I’ve reached letter O of Goomics by Manu Cornet. (you can see my previous post about the book here). My favorite piece is at letter N for Nerds. I hope this author will not complain about my copying it here…
I agree with the author. That much for lousy jokes, but I love it. And a more serious one, the amazing growth of Google with its 4 CEOs.
Thanks a lot for the author for new contribution about Google.
The New Yorker just published a beautiful article abotu two google developers. The Friendship That Made Google Huge is subtitled Coding together at the same computer, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat changed the course of the company—and the Internet.
The company’s top coders seem like two halves of a single mind.
Illustration by David Plunkert
Here are some extracts:
Sanjay Ghemawat, [is] a quiet thirty-three-year-old M.I.T. graduate with thick eyebrows and black hair graying at the temples. Sanjay had joined the company only a few months earlier, in December. He’d followed a colleague of his—a rangy, energetic thirty-one-year-old named Jeff Dean—from Digital Equipment Corporation. Jeff had left D.E.C. ten months before Sanjay. They were unusually close, and preferred to write code jointly. In the war room, Jeff rolled his chair over to Sanjay’s desk, leaving his own empty. Sanjay worked the keyboard while Jeff reclined beside him, correcting and cajoling like a producer in a news anchor’s ear.
[…]
Today, Google’s engineers exist in a Great Chain of Being that begins at Level 1. At the bottom are the I.T. support staff. Level 2s are fresh out of college; Level 3s often have master’s degrees. Getting to Level 4 takes several years, or a Ph.D. Most progression stops at Level 5. Level 6 engineers—the top ten per cent—are so capable that they could be said to be the reason a project succeeds; Level 7s are Level 6s with a long track record. Principal Engineers, the Level 8s, are associated with a major product or piece of infrastructure. Distinguished Engineers, the Level 9s, are spoken of with reverence. To become a Google Fellow, a Level 10, is to win an honor that will follow you for life. Google Fellows are usually the world’s leading experts in their fields. Jeff and Sanjay are Google Senior Fellows—the company’s first and only Level 11s.
And more about dual creativity. Quite fascinating!
It took Monet and Renoir, working side by side in the summer of 1869, to develop the style that became Impressionism; during the six-year collaboration that gave rise to Cubism, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque would often sign only the backs of their canvases, to obscure which of them had completed each painting.
[…]
In “Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs,” the writer Joshua Wolf Shenk quotes from a 1971 interview in which John Lennon explained that either he or Paul McCartney would “write the good bit, the part that was easy, like ‘I read the news today’ or whatever it was.” One of them would get stuck until the other arrived—then, Lennon said, “I would sing half, and he would be inspired to write the next bit and vice versa.”
[…]
François Jacob, who, with Jacques Monod, pioneered the study of gene regulation, noted that by the mid-twentieth century most research in the growing field of molecular biology was the result of twosomes.
You should read the article…
A new and interesting report on Swiss startups has just been published by Startupticker, the Swiss Startup Radar.
It shows a fairly new information, the number of startup created a year, about 300,
and their slow growth …
Interesting testimonials also:
Is it due to the much-cited conditions? (Page 80)
No, Switzerland’s regulatory and fiscal framework is first-rate. But I identify two deficits in the support services available in Switzerland: first, there is a lack of contact points for entrepreneurs in the low and no-tech sectors, and, second, we tend to address young people.
More money is one thing, but is it spent differently? Page 89)
In Switzerland, I observe a strong focus on the survival rate. Startups are encouraged if they have collateral, such as patents, and take a cautious course. As a result, eight out of 10 startups from ETH Zurich are still active five years after their foundation. In Israel, on the other hand, more attention is paid to the economic impact. What matters when assessing a project is the prospect of growth and the creation of new jobs.
The awareness that investing in startups can lead to losses is undoubtedly more pronounced in Israel. This is particularly evident in the financing of very young projects. In Switzerland, seed rounds are worked on with thick business plans, PowerPoint presentations and sales projections. In Israel, this paper war has been largely dispensed with. The business angels and VCs accept that there can be no absolute security in the high-tech segment.
