I spent much of the summer of 1982 in Beijing. China was a very different place 30 years ago. Foreigners were rare, foreigners actually working in China for Chinese organizations were rarer still, and I was there to work. I was an editor at China Daily, the English language newspaper created for foreign visitors as a preferred alternative to allowing western publications into the country. The way I got the gig was simple: much of the reporting staff had been students of mine at Stanford the year before.

Once the decision was made to start China Daily, there was a need to find Chinese reporters who could write in English. Whoever was in charge decided it was easier to make English teachers into reporters than to teach Chinese reporters to speak and write English. So a deal was struck with Stanford and the University of Missouri to make reporters out of Chinese English teachers. That was my job.

My Chinese students back in 1981 were older and more motivated than my American students. Many of them had been imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution — banished to the countryside to build in former rice paddies the prisons which they then occupied. English teachers were especially suspect. In addition to working hard at journalism (there appeared to be little or no journalistic tradition in China at the time) my students nearly all got off-the-books jobs in Chinese restaurants and worked hardest of all learning to drive. Returning  with a California driver’s license was good for two jumps in pay grade in the China of 1982, where private cars were unknown. The only way to learn to drive in Beijing back then was by joining the Army.

This is all prelude to a story of one student’s experience at the Beijing City Hall on her return.  She had a reason to go to the City Hall, some business with the city government.  A guard at the door told her she couldn’t enter because her hair was too long. There was a law still on the books from the days of the Cultural Revolution that dictated precisely how long both men’s and women’s hair could be. You remember that look, along with the gray and green Mao jackets. The law was rarely enforced anymore, but this guard was a stickler. He barred her entrance to the building but then offered her a rubber band to hold her hair in a more acceptable manner. If she’d return the rubber band as she left the building the guard would let the woman proceed.

She told me her story that afternoon in the newsroom and I urged her to write about it, which she did, and lo the law was eventually repealed!

Understand this was a long time ago, before Tiananmen Square, and I don’t want to make too big a deal about it. But one person was able to change in a small way the lives of a billion people just by writing a story, which I think is pretty darned amazing.

But it probably wouldn’t have worked at Google.

I have a longtime reader who was banned from Google Groups for reasons he still does not understand.  I’ll let him take it from here:

To my knowledge I wasn’t part of any group at the time and certainly hadn’t “abused” any groups. No reason was given for my being banned. My only recourse was to go to this link.

Clicking on “contact” takes you here, where I’m allowed to fill in exactly one thing which is my email address.    I can’t give them any details or anything else. Not sure what good that would do anyway since they’ve never given me a reason why I was banned in the first place, so what would I really say?

Now I can’t even visit a Google Groups web page if I’m logged into Google. Of course if I log out of Google I can go there no problem.

Flash forward to the past week or so. Suddenly I’m getting craploads of spam in Arabic that is all getting through because it is coming from Google — Google Groups to be precise. I finally figured out it was Google Groups today and looked at the headers and see this link in them to unsubscribe.

Except guess what? I can’t go to that link because I’m banned from Google Groups!

As far as I can tell, all the “contact us” links on Google go here.

Since my issue doesn’t fall into any of these categories there isn’t any way for me to even contact Google to fix this problem. So now I’m getting 30 emails a day in Arabic with no way to contact Google to make them stop.

Best I can tell, this type of (Catch-22 — though he used a better word) is exactly what happens with Google no matter the product. I can’t see how they ever have any hope of having a product other than search if with the way they handle customer service. I mean in this case they are just brushing me off but it has been the same experience ever time I’ve dealt with them.

I’m also banned from Google Adsense and again I have no idea why. We’ve never done anything that was even marginally questionable much less tried to do anything abusive or illegal. As far as I can tell both bans are for life. Since they won’t tell me why or let me respond to them I’m just stuck.

They wouldn’t even lend him a rubber band.

