Technology – Page 37 – artdiamondblog.com

38 Theories Why Humans Became Sedentary

(p. 36) . . . if people didn’t settle down to take up farming, why then did they embark on this entirely new way of living? We have no idea–or actually, we have lots of ideas, but we don’t know if any of them are right. According to the historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, at least thirty-eight theories have been put forward to explain why people took to living in communities: that they were driven to it by climatic change, or by a wish to stay near their dead, or by a powerful desire to brew and drink beer, which could only be indulged by staying in one place. One theory, evidently seriously suggested (Jane Jacobs cites It In her landmark work of 1969, The Economy of Cities), was that “fortuitous showers” of cosmic rays caused mutations in grasses that made them suddenly attractive as a food source. The short answer is that no one knows why agriculture developed as it did.

Making food out of plants is hard work. The conversion of wheat, rice, corn, millet, barley, and other grasses into staple foodstuffs is one of the great achievements of human history, but also one of the more unexpected ones.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.
(Note: italics in original; ellipsis added.)

Google CEO Larry Page Admires Steve Jobs

“Former colleagues describe Larry Page, center, as strong-willed and sometimes impolite. He is said to admire Apple CEO Steve Jobs.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) Larry Page’s PageRank algorithm was the basis for Google Inc.’s search engine. As Google’s new chief executive, Mr. Page will face the challenge of leading a company that has grown far beyond that algorithm and must compete with agile Web upstarts such as Facebook Inc. and Groupon Inc.

On Friday, a day after being named to replace outgoing CEO Eric Schmidt in April, Mr. Page gave little hint of how he planned to tackle such challenges. The 38-year-old Google co-founder didn’t immediately address employees in an all-hands note or meeting, said a person familiar with the matter, though the company has a weekly Friday meeting that Mr. Page was expected to attend.
But several of Mr. Page’s former colleagues describe him as having similarities to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, whom Mr. Page has said he admired. Both men are strong willed, sometimes impolite and push engineers hard to execute their ambitious projects.
Some former colleagues said Mr. Page is likely to try to pierce through the sometimes “paralyzing” bureaucracy that product managers and engineers have faced when trying to launch some Google products in recent years.
On Thursday, Messrs. Page and Schmidt said some top-level decision-making had gotten slower and the management change would improve that. Also, the company has said it is trying to allow more projects to operate like start-ups inside of Google in order to speed up innovation.

For the full story, see:
AMIR EFRATI and SCOTT MORRISON. “TECHNOLOGY; Chief Seeks More Agile Google; As CEO, Larry Page Must Pierce Bureaucracy, Compete With Nimble Upstarts.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., January 22, 2011): B1 & B4.

“The American Machines Did Things that the World Earnestly Wished Machines to Do”

(p. 22) . . . when the displays were erected it came as something of a surprise to discover that the American section was an outpost of wizardry and wonder. Nearly all the American machines did things that the world earnestly wished machines to do–stamp out nails, cut stone, mold candles–but with a neatness, dispatch, and tireless reliability that left other nations blinking. Elias Howe’s sewing machine dazzled the ladies and held out the impossible promise that one of the great drudge pastimes of domestic life could actually be made exciting and fun. Cyrus McCormick displayed a reaper that could do the work of forty men–a claim so improbably bold that almost no one believed it until the reaper (p. 23) was taken out to a farm in the Home Counties and shown to do all that it promised it could. Most exciting of all was Samuel Colt’s repeat-action revolver, which was not only marvelously lethal but made from inter-changeable parts, a method of manufacture so distinctive that it became known as “the American system.” Only one homegrown creation could match these virtuoso qualities of novelty, utility, and machine-age precision–Paxton’s great hall itself, and that was to disappear when the show was over. For many Europeans this was the first unsettling hint that those tobacco-chewing rustics across the water were quietly creating the next industrial colossus–a transformation so improbable that most wouldn’t believe it even as It was happening.

The most popular feature at the Great Exhibition was not an exhibition at all, but rather the elegant “retiring rooms,” where visitors could relieve themselves in comfort, an offer taken up with gratitude and enthusiasm by 827,000 people–11,000 of them on a single day. Public facilities in London were woefully lacking in 1851. At the British Museum, up to 30,000 daily visitors had to share just two outside privies. At the Crystal Palace the toilets actually flushed, enchanting visitors so much that It started a vogue for installing flushing toilets at home– . . .

