2009 June | Mic Farris

Archives For June 2009

Being Recognized Means Benefiting Others First

2009/06/29 — 1 Comment

Recently, at my company, we’ve started the process of going through a transition. Our company has been around for over 30 years, pushing the bounds of technology and providing critical solutions to national security.

However, as the transition takes place, there will be a number of people on our staff who will feel overwhelmed, partly because some struggle with having the right perspective.

We have a part of our company that strives to gain a deeper understanding. They know things really, really, really well (admittedly, these are some of the smartest people I’ve ever had the honor to work with…). However, they have a hard time describing what they know to others or even how to turn what they know into something that might be useful.

We have another part of our company that strives to develop new capabilities. They focus on the people who are interested in what they are working on, and they turn their knowledge into beneficial products that can be easily understood and useful.

Of course, it’s always incredibly important to strive to know more or to create new innovations that do things that have never been done before.

But, for our efforts to have true impact, they need to be geared towards benefiting others. While significant energy can be exerted on gaining new knowledge or demonstrating a new capability or invention, an equal amount of energy is needed to present these new insights into benefits for other people. Otherwise, our initial efforts in gaining the new knowledge might ultimately be lost.

One such example is the comparison between the contributions of British chemist Sir Humphry Davy and those of American inventor Thomas Edison.

By connecting two charcoal sticks to powerful battery technology he invented, Davy demonstrated the capability of using electricity to generate light. Davy had developed many other lamps, including candle-based safety lamps used by miners, but the demonstration of his powerful arc lamp to the Royal Society in 1809 was the first of its kind – a brand new innovation.

Thomas Edison, on the other hand, strove to make the light bulb practical, thus benefiting others. Seventy years later after Davy’s demonstration, Edison took advantage of the rush to create practical light bulbs using a method called “incandescence”, which refers to light being emitted from a hot metal object due to its temperature.

As a result of thousands of attempts on Edison’s part, he created an incandescent light bulb that lasted for 40 hours and then later improved the design to last for over 1200 hours.

Now, by the electrical light bulbs that illuminate nearly every home and office in the world, we remember Edison. In fact, many people think that Edison actually invented the electric light bulb itself, leaving Davy’s contributions, while significant, deep in our collective memories.

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard in my occupation that people want to be recognized for their great ideas. They sometimes ask how we’re going to recognize the scientist that comes up with the next $100 million idea for our company. However, (even I sometimes fall into this trap myself…), what I tell my colleagues is that it doesn’t matter how great your idea is, it matters what you do with it.

And what you do with it needs to benefit others. Other people need to understand why your innovative concept or capability will make their lives better.

Your work may explain something that others have never understood before. So, not only should your work provide that answer, it needs to explain that answer in such a way that it’s clear to others.

One way to think about your efforts is to think of what you are providing, and ask: What am I producing or what “product” am I creating that others will find useful?

If your goal is to gain understanding, you need to communicate that understanding to others. The “product” is the understanding AND the communication of that understanding.

If your goal is to provide a new capability, your need to present it in a way that is useful to others. The “product” is the new capability AND communicating the way that others can use the new capability to benefit their lives.

In the end, when you benefit others, others will return the favor and recognize you for your contributions. That’s how to make a lasting impact within the science and technology fields.

In Personal Development Humphry Davy, Thomas Edison

Persistence That Lit the World

2009/06/13 — 5 Comments

You’d probably never think that we’d actively toss Thomas Edison aside, but over the past few years, the world has been taking steps that make it seem like we’re doing just that.

In March of this year, the European Commission voted to effectively phase out the incandescent light bulb by 2012. This follows steps taken by the United States just over a year prior to ban them outright by 2014.

As our society grows, we invent new ways to light our homes and offices that use much less energy. As it turns out, incandescent light bulbs, an invention dating back to the 1800s, take up to twice as much energy to use as more efficient halogen bulbs and up to three times more energy than compact fluorescent lamps or CFLs.

Of course, we’re not really throwing Thomas Edison aside, just his particular invention. And further, we’re certainly not diminishing Edison’s contributions – there are important lasting lessons we can learn.

Thomas Edison was a prolific inventor, having 1,093 U.S. patents to his name. Many of his patents described improvements to the main technologies of his day, including the telegraph, and burgeoning ones, such as electric motors and electric railways.

In addition, Edison created significant innovations such as the phonograph (the first device to record and reproduce sound), the kinetograph (an early form of the motion picture camera), the first commercially available fluoroscope (an X-ray imaging device), and systems for the distribution of electric power.

Of course, Edison’s most famous invention is his seminal improvement on the electric light bulb.

While others scientists invented the electric light bulb itself, Edison worked to make the light bulb practical. According to the most prominent of Edison’s patent applications for his electric light bulb, the key was using “a carbon filament or strip coiled and connected to platina contact wires”. With this filament, an electric current passing through it would give off light, and the oxygenless environment inside the bulb would prevent the filament from burning, thereby making the bulb last longer.

Edison’s first successful test of his invention lasted 40 hours, and he soon improved his design to last for over 1200 hours. In comparison, bulbs designed by others could last only 12 hours or so – a 100x improvement.

