James's Musings » Media

Facebook Fight: 12 Billion Apples and Oranges

James G. Beldock — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:12:14 +0000

Miguel Helft’s article (“Twins’ Facebook Fight Rages On”) in today’s New York Times recounts the ongoing saga of the lawsuit brought by Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the identical twin Harvard graduates who have alleged that Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from them. Unfortunately, the article also perpetuates a $12 billion misperception.

The news in the article is that the Winklevosses are seeking to unwind their $65 million 2008 settlement with Facebook, a portion of which was paid in Facebook stock. Their argument is that Facebook’s stock was worth far less than the price they paid for it, and therefore that the settlement was conducted in bad faith and constitutes an act of securities fraud. Unfortunately, Helft’s article repeats the same error made elsewhere:

But according to court documents, the parties agreed to settle for a sum of $65 million. The Winklevosses then asked whether they could receive part of it in Facebook shares and agreed to a price of $35.90 for each share, based on an investment Microsoft made nearly five months earlier that pegged Facebook’s total value at $15 billion. Under that valuation, they received 1.25 million shares, putting the stock portion of the agreement at $45 million.

Yet days before the settlement, Facebook’s board signed off on an expert’s valuation that put a price of $8.88 on its shares. Facebook did not disclose that valuation, which would have given the shares a worth of $11 million. The ConnectU founders contend that Facebook’s omission was deceptive and amounted to securities fraud. ¹

To anyone who has run a private company with venture or private equity investors, this statement simply doesn’t smell right. What is missing—but critically important—is mention of what type of shares were being valued in each transaction.

In a typical venture capital-backed company, there are two classes of stock: Common and Preferred, with very different rights and privileges. Common stock, typically held by founders and of which options to purchase are granted to future employees, and Preferred stock, often in several series each with special terms, rights, and conditions (such as the right to earn a dividend on their investment, to get their money out first ahead of the common stock in the event of a liquidity event, the right to appoint board members, and many, many others, including the right to convert each share of preferred stock to some number of shares of common stock in the event of liquidity). Throughout the world, both public and private companies have different prices for common stock and preferred stock. (Remember Warren Buffet’s $5 billion investment in Goldman Sachs at the height of the 2008 crisis? He bought convertible preferred stock at a completely different price than the common stock, in return for a 10% dividend yield, warrants on additional common stock, and other rights he negotiated for.) Here, for example, are two Citigroup securities, the venerable C, and a preferred variant, Preferred Series I, over the past six months (click the thumbnail to explore on Google Finance):

Two Different Citibank Securities:Two Different Prices!

More often than not, the price of Preferred shares in a venture-backed private company is determined by financing events (e.g., when Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook in October, 2007). But pricing events for Common shares are far less, errr, common. Unless someone explicitly purchases Common (a fairly uncommon event , there simply aren’t pricing events for those shares. Instead, venture-backed companies generally hire an outside valuation firm to come in an provide a valuation for the common shares given the existence of all of the other preferred shares. This is important, because private company Common is nearly always last in line for liquidity, often behind literally hundreds of millions of dollars of preferred liquidation preference. Naturally, such Commons therefore carry a lower price. It is this lower price that the outside valuation expert provides. To those in the industry such a price is called a 409(a) Valuation, after the 2004 IRS code section which requires such a valuation to be performed in order for stock options granted at that Common price not to trigger deferred compensation tax liability. In 2007, IRS issued its final ruling on 409(a), and the 409(a) Valuation process became an annual ritual for all companies which issued stock or options on stock for which a market price was not readily available.

Which brings us to the Winklevoss’s fight with Facebook. They allege that the 409(a) Valuation performed in early 2008 set a price they should have been offered in their settlement. As a narrow point, whether this claim is valid or not depends on whether they received Preferred or Common shares as their settlement payment. There are few details regard, but some sources say they received Common Stock—at the Preferred price. Such a calculation would give the Winklevosses and their attorneys at least some leg to stand on in their argument. (The redacted transcript of the hearing is online here, and it makes clear that counsel for the Winklevosses intentionally ignore the difference between Preferred and Common stock valuations.)

