Technology – Page 42 – artdiamondblog.com

Low End Tech Upstart Moves Up-Market to Compete with Incumbents

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

The MediaTek example briefly mentioned below, seems a promising fit with Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovators.

(p. B7) TAIPEI–A little-known Taiwanese chip-design company is making waves in the cellphone business, grabbing market share from larger U.S. rivals and helping drive down phone prices for consumers.
. . .
While MediaTek isn’t known for cutting-edge innovation, it has been able to apply the nimble, cost-cutting approach of Taiwan’s contract manufacturers to the business of designing semiconductors, in which engineers use advanced software to lay out the microscopic circuits that make gadgets like cellphones function.
“MediaTek has brought down the cost significantly,” says Jessica Chang, an analyst at Credit Suisse Group AG, who says mobile-phone makers are increasingly drawn to MediaTek’s products because of their functionality and low cost.

For the full story, see
TING-I TSAI. “Taiwan Chip Firm Shakes Up Cellphone Business.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., APRIL 19, 2010): B7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

On Christensen’s theories, see:
Christensen, Clayton M., and Michael E. Raynor. The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2003.

Cellphones in North Korea Promote Free Speech

“Mun Seong-hwi, a North Korean defector, speaking to someone in North Korea to gather information at his office in Seoul.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

I have long believed, but cannot prove, that on balance technology improves human freedom more than it endangers it.
The case of cellphones in North Korea supports my belief.

(p. A1) SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea, one of the world’s most impenetrable nations, is facing a new threat: networks of its own citizens feeding information about life there to South Korea and its Western allies.

The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea’s near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers’ phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
The work is risky. Recruiters spend months identifying and coaxing potential informants, all the while evading agents from the North and the Chinese police bent on stopping their work. The North Koreans face even greater danger; exposure could lead to imprisonment — or death.

For the full story, see
CHOE SANG-HUN. “North Koreans Use Cellphones to Bare Secrets.” The New York Times (Mon., March 29, 2010): A1 & A10.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated March 28, 2010.)

Wozniak: “It Was as if My Whole Life Had Been Leading Up to this Point”

(p. 155) It was as if my whole life had been leading up to this point. I’d done my minicomputer redesigns. I’d done data on–screen with Pong and Breakout., and I’d already done a TV terminal. From the Cream Soda Computer and others, I knew how to connect memory and make a working system. I realized that all I needed was this Canadian processor or another processor like it and (p. 156) some memory chips. Then I’d have the computer I’d always wanted!

Oh my god. I could build my own computer, a computer I could own and design to do any neat things I wanted to do with it for the rest of my life.
I didn’t need to spend $400 to get an Altair–which really was just a glorified bunch of chips with a metal frame around it and some lights. That was the same as my take-home salary, I mean, come on. And to make the Altair do anything interesting, I’d have to spend way, way more than that. Probably hundreds, even thousands of dollars. And besides, I’d already been there with the Cream Soda Computer. I was bored with it then. You never go back. You go forward. And now, the Cream Soda Computer could be my jumping-off point.
No way was I going to do that. I decided then and there I had the opportunity to build the complete computer I’d always wanted. I just needed any microprocessor, and I could build an extremely small computer I could write programs on. Programs like games, and the simulation programs I wrote at work. The possibilities went on and on. And I wouldn’t have to buy an Altair to do it. I would design it. all by myself.
That night, the night of that first meeting, this whole vision of a kind of personal computer just popped into my head. All at once. Just like that.

Source:
Wozniak, Steve, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.

Electronics Projects Were Wozniak’s “Passion” and “Pastime” and “Reward”

(p. 127) I think most people with day jobs like to do something totally different when they get home. Some people like to come home and watch TV. But my thing was electronics projects. It was my passion and it was my pastime.

Working on projects was something I did on my own time to reward myself, even though I wasn’t getting rewarded on the outside, with money or other visible signs of success.

Source:
Wozniak, Steve, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.

Scientific Calculators Creatively Destroyed Slide Rules

(p. 120) I’d been a slide rule whiz in high school, so when I saw the calculator, it was just amazing. A slide rule was kind of like a ruler– you had to look at it precisely to read the values. The most accurate number you could get was only three digits long, however, and even that result was always questionable. With a calculator, you could punch in precisely the digits you wanted. You didn’t have to line up a slider. You could type in your numbers exactly, hit a button, and get an answer immediately. You could get that number all the way out to ten digits. For example, the real answer might be 3.158723623. An answer like that was much more precise than anything engineers had ever gotten before.

Well, the HP 35 was the first scientific calculator, and It was the first in history that you could actually hold in your hand. It could calculate sines and cosines and tangents, all the trigonometric and exponential/logarithmic functions engineers use to calculate and to do their jobs. This was 1973, and back then cal-(p. 121)culators–especially handheld calculators–were a very, very big deal.
. . .
There was no doubt in my mind that calculators were going to put slide rules out of business. (In fact, two years later you couldn’t even buy a slide rule. It was extinct.) And now all of a sudden I’d gotten a job helping to design the next generation of these scientific calculators. It was like getting to be a part of history.

