Tech Mogul Injured By Elephant

Today he's home in Woodside, recuperating from serious injuries. A little more than a month ago, Silicon Valley billionaire Tom Siebel was in the Serengeti, where a charging elephant attacked him and a guide.

"It was all happening so fast. There was no place to hide, no place to run," the 56-year-old Siebel, founder of the Siebel Systems software company, told the Mercury News in an exclusive interview Wednesday.

The elephant plowed into the guide and then turned on Siebel, breaking several ribs, goring him in the left leg and crushing the right. Siebel said they were able to radio for help only after the animal lost interest and wandered away, but it was three hours before he received any medical treatment.

Siebel sold his business to Oracle four years ago and now divides his time between his Woodside home, an office in Palo Alto and a ranch in Montana, where he raises cattle and competes in team roping events. He said he was on a photo safari in Tanzania last month when the elephant attacked without warning.

Early on the morning of Aug. 1, Siebel said, he and a guide went to a watering hole, where they hoped to observe a variety of game that were known to gather in the quiet early morning hours. They were watching a group of elephants from 200 yards away — "keeping a respectful distance," Siebel said — when one turned and without warning began to charge.

"There was no apparent reason, nothing that should have made it feel threatened," Siebel said. "It was quiet, and then the quiet stopped," when the elephant began thundering toward the two men. As the massive animal closed the distance, Siebel said the guide fired a gun but missed. Siebel said he was trampled and gored in the leg, until he just "curled into as tight a ball as I could." The guide suffered broken ribs and other injuries.

After the animal left and the men called for help, rescuers came and eventually airlifted Siebel to Nairobi, where he received emergency care before flying back to California for more treatment. All told, he said, he spent 18 days in four hospitals before he was allowed to go home. Siebel has been using a wheelchair but has told friends he expects to make a full recovery, after reconstructive surgery and physical therapy. "I was very fortunate to have survived something you might not think was survivable," he said cheerfully Wednesday. "But I am home now, and with my family. It makes you glad to be home."

Siebel has not discussed the incident publicly before now. He said Wednesday that he was not eager for publicity about the experience but agreed to describe what happened after the Mercury News contacted him to confirm an account that was circulating in the community. A veteran software executive, Siebel has kept a relatively low profile in the business world while investing his assets through a holding company called First Virtual Group. He has made a bigger splash with his nonprofit, the Thomas and Stacey Siebel Foundation, and by helping to fund alternative energy research and an anti-methamphetamine campaign that has been adopted by several rural states. BusinessWeek magazine included him in a 2008 ranking of the 50 most generous philanthropists in the country.

Siebel said Wednesday that he doesn't know what became of the elephant that attacked him. He said authorities in Tanzania searched for it, but as far as he knows it was never found. While he's doing some work from home, he said, he's focused on his recovery. "My job is to get healthy and get over it," he said, "and I'm going to do my job."

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Source:

http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_13256318?nclick_check=1

Tags:

Silicon Valley billionaire, Tom Siebel, Serengeti, charging elephant attack, founder Siebel Systems software company, Mercury News, Oracle, Nairobi, Tanzania, First Virtual Group, Tom and Stacey Siebel Foundation, fund alternative energy research, anti-methamphetamine campaign, BusinessWeek magazine, 50 most generous philanthropists in USA,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Who's To Blame For The Mortgage Crisis?

If you're having a hard time getting your head around exactly what happened in the historic meltdown of America's home-mortgage market, you're not alone.

As the wife-and-husband investigative team Leslie and Andrew Cockburn suggest in their new documentary, "American Casino," nobody fully understands it: Not the bankers and brokers who sold subprime mortgages (often using deceptive tactics or disingenuous language), not the Wall Street wizards who carved them up into ever more esoteric financial instruments, not the free-market wise men like former Fed chair Alan Greenspan or former Sen. Phil Gramm, and certainly not the ordinary citizens who believed they were fulfilling the American dream and wound up losing their homes, their financial security and their self-respect.

