Even the major oil companies give lip service to the claim. Head and introduced the BS and MS degree programs in petroleum engineering. End-users love cryptography, right? In this edition, we are reminded that rigorous technical work is one of the pillars of our industry. So how could we find the treasure thats hiding in plain sight? After solving a problem, humanity imagines that it finds in analogous solutions the key to all problems. Consider the ill-fated eToys.com or Pets.com: was the investor right to believe that Americans would spend a ton of money online such as for buying toys or dogfood? Integrated Cognitive Systems, Michie1970 (pg9396 of Michie, On Machine Intelligence): How long is it likely to be before a machine can be developed approximating to adult human standards of intellectual performance? Early PC history is rife with examples of the prescient failing. The loan guarantee from General Dynamics raised our hopes and increased our spirits, but also increased the pressure to finalize the private placement. Right then, I made an incredible blunder. Critical problems are the research questions, cast in terms of the concrete particulars of currently available knowledge and technique and of specific exemplars or models (eg. Origins of Innovation: Bakewell & Breeding, Build something people want is not enough, The Psychology of Entrepreneurial Misjudgment, part 1: Biases16, Resistant protocols: How decentralization evolves, Technological convergence in drug discovery and other endeavors, Quantifying the evolution of individual scientific impact, Large teams develop and small teams disrupt science and technology, How DFS, poker, basketball, Starcraft and strong opinions, weakly held (SOWH) can help your startup, An Attempt at Explaining, Blaming, and Being Very Slightly Sympathetic Toward Enron, How Bubbles and Megaprojects Parallelize Innovation, Market Research, Wireframing, and Design, Spend twice as much effort every time you attempt to solve a problem, Why didnt electricity immediately change manufacturing? The third big area of team investigation for VCs focuses on the founders leadership abilities. If so, you might spend some of your hypothetical money on whatever the best approximation to a robotics index fund you can find, as the best of a bunch of bad choices. . The motivation to take something into the real world, which necessarily requires attacking the reverse salients, may be part of why corporate & academic research are both necessary; too little of either creates a bottleneck. Learn more with Olympus. In a recent poll [8], thirty-five out of forty-two people engaged in this sort of research gave estimates between ten and one hundred years. Starting a new pastime such as playing tennis, learning to paint, riding a horse, or listening to new types of music can provide a fun opportunity to reflect on what and how you are thinking and learning. To the extent that VC/startups stampede into particular sectors, this leads to inefficiency of the first timewere so many green energy startups necessary? Is this even nonpublic knowledge at all? If you think about the spectrum of things in which you could invest, there are good ideas that look like good ideas. Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest. within the environment where learning is taking place). It is not like the horse or the bull, the wolf or the deer. Informatio: The new language of science ( Hans Christian von Baeyer) 14-15 In2012, I watched impressed as my aunt used the iPhone application FaceTime to video chat with her daughter half a continent away. Err After all, why would they say no? ): CyberSlice blew through $174.1$100.02000m+ trying to sell pizza online, but this time will be different., FedEx: The experienced & well-capitalized Emery Air Freight is already trying and failing to make the hub-and-spoke air delivery method work; Ill blow my inheritance on trying to compete with them while being so undercapitalized Ill have to commit multiple crimes to keep FedEx afloat like literally gambling the companys money at Las Vegas., Lotus1-2-3: VisiCalc literally invented the spreadsheet, has owned the market for 4 years despite clones like Microsofts, and singlehandedly made the Apple II PC a mega-success; well write our own spreadsheet from scratch, fixing some of VisiCalcs problems, and beat them to the IBM PC. A major benefit of R&D, then, is in laying fallow until the ripe time when they can be immediately exploited in previously-unpredictable ways; applied R&D or VC strategies should focus on maintaining diversity of investments, while continuing to flexibly revisit previous failures which forecasts indicate may have reached ripe time. When interviewed many years later about why, despite being a lawyer by training, he was the natural founder for an airline business, Kelleher quipped: I knew nothing about airlines, which I think made me eminently qualified to start one, because what we tried to do at Southwest was get away from the traditional way that airlines had done business.. (Checking a few random entries in Wikipedia, as of 2012, maybe a fifth of the companies are publicly traded, and the private ones include the ones you mightve heard of like Boston Robotics or Kiva so that will be a small unrepresentative index.) After10 hours of deliberation, he was acquitted. One of the ideas is to have sort of a SWAT team of people who go around looking for how to connect the dots all day long in these serendipitous ways. but less IBM and Apple both went nearly bankrupt at points, and Microsofts stock has been flat since 1999 or whenever (translating to huge real losses and opportunity costs to long-term holders of it). Then after your special knowledge has become public knowledge, the robotics company goes public, and by EMH, their shares become a normal investment. It may be easier said than done, but one of the biggest factors in taking time to reflect should be stillness and, if possible, solitude. Although Babbage was one of Britains great innovative geniuses, support of his work was wasted money in terms of tangible return on investment. The system as a whole can be seen in RL terms. The flowmeter did have a place in transient testing, though, but during drawdown, not buildup. No, and not even later, as demonstrated by Orkut and Friendster, and the lingering death of MySpace. How often did I read in the 90s and early 00s about how amazing Japanese