This is the kind of read that makes you proud to be even remotely connected to computers, science and academia…..
Category Archives: Academically speaking
Education and technology – a historic view
Nice review of Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz’s The Race between Education and Technology
Our central conclusion is that when it comes to changes in the wage structure and returns to skill, supply changes are critical, and education changes are by far the most important on the supply side. The fact was true in the early years of our period when the high school movement made Americans educated workers and in the post-World War II decades when high school graduates became college graduates. But the same is also true today when the slowdown in education at various levels is robbing America of the ability to grow strong together.
The maladjusted and marginalized terrorist
Bruce Schneier, security guru extraordinaire, has a cracking good article on what motivates terrorists in Wired: The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Terrorists, much of it drawn on a paper by Max Abrahms called What Terrorists Really Want.)
The main argument is that terrorists "turn to terrorism for social solidarity", i.e., that they join terror organizations less for political aims and more because they themselves are alienated and outcasts in search for belonging and, perhaps, as an outlet for violent or authoritarian tendencies. They are loners in search of meaning rather than radicals in search a way to express their political views:
Individual terrorists often have no prior involvement with a group’s political agenda, and often join multiple terrorist groups with incompatible platforms. Individuals who join terrorist groups are frequently not oppressed in any way, and often can’t describe the political goals of their organizations. People who join terrorist groups most often have friends or relatives who are members of the group, and the great majority of terrorist are socially isolated: unmarried young men or widowed women who weren’t working prior to joining. These things are true for members of terrorist groups as diverse as the IRA and al-Qaida.
I think this makes lots of sense. During the late 60s and early 70s there was a vogue in many European countries for politically active youngsters to join the far left – a movement that at the most extreme produced the Bader-Meinhof group in Germany. Here in tiny and peaceful Norway a number of people who later wondered how they got into it joined various versions of marxist-leninist groups with the stated aim of violently overthrowing the state. (A great novel by the author Dag Solstad, later turned into a film, explores these mechanisms, telling the story of a small-town high school teacher who joins the movement because he falls in love with one of the leaders). This caused a number of bookish intellectuals from well-off homes to try to act and talk like "the people" (often with hilarious results) and take menial jobs with a view to start strikes, unrest and eventually, the great revolution.
The movement petered out eventually, due to a lack of examples of marxist-leninist success stories, better career opportunities elsewhere, the demands of family life and, most importantly, the failure of the general populace to join the cause. Today, most of these people (especially the ideological leaders) are found in relatively good positions in society and will not thank you for bringing up this period. (In one ironical twist, one of them is a professor of journalism – an interesting position for someone who once wanted to force the press to serve the needs of the proletarian dictatorship.)
Now, imagine what would have happened if the Norwegian state had declared war on these groups and instituted all kinds of controls in the name of national safety? Suddenly they would have increased in importance, had some legitimate cases of persecution (heavy-handed security always produces incidents) and play off the fear and irritation induced by surveillance and controls.
Instead, the Norwegian government largely ignored them, aside from discreet monitoring for weapons violations and espionage. To the extent that anyone was arrested, the perpetrators were charged with clear violations of current law and given sentences similar to those of anyone else.
The movement did not achieve much: A few strikes, a half-hearted rebellion at a few universities, a radical newspaper that still scrapes by (and occasionally is rather good, especially after they toned down the ideology,) "progressive" clothing fashions, some small groups of old professors with weird research streams, reams and streams of newspaper commentary, and that’s about it.
Now, imagine if the current war against terrorism had been pursued as a large-scale police investigation rather than a war, with terrorists being pulled into regular courts, security controls set up for security rather than show, publicity focused on a general toning down of the whole thing, money spent on improving the situation for various downtrodden groups, and military solutions employed as the absolutely last resort, and then only under the auspices of the UN.
