Category: Economics of Technology

Krim Saw Use for Noisy CK722 Transistors

KrimNorman2012-01-13.jpg

Norman Krim holding some early transistors. He first put transistors into hearing aids. Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT obituary quoted and cited below.

(p. B11) Mr. Krim, who made several breakthroughs in a long career with the Raytheon Company and who had an early hand in the growth of the RadioShack chain, did not invent the transistor. (Three scientists did, in 1947, at Bell Laboratories.)

But he saw the device’s potential and persuaded his company to begin manufacturing it on a mass scale, particularly for use in miniaturized hearing aids that he had designed. Like the old tube, a transistor amplifies audio signals.
As Time magazine wrote in 1953: “This little device, a single speck of germanium, is smaller than a paper clip and works perfectly at one-tenth the power needed by the smallest vacuum tube. Today, much of Raytheon’s transistor output goes to America’s hearing aid industry.” (Germanium, a relatively rare metal, was the predecessor to silicon in transistors.)
. . .
Thousands of hearing-disabled people benefited from Mr. Krim’s initial use of the transistor in compact hearing aids. But not every transistor Raytheon made was suitable for them, he found.
“When transistors were first being manufactured by Raytheon on a commercial scale, there was a batch called CK722s that were too noisy for use in hearing aids,” said Harry Goldstein, an editor at IEEE Spectrum, the magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
So Mr. Krim contacted editors at magazines like Popular Science and Radio Electronics and began marketing the CK722s to hobbyists.
“The result was that a whole generation of aspiring engineers — kids, really, working in their garages and basements — got to make all kinds of electronic projects,” Mr. Goldstein said, among them transistor radios, guitar amplifiers, code oscillators, Geiger counters and metal detectors. “A lot of them went on to become engineers.”
Mr. Ward called Mr. Krim “the father of the CK722.”

For the full obituary, see:
DENNIS HEVESI. “Norman Krim, 98, Dies; Championed the Transistor.” The New York Times (Weds, December 21, 2011): B11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated December 20, 2011 and has the title “Norman Krim, Who Championed the Transistor, Dies at 98.”)

Ridley Argues that Our Future Can Be Bright

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Source of book image: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cheRMv1X2oI/TAOvTFTnoeI/AAAAAAAAAgU/WAp7q0I_5mw/s1600/Ridley+Rational+Optimist.jpg

Ridley’s book is very well-written, well-argued and well-documented. He takes on all the main arguments against a happy future for humans. I agree with most of what he writes. (One exception is that I think he underestimates the importance of patents in enabling a broader group of inventors to continue inventing.)
In the coming weeks, I will be quoting some of the more memorable, thought-provoking, or useful passages.

Book discussed:
Ridley, Matt. The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. New York: Harper, 2010.

Federal Subsidies Create Few Green Jobs

(p. F2) . . . solar power, which makes extensive use of robots in fabricating the cells, and has no moving parts to service once it is up and running, may be an odd choice for job creation.
“It’s just not that labor-intensive,” said Howard Axelrod, an engineer and economist. And as for the jobs it creates, there may be a price elsewhere, Dr. Axelrod said.
. . .
Build enough solar plants and some coal plants will shut down; that would amount to firing Peter to hire Paul.
. . .
And, economists point out, some of the work that renewable energy creates goes to people who already have jobs — roofers who install the panels or truck drivers who move them around, or steel workers who make towers for new wind machines.
Some of the jobs could eventually go elsewhere. Two years ago, Evergreen Solar, which got $58 million in aid from Massachusetts for a factory in Devens, said it would shift production to China instead.
. . .
The debate is part of a larger discussion of what constitutes a “green” job. In October 2009, Congress gave the Bureau of Labor Statistics a special appropriation to count them.
. . .
“Driving a bus is driving a bus, right?” said Connie Mack, Republican of Florida. Hilda Solis, the secretary of labor, said they were “green buses.” But aides later clarified that the bureau counted any bus driving job as green because it preserved natural resources.
None of this suggests that green is bad, just that it is not particularly job-heavy. In December 2010, Susan Combs, the comptroller of Texas, reported that school districts in her state were giving tax abatements to lure new jobs, but had to give $1.6 million for every wind energy job. Manufacturing jobs could be created for $166,000 each.

