Ex-Pat Entrepreneurs

This morning on KUT I heard about a plan here in Austin to encourage Mexican Nationals to start companies based in Austin. This initiative is being pushed by the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and Austin's IC2, an incubator. I think this is a great idea. This will allow a great cross pollination of ideas between Mexico and the United States. Bringing together people with great ideas leads to more interesting ideas. This is something I really loved about my Master's program. I was continually surrounded by people with big ideas, vision and energy.

I think that this idea also can help Americans see that people in other countries can have and do have, fantastic exciting ideas that can drive technology, the economy and employment. With our US-centric view of entrepreneurship and venture capital we tend to overlook this. It's not fair and it short changes potential collaborators, because we assume that Americans have the best ideas.

This collaboration also shows that resources in America can be used to help develop entrepreneurship within a community of immigrants. We have seen some of this with Silicon Valley and the Indian and Chinese populations there, but we have not see it with another community in the US or with a Latin American culture. I think that this experiment will be useful in spreading knowledge and developing future entrepreneurs in Mexico to the south.  It will also likely lead to an increase in entrepreneurship within Mexico over time. It will not happen immediately, but a group of these entrepreneurs will eventually move back to Mexico and will start companies there or at least subsidiaries in their home country. This will produce more legitimate work for Mexicans in Mexico that could offer wages that can compete with the drug cartels and develop a larger business community.

This type of growth is important for Mexico, as it will increase the amount of resources for Mexicans to develop their own businesses. It will increase legitimate pressures on the government to fight corruption and make efforts to reduce the impact on organized crime on the government. It will provide employment for highly capable graduates from Mexican universities which will continue to drive improvement for the country.

Most of this is a decade or two in the future, but there will be a great deal of benefits for both Austin, the Hispanic community in the city and for Mexico. Austin will benefit, because it will continue to grow as entrepreneurs will bring more money in, more jobs and new ideas.

The Mexican nationals will fuel increase knowledge sharing between the US and Mexico and will act as de facto ambassadors for their home country. They will educate people on the real Mexico and show Austines that Mexico has a great deal to offer besides amazing food.

Unintended consequences of knowledge management regimes

There are several consequences of the differences between the US (and the west) and China (and other autocracies). First, with one of the major assumptions of neoclassical economics out the window, it calls into question basing economic policy on neoclassical economics. Second, with a monopoly structure for intellectual property several different economic incentives have been created. Finally, the differences in IP management between the countries creates tensions at several different levels. I'll discuss each of these points in more detail.

First, if one of the major assumptions for economic policy includes non-rival, non-exclusive knowledge, it's difficult to understand why there isn't more competition in many markets. However, as we know it's not really possible for any firm to pick up any sort of technology and start to produce a given product. Because of this difficulty regions and areas tend to become experts at specific types of technologies. However, even in the case of China the freedom of access to IP makes it easier for firms to produce specific products. The problem still lies in the fact that you still need tacit knowledge to actually make the product. A patent is supposed to give you the information you need to produce the technology. However, the actual patents are difficult to read and not likely to be possible

Second, with a monopoly structure in place for intellectual property it gives very different incentives for owners of intellectual property. First, for people who actually produce a product, attacking products that are similar for infringement can be a very lucrative proposition. It prevents other companies from becoming competition. Apple is currently using this tactic to go after Android through Samsung and HTC. With a full monopoly technological progress can actually come to a standstill. An example of this is with Xerox copiers. With the monopoly in place Xerox did not innovate and kept prices extremely high. As soon as their patent ran out the competition came in and almost took all of the market share from Xerox. They introduced lower priced products and a wider more personal product range. Without the monopoly in place other companies could try to move into the market space earlier and drive innovation from the beginning of the market.  Finally, with reduced ownership of IP there will be less patent trolls like Intellectual Ventures.

Third, the IP management is causing issues between firms and the Chinese government. The firms do not want to give up their IP because it's how they are able to make their money. Some of these technologies are so easy to copy it's impossible to make a profit without protection. In theory pharmaceuticals should be perfectly copyable based on the chemical properties of the drug. If the pharmaceutical companies didn't have a chance to recoup the investment on a drug (500 million - 1 billion per drug) there would be no innovation. The differences present problems for trade and agreements between countries. The US and China have had serious disagreements over how IP should be managed.

Basically, the differences in how IP is understood impacts a countries policies economically and in trade. It is important to understand exactly what's going on with these issues. Our governments are pushing for different levels of control over IP both in patents and other forms of copyright. As some one interested in policy, it's important to understand what types of policies we should be pushing for. I don't think there's any true right answer for the IP problem. In different situations policies should be adjusted. We cannot have a stagnant IP regime when technologies are evolving as fast as they are.

Are democracies or autocracies better with technology Management?

According to neoclassical economics knowledge is a non-rival (I can use it without preventing you from using it) and non-exclusive (available to everyone) resource. This has two impacts on their economic theory. First, the actual impact of research and development is excluded from economic growth and is ignored. Second, that any company should be able to pick up and produce any technology. Both of these points are relatively ridiculous. For two reasons. First, we know that research leads to the formation of new companies. Second we know that most companies cannot produce any product and many companies that produce products outside their expertise fail at it.

From a neoclassical perspective democracies are terrible at sharing knowledge and technologies. Democracies have a slew of laws that regulate access to technology form monopolies for specific technologies if they have something called a patent. Additionally, there are other contracts that can get in the way of sharing of knowledge in a way that is neoclassical. Non-disclosure agreements and non-compete clauses. If you aren't allowed to discuss a specific technology with other people, it prevents knowledge from spreading and being shared to other companies. If you aren't allowed to compete within the same industry after you leave a company, it prevents you from using that knowledge in a positive way at another firm.

These laws have been put into place in our democracies to ensure proper protection of technologies for firms. It's designed to prevent the spreading of tacit knowledge from company A to company B. As a company this is incredibly desirable. Without these protections some research would be worthless to conduct. Knowledge spill-overs would cause prices to fall to cost or lower as firms compete for market share. It's great for consumers, but bad for firms.

So what happens in China? Well according to Make it in America, China requires many firms to hand over their Intellectual Property to the Chinese state. What ends up happening after this is that the Chinese government sells the information or gives the information to one or more Chinese company. These companies tend to be made up of former employees at the company that made the product before. This allows tacit knowledge transfer to the firm and a fast ramp to compete directly with the inventor of the technology. The knowledge is freer in China than it is in the US because of this. This increases competition and may be impacting the cost of goods like solar panels.

