On Being Competitive in the World Market

One of the blogs on the Forbes magazine's website had an aticle a few days ago titled "Why Amazon Can't Make A Kindle in the USA" by Steve Denning.

Here is "the money quote":

How whole industries disappear

Take the story of Dell Computer [DELL] and its Taiwanese electronics manufacturer. The story is told in the brilliant book by Clayton Christensen, Jerome Grossman and Jason Hwang, The Innovator’s Prescription :

ASUSTeK started out making the simple circuit boards within a Dell computer. Then ASUSTeK came to Dell with an interesting value proposition: “We’ve been doing a good job making these little boards. Why don’t you let us make the motherboard for you? Circuit manufacturing isn’t your core competence anyway and we could do it for 20% less.”

Dell accepted the proposal because from a perspective of making money, it made sense: Dell’s revenues were unaffected and its profits improved significantly. On successive occasions, ASUSTeK came back and took over the motherboard, the assembly of the computer, the management of the supply chain and the design of the computer. In each case Dell accepted the proposal because from a perspective of making money, it made sense: Dell’s revenues were unaffected and its profits improved significantly. However, the next time ASUSTeK came back, it wasn’t to talk to Dell. It was to talk to Best Buy and other retailers to tell them that they could offer them their own brand or any brand PC for 20% lower cost. As The Innovator’s Prescription concludes:

Bingo. One company gone, another has taken its place. There’s no stupidity in the story. The managers in both companies did exactly what business school professors and the best management consultants would tell them to do—improve profitability by focus on on those activities that are profitable and by getting out of activities that are less profitable.

I highly recommend reading the article (in 4 parts).

On words we use to label each others' values

A recent post on blog by a local parish minister (http://roydonkin.blogspot.com/2011/08/i-have-faith.html) suggests that true Christians must have faith that a better future is possible, and so they would be more likely to be liberals than conservatives. Unsurprisingly, the Republican readers of the blog were unhappy with this observation.

Labels like "liberal" and "conservative" are dangerous because they are often misleading. We have diminished the information content of the words we use when talking about important issues to the point where they often seem useless.
Take a word like "liberal". In this country, it has come to be associated with whatever the policies of the Democratic party are at the moment. Or as a milder word for "socialist". But it used to mean "someone who is in favor of increased freedom" of any kind. In Europe, it currently is used about center-right parties, which are in favor of free trade and an easier regulatory environment for businesses. For that reason, I try to avoid it whenever possible, preferring to say "progressive" which is generally agreed to denote mildly socialist leanings. I would like to see liberal regain the original meaning, which would mean that is would be best applied to Libertarians.
In the same way, the word "conservative" has come to mean "against socialism", where it used to mean "someone who wants to preserve the old ways", which would include conservationists. In my eyes, the "TEA Party" is not "conserving old values", it is a radical right-wing movement.
Finally, I have seen so many different value systems described as "Christian values", that I do not know what that means. Certainly, the early Christians lived in a socialist commune (see Acts 2:41-47, Acts 4:32-35, Acts 5:1-10).

On what shape of tax increases work best

I had lunch today with a bunch of retired people; I'm pretty sure I was the youngest one there. Most of the group agreed that President Obama's (and Warren Buffett's) proposal to raise taxes on the wealthiest is a no-brainer. But one of the other men disagreed. He (like me) would pay higher taxes under the President's proposal, and (unlike me) he was not happy about it. "It is easy for you guys to say that someone else should pay higher taxes while you get a free ride; but I already pay a much higher rate of taxes on my income than you do." Essentially he was saying that he would only support a tax increase if the burden was shared. He seemed to think that it would be much fairer if we just rolled back the Bush tax cuts so everybody paid a bit more.

And this is my only problem with Buffett's proposal to raise taxes on incomes above $1M, and only those. I don't think it raises enough money to really make an impact on deficits or allow the infrastructure investments that we really need (and which could boost employment). And almost all of those who have to pay it, will resent it deeply, which leaves a very small constituency for passing it. In other words: The proposal is not a realistic legislative proposal, but ammunition for the election battle.

On government and deficits

Having watched the American political circus this summer, I am getting seriously angry. First and foremost I am angry at the "TEA party" Republicans who want President Obama to fail, even if it means taking down the country's economy and then pinning the blame on him. Secondly, I am angry with more moderate Republicans who let these rogues set the political agenda, even though I am sure they themselves know better. And finally, I am angry with the Democrats who seem to be completely unable to either stick to their beliefs and political traditions, and equally unable to expose the counterfactual claims of the right wing in what passes for political debate today.

