As legend has it, the humanities program at MIT was started by an MIT president who quipped “too many MIT graduates end up working for Harvard and Yale graduates”. The thinking then, which remains to this day, is
that engineering classes make a person narrowly focused whereas humanities classes help a student to see the full picture. Although I can see some truth in this, I would argue that a person is far better equipped to be a great manager having taken engineering than its “softer” alternatives.

The New York Times today has an article about how YouTube is transforming the nightly news. As more high-quality, user-generated content is uploaded to YouTube by professional news networks, semi-professional hobbyists and amateur aspiring Ron Burgundys, the potential for customized, localized news delivered directly to your computer whenever you want it becomes a reality. Google, which owns YouTube, has already built out Google News to deliver fresh and personalized news that they’ve harvested from news sites around the web, and YouTube video news is a logical next step.

No doubt, this is great. However, with smaller city newspapers failing across the country and even the venerable Times in trouble, the long-term sustainability of content providers is a serious question. Right now, Google News and YouTube news videos are fueled largely by professional journalism companies that make their money selling advertisements in print and video media. However, as Google steps in and uses the content without providing an adequate revenue stream back to the content creators, the prospects for professional journalism look dim.

I’ve noticed more and more lately that there seems to be an air-conditioning problem nearly everywhere I go. Businesses for some reason think that their customers want to be kept at a frosty 68 degrees while they shop. Office buildings think that the computers and inhabitants will melt if the temperature leaps beyond the 70 mark. At the offices I’ve worked at, it’s typically so cold that people bring sweaters or fleeces to wear during the day!

The Department of Energy says that HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) account for 40-60% of the energy use in buildings. Given that it’s expensive, inefficient, environmentally harmful and just plain uncomfortable, why not just turn the thermostat up a few degrees!

I just got off the phone with 1-800-Flowers.com. I had tried to get flowers sent to the hospital yesterday, but they failed to deliver them, so I canceled the order. I called back today to try to re-enter the order with a different address, and finally gave up after speaking to several apathetic employees and getting left on permanent hold. The pivoting issue was a minor one related to a gift code, but their seeming unwillingness to even attempt to solve my problem ultimately caused me to go elsewhere.

In many states, New York included, there is a $0.05 deposit on aluminum cans. The deposit is designed to provide an economic incentive to people so that they recycle their cans instead of just throwing them in the garbage when they’re finished. The program works beautifully; however, like many such programs, the way it works isn’t necessarily the way you’d immediately picture such a system to function. People that buy the cans and pay the extra $0.05 are rarely the people that end up collecting the nickel when they’re done with it — for them, the deposit is just an added tax on cans that they are still going to throw away. Instead, the people that benefit are those who are able to collect cans out of the garbage and off the street and then turn them in for the deposit. The economic incentive turns an otherwise difficult task — collecting and sorting a city’s worth of cans from the garbage — into a task done readily by people that otherwise may have few other work alternatives.