Closed or open stacks, it doesn't matter

My alma mater, Georgia Tech, has announced a deal with Emory University that has the effect of moving Tech's library to Emory. As the two institutions noted, the existing collections of the two libraries have very little overlap because of the nature of the institutions. Suburban Emory has room to expand on its campus, but urban-core Tech does not. There will be economies of scale in operation after consolidated. The move will also allow Tech to reuse its two library buildings in the center of the campus. No doubt there is a feeding frenzy among professors and staff for that space. These are all good reasons to proceed with consolidation.

Not having any direct relationship with Tech since 1985, I find the move interesting because of what it says or implies about university libraries. Most technical journals in science, mathematics, and engineering have been digitized going back decades. Professors and students are now accustomed to browsing those journals online. The fact that the Tech collection of physical books and journals will move five miles away — not the easiest trip to make by MARTA, with parking constraints at Emory too — doesn't seem to be objectionable to anyone.

Many more technical journals are being published now than when I was a student at Tech (1972-76 and 1978-79). Conversely, fewer traditional books are being published. When I did research during grad school, I found that books from the 1950s and 1960s were a more efficient source material for me to use than journals. Why? Because a book typically had a full spectrum of information on a given topic, whereas journal articles were scattered across hundreds of feet of shelves. Online access makes that problem go away. Meanwhile the content of books that haven't been digitized becomes less relevant to scientists, mathematicians, and engineers each year.

Furthermore, between Google and Wikipedia, there is a lot of information readily available without having to go to a physical or virtual library. I know you're thinking that only a fool trusts Wikipedia completely. For many subjects, I agree. But on some specialized topics, Wikipedia can be quite good. An example is Wikipedia's article on Mellin transforms, a tool of mathematics that was central to my interest. This type of reliable information could take 30 minutes to find in a physical library under the best of circumstances, even with the help of a professional.

The irony, however, is that I became aware of Mellin transforms only because I browsed the stacks at the Tech library. That's how I ran across a book describing them. Emory's library is closed stacks, and the newly consolidated Tech-Emory library will be closed stacks too. I have read that NC State's new library is closed stacks. It's apparently an irresistible trend. Those of us who like to browse will have to be content with online access.

About HB 2

Usually I avoid politics in this blog, but I want to make a few points about North Carolina's House Bill 2:

• HB 2 follows Amendment One, which wrote into the North Carolina Constitution a definition of marriage as solely man-woman.
• 93 of North Carolina's 100 counties passed Amendment One, in some cases by over 80% of the voters in those counties. Statewide, Amendment One received 61% of the vote in an election that drew 35% of registered voters. The hideous but inescapable conclusion is that a majority of North Carolinians — not merely the legislators they elect, but We the People ourselves — are fully prepared to discriminate against LGBTs and to re-write laws to allow such discrimination.
• If you want change in North Carolina, start with people in those 93 counties and the voices they listen to.
• North Carolina is a key battleground state for the presidential election. Political operatives at the national level drove the introduction of HB 2 at the North Carolina General Assembly. It's a deliberate tactic to activate the conservative voter base in North Carolina in anticipation of November.
• I heard a journalist on WUNC say that Governor McCrory had "changed" (verbatim) HB 2 by means of Executive Order 93. That, of course, is nonsense. The Governor has no right to amend the law that the General Assembly adopted and he himself signed last month. The law remains on the books as-is.
• Into the 1960s and perhaps onward, a majority of voters in the South were likewise fully prepared to discriminate against African-Americans — and did. The role of the federal judiciary is to protect minorities and prevent such discrimination. Although federal judges don't always do the right thing, often they do. A federal judge in North Carolina struck down Amendment One. But opponents of HB 2 had better prevail in one of North Carolina's three federal court districts or before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va. The U.S. Supreme Court is likely to split 4-4, affirming whatever the lower courts decide. For the time being, judges whose names you probably don't know are very important people.

Hard to watch and hard not to

Sportswriter Scott Fowler of the Charlotte Observer aptly described Jordan Spieth's meltdown at the Masters yesterday: "It was hard to watch. It was hard not to watch."

Don't we often feel that way? I'm not referring to schadenfreude, the German word we so often read these days because the English language has no concise, direct equivalent for enjoying someone else's misfortune. Yesterday was not schadenfreude because hardly anyone derived pleasure from seeing Spieth's game collapse like that — not even his opponents in Augusta. Nor do I believe that those of us who have played golf on occasion and found it to be so much more difficult than it looks on TV had thoughts of vindication and equality when Spieth put two consecutive balls into Rae's Creek.