For the full story, see:
MATTHEW L. WALD. “Solar Power Industry Falls Short of Hopes in Job Creation.” The New York Times (Weds., October 26, 2011): F2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date October 25, 2011.)

More Firms Adopt ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) Policies to Empower Workers and Cut Costs

CitrixSystemsWorkersPickOwnLaptops2011-11-10.jpg“At Citrix Systems, Berkley Reynolds, left, uses his Alienware laptop, and Alan Meridian, his MacBook Pro, paid for with stipends.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) SAN FRANCISCO — Throughout the information age, the corporate I.T. department has stood at the chokepoint of office technology with a firm hand on what equipment and software employees use in the workplace.

They are now in retreat. Employees are bringing in the technology they use at home and demanding the I.T. department accommodate them. The I.T. department often complies.
Some companies have even surrendered to what is being called the consumerization of I.T. At Kraft Foods, the I.T. department’s involvement in choosing technology for employees is limited to handing out a stipend. Employees use the money to buy whatever laptop they want from Best Buy, Amazon.com or the local Apple store.
“We heard from people saying, ‘How come I have better equipment at home?’ ” said Mike Cunningham, chief technology officer for Kraft Foods. “We said, hey, we can address that.”
Encouraging employees to buy their own laptops, or bring their mobile phones and iPads from home, is gaining traction in the workplace. A survey published on Thursday by Forrester Research found that 48 percent of information workers buy smartphones for work without considering what their I.T. department supports. By being more flexible, companies are hoping that workers will be more comfortable with their devices and therefore more productive.
“Bring your own device” policies, as they are called, are also shifting the balance of power among electronics makers. Manufacturers good at selling to consumers are increasingly gaining the upper hand, while those focused on bulk corporate sales are slipping.
. . .
(p. B6) Letting workers bring their iPhones and iPads to work can . . . save companies money. In some cases, employees pay for equipment themselves and seek tech help from store staff rather than their company’s I.T. department. “You can basically outsource your I.T. department to Apple,” said Ben Reitzes, an analyst with Barclays Capital.
A similar B.Y.O.D. program at Citrix Systems, a software maker that also helps its clients implement such programs, saves the company about 20 percent on each laptop over three years. Of the 1,000 or so employees in Citrix’s program, 46 percent have bought Mac computers, according to Paul Martine, Citrix’s chief information officer. “That was a little bit of a surprise.”

For the full story, see:
VERNE G. KOPYTOFF. “More Offices Let Workers Choose Their Own Devices.” The New York Times (Fri., September 23, 2011): B1 & B6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated September 22, 2011.)

Innovation Not Highly Correlated with R&D Spending

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Source of graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B9) Many companies say innovation is a top priority, but even those who spend the most on research and development can have little to show for it, a new study says.

A report expected to be released Monday by consulting firm Booz & Co., says that few of the biggest R&D spenders crack the top 10 in terms of being considered “innovative” by their peers.
Booz identified 1,000 companies with the biggest 2010 research-and-development budgets and invited 600 executives from those companies to rate which ones they deemed most innovative. The most frequent pick was Apple Inc.–the 70th biggest research-and-development spender–followed by Google Inc. and 3M Co., also not among the top-20 spenders.

For the full story, see:
MELISSA KORN. “Top ‘Innovators’ Rank Low in R&D Spending.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., OCTOBER 24, 2011): B9.

Entrepreneur Julius Blank’s Greatest Pleasure Came from “Building Something from Nothing”

FairchildSemiconductorFoundersIn1988.jpg“Fairchild Semiconductor’s founders in 1988. Victor Grinich (left), Jay Last, Jean Hoerni, Julius Blank, Eugene Kleiner, Sheldon Roberts, Robert N. Noyce (seated, left,) and Gordon E. Moore.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT obituary quoted and cited below.

