DaveShearon

Google's Worth

Scott Burns (ridiculously invasive registration required) column in today's Tennessean contains this note:

...Google, which, at its recently reduced $369 a share and $109 Billion marktet capitalization, is still valued at more than eight times General Motors and nearly twice as much as the entire newspaper industry."

He's talking about "residual" - an economics concept that entails value not captured by standard measures.  The suggestion is that Google's value, (and Yahoo's, etc.) is the "residual" of lots of value that wasn't captured when tens of thousands of individuals put in untold hours of high-value time working on startups during the dot-com burst.  And that work continues today.  The value ultimately shows up somewhere, and part is in IPO's, stock prices of the companies that succeed, etc.

Google worth more than the newspaper industry?  Does that make sense?  Well, when's the last time you "newspapered" something?  Eight times more valuable than GM?  Well, if you had to bet, which organization would you say  is more likely to survive twenty years from today, GM or Google?  Very little "residual" value's gone into newspapers or automobiles (in this country) in recent years.  And it shows.

Slow Down!?

One of my MAPP classmates (Thanks, Senia!) pointed me to an article in the Law Practice Management Section of the ABA web site (hey!  I'm a member of that section!).  I thought this passage particularly interesting for the K-12 crowd.

Parents who think hot-housing is the only way to get their children into Harvard or Yale should heed the warnings now emanating from elite colleges around the world. Admissions officers everywhere lament the rise of a new kind of applicant: brisk, industrious, accomplished but lacking spark and curiosity. “We are training our children to be workaholics,” warned Marilee Jones, the dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

A meeting with a group of teenagers persuaded Jones that elite colleges are sending the wrong message to parents and children. “I asked them: ‘What do you daydream about?’ And one kid said to me: ‘We don’t daydream. There’s no reward for it, so we don’t do it.’ Boy, that hit me right between the eyes,” she said. “Colleges have created mechanisms to crowd out the kids who are dreamers, to crowd out the kids who step off the conventional path and want to do something unique. But what does it mean to have a nation of kids who don’t know how to dream?”

To send the message that less is more and that daydreaming is good, Jones has shrunk the section devoted to extracurricular activities on the MIT application form. She also travels around the United States to reassure anxious parents that slowing down will benefit their children.

Still here!

I'm still here, just too busy to post muh right now!

But, I did see this tonight while waiting on a batch job to run at work.

New technology is an improvement in proportion to how badly it is missed when it is not available.

Penn Snow Pics

Last weekend's Northeast snow storm stranded me for a day in Philly, but I got some  pics of the University of Pennsylvania campus in the snow!