Michael Nielsen has a mission: to open up science. A pioneer in the field of quantum computing (a quick Google scholar search shows his top publication to have over 13,000 citations), Nielsen pretty much dropped out of academia to pursue his quest to change science. Like myself he is an Australian living in Toronto. But …
Continue reading "Science with & without the Internet: Part I"
We have lots of passwords. In my case, some of them are of little consequence. But others are critically important. For instance, I'd hate for my family to be struggling with bank account information if I were to pass away. And with password updates, it is hard to incorporate them in wills. This is not …
The notion of tapping into crowds as a means of improving creative activity has become, dare I say it, "all the rage." Reviews of restaurants are crowd-sourced by Yelp, Zagat and others. The Wikipedia model crowd-sources knowledge collation. There is Kickstarter, that crowd-sources, well, crowd approval and with it funding for new products. There are various attempts …
[This is a guest post by Tim Bresnahan, the Landau Professor in Technology and the Economy at Stanford University; Ed.] Steve Jobs has died. We should remember his accomplishments and the vision of American entrepreneurship he embodied. The PC business was founded by a ragtag band of outsiders. Steve, a lotus-eating less-than-successful Atari employee, was …
Continue reading "Jobs: A Vision of American Entrepreneurship"
I live in a world of economics where we tend to doubt the power of the individual. To be sure, there are individuals who are in positions of power and who can inflict damage on the world. But in the world of business, these tend to wash out. Leaders may come and go but very …
Continue reading "The Representative Agent in the Technological World"
Thanks, Steve, for all you've done for the world. You lived a life true to your ideals.
A common theme in innovation is how much uncertainty there is about innovations that will be achieved in the future and, in particular, about their value. The classic reference is this piece by Nathan Rosenberg that documents many cases where people got it wrong. The flip-side are situations where the future was well anticipated. For …
Continue reading "Lunchtime videos: anticipating the future"
Product life cycles are a tricky business. Car models often have a five year lifespan. Computers have a couple of years. But somewhere along the way, the world decided that iPhones should have a yearly cycle. Today, Apple announced the iPhone 4S. It's an upgraded iPhone 4 and labelled as such. During the announcement Apple's …
Steve Landsburg alerted me to an amazing set of interactions in Mathematics this week. A very distinguished Princeton professor, Ed Nelson, announced what may have been the most profound mathematical result of the century (right up there with Godel's Theorem last century): that the Peano axioms in mathematics were inconsistent. Nelson announced his finding on …
Postal mail and electronic mail have coexisted for years, sitting next to one another in an uneasy tension. That was so thirty years ago, as it is this year. Two recent posts -- one from Robert Cannon, and one from Randall Stross -- offered a quick reminder about how that tension has evolved. Robert Cannon …