In a way this type of behavior forces companies to compete based on the actual costs of the technology. This is what is expected in the neoclassical theory. All prices will eventually drop to the marginal cost of a product with near zero profits for the producing company. In a perverse way, this is a "freer" market than ours because it comes closer to the non-rival non-exclusive knowledge base.

In my next blog, I'll discuss this topic more.

China, Technology and creativity

Sorry I've been away for so long. I've been hanging out with my Awesome wife! She gave a talk in Ireland, which I went to for most of a week. It was a good time. She then came here to Eindhoven for a week and had an interview. So that's why I haven't been updating. Sorry faithful readers.

At a party on Saturday, I got into a fairly active discussion with 4 PhDs and myself. They are all engineering PhDs, so they understand research and how technology works rather well. We got into a discussion on if China was going to actually really over take the US in scientific research. I said I think it's likely, but there were many arguments against that likelihood. I didn't really get to finish my argument on why it's possible. So, I'm going to do that now.

Basically, some of the core arguments against China being able to overtake is us lack of creativity. China is a country of followers, not a country of creative leaders. Another argument was the lack of high quality education and research centers in China. I'll address the second argument first and then discuss the first argument.

Americans know that we educated a lot of foreigners at our universities, 2008 was an all time high for the number of international students. In fact my roommate at one point explained to me that one of the groups at the University of Texas was comprised entirely of Chinese students. They conduct their meetings and research all in Chinese and, in fact, leave the US speaking worse English than when they arrived. But why are they leaving? The link above notes that there simply aren't enough H1B Visas or green cards for them all to stay. Effectively we're throwing out the people we educate. Over time enough good scientists and engineers will be sent back and will start teaching in China. China has big ambitions and has been creating universities as fast as it can. Using an evolutionary perspective, we can see that it's likely they will continue to create variation and students will be selecting the best universities. One of them is likely to start producing more science and better science than another. This will lead to the best students and best researchers going to that school. One or two could become the Chinese version of MIT, Berkeley or Harvard. I think it's clear that education won't hold them back. Eventually, they will have several universities in the top 200 list according to the Times Higher Education ranking.

The second argument is a little tricker to argue against. The Chinese aren't creative enough to create radical innovations. First, I'm sure that the Chinese I know would object to this blanket statement. However, let's assume for the moment that's it's some what correct. There's a culture that doesn't reward creativity and rewards conformity. I can think of two countries that have similar types of culture that have been creative and are excellent centers of research and innovation, Japan and South Korea. Now are they as good as the US at innovation or research, No. However, they have had some great innovations and do great research.

When it comes to patent research there's something called a Triadic patent. It's a patent that is filed in the US, Europe and Japan. Europe and Japan have higher standards for patents than the US and are more difficult to acquire. Why does this matter? Well effectively Japan is the only country in Asia that would fit better with the European countries in terms of GDP per capita, protection of IP and research.

Both South Korea and Japan have a few companies that are on the leading edge of their respective fields. Samsung is in a huge number of different areas and is the world leader in many of them. Japan has Nikon, Sony, Toyota and a few other big companies that are on the cutting edge in research, design and innovation. So, I don't accept the argument that the Chinese couldn't be creative.

Another point I was trying to make, is that over time as a country becomes the center of manufacturing and incremental innovation on a product, it's likely that they are going to be able to create the next radical innovation in that field. There are two things that support this. First, in a book by Andrew Liveris, the British CEO of Dow Chemical, there is anecdotal evidence to support bringing manufacturing back to the US along with the R&D that goes with it. The other argument is based on the research of Cesar Hidalgo of MIT that shows through network theory, that to become a leader in technology you have to build your way through a series of other technologies. It helps explain why it's so hard for countries to pick up creating semiconductors. However, as a country develops the technological capability to work within a type of technology they are likely to create innovation and changes in that technology.

China has effectively been given the ability to manufacture just about everything through outsourcing. They have the technological capabilities to build and design new technologies. China also has the resources devoted to it. They created a five year plan where they are going to invest $1.5 trillion in 7 science sectors. Because of these factors I believe that China is a real threat to US and European leadership in research and technology. For any one to dismiss China because of cultural reasons or technological capabilities is making a mistake and is likely to be surprised in 20 -30 years when China becomes a leader in at least one field, likely more than one.

Where good ideas come from

Last year I bought a book after listening to a segment from NPR that my dad had sent. In it they interviewed to different authors, Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson, I ended up getting both books. To my dismay the Kevin Kelly book, What technology wants,  was in my opinion painting a technology deterministic world that ultimately was unrealistic and absurd. I stopped reading it and never finished it, which is something I almost never do (I would equate him with Clay Shirky in being overly optimistic about the role of technology).

The second author's book was significantly better. It's called Where Good Ideas Come From and it has some really great ways to generate new ideas and how he believes ideas are formed. Below is a short talk of his animated by RSA animation.

The short and simple is that I completely buy his approach to generating new ideas. In his book he discusses using a piece of software (DEVONthink) while doing almost all of his reading . I've tired to do this with a similar program in windows called Evernote, but it's difficult to remember to do it. I feel I need to get better at it. I had a great idea for a blog two days ago, never wrote it down and totally forgot what it was. Helaas pinda kaas (Dutch for "too bad peanut butter"). In some way the book is a big ad for DEVONthink, but that's not really the important part. The important thing is how these different ideas come together and lead to new and fully formed ideas. A tool like DEVONthink or Evernote (There's also OneNote as part of MS office) allow you to increase your ability to find things and create new ideas.

I effectively use websites like Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and the books I read in this fashion. Many of my blog posts come about from the different news stories I read to which I put my own spin on them and add additional commentary. Typically by combing ideas from multiple different sources. I love when my friends point me to new sources of information or stories I'd be interested in. One of my blogs, What is the value of a patent, was written because someone sent me the "When Patents attack" story by This American life. I was able to combine the ideas presented in that story with my knowledge of patents that I've learned at TU/e to write an interesting blog that's more than either story.

Yes, my last two blogs have basically be book reviews. However, I figured that as a public service announcement to let people know how I come up with my topics. I think it's important that other people try to create their own content and share what you know. If you don't feel comfortable writing, shoot me an idea and let's see what we can make of it.

Internet and Social Media books: A comparison between Lessig and Shirky

Recently I've read two books related to the internet and to some extent social media. The first book I've mentioned and quoted repeatedly, Code 2.0 by Lawrence Lessig. The second is a book I just finished called Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky which is about how as the internet has evolved and grown we have been able to create our own content instead of simply being passive consumers.

