than a teenager does not guarantee character; an individual has to choose to learn and grow from experiences in life to gain that character. Without that character, they lack the ability to raise their kids in a more successful way than they know. You can't instill a value in your children that you yourself don't have. When people talk about the problems coming from broken families, in my mind, this is the fundamental issue, this cycle where a lack of character continues to perpetuate itself from one generation to the next. We all "inherit" the failings of our parents; they are the most influential models we have and whether we like it or not, we bear their fingerprints on our lives.

I hope that movies like "The Blind Side" inspire people to be more involved in their communities, helping students who have rough backgrounds to grow into men and women of character. Steel yourself, though, because it probably won't be as easy as what you see in the movies. Count the cost and make the investment.

Merry Academic Christmas

Well, its been a week since my third semester at Wichita State ended; just one more to go until I'm done with my Master's. I took all my tests two weeks ago (the week before finals) and had a final presentation the last day of finals week. Unlike last semester, our presentation went nearly exactly as planned and the presentations by my classmates were also much better than in previous semesters.

My final semester will be different than the past three. I'm only taking one class and the other six hours will be thesis. I've already unofficially started on it this past fall and have made a good start, getting a lot of the time-eating logistics and co-ordination with other people worked through. Now I just have to, you know, do my part. Developing some software, doing some experiments, lots of writing, that kind of thing.

In addition to my official school-work this spring semester I also got a job with my thesis advisor as a research assistant. We haven't nailed down what specific project I'll be working on but it'll be 20 hours a week and it looks like it will continue into the summer as well. This is essentially the work/school balance I had when employed at Cessna, just without the commute time. I'm excited about getting a chance to see what the research world is like and hopefully get some ideas for further research I could be involved with.

So, yeah, after talking with my wife we've decided I should go on to do my PhD and unless something crazy happens it will be at Wichita State. I've done a lot of reading over the Christmas break from other graduate students who have written about their experiences on the Web and it is echoing what I hear from grad students I know personally: having a good advisor is gold and I have a fantastic advisor. I know the department well, am interested in what my advisor is working on and have enjoyed my classes so far.

One of the best articles I've read recently had some very good advice: write down and define very specifically what you will and won't do for a PhD. Katie read the article too and she is a big fan of this idea, defining a line that will set expectations for the next several years of school. I'll have to think through this before I put pen to paper but the exercise will be invaluable. Part of the appeal of Wichita State is that, given our state in life and circumstances, it is a program that I can manage. If I was ten years younger, without family, and able to move anywhere in the world, the situation might be different. That's not where I am now, though, and so single-minded devotion to a PhD is not an option; I know that I'm not willing to give all my life now for the degree.

There are many great things about this Christmas but having a path for the next few years nailed down (Lord willing) is the best Christmas gift.

Two Wheels Through Winter

I rode my motorcycle to class today. The high for today in Wichita was 24 'F and I've ridden both my bicycle and motorcycle in colder weather. When I lived in Boise, I would routinely ride by bicycle all the way through the winter. Boise is pretty dry so I rarely had to worry about snow and ice and since I was moving the whole time, only my fingers and toes would get cold. I would often end up riding with my jacket unzipped due to all the heat I was generating.

Now that I don't have a commuter-worth bicycle, I'm on my motorcycle all the time. Many people think that riding in the winter is crazy, it being so cold outside. It helps that my commute is only five miles or so and I don't ride with snow or ice on the ground. When the temperature doesn't rise above freezing, I would be hard-pressed to say I enjoy the ride or find it comfortable. Its over soon enough, though, and I can manage.

I was reminded a week or two ago why I do ride motorcycles when we spent over $1000 on car repairs: its cheap. $5 for fuel every two weeks, insurance is $100 a year, I can do most of the repairs myself and though parts aren't "cheap" they tend to be cheaper than a comparable part for cars. After paying $350 dollars to have the power window mechanism replaced, I get almost giddy when I think that this is a repair I'll never have to make on the motorcycle. No air-conditioning, no heater, one cylinder, four valves (which I just adjusted last weekend), one carburetor, two wheels. There's something to be said for simplicity.

