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The Dyson Air Multiplier Doesn't Suck, It Blows

BY Noah Robischon1 hour, 22 minutes ago

Sir James Dyson has made a mint selling the story of his dogged pursuit of the vacuum cleaner that "never loses suction." But Dyson's newest product doesn't suck. It blows.

That's right, Dyson's newest invention is a room fan--a bladeless fan--called the Air Multiplier. And it turns out that the Air Mulitiplier might never have been invented at all, if Dyson's engineers didn't notice something strange was happening during testing of another product, the Airblade hand dryer. More

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Posted by John Murrell on October 2nd, 2009 at 6:54 am 

Oh sure, “Ardi,” the newly revealed skeleton of the oldest known member of the human family tree, is the science story getting all the big headlines today, but let us not ignore the diverse and compelling projects that were honored Thursday night with this year’s Ig Nobel prizes, given with good humor for research that “cannot, or should not, be repeated.” Among this year’s winners:

* Elena N. Bodnar, Raphael C. Lee, and Sandra Marijan of Chicago, who won the public health prize for inventing a bra that in a pinch can be used as a pair of gas masks.

* Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, given the peace prize for their experiments to determine whether it is better to be cracked over the head with a full beer bottle or an empty one. “Empty beer bottles are sturdier than full ones,” they concluded. “However, both full and empty bottles are theoretically capable of fracturing the human neurocranium.”

* Donald L. Unger, of Thousand Oaks, Calif., recipient of the prize in medicine for his personal quest to test his mother’s warning that cracking his knuckles would give him arthritis. Every day for 60 years, Unger cracked the knuckles of his left hand at least twice and those of his right not at all. Now 83, Unger said, “After 60 years, I looked at my knuckles and there’s not the slightest sign of arthritis. I looked up to the heavens and said: ‘Mother, you were wrong, you were wrong, you were wrong.’”

* Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, U.K., who picked up the veterinary medicine prize for showing that cows who have names give more milk than cows that are nameless.

* Katherine K. Whitcome of the University of Cincinnati, Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard and Liza J. Shapiro of the University of Texas, given the physics prize for analytically determining why pregnant women do not tip over.

Those other Nobels start going out next week.

"The first skill is what we call 'associating.' It's a cognitive skill that allows creative people to make connections across seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas. The second skill is questioning — an ability to ask 'what if,' 'why,' and 'why not' questions that challenge the status quo and open up the bigger picture. The third is the ability to closely observe details, particularly the details of people's behavior. Another skill is the ability to experiment — the people we studied are always trying on new experiences and exploring new worlds. And finally, they are really good at networking with smart people who have little in common with them, but from whom they can learn."

— Brigham Young University professor Jeff Dyer, summarizing findings of a six-year study, lists the five skills that distinguish the most creative executives. (Bonus food for thought from The Economist: "The Last Days of the Polymath.")

From SiliconValley.com

What idea? An innovation contest, like what Netflix did. Of course there are already "markets" out there that do this--most notably, Innocentive.com. Nonetheless, a good idea.

It's no surprise that Netflix has launched another contest to improve its
movie-recommendations system—the $1 million the company gave away for the
first Netflix Prize was the steal of the century. On Monday, three years
after the contest kicked off, Netflix awarded the jackpot to BellKor's
Pragmatic Chaos, a team of seven engineers, mathematicians, and computer
scientists who managed to improve the DVD-rental service's recommendations
by 10 percent. BellKor beat out another team—the Ensemble, with more than 30
members—that had achieved the exact same ratings improvement but lost by
turning in its method 20 minutes after BellKor.

Imagine if Netflix had paid all these math whizzes the prevailing wage—say,
$100,000 a year. The company would have had to shell out more than $3
million for just one year of the top performers' time, and that's assuming
it could've sussed out who the top performers were going to be. Of course,
many of the programmers worked far longer than a year, some of them setting
aside their primary occupations in order to work on the Netflix problem
full-time. As Netflix CEO Reed Hastings admitted to the New York Times, "You
look at the cumulative hours and you're getting Ph.D.s for a dollar an
hour."

But even that number discounts the contest's true benefits to Netflix. Had
the company simply put out a help-wanted ad for software engineers, it
probably wouldn't have been able to recruit many of the geniuses it found
through the competition. That's because most of them already have other
jobs. BellKor's members work for, among others, AT&T and Yahoo, and many
members of the Ensemble are employed by the data-consulting firm Opera
Solutions. The participants also spanned the globe. Netflix got submissions
from people in more than 100 countries, and the winning team's members
worked in New Jersey, Montreal, Israel, and Austria.

The Netflix Prize isn't entirely novel. Science prizes date back to at least
the 18th century, when the British government offered ₤20,000 to the first
person to come up with a way to determine a ship's longitude. Other notable
innovation-prize winners include Charles Lindbergh, who won the Orteig Prize
in 1927 for flying across the Atlantic, and SpaceShipOne, which won the 2004
Ansari X Prize, a contest to launch a privately funded manned craft into
space.