When I was visiting with my family in Denmark this summer, my nephew - who works for a bank - asked me how our American politicians can be so crazy as to deliberately work towards a downgrading of the Treasury bonds. This will lead to an increase in interest rates and carrying costs on the national debt load. It is also likely to force many banks and trust funds to dump their holdings of T-bills because these institutions are subject to rules that require them to invest ONLY in AAA rated securities. (The only reason this has not happened yet, is that Moody's and Fitch have not yet revised their ratings, so the institutions can still bury their heads in the sand and say that 2 out of 3 agencies still rate the bonds as AAA.) For someone who claims to want to reduce the deficit to wreck the credit rating of their own government seemed unbelievably stupid to him. I could not disagree at all.

I happen to believe that deficit are bad in the long run, and we ought to work on paying down the national debt when we can. But in the middle of a recession is not the time to try. We should have taken advantage of the opportunity in 2001, when the massaging of the budget that the Clinton government had done seemed to be on the verge of producing a surplus ... in other words a reduction of the national debt load. But the Bush government insisted that we should do no such thing; we should cut taxes and reduce the government's income in order to ensure that the debt kept rising (albeit slowly). And shortly after passing the tax cut bill, they dramatically increased expenditures by the military ramp-up in response to 9/11.

The Bush tax cuts were always unsustainable, and even their proponents knew this perfectly well. The proof of that is in the way they were structured to be temporary. If the legislation had declared them to be permanent, the budget projections required under the congressional rules for budget legislation would have shown that they would lead to ever larger deficits, even under the optimistic budget projections that accompanied the draft legislation. By having a sunset clause, the deficit appeared to be rather large in the first year, but getting smaller and smaller each year, as the tail end (when the old tax rates would be reinstated) kept getting nearer; and in the long run it would be a wash (because in the long run, the cuts would have ended). This was all a giant fraud.

With the above in mind, I think these are some positions that I hold regarding the deficits as we see them today:

(1) Running a government budget deficit in good times as well as in bad times is irresponsible and essentially borrows from our children in order to live beyond our means today.

(2) Forcibly balancing the budget at a time of economic crisis by cutting government help to the poor and by cutting education funding is irresponsible, and takes money away from the weakest. A country (or a state) needs to save up during good times and disburse those savings (and may even borrow a bit further) to help the poorest when the economy is bad.

(3) To seriously reduce the national debt cannot be done by cutting expenses alone. We must increase tax revenues. Ideally, we should just let the Bush tax cuts on income and inheritance expire and reinstate the Clinton era tax rates. I am personally in an income bracket the would see a tax increase even under Obama's over-modest budget proposal, and I would welcome such an increased tax bill.

(4) Progressive taxation is a legitimate tool for reducing economic disparity by letting those with large incomes pay a larger portion of their income as taxes to support the common good. When an individual reports a personal income of 4 billion dollars in a single tax year, I see no problem with having him pay 50% income tax on the last 3 billion dollars earned (instead of 15% capital gains tax). Actually, I think the rate could be higher than that without seriously “damaging his will to work hard to create jobs”.

(5) We need to seriously reduce defense expenditures. I think we would be entirely secure in the world if we spent no more that what Russia, China, India, and the EU countries combined are spending on defense. That would amount to a 50% reduction in defense spending. We also need to bring home our “imperial” armies from Afghanistan and Iraq. We have not achieved much more in either of those two wars than we did in Vietnam. The impulse to “make the world better” by forcing better governments on those countries is a good and moral impulse, but by now we should have learned that this is an impossible goal.

(6) We need to reform health care and health insurance in the USA. We have a good model for how to do that: We should implement the Canadian model. “Medicare for all”. Like in Canada, we should decentralize the implementation to the states. Everybody knows that this is the only way we can cover everybody, save money and improve care. The only argument against it is that it would put the health insurance companies out of business, and their investors don't like that idea.

But as obviously necessary as these actions seem to me, I have little confidence that even the Democrats in congress will fight to see these things implemented. And as a (non-voting) resident alien, I have no direct influence on US politics.

Things I Believe

[This is a work item from a writing workshop I am participating in.]

