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Archive for the 'Technology' Category
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For the last two years, I’ve had the pleasure of being able to work on a publication that the Globe & Mail puts out on the state of Canadian universities. This publication had previously been called “University Report Card,” but this year the name has been changed to “Canadian University Report.” I enjoy having the opportunity to connect back with campus life and find out what’s going on there now. Last year, I wrote about how technology is changing the classroom, and this year I got the chance to look into the technology transfer process at univerisities today.
As someone who spent a lot of time hanging around in university labs a decade (and a half! yikes!) ago, I was amazed by how much more serious and business-like things seem to be today.
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Thirsty for the next Gatorade
Universities can profit handsomely from the commercialization of their research, and links between academia and big business continue to grow. But the technology-transfer boom has its critics
Given our obsession with weather, it is fitting that the first Canadian instrument ever to land on another planet is a weather station. On May 26, 2008, a suite of highly sophisticated meteorological tools aboard the Phoenix spacecraft started keeping tabs on the atmosphere of Mars. The design and construction of this station was led by a team of scientists and engineers from York University who collaborated with the Canadian Space Agency, MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates, a Canadian laser-based surveying company called Optech, and the Finnish Meteorological Institute, to name a few.
It is perhaps the single most dramatic example of what can be achieved when the barriers between universities, the private sector, and government agencies are broken down.
Deconstructing those barriers is the job of “technology transfer” offices at universities across the country. Technology transfer is the process of taking the intellectual property that is generated on campus and finding ways of getting that out into the real world. It can involve patenting and licensing inventions, doing research for hire, fostering the growth of spinoff companies emanating from campus research, or building and operating research parks where private companies can set up shop in an atmosphere that is tightly integrated with campus life. For some, this represents a real step forward in the role that universities play in our society: They are no longer isolated “ivory towers” but centres of innovation where inventors and scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs can come together.
The creeping influence of the private sector on campus, however, has a number of critics. Universities have been accused of selling off their most noble mission, the pursuit of truth, to the highest bidder. Even worse, there is a perception that universities that once shared their research openly and widely have become secret enclaves, hording knowledge until the day they can find a way to profit from it. Jennifer Washburn, author of University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education writes, “The openness and sharing that once characterized university life has given way to a new proprietary culture more akin to the business world.”
Arthur Schafer, a biomedical ethicist and director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba, has called for a ban on universities accepting corporate funding for research. Speaking to a conference on academic integrity last year, Prof. Shafer told the crowd, “If we want public science in the public interest, it’s got to be paid through public tax dollars, it’s got to be free of corporate interests.
At York, however, Stan Shapson, vice-president of Research and Innovation, does not see any conflict. “The word ‘commercialization’ gets certain people’s backs up, and there’s really no reason,” he says. “Universities do a lot of basic research. In most cases these are things that are years or decades away from having an impact on society, but when faculty members are working on things that can have an impact today, then why not develop closer relationships with industry and the private sector? Researchers might have a great idea, but they don’t necessarily know where to take that idea, or how to prototype it. Working with industry should be part of the natural cycle of doing research.”
According to the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, private sector funding for research at Canadian universities has grown dramatically, from $910 million ten years ago to over $1.7 billion today. For Dr. Shapson though, the most exciting thing about the Phoenix project wasn’t the millions of dollars in research funds that came to York because of it, but the experience gained by the students and researchers. “The most important type of technology transfer that occurs,” he says, “is the experience we provide to our students, most of whom are also going to wind up in private industry. We don’t look at this as a money maker. In fact, if you look carefully at the business case you’ll see that it’s very difficult to make money this way, unless you’re the University of Florida and you hit on Gatorade.”
When discussing how universities might turn their research efforts into moneymakers, the subject of Gatorade always seems to come up. A mixture of water, sugar, lemon juice, sodium, potassium, and phosphate, it is one of the simplest, yet most successful products ever to come out of a university. Since the University of Florida started collecting royalties on the sports drink in 1973, it has made over $80 million (U.S.). This is the dream that keeps technology transfer officers wandering the halls of universities and asking researchers what they are working on. Everyone’s chasing the next Gatorade.
One of the people who knows how hard it is to find another Gatorade-type invention is Angus Livingstone. He’s been managing the University-Industry Liaison Office at the University of British Columbia for twenty years now, making him the “dean of technology transfer” in Canada. During that time, he estimates that they’ve looked seriously at perhaps 2,500 different technologies. UBC holds hundreds of patents, and in the last year or so, it has surpassed
the $100-million mark in total revenue earned from license agreements, making it easily the top school in Canada in intellectual property earnings.