(p. B14) Julius Blank, a mechanical engineer who helped start a computer chip company in the 1950s that became a prototype for high-tech start-ups and a training ground for a generation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, died on Saturday in Palo Alto, Calif.. He was 86.
. . .
Mr. Blank and his partners — who included Robert N. Noyce and Gordon E. Moore, the future founders of the Intel Corporation — began their venture as scientist-entrepreneurs in the wake of a mutiny of sorts against their common previous employer, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist William B. Shockley.
Dr. Shockley, . . . , had recruited the eight scientists from around the country in 1956 to work in his own semiconductor lab in nearby Mountain View, Calif.
The group left en masse the next year because of what its members described as Dr. Shockley’s authoritarian management style and their differences with him over his scientific approach. Dr. Shockley called it a betrayal.
Fairchild’s founders came to be branded in the lore of Silicon Valley as the “Traitorous Eight.” How that happened remains something of a mystery.
. . .
When he left Fairchild in 1969 — he was the last of the eight founding partners to depart — Mr. Blank became an investor and consultant to start-up companies and helped found the technology firm Xicor, which was sold in 2004 for $529 million to Intersil.
His former partners, in addition to founding Intel, had started Advanced Micro Devices and National Semiconductor. Mr. Kleiner had founded a venture capital firm that became an early investor in hundreds of technology companies, including Amazon.com, Google and AOL. Still, the greatest pleasure of his working life, Mr. Blank said in a 2008 interview for the archives of the Computer History Museum, a project in Silicon Valley, came with the uncertainty and camaraderie of “the early years, building something from nothing.”
Mr. Blank described a moment in the first days of Fairchild, just before production began in its factory built from nothing, when the ducts and plumbing and air-conditioning were set, and the new crystal growers and one-of-a-kind chip making machines were ready to be installed.
“I remember the day we finally got the floor tile laid,” he said. “And that night, Noyce and the rest of the guys came out and got barefoot and rolled their pants up and were swabbing the floors. I wish I had a picture of that.”

For the full obituary, see:
PAUL VITELLO. “Julius Blank, 86, Dies; Built First Chip Maker.” The New York Times (Fri., September 23, 2011): B14.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary is dated September 22, 2011 and had the title “Julius Blank, Who Built First Chip Maker, Dies at 86.”)

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May 2011 photo of Julius Blank. Source of photo: online version of the NYT obituary quoted and cited above.

Patent on Cotton Gin Not Enough for Whitney to Get Rich

(p. 395) Whitney patented his ‘gin’ (a shortened form of ‘engine’) and prepared to become stupendously wealthy.
. . .
(p. 396) . . . , the gin truly was a marvel. Whitney and Miller formed a partnership with every expectation of getting rich, but they were disastrous businessmen. For the use of their machine, they demanded a one-third share of any harvest – a proportion that plantation owners and southern legislators alike saw as frankly rapacious. That Whitney and Miller were both Yankees didn’t help sentiment either. Stubbornly they refused to modify their demands, convinced that southern growers could not hold out in the face of such a transforming piece of technology. They were right about the irresistibility, but failed to note that the gin was also easily pirated. Any halfway decent carpenter could knock one out in a couple of hours. Soon plantation owners across the south were harvesting cotton with home-made gins. Whitney and Miller filed sixty suits in Georgia and many others elsewhere, but found little sympathy in southern courts. By 1800 – just seven years after the gin’s invention – Miller and Catharine Greene were in such desperate straits that they had to sell the plantation.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Art Diamond Defended Air Conditioning in WPR Debate with Stan Cox

From archive of the Joy Cardin show:

Wednesday
6/8/2011
7:00 AM

Joy Cardin – 110608B
After seven, Joy Cardin asks her guests a weather-related Big Question: “Do we rely too much on air-conditioning?”