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

Steve Jobs as Project Entrepreneur

“Steve Jobs’s presence at the unveiling seemed to reassure investors.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

Innovative entrepreneurs can have several different motives. I think Steve Jobs is mainly a “project entrepreneur”—his main motive is to envision a project and to accomplish it.

(p. B1) SAN FRANCISCO — Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, interrupted his medical leave on Wednesday to introduce the company’s much-anticipated new iPad, a thinner, faster and lighter version of its popular tablet computer that will sell at the same prices as the original models.

Mr. Jobs alluded to his leave but neither commented on his health nor said whether he planned to return to the company in the near future.
“We’ve been working on this product for a while and I just didn’t want to miss today,” he said.

For the full story, see:
MIGUEL HELFT. “Jobs Returns to Introduce a New iPad.” The New York Times (Thurs., March 3, 2011): B1 & B6.
(Note: the online version of the commentary is dated March 2, 2011 and has the title “Jobs Returns to Introduce a New iPad.”)

At NeXT Steve Jobs Learned to Delegate, Retain Talent, and Attend to the Price

“Steve Jobs, after returning to Apple in 1999. Would Apple be what it is today had he never left?” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 5) Suppose Mr. Jobs had not left in 1985. Suppose he had convinced the Apple board to oust his nemesis, John Sculley, then chief executive and president. Under Mr. Jobs’s uninterrupted direction, would Apple have arrived at the pinnacle it has reached today, but 12 years earlier?

It’s hard to see how anything like that would have transpired. The Steve Jobs who returned to Apple was a much more capable leader — precisely because he had been badly banged up. He had spent 12 tumultuous, painful years failing to find a way to make the new company profitable.
“I am convinced that he would not have been as successful after his return at Apple if he hadn’t gone through his wilderness experience at Next,” said Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies, a technology consulting company.
. . .
Mr. Jobs’s lieutenants tried to warn him away from certain disaster, but he was not receptive. In 1992-93, seven of nine Next vice presidents were shown the door or left on their own.
In this period, Mr. Jobs did not do much delegating. Almost every aspect of the machine — including the finish on interior screws — was his domain. The interior furnishings of Next’s offices, a stunning design showplace, were Mr. Jobs’s concern, too. While the company’s strategy begged to be re-examined, Mr. Jobs attended to other matters. I spoke with many current and former Next employees for my 1993 book, “Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing.” According to one of them, while a delegation of visiting Businessland executives waited on the sidewalk, Mr. Jobs spent 20 minutes directing the landscaping crew on the exact placement of the sprinkler heads.
Next’s computer hardware and software were filled with innovations that drew a small, but devoted, following. Mr. Jobs had created the first easy-to-use Unix machine, but the mainstream marketplace shrugged. He had already helped bring to market an easy-to-use machine, the Mac, so the Next couldn’t differentiate itself enough — and certainly not at the price the company charged.
. . .
And he had always been able to attract great talent. What he hadn’t learned before returning to Apple, however, was the necessity of retaining it. He has now done so. One of the unremarked aspects of Apple’s recent story is the stability of the executive team — no curb filled with dumped managers.
Kevin Compton, who was a senior executive at Businessland during the Next years, described Mr. Jobs after returning to Apple: “He’s the same Steve in his passion for excellence, but a new Steve in his understanding of how to empower a large company to realize his vision.” Mr. Jobs had learned from Next not to try to do everything himself, Mr. Compton said.

For the full commentary, see:
RANDALL STROSS. “DIGITAL DOMAIN; What Steve Jobs Learned in the Wilderness.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., October 3, 2010): 5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary is dated October 2, 2010.)

“A Tax on Air and Light”

(p. 11) Paxton was very lucky in his timing, for just at the moment of the Great Exhibition glass suddenly became available in a way it never had before. Glass had always been a tricky material. It was not particularly easy to make, and really hard to make well, which is why for so much of its history it was a luxury Item. Happily, two recent technological breakthroughs had changed that. First, the French invented plate glass–so called because the molten glass was spread across tables known as plates. This allowed for the first time the creation of really large panes of glass, which made shop windows possible. Plate glass, however, had to be cooled for ten days after being rolled out, which meant that each table was unproductively occupied most of the time, and then each sheet required a lot of grinding and polishing. This naturally made it expensive. In 1838, a cheaper refinement was developed–sheet glass. This had most of the virtues of plate glass, but ¡t cooled faster and needed less polishing, and so could be made much more cheaply. Suddenly glass of a good size could be produced economically In limitless volumes.

