([ skip this part if history is not your cup of tea ])
6:23
The history of the telephone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3RbnsHTuVw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3RbnsHTuVw
CNET
Published on Feb 15, 2016
Tim Wu, The Master Switch, 2010 [ ]
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1IhN9QUg3y1ghWhNkBxPbDs63W0KmRBSp
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IhN9QUg3y1ghWhNkBxPbDs63W0KmRBSp/view
p.18
On the very day that Alexander Bell was registering his invention, another, Elisha Gray, was also at the patent office filing for the very same breakthrough.*
* Consequently, many books have been dedicated to the question of who actually invented the telephone, and the majority seem to side against Bell, though of course to do so furnishes a revisionist the more interesting conclusion. Most damning to Bell is the fact that his telephone, in its specifications, is almost identical to the one described in Gray's patent. On the other hand, Bell was demonstrably first to have constructed a phone that was functional, if not yet presentable enough to patent. A final bit of evidence against Bell: the testimony of a patent examiner, Zenas F. Wilbur, who admitted to accepting a $100 bribe to show Gray's design to one of Alexander Bell's lawyers. (New York Times, May 22, 1886.)
(Wu, Tim, The master switch : the rise and fall of information empires / Tim Wu., 1. telecommunication--history., 2. information technology--history., 2010 )
(The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Tim Wu, 2010.)
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Clayton M. Christensen, The innovator's prescription, 2009 [ ]
p.313
Before most modern industries emerged, during a period we'll call “Stage Zero,” things were almost always done by hand. We wrote letters, calculated with slide rules, made copies with carbon paper, and so on. Activities during Stage zero in these industries are diffused and local. When “modern” technology comes to an industry, it often brings quantum improvement in quality, cost, and speed. But the equipment that accomplishes this typically is so complicated and expensive that only people or institutions with a lot of skill and a lot of money can own and use that equipment. To economise on the scarcity of money and skills, activity in the industry becomes Centralised--meaning we must take the problems we're trying to resolve to a Central location, where people with the requisite expertise and equipment can solve them. Ultimately, however, the cost and inconvenience of these Centralised solutions creates the impetus for disruptive innovators to find ways that Decentralise the ability to solve these problems. When this is accomplished, rather than taking our problems to the Center to be addressed, technologically advanced solutions go to where the problems are.
As an example, during Stage Zero of the “distance communication” industry we wrote letters that were delivered by railroad, stagecoach, or boat. When the telegraph emerged, it was much faster than the mail. But we had to take our message to the nearest telegraph office, where a skilled operator sent the message in Morse code. Eventually, the wire-line telephone brought the capability of distance communication to our homes. We no longer had to go to a Central location where an expert did the job for us; we just had to go home and do it for ourselves. Today, wireless mobile phones have brought the ability to communicate to us, wherever we are--so we no longer have to go to the phone.
( Christensen, Clayton M., 2009, The innovator's prescription : a disruptive solution for health care / by Clayton M. Christensen, Jerome H. Grossman, Jason Hwang., 1. Health services administration., 2. Public health administration.
3. Disruptive technologies., RA971.C56 2009, 362.1 Christen, p.313 )
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5:01
The Endgame is Near for Phones
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otHviixLykI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otHviixLykI
Dave Lee
Published on May 3, 2019
Thoughts on the state of phones right now in 2019.
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4:57
The Innovator's Dilemma
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu6J6taqOSg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu6J6taqOSg
QUT IFB101
Published on Mar 22, 2015
Disruptive Innovation theory observes how new innovations create a new market and a new value network, which in turn disrupts an existing market.
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5:49
Dr. David Firth: Innovator's Dilemma - Apple
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0xitghqRT4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0xitghqRT4
David Firth
Published on Jun 6, 2018
Dr. David Firth walks through how Apple fits in to the Clayton Christensen Innovators Dilemma framework as part of his technology innovation class.
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6:48
Mature markets - fight your way into the corner [video]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU8rNI7CN_Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU8rNI7CN_Y
align.me
Published on Sep 22, 2016
6:48
Theory of Constraints (TOC) 3 Bottle Oiled Wheels Demonstration
([ if you have not seen this demonstration, watch this video ])
https://youtu.be/mWh0cSsNmGY?t=16
https://youtu.be/mWh0cSsNmGY?t=16
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWh0cSsNmGY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWh0cSsNmGY
Arrie van Niekerk
Published on Jul 5, 2012
theory of constraits (TOC)
Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox, The Goal [ ]
p.213
“Okay, both of you can work on this,” I say. “Here's the problem: We've got a line of kids on a hike in the woods. In the middle of the line, we've got Herbie. We've already taken the pack off Herbie's back to help him go faster, but he's still the slowest. Everybody wants to go faster than Herbie. But if that happens, the line will spread out and some of the kids will get lost. For one reason or another, we can't move Herbie from the middle of the line. Now, how do we keep the line from spreading?”
On Teamwork, p.175
I used to tell production workers one of my favorite stories about a boat rowed by eight men. One rower might feel he is stronger than the next and row twice as hard. This extra effort upsets the boat's process and moves it off course.
( Taiichi Ohno's workplace management: special 100th birthday edition, English translation by Jon Miller, copyright © 2013 by the macgraw-hill companies, inc., p.175, )
p.214
So they leave and I get about 10 minutes of peace and quiet. Then I see the two faces looking around the corner.
(The Goal, Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox, The Goal : a process of ongoing improvement, 3rd revised edition, 25th anniversary edition, theory of constraits (TOC), a Novel, 1984, 1986, 1992, 2004, )
5:05
Theory of Constraints in production - 5 min. summary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTZcDXlAB2U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTZcDXlAB2U
marrisconsulting
Published on Oct 20, 2016
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BCG Classics Revisited: Time-Based Competition
December 23, 2013
By Rich Lesser , Martin Reeves , and Kaelin Goulet
https://www.bcg.com/en-us/publications/2013/bcg-classics-revisited-time-based-competition.aspx
To mark The Boston Consulting Group’s fiftieth anniversary, BCG’s Strategy Institute is taking a fresh look at some of BCG’s classic thinking on strategy and exploring its relevance to today’s business environment. This third in a planned series of articles examines time-based competition, a concept introduced by BCG in a series of Perspectives in 1987 and 1988.
Our Herstory
What Is Time-Based Competition?
https://www.bcg.com/about/our-history/time-based-competition.aspx
Time-based competition was first introduced by BCG in the 1980s in one of BCG’s short essays, called Perspectives. More than 30 years later, the concept is still a tenant of business strategy and relevant for today’s speed of change.
Time-based competition is a demonstration of the power of time management, and how companies can use it to gain a competitive advantage. For companies that make best use of time as they respond and adapt to changes in the market and other possible conditions and obstacles, they will gain an adaptive advantage. But time-based competition is about more than just viewing time as a critical resource, it’s about time as the basis of strategy.
The concept was made well known in the business world by BCG’s George Stalk, who first coined the term in a 1988 Harvard Business Review article "Time—The Next Source of Competitive Advantage," and published a follow-up book in 1990, Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition Is Reshaping Global Markets.
what is time-based competition?
time-based competition is the
concept that companies that meet
the needs of their customers, and
respond to market changes faster
than competitors, grow faster and
are more profitable than others
in their industry.
How Does Time-Based Competition Work?
The adaptive advantages of time-based competition can be gained in all facets of a company’s value chain. To become time-based competitors, companies must execute organizational and structural changes in three key areas:
Manufacturing. Companies use just-in-time production and flexible factories, leading to fewer employees being needed to produce more goods in less time, with lower costs. By reducing or eliminating time delays, it produces a time-based competitive advantage.
Sales and Distribution. The next step is to optimize sales and distribution channels to prevent the loss of any time-based gains from refining the manufacturing process. An example of this is a company only shipping what they sell, meaning less storage requirements and fewer employees being needed since there is no inventory.
Innovation and Product Development. Lastly, companies must bring out products faster than their competitors when it comes to innovation cycles. When a company reduces its new product development and introduction cycle, they gain an immediate advantage by bringing the product to market first, helping to shift the balance of power in an industry and forcing competitors to react.
Reducing, or even eliminating, time delays in all three of these areas allows companies to reduce costs, improve quality, and stay closer to their customers—producing a time-based competitive advantage.
([
notice how if everyone is competing on innovation and production development, then at some point (or stage), the market leaders are going to run into the problem of over performance. thus enabling the ideas in the book, Innovator's Dilemma, by Clayton M. Christensen, 1997.
the take away is that, competition, which on the face of it, might started out as a good thing (assuming), overall (holistically or on the whole), ends up being a bad thing. so what you might want is not an all out competition (throwing the rule book out the window), but an orderly competition, managed competition, or coordinated competition (a norm or rule-based competition).
plan to learn versus plan to execute (which setup a false either or)
plans to learn; plan to execute what you learned; monitor, track, analyze, and get customers and market feedback from the execution; learn from that; rinse, repeat, and iterate (continual repetition of an action or sequence of events); the u.s. military or specifically the u.s. air force has a term for all that whole thing, using different words, but the same idea (concept); it is called the OODA loop (the cycle observe–orient–decide–act - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop).
Innovator's dilemma
Clayton M. Christensen
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1AL-yE4Qv2_0Kb5PCoetRB1PPE52REgVX
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AL-yE4Qv2_0Kb5PCoetRB1PPE52REgVX/view
p.xxii
Colleagues who have read my academic papers reporting the findings recounted in chapters 1 through 4 were struck by their near-fatalism. If good management practice drives the failure of successful firms faced with disruptive technological change, then the usual answers to companies' problem — planning better, working harder, becoming more customer-driven, and taking a longer-term perspective — all EXACERBATE the problem. Sound execution, speed-to-market, total quality management, and process engineering are similarly ineffective. Needless to say, this is disquieting news to people who teach future managers!
(Innovator's dilemma, by Clayton M. Christensen, copyright © 1997, 2000, 658.4 Christen, )
])
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'You don't have to run faster than the bear to get away. You just have to run faster than the guy next to you.'
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Stalk, George
Competing against time : how time-based competition is reshaping global markets / George Stalk, Jr. (and) Thomas M. Hout.
1. time management
2. delivery of goods
3. competition, international
4. comparative advantage (international trade)
copyright © 2009
HD69.T54S73 1990
658.5'6——dc20
(it has been said, Tim Cooks wanted every one at Apple to read this book)
We dedicate this book to the past, current, and future clients and staff of The Boston Consulting Group
https://drive.google.com/open?id=12L03fUTm3oPsnO5W4BDsvvbTMckKNMKu
https://drive.google.com/file/d/12L03fUTm3oPsnO5W4BDsvvbTMckKNMKu/view
(Stalk, George, HD69.T54S73 1990, 658.5'6——dc20, copyright © 2009)
( Competing against time : how time-based competition is reshaping gloabl markets / George Stalk, Jr. (and) Thomas M. Hout., 1. time management., 2. delivery of goods., 3. competition, international., 4. comparative advantage (international trade)., )
<see Frederick Winslow Taylor, efficiency expert>
<see W. Edwards Deming>
<this book should be read as a companion with Innovator's dilemma, by Clayton M. Christensen, copyright © 1997, 2000, 658.4 Christen, >
contents
preface ix
1. The dawn of a new competitive age 1
2. Time and business 39
3. Time and customers 83
4. Time and innovation 107
5. Time and money 149
6. Redesigning the organization for time 169
7. Becoming a time-based organization 197
8. Using time to help your customers and suppliers compete 231
9. Time-based strategy 253
notes 275
index 279
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Newsroom
Press Releases
EGHAM, U.K., February 21, 2019
Gartner Says Global Smartphone Sales Stalled in the Fourth Quarter of 2018
https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-02-21-gartner-says-global-smartphone-sales-stalled-in-the-fourth-quart
Global sales of smartphones to end users stalled in the fourth quarter of 2018, totaling 408.4 million units — growth of just 0.1 percent over the fourth quarter of 2017, according to Gartner, Inc. Apple recorded its worst quarterly decline (11.8 percent) since the first quarter of 2016.