Despite the fact that Code 2.0 was originally written in 1999 and then updated in 2006 and Surplus was written in 2010 I feel that Code is still more relevant. Some of this can be attributed to the approach of the authors. In both cases the authors discuss specific websites and how they impact social interaction between different actors. As side from arguing that the free time and the increased ability to create, Shirky focuses on social connections and ignores other considerations related to content creation. He oversimplifies the skills required to create new content and ignores vested interests ability to prevent content creation.

Lessig on the other hand, creates a framework where it is possible to analyze the interactions between the various actors that interact on the internet. He looks at the market forces, social forces, regulatory forces, and social norms that interact with the internet in different ways. In this way Lessig is able to create recommendations to improve the interaction with the various forces acting on the internet. His goal is to create a safe internet that allows privacy, transparency, great places where economic exchanges can happen and required controls to prevent abuse of the internet.

There are some other differences between these books. Shirky reminds me of Thomas Friedman's the World is Flat. It's an incredibly optimistic view of the internet. Effectively the author can't find anything wrong with the social interactions that occur on the internet. He isn't concerned with the privacy issues with sites like Facebook, hacking issues both white and black hat and censorship at any level. He ignores these issues and looks at the community aspect. Which is fine, but he should at least mention these factors as they can seriously impact the quality of a community that's being created. Lessig has a much less optimistic outlook and in fact believes that the internet will allow the government unprecedented access to our personal information and control over the information we control.

I think that these two books represent well the different ways that people look at the internet. I personally have a Lessig outlook. This maybe for a few reasons. I've read a few of his books, I can be cynical and I don't have endless optimism for any technology. I think that the internet is an amazing thing. That people are creating more content, but it's going to take some time before it gets to the point that Shirky is dreaming of. One of my friends over at KBMOD things that within a few years everyone will have a YouTube account the way that everyone has a Facebook account. I'm skeptical of this. I think there's more time required to be effective at being a YouTuber than being a Facebooker. Which will decrease the number of people that are willing to take up a hobby. Facebook takes about 10 seconds to update, with YouTube you have to feel comfortable in front of a camera or talking over some sort of content. I think it'll happen over time, but I think there will be something of a U shape of users. I think older generations that have more free time will pick it up.

I think both books have a positive outlook on the internet and social media. They both think that the more connections that happen the more connections that can occur. Overall, I personally think that if you're interested in the different forces interacting in the internet Lessig's book is for you. If you're interested in a rosy outlook on the positive impact of the internet then read Shirky's book.

The trouble with experts...

I wrote two blogs in September about technocrats and how as experts of science and technology they some times think they know what's best for the larger population. The problem becomes when these scientists start to venture outside there area of expertise. They start arguing about topics with a voice of authority on a topic they know little more than a lay person. The difference may be that they pick it up a little bit easier. However, they are also some what blinded by their own knowledge of other topics and not listen to a knowledgeable person.

I'm picking on scientists right now, but the truth of the matter is this happens all the time. There's a well known (in the US) and depressing example of this during a climate debate in the US congress. During a hearing Rep John Shimkus called a bishop to testify, where he read a passage from the bible where god said he would never flood the earth again, he then went on to say that god decides when the end of the earth will happen, so he's confident that global warming is a fraud (see youtube video). The scary thing is that this guy is the chairman of the subcommittee of environment and economy. The bottom line is that he feels he's an expert of the bible and of religious matters and is using this in a context that he's not an expert.

These are just two examples but they bring me to my main point. There's a greater difference between acknowledged experts and self appointed experts. Scientists have degrees and go through formal training to become experts. Congressmen also typically are well educated and are voted into an expert position by their constituents. If they are experts or not is clearly up for debate, but at least they have been accepted by at least one community as a whole.

Then there are the self-styled experts. I think the two most obvious ones are leadership gurus and social media experts. I follow a few of each on twitter and some of what they have to say is really frustrating. For example the leadership gurus typically have some trite quote from some one. Something along the lines of "When a window of opportunity opens don't pull down the shade" (literal quote not sure who it's from). First of all, this is an incredibly easy thing to say, but horribly difficult thing to do in practice. In the entrepreneur literature I've been reading one of the biggest indicators of entrepreneurial behavior is the ability to notice when there IS a window of opportunity. The second is having the means to take advantage of it before it closes. In the case of academic spin-offs this can be measured through the resources the university has on hand for an academic to start a firm. This is in terms of technology transfer offices, incubators, equity stake investments, licensing and venture capital. Sadly, the skills to identify these windows can't be taught at a seminar. They can only be taught by being surrounded by people that are already able to find them. The ability to exploit them comes from being in the right place. So, if you want to leverage your opportunity as best as you can then you need to figure out how to put yourself in the right position to take advantage of it. See how fun it is to be trite!! The fact is you can control that, it's not easy, but it's possible.

The second group, social media experts, are equally frustrating but for different reasons. The first is that their focus on social media blinds them to fact that in many cases it plays a very small role in day to day business operations. For example, many social media experts say that if a firm doesn't do social media then they are going to fail. That's insane. Many firms the end customer never deals with. There are tons of suppliers that don't need to care about social media at all. An example of this is a company that supplies chemicals to Intel to make semiconductor chips. Most likely a firm like this doesn't have social media, because it never deals with random people.. Now, if you are a firm that does deal with the end customer, we the consumers, then yes you should have some form of social media. That's not to say that some of these supplier companies don't have them because they need to deal with environmentalists or some other protest group.

The other problem with these social media experts is they very easily start to move into other aspects of business. If you keep within your social media bubble I have no problems with you at all. In fact, you're doing something that I am really bad at. You're what Malcolm Gladwell would call Mavens. You're connectors, you have a great deal of contacts that listen to what you say. In social network theory you'd have many structural holes. This is a good thing for you as a person. However, when you start to believe you're an expert in other topics that's when things get dangerous. I read two articles in the past two days that really irritated me. The first article discusses a five step plan to save Google from Google+, it really shows that this guy doesn't have any understanding of how Google itself works. He basically calls for splitting the company and firing the management group. Google made 9.2B in revenue with over 2B of that as profit. He says Google needs to innovate. Google is cutting bad unused apps and getting back to the core business with plans to work on innovation. While the author is an owner of a small start up, he doesn't really know how large companies work and bases his comments entirely on social media aspect of Google.

The second article was on an unofficial facebook blog which argues that Google is done because facebook came up with some algorithm that focuses on keyword correlation. The algorithm is an iterative process and gets better with time. Pretty innovative, but Google's been doing this a long time. Every time they've been challenged in terms of search Google has stepped up to the plate and kept it's dominance in results.