cellphones were and how amazing a good smartphone would be, even though year after year the phones were jokes and used pretty much solely for voice? The productivity boost expected from electric dynamos was slow to materialise, The evolution of large technological systems, #326, Part II. Vacuum tube technology was first exploited for high-speed digital computing in Britain during the Second World War [16]. Reflections on Timing and Technology Christine Ehlig-Economides reflects on her career and how being in the right place at the right time has made all the difference. This is true but I would say it reverses the order (N to N+1? Can you ask researchers if the time is ripe? If Blockbusters CEO had paid a pittance ~2000 to acquihire Netflix & put Reed Hastings in charge, or if it had simply stuck with its CEO in 2007 to strangle Netflix with Total Access, its shareholders would be far better off now. Theyd been known for decades. Lets start one. The people listed in her article have all subscribed to the rigorous analysis that was necessary, and they, as she has, have left their mark in the improved understanding we now often take for granted. After all, nonobvious ideas that could in fact become big businesses are by definition nonobvious. The energy business should ensure that the world has the affordable sustainable energy it needs without undue environmental impact. The key to reflection is learning how to take perspective on one's own actions and experiencein other words, to examine that experience rather than just living it"[1], stages, reflective . Neither of these technologies was a valid alternative to the use of the pressure derivative, but it took a few years for the industry to see it that way. Freeman Dyson, Freeman Dysons Brain 1998 (cf. You can read books from the past about tech visionaries and note how many of them were spot-on in their beliefs about what would happen (TML is a great example, but far from the only one) but where a person would have been ill-advised to act on the correct forecasts. The most informative plan is the most polarizing one.29. Just knowing that single trajectory of Moores, and none other, we would have educated differently, invested differently, prepared more wisely to grasp the amazing powers it would sprout. 2. So, what Babbage should have aimed for is not making a practical thinking machine which could churn out naval tables, but demonstrating that a programmable thinking machine is possible & useful, and currently limited by the slowness & size of its mechanical logicso that transistors could be pursued with higher priority by governments, and programmable computers could be created with transistors as soon as possible, instead of the historical course of a meandering piecemeal development where Babbages work was forgotten & then repeatedly reinvented with delays (eg. And then on the other hand, if a startup idea becomes debunked, and no one is willing to invest in it ever, that idea may be starved of investment long past its ripe time, and this means big regret. Reflection-in-action "Thinking about what you are doing, while you are doing it." (Schn, 1983) Reflection-in-action happens in what Schn (1983) describes as 'the midst of activity' - in coaching terms this is likely to be during a coaching session or game. Dont ask Fisher, hes hardly going to say, oh yeah, all the money was completely wasted, we were trying to do it too soon; our bad. A portion of the output pulse of the microchip laser was incident into the fiber delay line, and then, the backward reflection light induced the formation of the pulse. Smartphones are an even bigger example of this. Another time, we had to ask our employees to hold their paychecks while we waited for the next wave of financingFred dumped his entire inheritance into the company and was full speed ahead without concern for his personal finances. What made them a success was that they happened to give the pinata a whack at the exact moment where some S-curves or events hit the right point. That was inconceivable before because it would have been just so expensive to do that calculation. We ultimately chose to abandon our word choice, but the principle remains today: You have to be partly delusional to start a company given the prospects of success and the need to keep pushing forward in the wake of the constant stream of doubters. Before that, everyone relied strictly on finding a straight line on a Horner plot3 (Fig. If you are copying these guys, you arent learning from them.. Her example of the pressure derivative demonstrates that something developed for an entirely different industry, the capacitance transducer (quartz pressure gauge) developed for low-vacuum research, can influence how a part of our industry operates.Andrew Lambert, Pillars of the Industry Editor. It may be relevant to note that Musk did not found Tesla; the two co-founders ultimately quit the company., As late as 20072008, Blockbuster could have still beaten Netflix, as its Total Access program demonstrated, but CEO changes scuppered its last chance. These areas shared a number of generic problems and solutions, for example, the need to isolate a substance (natural product, synthetic product, body substance) in chemically pure form, the need to synthesize the substance and to do so economically if it was to go on the market, and the need for pharmacological, chemotherapeutic, toxicological, and clinical testing of the substance. 3). Launching too early means failure, but being conservative & launching later is just as bad because regardless of forecasting, a good idea will draw overly-optimistic researchers or entrepreneurs to it like moths to a flame: all get immolated but the one with the dumb luck to kiss the flame at the perfect instant, who then wins everything, at which point everyone can see that the optimal time is past. A kind of definition of Value of Information: If you do not work on an important problem, its unlikely youll do important work. How hard could it be? Kafkas idiosyncrasy is present in each of these writings, to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had not written, we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. In this correlation, the identity or plurality of men doesnt matter. Everyone will buy it simply because itll be slightly better., Airbnb: Well max out our credit cards to let people illegally rent out their air mattresses en route to eating the hotel industry. What was systemic in Hrleins way of thinking was his concept of the organizational pattern or patterns that will best facilitate the production of valuable results in the areas in which medicine and chemistry interact. We didnt work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, and (3) antigravity. An additional analogy from reinforcement learning is PSRL, which handles more complex problems by committing to a strategy and following it until the end and either success/failure. neural net, Bitcoin, economics, history, insight porn, sociology/tech, decision theory, [For support of website features (tablesorting, collapsible sections, image zooming, link annotation popups/popins & transclusions, sidenotes), please enable JavaScript.]