Allied with this was the timely abolition of two long-standing taxes: the window tax and glass tax (which, strictly speaking, was an excise duty). The window tax dated from 1696 and was sufficiently punishing that (p. 12) people really did avoid putting windows in buildings where they could. The bricked-up window openings that are such a feature of man period
buildings in Britain today were once usually painted to look like windows. (It Is sometimes rather a shame that they aren’t still.) The tax, sorely resented as “a tax on air and light,” meant that many servants and others of constrained means were condemned to live In airless rooms.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

Entrepreneur Ken Olsen Was First Lionized and Then Chastised

“Ken Olsen, the pioneering founder of DEC, in 1996.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

I believe in The Road Ahead, Bill Gates describes Ken Olsen as one of his boyhood heroes for having created a computer that could compete with the IBM mainframe. His hero failed to prosper when the next big thing came along, the PC. Gates was determined that he would avoid his hero’s fate, and so he threw his efforts toward the internet when the internet became the next big thing.
Christensen sometimes uses the fall of minicomputers, like Olsen’s Dec, to PCs as a prime example of disruptive innovation, e.g., in his lectures on disruptive innovation available online through Harvard. A nice intro lecture is viewable (but only using Internet Explorer) at: http://gsb.hbs.edu/fss/previews/christensen/start.html

(p. A22) Ken Olsen, who helped reshape the computer industry as a founder of the Digital Equipment Corporation, at one time the world’s second-largest computer company, died on Sunday. He was 84.

. . .
Mr. Olsen, who was proclaimed “America’s most successful entrepreneur” by Fortune magazine in 1986, built Digital on $70,000 in seed money, founding it with a partner in 1957 in the small Boston suburb of Maynard, Mass. With Mr. Olsen as its chief executive, it grew to employ more than 120,000 people at operations in more than 95 countries, surpassed in size only by I.B.M.
At its peak, in the late 1980s, Digital had $14 billion in sales and ranked among the most profitable companies in the nation.
But its fortunes soon declined after Digital began missing out on some critical market shifts, particularly toward the personal computer. Mr. Olsen was criticized as autocratic and resistant to new trends. “The personal computer will fall flat on its face in business,” he said at one point. And in July 1992, the company’s board forced him to resign.

For the full obituary, see:
GLENN RIFKIN. “Ken Olsen, Founder of the Digital Equipment Corporation, Dies at 84.” The New York Times (Tues., February 8, 2011): A22.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated February 7, 2011 and has the title “Ken Olsen, Who Built DEC Into a Power, Dies at 84.”)

Gates writes in autobiographical mode in the first few chapters of:
Gates, Bill. The Road Ahead. New York: Viking Penguin, 1995.

Christensen’s mature account of disruptive innovation is best elaborated in:
Christensen, Clayton M., and Michael E. Raynor. The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2003.

“The Internet Is Really the Work of a Thousand People”

Paul Baran. Source of photo: online version of the NYT obituary quoted and cited below.

(p. A23) In the early 1960s, while working at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif., Mr. Baran outlined the fundamentals for packaging data into discrete bundles, which he called “message blocks.” The bundles are then sent on various paths around a network and reassembled at their destination. Such a plan is known as “packet switching.”

Mr. Baran’s idea was to build a distributed communications network, less vulnerable to attack or disruption than conventional networks. In a series of technical papers published in the 1960s he suggested that networks be designed with redundant routes so that if a particular path failed or was destroyed, messages could still be delivered through another.
Mr. Baran’s invention was so far ahead of its time that in the mid-1960s, when he approached AT&T with the idea to build his proposed network, the company insisted it would not work and refused.
. . .
Mr. Baran was also an entrepreneur. He started seven companies, five of which eventually went public.
In recent years, the origins of the Internet have been subject to claims and counterclaims of precedence, and Mr. Baran was an outspoken proponent of distributing credit widely.
“The Internet is really the work of a thousand people,” he said in an interview in 2001.
“The process of technological developments is like building a cathedral,” he said in an interview in 1990. “Over the course of several hundred years, new people come along and each lays down a block on top of the old foundations, each saying, ‘I built a cathedral.’
“Next month another block is placed atop the previous one. Then comes along an historian who asks, ‘Well, who built the cathedral?’ Peter added some stones here, and Paul added a few more. If you are not careful you can con yourself into believing that you did the most important part. But the reality is that each contribution has to follow onto previous work. Everything is tied to everything else.”

