Young Man, Young Woman: Go West! Go East! Just…Go!

March 17, 2014 in Global Crisis Blog, Innovation Blog | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

Young Man, Young Woman:  Go West! Go East!  Just…Go!

By Shlomo  Maital    

           World Traveller

Each year, New York Times columnist Nicolas Kristof chooses an intern, to travel with him and report on ‘neglected issues’.  This year’s winner?  20-year-old Nicole Sganga.   In his column “Go west young people! And east!”,  Kristof makes an interesting point.

   First, a little joke.   If ‘trilingual’ means knowing 3 languages, bilingual means knowing 2 – what is a person called who knows no foreign languages?   Answer: an American.  Most Americans do not have a passport, do not know a foreign language, and do not travel abroad.  The result is an insular nation ignorant of geography and other cultures.

   Kristof notes that of all the 50 American states, the most cosmopolitan, and the best state in which to do business (according to Forbes magazine) is…not New York!  It is..Utah, the state with a large population of Mormons (Church of the Latter Day Saints), a religion not known for liberality.   Why?  Because young Mormons are required to do two years of missionary work in a foreign land, and they return speaking Thai, Mandarin, Korean and a blizzard of languages – 130 languages are spoken in commerce in Utah, as a result!

    Kristof notes that fewer than 10 per cent of US college students study overseas during their undergraduate years. 

    In my country, Israel, young people complete their compulsory army service, then pack a backpack and trek through India, South America, Thailand, anywhere, partly to cleanse themselves of the early-rising army discipline.  One result is to make Israel a very cosmopolitan nation, which I think helps our startups a lot. 

    Kristof suggests: How about if American colleges gave students a semester credit for a gap year spent in a non-English-speaking country?    

     America has paid heavily for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, bungled in part because America had little understanding of the complex cultures of those nations, cultures you can understand only by living there  and learning the language.  So simply as a matter of survival, if America wants to understand this complex often hostile world, more young Americans need to experience other nations.  It’s a matter of national security.    

Obama – Bring the Money Home!

March 16, 2014 in Global Crisis Blog, Innovation Blog | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

Obama – Bring the Money Home!

By Shlomo  Maital    

       money abroad

Two reports in today’s Bloomberg Business Week and  Global New York Times are closely connected.

 Floyd Norris reports that after six years of economic crisis and stagnation, the level of employment in the U.S.  has at least returned to its level in 2008. 

  And Bloomberg reports that American businesses, which recovered far far faster than us ordinary working people, have piled up nearly 2 trillion dollars (!) in retained profits abroad, which they choose not to repatriate and bring home to America, in order to avoid the 35 per cent corporate income tax. 

   General Electric alone has $110 b. locked up abroad; Microsoft, 76.4 b.; Pfizer, $69 billion; Merck $57 billion;    and Appel $54 billion.   Overall,  only 22 big companies hold half of the ‘locked earnings’ abroad, or $984 billion. 

   In the past, economic recoveries occur when businesses start investing again, in capital formation, using their retained earnings.  But this cannot happen in America when businesses are sitting on their money abroad. 

   It’s not as if America doesn’t need investment. It needs infrastructure, new airports, fast trains (Amtrak’s ‘fast’ Boston to Washington train is a disgrace, compared to Japan’s and France’s bullet trains), new roads, new bridges, new schools, new factories…in short, everything. 

   So President Obama —  why not declare an amnesty?  Tell the giant businesses, if you  bring your money home and use it – or even just bring it home, and make it available in capital markets for OTHERS to use it —  we’ll offer you an Irish rate of tax, about 12 per cent, rather than the American one, 35 per cent.   Do it because it makes good business sense, and besides, your country needs it – and it is your country that gave you the innovation and creativity that made you the profits in the first place. 

      It’s pretty likely the Republicans, who are pro-business, will support such an amnesty.  And President Obama —  after your dismal performance for six years, this may be your last chance to actually do something creative and productive.    Do something for America’s workers.  Renewed investment will create jobs more than anything.  Until America’s businesses stop sitting on their piles of money abroad and start using it at home, employment cannot recover strongly.

Should We Teach Kids to Break the Rules?

March 15, 2014 in Global Crisis Blog, Innovation Blog | Tags: , , , , , | 3 comments

Should We Teach Kids to Break the Rules?

By Shlomo  Maital     

Library Lion

    In Michelle Knudsen’s book for children, “Library Lion”, 2006, illustrated by Kevin Hawkes,  the head librarian Miss Merriweather and Mr. McBee  kick Library Lion out of the library, because he roared.   And in the library, the rule is, you have to keep silent.  They come to realize that by sticking to the formal rules, McBee and Merriweather have made a mistake.  