“Demand for entry-level and midprice smartphones remained strong across markets, but demand for high-end smartphones continued to slow in the fourth quarter of 2018,” said Anshul Gupta, senior research director at Gartner. “Slowing incremental innovation at the high end, coupled with price increases, deterred replacement decisions for high-end smartphones. This led to a flat-growth market in the fourth quarter of 2018 (see Table 1).”
Table 1
Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users by Vendor in 4Q18 (Thousands of Units)
Vendor 4Q18 4Q18 4Q17 4Q17
Units Market Share Units Market Share
(%) (%)
Samsung 70,782.5 17.3 74,026.6 18.2
Apple 64,527.8 15.8 73,175.2 17.9
Huawei 60,409.8 14.8 43,887.0 10.8
OPPO 31,589.9 7.7 25,660.1 6.3
Xiaomi 27,843.6 6.8 28,187.8 6.9
Others 153,205.0 37.5 162,908.8 39.9
Samsung 70,782.5 17.3 74,026.6 18.2
Apple 64,527.8 15.8 73,175.2 17.9
Huawei 60,409.8 14.8 43,887.0 10.8
OPPO 31,589.9 7.7 25,660.1 6.3
Xiaomi 27,843.6 6.8 28,187.8 6.9
Others 153,205.0 37.5 162,908.8 39.9
Total 408,358.5 100.0 407,845.4 100.0
Due to rounding, numbers may not add up precisely to the totals shown
Source: Gartner (February 2019)
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Wu, Tim
The master switch : the rise and fall of information empires / Tim Wu.
1. telecommunication--history.
2. information technology--history.
2010
HE7631.W8 2010
384'.041--dc22
Tim Wu, The Master Switch, 2010 [ ]
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1IhN9QUg3y1ghWhNkBxPbDs63W0KmRBSp
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IhN9QUg3y1ghWhNkBxPbDs63W0KmRBSp/view
p.8
It may sound strange to our ears, but Vail, a full-throated capitalist, rejected the whole idea of “competition.” He had professional experience of both monopoly and competition at different times, and he judged monopoly, when held in the right hands, to be the superior arrangement. “Competition,” Vail had written, “means strife, industrial warfare; it means contention; it oftentime means taking advantage of or resorting to any means that conscience of the contestants ... will permit.” His reasoning was moralistic: competition was giving American business a bad name. “The vicious acts associated with aggressive competition are responsible for much, if not all, of the present antagonism in the public mind to business, particularly to large business.”5
pp.9-10
But this book will focus on chronicling the turning points of the 20th century''s information landscape: those particular, decisive moments when a medium opens or closes. The pattern is distinctive. Every few decades, a new communications technology appears, bright with promise and possibility. It inspires a generation to dream of a better society, new forms of expression, alternative types of journalism. Yet each new technology eventually reveals its flaws, kinks, and limitations. For consumers, the technical novelty can wear thin, giving way to various kinds of dissatisfaction with the quality of content (which may tend toward the chaotic and vulgar) and the reliability or security of service. From industry's perspective, the invention may inspire other dissatisfactions: a threat to the revenues of existing information channels that the new technology make less essential, if not obsolete; a difficulty commoditizing (i.e., making a salable product out of) the technology's potential; or too much variation in standards or protocols of use to allow one to market a high quality product that will answer the consumers'dissatisfactions.
When these problems reach a critical mass, and a lost potential for substantial gain is evident, the market's invisible hand waves in some great mogul like Vail or band of them who promise a more orderly and efficient regime for the betterment of all users. Usually enlisting the federal government, this kind of mogul is special, for he defines a new type of industry, integrated and centralized. Delivering a better or more secure product, the mogul heralds a golden age in the life of the new technology. At its heart lies some perfected engine for providing a steady return on capital. In exchange for making the trains run on time (to hazard an extreme comparison), he gains a certain measure of control over the medium's potential for enabling individual expression and technical innovation--control such as the inventors never dreamed of, and necessary to perpetuate itself, as well as the attendant profits of centralization. This, too, is the Cycle.
p.19
Indeed, the history of science is full of examples of what the writer Malcolm Gladwell terms “simultaneous discovery”--so full that the phenomenon represents the norm rather than the exception. Few today know the name Alfred Russel Wallace, yet he wrote an article proposing the theory of natural selection in 1858, a year before Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. Leibnitz and Newton develop calculus simultaneously. And in 1610 four others made the same lunar observations as Galileo.4
(Wu, Tim, The master switch : the rise and fall of information empires / Tim Wu., 1. telecommunication--history., 2. information technology--history., 2010 )
(The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Tim Wu, 2010.)
“I suggest that there are excellent reasons why
revolutions have proved to be so nearly invisible.
Both scientists and laymen must take of their image of
creative scientific activity from an authoritative
source that systematically disguises the existence and
significance of scientific revolutions.
Only when the nature of that authority
[authoritative source] is recognized and analyzed
can one hope to make historical example fully effective.”;
── Thomas S. Kuhn,
The structure of scientific revolution,
1962, 1970, 1996, pp.136-137
Thomas S. Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolution, 1962, 1970, 1996 [ ]
pp.136-137
I suggest that there are excellent reasons why revolutions have proved to be so nearly invisible. Both scientists and laymen must take of their image of creative scientific activity from an authoritative source that systematically disguises--partly for important functional reasons--the existence and significance of scientific revolutions. Only when the nature of that authority is recognized and analyzed can one hope to make historical example fully effective.
(Kuhn, Thomas S., 'The structure of scientific revolution')
(The structure of scientific revolution / Thomas S. Kuhn. --3rd ed., copyright © 1962, 1970, 1996, 1. science--philosophy, 2. science--history, pp.136-137)
Thomas S. Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolution, 1962, 1970, 1996 [ ]
pp.84—85
The transition from a paradigm in crisis to a new one from which a new tradition of normal science can emerge is far from a cumulative process, one achieved by an articulation or extension of the old paradigm. Rather it is a reconstruction of the field from new fundamentals, a reconstruction that changes some of the field's most elementary theoretical generalizations as well as many of its paradigm methods and applications. During the transition period there will be a large but never complete overlap between the problems that can be solved by the old and by the new paradigm. But there will also be a decisive difference in the modes of solution. When the transition is complete, the profession will have changed its view of the field, its methods, and its goals. One perceptive historian, viewing a classic case of science's reorientation by paradigm change, recently described it as "picking up the other end of the stick," a process that involves "handling the same bundle of data as before, but placing them in a new system of relations with one another by giving them a different framework." 8 Others who have noted this aspect of scientific advance have emphasized its similarity to a change in visual gestalt: the marks on paper that were first seen as a bird are now seen as an antelope, or vice versa. 9 That parallel can be misleading. Scientists do not see something AS something else; instead, they simply see it. We have already examined some of the problems created by saying that Priestley saw oxygen as dephlogisticated air. In addition, the scientist does not preserve the gestalt subject's freedom to switch back and forth between ways of seeing. Never-the-less, the switch of gestalt, particularly because it is today so familiar, is a useful elementary prototype for what occurs in full-scale paradigm shift.
8 Hebert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800 (London, 1949), pp. 1-7.
The preceding anticipation may help us recognize crisis as an appropriate prelude to the emergence of new theories, particularly since we have already examined a small-scale version of the same process in discussing the emergence of discoveries. [...]
(Kuhn, Thomas S., 'The structure of scientific revolution')
(The structure of scientific revolution / Thomas S. Kuhn. ——3rd ed., copyright © 1962, 1970, 1996, 1. science——philosophy, 2. science——history, pp.84—85)
Tim Wu, The Master Switch, 2010 [ ]
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1IhN9QUg3y1ghWhNkBxPbDs63W0KmRBSp
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IhN9QUg3y1ghWhNkBxPbDs63W0KmRBSp/view
pp.19-20
Through circumstance or luck, they are exactly at the right distance both to imagine the future and to create an independent industry to exploit it.
Let's focus, first, on the act of invention. The importance of the outsider here owes to his being at the right remove from the prevailing currents of thought about the problem at hand. That distance affords a perspective close enough to understand the problem, yet far enough for greater freedom of thought, freedom from, as it were, the cognitive distortion of what is as opposed to what could be. This innovative distance explains why so many of those who turn an industry upside down are outsiders, even outcasts.
p.20
The disruptive innovation, conversely, threatens to displace a product altogether. It is the difference between the electric typewriter, which improved on the typewriter, and the word processor, which supplanted it.5
p.20
But to be clear, it is not mere distance, but the right distance that matters; there is such a thing as being too far away.
“It takes time to gain experience and familiarity that
lead to the fineness of granularity wherein the sweet
spots lie. And, no, we haven't found a solution to
time travel. But the history of technology is full of
discoveries of how to move [slower], finer, smoother.
That is the heart of your quest—to find ways to
accelerate the rate and quality of gaining experience
that get you to the fine level. What all of this says
is that to be successful, we need to innovate around
the whole package, not just one part.”;
── Bill Buxton, February 06, 2008
Innovation & Design :
A Familiar Problem,
• gradual granularity refinement
http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/stories/2008-02-06/a-familiar-problembusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice
• https://www.billbuxton.com/BW%20Assets/02a.%20A%20Familiar%20Problem%20Published.pdf
p.21
It was that everyone else was obsessed with trying to improve the telegraph. By the 1870s inventors and investors understood that there could be such a thing as a telephone, but it seemed a far-off, impractical thing. Serious men knew that what really mattered was better telegraph technology. Inventors were racing to build the “musical telegraph,” a device that could send multiple messages over a single line at the same time. The other only grail was a device for printing telegrams at home.*
* In this yearning for “home telegraphs” was the first intimation of what would one day flower as email and text messages.
pp.22-23
More generally, since the Civil War, the Republican Party and the telegraph industry had enjoyed a special relationship, in part because much of what were eventually Western Union's lines were built by the Union army.
p.28
Schumpeter's cycle of industrial life and death is an inspiration for this book. His thesis is that in the natural course of things, the new only rarely supplements the old; it usually destroys it.
p.28
As we shall see in future chapters, allying itself with the state, a dominant industrial force can turn a potentially destructive technology into a tool for perpetuating domination and delaying death.
(Wu, Tim, The master switch : the rise and fall of information empires / Tim Wu., 1. telecommunication--history., 2. information technology--history., 2010 )
(The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Tim Wu, 2010.)
Tim Wu, The Master Switch, 2010 [ ]
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1IhN9QUg3y1ghWhNkBxPbDs63W0KmRBSp
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IhN9QUg3y1ghWhNkBxPbDs63W0KmRBSp/view
p.32
The First Bell Monopoly was a service for the rich, operating mainly in major cities in the East, with limited long distance capacity. The idea of a mass telephone service connecting everyone to everyone else was still decades away.
p.54
Unfortunately, before it had even gotten under way, all the backers suddenly pulled out for reasons that remain mysterious. According to an FCC investigator's report decades later, in 1936, the pressure on the Traction Kings had come from J. P. Morgan himself, whose designs on a telephone monopoly were by then already formed. Indeed, as the FCC documented, no rival national long distance network could get financing in the United States or abroad. And so, in the absence of capacity, coordination, and cash, no real challenger to AT&T long lines would appear until the 1970s, some 60 years later. That was J. P. Morgan's lasting legacy.
p.55
But also at that very moment, Vail executed his most ingenious and surprising maneuver.