But what their claim does not mean is what other news sources have inferred: that the entire value of Facebook was equal to the 409(a) Valuation for the Common Stock times the total number of shares of Common and Preferred outstanding (= $3.7 billion). Why? Because doing that math completely ignores the value of the Preferred stock and its rights. By this same logic, Warren Buffet’s investment in Goldman should have been at the same price as the common stock was trading at that day. (It wasn’t.) And every venture Capitalist who spends days negotiating preference rights in a financing is negotiation for something worth $0. (It isn’t.) In return for paying higher prices for Preferred shares, investors get board seats, voting privileges (often on behalf of the Common), dividends, and, at least in a startup, often complete control over the company’s balance sheet and stock ledger.

Three things are clear from the court papers:

Facebook Preferred stock carried a price of $35.90 in late 2007 when Microsoft invested its $240 million;
Facebook’s Board approved a 409(a) valuation of $8.88/share for its Common Stock in early 2008;
If the Winklevosses received a number of shares of Common Stock equal to a settlement value ($45 million) divided by the Preferred price, they have something to argue about, but that action itself does not mean that the Preferred and Common had the same value.

The value of Facebook thus did not fall between these two events, as has been variously and mistakenly reported. Those two prices simply reflect the value of apples and oranges. The Times mistakes the matter when it reports that “expert’s valuation . . . put a price of $8.88 on its shares,” either intentionally or unintentionally agreeing with the Winklevoss’s attorneys who tried to confuse the matter. That valuation put a price of $8.88 on its Common shares, not its Preferred shares. And while the distinction may be a technical one, an entire industry of venture capitalists, private equity, and public investors relies on it every day. Reporting otherwise doesn’t help the public understand the merits (or lack thereof) of the Winklevoss’s allegations.

M. Helft, “Twins’ Facebook Fight Rages On,” Page B1, New York Times, December 31, 2010. Emphasis added.

Jon Stewart’s Audience Bests NPR Listeners in Current Events Knowledge (!)

James G. Beldock — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 07:29:29 +0000

Two years ago, I only half-jokingly asked whether Fox News kills brain cells, about the results of a remarkable study based on data gathered by my friend Michel Floyd‘s former company¹. (See the “amazing coincidence” follow-up posting, and Michel’s comments to it.) His data showed that viewers of Fox News Channel regularly scored half as well on tests regarding basic facts of current events than did listeners to National Public Radio. Of course, NPR has something of a “high falutin’” reputation, so perhaps this is to be expected (although judging from the blogosphere’s reaction to my post, it was nevertheless a cause for some debate!). But I must admit that even I was surprised to discover this evening that viewers of Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” beat even NPR listeners on analogous tests!

Buried within the “Primary Sources” section of next month’s The Atlantic is a section appropriately headed “Seriously Funny,” recounting a report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism at journalism.com. The journalism.com report summarizes a number of studies by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, one of which offers the following surprising comparative current events knowledge scores:

source²

Your eyes are not deceiving you: The Daily Show and Colbert Report’s viewers actually scored higher on this particular test than did NPR listeners. (Note: I want a margin of error on this measurement, and the Pew study doesn’t identify one, so it’s hard to tell how meaningful this 3% difference is.) But there is no question that the data corroborate the earlier Knowledge Networks study: Fox News Channel yet again brings up the rear.

Pew goes a little further than the Knowledge Networks study and conveys some of the audience demographics. Of particular interest, for example, is the fact that NPR listeners are more likely to have graduated college than regular consumers of any other news media other than major newspapers’ websites, and that yet again Fox News Channel lags behind:

source 3

There are some surprising numbers in these demographics, too: The Daily Show’s viewers may know marginally more about current events than listeners to NPR, but they are substantially less likely to have graduated college (only about 75% as likely). Equally surprising is that the Daily Show’s demographic is slightly less likely to be young than regular readers of major newspaper websites or Google/Yahoo! news. In other words, if you’re aged 18-29, you’re most likely to get your news online.

Or, to put it another way, if you’re over 29, why are you reading this?

Michel was then CTO of Knowledge Networks and his colleague Stefan Subias, conducted by PIPA (the Program on International Policy Attitudes) and published in Political Science Quarterly
The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Public Knowledge of Current Affairs Little Changed by News and Information Revolutions
The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Public Knowledge of Current Affairs Little Changed by News and Information Revolutions

DC Expanding ShotSpotter System

James G. Beldock — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 21:33:32 +0000

I am happy to report that Washington DC has formally announced its plans to expand its ShotSpotter system to what will become the largest in the world (covering nearly a quarter of the District). Allison Klein’s article “District Adding Gunfire Sensors” on the front page of today’s Washington Post Metro Section does an excellent (and, as usual, both balanced and accurate) job of providing the details. Highlights:

ShotSpotter was originally deployed in the District by the FBI, in August 2006; the Metropolitan Police Department has subsequently taken over operational responsibility.