However, we shouldn’t credit some stroke of genius for enabling Edison’s light bulb to be invented. While Edison’s carbon filament was the key to his invention, Edison’s persistence was the key to his success.

It is said that Edison tried thousands of different kinds of filaments before coming up with his final design. He tried and failed, and tried and failed, and tried and failed. And while a single filament design may have failed, he never considered himself a failure; he just learned another new way not to make a light bulb.

Obviously, Edison created his inventions over 100 years ago, so we’ve certainly progressed since Edison’s time, replacing his inventions with the new innovations of today.

The phonograph has been replaced with the iPod. The fluoroscope has been replaced by magnetic resonance imagers or MRIs. The kinetograph has now evolved into the handheld digital camcorder. So, we shouldn’t be surprised that Edison’s incandescent light bulb has finally been replaced with better technologies.

However, Edison’s influence has been unquestionably dramatic, and the lessons of his success are enduring. Had Edison not persisted in his quest to build a better light bulb, the practicality of illuminating every corner of our world with electric light could not have been realized.

When we turn on a light switch, the lights go on. While this seems so simple to us today, we can thank Thomas Edison and his persistence for making it real.

In Personal Development Thomas Edison

Blaze a New Trail

2009/06/02 — 3 Comments

In our fast paced world, it seems that every new technology gets overturned every few years or so.

Just look at social networking – it used to be MySpace, then Facebook, now it’s Twitter (I’m sure by the time I publish this column, Twitter will even be passé…)

But there has (at least for the time being) been a stable anchor in our technology world – Google. Everybody knows that you enter what you’re searching for, and Google provides relevant webpages that give you the information you want. It’s almost as if it’s been around forever (at least in technology years…), and it’s even become a verb – people can actually “google” something…

But now, there is a new knowledge engine on the block, called Wolfram|Alpha (www.wolframalpha.com). It’s similar to and different from Google in what you can do with it.

You can still enter a search term like “weather new york city”, and Wolfram|Alpha will provide you information. However, while Google will provide you a list of links to go seek the information you want, Wolfram|Alpha actually calculates new and more immediately relevant information for you – on the fly.

You’ll get the temperature, conditions, relative humidity, and wind speed, but Wolfram|Alpha will also generate week histories and forecasts for the temperature and conditions, as well as provide a historic temperature graph for today’s date for the last 40 years. It will even provide the closest local weather station and compare that with other locations in the area.

It is indeed a new kind of knowledge engine, and an ambitious undertaking. According to the website, “Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone.”

But none of this is surprising, coming from its creator, Stephen Wolfram.

Born in 1959, Wolfram studied at Eton, Oxford, and Caltech. His first scientific paper, called “Hadronic Electrons?”, was accepted for publication when he was just 15, and he graduated for Caltech with a PhD in theoretical physics at 20.

His work had such a profound impact on the physics community (one of his widely-cited papers on heavy quark production was published at the age of 18) that he joined the Caltech faculty immediately upon receiving his doctoral degree. A year later, Wolfram became the youngest recipient of the MacArthur Prize Fellowship.

While at Caltech, he began the creation of SMP, the first modern computer algebra system, which was commercially released in 1981. He spent the next several years in academia, first at Caltech, then at Princeton, and finally at the University of Illinois. However, his scientific pursuits did not follow the standard track for a physicist – he set out on his own path toward finding the fundamental origins of complexity.

After publishing numerous classic papers on simple computational systems known as cellular automata, he went on to found his own company called Wolfram Research.

There he created Mathematica, probably the most significant achievement in technical computing to date (I even used an early version of Mathematica to perform a little of my thesis work…). Rather than having different toolkits for different technical jobs, such as computer algebra systems, graphing calculators, or 3D visualization, Mathematica creates a unified computational framework for technical development. It has changed the way scientists and technologists perform their work.

Through the course of his development of Mathematica, learning more and more about how computation relates to the complexity we see in our world, Wolfram embarked upon his most ambitious project – publication of his treatise A New Kind of Science.

Starting from examination of very simple computer experiments, Wolfram explains in NKS how simple computational programs can generate incredible complexity, debunking the primary scientific belief that only complex models can create such complexity.

Wolfram goes on, as described in the book’s summary, to use his approach “to tackle a remarkable array of fundamental problems in science, from the origins of apparent randomness in physical systems, to the development of complexity in biology, the ultimate scope and limitations of mathematics, the possibility of a truly fundamental theory of physics, the interplay between free will and determinism, and the character of intelligence in the universe.”

Ambitious indeed.

Of course, Wolfram hasn’t stopped there. He created an application called WolframTones, which uses computational algorithms to generate original music stylings that can be downloaded to cellphone ringtones. And now, he’s created Wolfram|Alpha, a computational knowledge engine intended to complement (if not rival) Google in its impact.

As we witness the next technological advances, we’ll continue to be amazed by what we enable computers to do. With Wolfram|Alpha and his other monumental achievements, Stephen Wolfram is blazing a new trail in defining what is possible.

In Personal Development Stephen Wolfram