10. November 2008 by Martin Suter.

Coming off an election where “elite” was an insult, “Joe the Plumber” was a hero, Obama was “too articulate” and Sarah Palin was sold as being capable of assuming the Presidency, I was despondent about how dumbed down America appeared to have become. Part of that comes from living in Florida, a southern swing state, where there’s tremendous gravitational pull for the worst of partisan politics, but it seemed to be more pervasive this cycle than in previous elections.

Then, last week, I travelled to Boston to take a 2-day course on “Technology Negotiation” put on by Harvard, MIT and Tufts. Spending 3 days in Cambridge was like a shot of adrenalin right to the brain, and I realized that there is intelligent life out there!

But not just intelligent, people with big brains thinking big thoughts. There are people who are smarter than Spock everywhere you look.

The program itself was excellent, with a top-notch faculty and about 70 attendees from all over the world. Lawrence E. Susskind, Dr. Hal Movius, and Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld spent the full two days working with us, answering questions and inspiring the group. During lunch on Day 2, several of us began discussing the nature of technology. I brought up a concept that I love by Nicholas Negroponte, who describes the transformation that is occurring as the move from the production of atoms to the production of bits. From “stuff”, to information, content and software. The implications are profound.

As I mentioned Negroponte’s quote, Joel C-G chuckles and says that his brother runs the “MIT Center for Bits and Atoms’ Fab Lab” lab at MIT and starts to describe some of the things they’re working on. Some of the research that is going on reminded me of Ray Kurzweil’s concept of “the singularity”, so I said, “It sounds like the singularity is near”, which is also the title of Kurzweil’s book. Joel chuckled again, and said that he lived two doors down from Ray in Boston.

It was like being brought back to life. I forgot how much I missed intellectual sustenance, and for 48 hours last week, I was able to refill the tank with the highest octane intellectualism that I’ve had the privilege of meeting in a long time.

That’s my .02!

Martin Suter

(martin.suter at iplicensing.net)

(PS – For anyone interested in learning more about the premise behind “The Singularity is Near”, TED.com has a 20 minute video of Kurzweil speaking about it. Watch it, and then go buy the book!)

Posted in Election, Disruptive Technology, Education | Print | No Comments »

14. September 2008 by Martin Suter.

With Sarah Palin’s nomination, much that is ugly and contentious about the US today has been brought to center stage. Having gone through the 2004 election in a swing state, I can honestly say that there is nothing more polarizing than grassroots-level politics in this country. Unfortunately, 2008 promises to make 2004 look like a day at the beach.

Following her nomination, the news quickly emerged that Ms. Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is pregnant. Others have written about the hypocrisy about elevating her and her mother to heroes for choosing “life”, while these same people tore into Jamie Lynn Spears, despite the fact that she appears to have made the very same mistake and decision, so I won’t go over that ground again. However, rather than avoiding the topic of her pregnancy, this should be front and center in the debate about the failure of the head-in-the-sand approach to sex education and the cost to society of this approach.

There was a line in Obama’s acceptance speech in Denver that struck me at the time and which is worthy of mention. To paraphrase: “We may not agree on a woman’s right to choose, but I’m sure we can agree on the goal of reducing abortions and unwanted teen pregnancies.” His comments demonstrate a respect for an opponent’s view, and a reframing of the issue towards a common goal. The problem is that his opponents also oppose the solution, which is open dialogue and education about things such as contraception. Taking a pragmatic view of sex education rather than attempting to impose one’s own morality would go a long way to achieving both goals articulated by Obama. Although to the Republican base, the horror of sex is too much to bear. Their opposition to a realistic view on teenage sexuality is the cause, teenage pregnancy and abortion is the effect.

An interesting exercise is to take the emotion out of the discussion and simply look at statistics. A recent article in the Times cites a US government report from 2001 that states the US teen birth rate is the highest per capita of any OECD country. Of course, I can hear the Republicans blaming this on the Clinton years leading up to 2000, and kidding themselves that “things have changed” (there’s that Republicans for “change” mantra again), but as we have seen with Bristol Palin, things probably haven’t changed very much.