By September, police will be covering 16 of the District’s 68 square miles with ShotSpotter.

Police rely on ShotSpotter to provide accurate information about gunfire more quickly than they hear about it at 911—if anyone calls 911 in the first place (more often than not, they don’t).

In one district (District 7, where 21 of the City’s 78 homicides occurred last year), ShotSpotter detects as many as 50 gunfire incidents per week.

ShotSpotter has helped DC police make arrests, save lives, and has provided key evidence in high profile cases, such as the officer-involved shooting of DeOnté Rawlings.

The blogosphere and traditional news media are actively reporting this news. Check out the coverage and photo on Fox News and WTOP, and blogs at YourStreet, APBNews, and of course on the ANC2C02 Forum (a resident of Shaw and a regular blogger on the topic).

Personally, it’s gratifying to see a city and its community rally around what my colleagues and I spend our days working so hard to deliver. Nothing replaces good, hard police work (no ShotSpotter sensor will ever look in someone’s eyes and make a tough decision, put its life at risk every day, or put handcuffs on a suspect), but in the end, our job is to deliver our first responders the best tools they can have, and it appears to be working in our nation’s capital.

You Are What You . . . Read (but You’re Still Living in a Silo!)

James G. Beldock — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 21:52:55 +0000

Proving once and for all that the storm pounding the Bay Area this weekend with hurricane-force winds is not only dangerous for the risk of flooding and hurtling objects but for the free time it affords all of us who like spending part of our weekends outdoors, I set my mind to doing something creative and, well, frivolous (at least that’s how it started). My frequent readers (all three of you will know that I’m something of a compulsive reader and book collector. I’ve taken to keeping track of my library using a combination of LibraryThing and Visual Bookshelf (more about why I use two in a little bit), and late last night I stumbled upon an interesting use for a collection of the images of the book covers in my library: building a photo mosaic. So, without further ado, here I am, in all my bibliophilic glory:

(click for the full mosaic, 1,300+ books in all!)

Yes, that’s a geeky thing to do. But it highlighted a few things about my changing “digital existence” that I thought were worth reporting:

So Much Data
First and foremost, all of this data (the books, the covers, and even the photo I turned into the mosaic) were available with a few minutes worth of work. Admittedly, I had previously spent hours scanning the ISBN bar codes on my books (conveniently when packing my books in order to move to my new apartment). But think about the amount of data available to me for very little investment: the titles, authors, and graphic images of 1,300 some-odd books, along with their associated meta-data (length, ISBN, etc.). When I was in school (ending in the mid ’90s), gathering and manipulating this sort of data was certainly possible, but doing so was the domain of database experts, programmers, and the like. So I became one of those, mostly because I saw the computer as a tool which would facilitate information manipulation of a nature never previously possible−or indeed imagined.
Trumbull College, My residential college at Yale, for example, had a library boasting some 5,000 works. Its card catalog was positively ancient and poorly maintained. Estimates for the workload involved in cataloging it and keeping it up-to-date were so substantial that the (volunteer) project never got off the ground. A mere fifteen years later, my catalog is not only mostly up-to-date, but it contains all manner of “rich content” that a card catalog could not muster: images of the covers, other books by the same author, publication history, and of course the meta-data: reviews, social/popularity information, and even feedstock for inference and recommendation engines.

Community Creativity
Then there is the accessibility of the inspiration. LibraryThing cleverly suggested the mosaic and linked to David Louis Edelman‘s post in which he created a similar mosaic. Call it community scrapbooking, community arts and crafts, or simply community creativity, but this sort of cross-country “we all trade inspiration” is unusual, to say the least. To be sure, historically artist communes and even local arts and crafts fairs historically provided fodder and inspiration for our individual creativity, but this is a different kind of inspiration: it is both more instantaneous (I got the idea late last night; got a full night’s rest; and woke up and produced the mosaic before breakfast this morning) and more eclectic (David is a computer programmer and Science Fiction author in the Washington, DC area; I am a technology company CEO in Silicon Valley).