However, Mr. Livingstone emphasizes that the vast majority of inventions they work on never wind up making any money. Of all the revenue UBC has earned, he estimates that 98% of it comes from just 20 different license agreements. The university’s biggest money maker has been QLT, a spin-off company started by a group of UBC biologists in the early ’80s that is now one of Canada’s biggest biopharmaceutical companies.
Mr. Livingston says it’s possible for universities to be too vigilant when it comes to protecting intellectual property. “There are certain technologies,” he says, “which do have great value, that may turn into large companies or even entire industries, and those should be protected, but there are very few of them. In the ’90s there was a lot of concern about the potential value of intellectual property, and there was a very strong desire to try to protect everything and extract as much value as possible. That was often at odds with industry though. They wanted easy access to whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted it. It cost us some relationships.
“Eventually, we started to understand each other better. Now, we understand the needs of industry and industry understands the needs of the university. The benefits flow in both directions and that includes training and educational opportunities for our students.”
At the University of Western Ontario, Mr. Paul Paolatto agrees that managing the relationship between the university and industry is an essential part of the process. Paolatto is the Acting Executive Director of WORLDiscoveries, Western’s main technology-transfer office, and the former president of a company that started as a technology spinoff at UWO. Since he comes from the industry side, rather than the academic side, he feels he brings a unique perspective on how the two can work together best. Mr. Paolatto sees the mission of technology transfer as one of expanding upon the work that researchers are already doing, not directing them toward his notion of what a money-making idea might be. “Researchers tend to focus on publication and leave it at that, but if we can take some of that intelligence and commercialize it, then there can be benefits to the environment, to health care and to the country as a whole. It’s not just about monetary gain; though that is a consideration, this can also be about social gain.
“We are seeing so many inventions that previously would have died on the lab bench and we’re moving them to market. Canada’s biggest asset today is our knowledge base. If we can tap into that a bit better it will help offset some of the decline we see in other areas of the economy. This is really an exciting place to be. I’m delighted to be a part of it.”
On the opposite side, purists argue that even if corporate funds do not in fact compromise academic ethics, they can still give the impression that ethics are compromised, which is almost as worrying. One case often cited is that of Dr. David Healy.
A respected scholar from the University of Wales College of Medicine, Dr. Healy was offered the position in 2000 of heading up the Mood and Anxiety Disorder Program at the Centre for Addiction & Mental Health (CAHM), a hospital affiliated with the University of Toronto. Just before he took up his new position, Dr. Healy gave a talk during which he blamed Prozac and other SSRI antidepressants for triggering suicide in some patients.
Shortly after his talk, the offer from CAMH was suddenly rescinded. He was informed that it was apparent that his approach to psychiatry was not going to be compatible with CAMH. The appearance of a serious breach of Dr. Healy’s academic freedom was exacerbated by the fact that Prozac’s maker, Eli Lilly, was a major sponsor of U of T, CAMH, and the clinic that Dr. Healy was supposed to lead. Both the university and Eli Lilly insist that the sponsorship arrangements had nothing to do with the job offer being rescinded. The incident became known internationally as “The Toronto Affair” and Healy’s $9.4-million lawsuit was settled out of court.
The pharmaceutical industry funds a large percentage of medical research in Canada today. Many medical schools would find it difficult to operate were it not for the dollars rolling in from these companies. Given those facts, it’s not just academic purists who wonder how much confidence we can have in studies that are ultimately funded by someone who has a vested interest in the outcome. The potential moral problems associated with taking money from tobacco companies or arms manufacturers are also familiar topics of debate on campus, and many have rules concerning just what kind of money it is alright for the university to accept, and what kind is not.
It’s not desirable to return to a time when universities were completely cut off from corporations. But they also need to maintain their ideals. Jennifer Washburn puts it well in the final pages of University Inc. “Universities should be places that are engaged with the outside world, encourage creative problem solving, and support entrepreneurial thinking. They should have mechanisms in place to facilitate the transfer of new knowledge and inventions to industry and provide students with the tools and training they need to start up new companies and pursue new careers without sacrificing their autonomy or compromising the values and ideals they have long pledged to uphold.”
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The New Yorker’s Politics Issue had some great reads in it, including the eloquent endorsement of Barack Obama, and the fascinating profile of Arianna Huffington, but my favourite piece was written by Jill Lepore and titled Rock, Paper, Scissors. It is an historical overview of the messiness and madness of the American electoral process. In particular, the piece focuses on the adoption of the secret ballot (also known as the “Australian Ballot“) in the United States.
One of the things that great writing about history always does is to remind us that there are some notions that we don’t even think about today, ideas we find so commonplace and sensible that it is hard to believe they haven’t always been the status quo, but were once considered radical or controversial. For instance, Lepore tells us that 150 years ago, voting wasn’t a simple matter of showing up at the polling place and filling out your ballot. In fact, polling places didn’t even have ballots. Voters had to provide their own.