. Reindex into what, another doomed firm?). Konrad Zuse vs von Neumann). My timing on the technical front could not have been better. Now BP is Beyond Petroleum. Bible verses about God's perfect timing. We wanted the reflections to be as close to the learning experience as possible, both in terms of the timing of the reflections and where the reflection would take place. Youve seen the curves Gordon Moore discovered. Alfred North Whitehead, The Organization of Thought (1917). But equally, anything with that much potential has a high likelihood of failureif it was obviously a good idea with no risks, everyone would be doing it. The flow rate showed a very clear oscillation, and there was a concern that the meter had malfunctioned. Progress, then, depends on the unreasonable man. After 20 years with Schlumberger in various positions, she returned to academia as a full professor of chemical engineering at the U. of Houston, where she has served as Director of the Petroleum Engineering Program as an adjunct professor since January 2000. And, incidentally, offering an example of why stock markets are fine with paying executives so much: a good executive can createor destroythe entire company. View 3 Samsung T7 Shield Check Price 4 Crucial X6 Portable SSD View 5 Western Digital My Book Check Price Yet the principle of unripe time, distilled by F. M. Cornford [15] more than half a century ago from the changeless stream of Cambridge academic life, has provided the epitaph of more than one premature technology. These project managers tend to pick polarizing projects rather than consistent projects (Goldstein&Kearney2017), ones which generate disagreement among reviews or critics. In this case, the flowmeter acquires data while the well is flowing, which is what it is intended to do. For my last 4 years in Schlumberger, I was permitted to work about 1 day a week with the U. of Houston, where I was appointed Director of the Petroleum Engineering Program. Excerpts from The First Miracle Drugs: How the Sulfa Drugs Transformed Medicine, John Lesch2006. We can think of the prototypes as 23 different attempts to describe the inevitable generic lightbulb. And so, we see, in our world around half such attempts fail completely, and 5% or so go to the moon. However, people usually ignore the bad effects of technology that may lead to many problems in our . Hrleins efforts to translate success in certain areas (vitamin deficiency disease, chemotherapy of protozoal infections) into optimism about possibilities in other areas (cancer, antibacterial chemotherapy) was characteristic. She currently is working to introduce degree programs in energy engineering at Texas A&M U. The paper I presented1 was later published in Water Resources Research, a groundwater hydrology journal. Even now, after weve been building them for 100 years, its very difficult to understand just why a bicycle worksits even difficult to formulate it as a mathematical problem. quick and timely) and also ecologically valid (i.e. At Rice U.s Baker Inst., we find the Shell Center for Sustainability. . He could spot the points where the enemys line was broken, and the reverse salients in his own. After all, during a buildup, the downhole flow rate was rapidly approaching zero. reflection-in-action. A typical reflection paper is between 300 and 700 words long. The research manager had to be active in defining goals, in marshaling means and resources, and in assessing success or failure. But it is by no means obvious that it was unripe for Babbages research and development effort, if only it had been conceived in terms of a more severely delimited objective: the construction of a working model. The aeroplane industry cannot now redeem Daedalus nor can the computer industry recover the money spent by the British Admiralty more than a hundred years ago in support of Charles Babbage and his calculating machine. After 7 of my 20 years with Schlumberger, I left transient-test analysis for several other pursuits, and as before, my timing continued to be great. If the latter, how could IP or economics be fixed to more closely link intermediate contributions to the final result to more closely approach a fairer distribution like the Shapley value than contributions being commoditized, yielding last-mover winner-take-all dynamics?. If you arent struck by a sense of dj vu or pity when you read this book, compare the claims by people at the Media Lab with contemporaryor laterworks like Clifford Stolls Silicon Snake Oil, and youll see how right they were. We may want things now, we may want them fast, But God knows best, our future is cast. In particular, VCs are trying to determine whether this founder will be able to create a compelling story around the company mission in order to attract great engineers, executives, sales and marketing people, etc. The different pathologies might be: small ones will collectively try lots of strange or novel ideas but will fail by running underpowered poorly-done experiments (for lack of funding & expertise) which convince no one, suffer from small-study biases, and merely pollute the literature, giving meta-analysts migraines. . Only Apple can build apps for it. (You too can achieve overnight success in just a few decades of hard work) A 2013 interview with Eric Jackson looks back on smartphone adoption rates: Q: Whats your take on how theyre [Apple] handling their expansion into China, India, and other emerging markets?, A: Its depressing how slow things are moving on that front. Could we find the Shell Center for Sustainability them fast, but during drawdown, buildup. 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