Actually, the Cockburns meet one guy in "American Casino" who understands the whole mess better than most, a California real estate investor named Jeff Greene who smelled the end of the housing bubble around 2006 and bet $1 billion against the mid-decade exuberance of Wall Street. Sitting in his walled and gated beach compound in Malibu, Greene calmly tells the camera that the opportunity for his successful hedge bet (which has yielded $500 million so far) involved massive pain for millions of homeowners.

We meet some of those people too; the Cockburns focus in particular on the African-American community of Baltimore, a city devastated by the tidal wave of foreclosures. Of course foreclosed properties can be found in virtually every neighborhood of every town and city, and at every income level. But Latinos and African-Americans are several times more likely to be affected than whites, and while the problem is undeniably complicated, that almost certainly reflects the enduring legacy of racism. In the 1990s and 2000s, neighborhoods that had previously been "redlined" by traditional lenders became targeted by unregulated and unscrupulous vendors of subprime mortgages, who neither knew nor cared whether borrowers were likely to default on those loans. As we now know, the results were toxic.

One of the film's sad ironies is that middle-class homeowners like Denzel Mitchell, a Baltimore high-school teacher, or Patricia McNair, a family therapist, might well have qualified for conventional loans from normal banks. (One survey mentioned in the film suggests that at least half the people who applied for subprime mortgages in 2006 could have qualified for prime mortgages.) Instead, they were enticed into too-good-to-be-true first and then second mortgages that adjusted sharply upward, which they couldn't realistically afford. Both people are aware that their own lack of financial sophistication is partly to blame for their predicament, but that does nothing to lessen the heartbreak as McNair and her husband have to leave the appealing family home where her adult children grew up, or as Mitchell must abandon his organic vegetable garden and the Tuskegee Airmen-themed bedroom for his little boys.

But if you want to blame somebody for what happened to Mitchell, McNair and millions of other Americans, the place to point the finger is at the fervid deregulation advocated by Greenspan and enacted by Congress under the whip of Gramm and other free-market ideologues. Such laissez-faire reforms created a wide-open marketplace where bankers and brokers could sell whatever extortionate mortgage deals they wanted to whomever they wanted, while lying to consumers about what they were getting and lying to lenders about the borrower's income and assets. Meanwhile, as one anonymous former Bear, Stearns banker tells the Cockburns, Wall Street securities dealers carved up packages of mortgages into abstruse, "fourth-dimensional" instruments to be sold to "idiots."

"American Casino" is of necessity a fragmentary tale; it was being filmed in 2008 as the crisis broadened and deepened, with events unfolding too fast for the Cockburn cameras. But while the mortgage crisis still awaits a rigorous deconstruction along the lines of Alex Gibney's "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," this film stands as an intimate, terrifying document that renders an incomprehensible slice of recent history in human terms. While the stories of Denzel Mitchell and Patricia McNair made me want to weep, the film's most memorable images stem from the Sisyphean task of Jared Dever, a bright and handsome local official in Riverside County, Calif., whose job is to control the county's mosquito epidemic, largely caused by the fetid, abandoned swimming pools behind foreclosed suburban homes.

Dever patrols a nightmarish, new-but-decrepit landscape straight out of the fiction of J.G. Ballard, carefully checking empty houses for signs of meth labs or marijuana grow zones before attacking the pools, whose algae-green water is full of abandoned patio furniture, tires and sports equipment, along with millions of mosquito larvae and the minnows who live on them. I'm not sure that hosing down the whole subdivision with Malathion is any kind of answer. Civilization didn't leave much of an imprint on that place. Now that the bankers have sucked out all its supposed economic value, we might as well drain the pools, knock down the houses and let the coyotes and rattlesnakes take over.

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Source:

http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/btm/feature/2009/09/02/casino/index.html?source=rss&aim=/ent/movies/btm/feature

Tags:

Salon, American Casino, Leslie and Andrew Cockburn, documentary, bankers, brokers, subprime mortgages, Jeff Greene, redlined, Phil Gramm, Alan Greenspan, Global Economic News,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Workers Adjust To The New F-word: Furloughs

"Furlough Fridays" for John Krumm may as well be called "Food Bank Fridays."