  Sometimes, to do a good thing, you have to break the rules.  An Israeli theater group has now made a musical out of this story. 

    Here is a short passage:  One day a lion came to the library. He walked right past the circulation desk and up into the stacks.  Mr. McBee ran down the hall to the head librarian’s office.  “Miss Merriweather!” he called.  “No running”, said Miss Merriweather, without looking up.  “But there’s a lion!” said Mr. McBee. “In the library!”    “Is he breaking any rules?” asked Miss Merriweather. She was very particular about rule breaking.  “Well, no,” said Mr. McBee. “Not really”.   “Then leave him be.”

      As parents and teachers, we teach our kids to become ‘socialized’, which means, to learn the rules of civilized behavior in society.  Every society socializes its kids.  Without that, we would have a crumbling society of sociopaths. 

    The question is,   if creativity and innovation are about breaking the rules, can we teach kids to follow some rules and break others?  And can they learn to know the difference?    Can we raise good kids, well behaved, who at the same time rebel against rules, unwritten ones, and create wonderful new inventions?   Can you be totally socialized, and extremely creative? 

     Perhaps “Library Lion” is a wonderful start at grappling with these tough questions.  It is clear that doing so is long overdue.   A lot of parenting, and a great deal of schooling, are one-sidedly focused on teaching the rules, and not on when they might be, and should be, broken.   

Innovation as Grave Robbing: Reviving Air Ships

March 12, 2014 in Global Crisis Blog, Innovation Blog | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

Innovation as Grave Robbing

By Shlomo  Maital   

             Airlander

Airlander: 80% Less Fuel

   One way to innovate is to rob graves;  find old ideas that failed, dig them up, revive them, spruce them up and make them work.   The British firm Hybrid Air Vehicles has done just that!  The future may lie with airships like Airlander.

     On Thursday May 6, 1937, the German passenger airship LZ 129 Hindenburg caught fire and was destroyed, when it tried to dock with a mooring mast at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, New Jersey.  There were 97 people on board. Of them, 35 passengers and crew were killed, and a ground crewman.   The tragic scene was broadcast live on radio, with play-by-play by a distraught broadcaster, who broke down.  The live account of the disaster spelled the end for hydrogen-filled airships.  It traumatized air ship technology for decades.

   Now, 77  years later, comes the revival.  According to Matt McFarland, writing in the Washington Post, March 6,  a British company  bought a spy ship (helium blimp) built for the US Army, took it apart, shipped it to Britain, and is finding new uses for it.   The Washington Post reports that  “the Airlander is able to carry large payloads over long distances very efficiently. Hybrid Air Vehicles’ project to develop the technology further is being funded by a Government grant as well as private finance from individuals including Bruce Dickinson, the lead singer of the band Iron Maiden.”

    The company plans to build more of the airships;  an  Airlander costs about $40 million to build, and a version that could carry 55 tons would cost about $100 million.   It is  300 feet in length, 60 feet longer than the biggest jets from Boeing and Airbus.  It doesn’t need a   runway to land. It has four diesel engines and is   helium-filled.  (Filling the Hindenburg with hydrogen, highly flammable and explosive, was simply engineering madness. Helium doesn’t burn).   The Airlander sits about 20 people and can carry between 3,300 pounds and 11 tons.   And it uses 80 per cent less fuel than a jet.

    “ There is now a worldwide competition to develop cargo airships,” wrote Barry Prentice, a professor at the University of Manitoba in a recent paper. “The most important remaining barrier to a cargo airship industry is the lack of business confidence.”

    The long-lived ghost of the Hindenburg still lives.  But, look to see many more cargo airships filling the skies in future.    Can YOU innovate by robbing a grave — reviving an old failed idea ready to emerge and save the world?

The Einstein Principle in Innovation: Make Time Variable!

March 10, 2014 in Global Crisis Blog, Innovation Blog | Tags: , , , | 1 comment

The Einstein Principle in Innovation: Make Time Variable!

By Shlomo  Maital  

             Dali time               

  The painter Salvador Dali once painted a famous portrayal of time, in the form of ‘rubber stopwatches’.    It recalls Einstein’s breakthrough in relativity theory – in his theory of space and time,   time is no longer a constant, but in fact slows as the speed of light is approached.  Indeed, a space traveler moving at the speed of light would return to earth to find everybody much older than he or she. 