I think al-Qaida would be reduced to a group of fringe Islamist fundamentalists with uncertain political aims, lots of fratricidal infighting (when the populace ignores them, they turn on each other), uncertain career paths and increasingly untenable positions. Which is what they were, until the Western world handed them prominence to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
Bruce would, I think, agree. Here is his conclusion:
We also need to pay more attention to the socially marginalized than to the politically downtrodden, like unassimilated communities in Western countries. We need to support vibrant, benign communities and organizations as alternative ways for potential terrorists to get the social cohesion they need. And finally, we need to minimize collateral damage in our counterterrorism operations, as well as clamping down on bigotry and hate crimes, which just creates more dislocation and social isolation, and the inevitable calls for revenge.
Innosuing, not innovating
Endnote, owned by Thomson Reuters Reuters, is suing the main creator of Zotero, Dan Cohen (Or, rather, they are suing GMU, his university.) The reason is that Zotero includes a tool that can convert Endnote styles to Zotero (much like Openoffice has functionality for converting from MS-Word or other formats).
Now, there is a brilliant market move. Endnote is primarily used by academics. I have used it since around 1991, and for a couple of years I was a beta tester (and had the T-shirt to prove it.) Aside from the T-shirt, I got zilch for my efforts (and I did find a bug or two.) Neither did the thousands of academics who have created bibliography styles for various journals and uploaded them to Endnote’s web site.
I can’t think of a better way than a law suit to make people move to Zotero. This definitely does it for me – unless Thomson Reuters pulls this stupid suit. Come to think of it, we have a number of users at the Norwegian School of Management, I am sure I can persuade quite a few of them to switch sides…..
Suing an academic for creating software for other academics which draws on work of other academics when your primary market is academics? Have they hired hired lawyers from the music industry?
Zotero is a better tool, too. Shared lists, bibliographies, support for clipping from searches, including Google Scholar. Instant saves from browsing.
Time to move, methinks. Let me see, how hard would it be to migrate my 2100+ article database….
Update two hours later: Boingboing is on the case.
Update 10 hours later: Check out the Boingboing comments – Streisand effect in the making. John Mark Ockerbloom has a thoughtful piece on the suit.
Carlota Perez on how to understand global technology trends
Carlota Perez: Global Technology Trends: Challenges to national strategies and policies
HBS 100th Anniversary
Soria Moria Hotel, Oslo
Only one of Schumpeter’s ideas accepted: Technical change is the driver of economic growth. But it is not totally random, it has continuities and discontinuities.
1970: Low cost microelectronics, sw, computers, internet, digital telecommunications….
1907: Mass production, low cost petroleum fuels, universal highways and electricity networks
Success may depend on anticipating the future, which you can do by looking at the past. There are powerful regularities and identifiable specificities in technological revolutions: Comes every 40 to 60 years, at the end of maturity of the previous technology, and has a similar sequence of diffusion in two periods of 20 to 30 years, with a financial crisis in between.
Tech revolution and techno-economic paradigms
Five revolutions: 1771 Industrial revolution, 1829: age of steam and coal, iron and railways. 1875 age of steel and heavy engineering (electrical, chemical, civil and naval); 1908 Age of the automobile: 1971 Age of the information technology and telecommunications. Next one may be biotech, bioelectronics, nanotech and new materials.
We are only halfway in the IT revolution. And each revolution takes about half a century to spread around the world.
Each revolution has a double nature: the create new industries that function as engines of growth, but there is also a new techno-economic paradigm. The first creates an explosive growth, the second modernizes and rejuvenates the mature industries.
The diffusion of each technological revolution confronts enormous resistance from institutions deeply adapted to the previous paradigm. Therefore, each technological propagates in two different periods: Installation and deployment. The first half sets up the infrastructure, usually with over-investment, but the infrastructure stays. It is a period of creative destruction, of unlearning, lead by financial capital, ends in a stock-market crash. The second is one of creative construction, led by production capital, applying the paradigm to innovate across all sectors and to spread the social benefits more widely – until maturity and exhaustion.
Why the bubble?
The capitalist economy is shaped by two different and functionally separate agents: Production capital (agent of accumulating wealth-making capacity) and financial capital (agent for reallocating and redistributing). Production capital has a long-term bias, financial capital has a short-term bias. Financial capital is better at massively redirecting resources and force new paradigm diffusion. Production capital is better for carrying growth and expansion within an established paradigm.