In a manner nearly unimaginable today, Vail turned to the government, agreed to restrain himself, and asked to be regulated. Bell agreed to operate pursuant to government-set rates, asking in exchange only that any price regulations be “just and fair.” Imagine Microsoft in the 1990s asking the states and the Clinton Justice Department to determine the price of installing Windows, or Google today requesting federal guidelines for its search engine. Having spun much rhetoric about Bell as a public trust, Vail now seemed to be putting his money where his mouth was.
With this conciliatory if not quite prostate attitude, AT&T was able to settle the lawsuit in 1913, acceding to a consent decree named the “Kingsbury Commitment” after Bell's vice president. Under the settlement, Bell make one big concession: it agreed to sell Western Union. It also agreed to permit Independents to retain their independence while enjoying access to its long distance services, and to refrain from acquiring further Independents in over one thousand markets.22
p.56
The trick of the Kingsbury Commitment was to make relatively painless concessions that preempted more severe actions, just as an inoculation confers immunity by a exposing one's system to a much less virulent form of the pathogen. By offering to renounce hegemony in a dying industry and make available a service relatively few could still exploit, Bell spared itself the brunt--and the one truly meaningful remedy--of most antitrust proceedings: a breakup of the firm. With the government satisfied, and even Woodrow Wilson hailing it as an act of business statesmanship, Kingsbury's greatest achievement was to free Bell to consolidate the industry unmolested.23
p.56
This was something Vail seemed to understand intuitively: that antitrust, perhaps all law, is ultimately pliable by perceptions of right and wrong, good and evil. He understood that the public and government would rise up against unfairness and greed, though not necessarily against size in and of itself. Had Goliath not cursed David by his gods, David might have kept his sling in his pocket.
(Wu, Tim, The master switch : the rise and fall of information empires / Tim Wu., 1. telecommunication--history., 2. information technology--history., 2010 )
(The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Tim Wu, 2010.)
Tim Wu, The Master Switch, 2010 [ ]
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1IhN9QUg3y1ghWhNkBxPbDs63W0KmRBSp
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IhN9QUg3y1ghWhNkBxPbDs63W0KmRBSp/view
p.12
Sometimes it takes an outsider to make this clear. Steaming from Malaysia to the United States in 1926, a young English writer named Aldous Huxley came across something interesting in the ship's library, a volume entitled My Life and Work, by Henry Ford.8
p.12
But what really interested Huxley, the future author of Brave New World, was Ford's belief that his systems might be useful not just for manufacturing cars, but for all forms of social ordering.
p.13
When he returned to England, Huxley declared in an essay for Harper's Magazine called “The Outlook for American Culture” that “the future of America is the future of the World.” He had seen that future and been more than a little dismay by it. “Mass production,” he wrote, “is an admirable thing when applied to material objects; but when applied to the things of the spirit it is not so good.”10
Seven years later, the question of the spirit would occur to another student of culture and theorist of information. “The radio is the most influential and important intermediary between a spiritual movement and the nation,” wrote Joseph Goebbels, quite astutely, in 1933. “Above all,” he said, “it is necessary to clearly centralize all radio activities.”11
It is an under acknowledged truism that, just as you are what you eat, how and what you think depends on what information you are exposed to.
p.13
My effort to consider this process is also an effort to understand the practical realities of free speech, as opposed to its theorectical life.
p.13
Yet the shape or even existence of any such marketplace depends far less on our abstract values than on the structure of the communications and culture industries. We sometimes treat the information industries as if they were like any other enterprise, but they are not, for their structure determines who gets heard.
p.14
In fact, the place we find ourselves now is a place we have been before, albeit in different guise.
(Wu, Tim, The master switch : the rise and fall of information empires / Tim Wu., 1. telecommunication--history., 2. information technology--history., 2010 )
(The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Tim Wu, 2010.)
Tim Wu, The Master Switch, 2010 [ ]
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1IhN9QUg3y1ghWhNkBxPbDs63W0KmRBSp
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IhN9QUg3y1ghWhNkBxPbDs63W0KmRBSp/view
p.273
What should be apparent to any reader having reached this point is that here in the 21st century, these firms and their allies are fighting anew the age-old battle we've recounted time and time again. It is the perennial Manichaean contest informing every episode in this book: the struggle between the partisans of the open and of the closed, between the decentralized and the consolidated visions of a proper order. But this time around, as compared with any other, the sides are far more evenly matched.
Manichaean
Man·i·chae·ism, Man·i·che·ism n.
a religious philosophy taught from the 3d cent. to the 7th cent. A.D. by the Persian Mani, or Manichaeus, and his followers, combining Zoroastrian, Gnostic Christian, and pagan elements, and based on the doctrine of the two contending principles of good (light, God, the soul) and evil (darkness, Satan, the body): also Manichaeanism ── Manichaean n., adj. ── Manichee n.
p.289
In Hindu mythology, deities and demons assume different incarnations to fight the same battles repeatedly.
p.289
It is the old conflict between the concepts of the open system and the closed, between the forces of centralized order and those of dispersed variety. The antagonists assume new forms, the general change, but essentially the same battles are fought over and over again.
same shit different band
Same Shit, Different Day
Army buddy: So what are we going to do today?
Army buddy 2: same shit different day.
Army buddy: That's just great.
Same Shit, Different Toilet.
p.255
Human history is a drama in which the stories stay the same, the scripts of those stories change slowly with evolving cultures and the stage setting change all the time. So it is that we see our 20th century selves mirrored in Shakespeare, Homer, and the Bible. So to the extent The MM-M is about people and teams, obsolescence should be slow.
(The mythical man-month : essays on software engineering, Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. -- Anniversary ed., © 1985, Software engineering, p.255 )
pp.290-291
In 2006, Professor Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard made the startling prediction that over the next decade, the information industry would undertake a determined effort to replace the personal computer with a new generation of “information appliances.”18 He was, it turned out, exactly right.
18. These predictions form the thesis of Jonathan zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
“... designed for consumption, not creation ...”
p.293
Tom Conlon of Popular Science
The owner of an iPod or iPad is in a fundamentally different position: his machine may have far more computational power than a PC of a decade ago, but it is designed for consumption, not creation. Or, as Conlon declared vehemently, “Once we replace the personal computer with a closed-platform device such as the iPad, we replace freedom, choice and the free market with oppression, censorship and monopoly.”
(Wu, Tim, The master switch : the rise and fall of information empires / Tim Wu., 1. telecommunication--history., 2. information technology--history., 2010 )
(The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Tim Wu, 2010.)
Tim Wu, The Master Switch, 2010 [ ]
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1IhN9QUg3y1ghWhNkBxPbDs63W0KmRBSp
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IhN9QUg3y1ghWhNkBxPbDs63W0KmRBSp/view
p.244
The Bells were corporate America's reigning champs in the rope-a-dope game of keeping up appearances in the front office while quietly pummeling their rivals in the parking lot.
While not keen to share their toys under the Act's so-called unbundling rules, the Bells immediately understood that the deal was a win for them. What mattered most was one critical fact: the 1996 law superseded the consent decree that had ended the Bell antitrust lawsuit. With that decree abrogated, the Bells were now under the supervision of the FCC, as opposed to the hawk-eyed taskmaster Judge Greene. It was for them the catbird seat: there was no rival they couldn't handle, except for the federal courts and the Department of Justice.
p.245
Eliminating competition is rarely accomplished in a single grand stroke. The would-be monopolist does not round up rivals for a wholesale massacre; there are no corporate killing fields. Instead, the corporation seeking dominance behaves rather like a pest exterminator, setting poison bait traps, killing what he can see, and methodically decimating his foes by making their life a living hell. The monopolist's tools are lawyers and local statutes; his tactics are delays and court challenges, all deployed with an eye toward unraveling firms with lesser resources.
The 1996 Act enabled the Bells to blow the trumpet of competition while simultaneously eliminating all actual competitors.
p.246
a hefty price on market entry
To offer service to a single customer, a would-be telephone company had to build physical lines reaching 60 percent of homes and businesses in a 27-square-mile radius. It was roughly like requiring that one build roads to every house in the area just to open a gas station.
p.248 AT&T, Verizon, Qwest
/ AT&T ---------------------x
/ \
| Ameritech \ \
| Southwestern Bell }--SBC----}---> AT&T
AT&T---| Pacific Telesis / /
| /
| Bell South ---------------x
|
| Bell Atlantic \___Verizon-------> Verizon
| NYNEX /
|
\ US West -------------------------> Qwest
BBS = bulletin board system
p.263
<see book for diagram>
BBS period Dial-up period Broadband period
(1980s-1994) (1995-2000s) (2000s on)
Internet Internet
| |
| |
AOL AOL | cable/DSL
| | |
| dail-up | dail-up |
| | |
homes homes homes
p.266
Yet for many people, the Internet's structure was--indeed remains--deeply counter-intuitive. This is because it defies every expectation one has developed from experience of other media industries, which are all predicated on control of customer. Levin, an apostle par excellence of that control model, fell victim to Schumpeter's observation that “Knowledge and habit once acquired, become as firmly rooted in ourselves as a railway embankment in the earth.” Unlike any medium Levin had known, the Internet abdicates control to the individual; that is its special allure, its power to be endlessly surprising, as well as its founding principle.
(Wu, Tim, The master switch : the rise and fall of information empires / Tim Wu., 1. telecommunication--history., 2. information technology--history., 2010 )
(The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Tim Wu, 2010.)
Tim Wu, The Master Switch, 2010 [ ]
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1IhN9QUg3y1ghWhNkBxPbDs63W0KmRBSp
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IhN9QUg3y1ghWhNkBxPbDs63W0KmRBSp/view
p.57
Bell's dedication to common carriage was a promise to serve any customer willing to pay, charge fixed rates, and carry his or her traffic without discrimination. It made Bell's telephone service offer rather what a taxi service is meant to provide in most cities--a meaningful similarity, since the concept has its origins in transport.
p.99
... Brave New World, as we have seen, Aldous Huxley could already glimpse where the centralization and mechanization of culture was leading. He foresaw culture's future dominated by commerce. He also saw the prospect of global standardization. “In 3000 A.D.” wrote Huxley, “one will doubtless be able to travel from Kansas City to Peking [currently known as Beijing, Peking is an older name of the city] in a few hours. But if the civilisation of these two places is the same, there will be no object in doing so.”, p.99, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Tim Wu, 2010.
p.114
Having won its case, Hush-A-Phone ran a series of advertisements proclaiming its device newly approved for use by federal tariff. Unfortunately, its could not keep up with Bell's own stately pace of product design, and then the phone company began to sell new handsets again, sometime in the 1960s, Hush-A-Phone folded. Such are the wages of stifling innovation: to this day, while the annoyance of mobile home chatter, the banality of overheard conversations, has become a cliché, there is not a Hush-A-Phone or its equivalent to be found.
Hush-A-Phone's valiant founder died sometime in the 1970s, to be forgotten, apart from one great cultural reference. In the 1985 film Brazil, Robert De Niro plays a maverick repairman who does unauthorized repairs and leads a resistance movement against a totalitarian state. The hero and hope of that dystopia is named Harry Tuttle.
(Wu, Tim, The master switch : the rise and fall of information empires / Tim Wu., 1. telecommunication--history., 2. information technology--history., 2010 )
(The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Tim Wu, 2010.)
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Clayton M. Christensen, The innovator's prescription, 2009 [ ]
pp.147-148
NOTES
41. We thank our friend Chris Rowen, CEO of Tensilica Corporation, for articulating this concept to us. Rowen's name for this phenomenon is the “Law of Conservation of Modularity,” named in honor of Clayton Christensen's 12th-grade physics teacher, Mr. Steed, who first propounded the principle. The law is, we think, more obscure in the present than it will be in the future. Christensen and Raynor labeled this phenomenon the “Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits” in the appendix to Chapter 6 of The Innovator's Solution, because what becomes more modular becomes less profitable, and what becomes more interdependent and proprietary becomes more profitable. We recommend Chapters 5 and 6 of that book to readers with a deeper interest in this topic.
