What is the Theme of Your Life?

Recently I read a fabulous article:

The Disadvantage of an Ivy League Education.  It was fascinating.  Written by Professor By William Deresiewicz, an Ivy League professor, who should know.  Read it first, it is self explanatory.   Here's a short quote:

...
In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse.
...

I wondered if the ideas put forth.  Has my career been determined by the universities that I went to?  Had I gone to an elite university, would my career have been different?  Or not?

I then suddenly had the thought.  If your life were a movie, what would the theme be?  What simple theme would explain your life the best?  Think of documentaries, biographies, books, stories, movies that you have seen.   It's a fascinating question. 

Healing Infection, Inflammation, and Swelling with Magnets

Here is something that others have encouraged me to post online.

I went walking in the ocean one Sunday, and got stung by a stingray on the top of my right foot.  Ow!  I started limping immediately.

The lifeguards put my foot in hot water, checked the wound for the barb (none), and let me go. It bled enough.  It was tough to walk on it. I limped back to the car.

Unlike when I sprained my ankle at different times, this time the foot stayed swollen. I noticed that what seemed to be a liquid inside the foot moved to each side of the foot when I sat on my heels.  That is, when I eventually could sit on my heels, after a number of days.

I could only wear my really old loose sneakers.  If I tried to put on my regular shoe, or new sneakers, my foot was too big, and it hurt to get it in.  When I put my flip flops on, the straps  pushed the liquid away from the straps.

I tried some home treatments:  Topical anti biotic. Epsom salts and hot water. Topical colloidal silver.

On the Friday, the swelling still had not gone down.  I couldn't put my foot into my shoes.

That weekend, I decided to see if my violet ray machine would make a difference.

More Experiments With Magnets And Plants - 2010

In 2010, I wanted to plant some flowers again.  I wasn’t thinking of doing an experiment when I started; I just wanted to plant some flowers.  So I planted some Brown Eyed Susans in recycled containers that plants are sold in.

Immediately after the fact, I thought I should use some magnets.  Since magnets help plants grow, I came up with a hypothesis and experiment.

Davis and Rawls state that the south pole of a magnet will help plants grow.  And the north side will impede the growth.  The pole that faced the plants was the south pole.  I put the magnets close to the tray.  If the magnets did help the plants, then the plants closest to the magnets should grow fastest.

Again, everything here was the same.  All the seeds came from the same package.  All the soil came from the same package also.  The magnet used was a type N42, 1 inch square, by 3/8 inch thick.  Magnetized axially.  If you lay it down, the top is south pole, and the bottom is north pole, or vice versa.

You can see the results here.  The magnet is in the white 35mm film container.   

As you can see, the plants closer to the south pole of the magnet, grew faster, than the ones further away.  As I expected.  Proving the thesis. 

Experiments with Morning Glories, Magnets, and Magnetized Water, 2009

I've shown pictures of these experiments to a number of people recently, and many have asked me to put it up on the web.

I like blue, and blue flowers are relatively rare.  In 2009, I saw some packages of seeds for blue morning glories, and bought them immediately.

The same year, I'd bought some magnets.  I suddenly wondered, do magnets affect the growth of plants,  and was inspired to do an experiment.  Using the morning glory seeds from the same package, I tested for four different scenarios.

1 - Seeds, with powerful magnets inside the pot, and regular water.
2 - Seeds with regular water
3 - Seeds with magnetized water
4 - Seeds with regular water, with a purple plate under the pot

What is magnetized water?  It was water had been subjected to a magnetic stirrer.  I'd pour water into the container, and stir the water with a magnetic stirrer for about 15 minutes.  What is a purple plate?  I'd been told it was supposed to do all kinds of wonderful things, so I decided to include it in the tests.

The magnets I used were from KJ Magnetics, and are in this picture.

The sizes of the magnets are:  

Summer For Bureaucrats

While still in university, in 1989, I visited Japan for three months on an AIESEC traineeship. I was very impressed with Japan!

While I was there, I heard a number of different Japanese people spontaneously tell me, “Japan has no resources excepts its people”. Japanese companies put a lot of effort into developing their human resources and capital. And, they were beating the Americans in so many industries: steel, electronics, television, cars.

When I returned to university, I noted how Western companies essentially did no investment in their people. They wanted fully educated workers. And fully trained. But at the expense of another company. So they could just hire them away. Quite the contrast in HR policy.

This summer, I started watching a TV series on Japan’s NHK network, called “Summer For Bureaucrats”. It’s a docudrama about the history of the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry – MITI.

It starts about 1955, ten years after WWII. Each episode is a different drama, not only about MITI, but about Japan also.