Electric Cars

I just got back from a presentation by one of my class-mates who was giving his PhD dissertation proposal. His topic was the performance of the future "smart grid" and one of the major factors was the impact that electric cars will have. He said, and I'm assuming he did the research and isn't making this up (a bad thing to do if you're trying to get your PhD), that the Chevy Volt is estimated to use in two months of operation the same amount of energy an average household would in one year.

Think about that. It may be cheaper per mile to operate an electric vehicle but that may only be true if you're the only one that has one. Utilities will have to build more power plants, the distribution grid will all have to be massively upgraded for all the additional energy it will have to provide, rates may go up. Buying a Chevy Volt and parking it in your garage will, to the power company, look like you just built six more homes to live in and are powering them all from the same wires that are running to your house right now.

This seems like big deal to me. I'm glad people like my friend are doing the research on how to make this work now before it becomes a huge issue.

Admitted

I just got a letter from WSU stating that I have been admitted to their PhD program for the fall 2010. This is not really a surprise considering that they admitted me to their Master's program and I've done quite well in it. Its still good to see it in black and white, though.

So if I decide to go the PhD route in the fall, I've got at least one place to call home. I plan on applying to at least one other school and am debating/agonizing about whether I want to go through all the effort of applying to one of the Big Name schools. I would probably have to retake the GRE test because my score is very mediocre (when compared with those who are admitted to such institutions). More effort, more studying, more tests....

This PhD decision is not easy for me. Though Wichita State is far from prestigious I have found a great professor here who would serve as my advisor and he is well-respected in the field. The quality of the eduction here is pretty good, though not as rigorous as I was hoping. (On the other hand, I don't know if my life supports a rigorous program at this point.)

The big problem with Wichita State is the name recognition. If I get a PhD from Wichita State, nobody is ever going to look at my resume and think big things of me. In general, I don't care much about this but there are a very small group of people I do need to be impressed with me: those that might want to hire me. In this single regard, Wichita State fails me. In fact, this is my only serious reservation about working on a PhD here; will I be able to have a career in academia after getting done?

I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

New bathroom floor

The last home improvement project for the season (if you consider October part of the spring/summer season) was replacing the floor in the front bathroom with, you guessed it, tile. In the process, I managed to break the old toilet and thus turn a $200 project into a $450 project. As you might guess, breaking the toilet was not a high point of the project for me.

Just like tiling the kitchen and dining room, under the carpet I found vinyl on particle-board subfloor. All of it had to come out....

and be replaced with plywood.

Once the new plywood was in, the Ditra was laid on top (shown here prior to mortaring onto the subfloor).

I spent several hours cutting all the tile first which is a bit risky as it is hard to keep the tiles from shifting and the cuts consistent. Once all the tiles were cut, they got mortared in and let set for a day or two.

Grouted.

The new toilet gets installed and everything gets caulked and prettied up.

New Backsplash

Fulfilling a promise to my wife when we redid our kitchen floor, we finally got around to doing the kitchen backsplash. Mainly due to size, the backsplash went a lot faster than the floor. We tore the old tiles out in a few hours (a few weeks before), set the new tiles in four or five hours one day, and grouted in a few hours a week later. Though she had trepidation about her choice of tiles, Katie is very happy with them now that they are installed.

Original, boring small white square tiles:

Fancy new brick tiles, prior to putting in the grout:

Backsplash after grouting:

Completely cleaned up and finished.

Bye-Bye Bicycle

Last Thursday my bicycle was stolen on-campus at Wichita State University. I'm normally very diligent about locking it up but forgot to when I made a quick run into the athletic center to get something out of my locker there. I was away from the bike for 30 seconds and when I came back it was gone. Shame on me for not locking up. Shame on the thief for taking something he/she did not own. I'm hoping that another student on campus took it and I'll spot it again soon but more than likely it is a lost cause. For now that means I'm riding my motorcycle to school and maybe someday I'll get another bike. Maybe.

Its a shame it was lost, though, because I actually used it quite a bit. It didn't have that many miles on it either, probably about 10,000 or so.