( Christensen, Clayton M., 2009, The innovator's prescription : a disruptive solution for health care / by Clayton M. Christensen, Jerome H. Grossman, Jason Hwang., 1. Health services administration., 2. Public health administration.
3. Disruptive technologies., RA971.C56 2009, 362.1 Christen, )
p.17 (pdf 22)
https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/49353/UnderstandingInfrastructure2007.pdf
“Below the level of the work.” Neither the exact implementation of standards, nor their integration into local communities of practice, can ever be wholly anticipated. For this reason, gateways in information infrastructures work best when they interlock with the existing framework “below the level of the work”, i.e. without specifying exactly how work is to be done or exactly how information is to be processed (Forster and King, 1995). Most systems that attempt to force conformity to a particular conception of a work process (e.g. Lotus Notes) have failed to achieve infrastructure status because they violate this principle (Grudin, 1989; Vandenbosch and Ginzberg, 1996). By contrast, email has become fully infrastructural because it can be used for vitually any work task.
― Paul N. Edwards,
Steven J. Jackson,
Geoffrey C. Bowker, and
Cory P. Knobel,
Understanding Infrastructure: Dynamics, Tensions, and Design.
(Ann Arbor: DeepBlue, 2007)
NSF Grant 0630263,
January 2007,
p.17 (pdf 22)
p.57
Bell's dedication to common carriage was a promise to serve any customer willing to pay, charge fixed rates, and carry his or her traffic without discrimination. It made Bell's telephone service offer rather what a taxi service is meant to provide in most cities--a meaningful similarity, since the concept has its origins in transport., p.57, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Tim Wu, 2010.
Clayton M. Christensen, The innovator's prescription, 2009 [ ]
p.li
NOTES
30. This subsidy is akin to what was done in telecommunications. For nearly half of the 20th century the government intentionally kept the prices of long-distance telephony high--in part to subsidize local phone service, but also to cover the cost of AT&T's Bell Laboratories. A great number of the technological and scientific discoveries in the history of microelectronics were developed at Bell Laboratories and then licensed to the world at extraordinarily low prices.
( Christensen, Clayton M., 2009, The innovator's prescription : a disruptive solution for health care / by Clayton M. Christensen, Jerome H. Grossman, Jason Hwang., 1. Health services administration., 2. Public health administration.
3. Disruptive technologies., RA971.C56 2009, 362.1 Christen, )
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https://www.submarinecablemap.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_exchange_point
An Internet exchange point (IX or IXP) is the physical infrastructure through which Internet service providers (ISPs) and content delivery networks (CDNs) exchange Internet traffic between their networks (autonomous systems).[1]
https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/cdn/glossary/internet-exchange-point-ixp/
https://www.internetexchangemap.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_exchange_points_by_size
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_exchange_points
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http://www.cidr-report.org/as2.0/
Important RFCs
Humorous RFCs
https://tangentsoft.net/rfcs/humorous.html
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1925
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<< Cellphone Radiation >>
NIH Study Links Cellphone Radiation To Cancer In Male Rats (techcrunch.com)
Posted by BeauHD on Friday February 02, 2018 @11:30PM from the equivocal-
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/18/02/03/0150237/nih-study-links-cellphone-radiation-to-cancer-in-male-rats
<< Cell Tower Radiation >>
World's Largest Animal Study On Cell Tower Radiation Confirms Cancer Link
Posted by BeauHD on Thursday March 22, 2018 @11:30PM from the possibly-
https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/18/03/22/2333203/worlds-largest-animal-study-on-cell-tower-radiation-confirms-cancer-link
Two Studies Find 'Clear Evidence' That Cellphone Radiation Causes Cancer In Rats (qz.com)
Posted by BeauHD on Friday March 30, 2018 @11:30PM from the can-you-hear-me-
https://science.slashdot.org/story/18/03/31/0124212/two-studies-find-clear-evidence-that-cellphone-radiation-causes-cancer-in-rat
11-Year UK Study Reports No Health Danger From Mobile Phone Transmissions
Posted by samzenpus on Thursday February 13, 2014 @04:04AM from the take-off-
https://news.slashdot.org/story/14/02/13/0226220/11-year-uk-study-reports-no-health-danger-from-mobile-phone-transmissions
May 16, 2010 / 11:13 AM / 9 years ago
UPDATE 1-WHO study has no clear answer on phones and cancer
By Kate Kelland, Health and Science Correspondent
https://www.reuters.com/article/cancer-cellphones/update-1-who-study-has-no-clear-answer-on-phones-and-cancer-idUSLDE64F0J420100516
* No apparent cancer risk, but concern about heaviest users
* Study’s findings unclear, methodology has weaknesses
* Experts say phone use now much higher so more work needed
“Today, mobile phone use has become much more prevalent and it is not unusual for young people to use mobile phones for an hour or more a day,” the researchers wrote.
But increasing use is tempered by generally lower radiation emissions from modern phones and greater use of texting and hands-free sets that keep the phone away from the head, they said.
1:32
"Apparently" This Kid is Awesome, Steals the Show During Interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz5TGN7eUcM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz5TGN7eUcM
WNEP-TV
Published on Aug 4, 2014
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23:48
#StrangeParts #iPhoneAdventures #China
How I Made My Own iPhone - in China
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leFuF-zoVzA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leFuF-zoVzA
Strange Parts
Published on Apr 12, 2017
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ifixit
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_trust#Roosevelt's_%22Brain_Trust%22
Rethinking Repair
by Steven J. Jackson
https://sjackson.infosci.cornell.edu/RethinkingRepairPROOFS%28reduced%29Aug2013.pdf
pp.222-223
For this and other reasons, broken world thinking asserts that breakdown, dissolution, and change, rather than innovation, development, or design as conventionally practiced and thought about are the key themes and problems facing new media and technology scholarship today.
Attached to this, however, comes a second and more hopeful approach: namely a deep wonder and appreciation for the ongoing activities by which rich and robust lives are sustained against the weight of centrifugal odds, and how sociotechnical forms and infrastructures, large and small, get not only broken but restored, one not-so-metaphoric brick at a time. On this road we travel the path from despair to admiration, even reverence, annd are confronted above all by the remarkable resilience, creativity, and sheer magnitude of the work represented in the ongoing maintenance and reproduction of established order.
Here, then, are two radically different forces and realities. On one hand, a fractal world, a centrifugal world, an always-almost-falling-apart world. On the other, a world in constant process of fixing and reinvention, reconfiguring and reassembling into new combinations and new possibilities——a topic of both hope and concern. It is a world of pain and possibility, creativity and destruction, innovation, and the worst excesses of leftover habit and power.
The fulcrum of these two worlds is repair : the subtle acts of care by which order and meaning in complex sociotechnical systems are maintained and transformed, human value is preserved and extended, and the complicated work of fitting to the varied circumstances of organizations, systems, and lives is accomplished. Repair in this connotation has a literal and material dimesion, filled with immediate questions: Who fixes devices and systems we “seamlessly” use? Who maintains the infrastructures within and against which our lives unfold? But it also speaks directly to the “the social”, if we still choose to cut the world in this way: how are human orders broken and restored (and again, who does this work)?
Some of these effects are captured in the language of “articulation work” so usefully described by Susan Leigh Star and Anselm Strauss (1999).
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[pp.171-172]
19
the patterns of human mobility
... About a year after the publication of my first book on networks I had grown used to e-mails and calls from readers seeking advice on inter-connected systems. This was one of the few times that someone had called not to ask but to give. He had my full attention.
The caller was a high-ranking executive at a mobile-phone consortium who'd recognized the value in having records of who is talking with whom. After reading 'Linked' he had become convinced that social networking was essential to improving services for his consumers. So he offered access to their anonymized data in exchange for any insights our research group might provide.
His intuition proved correct: My group and I soon found the mobile users' behavior patterns to be so deeply affected by the underlying social network that the executive ordered many of his company's business practices redesigned, from marketing to consumer retention. With that, he pioneered a trend that over the past few years has swept most mobile carriers, triggering an avalanche of research into mobile communications. Despite his crucial role in advancing network thinking in the mobile industry, his combination of modesty and caution prevented his ever wanting his name attached to any of it.
As my group and I immersed ourselves in the intricacies of mobile communications, we came to understand that mobile phones not only reveal who our friends are but also capture our whereabouts. Indeed, each time we make a call the carrier records the tower that communicates with our phone, effectively pinpointing our location. This information is not terribly accurate, as we could be anywhere within the tower's reception area, which can span tens of square miles. Furthermore, our location is usually recorded only when we use our phone, providing ... information about our whereabouts between calls. ([ this statement might not be truly fully accurate. I am not a mobile-phone expert and I am not aware of what type of logs information the mobile-phone hardware box maintain to monitor mobile-cell phone capacity and quality within a given area. Data log like how many mobile-cell phones are roaming within a tower area, what is the relative strength signal of each of the mobile-cell phones, the distance of the mobile-cell phones from the tower to be determine by how long it takes for the phone operating system to acknowledge a tower ping, all these data are compiled to monitor and determine the service quality of the phone call, when and where to plan for putting up additional mobile-phone cell site. We know we can use data from multiple cell-phone-service provider units to pinpoint mobile-cell phone to greater accuracy. Data can also be gather after the fact and-or in real-time of any devices that has GPS (Global Positioning System - where location is determine using tri-angulation by at least three satellites timing signal from the sky) or GPS-like circuitry with the appropriate software enable to take advantage of the available hardware. ]) Despite these contraints, the data offered an exceptional opportunity to explore the mobility of millions of individuals.
(Barabási, Albert-László; 'BURSTS: the hidden pattern behind everything we do', copyright © 2010, 303.4901 Barabási, )
(BURSTS by Albert-László Barabási, © 2010, 303.4901 Barabási, pp.171-172)
[pp.193-195]
... As a result we tend to romanticize college life, the cradle of youth culture, seeing students as perhaps the most spontaneous and thus least predictable segment of the population. Yet Sandy Pentland, an MIT professor who follows the chatter of hundreds of students every day, finds that concept preposterous.
In the early 1990s Pentland started a research program in wearable computing at the Media Lab at MIT, prompted by the the realization that, given the rate at which computers were shrinking, we soon would want to have them with us all the time. Sandy's vision of the future proved remarkably accurate, as today computers have become a part of our wardrobe, fashion accessories of a kind. In fact, for the most part we have stopped even calling them computers. We refer to them simply as smart phones.
In the fall of 2002 Nathan Eagle, a doctoral student in Sandy's lab, offered one hundred MIT students free Nokia smart phones, a desirable top-of-the-line gadget at the time. This was no handout, however; the catch was that the phones collected everything they could about their owners: whom they called and when, how long they chatted, where they were, and who was nearby. By the end of the year-long experiment, Nathan Eagle and Sandy Pentland had collected about 450,000 hours of data on the communication, whereabouts, and behavior of seventy-five Media Lab faculty and students and twenty-five freshmen from MIT's Sloan School of Management.
Trying to make sense of his data, Nathan arranged each student's whereabouts into three groups: home, work,and "elsewhere," the latter category assigned when they were neither at home nor at work but jogging along the Charles River or partying at a friend's house. Then he developed an algorithm to detect repetitive patterns, quickly discovering that on weekdays the students were mainly at home between the hours of ten P.M. and seven A.M. and at the university between ten A.M. and eight P.M. Their behavior changed slightly only during the weekends, when they showed an inclination to stay home at late as ten A.M.
