The Hindu Business Line : No better time for big ideas

R&D or research and development sums up all technology. Where is `I' for invention, wonders Nathan P. Myhrvold in his foreword to Juice: The creative fuel that drives world-class inventors, by Evan I. Schwartz, from Harvard Business School Press (www.HBSPress.org) .

Despite the poor attention that invention has been getting, "there's never been a better time to have big ideas," assures Myhrvold. "We have incredible information and communication tools at our disposal, and that alone is transforming the possibilities of invention," he reasons.

"You don't have to be a scientist or an engineer to be more inventive," reads the prologue. "Invention is trans-disciplinary and therefore can be extracted from any technological realm and applied to problems in any area... There are thousands of problems out there that can be solved by inventive thinking."

Inventors create possibilities, as Woody Norris and Graham Bell did, in separate fields. Norris' idea of `radial tracking tone arm' envisioned `a wireless cartridge that would hold the needle and move from the outside of a record along the radius to the inside.' A subsequent idea of his was `a phase-lock Doppler system for monitoring blood vessel movement'.

Bizarre it may sound, but one of the experiments of Bell involved `a human ear cut from a corpse'? He'd speak into the ear and watch the tiny bones inside vibrate! "He attached a piece of straw to one of the bones and rigged the other end of the straw so that it would trace the vibrating patterns on a charcoal slate." It was thus that Bell found "a way for continuous patterns of electricity to carry almost any type of sound over wires," explains Schwartz.

Inventors pinpoint problems, as did Jay Walker, post 9-11. His team narrowed the problem of national security to `the sub-problem of trespassing', especially in prohibited places, such as `areas around chemical plants, water reservoirs, nuclear waste dumps, electrical power generators, and the perimeters around airport runways.' The resulting invention called US HomeGuard is "a system that connects the thousands of current and future security cameras located in these prohibited zones to the Internet."

Walker reasons that it would cost about $25 per hour to hire security professionals to patrol these places. Instead, "pay ordinary citizens sitting in their homes $10 per hour to view snapshots taken by the cameras." Because "the human brain is the best pattern recogniser ever built." If they see anything suspicious, such as a trespasser, they'd click a button and send that image data to a small cluster of professional security people, explains the book.

On `recognising patterns' there is a whole chapter, where the author discusses DNA research and credit card fraud. Read about Max Levchin's fraud detection program Igor, which can mine data for clues.

Some of the patterns Levchin looked for were: "If you opened your account in the middle of the night, does that increase the chance that you are a criminal? If buyer and seller are both transacting in the middle of the night in their respective time zones, does that increase the likelihood of fraud? If you capitalise the first letter of your name in your e-mail address, does that decrease the chances you're a fraudster?"

Chance and serendipity, luck and accidents happen one time of the other. "The trick is to observe and leverage the more meaningful of these arbitrary occurrences into opportunities," observes Schwartz.

One of the examples he cites is of Bernie Meyerson, who while removing a silicon wafer, during a graduate work in solid-state physics, `accidentally dropped the chip onto a dirty metal hood', then rinsed the chip with water, only to notice something odd: "The chip didn't get wet."

On more about that and the other drivers of invention, you may need to get your feet wet in `Juice'!

In defence of science

According to critics, ID is neither observable nor repeatable.

ID or `intelligent design' is a movement that has been in the news recently for its alternative views about evolution. ID proponents allege that science shouldn't be limited to naturalism, and shouldn't demand the adoption of a naturalistic philosophy that dismisses any explanation that contains a supernatural cause out of hand, explains an entry for the phrase in Wikipedia.

ID has been the focus of lawsuits, with controversy revolving around issues such as whether ID can be defined as science, and taught in schools. According to critics, ID is neither observable nor repeatable, thus violating `the scientific requirement of falsifiability'.

Pitching science against ID movement, John Brockman has edited Intelligent Thought, from Vintage (www.vintagebooks.com) . The collection of 16 essays from experts begins with Jerry A. Coyne's piece about evidence of evolution buried in our DNA.

"Our genome is a veritable farrago of non-functional DNA, including many inactive `pseudogenes' that were functional in our ancestors," he notes. "Why do humans, unlike most mammals, require vitamin C in their diet? Because primates cannot synthesise this essential nutrient from simpler chemicals."

It seems we still carry all the genes for synthesising vitamin C though the gene used for the last step in this pathway "was inactivated by mutations 40 million years ago, probably because it was unnecessary in fruit-eating primates."

Tim D. White's piece takes one through volcanic rock samples `fingerprinted at the Los Alamos National Laboratory', and fossils aged millions of years. "Today, evolution is the bedrock of biology, from medicine to molecules, from AIDS to zebras," declares White.

"Biologists can't afford to ignore the interconnectedness of living things, much as politicians can't understand people, institutions or countries without understanding their histories.

`Intelligent aliens' is the focus of Richard Dawkins. How would we recognise intelligence in a pattern of radio waves picked up by a giant parabolic dish and say it is from deep space and not a hoax, asks Dawkins?

The universe can perform approximately 10 to the power 105 elementary operations per second on about 10 to the power 90 bits, writes Seth Lloyd in a chapter titled `How smart is the universe?' One learns that over the 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang, the universe has performed about 10 to the power 122 operations.

He looks closely at how the universe processes information and states that atoms register bits the same way the magnetic bits in a computer's hard drive do. With magnets flipping directions and changing bit values, "every atom and elementary particle in the universe registers and processes information."

Most bits are humble, explains Lloyd. "But some bits lead more interesting lives. Every time a neuron fires in your brain, for example, it lets loose a torrent of bits. The cascade of bits in neural signals is the information processing that underlines your thoughts." To him, "Sex is a glorious burst of information processing designed to pass on and transform" the billions of bits of genetic information locked in the nuclei of the cells. "The more microscopic the form of information processing, the longer it has been going on."

Worth a read for the defence of science it puts up bravely.

Tailpiece

"What's the moral of the Gates story?"

"That we should do charity?"

"No. You should first gross a few billions."

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