Phone Number Mix-Up

I just got a call from a person unknown to me who has a phone number very close to mine. He sounded like an older gentleman and was having a problem with people calling him on his cell phone when they were trying to reach me. He was hoping that I could help him do something about this.

I was a bit perplexed. I know my phone number pretty well and may occasionally give out an incorrect variation of it but I assume I get it write most of the time. Clearly, I don't give out the wrong number with the intent of preventing communication between them and me. Similarly, I have not been not instigating some kind of prank on him by passing around a bogus phone number. From what he said, there have been quite a number of people calling him instead of me, ranging from the unemployment office to the insurance company to my friends.

I told him I didn't see what I could really do to help the situation; if I've handed out a bad phone number there's not much I can do at this point to keep people from using it. It seems more likely to me that people were mis-dialing my number than have it written down incorrectly but he didn't seem convinced of this; hence his call. He suggested that whenever I meet up with my friends or go to a place of business that has my number I double-check and make sure that their records are correct. This seemed like a reasonable suggestion but unless I make a campaign out of it and call all the appropriate people myself, it will probably take a while. The hardest part will be remembering to make a point of asking.

Oddly, there is another older couple in my life that has endured a similar mix-up. The couple the lives two doors down from us has a similar looking house (shape, color, yard) and when we first moved in, they got a lot of people knocking on their door looking for us. They seemed more amused by it than anything; we still have a good, neighborly relationship with them

Obama's Healthcare Speech

Katie and I didn't have a chance to catch this evenings speach live so we read it together before going to be last night. This is the only reading we've done so far on Obama's proposals and what you're about to read is based entirely on that speech. You can be sure that I'll be doing more reading, both from those who are support and oppose this bill but for now, I'm mulling over what was said during the speech. And, as always, the devil is in the details. We've all seen good ideas get ground into worthless laws by the legislative process. The specifics of the bill (which I haven't seen yet) could make the intentions expressed by the President into a unhelpful legal mess.

Using lists as a crutch, here are my thoughts:

• Federal Cost Controls I think that our national deficit is a very significant problem that seems to be commonly overlooked when it comes to legislation. I'm a member of the generation that, unless something is done, will literally be paying the consequences of our governments overspending and want something done to address the deficit sooner rather than later. I am glad that the President wants to include provisions in the bill to require the program not add to our federal deficit and if the savings the bill is intended to produce don't arrive, then it would require cuts in the budget to keep the plan budget-neutral. Not knowing any details, I'm skeptical of the level of efficiencies to be gained through the other aspects of his proposal but I am quite glad to hear that there are concrete and realistic measures being taken to keep this program from growing out of control.
• Patient Cost Controls I was most surprised to hear the President propose a requirement for annual out-of-pocket maximums and removal of lifetime maximums from insurance policies. As a patient this is good news but it is not clear to me what the long-term consequences of this will be. Insurance companies have used things like a lifetime maximum to prevent a few patients from costing the company an extra-ordinary amount of money due to having to cover expensive treatments. This is another piece of the puzzle that prevents insurance companies from only insuring the healthy (see below) and because of that, I'm generally in favor of it. There's no such thing as a free lunch, though, and I wonder how this will play out over time.
• Required Coverage I like both sides of this coin, both requiring nearly everybody to buy health insurance and requiring insurance companies to ignore "pre-existing conditions" when writing policies. These two items go together, hand-and-glove. As the President said, many insurance companies have (logically) sought to reduce their liability by trying to only insure the healthiest individuals. By removing the ability to deny coverage to anybody based on pre-existing conditions (that is, things the insurance companies know will cost them money) this bill would force the insurance industry to treat all of us like potential customers. By requiring everybody to have insurance, we make nearly our entire country the customer-base for these companies which should be something they like. They just can't pick and choose anymore and have to treat us all the same. This is a big first step in divorcing health insurance from our employers which should give us, the workers, more security by making it easier to switch employers.
• Market Forces and Public Option The key to making me happy with a public option is that it is expected to operate more like a non-profit rather than a corporation subsidized by tax-payer dollars. This seems like a great idea to me; fighting the profit-driven insurance companies with a non-profit, patient-oriented entity. If a for-profit company can offer policies that are competitive with the public non-profit policies, then they deserve the money they earn. If they value they add is not enough to justify the price of their policies or if they become solely profit-oriented at the cost of making policy-holders satisfied, then they'll lose business. More generally, I see no problem in having for-profit businesses compete with non-profits even if in this case the non-profit is a government entity. The playing field is level as long as this government non-profit must be self-sufficient. I'm not totally clear on this but Obama said in his speech "Let me be clear - it would only be an option for those who don't have insurance. No one would be forced to choose it...." If my employer offers health insurance but I find that the public option is better for me, can I choose it? I think I need to be able to do that for there to be a true marketplace where choices force competition. In short, it seems like the public option might be a good way of introducing more market forces.
• Waste and Increased Efficiencies The $900 billion price tag (over ten years) for this reform is intended to be paid for by reducing waste and inefficiencies in the current system. Specifically, this alleged waste resides in the way Medicare/Medicaid is handled by the insurance companies in their attempt to increase profits. I'm skeptical of the amount of waste alleged in the President's speech but I'm not in a good position to know one way or the other. I hope the President has good data in this regard because the ability for this reform to work well for all relies on these savings. As the President said, if these savings don't materialize, expenses have to get slashed and the reform gets gutted.
• Subsidies From what I've read, if don't get insurance through your workplace and the open-market (with both the traditional for-profit insurance companies and the public non-profit company) can't offer an affordable policy, then a tax credit will be given to you which I assume is intended to make the policies affordable for low income earners. There is also a "hardship waiver" for individuals. I'm confused by this. Does this mean that as we move down the income scale the tax credit increases but insurance is still required until a given (very low) income level where the requirement to carry insurance is removed? If this is the case, I hope that the tax credits stop at that level as well.
• Uninsured There will still be uninsured living in the US. The President made a point of saying that the insurance reform will not help illegal immigrants and he also said that there will be a "hardship waiver" for those who just can't afford health insurance. There is nothing in the speech about hospitals being allowed to turn away uninsured so I'm assuming that those that are insured will be indirectly subsidizing those that aren't insured when they go to the hospital. (Hospitals make up the money they lose on non-paying patients by raising the prices over-all for paying patients. Its the same way stores make up money lost to theft; they raise the prices on the paying customers to cover the loss). The percentage of uninsured needs to be very low for this to work.

Katie and I came up with a few items of note that this bill didn't seem to address:

• Health Insurance Complexity As you've heard me rant about before, right now our health insurance system is quite complex. There is very little transparency in pricing, it is hard to shop around, billing overhead is significant for most providers, and the whole in-network/out-of-network stuff can drive you crazy. I heard nothing in the President's proposal to make any of this simpler. Whether you have a private or public insurance plan it sounds like you'll still be jumping through the same hoops. Providers will still have a mountain of paperwork to deal with, patients will still have to try to wade through bureaucracies to figure out how much a given procedure will end up cost them. I haven't had any personal experience with Medicare/Medicaid so I don't know if having the government as the insurer makes the process easier but I doubt it.
• Healthy Living There didn't seem to be any effort to include in the bill some kind of provision to encourage us as citizens to live healthier lifestyles. Legislation like this is not easy to write but I can't recall anything the President said that would encourage people to make better lifestyle choices. There was some talk about encouraging marketplace competition so maybe insurers will come up with a way to encourage us to reduce their costs by going through some kind of wellness program. Stealing from Michael Pollan, I would love to see our government overhaul the Farm Bill in such a way that it was not so cattle/grain/pig-centric. Are their good reasons for not subsidizing fruits and vegetables instead of corn which often gets made into either cattle-feed or corn syrup?