Like everybody else's, my intuition is guided by my beliefs and values. I have done a lot of work over the years on clarifying my values, but beliefs are a lot harder to get my hands around. By beliefs, I mean things that I “know” but have not recently examined how I have come to “know” them. As Mark Twain said: said “It ain't the things you don't know that will get you in trouble. It's the things you KNOW for sure that just ain't so!”
* I believe that a society where the disparity between rich and poor is small, will be a happier and more stable society.
* I believe that we have a responsibility towards each other in our community, in our country and in the world.
* I believe that love is better than intense competition.
* I believe that a little competition makes us stretch and do a little better.
* I believe that what goes around, comes around.
* I believe that the smart and the rich can take care of themselves, and the weak and the poor need us to look out for them a bit.
* I believe that Americans once walked on the moon, and getting there was worth it.
* I believe that men – I can't speak for women – were not made to be alone, and it is not good for us.
* I believe that women are a man's best friends. (My experience with dogs has not been nearly so good.)
* I believe that America has a unique blessed position in the world – and therefore also has a unique responsibility.
* I believe that one reason for those blessings is that despite its often apparent tendency to insularity, this is a country built by immigrants, where every family has a deeply rooted connection to somewhere else in the world.

Car Shopping - The Result

For the record: I did buy the Prius, and I am very happy with it. It is full of geeky features provided by the alleged 14 on-board computers. Some of them - like the electronic stability control - are invisible, while lots of others are visible in the multiple cockpit displays on the dashboard and on the entertainment/navigation screen. To help me make sense of it all, a 400-page general user manual and another 300-page addendum for the entertainment/navigation system sit unread in the second glove compartment.

My MPG average is still climbing with each tank of gas: On the last one I ended up with 46.2 MPG, on the current one I'm bubbling in the range from 46.5 to 47.0; for a long time it drifted down to 45 when I drove on the freeway to and from work, but I am getting better at using the "hybrid system indicator" display to smoothe out the power draw.

And after 11 years in the convertible, I love the cargo capacity of the hatchback, which also gives the dogs a proper place to ride without muddying up the passenger area.

Car Shopping

"If your car is going to have an accident, the best situation is if it happens when you are not in it!" And that is just what happened to me yesterday. I have been doing some work on my house recently, and came home on my lunch break to see if the floor guy (who is patching in a new oak board to replace one that rotted out due to water damage from a leaking bathroom wall) had been there in the morning, so I could release the beagles from where I keep them confined when workmen are there. Since the front door was unlocked, I parked curbside in front of the house.

The contractor had not yet been there. I was warming some food in the microwave when I heard a very loud impact noise from the street. A full-size pickup truck had come over the curving hill above the house and slammed into the rear corner of my car, doing considerable damage to both vehicles. The sad part was that I knew the guy: He is my maintenance gardener. After we exchanged insurance identification, I replaced the cut-up left rear tire with the doughnut spare wheel and took the car to the body shop most favored by all the insurance companies. The impromptu comments led me to conclude that I am going to need a new car.

So this morning I went to look at the three most likely replacements for my 11 year old Mustang convertible:
- a Smart FourTwo Passion Cabriolet (the smallest convertible I know of)
- a Prius (I have wanted an excuse to test drive one for the last 5 years)
- a Volvo C70

Very different wheels, for sure, but each resonates with different desires.

I decided that the Smart is an overpriced Golf Cart. While it is totally adequate for my daily commute 8 miles each way, I would probably not want to drive it to Los Angeles (2 1/2 hours) or San Francisco (5 hours), but would need a rental for that. The salesman pointed out that the Hyundai Elantra gets the same miles per gallon as the Smart. (By some coincidence, the two marques are in the same dealership.) He did not actually have any Elantras in stock, but wanted me to come back when he gets some in 9 days.

I liked the Prius exactly as much as I thought I would. The salesman thought he could get one with exactly the features I wanted (white, trim level 4, and with a moonroof) but warned me that supply may soon become very tight due to the recent events in Japan.

And I loved the Volvo. To my surprise, they had 3 in stock (one each red, black, white), although the only color I liked was the white, which happened to be less expensive, being a left-over 2010 model. It drinks 50% more gas, and costs 25% more than the Prius, but it is very lovely. Having driven a convertible for a few years, I can appreciate how much nicer this one is: Better seats, folding hardtop instead of nylon hide (less noise), etc etc. The Mustang is cheap, the Volvo is nice. If I was ordering one from the catalog, I would take the stick instead of the automatic, and I would take the wood panel inlays. But a catalog order has to come all the way from Sweden, so I'd have to wait 6 weeks ... and probably have to pay the sticker price.