The role of the state changes: In installation period – the gilded age – the market does it all. In the deployment stage – the golden age – the state has an intelligent come-back, promoting long term growth.
Three investment paths for assuring long-term growth
Financial wealth and production wealth can both be destroyed, but for financial wealth you normally cannot influence it.
The best investment for the future is the capacity for technical change. Short-term, this means fostering innovation and entrepreneurship in the current paradigm. In the medium-term it means betting on the gestation of the next revolution. Insuring the long-term future means favoring open-ended science increasing the quality of human capital.
The current techno-economic paradigm shift is from the logic of cheap energy to the logic of abundant information. The new paradigm is still wrapped in the old, because cheap oil and cheap Asian labor favored stretching the old paradigm. But rising material and oil prices will lead to rising packaging and freight costs. Every little thing is wrapped in energy, such as cardboard or plastic. The visible effects of increasing global warming, with a rising climate risk (more Katrinas). There will be a change in the production, transport and distribution of tangible goods, leading to changes in business strategies and government policies.
The major transformations to expect (or to participate in): [lots of things], two being changes in lifestyle and urban planning towards activities and foot transportation.
Long-term funding: In the knowledge society, redistribution is not enough. Open-ended science works like a rich genetic pool. Investing in science, technology, education and entrepreneurship counteracts inflation by increasing average productivity. It is time to abandon market fundamentalism and agree ton a shared strategy to put order in finance and to collectively promote innovation to insure the future.
Brad Feld on history and future of computing
Good talk at MIT – the good stuff comes towards the end, where he starts to talk about the future. The rest is useful for my students….
IAD center opening
Monday was exciting – not only was it the Fall workshop for the iAD Center for Research-based Innovation, but it was also the opening of the iAD Lab [Norwegian language story here] – a physical manifestation of the 
research project, as well as an important tool for drawing the researchers from the five Oslo-based participants (FAST, Accenture, Schibsted, UiO and BI) closer together.
Myself, I plan to spend at least one day per week in the lab – there is nothing like physical proximity to get to know an organization and a field, notwithstanding all the communications capabilities, electronic and otherwise, we surround ourselves with.
The lab itself, incidentally, is just six workspaces, a few computers and access cards for researchers. Gone are the days when the opening of a computing center was photogenic, with blinking lights and spinning tape decks. But it will enable us to store sensitive data in a secure environment, have enough horsepower to really analyze them, and provide a natural focal point for demonstrations, prototypes and experiments.
WSJ Cucumber season
George Will describes how beer was essential as a water purifier and human selection mechanism as the world urbanized and industrialized. This, of course, is different from Clay Shirky’s theory that rising alcohol consumption came because people had too much time on their hands and needed to burn off surplus synapses.
Personally I think it was the more mundane effect of lower unit cost due to more centralized production to serve a denser urban market, but who am I to spoil an interesting theory during cucumber season….
(Via Volokh. Who adds that wine, not beer, founded our civilization. I am tempted to quote Gandhi, who, when asked what he thought of Western civilization, replied that he thought it was a good idea.)
I need a beer. Need to feel more civilized….
A dose of tail reality
The long tail doesn’t work, according to Anita Eberle. Chris Anderson, rather sportingly, likes the article but begs to differ when it comes to determining how long that tail should be.
Maybe it is a tall tail?
Sort of simulated
This interesting article in the Economist shows how American politics is becoming increasingly polarized partially because when people move, they locate in areas with similar cultural preferences – be it granola or shotguns. When I lived in the States, I was always fascinated by the difference between Vermont (Birkenstock and yogurt country) and New Hampshire (main business: roadside hubcap emporiums). As it turns out, this split between liberal and conservative is happening all over the country, and you end up with the curious situation where the United States from the melting pot evolves into a salad, with rather few ingredients.
All this is interesting, but hardly relevant for technology, no? As a matter of fact, not: I am currently working on a research project with nGenera, called BST: Putting Business Simulation Technologies to Work. Simulation allows us to see the aggregate effect of many small decisions.
One of the early books showing the importance of this is Mitchell Resnick‘s Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams. In this book, Resnick demonstrates a number of simulations programmed in StarLogo (a parallel version of Logo, a programming language originally created for children.)