Guests:
– Stan Cox, Senior Scientist, The Land Institute. Author, “Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air Conditioned World” Author’s blog: http://losingourcool.wordpress.com
– Arthur Diamond, Professor of Economics, University of Nebraska at Omaha. Author, conference paper, “Keeping Our Cool: In Defense of Air Conditioning” (http://artdiamond.com/)

Link to streaming version of debate between Art Diamond and Stan Cox (author Losing Our Cool) on whether air conditioning is good (Diamond) or bad (Cox). Broadcast on Joy Cardin Show on the Wisconsin Public Radio network on Weds., June 8, 2011, from about 7:00 – 7:50 AM: http://wpr.org/webcasting/play-wma.cfm?FileName=jca110608b.wma&pagename=/webcasting/audioarchives_display.cfm

Obama Regulations Are “Choking Off Innovation”

From 2007 to 2010 Nina V. Fedoroff was the science and technology adviser to Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in the Obama administration. Fedoroff is currently a Professor of Biology at Penn State. The passages quoted below are from her courageous commentary in The New York Times op-ed section:

(p. A21) . . . even as the Obama administration says it wants to stimulate innovation by eliminating unnecessary regulations, the Environmental Protection Agency wants to require even more data on genetically modified crops, which have been improved using technology with great promise and a track record of safety. The process for approving these crops has become so costly and burdensome that it is choking off innovation.

Civilization depends on our expanding ability to produce food efficiently, which has markedly accelerated thanks to science and technology. The use of chemicals for fertilization and for pest and disease control, the induction of beneficial mutations in plants with chemicals or radiation to improve yields, and the mechanization of agriculture have all increased the amount of food that can be grown on each acre of land by as much as 10 times in the last 100 years.
These extraordinary increases must be doubled by 2050 if we are to continue to feed an expanding population. . . .
. . .
Myths about the dire effects of genetically modified foods on health and the environment abound, but they have not held up to scientific scrutiny. And, although many concerns have been expressed about the potential for unexpected consequences, the unexpected effects that have been observed so far have been benign. Contamination by carcinogenic fungal toxins, for example, is as much as 90 percent lower in insect-resistant genetically modified corn than in nonmodified corn. This is because the fungi that make the toxins follow insects boring into the plants. No insect holes, no fungi, no toxins.
. . .
Only big companies can muster the money necessary to navigate the regulatory thicket woven by the government’s three oversight agencies: the E.P.A., the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration.
. . .
. . . the evidence is in. These crop modification methods are not dangerous. The European Union has spent more than $425 million studying the safety of genetically modified crops over the past 25 years. Its recent, lengthy report on the matter can be summarized in one sentence: Crop modification by molecular methods is no more dangerous than crop modification by other methods. Serious scientific bodies that have analyzed the issue, including the National Academy of Sciences and the British Royal Society, have come to the same conclusion.

For the full commentary, see:
NINA V. FEDOROFF. “Engineering Food for All.” The New York Times (Fri., August 19, 2011): A21.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary was dated August 18, 2011.)

“Insanely Great” Entrepreneur Steve Jobs Wanted “a Chance to Change the World”

Steve Jobs died yesterday (Weds., October 5, 2011).
Jobs was an innovator of my favorite kind, what I call a “project entrepreneur.” He showed us what excitement and progress is possible if we preserve the institutions that allow entrepreneurial capitalism to exist.
When he was recruiting John Sculley to leave Pepsi and join Apple, Jobs asked him: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?” (p. 90).
Steve Jobs wanted to change the world. He got the job done.

Source of quote of Jobs’ question to Sculley:
Sculley, John, and John A. Byrne. Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple. paperback ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1988.

Solyndra Debacle Illustrates Why Feds Should Not Pick Tech Winners

The clip above is embedded from the Jon Stewart “The Daily Show” episode that was aired on Thurs., September 15, 2011.

Government “industrial policy” is likely to fail for many reasons. One is that the government decision makers are unlikely to know which future technologies will turn out to be the best ones. Another reason is that even if they know, government decision makers often decide based on what is politically expedient or what is beneficial to their friends.

Solyndra is a case in point, as Jon Stewart hilariously reveals.