Cool stuff at the 1989 World Design Expo, Nagoya, Japan

In 1989, while in univeristy, I went to Japan on an AIESEC traineeship. It was an awesome experience!

While I was there, I attended the World Design Expo in Nagoya.

The theme of the conference was Fire. Anything goes. So there was lots of different aspects featured.

There was a whole section of graphic arts, with many posters on fire safefy.

Another section had fire safety products. One product in particular that I thought was rather smart was a fire safety device for buildings. It looked like the long tape you would use to measure distances in track and field. If there was a fire in a building, and the fire escape was blocked, you would anchor one end around something fixed in the office. The other end would go under your armpits. Jump through the window. It would slowly lower you to the ground at a constant speed. On September 11th I remembered it. Perhaps it wouldn't be long enough for so many stories. But it was long enough to go to a floor below the fire.

The second grand prize went to this solar energy cooker.


The idea behind the cooker was that in developing countries, green trees were being cut down for firewood, because all the dead wood had already been burned up. Fewer green trees meant more carbon dioxide, and less oxygen being produced. This is causing an ecological imbalance. The idea was to eliminate burning altogether.

Oracle Developer Tools User Group Conference

ODTUG - Oracle Developer Tools User Group
June 21 to 25, 2009. Monterey, California.

This year, I went to ODTUG conference to see what was new in the Oracle tools space. It’s well over a month since I went, so I’ll just write a few highlights.

ODTUG included subjects on:
Application Express
Oracle Fusion Stack, JDeveloper
SOA
BPEL
Essbase/Hyperion
Oracle BI
PLSQL

Some of the heavy Oracle hitters there were Tom Kyte, and Steven Feuerstein, and Michael Ault.

One interesting thing to me was the HUGE international prescence. There were many people from Europe and Australia. Even from Nigeria, Africa. I asked these two about the 419 scams, and they say, that they not only get the emails, they get the 419 scam by phone call too! I wonder how many countries were represented.

Most of the conference was on the latest and greatest from these new Oracle tools.

However, I’m always interested in how do we build solid software that works first time, every time. And is instantly understood and maintained by ten new people that just walked in the door.

Put in the wrong people, with the best tools, you can still produce really awful systems. There were a few presentations that I resonated with.

A few years ago, the subtext of my tuning presentation was “avoiding the worst practices”. At ODTUG, Tom Kyte had a presentation, “Worst Practices for DBAs and Developers”. It was a collection of really bad things he has unfortunately actually seen in industry! A lot of it concerned underlying attitudes and beliefs that lead to seriously pathetic systems. Such as:

Probably you don’t need to test.
Testing would be a waste of time.
It might not break.
It probably won’t have any scalability issues.
Just do the upgrade, it’ll probably work.
If I test, and it doesn’t work, I’ll be in trouble.

and
Never question authority. Experts are always right.
Nothing need be backed up with evidence.
Things never change.

Tom ended with an hilarious example of the attitude: “let’s build in the security in later”. Imagine if a car was not built with security in mind. He showed a picture he’d found on the web that did just that. It got a huge laugh.





I too see so many bad practices and results in IT. Some are truly unbelievable. Tom Kyte articulates many of the things I’ve been saying for years. Can I say, great minds think alike?

See Tom’s presentation at:
http://www.nyoug.org/Presentations/2008/Sep/Kyte_WorstPractices.pdf

I also liked the presentation by Toon Koppelaars.

He talked about how three tier applications, as far as the user is concerned, are essentially much the same as two tier client server. It’s just a window on the data.

But since java and the web the technologies have become very complex now. There are dozens if not hundreds of technologies to learn now. Each requiring months of learning curve to become really productive. With more and more features, of which only 10 to 20% will actually be used. That have a short lifespan of sometimes only two years! He calls them YAFET: Yet Another Front End Technology.

Find his excellent presentation and solutions at:
http://thehelsinkideclaration.blogspot.com/2009/03/helsinki-declaration-observation-1.html
http://thehelsinkideclaration.blogspot.com/2009/03/helsinki-declaration-observation-2.html
http://thehelsinkideclaration.blogspot.com/2009/03/helsinki-declaration-observation-3.html

The full blown talks are at:
http://thehelsinkideclaration.blogspot.com/2009_03_01_archive.html
http://thehelsinkideclaration.blogspot.com/2009_06_01_archive.html

http://www.RuleGen.com

I met tuning expert Cary Milsap. We had met in Boston area we he presented there. We had a good dinner together.

Brian Spedolini had an interesting presentation, Oracle Application Express on the iPhone. Cool.