The big take-away: health insurance will be required by law just like auto insurance is. For those who already have insurance, the cost of complying with this law should not increase and may decrease (depending on how effective this new insurance market works and other devilish details). For those currently without insurance, this will be an increased cost that there won't be any legal way around. I don't know if, on average, the dollars spent on health-care per person will increase or decrease. The hope is that by growing the market and forcing it to run more efficiently (by introducing a public non-profit into the competition) that the average will stay roughly the same while providing insurance to many more people. In short, economies of scale might just make this a win-win.

The Great Car Exchange

This past Labor Day weekend I helped do a favor for my uncle living in Oregon by driving the car his son has in Kansas City half-way to Oregon and there, meeting with another party, switching cars and driving the replacement back to Kansas City. Actually, its a bit more complicated than that but that's the gist of it. My cousin had a rear-wheel drive Volvo and the weather in Kansas City can be such that rear-wheel drive is a bit dangerous. My uncle had a front-wheel drive Volvo he wanted to get to his son and recruited Katie and I to help make the car exchange happen. As it turns out, my uncle also recruited his brother (my father) to do the western leg of the drive so I also got to spend half a day with my parents in Evanston, Wyoming where we made the switch. Two thousand miles of driving, three days, several bottles of root beer. Good times.

One of the great things about the drive was getting to see a bunch of wind farms near the interstate. I'll put a few pictures up here but there are more on my Flickr stream. (I must admit, though, that once you've seen one wind turbine you've kind of seen them all. At least when you're driving by at 75 mph. Up close its a different story.)

Passing through Concordia, KS we saw this carved mural on the side of the tourist information/museum. I don't know how it was done or have ever seen anything like it.


Last but not least, in honor of a dear little girl I know who loves a DVD titled "I Dig Dirt", we saw one of the machines featured in said DVD. The photo is not near as impressive as seeing it action, even if just while driving by.

Return Paranoia

One of our rear turn signals burnt out yesterday and so before heading out on a road trip this weekend, I went to AutoZone to get a replacement. I used the convenient part selection book to find the correct lamp and purchased it. Upon heading home and removing the headlight cover I found that I had purchased the wrong lamp. Pulling out the broken lamp as a reference I went back to AutoZone, found the lamp I needed, and went to the counter to make the return and purchase.

The clerk started on the return first and instead of just scanning the item and asking if I wanted it back on my credit card she asked for my name, phone number and address. I told here I didn't want to provide that information and she said for returns it was required. Not believing this, I clarified that even with a receipt and even having just purchased the item five minutes ago (literally, I live no more than five blocks from the store) they needed all this information. She said yes, the computer would not allow a return without this information. After thinking this over a few seconds I decided that it wasn't worth getting my name in their database for who knows what reason and told her I'd keep the wrong lamps and go buy the correct lamps at another store. Fortunately for me, one of their competitors is five or six blocks the other direction from where I live.

I'm not normally a big privacy advocate but am tired of getting junk mail and phone calls from corporations (despite being on the "Do Not Call" list) and usually decline to provide this information to businesses. Until now, none of them have refused to do business with me because I won't give them a name, phone number, or address. This was a first and its a bit scam-y that you probably don't know they'll want this information until they have your money and you'd like to make a return. All the more reason to make sure you buy the right item the first time.

Which, by the way, it turns out I did. I was looking in the wrong spot for the burnt-out turn signal and once I figured this out, realized I had purchased the correct part. In this one special case, I was able to stand on principle AND not be inconvenienced. I still don't plan on shopping at AutoZone any more, though.

School is my life

As I suspected, with school now back in full swing I am once again fully busy. I've turned in my first two homework assignments and have started doing some background reading for my thesis. Due to a retirement and my lay-off, I've switched topics for the thesis and have to start over pretty much. Fortunately, I wasn't too far along in the process before all these changes hit. Even though we haven't decided that I'm doing a PhD, it is enough of a potential that I've got a handful of applications I'll have to do this semester as well.

So, consider this a pre-warning that my posting will probably get sporadic, just like they've always been.

(Oh, and we've finally got all the equipment we need to replace the backsplash in the kitchen and the front bathroom floor. That will also be sucking my time. Did I mention we're driving most of the Labor Day weekend to help move a car from Eugene, OR to Kansas City, MO? Fun times.)