I'm sure that psychologists have researched why we find disasters, whether natural or personal, so riveting. We rubber-neck at highway accidents. We repeatedly watch TV replays of crashes at Daytona. The dénouement of the golf movie Tin Cup hung on a meltdown. Golf is a particularly strong trigger for this aspect of our psychology because golf is usually an individual sport with a slow pace. I am reminded of the intro to ABC's Wide World of Sports. We saw it countless times, a solitary ski jumper crashing in spectacular fashion. Not only did we never tire of it, we brought "the agony of defeat" into our culture as a catchphrase. (The intro was astutely scripted by the multitalented Stanley Ralph Ross.) Fortunately the athlete in that infamous clip suffered only a mild concussion and recovered completely.

Spieth was not physically injured yesterday. He has two or three decades of competitive golf ahead of him; perhaps he will play so well in future tournaments that he avoids the stigma of choking. Many people know that Greg Norman blew a big lead on the final day of the Masters twenty years ago — with bogeys on 10 and 11, and a multiple bogey on 12, almost exactly like Spieth. Norman was near the end of his best playing years, and plagued by injuries he could never dispel the public's recollection of the event. On the other hand, almost no one knows that Arnold Palmer blew the Masters in 1961. He won it in 1962 and again in 1964.

Will Spieth recover to enjoy the "thrill of victory"? We must wait and see. I hope so. Public humiliation is fit punishment for crime, not a desirable or necessary part of sport.

138 and counting

I'm killing time at Washington National Airport (a/k/a Reagan). How many airports have I flown into? In a few minutes I counted 138, but there may be more.

Albany, Albuquerque, Amsterdam, Atlanta (Fulton County), Atlanta (Hartsfield-Jackson), Atlanta (Peachtree Dekalb), Auckland, Austin, Baltimore, Bangalore, Bangkok, Barcelona, Beijing, Birmingham (Ala), Boston, Brisbane, Brussels, Buffalo, Burbank, Calgary, Charlotte, Chicago (O'Hare), Cincinnati, Cleveland, Colorado Springs, Copenhagen, Dallas (D/FW), Daytona Beach, Denver (DIA), Denver (Stapleton), Detroit, Dubai, Dublin, Edmonton, Erie, Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers, Frankfurt, Fuzhou, Geneva, Greensboro, Greenville-Spartanburg, Guangzhou, Halifax, Hanover, Hartford, Hilo, Hong Kong, Houston (Hobby), Houston (IAH), Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Jaipur, Kahului, Kansas City, Kuala Lumpur, Key West, Las Vegas, Little Rock, London (City), London (Gatwick), London (Heathrow), Long Beach, Los Angeles, Lyon, Madrid, Manchester (NH), Melbourne (Australia), Melbourne (Fla), Memphis, Miami, Milan, Minneapolis, Mobile, Montgomery, Montreal (Dorval), Mumbai, Munich, Nashville, New Delhi, New Orleans (Lakefront), New Orleans (Moisant), New York (JFK), New York (Laguardia), Newark, Nice, Oakland, Oklahoma City, Ontario (Calif), Orlando, Ottawa, Paris (CDG), Paris (Orly), Pensacola, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland (Oregon), Quebec City, Raleigh-Durham, Reno, Richmond, Rio de Janeiro (Galeão), Rochester, Sacramento, Saint John, Saint John's, Saint Louis, Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, San Juan, Santa Ana, Saskatoon, Seattle, Shanghai (Hongqiao), Shanghai (Pudong), Shreveport, Singapore, Sioux Falls, Stockholm, Stuttgart, Sydney, Syracuse, Taipei, Tampa, Tokyo (Narita), Toronto (Pearson), Toulouse, Udaipur, Valparaiso (Fla), Vancouver, Vienna, Washington (Dulles), Washington (National), Winnipeg, and Zurich.

Lord, have mercy.

RIP, Patty

Patty Duke died Tuesday. For the first two hours after I heard the news, I thought I was the only one who had a crush on her in 1963-65. Not so! I've lost count of the number of Facebook and Twitter posts from guys my age about her.

What made her so attractive to my cohort? First, she had a smile that radiated warmth and acceptance. Second, her role on The Patty Duke Show was a simple teenager, not someone pretending or aspiring to act like an adult. Third, she was funny. Fourth, her character was mostly happy and upbeat. And fifth, she was stunningly pretty even though production norms of the day avoided any display of her physique. (This was still conservative, black-and-white TV before I Dream of Jeannie or Batgirl and Catwoman on Batman changed the rules about tight-fitting costumes.) All these things made Patty Duke non-threatening and seemingly accessible to younger boys.

I had not been old enough to fall for Annette Funicello on The Mickey Mouse Club, and by the time Gilligan's Island converted to color and I began to lust for Mary Ann — played by Dawn Wells, a much older actress — I was beginning to understand more about passion and had left behind the simple adoration that I had for Patty Duke.