Source:
Wozniak, Steve, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

In the Age of Vacuum Tubes, 6th Grader’s Dad Showed Him How Transistors Work

Wozniak went on to invent the personal computer.
This example would probably fit with some of what Malcolm Gladwell claims in his bestseller Outliers.

(p. 15) I have to point out here that at no time did my dad make a big deal about my progress in electronics. He taught me stuff, sure, but he always acted as if it was just normal for me. By the sixth grade, I was really advanced in math and science, everyone knew it, and I’d been tested for IQ and they told us it was 200-plus. But my dad never acted like this was something he should push me along with. He pulled out a blackboard from time to time, a tiny little blackboard we had in our house on Edmonton Avenue, and when I asked, he would answer anything and make diagrams for it. I remember how he showed me what happened if you put a plus voltage into a transistor and got a minus voltage out the other end of the transistor. There must have been an inverter, a type of logic gate. And he even physically taught me how to make an AND gate and an OR gate out of parts he got–parts called diodes and resistors. And he showed me how they needed a transistor in between to amplify the signal and connect the output of one gate to the input of the other.

(p. 16) To this very moment, that is the way every single digital device on the planet works at its most basic level.
He took the time–a lot of time–to show me those few little things. They were little things to him, even though Fairchild and Texas Instruments had just developed the transistor only a decade earlier.
It’s amazing, really, to think that my dad taught me about transistors back when almost no one saw anything but vacuum tubes. So he was at the top of the state of the art, probably because his secret job put him in touch with such advanced technology. So I ended up being at the state of the art, too.
The way my dad taught me, though, was not to rote-memorize how parts are connected to form a gate, but to learn where the electrons flowed to make the gate do its job. To truly internalize and understand what is going on, not just read stuff off some blueprint or out of some book.
Those lessons he taught me still drive my intelligence and my methods for all the computer designs I do today.

Source:
Wozniak, Steve, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.

The reference to the Gladwell book is:
Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. New York, NY: Little, Brown, and Co., 2008.

Wozniak’s Dad Taught Him the Power of Technology

(p. 12) . . . my dad taught me . . . a lot about electronics. Boy, do I owe a lot to him for this. He first started telling me things and explaining things about electronics when I was really, really young–before I was even four years old. This is before he had that top secret job at Lockheed, when he worked at Electronic Data Systems in the Los Angeles area. One of my first memories is his taking me to his workplace on a weekend and showing me a few electronic parts, putting them on a table with me so I got to play with them and look at them. I can still picture him standing there working on some kind of equipment. I don’t know if he was soldering or what, but I do remember him hooking something up to something else that looked like a little TV set. I now know it was an oscilloscope. And he told me he was trying to get something done, trying to get the picture on the screen with a line (it was a waveform) stable-looking so he could show his boss that his design worked.

And I remember sitting there and being so little, and thinking: Wow, what a great, great world he’s living in. I mean, that’s all I (p. 13) thought: Wow. For people who know how to do this stuff–how to take these little parts and make them work together to do something–well, these people must be the smartest people hi the world. That was really what went through my head, way back then.
Now, I was, of course, too young at that point to decide that I wanted to be an engineer. That came a few years later. I hadn’t even been exposed to science fiction or books about inventors yet, but just then, at that moment, I could see right before my eyes that whatever my dad was doing, whatever it was, it was important and good.

At Apple Wozniak Was the Inventor, and Jobs Was the Entrepreneur

Source of book image: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_TwOg8fVl5Og/SkXmn7MyaxI/AAAAAAAAAug/G-klN-KQHis/s1600/iWoz.jpg

iWoz is a fun read, with wild fluctuations in the significance of what is written. When Wozniak writes about the ingredients of inventiveness, it is significant. When he talks about his pranks, or his obsessions with certain number combinations, it is strange. (Maybe I just haven’t figured out the significance of Wozniak’s quirks—I once heard George Stigler say that even the mistakes of a great mind were worth pondering.)
In the next few weeks I’ll be quoting a few of the more significant passages.
An over-riding lesson from the book, is the extent to which both Wozniak and Jobs were necessary for the Apple achievement. Wozniak was a genius inventor, but he did not have the drive or the skills, or the judgment of the entrepreneur.
Schumpeter famously distinguished invention from innovation. Wozniak was the inventor, and Jobs was the innovator (aka, the entrepreneur).

Book discussed:
Wozniak, Steve, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.

