Derek Scruggs

This morning I was shocked and saddened to learn that Northwestern’s football coach Randy Walker died of a heart attack last night. He was only 52. I first heard about it on the radio, but within a couple hours I received a short email from the alumni association. Later in the afternoon they sent out another email that included a picture of Coach Walker and link to a forum where people can post condolences. Tastefully done.

Walker did a great job in picking up where Gary Barnett left off. Between the two of them, NU gained a measure of football respect that it hadn’t seen in two generations. I hope that the program has enough momentum to continue down that path, though I don’t envy the coach who has to replace him.

This morning NPR had a story about Jerry Falwell opening a new church. Ho hum. I think Falwell is a jerk, a homophobe and a noxious representative of anti-science attitudes that hurt our country. But as part of the piece they talked with Mel White, who ghost wrote Falwell’s autobiography. Here’s the kicker: Mel White has since come out of the closet as a homosexual. And the best part is that he regularly attends Falwell’s services and silently protests Falwell’s attacks on gays:

Years later, White became one of those gay protesters. Falwell’s ghostwriter came out of the closet, and moved to Lynchburg. He attends Falwell’s church, and stands in silent protest if Falwell attacks gays.

“I believe Jerry Falwell will change and I believe it’ll be in my lifetime,” White says. “And if he doesn’t change, I’m gonna die trying.”

White says he’ll be at the front of the line to attend the new church’s opening. “I want to get a front seat, so that if he talks about gay people, I can stand up and protest there just like I did in the old church.”

Good for him, and I’ve actually gained a tiny bit of respect for Falwell and his church for not barring White from services.

(As an aside, it’s interesting that NPR’s transcript uses “gonna” instead of “going to.” Is that now part of the AP style guide?)

Heh heh. I know who Mr. Y is.

Lately I’ve noticed that I watch way more YouTube and Google Video than I do traditional TV. The exception is that my wife and I recently have been renting Desperate Housewives, but we don’t actually watch TV otherwise.

From http://secretsofy.com/:

A couple days ago Brad Feld had a post about CEOs that are introverts. He may not realize it, but I fall into that category. I’m not a fan of big crowds and don’t get energy from it, though I love to have conversations with small groups of people.

The spark for his post was a USA Today article called “Not all successful CEOs are extroverts.” Which reminded me of Jim Collins, the brilliant author of Built to Last   and Good to Great (both aff.). I don’t know what he thinks about introverts, but he persuasively argues that charismatic CEOs are usually bad for companies. (Also check out the mp3 called  “Being charismatic and wrong is a bad combination” on this page.)

I believe this is behind the phenomenon of outrageously overpaid CEOs who make out like bandits even then they run the company poorly. These CEOs are often very charismatic and so convince the board to hire him and give him an impossible-to-lose contract. This in turn shows how markets don’t always work very well. I’m a capitalist and love capitalism, but economists have shown over and over that markets don’t always produce the desired social result or even force companies to improve and innovate. If he escapes prosecution, Joe Nacchio is exhibit A.

A couple years ago the Atlantic ran a great essay about introverts by Jonathan Rauch. Evidently it was very popular.

Callout seen in a decidedly unsexy article about World Cup soccer:

I started to write this as a comment to a Jeff Jarvis post about some agressive questioning Yahoo’s Terry Semel apparently endured about its operations in China. But it got to be rather long so I thought I’d post it here instead.

May I suggest that people who are concerned about this actually go to China and spend some time there before you decide what is good or bad about Yahoo, Google etc. being there?

My wife is from China, I’ve spent some time there and I’ll be spending a lot more there over the next two years.

Here’s my read on China vis a vis democracy, freedom etc. (And it’s just one man’s opinion, so jump in with another view if you wish).

Political rights in China will incrementally grow based on specific issues. In other words, no one is going to march in the streets over abstract concepts like “freedom” and “democracy.” Rather, just like in the US with the Stamp Act, the election of Abe Lincoln, the Montgomery bus boycott etc, political freedom will be fought over very specific issues driven by the sense that something needs to change right now.

The two biggest simmering political issues in China right now (again IMO) are the environment and property rights. Let’s take the environment as an example.

The pollution there is terrible and people are pissed that 1) their drinking water is not clean and 2) many times a local official has been bribed to allow it to continue. Last fall there was a major spill of toxic chemicals in the Songhua river near Harbin (the primary center of China’s beer industry, BTW). I’ll bet my house that, prior to that event, a plant inspector was given a few thousand RMB to look the other way. And I’ll also bet that, because that spill got intense media attention and there were protests about it, that guy has been fired and the local party apparatus is intensely focused on not letting it happen again. (Yep.)

What does this have to do with Google and Yahoo? Here’s the point:

We think of censorship primarily as something that affects the media. This is what we don’t like about China – they censor press reports about, say, Tianenmen Square (which BTW local Chinese refer to as “6–4”, which is short for June 4, 1989). But what use is that information in the context of a toxic spill at Harbin? The short answer: none. And what information is useful? Here are some suggestions:

• The chemical makeup of benzene (which I believe was part of the spill)
• Likely symptoms of ingesting benzene, and how to treat them
• How to test your water for benzene

Those are pretty benign, but what about these:

• Documentation of safe drinking water levels for certain chemicals as specified by governments of the US, Europe, Japan, Korea etc.
• The history of environmental regulation in the West
• The text of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
• Tips on how to organize a peaceful protest
• The history of the US Civil Rights movement

I will also bet my house that none of these pieces of very useful information have been censored because 1) the Chinese government has its hands full with porn and breaking news and 2) most of these are the basis of research and scholarship at companies and universities – they need access to this info too.

Most people in the West don’t realize that there are literally tens of thousands of public protests every year in China. Yahoo and Google help make these protests possible not by supplying pictures of Tianenmen Square and access to blogger rants about freedom, but rather by helping people access the information that is relevant to the issue at hand.

Also, the questioning directed at Semel asked him if Yahoo would’ve cooperated with Nazi Germany. This is a red herring for a few reasons:

• Back in 1936, not even the US governement acknowledged the persecution of Jews there. The Holocaust was not widely reported until after the war. It’s unlikely Yahoo execs would’ve know any more about it than the average citizen. Which is to say, almost nothing. Executives must make decisions based on the known facts, not hypotheticals.
• Germany was an agressively expansionist state seeking to subjugate Europe and build an empire. While China undoubtedly would like military supremacy in the region, it’s not going to happen as long the US continues to have bases surrounding it. China appears to have no desire to invade other countries except for Taiwan, and that issue transcends Yahoo in the same way as the tensions between India and Pakistan.