In an article by Techcrunch, 30 European startup CEOs call for better stock option policies, we also talk about the gaps in the framework conditions in Switzerland:
with the following recommendations:
1. Create a stock option scheme that is open to as many startups and employees as possible, offering favourable treatment in terms of regulation and taxation. Design a scheme based on existing models in the UK, Estonia or France to avoid further fragmentation and complexity.
2. Allow startups to issue stock options with non-voting rights, to avoid the burden of having to consult large numbers of minority shareholders.
3. Defer employee taxation to the point of sale of shares, when employees receive cash benefit for the first time.
4. Allow startups to issue stock options based on an accepted ‘fair market valuation’, which removes tax uncertainty.
5. Apply capital gains (or better) tax rates to employee share sales.
6. Reduce or remove corporate taxes associated with the use of stock options.
I must thank sincerely Nicolas for offering me today Goomics by Manu Cornet, subtitled Google’s corporate culture revealed through internal comics.
It looks great though I have read only the 1st two chapters (A is for Android and B is for Bonus). It is funny for sure if you know a little about Google.
It begins with a Foreword this way: “Forewords are boring. I never read them myself. Please go ahead and turn the page now.” I did not and was right not to! I think this may become another bestseller about Google… I might tell you more as I read it…
Another short post following my initial one about Harari’s new book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Harari is clearly a broad, deep and impressive thinker. Whereas I was a little concerned with his first chapters, the middle ones are great. I will give you a few example below. But first have a look at the subtitles of all these 21 lessons:
Part I: The Technological Challenge
1. DISILLUSIONMENT – The end of history has been postponed
2. WORK – When you grow up, you might not have a job
3. LIBERTY – Big Data is watching you
4. EQUALITY – Those who own the data own the future
Part II: The Political Challenge
5. COMMUNITY – Humans have bodies
6. CIVILISATION – There is just one civilisation in the world
7. NATIONALISM – Global problems need global answers
8. RELIGION – God now serves the nation
9. IMMIGRATION – Some cultures might be better than others
Part III: Despair and Hope
10. TERRORISM – Don’t panic
11. WAR – Never underestimate human stupidity
12. HUMILITY – You are not the centre of the world
13. GOD – Don’t take the name of God in vain
14. SECULARISM – Acknowledge your shadow
Part IV: Truth
15. IGNORANCE – You know less than you think
16. JUSTICE – Our sense of justice might be out of date
17. POST-TRUTH – Some fake news lasts for ever
18. SCIENCE FICTION – The future is not what you see in the movies
Part V: Resilience
19. EDUCATION – Change is the only constant
20. MEANING – Life is not a story
21. MEDITATION – Just observe
In his 14th chapter, secularism, he uses a few keywords which are very enlighting. If puzzling for you, you will need to read his book. Secularism is defined by a coherent set of values: truth, compassion, equality, freedom, courage, and responsability [Pages 203-14]. In his next chapter, Ignorance, he has a very interesting analysis of power and truth: It is extremely hard to discover the truth when you are ruling the world. You are just too busy. Most political chiefs and business moguls are forever on the run. Yet if you want to go deeply into any subject, you need a lot of time, and in particular you need the privilege of wasting time. You need to experiment with unproductive paths, to explore dead ends, to make space for doubts and boredom. If you cannot afford to waste time – you will never find the truth. […] You need to waste a lot of time on the periphery – they may contain some brillinat revolutionary insights, but they are mostly full of uninformed guesses, debunked models, superstitious dogmas and ridiculous conspiracy theories. Leaders are thus trapped in a double bind. If they stay in the centre of power, they will have an extremely distorted vision of the world. If they venture to the margins, they will waste too much of their precious time. [Pages 220-2]
I had mentioned Grigori Perelman in a rather old post: 7 x 7 = (7-1) x (7+1) + 1. I discovered recently a new book about this exceptional mathematician, not so much about his achievements but more about his personality.