“The Evolutionary Concomitant of Incessant Climate Change Was Human Resilience”

“Early Homo sapiens created these symbolic objects between 60,000 and 30,000 years ago. Using natural materials and creativity, they combined animal and human features into fantastical creatures and fashioned instruments for making music. “Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

The sort of artifacts displayed above have been used to argue that homo sapiens had essentially reached their modern capabilities at least by 40,000 years ago.
The handaxes below are fascinating, in that they clearly display progress, and they clearly display how slow that progress was.

(p. D13) The mysterious Ice Age extinction of the Neanderthals, losers in the competition against modern humans, still fires the popular imagination. So it’s startling to learn that as recently as 70,000 years ago, at least four human species coexisted, including tenacious, long-lived Homo erectus and diminutive, hobbit-like Homo floresiensis, found in Indonesia in 2003.

The sensational 1974 discovery in Ethiopia of “Lucy,” resembling an ape but walking upright, located human origins 3.2 million years in the past. Those same fossil deposits have recently yielded even more-ancient ancestors, who stood on their own two feet as far back as six million years ago.
Paleoanthropology is thriving, and human fossil finds–more than 6,000 and counting–regularly force revisions of old timelines and theories. Our species, Homo sapiens, turns out to have had an abundance of long-lost cousins, though scientists are still arguing about the closeness of those relationships. The new David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, whose opening marked the museum’s centennial, provides a formidable overview of this still-developing story.
. . .
It’s long been accepted that different human species were adapted to thrive in specific climatic niches. Neanderthals had short, compact bodies to conserve heat and large nasal passages to warm frigid air, while some of our African forebears had long, skinny frames suited to hotter climes. But this exhibition contends that the evolutionary concomitant of incessant climate change was human resilience–the flexibility to make it almost anywhere, thanks to large, sophisticated brains and social networks.
Versatility apparently characterized even our oldest relatives. The ability to walk upright through the drier, more open grasslands did not immediately divest them of their penchant for climbing trees in the shrinking woodlands. A diorama of Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) depicts her with one foot on the ground and another on a tree limb, symbolizing her straddling of two environments.

For the full review, see:
JULIA M. KLEIN. “Natural History; Our Species Rediscovers Its Cousins.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., May 11, 2010): D13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

“Handaxes — multipurpose tools used to chop wood, butcher animals, and make other tools — dominated early human technology for more than a million years. Left to right: Africa (1.6 million years old), Asia (1.1 million years old), and Europe (250,000 years old).” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

Technology Can Enable the Disabled

“Eric P. Jones demonstrating his new prosthetic fingers. They have helped him master movements other people take for granted, like pouring soda into a cup.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 4) ERIC JONES sat in a middle seat on a recent flight from the New York area to Florida, but he wasn’t complaining. Instead, he was quietly enjoying actions that many other people might take for granted, like taking a cup of coffee from the flight attendant or changing the channel on his video monitor.

These simple movements were lost to Mr. Jones when the fingers and thumb on his right hand were amputated three years ago. But now he has a prosthetic replacement: a set of motorized digits that can clasp cans, flimsy plastic water bottles or even thin slips of paper.
“Pouring a can of soda into a cup — that is a mundane daily action for most people, but to me it is a very big deal,” said Mr. Jones, who lives with his family in Mamaroneck, N.Y. “I slip my bionic fingers on like a glove, and then I have five moveable fingers to grasp things. It’s wonderful to have regained these functions.”
Mr. Jones’s prosthesis, called ProDigits, is made by Touch Bionics in Livingston, Scotland. The device can replace any or all fingers on a hand; each replacement digit has a tiny motor and gear box mounted at the base. Movement is controlled by a computer chip in the prosthesis.

For the full story, see:
ANNE EISENBERG. “Novelties; Grabbing Gracefully, With Replacement Fingers.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., April 9, 2010): 4.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Genetically Modified Crops Provide Benefits, Scientists Say

“A Missouri corn and soybean farmer with a sample of BioTech seed corn.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B3) The report is described as the first comprehensive assessment of the impact of genetically modified crops on American farmers, who have rapidly adopted them since their introduction in 1996. The study was issued by the National Research Council, which is affiliated with the National Academy of Sciences and provides advice to the nation under a Congressional charter.

The report found that the crops allowed farmers to either reduce chemical spraying or to use less harmful chemicals. The crops also had lower production costs, higher output or extra convenience, benefits that generally outweighed the higher costs of the engineered seeds.
“That’s a long and impressive list of benefits these crops can provide, and have provided to adopting farmers,” David E. Ervin, the chairman of the committee that wrote the report, said on Tuesday during a webcast news conference from Washington.

For the full story, see:

ANDREW POLLACK. “Study Finds Benefits of Genetically Modified Crops But Warns of Overuse.” The New York Times (Thurs., April 14, 2010): B3.
(Note: the online version of the article was dated April 13, 2010 and has the very different title “Study Says Overuse Threatens Gains From Modified Crops.”)