But Silos—Still
Unfortunately, it’s not all wine and roses. LibraryThing is the site I’ve always used to catalog my books, but recently Visual Bookshelf has won many converts, mostly because they have embraced the Facebook Platform API and have created a Facebook application. Since some 500 of my friends are on Facebook, and since many of them are avid readers, Visual Bookshelf has already netted me 40 some-odd “reading buddies” (which I define as other people I am friends with on Facebook and who have Visual Bookshelf profiles). An 8% cross-over rate isn’t bad, especially when you consider that Visual Bookshelf is only one of hundreds of Facebook applications. (And, for that matter, it’s one of the least annoying, since it doesn’t spam the hell out of your friends.) Here, for example, is my bookshelf, as displayed on Facebook, and what my friends are reading:

Unfortunately, I cannot synchronize my book activity on Visual Bookshelf with my LibraryThing account. Visual Bookshelf finally implemented a LibraryThing import feature, but it’s unidirectional. Likewise, Facebook makes it nearly impossible to export friend information (going so far as to display email addresses as images to foil screen scrapers and other brute force export tools). So I’m stuck maintaining two databases and importing one to the other, potentially over-writing or losing information each time I do so.

Of course, I’m not the only one who has noticed this problem, and it is but one example of the growing “problem” of social networking data living in proprietary silos. Such well-known Web 2.0 commentators as Om Malik have even gone so far as to propose that social networking features will end up getting built into most desktop and web software, much the same way as the Cut/Copy/Paste mechanism has become a de facto paradigm standard. But that will only work if the core social networking information (who is who and who knows whom) does not remain the proprietary information of, e.g., Facebook. Technologies from the simple XFN to the ambitious OpenSocial are supposed to fix that, but OpenSocial appears almost to have been promulgated by Google to compete with Facebook, and it will be a chilly day in the netherworld before Facebook adopts it. More recently, the DataPortability Working Group has been graced by the participation of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and others (or at least representatives from those companies). But until something concrete develops, we early adopters will continue to enjoy the benefits of So Much Data and Community Creativity, but only if we’re willing to put up with duplicate data, lost data, and the other assorted horrors of manual synchronization.

All told, the information revolution continues in directions we never could have anticipated. Here I am trading notes with friends I haven’t physically seen in over a decade, enjoying better book recommendations from the wisdom of my friends (and the crowds) than I do by poking around my local bookstore, and finding a nice Sunday morning arts and crafts project inspired by a Washington, DC science fiction author whom I’ve never met.

Now if only I didn’t have to keep three copies of it all!

Bubbles, Crashes, and Some _A Cappella_ Brilliance

James G. Beldock — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 07:14:03 +0000

Every once in a while, a YouTube video gets my attention, as this one has. In the week since its posting, it has begun to go viral, with something on the order of 700,000 viewings. For those of us working in the Tech Industry—especially those of us in Silicon Valley and in the Tech Industry—it pretty much tells the whole story:

**GRINCH UPDATE 12/18: Some militant copyright holder has filed a DMCA Takedown request with YouTube, so this wonderful piece of (IMO) fair use parody was temporarily unavailable. Fortunately, Matt Hempey has created version 1.1, which went online this evening**

**GRINCH UPDATE 12/18: Some militant copyright holder has filed a DMCA Takedown request with YouTube, so this wonderful piece of (IMO) fair use parody was temporarily unavailable. Fortunately, Matt Hempey has created version 1.1, which went online this evening**

As I poked around YouTube to see what other bits of cynical commentary I could find, I found that the group which created this little gem, The Richter Scales, has been busy singing their unique sharp commentary for a while. Check out this equally funny piece (which hasn’t quite gone viral—34,000 views since September) about the sub-prime debt melt-down:

This particular one strikes a chord (sorry ) because the song on which it is based, “There’s a Fine, Fine Line (Between Love and a Waste of Time)” from Avenue Q, was written by my friend and college classmate, Bobby Lopez, who just might just be the youngest composer to win a Tony Award for best score, which he and collaborator Jeff Marx shared in 2004 for Avenue Q. The world is, indeed small.

And it gets smaller.

