Future scientists and the future of science

One of the hats that I wear outside of my job is as a STEM volunteer and (cringe) activist. Unlike Stem Cells, it’s not a very controversial position, but it does require overcoming huge amounts of inertia.

STEM is the (fairly recent) TLA given for K-12 education in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. The idea is that certain professions (and thus society) will be in trouble if we don’t give our children the basics, keep them interested through adolescence, and expose them to real science and the career opportunities. The NSF, Department of Education and others are making (limited) efforts to correct the problem.

As with last year (and most years since 1989), today I spent the whole day (as I have annually since 1989) as a judge for the county science fair, now known as the Synopsys Challenge after its sponsor. As an IEEE member, I was part of a team of a dozen or so judges that gave out awards on behalf of IEEE and other organizations that outsource their judging to use (due to our superior processes and scale efficiencies).

Among the junior/senior high projects I saw, perhaps the most exciting was an improved efficiency wind turbine blade where the 12th grader applied for a provisional patent earlier this year. (I also suggested a provisional patent for two Cupertino students, although they are probably more than a year away from a prototype that would justify the cost of a full patent application.)

Mostly I looked at computer science or computer engineering projects, including three by 11th grade boys. One Palo Alto student measured the robustness of the SVD algorithm at the heart of the winners of the $1M Netflix challenge. A San Jose student improved on encryption strength using a different randomization technique, and solving the indeterminacy of the decryption problem. A project from Cupertino looked at solving differential equations using Nvidia’s CUDA GPU toolkit. A fourth project introduced me to DNA computing.

Today marked the 50th anniversary of the Santa Clara science fair, which is 5 years younger than the San Diego science fair where I was once a contestant and later a judge. An interest in science fairs is a theme of my K-12 efforts, having run the science fair at my child’s elementary school for 3 years.

I also try to recruit volunteer science fair and robotics judges from among MIT’s 10,000+ alumni in Northern California as the coordinator of the MITCNC K-12 outreach efforts. My next task is to help find Silicon Valley judges for the International Science & Engineering Fair to be held in San Jose May 11-14. (Apparently some of our outreach efforts are a model for a nationwide K-12 outreach effort being launched nationally by the MIT Alumni Association).

The extracurricular stuff is fun, and recognizes the best and the best of the best. But it does little to raise the understanding of science and technology by the average college student, employee or citizen — or to increase the supply of graduates for STEM-related professions.

Last week, I went to the semi-annual regional meeting of SJSU’s Center For STEM Education, to meet local K-12 STEM educators and administrators. What I heard was troubling.

The weakness of STEM education is particularly severe in grades K-5, where one estimate is that California kids get 1 hour/week of science education. There are several root causes. While secondary ed (grades 6-12) has science (“single subject”) specialists, K-5 teachers are generalists — most with a humanities background.

Worse yet, some California principals don’t care about science achievement because it plays a very small part in the standardized performance tests — by one estimate, 5% of the school’s total points. This is an example of the tyranny of measurement — perhaps not so blatant as WorldCom sales commissions, but one that has a far broader and longer-lasting impact on society.

Last Saturday, President Obama announced his intention to fulfill promises to teacher unions to water down No Child Left Behind. But the one change that I would agree with is the idea that school districts could modify the weighting criteria to include subjects such as science.

The actual technical content of improving science education is pretty straightforward. The organizational change to make that happen in more than 15,000 districts across the country is quite daunting.

I’m not sure how to get from here to there, but apparently that’s not enough to discourage me or my fellow STEM activists from pursuing such a Sisyphean task. Perhaps efforts by other alumni organizations — and professional scientific and engineering societies — will help raise the priority and efficacy of K-12 science education.

In praise of dumb pipes

Last week, our research-oriented faculty gave 20 minute PPT presentations about how they spent their summer support money. (Mine was about an ongoing research project comparing open, user and cumulative innovation).

On Friday, listening to a talk by colleague Subhankar Dhar about his forthcoming CACM paper on Location Based Services business models reminded me of how far the US has come in just three years both in adopting data services, and also transforming mobile phone carriers into operators of commoditized dumb pipes.