   This principle has now been used to revive television.  A few years ago, everybody was eulogizing TV  (Rest In Peace), with low quality programming jamming the cable airwaves and viewer ratings plummeting.  Amazingly, TV has revived.  According to David Carr, Media columnist for the New York Times, there is a blizzard of great new TV and cable series.  Here are a few:  Breaking Bad, Grey’s Anatomy (my own favorite), Nashville, The Walking Dead, House of Cards, Modern Family, Archer, True Detective, Game of Thrones, The Americans, Girls, Justified…and that’s just a start.

    What happened!

    Time changed.  That is – that high-tech remote, with the red button now enables us to record and view later, or to access and view an entire season of 7 or 13 or 24 shows from a whole series at one swat.   Time has become variable. That is, we no longer have to watch the program at the time slot allotted to it – often, in the past, the single most critical variable for a series’ success or failure.  We can now watch a series whenever we wish.

    There is a major lesson here.  When you innovate, if you can shift the time at which a product is used, consumed or enjoyed, you can turn failure into success.  So think carefully not only about your innovation but also about the forgotten question, ‘when’?  When is it used? When do people want to use it?  When CAN they use it?  Can I widen the range of (time) choice? 

    Television is the proof of concept.  Welcome back, TV.  As David Carr sums up, “the idiot box has gained heft and intellectual credibility to the point where you seem dumb if you are not watching it. “  Wow, what a change.   

 

Curing AIDS in New-born Infants: Breakthrough!

March 9, 2014 in Global Crisis Blog, Innovation Blog | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

Curing AIDS in New-born Infants: Breakthrough!

By Shlomo  Maital     

           baby AIDS

    Few things are more tragic, and more unfair, than new-born infants born with AIDS, acquired from their mothers.   I was stunned to learn that every year, 250,000 babies worldwide are born infected with the AIDS virus! 

   It is tough enough for many babies to make their way in the world, without the lifelong struggle with AIDS, starting at birth. 

   But a creative doctor may have found the answer.

   According to a report in the New York Times,  *    “When scientists made the stunning announcement last year that a baby born with H.I.V. had apparently been cured through aggressive drug treatment just 30 hours after birth, there was immediate skepticism that the child had been infected in the first place.   But on Wednesday, the existence of a second such baby was revealed at an AIDS conference here, leaving little doubt that the treatment works. A leading researcher said there might be five more such cases in Canada and three in South Africa.  And a clinical trial in which up to 60 babies who are born infected will be put on drugs within 48 hours is set to begin soon, another researcher added.  If that trial works — and it will take several years of following the babies to determine whether it has — the protocol for treating all 250,000 babies born infected each year worldwide will no doubt be rewritten.  “This could lead to major changes, for two reasons,” said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, executive director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “Both for the welfare of the child, and because it is a huge proof of concept that you can cure someone if you can treat them early enough.”   

    Let’s applaud Dr. Audra Deveikis.  Here is how she made the breakthrough discovery:   “ A baby girl born at Miller Children’s Hospital in Long Beach, Calif., is now 9 months old and apparently free of the virus that causes AIDS. Her mother, who has advanced AIDS and is mentally ill, arrived in labor; she had been prescribed drugs to protect her baby but had not taken them.   Four hours after the birth, a pediatrician, Dr. Audra Deveikis, drew blood for an H.I.V. test and immediately started the baby on three drugs — AZT, 3TC and nevirapine — at the high doses usually used for treatment of the virus.    The normal preventive regimen for newborns would be lower doses of two drugs; doctors usually do not use the more aggressive treatment until they are sure the baby is infected, and then sometimes not in the first weeks.   “Of course I had worries,” Dr. Deveikis said in an interview here. “But the mother’s disease was not under control, and I had to weigh the risk of transmission against the toxicity of the meds.”   “I’d heard of the Mississippi baby, I’d watched the video,” she added. “I knew that if you want to prevent infection, early treatment is critical.”   The Long Beach baby is now in foster care, she said. The mother is still alive as well.

It may take some time. But perhaps, many of those 250,000 babies born to AIDS moms will be spared the illness, thanks to  Dr. Deveikis.  

    Dr. Deveikis simply broke the rules, broke the protocol for treating AIDS babies – and may as a result have saved many lives.   And of course, she read the literature and case studies.   

    Thanks, Dr. Deveikis!   It took courage to defy the conventional protocol, and you may even have endangered your career in doing so.   Perhaps one day you will get a Nobel Prize.   I wonder why no other doctors thought simply to administer the large doses of anti-AIDS drugs to newborns at risk?   I guess it’s really hard to think out of the box. 

