I, Lamont: January 2011

Friday, January 28, 2011

The Narragansett story

Imagine an industry with hundreds of competitors, including several multibillion corporations with fat marketing budgets, national reach, and nuclear-powered partnerships with complementary businesses. Add to that an archaic system of bringing product to market that gives great power to distributors and independent retailers. Finally, top it off with a customer base that not only obsesses about product quality, but is also incredibly sensitive to price.

No, I'm not talking about media. Rather, this is a story about beer. And while you may think it would be crazy to try to break into any business having the characteristics described above, that's exactly what the people behind the Narragansett Beer Co. have been doing for the past five years -- with a fair amount of success, as I learned today from one of the company's executives. Narragansett's V.P. of Sales Bill Heslam happened to be at the local package store when I was picking up a half-case, and kindly answered some of my questions about the revival of the brand (established in 1890, it went through a period of decline and was shut down in the 1980s, before new investors brought it back in 2006) as well as recent wins, including a well-regarded industry prize and expansion into a new region. Toward the end of the interview, Heslam also discussed how the company uses technology to give it an edge.

Here's the entire video, shot in Auburndale, Massachusetts:

More videos from my blog about entrepreneurship and innovation:

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Goodbye, Vietnam

Friendly.

Open.

Buzzing.

Beautiful.

Deep.

Hard-working.

Laughing.

Tasty.

These are just some of the words that came to mind as I looked back at our three-week G-Lab mission.

Thanks for all of the memories:

More of my blog posts about Vietnam, Taiwan, and China:

Monday, January 24, 2011

Vietnamese calligraphy may look like Chinese, but ...

Spotted on a Saigon storefront in district 1, in the week before Tết:

Doesn't look much different than what you'd see in Beijing or Taipei around this time, right? A four-character blessing for a happy and prosperous new year.

Except for one thing: Aside from the pictogram in the circle, those aren't Chinese characters. They are calligraphy in Vietnam's quốc ngữ alphabet, which is based on Roman letters and Portuguese. The text reads "Vạn Sự Như Ý", and corresponds to the Chinese phrase 萬事如意 ("May 10,000 things go according to your will").

The Vietnamese alphabet was developed by Jesuit missionaries in the 17th century, and replaced the Chinese-based character system called Chữ Nôm that was once used for written Vietnamese. Even though the quốc ngữ alphabet has been used for centuries, the Chinese influence is still strong, thanks to Vietnam's and China's shared cultural heritage and long historical association. The sharp corners on "N" and "V" in the example above help differentiate it from Chinese characters, but I've seen examples of Vietnamese calligraphy that so resemble Chinese "grass script" calligraphy (草書, sample here) that the Roman letters are nearly impossible to discern.

As for spoken Vietnamese, I spent about a month listening to Pimsleur Vietnamese CDs before coming to the country, in order to get a feel for the language. Now that I'm here, it's interesting to hear the similarities between Vietnamese and Chinese. Both are tonal languages (four for Mandarin, five for Vietnamese). Vietnamese also employs measure words, which are called "classifiers" in the Vietnamese dictionary I use. In addition, I've noticed that the two languages have certain words that sound very similar, and I can't help but wonder if Vietnamese borrowed some terms from its neighbor to the North. Some examples include the terms for America ("Mỹ" in Vietnamese and "meiguo/美國" in Chinese) and electricity ("điện" in Vietnamese, "dian/電" in Chinese).

French has also had an influence on spoken Vietnamese. I hear it all of the time in words for food, beverages, and some technical terms: wine ("vang"), chocolate ("sôcôla") and cake (sometimes listed as "ga to").

As for the English influence, I heard an interesting admission from several Vietnamese friends: They use English for business emails and certain terms. Why? "Because it's more direct" and they don't have to worry about how to properly phrase the Vietnamese, which apparently can vary significantly depending on the relation or stature of the recipient.