She went on to play a very different character in Valley of the Dolls, a film which of course I did not see at the time. Later she revealed that her years of acting on TV were a grim experience for her and that she suffered from bipolar disorder as well. I was naturally oblivious.

So, like my cohort, I am particularly sad to hear of her death because I still feel a connection. And if you feel the same way, I have one final question: Cathy or Patty? For me it was Cathy.

Senseless acquisitions

In my last blog I wrote of the mismatch between the investment community's expectations for Twitter and the apparently inherent limitations on Twitter's ability to grow and to monetize its user base. Today I want to address a similar perverse behavior of the investment community: overpaying for acquistions. It's a topic I know something about, having glimpsed the inside.

How many times have we seen Company A acquire Company B with great fanfare, only for Company A to quietly sell Company B several years later for less than the original value? Yesterday Dell announced that they're selling Perot Systems for $3.06 billion. They purchased it in 2009 for $3.9 billion. More examples? DaimlerBenz buys and sells Chrysler. Cisco buys and sells both Scientific Atlanta and Linksys (two mistakes by the over-rated John Chambers). eBay buys and sells Skype… and on and on.

Most of the time, Company B allows itself to be bought easily. The board of directors of Company B has a legal duty to get the highest price they can. As long as they don't lie about their company, they aren't to blame for a transaction gone wrong. I can't think of an instance when when the buyer of a company sued the seller for fraud or misrepresentation. I suppose it could happen, but caveat emptor is a good rule and the courts are reluctant to make amends for a buyer's misjudgment. Besides, when a buyer screws up, they'd rather put the matter behind them as quickly and quietly as possible. Even if the purchased company lied, critics will correctly say that the buyer should have discovered the lies during due diligence.

No, the blame for paying too much in an acquisition falls on the buyer —  and more directly on the buyer's investment banker. Of course, the investment banker is often compensated in proportion to the size of the deal, and they don't get paid in full if a deal doesn't close. It's no surprise, then, that investment bankers are often wildly optimistic about the numeric value of the transaction to the buyer.

When eBay was acquiring Skype in 2005, I happened to see the valuation package from eBay's investment banker. (How did I come to see such a tightly guarded document? Don't ask, don't tell.) The valuation was complete nonsense, but it was wrapped in impressive financial bling, it had a big name on the cover, and it purported to use the very best methodology from the Harvard, Wharton, Chicago, and Stanford business schools. If I include the earn-out provisions of the deal, eBay paid over $4 billion for Skype — an astounding figure. Not long after, having finally grasped the reality of what they'd bought, eBay sold most of Skype to outside investors at a valuation of less than $3 billion. Microsoft eventually stepped in and bailed out eBay, but eBay's executives and board of directors in 2005 should have been sacked and required to get brain MRIs before working in corporate America again. By the way, eBay has had a lackluster record ever since.

During my years at Nortel I saw acquisitions whose financials would make you laugh, cry, or vomit. Some of those purchases were paid in hard cash, not in the momentarily inflated Nortel common stock. Of course, Nortel eventually went bankrupt. Given the astute senior leadership as evidenced by those deals, the death of the company could have been predicted (and was, by a few people).

Sometimes an acquisition fails not because the buyer paid too much but because the buyer could not effectively assimilate the purchase. I saw that happen at Nortel too. But when a buyer overpays, the fish rots from the head.

Twitter in twilight

I use Twitter a lot — more than Facebook, more than email, more than Feedly and RSS (still a good tool, by the way), and way more than LinkedIn. Twitter is my primary mechanism to gather information about the world and to follow interesting or funny people. I don't use hashtags; to me Twitter is all about a self-curated feed, the sources of which I review once a month. I'd be delighted if Twitter lasts forever in its current form.

Nevertheless, many people in Silicon Valley and Wall Street consider Twitter to be a failure. Some even predict its death. How can a company that has attracted 300 million users be in such disfavor?

Twitter's share price is far below the IPO price. This is a symptom not a cause, but it makes the investment community look bad. They don't like that, and they'll find someone to blame. The real problem is that Twitter's user base has flatlined at 300 million but the company's operating expenses are aimed at a much larger user base. In contrast, Facebook's user base continues to grow (now exceeding 1.5 billion).

Twitter has been extracting more revenue per user in the form of advertising and promoted tweets, but the gap between revenue and expenses remains very large. This cannot continue forever. Either the company triples its user base (difficult), cuts expenses to turn a profit on the user base that it has today (very difficult), or finds a way to generate even more revenue per user (incredibly difficult). No wonder the CEO's office at Twitter has been a revolving door!

I see a big difference between Twitter and Yahoo!, which fails to offer anything valuable and unique anymore. Yahoo! deserves to die, but not Twitter. That said, when it comes to the future of Twitter, "I've got a bad feeling about this."