Profiles in Courage: How Kyla Montgomery Outruns MS

March 5, 2014 in Global Crisis Blog, Innovation Blog | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

Profiles in Courage: How Kyla Montgomery Outruns MS

By Shlomo  Maital       

          Kyla

Kyla Montgomery

  Meet Kyla Montgomery.   She is one of America’s leading high school athletes in the mile race, a very difficult race that today is run almost at a sprint, for the whole four minute plus distance. 

    Kyla is a profile in courage.  Three years ago, she was disgnosed with MS, multiple sclerosis, a disease in which the insulating covers of the nerve cells are damaged, making it hard for the nerves to send messages to the brain.   It is a debilitating disease, that can be treated but as yet not cured. 

   Strangely, according to today’s New York Times (“Challenge like no other for runner with MS”,  March 5),    Kyla’s MS affliction gives her an advantage.  She cannot feel the pain in her legs when she runs, and when you run the mile, the pain is quite severe, because it is a race that creates an oxygen debt in the muscles and naturally, they complain. But Kyla’s brain can’t hear the complaints from her leg muscles, because the nerves don’t transmit it.  (The U.S. women’s high school record for the mile was recently broken, at 4:32! by a 16-year-old). 

   But there is a disadvantage too.  She cannot stop.  When she stops, at the end of the race, she collapses, as her legs simply give out. Her coach has to catch her and carry her.  If she stumbles within the race, as she once did, she has trouble getting up. (She once crawled to a fence, pulled herself up to her feet – and dashed ahead, finishing 10th!).    In one race, when officials forgot they had to catch her, she collapsed after finishing, right onto her face.   Some ignorant people in the audience called her a ‘wimp’.   She is quite the opposite.

    When Kyla was diagnosed with MS, she told her coach that “I don’t know how much time I have left (to run, after being diagnosed with MS), so I want to run fast – don’t hold back!”.  She improved her time from 24:29 for five kilometers, to 17:22 (yes, that’s just over 3 minutes per kilometer…).   

    Kyla was rejected by many universities’ sports programs. But finally, Lipscomb University in Tennessee saw the light. She won an athletic scholarship there, and will run for them.   We wish her luck.  

Lessons of the Ukraine/Crimea: Will Insanity Recur?

March 4, 2014 in Global Crisis Blog, Innovation Blog | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

Lessons of the Ukraine/Crimea:

Will Insanity Recur?

By Shlomo  Maital    

            Crimean war

Crimean War

My friend Bilahari Kausikan, Ambassador at Large in Singapore’s Foreign Ministry and until recently First Permanent Secretary, has wise words regarding the Ukraine/Crimea crisis, published in the Straits Times.  He visited Kiev in December, recalls hearing a speech by an EU politician in Independence Square – and thought, “this could end up like Hungary in 1956”, when the West encouraged Hungarian revolt, then folded its arms and did nothing to help when Russian tanks invaded.

    “Russia cannot allow Ukraine to become part of the Western system without losing an essential part of itself and abandoning Putin’s goal of a revived Russia as a great power,” Kausikan observes.   Some 17% of Ukraine’s population, or 8 million people, is ethnically Russian. This is the largest Russian diaspora in the world.  They live in the Crimea, and East and southeast Ukraine.  Russian gas pipelines run through Ukraine, and Sevastopol is Russia’s only warm water port.

     “It was inevitable that Russia would move decisively,” Kausikan notes.  (He once served as Singapore’s Ambassador to Moscow).   And as usual,  Russia’s intervention  “caught the West flatfooted”.   The U.S. is weary of wars. And “the EU has neither the stomach nor the capability to wage war on Russia”. 

    Kausikan believes that the West gave false encouragement to the Ukrainian, without the capacity to deter Russian intervention or respond effectively. 

     Once again, my own view is that President Obama, and the incompetent EU foreign Minister Katharine Ashton have proved worse than incompetent.   “The West mistook their hopes for reality,” Kausikan writes.  Because the West has no stomach for military intervention, they thought Russia felt the same.  Stupid.

       “Do not listen to the sweet words of foreigners,”  Kausikan counsels Singapore.  And, he might have added,  Israel, as well.   Small countries have no room for error.  And the great powers that ‘support’ them are increasingly unwilling to stick out their necks for their friends. 

  “It is the Ukrainian people who paid and who will continue to pay the heaviest price,” Kausikan writes.  “We (Singapore) must never lose the ability to look after ourselves, because if we cannot look after ourselves, nobody will look after us.”   True of every single small nation, sandwiched between a paper-tiger marshmallow former great nation, America, a bankrupt internally-conflicted EU, and an aggressive Russia led by a megalomaniac dictator who is, according to Merkel, “detached from reality”.   

    Watch your backs, small nations.  Nobody else will. 