The final point I'd like to make is that social media experts clearly understand the importance of social capital. You can see this from the amount of retweets they send out, the thank yous and the use of Klout. All of these tools indicate an understanding of the need to scratch some one's back to have them do it back. However, they apparently aren't able to understand how to extend this to firms. I believe that Google has a great deal more social capital than Facebook. I would say that Google and Apple have about the same level of social capital where neither company can do wrong in the eyes of a large portion of the population. I'd argue that Facebook, on the other hand, has as much social capital as Microsoft in the late 90s and early 2000's. No one trusts them. They have had a virtual lock-in on the market since Myspace couldn't keep up with their innovations and borrowing of ideas. Now that there are new platforms opening up its obvious that Facebook has the most to lose. Google will make missteps as they develop Google+ into a different platform than Facebook. For a service that is as young as it is, I'm surprised it hasn't made more.

So, you ask, what gives me the right to comment on these people, are you an expert? I don't know if I'm an expert, but I've been trained to look critically at arguments like those presented by the social media experts. I understand business strategies and environments that allow people to create new firms. I would argue that Google+ is effectively a case of corporate venturing, where Google created an internal start-up that produced Google+. So, in the end, yes I think I have the proper insights to address these points.

Ubiquitous free high speed wireless: Society

This is the last post I discussed the impact on the computing industry of ubiquitous high speed free wireless internet. In this post I'll discuss some of the societal changes. In some ways the societal changes may be smaller, at first, than we'd anticipate.

First, we've seen how much people have jumped on playing with their phones in public spaces. I fully expect this trend to continue and in fact to increase. Simple to play games like Angry Birds will become more advanced and will likely look better. People will do more work on their phones and will likely begin using video calls in public. Which will be annoying, but it's going to happen.

There may be a wave of apps that will try to increase the amount of social interaction of players. This doesn't mean that we'll have an increase of in person social interaction, but will likely be an increase of virtual social interaction. Which for some people is significantly better than what would happen otherwise.

I think that the ubiquitous internet will have a mixed impact on the ability to do work. As it is a lot of people already spend a great deal of time working from home off the clock. This will likely increase, but I think there will be a trade off. As people will, hopefully, be able to work while commuting more easily on trains and buses. People will begin to work in more places like cafes compared to the amount that currently do.

There will be other changes as new devices and applications are created to take advantage of the high speed internet. Many of these changes will happen as these devices are developed.

I would like to be completely optimistic that the greater the amount of internet will lead to a larger amount of user created content. That the increase of wireless internet will increase personal engagement in political and social activities, but I don't think it will. I think that there will be a small increase because there will be a larger number of people that weren't able to do it before are able to do it.

I think that a high percentage of engagement in social networks, content creation and other types of engagement will take some time to occur. I think it's because of a mind set. A lot of people have no desire to become involved in these types of things. I would like to imagine that these changes will happen over night. However they will not. People will need time to understand how to exploit this infrastructure. It will take time for unique social experiments to develop using the network. Some people will understand immediately how to create new tools for the new environment, but it will take many established firms time to fully exploit it.

It will also take people time to adapt to the change. It's not obvious in what ways the average user will exploit this technology. In many ways it will just increase the amount of general web browsing going on, in other ways video viewing will increase as well.

In this series I've looked at how our government, business, computer and social environments will change based on ubiquitous free wireless internet. It will have immediate changes and longer term changes that currently fall into the realm of science fiction. Device makers and app developers will have a new world to exploit because of increases in computing power locally and remotely. Creating novel methods of using this power is what will drive the next phase in our economy.

Ubiquitous free high speed wireless: Computing

In my last two blogs, Government and Business, I've discussed some of the impacts on our society of ubiquitous high speed wireless internet. In this post I'll look at the future of the computing industry. I think that this industry will go one of two ways, or perhaps both at the same time. The first route is obvious and is already happening, the second route will probably begin as a backlash to the first route.

The obvious route is cloud computing. As I've said we're already going down this route. The best example of the speed of this transformation is the Amazon Kindle Fire (all three different links). Basically, we will be using less powerful, but still growing in abilities, equipment and pushing the more processor intensive applications out onto a server in the cloud. This will most likely be owned by some private organization. Amazon's Fire is a great example of this because it provides the ability to browse websites at a much faster rate than what's allowed under current network speeds. Even with high speed internet this may continue because it'll fit the website to your screen and make it even faster than over the high speed network.

However, many people are skeptical of cloud computing. There is a sense of a loss of ownership. You become locked in to a specific firm to provide the required services. End User license agreements change frequently and your true ownership of the data and information you place on their servers can change unexpectedly and in ways that aren't in the favor of the users. Additionally, it's been acknowledged by both Google and Microsoft that all data in their cloud servers are subject to the US Patriot Act. This raises privacy concerns for the EU and firms using cloud services.

I think that these concerns will drive another type of cloud computing. I think it'll be something like a personal cloud. It will be similar to working with both a desktop and a laptop at the same time and remoting into the desktop from the laptop, but it will be done seamlessly and transparently. The ownership of the data will be clearly yours and the power will effectively take a phone or low power table and turn it into a fully powered desktop computer. This way the cloud won't be out there and will be easily controlled by the end user. You don't have to worry about the Patriot Act or a company going under, changing rates and other issues like that.

Both of these changes will create disruptive changes within the computing industry. The Kindle Fire is on the cutting edge of this. I fully expect Amazon to create additional applications that will run on the Amazon cloud system. There's no reason not to expect this. It will shift how apps are developed. It will also change who is in the game of creating computers. Dell, for example, will continue to have a major hold over both servers and personal computers, however as we move away from laptops to tablets and phones over time Dell is going to fail in this market. They have been unsuccessful at every attempt to enter these markets. There will be a shift in the players in the market.

These systems will only work with ubiquitous internet connection. They will become more effective as the network speed and capacity increases. Users will become more willing to use the systems as the reliability of the systems increase.

In my opinion these changes will fundamentally change the way that we look at computers. The way we interact with computers and how we feel about the usage of computers. Today they are everywhere, but in the next few years I expect them to become more prevalent as we are able to offload high power demanding applications off of our phones and onto powerful servers.

In my next blog I'll discuss some overall societal changes.

Ubiquitous free high speed wireless: Business

In my previous blog I discussed some governmental issues with ubiquitous free high speed wireless internet. In this piece I'm going to discuss the impact on businesses. I'll start with some really obvious impacts and then move into some that may be more interesting.