None of these patterns would shock anybody familiar with graduate student life. But the level of predictability of their routines was still remarkable. Nathan found that if he knew a business-school student's morning location he could predict with 90 percent accuracy the student's afternoon whereabouts. And for Media Lab students, the algorithm did even better, predicting their whereabouts 96 percent of the time. ([ we are creatures of habits ])
It is tempting to see life as a crusade against randomness, a yearning for a safe, ordered existence. If so, the students excelled at it, ignoring the roll of the dice day after day. Indeed, Nathan's algorithm failed to predict their whereabouts only twice a week, during rare hours of rebellion when they finally lived up to our expectation that they be wild and spontaneous. Yet the timing of these unpredictable moments was by no means random--they were the typical party times, the Friday and Saturday nights. The rest of the week, twenty-two out of twenty-four hours a day, the students were neither the elusive Osama bin Laden nor the ubiquitously erratic Britney Spears but intead dutifully trod the deeply worn grooves of their lives. So maybe the Harlequins were onto something when they insisted on using an RNG(Random Number Generator). Had they studies at MIT, their whereabouts would have been no mystery--not to Nathan, nor to the Vast Machine.
But we may yet avert the dawn of an Orwellian world as described in 'The Traveler'. For me, this sense of hopefulness emerged in the summer of 2007 when I purchased a brick-sized wristwatch. It was a loud antifashion statement and doubled as a GPS device, which recorded my precise location every few seconds. After I had worn it for several months, Zehui Qu, a visiting computer-science student, applied Nathan Eagle and Sandy Pentland's predictive algorithm to the data collected by my GPS. Sure enough, after a few days of training, Qu was able predict my whereabouts with 80 precent accuracy.
While the algorithm's performance was impressive, the persistent gap between the 96 percent predictability Nathan found amoung the MIT students and my 80 percent raise a red flag. Neither I nor the MIT students were a fair representation of the population at large. Marta's study of the mobile-phone records had already explained why: When it comes to our travel patterns, we are hugely different. Some, like the MIT students and myself, are relatively home- and office-bound. Others are outliers, however, and travel a lot, tending to be less localized.
So does that mean there are people out there who are far less predictable than the MIT students and I? Truck drivers, perhaps, who travel the country for weeks at a time? Soccer moms, whose minivans shuttle between piano and fencing lessons? What about super-traveler Hasan Elahi, whose "suspicious movements" will undoubtedly land him in hot water again? How different are they from you and me? Are there Harlequins among us, individuals whose lives are driven by the roll of the dice to such a degree that their movements are impossible to foresee?
(Barabási, Albert-László; 'BURSTS: the hidden pattern behind everything we do', copyright © 2010, 303.4901 Barabási, )
(BURSTS by Albert-László Barabási, © 2010, 303.4901 Barabási, pp.193-195)
[pp.199-200],
Before we move on, let me clarify that there is a fundamental difference between WHAT we do and how PREDICTABLE we are. When it comes to things we do--like the distances we travel, the number of e-mails we send, or the number of calls we make--we encounter power laws, which means that some individuals are significantly more active than others. They send more messages; they travel farther. This also means that outliers are normal--we EXPECT to have a few individuals, like Hasan, who cover hundreds or even thousands of miles on a regular basis.
But when it comes to the predictability of our actions, to our surprise power laws are replaced by Gaussians. This means that whether you limit your life to a two-mile neighborhood or drive dozens of miles each day, take a fast train to work or even commute via airplane, you are just as predictable as everyone else. And once Gaussians dominate the problem, outliers are forbidden, just as bursts are never found in Poisson's dice-driven universe. Or two-mile-tall folks ambling down the street are unheard of. Despite the many differences between us, when it came to our whereabouts we are all equally predictable, and the unforgiving law of statistics forbids the existence of individuals who somehow buck this trend.
But let statistics forbid, halt, hinder, impede, refuse, and deny, there's still someone who won't be limited by it. Our friend Hasan Elahi.
[pp.201-202]
... When Zehui Qu ran the predictive algorithm on Hasan's data, though, it was an epic failure--only three times out of more than four thousand hourly attempts did he succeed in predicting Hasan's movements. .... For all practical purposes, Hasan was a Harlequin, fully unpredictable.
I confronted Hasan with our conclusions, telling him that, as far as we were concerned, he was completely random. His predictability was practically zero.
"Can't be zero, is it?" He laughed, then continued without missing a beat, "I mean, there are a few places I go now and then."
Sure, Hasan did visit the same spot in New Jersey 131 times, which, as we later learned, was his home at the time. .... By way of comparison, during the two-month period I dutifully toted my GPS device around, I was tracked at home on more than 880 occassions. The difference between Hasan and me boils down to this: While I was predictably at home every night, Hasan was just as likely to be on a train in Europe or asleep in an airport as spending the night in his own bed. He did go home occasionally, but there was no recognizable pattern to it.
For Hasan's perspective, his unpredictability wasn't all that surprising; and while he never explicitly said so, I think he found our whole analysis somewhat puzzling.* That he could readily explain each move he'd made convinced him that his behavior was absolutely normal.
"This is what I do," he said. "It's the transit points that's become my work."
Well, that didn't really cut it for me. Not because I doubted what he said. The real problem is that if power laws had governed our predictability, as they did the distances we cover, we'd expect to have a few outliers. Once power laws are absent, however, outliers are no longer normal. They are forbidden, making us all equally predictable. But no matter how we parsed the data, when it came to his predictability and lifestyle, Hasan was an outlier. Since outliers could not exist in this context, he was not normal any longer. Just as Homeland Security has suspected.
(Barabási, Albert-László; 'BURSTS: the hidden pattern behind everything we do', copyright © 2010, 303.4901 Barabási, )
(BURSTS by Albert-László Barabási, © 2010, 303.4901 Barabási, pp.199-200, pp.201-202)
* "As of mid-April and on, I was on sabbatical leave from Rutgers," he told me, adding, "so I didn't exactly have a regular weekday schedule to go on. Even when I was at school, I would just basically fly in, teach my class, and then leave. So it does make sense." He then thought a moment, adding, "Because I literally was all over the place that year."
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By Cam Simpson
June 15, 2017, 2:00 AM PDT
American Chipmakers Had a Toxic Problem. Then They Outsourced It
Twenty-five years ago, U.S. tech companies pledged to stop using chemicals that caused miscarriages and birth defects. They failed to ensure that their Asian suppliers did the same.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-06-15/american-chipmakers-had-a-toxic-problem-so-they-outsourced-it
Park Min-sook at home with her daughter Ju-hyun in Danyang, South Korea. Park, 44, worked at a Samsung semiconductor factory for seven years. She later suffered from breast cancer, infertility, and a miscarriage.
Photographer: Anastasia Taylor-Lind for Bloomberg Businessweek
Results in epidemiology often are equivocal, and money can cloud science (see: tobacco companies vs. cancer researchers). Clear-cut cases are rare. Yet just such a case showed up one day in 1984 in the office of Harris Pastides, a recently appointed associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
... ... ...
Kim began compiling and analyzing occupational-health studies about semiconductor workers worldwide, a body of work that had drawn little attention in South Korea despite the industry’s importance there. She found 40 different works published by 2010, and virtually every one mentioned exposure to toxic chemicals. “I had no idea that this is a chemical industry, not the electronics industry,” she says.
Physics drives the design of microchips, but their production is mostly about chemistry. In a basic sense, chemicals and light combine to photographically print circuits onto silicon wafers. Gordon Moore, a founder of Intel and a major figure in the creation of the modern chip in 1960, is a chemist. He worked closely on the printing process with a physicist named Jay Last. “We were putting into industrial production a lot of really nasty chemicals,” Last said in an interview he did with Moore for an oral history project of the Chemical Heritage Foundation. “There was just no knowledge of these things, and we were pouring stuff down into the city sewer system.”
Moore recalled how, years later, when workers dug up the pipes beneath Intel, they discovered the “bottom was completely eaten out the whole way along, and that was just about the time we really started recognizing how much you had to take care of this.” Authorities would end up designating more Superfund hazardous waste sites in Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley, than in any other county in the U.S.
... ... ...
After the Digital Equipment investigation 30 years ago, Pastides’s academic career advanced steadily and impressively. Today he’s the president of the University of South Carolina, a post he’s held since 2008. But the memories of the Super Bowl Sunday tribunal and the pressure he faced from the world’s top technology companies still make him feel somewhat anxious. And controversy lingered for years. “That was something unprecedented to me. I didn’t expect it,” he says. “And frankly I had difficulty coping with it at times.”
His work on the Digital Equipment study certainly remains untarnished. But he’s moved on to other concerns. And when I tell him the reforms in the microelectronics industry don’t appear to have been as deep or as wide as he believed, he seems shaken. “That is terrible news,” he says. He gathers himself, ever the scientist. “The fact that women around the world were still being subjected to things that experts, including corporate leaders, decided should not be used in the workplace—to me that is an extremely sad story, and a loss for public health.” —With Ben Elgin, Wenxin Fan, Heesu Lee, and Kanoko Matsuyama
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Yale Environment 360
Published at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies
Toxics in the ‘Clean Rooms’: Are Samsung Workers at Risk?
Workers groups in South Korea report an unusually high incidence of cancers and other serious diseases among employees at Samsung’s semiconductor and other electronics plants. While the company denies any link, the pattern of illnesses is disturbingly similar to that seen at semiconductor facilities in the U.S. and Europe.
By Elizabeth Grossman • June 9, 2011
https://e360.yale.edu/features/toxics_in_the_clean_rooms_are_samsung_workers_at_risk
To experts in health issues relating to high-tech electronics workers, the story emerging from Samsung’s manufacturing plants in South Korea is distressingly familiar: An unusually high incidence of leukemia, lymphoma, brain cancer, and other serious diseases appears to exist among relatively young people who have worked in Samsung’s semiconductor and other chemically-intensive manufacturing plants. While direct cause and effect are difficult to prove, the South Korea situation presents striking similarities to patterns of illness seen at semiconductor plants in the United States and elsewhere in decades past.
... ... ...
Samsung’s findings thus far mirror what the semiconductor industry has found in its investigations undertaken in response to revelations of comparable illnesses in similar circumstances in the U.K. and the U.S. While academic epidemiologists have found higher than expected incidences of cancers among semiconductor workers based on records from National Semiconductor in Scotland and from IBM in the U.S., the companies involved and the Semiconductor Industry Association have maintained that these studies are scientifically flawed and that there is no proof of a connection between chemical exposures and these illnesses. In 2008, the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety (NIOSH) launched a study of cancer incidence among 28,000 former New York State IBM electronics plant workers, but it does not yet have any preliminary results.
... ... ...
In a May 31 email, Kong said that she had just met with the family of another leukemia victim who had worked in a semiconductor factory and was diagnosed at age 37, having worked in electronics plants for 14 years. “He had told his wife to go and meet me when he cannot overcome the cancer,” Kong wrote, “So his wife called me and we met.”
These illnesses — the blood cancers, lymphomas and nervous system and other blood diseases — are all symptomatic of solvent exposure, according to Hawes. These cases are “a red flag,” says Clapp. “If you want to find a cause for these illnesses, this is where you’d go to look.”
Elizabeth Grossman is the author of Chasing Molecules: Poisonous Products, Human Health, and the Promise of Green Chemistry, High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health, and other books. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, Salon, The Washington Post, The Nation, Mother Jones, Grist, and other publications.
