Technology – Page 19 – artdiamondblog.com

Larry Page Makes an O.K. Decision Now, Rather than a Perfect Decision Later

“Larry Page has pushed for quicker decision-making and jettisoned more than 25 projects that were not up to snuff.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, so hates wasting time at meetings that he once dumped his secretary to avoid being scheduled for them. He does not much like e-mail either — even his own Gmail — saying the tedious back-and-forth takes too long to solve problems.
. . .
(p. A3) Borrowing from the playbooks of executives like Steven P. Jobs and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, he has put his personal imprint on the corporate culture, from discouraging excessive use of e-mail to embracing quick, unilateral decision-making — by him, if need be.
“Ever since taking over as C.E.O., I have focused much of my energy on increasing Google’s velocity and execution, and we’re beginning to see results,” Mr. Page, 38, told analysts recently.
. . .
Despite the many external pressures on Google, it is dominant in its business and highly profitable. But, when asked at a recent conference about the biggest threat to his company, Mr. Page answered in one word, “Google.”
The problem was that the company had ballooned so quickly — it now has more than 31,000 employees and $27.3 billion in revenue so far this year — that it had become sclerotic. A triumvirate of Mr. Page, his co-founder, Sergey Brin, and Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s former chief and current chairman, had to agree before anything could be done. The unwieldy management and glacial pace of decision-making were particularly noticeable in the Valley, where start-ups overtake behemoths in months.
It is different now.
“It’s much more of a style like Steve Jobs than the three-headed monster that Google was,” said a former Google executive who has spoken with current executives about the changes and spoke anonymously to preserve business relationships. “When Eric was there, you’d walk into a product meeting or a senior staff meeting, and everyone got to weigh in on every decision. Larry is much more willing to make an O.K. decision and make it now, rather than a perfect decision later.”

For the full story, see:
CLAIRE CAIN MILLER. “Google’s Chief Works to Trim a Bloated Ship.” The New York Times (Thurs., November 10, 2011): A1 & A3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date November 9, 2011.)

Limited Choice Is Cost of Amish Community Closeness

(p. 230) . . . the cost of . . . closeness and dependency is limited choice. No education beyond eighth grade. Few career options for guys, none besides homemaker for girls. For the Amish and minimites, one’s fulfillment must blossom inside the traditional confines of a farmer, tradesman, or housewife. But not everyone is born to be a farmer. Not every human is ideally matched to the rhythms of horse and corn and seasons and the eternal close inspection of village conformity. Where in the Amish scheme of things is the support for a mathematical genius or a person who might spend all day composing new music?

Source:
Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking Adult, 2010.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Amish “Are Big Boosters of Genetically Modified Corn”

(p. 222) The Amish use disposable diapers (why not?), chemical fertilizers, and pesticides, and they are big boosters of genetically modified corn. In Europe this corn is called Frankenfood. I asked a few of the Amish elders about that last one. Why do they plant GMOs? Well, they reply, corn is susceptible to the corn borer, which nibbles away at the bottom of the stem and occasionally topples the stalk. Modern 500-horsepower harvesters don’t notice this fall; they just suck up all the material and spit out the corn into a bin. The Amish harvest their corn semimanually. It’s cut by a chopper device and then pitched into a thresher. But if there are a lot of stalks that are broken, they have to be pitched by hand. That is a lot of very hard, sweaty work. So they plant Bt corn. This genetic mutant carries the genes of the corn borer’s enemy, Bacillus thuringiensis, which produces a toxin deadly to the corn borer. Fewer stalks are broken and the harvest can be aided with machines, so yields are up. One elder Amish man whose sons run his farm said he was too old to be pitching heavy, broken cornstalks, and he told his sons that he’d only help them with the harvest if they planted Bt corn. The alternative was to purchase expensive, modern harvesting equipment, which none of them wanted. So the technology of genetically modified crops allowed the Amish to continue using old, well-proven, debt-free equipment, which accomplished their main goal of keeping the family farm together. They did not use these words, but they made it clear that they considered genetically modified crops appropriate technology for family farms.

Source:
Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking Adult, 2010.
(Note: italics in original.)

Cars Increase Our Individual Freedom

(p. A13) Cars appeal powerfully to one of the most important conservative values: individual freedom. Straphangers in public conveyances can only travel in groups, moving along with hordes of strangers according to schedules imposed by others. Bicyclists, free as they may be, are clearly limited by distance and time constraints. Once you get into a car, however, you go wherever you want, whenever you want, subject only to your ability to put gas in the tank.

For the full commentary, see:
MICHAEL MEDVED. “OPINION; Honk If You Were Ever Devoted to a Car; I asked for a chance to say a proper goodbye to our family Plymouth. The night before we traded the car in, I slept in it.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., March 9, 2013): A13.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 8, 2013.)