First, this would effectively kill the current business model for telecoms. Not just internet providers but it would also have a massive impact on telephony and television providers. Internet providers would basically go out of business unless the governments that implemented the network hired them to manage the networks and perform the upgrades required to ensure expected performance. It should also be expected that net neutrality should be the norm as the internet is free as in free beer and as in free speech in a situation like this. This would impact telephony in a similar manner. With free internet phones could be designed to work on wifi (or whatever the network type is) and use services like Google Voice (which is popular in the US and free). These services provide a telephone number as well. Further more skype communication or similar type programs could become the norm as they are free and easy to use. The impact on television would be a continuation of the current system. With Netflix and Hulu driving usage to the web. Without easy access pirating will be the norm and extremely easy.

In the US Starbucks is extremely popular for two reasons, gigantic flavored coffees and free wireless internet. I think in the Dutch context free wireless internet would spur an increase in the amount of business meetings that happen at cafes. With the slow service which is designed to encourage conversation and being social, it would be a great way to work remotely from outside of home. As it stands there aren't that many places, at least in Eindhoven, that have wireless internet like that. I think it will spur sales at restaurants.

The broadband movement is already increasing the number of people that can work from home and be educated at home. I think there will be some differences though. Mostly because of the freedom that is allowed with the wireless connections. You are able to connect everywhere and anywhere. I think this will create more flexible schedules. I'd be able to work nearly as easily on a train as I would be able to in the office. I would be able to get on a train at the time I'm supposed to be at work get there for some meetings and finish up around the same time just on the train.

I think that there will be more business models based on highly interactive advertisements and user driven actions out in the "wild." I've seen a lot of the QR codes outside of buildings as it is, but I think there will be an increase in the number of these. Users will be more willing to activate them because they are going to get the data from them significantly faster than previously. This will drive traffic to these sites and potentially new jobs from the different types of videos/ads that could be created with them.

I think this will also be something of a technological discontinuity. Broadband at home encourages one type of behavior, but I think there will be very different interactions with broadband everywhere. In the long term there could be a slew of different devices that will take advantage of the continual connections. Clothing could be that could measure the current weather conditions real time which could be uploaded to get real time weather information. We could collect data at levels we've never seen it before. This is just one usage of the informational sphere we'll be living in. There will be a huge number of new applications that will radically shift the way people think about knowledge, information and computing products. Predicting the next wave of technologies based on the wireless web is difficult. It's likely to be impossible.

However, I think that in my next blog on Computing, we'll see the largest changes.

Enabling Technological Convergences

In my last post I discussed technological convergences. I didn't really discuss anything ground breaking or earth shattering. We all know these things happen. Even if we never really make a note of it. What's a more interesting question though is why do some companies, like Apple and Blackberry, succeed and others like Microsoft and Rio (early MP3 maker) fail, either in creating technologies that converge or create technologies that then fail.

One of the first reasons is the culture of the company. To create a totally different product that will shake the core business firms may have to do something called "corporate venturing." This is where a company decides they are going to take people that normally work on the major product and put them into a different area and seclude them and allow them to create a new product. Whatever sort of leadership structure develops, develops. It really doesn't matter if this matches the rest of the firm. Essentially, these people are put into a position where they are starting a new company. Apple famously did this with the original Macintosh program. It was called a skunk works area. Of course recombining the two portions of a company creates huge problems, but good management can figure out how to deal with this.

Another piece required for a firm to successfully move into a new product space is the ability to identify the market need. This one is pretty obvious, but it still needs mentioning. In many cases it's really obvious that there's a product space and that some one should fill it. When companies don't move into it there must be some sort of reason.

One of those reasons comes down to firm capabilities. Every firm has something at its core that it's best at. I would argue that Microsoft is best at taking advantage of a virtual monopoly of a platform and moving into new directions within that platform. Internet Explorer and the Office Suite are the best example of this. Microsoft has also tried to do this with servers and other peripheries. Which is why Microsoft has had difficulty moving into other platform positions. They have failed (or mixed results at best) over and over again with phone OSes because it doesn't rely on their dominate platform.

Another company that is an R&D powerhouse in energy but has failed at anything outside of their major focus is Shell. As a major energy company you'd expect Shell to be moving into other types of energy production to make massive amounts of money in the transition from fossil fuels to renewables. You'd actually be right. They have tired and failed. Aside from having a failed solar industry Shell has a moderately successful Wind program. Between the two it actually makes sense why solar failed and wind is doing well.

First, wind is closer to extracting material from the ground than making energy from the sun is. Now hang on, I know, but Shell has to maintain offshore oil rigs in tough conditions. Understanding how to build a wind farm out in the ocean has some similarities. Shell doesn't actually make the windmills themselves, they buy the windmills and put them together to harvest energy. Shell was trying to make solar panels. Intel would be a significantly better solar panel producer than Shell. Why? Because solar panels are semiconductors. You make them with similar machines the technologies are adjacent to each other.

What's technological adjacency? It's whenever you are able to use your current skills and apply them with some research to a related technological field. I'll discuss this more in my next blog.

Innovation, Science and Money

The death of Steve Jobs has really shaken the technology community. It has really made people do a lot of thinking about innovation and the impact of technology based companies on the economy. The Economist notes that the American work force is on the decline and the high tech companies aren't making up enough jobs. That now companies like Apple and Google employ less than a third of what companies like GM used to employ. These high tech companies don't need as many employees. Additionally, it's a different type of work force that are required in the US. Apple outsources manufacturing because they are really concerned with driving down the cost of manufacturing and maximize profits. This is good business.

In a long article by Peter Thiel, co-founder of Pay Pal and a venture capitalist, he discusses what he calls the end of the future. Where he claims that we've been in an innovation slow down since the 70's. He also argues that scientists and technologists aren't living up to the claims they are making. He argues that in a lot of ways we've been technologically stagnant. Politicians have been making the same promises on energy since the 70's and that we've been slowing down are rate of increase of production for food barely keeping up with population growth. I think that he does make some good points, but he definitely goes a bit over the top with his statements. He's looking at things only within the national and regional context and is ignoring the fact that there have been cultural changes that have driven a change in how companies innovate.

Historically, companies don't find value in doing basic research. If you look at the history of research labs within industry, they hire researchers to do incremental and radical innovation. However, this research is carried out within a scientific paradigm which was created in basic research.

In fact we've seen a decrease in the amount of R&D being spent by companies. This has lead to some of the stagnation in innovation that Thiel mentions. To combat this and to reduce the risk borne by the company they have been doing more and more contract research with universities and have increase the amount of money they spend with universities.