With a little more poking, I discovered that The Richter Scales are based right here in San Francisco. They’re quite the motley crew of former a cappella singers from various universities. Naturally, since my alma mater has something of an a cappella “problem” (15 singing groups on one campus will do that), I figured I might find a few, and, sure enough, there’s friend Nils Erdmann, a year ahead of me and a member of the elite Senior mens group the Yale Whiffenpoofs. A cappella singing was maybe the highlight of my undergraduate experience, and my group, Out of the Blue, is still going strong—some would say stronger, now that that my voice is but a distant memory!—and celebrating its 20th Anniversary this year. With some 200 or so alumni, there will be a run on hotel rooms in New Haven for the event….)

And now it comes full circle: A cappella singing seems to be somewhat addictive for those of us who indulged in it in college, and just the other night, an old friend from school asked me if I’d sing background on a project her band was working on. Little did I know the evidence would be caught on tape—complete with a street-side serenade and the resultant reaction from our Mission crowd:

And now for the clincher: The Richter Scales have quite the sense of humor (as witness their great “I Hate A Cappella”), but they’re even tougher on the Tech industry. Earlier this year, they were nominated for a CARA award (by CASA, the Contemporary A capella Society of America, who else?) for “I’ve Got Mail”.

Enjoy.**If the Grinch lets you.**

The Bigots Are Comings! The Bigots Are Coming!

James G. Beldock — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 18:55:48 +0000

My friend Irshad Manji, whom I have blogged about before (“Catalyst in Chief: A Voice Worth Listening To” and “The Catalyst Strikes Again”), wrote a great piece in the Washington Post and Newsweek’s On Faith column yesterday. As usual, she is thoughtful and and respectful, and ultimately reassuring in her insistence on a reasoned dialogue within Islam about what it means to be a Muslim.

She and her colleagues have formed Project Ijtihad, which seeks to encourage discussion, debate, and independent thinking about what Islam should and should not mean to its believers. Ijtihad (Arabic اجتهاد IPA: [ iʤti'hæːd]) is originally a word of technical legal origin for the process of reaching a legal conclusion by direct interpretation (i.e. independent analysis) of legal sources, as opposed to blindly following the decisions of others (its opposite is, tellingly, Taqlid (Arabic تَقْليد IPA: [ taqlīd ]) which means “immitation”). Interestingly, the word ijtihad shares is etymologically related to jihad (Arabic: جهاد IPA: [ ʤi'hæːd]), which means struggle. The mission of Project Ijtihad? Incite debate. (“Struggle!”)

Irshad (lower right) with Craig Kielburger, President,

FreeTheChildren and StudentsEffectingChange
Irshad (right) with Bono

No sooner does Irshad’s piece run on line than the bigots and pedants come out in droves to comment. We’ll start with the pedants, who mindlessly quote mid-millennial Muslim conservative thinkers (mostly writing after the twelfth century, a.d.). Nobody actually pays attention to arguments Irshad is making that it was pre-twelfth century Islam that was the seat of open and honest debate and intellectual curiosity. They (her critics) just blindly post quotations from all of these reactionary, conservative voices as if she never made her argument in the first place. It’s almost amusingly pathetic.

And of course there were several crackpot posts from people attacking Irshad for being a woman. Or for being a lesbian. Or for having a brain. Or an opinion. There was, in short, the usual display of small-binded bigotry for which the whole of Islam is occasionally mistaken. They (the bigots) give Islam a bad name and a bad reputation, and every time they attack as they have on the Washington Post’s website in response to Irshad’s column, they further prove the point that debate and introspection is what is most desperately needed in Islam today. (“Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” said Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.)

Since the Washington Post’s commenting system is running several hours behind, I’ll copy the comment I made here–especially because of the irony of the tagline of Islamica Magazine (which supposedly is “Opening Minds Everywhere”), where a scathing review of Irshad’s book recently ran.

Why is it that anyone who bravely raises her voice to seek reason, discussion, or tolerance within Islam immediately becomes the target of such vitriol? I suppose I don’t object to the reasoned (if intensely verbose) review of her book by Haroon Moghul, which someone was “clever” enough to cut and paste above (thus flagrantly violating US copyright law . Twice. (Incidentally, the review was originally published in Islamica Magazine, whose tag line reads “Opening Minds Everywhere.” Irony.) But the intense desire of the others who speak out above and insist on flinging mud at Ms. Manji for her person

Update: my colleague Pascal Levensohn, whom I’ve blogged about before (No Reason to be Board) has just posted his own response to Irshad’s column and the attendant reader response. (Full disclosure: although we knew each other long before, and indeed participated in an Aspen Institute seminar on Islam with Irshad long before, Pascal now sits on the Board of Directors of ShotSpotter.)