Nowhere in the United States in 1859 did election officials provide ballots. [...] Voters got their ballots either from a partisan, at the polls, or at home, by cutting them out of the newspaper. Then they had to cross through the throngs to climb a platform placed against the wall of a building (voters weren’t allowed inside) and pass their ballots through a window and into the hands of an election judge.
Violence and intimidation at the polls was common in this era. That is true not only in the U.S., but here in Canada as well. (According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, British Columbia adopted the secret ballot in 1873, Ontario in 1874, and P.E.I. didn’t adopt it permanently until 1913.) The primary reason, it seems, that violence flourished at the polls at this time in history was that suffrage was expanding faster than the mechanisms needed to handle it.
In this fall’s Presidential election, every citizen who is eighteen or older—except, in some states, prisoners and felons—will be eligible to vote. Somewhat more than half of us will turn up. We won’t be clobbered, stabbed, or shot. We will not have to bring our own ballots. We will insist that how we vote be secret. The founders didn’t plan for this. No one planned for it. There is no plan. It’s patches all the way down.
[...]
With the exception of Benjamin Franklin, who anticipated Malthus, the nation’s founders could scarcely have imagined that the population of the United States, less than four million in 1790, would increase tenfold by 1870. Nor did they prophesy the party system. Above all, they could not have fathomed universal suffrage. In the first Presidential election, only six per cent of Americans were eligible to vote. And these men didn’t elect George Washington; they voted only for delegates to the Electoral College, an institution established to further restrain the popular will.
If you have enough extra money lying around it’s quite possible that you’ve already booked one of the seats on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, set to launch sometime in 2010. There are plenty of good reasons to get on board: the spirit of adventure, being among the first humans to slip the surly bonds of earth, and so on…
But perhaps the best reason to get a seat at the dawn of commercial space travel is so that you can experience it before it begins its long slide into becoming the same kind of life-sucking bureaucratic nightmare that air travel is today.
One of the saddest stories of the 20th century is the fate of air travel. In 1900 it was a dream, feverishly speculated upon, subject to all manner of Jules Verne imaginings; by 1999 it was a chore, a tedious, uncomfortable ritual undertaken in order to get from A to B.
That’s how Owen Hatherley starts a wonderful essay on the state of air travel over at the New Statesman. Much of the blame, in his view, belongs to the institution of the airport, which he describes as a “warren-like combination of the shopping mall and the high-security prison.” Fans of Douglas Adams, of course, cannot read any description of the airport and not immediately recall the famous opening lines of The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul.
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the phrase, “as pretty as an airport.”
Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk Airport is the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.
They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve-jangling colors, to make effortless the business of separating the traveler forever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveler with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not.
Adams is describing Heathrow circa 1988, but it seems that not a lot has changed since then. Twenty years after the publication of Tea Time, here’s how Hatherley describes the opening of Heathrow’s Terminal Five.
Terminal Five is majestic: a thrillingly Constructivist space, with huge spans of glass and steel, open to the expanse of the surrounding airfield. Yet within weeks of opening, 28,000 bags were lost, and 500 flights cancelled. And to ensure that people milling around in limbo keep themselves busy spending money, the terminal only has 700 public seats. Today, amid the airline bankruptcies, an advert declares “Terminal Five is working”, as if we should be impressed.
Hatherley’s essay reviews two new books, Naked Airport, a cultural history of “the world’s most revolutionary structure” by Alastair Gordon and Politics at the Airport, a collection of academic essays edited by Mark B. Salter of the University of Ottawa. Both sound like they are worth a read.
The title of Gordon’s book comes from a quote by Le Corbusier who apparently said “the airport should be naked”, and suggested placing them in the middle of cities, like railway stations, without any thought given to the logistics of actually landing planes or allowing them to take off.
When it comes to air travel, it seems, cold hard realities have always gotten in the way of big dreams. Today it is the economic realities of air travel that are truly destroying the fantasy of flying around the globe. Rising oil prices, deregulation and the emergence of discount carriers have thoroughly democratized the experience. Leaving aside the ecological problems of air travel, it is a wonderful thing that anyone can afford to do it, it’s just a shame that it is no more exciting than riding the bus and, because of security worries, a whole lot more hassle.
If commercial space travel ever becomes a useful way to get around, rather than just a novelty for the wealthy, it is inevitable that the same thing will happen to it. So, if you have the means, gather ye space miles, while ye may.
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It’s been a hell week, one for the record books really. I certainly wish I hadn’t launched a new blog and then been totally incapable of posting to it for a week, but that’s just the way things go.
