mim’s blog

Marios pointed me to this article from the New Yorker, again by Malcolm Gladwell. I’ve been thinking about many of these ideas lately, and Gladwell seems to have come up with them at the same time…

The article is both about coincidences in simultaneous, independent inventions and a company called Intellectual Ventures (IV) with the business model of generating, patenting, and licensing lots of ideas. It’s a story that appeals to everybody who thinks, “I could do that, I have lots of ideas.” My problem with this presentation of the business model is that it’s misleading. Everyone loves coming up with new ideas, so everyone does, and as a result, ideas are cheap. The real business, however, is being able to turn an idea into something that people can and do use. I would guess that if IV is going to succeed, it will be because they’re able to make ideas useful and used and not just because they’re able to come up with new inventions. They appear to have all of the accompanying things necessary to get ideas off of the ground: funding to pay lawyers to file 500 patents a year, research before and after brainstorming sessions, and connections to people who want the ideas. It doesn’t hurt if Bill Gates is pushing your patent, either.

It seems like many people believe that there is a person called an inventor, and this person comes up with ideas, which they send out into the world. These ideas then supply money without any additional work required of the inventor and the only thing that keeps the inventor inventing is a need to tinker or to fatten the royalty stream. This seems very naive to me. As Marios has said many times before, ideas are cheap, what’s expensive is the execution and the follow-through, and what’s risky is whether people will find the invention useful and actually use it.

It seems like a person with answers or potential answers can get around some of these issues by going to a person with a problem. That a person has a problem indicates that a solution of that problem ought to be useful and used. A person with a problem has probably looked around for solutions. The more they need their problem solved, the more thorough they’ve been in their search. If you’re interested in science, then a person with a problem indicates a problem that probably hasn’t been solved yet and would be worth solving.

When I come up with ideas, just about all of them have been thought of before. I enjoy the feeling of elation that comes from discovering something new to me and running through the implications of it, and it’s always disappointing when the internet tells me it’s already been invented. Even so, it’s fun to find out when the idea was invented. “Oh, that was a 1962 idea, that one was a 1998 idea, this one’s a 2005 idea.” I find that as I’ve gone through school, my ideas have been catching up with the present. In a class, it’s a matter of extrapolating from one lecture to come up with the idea that might be presented in the next lecture. Of course, the next lecture will present it with more of the implications worked out, because other people have been thinking about it for more than a week. This process has also made me think about the relationship between my personal history of learning and the collective history of science and how something that’s new to me generally isn’t new to science. Every once in a while, though, it will be, especially in areas where I’m “caught up” with science, whatever that means.

As an aside, Malcolm Gladwell has obviously never experienced the Pfaffian, or he would have included Pfaff in the section on eponymous inventions and not just the section on second-tier scientists.

I was reading Fay and Popper’s book Sound source localization and came across an awesome chapter about the auditory localization abilities of insects by Daniel Robert. With a distance of just millimeters between their ears of the same size, they’re able to hear and localize sounds with wavelengths of centimeters. That’s pretty amazing in itself, but one little fly can do even better. Ormia ochracea is a parasitoid fly that lays its eggs in crickets. Crickets make a lot of noise, so O. ochracea uses that to find them, dive bomb them, and spray them with eggs.

Müller and Robert were intrigued and wanted to see how well O. ochracea could do just with its ears. They put it in a room, set up some infrared cameras to track it, and turned off the lights. When they played cricket sounds out of a speaker four meters away from the fly, it took off, flew to just over the speaker, then spiraled down and landed right on it, slightly miffed. Then they repeated the experiment, but shut the speaker off while the fly was in mid-air. The incredible thing was, it was still able to land right on target. This means that the fly can not only judge the three-dimensional position of the sound source, but it can remember where the sound source is and control its flight well enough to land right on the mark. It’s amazing what you can do with only a few hundred auditory neurons.

Last week’s New Yorker has an article entitled “Come one, come all” by Frances Fitzgerald about a new megachurch in Connecticut called Faith Church. I was expecting a description of a big box store filled with evangelical fire and brimstone, but instead found it full of chicken soup for the soul. The bits about this particular church were interesting, but the parts about the megachurch phenomenon in general were fascinating because they failed to conform to my expectations in every way. While looking for an online version of this article, I came across a 2005 Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker entitled The Cellular Church. I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me to have found Gladwell on the scene 2 years before me. This led me to still other articles, one in Mother Jones and another in the Detroit News.

Even though all of the articles described different churches, they all basically followed the same pattern. Charismatic pastor fresh out of seminary seeks to set up church in suburbs. Goes door-to-door asking people why they don’t attend church and what kind of church they would attend. Pastor proceeds to found such a church, achieves overwhelming success, spreads message to the masses, creates network of affiliated churches, posts Peter Drucker (management guru) quotations on office wall.