This is a column about Weber barbeque grills, but the story came from a friend who is an engineer from Purdue University and I can’t let that pass without comment. There are other engineering schools but there is only one Purdue. It’s a place where student curiosity inevitably results in every piece of machinery being disassembled and some being reassembled, too. At Purdue it’s not that tearing stuff apart is a school requirement, the kids just can’t help themselves. This characteristic appears in varying degrees at other schools like Georgia Tech and Texas A&M, but Purdue does it with elan, they take stuff apart for fun.

Which brings us to Weber Kettle grills, which are proudly made in America. Weber gets away with this in a world where everything else is manufactured in China because grills — especially kettle-shaped grills — have a lot of air in them, occupy a lot of volume for their weight, and are therefore too expensive to ship from Asia. Weber Kettles are shipped unassembled, too, which means Weber’s labor rates (that would be you and me, working for free) are lower than China’s. It’s an American manufacturing success story. But it may be an endangered one.

Here’s how my friend explained it:

My charcoal grill has a propane starter.  I put in the charcoal, turn a knob, push a button, and 10 minutes later my charcoal is lit.  It is very nice.  My grill uses the small 14 oz propane bottles.  One summer I noticed my bottles were running out too fast.  There was a small leak in the control valve.  Weber sent me a new valve, for free.  It was a different type and design of valve.  They sent me some other parts to fit it to my grill properly.  One of the makers of their valves had sent their production overseas and the quality was suffering. Weber found another domestic maker of valves and had redesigned their products to use them. You know me, I have an insatiable curiosity.  I examined the old, leaking propane valve from my grill.  I did some Google’ing and found the manufacturer.  Most of their products go into small propane heating products, like the stoves in RV’s.  Weber was smart enough to figure out this supplier was now making lower quality products.  

While this sounds like a success story (bad valve discovered and replaced) what prompted my friend to write me was the notice he received yesterday of a class action lawsuit concerning these defective valves, which you’ll note have already been replaced. If he chooses to join the class, my friend has a chance to get as much as $5 back from Weber in addition to the parts he has already received. Reading the fine print he noticed that the law firm pressing the suit will earn up to $1 million for its trouble.

Here’e the key to this class action suit: the suspect valves were of foreign origin while Weber advertised its grills as made in America. They have have been made here, but one part was of foreign origin, hence the claim of false advertising.

Lawyers in the audience will argue that Weber shouldn’t have cut corners and this experience will make them both more careful and more honest in future. Maybe. Or Weber could go the other way entirely and do what every other American manufacturer seems to be doing and reincorporate as a holding company in the Cayman Islands with a separately-incorporated operating company in Hong Kong and a sales and distribution corporation in the U.S. that I guarantee will never — ever — report a dollar of taxable profit.

I don’t have a solution to offer here. I’m not suggesting that we first kill all the lawyers. Nor am I saying that manufacturers shouldn’t have to stand behind their products or advertise them honestly. But the system as it is running right now doesn’t seem to be working as well as it should at helping U.S. manufacturing employment.

What do you think?

Was I the only one to be surprised by Apple this week announcing the arrival in the summer of yet another new version of OS X?  It’s my belief OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion doesn’t represent an Apple triumph but is more damage control and preparing us for iTV.

This OS X release was not only unexpected, it’s an aberration in Apple’s relentless process of showing that it isn’t Microsoft with Redmond’s tortured OS releases.  A new OS version from Apple has come every 18-24 months, yet here we are with Mountain Lion — POW! — less than a year after the launch of OS X 10.7 Lion. What gives?

For all the hype, Lion has been less than the success Apple hoped it would be. Support has been a pain in the ass for this release that still feels like beta software.  Maybe Cupertino decided that a whole new release, rather than a service pack, was required.

Further, I’ve heard that customers have complained about iOS features they don’t see in Lion and wish were there.

Certainly Apple will be rolling into Mountain Lion all the cool touchscreen, digital media management, and distribution features along with hardware support for iTV and other new hardware platforms. This virtually guarantees, I guess, that the TV is on its way for Christmas 2012.