Thiel also mentions that the government might be able to help but doesn't see it ever going to happen when you have to justify the expense by cutting something else. Since he's a libertarian he feels that the budget must be balanced. However, our politicians are cutting budgets to the largest scientific funding agencies in the US. My wife sent me an email with some of the funding cuts, National Science Foundation is getting cut by 2.3%, in fact it's 14% below the budget requested by the administration. The National Institute for Standards and Technology's budget is getting cut by 9.3%. Both of these agencies create a large number of jobs. It's been shown that one research job creates several other jobs. Cutting these budgets will reduce the amount of research which can be conducted. This will impact the number of researchers, impact the quality of education at universities and slow down the ability for universities and firms to exploit new research.

It typically takes 10 years for research to be monetizable. Cutting funding now impacts employment now and future employment. In fact, these changes will have a long term lasting impact. These choices create a path dependency within our society. Without proper funding we'll be passed by some one that feels research is paramount.

Remembering Steve Jobs

This post will piss a lot of Apple Fans off. I'm going to say that now.

Steve Jobs was a great designer. He built a company up twice based on maximizing control over the hardware, design and the software. He was able to do this an incredibly well. He was able to use this skill to dominate the early computer industry. However, under more competition Apple faltered as it relied heavily on a single creative driver. The designs that Apple created were radical design, these designs in a way constituted a type of radical innovation. The components within the computers themselves weren't radically improved over the competitors, the design was what made it special.

This is the same for the iPod. By the time the iPod came out there were already many MP3 players and many of them were doing very well. What Apple was able to do was make it simpler to move music onto the device and interface with the device itself. This is the radical portion of the iPod. I feel that this is exactly what happened with the iPhone as well. They created a radical design for the interface, but in many cases didn't even have legacy features.

Apple does a great job in marketing what any other phone maker would have expected as a normal feature. Even some of the biggest changes, like the fantastic screen it's an incremental innovation. As a consumer I fully expected some of the newest phones to have amazing screens.

One of the things Jobs did best was to get people to buy the newest version of Apple's phones. The iPad was also a very similar type of innovation. It's a gigantic iPhone. However, the reason it worked so well was the fact that iOS was able to scale up and work well on it. In the end I feel that Jobs was able to use cases of Radical Design innovation with incremental technological innovation a loyal consumer base to turn products into massive success.

However, Jobs has also turned Apple into one of the largest patent trolls in the world. With the level of control that Jobs had over Apple, it seems unlikely that he would not have initiated the litigation. Jobs did remember how they lost the PC war in the 80's and 90's. I think that Jobs is attempting to use patent law to control the market. There were no software patents during the initial PC battle, however there are software patents now and Apple has been patenting a great deal in order to control how devices are marketed and developed.

Finally, I think that Jobs was what Jim Collins called a level 4 leader. Similar to Lee Iacocca (of Chrysler), Jobs was able to control Apple through sheer personality and create a great company. However, he doesn't like dissent and would probably pull a George Lucas and change the original Star Wars trilogy.

Jobs did have a vision of what devices should look like and how they should work. He was excellent at creating great designs. He will be remembered for saving a trouble company, bringing design back into mobile devices and forcing a huge number of companies to compete in the mobile market space.

On Being the Product

Today I've read and reposted a few articles (another) about users being the final product for several companies. These of course are facebook, twitter, google (in various forms including plus), yelp and the list goes on. Personally, I think that the claims that we are only the product is a bit of simplification. There is no doubt that we are the product, however, it's also a matter of to whom are we the product? For instance, my blog, which I post on facebook, twitter and Google Plus allows others to be consumers of my content. The people who are my friends, followers or in my circles are able to consume my content. We are not merely products to companies, but we are products for other people as well.

We consume what are friends put out there. We have habits an manners in which we'd like to be able to consume that information. However, we're running into a bidirectional problem. We're losing control over what information we're sharing and we're losing control over how we consume this information. In Tom Anderson's (of myspace fame) post about the changes in facebook, he mentions something called seamless sharing, where you have to do nothing and it's instantly shared. This, to me, raises all sorts of privacy concerns. In this TED talk the speaker addresses the problem of filtering algorithms in google and facebook.

I think it's very obvious that Facebook still realizes that we're consumers of the information. For without our work as the product, posting links, pictures and statuses, there'd be no facebook. However, without us as consumers reading various different posts and clicking related links there'd also be no facebook. The product we are to non-fellow consumers comes down to our network, what the people in our network are interested in and whatever information that is automatically shared with facebook through our web browser.

We need to be aware that this trend is going to continue. We as users and consumers need to fight to get control over our data and the right to control what we share when we share it. This gets back to my points in my earlier blog posts about pseudonyms and truly being anonymous on the web. If you are interested in knowing at least some of the information that you've shared on facebook over the years in some countries you are able to download a copy of your facebook history. I haven't done so yet, but I plan on it. If it is not available in your country, try to get the rights to your data.

While facebook is using you as a product, you still should have the right to demand the information they have on you and are selling to 3rd parties. Being the product isn't fun, however, it's nothing new. We've been the product for years and have never really complained. The difference now, is that the information about your personally has never been better and is only going to get better the more you give them. For free.

Pseudonymity and Anonymity

There are so many different things going on right now that I don't even know where to start. There's tons going on with patents, software patents and copyright, there's been many things going on with internet freedom and Anonymity/Pseudonymity that I'm not sure where to even start. However, you have to start somewhere. So I'll start with this: Randi Zuckerberg said pseudonyms should go away. What's the big deal with that?

Well, Google and Facebook both require real names on their website. There are a few links that have commented on why this is a big deal. Tom from Myspace thinks it's a bad idea, he has a friend that is an expert in social media privacy policies, Danah Boyd, and she claims that forcing real names is an abuse of power, Tech Dirt agrees withBoyd's assessment indicating that there's a great amount of danger in moving away from pseudonyms. The Atlantic also notes how different with normal speech tying all actions to a single person online has become.

One of the common reasons for banning pseudonyms, which Zuckerberg argues, is that it changes online behavior. It basically forces users to comply with offline social norms. Norms that the person may actually be attempting to escape for whatever reason. Boyd also argues that Google + originally had a cultural norm without "Real names." She pulls in Lessig's Code book that I've mentioned on here a few times to support her claim. It's a really important point she's making. Cultural norms are established by early adopters. The early adopters of Google + didn't go with real names. They liked their nicknames.

While Zuckerberg claims that it's the users fault and their pseudonyms that cause the problem, others claim that the person who owns the website needs to control this. Basically by creating cultural norms that prohibit the ability to be an asshole/troll online. So when my friend bpost over at KBMOD talks about avoiding feeding the trolls, he's either reinforcing or preventing trolling behavior. A set stance by the moderators of KBMOD should be established to control trolling behavior.