Along with 210,000 fellow state government workers, the driver and safety clerk for the Department of Motor Vehicles is helping California balance its battered budget by taking an unpaid day off from work three Fridays each month. But he's not going to Project Open Hand's kitchen to volunteer. "I go to save money and get food for my table," says Krumm, describing a still-life tableau of his furlough handout:

"Couple pieces of chicken. Some fruits and vegetables. Beans, milk and cheese. I'm losing $450 each month from my paycheck, so I'm watching every penny," he says. "And if they make us take off any more days, I won't be able to afford my rent."

As private and public employers seek to whittle overhead while skirting the heavier costs of laying off and rehiring staff, millions of workers are being poked and prodded with America's hottest management tool.

"Furloughs make sense because if you have a good employee, you want to do whatever you can to keep them," says labor lawyer Michael S. Bernick, former head of California's Employment Development Department under Gov. Gray Davis. "But while they may help reduce layoffs, they have their other side — for most workers, taking a 10 to 20 percent pay cut is a big hit."

Furloughs can also create huge workload backups as well as raise sticky legal questions for employers who try to force exempt workers into unpaid leaves. And critics like San Francisco State University professor John Sullivan say the management tool could actually end up causing more workplace problems than they solve. "If you cut everyone's pay," he says, "you'll drive away your top performers and end up with mediocre people."

Cost-cutting tool

As the new F-word makes the rounds of the water-cooler and cocktail-party circuit, it seems everyone from autoworkers to bridge inspectors to newspaper reporters is being forced to take unpaid leave as companies try to stay afloat and governments slash budgets. Firm numbers are hard to come by, according to economist Stephen Levy, who says that in the private sector, at least, "as long as sales start to pick up slightly, we're probably at the peak of layoffs and furloughs right now."

But in an economy where 6.7 million jobs have disappeared since the recession began in December 2007, and as private wages and salaries continue to fall each month, no one's betting against the prospect of more furloughs. In fact, 6 percent of employers surveyed by the consulting firm Watson Wyatt Worldwide say they will force mandatory furloughs within the next 12 months, while nearly one in 10 of those asked say they expect to implement a shortened workweek over the same time frame.

And while nearly half the state governments have instituted or proposed furloughs, it may have been California's historic embrace that moved them onto the front page. In addition to planned layoffs, California hopes to save $3 billion over 17 months by sending home state employees the first three Fridays of each month. With the Department of Personnel Administration using the tool for the first time to bridge its gaping deficit, spokeswoman Lynelle Jolley says furloughs were the best fix for a dire situation.

"With the state in a precarious position, we needed to conserve cash immediately," she says. "The layoff process can be quite lengthy, but with furloughs we can achieve savings immediately. We were desperate."

State governments seem to be taking a page from industries like heavy manufacturing and airlines, which historically have furloughed employees when business slowed. In Silicon Valley, temporary shutdowns have been a common practice, often a year-end tradition at many high-tech firms.

Mark Perry, a computer programmer with 30 years' experience in the valley, says state workers are now "getting a taste of real life that we've known for years in tech. They've been sort of sheltered. "I was with Intel, Fairchild, 23 different companies, and I was furloughed at about half of them until business turned around," says Perry, laid off in 2003 from Applied Materials. "The first time it's a bit of a shock, because you depend on a certain amount of income. But gradually you learn to treat it like you're on a pretend vacation. You kind of expect it and build it into the salary you think you're making. "Furloughs," Perry says, "train you not to live paycheck to paycheck."

Beats a layoff, but "...

A lot of affected employees are conflicted: Having a job is great — but taking a pay cut to keep that job stinks. First-timers like John Krumm are struggling with furlough shock. "I think it's a shame," says Krumm, who works at a San Francisco branch of the DMV. "You've already cut our pay by 14 percent, and if you add another day, you're up to 18 percent. People working here will now be making less than they made when they started 10 years ago."

For a couple employed by the state, the furloughs can be devastating. Krumm says "a lot of my colleagues at the DMV are filing for bankruptcy. A lot of them have a partner or husband who works for the state," which is a double whammy for the family budget.

While most experts stress the positive impacts of furloughs over layoffs, no one says they're a panacea. They punish lower-paid workers disproportionately; they can torpedo workplace morale; and workers whose pay has been cut make for lousy consumers, saving more and spending less, hampering a quick economic recovery.