If this is the big OS X/iOS merge, what happens to those separate products?  If distribution, backups, and updates are all through iCloud, maybe it doesn’t matter.

Some of YouTube’s more popular producers of original videos are quietly reporting their viewership numbers have suddenly dropped. The problem isn’t that viewer habits are changing. We’re still in love with cute kittens and people in pain. The problem is click fraud and online video producers are finally getting busted for it.

I was told last week that least some of the numbers generated by more than a few YouTube video makers who deliver hundreds of thousands of views on a regular basis come from banks of servers and zombie PCs pretending to surf. Such click fraud was a huge issue a few years ago for the Google search engine, but YouTube has separate management, remember, and maybe has different values, too.  Ever bigger numbers approaching a billion total views per day have been part of the YouTube mystique, so looking the other way may have been part of the YouTube M.O., not that advertisers will be cheered.

I remember in the late 1990s Microsoft honcho Steve Ballmer telling me how Redmond wanted back then to be the most pirated software company. Though I’m sure he wouldn’t say that today as CEO, Ballmer’s logic was clear: piracy is free distribution with zero support costs and once a country can be made to enforce copyright laws huge bucks almost instantly follow as penalties are paid. So too, YouTube benefited from click fraud by showing huge numbers that discouraged competitors and attracted advertisers, even though advertisers were actually getting less for their money.

But now it appears that YouTube is ready to grow up. Pumping Google’s own cash into professional content for the first time, the company may no longer be willing to tolerate video click fraud since it would be stealing from itself.

Some producers report views per-video that are down as much as 90 percent. All it takes is for YouTube to apply a filter that rejects clicks coming too fast from the same IP or MAC address. No citations are issued, just an algorithmic reduction of numbers. And no producer fights it because, of course, they are in the wrong to do so.

Yet many successful YouTube producers who do this trick mistakenly think it isn’t against the rules or even wrong to do.

Kids.

So the YouTube ecosystem is in flux.  It will be interesting to see how YouTube changes in coming months as producers, if they are to remain in business, have to get viewers the old fashioned way, by earning them.

More news later today on my new/old book project, but for a moment let’s look at what’s happening in Greece, because I’ve become quite convinced that markets have gone completely mad and the world economy is about to suffer for that madness. In fact I am sure of it. That’s because stocks are up today on word of a second debt bailout for Greece — a bailout that has no more hope of standing than the one before it. Greece is bound to default, beginning a likely fall of economic dominoes across Europe. And while that news is not explicitly about technology, it will certainly affect all of us interested in technology, because Greece is screwed along with much of southern Europe.

Here are the facts — not my opinions, facts.

In January, Greece’s tax revenue from its Value Added Tax (VAT) collapsed by 18.7 percent from a year earlier.

The VAT rate for food and drink rose from 13 percent to 23 percent in September to comply with demands of the European Union, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund.

The effect of this boosted tax revenue has been overwhelmed by the contraction of Greece’s economy with overall tax receipts (not just the VAT) falling 7 percent compared to a year ago when they were also considered to be terrible, just not quite as terrible as they are now.

Meanwhile, 60,000 small firms and family businesses have gone bankrupt in Greece since the summer, this in a country with only 11 million people. Imagine a quarter of all businesses disappearing from Ohio over just three months, because that’s the equivalent.

The Greek budget deficit is stuck near 8-9 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) because the country’s economic base is shrinking so fast.

Yet shares are rising on markets across Europe supposedly on the idea that Greece will this time fulfill its obligations under the new debt accord — obligations that will continue until 2020 when the country will still be prostrate with public debt at 120 percent of GDP — if everything goes perfectly?

Now my opinion: Greece is screwed. The new debt accord won’t hold, austerity measures won’t be fully implemented, and the Greek government will formally default within six months.  And stocks are rising as powerful people and organizations prop up share prices just long enough to unload their own positions, leaving the little guys to drown.