    And, an historical footnote:  The Crimean War, between the French British & Ottoman empires and the Russian Empire, lasted from Oct. 1853 to Feb. 1856.  Russia lost.  But there were 300,000 to 375,000 dead, including 100,000 who died of disease.       The cause of the war?  Rights of Christians in the Holy Land.  France promoted the Catholics. Russia, the Orthodox.   I’m not kidding.  That was the cause of a bloody war.  So maybe, in the 21st C., we are a tiny bit more civilized. 

Gossip is Good? – Lucy Strikes Again!

March 3, 2014 in Global Crisis Blog, Innovation Blog | Leave a comment

Gossip is Good? – Lucy Strikes Again!

By Shlomo  Maital  

                     gossip

Norman Rockwell’s take on ‘gossip’

 Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway has done it again!  This time, she writes about ‘gossip’ in her column – and manages to persuade us that  “gossip is particularly important in offices. It helps us know who to avoid, it undermines bullying bosses, it binds people together and shores up a company’s culture.”  And what’s more, she buttresses her unusual case with academic research.

   “….according to recent research from Stanford University, published in Psychological Science, not only have I done no harm by gossiping, I have been making the world a finer place. Talking about people behind their backs increases co-operation, upholds the moral code, punishes the selfish and rewards the unselfish. And if people know they get voted off the island for bad behaviour, they behave less badly.”

    According to the Psychological Science website,   “Their research shows that gossip and ostracism can have positive effects, serving as tools by which groups reform bullies, thwart exploitation of “nice people,” and encourage cooperation.  “Groups that allow their members to gossip,” said Feinberg, “sustain cooperation and deter selfishness better than those that don’t. And groups do even better if they can gossip and ostracize untrustworthy members. While both of these behaviors can be misused, our findings suggest that they also serve very important functions for groups and society.”

    The Jewish faith places gossip among the most heinous of sins.  In Hebrew, gossip is “lashon ha-ra”, which means, “evil tongue”.  Indeed, in our faith,  you must not speak evil of people behind their backs, or even to their face (destroying a person’s self-respect is a colorful Hebrew phrase, “le-halbin panim”, or literally, to ‘whiten somebody’s face’).   And,  you also must not even praise people excessively to their face.

     In the academic ‘publish or perish’ game, the more illogical, contrarian or radical your idea, the more likely you are to get it published.  “What’s new?” is what editors ask, and if the answer is, well, nothing much – don’t bother to submit.  So there is inherent bias toward articles like the one in Psychological Science about gossip, in which black is white, good is bad, and wrong is right.

    But Lucy – I don’t buy it.  Gossip is destructive. Period.  Norman Rockwell (above) got it right.

“Gossip and Ostracism Promote Cooperation in Groups”,   Psychological Science.   By Robb Willer, Stanford University,   in collaboration with co-authors Matthew Feinberg, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford, and Michael Schultz from the University of California–Berkeley.

 

Who am I? Montaigne & Self-Awareness

March 2, 2014 in Global Crisis Blog, Innovation Blog | Tags: , , , | 1 comment

 Who am I?  Montaigne & Self-Awareness

By Shlomo  Maital  

                   Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne was one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance,  b. 1533, d. 1592,  a short 59-year life.   He wrote thoughtful essays that investigated his own thoughts, and personality. 

   Writing in his New York Times column, David Brooks tackles Montaigne, along with another great essayist, Samuel Johnson. I doubt there is another columnist alive who would dare to make a column out of two authors who have been dead for hundreds of years.    As a high school French student in Regina, Canada, I once impetuously wrote an essay on Montaigne – but the truth is, I didn’t understand a word of what he wrote. 

    Brooks quotes Montaigne:  “If others examined themselves attentively as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense.  Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself.  We are all steeped in it, but those who are aware of it are a little better off.”

    In others words, as Nietzsche counselled, “become who you are”.  But first, understand who you are.

    I teach young people in many countries.  Increasingly I find that Generation Y, those born after 1980, lack an understanding of who they really are, and what their passions are.  The reason seems to be the connectedness of the smartphone.  Why bother to know what you really think, if you can ask others instantly?  If you are permanently instantly linked to others,  how can you ever build self-awareness, when your own self disappears in the swamp of ‘connected socially-networked others’?   How can you become who you are, if you do not ever really know who you are?   

     There is a kind of serenity that comes with self-awareness.  I deeply regret that many troubled people I encounter never achieve that serenity.  It starts with recognizing our own faults, our own flawed character.  If you are constantly looking outward, at what others are tweeting and posting, you will never have time and space to look inward. And that’s a real shame.  

Blog entries written by Prof. Shlomo Maital

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