It is lovely to have a week to mull over this decision, and reflect on what "statement" each makes. I mentioned to one female friend that I had looked at a Volvo convertible, and she instantly wanted to know how many miles it gets per gallon, and how I could possibly find anything below 30 mpg to be acceptable. It is a fact that the parking lot at my church is about 30% Prius already.

GPS in Aviation

My old friend G.G. who is a recreational pilot in Northern California offered me this supplement to the mailing list version of my previous post:

"It might be unclear to your readers that the WAAS correction, while created from stationary receivers on the ground, is in fact (IIRC) broadcast by a subset of the GPS satellite constellation. Satellite failures can create areas where WAAS isn't available until the constellation is either adjusted or a new satellite is deployed.

I've an IFR certified WAAS GPS navigator for flight, and the accuracy seems generally within centimeters. Awesome performance. The WAAS navigators are also required to have a 5Hz update rate, which allows them to synthesize glideslopes, allowing ILS-like approaches for most airports.

The only problem for aircraft is that Jeppesen is the monopoly provider of GPS databases of enroute and arrival/departure procedures, which now cost ~$450 a year, vs. Free to use the old terrestrial navaids. And Garmin, who couldn't quite get their GPS designs to operate to WAAS standards, were allowed to buy their only competition, UPS Aviation Technologies, to get their hands on a WAAS solution. They stopped development of the UPSAT offering, the CNX80, relabeled it the GNS 480 but never delivered all of the advertised features, used the now Garmin AT office to port the good stuff over to look like the Garmin GNS 430/530 operations, and then quietly announced they were immediately dropping the 480.

BTW there is a free public aviation navigation database, but Garmin is making good money in partnership with Jeppesen and refuses to make the public database available. Not an open format, needs compilation to be usable.

GPS is wonderful and seductive. It is no surprise that general aviation pilots like it a lot and that it has gained a lot of use far faster and wider than the safety community is comfortable with. Many legislators have been clamoring for replacing the aging instrument landing systems used by civil aviation with GPS based systems that could integrate tighter with on-board systems on modern airliners. But there is a big worry about reliability, especially the fact that a small jamming transmitter can very effectively disable GPS within its surrounding area. That sounds far-fetched, but is actually a very real risk.

The trucking industry has embraced GPS for fleet monitoring systems. A GPS receiver with a cell phone modem allows a trucking company to keep track of where its vehicles are moving. This is good for keeping customers informed about whether the load is moving on schedule, but it also allows a degree of supervision over the drivers that bugs many of them out of their skin. They like to think that when they are on a week-long cross-country trek with a load, they are lone warriors on the high range, masters of their own day-to-day life. But the GPS tracking device lets the company know exactly where they have been, and where and when they have been stopping. If they schedule an evening meal break in the parking lot of Gilley's dance hall on Saturday night, it is likely to result in some trouble. Much better for the driver if the device is somewhat unreliable, and fortunately, that can be arranged. Ads in the back of truckers' magazines offer a $30 device that plugs into the vehicle's cigarette lighter socket and transmits pure noise on the GPS radio frequencies. That will disable the GPS devices on the truck, and often all the other GPS devices in a half-mile radius around it. This turned out to be the cause of a lot of malfunctions in an experimental GPS instrument landing system that was being tested at Baltimnore-Washington International airport a couple of years ago.

What is GPS and how does it work

GPS (Global Positioning System) was invented as a precision guidance system for ICBMs (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles). Before GPS, missiles were steered by inertial navigation systems (spinning gyroscopes). That would get them to the right city, but not necessarily anywhere near the right block within that city. With GPS, you could get to within about 10 meters of the target that was marked out on the map. That meant that you could take out an army barracks or an airforce hangar building instead of the whole city. This in turn meant you might fight a war without killing several million civilians. That was a great improvement.

Of course, we wanted to give this technical advantage to our own missiles without giving our enemy's missiles a free ride on the system. So the technology was classified, and the receiver modules that were sold to the public for civilian use were crippled in 2 different ways:
1) They were blocked from providing any position data at all at altitudes above 10,000 feet (3,000 meter)
2) The readout precision was "smudged" so that it had a random variation of about 50 meters. To get a "good" position, you had to average over a 24-hour period.

The better signal was encrypted so that only military receivers could get it in "normal" times, and the civilian signal could be completely disabled (globally or in a specific international region) when the military commanded it to be.