Far better to just let Germany take over the payments and own that Greek jalopy outright.

But that’s just one geek’s opinion. What the heck do I know? Yet I must speak up because I sure don’t see any of this in today’s business press.

Today is the 200th birthday of author Charles Dickens, yet also an oddly appropriate moment to announce a new edition of my book Accidental Empires in a very 21st century format.

Late last year a reader pointed out to me that 2012 is the 20th anniversary of Accidental Empires which was, in its own way, a pretty influential book. Accidental Empires was my attempt to blatantly apply the breezy style of Adam Smith’s The Money Game to the personal computer industry. And somehow it worked, because the book was eventually published in 18 languages and was a bestseller in several countries including the U.S. and Japan.

The book was also the basis for my 1996 TV miniseries Triumph of the Nerds, which has aired in more than 60 countries.

My reader wondered why there wasn’t an eBook edition?  Good question. The printed book technically remains in print, yet there is no eBook.

Well it turns out that eBooks had yet to be invented in 1989 when I signed the original contract with publisher Addison-Wesley, and there were no sharp-eyed lawyers working that day to claim all rights on all platforms, invented or yet to be invented.  So the eBook rights are mine.

Now here‘s my dilemma. I could rip up a pristine copy of the “updated” 1996 paperback edition, run that through my Fujitsu SnapScan scanner, and have the bones of an eBook edition almost instantly. Or I could spend a year or more to update the book for today’s readers, adding pictures (the original book had none) and some new chapters.

We’re not talking about a work of art here, but this is a book that some people feel pretty strongly about.  Dozens of company founders have told me over the years that they read it more than once on their way to the top (and sometimes back again). Hundreds of people have told me the book inspired them to find careers in technology or they used it to explain to their clueless loved ones what all the fuss was about. I could mess with the original text, sure, but doing so would surely upset someone.

And then it came to me — a whole new way to publish a new edition of Accidental Empires or any older but still popular book for that matter.  In an eBook edition I could add new material yet give readers the option to read the original text as published back in the 90’s or an updated text for today or even toggle back and forth.

But wait, there’s more!

Here’s where Charles Dickens enters the picture.  When his stories first appeared back in the 19th century, Dickens’ David Copperfield and Oliver Twist weren’t sold in bookshops, they were serialized in newspapers, unfolding one chapter at a time over weeks or months. The books came later.

I’ll do a 21st century version of the same thing, serializing Accidental Empires on the web.

So next month I’ll be starting a second blog with its own URL just for Accidental Empires.  I, Cringely will continue right here as ever (no changes at all), but on the book blog I will over several months publish — a chapter or so at a time — the entire 100,000-word book for the world to read, free of charge.

Like most blogs, this new one will allow reader comments. And it’s those comments I’ll use in part to update the work when it later appears in eBook form.  What happened to these people?  What stories do you remember? Where did it go from here? 

Once the entire book has been serialized, my friend and eBook expert Parampreet Singh (he of the Toronto Singhs, of course) and I will pick the best of these reader annotations along with several thousand words of new material I’ve been saving-up and publish what ought to be an enormous number of electrons — Accidental Empires Rebooted.

This will be, as usual, both a grand adventure and a crap shoot. To minimize our financial risk I’ll run ads on the new blog. But to avoid pitching adult diapers and electrolyte replacements alongside my life’s work I’d rather sell out the entire blog to a single tech advertiser like a Cisco or a Salesforce.com.

If you know any outfit that might like to participate in what should be an amazing publishing adventure, please pass it on.

Facebook last week announced its Initial Public Offering — exactly the event I said wouldn’t happen in one of my controversial predictions for 2012. But I’m sticking with my call on this one since we’re 2-3 months from the actual event and a lot can happen to screw things up between now and then. I’m pretty sure Facebook shares will be trading sometime this year, I just don’t think the company will have a traditional IPO.