Not only does the US have the highest incidence of teenage births (52.1 per 1000), it also has the dubious distinction of having the highest incidence of abortions in women under 20 (30.2 per 1000). So fully 8.23% of American teenage girls end up with unplanned pregnancies before turning twenty. Only Hungary comes anywhere near the US, and it is still only about 60% of the US figures.

Are American girls having a disproportionate amount of sex as compared to other countries? Not at all, in fact they fall somewhere down the list with eighty one percent of American women reporting having sex before their 20^th birthdays.

According to the study, the girls in Denmark are the most prolific sexually – fully 90% of Danes have had sex before they turn 20, as have had 88% of Icelanders, 87% of Brits, and 84% of Norwegians and Finns.

But what happens when you look at the Danish numbers? More girls are having sex, yet the incidence of teenage births is 85% lower than the US. And what about abortions? Half.

It seems reasonable to take a position, as Obama did, that both teen births and abortions are undesirable. So while more Danes are having sex, they are smarter at avoiding the unwanted side effects of their decision. How do you get smarter? Education and acceptance. It’s clear that “abstinence only” is a deluded approach that has been proven to be ineffective.

How else does society pay the price for this evangelical approach to “education”?

According to the CIA World Factbook, the US has an incidence of AIDS that is 300% that of Denmark. Nearly a million people are living with HIV/AIDS in this country, while Denmark has five thousand. Sure it’s population is 1/60 that of the US, but its rate of infection is still 70% lower than the US number. Lastly, over 17,000 people have died in this country from HIV/AIDS, while in Denmark fewer than 100 have done so.

When you add all of this up, the cost to US society is staggering. Teenage mothers (and fathers) are forced to make a terrible decision.  They are then forced to live with that choice for the rest of their lives, one way or another. How many life dreams and aspirations die on the vine, as teens drop out of school to raise their children? What about the burden this places on social programs, not to mention the hit our GDP and tax base take, as these kids aren’t qualified for much beyond McJobs? What about the cost to our healthcare system of treating those with HIV/AIDS for decades, and the loss to the economy (not to mention friends and families) of those that have died prematurely because of ignorance and shame.

For the lack of a condom, a life is lost - the life of a fetus, the teenage mother or the AIDS victim.

So while Bristol Palin’s personal situation is indeed unfortunate, her mother’s decision to step out on the world’s largest stage makes it fair game. Indeed, I am sympathetic to Bristol, but what is disappointing is that her mother and her newfound following are so narrow-minded that they can’t even consider that imposing one’s sexual morality on others is fundamentally flawed. Bristol Palin is not a hero, but she is a victim. She’s a victim of her church’s misguided position on sexuality. She’s a victim of her mother’s views on sex education. She’s a victim of her mother’s decision to run and to put her in the spotlight. Her life will never be the same.

Abstinence only is a dangerously naïve and misguided approach that clearly hasn’t worked nationally, just as it didn’t work in the Palin household. Sex education should be a topic of national discussion with a shared objective as outlined in Denver.

Unfortunately Bristol Palin is the poster child for the failure to engage in this dialogue.

That’s my .02!

Martin Suter (martin.suter@iplicensing.net) 

Posted in Education | Print | 3 Comments »

1. August 2008 by Martin Suter.

Recently a colleague of mine and I had a fascinating discussion over drinks one night about a concept that Clay Shirky refers to as “cognitive surplus”. He then sent me a link to a speech Clay gave at the Web 2.0 Conference in April of this year, called “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus” (video).

I love reading something that really makes you think, and Shirky nails it. Effectively he describes the cyclical anaesthetization and awakening of Western society, and suggests that we’re in the middle of that cycle currently. I can’t speak to the historical accuracy of his description of the pre-Industrial Revolution gin carts helping everyone in London to dull their senses, but I can totally relate to his modern day example: the sitcom. He refers to Desperate Housewives as “a cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking…” I love that line!

Obviously, Shirky is a fan of wikis, and uses Wikipedia as a unit of measure for productivity of the collective against which he compares non-productive activity, most notably the watching of television. He estimates that there’s 100 million hours of collective human thought in “all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in.” He doesn’t share his calculations, but he seems like a smart guy, so I’ll take that number at its face.