One simulation in particular (caveat: this is from memory, my numbers may be wrong here) is pertinent to the polarization of America: The effect of weak preferences on clustering. Resnick constructs a 100 x 100 matrix where each cell is inhabited by either a black or white dot. Each dot can “think” (i.e., have preferences) for itself, and the simple preference each dot has is the unless it is living in a neighborhood with at least two of its own kind (“neighborhood” defined as the 8 cells sharing a side its own cell) it will move, randomly, to somewhere else. Note that this is not a strong preference: A dot of one kind will happily inhabit a cell where 6 of its neighbors are different, as long as two are the same. (A more thorough description, with images, is here.)
In a surprisingly short time, the initially well distributed matrix transforms into clear clusters (even bands) of white or black. Importantly, this process, when viewed from a distance, seem to be conscious, yet the relatively mild preference exhibited by each individual dot seems rather harmless. It may be tempting to ascribe the segregation to some conscious plot, failed policy or other single cause. It is a very powerful demonstration of the aggregate and cumulative effect of small decisions and weak preferences – and simulation is the only way to make it apparent.
Resnick’s book shows similar uses of simulations to understand ant foraging strategies and traffic jam formation – and some of the insights have been put into use in real life. For instance, traffic lights at on-ramps that introduces cars into traffic flow in an even stream rather than random groups is, as far as I know, a direct result of simulations of traffic jam formation.
In science, business and politics, we are moving from isolating single factors and varying them to understanding interaction patterns between many small components. Simulation allows us to understand this – the challenge lies in understanding where and how this very powerful tool can give insights.
And there you have Vermont and New Hampshire, Virginia and Maryland: The results of weak preferences over time. Perhaps we could simulate some real political discussion at some point?
Open Mobile conference musings
Tomorrow I am giving a talk on disruptive technologies at the Open Nordic Conference, and how that theory applies to open standards and open source in the mobile technology industry. The audience is apparently very technical and I, quite frankly, do not think that open source plays that much of a role – apart from providing available functionality for innovators (mostly at the user interface/user service level) to build on.
The challenge in mobile technology (and in any consumer technology whose aim is to facilitate interaction) lies in establishing a platform for users and business to build on. Right now I am listening to Nick Vitalari analyze platform establishment and growth as part of the nGenera project PBG: Building a platform for business growth.
I am thinking about how platforms get established – and playing with words. It seems to me that the process can be described in terms of four words:
- Problem (often personal): Somebody has an itch to scratch, something that can be fixed with software, so they do it. (This is what Eric Raymond considers to be the beginning of almost any open source project.)
- Product (or service): The solution to the problem gets productized, either in a closed or open fashion, using standard or collaborative programming and development processes.
- Platform: The solution expands both in scale (distribution) and scope (technologies it can run on, added services, links to other solutions) until it is less a solution in itself for others to build on, where customers and users get it less for itself than for the added functionality it provides.
- Protocol: The platform becomes so open and ubiquitous that it is available everywhere, fading into the background in terms of user awareness. This can happen in many ways – it can expand to become all-encompassing (Google, for instance, maybe Facebook in certain communities, email certainly); it can be modularized with tools that pulverizes the proprietary value proposition (emulation, multiple clients (like Trillian in the chat space, cross-licensing); it can be regulated into a standard (AT&T with telephones, for instance); or it can be subsumed into an underlying functional layer (Microsoft’s embrace and extend strategy).
In the end, it will be forced into some form of openness.
Half-baked so far, but it’s a start.
The importance of failure and the value of photographic evidence
J. K. Rowling does a great commencement speech at Harvard.
Mass Digitization: Time to fund it properly
The always readable Dan Cohen discusses funding for digitization of public domain books. Hard not to agree – I think Harvard-Yale-Princeton (or, for that matter, Harvard alone) should just pony up the money and do it. The resulting archive would be a boon to humanities research and researchers all over the world, would yield immense dividends in the form of research and study activity for decades, and would give Harvard a signal project like that courseware project down the river, especially given the recent kvetching about the size of the Harvard endowment and the lack of visible largesse on the expense side.