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benzene
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzene
https://emergency.cdc.gov/agent/benzene/basics/facts.asp
https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/benzene.html
https://www.who.int/ipcs/features/benzene.pdf
https://progressreport.cancer.gov/prevention/benzene
https://www.epa.gov/gasoline-standards/gasoline-mobile-source-air-toxics
https://publicintegrity.org/environment/benzene-and-worker-cancers-an-american-tragedy/
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (environmental science book), 1962
9:04
Rachel Carson: The Impact of Silent Spring
https://youtu.be/aycQKk4qn_Y?t=65
https://youtu.be/aycQKk4qn_Y?t=65
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aycQKk4qn_Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aycQKk4qn_Y
clickypens03
Published on Jun 14, 2010
7:39
Chemistry That Kills and Rachel Carson – Why Silent Spring Says Don't Put DDT on Your Cereal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oj5CjLNDr0o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oj5CjLNDr0o
My Girl Heroes
Published on Jul 24, 2018
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48:46 [...] system has momentum and even if
48:49 we had a perfect [...] mitigation
48:50 policy tomorrow the [...]
48:54 system won't notice that for about two
48:56 generations in a meaningful way, meaning
48:58 ... ... ...
49:01 [...] change are pretty much locked in
49:03 you're looking at the [...] change
49:04 that's already built
Obviously, too, the performance of an enterprise and its industry in one decade reflected investments made, personnel hired, technologies adopted, and markets obtained in the previous and earlier decades. (Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., 1990, p.10; with assistance of Takashi Hikino)
references and sources (Once ... , , ):
“ Once a development path is set on a particular course, then network externalities, the learning process of organizations, and the historical derived modelling of the issues reinforces the course.”
― Douglas North
• Uncertainty and path dependence
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKfkQW7_-Pg
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKfkQW7_-Pg
1:42:42
The Predictioneer's Game
42:47 (start)
https://youtu.be/XfE0ih-6fi8?t=2567
https://youtu.be/XfE0ih-6fi8?t=2567
44:00 (stop)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfE0ih-6fi8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfE0ih-6fi8
NYUAD Institute
Published on Sep 15, 2015
The Predictioneer's Game
December 9, 2009
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita will discuss how applied game theory can be used to anticipate policy choices whether in business or in government.
The Predictioneer's Game
https://slideplayer.com/slide/4437069/
([ what's done is done, those things can not be changed ])
([ they are water under the bridge ])
([ what we continued to do, that we have difficulties ])
([ changing, that is developmental path dependency - ])
([ history, culture, decision that was made is ])
([ limiting current development and decision ])
https://youtu.be/NHVGxzEajrg?t=2911
48:31 I got to add one thing about this having
48:33 studied the science for 30 years the one
48:36 of the least convenient realities and
48:38 global warming science is this thing
48:40 called commitment, the IPCC reports have
48:43 described this for many years that the
48:46 climate system has momentum and even if
48:49 we had a perfect climate mitigation
48:50 policy on emissions tomorrow the climate
48:54 system won't notice that for about two
48:56 generations in a meaningful way meaning
48:58 sea level raised rise patterns of
49:01 climate change are pretty much locked in
49:03 you're looking at the climate change
49:04 built that's already built and that's why
https://youtu.be/NHVGxzEajrg?t=2911
source (I got to add ... and that's why):
1:01:04
The Age Of Consequences
https://youtu.be/NHVGxzEajrg?t=2909
https://youtu.be/NHVGxzEajrg?t=2909
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHVGxzEajrg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHVGxzEajrg
HooverInstitution
Published on Feb 27, 2017
The Hoover Institution hosted "The Age of Consequences" on Wednesday, February 22, 2017 from 5:15pm - 8:00pm EST.
https://youtu.be/NHVGxzEajrg?t=2911
Scale and scope
The dynamics of industrial capitalism
Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.
with assistance of Takashi Hikino
copyright © 1990
p.10
Obviously, too, the performance of an enterprise and its industry in one decade reflected investments made, personnel hired, technologies adopted, and markets obtained in the previous and earlier decades.
(Scale and scope : the dynamics of industrial capitalism / Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. with the assistance of Takashi Hikino., 1. big business--United States--history, 2. big business--Great Britain--history, 3. big business--Germany--history, 4. big business--Germany (west)--history, copyright © 1990, , )
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1QiVkZw2UzskMFOIHrOsYlqxMPMHAOv75
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Vaclav Smil, Transforming the 20th century, 2006 [ ]
p.233
field-effect transistor
p.233
Shockley's group attributed the failure to surface trapping of electrons, and by further experiments they found that when injecting a current to flow between two close point-contact electrodes, they could amplify power and, by December 16, 1947, both power and voltage, and do so at audio frequencies.
bipolar point-contact transistor (figure 5.14)
“three-electrode circuit element utilizing semiconductive materials” (Bardeen and Brattain 1950)
December 16, 1947, bipolar point-contact transistor (figure 5.14)
p.233
Shockley intensified his efforts to come up with a better, more practical solution. The path to it opened once John Shive discovered that, contrary to Bardeen's conclusion, electron flow is not confined to the surface and can travel through the body of material.
p.233
By January 23, 1948, Shockley proposed a major modification to Brattain-Bardeen design. Rather than using point contacts to inject positive charges, he used larger junctions and higher currents. Shockley's three-layer p-n-p design──known as the bipolar junction transistor (with the two outer layers doped to supply electrons and the middle layer to creates “holes”)──thus functions much like a triode with the n-layer analogical to a vacuum tube grid (Shockley 1964).
January 23, 1948, three-layer p-n-p design──known as the bipolar junction transistor (with the two outer layers doped to supply electrons and the middle layer to creates “holes”)
p.234
metal-oxide-silicon field-effect transistors (MOSFET)
p.235
In 1955 Carl Frosch and Link Derick found that heating a silicon wafer to about 1,200 C in the presence of water or oxygen creates a thin SiO2 film on its surface. Selective etching of this film can be used to make p-n junctions with doped silicon. In an all-diffused silicon transistor, impurities permeate the entire wafer while the active parts are protected by the oxide layer. But even this switch would not have made semiconductors as inexpensive as the next radical innovation that led to their miniaturization and mass production. This step was imperative in order to produce more complex circuits.
p.237
Robert Noyce (1927-1990), director of research at Fairchild Semiconductors (FS)
The key idea was identical to Kilby's proposal, but Noyce's design of a planar transistor also solved the problem of miniaturized connections by taking advantage of the SiO2 layer that Jean Horni (1924-1997) as FS proposed in 1958 to place on top of the n-p-n sandwich in order to protect it from contamination.
p.238
As a result, major electronics companies were reluctant to make a switch. The prospects changed once the Apollo missions got under way and once the designers of the first U.S. ICBMs decided to control them with integrated circuits. By 1965 integrated circuits were finally embraced by all of the U.S. armed services.
p.238
Also in 1968 another fundamental semiconductor discovery was made at Bell Labs by a group lead by Alfred Y. Cho that developed the process of molecular beam epitaxy, whereby single-crystal structures are deposited one atomic layer at a time (Cho 1994). This method, unmatchable in its precision, became the mainstay for making microships.
p.241
ultralarge-scale integration (ULSI)
(Smil, Vaclav., Transforming the 20th century: technical innovation and their consequences / Vaclav Smil., 1. technological innovation ── history ── 20th century, 2006, )
pp.19-20 (pdf pp.21-22)
The horizontal externality can illuminate some issues in the economics of technology connected with the role of large, predictable demanders, which are in turn related to policy. It is often claimed that the procurement policy of the U.S. Defense Department "built" the microelectronics-based portion of the electronics industry in the US during the fifties (1950s) and sixties (1960s). Obviously, the presence of a large demander changes the condition of supply, and this may benefit other demanders. However, the important point here is that such a demander had a high willingness to pay for components embodying z well outside current technical capabilities, and was willing to shoulder part of the risk, primarily by procurement assurances; in so doing may have indeed set in motion (and sustained for a while) the virtuous cycle mediated by the horizontal externality.
( NBER working paper series, General purpose technologies : "engines of growth?", Timothy F. Bresnahan, Manuel Trajtenberg, working paper no. 4148, national bureau of economic research, 1050 massachuesetts avenue, cambridge, ma 02138, august 1992 )
Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, 1966
Tragedy and Hope
p.1106 (pdf 1119)
The dominant fact in the whole situation was the overwhelming character of America's power and the fact that this was known both to the White House and to the Kremlin, but was largely unknown, and certainly unpublicized, to the world. Around the Soviet Union's border were 144 Polaris, 103 Atlas, 159 Thor, Jupiter, and Titan missiles;
pp.1089-1090 (pdf 1102-1103)
The key to the missile race rested on the fact that the United States and the Soviet Union took opposite routes in their efforts to obtain nuclear-armed rockets. One basic problem was how to combine the American A-bomb of 1945 with the German V-2 rocket. Since the A-bomb was an egg-shaped object 5 feet wide and 10 feet long, which weighed 9,000 pounds, and the V-2 could carry a warhead of only 1,700 pound 200 miles, the problem was not easy. The Soviet government sought to close the gap between rocket power and nuclear payload by working toward a more powerful rocket, while the American scientists, over the opposition of the Air Force and the aviation industry, sought to close the gap by getting smaller bombs. The result of the race was that the Soviet Union in 1957-1962 had very large boosters which gave it a lead in the race to propel objects into space or into ballistic orbits around the earth, but these were very expensive, could not be made in large numbers, and were very awkward to install or to move. The United States, on the other hand, soon found it had bombs in all sizes down to small ones capable of being used as tactical weapons by troops in ground combat and able to be moved about on jeeps.
p.1091 (pdf 1104)
Just at the time (summer 1962) that the Soviet Union was deciding to remedy its weakness in ICBM's by trying to install ICBM's in a third Power close to the United States, the latter [US] was deciding that its supply of ICBM's was increasing to rapidly that it would close down its ICBM bases in third countries close to the Soviet Union (such as Turkey). This American decision was already beginning to be carried out when the Cuban missile crisis broke in October 1962.
(Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, 1966)
noise in models
Some systems thinkers would be hesitant to call the error from such a defective model "noise," for the assumption is often implicitly made that noise is a small residue of unaccountable behavior. This definition, however, is based on observation of the external world, not on general principles. Naturally we find that MOST systems the noise is a relatively small part of the regulatory models, because those systems with highly defective models do not last very long and are not likely to be seen. But when we build a new system, we cannot assume that it will automatically have accurate models just because other, older, systems do.
As we know, the strategy for overcoming noise is to expend energy. When complimented on the precision of the guidance systems in American rockets, one of the old German rocket scientists pointed out that the American systems had to be precise, since they had no energy to spare. The Russians, on the other hand, had much bigger rockets. If they made a mistake in navigation they had a lots of thrust remaining to correct it. Of course, without the press of international politics, systems that take more energy to do the same job of regulation are at a disadvantage in the competition for survival.
Still, there may be situation in which the best available strategy is simply to overpower the noise, rather than to try to account for it.
...
If we are trying to catch a fish whose maximum strength is thought to be 50 pounds, we can be sure it won't break the line if we use a 100-pound filament. Such overpowering, of course, is not "sporting", which is why anglers try to take the maximum fish on the minimum line. They are not, contrary to some belief, trying to save money on equipment. If that were the case they would buy their fish. The fish in the market are caught by people whose living depends on NOT giving the fish a sporting chance.
In some situations, the method of overpowering noise may not be so simple. For example, consider the problem of adjusting the flame on a gas stove that has a sticky valve. We try to raise the flame, but the valve will not move until we apply so much pressure that it abruptly slips past the intended point. Trying to move it back, we have the same trouble, for we cannot predict the friction with sufficient precision. What we can do, however, is to use one hand to push against the direction we are trying to turn the valve. If we push hard enough, the frictional resistance becomes a relatively small part of the force we must overcome to position
the knob. By working "against" our own goal, we make precise adjustment possible in the face of an unknown, but small, amount of stickiness.