See my other blog posts that relate to Vietnam and China:

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Google's spam and content farm problem is not "better than it has ever been"

(Update below) I use Google Alerts to keep abreast of certain topics, such as my MIT program and mentions of my name. The automated search results that are emailed to me are interesting, particularly the ones based on my name. They almost always look like this:

The results are garbage, filled with contextually unrelated and bizarre terms such as "Lamont Arizona" or "lamont rupture disk." The links in the screenshot above take users to a page filled with links about Georgia real estate and references to many random terms (including my name), while the Danish site contains scores of random terms that include my last name (such as product or business names -- "Lamont auto", etc.), but no links. They contain no useful information about me or any other topic, yet pages like them are generated every week and added to Google's index. I looked back at my email archive, and found that pages created more than a year ago are still active.

What is their purpose? Pages like this are machine-generated spam, designed to get eyeballs on pages filled with advertisements, or to boost the search-engine ranking of linked sites. Google's wonderful search engine depends on language in headlines and page text as well as inbound links to determine which sites deserve to be at the top of search engine results when certain terms are typed in. That's great for quality sites which have lots of inbound links and deserve to be at the top because they are likely to be the most relevant and useful for users.

The problem is the system has been effectively reverse-engineered by spammers and content farms who are adding little, if any value with spam pages and poorly written trash or copied content that are boxed in by ads and affiliate links. In some cases, the pages don't contain any ads, but lots of links to other pages that someone wants to raise in the search engine rankings. Links and search-engine ranking translates to money if the keyword is popular or relates to something that people research online with the intention of buying. The ultimate prize for the spammers and content farms is getting their garbage on the first page of Google search results. The fact that quality pages (or the original content) that people are more likely to be interested in are pushed down or off the page are of little concern to them.

So I read with some interest a post by Google's Matt Cutts on the company's recent efforts to fight the problems described above. He said:

January brought a spate of stories about Google’s search quality. Reading through some of these recent articles, you might ask whether our search quality has gotten worse. The short answer is that according to the evaluation metrics that we’ve refined over more than a decade, Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness.

Say what? I don't know what sorts of metrics Google is using, but I see poor quality results showing up in almost all of the searches that I perform. Not always on the first page -- on a Google search for my own name, there are enough high quality results (my blogging and social networking activity, plus references to other people with the same name) that push the garbage off the first page of search engine results. Still, starting at the top of page 3 of the results, I see results for bogus/scammy paid ringtone and "fast download" schemes attached to copyrighted technical mp3s that I produced for Computerworld when I was an editor there. Besides being illegal, such pages are not the original source of the mp3s (the pages on Computerworld.com are) yet the scraped content repackaged into paid services ranks higher than the originating site, which offers the mp3s for free.

For popular terms, however, the garbage routinely outranks the real thing. For instance, when you search for "online education," affiliate garbage dominates the first page of results. I am sure practically everyone reading this post has had a similar experience, attempting to conduct some serious research using Google and on the first page of results being presented with trick sites or utter drivel. It wastes users' time, and in some cases gives people false or misleading information. Organized hacking and crime rings have also joined the party -- for one of the bogus mp3 sites I obsrved, the credit card payment server is located in Russia. How many innocent people have attempted to pay for something through this system, and have ended up having their credit card information stolen or malware downloaded to their computers?

I also found it strange that Google is bragging about quality while the main problems that people were criticizing the company for in December and January -- low-quality content farms and scrapers -- still clog up search results (see one humorous example described on this Hacker News thread). Certain keywords are basically useless to find quality content on the first page of results (Wikipedia sometimes ranks high, but the quality is often questionable). SEO-driven content farms have simply taken over.

To Cutts' credit, he tried to respond to some of the questions and criticisms on Hacker News, but it is premature to crow about "quality" when spam, low-quality information, and other garbage fills search engine results. The problem clearly has not been fixed.

Update: Matt Cutts and debated the definition for "quality" and what an increase in spam and content farms does to Google's quality metrics. Part of the Twitter thread can be accessed here.

Related posts:

Disclosure: I am not a spammer or content farm, but I do use Google Adsense and Amazon Associates, and rewrite my headlines to improve their search engine ranking.

Sources and research: Google, Paid Content, Techmeme, my own experience.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Vũng Tàu: Reflections on Vietnam's past

Over the weekend, on a break from my MIT G-Lab project, I traveled to the coastal city of Vũng Tàu for a little R&R. Hanging out with a book by the beach was nice, but I also had a couple of special learning experiences. One was a conversation with a Vietnamese man from Vũng Tàu (described in the video, below) who remembered the bitter years following the fall of the South Vietnam government in 1975. The other was an unexpected historical relic in the forested hills above the coast: An overgrown French military installation dating from the early 1900s.