About Asperger’s Syndrome
I will not tell much Perelman here, Masha Gessen does it with talent. Let me just translate here form the French version I am reading: “It seems to me that many of the whistleblowers,” wrote Atwwod, “have Asperger’s Syndrome, I’ve met several who have applied the code of ethics of their company or government to their work and have reported wrongdoing and corruption in the workplace. All of them were surprised to see that their management and their colleagues did not understand their attitude. ”
So it is perhaps not a coincidence that the founders of dissident movements in the Soviet Union were among mathematicians and physicists. The Soviet Union was not the place for people who took things literally and expected the world to work in a predictable, logical and fair way. [Pages 215-6, French edition]
[…]
One can also interpret the difficulties he experienced when he presented his solutions. If Perelman was suffering from Asperger’s syndrome, this inability to see “the big picture” is perhaps one of the most surprising traits. British psychologists Uta Frith and Francesca Happe talked about what they call the “low central coherence” characteristic of autism spectrum disorders. Autistics focus on details, to the detriment of the overall picture. When they manage to reconstitute it, it is because they have arranged the various elements, a little like the elements of the periodic table, in a systemic scheme that satisfies them to the extreme. “… the most interesting facts, wrote Poincaré, one of the greatest systematizing minds of all time, more than a century ago, are those who can be used many times, those who have a chance to happen many times. We have had the good fortune to be born in a world where there is are many; suppose that instead of sixty chemical elements we have sixty billion, that they are not common ones and rare ones, but they would be evenly distributed, so every time we pick up a new pebble, there would be a high probability that it would be made up of some unknown substances… […] In such a world, there would be no no science, perhaps no thought and even life would be impossible because evolution could not have developed the conservative instincts; thanks to God it is not so.”
People with Asperger’s syndrome apprehend the small pebble world by small pebble. Speaking of the existence of this syndrome in society, Attwood resorted to the metaphor of a five thousand-piece puzzle, “where normal people would have the full image on the lid” which would allow them to have global intuitions. Aspergers, they would not see this big picture and should try to nest the pieces one by one. So maybe rules like “never take off your hat” and 2lis all the books that are on the list “formed for Gricha Perelman a way to see the missing image on the lid, to encompass all the elements of the periodic table of the world It was only by clinging to these rules that he could live his life. [Pages 217-8, French edition]
About power
Another interesting topic addressed by Misha Gessen is on page 236 of the French edition again:
– When he received the letter from the commission that invited him he replied that he did not speak with committees, said Gromov, and that is exactly what he did. They represent everything that one should never accept. And if this attitude seems extreme, it is only in relation to the conformism that characterizes the world of mathematics.
– But why refuse to talk to committees?
– We do not talk to committees, we talk to people! exclaimed Gromov, exasperated. How can we talk to a committee? Who knows who is on the committee? Who tells you that Yasser Arafat is not one of them?
– But he was sent the list of members, and he continued to refuse.
– The way it started, he was right not to answer, Gromov persisted. As soon as a community begins to behave like a machine, all that remains to do is to cut ties, and that’s all. The strangest thing is that there is no longer a mathematician who does the same. That’s what’s weird. Most people agree to deal with committees. They agree to go to Beijing and receive a prize from President Mao. Or the king of Spain, anyway, it’s the same!
– And why, I asked, could not the King of Spain have the honor of hanging a medal around Perelman’s neck?
– What is a king? Gromov asked, totally furious now. Kings are the same morons as the Communists. Why would a king award a medal to a mathematician? What allows it? It is nothing from a mathematical point of view. Same for the president. But there is one who has taken control of power like a thief and the other who inherited it from his father. It does not make any difference.
Unlike them, Gromov explains to me, Perelman had made a real contribution to the world.
It reminds me of a colleague’s quote: “There are not many statues for committees in public parks.”
It’s also worth mentioning here an article from the New Yorker that Gessen mentions too: Manifold Destiny. A legendary problem and the battle over who solved it by Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber. On a related topic, the authors quote Perelman whom they met: He mentioned a dispute that he had had years earlier with a collaborator over how to credit the author of a particular proof, and said that he was dismayed by the discipline’s lax ethics. “It is not people who break ethical standards who are regarded as aliens,” he said. “It is people like me who are isolated.” We asked him whether he had read Cao and Zhu’s paper. “It is not clear to me what new contribution did they make,” he said. “Apparently, Zhu did not quite understand the argument and reworked it.” As for Yau, Perelman said, “I can’t say I’m outraged. Other people do worse . Of course, there are many mathematicians who are more or less honest. But almost all of them are conformists. They are more or less honest, but they tolerate those who are not honest.”