Forced to downsize by his boss to a three-day workweek, San Jose real estate professional William Huey says his furlough threw him off kilter, "because I'd had this structured routine and suddenly everything changed. On my days off, I had to think, 'What am I supposed to be doing today?' "

Even though his three days eventually turned into a layoff, Huey does see some benefits to mandatory time off. "In retrospect,'' says Huey, who used his forced leave to help his wife start a private Chinese-language school, "it was as if I'd been allowed to leave my job gradually, because having that time off gives you the chance to explore other ideas you may want to try. The furlough,'' he says, "was like the severance package I never got in the end."

Hard choices

Yet for Rick Binger, furloughs became a powerful if painful management tool to save his San Francisco catalog marketing firm and, he hopes, will ensure that his six staffers all have jobs when the recession recedes. In February, faced with a virtual collapse of his business, Binger had his employees take a month off without pay. When new business didn't materialize, the furlough grew even longer until work picked up and employees started coming back to their jobs in July.

"I told everyone I was really sorry, but I just didn't have any work so there was no income coming in," he says. "My hands were tied. Everyone sacrificed, and I think they knew that as hard as this was, it was better than being laid off."

The use of furloughs, says Binger, "enabled me to survive over those four months." Others, though, say furloughs create more problems than they fix. Sullivan, of San Francisco State University, is not only a passionate critic of the practice, but he's now being forced to take a furlough himself as part of the college system's efforts to cut costs.

"I ask employers, 'Why are you doing furloughs?' and they say, 'Because the other guy is,' " he says. "But they're a fad and they don't really save money. It's the poorly managed companies that use them, not places like Microsoft or Google."

Sullivan says the smarter route would be better planning, a greater push for productivity gains — and the corner-office fortitude to let heads roll. "Managers are chicken to make the tough decision and let you go. But that's what a great manager does."

"When you cut time and not workload," he says, "you've really compounded the problem you had to begin with." Just ask Krumm. DMV offices on Monday mornings after a Friday furlough have been described on online forums as a circuslike crush of humanity, with drivers lined up out the door to reach clerks whose workloads have been stacking up since Thursday. "After a while,'' Krumm says, "they have to stop people from coming in the door because otherwise we'd be in violation of the fire code."

FURLOUGH FACTS

Although the actual number of furloughs is hard to come by, one national survey of employers found some interesting statistics:

» 17 percent of employers surveyed in April said they had initiated mandatory furloughs, up from 11 percent the previous month.

» Nearly one in 10 employers expect to implement a shortened workweek within the next 12 months.

» Another 6 percent will force mandatory furloughs.

» 9 percent say they"ll have voluntary furloughs.

» 7 percent have cut workers" salaries.

Source: Watson Wyatt Worldwide

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Posted via email from Global Business News

High Frequency Trading: The Rise of the Machines

As a professional trader, you are confronted daily with all kinds of dynamics and situations that require a flexible and adaptive mind. You are faced with multiple variables constantly interacting with each other and your task is to process ever-changing information quickly and profitably. Valuations arbitrage, reflexive supply-and-demand dynamics, and structural changes are recurrent landmines in the typical day of traders and money managers.

We accept this “dangerous” line of work for only two reasons: monetary compensation and pride in being part of capital markets, that transmission mechanism without which innovation and creativity would be prisoners of their own ethereal state.

As a society, we are ready to strike compromises in return for a system that will allow the ethereal state of our creativity to turn into reality. We allow market insiders like market makers, broker-dealers, and others to have small advantages over us mortal investors in order to have them create the positive externalities that help us build a more sophisticated economic system. We give market makers and specialists a privileged look at the order flow (the supply and demand of stocks) in exchange for their commitment to maintaining orderly markets whenever an imbalance occurs.

We give systemic firms like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs privileged access to liquidity via the Federal Reserve so that the banking system and capital markets can continue to serve us in our quest to invent, produce, and distribute new products. But sometimes things turn out more like a bad inland casino rather than a better market… We may still be reeling from the systemic economic collapse of last year, but new structural changes with potential negative externalities are already at our door.