This strategy, by which the system overcomes noise through supplying opposing actions, is essentially what is involved in the "factors having an opposing effect" in Cannon's Polarity Principle. If a system relies on an uncertain environment to supply the opposing factor to one of its regulatory mechanisms, that mechanism must have a much more refined model. By supplying its own opposing factor, it can get away with a much simpler model of the environment.
pp. 261-262
General Principles of Systems Design
Gerald M. Weinberg
Daniela Weinberg
formerly titled On the Design of Stable Systems
May 1979
John P. Carlin with Garrett M. Graff., Dawn of the code war : America's battle against Russia, China, and the rising global cyber threat, 2018
pp.258-262
p.258
Avago technologies
bulk acoustic wave (BAW) filters.
California, Colorado, Singapore
in manufacturing a specific type of BAW filter known as FBAR, film bulk acoustic resonators, which are tiny acoustic resonators that are hermetically sealed inside a wafer-thin silicon package and are critical to helping mobile phones and similar wireless devices filter out electrical interference.*
* A modern iPhone 6, for instance, has more than a dozen FBAR filters, each containing seven or eight acoustic resonators ── a total of more than 100 per phone.
p.258
FBARs, Dr. Rich Ruby, PhD in engineering physics from UC Berkeley
FBAR filters
an old Avago colleague named Wei Pang
p.259
Wei Pang, Hao Zhang, and Huisui Zhang
graduate school
University of Southern California (USC).
(Dawn of the code war : America's battle against Russia, China, and the rising global cyber threat / John P. Carlin with Garrett M. Graff., first edition. } New York: PublicAffairs, [2019] } Includes bibliographical references and index.,
subjects: cyberspace operations (military science)──united states. | cyberterrorism──history. | cyberspace──security measures──history. | computer security──united states. | computer crimes──united states. | information warfare──united states. | national security──united states. | cyberterrorism──prevention. | internet in espionage. | espionage──united states., https://lccn.loc.gov/2018020918, 2018, )
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By David Reynolds, professor of international history at Cambridge university
refining the magnetic core memory
revolution in electronics, first, the transistor and, then, integrated circuits.
Cold War proved a critical catalyst.
early vacuum tubes where large, fragil, and expensive.
But a substitute emerged from wartime work on radar, where eletronic tubes could not be used for microwave detection ─ hence the development of crystals such as germanium and silicon as semiconductors.
Bell Laboratories
radar scientists, in search for a solid-state amplifier
at the end of June 1948, Bell lab unveiled a prototype called ‘the Transistor’
Although the first transistor radios were on sale by 1954, the new technology took time to catch on.
from germanium to the more robust silicon.
But the industry would not have reached that point without military assistance.
The transistor was hugely attractive to the armed forces, because they needed reliable, lightweight guidance and communications systems in ships, planes, and guided missiles.
By 1953, the US military was funding half of Bell Labs' R&D in transistors.
In 1963, transistor sales to the military were worth $119 million, to industry $92 million, and only $41 million to the consumer.15
smaller specialist firms
Fairchild semiconductor
Texas instruments
the next-phase of solid-state technology
Texas and Fairchild pioneered miniaturisation, replacing separate transistorised components linked in circuits with a single integrated circuit in one piece (or chip)
June 1948 (at the end of),
Bell lab unveiled a prototype called ‘the Transistor’
1953 the US military was funding half of Bell Labs' R&D in transistors.
1954 first transistor radios were on sale
1963 transistor sales
to the military $119 million,
to the industry $92 million,
and only $41 million to the consumer.15
transistor
governmental-industrial-academic complex was the motor of Big Science for most of the Cold War era.
massive data-processors
Remington Rand
International Business Machines corporation (IBM), 1964, accounted for 70 per cent of the worldwide inventory of computers
government contracts, particularly for the military, made a crucial contribution to establishing IBM as the industry's giant in the quarter-century after the Second World War. Over half of IBM's revenues from electronic data processing in the 1950s came from its analog guidance computer for the B-52 bomber and from the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) air defence system ─ at around $8 billion, the largest and most expensive military project of the 1950s. In 1955, about 20 per cent of IBM 39,000 American employees were working on it.10
Once MIT had designed a feasible system and tested a prototype on Cape Cod, south of Boston, IBM won the contract to build and run the computers for the whole system.
The first SAGE direction centre became operational in July 1958, but the whole system was not fully deployed until 1963 ─ involving 24 separate centres, each with two identical computers to permit servicing and prevent any system collapse.
SAGE thereby pioneered the random-access core memory that within a few years was routine in all commercial computers.
Apart from the financial benefits, SAGE also gave thousands of IBM engineers and programmers their basic training in business.
Thomas J. Watson: ‘It was the Cold War that helped IBM make itself the king of the computer business.’12
Not until the 1959 did IBM's revenues from commercial electronic computers exceed those from SAGE and other military computing projects.13
Bell Laboratories
radar scientists, in search for a solid-state amplifier
Without the Cold War, electronics and computing would not have developed so quickly and dramatically in the United States. But the strength of American corporate capitalism and the relative openness of American society make possible spin-offs and cross-fertilisation that were inconceivable in the ([ relatively closed, isolated and restricted ]) Communist world ([ of the Soviet Union era ]).
Only near the end of the Cold War, in the late 1980s, did Japan overtake the United States in the world market for semiconductors.
p.394
38 Lawrence G. Robert, ‘The ARPAnet and Computer Networks’, in Adele Goldberg (ed.), A History of Personal Workstations (New York: ACM Press, 1988), 152. See generally the review essay by Roy Rosenzweig, ‘Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors, and Hackers: writing the history of the Internet’, American Historical Review, 103 (1998), 1530-52.
p.399
The American military system, however, was integrated symbiotically into a dynamic civilian economy geared to consumer demand. Government funding, though often essential in the start-up phase, was soon eclipsed, as new technologies were refined outside the military sector and then adapted anew for Cold War use ─ the personal computer being a classic example.
By David Reynolds, professor of international history at Cambridge university
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News & Analysis
Apple Talks About Sole Sourcing from TSMC
Alan Patterson
10/24/2017 02:51 PM EDT
TAIPEI — At its 30th anniversary celebration this week, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) hosted a forum of key customers including semiconductor CEOs and Apple chief operating officer Jeff Williams.
Williams provided a rare glimpse into TSMC’s role as the sole supplier of Apple’s A11 application processor and where he sees the electronics industry going in the next ten years.
From now to TSMC’s ramp up of 7nm process technology in 2018, TSMC will probably remain the sole source of application processors for Apple, according to independent analyst Andrew Lu, who writes reports for information provider Smartkarma.
At the 7nm+ node starting later in 2018, Samsung will be very competitive on technology and pricing, and TSMC may lose some of Apple’s business at that point, Lu said.
Samsung, TSMC’s main rival for Apple’s application processor business, probably walked away from the Apple A11 opportunity because it was unwilling to make the multibillion dollar capital investment needed to clinch the deal, according to another analyst with an investment bank who asked that his identity be withheld.
As long as TSMC can develop its technology ahead of Samsung, Apple will stay with TSMC, but Apple will not let the Taiwan foundry make any mistakes, Lu said.
Speakers at TSMC's 30th anniversary celebration from the left: Apple COO Jeff Williams, ASML CEO Peter Wennick, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan, ARM CEO Simon Segars, Analog Devices CEO Vincent Roche, Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf, Nvidia CEO Jensun Huang and TSMC Chairman Morris Chang.
Speakers at TSMC's 30th anniversary celebration from the left: Apple COO Jeff Williams, ASML CEO Peter Wennick, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan, ARM CEO Simon Segars, Analog Devices CEO Vincent Roche, Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf, Nvidia CEO Jensun Huang and TSMC Chairman Morris Chang.
Excerpts of the conversation Monday (Oct. 23) between TSMC Chairman Morris Chang and Apple COO Williams follow below:
Morris Chang: Our partnership with Apple does not go back very far. It has been intense and important. Certainly, very important for TSMC.
Jeff Williams:
Shortly after the introduction of the Cray 2 supercomputer, 25 years later, we put the same processing power into peoples’ pockets with an iPhone 4 in 2010.
It was actually 2010 that the first seeds of our partnership between Apple and TSMC were planted. I had flown to Taiwan and had dinner with Morris Chang and (his wife) Sophie at their house. It was a wonderful dinner.
We were not doing business with TSMC at that time, but, we had a great conversation. We talked about the possibility of doing stuff together, and we knew the possibilities were great if we could take leading-edge technology and marry it with our ambitions.
It seems obvious right now, but it wasn’t then, because the risk was very substantial.
The nature of the way Apple does business is we put all of our energy into products, and then we launch them.
If we were to bet heavily on TSMC, there would be no backup plan. You cannot double plan the kind of volumes that we do. We want leading-edge technology, but we want it at established technology volumes.
That may be what Morris Chang refers to when he mentions 'intense.'
On the TSMC side, that means a huge capital investment. It means ramping faster than the more careful yield plan that the industry is used to.
Together, we decided to take the bet, to take the lead and Apple – this was our first engagement — decided to have 100 percent of our new iPhone and new iPad chips — application processors — sourced at TSMC.
TSMC invested $9 billion and had 6,000 people working round the clock to bring up the Tainan fab in a record 11 months, and in the end, the execution was flawless. We’ve gone on to ship over half a billion chips together in that short window, and I think TSMC has invested $25 billion — $9 billion on that first venture — there are very few companies in the world that would spend $9 billion in capital across everything and without a single debt.
So for that, we thank you, Morris Chang, and everybody at TSMC. It’s been a wonderful partnership.
Williams continues on the direction of development in the next 10 years.
Williams:
Now for me, the request was to describe the next 10 years in silicon, which I’m completely incapable of doing. So I’m going to reframe the question. I think in politics they call this a ‘pivot’.
When we look back a decade ago, the question we had was ‘do we have enough processing power in silicon to match our ambitions?’
The big challenge we had as we looked at the mobile revolution was this tradeoff between performance and power. The view at the time was you had to choose. You had one or the other.
Largely as a result of what the fabless model has done, what TSMC has done, what many people in this room have done, including (ARM CEO) Simon Segars and his organization, we came to the point where those tradeoffs are not necessary. We have performance in thoroughly constrained environments. This opens up for the next decade a whole new world.
In the next decade, the question is not so much ‘do we have enough processing power to meet our ambitions’. The question for us is ‘do we have the right ambitions to utilize this technology’.
We at Apple are not concerned about the talk of slowing in the semiconductor industry. That’s not the case at all. We think the potential is huge. We believe strongly in the cloud side, but the future will be a lot of on-device processing. We believe this is the best way to deliver great features without sacrificing responsiveness, privacy and security.
We see that in our brand-new A11 bionic chip made here at TSMC. Every time somebody takes a photo, there’s over a hundred billion operations. That’s just mind boggling.
The potential is limitless. We’ve put a neural engine on the chip, and I won’t repeat some of the things that Nvidia CEO Jensun Huang shared (on the subject of artificial intelligence).
We have the same view of the potential of AI to deliver a much safer and autonomous system. The neural engine on our chip has already enabled face ID processed locally.
We view that the next 10 years (will be) about the ambition to make life better. Probably one of the most significant examples of this is the opportunity to use transistor technology advancements and power scaling to revolutionize healthcare.
We think the industry is ripe for change. We think there is tremendous potential for on-device computing, to do cloud computing as well, and through deep learning, machine learning and ultimately artificial intelligence to change the way healthcare is delivered. I can’t think of anything more significant than this.
The question in front of us is ‘do we have the right ambitions.’ There is no such thing as autonomous innovation. Human beings dream it, human beings drive it, sure we’ll have deep learning, but there’s no such thing as autonomous innovation, so it’s up to us during this generation and the next 10 years to take advantage of what can be realized in the silicon world.