Catalyst In Chief: A Voice Worth Listening To

James G. Beldock — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 06:25:00 +0000

I’ve been meaning to blog about my friend, Irshad Manji, for a long time now. I first met Irshad at the Aspen Institute, where she and I took a seminar in leadership taught by long-time White House adviser, David Gergen, now Professor of Public Service at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and Editor-at-Large at US News & World Report.

Irshad is perhaps best known for writing the controversial
The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith, a work which has brought her accolades, criticism, and a fatwa. Irshad is no shrinking violet: despite her faith and profound Muslim identity, she has been the target of more criticism than I care to recount, and the fatwa certainly doesn’t make her life any easier. But no amount of criticism and no number of threats will cause her to soften her message: that Islam has forgotten its egalitarian and tolerant roots, and that Modern Islam has a lot to learn from the more open and inclusive societies.

Just under a year ago, Irshad taught a seminar as part of the Socrates Society of the Aspen Institute entitled “Reforming Islam?” and I found myself both refreshed by her willingness to confront those who disagree with her and troubled by the resistance so much of the Muslim world appears to harbor towards her and those who, like Irshad, are willing to question both their own assumptions and those of their fellow Muslims. [Note to the orthographically scrutinous: there is a QUESTION MARK--an interrogation point, an eroteme--in the title of this seminar! Irshad is asking a question (should we reform? who is we? what is reform?), not stating a position.]

The seminar centered on Irshad’s core thesis: that the concept of ijtihad must return to Islamic discourse. Ijtihad, originally a narrow Islamic legal term for making legal decisions based on interpretation of independent legal texts, has a broader meaning relating to independent and interpretation. Irshad has adopted the term and created Project Ijtihad of which she is the Chief Catalyst. Fortunately, she’s not the only one calling for independent thought and interpretation: Muqtedar Kahn’s excellent website has superb material.

This afternoon, as I drove about running errands trying to recover from the weekend’s onslaught of tryptophan, I heard Irshad’s voice on the radio. BBC World Service’s excellent Heart and Soul ran a program called “The Future Of Islam – Or Just ‘Islam Lite’?” As usual, Irshad did her cause proud. More interesting were the other Muslim thought leaders, who agreed with Irshad to one degree or another: Prof. Tariq Ramadan is a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University and was the subject of a number of news stories when his US Visa was revoked in 2004 when he was teaching at Notre Dame. And even Saira Khan, runner-up in the UK’s version of The Apprentice.

Irshad has her critics, and many of them could be heard throughout this thoughtful and well-balanced BBC program. One of them makes the excellent point that, even if Irshad is too far “out there” for mainstream Muslims to accept, the very nature of her “extremism” will cause others with more moderate but nevertheless reformist voices to appear less strident and less extreme in comparison. That’s something of a back-handed complement if ever I’ve heard one, but they all miss the point: what Irshad wants, what she strives for, is the very dialogue in which all of her critics are engaging.

So Irshad is Catalyzing precisely the ijtihad and the discourse she so correctly proclaims Islam needs. And, despite their dissent, even her critics have succumbed: they are engaging in intelligent debate and consideration of her ideas. And the ideas of others. And that’s precisely what ijtihad is all about. Mission accomplished.

ShotSpotter on the Front Page of the Washington Post!

James G. Beldock — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 06:06:00 +0000

I don’t usually blog about my work directly, if only because there’s a link to it up above. But it’s also not every day that your company finds its way onto the front page of a major national newspaper. The article (“Gunshot Sensors are Giving D.C. Police Jump on Suspects”) tells the story of the large deployment of ShotSpotter technology in Washington, DC by the Metropolitan Police Department and the FBI.

So today I’m going to brag a bit: ShotSpotter systems are now deployed in cities nationwide, from Los Angeles, CA to Washington, DC, and they’re saving lives and helping police make arrest. ShotSpotter systems really do make a difference (60-80% reduction in gunfire rates in coverage areas, 30% reduction in violent crime rates in some areas we cover, we helped FBI and local authorities catch the Ohio Sniper back in 2003-2004), and its gratifying when the press picks up the facts and–for once–makes the front page news out of some good news.

A Tail of Two Economies

James G. Beldock — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 05:28:00 +0000

This is not a good century to be a broadcaster.