For the full obituary, see:
KATIE HAFNER. “Paul Baran, Internet Pioneer, Dies at 84.” The New York Times (Mon., MARCH 28, 2011): A23.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary is dated March 27, 2011.)

Cars Bring Convenience, Freedom, and Personal Security

(p. 16) Two generations ago in the United States,most families lacked a car; by our parents’ generation, most families had one car while the two-car lifestyle was a much-sought ideal; today a third of America’s families own three cars or more. The United States now contains just shy of one automobile per licensed driver, and is on track to having more cars than licensed drivers. Cars are a mixed blessing, as a future chapter will detail: But there is no doubt they represent convenience, freedom, and, for women, personal security, when compared to standing on street corners waiting for buses or lingering on dark subway platforms. Cars would not he so infuriatingly popular if the did not make our lives easier. Today all but the bottom-most fraction of the impoverished in the United States do most of their routine traveling by car: 100 auto trips in the United States for every one trip on a bus or the subway, according to the American Public Transit Association. The portion of routine trips made in private cars is rising toward overwhelming in the European Union, too. Two generations ago, people dreamed of possessing their own cars. Now almost everyone in the Western world who desires a car has one–and vehicles that are more comfortable, better-equipped, lower-polluting, and much safer than those available only a short time ago.

Source:
Easterbrook, Gregg. The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. Paperback ed. New York: Random House, 2004.

“The Adventurous, Pioneering Spirit”

Source of book image: http://www.jetagebook.com/

(p. 30) “Jet Age” is ostensibly about the race between two companies and nations to commercialize a military technology and define a new era of air travel. There’s Boeing with its back to the wall and its military contracts drying up, betting everything on passenger jets, pitted against de Havilland and the government-subsidized project meant to reclaim some of Britain’s lost glory. . . .
. . .
But the book is really about the risk-taking essential for making any extreme endeavor commonplace. “Jet Age” celebrates the managers, pilots, engineers, flight attendants and, yes, even passengers (for without passengers there is no business) who gambled everything so that we might cross oceans and continents in hours rather than days.
It is easy to forget, in this time of overcrowded flights, demoralizing security checks, embattled flight attendants and dwindling service, that risk was once embraced as a necessary, even desirable, part of flying. Quoted in the book, the celebrated aviator Lord Brabazon summed it up in post-accident testimony: “You know, and I know, the cause of this accident. It is due to the adventurous, pioneering spirit of our race. It has been like that in the past, it is like that in the present, and I hope it will be in the future.”

For the full review, see:
MICHAEL BELFIORE. “Fatal Flaws.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., February 6, 2011): 30.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated February 4, 2011.)

The book under review is:
Verhovek, Sam Howe. Jet Age: The Comet, the 707, and the Race to Shrink the World. New York: Avery, 2010.

Abraham Lincoln’s Defence of the Patent System

William Rosen quotes a key passage from Abraham Lincoln’s speech on “Discoveries, Inventions, and Improvements”:

(p. 323) The advantageous use of Steam-power is, unquestionably, a modern discovery. And yet, as much as two thousand years ago the power of steam was not only observed, but an ingenious toy was actually made and put in motion by it, at Alexandria in Egypt. What appears strange is that neither the inventor of the toy, nor any one else, for so long a time afterwards, should perceive that steam would move useful machinery as well as a toy. . . . . . . in the days before Edward Coke’s original Statute on Monopolies, any man could instantly use what another had invented; so that the inventor had no special advantage from his own invention. . . . The (p. 324) patent system changed this; secured to the inventor, for a limited time, the exclusive use of his invention; and thereby added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery of new and useful things.

Source:
Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.
(Note: italics and ellipses in original.)