The installation consisted of two batteries of mortars or howitzers, concealed by earthen embankments and trees. I saw four guns, but there may have been more, as one of the batteries was very difficult to enter owing to undergrowth.

The first battery was located off an access road that I happened to wander down, and aside from some lizards, was totally deserted. It was hidden from view by design -- a plaque explained that the artillery pieces were installed in the late 19th or early 20th century to guard shipping in Vung Tao and Saigon (Vũng Tàu is located near the mouth of the Saigon River, where ships coming to and from the port of Saigon have to pass). There was also an above-ground bunker, encased in vines and trees, as well as some underground rooms and what I believe used to be an underground ammunition shed next to the howitzers. A ten-minute walk away, there is a Jesus statue on the tallest point overlooking the town, that is incongruously flanked by two much longer guns that I also believe are French. The statue and tourist access stairs were was built in the last 10 years, but before they existed the long guns were placed on the high point, with a direct view of any ships approaching Saigon from the north or east.

One of the hidden howitzers had a serial number dated 1893 and then an inscription that read, "R 1901 No. 3, 1C/496". They must weigh three or four tons apiece, and I don't believe a horse team could have pulled them up the hill -- perhaps some sort of temporary railroad was used? In any case, I doubt they will ever move again. But they do serve as testament to the economic and military value that the French placed upon this part of their Indochinese empire. More than 100 years later, the port continues to power Vietnam's economic growth -- when I was there, I saw a continuous stream of container vessels, commodity freighters, tugboats, and fishing vessels of all shapes and sizes streaming past Vũng Tàu.

The first video describes some of my reflections about Vietnam, and shows the French howitzers as I discovered them. I have also included some still photos of the guns as well as a walkthrough of the small bunker. (Update: A reader sent me a link to a Belgian forum that has details of the guns origins as well as photos of other batteries in the area)

All of the photos above are licensed under a Creative Commons Sharealike license. You can use them for free for commercial purposes, but you must credit Ian Lamont and link the photos to http://ilamont.blogspot.com .

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

"To get the real taste of Vietnam, you have to be in Vietnam to try it"

So I'm in Vietnam right now for a school project. We're based in one of the outer districts of Saigon where few foreigners tread, but there's nevertheless a lot of things to experience here -- particularly when it comes to food.

From the moment I arrived, I've made it a point to try all sorts of restaurants, dishes, and snacks, some of which I have documented on Twitter. Today, I managed to have Vietnamese variations on soup for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Not one of the meals was advertised as "pho" -- the classic rice noodle soup made from dry noodles, that are often served at Vietnamese restaurants in the States (the inset picture is of some beef pho that I had last week). But two of today's soups were quite close to pho -- the pork knuckle hủ tiểu (flat rice noodle that retain some moisture before being made into soup) I had at a street stall for breakfast (see video below) as well as the Bun Bo Hue (Hue-style beef noodle soup, made with rice noodles that look like spaghetti) I had for dinner. Like pho, the hủ tiểu and Hue soups used clear broths and had similar vegetable condiments.

The odd soup today of the bunch was Bun Ca Re (curry noodles) at a vegetarian restaurant for lunch. It was nothing like the clear-brothed soups. The curry broth was thick and had a sweet curry taste, and had huge lumps of potato in it as well as fine rice noodles that had absorbed the broth. It needed extra spice. This was not a problem, as the vegetarian restaurant, like practically all Vietnamese soup restaurants I've been to, puts out a little dish of green chiles to add to the broth, according to the diner's tastes.

All of the soups were cheap. The cost breakdown was as follows, converted from Vietnamese dong:

Hủ tiểu breakfast: $1
Curry soup lunch: $1.50
Hue beef noodle soup dinner, with a bottle of beer: Just under $2.50

The following video gives an idea of what it's like to eat at a street stall. Note that array of condiments (limes, chiles, sauces, and leafy vegetables). The ingredients of the soup, besides broth and noodles, were pork knuckle, garlic, deep-fried shallots and garlic, black pepper, some chopped scallions, and many other fresh spices I couldn't identify, but greatly enjoyed eating!