Companies go public for three reasons: 1) to raise capital for various corporate purposes like acquisitions and paying down debt; 2) to secure the wealth of founders, giving their kids something to fight over, and; 3) because they have over 500 investors, secondary trading of shares is picking up and if they don’t go public under a process they control the SEC will force them to go public in a less-profitable event.  Facebook in its prospectus says reason one — the most cited reason by far for companies going public — does not apply to them. They don’t really need the money and plan to park it in T-bills, which if you think about it can only drag Facebook earnings down given current low interest rates.

Give us your money and we’ll do nothing with it.  Not only that, we’ll also use your money to hurt the value of your shares.

To be fair, sometimes companies go public just because they can. Remember the dot-com bubble?  In that period of irrational exuberance companies went public and their shares soared for awhile without regard to profitability or even having a real business model. So sometimes you take the money because it is obviously stupid money and if you don’t take it now you may never get another chance (yes, I’m talking about you, Webvan).

But that’s certainly not the case with Facebook, which is profitable and growing, has no debt, and has $3.5 billion already earning next to nothing in the bank.

Reason two for having an IPO — to secure the wealth of founders and early investors — is the reason Facebook gave for going public and that makes sense. After eight years of hard work everyone involved would like a liquidity event so they can buy a new house and car. There’s nothing wrong with this motivation except, given the lack of actual need for capital, it shows a misalignment of interests between Facebook management and new Facebook investors.  We are actually investing in their Ferraris.

Now maybe Facebook is the IPO of the century and none of this matters, but as a narrative for big institutional investors it’s a little shaky, especially when you see that after the IPO Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is younger than the IBM PC, will still control 57 percent of Facebook’s voting shares, in effect placing total voting and managerial control of a major public company in a single executive.  This is unprecedented for a company at this scale; even Bill Gates only owns 20-odd percent of Microsoft and had to answer to investors when he was CEO.

So this isn’t just the Facebook IPO, it is the Zuckerberg IPO.

Something similar to this happened back in 1988 when Dell Computer went public. Michael Dell was the Mark Zuckerberg of his era. At 24, Dell was even younger than Zuckerberg is today. Dell was smart and he was full of himself — but not so full that he thought he could carry the company offering on his shoulders alone.  With the encouragement of his investors and board, Dell hired some seasoned managers to help him take the company public, then later fired them all and went back to running the company as he saw fit.

Mark Zuckerberg wants to do the same thing that Michael Dell did, just minus the pro forma hiring and firing of suits.

It’s going to be a slog for Zuckerberg. For the next 2-3 months he’ll have to be everywhere, kissing ass while not appearing to be kissing ass, answering tons of boneheaded questions from people he doesn’t respect — people who will be primarily questioning his vision and fitness to lead.

Zuckerberg is going to hate this process and might explode as a result. He’s going to be under a journalistic microscope, too, and some bad information about him may come forth (I don’t have any, by the way, but powerful people often have powerful enemies). Throw in some bad business news for Facebook or some good news for Google and a $100 billion IPO starts to look pretty iffy.  There are lots of ways this process could fall apart.

What’s a geek to do?

Well just as there are three reasons for companies to go public there are also three ways to do it. The normal way is to follow the traditional path Facebook and Zuckerberg have embarked on now — hire investment bankers, do a road show, pay $500 million in fees, go public. That’s how Dell did it in 1988, though that company raised only $30 million, not $5 billion, so the fees were significantly lower.

The second way to go public is to do nothing at all yet have more than 500 investors and a brisk secondary trading market in private company shares.  In that case the SEC will do the IPO for you for free (well, they’ll fine you too, but not much) which sounds good in a way but must be bad because nobody ever does it.  Name a company that went public in this manner?  I can’t.

The third way to go public is by buying or merging with a company that is already public. This is viewed on Wall Street as the chickenshit method because it generates nowhere near as much in fees to investment bankers who, after all, are the cowboys driving this herd. To be fair, most of the time when companies back into going public it is because of weakness.  Certainly the public company they are buying is weak, often valueless.  The decision to use this method is often based on being unable to find an underwriter to go public by the usual route and not having the capital to wait for better times. Again, it’s hard to find a really big company that has done it this way, though little companies do this all the time.