When I saw Harari‘s third book, I had some concerns. Could he write another great book after amazing Sapiens but less good Homo Deus. And why so fast?
Indeed the first part of 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is scary not to say very bad. It is full of anxiety and I am not sure it is based on facts or even truth like his previous books… Indeed this first part is even misleading because when I read “Sapiens explored the past, Homo Deus explored the future and 21 lessons explores the present” on the book cover, I discovered the first part is about the possible scary future based on artificial intelligence and biotechnologies. But this is the future, not the present.
Fortunately, I recovered the Harari I like in the beginning of part II. In chapter 5, Community, he shows that we are real, physical beings, not virtual, augmented ones. In chapter 6, Civilization, he fights against the concept of clash of civilizations. “There is one civilization in the world” is the subtitle. So let me just quote Harari here [Pages 94-5]
More importantly, the analogy between history and biology that underpins the ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis is false. Human groups – all the way from the small tribes to huge civilisations – are fundamentally different from animal species, and historical conflicts greatly differ from natural selection processes. Animal species have objective identities that endure for thousands upon thousands of generations. Whether you are a chimpanzee or a gorilla depends on your genes rather than your beliefs, and different genes dictate distinct social behaviours. Chimpanzees live in mixed groups of males and females. They compete for power in building coalitions of supporters from among both sexes. Amid gorillas, in contrast, a single dominant male establishes a harem of females, and usually expels any adult male that might challenge his position. Chimpanzees cannot adopt gorilla- like social arrangements; gorillas cannot start organizing themselves like chimpanzees; and as far as we know exactly the same social systems have characterized chimpanzees and gorillas not only in recent decades, but for hundreds of thousands of years.
You find nothing like that among humans. Yes, human groups may have distinct social systems, but these are not genetically determined, and they seldom endure for more than a few centuries. Think of twentieth-century Germans, for example. In less than a hundred years the Germans organized themselves into six very different systems: the Hohenzollern Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the German democratic Republic (aka communist East Germany), the Federal Republic of Germany (aka West Germany), and finally democratic reunited Germany. Of course, the Germans kept their language and their love of beer and bratwurst. But is there some unique German essence that distinguishes them from all other nations, and that has remained unchanged from Wilhelm II to Angela Merkel? And if you come up with something, was it also there 1,000 years ago or 5,000 years ago?
This is the second and final part of an unusual post topic, humor and bureaucracy. See part I if you missed it.
The author has a comment in the end, which is interesting. ‘The problem with you is that you refuse to take anything seriously – not Communism, not me… Not even yourself.’ ‘That’s true,’ I said ‘but I take not taking anything seriously very seriously.’ [Page 307]
´The Communist economy was very bad at producing everything – except jokes. They were very good at jokes.´ [Page 222]
Many Communist jokes were adapted into ones referring to the shortcomings of Western economies. ´Why does an Austin Allegro have a heated rear window? So you can keep your hands warm when you push it’. [Page 300]
How does a clever Russian Jew talk to a stupid Russian Jew?
by telephone from new York. [Page 211]
What is the definition of a Russian string quartet?
A Soviet orchestra back from a US tour. [Page 212]
Do you know why Romania will survive the end of the world?
Because it is fifty years behind everyone else! [Page 263]
My favorite one follows…
Leonid Brezhnev wanted to commission a portrait to be entitled ´Lenin in Poland’. Russian painters, being schooled strictly in the Realist school, were unable to paint an event that had never actually occurred,
´Comrade Brezhnev, we would like to do it, but we cannot. It goes against our training,´ replied each of the man artists approached by Brezhnev. Finally, in desperation, Brezhnev was forced to ask the old Jewish painter Levy.
´of course, I prefer to portray actual events, but I’ll do the painting for you, Comrade. It would be my great honour.´ Levy commenced work on the painting.
Finally the day of the unveiling arrived. Everyone gasped as the cloth was removed to reveal the picture of a man in bed with a woman who looked like Lenin’s wife.
Brezhnev asked, horrified, ´Who is that man?