So, a good conference. If you want to go next year, find them at:

http://www.odtug.com

Just how big and influential are the oil companies? Gas is a tax.

Just how big and influential are the oil companies? Looking the 2009 Forbes Top 2000 companies, it is considerable.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/08/worlds-largest-companies-business-global-09-global_land.html

(Scroll down. Unfortunately, Blogspot doesn't handle HTML tables very well.)

Within the Top	Sales	Profits	Assets	Market Value	As Ranked By Forbes
5	3 (60%)	5 (100%)	0	2 (40%)	3 (60%)
6	4 (67%)	6 (100%)	0	2 (33%)	3 (50%)
10	6 (60%)	8 (80%)	0	3 (30%)	4 (40%)
15	8 (53%)	9 (60%)	0	5 (33%)	7 (47%)
25	8 (32%)	10 (40%)	0	7 (28%)	9 (36%)

By profits, the Top 6 most profitable companies, are ALL (100%) oil companies!

Look here for a better compilation.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/18643748/Worlds-Largest-Companies-April-2009

In almost every category, a significant percentage of the largest companies in the world are oil companies. As for assets, the companies with the largest assets are banks, insurance and financial companies. Which makes sense. If all business, and consumers, put their cash into the bank, you would expect that the banks would have a larger cash balance than other non financial companies.

However, if we ignore these kinds of financial companies from the assets list, only General Electric (conglomerate), Deutsche Post (transportation), and Toyota (consumer durables), are larger than the largest oil companies by assets; Royal Dutch Shell in the Netherlands, and Gazprom in Russia. Again that makes sense. The big and complex assets required to build a car at Toyota, should be more significant than what is required to build oil wells and pipelines.
 
Which brings up the question, why are gasoline companies so big, no matter which way you look at it?
 
The current infrastructure is designed so that most everyone uses gas. How many vehicles can you buy that don’t use gasoline? There are starting to be substitutes, such as electric cars, or plug in hybrids, but they are still in really small numbers.
 
Applying economic theory to the question, gas is an inelastic good. If it goes up in price, we still buy it. Unlike elastic goods, which, if they goes up in price, we slow down our purchases of it. Or, buy more when they go on sale.


With sales, profits, and market value as large as this, do you think that the oil companies have some influence in politics? Or have made some contributions to politicians? Or have government lobbyists on the payroll?


Just how much do we pay for gasoline each week, month, year? See this quote from:

http://www.himacresearch.com/books/crisis3.html

"In 1952, the average citizen paid the same amount in various gas and automobile taxes as he did in INCOME TAXES ! 'The American Motorist: No.1 Tax Sucker', Cornet, August 1952, pages 40 - 41."

While there is so much discussion about taxes, there is little about how much the consumer, and the USA spends on energy. In economic and political discussions, much is made about reducing taxes, and how raising taxes will stagnate the economy. But until gas prices began to rise in the seventies, and in 2008, there has been little discussion is made on how the cost of energy stagnates the economy. Clearly the higher cost of energy does stagnate the economy.

Gas is a Tax. And I'm NOT talking about government taxes on gas. I'm talking about the fact that we have to buy so much gas each day, week, month, year, because we don't have energy alternatives.

Imagine the economic benefits if we doubled, tripled, or quadrupled the efficiency of the use of energy; if the real cost of energy was only one half, or one third, or one quarter of what it currently is. Prices of goods would be cheaper, and consumers would have more of their wealth to spend on other things. Imagine how much wealthier all individuals, and the whole economy would be!

Never mind a tax cut. Just cut the real cost of energy by making machines multiples more efficient than they are now. The government stays out. People have more money to spend because they are spending less on energy, and spend their money.

How would that be for an economic multiplier?

My Model Stirling Engine

Check out the model stirling engine I bought from Kontax.

On a single cup of hot water, the flywheel turned for almost 3 hours! And on a single cup of ICE water, it turned in the opposite direction, for over 2 hours! Cool!





Stirling engines were invented in 1816, by the Scottish minister, Robert Stirling. They are technically, an external combustion engine, because the heat source is outside the piston chamber. It creates power from the differences between hot and cold, and will actually create more power on a cold day, than on a hot day.

Stirling engines are known to be very efficient, but I'm having a hard time finding reliable numbers on what the relevant efficiency range is. If you know, or find, good numbers on their efficiency, please let me know what they are.