Five years ago, there was an assumption by the carriers that — unlike in the wired Internet — they controlled access to content on their networks. The “deck” (cellphone opening screen) was tightly controlled, and the only applications and content that would make it on-deck were those that made it through their 3-12 month review and paid them a big piece of the action.

This was true not just for applications like games and for streaming content, but particularly for e-commerce. Thinking about the talk on LBS, I realized that If you looked at a paper on m-commerce from the period 2001-2005, they all assumed that such operator control of handsets, pipes and monetization was an inevitable thing.

Of course, such centralized bureaucratic control was hardly a recipe for innovation. But that was where we were stuck until the iPhone came along.

Apple was highly controversial for wresting control away from the carriers of the right to determine applications and content for the mobile Internet. Now it’s clear that it has blazed a path for making the innovation (and adoption) of the mobile Internet as open as it was for the wired Internet 15 years earlier.

This success has, in turn, allowed its onetime ally (now frenemy) Google follow the same path of promoting a platform and proliferating applications for mobile Internet users. I recall that when the iPhone was announced in 2007 (with Google maps), Yahoo was then doing the most interesting stuff on mobile and the idea of Google as a mobile powerhouse was nascent at best.

As Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker put it last December:

It’s notable that, after years in the backwaters of global mobile development, American companies (led by the likes of Apple, Facebook, Amazon.com and Google) are becoming mobile internet innovation pacesetters.

Of course, this wresting of control and transformation of the mobile Internet is entirely in these firms’ self-interest. And this leadership by the WWW pioneers may only be temporary.

Still, I think almost any analyst would agree we’re in a better place than 5 years ago, because these firms have forced the carriers to relinquish their desired role as tollkeepers on the mobile Internet to become operators of dumb pipes.

Cutting their way to greatness

A company in a downward spiral can never cut its way to greatness — and rarely even to survival. Yes, it should throw losing products and divisions over the side, but in the end, it will never survive unless it can find some profitable core operations — and continue to build and build upon those operations.

Two examples come to mind. During a run of miserable CEOs, Yahoo was cutting left and right but not building anything. Now Carol Bartz has defined the core focus of Yahoo as a consumer media company. Who knows, it might even work, but at least it’s a plausible shot at turning around a company that’s fallen long and hard.

The other example is HP, which made a wrenching (but successful) shift from an innovative company to a cost-cutter, as designed by Carly Fiorina and implemented by Mark Hurd.

Washington Examiner contributor (and law school professor) Glenn H. Reynolds offers a counter-example of how not to do it, using a once-storied beer brand: Schlitz.

When I began drinking in college — the pre-Jimmy Carter drinking age was still 18 — the word “Schlitz” had become synonymous with swill. The epitome of this was a fellow Baker House freshman who was so cheap and so intent on getting blitzed on weekends that yes, he’d even drink Schlitz. (Today I can’t even finish a Coors, let alone a Bud — give me a Firestone IPA.)

But apparently Schlitz was once a premium beer. Reynolds explains its self-inflicted slide into oblivion:

Schlitz was once a top national brew. But, in search of short-term gains, it began gradually reducing its quality in tiny increments to save money, substituting cheaper malt, fewer hops and "accelerated" brewing for its traditional approach.

Each incremental decline was imperceptible to consumers, but after a few years, people suddenly noticed that the beer was no good anymore. Sales collapsed, and a "Taste My Schlitz" campaign designed to lure beer drinkers back failed when the "improved" brew turned out not to be any better. A brand image that had been accumulated over decades was lost in a few years, and it has never recovered.

The rest of Reynolds’ column would probably raise hackles here in Silicon Valley — a small government criticism of the Federal government’s self-inflicted damage to its own credibility and legitimacy.

Still, Schlitz provides a great lesson illustrating a key point I teach my students about strategy: make your strategic choices internally self-consistent.