He then cites statistics on the amount of time spent watching TV per year – 200 billion hours in the US alone, or as he equates it to “two thousand Wikipedia projects a year”. Therein lies his “cognitive surplus”. People sitting on their couches as passive recipients of brain candy, rather than being active producers…Doing nothing as opposed to doing something.

Where we diverge is probably in our views on profiting from this cognitive surplus. While he doesn’t come out and say it, my guess is that he believes that society as a whole will benefit from contributions made from this cognitive surplus and the collective sharing of knowledge. That’s a little too warm and fuzzy for me. I’d take a slightly different view. If we were to look at this through an economic lens, then tapping into this cognitive surplus could grow our GDP at Chinese-like rates!

There is not a shortage of time, there’s a shortage of intellectual activity.

That’s my .02 (with much inspiration from Mr. Shirky)!

Martin Suter

(martin.suter@iplicensing.net)

Posted in Web 2.0, Education | Print | 1 Comment »

7. July 2008 by Martin Suter.

A line from a poem, “The New Colossus”, by the nineteenth-century American poet Emma Lazarus, appears on a plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty. It ends with Liberty herself speaking:

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

While this may have sufficed as American immigration policy pre-WWI, when a strong back and a desire to work was all that was necessary to build out the nation’s infrastructure, it doesn’t cut it today. And yet, in many ways, these sentiments continue to be reflected by US immigration policy in the 21^st century.

America is slipping by most meaningful, objective measures: Education, healthcare, productivity, GDP per capita, trade deficits, etc. I was at a private lecture, a couple of years ago, at which Gene Kranz (“Failure is Not An Option”) was the guest speaker. He decried the situation in fairly stark terms by saying that there will not be enough US aerospace engineering graduates to backfill the positions vacated by retiring NASA engineers. How are we going to beat the Chinese to the moon or continue to push the boundaries of exploration with a manned mission to Mars if we can’t fully staff NASA?

The US has many different visa classes. The H1B is an employer-sponsored visa specifically for those positions that require advanced degrees. However, the number of H1Bs available each year is a fraction of the demand, meaning that one’s chances of getting a visa are reduced to a lottery. Companies like Google and Microsoft have been vocal in their view that their ability to fully staff in the US is negatively impacted by the inadequate quota levels of available H1B visas and have gone so far as to open substantial R&D offices in Vancouver, as well as in places like India, China & Russia.

While getting an H1B is a milestone for many professionals, it is limited in terms of time (3 year term, 6 years max), and does not allow for spouses or children to work in the US. Nor is it a path to US citizenship – that path is through a Green Card.

There are essentially two ways to get a coveted Green Card – sponsorship by a family member already resident in the US, or sponsorship by an employer. The family sponsored applicants need not have any advanced skills or education – only a desire to reside in the US and a family member capable of sponsoring them. And while we cling to the belief that it is possible to live the American Dream, the reality is that many of these Green Card holders have neither the education nor the skills necessary to help America improve its competitiveness in a frictionless, flat world.

I speak from personal experience when I say that the path to Green Card for educated professionals is not trivial. Many potential Green Card applicants may also be H1B visa holders, at least the lucky few to have gotten one. The perception continues to be propagated that a Green Card applicant can’t be in the country to fill a position that an American is capable of doing. The first step is for the employer to demonstrate to the Department of Labor that no American meets the minimum qualifications laid out for that position. Not that they are more qualified than the prospective immigrant, simply that they meet the minimum qualifications. This is a very low bar to set and as a result, many highly qualified non-US citizens that want to live, raise their families and pay taxes in the US are not able to do so.

The sad fact is that these jobs are being created elsewhere, as the production of “bits” has very different location requirements than does the production of “atoms”. American leadership in technology and its competitive advantage are evaporating, and what’s unfortunate is that many of the people that could help stop this slide, have been lined up at the door, asking politely to get in.  However, too many are turned away and prevented from doing so.

Immigration needs to be managed, but the pool of potential immigrants is a tremendous resource to be tapped. An enlightened immigration policy would be aligned with a clearly defined set of national priorities. Want to improve competitiveness and GDP? Make it easier for educated professionals to live and work in the country. Let their spouses, many of which are also highly educated, work and contribute as well. And most importantly, so doing will allow their children to be educated, work and stay in the US as well. Professionals are net producers and help to grow the national economy and the tax base not takers.