What I find so interesting is not the religious message by any means, it is the fact that the religion has so little to do with it. Between the child care, the food court, the youth programs, the sports complexes, the massive parking lots, and the ubiquitous television screens, you might miss the religion. But in addition to the amenities, Gladwell argues that what keeps people coming back are the “support group” of 6-8 people, one for any combination of interests or needs. The church that appears to be made up of 20,000 members is really an aggregation of 3000 “cells.” The group member keep each other engaged and interested in what going on and provide community in the otherwise lonesome suburbs.

The articles mention other groups that succeeded with this cellular model in the past: elks, shriners, labor unions, the communist party, and so forth. I would volunteer another example, all levels of government and their constituent institutions, from city councils to political parties. But you’ll notice from the list that all of these groups have at least one thing in common, they don’t have much momentum these days. All of the articles quote Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community, which enumerates an almost limitless number of civic and community groups that have shriveled since their heyday in the sixties. Not only does he study civic life in general, he also teaches people like the SEIU’s Andy Stern how they can use the lessons learned from the megachurch.

It seems to me that the megachurch’s real success is its structure, not its spirituality. Any religion or even secular morality could be swapped in instead of whatever passes for the church’s denominational affiliation without chasing people away. Religion does provide a focus for the proceedings and a reason to come every week, and has the advantage of being a societal activity deeply ingrained in people. It would be difficult, but not impossible, to replace. For example, the religious institution of the tithe facilitates fund raising. Gladwell describes one weekend at Saddlebacks church in which pastor Rick Warren’s congregation gave $7 million in cash and $53 million in commitments in addition to their tithes. The government has taxes and other organizations have dues, but it seems hard to compete with those sorts of numbers.

The megachurch shows that people still do want community. Perhaps these other institutions that worked so well in the past could be revitalized through “suburbanization” as well. Could government engage more voters by redesigning itself to cater to voters’ and citizens’ needs? Could communities regain some notion of common spaces that are actually used and shared? Could people be re-empowered to change their society, to regain some control over their lives, to alleviate alienation? It seems a Faustian bargain, with the disastrous consequences of the suburbs accompanying the benefits of community. Making more institutions suburban means acknowledging the reality and permanence of the suburbs. It takes us that much farther from a sustainable society, but it seems like the direction things are heading at the moment.

I was reading Hermione Lee’s interview with Philip Roth in the New Yorker and was struck by Roth’s observation:

Even if one is not, strictly speaking, “haunted,” the past is perpetually with one in the present, and the longer it grows and the further it recedes the stronger its presence seems to become. I agree with the Chekhov character who, when, in a crisis, he is reminded that “this, too, shall pass,” responds, “Nothing passes.”

Time passes so smoothly while you are trying to steer your present, that you hardly notice it solidifying into an immutable trail.

Malcolm Gladwell seems to be everywhere I want to be. He wrote an article in the New Yorker in October about movie hit prediction, which is related, albeit tangentially, to my own research on music recommendation. This week, he has an article entitled Open Secrets, which is about a lot of things, but mostly the idea that the answers to important questions are no longer unavailable, but are instead hidden amongst other, less useful facts. It focuses on the data indicating Enron’s impending collapse, but also touches on the Allies’ inferences from Nazi propaganda, Woodward and Berstein’s investigation of the Watergate scandal, and the diagnosis of prostate cancer.

The part that I found the most interesting, though, was a quotation about regulating modern businesses,

“In order for an economy to have an adequate system of financial reporting, it is not enough that companies make disclosures of financial information,” the Yale law professor Jonathan Macey wrote in a landmark law-review article that encouraged many to rethink the Enron case. “In addition, it is vital that there be a set of financial intermediaries, who are at least as competent and sophisticated at receiving, processing, and interpreting financial information . . . as the companies are at delivering it.”

This seems to be the same problem that the US Patent and Trademark Office is up against, namely evaluating the work of experts in their fields.

The patent system in the US seems to be straining, if not buckling, under the weight of an ever-increasing number of purported inventions, which must be evaluated against all of the other granted patents, prior art, etc, before a patent is granted. What greets the patent evaluator is a river of paperwork, from which ideally could be plucked those truly new inventions. What seems to happen is that the government would rather allow as much as possible to be patented and let the courts decide which patents should hold.

Since businesses spend a lot of money on lawyers for patents, SEC filings, and IRS filings, one would think that they would throw their political weight behind the reform and simplification of these systems. While I don’t exactly have my ear to the rail of government regulation, I haven’t heard much along these lines. I’m sure that people are thinking through these problems, but you’d think there would be more urgency. One possible explanation is that businesses have figured out how to deal with the current system well enough to prefer it to an unknown new system, which will also incur the menu costs of retuning business practices.

Hopefully some time soon a politician who wants to improve our country instead of destroying others will gain the political capital to sort out some of these problems. To be sure, there are many issues more pressing to the general public, but the general public has less political muscle than the business world, and this is one positive change that even the business world could love.