De Spiegel notes that the actions of governments and corporations amount to a war on anonymity on the web.
Which has lead to the arrest of many members of Anonymous and other hacking groups like that. This war has a few benefits like the recent ring of 72 child pornographers that were caught. Unfortunately for most users the days of freedom to untag your photos may be passed. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have developed off the shelf products to analysis people freely from pictures pulled from facebook. To me, this is really scary, as we have no control over the privacy settings of our friends. If I'm drinking a tasty beer in a picture it could have employment ramifications. Two years ago a teacher was fired for having pictures of beer while in Europe. This is one example there are many others. While, third parties will likely create applications to determine who is whom in a given facebook picture, Germany is suing facebook over their ability to do say, and are saying it's illegal.

So, what's all of this mean? There's been a lot of people talking about this and why should people care? Well, personally I have made a choice to use my real name. Well, it's still a nickname, but I made a choice to do that. However, since I was aware of the choice when I set my handle as my last name I am conscience of what I should and should not say on the public record online. The first three Google searches for "Kapsar" are for me. Sadly, none of them is for my blog. Thus my online activity easily follows me.

That being said, I fully support the right and the ability of people to use any different name or no name online. It's the right thing to do morally, and for freedom of speech.

In my next post I'll discuss some of the speech issues a little bit more. Many of the people I've linked too have commented on these issues as well.

Ethics in Science II

Yesterday I discussed some of the ethical concerns within the Medical science field. This case most likely has the most frequent cases of fraud and unethical behavior. Why? Because there's a ton of money involved. Clinical trials relate to drugs, which is a multibillion dollar industry. Additionally, there is no requirement by the National Institute of Health to list any potential conflicts of interest. According to Nature there was a plan in the works to require this. However, it got scuttled. In business people go to jail for these types of things.

However, medical science is not the only place where fraud happens. As this ethic blog notes there are a lot of several different kinds of fraud. Some are intentional, others are less intentional. The biggest problem is intentional fraud. Where the author makes up some result. There are two pretty big examples of this. The first is the fake human clone from South Korea by a scientists named Dr. Hwang Woo Suk. This  guy was rather quickly outed as a fraud. However, this wasn't until there was a HUGE debate in the mainstream media about the ethics of cloning human stem cells. This helped push the US and much of Europe to ban cloning of human embryos.

The second most famous case of fraud is the case of cold fusion. What is cold fusion though, why would people want to make claims of making that happen? Well, fusion is what the sun does, if we could manage to do that on earth without burning ourselves up that would be pretty awesome. Basically, as the PopSci article states, is that with fusion you get more energy than what you put into it. It basically would solve all world energy problems. The first person that does it would basically be a savior to the human race. So, it's something that people really want to do. There's debate if it's even possible, it's theoretically possible, but physically possible is still up for debate.

So, accidental fraud comes about from introducing a personal bias or from misinterpreting data. Both of these happen fairly often in science. Why? because we're human, and this is what the scientific method is supposed to eliminate over time. Before publishing results you typically need to have been able to reproduce them and show that there is a trend that is consistent over time for the phenomena that you are studying. This is one of the biggest requirements for science. Which is why in clinical trials there are at least three stages to ensure repeatability of the data.

The other good thing about the scientific method is the fact that other people can take your results and findings and test them. IF the results are different they can be published and used to dispute the previous findings. This happens all the time in regular scientific discourse. In fact there's a great example of this going on right now. This debate has been going on for about a hundred years now or so. Recently a group debunked Gould's bias argument. Basically a guy back in the late 1800's measured a big set of skulls to see if there were any size differences. Stephen Jay-Gould, basically the Richard Dawkins of his day, re-analyzed the data because he felt there was bias in it, and found that there was in fact bias! Well, this recent group actually remeasured the skulls and found out that it was Gould that was biased and that if anything the original sample was more correct.

Science is supposed to be totally objective. As we can see from this discussion it's not, and cannot be. Why? We're human. However, the system works really well as a whole. In my next blog I'll discuss some of the ways we can address issues of fraud other concerns that I've mentioned over the past two days.

Networking and knowledge flows

We hear on a daily basis about how important social networks are, either social or professional. I have to agree, they are extremely important, however, not all of us are actually good at actively engaging in expanding their personal networks. I'm personally terrible at it, although I think this may be a problem for me going forward the next few years. I plan on getting into science and technology policy, if it wasn't pretty clear based on my writings here. So, having a broad network is important. I will need to keep up with technological, scientific and political advances (although in the US regressions may be more apt).

I just finished reading The New Argonauts by AnnaLee Saxenian, which really pointed out the power of networks. It's a pretty rosy interpretation of the benefits of networking for Taiwanese, Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs that had decided to move back home after working in Silicon Valley. It's a much better representation than Thomas Freedman's World is flat, which is just ridiculously overly the top optimistic.

There are a lot of theories about how networks operate and what type of network you want to have. What do you mean type of network? Well, I'm sure you can think of different types of networks that you have. You have close friends that you are around all the time, and then you have co-workers that you interact with in a different manner. Some of them you let into your social network, others you keep within you professional network. Now within those networks they could be structured very differently. At work you could have a lot of contacts in many departments and interact with them to get the best information about how to get a job done or that person is your go to for getting stuff done for you. This was how my network was at when I worked at SAS. I had to have many contacts in different departments. This was different from some of my colleagues  who only worked within a department and didn't have much external exposure. You would have to make an effort to change your network type.

As I mentioned above networking is good for information. This is also the case in the scientific community. Saxenian focuses on technological knowledge flows in her book. She looks at the locations of firms and how they interact with both halves of their network. Two halves? Yep, one in Taiwan and one in Silicon Valley. These Argonauts were bridges between the two regions. This has allowed Taiwan to become a leader in computing because of this.

You are also able to use social networks to identify people. This was an assignment for one of my classes, which had three different class codes. We were given our class network data, from a survey, and we had to attempt to reconstruct our class networks. As you can see below there was some clustering going on, with some people acting as bridges from one part of the network to the next.  The points that bridge the networks are good points for knowledge to flow from one part to the next. These are the people that are always good to have contact with.

Three major clusters roughly correspond to different courses

Further Reading:
Saxenian, A. (2006) The New Argonauts Harvard University Press, Cambridge Massachusetts

What is the value of a patent?

The truth of the matter is that most patents are worthless. What? How can that be with so many people suing over these patents? Why has there been a HUGE increase in patent activity in the past few years? Just because something is worthless doesn't mean it can't be useful. However, that being said, most patents are still useless. A patent on how to swing some one in a swing, is in fact, worthless and useless (real patent) (Jaffe and Lerner, 2006). In fact, I would argue it has negative value as it cost substantial money to have it patented. Granted the father was the patent attorney, however, there are still expenses that has to do with the procedures to get it patented.