Masterstudies at Hawaii
I have just (well, last Friday) come back from the AACSB conference in Hawaii. As previously noted, I am on the board of a small but quickly growing company called Masterstudies.com, and this was our first “in the flesh” meeting with customers and partners. I tagged along on the theory that since I am an academic, I probably know how to talk to academics as well.
I am no stranger to academic conferences, but attending it as a vendor, not a regular participant or speaker, was new to me. I usually walk through the vendor section of a conference with downcast eyes, trying to not be cornered and pitched to. It was very interesting to stand there and see other people trying to avoid you – as a result, I have resolved to be much nicer to salespeople from now on.
That being said, the conference was a resounding success for us as a company – we talked to more than 60 universities and many of the other vendors and conference partners came over to our booth to congratulate us on the high interest and many compliments we got for our product. And I found it rather fun to market something – especially when it turned out we had a service that addressed a real need for many of these universities.
Recruiting blues
The problem with recruiting students is selectivity and quality control – you want students that are both good (in the sense that they have good grades and other qualifications) and also are environmentally compatible (for lack of a better term) with the other students. The first criterion is pretty easy to test for – grades and GMAT scores provide good indicators. Ensuring a proper mix of students for a program is harder.
For the prospective students, finding a school can also be very hard, since few students (at least outside the US) know more than a few business schools’ names and nothing about their quality. The result is a power law of prestige: At the top (“the fat head”), you find a few extremely well known schools (such as Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Wharton, INSEAD, LBS and IMD) with thousands of extremely well qualified people applying and very few getting in. Harvard, for instance, tend to receive 10 times as many applications as they have spaces, and of those people applying at least half of the people are good enough to make it through the program, if they only got in. At the top, finding students is not the problem – selecting them is.
For the students, another problem is avoiding the very bottom of universities: The outright frauds and degree mills that will sell you a certificate for a fee and an overview of your “life experiences”. (See this list for some suspects, but they tend to pop up like mushrooms after a rainy night.) A degree from a very weak place is not something you want to attach to your CV at all.
Most schools and most students fall somewhere in the middle, though: Decent schools providing good programs, and reasonably smart students prepared to do the required work to obtain a degree. Masterstudies.com provides a service here by maintaining a database of quality-controlled schools which prospective students can search without having to go to each school’s web site, and quickly submit requests for information to interesting schools.
Selective international recruiting
If this was all we did, we wouldn’t provide much value, however. Most students can search in Google for business schools, and listings abound. The problem for schools trying to recruit internationally is not that they don’t get responses when they advertise on the Internet – it is that they get hundreds or thousands of “leads” from people who clearly are not qualified to be admitted, either because they don’t have the background or the finances.
In certain countries, such as a large African country beginning with N, most of the requests for information have nothing to do with getting an education: Enterprising men request glossy business school brochures to show women, saying that they are applying to a prestigious school and thus are attractive partners. Given the cost of an information package, this is clearly not a service most schools would want to provide.
To avoid this, we have the students put in their characteristics (education, work experience, managerial experience, age, desired industry they want to work in, etc.) and then match them to schools where they have a chance of getting admitted. The schools can filter the incoming leads so that they only get students they want, doing things such as selectively market in certain countries – say, perhaps they have enough people from Northern Europe or India, but want more from China or Southern Europe. Since we track where the prospective students log in, we can filter based on geography as well.
It works surprisingly well, which is why I am willing to be on the board. It is also very cost-effective: We charge the industry standard price for a lead (i.e., a prospective student), but the lead is qualified, meaning that every reference that comes from us has passed the hurdles the schools have set up themselves. That means that information packets go out only to students that actually a) have the requisite quality, and b) are in target markets the school want to serve.
(Of course, since I have read Shapiro and Varian, we also have a Pro package, where schools can pay a little extra and get promoted on the front page and so on – perfect for that newly launched MBA with a special twist that you secretly worry filling up.) As we start to build up good logs (we have had more than 100,000 unique visitors and growing per month since the new site launched in January) we should also be able to provide some pretty good and detailed overall statistics. For my own research, I am thinking about doing text analysis on the language in the program descriptions, to see what the main differentiating strategies of the schools are.