If you’re not familiar with Chris Anderson, the Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine, you’re missing someone with a profound understanding of the changing media economy. And he has the facts to back himself up. I’ve been reading his stuff for a while, first in Wired and then on his blog, and was pleased to find
his new book, The Long Tail, at my local Barnes & Noble this evening. It inspired me to do some digging…

Broadcast television had its worst week in recorded history last week (Chris points to this CNN story; Clay Shirky predicted this as far back as 1999 in a piece presaging the “Death of Mass Media”

Troop-to-Task Analysis: There Aren’t Enough Jews to Control Everything They Say We Control!

James G. Beldock — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 04:33:00 +0000

Jews control the American economy. And we control the European Economy. For that matter, we control all the banks in the world. And, the media. (Which makes me wonder: since not all Jews are Liberals, and since the Liberals supposedly control the media, what do Republican Jews do with their time while the Liberal Jews are busy controlling the media?)

The absurditity of these contentions barely merits a blog post. But at the risk of linking to some people whose thoughts I don’t think much of, no amount of my scorn will stop the likes of this guy, whom you might otherwise know for writing the film score to Zorba the Greek, from continuing to trumpet his theories. Or these people. Or these guys at www.nukeisrael.com. (Wow.)

These and other contentions weren’t exactly at the forefront of my mind this evening as I drove home, but the first of two pieces of the puzzle did fall into place. Terry Gross interviewed Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks on NPR’s Fresh Air today about his new book, Fiasco, which delivers detail both the intelligence failures leading up to the Iraq War and the failure of our civilian military oversight to approve appropriate troop levels after the ground war had ended. Apparently, CENTCOM performed repeated “Troop-to-Task” analyses during the early days of the post-invasion period, and repeatedly reached the conclusion that there were far too few troops on the ground to “win the peace.” This wasn’t news. The Goverment Accounting Office (GAO) had said as much in 2003, according to Mark Thompson and Michael Duffy’s September 1, 2003 TIME magazine cover story “Is the Army Stretched Too Thin?”. The concept of a “Troop-to-Task” analysis has been used to analyze the appropriate level of resources required for various tasks–from revisionist Classical Historians rethinking reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire (Edward Luttwak quoted in Isaiah Wilson III’s Providing for an Uncommon Defense: Attaining a Sustainable U.S. Security Strategy for the 21st Century) to modern military planners. As our ongoing fight against the insurgency in Iraq proves, those who ignore military planners’ Troop-to-Task analyses do so at the peril of their very credibility.

The second piece of the puzzle fell into place later this evening, when I noticed that my friend, colleague, and fellow Aspen Institute Socrates Society “lifer,” Pascal Levensohn, had made a recent post to his excellent blog regarding the actual numbers of Jews in the world. The numbers are about as small worldwide as I think I expected (about 13.3m worldwide), but shockingly low in Spain, where, as Pascal points out, the average Spaniard will tell you there are between 100k and 1m, but in fact there are a mere 12k. All in all, we still make up just 1.9% of the world’s population. (It was 2% when I was growing up. Perhaps they rounded up?) And focusing on the US, where 5.7m Jews live, an amazing 2m live in New York City. Pascal’s numbers, by the way, come from The Jewish Agency for Israel.

Now for the question: if we Jews are busy controlling the economy of the US, and Europe, and all the banks, and the media, and, and, and…, what does the Troop-to-Task analysis say about these duties? Let’s see: That’s One Jew for every 49 others worldwide. We’d better eat our Wheaties! Maybe it’s not just people. How about dollars? The world GDP in 2004 was $41 trillion, according to the World Bank. That means each Jew has to control his $3.1m of annual GDP. And if 35% of Jews are younger than 18 (just a rough estimate), then that’s more like $4.5m for each Jewish adult. Every year. So my wife and I control $9m annually. Somehow. The numbers don’t work. By the way, global GDP per capita is only $9,500, according to the CIA FactBook. (And by the way, there are about $500 billion in banking assets in they Cayman Islands. My “share” of those assets–which I’m supposed to be busy controlling–would be about $38,000. I’m way behind.) So a Troop-to-Task analysis makes the contention that the Jews Control the World all the more ludicrous.

Now, here’s a guy who claims the Jews control the pornography industry. That’s a different sort of Troop-to-Task problem, isn’t it?


Irshad (lower right) with Craig Kielburger, President, FreeTheChildren and StudentsEffectingChange	Irshad (right) with Bono