But that’s exactly why I feel Facebook will abandon its present IPO course and instead buy a public company.

No road show for one thing.  Zuckerberg’s agony ends. The idea that acquiring a weak public company would drag down Facebook shares is ridiculous because Facebook is so big and available public shells are so small that the dilution effect would be vastly less than that $500 million in banker fees.

Here’s an idea: Facebook might actually find a public company it wants to buy.  Yeah, that’s the ticket.

And while buying a public company would limit the amount of money Facebook would be able to raise initially, the point isn’t to even raise money, remember?  The negative effect of all those T-bills would be avoided.

That’s why I think Facebook will change course and back into being a public company. It’s cheaper, easier, and accomplishes the same result.  Five years from now nobody will even remember how they did it any more than they can explain Google’s Dutch Auction IPO in 2004.

This is my third and (I hope) last column in a series on education. If things work as planned this is where I’ll make some broad generalizations that piss-off a lot of people, incite a small riot in the comments section, after which we’ll all feel better and switch to discussing the Facebook IPO. So let’s get to it. I believe that education is broken in the U.S. and probably everywhere else, that it is incapable of fixing itself, and our only significant hope is to be found in the wisdom of Sharon Osbourne.

These conclusions are based on my experiences as a teacher, a parent, on the content of those two previous columns, one visit to OzzFest, and on my having this week read a couple books:

The Learning Edge: what technology can do to educate all children, by Alan Bain and Mark E. Weston.

Teaching Minds: How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools, by Roger Schank.

The first book was a pain to read as academic books often are. It’s like the writers think that making their work harder to read will make it be taken more seriously. So to save you the pain I’ll give you the short version: 1) computers haven’t helped much, if at all, in education despite our spending $8.6 billion per year on them just for schools; 2) they don’t work because teachers won’t use them and administrators don’t know how they should be used; 3) there is, however, a body of research beginning in the 1970s that says (that proves the authors maintain) it is possible to shift student performance (whatever that means — they never really explain) by two standard deviations in the good direction; 4) alas, this technique is too labor intensive to be practical, and 5) the authors have figured out how by using cool software a single teacher can achieve that two-sigma objective for an entire class.

These authors, one of whom works for Dell, talk a good game but their argument doesn’t work for me. They illustrate how poorly we use computers in education and why (it puts too much of a burden on the teachers who don’t really want computers and therefore don’t use them much), but the authors then lay out an entirely new way of doing things that is an even bigger burden on teachers, though the authors say it isn’t.

I say if it looks like a burden it probably is a burden, and even if it isn’t actually a burden nobody is going to stick around long enough to find that out just because it looks so bad going in.  Worse still, there isn’t a single example in the book where the needle is actually shown to move more than 0.58 standard deviations, much less 2.0.

If this stuff works, then give examples that show it working.

But that’s not the worst of it. They spend several pages describing how an expert teacher at an elite private school uses these techniques to teach an elegant course in projectile motion — a course that is defined in the first sentence as being five weeks long. This teacher is a rock star and really has his mojo working, but there are two conditions that are left completely uncovered in the example — both conditions that I have experienced vicariously through my son Cole, age seven.

Condition #1 — Cole gets bored after the second week. This is a second grader who is reading on an 8th grade level.  Keeping him focused after he’s run through it a few times is almost impossible. Yes, you can make him a tutor or a helper or even the teacher, but five weeks? Yet only by taking five weeks is all that laborious curriculum and software development justified for the teacher or the school.

Condition #2 — At some point in the elegant presentation, another child in the class grabs Cole by the crotch, or spits in his face, or humps him from behind, or calls him any number of hearty Anglo-Saxon slang terms we don’t allow in our house. A day or an hour pass and then it happens again — same child, same actions. It’s hard to put on a good show when the theater is burning down.