So continue to let in the tired, poor and huddled masses, but make it easier for those of us that are neither tired, nor poor, but who desire to be productive members of the US economy to stay in the country for more than six years.

That’s my .02!

Martin Suter

(martin.suter@iplicensing.net

Posted in Immigration, Education, Microsoft, Google | Print | 1 Comment »

22. March 2008 by Martin Suter.

Yesterday, I started reading Susan Jacoby’s new book, "The Age of American Unreason". Many of the statistics she cites have been cited elsewhere, but it was her aggregation of these, and the discussion of the implications, that I have found sobering. This has led me to ponder whether America has any chance of remaining the greatest country in the world, or whether any forward motion is strictly a function of momentum from previous generations’ effort, or perhaps through the sheer strength of a very small subset of society. I would wager that to these "Atlases", the US is getting very heavy indeed.

The examples Jacoby uses provide quantitative measures that reinforce what I (we?) see manifested on a daily basis but all too often choose to ignore:

"Nearly two-thirds of Americans want creationism…to be taught alongside evolution in public schools. Fewer than half of Americans-48 percent, accept any form of evolution, even guided by God, and just 26 percent accept Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Fully 42 percent say that all living beings, including humans, have existed in their present form since the beginning of time." (1)

In another section, she points out that, in a 1998 survey by researchers from the University of Texas, "one out of four public school biology teachers believes that humans and dinosaurs inhabited the earth simultaneously." (2)

This can’t be a shock to anyone who watched the early Republican debates, where fully 7 out of 11 candidates came out as Christian fundamentalists, falling over each other in their attempts to prove their religiosity exceeded that of their opponents. Not intelligence, not competence or experience, but how strongly they believed that the Bible was the inerrant word of god was their primary qualification for running for President of the United States.

How have we allowed this to happen? How have we become so intellectually neutered so as to allow "political correctness" to supersede intellectual debate and discourse?

In his song, "None of Us Are Free", Solomon Burke sings "If you don’t say it’s wrong, then that says it’s right". The intellectuals of this country have been the silent minority, and as a result, are equally complicit in the sorry state of US society today.

In Atlas Shrugged, the intellectuals of the world went on strike, removing themselves, their capital and their productive capabilities from society and physically relocating to a world of their own. Today, it is not just the exodus of intellectual horsepower, but capital flows and competitive advantage as well that threaten this country. In an information/knowledge based world, how is it possible for the US to be competitive with such a pervasive, systemic abdication of reason? And perhaps more importantly, what are the prospects to pull out of this dive?

As in Atlas Shrugged, the US is being held aloft by a disproportionate few - intellectuals, engineers, entrepreneurs. In a flat world, where ideas, capital and people can move with relatively little friction, it will not be surprising if these few "shrug". Wouldn’t you?

That’s my .02!

Martin Suter
(martin.suter@iplicensing.net)

(1) "Public Divided on Origins of Life, August 30, 2005, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life

(2) George E. Webb, The Evolution Controversy in America (Lexington, KT, 1994), p.254

Posted in Objectivism, Ayn Rand, Education | Print | 2 Comments »

12. February 2008 by Martin Suter.

Allen Kupetz, Executive-in-Residence, Crummer Graduate School of Business at Rollins College, is the kind of professor that was exceedingly rare when I was in university. Allen wants his MBA students to gain a deeper appreciation for the “real” business world, and is not shy about bringing in local subject matter experts to share their insights with his class. I’m very fortunate to be Allen’s “go-to” guy on the topic of licensing.

Tomorrow, I have the opportunity to speak with his “Technology Entrepreneurship” class about IP Licensing, both as a catalyst to start a company as well as a means of commercializing early-stage technology. If they’re like me, there’s little chance that they’ll be filing patents on their own inventions, so I’m hopeful that introducing them to sources of IP and describing what it takes to get a deal done will be interesting. My goal for the talk is to expose them to the world of licensing, as a means of harnessing their entrepreneurial aspirations…stuff that you’ll never find in a textbook.

The academic world needs more guys like Allen and fewer textbooks.

That’s my .02!

Martin

(martin.suter@iplicensing.net)

Posted in Education, Licensing, Start-ups | Print | 1 Comment »