Check it out for yourself – though if you are a school, you should probably contact Linus, our Irish CEO (a former professional racing biker), or Bernt, our VP of Business Development (who tried to teach me to surf in Hawaii, with decidedly mixed results) to get a peek under the hood, at the statistics and filtering pages which allow schools to select carefully and measure the results of their marketing.
And now, back to our regular programming….
Should rich countries open up for fair trade?
Excellent stuff by Brad Delong on what happens when rich countries open up their economies – not much, and long term the effect is positive, especially when you realize that 1.3b Chinese (and 1.1b Indians) are a pretty powerful force of economic development that you want to tie into your own economy with as many and as unbreakable strings as possible. In the long run, we all benefit by trade.
If only politicians up here in the frigid north could understand that….. Here is the video directly:
Brad is an inspiration and a glorious example to academics everywhere – he really is out there, putting his thinking, teaching and publicizing online. Maybe the makers of Morning Coffee ought to include Brad’s Morning Coffee as a default choice.
iAD Master students wanted!
(This message is meant for students at the Norwegian School of Management, but I am posting it here for distribution – and if someone from another institution should be interested, by all means, get in touch.)
The Center for Technology Strategy is seeking M.Sc. students who are looking for interesting topics for their thesis, offering the opportunity to write their thesis under the iAD research project. This project is a joint project of FAST, Accenture, Schibsted and six universities, among them NSM. The purpose of NSM’s part of the project is to understand the business impact of search technologies and other new technologies for information access.
This opportunity is open to all Master students, at any specialty, and would involve finding a research topic connected to the iAD project. (See a list of proposed topics here, but feel free to come up with your own.) The topic definition will happen in collaboration with faculty from your M.Sc. specialty. Thesis advisor will be either your own faculty, one of the faculty associated with the iAD project (Espen Andersen, Ingunn Myrtveit, Erik Stensrud, Torger Reve), or possibly an advisor from FAST, Accenture or Schibsted, as appropriate.
We are planning an information meeting on
April 2, at 0900-1030 at room C2-040, BI Nydalen
If you are interested, please send me an email so I can know how many will be there.
Updated March 25: A list of some suggested topics can be found here.
Time to move the scientific process on the web
A fascinating paradox is that, for all the innovations around the web, and the fact that it was created to support a research community (CERN researchers around the world) and a research consumption model, the scientific method still operates largely as it did in the time of Newton. This presentation at MIT shows some of what needs to be done in order to fix that
I particularly liked John Wilbanks’ slide saying that we need to move from
- old collaboration:
- reading the canon on paper
- querying single-access databases
- human as mediator
- artisanal tool manufacturing
- tightly controlled distribution
to
- new collaboration:
- reading the canon with machines
- integrating databases
- computer as mediator
- industrial tool manufacturing
- standardized distribution
The time is more than ripe for just getting this done, lest academic research fall so far behind industrial and commercial research that it becomes completely irrelevant (it already has, in some fields). MIT understands it and will build the future. Many other universitites, especially in Europe, do not. I am sorry to say, but I think it is a generational problem as well.
(That being said, it is irritating to have to download Realplayer to see MIT’s videos. Real has this constant nagging to have you try out a "free trial version" rather than the truly free version, which you have to look hard for to locate.)
The scientific method
I am currently re-reading Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, and came across this section, which is one of the best explanations of the scientific method I know of (explained in terms of motorcycle maintenance, of course). So, here goes:
Academica nervosa
Beware the academic with "gravitas", writes Philip Davis; all it means is that he can make a ten-second banality last ten minutes. A gravitas has "all the inner life of a bicycle pump."
I love it. As for comments on why – no comments. Aside from the fact that anyone connected to academia has met Professor Gravitas. Sometimes on self-reflection.
I am still formulating my thoughts here.
In and above the flow wikis
Andy McAfee has a good post on how to make people use wikis – use it as a tool to do their work (in-the-flow) rather than document it (above-the-flow).
I have used wikis in classrooms situation for a few years now, this is a call to move more of the activity over to the wiki and away from traditional papers and email.
Applied Abstractions 