You might think condition #2 is rare but it has occurred (and continues to occur) in the classrooms of two out of my three sons. Yes, we’ve been to see the Principal. This is a good public school with well intentioned teachers and administration, but the district doesn’t believe in taking disruptive children out of regular classes unless they are proved to consistently (dozens of times) act in a manner that physically endangers their schoolmates.  None of those actions I described are considered dangerous, though they contribute to Cole’s reluctance many days to go to school.

Computers have nothing to do with this, but the graceful works of computer-assisted academic art described by Bain and Weston won’t survive such outbursts. Theirs is a Utopian vision and Utopia isn’t anywhere near Santa Rosa.

But my greatest criticism of this approach is that — even if it worked — it takes too long to accomplish anything. Yes, teachers don’t like computers, so we have to somehow replace teachers who don’t with teachers who do and that’s going to take, what, 20 years? Education researchers can think 20 years in the future but I’m fixated on next year.  No make that this year.

In this sense I, as a parent, approach the problem like any modern CEO would, thinking a quarter or a year ahead and looking for measurable improvements in that time.

The second book was better written and a lot more fun. The gist of it is this: school is bunk so stop teaching information and instead teach skills and how to learn. This is coming from a pretty famous professor of computer science, mind you, who admits that he hates teaching almost as much as he hated being a student.

Teach skills not stuff is an interesting idea. We teach stuff (information) because it is easy to test, not because it is more useful to know. If you look at the work of Sal Khan at the Khan Academy, his screencasts are all about how to do something.  When my kids are learning how to do something, they can be entirely engaged for hours, even the five year old.

Many kids watch Khan lessons for fun. And Sal, quite wisely, gives no tests.

My conclusion, then, is that schools serve a limited social and cultural function but our kids mainly learn despite them. My own experience is that I learned a lot about learning from half a dozen teachers in my life, so those relationships are both rare and essential. But are they reliable enough to even justify modern schools?  I don’t know. What I do know is that if I want to improve the educational environment for my children in the next year or two, I’ll probably have to come up with my own solutions.

Which brings me to Sharon Osbourne, wife of Ozzie. Sharon has, not surprisingly, a couple troubled kids in Jack and Kelly. Both have been in rehab, both dropped out of high school, yet both appear to have landed with successful careers. I’m sure it helps some to have wealthy parents. But I think Jack and Kelly have actually done better than we might expect given the raw materials they are built from.

I think Sharon very consciously two-sigma’d her kids right into their current lives.

The 1970s education research that showed a two-sigma improvement was even possible was conducted by a guy named Benjamin Bloom and the technique that worked was individual instruction. One teacher per student led consistently to a two-sigma improvement.

What educators have tried to do ever since is to find a way to achieve the two-sigma without requiring the one-to-one ratio.  Sharon Osbourne, on the other hand, simply created in her own way that one-to-one relationship for her children.

Watch old episodes of The Osbournes on Hulu and you’ll notice the kids are never alone. There is always a friend — slightly older, definitely smarter, and marginally cooler — for each kid. Over the course of several episodes it becomes clear that these aren’t friends at all but employees functioning in the role of friend.

We’re about at the point where technology, best exemplified by Apple’s Siri digital assistant, can go quite a way toward providing through electrons much of what Sharon Osbourne bought for her kids with blood and treasure. Imagine a device, a Bluetooth friend in the cloud with whom your kid could converse, ask questions, laugh, be monitored and advised.

“I’m sorry, Dave, but you’ve had too many beers, I can’t let you start the car…”

It’s not a substitute for school but a whole new category of educational device. It’s not a person, it’s both better and worse. It would work in my kids‘ interest but for me. And I know my kids, at least, would embrace it. Heck, Fallon (age five) carries with him much of the time a stuffed killer whale toy named Fifi.

Time to teach Fifi to talk.