Victor Rozek
-
As I See It: To Serve, To Strive, And Not To Yield
July 23, 2012 Victor Rozek
… Read moreShe arrived at the dining room as she always did, carrying a baby doll. The woman, like the doll she clutched, was damaged; her appearance shabby, her demeanor distant. She waited her turn in line, acknowledged a greeting from the doorman with a slight nod of her head, and shuffled in looking about for a place to sit. . . .
Stephen Covey, he of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, died last week of complications from a bicycle accident. At age 79, he lost control of his bike on a steep hill. Happily, one of his habits
-
As I See It: The Visionary
July 9, 2012 Victor Rozek
… Read moreHe was a world-class marathon runner, but he is not known for that. He was a defender of human rights, but neither is he known for that. He is better remembered for having shortened a long and terrible war, and for being an originator of the field that remade the world in the last half-century. That field is computer science, and his name is Alan Turing. Yet given his many achievements and with everything to live for, why then did he commit suicide at the age of 42?
Turing was a child of the British Empire. His father was a
-
As I See It: The Three Graces
June 25, 2012 Victor Rozek
… Read morePeople who lived during the Great Depression often greeted each other with a question: “Are you working?” For millions, finding work was the daily imperative and it dominated every waking hour. Notably, no one asked the quintessential question of our time: “What do you do?” That is a question born of having choices, which themselves are the products of affluence. Back then it hardly mattered. There was dignity in simply having a job, and sanctity in labor that could provide food, shelter, and the most elusive commodity of all during hard economic times, hope.
The importance of securing a job–any
-
As I See It: Bad Boys Rising
June 11, 2012 Victor Rozek
… Read moreA few decades back when Stanford University decided to drop its mascot moniker “Indians,” the administration held a naming contest open to the student body. Students were encouraged to submit suggestions, and the most frequently chosen name would win. Things were progressing nicely until someone decided to check the tally. The students, evidently inspired by the business practices of the university’s founder Leland Stanford, voted to replace the politically incorrect “Indians” with the economically incorrect “Robber Barons.” The contest was quickly retired and some quivering bureaucrat selected “Cardinal” as the new mascot–the color, mind you, not the bird. Probably didn’t
-
As I See It: Pocket Litter
June 1, 2012 Victor Rozek
… Read moreFor those in the “pocket litter” collection business, things are looking up. They’ve got a project with a $2 billion budget, courtesy of us the taxpayers, and a whopping 10,000 contractors who, as we speak, are building an ugly but exceedingly spacious data center to be filled with high tech toys. And, overruns will not be a problem.
If you’re a supercomputer maker, server provider, or manufacturer of storage devices and count the NSA among your customers, these are equally heady times. You’re probably ecstatic, hyperventilating with anticipation. You’re going to sell a lot of hardware, and overruns are almost
-
As I See It: A House of Many Windows
May 21, 2012 Victor Rozek
… Read moreA friend of mine was having relationship troubles. His girlfriend complained that he seemed incapable of going “deeper,” meaning he was resistant to the level of commitment she craved–a lament many women will no doubt recognize. From his perspective, he didn’t want heavy commitment, he wanted light companionship. He had a variety of interests, enjoyed doing a great many things, and wanted someone to share them with. Of course, one of his interests was sex, and therein, if you’ll pardon the expression, lies the rub. Essentially, he wanted a woman in his life, but not in his house. And things
-
As I See It: Cloud Cover
May 14, 2012 Victor Rozek
… Read moreHerb Grosch was the second scientist ever hired by IBM. And he was a good hire. His resume resembled an achievement highlight reel. It included doing calculations for the Manhattan Project, and helping develop the Whirlwind computer at MIT–the first system that actually operated in real time and used video displays for output. He was also the first to formalize the relationship between cost and performance in what has become known as Grosch’s Law: “economy is as the square root of the speed.”
But perhaps his most fascinating insight dates back to the 1950s–more than a half-century ago–when he
-
As I See It: Spooky Action at Great Distance
April 30, 2012 Victor Rozek
… Read moreFrom Alaska to Chile, Norway to New Zealand, 65 random number generators (RNGs) were going about their business generating random numbers. Then the unexplainable happened. But more about that later. The RNGs are part of a larger scientific effort called the Global Coherence Initiative (GCI), a research project that uses a vast array of magnetic field detectors to monitor fluctuations in the earth’s geomagnetic fields. They also measure pulsations and resonances in the ionosphere–the portion of the atmosphere extending approximately 30 to 250 miles above the Earth–associated with what scientists call “excitations.”
Picking up good vibrations and monitoring excitations. .
-
As I See It: You’ve Got Interviews
April 2, 2012 Victor Rozek
… Read moreHigh traffic websites require a daily supply of new material to entertain the surfing masses. But curing the ills of the terminally jaded requires taking a broad-spectrum antibiotic approach: provide a wide variety of postings as remedy for a wide variety of tastes, from the serious to the vacuous.
On Yahoo!, for example, you can find everything from video of the Annual Wife-Carrying Obstacle Race (my wife and my back decided to abstain this year), to Rick Santorum insisting that he doesn’t care about the unemployment rate. Sometimes it’s hard to know where vacuous ends and serious begins.
On
-
As I See It: No, It’s Not Painless
March 19, 2012 Victor Rozek
… Read moreIn the hierarchy of bad work days, having a colleague hurl herself out of a fourth story window ranks right up there near the top. Though thankfully rare, workplace suicide is on the rise, a reflection of mounting desperation as, for many, economic options run out. A single telecommunications company in France (the former employer of the fourth floor flyer) had a horrific, mind-boggling string of 23 employee suicides. The company had been busy restructuring–a pallid euphemism for discarding workers–and apparently forgot it was altering lives as well as spreadsheets.
Back home, where compassion and corporation have become all but