For months I have witnessed strange dynamics in the way markets behaved: liquidity issues, intra-day volatility, and a constant disconnection between technical, sentiment and fundamental inputs. Markets often go through periods of irrationality, but this time it felt different.

As a professional trader and an educator on markets, my sensitivity level is higher than normal and I immediately began conducting research to make sense of my discomfort. This process pointed consistently to one element: high frequency trading or as I like to call it “the rise of the machines.”

What is High Frequency Trading?

High frequency trading (HFT) was, until recently, a topic confined to Wall Street insiders. Only in the last few weeks has it become a mainstream subject of debate via articles on theNew York Times, the Washington Post, and interviews on CNBC (yes even CNBC’s clueless anchors can now spell HFT).

The reason for this foray into the mainstream media is the potential negative ramifications HFT can have for all of us: investors, entrepreneurs, and just plain hopeful citizens.

But first, let’s define HFT as it is a very technical classification that, nonetheless, encompasses many different things. Generally speaking, HFT is high velocity trading based on mathematical algorithms that create huge daily volume on different electronic exchanges and platforms. It is machine against machine—endless trading in order to capture fractions of pennies in profits. But, so far so good: the machines provide liquidity to all of us. The owners of the machines (financial institutions) make an all-American profit and the liquidity aggregators (electronic exchanges) provide competition to other exchanges in the most capitalistic way.

But what happens if we scratch the surface? Like Michel de Montaigne, the famed Renaissance scholar, once said: “There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the law would not deserve hanging ten times over.”

High frequency algorithmic trading is ridden with issues:

Volume. Machine-driven trading is over 60% of trading volume on a daily basis and in some confined cases it can be as high as 90%.

Adaptability. Machines are unthinking units that do not adapt to human reactions. HFT algorithms are based on correlations and historical relationships, which are great guidelines for trading and investing but by no means they can be used blindly (see: 1987 portfolio insurance, long-term capital management 1998, credit default swaps 2008, mortgage-backed securities 2008…the list of quant-related disasters is a sad one).

Exclusivity. HFT can only work by using incredibly fast and powerful computers that also must be placed in the exchanges as proximity helps the speed. Few people can afford the computers and/or the co-location fees charged by the electronic exchanges.

Flash quotes. Some brokers have access to quotes of orders before anyone else. By exploiting the speed of their machines, they can either arbitrage price differentials or potentially front-run clients. Another abuse of flash quotes (called flash because they last one–to-three milliseconds) is that they can be used as teaser quotes to gauge supply and demand without the risk of being hit due to their quickness.

Rebates. Many high frequency traders trade not for profit but for rebates paid by the electronic platforms to attract liquidity. This escamotage incentivizes useless and toxic volume.

While these are only the most immediate concerns about HFT, they have a potentially disproportionate influence on the cost of running our capital markets. The HFT lobby pushes the argument that they create positive externalities by exploiting improving technology—but there is a difference between volume and liquidity.

If over 60% of trading is toxic, it will go away in a nanosecond and most likely it will dissipate right when investors and money managers need it the most. This could cause a huge liquidity vacuum and a 1987-type of event. Liquidity is created by market players with a stake in the game, not by casino-like machines. Flash quotes and “predatory algorithms” also raise the cost of execution for the necessarily slower institutions like pension funds and mutual funds. Additionally, the surreal tempo of machine trading makes trading for all more expensive as we now have to prepare for the irrational moves and volatility of markets when executing our trades.

I love this business and I love technology, but checks and balances are needed to preserve our capital markets. Little adjustments can be made to reduce systemic risk, like re-instating circuit breakers that cut off program trading when price changes accelerate beyond certain parameters, like investigation or stopping flash quotes that drive front running, like making good on teaser quotes for longer than just three milliseconds, and so on. In the end, we need to understand that capital markets are here not to destabilize our economy, but to serve us as a society and help us make better lives.

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The Future of Search: Social Relevancy Rank

FriendFeed has recently launched a search feature, and so Facebook search must be coming soon.