In any case, one of the things I’ve been working on has been research into neuromarketing for an upcoming column in Report on Business. One of the most interesting things I came across in the course of this research was a 1996 essay by Tom Wolfe titled, “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died“.
Wolfe is one of my favourite writers and I must have read this essay when it was reprinted in Hooking Up, but it had totally escaped my memory. It’s funny how often something like that happens, a piece of writing needs to come along at the right point in your life or you can totally miss out on how great it is.
The essay was written in 1996 at the dawn of modern imaging of the brain. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) had just been developed, and for the first time we were starting to get a grasp on how the brain reacts to various kinds of stimulation in real time. fMRI measures
the flow of blood in the brain, so as various portions of the brain demand more glucose and oxygen they “light up” the display. It’s like watching the weather patterns of the mind.
Wolfe was very impressed by the technology available at the time, but he also thought that within ten years (2006) there was a good chance that fMRI would seem primitive. That has not been the case. fMRI has not been superseded by new technologies that give a deeper insight into the brain, not yet anyway. In fact, we don’t seem to have made much progress at all, either in terms of technology or on any of the larger philosophical debates that Wolfe thought would define our discussions of morality, free will, and the nature of what it means to be human in the 21st century.
The main thrust of Wolfe’s argument is the notion that in the coming decades we’ll have so much insight into the human mind and the actual mechanics of it, that quasi-religious notions like the existence of the soul will start to seem incredibly old-fashioned. He reports that when Nietzsche wrote “God is dead,” it wasn’t a pronouncement, but rather a simple accounting of an idea that had already taken hold in the minds of educated people. Darwin had replaced the need for a God in people’s understanding of the universe. Wolfe thinks that modern neuroscience will do the same thing for the soul.
I find this argument fascinating, but I don’t really buy into it. Darwin provided an explaination for why the world is the way that it is. Neuroscience, and fMRI in particular, is merely descriptive. It allows us to see what is happening in the brain, but it has yet to provide us with a deeper understanding of why the brain does what it does. It’s a weather map, not a climate model. (Look for that line to be repeated in my column when it comes out.)
Ultimately, I think that the soul and free will have a much better chance of standing up to any advances in science than God ever did.
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A few weeks ago I got a Samsung Instinct, the so-called “iPhone killer” available from Sprint in the US and Bell here in Canada.
I got off to a rough start with the phone. I returned my first one when it hung any time I tried to trying to play video. The second phone I got started crashing anytime I added a bookmark in the web browser. I took the phone back to Bell and had them do a master reset, and that solved the problem for a day or so, but it then re-appeared. I finally managed to solve the problem on my own, but it took a few days.
Despite the rough start though, I’m fairly happy with the Instinct now. It’s definitely not an iPhone killer, if for no other reason than it’s not a software platform. It has a not of nice features though, and I’ve found the EV-DO web browsing to be surprisingly fast. The biggest problem is still the browser, which is a bit wonky at times, but there is hope that Opera mini will be available on the phone before the end of the year. Considering how much cheaper the Instinct was in comparison to the iPhone, both initially and on an on-going basis (plus the amount it would have cost me to break my existing Bell contract), I’m happy with the choice.
All that is a long lead-in, to the fact that for the last month I’ve been getting used to typing on a touch screen. From the little I’ve used the iPhone, the Instinct’s keyboard is definitely superior. The keys are a nice size, and the phone gives a nice little vibration and makes a click every time you press a letter. This “haptic feedback” system so impressed me that I was sold on the idea that this was way of the future. Sold, that is, until I saw this video from this year’s TechCrunch50 conference.
Swype was a runner-up to Yammer, a Twitter for business, for top company at the conference. Yammer looks neat, but I just don’t think there’s a high enough barrier to entry for competitors. The tech looks pretty simple, it’s just a matter of being able to scale properly, and we’ll have to wait and see how good Yammer turns out to be at that.
I really believe that Swype is the company that’s going to be changing your life first. The technology is impressive as hell. It was invented by Cliff Kushler, one of the people behind T9, the predictive text system that is already on two million cell phones. Amazingly, Swype has a memory footprint of only about 1MB, which bodes well for it being ported to just about mobile device.
We’ve been waiting for the death of the keyboard for a long time. Voice recognition was always touted as the technology that, once it got good enough, would free us from having to type. In my experience, however, speaking aloud isn’t a natural way to write something. Voice recognition is also disturbing to everyone else around you. I can’t imagine sitting in Starbucks and narrating my novel, but even if I could, we’re still nowhere close to a good enough voice recognition system, despite decades of research.
On the other hand, I can definitely imagine sitting down with a stylus and using Swype on a netbook. In fact, that’s what I want to be doing right now.