Amish Factory Uses Pneumatics in Place of Electricity

(p. 219) The Amish also make a distinction between technology they have at work and technology they have at home. I remember an early visit to an Amish man who ran a woodworking shop near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. . . .
. . .
(p. 220) While the rest of his large workshop lacked electricity beyond that naked bulb, it did not lack power machines. The place was vibrating with an ear-cracking racket of power sanders, power saws, power planers, power drills, and so on. Everywhere I turned there were bearded men covered in sawdust pushing wood through screaming machines. This was not a circle of Renaissance craftsman hand-tooling masterpieces. This was a small-time factory cranking out wooden furniture with machine power. But where was the power coming from? Not from windmills.
Amos took me around to the back where a huge SUV-sized diesel generator sat. It was massive. In addition to a gas engine there was a very large tank, which, I learned, stored compressed air. The diesel engine burned petroleum fuel to drive the compressor that filled the reservoir with pressure. From the tank, a series of high-pressure pipes snaked off toward every corner of the factory. A hard rubber flexible hose connected each tool to a pipe. The entire shop ran on compressed air. Every piece of machinery was running on pneumatic power. Amos even showed me a pneumatic switch, which he could flick like a light switch to turn on some paint-drying fans running on air.
The Amish call this pneumatic system “Amish electricity.” At first, pneumatics were devised for Amish workshops, but air power was seen as so useful that it migrated to Amish households. In fact, there is an entire cottage industry in retrofitting tools and appliances to run on Amish electricity. The retrofitters buy a heavy-duty blender, say, and yank out the electrical motor. They then substitute an air-powered motor of appropriate size, add pneumatic connectors, and bingo, your Amish mom now has a blender in her electricity-less kitchen. You can get a pneumatic sewing machine and a pneumatic washer/dryer (with propane heat). In a display of pure steam-punk (air-punk?) nerdiness, Amish hackers try to outdo one another in building pneumatic versions of electrified contraptions. Their mechanical skill is quite impressive, particularly since none went to school beyond the eighth grade. They (p. 221) love to show off their geekiest hacks. And every tinkerer I met claimed that pneumatics were superior to electrical devices because air was more powerful and durable, outlasting motors that burned out after a few years of hard labor. I don’t know if this claim of superiority is true or merely a justification, but it was a constant refrain.

Source:
Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking Adult, 2010.
(Note: ellipses added.)

If Anarcho-Primitives Destroy Civilization, Billions of City-Dwellers Will Die

(p. 211) . . . , the . . . problem with destroying civilization as we know it is that the alternative, such as it has been imagined by the self-described “haters of civilization,” would not support but a fraction of the people alive today. In other words, the collapse of civilization would kill billions. Ironically, the poorest rural inhabitants would fare the best, as they could retreat to hunting and gathering with the least trouble, but billions of urbanites would die within months or even weeks, once food ran out and disease took over. The anarcho-primitives are rather sanguine about this catastrophe, arguing that accelerating the collapse early might save lives in total.

Source:
Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking Adult, 2010.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Patents Turned Steam from Toy to Engine

Source of book image: http://img2.imagesbn.com/p/9781400067053_p0_v1_s260x420.JPG

(p. 20) The obvious audience for Rosen’s book consists of those who hunger to know what it took to go from Heron of Alexandria’s toy engine, created in the first century A.D., to practical and brawny beasts like George and Robert Stephenson’s Rocket, which kicked off the age of steam locomotion in 1829. But Rosen is aiming for more than a fan club of steam geeks. The “most powerful idea” of his title is not an early locomotive: “The Industrial Revolution was, first and foremost, a revolution in invention,” he writes, “a radical transformation in the process of invention itself.” The road to Rocket was built with hundreds of innovations large and small that helped drain the mines, run the mills, and move coal and then people over rails.
. . .
Underlying it all, Rosen argues, was the recognition that ideas themselves have economic value, which is to say, this book isn’t just gearhead wonkery, it’s legal wonkery too. Abraham Lincoln, wondering why Heron’s steam engine languished, claimed that the patent system “added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius.” Rosen agrees, offering a forceful argument in the debate, which has gone on for centuries, over whether patents promote innovation or retard it.
Those who believe passionately, as Thomas Jefferson did, that inventions “cannot, in nature, be a subject of property,” are unlikely to be convinced. Those who agree with the inventors James Watt and Richard Arkwright, who wrote in a manuscript that “an engineer’s life without patent is not worthwhile,” will cheer. Either way, Rosen’s presentation of this highly intellectual debate will reward even those readers who never wondered how the up-and-down chugging of a piston is converted into consistent rotary motion.