In 2008 a study was published on the values of patents based on a survey asking both inventors and managers what they felt the value of a patent would be. As can be see in the figure below it's a greatly skewed graph with the vast majority of the patents being worth less than €1 Million ($1.5 Million). This value is related to how much an inventor or manager would have sold the patent for as soon as it was issued.

Gambardella et al, 2008

But wait! That's not worthless. In fact that's worth a lot of money! Is it? For a person yes. For a company maybe not. R&D is not cheap. Let's say it took three years to develop the technology and a staff of 5 people making €50,000, that alone is a cost of €750,000. You'd barely recoup the expenses of that let alone the materials. However, most economists would argue that those costs are sunk and shouldn't be factored into the cost of the patent. I do agree with this assessment, however there are other costs to consider as well. One of the biggest costs is risk of lawsuits. Which as you can see below are growing at an alarming rate.

In a lot of ways, patents are worthless until you sue someone. There are arguments that a patent has no value until you try to actually use it, or prevent some one from using it. Thus, the fact you're suing means it has inherent worth. Additionally, as there are requirements to pay for patents, a certain fee each year, there is a certain bottom level threshold to indicate the value of a patent. Shifts in this value will impact different patent holders differently. Increasing it towards the end could drive up litigation, while decreasing it, means that no patents will lapse.

So what can we take from this? With the rising numbers of patents, and the rising numbers of law suits, it could be argued that there is a sense of an increased value of patents. However, I think we need to be very careful with this sort of argument. As, we could just be letting bad patents get approved because of changes in the USPTO (there has been more of an increase in the USPTO than at the European Patent Office). In the end, the value of a patent is truly decided in the market when people purchase a product. Unfortunately, the person that gains value out of the patent may not be a true innovator. They could be a troll like Intellectual Ventures http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/when-patents-attack


References/Further Reading:

A.B. Jaffe & J. Lerner (2006). Innovation and Its Discontent.  NJ: Princeton
University Press.


Alfonso Gambardella, Dietmar Harhoff, Bart Verspagen (2008). The value of
European patents. European Management Review (2008) 5, 69–84.

Evidence of Higgs boson

I've been a bit remiss with my blogging of late and managed to miss discussing this pretty big story. CERN, the European particle physics group, has evidence that there might be Higgs particles. What are Higgs? Well, they are theorized to provide mass to all other particles. Not only has CERN reported this, but Tevatron in Chicago at Fermilab has reported seeing similar, but smaller results. This is very good news. In fact, despite the fact that Tevatron (6.3km) is no where near the size of Large Hadron Colider (LHC) of CERN (27km), which means that it can produce less power, can detect it means that there's a lot of room for further investigation at LHC. This is exciting.

What if Higgs doesn't exist? Well, basically it means that the Standard Model of particle physics is partially scrapped. Only partially, because a lot of the theory has been supported through the research at institutions like CERN and Fermilab. However, the evidence is pretty good, however, the scientists are being extremely cautious. They are currently at 2.8 sigma on a normal curve (bell curve for grading). For most research this error rate is more than enough for it to be considered a significant finding, 99.9% likelihood, however in particle physics significantly higher results are required. They require 5 sigma, which is about 1 in a million.

Does this impact my daily life? No not really, however I'm very sure whenever some of the original atomic theories were put forward and verified, most people didn't see much use in them. It might take us a large amount of time to figure out how to actually use this. For all we know some of these developments may lead to a better understanding of fission in some way. I'm speculating of course, but there's no reason to assume that this research is good for just doing more research.

In the United States cutting edge particle research is drawing to a close I'm afraid. In October of 2011 Tevatron will shut down for good, and there are only a few other large accelerators in the US, none as large as Tevatron.This will likely have long term impacts on both theoretical physics and particle physics in the US. The expertise will leave Universities like University of Chicago and move over to Europe to work with CERN. This didn't have to be the case, but in 1993 Congress scrapped the Super Collider in Dallas, the US gave up the desire to lead in particle physics.

Congrats to both Fermilab and CERN for coming so close to detecting the Higgs boson!

Aaron Swartz and Freedom of Knowledge

Aaron Swartz has been arrested and accused of a multitude of crimes, for a break down of them go here, for gaming a big journal retrieval site called JSTOR (it is a large one many journals are stored within this site). As some one that works with these retrieval services quiet often and has actually hit the limit for the amount of citation data you can pull from them, they can be frustrating. Some of the work I'm personally doing right now is related to citation analysis and co-authorship analysis. Which allows networks of knowledge flows to be seen. Another method is to do a word analysis within articles to create knowledge networks based on what articles are about, what knowledge is contained in each of the articles. Apparently, in the past, Swartz has done something like this. Some of my colleagues also use techniques to allow additional gathering of information. Most of this information, even with you have legal access, is difficult and very time consuming to procure. In this case, Swartz has access and may have been able to get a hold of this data through other means. JSTOR mentioned in one of their releases that they have a program that allows for high volume access to their publications. 

This case also has made me think of a few other issues with our current knowledge retrieval systems and repositories. Companies need to make money off these publications, so we can't have them for free. However, through my research, I've used articles that are 20 years old. If this knowledge was patented, I would be able to access this and use it with no problem at this point. In many cases, it could happen sooner as many patents aren't renewed after a certain time frame. Using a scientific article is typically more like using something published under a creative commons license, which means you can remix the information. Through citations you give credit where it is due. In most cases you can get access to the data and models, if you give the person credit, either through citations or co-authorship. Why does this work? Because the research is publicly funded.

Authors can also pay to allow full free access to their work depending on the journal. However, in most cases they don't, or don't get the article to be free continuously. However, there is some relief from the burden of paying for individual articles, Google Scholar, is able to find articles that scientists have on their personal websites, and allow access to "working paper" versions, which means they aren't quite publishable yet, even after they have been published. 

I think for publicly funded research we need to have an exception to the copyright law, which changes it from 70 years to 10 years. Depending on the field even 10 years is to long. The work my wife is doing articles cited which are that old are typically cited because it's giving credit to trail blazers. These papers are typically cited in the hundreds compared to the average of the tens. Once the copyright expired there would be much more competition for distribution of the articles and reduces the risk to the knowledge community if any given retrieval system or journal fails.

This Swartz case scares me in general, because it will make it even more difficult to access information and care a large risk if you create scripts to make it easier to get access to massive amounts of data.