Penny-pinching for a premium brand can be done — as Apple did in the late 1990s, when it fixed its production and supply chain cost disadvantages. However, it’s always a tricky combination to pull off. The only two ways I’ve seen it work is to do what Apple did (favor quality over cost), or what HP did (accept commoditization and switch to a generic low cost strategy).

Economic freedom saves lives

The Chilean earthquake has been on my mind since I turned on the TV Saturday morning. It demonstrates the life-and-death benefits of a functioning economy, society and political system, conclusions reinforced by an email I received Tuesday from one of the friends I made during my 2008 trip to Santiago.

As a native Californian, the collapsed freeways in Santiago — while the rest of the city survived intact — reminded me of similar photos from the three major California earthquakes during my lifetime: 1971, 1989 and 1994.

Here earthquakes are a way of life. Just before lunch on Wednesday, my 5th floor office swayed due to a 3.4 earthquake 9 miles away. Since becoming a state, California has eight major earthquakes:

• Ft. Tejon (LA), 1857, 7.9
• Hayward (Bay Area), 1868, 6.8, killing 30
• Owens Valley (Eastern Sierra), 1872, 7.4, killing 27 and leveling the town of Lone Pine
• San Francisco, 1906, 7.8, killing more than 3,000 people
• Long Beach (LA), 1933, 6.4, killing 115
• Sylmar (LA), 1971, 6.6, killing 65
• Loma Prieta (Bay Area), 1989, 6.9, killing 63 and causing $6 billion in damage
• Northridge (LA), 1994, 6.7, killing 60 and causing more than $13 billion in damage

The major quakes in the 20th century brought dramatic improvements in California’s building codes to make new construction among the safest in the world. One place that’s comparably prepared is Japan — and the other is Chile.

The Christian Science Monitor compared California and Chile’s preparation in an article Monday. While it’s much less wealthy, Chile has had stronger earthquakes that California in the past 200 years, including the strongest earthquake of the 20th century — if not recorded history — the 9.5 earthquake of 1960.

Bret Stephens of the WSJ noted Tuesday that Chile’s 8.8 earthquake was 500 times stronger than Haiti’s but the death toll was 1/200th as large. His explanation:

Chile also has some of the world's strictest building codes. That makes sense for a country that straddles two massive tectonic plates. But having codes is one thing, enforcing them is another. The quality and consistency of enforcement is typically correlated to the wealth of nations. The poorer the country, the likelier people are to scrimp on rebar, or use poor quality concrete, or lie about compliance. In the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, thousands of children were buried under schools also built according to code.

He attributes this outcome to Chile’s economic growth, which in turn he credits to the success of Friedmanism. However, I think Chile’s successful institutions run deeper than that.

However you slice it, Chile is a unique bastion of freedom in South America if not the Western Hemisphere. In January, it became the first Latin America country to join the OECD. According to the latest WSJ study, its economic freedom is slightly behind the US and slightly ahead of the UK. According to Transparency International, corruption is nearly as low as for the US, ahead of Spain and far ahead of the rest of the continent (except Uruguay). By fiscal measures, it’s the best run country in the hemisphere.

On Tuesday night, I got an email from one of those friends in Chile — ironically, an American expat from Texas who (unlike the Chileans) had never experienced a major quake before. Nathan Young wrote:

It was definitely a traumatic experience for us all, and probably the scariest of my life. I awoke right before it hit … In a matter of seconds the bed started softly shaking. As Chile is on a major fault zone, I thought nothing of this as it is quite a frequent occurrence. However, that lighter shaking quickly progressed into violent throws. I live in a 20 story apartment building on the 8th floor and the entire complex began swaying back and forth, moaning and popping, it was deafening. Glasses were breaking, windows rattling, walls splitting, I felt the entire building was about to fall down on me. I was able to scramble to make my way awkwardly to the front door and got down the stairs to the first floor when it finally stopped.
…
I am amazed at how quickly the Chilean economy is getting back on track. In the top 10 for largest earthquakes of all recorded time, and yet two days later everyone returned to work, with the majority of supermarkets open for service as well.
…
Overall I have been very impressed with the way the government and economy itself is recuperating. Most of the city already has electricity again, though looting is taking place in some of the same older and poorer parts of town. I was at a lunch with some friends today and while we were there some hoodlums taking advantage of the chaos and began robbing many of the stores in the central part of Santiago. They shut down the majority of that sector and began patrolling with cops and dogs afterwards.
…
Have some friends here for a wedding that we actually ended up celebrating that same Saturday after the earthquake. Quite a bit more somber though and the reception was discontinued, though it was good to try and begin reflecting and advancing.