Real-time Web search (of streams of activities) is a hot topic right now. Everyone, including Google and Microsoft, recognizes the value of using trusted contacts as filters. What was once called social search is now called real-time search, but this time it will really happen. First, it will be applied to streams and then to the Web in general.

What we are about to get is a Social Relevancy Rank. Whenever you search streams of activity, the results will be ordered not chronologically but by how relevant each is to you based on your social graph. That is, people who matter more to you will bubble up. How does this work? Well, there will be a formula, just as there is a formula for Page Rank.

Solution 101: Rank by Friends and People You Follow

Here is an idea so obvious that it is surprising Twitter has not implemented it already: front-load search results with people you follow. When you search for, say, "Wilco" on Twitter today, the results are in the chronological order. That is not really relevant because you do not know who most of these people are. But if instead you could see people you follow, the search results would be much more useful.

This is not possible on Twitter today, but it already works great on FriendFeed. There, results are filtered or ranked based your social graph. This is not difficult for FriendFeed to do because, on the one hand, it knows who you care about and, on the other, it applies its advanced feed search technology to your social graph:

This sounds awesome, but there is a problem. "Wilco" works well as a query because the band has just released a new album, but many other queries would return no results. Simply put, your friends on Facebook and people you follow on Twitter can't possibly have an opinion on every topic you may be interested in. This is a problem of sparse data: trusted opinions are scarce.

Small Worlds and Taste Neighbors

To solve the problem of sparse data, we need more data... obviously. One possible solution is to incorporate other sources that you trust (i.e. broaden your social graph). As a next step, search results could rank people you may not be directly following but who are being followed by people you follow. Or in Facebook-speak, friends of friends. You could argue that you are not familiar with their opinions and so cannot yet trust them, but given the small world phenomenon, their contributions are often just as valuable.

Another step could be to include people with similar tastes, so-called taste neighbors. This approach is common among vertical social networks such as Last.fm, Flixster, and Goodreads. These networks have ideas about which people, other than your friends, are like you. However, this is a costly calculation and takes time. In order for Twitter to do something like this, it would have to compare people based on links or perform semantic analyses of tweets over time. Yet even though this is a difficult problem, it will be solved in time.

The Influencers and the Crowd

Aside from using the "second degree" of your social graph or taste neighbors, a Social Relevancy Rank could front-load influencers. In the absence of any other metric, someone who is followed by hundreds of thousands of users is likely more relevant to you than someone you don't know at all. Using number of followers as a weight might be a good way to order the rest of the activity stream.

In general, combing through countless tweets from strangers is not terribly useful anyway. Just as people have stopped looking at anything beyond the first page of results on Google, sifting through pages of tweets in chronological order gets tedious quickly. What needs to be incorporated into the Social Relevancy Rank is the aggregate sentiment of the crowd: a score that tells you yay or nay and gives you an opportunity to drill into more results if you choose.

The Quest for the Perfect Filter

There is no such thing as a perfect formula. Even Page Rank isn't perfect. Yet we all use it and find it useful. Much as Page Rank has been adapted and tuned to search the web, Social Relevancy Rank will evolve over time to help us make sense of endless streams of activity. This ranking will have a profound impact on how we tap into our friends' opinions.

It will change the face of general Web searches in time, too. Today, results are automatically ranked by relevancy and freshness. Once Social Relevancy Rank is factored in, search results will be re-ordered based on social relevancy.

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http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/google-they-might-be-little-evil.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/wolfram-alpha-has-google-attention.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/26-people-who-mislead-you-on-twitter.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/ballmer-all-traditional-content-will-be.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/rate-of-tweets-per-second-doubles.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-unveils-sms-service-for-africa.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/yahoo-ceo-stop-comparing-us-to-google.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/future-of-facebook-usernames.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/googles-schmidt-rips-microsofts-bing.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/history-and-future-of-computer-memory.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/kosmix-tries-to-avoid-google-search.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/dispute-finder-intel-program-finds.html

Source:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/future_of_search_social_relevancy_rank.php

Tags:

FriendFeed search feature, Facebook search, real-time Web search, Google, Twitter, Twitter search, PageRank, Microsoft, trusted contacts as filters, social search, Global IT News, Social Relevancy Rank, metrics,

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