´That’s Trotsky said the artist.
´And who,´ Brezhnev enquired, is that woman?´
´That is Lenin’s wife, Comrade Brezhnev.´
´But where is Lenin?´
´He’s in Poland,´ Levy explained.
[Page 207]
Now you may want to explore your favorite ones…
As a follow-up of my previous post Aaron Swartz – The Idealist, here are a few additional notes from this very moving and intelligent book.
So why did he die? You must read the book. But here is a sentence close to the end [page 268]: “Swartz saw things differently, and, indeed, devoted much of his life to the notion that the only way that the world ever improved was by allowing people to open things up. This notion […] is Swartz’s legacy. It is also his challenge to the world he left behind.”
Corporations continue to deploy law and rhetoric to combat the situational ethics of unauthorized downloading, to argue that copyright is a zero-sum game. Conflicts recur. The actors may change, but the script remains the same. [Page 271]
A surprising argument is against Apple and Steve Jobs: Swartz depicted Apple as “a ruthless, authoritarian organization” that flouted labor standards and Jobs himself as a martinet who insisted on controlling every aspect of the user experience. His megalomania manifested in Apple’s portable music players: sterile white rectangles that could be neither opened nor modified by the end user. “Jobs couldn’t abide people opening things”. [Page 267]
A stronger quote taken from Swartz’s blog: Since power over human beings is shown in making them do what they would rather not do, the man who is actuated by love of power is more apt to inflict pain than to permit pleasure. If you ask your boss for leave of absence from the office on some legitimate occasion, his love of power will derive more satisfaction from a refusal than from a consent. If you require a building permit, the petty official concerned will obviously get more pleasure from saying «No» than from saying «Yes». It is this sort of thing which makes the love of power such a dangerous motive. — Bertrand Russell [Page 254]
Peters would like to have a balanced view of the situation: Property holders are but one party to the social contract. That is supposed to govern our polity, and their interests are not the only ones that matter. There is a middle ground between functionally eternal copyright and wholesale anarcho-syndicalism. [Page 268]
So what is innovation? I had already addressed the question in 2015 in Invention, Entrepreneurship and Innovation. My colleague Federico gave me a few days ago another definition of Innovation from MIT’s Bill Aulet.
Innovation = Invention ∗ Commercialization
You will find the video here.
And here some extracts:
So could it have been “Innovation equals invention?” No, often people mistake these two things for the same thing. They are not. Innovation is something that generates value for the world. It makes something faster, better, cheaper. It gives someone some great satisfaction. An invention is an idea, a technology, a patent. In and of itself, it does not generate value. So these two are not the same thing. And sometimes you see them interchange. And that’s not correct.
So innovation equals invention times commercialization. And when we look at this equation of innovation, something of value, it requires a new idea. And then, it requires someone or some organization that is going to commercialize that idea and to make it a value to the world. So it’s important to understand that an idea by itself is not valuable. Ideas are cheap. Is the commercialization when combined with it that makes them extraordinarily valuable. So while sometimes when I used to say invention plus commercialization, in fact, it’s times.
It’s a product because if I don’t have one, then it’s zero. Then, I have no innovation. If I have no new idea, I can’t commercialize anything. Therefore, it’s zero. If I have an invention and no commercialization, I have no innovation as well. So it’s actually a product. It’s, in fact, the commercialization aspect of it that’s very, very difficult.
If you look at the most innovative company in the world today, which I would argue is Apple, the underlying inventions that created Apple, great innovations starting with the Mac, did not come from themselves. It actually came from Xerox PARC. It was windows, icon, mouse, pointer. That invention, they commercialized to create innovation, which created terrific value in the marketplace and for their customers and for themselves, their investors as well. Likewise after that, you look again that the invention for the underlying and enabling idea, technology from the iPod was MP3, which did not come from Apple, again. That came from Fraunhofer. But what Apple was terrific at was commercialization to create innovation and, again, to create great value for their customers and their shareholders. So this definition of innovation we found very, very helpful to make clear that innovation is a combination of a new idea, a new technology. But then, it has to be commercialized and mapped to some customer in the real world where it will generate value.
Thanks Federico 🙂