This all changed in the early 1990'es, when the civilian signal was allowed to get the full precision during the first Gulf war, so that the US Army could give a cheap civilian receiver to every vehicle in the US Army. Where a US Army dropped into a foreign desert used to be severely handicapped by the unfamiliar terrain, they now had better map data than the Iraqi army and could easily outmaneuver Saddam's army. A couple of years later, Bill Clinton quietly made the improvement permanent, and we have all seen the benefits of that.

Having learned about the GPS system before it was ever launched, the Soviet military quickly decided that they needed a system like that, too. Their clone was called GLONASS but like everything else produced by that system it did not work nearly as well as their literature indicated that it did. In fact, they had trouble keeping the satellites operating for more than a year at a time, so the system never achieved worldwide full service. They are now finally scheduled to reach full service this year.

Since then, both China (Compass) and Europe (Galileo) have designed similar systems and started to launch satellites. It will be a few years still before all 4 systems are each capable of independent world wide service. But the commercial builders of GPS receivers are building devices that will make use of any additional satellites they can see. At least one company, JAVAD (headquartered in Moscow, but chaired by an Indian), has promised that their newest series of high-precision receivers will be able to compute a fix from four arbitrary satellites, even one from each of the four constellations. That is VERY impressive.

Most of us have used a GPS receiver, but few have any idea how they work. Most people seem to think that the receiver transmit a signal that is picked up my the satellites. That is exactly backwards. While there are minor differences between the systems, they are essentially similar, and the following description is more or less true for all of them, although the one I know best is the American GPS system.

The full GPS constellation is 24 satellites (plus a few spares) in medium high orbits at different inclinations betweenn equatorial orbits and polar orbits, designed so that most points on earth will have between 8 and 12 satellites above the horizon at all times. For a given service (such as the civilan "public" signal) all satellites in the constellation transmit on THE SAME frequency, using a direct-sequence spread spectrum signal with a long spreading code - a different code for each satellite. Similar to CDMA mobile telephone encoding, this allows a receiver that knows the proper code for a specific sender to extract that one signal out of the resulting mess. And a receiver can have a single front end (tuned to the shared radio frequency) for all the satellites and apply a separate back end loaded with a separate code for each channel that it needs to decode. Each of the satellites then transmits a complex data stream at a low data bit rate which contains a description of the orbit for each of the satellites as well as a very precise time signal - in the nanosecond range of precision. All of these data streams are precisely synchronized to an absolute time reference. Each satellite actually contains an atomic clock (and two spares!)

When decoding these data streams, the hand held receivers can triangulate to find their position. Since they know the precise position of each satellite (from knowing the orbit of each and the precise current time) and they can measure the relative delay between the multiple satellites that they can receive, they can compute their own position in 3 dimensions from 4 satellite data streams. With more satellites, they can improve on the solution by solving for multiple different combinations of 4 and then averaging.

Even with the best equipment and without the deliberate introduction of errors, this tends to only get to about 10 feet (3 meters) of precision for a variety of reasons. One of these is atmospheric disturbances, especially in the ionosphere, which can affect areas up to a few hundred kilometers at a time. But the error induced by this effect (and several others) tends to be similar for all receivers within a particular geographic area. This means that you can install a stationary receiver, learn its exact location by averaging over several weeks of time, and then compute its error vector by comparing its reading with the known location in real-time. You can then broadcast this correction factor to other receivers on the neighborhood, for example using a local ethernet network or a cellphone network. (Some geostationary satellites broadcast such a corrective data stream in a way that lets some hand-held receivers apply the correction in real time. This is called the WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation Service). While it is not as precise as a local differential reading, it may still get you from 20 feet to 5 feet. A local differential correction obtained from a station a mile or so away may get you in the centimeter range.

Are you impressed yet? I sure am, and I work with wireless engineering every day.

Another article soon will talk about novel applications for GPS and other GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite Systems).

Do we learn anything from listening to the news ?

My local NPR (National Public Radio) affiliate (KCLU) runs an hour of BBC World Service from 8 PM to 9 PM every evening. That works out to be the 3AM hour in London, which is probably a sleepy time there, but would be morning drive time around the Persian Gulf.
Tonight, on my way home after a business dinner, I heard the news anchorman say: "To give you an idea of the magnitude of Ireland's financial problems, let me share this number: The total bank debt of Ireland is equal to one and a half time the value of Ireland's entire economy."