The stirling engine must literally warm up. So, it cannot do fast starts and stops like an internal combustion engine (ICE). It is suited for long steady state operations. Another characteristic is that unlike an ICE, there have no: valves, intake, or exhaust. And so, they are very quiet. They also have fewer moving parts than an ICE, and so are more reliable. Because the heat source is outside the engine, any type of fuel can be used, such as: wood, natural gas, garbage. Even hot water, as in the case of the Kontax, if it was designed for that.

My current car generates a lot of waste heat, that you can really feel coming out from under the hood. I wondered if there was something wrong with it, but I was assured that was normal for that car.

On a long drive, I suddenly had the idea of a stirling engine that could capture the waste heat from the exhaust pipe. This could be used in hybrids. The waste heat could power a stirling engine, which would then be used to generate electricity.

Then I thought, why bother with an internal combustion engine (ICE) at all? In a hybrid, Instead of an ICE, why not just use a stirling engine to generate the electricity?

After I got back, I discovered that Dean Kamen, most well known for his invention of the Segway, is currently working on Stirling engine for use in hybrid automobiles.
http://www.dekaresearch.com/stirling.shtml
Do great minds think alike? Can I compare myself to Dean Kamen?

And I’ve since found out that another company is also working on another heat exchanger that would work on the waste heat from the ICE.
http://www.heat2power.net/en__introduction.php
They have a lot of calculations on their website, but I can’t seem to find a clear diagram of exactly how it all works. Even though they have patents:
http://www.heat2power.net/en__intellectual_property.php
the same website also talks about confidentiality agreements.
http://www.heat2power.net/en__evaluation.php

Considering how many ICE and electric motors manufacturers that exist, there are relatively few manufacturers of stirling engines around the world, and few places where the stirling is being used.

One place that the stirling engine is being used is in generating electricity at a solar energy plant in the Mojave desert. Mirrors reflect the sun’s heat onto one side of the stirling engine. The engine turns and generates electricity. All pollution free, and totally renewable. Very cool!
http://www.stirlingenergy.com/

Another place stirling engines are being used is in Swedish submarines.
http://www.kockums.se/products/products.html
http://www.kockums.se/submarines/aipstirling.html
“The Stirling AIP system is practically vibration-free, silent and wakeless. Its infrared signature is very low.”

Stirling DK, from Denmark, manufactures a combined heat and power (CHP) unit for the home. The home is heated with biofuel such as wood chips, and the stirling engine generates electricity for the home at the same time.
http://www.sd.econtent.dk/

The American company, Stirling Technology, manufactures a stirling engine for use in areas away from the power grid. It will supply 5 horsepower of shaft power at 650 RPM, and can be used to generate electricity, or pump water.
http://www.stirling-tech.com/st_engines.shtml
http://www.stirling-tech.com/literature.shtml

Ronald Steele has built a homemade stirling engine, and sells the plans for it here:
http://www.stirlingsteele.com/StirlingEnginePlans.html

For more information on this very cool motor, check out these links:

Stirling Engine Society and cool Links:
http://www.sesusa.org/index.html
http://www.sesusa.org/links.htm


PESWIKI:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Stirling_Engines

My experience passing the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Institute Level I exam

In 2006, I met some technlogy people who had business designations. One, an architect, had a treasury designation from the Federal Reserve. And another, had a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation. I'd been looking to get closer to the business side, and take a larger leadership role in the systems I'd been developing. Their designations seemed to help them, so I decided to do the same. But what a LOT of work!

The CFA program is a graduate level self study program. One of the prerequisites to enter the program is that you already have a bachelor's degree. There are three levels (exams) to pass, Level 1, 2, and 3. Abbreviated as L1, L2, L3. And, before attaining the charter, you also have to work in the finance business for a number of years.

For L1, there are 10 major sections (study sessions), and 78 readings altogether. The official books had about 3000 pages to study, read, and retain! By the time I started, I was estimating that I would need to read and retain, about 30 pages a day! And then review, and write practice tests, to prepare for the big exam. The official website says, "Each level demands a minimum of 250 hours of study, with substantially more, depending on individual circumstances". That is an equivalent of over 6 weeks of full time, 40 hours of work! But I know I studied more than 250 hours.

The CFA exams are pretty hard. On a single day, there are two 3 hour exams, one in the morning, and one in the afternoon. Each exam has 120 questions. In 2007, the percentage of people who passed L1, was somewhere around 40%. And only 40% passed L2 and 50% passed L3. Clearly, this is not the same passing rate as found in most university programs!