Thursday, January 06, 2011

ACICS accreditation and for-profit education: What's at stake

One aspect of for-profit education that I've been wondering about is how so many of the schools manage accreditation, considering the seemingly endless trail of high-profile abuses and shady practices emanating from University of Phoenix and others.

Accreditation is crucial for two reasons. First, it helps with marketing. Students assume "accreditation" means degree programs are legitimate and/or have gained an independent stamp of quality. Second, accreditation allows schools to participate in Title IV financial aid programs (the ones that require you to fill out a FAFSA form for grants, federal loan programs, etc.) which have brought billions of dollars in profit to UOP, Everest, DeVry, and other for-profits.

Thanks to Frontline, I knew that some for-profit schools "bought" regional accreditation by taking over failing non-profit schools. One famous example involved an obscure school with 312 students known as Franciscan University of the Prairies. It was bought in 2005 by Bridgepoint Education, renamed "Ashford University", and turned into an online university with 54,000 students. It was nevertheless able to keep its regional accreditation from the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools (details here). Google it now, and the first thing you'll see in the listing is "Ashford University is a top accredited university." It's a marketing cue that conveys legitimacy, even though the accreditation was gained through a financial takeover, as opposed to an academic program review.

But there's another path to accreditation, if taking over a regional accredited school proves too difficult or costly, or the schools in question otherwise want to buttress the reputations of their degrees and programs: The for-profits get "national" accreditation. Over the years, national accrediting agencies have sprung up around niche educational fields (business, nursing, etc.) to serve community colleges and small for-profit technical schools that offer live classes. In recent years, however, large for-profits (including many online universities) have latched onto these bodies, knowing that students don't know the difference between regional and national accrediting bodies. For instance, the MBA and other business degrees offered by the University of Phoenix (owned by Apollo Group) are accredited by the Accreditation Council for Business Schools and Programs (ACBSP), whose membership is dominated by small community colleges, international schools and for-profits. (Ashford is also a listed member of ACBSP, although it does not have accreditation from it -- although if its regional accreditation falls through, it will need a backup plan.)

Some for-profits even control their own national accreditation body, the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS). The current ACICS board is filled with for-profits such as Education Corporation of America, Corinthian College (Everest Institute), CollegeAmerica Services, and Lincoln Educational Services. Is it a conflict of interest? As noted by for-profit education industry critic Steve Eisman, "The scandal here is exactly akin to the rating agency role in subprime securitizations."

Further down the page, I've embedded a presentation by Eisman, a short-seller who is betting against for-profit schools. Despite his obvious interest in seeing the for-profits decline in value, his assessments of the industry should be seen by students -- much of his criticism is valid (Note that I did check Eisman's data about accreditation against other sources, including ACICS, ACBSP, The Department of Education accreditation website as well as the websites of the for-profit schools themselves).

Steve Eisman - Ira Sohn Conference - May 2010

Update 3/21/2011: Another interesting approach by an online diploma mill called "Lorenz University" to the pesky accreditation problem - use IAAFOE and ACTDE. Authentic-sounding acronyms, until you look at who operates the websites ...

For further reading on this topic, I would suggest the following posts:

Tuesday, January 04, 2011

Saigon: First impressions

So I've been in Saigon, Vietnam, for less than 12 hours. I've seen the streets at night, during the ride from the airport, and also this morning, when I took a 30-minute stroll around the residential neighborhood where my hotel is located.

So far, street life reminds me a lot of southern Taiwan -- small cities like Tainan (台南）or Jiayi (Chiayi/嘉義). The buildings look the same, there are a huge number of scooters, and the people look very similar. Street vendors are everywhere, mostly selling food (including some Chinese items, like giant steamed dumplings/包子) but there are also touches of Vietnam's French colonial past -- I spotted several vendors selling French-style baguettes (see inset photo).

I am also going to be taking a close look at the media scene while I am here. Here's what I tweeted this morning:

@newsio: social media in Vietnam: Skype works well off-peak, YouTube uploads seem very slow, Twitter/Hootsuite seem OK, Facebook DOA.

Here is some video from the walk this morning. Note that the traffic increases by about 10x by 9 am:

I, Lamont

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