The more I thought about this, the less I understood. What did he say ?

The easiest part of this is "the value of Ireland's economy". He is almost certainly talking about the annual gross domestic product figure for Ireland. Although "value" to me would more closely be associated with "worth" (assets) we are so used to comparing everything to the annual GDP that one needs a good reason to choose any other yardstick, so as long as he is not clearly describing a different yardstick that is probably what he meant; he just wanted a more colloquial phrase for it.

But what is "the total bank debt"? I can think of several possibilities:

a) The total debt owed to the banks in Ireland.
As far as the banks in Ireland are concerned, that would be an asset.
If this includes the total amount of mortgage debt owed on all the
"real estate" in Ireland, that does not seem excessive.
b) The total debt owed *BY* the banks of Ireland.
Without comparing it to the assets of Ireland, we don't know if the banks
are in good shape or in bad shape.
c) The *net* debt owed by the banks of Ireland.
This sort of implies that the banks are all grossly insolvent. Indeed,
if the sum of the negative balance sheet of all the banks is equal to
the annual GDP, then the banking system is in very bad shape.
That matches the headline. But is is even conceivable that the banks
would be allowed to continue doing business (by the local banking
regulators as well as by the foreign banks that they do business with)
if they were that grossly insolvent ? I sure would not want to leave any
transaction unsettled overnight with a bank that deep in the hole.

I would not be surprised at hearing this kind of garbage on an American commercial radio station, but I used to think that the BBC was better than this.

GPS, Personal Navigation Devices etc

By now, most people are familiar with the abbreviation GPS - Global Positioning System - and most people seem to associate it with at device with a small display screen that tells you where to drive your car to. Most people I know thinks that this is new and growing and must be a great business to get into.

Those people would be surprised to learn that the business of selling Personal Navigation Devices is already in decline: European sales declined by 18.6% in the 4th quarter of 2010 (presumably compared to the year before).

http://news.thewherebusiness.com/report/6364

The thing is that enough people can use Google Maps on their internet enabled cellphones so they don't need to buy a special navigation device.

I have an old GPS receiver without a map display, that I bought before internet cellphones were available; I have used it for a bit of geocaching, and hooked it up to a laptop with a map application loaded from a CD-ROM. But these days, I just use the Maps on my iPhone. I still think the navigation system in my daughter's car is cool, and I will almost certainly get one when I need a new car. The car devices speak, while my iPhone Maps require reading, thus distracting me when I am driving.

Meanwhile, the positioning provided by these device is getting remarkably accurate. That will be the subject of another post in the near future.

The Plight of the Homeless

It is winter in California, and we have rainy days almost every week. Occasionally, there's water in our rivers ....

A local news story on my NPR station this morning told of how police and social workers in Ventura, the next city down the coast from here, had spent yesterday clearing out homeless encampments from the bed of the Santa Clara River, I did not catch the total numer of people that they rounded up, but they said they had removed 17 tent camps and 14 tons of trash.

While camping in a riverbed in the raining season is certainly not a very good housing situation, I thought for a long time afterward, wondering how many of the people will actually be helped into a better situation as a result of this action. I expect that most of these are people with multiple problems that put them in this miserable place; pick a few from this list:
- military veterans with PTSD
- learning disabilities
- mental illness
- illiteracy
- brain damage from years of substance abuse

In an ideal world, we would have a "boarding school" where we could house those who are willing to be treated for some of these problems, with the goal of getting back to a functioning state and in the best cases, employability.

But in a state with a twenty billion dollar budget deficit, such things just do not happen.

Can you believe that IBM is 100 years old ?

IBM is celebrating 100 years of business in two ways:
(1) They have released a few promotional videos:



and

(2) They did a marvelous project with the Jeopardy TV quiz show showcasing their artificial intelligence research with a supercomputer that can play Jeopardy, which turns out to require some very fancy natural language processing to understand the puns and ambiguities in the questions.





I have enjoyed this celebration. The Jeopardy was especially fun. It showcased both the strengths and the weaknesses of the computer "brain" when compared to the human contestants. On the second night of the match, there was a question to identify a US city, whose two airports were named for a WW2 here and a WW2 battle, respectively. Watson's reply was "Toronto", which was of course wrong (the real answer, as I knew right away, was Chicago). Watson was very uncertain of that answer, but since this was a "final Jeopardy" question, passing was not an option. But Watson bet very little money on the question, so he did not lose very much of his commanding lead.