But the Netflix effort was unusual for a couple of reasons. First, it was
funded explicitly for the benefit of a private company; though many
participants were interested in finding better ways to predict fickle human
tastes, Netflix was looking for research that would help boost its bottom
line. The company has already folded some of what it learned from the
contest into its recommendations system, and that has helped increase its
customer-retention rate. The Netflix prize is also notable for what it was
after—not a feat of derring-do, like Lindbergh's, or one of engineering,
like SpaceShipOne, but rather a kind of mathematical recipe. Netflix was
looking for an idea—and it turns out that Internet-enabled collaboration is
particularly well-suited to fostering such abstractions.

Indeed, the Netflix Prize should serve as a model for other tech companies
working on hard problems, as it combines the best parts of open-source
development with the best parts of proprietary code. Just like an
open-source project, the prize was remarkable for its spirit of
cooperation—over the life of the contest, competitors frequently became
collaborators, joining one another's teams when they realized that they
could never win by going it alone. The winning team is actually a mélange of
three different teams; they joined up in June, and their winning algorithm
combines the best ideas of each group.

Open-source projects work similarly, but they can sometimes become unwieldy
and unfocused when they grow too large. What's more, the open-source model
can put off developers who—not unreasonably—are interested in some kind of
reward for their work. The prize model solves those problems. Because
there's a reward involved (not just money but also fame), teams have a
natural incentive to stay focused on a goal and to closely monitor each
participant's progress. The winning team—like several others that
participated—worked out a formula to determine each member's share of the
prize money. And, of course, the prize model works out much better for a
sponsoring company like Netflix. By awarding a prize, the company gets to
keep all the fruits of contestants' labors; if it had merely sponsored an
open-source project, Netflix would have had to share all the innovations
that resulted.

The Netflix Prize model will likely work a lot better in the software
business than in other industries that depend on intellectual property.
That's because programmers are used to collaborating with one another, even
when they work for companies that are competitors. Netflix can be considered
a rival to AT&T—both are working on ways to bring movies into people's
homes—but employees of the phone company apparently had no problem helping
out the DVD service. You'd be hard-pressed to find such cross-business
collaboration in, say, the pharmaceutical industry, where secrecy prevails.

So which tech firms can benefit from setting up prizes? My first candidate
is Microsoft. In trying to beat Google's search engine, the company faces a
clear hiring disadvantage—the world's best search engineers want to work for
the world's most committed search company, and that's not Microsoft. What's
more, search engines have proved impervious to open-source development;
Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales tried to take on Google with his wikilike
search project in 2007, but the plan foundered and was eventually shut down,
mainly for a lack of interest. How to spark that interest? Money. Microsoft
could offer $10 million to the first team that figures out a way to improve
its search engine by, say, 10 percent. The difficulty here would be in
deciding how to measure the "improvement"; one way of doing so would be to
discreetly test contestants' algorithms on a subset of search engine queries
and then to analyze whether users respond to the results.

Google itself could also do well with a prize. The company is heavily
invested in solving one of the world's hardest tech problems—machine
translation. A prize would be useful here because translation requires a
wide range of expertise—software engineering, linguistics, and a whole lot
of math—and a high-profile award could get people from different disciplines
to team up. Google could award $1 million for each 10 percent improvement in
its algorithm for translating large bodies of text across languages. The
improvements would be measured in accuracy—the team that writes code that
best translates, say, Proust's oeuvre into English would win big.

What else? When you start thinking of problems that could be solved through
competition, it's hard to stop. How about a prize for improving face
recognition in pictures or videos? Or what about one for improving speech
recognition, so that we'll finally get to talk to our computers instead of
type? After all, movies are important—but perhaps Netflix has stumbled on to
something much more useful than a way to tell whether you'll love Napoleon
Dynamite.



Farhad Manjoo is Slate's technology columnist and the author of True Enough:
Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society. You can e-mail him at
farhad.manjoo@slate.com and follow him on Twitter.
Sept. 22, 2009
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
http://www.slate.com/id/2229225/

Honda's new unicycle:

Courier: First Details of Microsoft's Secret Tablet

It feels like the whole world is holding its breath for the Apple tablet. But maybe we've all been dreaming about the wrong device. This is Courier, Microsoft's astonishing take on the tablet. More (including video)

This is a guest post by Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Executive in Residence at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @ vwadhwa.

Back in 1986, when Bill Gates was still making sales calls, he pitched my group at First Boston on why we should bet the farm on Windows. Despite the risk involved, we gave his fledgling startup the deal. This wasn't because of his financial backers (he didn't even drop any names), but because we believed in his vision and nerdiness. In the same way, Google became a huge success long before the deep pocketed VC's arrived to ride Larry and Sergey's coattails. They simply had a great technology and winning strategy.

So I'm miffed by the National Venture Capital Association?s (NVCA) claim that companies like Microsoft and Google would not exist today without the funding and guidance provided during their early stages by venture capitalists. more