Far from the devastation, the FT reached a similar conclusion about the country’s resilience — first to the global recession and now the earthquake:

[Chile] withstood the global slowdown far better than many of its neighbours because of the policy of saving profits from sky-high copper prices. It has some $16bn of that cash still available – about 12 per cent of GDP – which will provide a handy reserve as Sebastián Piñera, new president, sets about rebuilding the roads, bridges, ports and 1.5m homes affected.
…
“Chile should have no problem financing things. It has fiscal savings and international financial institutions are ready to finance Chile, whose leverage is very low,” said one analyst at a bank in Buenos Aires who declined to be named.

So transparency, accountability, strong political and economic institutions don’t just provide economic growth — they save lives. If not from earthquakes or hurricanes, then from tropical diseases, basic sanitation, and infant mortality. Other countries that aspire to the OECD and developed country status have an excellent role model, whether they realize it or not.

Live by the patent, die by the patent

Apple sued smartphone maker HTC for patent infringement Tuesday in Federal district court, and filed to block imports of HTC phones with the US International Trade Commission.

PC magazine lists the phones and patents, while All Things D has the actual court filings, and TechCrunch has both. CNET summarizes HTC’s oral response. Engadget has details of the patents and what they mean.

The ITC complaint lists both Android phones (Droid Eris, Google Nexus One, the Dream/T-Mobile G1) and others (HTC Touch Pro, the Touch Diamond, the Touch Pro2, HTC Tilt II, HTC Pure, HTC Pure, and HTC Imagio.) Nearly all of the accusations are against the Android phones.

The reaction by iPhone haters is predictable outrage. When it comes to aggressive assertion of IP against heroes of the open source revolution, Apple is now where Microsoft was almost a decade ago.

To at least some degree, Apple is doing what exactly what the patent system was intended to do. Apple created a new interface for the mobile phone industry, it was very popular, and then it was copied by its competitors. I haven’t examined the specific patents and allegedly infringing products, but in principle it seems plausible.

Rationality may not be the entire explanation. Apple oldtimers — and I suspect Steve Jobs — still have a bad taste in their mouth from losing the Windows look and feel lawsuit (mainly because of a stupid decision by Apple to grant MS a license in exchange for a renewal for MS’s Basic). It appears that Apple hopes that patents will work to protect Apple from competitors where a look-and-feel copyright suit two decades ago did not.

The problem today is that Apple’s patents are mainly in UI, which are a small part of a complex portable network-connected multifunction device. In my study with Rudi Bekkers, we found that there’s a thicket of 3G patents out there, including held by four of Apple’s largest handset rivals. Among UMTS patent holders, Nokia and Ericsson were the top two with more than 240 each, while Samsung and Motorola were 5th and 6th more than 50 each. (HTC didn’t even have a single one as of 2005.)

So while HTC might be easy to sue, it could be very dangerous to sue four of the top five handset makers. A no-holds-barred patent war could easily become a lose-lose proposition for Apple, unless Apple obtains protection through a patent pass-through license to large 3G portfolios from its current (Broadcomm) or future (Qualcomm) component suppliers.

My guess is that this will slow up the Taiwanese and Chinese commodity rivals for a couple of years, but not those from Europe, Korea or North America that have generous patent portfolios. If it only works against HTC — the fastest growing Android supplier — that might be enough for while. But even if it does, in the long run Apple will need more than patents to protect it against the commoditization of its smartphone innovations.