For the full review, see:
JOHN SCHWARTZ. “Steam-Driven Dreams.” The New York Times (Sun., August 29, 2010): 20.
(Note: ellipsis added; italicized words in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date August 26, 2010.)

The book under review, is:
Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

Moore’s Law: Inevitable or Intel?

I believe that Moore’s Law remained true for a long time, not because it was inevitable, but because an exemplary company worked very hard and effectively to make it true.

(p. 159) In brief, Moore’s Law predicts that computing chips will shrink by half in size and cost every 18 to 24 months. For the past 50 years it has been astoundingly correct.

It has been steady and true, but does Moore’s Law reveal an imperative in the technium? In other words is Moore’s Law in some way inevitable? The answer is pivotal for civilization for several reasons. First, Moore’s Law represents the acceleration in computer technology, which is accelerating everything else. Faster jet engines don’t lead to higher corn yields, nor do better lasers lead to faster drug discoveries, but faster computer chips lead to all of these. These days all technology follows computer technology. Second, finding inevitability in one key area of technology suggests invariance and directionality may be found in the
rest of the technium.

Source:
Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking Adult, 2010.

Faculty Unions Oppose MOOCs that Might Cost Them Their Jobs in Five to Seven Years

“Sebastian Thrun, a research professor at Stanford, is Udacity’s chief executive officer.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) SAN JOSE, Calif. — Dazzled by the potential of free online college classes, educators are now turning to the gritty task of harnessing online materials to meet the toughest challenges in American higher education: giving more students access to college, and helping them graduate on time.
. . .
Here at San Jose State, . . . , two pilot programs weave material from the online classes into the instructional mix and allow students to earn credit for them.
“We’re in Silicon Valley, we (p. A3) breathe that entrepreneurial air, so it makes sense that we are the first university to try this,” said Mohammad Qayoumi, the university’s president. “In academia, people are scared to fail, but we know that innovation always comes with the possibility of failure. And if it doesn’t work the first time, we’ll figure out what went wrong and do better.”
. . .
Dr. Qayoumi favors the blended model for upper-level courses, but fully online courses like Udacity’s for lower-level classes, which could be expanded to serve many more students at low cost. Traditional teaching will be disappearing in five to seven years, he predicts, as more professors come to realize that lectures are not the best route to student engagement, and cash-strapped universities continue to seek cheaper instruction.
“There may still be face-to-face classes, but they would not be in lecture halls,” he said. “And they will have not only course material developed by the instructor, but MOOC materials and labs, and content from public broadcasting or corporate sources. But just as faculty currently decide what textbook to use, they will still have the autonomy to choose what materials to include.”
. . .
Any wholesale online expansion raises the specter of professors being laid off, turned into glorified teaching assistants or relegated to second-tier status, with only academic stars giving the lectures. Indeed, the faculty unions at all three California higher education systems oppose the legislation requiring credit for MOOCs for students shut out of on-campus classes.
. . .
“Our ego always runs ahead of us, making us think we can do it better than anyone else in the world,” Dr. Ghadiri said. “But why should we invent the wheel 10,000 times? This is M.I.T., No. 1 school in the nation — why would we not want to use their material?”
There are, he said, two ways of thinking about what the MOOC revolution portends: “One is me, me, me — me comes first. The other is, we are not in this business for ourselves, we are here to educate students.”

For the full story, see:
TAMAR LEWIN. “Colleges Adapt Online Courses to Ease Burden.” The New York Times (Tues., April 30, 2013): A1 & A3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 29, 2013.)

“Katie Kormanik preparing to record a statistics course at Udacity, an online classroom instruction provider in Mountain View, Calif.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Edison, Not Muybridge, Remains the Father of Hollywood

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) Wish it though we might, this strangely off-center Briton isn’t really the Father of Hollywood, nor even a distant progenitor of “Avatar.” The famous time-lapse images that he took for Stanford, proving that a horse does take all four hoofs off the ground while galloping–and the tens of thousands of photographs that he went on to make of birds flying and people sneezing or bending over and picking things up–were soon so comprehensively overtaken by newer technologies (lenses, shutters, celluloid) that his stature as a proto-movie-maker was soon reduced to a way-station. His contribution was technically interesting but hardly seminal at all. The tragic reality is that Thomas Edison, with whom Muybridge was friendly enough to propose collaboration, retains the laurels–though, as Mr. Ball points out with restrained politeness, Muybridge might have fared better had he been aware of Edison’s reputation for “borrowing the work of others and not returning it.”

For the full review, see:
SIMON WINCHESTER. “BOOKSHELF; Lights, Camera, Murder; The time-lapse photos Muybridge took in the 19th century were technically innovative, but they didn’t make him the Father of Hollywood.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., February 6, 2013): A13.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date February 6, 2013.)

The book under review is:
Ball, Edward. The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures. New York: Doubleday, 2013.