Frictionless Science

In1996 Bill Gates in his book The Road Ahead predicted a future of "frictionless capitalism". In this world, buyers would have immediate and direct access through the Internet to a supplier of almost any good no matter its location in the world. The product could be made and transported efficiently through just-in-time manufacturing, computer-aided-design (CAD), computer numerical control (CNC) for precise machining, and a global transportation network. That world exists today. For example, a customized iPod music player ordered from Apple's web site is shipped within hours via Federal Express from Shenzhen, China, and delivered in two days to the customer in Ohio.

Time, distance, resources, education and politics are among the sources of friction in science. Money is the essential lubricant in overcoming that friction. Jesse Ausubel at Rockefeller University and director of the web-based “Encyclopedia of Life” points out that rich nations and fast-growing countries are developing and absorbing technologies at steeper rates in each new wave of innovation and that changing the pecking order requires an aspiring country to spend a lot.

China is definitely an example of the phenomena. The World Bank ranks China with the number two GDP in the world. China is now able to afford the creation of 100 new universities which produce almost the same number of scientists and engineers as the United States. According to Economist magazine, the result is that China, which has already overtaken Japan to become the world's second-largest investor after the United States in research and development in absolute terms, is a country to watch in terms of acceleration in the innovation market. In contrast is the Arab world, which continues to see a “brain drain” to western countries. Forty five per cent of Arab students who study abroad do not go back to their countries after graduating.

However, we are now entering into in an era of "frictionless science". The ubiquity of the Internet is eliminating time and distance factors to diffusing knowledge among scientists and innovators. This was in essence the vision of Tim Berners-Lee, who created the first World Wide Web (WWW) browser in 1990 to help physicists from around the world who needed to share data. Almost all major research physicists put their pre-publication papers on arXiv web site at Cornell for review. The papers, ranging from Astrophysics to Nuclear Theory, are instantly retrievable by scientists from S. Korea to Brazil.

As long as a person – scientist or hobbyist -- has access to the Internet, he can search the electronic archive of thousands of publications. Since 2000, a host of other organizations have opened up their electronic publication libraries to the world. For example, students in India can access journal articles in electrical engineering from the IEEE going back to 1913. Iranian engineers can access all US patents going back to 1790.

Moreover, according to Stuart Brand of the Long Now Foundation, there is a new diffusion phenomenon with the ubiquity of the Internet -- "Wiki-Science". "The average number of authors per paper continues to rise. With massive collaborations, the numbers will boom. Experiments involving thousands of investigators collaborating on a "paper" will be commonplace." Many of those "thousands of investigators" will be from outside the US.

The Internet is also creating on a global scale an eBay style market for science matching researchers to problems. InnoCentive, connects top scientists to relevant research and development challenges facing leading companies around the globe, for rewards up to $100,000 USD or more.

The Fifty Year Strategy

How did the US become the leader in technology?

At the end of World War II, the United States had only two major competitors in science and technology -- Great Britain and the Soviet Union. Continental Europe and Japan were in ruins, China was in civil war, and the rest of the world had few scientific resources as it recovered from six years of war. The United States quickly went on to capitalize on its post-war advantage by developing a national strategy for research proposed by Vannevar Bush, President Roosevelt's director of Office of Scientific Research and Development -- the office responsible for the atomic bomb.

The strategy promoted basic research as "the pacemaker of technological progress” and eventually became embodied in activities such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institute for Health, and the Defense laboratories. Furthermore, competition with the Soviet Union spurred a rapid expansion of the physical sciences which later gave the US a dominant position in such diverse areas as aerospace, computing, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and energy production technology.

The end of the Cold War in 1991 was as a culmination point for this strategy. It was also a moment of transition for science and technology in the US and in the world. The Internet was about to explode with the development of the Web browser and fiber-based communications. The Human Genome Project to sequence human DNA was just getting underway. Personal computing over local area networks (LANs) was reaching ubiquity in United States businesses. And foreign students accounted for 50% of Ph.D. production in the United States with China sending the largest contingent. Globalization was in full-swing.

The Theory of Large Numbers and R&D

So what if there are a billion people with broadband smartphones in 2011? Well the first effect is to warp the universe of R&D. Huge sums of money are being spent because it can be amortized over billions of devices. Nokia spent nearly $8 billion on R&D for their mobile phone business last year. R&D Number from Motorola, Samsung, Apple, Intel, and Microsoft are all comparable as they focus on a world wide technology upgrade to broadband.

This puts government R&D in command and control at a big disadvantage if does not exploit commercial developments and standards. Military system developers often try to "leap ahead" of existing technology. Instead, they have been falling behind the torrent of change. And strange things begin to happen like soldiers carrying iPhones into battle in Afghanistan.

It also changes business models dramatically as we can imagine ethereal markets for goods and services from anywhere for anyone. Take a visit to the UCF Medical School library. One would expect an entire building filled with volumes of expensive medical books and journals. Its the size of a Starbucks. The students are all given iPad's. Their library is virtual. Saved UCF millions of dollars. And the library moves with the student.

The Kindle and Nook devices are also emptying the book stores. I get nostalgic for paper. I have pangs of concern about how we will archive digital data. Paper seems to be a durable. But it can't keep up. Billions of people now need to read, communicate, and compose with billions of other people that mobile technology can provide. Its not 1848 when the steam-powered printing press was sufficient for informing a generation of small literate class in the industrial era.

And when you can make information devices so cheaply for billions then you can think about other problem they might solve. The Taiwanese semiconductor folks already have a target.
"The semiconductor technology can not only merchandize but also enter human bodies to monitor hart beat, check blood pressure and cure stroke."

Computers in Battle

This is the twentieth anniversary of Desert Storm, the first Iraq War. Desert Storm was a transitional war. It occurred right after the end of the Cold War and at the beginning of the digital age of warfare.

On 25 February 1991 a SCUD missile fired by the Iraqis landed on mess hall in Dahran killing 29 soldiers, the largest loss of US life in a single incident. A Patriot missile fired at the incoming SCUD but literally missed by a mile. An investigation was conducted by the GAO which showed that the clock on the computer had drifted and made the wrong calculation about how fast the SCUD was moving based on radar data. Though a lot of fingers have been pointed to explain this, the reality is that the Patriot was designed for a different war. It was designed to shoot down planes, not ballistic missiles.

Missile defense was an unanticipated by-product of a desperate need to do something against TBMs. The Patriot was also meant to be constantly be mobile during the Cold War to avoid Soviet attacks. Every time it moved the computer was turned off and rebooted at its new location, resetting its clock. It was never meant to stay stationary for two weeks at a time -- a long time not to reset and enabling the clock to drift enough to induce large (but not noticeable to the operators until launched) errors. And because the Patriot had been designed for Cold War requirements, it was never tested without moving every 100 hours so no one knew that this would happen.

The Patriot story is a lesson about how technology and our understanding of its utility are always out of phase. Our ability to predict the future is about the same as the computer on the Patriot with an out-of-sync clock. You don't know what you don't know.

The Next Bruce Springsteen

Is Abigail Washburn. I am listening to her City of Refuge album and it reminds me of early Bruce. It may be strange to say this about a "folk" album but turn it up loud.

Another Ice Age Part Deux

I actually remember reading this story of the coming Ice Age. My parents would get Time magazine and I found out about how crazy the world was. 1972 was a potpourri of discontinuities. Nixon goes to China. US ground troops leave Vietnam. And the HP-35 calculator is introduced for $395. Nixon is gone. Vietnam now wants our troops back. HP sells calculator iPhone apps.

But its still cold!

The Fast Growing Game of All Time

CityVille shows the power of social media well delivered.