In 2007, 71,172 candidates wrote the L1 exam, and 28,125 passed, about a 39.5% pass rate. But only 6,399 candidates passed the L3 exam. So, of those who start the program, significantly less pass L3. See the complete stats here:
http://www.cfainstitute.org/cfaprog/pdf/candidate_results.pdf

So I say, there is no grade inflation, or designation devaluation, in the CFA program. If you see someone with CFA after their name, you know that they have accomplished something serious. I've since met one Japanese lady, who wrote the exams in English, not her native language. And English and Japanese are not like Latin languages that all have the same root. Pretty smart if you ask me!

The lessons are definitely at the master's level. L1 had a big section on quantitative methods. In finance, it could be used to find correlations between economic indicators, company financial numbers, and values a stock might take in the future. In my bachelor's degree, I'd already aced a number of statistics classes. But these quant readings were at a whole new level. I really had to work at them.

I felt that I was at a serious disadvantage. I'd been working on the tech, not the business side. So, a lot of the business terms and practices, while second nature to those on the business side, were unfamiliar to me. Options were a really new paradigm that I had to work on. I'd always bought mutual funds, or stocks "long". The idea of buying an option that was "short", with the expectation that the instrument would go down in price, was new to me.

I compared my disadvantage to a business person attempting to attain the professional designations for Oracle, Cisco, Microsoft, Java, and Linux. All at the same time.

Eventually I wondered what an MBA equivalent would be. I estimated that it was -at least- as much work, as taking five full time (September to December, three hour) classes. And then you wrote one big exam for all of them combined. Perhaps it is closer to the equivilent of a whole year's worth of MBA classes.

I did a lot of studying. On Saturdays, I would go to the university, and study from the afternoon, until about 10 PM. When the exam approached, I started at 10 am, and studied just as late.

One of the big aids that helped me was the video CDs from Schweser, which I bought used on Ebay. These are lectures, and powerpoint presentations that you watch on computer. With all the documentaries I watch, you can probably guess that I really like to learn through audio visual media. Like a regular lecture, the prof writes a few lines on the board, but they speak hundreds or thousands of words about the subject. This I find always helps me learn faster than just reading the text and diagrams in books.

The other thing that helped me was to do as many questions that I could find. It's not enough to just remember the concept. To answer a lot of the exam questions, you have to use multiple equations to find multiple inputs for a final equation. You also have to really know the concepts. Systematically doing the questions, and discovering what the right answer is, works for me.

Like all university courses, some subjects are not always explained as clearly as they should be, and were really confusing. Such subjects I usually looked up on the internet, my big library. So after I figured these subjects out, and explained them simpler, and better than the textbooks did, I wrote them down. One confusing subject that I figured out, the Percentage of Completion vs Completed Contract method, was actually found on the exam. So I was really happy that I made that confusing subject, simple enough to recall.

Writing things down always helps me with reinforcement, and to remember. Part of this is to make my own notes. I made a whole bunch of electronic notes on my laptop. Those were great because they could be searched really fast. And, I made paper notes that fit into a binder. These I took to the exam, and reviewed before the two exams. I wrote them to be, "instantly digestible", for this fast food generation.

I also started the Boston CFA study group on meetup.com. http://cfa.meetup.com/58/ You should still be able to see my picture there. The idea was "For studying, career, networking and socializing." Unlike MBA students, CFA candidates working in isolation don't make contacts. So, this way, we could help each other out when studying, and make friends in the industry at the same time.

In June 2007, I wrote the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Level I exam. Some L2, L3 candidates were sitting beside me. One guy finished with over 25 minutes to spare. After the exam, I found out that he worked for Bear Stearns. Later, it went under! Beside him, was a woman who got up and left with over 1/2 an hour to spare. I looked up and wondered, "did she ace it, or just give up?". She looked really confident, so I figured that she aced it. And I finished with a few minutes to spare to review some answers I wanted to double check. Just in time.

In August, I found out that I had passed. The exam was tough, and I hadn't expected to pass, but I did. I was so happy! I couldn't remember the last time I was so happy. Cool!

A whole section of the CFA program is on debt instruments. Soon after I passed L1, I interviewed with, and had a job offer at a financial company that specializes in bonds. The company sponsors their employees to take the CFA program, and I think they liked the fact that I had passed L1. So, there was some reward for all the work.

In retrospect, one of the things that impressed me about the CFA program, was the big emphasis on ethics. I've read, and heard, that if one candidate aces every section, but doesn't do well in ethics, that (s)he will not pass. After all the scandals in finance the past few years, it's refreshing to see. I've thought, those guys don't have a CFA designation. In fact, one of the key people who was sounding warning signals to the SEC about Bernie Madoff, Henry Markopoulos, actually has a CFA designation.

For more information on the program, see the CFA Institute homepage.
http://www.cfainstitute.org