We at Apple are really inspired. Those of us that started many years ago and sat in front of a green monochrome computer screen were super inspired. If in the next 10 years we do just a few ‘gee whiz’ things like flying-car kind of dreams and then the rest of the time, we’re using faster chips to do the same things we are doing faster, we will have squandered one of the biggest opportunities in front of us.
I think we are at an inflection point. With on-device computing coupled with the potential of AI (there’s the opportunity) to really, really change the world. We couldn’t be more excited at Apple.
—Alan Patterson covers the semiconductor industry for EE Times. He is based in Taiwan.
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Steve Casner, Careful : a user's guide to our injury-prone minds, 2017
p.239
Culture
How is it that so many people know the name and specifications of the processor of their new smartphone but know almost nothing about how their own bodies work?
( Casner, Steve, author. )
( Careful : a user's guide to our injury-prone minds / Steve Casner.
Accidents──prevention. | safety education. | public safety | industrial safety. )
( LCCN HV675.C35 2017 )
( DDC 613.6--dc23 )
( https//lccn.loc.gov/2016049067 )
Surveying relevant emerging technologies for the Army of the future
Lessons from forecast II
contract no. MDA903-86-C-0059
Surveying relevant emerging technologies for the Army of the future
July 1988
1. united states. army--forecasting.
2. technology and state--united states.
UA23.5.S88 1988
355'.00973
p.4 (pdf 26)
Identifying future technology directions using enabling technologies
The Army's effort to identify future technology directions in Army 21 began with a listing of enabling technologies, described in the Army 21 document as those technologies that are pervasive in nature and contribute to operational improvements for many elements of the total force.2 The list of such technologies include:
• Integrated circuits
• Artificial intelligence
• Materials
• Robotics
• Biotechnology
• Simulation
• Reliability
• Space technology
• Logistics support technology
The last three enabling technologies were added in later drafts of the Army 21 report. This is the only case that we could identify in which later version of the Army 21 document contained more that was relevant to our purposes than earlier versions.
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James C. Morgan, J. Jeffrey Morgan., Cracking the Japanese market, 1991
p.37
ABCD industries: automation, biotechnology, computers, and data processing.1
pp.279-281
Glossary of Japanese Terms
ABCD industries. Japan's primary strategic technologies for the 21st century: automation, biotechnology, computers, and data processing.
(Cracking the Japanese market: strategies for success in the new global economy / James C. Morgan, J. Jeffrey Morgan., 1. marketing ―― Japan., 2. industrial management ―― Japan., 3. corporate culture ―― Japan., 4. corporations, American ―― Japan., 5. competition ―― Japan., 6. competition ―― United States., 7. Japan ―― economic conditions ―― 1989- , 8. Japan ―― economic policy ―― 1989-, HF5415.12.J3M66 1991, 658.8'0952――dc20, 1991, )
ABCD industries. Japan's primary strategic technologies for the 21st century: automation, biotechnology, computers, and data processing.
• Integrated circuits
• Artificial intelligence
• Materials
• Robotics
• Biotechnology
• Simulation
• Reliability
• Space technology
• Logistics support technology
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general purpose technologies : "engines of growth?"
Timothy F. Bresnahan
Manuel Trajtenberg
working paper no. 4148
national bureau of economic research
1050 massachuesetts avenue
cambridge, ma 02138
august 1992
General Purpose Technologies "Engines of Growth?"
Timothy F. Bresnahan, Manuel Trajtenberg
NBER Working Paper No. 4148 (Also Reprint No. r2008)
Issued in August 1992
https://www.nber.org/papers/w4148
https://www.nber.org/papers/w4148
GPT (general purpose technologies)
AS (application sector)
p.0 (unnumbered) (pdf p.2)
Whole eras of technical process and economic growth appear to be driven by a few key technologies, which we call General Purpose Technologies (GPT's). Thus the steam engine and the electric motor may have played such a role in the past, whereas semiconductors and computers may be doing as much in our era. GPT's are characterized by pervasiveness (they are used as inputs by many downstream sectors), inherent potential for technical improvements, and innovational complementarities', meaning that the productivity of R&D in downstream sectors increases as a consequence of innovation in the GPT. Thus, as GPT's improve they spread throughout the economy, bringing about generalized productivity gains.
p.1 (pdf p.3)
What is there in the very nature (technological and otherwise) of the steam engine, or the electric motor, or the silicon wafer, that make them prime "suspects" of having played such a role?
pp.1-2 (pdf 3-4)
The central notion is that, at any point in time, there are a handful of "generic", or "general purpose" technologies (GPT's) characterized by their pervasiveness (i.e. they can be used as inputs in a wide range of downstream sectors), and by their technological dynamism. Thus, as the GPT evolves and advances, it spreads throughout the economy, and in so doing it brings about and fosters generalized productivity gains.2
p.2 (pdf p.4)
Rosenberg's insightful 1979 essay, "Technological Interdependence in the American Economy", reproduced in Rosenberg (1982).
p.3 (pdf p.4)
Moreover, time gaps and time sequences are an inherent feature of technological development, particularly in the context of GPT's (e.g. the transistor could not come before electricity, nor could interferon before DNA), and hence what could be required is coordination between agents located far from each other along the time and technology dimensions.
p.19 (pdf p.21)
14
Note that this issue arises above and beyond the multiple equilibrium problem, since we have assumed that the "best" Nash equilibrium is the one that holds; in particular, the economy is not trapped at z=0, T=0 by a failure to realize mutually profitable opportunities.
pp.19-20 (pdf pp.21-22)
The horizontal externality can illuminate some issues in the economics of technology connected with the role of large, predictable demanders, which are in turn related to policy. It is often claimed that the procurement policy of the U.S. Defense Department "built" the microelectronics-based portion of the electronics industry in the US during the fifties (1950s) and sixties (1960s). Obviously, the presence of a large demander changes the condition of supply, and this may benefit other demanders. However, the important point here is that such a demander had a high willingness to pay for components embodying z well outside current technical capabilities, and was willing to shoulder part of the risk, primarily by procurement assurances; in so doing may have indeed set in motion (and sustained for a while) the virtuous cycle mediated by the horizontal externality.
p.21 (pdf p.23)
Recent events in the computer and telecommunications markets show how pervasive yet complex the motive for technological cooperation can be. For a long period, each market was characterized by the presence of a dominant firm (IBM, and AT&T), which could take a leading role in the determination not only of its own technology, but in the encouragement of complementary developments in or for applications.
pp.21-22 (pdf p.23-24)
Now, technical progress in the GPT part of both computing and telecommunications is diffused across quite a few firms, and the mechanisms for technology contracting have changed accordingly. "Strategic alliances", participation in formal standards-setting processes, consortia, software "missionaries", and the systematic manipulation of the trade press, have all emerged as standard management tools in the microelectronics-based industries. These mechanisms permit technologies, and encouragement of complementary innovations. Yet they probablly fall short of offering the means to internalize the bulk of the externalities discussed above.
GPT (general purpose technologies)
AS (application sector)
p.22 (pdf p.24)
4. The Dynamics of General Purpose Technologies
In previous sections we assumed that the whole process takes place in just "one round", and that allowed us to discuss the two main externalities associated with GPT's in a relatively simple solution. However, in order to examine the implications of GPT's for growth, we need to formulate explicitly a dynamic process by which the innovational efforts of the GPT and the AS's unfold and interact over time. A suitable framework for that purpose is the theory of dynamic oligopoly as developed by Maskin and Tirole (1987) (henceforth M&T), which centers around the concept of Markov Perfect Equilibrium (MPE). In what follows we sketch the model and (re)state the main results from M&T in terms of GPT's and AS
p.25 (pdf p.27)
Thus, for example, firms developing new personal computers know that the next generation of Intel's microprocessors is going to be the 586, that it is due in the late 1992, that it is expected to have 2 million transistors and at least twice the 486's performance (see table 1). On that basis they may be able to do part of the R&D for the next generation of personal computers that will incorporate the 586, but not all: some of the development process requires that they actually get hands on the 586, examine it, test it in various configurations, etc. How much they can develop prior to the actual appearance of the 586 depends inter alia [among other things] upon the degree of detail of the technological information that they manage to obtain, the extent to which Intel is willing to make them privy of the development process, etc.
pp.25-26 (pdf pp.27-28)
The reverse conditioning is perhaps less obvious but not less important: to continue with the same example, Intel has been developing parts and circuits for personal computers (other than microprocessors) even though "neither line is profitable as chips, but through them Intel gains insight into trends: Knowing what needs to go on a board this year helps it determine what should go into microprocessors next year" (Business week, April 29, 1991, page 55). This is true to various degrees as one goes down the "technological tree": thus, software developers need to actually have the new operating systems in order to develop software for them; in order to write new operating systems one needs to get hands on the (new) personal computers that will be use them, and so forth.
gpt (general purpose technologies)
p.33 (pdf 34)
Third, historical studies of GPT's and "institutions" (in the broad sense): the intention would be to examine the historical evolution of particular GPT's and of the institutions coupled with them, using our conceptual framework in trying to understand their joint dynamics. In particular, we would like to assess the extent to which specific institutions facilitated or hindered the GPT's in playing out their presumed roles as "engines of growth". A key hypothesis is that institutions display much more inertia than leading technologies, and hence as a GPT era comes to a close and new GPT's emerge, an economy may "get stuck" with the wrong institutions, that is, those that enable the previous GPT to advance and carry the AS's, but that may prove inadequate to do as much for the new GPT.
p.33 (pdf 34)
To sum up, the main goal of this paper has been to suggest a way of thinking about technical change, that focuses on the interface between the characteristics of key technologies and the features of the markets for them. It is thus an attempt to look carefully inside the "black box" of technology, inspired by history and aided by formal modelling, while seeking to unveil the links between the stylized facts of technology and the institutions surrounding it. Since at any point in time there are countless "technologies", this approach is useful only in so far as it can identify at the outset a small subset of technologies that are of particular economic relevance, and characterize them tightly. The notion of general purpose technologies put forward here fulfills that role, but that is certainly just one possible abstraction in this vein, there may be other interesting and useful characterizations as well.
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Chapter Nine
Computer Communications for the community information utility
Paul Baran, 1970
Institute for the Future
Menlo Park, California
AUG 11 1976
p.250
Name of application
(examples)
1. Ticket reservations and scheduling activities
EDUCATION AND EDUCATION-LIKE ACTIVITIES:
2. Routine drill and practice, such as arithmetic problem drills
3. Gaming and simulation learning methods
4. Filmstrips as used in lectures in art, history, geography, etc.
5. Slides, as above, but order selected by student request
6. Alphanumeric text, electronic mail, writing term papers, English spelling, checking, automatic retyping
7. Polling, for market research and political preferences to elected leaders
ENTERTAINMENT:
8. TV (audience-requested)
9. Games
10. Contests
11. Shopping
12. News
(Paul Baran, 1970, Chapter Nine, Computer Communications for the
community information utility, Paul Baran, 1970, Institute for the Future, Menlo Park, California, AUG 11 1976, p.250 )
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Vaclav Smil, Transforming the 20th century, 2006 [ ]
p.276
All innovating industries had to go through distinct stages of market expansion, saturation, maturity, and retreat as their aggregate production rates first tended to rise exponentially and then relatively brief peaks were followed by often rapid declines. These declines were caused by inevitable saturation of respective markets or, even before that could take place, by introduction of new replacement products.
p.277
A single miss of an unpredictable shift in consumer tastes could result in punishing revenue losses──no matter how large or how well established a leading maker may be.
(Smil, Vaclav., Transforming the 20th century: technical innovation and their consequences / Vaclav Smil., 1. technological innovation ── history ── 20th century, 2006, )
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